by Toby Barlow
Will looked up. She looked familiar walking across the room, but he couldn’t place her. Her dark hair was pulled back, her blue eyes sparkled, and she was smiling at him in a familiar way, as if they were old friends at a school reunion. He and Oliver both rose to meet her. “Will Van Wyck, this is the lovely Zoya Polyakov,” he said.
She smiled. “It is nice to see you again.”
Will paused, confused. “I’m sorry—”
“We spoke, on the metro last night, about the rain. Do you remember?”
“Last night?” Will remained confused even as the memory dawned. The accent should have reminded him, but her black hair pinned up changed her face, her cheekbones seemed stronger, her neck longer, and in her elegant low-cut black dress she only vaguely resembled the woman he had met the night before. He did recognize her eyes, though; they were hard to forget.
Oliver laughed. “My, that is amusing, what a small town, eh? People do have a tendency to pop up out of the blue. Right, well”—he slipped his arm around Zoya’s thin waist—“I’m afraid we have to make our exit. I would invite you along, Will, but I’m not sure it’s up your alley. It’s a profligate and atheistic work, designed to shock, hence the Sunday screening. But I’m fairly sure it’s going to be dreadful. We should be ready for a good strong drink afterward, if you’d like to meet up.”
“No, that’s okay, I—” Will’s gaze was still stuck on Zoya. He was thrown by the coincidence, and, given all that had occurred that weekend, he didn’t quite trust it. But more than that, the girl intrigued him.
“You stole my eye,” she said, ignoring Oliver.
“Excuse me?”
“You have a bruise there, I put cover-up over mine.” She touched her face where the mark had been. “Perhaps I should lend you my makeup?”
Oliver chuckled. “Yes, I heard you got yourself into a scrape aiding a damsel in distress.”
She looked at Will with a small, complicit grin. “That’s not really true, is it?”
“No. It’s not,” said Will. He didn’t know what to add. He wanted to make her laugh, or at least smile. But all he could do was stand there, struck dumb. There was an essence to her gaze—the way her eyes connected with his—that took the simplest words in his mind and effortlessly broke them down into small, useless heaps of letters.
“Yes, well, dying to hear the real story but haven’t got time, I’m afraid. And now you’ll excuse us, Will, we’re running late,” said Oliver, guiding Zoya to the exit. “Thank you again. I’ll call you later to—” The hotel’s revolving door clipped off the end of his phrase as they spun away into the night.
Standing in the empty lobby, Will felt cheated. It was as if some captivating salesman had danced a collection of precious jewels in front of his eyes before whisking them away and locking them up in some unseen vault. Will played back the short conversation he had shared with the girl the previous night on the metro and then let his imagination jump to all the things he could have added to that brief exchange: the well-timed phrases he could have impressed her with, the little jokes to make her laugh and the observations to make her wonder, all of which could have culminated in Zoya Polyakov being on his arm tonight, looking up into his eyes.
There were charmed souls who always seemed to say the right things in the perfect manner, deftly slipping the precise amount of weighted meaning into every nuanced phrase and achieving their goal with a minimum of effort, squeezing every sugary drop of opportunity out of every ripe moment and always getting their way. That simply wasn’t Will. But Oliver did always seem to know what to do, what to say. He was so silver tongued, he could blackmail you and steal your girl and it was still hard to hate him. Probably because, for Oliver, none of it was serious. Like the boys back home on the field at Tiger Stadium, he was simply playing a game while the rest of the world struggled on. He held the world in the palm of his hand, the same way pitchers like Hal Newhouser and Dizzy Trout held a baseball. Will wanted that control, he wanted to possess his share of the graceful victories that came easily to some and never to him. But it was no use, he could improve and try harder, but in the end he knew he was too earnest and straight, he didn’t have the luck, the charisma, or the air of money that opened the secret doors and won the loveliest girls. He had been raised to follow the rules, and for the most part he had, knowing all the while that those rules were invented to keep everyone in their place. He had to live within those limits, he didn’t know what else to do. Besides, sticking to those rules had gotten him this far. Here he was, living in Paris, after all. He had no right to complain. Still, though, he didn’t have that girl, Oliver did. Will stood there for a few minutes, finishing his cigarette while staring down at his plain brown shoes. In the far corner of the room, the hotel’s pianist was playing the final phrases of a Schubert sonata. Will didn’t know the piece, all he knew was that its beauty hurt.
XVII
The rising sun sent bright rays of fresh light flooding across Zoya’s room. She was still awake, though out of her party clothes. She sat perched on a stool, leaning over her kitchen sink busily picking apart one of the pellets the owls had left. She separated out the larger bones from the small, tangled ball and rolled the remaining contents together in a paste with marzipan and chicory, spitting on the ball to hold it together. A pair of houseflies buzzed about as she dipped it into a teacup filled with elderberry wine, letting it soak before taking it out to dry on the sill. One of the houseflies landed on the ball and walked nervously along its surface. Go ahead, she thought, taste it, you will be surprised at what you find.
She went back to the bed and lay down, waiting.
Her plans for Oliver could not have gone better, he was so smug with his lofty attitude, so ready to go through all the motions of seduction. It never occurred to him that he might be the prey. She enjoyed this sort of man wherever she found him; more than once she had seen empires undone by the ignorance that pooled around such grand, unflappable confidence. Where would the world be, she wondered, without all these blind and greedy men?
Two nights ago, she had sat on the bench with her small, enchanted mirror, bouncing and bending the thin light from Will’s apartment. She watched as the tall man and his two accomplices had bullied Will. She had seen him tied up and gagged, she saw a knife flash. She could not hear anything, but it did not matter. Eventually things seemed to settle down. Will was untied. The tall man talked to him at length, clearly trying to make a point, while a short woman sat at the desk, taking pictures. Worried that she might be observed by some curious passerby, Zoya finally tucked her mirror away. She knew enough. Her path usually brought her into contact with the small, garden-variety deceptions people habitually dabbled in—hidden mistresses, larcenous accounts, or rude domestic violence. This was notably different. Will was like a rabbit she had been carefully stalking and tracking through the woods, only to have it stolen out from under her nose by another pack of predators right before she could pounce. This was interesting. She sat and waited.
When the tall man and his friends had finally emerged from the apartment building, Zoya fell in behind. When the three grabbed a taxi, she jumped in another. “Suivez le taxi là,” she told the driver.
They drove out of the 8th, down the Champs-Élysées, and crossed the river. Driving up the Left Bank, she watched the short woman emerge at one corner and the large oaf of a man crawl out at another. Finally the cab stopped in front of a café and she watched the tall thin man pay the cabbie and head in. This would not be too difficult, she thought. For starters, he was alone. Also, he was handsome enough, lean, and sharp looking. She’d done her fair share of work with ugly ones in the past, men with faces so pimpled and flabby her stomach turned merely at the memory of them.
She found Oliver sitting at the bar, hunched like a thirsty crane over a Pernod. She sat down in the manner of an old friend, and with, six words, whispered backward, had him convinced that they actually had met before. Three drinks later, a few double entendres, and a h
and on a knee had him convinced he would be seeing much more of her.
She had asked very little, but as he smoked and drank through the night, Oliver told her quite a lot. He was a writer and a publisher, he said. He had rowed crew in college, his parents had hoped for him to study law, following the family tradition (a grandfather on his mother’s side had been a Supreme Court justice). Zoya had listened, smiled, and nodded along, though it all meant very little. He said he had fallen in love with Paris after the war and had lived here off and on, ever since then, now over in the 5th arrondissement.
“Decades of lessons and tutorials plus years spent here, and the locals still say my French is only fairly good,” he said.
“You understand my French,” she said. “That’s good enough, oui?”
He smiled warmly at her. Testing the spell of familiarity, she had said that he seemed happier than he’d been the last time she saw him, but at this, Oliver shook his head in dismay. “Glad to hear I’m putting on an optimistic front, but no, the thunderheads are looming, I’m afraid, and nothing’s panning out. My humble little magazine’s about to go under, we’ve lost our biggest benefactor, you see, and if I don’t come up with some grand stroke of genius, well, I’ll have to pack it in and go home.”
“Perhaps your writing will be successful.”
“What writing?”
“You’re an author, no? Did you not say—”
“Oh, yes, I did, didn’t I?” This had made him erupt with a burst of drunken laughter, a startling sound that reminded her of a mule’s braying, but then his face grew somber again. “Well, I was a real writer for a stretch, banging away at the typewriter every morning, big ideas billowing like thick cumulus clouds across the horizons of my mind, and all that bunk. Hemingway says the best writing is when you are in love, and it’s true, but then something happened, a kind of personal tragedy, and I was forced to stop. You might say I was scarred. Anyway, since then, my mind’s been a blank. Oh wait, I did have one idea, I thought I’d write down the crudest pornography I could think of, then hit the Roget’s hard and doll it all up into a novel. Figured if I dead-on nailed it I could get the book banned in the U.S., a nice nasty scandal would erupt, and international sales would shoot through the roof. Miller and Nabokov both managed that trick quite well, of course. But then of course mother would want to see it and, well…” He stopped to sip his drink. “For quite a long time I felt guilty about abandoning my writing, but then I heard a story that helped. A taxicab driver told it to me—he was Russian too. You see, before the revolution there was a Muscovite writer, magnificently talented, who was known for his brutal realism, real hard stuff, like Gorky, only darker. His work exposed the callous ugliness of the tsars, the starving peasants, the pestilence and fever, the whole shebang. Then, of course, the revolution came and, like the rest of the true believers, he bought all of it, brotherhood, unity, fraternity, the works. Of course, then comrades began disappearing into Black Marias; the state was seizing journalists, neighbors, all of them, poof, vanishing like some sort of terrible magic trick, and this writer began to worry. So he worked up a canny little strategy to dodge the ax: from that point forward, he only wrote nonsense. Kitchen sinks barking recipes to mops, cattle mournfully mooing out tennis scores, salt shakers singing nursery rhymes—the man had no agenda, but he had to write, because all he knew how to do was weld verbs and nouns together into some kind of powerful harmony. In the end, of course, Stalin suspected this fellow was up to something, so bang, they shot that writer dead. End of story. Well now, this tale certainly shook me, but I also took some solace from it. When the revolution does arrive and the committee gathers to judge, they won’t be able to hang me for any of my work, for I am the writer who never writes.”
“I see,” Zoya said. She was interested in the way he told his tale, beginning with an emotional truth, a point of clear vulnerability, and then quickly burying it under drunken tangents, glib humor, and randomly grabbed pages of history. Here, she realized, was a man afraid of his own heart. He would rather hide it beneath layers like some papier-mâché mask, pasted together for a carnival. He was simply a coward. This was not a condemnation; she genuinely appreciated it about him. The truly craven were, in her eyes, nothing to despise; she had spent much of her life hiding with them, cowering in the dank, dark corners of root cellars, hiding up high in the branches of trees, or cringing below the putrid edges of half-full latrines, listening as pillaging troops and blood-lusting rioters tore apart their homes and villages. She remembered looking into the cowards’ quiet, knowing eyes as they huddled together, listening to the gunshots and the screams and then the receding din of the marching boots mixed with the clatter of looted spoils, all followed finally by the perfect silence of death. Cloaked there in that petrified darkness, crammed shoulder to shoulder with the breath of their fear on her neck, she learned that coward was often only another name for survivor.
“So, you never write?”
“No,” he said. “Every so often I think about dashing off a stanza about the crystal winter frost or the blush of a girl’s cheek, only to keep the blood going, but I rarely get round to it.” Oliver finished the last of his drink and seemed ready to change the subject. “Say, look now, here’s a thought. I’ve got two tickets for a cinema premier tomorrow night. Wasn’t planning on attending, but maybe we should go?”
“Didn’t you already invite me?”
“When?” He looked confused.
“Earlier.” She liked shuffling the deck of time, keeping him off balance.
“Did I? Yes, maybe, who knows. Lord,” he said, chuckling, holding up his drink, “I suspect someone slipped some alcohol into my cocktail. Ha ha. So, how about we meet up at the Hotel Lutetia, say at six?”
She had agreed and then excused herself, leaving Oliver with kisses on his cheeks and a warm smile promising more. As she was leaving she saw him shake his head, clearly a little bewildered and slightly thrilled by their encounter. She paused to look back through the window as he signaled the bartender for another drink; clearly she had excited nerves that now needed soothing, better with a bottle than another woman. Wives were fine, but other lovers tangled plans.
Arriving home that night, she had looked around for a sign of Max’s visit, but it was clear he had not been in the apartment. She didn’t think much of it, the rat often took days to make his way, sniffing over the rooftops and up the drainpipes until he tracked her down.
She found the two owl pellets lying inside the open window and placed them in an empty pickling jar. Then she prepared for her work. Inside a wide, shallow bowl she placed Oliver’s handkerchief (which she had furtively slipped from his pocket), along with the calling card he had handed her as they departed. Before she placed the card into the bowl, she licked both sides and poured in a spoonful of honey, sprinkled tea leaves, ground star anise, white pepper, and cinnamon. Then she placed the bowl on the sill and, singing a quick spell, spit into it twice.
The next evening, she met Oliver at the hotel. She had not expected Will to show up, she had not seen or prepared for it, and when she came into the brightly lit lobby and saw him sitting there, she paused and thought, Well, hello, rabbit.
She felt the dust stir in her heart. Perhaps it was the simple pleasure of surprise, or the deliciously wicked feeling of having a plan surge ahead. But possibly, she thought, those wisps of girlish sentimentality that always floated around inside her had been blown to life, those gilded and hopeful fairy-tale notions that Elga always scolded her for harboring.
Stay focused, she thought, but it was all moving very fast. In the old days it would take eons of plotting star charts and memorizing stagecoach schedules to choreograph the right coincidences, but now, with combustion engines roaring and the sky scratched thick with telephone lines, gears meshed quickly and plans flew together. Walking toward him, she adjusted her dress, one of the few couture items Leon had ever bought for her (petite lace negligees had been more his style). She was tempted to toss
a quick trick into the air but hesitated, reminding herself that spontaneous spells too often went awry (there were countless rows of countryside graves attesting to that); but also she was curious to see what she could accomplish naturally. Watching the slow recognition on Will’s face as he saw her, followed by his realization that she was accompanying Oliver, made her wonder if this enchantment might work entirely organically; after all, coveting another man’s possessions tended to come with its own dark spell.
Moments later, when Oliver put his arm around her waist and swept her out the door, she barely had time for a quick glance back at poor Will, still standing there, watching her go. The look on his face told her the deed was as good as done. The fish had swum into the net, the bear’s paw had found its trap, and this little rabbit was now all hers.
XVIII
Elga steered the patrol car off the country road and bounced it up the farm’s muddy driveway. She parked between a small flatbed truck and a shed. Getting out of the car, she paused to look around. Past the small farmhouse a yellow bicycle rested against the large barn. She walked up onto the farmhouse porch and, without knocking, went in. The rat scurried in behind her.
An old man wearing a priest’s cassock sat at the table, eating a bowl of soup. He paused for a moment to look up at Elga, then returned his attention to the soup. The rat crawled from behind Elga’s feet, jumped up onto a chair, hopped up onto the table, and started licking at the edges of the bowl.
“Tell him to stop that,” said the priest, raising his spoon in protest.
“You tell him, he’s your brother,” said Elga.
“Max, stop it,” said the priest, but the rat kept at the soup. The priest put down his spoon and watched as the rat steadily emptied the bowl, licking it clean.
“He was hungry.”
“I can see that. Where’s your Zoya?” said the priest, taking a green apple off the sideboard. “Curled up in her little love nest?”