Tibetan Cross

by Mike Bond

  “Why call it serpent?”

  “That's our name for the little plateau there. It's loaded with serpentine – Colorado jade.”

  “Why'd you pick such a lousy place?”

  “Because it'd be difficult to find. Paul should remember.”

  “I'll talk to him,” Mort said.

  “I don't think you have him. Otherwise you'd kill me, wouldn't you, fat prick?”

  “Please get it through your head, Sam,” Claire said, calmly, “we haven't killed anyone. I was supposed to keep you safe, and I blew it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Mort tut-tutted, shaking his head. “Let's get some background, while Tim's finding a map. Now, how long have you known Paul?”

  “Since college.”

  “You played football together, as I remember.”

  “We were on the same team.”

  “And so are we. We're on your team now, Sam.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do, on the team?”

  “I was a quarterback; he was a defensive back. We were friends outside of that. We didn't work together; he wasn't a receiver or anything.”

  “Like Alex?”

  “Yes, he wasn't like Alex. Alex and I worked together, almost every day, for years.”

  “You miss him, don't you?” Mort patted Cohen's thigh. “I'm sorry for what's happened, Sam. Believe me, I know. I know…” He cleared his throat. “Tell me, as you remember Paul, was he willing to see both sides, when things got rough?”

  “Only the impossible attracts him. Some day he'll piss on your grave.”

  He was ready for it this time but it made no difference. It could not be worse but it was, mashing each separate anguished cell, burying him in a choked, heat-glassy ocean. “It's just pain,” he told himself and tried to think like the Blackfeet who laughed in their torturers’ faces, but that only made it worse, and he knew it would kill him and hungered for death.

  “Is this how you get it up?” he lisped at Mort. “Wire one to my dick – maybe it will make you come!” Mort nudged the rheostat. Pain was everything, pain and only pain, but still he did not die. Higher and higher the pain lifted him, until he stood alone on a plateau where he had never been.

  It was fading. He stared at Claire. “And may you ever live, every moment, the first moment of the death of your husband.” She blanched, briefly shook her head. “May it be all you know, especially if it isn't true.”

  “Enough, Mort!” she said. “You're gonna lose him.” The world began to circle, gained speed, sucking him down a ravenous whirlwind.

  Her mouth was moving. Words hissed in his ears. Behind her a line, dark below and white above. Humps of trees on the horizon. Grass tossing in the wind, October stinging his nostrils. Femur of a moose aslant the sandy soil, its grain weathered like barn wood. “Transitory,” it said. “All transitory.”

  By degrees the heat grew bolder. Time followed no pattern; this day had lasted weeks, had not occurred. They came rattling a sheet of paper and asked him questions that he did not answer; they went away.

  THIRST woke him. His voice issued in faint crackles, the sound of a mouse in sawdust. Jack hovered at the far end of the room.

  Claire dipped a handkerchief in a glass, squeezed it on the floor. Drops beaded the dust. She touched it to his lips. He sucked ecstatically. She tipped up the glass. The water evaporated in his throat.

  Time waited. She shifted on the crate, or paced the floor. He counted the pulses in his head to a thousand, then again, and again, again, and again, all the while images, memories tumbled through his mind.

  I'm here and now I understand. I understand that everything I've ever done has led to this moment: this is the product of my life. I'm paying for some monstrous thing I never understood: a killdeer's death, death of all life. We all have to make payment. Now I'll die, in their hands. But I'll die by my rules, not by theirs.

  Paul walked toward him through late afternoon shadows of the stadium wall, the first lights coming on, roaring voices in the background like a radio unheard, hands slapping Paul's shoulder pads as Paul grinned at him. “It was there,” Paul said. “It was easy.”

  “You won it, Paul.”

  “It's a game. We all win or lose it, together.” Paul took the football he had just intercepted and with a fluid motion hurled it far up into the stands.

  THIRST spread inside him like a cancer; his chest burned with each breath. Blood vessels were splitting in his eyes. The world danced before him as one level of illusion over another. People sat on the crate and were replaced by others.

  Coolness pervaded the attic. Jack sat on the crate. After a time Mort came up and they wired thin electrodes between Cohen's teeth, then to his testicles, questioned him again with the electricity, and left unsatisfied. He heard the Mercedes purl away. Jack rubbed his chin, a raspy sound. She climbed the stairs. She wore a suede jacket. Blue-black glitter of the little shotgun in her hands. He tensed for death. This moment. Barrel blue with two black holes. Steel to come out of it, shatter my head, shredding my eyes. One breath. Now. Please not in the eyes. Another breath. Sylvie, this is Maria: I love you both. Give me a moment – my father – I hardly remember…

  Jack turning slowly on his crate. “We're not ‘sposed to fuck with him, Ruby.” Jack starting to stand. Now! My chest heaving. I see them all – this moment. The shotgun roared, crushing his ears. Jack flew sideways off the crate and rolled along the floor leaving watermelon blotches. Cohen backed against the post. “You can't kill us all.”

  She caressed his face. “God, Sam, I'm sorry.” He recoiled; she knelt and uncuffed his ankles, bent over Jack's body, her shoes squishing in the new blood. She took keys from Jack's trouser pocket and uncuffed Cohen's wrists.

  He fell down. She tugged him up. “In half an hour they come back – they'll kill us both. I can't carry you. You have to run!” She shoved him down the stairs.

  “Where?”

  “Forest – hide!” She shoved his arms into his jacket, yanked it on him. “Come, darling, run!”

  “My glasses…”

  “Hell with them.”

  “Car.”

  “Can't – Mort's got the keys.”

  “No, Alfa. In the woods!”

  “Show me!”

  He was running along the slope beside her in the early darkness. Is this it, after death? He pulled her to a halt. “My father – needed to speak…”

  “Sam! Sam!” she kissed him, hugging him, crying, “It's over, we're getting away – you're safe.”

  “Wanted to tell my father…”

  “Faster!” she shouted.

  Forgetting already what I had to tell him…Lights far below, a tiara nestled in blackness. “Neuenweg!” he said, stunned.

  “They're eating dinner down there right now – with a team come from Frankfurt for you.” She hurried him up the prickly slick slope onto a narrow track. “This it?”

  He felt for tire marks in the duff. “Maybe.” He grabbed her. “What about Paul?”

  “They don't have him! Never did. Hurry, twenty minutes already!” She encircled his waist, half-carrying him.

  The track stopped at a wall of trees. “Higher!” He dove upslope, running now. Nothing mattered, not pain, not exhaustion, not even fear. Tomorrow, Paul. I'll be there.

  20

  RAIN SLUICED over the windshield like waves across a deck. Bough-shaped arrows of darkness stabbed out from the roadside. The Alfa rumbled like a ship, its motion grasping him, releasing him, grasping him again.

  TODAY'S the day. He sat in knee-deep grass at the base of a ruined rock pile. Stones crouched in the green heat. Oaks clung to them with scaly exposed roots. Above, where vestiges of a castle wall slinked along the crust, he peered through a window slit at the rubble beneath. Pink and yellow daisies burst from a fissure in the wall. A brown moth buzzed round them, wing beats blurred. It darted up, down, became a hummingbird the size of his thumbnail.

  The black Alfa glinted from a fo
ld in the hills below, beyond sight of the country road where a single bicyclist pedaled up a gentle grade. Cohen descended granite steps where fat black ants scurried over strawberry runners. She sat against a south wall, under a meurtrière, drinking wine from a bottle.

  “Long live krasi,” she said. “And happy Easter.”

  “Are you Ruby or Claire?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “I'll take the real one.”

  “There isn't one. Claire was for you. Ruby's my standard.”

  He sat beside her, woozy from the sun, and fell asleep.

  THE SUN HAD slid behind a broken wall. She pushed white-covered bread at him. “Goat cheese from the village,” she said, pointing down at an intermission in the hills tiled in faded orange. “Go easy on the wine. I refuse to carry you again.”

  “Did you?”

  “You passed out three times between the house and the car.”

  “When?”

  “Last night, at Belchen. We're two hours from Paris.”

  He scrunched his body around to lie in the sun, the back of his skull on the warm, worn stone. Above the abbreviated wall the sky was blue, cloudless. “I'll stay here.”

  “You need rest; the city's anonymous. Here we'd be noticed. The police are looking for us.”

  “The police are always looking for me. I don't give a shit.”

  “If I'd known that I'd have let them have you.”

  “Who is ‘them'?”

  She fished a crumb from a fold in her jeans, tossed it in her mouth. “There's time in Paris for all that.” She pulled him up and took his arm. They descended to the Alfa; she backed it speedily out the narrow trail, weeds lashing its sides. She slowed for the village, then accelerated down a long roadway where leafing trees met overhead, their white-painted trunks flicking along the shoulders.

  He awoke to the rumble of trucks and the downgearing of the Alfa. “Where are we?”

  “Autoroute du Sud – Orly. Too risky from the east.”

  PARIS was stunning, its crowds, traffic, clothes, and vistas of trees, its columns, and glowing facades. The Parc de Montsouris throbbed with hallucinatory colors. The Boulevard St. Michel rippled with moving bodies: girls in flashy dresses and quick stiletto heels, dark-suited young men shaking hurried hands outside leaf-shaded corner cafés, families coming home from church with daughters all in white. The ripe, almost cheesy aroma of bread floated in the fumes of taxis and the blue glare of truck and bus exhausts.

  Not since Sylvie have I dared to be here…not since I turned around and went to the Himals to climb until I died up there somewhere. That's what I wanted: to die up there in the cold. But Alex and Paul came over and after a while it was fun, the climbing. Trying to find a place no one'd ever been.

  “If you were trying to hide in Paris,” her voice broke in on him, “where would it be?”

  “Where I wouldn't stand out. St. Germain, with polyester tourists, down-at-the-collar poets, fifty-cent guitarists and fifty-dollar whores, South American exiles…” Not the Île de la Cité, down the alley and up the narrow stone stairs to the room curving out over a view to the river? Where she dressed before the chipped old armoire, turning this way and that in its flaky stained mirror, asking, “Does it go with the part, Chéri?” How bad would it hurt to see it again?

  “Too many cops, mostly plainclothes. It's the most logical place for us, and the most logical place to look for us. There's nowhere cheap to stay and the food's lousy. If these are the last days of my life I'm going to eat well.”

  “Don't be heroic,” he snickered. “It's ludicrous.”

  “Don't be foolish enough to disbelieve me.” She turned left on Des Grands Augustins. “We'll go to the Eighth. The American Embassy and the Elysée Palace, bastions of freedom in an unfree world…we'll fit like peas in a pod. Perhaps we should be from Des Moines.”

  “Look, why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “This – Paris, ‘escaping’ with me, and all that?”

  “Cool down, Sam. I want to tell you, step at a time.”

  “It will have to wait. I'm splitting.”

  She looked over, her voice suddenly contralto. “Leave any time you like. But what I have to say could make it better.”

  “Make what ‘better'?”

  “Either the going or the staying.”

  “You're full of shit.”

  “You could work for the local bank, and I'll give my time to our PTA.”

  “What the fuck you talking about now?”

  “Des Moines. What we do there. Our cover.”

  “I never intended to see you again except to kill you.”

  “Would you?” She nipped her lip.

  “The last morning in Vye.”

  “That's why I left. The old man told you?”

  “Were they the ones I killed on Sainte-Victoire?”

  “No.” The Seine furled jadelike under the Pont Royal. West of the Louvre, the arbors of the Tuileries and the Champs Elysées. The clothes were richer now, the cars lower and faster. She swung left on rue de Rivoli.

  La rue Jean Mermoz was inconspicuous even for the quarter. Dress shops, front-room restaurants, and inexpensive hotels jostled for space along the narrow sidewalk. Opposite their hotel window children played on an ornate, peeling balcony. “You dye your hair black and grow a moustache,” she told him, “and we'll get you a blue sweater and leather jacket. You'll pass for Lebanese.” She rattled the room key. “I won't be long.”

  “Where to?”

  “Arranging a new persona.”

  “Perhaps I should go, to see who you call.” He watched the inexpressive ovals of her eyes. “But I'm past caring about all that.”

  “You're already dead,” she grinned. “I reincarnated you.”

  “I'm not sure why.”

  “Neither am I.” She kissed him, fished in her purse. “Here's two hundred francs in case I disappear. In the meantime, get some sleep.”

  WHEN she returned he did not know her, but started in fear from the bed. Her hair was short and black, her face Eurasian in color, seeming rounder. Under black brows her eyes were betel nut. Her lips were broadly carmine; she wore a dumpy black sweater above tan slacks and worn buckle shoes, held up a wrinkled paper sack. “Been to the used clothing stores.” In the sack were sandals, a blue sweater, a gaudy chest amulet in fake gold, a Japanese chrome watch and watchband. At the bottom was a small furry object. “Your moustache, until the real one grows. Let's do your hair.” She sheared his Aix-en-Provence curls, daubing black dye in the remains.

  “I look like the Corsican who turned me in.”

  “He had no choice.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Shave your beard every other day.” She rubbed dye into his stubble and stuck a pack of Gauloises into his front jacket pocket. “Keep one in your mouth. You look positively awful.” Her voice took on a rough, Arabic twist, “Speak French with harshness, like this.” She handed him cheap sunglasses. “Put these on when you go out.”

  “Christ, I'm already half blind. What did you do to your eyes?”

  “Colored contact lenses I've had for years and never used. We'll get you some.”

  “I'm fine like I am.”

  “I want us alive.” She pulled the dumpy sweater over her head and slipped down the slacks. Her body was long and slender. “And I want to lie next to you, breathe you, kiss you. This thing has almost killed me.”

  “Me too, actually.”

  “Don't be snide, darling. I'm going to die for you.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Love me.”

  “Not a chance.” He turned away. “I'm not the least bit interested.”

  “From being kicked?”

  “And beat, and punched, and drugged. But mostly because your friends killed Maria, and I remember her right now and don't care for anyone else.”

  “You don't remember me?”

  “You're evil, as far as I'm concerned.”r />
  “But I love you! Touch me a little with your hand, I'm going crazy. There's so little time, darling.”

  “Maybe they won't get us.”

  “They will, I know them. But it won't change things if they don't.”

  LATE afternoon traffic in la rue Mermoz woke him. She sat reading Le Monde in a tattered lilac chair. “I've been here before,” he said. His mouth tasted awful.

  “Where's that?”

  “Sleeping in an unknown bed, hurt and exhausted, while you sit over me. Where was that – Athens? And Marseille, too – no, that was Maria.” The thought of Maria brought pain and he lay silent waiting for it to go away. “It seems I'm always getting better, about to get up and fight back; then suddenly I'm lying here again, trying to heal and gather strength for the next round.”

  “What's amazing is that you've lasted. That you've overcome.”

  “Overcome what?”

  “The diligent efforts of several countries’ intelligence agencies to crush you into nonexistence.”

  “What other countries, besides the U.S.?”

  “West Germany, Turkey, France, Spain, Morocco – those are the five I'm sure of.”

  “What the fuck do they care?”

  “You're a terrorist, dear – a dedicated killer. The intelligence community clings together against people like you; they feel they're entitled to a monopoly on terrorism, don't like competition.”

  “So why didn't they kill me in Neuenweg?”

  “They needed you, darling, to track down Paul.”

  “It irritates me, that word. Darling.”

  “You'd prefer I called you Prick? Because that's what you're being.”

  “Fine.” He sat up licking his fuzzy teeth. “Old blood and vomit – caked on my teeth.”

  “How charming. You could consider brushing them. Or should you keep them like that to remind me what you've been through?”

  He grinned. “Right now I'm considering how to get rid of you.”

  “It's easy to get rid of me. Just walk out that door. I'm a lot safer without you.”

  “Then why don't you go?”

  “Unless you stop laying your trials and tribulations on me I will.” She sat on the bed beside him. “You've been through Hell and that's a shame, but it ain't my fault. I was trying to get you out of it in Crete. I failed, but I was trying. Now I've written my own death warrant – no, don't you dare laugh at me! – by hustling you out of Neuenweg, so I'm unlikely to take any puerile remonstrances from you about the holes in your hands and how heavy your cross is. It's your cross, Prick, so bear it!”