by John Boyne
“There’s rooms up there, isn’t there?” asked Damir, looking up now. “Is that where the bar owner lives?”
“You must have many boys,” said Bastiaan. “Why can’t you just leave Ignac alone? He wants a different life.”
“Because he doesn’t get to make that choice.”
“Why not?”
“Ten years,” he said. “In ten years’ time he won’t look like he does now and then he can do whatever he likes with his time. I won’t stand in his way. But right now…right now he must do as I say.”
“But why?” insisted Bastiaan.
“Because that’s what sons do for their fathers,” said Damir.
I felt my head grow a little dizzy at the words and glanced at Bastiaan, who was frowning as he took them in. Of course, now that I thought of it the man might have borne no physical similarity to Ignac but their accents were similar.
“You’ve pimped out your own son?” I asked, appalled.
“I left him with his mother,” he said. “But the stupid woman died and my lazy bitch of a mother wouldn’t take care of him. So I paid for him to come here instead. I took him from a troubled homeland to a safe city.”
“There’s nothing safe about what you make him do,” said Bastiaan. “How can you do this to your own son?”
Before he could answer, however, the door opened and a girl named Anna, one of the waitresses, came outside as she left for the night. She recognized us, of course, but not our companion, who pushed past her and marched inside, leaving us standing on the street, uncertain what to do next.
“We’re closed!” shouted Anna after him.
“Where’s Ignac?” asked the man.
“Go home,” said Bastiaan to the girl. “We’ll sort this out.”
She shrugged her shoulders and continued on her way, and we followed Damir inside to find him marching around the empty bar.
“He must have left already,” I said, hoping he might believe me, but Damir shook his head and looked toward the staircase behind the bar that led upstairs to Smoot’s flat and marched toward it.
“I’ll call the police,” I called after him.
“Call whoever the fuck you like!” he roared back, disappearing out of sight.
“Shit,” said Bastiaan, running after him.
We ran up after him to find the man ineffectively rattling the door handle to the flat. When it didn’t open immediately, he took a step back and kicked it so hard that it flew open, slamming against the wall and causing a shelf of books to fall to the floor. The living room was empty but even as he stumbled inside with me and Bastiaan in pursuit, the sound of anxious voices could be heard from the kitchen beyond. I had been up here a few times before. There was a safe in one of the cupboards and Smoot locked his takings in there each night before bringing them to the bank the next day.
“Get out here, Ignac!” roared the man. “I’m a patient man but even I have my limits. It’s time to come with me now.”
He lifted his hand and brought it down solidly against the table a few times as Smoot and Ignac appeared in the doorway. The boy looked terrified, but it was Smoot’s expression that most concerned me. He looked angry and upset but also strangely calm, as if he knew what to do.
“Leave,” I said, reaching for the man’s sleeve, but he pushed me away violently and I tripped on a rug and fell backward against the floor, landing on my elbow.
“I’m not going with you!” shouted Ignac, looking young and sounding terrified as Smoot disappeared back into the kitchen behind him. His father just laughed and reached one arm out, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and slapping him hard across the face, knocking him off his feet, before picking him back up and slapping him again.
“You’ll do what I tell you,” he said, dragging the boy through the living area, and when Bastiaan tried to pull him away, he simply swatted him away with his free hand. In the corner of the room I saw a hurley stick, a red and white sticker affixed to it showing two towers and a ship sailing between them, an unexpected reminder of home that Smoot must have brought with him when he left Ireland. I grabbed it and ran for Damir now, holding the hurley in a lock position, and as he turned to me, his teeth were bared like an animal and he pushed his son to the ground. “Come on then,” he said, beckoning me forward. “Hit me with it if you dare.”
I raised it, doing my best to appear threatening as I struck an ineffective blow across his arm, but he lunged at me, pushing me to the floor and grabbing the stick, snapping it easily across his knee and tossing it across the room. For the first time, I began to panic that he would take out his anger not just on Ignac but on the rest of us too. Even though he was outnumbered, he was so big that I wasn’t convinced we could fight him off. But I could not allow Ignac to be taken either. As he turned around, Bastiaan was standing before him, his hands clenched into fists.
“Don’t,” I cried, for as strong as Bastiaan was I did not rate his chances against this giant. The man barely hesitated, rushing at him with such force that Bastiaan toppled backward and when Damir kicked him on the ground I could hear what was obviously the sound of ribs cracking. I called out his name, but before he could answer Damir had dragged him to his feet and thrown him back down the stairs toward the bar.
“Enough!” he cried, when he turned around. “Ignac, you’re coming with me. Do you understand?”
The boy looked across at me but nodded sadly. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come. Just don’t hurt anyone else.”
Damir walked toward me and looked down to where I lay on the floor. “That’s the end of this,” he said quietly. “If you come near my boy again, I will cut your head off and throw it in the canal, do you understand me?”
I swallowed, too frightened to say anything, but the way in which his expression suddenly changed baffled me. The anger was gone, as was his threat, replaced by pain and disbelief. I stared at him and then toward Ignac, who was holding both hands across his face in fear. Damir reached his arms around his body, trying to grab at something and then his legs went from under him as he slipped, trying to catch hold of the living room table but instead falling to the floor next to me, groaning. I staggered away, crawled to my feet, and looked at him. He was lying facedown with a knife in his back. When I turned to my right, I saw Smoot standing over him.
“Go,” he said calmly.
“Jack!” I cried. “What have you done?”
“Go, the pair of you. Get out of here.”
I made my way toward the door and looked down the staircase toward Bastiaan, who was struggling to his feet and rubbing the back of his head. Ignac reached down and looked at his father’s face. The man’s eyes were wide open and staring. One firm stab had been all it took; he was dead.
“I couldn’t let it happen again,” said Smoot quietly, and I turned to him in confusion.
“Let what happen again?” I asked. “Jesus Christ, you killed him. What will we do?”
Smoot looked around and, to my astonishment, seemed to be perfectly calm. He was even smiling. “I know exactly what to do,” he said. “And I don’t need any of you here to do it. Just go, all right? Here’s the keys of the bar. Lock the door behind you and throw the keys back through the letter box.”
“We can’t just—”
“Go!” he roared, turning on me, spittle flying from his lips. “I know what I’m doing.”
I could think of no alternative and so I nodded and took Ignac by the arm and led him downstairs. Bastiaan was sitting on a chair, wheezing.
“What happened?” he asked me. “What’s going on up there?”
“I’ll tell you afterward,” I said. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”
“But—”
“Now,” insisted Ignac, turning to him and helping to lift him. “If we don’t leave here now, we never will.”
And so we left. We went out on the street and did as Jack Smoot had instructed us, locking the door behind us and throwing the keys back inside. We were home within twe
nty minutes and sat up half the night, torn between guilt, hysteria and confusion. When Bastiaan and Ignac had gone to bed, I found myself unable to sleep and so I made my way back across the river and bridges and toward the canal, where I watched as a car pulled up outside MacIntyre’s, a rental car from the ads on its side, and in the moonlight I watched a dark-cloaked figure stepping out of it and opening the boot before knocking three times on the bar door. When it opened, Smoot gestured the person inside and, a few minutes later, they reappeared on the street carrying what seemed to be a heavy rolled-up carpet obviously containing the body of Ignac’s father for they struggled to hold him. They threw it in the boot before slamming it shut and both climbed into the front seats.
Before they drove away, however, the moonlight caught the face of the driver. It was too quick for me to be absolutely certain, but in that moment I was certain that Smoot’s accomplice in the disposal of the body was a woman.
1987 Patient 741
Patient 497
Every Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock, I left our apartment on West 55th Street and made my way toward Columbus Circle, where I took the B train forty-one blocks north to walk across Central Park in the direction of Mount Sinai Hospital. After a quick coffee, I would take the elevator to the seventh floor and check in with Shaniqua Hoynes, the supremely dedicated and authoritative nurse in charge of the volunteer program who frankly terrified me. On my first day there, having skipped lunch out of an almost overwhelming feeling of anxiety, she’d caught me stealing a candy bar from her desk and given me a severe dressing-down before deciding forever that I was an untrustworthy person.
Shaniqua, who was part of a growing team reporting to Bastiaan, always began by asking me the same question—“You sure you’re ready for this today?”—and when I confirmed that I was she would reach over to a never-decreasing pile of patient folders, remove a list from the top and run her finger along a page before calling out two numbers: the number of the patient I was seeing that day and the number of their room. Occasionally, she might offer some particulars about how advanced his or her condition was, but more often than not she’d simply turn her back on me, shooing me out of her office. Typically, many of the patients on the seventh floor had no visitors at all—in those days, even some of the hospital workers were terrified to go near them and the unions were already asking questions about whether or not medical personnel should be put in danger’s way—but in moments of depression or extreme isolation they had put their names to the list of people hoping for an hour’s company with a volunteer. One never knew, however, what to expect; sometimes they could be grateful, wanting to tell you their life stories, but occasionally, in lieu of family members, they were simply looking for someone at whom they might lash out.
Patient 497/Room 706 was one of the older people I had visited so far, a sixty-something man with plump, exaggerated lips. He glanced over warily as I entered the room and let out an exhausted sigh before turning back to stare out the window in the direction of the North Meadow. Two intravenous drips were standing next to his bed, their bags filled with a fluid that seeped hungrily through the feeding tubes into his veins, while a heart monitor, its wires disappearing like thirsty leeches beneath his gown, beeped quietly in the background. He was pale but his skin remained unblemished, as far as I could see.
“I’m Cyril Avery,” I told him, standing next to the window for a few moments before pulling a chair out from the wall and sitting down. I reached out to pat his hand in a pathetic attempt at making some form of physical connection between us but he pulled away. Although I had been thoroughly educated by Bastiaan on the various ways in which the virus could be spread, I still felt nervous whenever I entered rooms like this and perhaps it showed, despite all my attempts to appear brave. “I’m a volunteer here at Mount Sinai.”
“And you came to see me?”
“I did.”
“You’re very kind. You’re English?” he asked, looking me up and down, apparently judging my fairly nondescript clothing.
“No, Irish.”
“Even worse,” he said, waving this away. “My aunt married an Irish man. A total bastard and a walking cliché. Always drunk, always beating her up. The poor woman had nine children by him over eight years. There’s something animalistic about that kind of behavior, don’t you think?”
“Well, we’re not all like that,” I said.
“I never liked the Irish,” he said, shaking his head, and I looked away when I saw a snail’s trail of spittle seeping down his chin. “A degenerate race. No one talks about sex and yet it’s all they ever think about. There’s not a nation on the face of the planet more obsessed with it, if you ask me.” His accent was pure New York—Brooklyn—and I wished he’d mentioned his racial prejudices to Shaniqua when placing his visitor request. It might have saved us both a great deal of trouble.
“Have you ever been there?” I asked.
“Oh for Christ’s sake, I’ve been everywhere,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world. I know the side streets and hidden bars in cities you’ve never even heard of. And now I’m here.”
“How are you feeling? Is there anything I can get you?”
“How do you think I’m feeling? Like I’m already dead but my heart keeps pumping blood around my body just to torment me. Get me some water, will you?”
I glanced around and reached for the jug that sat on the bedside table—“There! Over there!” he snapped—holding it close to his mouth as he sipped on the straw. Those enormous lips were flecked with white and I could see how deeply his yellow teeth were sunk inside his mouth. As he dragged the water through the thin plastic tube, an act that required enormous amounts of effort on his part, he stared directly at me with pure hatred in his eyes.
“You’re shaking,” he said, when he pushed the jug away.
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re frightened of me. You’re right to be frightened of me.” He laughed a little, but there was no lightness in his tone. “You a fag?” he asked eventually.
“No,” I said. “But I’m gay if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I knew it. There’s something about the way you’re looking at me. As if you’re afraid you’re having a vision of your own future. What did you say your name was, Cecil, was it?”
“Cyril.”
“That’s a fag name if ever I heard one. You sound like a character from a Christopher Isherwood novel.”
“But I’m not a fag,” I repeated. “I told you, I’m gay.”
“Is there a difference?”
“There is, yes.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Cyril,” he said, trying to sit up a little in the bed but failing. “I never had any problems with fags. I worked in the theater, after all. Everyone there thought there was something wrong with me because I liked pussy. But now they all think I’m a fag too because of this disease. They think I was hiding it all these years, but I never hid a goddamn thing. I don’t know what bothers me more, the fact that they think I’m a fag or that they think I didn’t have the balls to be honest about it from the start. Believe me, if I’d been a fag I would have told them and I’d have been the best goddamn fag out there. I would never have lied.”
“Does it matter what people think?” I asked him, already tired of his aggression but determined not to allow him to drive me away. That was what he wanted, after all: for me to leave so he could feel abandoned again.
“It does when you’re lying in a hospital bed feeling the life seep out of you,” he said. “And the only people who walk through the door are doctors, nurses and do-gooders who you’ve never laid eyes on in your life before.”
“What about your family?” I asked. “Do you have—”
“Oh fuck off.”
“All right,” I said quietly.
“I have a wife,” he told me after a moment. “I haven’t seen her in two years. And four boys. Each one a more selfish prick than the last. Although I guess I ca
n blame myself for how they turned out. I wasn’t much of a father. But show me a successful man who’s given his family everything they ever demanded of him who can say differently.”
“And they don’t visit you?”
He shook his head. “I’m already dead to them,” he said. “Once my diagnosis came through, that was it. They told their friends that I had a heart attack while I was on a cruise around the Mediterranean and that I’d been buried at sea. You have to admire their creativity.” He shook his head and smiled. “Not that it matters,” he said quietly. “They’re right to be ashamed of me.”
“No, they’re not,” I said.
“You know the funny thing is I’ve fucked about a thousand women over the last forty years,” he said. “And not once in all that time did I ever get any kind of disease. Nothing. Not even when I was in the Navy when, you know, most guys were fifty percent penicillin by the time they got discharged. So I guess it was inevitable that when I finally caught something it was gonna be something big. You people have a lot to answer for.”
I bit my lip. This was another familiar trope: a heterosexual patient lashing out at homosexuals for what he saw as their responsibility for the spread of both the virus and the disease that sprang from it, and I knew from experience that there was no point arguing with any of them. They couldn’t see beyond their own suffering. And why, I supposed, should they?
“What did you do in the theater?” I asked him, eager to change the subject.
“I was a choreographer,” he said with a shrug. “I know, I know. The one straight choreographer in New York City, right? But it’s the truth. I worked with all the greats. Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Bob Fosse. Bob came in to see me a few weeks ago, actually; he was the only one who did. That was kind of him. Most of the others haven’t bothered. All those pretty young dancers. They’d do anything for a part in the chorus line and I was happy to oblige. Not that I ever did any of that casting-couch crap. I didn’t have to. You wouldn’t think it to look at me now but I was a good-looking guy in my day. The girls, they all came running. I had my pick of them. But where are they now? They’re afraid to come near me. Maybe they think I’m dead too. My sons have done a better job of killing me off than AIDS has done so far. At least they were quick about it.”