The Price of Escape

by David Unger

  “All right! You win!” Samuel took out four more dollars, thinking that it was safer to settle accounts with a thief than to create a scene.

  Mr. Price snapped the bills out of his hands. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.” He stuffed the money into his front pocket. “And what about my tip, George?”

  “Just a minute, Mr. Price.”

  The clerk glanced nervously at Samuel. “I need your signature next to where you printed your name. Here, along this line.”

  Samuel uncapped his pen. He noticed that the register had few recent entries. As he began to sign his name, he heard two loud whistles.

  “What’s that?” he asked distractedly.

  “That’s the train for the capital, sir. It leaves every night at seven,” said George.

  Samuel banged his fist down. “But I wanted to be on that train!” He glared down at the dwarf.

  “Well, I guess you missed it,” Mr. Price chuckled. “You still might catch it—if you want to take a taxi to Bananera … Then again, you could also fly.”

  “You lied to me, Mr. Price.”

  The dwarf scrunched his face dismissively. “I’m not paid to recite the train schedule, you know.”

  “I’ve done nothing to you to deserve this treatment.”

  “You think because you have a bit of money that this entitles you to full services.”

  Samuel’s upper lip began twitching; he felt his head throbbing and a slight pressure in his chest. Before he could do anything, the clerk put his paw on Samuel’s hand and said softly: “It’s not so bad here for one night. Sometimes there’s a train leaving in the morning with Fruit Company personnel. I’m sure they would let you on it. Now, would you like a room facing the bay or the jungle in back?”

  “What’s the difference!”

  “I’ll give you a bay room at no extra cost,” said the clerk, closing the register.

  “I’m waiting, George,” Mr. Price chimed in, thumping his foot.

  George looked at him with blank eyes. He opened the drawer where he had placed Samuel’s money and flipped two large coins to the dwarf.

  Mr. Price leaped for the coins and snagged them in midair, one in each hand. His chest hit the wooden floor and he slid across. Then he stood up and dusted himself off.

  Samuel was furious, but chose to ignore him. He was asking the clerk if the hotel had hot water, when Mr. Price tiptoed over and poked him in the ribs. Samuel jolted up, bashing his fingers against the edge of the counter.

  The dwarf had a defiant smirk on his face. “Hey, how about a little company tonight? A girl or maybe a young boy if you prefer, to while away the hours? What do you say to a bit of fun after such a long voyage?” He swiveled his squat hips, thrusting his pelvis back and forth.

  “Get away from me, you disgusting little bastard!” shouted Samuel, trying to clutch the dwarf in his hands. The little man scooted out of his way, but stumbled against the suitcase.

  “Please don’t hit me. I was just kidding.”

  Samuel’s kick landed on the dwarf’s back, sending him and the suitcase across the wooden floor. They both ended up next to one of the ashtrays.

  Mr. Price pushed himself up slowly. There was a small gash just below his cheekbone and dust on his greasy face. Still, the little man smiled through his pain.

  “You’ll pay for this, you European monster.” He stretched his neck and lobbed a ball of spit toward Samuel. It missed him, but landed on the counter. “I should’ve left you on the pier alone with all those kids—then you would’ve understood how grateful you really should be. You fool! You stupid fool!” He ran his mouth across his shirtsleeve, jerked up his pants, and sauntered out of the hotel.

  “Sir, if you’ll—”

  “What do you want from me? More money?”

  The clerk dropped his eyes. He lifted a panel from the counter, allowing him out into the lobby, then walked over to pick up Samuel’s suitcase.

  Samuel beat him to it. “I don’t need your help!”

  “No, please, sir,” implored the clerk softly, trying to hide the foolish grin that formed around his mouth whenever he was nervous. “Let me help you with your bag. I had nothing to do with Tom Thumb. You can see that he’s a bit sick.” He tapped a finger against his forehead. “Most of the boat passengers miss the train as well—it’s been like that for years. You have to plan to stay at least one night in Barrios. We never know when the next train is leaving—”

  “But I told Mr. Price I wanted to go to the station first.”

  “Yes, but it’s too late for that now. You might as well take it easy—no use getting more upset. That will only make things worse for you.”

  Samuel eyed George incredulously. He didn’t know who he could trust. Alfred Lewis? George?

  He felt lost.

  The clerk blinked several times. “Let me give you a hand.”

  Samuel finally relented, letting George take his bag. “You’re right. I must be calm. You said there might be a train tomorrow morning, yes?”

  The clerk shook his head. “You can’t ever be sure of the trains,” he warned, as they walked together to the stairs. “Things go easy here, the Barrios way. You can’t make things happen. The Company would like to change that, but you can’t change people who would rather throw out a fish line than work. You’re not with the Company, are you?”

  “The Fruit Company? Not at all, Mr… .”

  “St. Lawrence. Geoffrey Quincy St. Lawrence. My family’s originally from the Bahamas, but I was born in Punta Gorda in British Honduras. My mother is Garifuna from Honduras. My friends all call me George, my father’s name.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, George.” Samuel felt that perhaps he had finally met a gentleman.

  “Likewise.” The two men shook hands warmly on the landing between floors and then continued climbing. “How is it that you speak English, Mr. Berkow?”

  “I also speak Spanish, but not as well. I was in England for nearly two years during the Great War. Then a few years back, my sister moved to Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. Well, I would visit her for weeks at a time. You might say I have a way with languages. Naturally, I speak German, my mother tongue.”

  “Interesting,” nodded the clerk, “very interesting.”

  At the top of the stairs, they swung left and walked down a long and wide corridor protected by a wire screen. At the end of it, George set down the suitcase. He pulled out a ring of keys and said, “This is it,” then thumbed through it and slipped one into the door lock; the tumblers screeched and clicked. George held the door open to let Samuel into the room.

  Samuel groped momentarily against the wooden wall, searching for a light switch.

  “It’s not there. Go to the center of the room and pull on the chain.”

  Samuel found the chain and pulled. The bulb went on, barely infusing the room with light.

  George hoisted the suitcase onto a rickety writing table. “Should I say that you don’t want to be disturbed?”

  “What a thought!” Samuel laughed. “No one will be looking for me,” he said, stretching. Then he remembered: “Actually a Mr. Lewis may stop by around eight o’clock.”

  George frowned.

  “Is something wrong?”

  A weak smiled formed on the clerk’s lips. “Nothing at all. I will let Mr. Alfred Lewis come up to your room. By the way, your towel is on the bed and there’s a pitcher of water by the bowl.”

  “And the shower?”

  “Well, that’s down the hall, back near the stairs we took. The toilets are there too. And the bar and dining room are downstairs, to the left. Rest up, sir.”

  “Here, this is for your help,” Samuel said, pulling a few coins from his pants pocket.

  “That’s not necessary, sir. I’m the night clerk, not a porter.”

  “Please, I insist.”

  “Well, I appreciate it.” The clerk pocketed the coins and left.

  Samuel walked after him. “Won’t I need a key?
”

  “No, I left the door unlocked.”

  “But what about thieves?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that here.”

  “And the other guests?”

  George blinked back at him, sighing. “There are no other guests except for an old priest who won’t bother you.”

  “You never have guests?”

  “Oh sure, lots of them, especially when a pleasure ship comes in. Just not today. None this week. But we will keep the kitchen open—for you. Will you be eating here tonight? I imagine you’ll be with Mr. Lewis.”

  Samuel nodded.

  And with that the clerk left.

  In the privacy of his own room, Samuel finally felt at ease. He took off his suit jacket, so sopped with sweat that it was like a second skin, and folded it over his chair. He felt a lightness in his being and did a little waltz around the room.

  He went over to his bed, mere canvas strung between two sidebars and a straw mattress covered with a white linen sheet. He pushed down on it with his fingertips and it sank to just inches off the floor. His pillow was also stuffed with straw and a bit flat. He tried puffing it up, but it simply collapsed in his hands.

  Glancing up, he saw two horseflies chasing each other around the thirtywatt bulb. And next to the light chain was another chain that activated the ceiling fan. He pulled down on it and the creaking blades began to go around so slowly that he imagined he could touch them and not be hurt.

  Samuel gazed into the mirror hanging just above the wash basin. He winced—is this what he really looked liked? No wonder Lewis had laughed and the dwarf had jeered! He looked like a hollow man on the verge of collapse.

  If he had been in Germany, Samuel would’ve showered and shaved, but here in Puerto Barrios, at the edge of the jungle in the middle of nowhere, he felt a mere touch-up job would do. He washed his face in the tepid pitcher water. He took out his tortoise-shell comb from his toilet case and proceeded to comb his hair back, leaving a wide part down the middle. He spread his lips and examined his gums: good, they weren’t bleeding, always a sign of bad nerves. He filled his only glass with water from the jug—it might have been potable, but it still had a moldy smell to it.

  All of a sudden Samuel felt his legs weaken. He went over to the light chain, pulled it down, and sunk into bed.

  A short nap would do.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Samuel lay on the bed with his arms crossed behind his head. He was exhausted, but could not get himself to sleep. He felt charged up—images raced through his mind as if they were cards flashed before his eyes. Worse still, he couldn’t get himself to focus on a single detail since he had arrived in Puerto Barrios. Just as soon as a face zoomed into focus—Lewis or Mr. Price or the clerk named George—some other vague face or gesture would blast it from his mind.

  Samuel saw himself walking determinedly through a snowy landscape of thick trees and tangling vines. There was smoke and a terrible stench like the rear of a butcher shop and he tried to figure out where he might be. He was wearing a light brown uniform and a pair of Ballys and yet, somehow, he was able to trudge through deep drifts of snow. His stomach hurt so he decided to stop and unbutton his shirt—there was caked blood all over his undershirt and stomach. Obviously he had been shot.

  He needed to find a hospital. He kept walking until the snow gave way to piles of flak jackets and boots in smoldering fires. He suddenly heard the voice of Field Marshall Dieter Rausch, his pug-nosed, no-neck commander, shouting orders at him above a deafening noise of mortars and shells that hacked the ground. Samuel stopped, and he felt his shoulder take another bullet. Despite this, he continued walking until he lost consciousness and fell to the ground like a perforated balloon. He curled up in a bush, hoping that the brambles would fight off the wind that attacked his wounds. Where was he? He recognized the Hallerbos forest of Belgium—and soon he knew that his troops would carry him back to the field hospital behind the battle lines. And now it began snowing heavily.

  He was not quite asleep. Though the noise was deafening, he heard one of his German comrades speaking stonily above him as if through dense glass. Das ist aber schade. Berkow ist tot, ganz tot. Gehen wir jetzt! Hier kommen die Englische soldaten. Samuel tried to protest—I’m not dead, can’t you see? Please take me back with you—but his words refused to issue out of him. He let his helmeted head drop comfortably into the snow as if it were the softest of pillows. Was this death? To witness things, to be able to hear and see what was going on, but not be able to cry out. No longer noticed. People prancing about you, even talking about you, but being incapable of being heard. What a horror!

  Then there was a lull, the late light of the day weakened, and he felt himself now losing consciousness as if forever. Before passing out, however, he saw his mother sitting on a park bench—was it in the Botanischer Garten or at the entrance of the Hagenbeck Zoo?—looking at six-year-old Samuel trying to read a plaque that had lots of words and dates and showed two snakes swallowing each other by the tail. Scared, he ran back to his mother, but then she, like his German comrades, disappeared. And again, as he was about to pass out, he heard yet another voice, a bit more shrill, telling him that snakes were charming creatures, silky and slithery, nothing compared to tarantulas. And if you want to know pain, invite a scorpion to sleep in your bed! Tee hee. The voice was coming from a dwarfish man with black rings around his neck.

  Samuel did not like this man, but there was nothing he could do.

  Then he felt something crawling on his cheek. Was it the deadly scorpion? Black, slender, with the finest of features. Nothing could be more beautiful. Ah yes, the only one of God’s creatures capable of simultaneously killing his enemy and himself with his very own stinger. And Samuel, it had to be noted, had been born in late October …

  He opened his eyes and batted away a horsefly that had landed on his ear. His room was dark. He turned to his right side on the slinglike bed. He heard furniture being moved on the floor of the room above his and then a voice chanting some kind of prayer. Hadn’t the clerk told him that the hotel was empty, absolutely empty? Ah yes. Just his luck to be in an empty hotel and have a crazy priest above him.

  Then it was quiet again, except for the clinking of his ceiling fan.

  Samuel remembered part of his dream—after all, he had replayed his war experiences hundreds of times. It had been a miracle that the following morning after having been shot three times, a British regiment found him alive, one of the few survivors of the previous afternoon’s carnage. They could have left him there, a brown caterpillar dropped in the snow, but several British soldiers challenged fate and carried him back behind their lines. A slow death, he had thought, as he felt his nearly lifeless body being jostled about. What could they do for him and his perforated lung?

  Later he would learn that several medics had operated on him in an army tent. Despite the anesthetics (they could only give him a bit), he had rolled his eyes for hours and his body had writhed in pain. The British doctors had patched up his lung, pulled out three bullets from his porous body, and mended him shut. He couldn’t be moved for a week but somehow managed to survive the whole surgery; when he finally came back to full consciousness, he was being transported back to England on a military vessel along with other German prisoners. He imagined that soon he would be walking the seashore in Dover, gathering pebbles.

  But he never walked the seashore because he was a prisoner of war. In Harwich, northeast of London on the coast, he recovered from the bullet wounds he had sustained during what had been a suicidal German attack.

  Two weeks in Harwich and the good doctors sent him to a detainment camp outside of Warford in the Chiltern Hills—the mountain air would do him good, would help his lungs recover. There were few prisoners there, and because Samuel learned English rapidly, everyone suspected that he was not a hardened soldier. In fact, he loved the British and said as much and soon he was made an orderly. He worked in the hospital serving meals to the other injured
prisoners, and though he had to sleep under lock and key, he was basically free. When the Treaty of Versailles was signed a year later, he wanted to stay in England, but the armistice had strict rules for repatriation. The best he could do was to get a letter from the hospital stating that he needed to go to a mountain region, perhaps in the Alps, for another six months of treatment. The doctors and nurses were sad to see him go.

  Samuel was sent back to Hamburg by boat along with five hundred other prisoners. Rather than be seen as heroes, the veterans were treated—as they had been as soldiers—like expendables by the German authorities. He received thirty devalued marks from the Veterans Administration, wooden-soled shoes, and, yes, a paper suit, for almost having lost his life serving his country. The German commanders insisted that Samuel go to a sanatorium in the Alps—but at his own expense.

  Samuel closed his eyes. Even now, twenty-odd years later, he didn’t know why he had enlisted. He came from comfort and he hadn’t been a particularly defiant adolescent, though he didn’t cherish his mother’s complaints about her husband’s philandering ways. His father hadn’t tried to stop him, he merely questioned the logic of it all—the usual clichés about duty and patriotism—not that Samuel shouldn’t be patriotic, but what did attack and counterattack have to do with him? Had his school friends been regaling him with exaggerated stories about the glories of war? His father had said, Yes, I know, we are patriotic Germans first and then Jews, but what do you think your death will prove? If I were you, Samuel, I’d stay in school, and if you’re drafted, drum up some false medical excuse … Better a live coward than a dead hero. I know my German people—life is expendable, and Jewish life, well, it has very little value for the Kaiser and his advisors.

  It was his mother who had been most upset by his decision. Were his parents and sister so horrible that he preferred war to them? It wasn’t proper for the son of a successful businessman—the importer of fine leatherwear, haberdashery goods, and French lingerie—to be chucking away his future for a cotton uniform and combat boots. She had grabbed his fingers, laid them across her soft, lotioned hands, and scolded him for wanting to ruin them with calluses and sores. And for what? So you can spend your days cleaning your rifle or polishing your boots for the fourth time in a week? You’re a young man with a future, Samuel, use your head! And through all these discussions, his mother seemed more concerned about what her lady friends—the Jewish tea-and-torte crowd—might think of her son than she was about his health.