“I asked. He says he’s not hungry.”
“What is that you’re talking to him in?”
“Latin.”
“I used to know some passages, this one book, Lucretius, you know Lucretius.”
“Personally.”
“So did I.”
“Personally?”
“Yes, I met him once, he visited me in Nebraska.”
“I see,” Lupi gave up.
At either side of the door, which Hannah closed, stood an antique cigar-store figure—carved in wood, brightly, grotesquely painted. One was a fat bald Harlequin, unmasked, with a green chin shaped like a zucchini slanting upward nearly to meet its nose; it wore a crooked smile, all tooth and angle. Its checkered blouse, pink and chartreuse, ballooned out about its belly, which was girdled by a silver cummerbund; its chubby legs were covered in white tights and blue bootees. Its hand was extended forward to offer a clutch of cigars. The other was an Indian chief with headdress of painted feathers white and with red tips, this hand stiffly saluting (or shading the savage eyes), in that hand a fagot of tobacco leaves. American gods, Lupi mused, like tritons or nereids standing vigil over fountains in Europe, like the sculptures of Apollo, Hercules, or successful commanders of troops that stood atop plinths in public squares.
Hannah made her way to the stove, lit a gas burner, selected a large copper skillet from the trammel overhead and with a clank popped the skillet on the grate. She spatulaed butter into it.
A griddle was taken down from a swinging crane that was hung with half a dozen griddles of various shapes and sizes. It, too, was slammed on the grate with a clang. She sprinkled a generous bed of salt in the pan. From the handles of both the skillet and griddle dangled tags with numbers. Iron, glass, wood, lead, stone, tinware; a sleigh, bicycles, stereoscopes, a loom, washtubs, hurdy-gurdies and zithers, a forest of calipers under glass, a collection of lamps (whale-oil, betty, wick-type, kerosene, a phoebe, crusie, electric), harvesting tools (hay knives, sickles, reaping hooks, rakes, hucking pegs, scythes), a battery of beat-up weathervanes.
“What is all this?” head thrown back, eye running the length of a metal purlin resting on a series of cross girders which supported the rafters. Hung from this purlin was what Lupi recognized, from all the numerable and fondly remembered westerns he had seen at the cinema in Florence, as a stagecoach: complete with oxhide thoroughbraces and iron stanchions, with metal-shoed wheels and ragged curtains at its windows and a bright red underbelly like that of a purple finch with “Abbott & Downing Co.” painted on its sides.
Hannah glanced over at him, saw what it was he was peering at, and said, “Concord wagon, about 1840, 1850.”
“But it looks, well I mean, looks real.”
“It’s original down to the driver’s whip and the upholstery in the cab.”
“What it’s doing on your ceiling?”
Hannah looked up. “Where else am I supposed to put it?”
“But all this, is it some kind of museum.”
Hannah whisked the eggs she had broken into a bowl. “It’s my own, it’s like my own crazy cross to bear.”
Lupi hoisted off a rack a cylindrical object fitted out with a long thin nozzle and a plunger at the opposite end, and studied it. In its beaten-copper casement he could see a distorted image of himself. “What’s this one?”
“Sausage stuffer.”
“Sausage stuffer?”
Lupi sniffed at the object; an odor of antiquity emanated from it, the combination of metal mustiness and a stagnancy like hardened rubber baking under a noon sun. There was a small label, time-browned on the rack, with an inventory number written out in ink, matching the number on the label affixed to the sausage stuffer. The neatly drawn number was five digits long.
“What do you use it for?” he asked, slapping it in the palm of his hand.
“A sausage stuffer?” Hannah laughed. “Nothing, I mean, what would I use a sausage stuffer for?” The steak on the griddle began to spit and sizzle. “Mama Opal said you get the entrails, the organs out of the cow and all the sweetmeats, you grind those up and in they go and you squeeze all that down into a length of intestine, tie the ends. See that dent there? Uncle LeRoy caught a bull snake once, happened to be stuffing sausage, heard a commotion, sneaked into the chicken coop and this snake was half full of pullet eggs, hit him on the head with it. I never ate any sausage after that. I think he ground that snake up right in with the rest of the innards.”
Lupi set the instrument down, swiftly, rubbed his hands on his shirt.
Her collection must have run into the tens of thousands of items. He looked at her where she stood at the stove, prodding the frying steak with a two-pronged fork (inventoried, no doubt), and wondered how Hannah could have the remotest connection with the fat man, with Bautista, Carlos, with Bernhardt—that man who first summoned him to Zurich, to the suite of cramped rooms in the Hôtel Eden au Lac, a grand pile that faced out over the smoky, drab water of the Zürichsee. Bernhardt, who later met with him in a café in Milan (noisy, bustling, the constant hiss of the big espresso machine, the clatter of coffee cups)—who had a job to offer Lupi and pressed into Lupi’s hands a retainer. Three thousand Swiss francs he was handed in mint-fresh bills; just like that.
“Questo è soltanto linizio, amico. Noi abbiamo tanto da fare con te,” Bernhardt said. This is just the beginning.
The line was stale enough, but it was rendered somehow original by Bernhardt, made odd by the sight of this compact businessman who sat back in the overstuffed chair, his head shorn, his black shoes highly polished, his blue jeans new.
And from the first stroll beside the Zürichsee, mist rising off the water lapping at the pebble beach, coots, mallards, brown-and-white swans coasting the oil-blued marina, Lupi had found all that Bernhardt proposed to be like this: tinged with an affectation which made no sense to him. Somehow, it had been easier in the past for Lupi to accept work from those whose politics he knew—even when he sensed in them some manner of absurd idealism or ruthlessness or even backward thinking, in sum, when he saw aspects of his own youthful idealism—long abandoned—than it was for him to agree to travel that far away on Bernhardt’s say-so.
America loomed ahead, however. Lupi’s opinion of it remained low even after his days of political radicalism had faded away into mercenary opportunism (it was depressing to think of these things). This was one of the few sentiments which lingered on, a vestige of late adolescence. Another, quite the opposite, was his feeling for Nini—Nini, who stood for so much more than she should have, he knew, who marked the moment of his choice. But as he didn’t know where Nini was, and did know, by globes and maps, where America was, the chance Bernhardt offered to witness it finally, the monster itself, firsthand, was too tempting to pass up.
He walked back alone toward the hotel, past the Henry Moore that shimmered insipid under the sallow Zurich skies, past the stands of neatly planted plane trees and manicured flower beds and tailored lawns. Thumb and forefinger rubbed, back and forth, the fold of francs there in his trouser pocket. The thought of marching straight past the Hôtel Eden au Lac—whose classical facade befitted the pomp and glory of another epoch—to the square several blocks farther down the lakeside promenade attracted his interest. He could catch a tram, he thought, a tram to the train station. He might disappear into its bustling crowd and buy a ticket for the first train north, up past the German frontier, money in hand.
Bernhardt, after all, had gone off to another appointment. They had agreed to meet three days hence in Milan. It had not been trust Bernhardt had shown in Lupi by fronting him this money and Lupi did not make the mistake of presuming it was. Rather, the money was all enticement, a hook. Bernhardt had known, as had Lupi, the tacit agreement between them was sealed by Lupi’s acceptance of the Swiss francs. And he had indicated more of the same would be put into Lupi’s hands in Italy with a balance representing four times the sum of these retainers to be paid upon completion of his “travels.”
<
br /> How the money warmed in his pocket, burned a little after its own degrading fashion. It wasn’t, in truth, very much money given the nature of the job Bernhardt proposed; these jobs always take three times as long as they are supposed to, and Lupi was doubtful that only five days would pass between the time he left Rome and returned. Were it so, it would mean a thousand dollars a day. Not bad by any measure. Underground bureaucracies were no less gummed up than governmental or any other system of business controlled by hierarchies of subordinates, middlemen, chiefs—and experience told him that this is not the way things would ultimately work out. He took the money, anyway.
Furtively, Lupi glanced over his shoulder. A nanny with striking blond hair pushed a pram; she was daydreaming. Two children, behind her, ran into a clump of pine trees that edged the lake. They were about to throw bread, or stones, at the waterfowl. He saw no one else. He had quickened his pace until soon he came alongside the Eden au Lac. It was like déjà vu, the self-disgust; a familiar scape across which lay only old choices. One reasonable demon was heard to complain there were no choices, that he could only proceed, and at that, only by the shortest travelable route. Thus it was not so surprising to him as it was disheartening when he found his legs had carried him up the steps and into the foyer. He stood at the desk and requested the key to his room. In the oak-paneled lift up from the grand lobby he felt claustrophobic and queasy. In his room he lay on his bed and drank splits of brandy, champagne, gin, until his frustration twisted free of him and floated up like a swirling mass of detritus snatched off the comforter into a column of wind. If he could have wept, he would have. He even tried. It didn’t work.
Sometime in the middle of the night he managed to stumble into the bright and elegant bathroom. He showered for half an hour, until the skin on his fingers and face puckered, but even so he didn’t feel washed. Some weight hung quite palpable in his chest. He felt polluted. When he groped his way back to the bed he was surprised at what lay on the pillow. Bit of a bill, a Swiss thousand-franc note. He had eaten half of it.
Shortly after, the fat man directed Krieger to return to Danlí and place a telephone call to Bernhardt. Whomever he had discovered must be brought in immediately.
“Herr Lupi,” began Bernhardt in his hesitating Italian, “I am proud to announce that the time has come to assist us in our project.”
Mozart, Berlioz, Wagner: there wasn’t a symphony wry enough to serve as background for the ambivalence Lupi’s movie was shocked into sponging up: what was this? Bernhardt behaved as if this were some prestigious honor he’d just bestowed.
7.
THE TELEPHONE RINGING loudly, mercilessly. Without its tape the answering machine had been rendered useless. For thirty, one, two, three, four, thirty-five rings Hannah stood looking down at the instrument not so much dumbfounded as defiant since she sensed who her caller would most likely be. There was a spare tape around somewhere, and she made a mental note to find it and prepare a new message, one that would make a caller think twice before leaving a date, time, and number.
She picked up the handset and gently, swiftly, set it back down in its cradle. The ringing stopped—but only long enough for the party at the other end to redial. Hannah allowed it to jangle along for fifty more rings before she lifted it and put it to her ear.
“I mean do you know what it costs to make, just to make the damn connection from down here, I mean really, Hannah, really wasteful, not to mention the bad manners of it, that first connection? you know how long it took me to get a line through? two and a half hours’s how long. And that was using contacts through his highness the ambassador down here, and what do you do? hang up. You know what you do? you worry me, you make me nervous. You know what I am up to … nights … at this stage? Hundred and fifty milligrams Restoril and for what, eke out two, maybe three hours’ sleep. This is not the way I conduct my life, not the way I behave. We have a project here, a program, an important, and of course I recognize that your participation is, that you’re compulsorily—”
“What was the point of that this morning?” she interrupted. “No, wait, it’s so obvious, you’re a lot less subtle than I remember you to be. What is that, Peter, desperation?”
“Was what. What was what? Haven’t been listening to a word I’ve been saying—”
“That, on my machine, me, the accident.”
“As you suggest just a passing reminder, nothing so desperate about it and of course it was not meant in fact to be terribly subtle but I’m not calling for, you’re wasting my precious time.”
“Krieger, what do you want?”
The briefest pause preceded his response, delivered in a mockish tone as if he were addressing a third person, someone judicious and attentive, who would be seen to nod slowly, affirmatively, understanding Krieger’s reasonable point of view (if he/she existed: he/she did not).
“Do you believe this stuff?” he began. “Do you believe what I’m hearing here, as if this young lady has any pretext, any leverage, any position of power at all to wield in the context?”
The line crackled, and Krieger felt he had reestablished to his own satisfaction his prevailing authority in the conversation. It was not meant to be a dialogue in the first place, but a monologue, punctuated by simple yes or no responses to questions posed.
“There then, our friend arrived safely?”
“Tell me what he’s doing here.”
“There we go, that’s the spirit, I must say that against all odds, and not to think for a moment my colleague didn’t entertain some serious second thoughts about you, Hannah-pie, and his is a mind shrewder than which I’ve never met, not in, you count the years, who has the time? and there were moments in the earliest stages of the project, times when your name was merely one of many.”
Aware Krieger’s hesitation was meant to prompt either protest or inquiry or some indication of ire, Hannah refused to capitulate. She repeated, “I want to know what these people are doing here.”
“And as this person was ruled out for this reason that person for that, there were times my colleague’s opinion of you, your not your shall we say situation which was, is, self-evidently perfect from our perspective, not your situation as much as you yourself didn’t strike him how can I say it? equal to the task, but you know how macho some of these s-p-i-x can be.”
Hannah hung up the telephone. She considered taking it off the hook. Half an hour elapsed before it rang again; she picked up before the first ring had ended.
He was calm. “You illustrate my point, that is I kept arguing your case with my colleague, this is not a suicidal person, this is not a person with much room to maneuver, either, to call a spade a spade, this is a person who loves her home such as it is—and do not think for one split second, one millisecond that we had not found a host of candidates for the job, people whose circumstances weren’t far more incredible than yours, don’t bother to flatter yourself for a moment on that count.”
“Krieger, I’m going to put them out on the street.”
“Hey, do you remember my shepherd’s pie, Hannah? I’ve been wracking my head trying to think what it was besides the haggis you liked so much. Shepherd’s pie, I just remembered, that’s what it was. Sometimes I threw a bit of the haggis in with it give the base some character, you know”—he awaited a response, a flicker of hope, but none came—“the hardest part—did I ever tell you this bit?—the hardest part about making shepherd’s pie is getting up at six in the morning to kill the shepherd,” and he laughed rather too heartily before shifting to a descending scale, singsong: “No, no, no, this is not a suicidal person, neither is it a person who can go anywhere, not really, not in fact. That is what I kept counseling my colleague. Here is someone respectable in her own right, bright, attractive, an absolute perfection. Christ on a crutch, I would interject, here is someone who would be even, even sympathetic to the idea. My opinion, it is not that my opinion prevailed, rather it came to be seen as the, as they say the least of all possible evils. Th
is quirkiness of yours is a mixed blessing.”
Hannah felt at the back of her throat a tightening and her eyes were warm. She would not allow herself to cry. The most curious phrase came to mind, like an antidote somehow, and she said it as if she were reading it off a script. “Krieger, you bore the living shit out of me, why don’t you just leave me alone.”
Krieger said, “Incomparable girl, what are you trying to do, make me fall in love with you all over again? that’s just choice, and coming from those delicate lips you ought to be ashamed, Hannah, but, living shit? it’s choice, my grandfather Werner, I told you about him ever?”
“You don’t have a grandfather Werner.”
“No? well, he collected these things in translation, let’s see in German what is there to match it? lebende Scheisse, no, zu Scheisse gelangweilig? just, just nothing comparable. Okay point well taken, and so tell me as I gather Mr. Lupi arrived safely?”
“Yes.”
“And his sidekick, the older gentleman, he arrived with him.”
“Yes.”
“See how simple? So, Mr. Lupi and friend are honored guests. As I said they won’t be with you very long. Your employee’s wife, Henry’s, she’ll of course have to be brought into this matter as an ignorant cohort, she will assist Lupi in any way possible to deliver our brochure which he has on his person, and the chieftain himself to her father. This, Hannah, is so easy a thing to do. A request upon which the future of your silly sand castle rests, unstable a thing as it is, unstable—Hannah, you follow? I’m enthusiastic by nature but not one who resorts to threat. It’s in my blood, enthusiasm, it’s red and it’s warm my passion, commitment to this. Were there another way to do it, but there isn’t. Has Lupi said anything, that is—”
“Peter, your flaw is you overestimate, you underestimate. Lupi’s been coy, hilariously coy, laughingly coy. You’ve chosen well, you and your friend. Listen, Krieger, while you gloat?”
“Listening.”
Come Sunday Page 11