The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  The words come stumbling out: “She said, she said also—that this, this isn’t…” I pause, catch my breath. “It isn’t necessarily a death sentence.”

  His knees crack as he rises slowly and goes again to the window. “What else would you expect her to say?”

  “And you’re okay with it?”

  But it’s like he doesn’t hear me at first. He’s fixated on something in the street. “So many stray dogs here,” he says.

  “You’re okay with it?” I ask again. “Just accepting this?”

  “Don’t really have much say in the matter, do we?” He sits on the sill, leans his head out. “Look,” he says. “A Dalmatian. When you were a kid, you wanted a Dalmatian.”

  I slam my hand on the table and stand. “Goddammit, Dad!”

  He turns, startled. “You did,” he says. “You called them ‘fire truck dogs.’ You kept asking for one, birthdays, Hanukkah.”

  “We don’t have to die,” I hiss, conscious now of the volume of my voice, conscious now of being overheard by the neighbors. “We have options.”

  He closes his eyes as if the sun were shining and warming his skin. “You have options.”

  “I refuse to”—the thought freezes in my mind and won’t come out, so I correct it—“I don’t want to leave you here.”

  “Of course you don’t,” he says. “But it’s been a long time since either of us could do what we wanted.”

  * * *

  I don’t remember how old I was when we attended the Eid feast at the end of Ramadan. It feels like Dubai, maybe, but it could have been earlier. Cairo, maybe. I remember only that I was small and that we flew there special on a State Department jet to the airfield of some dignitary, some sheikh. His villa was deep in the desert, a grand place, with multiple swimming pools, cyan rectangles against endless beige. He and my father called each other “brother” as they embraced, which confused me until my father explained that they were just really good friends. The thing I remember most clearly, though, is that they had a lamb there at the feast, a cute little thing. The other kids—there were a million other kids—played with it awhile. I remember thinking how odd it was, a lamb at a party, like a one-trick petting zoo.

  At some point, the sheikh gathered all the guests into a circle, straddled the lamb, and gave it a playful, reassuring rub between the ears. Then he cut its throat with a knife.

  As the blood poured out of the lamb and everybody clapped, I buried my head in my dad’s stomach. That’s why I remember how tall I was. A few hours later, though, I ate it just the same. By the next day, it had already stopped bothering me. Even then, I knew that was how the world worked. Lambs and men. Trust met with a knife.

  I don’t know why I should think of this now. I’m not nostalgic for the time. I’m not hungry for lamb. Maybe it’s because of how I buried my face in my dad’s stomach, like he could protect me from the world.

  I love him. I do. But no one will cut my throat. I will survive with him and struggle with him, but I won’t die with him. Part of me wants to scream about how unfair it all is. But the rest of me knows the world doesn’t give a shit about fair. The world is only as it ever was, subject to the desires of strong and cunning carnivores. One does not live by being meek. One does not live by remaining Judita the lamb.

  The air is still and humid in the bedroom. I dig out a shoe box from under my bed. In it is a filleting knife in a sheath I bought when I first arrived in Montevideo. For my first six months here, I wore it strapped to the underside of my left forearm every day. Now I’ll start wearing it again.

  With the knife beside me on the bed, I pour myself another glass of garbage wine and drink. I drink too much for anything like planning, or any clear thought whatsoever. The only thing remaining in my vision as I fall into unconsciousness is that I will not die here. I will not die here.

  * * *

  I find sanity again with the insanity of Mariela’s. I relish its immediacy and chaos, how everything happens in the moment and results in money on the table. It’s not complicated, not shot through with lies and intrigue. I wonder every time the door opens if it’ll be Brent again, but of course it isn’t. It’s just another clot of hungry tourists, eyebrows raised uncertainly as they ask, “¿Habla Inglés?” Mariela clasps her hands together at the joy of seeing them, old friends she’s just now meeting for the first time, and says, “Better than your English teacher!” She will be what they remember most.

  I’m sad to see the last ones stumble out, buzzed, belts a little too tight. I’m sad when the toilets are clean and Gustavo is finished pouring out the wine. The walk to the bus terminal is torture, knowing that on the other end of the ride is my ebullient, fatalistic father, practically picking out the color of the robe he’ll wear in the heaven in which he does not believe. I wish it were possible to go without sleep so I could wander the city until tomorrow’s shift. Wish I didn’t have to choke down the wine in my backpack so I can get something like rest.

  I drink some on the way, right from the bottle, for a head start. I take out my phone, pinch the bottle between forearm and side as I walk, and somehow manage to put a new SIM card in.

  An elegant man, in late middle age but attractive enough, is sitting in a café, lonely and sad as he drinks beer from a tall glass. Behind him, in the background, is a woman in early middle age, also lonely and sad, also drinking a beer from a tall glass. Oh, Terrance, the way you see the world.

  I scroll through his other photos. Here an old lady laying flowers on someone’s grave. Here two women leaning confidentially close as they share secrets on a park bench.

  The paranoia of this morning has given way to my exhaustion for this life of mine. So please let there be no danger in a Tumblr user in Uruguay with no profile picture, no posts, no followers, checking out the account of one TerraFirma, who wants nothing more than to share beautiful things with those of us who have none.

  No one’s around at the bus stop, and there’s still twenty minutes to kill. I sit and drink more wine—it is particularly awful tonight, or maybe my dad is right and it always is. In any case, what I think about is Buenos Aires and what it would be like to be there with Terrance. I don’t have the eye he does. I don’t notice the little dramas, life’s walk-on characters, all the world’s interesting bits. Maybe you could show me, Terrance.

  The Buquebus ferry terminal isn’t far. I could walk it, be there by the time the first one leaves, and be in BA three hours after that. But it’s a silly thought and would only drag Terrance down further than I’ve already dragged him.

  I take another drink and feel like I’m going to throw up. Fast-acting medicine tonight, and too much of it. My thumb hovers over the photo of the lonely man and lonely woman in the café—too dangerous, I tell myself, don’t—and I press down. Behold, NSA, how a photo posted by user TerraFirma was, at 2:09 a.m., liked by user RedShoesForSale.

  * * *

  From somewhere, he’s dug out a pair of reading glasses and looks over them at me as I come in. The stack of children’s notebooks sits on the table before him in a tidy pile.

  I breathe in slowly. “You’re doing that again?”

  “Just—something I forgot to include,” he says. “Some details.”

  I collapse into the chair across from him. “Tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll upload it tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” he says. “If you want. It’s about the Swiss accounts.” He pulls open a notebook with a Hello Kitty cover, flips to the last page, and hands it to me.

  Walter Kahn, Pension Alexandra, Hareth bei Bärenbad, Austria. It’s a name and a place I’ve never heard of before. I look up at him.

  “If there’s a way to get Zoric’s money, it will come from the information Walter Kahn has.” His voice is so quiet and strained, it’s as if the words themselves are sapping the life from him. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but maybe.”

  I study the name. Something menacing about it. “Is he a banker?”

  “Walter Kahn is an innkee
per. The owner of the Pension Alexandra.”

  He takes back the notebook, squares the stack. “A kind man. Not—an enemy.”

  I flash him a smile as I remember something and pull my backpack onto my lap. “I brought a good pork cutlet home. Mostly intact.”

  His face brightens. “Yes? Good. Maybe later. Did you bring wine?”

  “You want some?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “But go ahead, if you want to. Then—let’s talk a bit.”

  I get up and step into the little kitchen for my cup. All the cameras and phones I’d collected are arranged in tidy rows on the counter. A pang of pleasant, old-fashioned teenage fear—caught shoplifting, grounded for a month—flares inside me, then dies just as quickly. I take down my cup, fill it.

  “You found them,” I say, stepping into the other room.

  “We do what we must,” he says.

  I sit in the chair across from him.

  “No, kiddo,” he says, and pats the place on the couch next to him. “Here.”

  I slide in beside him, and he drapes his arm around my shoulder.

  “I found the money you put away, too,” he says.

  “Are you mad?”

  He’s quiet a minute, then says, “The cameras and phones should be worth a few thousand American.”

  “You think so?”

  “Maybe more,” he says. “Outside Uruguay.”

  He lets the words hang there, letting their meaning bloom in my mind. His arm tightens around me, and I slip my head into the crease beside his chest.

  “You remember The Wizard of Oz?” he says. “It was a thing with us. A tradition. Every year on Thanksgiving.”

  Suddenly he’s in the mood for nostalgia. I indulge him. “Yeah,” I say. “Hot chocolate. We always made it. Even in Dubai.”

  “The scene when the tornado comes,” he says. “What’s the last thing Dorothy’s uncle the farmhands do before going into the cellar?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Sure you do. Come on.”

  I close my eyes, picture the scene, black-and-white chaos, wind howling, nature itself in a panic. “They let the horses loose from the barn.”

  “Every single year you’d ask me why they were doing that.” His fingers push through my hair, stroke back and forth along my scalp. “You asked why they would just let them loose when the tornado was coming.”

  My lower lip trembles and I feel myself start to shake. He holds me tighter, not shaking at all.

  I swallow the sob down. “You said—because the horses would have a better chance on their own,” I say. “If they were free to run away, they might survive. But in the barn…”

  The sob comes anyway, silently. He presses his mouth to my head. I make a point to remember the rhythm of his heart, how it feels to have his breath on my scalp.

  He lets out a little sound that means contentment and regret all at once. “Better that way, don’t you think? For the uncle and aunt? Knowing the horses are alive somewhere?”

  “But the horses would come back,” I say. “That’s what you said.”

  “Of course they would,” he says. “Absolutely.”

  * * *

  I leave the next morning at dawn, when he’s finally fallen asleep on the couch and I’ve finally sobered up. I put what I need into my backpack: a change of clothes, and all the cameras and phones I’ve stolen. I take the paper cash, the SD cards of his doomsday device, and the original notebooks, two with blue covers, three with pink, two with Hello Kitty.

  The horses are being hitched to their scrap wagons and neither they nor their owners spare me a second glance as I make my way through the streets, past the barking dogs, past the tin shacks, to the bus stop where I can catch a ride to the city center.

  There could be no good-byes, because things would be said that would prevent it from taking place. We don’t have to do this. We’ll find a way. Emotions would overcome reason, and the parting would never happen.

  And how does one do such a thing? Leave one’s father, one’s only family, the only person to be trusted?

  One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. And hanging there, on the horizon, the idea of returning. We’ll check in with each other the sterile way, with encrypted e-mail accounts, the way we’d been trained. A secret e-mail account that only we two know about, at an encrypted service in Norway, complete with a duress code, an innocuous statement that meant one of us had been captured. The protocol had seemed ghoulish, and I didn’t want to believe it was necessary. But here we are. The kill list. Another Zoric.

  I focus on the single fact that survival requires action. With effort and luck, whatever I do next will save us both. But I must be content with the idea that it will not, that I will be the only survivor, and there is no easy way to do this other than to ignore the emotions that press against my chest and urge me to go back to the apartment. The biological commandment to live at all cost shoves me forward. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.

  Through the window of the bus, the first rays of sunshine warm the skin on my arms, melting the edges of my resolve. My eyes swell, but I pinch them shut. My breath catches, but I swallow hard.

  When I reach the Buquebus ferry terminal, I linger beneath the white archways, blending into the crowd of smokers sucking down their last cigarettes before they board. Everyone who goes in or out of the terminal gets an appraisal from me, as I search for anybody out of the ordinary. But all is as it always is, a few cops, knots of businessmen and tourists. No military police. No American-looking guys in cheap suits and sunglasses.

  I’m only a few blocks from Mariela’s and it would have been nice to say good-bye, but with what excuse? Only Marco lingers in my deep pool of regrets with something like pain, but that’s his doing—betraying me the way he did—and that makes what pain there is easier to bear.

  I buy my ticket and board with the last of the passengers. Inside, it looks like rows and rows of airplane seats, fifteen, maybe twenty, across, but I move past them to the back deck. The rotors of the ferry churn the brown water of the river impatiently, whipping it into an angry cappuccino of whites and tans. A few crew members untether the moorings, and the ferry begins to move. There is no one on the pier waving good-bye.

  Montevideo creeps away, receding into memory as the ferry picks up speed. I stand there on the deck a few minutes, then slip inside. Families are breaking out the picnic lunches they brought with them, and businessmen are opening their laptops. The alcohol is starting to wear off, so I’ll have to make do without the strength that comes from numbness. I push past the crowd to the outside deck and the boat’s very tip. The wind is sharp and the water parts before us. I lean on the railing with my forearms and breathe in the river air.

  Eight

  It arrives in my encrypted inbox as a message from MackintyreMack69@yahoo.com. Thought of you when I saw this, reads the subject line. The message itself is just a link to an article in a British tabloid, “10 Hottest Real-Life Gangsters.” What follows are plenty of photos and breathless descriptions of the sexy exploits, debauchery, and estimated net worth of young and handsome rising stars in the world of organized crime. Sexy arms trafficking. Sexy smuggling. Sexy murder. Three Russians make the list, two Chinese, three Americans, one Colombian, and one Serbian—Lovrenc Zoric.

  The photos are paparazzi-surveillance style, candids taken at a distance, a guy coming out of a nightclub with his entourage, a guy climbing out of a limo with his two girlfriends, a guy lounging shirtless beside a luxurious pool, phone pressed to his ear. Lovrenc’s, though, is of him standing on the prow of a large yacht, squinting handsomely as his black hair tumbles in the wind. He’s thirty-four, according to the article (and single!), with an estimated net worth of 900 million British pounds.

  The next e-mail is from JulieKurland2000@hotmail.com. Subject: Ugh, so want to go here … There’s a real message this time: I’ve never been to Valencia. What do you think? Spring break? We could rent a boat, do
a little cruise. The link is for the Valencia marina. A lovely place, judging by the pictures, and helpful sections about sailboats available for rent, the on-site restaurant and bar, and the newly expanded piers for docking your megayacht.

  It takes me a minute to figure the riddle out. I toggle back to the article in the tabloid, and study Lovrenc’s picture again. Just beneath him is a sliver of the yacht itself, and on it, the name Erebus. So back to the Valencia marina’s site I go, where I dig around and find a schedule of upcoming arrivals and departures. The Erebus has reserved a slip twelve days from now, headed from Marseilles.

  So twelve days from now, that’s where I’m expected to be.

  Well, Brent, aren’t you just the cleverest thing, communicating my orders this way. The arrogance of it makes me angry—just get the job done; how you do it and how you pay for it is none of my concern. But deniability is a two-way street, Brent. Can I be blamed for not carrying out an order that was never really given in the first place?

  I’ve been in Buenos Aires three days, three weightless days free of chains binding me to any responsibility. I’d been right about the city, the idea of it I’d had in my head: It’s enormous and disorganized and easy to get lost in. There’s a transit workers’ strike going on, so taxis are the only alternative to buses and the subway. But the streets aren’t moving anyway because demonstrations block the boulevards. Anarchists with red bandannas over their faces have taken up the workers’ cause and battle with police every few blocks, throwing tear gas grenades back at them and setting cars and dumpsters on fire.

  I’m in love with the place.

  Maybe I’ll stick around for a while. A week, or a decade.

  For the first time in my life, I am where I choose to be.

  I start a new session on the computer, reconnect through TOR, and check out Terrance’s new photos. He’s in Mendoza, Argentina, now. An old man with stained hands making a wine barrel. A woman sampling a glass of what must be delicious Malbec, because she’s closing her eyes as she sips, as one does when receiving a kiss. The user RedShoesForSale clicks the heart icon on each of TerraFirma’s images, writes a comment on the photo of the barrel maker: “love this so much.”