“We have the best people, boss. You are forever saying that.”
“Yeah, I know. Which brings us to the latest troubling fact.” Rufus ran over the latest beamer like an unfortunate bump in the road.
The cars stopped charging the truck. Rufus had already lost speed due to the truck being down a few tires and partly on fire. “At least we’re clear now,” Pontius said.
“That’s just the point. We must be off the trail. They must have taken that turnoff back there.” Rufus wheeled the truck around a little too quickly, and caused it to jackknife.
Lying on the side of the road, he looked up at the roadside cameras. And it just clicked. “Sometimes that’s all you need, Pontius, is a change of perspective.”
“What is it, boss?”
“They’re using self-evolving algorithms to track us and to intervene. They just keep rewriting themselves and evolving to match our level of play. Stunning. We need some of those bad boys. Let’s see how they like a dose of their own medicine.”
The dense air between them suspended a sense of triumph. After some delay, during which time Rufus managed to free himself from the seat belt, Pontius said, “You sure, boss?”
Following a pushup to peel his face off the passenger window, Rufus readjusted himself with the aim of getting comfortable. “A real person behind the cameras couldn’t know that truck we commandeered was being used to hijack stolen bikes. And a real person, even a team of people, couldn’t calculate the price of offing those people in the high end cars just to take us down. Who was to say they didn’t have destinies which would one day shine brighter than the guy working on the time machine? But in nanoseconds self-evolving algorithms could have extrapolated from data on them scattered across the net. It’s the only explanation, Pontius.”
After another delay in conversation, which Rufus hadn’t noticed, still stunned by his own revelation, Pontius spoke up. “Maybe we’re not thinking big enough. Maybe someone is trying to make the Internet sentient. Why shut us down once, when you can shut us down forever?”
Rufus regarded him bug-eyed. “It may take a while for you to generate a big thought of your own, Pontius, but it’s worth the wait.”
THIRTY-TWO
Santini steered the RV into its resting site with the hook up for running water and electricity, hitting a few nasty bumps along the way.
“Hey, you mind! Sensitive machinery being assembled over here!” Fabio yelled, fitting the potentiometer to the wire mesh.
“Easy, kid,” Milton said in his most parental voice, to which Fabio was curiously responsive. Having never had children of his own, he found himself stepping readily into the role. Aala, for all her charms, was barren, explaining perhaps why she was so fertile of imagination, overcompensating with the juju spells, and her witchy ways. Giving birth to altered states of consciousness, and opening doors to altered realities, was more her specialty.
The RV rocked before settling into its new home. “Love the nature theme,” Mort said, eying the old, overgrown park, with rundown trailers and trees, hedges and shrubbery galore, probably planted as far back as the last ice age. The acorns from the sprawling oaks were already falling, tap-tap-tapping the metal roof of the RV. Mort craned his neck to follow the orchestra of sounds overhead. “We should have rethought the whole metal-roof thing.”
“I say we ditch this stillborn idea for a double-wide.” Santini stood, stretched his legs, and groaned from having had to sit in one place too long. Not exactly the best formula for his hip arthritis. He surveyed the congregation filling up the RV, thinking, Stylish yeah, but we’re packed in a little too much like sardines. He wasn’t sure if the grumbling he was hearing were sounds of concurrence, or sounds coming from the others stretching out their kinks. “Mort, go find us someone willing to trade style for spaciousness, will ya?”
“On it.” Mort pushed his way out the door of the RV. “Get a whiff of the barbecue,” he said, talking through the open door, his feet firmly planted on leaf-covered terra-firma. He turned his nose toward the mélange of burnt odors. “I’ve never felt so proud to be an American.”
Gretchen pulled the casserole out of the oven. “Don’t suppose it’s too early for a house-warming gift. I think I’ll go meet the neighbors.”
“Maybe I should tag along,” Santini suggested.
“Nonsense. Too early to be alarmist. It’ll be a while before anyone knows we’re here.”
She grabbed the Plexiglas platter with oven mitts and headed out the open door Mort had trailblazed for her.
***
The tall grass, twigs, and uneven terrain kept Gretchen’s ankles flying higher than normal, and her eyes bouncing between her destination and the ground immediately in front of her.
“Knock-knock,” she said, standing on the patio of their nearest neighbor.
The gentleman inside opened the screen door for her and greeted her with a big smile. “That’s wonderful. I could smell it as soon as you drove up. I’m glad you chose not to be a tease.”
“Do you have a place I can set this down?”
“Of course. Right over there. I use that section of counter as an altar suitable to such delectable sacrifices. For the gods to be appeased, it must be that section, and that section only.”
She laughed, setting the dish down. She hungrily eyed his home, perhaps too aggressively for a first-time visit. “I hope you don’t mind me staring. I’m a fan of history myself.”
“Yes, if only I could stick to one era.”
“No kidding, you must have stuff in here dating back to the Stone Age.”
“Time is my mistress.”
Gretchen noted his auburn-hair and, by how he chose his words a little too carefully, his foxy demeanor. He was lean, his mind and body nimble from a life perhaps spent the same as all foxes, dodging bullets. “I’m Gretchen,” she said, extending her hand.
“Thomas Rex. T-Rex to my friends, being as I’m such a dinosaur.”
She laughed. He had a polished way about him that suggested a man beyond his years.
“You must be European despite the accent. Most Americans are just overgrown teens. You seem so cultivated.” She was referring to his refined mannerisms, which made him seem almost effete, and to his tone of voice, as if he was playing a deliberate melody every time he opened his mouth. His speech was sweet enough to qualify as seduction, only without any of the crassness or forwardness. He gestured for her to take a seat as he put his arm around the small of her back.
“What makes you decide what to collect?” Gretchen asked.
“I pick periods of my life in which something dreadful happened, and left me scarred in some way. I know, isn’t that horrible? I think the idea is to revisit the past, until I’ve worked out whatever it is that still needs working out. I guess you could say, these are my prayer beads.”
“What a wonderful idea.”
He sat on the arm of the sofa beside her as if he couldn’t stand to be any further away from her. His lanky limbs dangled and swayed like tree branches to the slightest breeze, coming in this case from the crests and dips in their conversation, and the accompanying laughter. When he brushed his lazy hair back, it was as if he couldn’t stand the insult of anything coming between his eyes and her. He spoke with his hands in the way a snake charmer attracts a cobra with his flute, moving them about hypnotically, conveying a sense of inner calm that could only be nurtured further by crawling into his arms.
“I couldn’t help noticing your artifacts from the forties,” she said, “I suppose because that’s a period that haunts me.”
“Yes, well, not surprising,” he said, after a brief pause, as if thrown by her comment. “A difficult period in history that left a lot of people scarred, I’m afraid. It touched even those not born to the era through loved ones and family who lived and died through the worst mankind had to offer.”
“That’s the thing. I’m convinced I lived back then. I remember some incidents more vividly than I remember what happened
to me yesterday.”
She noticed he tensed ever so slightly, ever so briefly. “Well, I’m not just a collector of history, I’m quite the student of it, as well,” he said. “Maybe if you tell me more, I can verify if what you remember is historically accurate.”
“It’s funny you ask, because you remind me a lot of the chocolatier who features prominently in one of my memories. He had a moustache, of course, and he did his hair a little differently, but—”
“What a charming coincidence.”
“Initially, I only observed him from beyond the window of his establishment. One day, three of his customers, a woman, and two children, were gunned down by a German plane just outside his store. When he rushed outside, that’s when I got to see him up close for the first time. I remember it was doubly horrific for me to discover it was the man’s wife and two kids, as he sat hugging them and crying.”
The color went out of Thomas’s face. Gretchen assumed it was out of empathy for her and how the ghastly incident made her feel, but it seemed like something more.
She rose and went to the rifle on the mantle. “This is an MG-17, isn’t it? It’s the gun mounted on the plane that shot down the woman and her children.”
There were tears streaming down Thomas’s face. “You’re very open,” Gretchen said. “Most people don’t allow themselves to feel others’ pain like that, to feel their own for that matter.”
Thomas wiped his eyes. “I imagine an incident like that would be hard to get away from.”
“I should really be going,” she said, embarrassed she had caused him such distress, if only secondarily.
“Nonsense. We haven’t authenticated your memory yet. Tell me, did you ever step into the chocolatier’s?”
***
Gretchen had never had the nerve to walk inside the chocolatier’s and into his colorful world, feeling she didn’t have the right. That door was a portal to a fantasy land that would make it that much harder to come back to her world, make it that much more unlivable, and it was unbearable enough already. It was the day after seeing the chocolatier's wife and children gunned down that she finally stepped across the threshold.
He didn’t even notice her walk in the store. The bell on the door signaling like all the herald angels singing did nothing to shake him from his stupor. Even under the cap, his face in shadow, absently eying the chocolates taking shape in his hand, it was clear he was only a bombed out shell of the man he was. She was so afraid he was going to kill himself. Isn’t that what young lovers did, before they had any clue how much of those feelings were triggered by love of love itself, love’s object being largely interchangeable? Even in profile, he would have inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo.
“I’d like one of everything,” she said.
“One of everything?” Startled, he looked up.
“I can tell how much of yourself you put into your chocolates. It’s a chance to get closer to you.”
“You’re the lady in the window. Never in the store, always in the window.”
“Yes, that’s me. And you’re the handsome man always promised to someone else.”
He glanced away as if embarrassed, and too much on emotional overload to process new information. He collected the chocolates of different shapes and sizes and colors beneath the display cabinet. “I’m afraid this is going to be expensive. I make everything by hand.”
“All the better,” she said. There was no one in the store; there seldom was. She was concerned for his livelihood during wartime. Most everyone was too depressed and too hungry to do much but break in to the store and take what they wanted. She noticed he kept spare window panes by the wall facing the street. Not a good sign.
She had no idea why she was flirting with him. It was horrible under the circumstances. Maybe a part of her felt if she could communicate that someone else could love him, someone pretty enough for him to love back, it might mitigate some of that extremist thinking lovers were given to.
“Here,” he said. “That’ll be five dollars.” A fortune in those days.
She handed him back an even bigger fortune, a twenty dollar bill.
“That’s too much.”
“I want to inspire you to create more chocolates for me, so I never have to taste the same flavors twice. You will be to me what traveling the world was to Marco Polo.”
He smiled surprise through his veil of tears, a small ray of sunshine piercing the darkness of his soul. “I can do that,” he said, perhaps relieved to have a project to get his mind off his personal woes.
“Think of all the people you make happy,” she said. “What a gift you have; treasure it. So few of us are blessed like that.” She figured she was laying it on thick, but to a psyche as wounded as his, was it possible to be too empathetic?
“Would you like to learn something of how chocolates are made?” he asked, actively using her to distract him from the loss of his loved ones.
“I’d love to.”
“Come stand beside me.” He took her hand, and guided it as he made the different candied marks over each chocolate. “The V on the round chocolate is to indicate vanilla cream. Chocolate cream is round with an open-C. Cherry cordial, round with a closed-C. Vanilla caramel, square with a V on top. Peppermint: round, flat, wavy stripes.”
His eyes lit up as hers sparkled. She could tell he was using her like a drug, like his chocolates, to numb his pain, which made what would happen between them next about as meaningful and lasting as a cresting wave on the beach. Still, they could pass through phases, couldn’t they? She could morph from drug to partner-in-arms, to love of a lifetime, given enough time.
From that moment in the store, his hands over hers drawing shapes over chocolates, her mind skipped briefly across the scenes of their unfolding love affair. The remembrances too painful to bear a longer visit. When she went to convey them to Thomas, the words stuck in her throat. Eventually, she was thrown out of the past altogether and back inside the trailer.
***
“I’m sorry. It’s still too painful even now to go any further.”
“My God. You’re the woman in the window.” Thomas’s mouth hung open.
“What do you mean?” Gretchen asked.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s such a great story. If you were ever to write a book about it, you must call it The Woman in the Window.”
She laughed and cried at the same time, unable to stop the tears from cascading down her cheeks. “Well, what do you think? Fact or fiction?”
“I’m afraid to report the art of signing chocolates died in the forties with the onslaught of mechanization and mass-manufacturing.”
“Still, there had to be a few old school confectioners plying the trade the way it had always been done.”
“Well, if you insist on playing the odds,” he said.
Thomas couldn’t resist the temptation to hold her and comfort her. As soon as he did, he could see it in her eyes; he felt the way Cicero, the chocolatier, felt! She was so stunned that she pulled away from him, flustered. “I’ve got to go,” she said, and then ran out of the trailer.
“Your name was Gertrude, then, also, in case you don’t remember,” Thomas said, though by then she’d already closed the door on him. He collapsed on the sofa, stared straight ahead. Tears streamed from his eyes in quantities that would leave him delirious from dehydration if he didn’t stop.
Gertrude collapsed on the stoop of Thomas’s trailer, her mind reeling. The brief moment Thomas held her in his arms had released another torrent of memories.
***
Gertrude cycled up Palermo’s steepest, most circuitous street, ringing the bell on her bicycle every chance she got: at kids running recklessly across her path; at drivers thinking of turning without checking for cyclists nearby; at birds flying overhead contemplating crapping on her. Why? Because the bell on her bike sounded very similar to the bell hanging in Cicero’s door.
Arriving at her favorite chocolatier’s, she noticed the “Closed” sign
in the door. She checked her watch. It was just two PM. The day before it had been one PM and the “Closed” sign had already been hung. Where was he going in the middle of the day? If customers couldn’t rely on him, he couldn’t build up his business. Seeing a window pane shattered, and a row of chocolates absent from the window, she decided to use his key and man the fort for him until he got back.
Once inside, she swept up the broken shards, and restored the windowpane with a spare sheet of glass and a line of caulk. Any woman not able to step in for a man during war-time was asking to become extinct. She was proud of her self-reliance, admittedly eaten away of late by her growing fondness for Cicero.
She picked up the sign labeling the chocolates now absent from the window, and used it as a reminder as she repopulated the empty shelf in the window over the remainder of the day. She had picked up a lot from Cicero during their sessions—a lot more than an inconsistent heart that could no longer keep time any better than Cicero seemed able. Enough to procure the simpler confections, at any rate.
When Cicero returned to the shop, he stole inside like a thief. She didn’t recognize him. His face so stern and malevolent. He wore a laborer’s outfit; his hands were greasy. He looked nothing like himself. She beat him off with a stick. He wrestled with her in turn, just as surprised to find her in the store, and just as disoriented.
Finally, he said, “Enough, Gertrude. It’s me.” He sounded ashamed, and angry at being made to feel ashamed. Emotions flashed across his face as he set the stick down: remorse; anger, and a determination to seek revenge; satisfaction and penitence. Gertrude knew one thing: none of those feelings had anything to do with her. What was he, a spy? A counterinsurgent? A trafficker of war criminals, escorting them to freedom? Those were all things better done under the cover of night, she reassured herself.
She decided not to push it. “I got here and the window was broken. I patched it and replaced the row of confections that were stolen.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 111