“Look, you fool. I am trying to keep the world safe, I do not have time to read every local rag in town.”
“It was in the Guardian,” Val said. “The butcher of Burgos. They arrested him in May 2004, in medieval Burgos on the route to Santiago de Compostela. He was the main conduit in Spain for money going to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”
“That’s bull diddy,” Danny said.
“Danny. Pakistan…North Africa…that blood sausage, the morcilla cocida you bought in Burgos, April ’04? The real Santiago trail story? Your foodie find was a terrorist money launderer.”
“I was on holiday.”
“Terror doesn’t take a holiday, Danny.”
Danny had that puzzled look of a man so sure he had it covered that he literally could not conceive he had nothing covered.
Val Gold spoke: “The prosecution will be bringing charges of dereliction of duty, lack of professional focus, becoming a ‘spiritual person’ and being gravely misdirected by a Spanish chorizo. Sentence pending.”
Danny smirked and fondled himself. “One gives fully frank assurances that, at this point in time, the Camino was no ham-handed stroll, but rather an attempt at the normalization of relations in the bigger picture of the Spanish Street.”
Val led Danny back to the bank ruin’s floor. They sat.
“So, terror money being washed in Spain,” Val said. “Let’s stay with Spain and go to that fateful year of 2001. You were on vacation, right? South of Barcelona, at the resort town of Salou.”
“I work hard. I deserve it,” Danny said.
“Did you know that the men who planned the attack on the Twin Towers were vacationing in Spain in the same town as you, Salou? Same place, same time. They were, our evidence now shows, in Spain in June of 2001, finalizing their September 11th attack. Three months after the Madrid train bombing, the Saudi terrorists were finalizing the details of their intention to fly into the Twin Towers as they lay on chaises at that resort in Spain. The same hotel where you and the missus were switching from your vodka martinis to your cava wine cups, lying back in the hell heat. The Dorada Palace Hotel. The Gold Palace, appropriate, don’t you think? Security footage shows you working on your melanoma three feet away from the men making their final plans to destroy New York City.”
“Call me a cab, la-la-la-la,” Danny said, putting his fingers in his ears. “One must needs return to the scribbling; my novel awaits me! Where is my gofer?”
The desert sand was silent.
“You could have stopped September 11th; you could have stopped March 11th, at the Madrid trains; you could have stopped the June 19th, 1987, ETA bombing in Barcelona; you could have fingered the Butcher of Burgos; you could have prevented the murder at the Bilbao Guggenheim the day it opened; and now you have to face the people’s court for it all.”
“For things I didn’t do?” Danny said.
“In our field, Danny, omission is a sin. The venal sin of incompetence. Your intent was vanity. You trained your pride. You became a B-plus in looking in the normal places. But, Danny, when counterterrorism gets a B-plus, people die.”
“Who retired and made you chief of spies?”
“They offered it to me,” Val said. That was true. “But you know what, Danny? I kinda like working the field, flying down to Rio a hell of a lot better. I used to go hole up at the Hotel Inglês in Botafogo. Go down when Washington was suffering one of those Rangoon Junes, and it was nice and autumn-like in Rio. On a nice crisp day, I used to take a long walk to Copacabana Beach. I believe I saw a man who looked just like you lying on the sand, oh back in ’64. You know, back when the Brazilian military was getting torture training from its American buddies. Was it you there, Daniel? With a small brunette. Very tan, white bikini. You and the missus? Maybe a little bikini volleyball on the Copacabana sand?”
“That wife of mine worked like a demon,” Danny said. “They gave her an airless office in a basement out in Leblon, and put her to work, training under the master, Mr. Mitrione. She deserved some time off. Then it was on to Montevideo. Beautiful little city. For my money, the beaches there were preferable. I told her I wanted to retire there.”
“You and Gilda.”
“Excuse me?” Danny took off his right boot. His leg was scaly.
“Danny. Dear dear Danny. You remember the movie Gilda?” Val was still on the track of his intention.
“Ah, yes, Miss Joan Crawford.”
Val chuckled. “I don’t think so, sonny boy. Yeah, I like it: Joan Crawford in a gown, entertaining at a nightclub? No, Dan. Rita Hayworth as Gilda. She and Glenn Ford get mixed up in that romance on fire. You know the one. Kinda like you and your brother, Johnny. Hate is the emotion so very much like love. But now Gilda is back at the nightclub, doing that dance, inducing Glenn Ford to hate her, while he can’t keep his eyes off of her with lust. It was Montevideo. Montevideo in Gilda was like romantic, alluring casinos; glamour figures; the Southern Cone –”
“Hello, sweetheart.” Vivienne was walking into the bank frame, with her camera at her eyes, saying, “I remember meeting your wife in Montevideo, Danny. ‘She who must be obeyed.’ The famous Mrs. Coma. Val, ask him about Mrs. Coma, La Doctora. Ask him about when she put the electrodes –”
“Out of order!” Danny said. “If it please the court…”
“Vivienne,” Val said. “Not now.”
“Ask him,” she said, walking over to Danny. Saying, right up in Danny’s face, “Ask him about when his wife put the electrical wires around my neck, applied the shock and asked me, and I am quoting verbatim, ‘Why do you like cartoonists?’”
“Vivienne. Please,” Val said. Johnny was outside the bank, listening.
“And I said to Mrs. Coma, ‘Cartoonists are fun. I like cartoons.’ She showed me a photograph of me and my buddy, a cartoonist from El Dedo, the satirical magazine in Montevideo, the two of us sitting in the Columbia Palace Hotel’s coffee shop. ‘Yeah?’ I said. So she shocked my neck again with the electric collar. No sense of humour, your wife, Danny. She wore a suit. That killed me. A little navy suit, dull black pumps. ‘Tell us where he is.’ They knew very well where he was. They always know the answers to the questions they are asking you. ‘Why are you taking pictures of public buildings?’ she asked me. ‘Because public means of the people,’ I said. More neck jolts. And you know what I remember most about Mrs. Coma? She smelled like booze. Bad enough she was a heart doctor torturing supposed subversives. She was a boozehound to boot. She put her ugly punim right up at me, saying, ‘Where is the cartoonist?’ and her breath smelled like a distillery.”
“This is outrageous,” Danny said. “Preposterous. Vodka doesn’t smell.”
“Vivienne,” Val said, “I am trying to do my work here.”
Vivienne snapped a pic of Danny. “Stop it,” he said. She snapped a dozen more.
“It’s people like her who forced us to put into effect the Homeland Security Act,” Danny said.
“Note the ‘us,’” Vivienne said. “Danny got duped by his own role-playing, in America.”
“I’d like to resume,” Val said. “If you have no objections, Ms. Pink.”
Vivienne was camera-stalking Danny. “You know what the best part was, Val? When Betty Coma was putting the electrodes to my neck… Oh, and by the way, Betts called her torture room the executive suite. It was a soundproof room in the basement of her and Danny’s capacious home in Montevideo. Gotta love that cork. And while you, Danny, entertained the local military wags upstairs, Mrs. Coma – said to be away on a medical mercy mission – was torturing citizens under suspicion. You know, photojournalists. Witnesses. People with eyes. Me. Then when the guests went home, guess who brought his cognac and cigar down to watch his wife. You watched the good doctora torture me, Danny Coma. You took a little VIP guest turn at the electricity machine. I saw your eyes, Daniel. You thought God was with you.”
“This is absurd,” Danny said. “I will have none of it.” He stood up on wobbly pins.
Val pushed him flat onto the gravel. “The prosecution accuses you of complicity, aiding and abetting the humiliation and degradation of innocent civilians.”
“Nothing of the sort,” Danny said, looking for help to the amorality of sky.
Johnny stepped into the ruins. “What are you talking about? Vivi, V? Why didn’t you tell me, Vivienne?”
“Val knew,” Vivienne said.
“You told Val and you didn’t tell me?” Johnny asked. He started buttoning his coat.
“You couldn’t handle it.”
“And you could?” he said.
“You know the answer,” Vivienne said. “It was thirty years ago.”
“My very point,” Danny said.
“He watched,” Val said. “Then he wanted to be a player. He stepped up – didn’t you, Danny? – to operationalize his need to know what it felt like to apply electricity to a woman’s nerve endings.”
Vivienne took pics of Johnny’s face. “Why, tell me why you didn’t tell me,” he said to her.
“We were dating,” she said. “You were already worried I might get killed, or worse. I made a decision to spare you.”
“But you told Val. When?”
“Let it go, Jojo.”
“When?”
“One night, in a Sarajevo taxi.”
“So, you and Val are off working in Sarajevo, and you go tell him how Danny’s wife, Betty Coma, tortured you in Uruguay? But you don’t tell me. ‘Oh hi, honey. No, I’m fine. Val says to save him some Gigi pizza.’ Is that it?”
“About right,” she said, crouching down to snap a pic of Danny’s rogue Frye boot and the scaly calf.
“All these years I never knew. I was your husband.”
“You needed to write your books, honey.”
Vivienne came up to Danny. She hated flashes, but she attached one to her camera. In the bright sunlight, standing a couple inches from Danny she kept using the flash. “You know who your wife was? She was the person who would have stepped into Gilda and taken Gilda in Montevideo and put her in a basement and tortured her to find out who this ‘Mame’ was who Gilda kept singing about putting the blame on.”
“You were fat,” Danny said. “Fat and blond. Now I remember. Don’t blame me because you lost weight and changed your hair colour.”
“What was it like, Danny?” Vivienne asked. “To be married to the most unkind of women? Is that why you threw her off the cliff in Patagonia?”
“You people are all one and the same,” Danny said, putting his bony face right up to Vivienne’s. “The wife? She was a damn embarrassment.”
Johnny unbuttoned his black wool coat. He stepped up to Danny and brought Danny into the coat. “Chilly, isn’t it, Dan? Feeling a bit freddo.” He kissed Danny on each cheek. He held Danny close inside the coat. “How did it happen, Dan? Two brothers, so different, nothing in common. So now I know. All that talk about writing a novel? It was just a con, to cover what your life really was. You knew my weakness was you, my brother. Your goddamned unused potential. You, the perfect son, hanging out with punks, watching them smash streetlights at night, and you became the perfect shadow man, watching your wife torture photographers. What were the choices you made, Danny, every day of the week, to take you to that soundproof basement?”
“Call Ma,” Danny said, inside the long black coat. “You should pay her back the thousand dollars you owe her. You should stop criticizing me. You should be more of a brother. You should do yoga. You should be less judgmental.” He stepped out of the coat. “You should never have married – that one.”
Johnny grabbed Danny by his bony arm. “My heart goes to my throat, you know, some nights. I think about how much I wanted to be proud of my older brother. And then I saw that all he ever wanted in life was that his younger brother be unhappy. Your intention in life, Dan, was to feel big by making other people feel small. Congratulations. Mission accomplished.”
Vivienne said, “To hell with it,” and started back up the old miners’ hill. Val followed her. She got to the abandoned train station, and sat down on one of the wide wooden stairs.
“You know, from here,” Val said, “that bank looks like the old city hall I saw in Hiroshima.” Like Vivienne, Val had seen things when he was too young to see them.
“You’re thinking about your mother,” she said. “Ruth.” His mother was a photographer; she had taken young Val on assignment with her.
“I was only – what was it? – seven years old,” he said. “And she takes me to Japan.”
Vivienne knew the story: Val’s dad, Len, had fought at Iwo Jima. He came home with only one leg. He went back to have a reunion with buddies at Okinawa, and he was never seen again. Gone like smoke. Val at age six became the man of the house. The next year, Ruth Gold took little Val along when she went to document Hiroshima, ten years after Little Boy was dropped on the city. Young Val had his Brownie camera. He wandered in the wreckage while his mom took pictures. He emulated her.
“I can still see it,” he said to Vivienne. “The gas company building with columns, and the high entryway, and everything is collapsed and bombed. Two and a half stories standing against a ruined atomic sky. Like a Turner-smudge-pot sky. Look down there. That bank looks like the sky fell on it.”
Down below, Danny was standing with his back to them, leaning on an old bank counter, looking into blue space. Johnny was on the ground, his head bowed.
“Did I ever tell you about the day my mother met Pablo Neruda?” Val asked.
“I like that story; tell me that story again.” Vivienne zipped her pink leather jacket to her chin.
The story went something like this: Ruth Gold’s hero was the war photographer Gerda Taro, a redhead called La Pequeña Rubia. She was Robert Capa’s lover and Capa said she was the braver of the two. Gerda went to the front in the Spanish Civil War and died in combat. Ruth had known Gerda. Friends had introduced them in Paris.
Ruth had told her young son, Val, not only about Gerda, the brave war photographer, but about palling around with Robert Capa. Endre or André Friedmann who had become Robert Capa. How Capa had died covering the Indochina War, in Vietnam in 1954, living to only age forty.
And another photographer buddy in Ruth’s circle: Dawid Szymin, who became David Seymour, who became Chim. Chim died when shot by Egyptian gunfire at Suez in 1956, living to just shy of forty-five.
But first, there was Gerda, his mom’s role model and hero. Gerta Pohorylle, the Jewish Spanish-German woman who covered war and who had renamed herself Gerda Taro. (Tarō was the name of a Japanese painter she knew in Paris.) Gerda was killed at the Battle of Brunete, during the Spanish Civil War. She lived to age twenty-six.
The French Communists gave her a grand funeral and commissioned the sculptor Alberto Giacometti to make a monument for her grave. And then, in came Pablo Neruda. Ruth Gold was at Gerda’s funeral in Paris, and so was Pablo Neruda, and they got to talking.
It was Ruth who told Val that Gerda Taro is considered the first female photojournalist to die covering war. Ruth used to say to Val, “How could this woman on the front lines be unknown when everybody who was anybody knew her?”
The photographers of the Spanish Civil War had been Hungarian, Polish, German. Jews all. And this, too, his mother had told him. (And Vivienne knew that she came from the same tribe, knew she entered a profession where every day you expect to die, knew she had already outlived each one of them.)
And that was their life, Ruth the single mother and her little boy, Val, out to the locations in Japan which his American elders had bombed. Where he saw necks like withered trees, trees like gouged steel, bottles looking like melted animal carcasses.
Val never let on to his mother that, when he was studying acting at Yale in the ’60s, he had been approached by the CIA, who wanted to recruit him as an information asset who would move to Toronto, in order to ingratiate himself with art and literary circles for the purpose of gathering intelligence on active individuals. Like photograp
her Vivienne Pink and writer Johnny Coma. Or that the usual advice – strongly “suggested” – was to not marry, not to become a homeowner, to stay low around the university area, to be ready to return to the States if needed for intelligence work. He could have said no, he could have declined, he could have become an activist for love, he could have made a love plan and acted on it, but he did not. He travelled with writers and artists. He reported back on them. He chose the rat existence.
“Did you spy on us?” Vivienne asked.
“What kind of a question is that?” Val said.
“Did you?”
“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”
“So answer without dignity. Did you?”
“Vivi. Why torment yourself? What’s past is past. Didn’t you yourself say that?”
“Do not turn this back on me. It’s just chumps and cons, isn’t it, Val?”
“What?”
“Everything. Everybody. Well, not Johnny.”
Val got up and walked to the end of the train platform. He picked up a dusty chair and brought it back to Vivienne. He stood leaning over the back of it, talking to her. She shot a pic of Val. He looked like an informal professor. “Gauguin’s chair,” he said. “Ruth took me to Hiroshima’s city hall. There was a chair sitting in the bomb rubble. There was a little boy’s jacket draped on it, charred, burnt.” He ran his hand through his silver fox hair. “When I first laid eyes on Van Gogh’s painting of Gauguin’s chair, it felt Japanese to me. It was lonely, like Hiroshima. Van Gogh’s green. What a green. Vincent wrote Paul a poem in paint.”
Vivienne took the shot. Val’s eyes were not on the chair or the haunted desert in which he stood. They were in that perfect place: when he was new and young and suffered the ecstasy of how bitterly transformative the world could be. Yet he still had not been able to cross the threshold into marrying her.
Everyone had their default oasis. Vivienne’s oasis was making art. Val’s oasis was knowing how to speak about art. Vivienne’s love oasis was Johnny. Val’s love oasis was picking the scab of his own stasis. The rat highway was a cold, cold place, indeed.
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