by Liam Pieper
‘Oh,’ said Tess, ‘believe me, I know that one.’
And Arkady, seeing he had steered her into melancholy, lightened his tone. ‘But my very favourite word is Dutch. Knuffelbeest.’
‘Which means?’
‘Teddy bear. But literally “cuddle beast”.’
‘Oh, that is good. It reminds me of the Australian word “puggle”.’
‘What is this puggle?’
‘It’s a baby wombat.’ She googled it, found a picture, showed Arkady, who laughed at the photo of the absurd little creature.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘That is a beautiful word.’ He paused for a moment, then laid his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. ‘You will make it a toy, this puggle. A plush toy. It will make a million dollars.’
She’d laughed then, but in the end she thought about it, and she’d looked into it and found another toy company had already had this idea, and had trademarked the word. At the time she’d been struck by two facts: that it was possible for a company to lay claim on the name for the young of an entire species (was nothing safe from lawyers?), and that Arkady’s instinct for business seemed infallible.
Now, back in the office with Arkady, as if nothing had changed, Tess felt content for the first time in weeks. She didn’t notice Arkady open and leaf through the file she’d left neglected on the desk, with the collected evidence of money laundered from the company. He cleared his throat and she started, moved to snatch the folder off him. He laid his hand down over it, gently resisting her efforts to take it.
‘Oh, don’t read that, Arkady. It’s . . .’
‘You mentioned this, before I got sick. That someone is stealing from you?’
‘From the company,’ she said, already regretting it. ‘Someone has been stealing from the company. For years, someone had been siphoning money away from our accounts.’
Arkady looked at her levelly, his face perfectly blank. ‘How much money?’
‘I’m not sure. Hundreds of thousands, at least. I keep looking further back, and the further I go, the more is missing. Then you got sick, and I stopped, and . . . I shouldn’t have told you, I’m sorry.’
Arkady stared at her. For a long time he said nothing, and then finally he said, softly, ‘It is me.’
‘What do you mean? I’m not sure you understand.’
‘Someone is taking money from the company. It is me. I am . . . What is the English? Cooking the books.’
He asked her to bring him the evidence of laundering that she’d found, and then demonstrated, matter-of-factly, how he’d done it. Every so often, as the company’s money snaked its way around the globe, a little of it disappeared. A few thousand from a factory floor in India; a secret cache of euros that vanished in a Portuguese port. And that money, secreted across the globe, was where his real empire was. Arkady rummaged through the old filing cabinets nobody but him had touched in years and brought out documents: bank account numbers, details of safe deposit boxes, stock portfolios.
For all that the world cared, the company was a fairly profitable little family business that had done well for itself thanks to decades of perseverance, but the public face belied the real purpose of the company, which was simply to launder cash from canny investments. For the first time, she began to realise that the day-to-day business of the Mitty & Sarah Company was only the facade of a huge, nebulous fortune that swirled and secreted itself all around them. On any given day, they had maybe ten million dollars in toys gathering dust in the warehouse, but, elsewhere, in stock exchanges and banks accounts across the world, the company’s real worth was ticking over, appreciating, drawing money to itself. As soon as Arkady had accrued a few hundred thousand over the years he spirited it away from the toy concern as quickly as he could, into bonds, trusts, shares, Arabian oil and American war bonds, Australian coal and Chinese manufacturing. The revenue from the web of cash dwarfed, many times over, the money that the toys brought in.
‘But why?’ Tess asked. ‘Why have you done this? And kept it secret?’
In his youth, Arkady explained to Tess, he had made money from his dolls, but not enough to keep himself safe. To do that he would need to spin his modest fortune into enough money for several lifetimes. ‘Any fool can make a fortune if he works at it. Keeping it is another story. When we were growing up in old Russia, my mother kept urging my father to bury his money in the backyard. My father laughed at her, until the Soviets took all his. Then he was no longer laughing. That’s a lesson I have never forgotten.
‘If I bury money in my own backyard, maybe it will be safe, maybe not. Maybe someday somebody will come to look for it. So I have buried my money in everyone’s backyard, Tess. You should do the same. Take some money and hide it away, away from the business, even away from me. You never know what will happen in your future. Life will always surprise you. Ambition, luck, people: things are never ever what you think they will be.’
Arkady closed the file, pushed it over to her. ‘A person is defined by the secrets they keep, Tess. I am trusting you to keep mine. I know I can trust you, yes?’
Tess was bewildered, nodded, shook her head, tried to think it through, a million questions clambering for real estate in her mind, none of which would be asked, because her son had just been dropped off by his babysitter, and was barrelling down the hallway to her office. Little Kade popped his head around the corner and squealed with delight to see his great-grandfather. He ran to tackle Arkady, who staggered and laughed and ruffled his hair. Then Kade took Arkady by the hand and led him, half dragged him, to the showroom, chatting happily about school, and a goal he’d almost kicked, just barely missed, and a new kid at school with a funny accent, and so on, while big Arkady laughed and made approving noises and Tess plodded after them.
In the showroom, each individual product was carefully placed and precision-lit with overhead lamps so that buyers could wander through the neat rows of toys and play with them at will, while the media manager would scurry behind, replacing the toys in their designated spots, moving the limbs back, posing them precisely as they were: action figures in mid kung-fu kick; dolls with teapots raised, pouring their imaginary tea for imaginary friends. In the centre of the room, under a spotlight just subtly brighter than any other in the room, sat a pair of the original Mitty and Sarah dolls, holding hands, rosy mouths smiling, wood lustrous and shiny.
Kade was nearly seven years old, but young for his age, and still as close to either tears or joy at any given moment as he’d been when he was two. Earlier in the year he’d gone away on school camp and taken his teddy bear, and had then been sent home inconsolable after some of the other boys teased him about it and threw it in the river.
Slow and sweet-natured as he was, he was easy prey for bullies, and their experiments in after-school care had been disastrous. So they were happy for him to while away his time in the showroom unsupervised. Now and again, if Adam wanted to impress the potential of a new toy on their retailers, he would make sure he brought them by just as Kade was discovering it, zooming about the room or giggling with pleasure as he rolled around the floor with it.
The showroom was locked, and Kade vibrated with impatience for entry, hopping from one foot to another. Tess punched in the code to the room (one of Adam’s ideas – a key would have done just fine, certainly there was nothing in there that cost more than the security system, but he liked the impression it made on guests) and the door swung open.
Kade stood on the threshold for a second, his hands on his hips and his eyes raking over the familiar rows of toys, searching for changes that only he, who’d half grown up in this room, could see. He reminded Tess of the young surfers who haunted the beaches near her childhood holiday home, who spent hours watching the waves, listening to the secret language of tides and currents and rips, the promises therein. Then he spotted what he was looking for, a new line of water guns that they’d just purchased. He made a beeline for them and started to play, imitating the rattle of gunfire with voice, makin
g Rambo-rolls under the tables.
Tess stood next to Arkady and together they watched Kade hurl himself around the room. After a moment the old man spoke without taking his eyes off the boy.
‘Isn’t he wonderful?’
Tess’s heart swelled: pleasure and pride. ‘I know. And just look at him go. I know that maybe this spoils him, but, God, doesn’t it make you feel young watching him?’
Arkady turned and smiled at her, then leaned over and said, in a low conspiratorial voice, ‘Can I tell you a secret?’
‘Sure.’ Tess shrugged. ‘What’s one more, right?’
‘I tell his parents that I take him with me on these trips because he helps me choose what to buy, but that’s not quite true.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The truth is, the boy is kind of an idiot. A nice idiot, but still an idiot.’
Tess started, turned to Arkady. ‘What?’
‘But idiots have their uses!’ Arkady said merrily, tapping the side of his nose. ‘They don’t ask questions, at the borders, in the hotels, at the offices, when you turn up with the child. “Here is my grandson, his name is Adam, good Jewish boy, isn’t he cute? I couldn’t bear to leave him behind.”’ He turned and his eyes were sharp and cruel and elsewhere. ‘They don’t suspect a thing, and even if they did, are they going to bring it up in front of a child? No, of course not. Why would I go to Europe? Why would I ever come back after the things we did?’
Tess, not sure what he was talking about, still felt something cold wrap itself around her heart. They stared at each other – Arkady conspiratorial, Tess confused. ‘I’m not sure I understand what . . .’ she began, and at that moment little Kade rushed up to them brandishing his toy rifle.
‘Bang!’ he yelled, pointing it at Tess. ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’ He was swivelling it around to point it at the old man when Arkady’s cane cracked the boy across the face.
One moment the old man was smiling and leaning sleepily on his walking stick, the next the stick arced up and caught little Kade across the cheek. The sound of wood on flesh and bone echoed through the stockroom, followed by a few seconds of shocked silence.
Nobody had ever hit Kade before, and the boy was at a loss, as the force of the blow knocked him arse-backwards. He sat, stunned, staring up at his great-grandfather who stood over him, the cane still raised, his eyes wild. His arm came down again and Tess, spurred out of shock, reached out and caught the walking stick, wrenching it away from Arkady.
‘What the fuck!’ she demanded, grabbing the old man by the shoulder and turning him to find his eyes foggy now, his jaw slack and quivering. The cane dropped with a clatter. ‘Es tut mir leid,’ he whispered. ‘Verzeihung.’ Then he was gone, out the door, running towards the stairs on broken old hips, and it was only then that little Kade came out of shock and started screaming for his father.
__________
There was a sense now, on both sides, that time was running out. The ovens ran day and night, the smoke from the chimneys dirtied everything, even the clouds, which hung low and greasy and spat back rain too soiled to wash away the film of dust and bone and human fat that had settled on the buildings. The fields of bodies, the walking dead all in rows, shivered on their way to factories where nothing was being built. Soon, even the grey skies were blacked out by swarming aeroplanes.
The Allied bombers, unchallenged now by the Luftwaffe, were overhead almost all the time, flying over the camp on their way to the Eastern Front. Every day they had less distance to travel, as the Red Army swarmed across Poland on its way to Berlin.
The SS who ran the camp reacted to the threat in different ways. Some of them redoubled their efforts, improvised, dumped thousands of people in mass graves dug in the surrounding fields, pouring gasoline over them to set them alight. Others retreated into drink. Some of the guards were so drunk they could barely walk, just slowly stalked their patrol route, pistols drawn, heavy-lidded eyes barely open for trouble.
Dieter was woken up in the middle of the night to treat a solider who had been shot through the shoulder when his bunkmate, too drunk to stand and turn out the light in their barracks, had tried to shoot out the bulbs. If his aim had been just a little worse the bullet would have found his friend’s head, but instead it sank into the fleshy part of his arm and passed through. He came in cursing and slurring, his bunkmates laughing as though it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen as they walked him into the surgery, arms around him like they were stumbling home from a cafe.
As Dieter cleaned and sutured the wound, he looked up at Arkady, who stood across the surgical table, and muttered, ‘You know, give these idiots enough time and they’ll kill themselves long before your people get here,’ which drew a rare a smile out of the Russian.
Dieter was worried about his friend. In the months after his torture, he’d changed. He spoke when he was spoken to, but rarely engaged in conversation. He did his work quietly, but didn’t offer new theories or opinions on their research. At night he ate very little but drank steadily. He got thin. Some nights he listened to one of the jazz records that Dieter had secured for him at great cost, but usually after dinner he would curl on his cot in the corner and work on one of his toys.
In his time off, Arkady travelled between the crematoriums and traded money and jewellery from Dieter’s stash for items collected from the trainloads of prisoners: bolts of cloth, buttons from coats, tufts of hair.
Using what he could find, he improvised. A teddy bear made from an evening dress and stuffed with odd socks and buttons for eyes kept a little Hungarian boy company while his sister was having a gangrenous arm amputated. A set of chess pieces carved from bone, the black side coloured with char, went to a bookish pair of twins who’d expressed a love of the game.
It amazed Dieter that Arkady could still extract a little imagination from the children, as effortlessly as a tooth or a litre of blood. He broke up an antique hardwood chair, which had somehow washed up in Canada, and used the splinters to make a dreidel for a little boy who hadn’t spoken since his mother had been executed in the selection line in front of him. The boy took it without a word, but sat spinning the toy for hours on end, passing the time.
Most nights he worked on the doll he called Sarah, the one he was making in the likeness of the little girl who was being moved back and forth from Mengele’s zoo to be infected with various bacteria, then with experimental treatments. It was rough, but grew more sophisticated every night. Arkady would sit with it in his lap, scalpel in one hand, for hours, for the most part not carving, just running his hands across the doll’s features, then, finally, raising the blade to lathe off a tiny sliver of wood. When he had the doll’s features just as he wanted them, he fashioned working articulated limbs for her, joining them to the body with surgical sutures. He stained the wood a dusky pink with a disinfectant solution and used a marker pen to give the doll eyes, lips, a nose. When a recently healthy young woman turned up on his autopsy table, he salvaged the cloth from her pyjamas to sew a small dress, and harvested her hair – long, flowing and black – which he painstakingly stitched onto the doll’s head.
Dieter watched his friend and his strange hobby with a rising sense of dismay. He knew that something had gone very wrong with Arkady. It was more than emotional trauma could account for. Something was broken inside him.
He no longer questioned what he was doing. When Dieter gave him an order, he followed it without arguing, even the day he went into the labs and found the tools for surgery laid out for him, the twins on the table. They were restrained with leather straps but conscious, their mouths gagged to muffle screaming, but their eyes wide and wild as they followed his hand as it moved to pick up a scalpel.
The guidelines were already drawn over the backs of the children, thin directives in black ink that showed where each incision would be made, where the stitches would be threaded. He’d learned how to follow these marks practising on cadavers during his studies in Prague, but right now his mind was i
n a place years before medical school, in the workshop with his father, as the toymaker drew patient lines on a plank of wood before cutting along them with a jigsaw. He’d loved that job as a child, the way each piece would be carefully cut out and then joined together, so a couple of lifeless slabs of wood could be portioned, lathed and, with ingenious tongue-in-groove assembly, be brought to life.
Dieter watched Arkady sew the identical twins together near the spine without complaint. Sections of skin were flayed and raised, then sewed together with the corresponding flesh on the other twin so that they sat back to back and wrist to wrist. Arkady threaded the delicate veins in the wrist through the body of other twin as instructed, then closed the operation, snapped off the sutures and left the room to clean up without a word.
Mengele had wanted to see if a conjoined twin could be created by surgically attaching two identical twins. The experiment failed. Later, Arkady vivisected the twins, harvested their organs and boiled the flesh off their bones, then prepared the skeletons for Mengele’s collection. When, a couple of days later, little Sarah, the model for his doll, died on the same table, he finally put the doll away, in a suitcase under his bed.
NINE
Seconds after Adam had checked his luggage, he realised his phone was inside his suitcase. He’d put it in there the night before so he wouldn’t forget it when he left the hotel at dawn, then had blanked on it completely. He stared forlornly as a conveyor belt whisked it away, to some place deep in the bowels of the airport, and the lady at the check-in counter assured him it would be impossible to retrieve before he landed in Melbourne. Faced with a long flight without his phone to entertain him, he bought a Sports Illustrated at a newsstand and settled in for his transit to Bali.
In Bali, his connecting flight was delayed by five hours, a wait he could neither believe nor stand the thought of, and so he caught a taxi from Denpasar down to Kuta beach and found a bar. He downed a vodka and soda quickly, then another, and was just starting on a third when two young men in thongs and Australian-flag singlets shuffled in from the beach, jostling each other, and sat next to him at the bar.