Judita is gone a moment later, already out of the yard, already pushing the camera into her backpack with the food and the wine. She knows she can fence a nice Canon readily enough. Two thousand pesos, easy. His credit cards and especially his passport would have brought in even more, but that means he misses his boat tomorrow morning and Judita wants to make his exit as easy and free of police as possible. Not that she worries much about that—in the version he told the cops, she would become an entire knife-wielding gang of men. But Montevideo is a small town, and she doesn’t want to risk running into him. Running into people is one thing Judita does worry about.
Two
I’ve gotten good at this, thinking of Judita in the third person, as if she were someone else. Her name isn’t my name, I tell myself. Her thoughts—concerned mostly with food and money—aren’t my thoughts. She ignores the slights dished out by the customers at the restaurant where she works. She ignores the under-the-breath insults of Americans and Brits as they express shock that the South American waitress and delivery girl doesn’t speak English as well as they think she ought to. She ignores all of it until, sometimes, she forgets who she’s supposed to be and goes back to her old ways for a little while. But only ever in private. Only ever when no one’s around to see.
To live as Judita is like waking up every day in a torturously boring sequel to a torturously boring sequel. Nothing changes. Today’s exhaustion is yesterday’s exhaustion. Today’s endless bus ride is yesterday’s endless bus ride. I tell myself to be grateful that I’m alive. I tell myself that I’m extremely lucky to be here in Uruguay instead of dead or in a CIA prison in Turkmenistan. Judita—Judita’s life—is a gift.
The Uruguayan passport granted to Judita Leandra Perels lists her place of birth as a small town about two hundred kilometers outside Caracas, Venezuela. Her surname is not common here in Uruguay. But then, all kinds of people turn up in Uruguay for all kinds of reasons, so nobody ever really asks about it. In the case of Judita Leandra Perels and her father, Dario Javier Perels, they were given citizenship after their names were brought up during negotiations about visa requirements and trade tariffs between Uruguay and Israel. Why Israel should care about two Venezuelans is anybody’s guess. But their application was supported by the Consejo Judío Sudamericana, Montevideo branch, with a personal recommendation from the organization’s president, Dr. Enrique Goldman, regular tennis partner of Uruguay’s attorney general.
That’s the official version of Judita’s life. And that’s the version I’ll swear to. I’ve got enough material to last me two, maybe three, days under serious interrogation.
* * *
The bus drops me off a twenty-minute walk from my home. At this time of night, the streets are mostly empty, and all the windows dark. Houses, mostly, and a few three-story stucco apartment buildings. A stray dog prances along beside me, not even bothering to beg, just happy for the company. He was a handsome thing once, a golden retriever maybe, but the mange and grime are so thick, it’s hard to tell.
Already, at three in the morning, the scrappers are coming out of their apartments, hooking horses up to empty wagons. The animals are beaten, ancient things, slouching along, heads low as their owners tie them up. In a few hours, the carts they drag behind them will be piled high with salvaged metal and wood, anything that might be of value to someone, somewhere. I always feel bad for the horses, though the guys driving the wagons don’t look much happier.
In the Old Town of Montevideo and the barrios near the center, everything looks nice. A city comfortable with its status as a cleanish, safeish capital to a cleanish, safeish country. But the scrap collectors and I know better. We live out here beyond where the tourists and politicians and the middle-class office workers go, on the edge of the city, at the edge of the nineteenth century. My dad and I are lucky to have running water, but most people here fare far worse. I pass them on this street daily on my way to work, kids in bare feet hauling pails of water back to the semilegal shacks made of whatever scrap their fathers can’t sell. Life in these quarters makes it hard to give a shit about your horse.
I climb the steps to my apartment building and go inside. The landlady on the ground floor is watching TV, or maybe she fell asleep in front of it. The stairs creak as I climb to the second floor, then the third. I pause at my door, hand resting on the doorknob, brass turned brown with age. It’s silent in my apartment, as it always is. I unlock the door and step inside.
“Soy yo, Papá,” I say. Just me, Dad.
* * *
He looks me over, the light from the table lamp catching his eyes, and the corners of his beard turn up into something like a smile.
“Good day?” he asks quietly.
“Fine.”
I slip into my bedroom, take the camera and two of the wine bottles out of my backpack. Then I count out the money. Two hundred and ten British pounds and 300 Uruguayan pesos. Add the camera and it’s a banner night. Something to celebrate.
All of it—the money, camera, and wine—go into the space between my bed and the wall. There’s a small fortune there now, four cameras, six phones, and, as of tonight, what works out to 1,700 US dollars in cash. What I’m saving up for, I don’t know. But I know we’ll need it, probably sooner rather than later.
I change into a T-shirt and shorts, wash up, and step into the other room of the apartment, holding the parcel of food and the third bottle of wine like I’d just discovered treasure. “Beef and a little lamb, I think,” I say in whispered English. “Also some asparagus.”
We own two plates, two cups, and two sets of silverware. I dish the food out and take it to him.
“Any adventures?” he asks quietly, inspecting a piece of lamb on the end of his fork. When we speak in English, it always has to be quiet. Foreign languages arouse suspicion.
“Delivered a big order to an American. She stiffed me on the tip.”
“Sorry, kiddo. That sucks,” he says. “Still, you get stiffed and bring home the bacon anyway. I’m proud of you.”
It’s silent as we eat, my dad on the couch, me on someone’s dining room chair that ended up at the flea market. After a few bites, my dad places the knife and fork carefully on the edge of the plate and leans back.
“Hot today?” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Sorry you have to, you know, be out in that. Unpleasant.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Another month, maybe.”
“Another month what?” I say.
“Before it gets cooler,” he says.
It kills me. It kills me that he’s like this. That he’s become this. There was a hero inside him once. But the last time he left the apartment was two weeks ago, and that was because I begged him to. Take a walk, I said. Get some air. He was back in ten minutes, and what I could see of his face behind the gray beard and scraggly hair was white as a sheet from terror.
“You need to eat more,” I say.
“Too rich,” he says. “I’ll eat something later.”
I just nod and finish what’s on my plate. I’ll tuck the rest of his away in the refrigerator. “You didn’t touch your wine.”
He brushes the knee of his pants. “I’m not thirsty.”
“So—what we were talking about yesterday,” I say. “The plan.”
“The plan,” he repeats, as if he’s never heard these words before.
I take a long drink of my wine and, when it’s gone, reach for his cup. He doesn’t like it, how much I drink. He used to tell me that, but in the last few months he hasn’t bothered.
“You need to get out,” I say. “Into the world. I saw a sign for a chess club at the Jewish Center downtown.”
“Dangerous,” he answers, swatting at a mosquito. “Maybe in a year or so.”
“We’ve been here a year,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Keep your voice down,” he says.
The anger flares inside me, but I look away to keep him from seeing it. “Buenos Aires,�
� I say just above a whisper. “It’s close. Three hours by ferry. And much bigger. We wouldn’t have to hide all the time. We’d be just part of the crowd. I could, I don’t know, go to college.”
“Sweetheart…”
I know what he’s going to say and cut him off. “There’s a program at the Instituto Tecnológico, a part-time thing. I could take math, intro courses. I looked it up on a computer at the library. It costs a lot, but if I tutored English…”
He reaches across the table, places a hand on my leg. “College can wait.”
“For what? Until I’m thirty?”
He squeezes my knee. “Your voice,” he whispers, glancing to the wall and the neighbors sleeping on the other side of it.
I pull my leg away.
“We can do it, Dad. We can have”—I gesture around the room to the cracked walls, the bedsheet curtains—“more.”
I stand and take our plates into the little kitchen. There’s a spider on the wall, a nasty, hairy thing, but it’s not bothering me so I won’t bother it. I place the dishes in the sink, and when I turn around, my dad’s standing there. His hands are folded over the stomach of his yellowed undershirt. He’s looking down at the cracked tiles on the floor. Don’t, I will him. Don’t start now.
But he doesn’t apologize. The last vestige of my old dad is still there somewhere inside him, the CIA operative part, the strong part. “Gwendolyn,” he says, using my real name for the first time in months. “It isn’t people that are looking for us. It’s a thing. With ten thousand heads and a million eyes and a very, very long memory. This—what we’re doing, keeping the lowest of low profiles—is a tactical necessity. Do you understand?”
I nod that I do. Tactical necessity. Soldier talk. Comrade talk. Not dad talk. “Yes,” I say, even though I’m not sure I do. “How long?”
“Until they get distracted by something else. But even then…” The thought hangs there, and he shakes his head, not wanting to finish it. “You never see it coming, Gwen. Never. There’s not a knock at the door. The floorboards don’t creak. You don’t see them until after the bullet is in you.”
I turn away. “Stop talking like that.”
“It’s true, Gwen. This isn’t the life I had in mind, either. But it’s the hand we’ve been dealt.”
“Then change it.”
“How?” he says.
“You know how,” I say.
I hear him breathe out through his nose, disappointed and a little angry. It’s the untouchable topic, the thing-that-must-never-be-discussed.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “Money won’t fix a goddamn thing.”
I turn back to him, eyes on his, willing the message to finally be received. “Let’s try it and see,” I say.
* * *
He may be asleep. Hard to tell. The other room is quiet, but then it’s always quiet with my dad, the mouse who thinks every shadow is a cat. I sit on the bed, back against the wall, eyes drifting aimlessly out the window. Sometimes in the morning, if the smog is not too thick, I can see a little slice of the river beyond the shanties. Sometimes, if the river’s not too muddy, it actually looks blue, gleaming like a promise. Now, though, the dim yellow lights of Montevideo are all I get, just a scattering of them, as if there were barely a city there at all.
I reach into the space between my bed and the wall and pull out a bottle of tonight’s wine, the slurry of remnants left behind by the customers at the restaurant. I have little to compare it with quality-wise, but it’s not bad by my low standards, and sometimes it even contains a surprise or two. Tonight’s, for example, tastes like rancid blackberries, but in the best possible sense. Complicated and weird. I pour it into a chipped coffee mug and sip it primly, like some exiled, destitute princess.
I don’t drink wine because I like it, or to get drunk—both are side effects, distractions from the real reason, which is that wine makes me sleepy. It’s a drug, a medicine. When I first started taking it home from the restaurant, a single glass did the trick. But then a single glass turned into two, then became a bottle. Lately, getting sleepy takes a bottle plus one—a full bottle plus a glass from the next. A bad road to start down, but a girl’s got to sleep. I can’t help it if my mind won’t shut off or if my body resists sliding into my personal dreamland hell.
I take out my deck of cards and begin shuffling. It’s an old deck, dating at least from my time in New York, maybe before, and I took it with me to Paris and Berlin and Prague. The cards are worn and bent and fraying, and really, I should just break down and spend a few pesos on a new deck. But it’s practically the only thing that remains from my other lives and other names, the single thread stretching from Judita to Sofia to Gwendolyn.
As I drink, my hands grow steadier, the shuffles sharper and more precise—another bad sign—but I can’t do it properly without the wine anymore. I splay the cards out on the bed in a perfectly spaced, facedown arc, then sweep them over so they flow like a wave and finish faceup. This has, for years, been my therapy, the calm orderly plastic world of chance and statistical probability. Each shuffle is a new universe of winners and losers.
The money. The idea flashes across my mind again, so I take another sip of slurry wine and tell it to go away. But it won’t. In the cartoon of the man crawling across the desert, the money is the mirage glass of water on the horizon, the thing keeping him going. But this is no mirage, despite what some people say. The money belonging to the dead crime lord Viktor Zoric, the man my dad helped put in the grave, is now comatose in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, asleep, dormant, waiting to come alive again at true love’s kiss.
It’s how Zoric paid people off, my dad says. Start a new company, open a new account, and make the payee a co-owner. Bribing an official is as easy as that. I’d had the account numbers. And my dad knew where to find the passcodes and names. This information had nearly killed us both.
I push the cards together and set the deck on the table next to my bed. Then I take the last swallow I’ll allow myself—a bottle plus one. I sink back into the bed and close my eyes. What I see projected in my mind are the twenty-odd bodies I stacked up as I gouged my way from Paris to Berlin to Prague. Each face comes back to me. The guy I stabbed on the train, the guy whose brains I blew out in a jail cell, are the most generous, appearing to me only as they appeared at the moment they died—openmouthed, frightened. But I remember the others more clearly. Emil in the blue cast of the dashboard lights of his van, rapping along with American hip-hop. Roman as he bought me a dress, struggling through morphine to count out the money. Bohdan Kladivo as he smiled and lit his cigar and told me that if I wanted to rise in this world, I needed to be crueler than any man.
These faces I see as they were before their deaths. Living faces. The faces of men. My rational, daytime self believes that each and every one deserved it, whether it was the knife or the bullet or the rat poison I dumped in their tequila. But my subhuman, nighttime self is less sure, remembering as it does the blood and toxic vomit and how the idea of justice looks nothing like the reality of justice.
That’s why, no matter the volume of wine I drink, my sheets are tangled around me and wet with sweat every morning. But it was all for a good cause, wasn’t it? Rescuing one’s father. It all worked out in the end, didn’t it? Waking to another morning in Montevideo, alive.
Three
See you on the other side.
That’s what Yael said, just before I left the German farmhouse a few kilometers from the Czech border. She said it casually, in the middle of a loveless hug concluded with two quick pats on the back. The other side of what? The Atlantic? Death? Good and evil? But instead of asking, I climbed into the trunk of the Mercedes sedan. Someone handed me a bottle of water, a bag to throw up in if I needed it, and two small pills—a sedative and something for nausea meant to be dissolved under the tongue.
I rode in the dark for a very long time—two hours or eight, impossible to tell. My mind went blank in the tight confines, aware only of itself and th
e discomfort of the body to which it was attached. I rode over rough roads and smooth, through cities and over highways. I puked into the bag once, and nearly again when the smell of it became too much. By the end, I had to pee so badly I thought I’d pass out from the effort of holding it.
When the trunk finally opened, we were in a dingy hangar at a small airport, the air smelling of gasoline and the walls piled high with boxes and spare parts. I climbed into the backseat of a single-engine prop plane, the whole cabin no bigger than that of a small hatchback. A pale guy with terrified eyes and clutching a briefcase to his chest climbed in next to me. “She saw my face,” he hissed in French to the man who turned out to be our pilot.
East to another airport, where the signs were in what I took to be Polish. Another plane south, a small jet this time, utilitarian blue vinyl seats with metal rings between them. I stared at these for a while, trying to figure out their purpose, and realized after we’d taken off they would be perfect for anchoring handcuffs. A pretty woman with short black hair smiled at us like a flight attendant, then seized my hand with an immensely powerful grip when I tried to open the window shade.
“Windows are to remain covered,” she said.
“Until when?” I asked.
“Until we land,” she said.
As she turned away, I saw a pistol holstered in her waistband.
The French guy fell asleep a short time later, his head resting on my shoulder. He snored and murmured something indiscernible as he dreamt. Every once in a while, he shuddered with the briefcase against his chest, as if even now he was fearful of losing it.
With no external reference point, time again slipped away, just as it had in the trunk of the Mercedes. We flew for six hours, or so I guessed, enough for several cycles of terror turning to boredom and back to terror again. Just as my body was telling me it was time to go to sleep, we touched down. The French guy woke in a panic as the wheels bounced and squealed on the tarmac, gasping and sucking drool into his mouth. But this wasn’t, it turned out, his stop. Only mine.
The Greed Page 2