“Your name is Jonathan?”
“That’s right.”
Still, she walked, and he followed her, resolute; Madeleine would come home now, and Henry, and this Hannah, too. He would see them soon, for Hannah was leading them west toward the Hudson, back toward where the hotel was, and this was what he knew he could say once he reached them, and could speak. Sure of this, he quickened his pace until he was walking beside her. She looked at him, and he smiled. His smile was not returned, but Hannah brushed her hair away from her face, and said, “That land back there, that’s mine, that land.”
“You mean where the fire was?”
“That’s my land. I own it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said.
“Madeleine and Henry are all right?”
“It’s my land, and you know what I’m going to do with it?”
“What.”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once all the rubble’s cleared I’m going to leave it alone, throw some seeds in, let it do whatever it wants to do.”
“It won’t do much,” said Jonathan.
“Fine.”
“What?”
“Henry and Madeleine, they’re fine,” she said, while a flock of pigeons started from the street which had been worn down to its cobble, circled round, rose, came directly over them, wings clapping like little dry sticks, and threw an imperceptible shadow which retreated in an instant before the whiteness of overcast returned.
Wrynn told the doorman to send her up. He looked at himself in the hall mirror. The gilt frame on the mirror was flaking. He’d have to get it refinished. After some hesitation he saw his face. Not that awful, really. He had kept himself up. He swam every day, fifty laps, used his rowing machine. Hannah would not be shocked. In the guest bath, quickly, he daubed some powder over the forehead, and beneath the sideburns. The chime rang and he went to the door composing on his face a look of nonchalance—nonchalance impossible to maintain. He folded her fondly into his arms. They were friends.
“Sweet Hannah,” he said and realized he’d only embraced her once before—and wasn’t altogether certain why he was holding her now, though it seemed like family.
Hannah was talking and Franz didn’t know what she was talking about, had heard nothing about a fire in Chelsea, but when he began to ask questions—had she seen Peter? there was no Peter? had she ever found Nicky? why didn’t Nicky take it on himself to find her?—she stopped him. “You remember that once we talked about doing the James Riding journey?”
“The who?”
“Baja, the trip down to Baja.”
“Oh, sure,” but it was obvious he couldn’t recall.
“Hey, Franzy, have you got a boyfriend right now?”
“You’re talking too fast.”
“Well, do you?”
“Sure.”
“What’s his name?”
Franz told her his name.
“Has he ever been to Baja?”
Franz doubted it.
“Well, why don’t the three of us go?”
Why didn’t they go? all right, they would go. Then what.
“Where’s Baja?”
Franz, Baja—Hannah looked him in the eyes. Kansas. Why did she think Kansas? she meant Nebraska. Franz had asked once, What is Nebraska, What is Kansas, or where, hadn’t he? Franzy, eyes young surrounded by the skin and the powder he used to cover it, the lotion; the head framed in part by the watercolor of wrens on the wall behind. She couldn’t remember what kind of wrens, rock wren, winter wren, house wren—
Hey—had he ever taken the day-trip boat up the Hudson, the milky brown dirty clean old Hudson?—not so very beautiful this time of year, all the leaves fallen and the almanac promised snow coming but she knew some people up there she wanted him to meet, what harm could there be in them trying that?
“No harm,” he said.
“And then we’ll buy some seeds, some little saplings, but strong ones, some oaks, they’re strong, chestnut, gingkos, lots of saplings, and plant them down where the building was, and then this spring maybe we will find him.”
“Find?”
Whoever else, the patron saint of pawnbrokers.
10.
TWO PLACES ON earth that are safe, two inviolate havens, thought Krieger. Churches and bars. He felt at home in neither, but the bar-priest was generally the more discreet individual, stools were more comfortable than tight-angled pews, the whole architecture of taverns scaled more to human endeavor than any cathedral’s. Besides, neon burned its welcome colors day and night, but the rose window? Forget it.
Scotch, sacramental and chilled by ice, arrived on the paper coaster although Krieger did not want scotch (where was the goddamn haggis, then?)—it was a key to further presentation here, as he saw it, where the other men gathered to view the girl crouched on the small stage (for this bar provided services beyond meditation and simple communion), her pasties trailing mirrored surfaces (was this legal on a Sunday?) and the black beads visible between her thighs where the spangled string jumped between buttocks. He may have watched the show with the others but it was as if it were played out—late disco (very post-Hustle), flesh pounding itself—in the exceedingly distant mouth of a tunnel. It was not like a dream, since he knew he could walk along the cave walls and emerge from the tunnel, come back out as it were into the sun. Plato’s cave; which happened also to be the name of the place.
Instead, he closed himself inside the telephone booth at the end of the bar and placed one call which got him aboard the flight he decided he would have to take, and a second call which afforded him only the briefest instant of immeasurable pleasure—of a kind so close to torment it had to exist on some wretched border in between—when he heard the voice of Franz Wrynn repeatedly asking, “Who is this? who is this?” before he was disconnected.
Later, while the jet taxied through the crisscross system of runways at Kennedy to reach the end of a line awaiting clearance, he breathed into his sleeve and saw a group of herring gulls out beyond the tarmac huddled in active disarray about the remains of—something; vile, no doubt, thought Kreiger, as he looked at the rosy round insignias on their beaks, marked as Cain, but who knew why? And as they bounded in and out, flashing, beaks pecking at the thing fallen which he not only could not see but would not allow any symbolic meaning to be attached to—and his breathing into the sleeve, this was against his allergy to the fumes—… none of this had the least actual significance (he almost said it aloud) as the plane came around and began its movement down the runway and lifted off over the water.
The last of Krieger’s quotes risen like flotsam from the chaos of his retentive mind was out of Camus’s essay “The Minotaur, or the Stop in Oran”: “It is impossible to know what stone is without coming to Oran. In that dustiest of cities, the pebble is king.” Yet here substitute an unrecorded Mayanesque perched village for the tenth-century Moorish port in Algeria. Substitute, further, the obese and appalling figure of Krieger’s former colleague, Obregón, for the pebble in Camus’s construct, since there he stood in the flawless sun-warmed afternoon on the short balcony of the crude palacio, dressed up in the regalia of a shaman, headdress elaborately fashioned from the long iridescent tails of sacred quetzals, coarse woolen robes so tightly woven that a spear could not penetrate nor a poison-tipped arrow find its way through to his heart, his face painted with a white pigment. Krieger adjusted the focus of the binoculars in a seizure of disbelief.
As he steadied his hands and the glasses they held, blew breath from his lungs like a marksman, blinked and squinted once more through the binoculars at the sight he had beheld from this perch in the perfumy shedding cedar tree, the fat man was still there pantomiming some magical rite, some invocation of powers from who knew what kind of pantheon, what manner of pantheon, and all for the benefit of this muster of Indians that stood or crouched in a semicircle in the cool green thrown b
y the shade tree at the plaza’s center.
The fat man now become a noble savage? a hermit crab that had scuttled sideways somehow into the shell of virgin village to present himself as successor to their own elder (and who knew, finally, just how old?) and metamorphosed out of a sense of self-preservation into a fake prince come to govern this tiniest world, a world so detached from the one that engulfed it that it might be called a fourth world, a fifth world, like a subterranean society or a colony out in space?
Behind him, hard-eyed and in need of a shave, stood his brother Carlos. Fatigues and beret. High-laced combat boots scuffed into a pearl-shell finish. No attempt to etherealize this, the nature of his presence there in the quiet yard. His shiny FAL automatic rifle he held confidently, barrel down. The placidity about him was only remarkable within the framework of incipient, or at least preparatory, violence, and such colorful shamming. Having scanned the rest of the village that was to be seen from this perch, Krieger concluded the fat man had moved in here with a relatively sizable entourage of family and supporters. The Indians seemed delighted at his histrionics. He went about his dance in spasms, tremors, and thrusts. He was as confident as he was grotesque. One adorned with such natural girth and fantastical bangles must surely be the emissary of a god if not a god himself; so Krieger reasoned on behalf of the charmed villagers.
With brilliant dignity the fat man took the African gray parrot—the very one which had repeated with such authentic, if unknowing, zeal Olid’s quaint Latin—from a pouch in which he had held it concealed. Calmly he broke its neck before the silent audience. He shook it like a rattle. He put it back into the pouch, then washed his hands in the stone fountain. The dying god now dead. Carlos brought him a cup and he dipped it into the tainted water and drank. He passed the cup into the hands of the elderly Indian that sat on his heels beside the fountain and the Indian, seeing his role, drew water from it and also drank; shortly, all the villagers had participated in the ceremonious ingestion of the ancient. The power had now flowed into the person of Obregón.
Just how this fake shaman had betrayed Krieger was not clear. Krieger understood, as he watched the bizarre performance which continued below his point of vantage, what motives the other would have had to see him at least temporarily removed from the scene by the authorities—for one, this occupation was legitimately an act of war, far outside the bounds of law to be sure, but not much farther beyond those bounds than what anyone else was doing down here. This had become the fat man’s private real estate development program, and as he lacked the means to piece together an army he was forced to create another framework for the passage of power. Dominion in his new sanctuary, what would it mean? Would he recall all of his family here to this desolate spot? And the villagers, whose contact had been confined to those visits from Sardavaal, how easily would they suffer their conversion into serfdom or slavery? That’s what was bound to happen here, was it not? A question there was no need to answer was what Obregón had figured Krieger’s importance might be to his project. Their relationship had always been loosely bound by the necessities of commerce, but while it was true the fat man had noted more than once that the two of them, historically, were opponents, Krieger took it all rather glibly.
“I’m a businessman,” he had said once, “and as such I understand that, well, to be sure, until there’s only one left standing, holding the whole damn wad in his hand—and I don’t mean one corporation, one partnership or committee, or anything like that—I mean one man and nobody left to merge with or take over, that would be it, the whole history of it wrapped up, but until we’ve reached that point I know we’re all opponents.”
“You’re very wise for someone out of the middle classes,” the fat man chided and he had started for a door as he thought he ought better.
Krieger’s smirk faded. “You’re pretty smart for a …” spic was the word on his tongue at the time, but he had swallowed it, rather self-conscious of his own cowardice. He now regretted both the bilious, sharp taste of the word and the laughter that followed the broken phrase. The insult, Krieger considered, like any insult, might have provoked a response which he could have interpreted, and which might have in turn given him a clue that what lay ahead was not a continued partnership, but a private coup. It was not like him to miss such opportunity but, as he reasoned even here, brothers and other family members standing about with machetes and carbines can influence the dialectic of any debate. Might is right, and forever shall be—some of the old adages were inviolate.
Whatever the fat man had said next must have been conciliatory since Krieger could not remember it. That had been the beginning and, by all evidence, the end of their argument, such as it was. Thereafter, business was conducted as usual and if anything this curious colleague—Krieger’s supply-side partner, as he liked to put it—maintained a friendly and circumspect attitude toward the Northerner. The only other time he had said something truly combative was when he’d interrupted Krieger who was monologuizing about the potential profits they were to make: “Tentative,” Krieger said, rather breathless, “but nevertheless positive and probable customers in what, not even six months, that’s a conceivable half million to post in receipts from starting up, two million per annum at no growth, which would mean with expenses of I don’t know, a hundred thousand tops, say just an expansion of ten percent after costs, that would leave one point nine no eight million, about a hundred and twenty million córdobas on the white market in the first year. Figuring conservatively—”
“You people have no culture, quantum theories for manufacturing money, all the rewards for being able to have made so much, a bright people, but no culture.”
Whenever the fat man pulled out a pipe or cigar, or even on the rare occasion a cigarette, Krieger knew that he proposed to lecture. They were, he had long since decided, meant to prop up the relative authority of what ideas were launched on the wings of their smoke.
“You’re going to patronize me?” Krieger countered.
“No culture.”
Krieger interpreted the cigar (he remembered it was a cigar, not of the best tobacco, and not fresh, for he could remember its foul scent) and rebutted. “Culture? There’s a word I don’t trust, always comes weighted down with fartloads more promise of something great and grand than it ever comes through with. I say stick a pin in it.”
“What?”
“Like a voodoo doll, stick a pin in it. I’ll bet you don’t even know what it means, not that it matters, not that you’d know the difference, but comes from something to do with plowing a crop. Cultivation, the same thing.
Plowing, tilling, you people ought to know a little bit about that particular exercise. Wetbacks, backs in the sun, backs browned, butts browned, tilling, culture, doesn’t that all connect?”
The fat man raised his hands, and dropped them to his sides. “No sense of culture.”
“Who the fuck needs it.”
“No sense of history or culture—”
“You’re starting to sound like me at about age ten.”
“No sense of the meaning and beauty of dirt.”
“The beauty of dirt?” Krieger scoffed and then paused before saying slowly in a deep, low voice, “Stick a fucking pin in it.”
“You’re no better than an animal in the yard but you don’t even have that much common decency for—”
“Listen, patriarch.”
“No sense of dirt. Mud, rock, the land.”
“Go make me a taco, make yourself useful.” (It wasn’t going the way it might have.)
“To you, everything is only to understand if it is made over in numbers, I’m convinced it has something to do with the polar icecaps. All your philosophers like to frown on the peoples of the equator—the darkies, the spics” (spic—he can use it) “the ragheads, you call them, you call us—we have no culture you say because our heads are cooked in the sun too long. But meantime you people are frozen.”
“He who’s got shall give, who’s not shall l
ose, right?”
“You yourself, you don’t understand anything unless it’s abstracted into numbers.”
“So the Bible says and it still ain’t news—but what you’re not getting at here is that you were born with the numbers, man, with the numbers on your side, hombre, and so the numbers like you, the numbers will always come back to you—you know it for a fact. Shame on you for turning the basic tables on me in a simple discussion, when you know all the facts just for what they are.”
Krieger was actually wagging his finger. The fat man saw this and sneered. “Numbers, it’s all you know. When you die—”
“Me?”
“When you die the dirt won’t take you, you’ll end up like a cipher written in a cloud.”
“Very poetic and if any of it were true you think I’d be sitting here talking to the likes of you?”
—was, more or less, Krieger’s rebuttal. He was not satisfied with it at the time and, considering of it again, he could still think of many things he might have said—most prominently, in reference to his colleague’s status as mere beneficiary to the same civilization he so freely condemned: his rhetoric was almost revolutionary, but no matter what it was Krieger understood it as accurate if worthless sermonizing …
It was a neat trick but would have been neater had the fat man’s tip to the authorities of a very sad and twisted transaction about to take place in a big, strange house on the river that flows down past New York come a few minutes sooner. The whole matter could have been deemed allegorical had the timing clicked.
But there was Krieger, still, up in a tree, viewing the fat man’s new mistake, as at first he persuaded himself to think of it, through the magnifying lenses of the pair of binocs.
He watched until the light began to go and he could no longer see what was happening. The masque, or ceremony—whatever it was—went forward without pause throughout the hours of the afternoon. For a time, they ceased. Everyone dispersed. Yet as if they were automatons or individual elements in the works of a clock, the villagers convened once more as the afternoon shade spread longer across the stone concourse. The fat man appeared again, now in fresh, if more recognizable, raiment—battle fatigues, high black laced boots, folderol of medals encrusted like some nutty carapace upon his expansive chest. The helmet, Krieger muttered to himself, was straight from central casting, but so elaborately accurate, so completely anachronistic and at the same time out of sync with the rest of the fat man’s fairly normal battle garb, that its effect (it was a conquistador’s helmet, half-moon steel brim cocked up away at either end into the sharp points of a banana-split boat) was as terrible as anything Krieger had ever witnessed. This time he carried with him a shallow basket filled with water lily leaves. Power play, thought Krieger, laying the sacred water lilies on these Indians. Where’d he get water lilies? Were they plastic?
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