Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  The sea came in and out with a rush and suck of sound that satisfied Noah’s ear. Laid out on a little pebbly triangle of beach were locals with orange leather skin, and more of them basked like seals on the great boulders farther on. He saw an INTERDIT DE FUMER sign, but nobody seemed to be paying it any attention, so he lit a cigarette. Michael threw stones in the sea, not skimming them with any skill, just heaving them far and hard.

  “Careful,” Noah called at one point; “you’re too close to that swimmer.”

  Out of the glittering waves an ancient-looking woman emerged, head enclosed in the hood of her black wetsuit, weird rubber webbings over her hands. She’d probably live to be a hundred, Noah thought, stubbing out his cigarette. “Let’s walk on a bit farther.”

  He ignored the boy’s groan.

  They took a little coastal path, meandering west away from the city. Bright blooms grew in crevices in the salt-splashed rocks. A nude man lay like a sacrifice, flat on his back.

  “If a flasher showed off his junk like that back home, cops would slam his ass in jail.”

  “Well, context is everything,” Noah said. “He’s not showing off, he’s napping. Americans are such prudes, freaking out at a glimpse of the human body.”

  “No, you’re the freak, making me look at that. I could tell Ms. Figueroa on you.”

  “Fire away.” Noah could just imagine the message: HELP, MR. SELL-VAG SHOWED ME A NAKED DICK. But he didn’t care, not this afternoon. Margot Isabelle was Marie Zabel, he told himself again. A boulder, lifted off his chest. She was better than I’ll ever be.

  Out to sea, a kite string of white triangles. “Look,” Noah said as they clambered back up onto the coast road again, “kids learning to sail in tiny dinghies.”

  “They’re going to get swamped by that big ship.”

  “The ferry?” A huge liner with a bandit’s head on the side was moving toward the port. “No, the sailing instructors must know what they’re doing.” A massive horn shook the air, and foam heaved high on the rocks. “There was a ferry that sank—this must be thirty years ago.”

  “How come?”

  “Somebody forgot to shut the doors, so the sea poured in and the ship tipped on its side. Hundreds drowned in the first minute. Passengers tried to scramble up, away from the sea, but there was a hole they couldn’t get across, with the water pouring through…and this one guy, a tall guy,” Noah remembered, “he lay down.”

  “Collapsed, like?”

  “No, he lay across the gap on purpose, so twenty other people could climb over him.”

  Michael frowned. “Like a rug?”

  “Like a bridge.”

  “You can’t lie on a gap, you’d fall through. That’s gravity.”

  “Well, I guess he was gripping on with his arms and feet.”

  “Face up or down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Face up, you could see what was happening, tell people what to do, but they might step on your junk.”

  Noah nodded. “Face down, it might hurt a bit less to be walked on, but you’d have to watch the water rising toward you.”

  “Wasn’t the guy afraid they’d be too heavy for him, and he’d get pushed through?”

  “I bet he was, if he had any sense.” Had the hero thought of himself as anything special before that day, Noah wondered?

  He and the boy squeezed onto the first orange bus jolting back to town, swerving around the coastal bends. No seats, so they hung on to a pole.

  In Place Masséna, young reenactors in medieval tunics and floppy caps were fighting laboriously with wooden swords. A stall of plastic kitsch was staffed by a man in a bizarre costume that made him look like he was riding a two-legged horse.

  Michael blew his last five euros on something called a sound machine: a rectangular orange device with buttons on it that produced various horrible effects.

  “You know that leaves you with nothing for the rest of the week?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” A burst of plasticky applause from the box. “What about next week?”

  Noah forced himself to consider the prospect. Back in New York, could he put the kid on the subway to school every morning, or should he go with him? The pair of them would be jet-lagged, too. No, actually, that would work; they’d be waking up early. “More allowance, you mean? TBD.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “To Be Determined. Negotiated.”

  Michael’s machine let out a ghostly laugh, then the ka-ching of a cash register.

  After the boy had put the thing through its paces, over and over, Noah said, “Maybe give it a rest now.”

  The only response was the losing horn from a game show: wah wah.

  “Oh, very funny.”

  The drum that marked a joke, what was that called? Ba dum tsssss! Then the applause.

  “Don’t you think we’ve heard enough silly sounds for the moment?”

  Here came a belch, so deep and open it was halfway to a retch.

  “Michael, frankly, I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”

  A tinny falsetto—Mickey Mouse’s—assured him, “You can do it!” Then glass smashed, and a rifle was cocked and fired.

  “Not that one in public places,” Noah said seriously. “You could start a panic.” He walked on.

  Michael cantered to keep up. “Listen, man, these are the best.” The scream and the laugh. A loud raspberry—or was it a fart?

  Put that thing in the nearest trash can, Joan advised.

  It’s his money, Noah argued. He likes what he likes, and who am I to—

  Fart. Fart. Fart.

  Noah spun around. “Enough!”

  Michael nodded, deadpan. From his pocket came the demonic laugh. “Hey,” he said, gesturing at the marble figure in the fountain, “another giant showing his junk.”

  The marble figure had a curious crown made of…four horses, could it be? Noah couldn’t imagine which naked Roman deity this was.

  He looked it up on his phone. Greek, in fact: Apollo, with a weird crown of small horses. In the spouting water around him, full-size bronze ones cavorted with their riders. “The sculptor finished the big horses first, but then the war broke out, so they were buried in a garden for safekeeping till it was over.” He thought of Michael’s keepsakes: his grandma’s drugstore glasses, that maroon chip that proved to the boy’s satisfaction at least that his dad had won his second-to-last battle against drugs. A pity people couldn’t tuck away their sons and daughters in the ground for safekeeping, in bad times. Noah thought of the carefully filled-in cards under the bishop’s tree: had they been dug up in 1944?

  He looked that up too, sitting on the cold ledge of the fountain. No complete set of the records had survived, he learned. The batch buried in the episcopal garden, in their paper wrapping, had rotted to mush, and it didn’t seem as if the passeurs had ever delivered their cards to the International Red Cross in Geneva. Rosenstock and Abadi’s own set, from the bishop’s library, had gaps; the couple had burned many cards out of fear of raids. But fortunately they’d kept one last failsafe—a complete list of the real and false names—so it seemed as if none of the children had lost their identities. Lost everything else, of course, so many of them: homes, parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, community. They got to hold on to their lives, and their names, but in many cases that was about it.

  “What’s up with you?”

  Noah met Michael’s gaze. “Oh, just the war. Those children.”

  “It’s a long time ago.”

  “True.”

  “And we know your mom was on the right side, now.”

  Noah nodded. The right side of a sad story.

  He found they’d strayed into a viewing area for what turned out to be the Bataille des Fleurs. Why hadn’t Noah remembered to buy tickets? Floats were going by encrusted with flowers. A girl whose dress seemed to be made of clementines tossed gladioli at the crowds seated in the stands. A man with ten-foot legs—he had stilts under his striped
trousers—was roaring incomprehensible encouragement through a megaphone. “French people stand too close,” Michael complained in Noah’s ear.

  It was just too noisy for Noah to attempt to parse this cultural difference. A police officer in a short-sleeved uniform was letting passersby pat her horse. “Like horses?” he mouthed at Michael.

  “What’s like horses?”

  “Do you like them?”

  Michael shrugged.

  He’d probably never been to summer camp. “Want to pet this one?”

  “What for?”

  Noah walked up to the horse and waited his turn. Michael’s eyes were nervous, but he moved closer.

  The policewoman smiled down and beckoned him. Michael stepped up to the horse and ran his fingers down the glossy coat.

  “You can be firm,” Noah told him, lightly slapping the chestnut flank with the flat of his hand.

  Michael did the same.

  “Stroke down the nose, too.”

  “This a he or a she?”

  Noah was reminded of some novel in which a boy from an orphanage saw a camel and thought it was a diseased or mutant horse. “Take a look.”

  Michael ducked and craned sideways. “Oh yeah, he’s all dude.”

  Just then a carnation came winging its way through the air; a leaf struck Noah’s temple, an inch from his eye.

  Michael laughed, and lunged for the next bunch, but an old lady got them first, snatching them out of the air. The boy let out a gasp of annoyance.

  “She’s probably had seventy years of practice,” Noah told him.

  Blooms had fallen down the sides of the stands; gladioli and that yellow stuff (mimosa?), mashed underfoot.

  “How come you gave me shit for whacking a few flowers,” Michael wanted to know, “but today everybody’s allowed to trample them?”

  “Ah…those ones were still growing.” Noah was aware his logic was weak. “These have been cut and paid for, specially for the battle. Besides, it’s a tradition. History.”

  “’Kay, if it’s history,” Michael said, sardonic.

  Noah peeled the sepals off a crushed carnation to see how they fit together. “Well, that’s Carnival. It’s supposed to be nonsense. Once a year, everything should get turned upside down.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “What about something healthy, for once?” Noah kept thinking of the kid’s life expectancy; those seven years Michael might be robbed of by growing up in his particular neighborhood. He wondered where Grace Drew was living. “Some fresh vegetables?”

  Michael put the sound machine to his head and made the noise of a gun cocking and firing.

  “Not in public,” Noah hissed.

  The boy stuffed it back in his pocket and held his hands up in surrender as he walked backward.

  They lined up for panini the length of the kid’s arm, then ate them crossing the raucous plaza. Michael’s hand strayed into his pocket once to make an electronic belch.

  Revelers went by with armfuls of broken flowers. Noah was picking a piece of lettuce from his lapel when—whap!—a sensation like that of a heavy cloth slammed over him, blinded him; a blow to the skull.

  His first thought was that Michael had ripped off his hoodie and tackled Noah with it. He spun around, bewildered; where had his panini gone?

  Behind him Michael was gasping with laughter. Applause burst from his pocket, over and over. “A gull, man! You got jacked by a goddamn seagull!”

  Noah followed Michael’s finger. Yes, there on the edge of the fountain, a muscular, triumphant bird held Noah’s panini with one orange foot, ripping and rending the bread. “Oh come on.”

  “I wish I’d had time to snap it,” Michael told him. “Best thing I’ve seen in Europe.”

  “Delighted to have entertained you,” Noah said sourly. Tourism always corrupted the locals—even the gulls.

  “You going to get yourself another?”

  “I’m not quite hungry enough to bother.”

  In the Excelsior, Noah collapsed on his bed. The hotel still spooked him, but he wasn’t weighed down by guilt now.

  Michael came out of the bathroom.

  Noah roused himself to say, “Hey, you should update your journal.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “OK. Brushed your teeth?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I did it quiet. Quietly,” Michael corrected himself.

  Person in Parental Relationship, Noah reminded himself. He heaved himself off the bed, went into the bathroom, and touched the toothbrush. “Your brush is dry.”

  “It dries quickly.”

  “Now you’re being childish.”

  “Nah, I’m behaving childishly.”

  “Michael—”

  Barely moving, the small hand in the pocket made the sound of gunfire over and over.

  Noah covered his ears.

  “What the fuck do you care if my teeth fall out ten years from now?”

  The accusation winded him. “Of course I care.”

  “You’re only in this for a couple weeks, max. You’ve got no skin in the game.”

  “Listen, Michael, I—”

  “You’re pepper, and I’m fucking rice,” the boy roared. “So I guess I’m going to be all toothless and mumbling while you’re laying in your coffin with a full set.” He bared his teeth like a wolf.

  Noah could think of no response except, “Would you just brush them already?”

  Michael shoved his way past him into the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it.

  As so often, Noah was left with the sense that he’d picked the wrong battle—and lost it. This was Victor’s son, he reminded himself. Michael was never going to be easy. He had his father’s perversity as well as his wit.

  What kind of cleverness or charm had gotten Victor out of custody the day after he and Amber had been arrested with her car full of drugs? Noah’s mind picked at the problem like a knot: what did Victor have that his girlfriend lacked? Only a record; dirty hands. He’d already served time as a boy and as a man. But it made no sense that innocence could have sent Amber to prison while experience set Victor free.

  Noah pulled out his tablet and typed in “drug arrest charges dropped.”

  Nothing helpful; mostly lawyers offering tips to the nervous that ended with “Nothing on this website is to be understood to constitute legal advice.”

  He tried rephrasing it: “Drug arrest release let go no charges filed.”

  Just a jumble.

  What was it Rosa had said about factors that might have gotten Victor off? That word she’d used: arrangements.

  Noah tried “drug charge drop arrangement deal.”

  This time he blinked at the screen and tried to make sense of the flood. Article after article about state and national drug task forces, desperate to boost the conviction rate to which their funding was pegged, relying on CIs (an abbreviation that could stand for Confidential Informant or Criminal Informant). When someone was convicted on drug charges these days, he learned, they might well be offered what was called a “substantial assistance deal”: the prosecutor offered to recommend a lower sentence if the offender helped convict an agreed number of others.

  But hang on. Victor hadn’t been convicted of anything that night; not even charged.

  Noah read on. The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the widespread practice of using CIs (often college students, generally lower-income or minorities, some as young as fourteen) wearing wires in undercover stings to buy drugs or even guns. It might sound heroic if you pictured toppling the linchpin of an evil cartel, but often it was a matter of the CI being told to entrap an acquaintance or workmate into selling them a few pills. “Up to 80% of all drug cases in the US may be based on information provided by informants.” All in the pointless cause of inflating conviction rates. According to one article, the no-snitching ethos so widespread in impoverished communities was a reaction to the fact that these communities were
riddled with snitches.

  That threw Noah. Spies around every corner…it sounded like France during the war. Though it wasn’t the same thing at all, he argued with himself. These CIs weren’t choosing to turn on their neighbors; they were forced into it by the hope of going home to their families a few years sooner, or staying out of prison altogether.

  But Victor. Noah’s fingers fumbled over the keys. “CI charges dropped,” he tried.

  He struggled with the jargon. Occasionally the filing of charges might be postponed; if an arrestee had just enough familiarity with the drug scene to be useful to the police, he might win his freedom “on the promise of reeling in bigger fish within a set period.”

  That was it! What had happened to Victor. It had to be. Amber was collateral damage; she’d been bullied into accepting a plea of five years. Vic had been full of regret, Michael had reported. He’d trade places with her in a second… Was it a choice between both of Michael’s parents being locked away for years and only one of them? Had Amber been party to this deal, or at least not spoken up about it? Maybe that was part of the “arrangement”: that Amber promised not to scream the precinct down about how the stash was Victor’s, and in return he got to walk away a free man? Well, Noah corrected himself, as a CI; an owned man; tethered. He had to travel for work, that’s what he’d told Michael.

  And the couple’s gamble had gone horribly wrong. Victor had been clean, if the boy’s plastic amulet was to be believed, when he’d walked into the motel that night. The strain of all those months of deception had proved too much for him, and he’d given in to his old consolation; in fact, gone farther out from shore than ever before.

  It all sounded more than possible to Noah. People held such secrets, lived with such complications. He tapped the Correctional Communications app. “Dear Amber,” he typed, “Michael and I are having a good trip. There’s something I need to ask you about—”

  Then he stared at the screen and backspaced till the words were gone. How naïve of him: of course every word in or out would be vetted. If the guards learned from Noah’s message that Amber had been a CI’s girlfriend, and if they let that slip to any prisoners… Noah wondered, with a shudder, what happened to “snitches’ bitches.”