The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  “A young man came down from Paris. Brought the papers personally.” Mucha adjusts his cape, pulls it tight over his body. “I didn’t know him, but Walter did. Ahmed Tannous.”

  Something about the name—not the first name, but the last. I know it from somewhere. Ahmed Tannous who came down from Paris. That’s it—the last name of the man Yael had tracked down right after my dad was kidnapped, Hamid Tannous. He died in front of my eyes, my hands sliding over his chest from bullet hole to bullet hole as I tried to keep him from bleeding out. In the dark, the blood looked just like black ink.

  “Ahmed was here only an hour. Didn’t even stay the night. He and Walter, they talked in the sitting room. Your father’s name was mentioned, and someone else, someone I took to be Ahmed’s brother, could that be right?”

  I stop digging. “Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

  “You knew him?”

  “The brother. Hamid. We met. Once.”

  “The two brothers, they were friends of your father’s. Or colleagues, of a kind. Hamid died, but he left the papers and instructions for Ahmed to deliver them,” Herr Mucha says. “Tragic when the young go. I’m sorry to hear about your mother, by the way.”

  “Long time ago.”

  “But still.” Herr Mucha coughs, shifts on the gravestone. “Your parents—our favorite guests. Winter. Summer. Didn’t matter to them.”

  I glance up at him but can’t see his face through the darkness. “You remember them?”

  “Oh, certainly,” he says. “As for you—quiet, curious. Liked to explore.”

  “I came here, too?”

  “You were a great friend to Frau Wexler—she was the housekeeper then. Off to the market the two of you would go, for bread and vegetables. Mein kleiner Helfer, she called you.”

  My little helper. I close my eyes, remember the odd nostalgia I’d felt passing through the town in the valley. The sound of laughter and music from a tinny speaker. Then, an image: a pink hippopotamus made of cracked fiberglass. Motion. In a circle. “I remember—a carousel,” I say. “Pink. And purple. It was old.”

  “Ah! Exactly so. In front of the grocery. Cost a pfennig—back when there were pfennigs. You’d beg Frau Wexler for a ride every time. ‘Nilpferd reiten! Ich will das Nilpferd reiten!’ Your German isn’t much better now, by the way.”

  Strange to be with a stranger in a strange place and find everything so familiar. I imagine us, me and my parents, walking the path to this clearing. My father and a shadow that is my mom, the space where her face would be a Cubist’s mosaic of my memories and the photos I’ve seen.

  I’m standing in a hole that’s just past my knees when my fingers slide across the surface of something smooth. I probe through the dirt to find the edges, then pry it free. Herr Mucha’s flashlight switches on as I hold the object up and squint at it. Black plastic sheeting bound tightly with electrical tape. It’s a package the size of a ream of paper. I glance over to him.

  “There it is, what you came for,” he says. “Now fill it back in, if you please.”

  I set the package aside and start pushing the dirt back into place, feeling Mucha’s eyes on me as I work. Fifteen minutes later, I rake my fingers over dirt that’s quickly turning to mud in the rain, blending it in with the soil around it as best I can. I keep doing this until Herr Mucha rises and says, “Enough.” Then we begin back down the path, he in front with the flashlight, me in the rear, the dirt-caked package held tightly in my hands.

  “You will stay the night, of course,” he says over his shoulder. “I’ll have it made up for you—room thirty-three—your parents’ favorite.”

  “They came here a lot?”

  “Four, five times a year. All of them did. Like a club.” The lights from the inn come into view, warm-looking, welcoming. “For some reason, our place was popular among their type.”

  “Their type?”

  “Der Geheimdienst,” he says.

  Spies.

  * * *

  The door of the room clicks shut behind me, and I set the key with its flat diamond-shaped fob—Zimmer 33—on top of a dresser. Moonlight streams through the window, catching the gauzy curtain and making shapes on the white eiderdown folded across the bed. Once again, I picture my parents. They’re lying on the bed while I play on the floor. Or maybe my mother’s over there, in that worn-out armchair, the brass lamp next to it switched on as she reads a book. Or maybe I’ve gone to the market with Frau Wexler, and they’re giggling and cuddling and trying to keep quiet.

  I look away, squeeze the package in my hands. Whatever’s inside is why I’m here, I remind myself. It’s the only why that matters. I scratch at my left cheek, where something is tickling me, and discover my skin is wet.

  In the bathroom, I turn on the lights and start the shower, passing the head over the package, letting the water drill away at the caked soil. When it’s clean, I tear at the plastic sheeting and tape with my fingernails.

  Herr Mucha had packaged whatever is inside with great care, wrapping it so well that it might have lasted decades, if not centuries, there in the ground above Walter Kahn’s coffin. When I finally get the plastic off, I’m holding a rectangular metal ammunition box, dark green and dented, a discarded bit of trash from someone’s army. I undo the latches cautiously and lift the top, as if there might be a monster inside waiting to be set free. But it’s just a fat envelope made of cardboard with accordion sides, held shut with red string around a little tab. The envelope has the formal, old-fashioned feel of something a lawyer might use to protect important documents—the deed to the house, someone’s last will and testament. I undo the string and slide a thick packet of papers into my hand, and a little surprise, just for me.

  The passport was issued in Budapest by the government of Hungary, to one Lila Kereti, aged twenty-four. She bears a striking resemblance to me. In fact, she is me. I recognize the picture as identical to the one on Gwendolyn Bloom’s old US passport. Its presence here, however, doesn’t surprise me. As soon as the burgundy passport slipped from the envelope, I knew I’d find my own photo inside. That’s the way it is here; this is what gifts look like.

  It’s my father who sent me here, so I can only assume this is his doing. But why this—I flip back to the identity—Lila? Why Hungary? I don’t speak the language and haven’t even been there. As far as cover identities go, it’s paper thin, certainly nothing to build a life on.

  I set it carefully on the floor and turn to the papers. It’s at least one hundred pages total—no, more than that, twice that. Some of the documents are in densely typed German legalese. Those that aren’t, mostly have officially stamped translations in English or French attached. How to begin? Where? This piece of paper, for example, looks very important, with embossed seals and indecipherable signatures printed on a single sheet of creamy linen paper. Freistellungsbescheinigung, it says at the top. Exemption Certificate. But what is it exempting, and from whom? The rest of the document would require someone with far more fluency than me. I flip to another document and drag my finger over a random sentence, translating as I go: “… shall be deemed to be in compliance with the Bundesdatenschutzgesetzes.” Federal data-something-something. Oh, sweet German, how you just roll off the tongue.

  I switch on the bedside lamp and it forms a gold semicircle of light on the parquet floor. As if beginning an enormous jigsaw puzzle, I spread out the papers, looking for the squared-off corners, the continuations of lines and colors between pieces. The documents are, to a one, dull and lifeless, meant for a lawyer’s eyes, not mine. Then I see it, the thing bringing them all together. I spot it first on a list of shareholders for a company called Webb-Rosenthal AG. No one named Webb or Rosenthal is mentioned, but three Russians are, along with three Chinese, an Arab, and one Hungarian. The Hungarian’s name is Lila Kereti.

  In the next stack, a certificate of incorporation for a company called España Shipping AD. Despite its name, the certificate was issued by the government of Macedonia. The company ow
ns three ships flying Liberian flags, and leases two more, flagged in Panama. Again, a list of shareholders, German, Italian, and Spanish names mostly, except for the single Hungarian, Lila Kereti.

  I thumb through a set of excruciatingly detailed documents spelling out the terms of sale for a company called Fomax Optical Instruments, based in Zagreb. It was sold to a group of investors in Paris five years ago for 75 million euros. Once again, Lila Kereti’s signature appears on the final page as the seller. Same with the lease for something called a strong room at someplace called Ports Francs et Entrêpots de Genève SA. The lease is for twenty years, and Lila Kereti paid it all in advance, in cash.

  In total, there are documents for five corporations and two nonprofit foundations. Construction. Manufacturing. Shipping. Medical research. Each organization has a different purpose. Each was formed in a different European country. In fact, there is only one point of overlap, a single shared node of DNA: the signature of Lila Kereti.

  I rise from where I’d been crouching and feel a rush of blood as my vision tunnels into blackness. I stagger, feel for the bed, and sit. The passport isn’t a cover ID at all. It’s an escape hatch from whatever destruction the doomsday device will unleash. Just as my father and Terrance described, the key isn’t account numbers and passcodes, but documents, paper, lawyers’ handiwork. It doesn’t lead me to the money, so much as lead the money to me.

  My fingers roll the passport over and over in my hands, and I touch each page looking for a sign of cheapness, a sign that it’s just a counterfeit. But it looks and feels as real as a passport gets. It, she, is a gift to me, a gesture from father to daughter, an act of protection. He’s a brave man, my father, and, I believed—and perhaps still do—a good man. But this, all this, shows a cunning I hadn’t thought him capable of. A fluency in the ways of high-functioning thuggery that means he was more than an observer to bribes and swindles but was maybe even their organizer. It’s obvious why he pointed me in its direction only at the last moment; it shows he’s guilty of more than he let on, and this was the only way he could find to save the horses.

  There’s a polite knock at the room’s door. I scramble to pick up the papers and answer it. But it’s just the maid, sent to tell me dinner will be served in the dining room in five minutes.

  I change into the black pants and sweater I’d brought, both horribly wrinkled from being rolled up in the bottom of my backpack. Then I wash up at the bathroom sink in the light of two flickering yellow bulbs. I catch my face in the mirror, and for just a fraction of a second, a photograph of my mother lingers in my sight instead. She would have looked in this mirror, just as I am now. She would have scrubbed soap in circles over her cheeks, just as I am now. Combed her black hair. Gathered it into a ponytail with a rubber band.

  * * *

  A weekday evening in the off-season. Only four couples—hushed conversation, the quiet clinking of silverware against porcelain—share the dining room with us. Herr Mucha’s table sits apart from the others, in the far corner, pinched between an enormous stone fireplace and a window with lace curtains. Leek soup is followed by duck breast. A sweating bottle of Riesling rests on a coaster.

  “Walter’s cancer—it took its time. When it ended, part of me was glad. For his sake.”

  I try to think of something to say other than a feeble apology, but I can’t.

  “We were so fond of them, your parents.” Herr Mucha looks at me, smiles. “They would put you to bed, and Walter and I would drink brandy with them in the parlor. Your mother’s German was perfect, like an aristocrat’s. Not a preposition out of place. Your father’s was—barbaric. Like yours.”

  “You said before, ‘their type.’ Security services. Was she—also part of that?”

  Herr Mucha blinks, understanding the question. “Certainly it was never said, not directly. But I have no doubt. Your mother, she was respected by the others—deferred to.”

  So another lie of omission from my dad. I try not to be angry, or at least put the anger on hold for when I see him again. I would have been happy to keep her the way she is in my head, all love and goodness, the soft things. But of course she wasn’t just that—it’s not how the world works.

  “And what were they like? Personally. With each other.”

  “That disgusting kind of newlywed love. Hands always touching. Kissing between dinner courses. I didn’t approve, of course. ‘So American,’ I’d say. But Walter—he’d say, ‘They’re the reason we do this.’”

  I look down, trying to feel them here. Touching hands, kissing, maybe at this very table. The soft yellow light, the white of the tablecloth. Gemütlich is the adjective for it in German: homey, cozy—but deeper than that, almost untranslatable. It’s how you talk about the place you always want to be, the place you wish you were whenever you’re not. This inn, this dining room, it would have all been just the same as it is now. Places like this don’t change. Men like Herr Mucha don’t change. It’s what makes the Pension Alexandra gemütlich.

  “Now, here you are. Carrying on the family business,” Herr Mucha says with a little smile.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not like them.”

  “You didn’t choose to be like them, you mean,” he says. “But the world doesn’t care much for what we choose. How is it, by the way?”

  I swallow a sip of Riesling. “The dinner? Very good.”

  “No. Walter’s package. Did it solve all the world’s mysteries?”

  I watch him carefully, eyes sharp for his reaction. “It’s just—legal papers. Contracts. Certificates. I don’t know what they’re for.”

  “That’s Walter.” Herr Mucha gives a shrug and a sad smile. “How better to answer a riddle than with another riddle.”

  I lean forward. “Do you know the name Lila Kereti?” I say quietly.

  He stabs a piece of asparagus with his fork but otherwise shows no sign of recognition. “Hungarian, by the sound of it.”

  “Yes. Or so I would assume.”

  “Can’t recall anyone by that name,” he says. “Perhaps no one can. Perhaps she’s just paper.”

  “Just paper?”

  He looks away, eyes lingering with an innkeeper’s indifference on a couple at another table, a middle-aged man and a woman of maybe twenty-five. “Those two,” he says to me very quietly. “Checked in yesterday. ‘Herr Schmidt,’ he says. Then he gives me a passport with his picture and the name Herr Schmidt.”

  I study the couple for a second, then shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “He is Herr Schmidt,” Herr Mucha says. “Because his passport says he’s Herr Schmidt.”

  Just then, a waiter arrives with dessert, Sacher torte, of course. They like their cakes dry here and it crumbles beneath my fork.

  I take a bite and study Herr Mucha. My parents trusted him, and I find myself trusting him, too. “I need a favor,” I say. “If you can.”

  He looks up from his dessert.

  “The identity papers I’m using. I’m worried.”

  A sip of wine and a nod of his head. “Getting a little worn out, is she?”

  “You were involved in that world.”

  “On the margins only.”

  “But still. Do you know someone who—can help with that?”

  He thinks for a moment. “Where are you headed?”

  “Zurich,” I say quietly.

  “You go east, Poland, Romania, I know a few. Best forgers in the world, those old communists. But in Zurich—” He looks down, dragging up something from deep in his memory. “Vidor. He was called Vidor. Ran a store. Antiques.”

  “And he’s good?”

  “Never had a call for such things myself, but his reputation was quite good.” He reaches for the bottle of Riesling, refills both our glasses. “Vidor Sonnenfeld, that’s it. At least what he went by.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “For that—and everything else.”

  Herr Mucha wipes his mouth with a cloth napkin. “It’s nothing. We all need friends,” he
says. “In desperate times, most of all.”

  * * *

  In room 33, I spread the papers out again, searching for some link besides Lila Kereti, but I can find nothing. The businesses and charities are nonsensically diverse, as if Lila had purposely chosen them so no link could be drawn, one to the other. And who was this Lila before she was me? A paper person, as Herr Mucha had said, a fictional notion someone, perhaps my own father, crafted? Or had she been real, or still is real, before I stole her name?

  Eventually I fall asleep on the floor surrounded by the contents of the package. At some point in the middle of the night, I wake up and climb into the bed, where I shiver beneath the eiderdown. Sleep comes and goes in nervous fits, the storm of paper and big German words and a faceless woman in my mind never quite leaving me alone.

  In the morning, Herr Mucha waves his hand dismissively when I ask him what I owe. I thank him again, and he inclines his head gravely, once more the formal innkeeper.

  I hitch a ride with the handyman who’s heading to the hardware store in town for a new showerhead. He drops me at the train station and I buy a ticket to Zurich from a sleepy clerk reading a fashion magazine. One-way or return, she asks. One-way, I tell her.

  Nineteen

  Sublime chaos in the Zurich train station, masses of people moving in perfect coordination, no one tussling, no one breaking the rhythm. I slide out onto the street and find myself in what a map on the train station wall says is the Altstadt, Old Town. Fussy, well-kept architecture. Neckties worn tight. Jackets buttoned. Shoes gleaming. There are no bums, no drunks, no litter. A particular German idiom pops into my mind: Alles ist in Ordnung. Not merely all is in order, but all is as it should be—an aesthetic commandment, but also a moral one.

  I buy a prepaid long-distance card with cash and find a phone booth. On the train, I’d checked the encrypted e-mail again and found nothing since the message I’d left in Spain. Thus, drastic action, breaking cover, if only for a moment. I thumb through the scraps of paper in my backpack until I find the number I’m looking for, then dial it. It gives a scratchy ring, and I picture the phone on Señora Lopez’s kitchen wall, mustard yellow, forty years of accumulated cooking grease.