The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

“When does Karol get out of Poland?”

  “Mister, who you?”

  “A man you shouldn’t lie to. I know everything about you, Mary.”

  Tears. “God. Mother of God.”

  “How many live with John?”

  “Six.”

  “Counting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s John’s name?”

  “John Stolmac.”

  “That’s not Polish.”

  “Hungarian man. Immigrant, too, but citizen now. He foreman, Universal Janitorial Service. We work for him.”

  “You have a contract with John?”

  “Yes. I tell you this, mister. Need guarantee to work in United States. To get green card. No can come without this thing.”

  “What about the other contract?”

  “What contract?”

  “Mary, stop bullshitting me.” The words were delivered lean, harsh. He was standing over her. He leaned close to her face. “You better start telling me the goddam truth.”

  “I know I immigrant. No speak English too good but not dumb Polack, not to you, mister.”

  “Mary, tell me about the contract.”

  “Mister.” Teary eyes again. She touched his hand. Look at me, mister, I’m flesh and blood. I’m so close to being all right. All the nights I cried, the nights John beat me, the nights John made me… Mister, please don’t do this to me.

  “Mister, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be afraid of anyone but me.” No mercy, not a drop of kindness.

  He waited. She removed her hand. She stared at the table in front of her. “No tell John this.”

  “I won’t tell,” Devereaux lied.

  “Contract. All have contract. Contract to work, then after two years, we free.”

  “Free of what?”

  “Three weeks Karol come. That is contract.”

  “They let your kid out if you work for them?”

  “Contract,” she repeated.

  “What do you do for them?”

  “Work. Only work.”

  “What do you do for them?”

  “Who are you, mister?”

  “The man you came to spy on,” Devereaux said.

  “Now I want to know about it.”

  “Mister. I work only. No spy.” Very quickly.

  She understood, he thought. He got up and went to the cupboard and took down a bottle of vodka. He poured two glasses. He dropped ice cubes in the glasses. He gave one to Mary.

  She didn’t know what to do.

  “Drink, Mary.”

  “I work, never drink—”

  “You’ve got a bottle of vodka in your purse.”

  “Mister, you—”

  “Drink, Mary.”

  Just like his mother. She couldn’t sip it fast enough. Down the hatch. Salute. Here’s looking at you. Mud in your eye. How about another? I just need a little drop, I’m not feeling well today. Hair of the dog. Morning after.

  Color returned to Mary’s face.

  Devereaux poured again.

  She knew he was watching her, judging her. “American,” she said after the second glass was empty. “You can say anything, do anything. You don’t know. You get drunk, you no get drunk, all the same to you. What you think to be Polack? What you think my son in Polonia, my Karol, I tell you things, I no see Karol no more. What you think?”

  “I think you have a problem,” he said.

  “You American, so cold. You have son? You never see someone again? You have anyone you love so much you not see if you do something? My son, mister. My Karol. You man no has someone?”

  “No.” Devereaux put down his glass. “No. There’s no one.”

  “My son, Karol. Three weeks, mister. Karol come, it is finished. You leave me alone. Okay, mister?”

  “I want to help you.”

  “No. You no help dumb Polack.”

  “When Karol comes. In three weeks. Then you can tell me.”

  “Why I tell you?”

  “Mary, I want you to understand what I’m telling you, all right? If I say something you don’t understand, you stop me. All right?” His voice surged lazily, a river in flood, casually destroying.

  She waited. Nodded.

  “I don’t want to harm you. I won’t. I won’t harm your son when he comes. When you are together, I will get you away from John Stolmac. And I want you to tell me everything. About the contract, everything. The government will take care of you, relocate you.”

  “What you mean, relocate?”

  “Move you to another state where you won’t be harmed. Not by John, not by anyone. The government will get you a new name, get you a job. Do you understand?”

  “Why you do this?”

  “Because we want to know about the contract.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen, Mary. Look at me.” Gray eyes, arctic fields. “That’s the good part. The bad part is if you don’t tell me when Karol comes. Then we arrest you and question you. You’ll tell us anyway, the nice way or the not-so-nice way. You think everything is different here than in Poland and you’re right. Except when we want to know something, we’ll find out, the same as they find out in Poland. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “So if you don’t help us after Karol comes, we arrest you and we find out what we want to know. Then we throw you in prison for ten or fifteen years. You’re a spy, Mary, a goddam spy. I know you are but I don’t care about that. Uncle Sam doesn’t care. We can give you everything nice, a nice home, a nice place for Karol to grow up in. Or we can put you in prison and take Karol and put him in an orphanage and—”

  She bit her knuckle. “Please, I do this thing you say.”

  “I know, Mary.”

  He poured another glass of vodka for her. She drank it without hesitation.

  “Mary. John wanted you to tell him about me, didn’t he?”

  Mary stared in silence at him. It was an answer.

  “Are you going to tell him, Mary?”

  “No,” she said.

  “That’s right. You’re not going to tell him anything. Not about this talk, not about what will happen in three weeks, after Karol comes.”

  “Why trust you, mister?”

  “Why trust John? Or the Polish government? Or the people you spy for?”

  Mary considered his questions. But she said nothing further to him.

  7

  VIENNA

  Morning. The air in the railway carriage smelled stale. Some of the passengers still snored in restless sleep; some were wide awake, huddled over cigarette embers, staring straight ahead. Two borders had been crossed during the long night and there were the usual delays as guards searched the train and collectors examined tickets and customs agents shuffled through passports and visas. All of it slow and usual and routine and slightly unnerving. Even those who had nothing to hide acted as though they had secrets.

  The child saw all this, savored the experiences. He was not afraid; he had no secrets. He had slept at one point, reluctantly, but was awakened by dawn light streaming through the dirt-splattered window he leaned against.

  “Here,” he said softly. “We are here.”

  The priest next to him scarcely heard him. The priest made a face and yawned and stretched. His bones felt old. He touched his waxy collar and seemed satisfied with the prim gesture.

  “Only the beginning of our journey, Karol,” the priest said. “We go to the airport in the afternoon. First we fly to Frankfurt and then to America.”

  “And how long is the airplane flight?”

  “Only an hour, I think, to Frankfurt. And then eight hours to Chicago.”

  Karol closed his eyes to see his mother better. “She will be there?”

  “Of course. You asked me a hundred times.”

  A hundred times were not times enough. Karol opened his eyes. For a long time, they had been on the edge of a great city. Gardens dressed brown for approaching winter; houses with green shutters and
red tile roofs; streets and walks; cars waiting for the train to pass; morning workers walking up hills to morning factories.

  And now the train slowed as it rolled across a tangle of tracks and slid along the platform, under a vaulted iron ceiling, into West Bahnhof of Vienna. As almost an anticlimax, the long journey down Central Europe from Warsaw was over. The train shuddered, doors were flung open. The aisles, empty a moment before, suddenly were filled with people struggling to carry their bags down the narrow corridor to the exits at either end of the car. A man in a cap with a fierce mustache was handing bags through the window to a second man on the platform. Everyone had waited so patiently so long, but now the journey was over and it seemed as though everyone had a sudden appointment that had to be kept immediately. Blasts of cold air blew refreshingly into the stuffy, stale, overheated compartments of the train. Karol smiled and shivered. He felt cold, a little afraid, happy.

  Karol Krakowski lifted up his plastic imitation-leather bag and threw the strap over his shoulder and stood. “Ready,” he said and the priest absently patted him on the head. The two of them joined the surging river of people in the aisle and pushed along to the exit.

  The sight on the platform was wonderful to Karol.

  The platform was filled with life. Passengers tramped along toward the station entrances, lugging too many bags, pausing now and then to readjust their grips. The platform was crowded with baggage trains pulled by electric carts, with hotel hustlers waving enigmatic signs (Mr. Vladost and Regency Group and Austro-Hungarian Tour) at the advancing river of passengers.

  Inside the terminal, all was dirt and noise and long lines. People shuffled through their Polish currency, waiting in a snake line in front of the currency exchange. Men with sallow faces and unshaven chins stood at high tables in the station bar, drinking in solitary silence, waiting out the cold morning with steins of Gösser beer.

  Karol Krakowski looked here and there, trying to see everything, filling his eye and mind with the circus of colors around him. He had never seen anything like it before.

  The dream had been building for two years. But in the last week, the fantasy of what would happen began. He had been taken out of the state orphanage eight days ago. A man who did not speak to him took him to an apartment building in a part of the city where he had never been before.

  The apartment contained two bedrooms in which two policemen took turns sleeping. The policemen wore plain clothes but showed him their badges. They gave him papers to sign, papers he did not understand. One of the policemen was always in the apartment with him. He stayed there four days. One of the policemen was named Stanislaus and he told Karol he had a little boy just his age and hoped to see the child on his next leave, after the assignment was finished. He gave Karol candy when the other policeman was not around.

  Their instructions to Karol were simple.

  A priest named Thaddeus Wojniak would take him by train to Vienna. He was to obey the priest in everything. After they arrived in Vienna, they would go to the airport and take a plane.

  To where? Karol had asked, though he was certain he knew the answer.

  “You know where.” Stanislaus had laughed and tousled Karol’s dark hair. “In a couple of days, little one, you are going to be very, very happy.”

  So, though they did not say it, he knew he was going to see his mother at last.

  She had promised him they would let him go to her in two years and had shown him how to count the time they must be apart on a calendar he kept on the wall behind his bed in the state orphanage on the outskirts of Warsaw.

  Two years was a long time, immense as eternity. Day by day, he marked off the two years with neat Xs across the numbers of the days.

  He marked from January until June and then through that long Polish summer, the first of two summers away from her. Marked the days off into fall and down to bleak winter when it was dark all the time, and then up the long slope to spring again. The people who ran the orphanage knew he was not an orphan. He told them of his mother. He told the other children. Some of the other children were driven mad by his boasting that he was not a real orphan. Sometimes, after lights out in the dormitories, there were dreadful fights. Admit it! You’re an orphan the same as we are! You don’t have a mother! But he would not admit it.

  Xs filled the leaves of the calendar now. He thought of all the Xs across the stretch of weeks, across all the pages past, and it was as though he had accomplished some great feat simply by keeping to his task, marking off the days, as his mother wanted him to do. Remember me. But how could he ever forget her?

  Some days would be so pleasant that Karol nearly forgot to mark the X at night. And once, when he was sick with a high fever, he neglected his nightly task for four days, which made it more pleasurable to fill in the days when he recovered. Most days were simply days, neither good nor bad, days endured.

  His mother’s letters came sparingly. She would send articles of clothing with them, and he would show the letters to some of the other children to prove that his mother was alive. Karol became very solitary in those two years in the orphanage; he was not an orphan.

  He was just ten. He had been just eight when she left him.

  “My darling,” she wrote to him. “I love you very much and pray for you every night. Do you pray for me? I am going to make you so happy when we see each other again. I have money saved, we will have toys, we will have our own place together and never be apart again. I did this for you, for your future, and you will understand that someday. We are working hard here and the work is good because when I work hard I can forget, just for a moment, that you are not with me. I think of you all the time, most of all at night. I know you are a brave man and that you are marking off the days until we see each other again. I miss you very much. Be my brave man, Karol. In a little while, we will be together again.”

  He saved her letters. On Sundays he would sit alone in the dormitory, on his bed, and read all the letters from the first to the latest. Then he would take down his calendar and go through the pages of the months marked off, from the first to the latest.

  Karol’s own letters to her were brief. He did not write very well when he was only eight years old.

  “Dear Mother: I love you and miss you. Please come to see me. It is lonely here. I love you.”

  He did not think his letters caused her pain. He was aware only of his own pain at first. How could she have left him? He didn’t understand what future she always talked of. He didn’t want a future. He wanted her.

  On some days Karol hated her, hated her memory, hated her for letting him be so alone. On some days, very bad days, he would forget her features. He would remember parts of her: her eyes but not the curve of her lips when she smiled at him. When he forgot her, he would be frightened and take out the little photograph of her and remember her again. He never forgot her odor; it was the smell of his mother, basic, without parallel in the world.

  Stanislaus gave him a new hat to replace his cap. He gave him a clean new coat. “You can’t meet your mother in old clothes,” he said. On the last night in the apartment, the policemen gave him his instructions for the journey: Karol was to speak to no one, he was only to obey the priest. Their voices were stern, even Stanislaus’. If he had not learned to be brave in two years alone, he might have cried. It was the first time they had mentioned his mother.

  The following day, Father Thaddeus Wojniak came to the apartment. The child was taken to the rectory of Our Lady of Sorrows, where he stayed another day. Father Wojniak said he was an official with the Catholic Relief Society of Poland. He said that the society cooperated at times with the government in reuniting families broken by immigration or economic circumstances.

  The next morning Father Wojniak took the child to Warsaw Station, where they waited for the express train to Vienna to be made up. The station was cold. The priest had bought him a cup of milky coffee and he drank it for breakfast. When the express train was ready, the gates were opened and the pri
est and the child boarded the train and sat in the open first-class compartment. The priest explained the difference between first class and second class to the boy; he was fascinated. He had never been on a train in his life, nor a plane.

  Traffic clogged the streets around Vienna’s West Bahnhof, which is in a neighborhood about one and a half miles south of the great Ring Road that encircles the old city.

  Red Viennese streetcars ground noisily against the metal tracks outside the station, then screeched into the thick of rumbling traffic like enraged birds. The noises were terrifying and comforting; all life surged around them on the steps of the station. Karol, feeling frustrated from his long imprisonment on the train, ran down the steps ahead of the priest to the park in front of the station.

  The priest knew the way. They took one of the streetcars and, after a long ride to the Ring Road, got out and walked across the wooded park, past the official-looking buildings, into the heart of the old city. Karol filled his eyes with what he saw. Women with bags bulging with food and so many cars that they could not all fit into the streets; it was wonderful.

  Karol and the priest walked hand in hand down the pedestrian malls fashioned out of streets deemed too narrow to have motor traffic on them. Past shop windows with cream cakes and rich, inventive pastries in a dozen shapes, past store window after store window laden with a thousand trinkets. At times, the child paused and stared at one item or another, but the priest would tug his hand and Karol would follow along reluctantly.

  Father Wojniak treated the boy to a rich lunch of heavy cream cake and hot chocolate in a little café just down the square from St. Stefan’s Cathedral.

  “We have two hours to wait,” Father Wojniak said after the meal, while he idled over coffee and stared out the window of the shop at the bright, cold morning light.

  Karol said nothing. He carefully ran the edge of his fork across the plate to pick up the last few crumbs of cake. He tasted them.

  The priest stared at the child. “Would you like to see the inside of St. Stefan’s? It is just down the street. It is one of the greatest churches in the world,” the priest said in a proprietary way.

  Karol said nothing. He licked at the fork.