The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  I lift my head and look—yes, I was right. The slot in the door is open. That’s what woke me. Instead of the usual tray of hospital food, I see a wooden chessboard, and on top, the pieces all set up and ready to play. A dream, I tell myself, some bizarreness in some cortex or another, a blip or short-circuit.

  But no.

  I can tell by the feel of my body as I swing my legs to the floor that it’s real. I can tell by the coldness of the concrete and the whisper my feet make as they walk to the door. I crouch, listen at the open slot, then drop to my knees to try to see through it. Someone’s there, looming just out of sight, their shadow cast on the corridor floor.

  So I move a piece, a white knight, two ahead and one to the side, everybody’s opening move. Then I slide the chessboard back.

  A hand descends, male by the looks of it, peach skin that hasn’t seen sunlight in a while, and stubby, strong fingers. He moves a center pawn two spaces forward.

  I move my own pawn, mirroring his.

  He moves a bishop to center court.

  I move my other knight.

  He takes my pawn.

  I lower my face to the slot. “Who are you?”

  “Your move.” The voice is deep and hushed.

  I move the knight again, to a square precariously close to enemy lines. “Who are you?”

  “Max,” he says, and takes my knight.

  I sneak another pawn one square forward, positioning it diagonal to his bishop. “You a—guard?”

  The pawn disappears and his second bishop replaces it. “Do you actually know how to play?”

  “I know how the pieces move,” I say. My bishop launches an attack and takes one of his pawns in retaliation. My first kill.

  He lets out a little snicker—not cruel, just amused—then takes the bishop with his queen. “Bad at chess, good at life. Isn’t that what they say?”

  “Isn’t that what who says?”

  “I don’t know. People.”

  I deploy my own queen, moving it diagonally to the right side of the board, hoping he won’t notice. “What about the camera in the corner?” I say. “Won’t you get in trouble?”

  “That’s me. I’m the one who monitors it.” His bishop again, repositioning for a kill. “You really do suck at this.”

  “Then I must be good at life,” I say.

  We continue for a short time longer, with my losing almost everything, even my queen. I manage to take only one more of his pawns.

  “If you want to surrender,” Max says, “you do it by tipping your king over.”

  “I know,” I say, and move my king forward.

  “Check,” Max says. “Give up?”

  “No.” I move my king back.

  * * *

  In the morning, Dr. Simon is waiting for me outside her office. “I’d like to show you something, Gwendolyn,” she says. “Might give you some—insight. Into what we might achieve together.”

  We walk deeper into the tunnel, Dr. Simon beside me, Rossi and LaBelle five or so paces behind. The farther we go, the shabbier the place becomes. At some point, someone stopped bothering with the paint on the walls and it becomes bare concrete, deep gray and brown, wet, crumbling. I can actually hear water trickling. The doors here are older, too—battered steel, with old-fashioned keyholes, and lightbulbs in wire cages hanging above them. I fold my arms over my chest against the damp cold.

  “On our files, what does it say next to your name?” Dr. Simon asks.

  “How would I know?”

  “It says, enemy combatant. No rights, that means. No lawyer, no anything,” she says. “So ask yourself why you’re not dead, Gwendolyn. Ask yourself why you’re here.”

  “Because you want something.”

  The clicking of her heels on the concrete slows—plain black leather pumps, not expensive but well-kept. “Yes,” she says. “I want to help you. In a way only I can.”

  I feel icy water sloshing over my laceless institutional sneakers and look down to see I’m standing in a puddle a centimeter deep. It runs in a stream down the slope of the corridor in the direction we’re heading.

  “Sorry,” Dr. Simon says. “The water, it wants its tunnel back.”

  “Tunnel?”

  “Over a hundred meters deep where we are.”

  “What is this place?”

  “It’s a dream, Gwendolyn.”

  I look at her.

  “For me, at least. A research facility all to myself. Off the radar. Quiet.”

  “You built this?”

  “Oh, no,” she says. “Nazis built it, during the war. Or rather, Jews and Gypsies and whoever else built it, but, you know…”

  The damp chill of the concrete suddenly seems more than skin deep, and I find myself squinting at every bolt, every crack in the concrete, as if these inanimate objects could be infused with evil. My body shudders.

  “It’s just a place, Gwendolyn. One has to do something with it, after all. The Poles have a seismic observatory in one of theirs. Looking for earthquakes. This one, the Nazis used it for developing nuclear weapons, but the Russians got here first.” She stops before a metal chain-link fence and a padlocked gate. “It was abandoned for a time, but the East German government, they set up a lab of a different kind. For some of psychiatry’s most gifted minds.”

  “Could we go back to your office, please?”

  “I’m sorry, I thought you’d be interested. This is a special place. No one, I mean no one, really gets this kind of access.” She motions to LaBelle, who goes over to a gray electrical panel on the wall and flips a series of switches. Down the tunnel beyond the gate, lights come to life, illuminating a patchwork of broken concrete, wooden crates dark with age, old desks, and rolling office chairs littered about. Rossi unlocks the gate.

  Dr. Simon and I walk together deeper into the tunnel, leaving the guards behind. The place feels less like a laboratory than the gut of a snake, mouth leading to ass, one way in, one way out.

  The desks are wood laminate, and the chairs plastic with moldy orange and mustard-yellow upholstery. They look like something from a German office circa 1975.

  “The psychiatric work the East Germans were doing was secret and unorthodox by our narrow Western standards. Thus their charming offices.” Dr. Simon opens a desk drawer, where I can see a few paper clips and a pen and someone’s pocket change. She roots around for a second, then pulls out an ID badge, the photo of a balding man with horn-rimmed glasses still visible. A pink nail taps on the words beneath the picture. “Streng Geh-guh—”

  “Streng Geheim,” I say. “Top secret. Who is that?”

  “The good doctor Stanislaw Richter. You’ve never heard of him.” She tosses the ID back into the drawer and closes it. “He was a pioneer of what was called ‘political psychiatry.’ East Germany’s best. People were so jealous of his work that they discredited the whole field, called it monstrous. But Dr. Richter, he found it. Yes, he sure did.”

  I take a step back. “Found what?”

  “Love. He found love.”

  “Love?”

  “Or rather, beauty. Maybe truth.” Dr. Simon smiles, looks down at her pumps. “A medicine, anyway. To cure citizens of what makes them sick. It was all very philosophical. Took me two years just to get my head around it.”

  I feel the edges of my mouth trembling as if I’m about to break out into a smile. Her words are madness. This place, madness. My eyes dart away from her, first back the way we came. The guards are standing there in silhouette, watching us. Then I look the other way, deeper into the tunnel. The lights end a hundred or so meters farther, but the tunnel keeps going after that, into darkness. Again, the sound of running water.

  “Gwendolyn. Tell me, Gwendolyn, what do you want? More than anything?”

  “To go home,” I say.

  “Home,” she says. “Curious word choice for someone without one.”

  “To be out of here, then.”

  “No,” Dr. Simon says. “That’s not what you want.”r />
  This time my smile actually happens and comes with a raspy laugh. “Yes, it is,” I say. “I want to get out of here.”

  “What you want is deeper than that,” Dr. Simon says, leaning forward, smiling along with me, as if we’re sharing a joke. “‘Out of here’ is just a negative. Like ‘freedom.’ But these words don’t really mean anything, do they? They’re just the absence of something.” Hands on my shoulders, a friendly squeeze. “What you want, Gwendolyn, is safety. You want peace. You want to be loved.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Lunch on a cardboard tray. A white bun in a perfect circle, a square of meat, and a square of cheese. There’s potato salad, safety yellow, blended to the consistency of toothpaste, and a cookie in a plastic envelope. I balance the tray on my knees but barely touch any of it. Dr. Simon serves coffee. After inquiries about my feelings, my progress, my bowel movements, Dr. Simon reclines slightly in her chair, so her face is in shadow, out of the floor lamp’s reach. I decide not to tell her about chess with Max.

  “In the end, it’s not so different, what you want and what we want,” Dr. Simon says.

  “Peace,” I say, repeating back her words from the tunnel. “And safety.”

  “Was I right about that, Gwendolyn? That that’s what you really want?”

  I have to think for a minute. “Yes,” I say.

  “Us too,” she says. “Us, meaning your government. The state. When it comes down to it, peace and safety are universal needs.” She gets up and stands beside me, looking down at me. “So you think we can make a trade—what you want, for what we want?”

  It’s obvious what she’s after: my father, delivered up like lunch on a cardboard tray.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I say.

  “I know. Funny that’s where your mind went first, though. You really care about your father. That’s clear.” She takes her seat across from me, folds her hands in her lap. “I mean, you’re a … I don’t know. Warrior. Ninja. That’s for sure. But there’s a soft, chewy center to you, isn’t there? The daughter part. That’s interesting to me.”

  “Like I said, I don’t know where he is.”

  “How was he, while you were together? What was his behavior like?”

  I look down, study the texture of the potato salad, too yellow and smooth. “He was—probably how you think he was.”

  Dr. Simon nods. “Depression, anxiety.”

  I look up, shooting my eyes into hers. “Lot of that going around these days.”

  She leans forward with that gentle earnestness she’s so good at. “Revenge. You want it, which is perfectly reasonable. But did he?”

  I shrug.

  “Someone in your father’s situation, they might try to create a bargaining chip for themselves. Release information, say.”

  She’s talking about his doomsday device. The fourteen videos and their handwritten transcripts I’d uploaded, the links ready and waiting to go out. Dr. Simon alluded to it so casually, so undramatically, that I almost missed it. But the doomsday device is, in fact, the point. Of this conversation and all our conversations. Maybe even the point of my being here in the first place, and not dead. The thing they wanted all along.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I say flatly.

  Dr. Simon clears her throat politely. “I have something for you. A little gift. To celebrate the progress we’ve made.”

  I set the tray on the table next to me and look up.

  “It’s news. About Terrance.”

  “News?”

  “Yes. He was accepted into Tulane University. And his father is being released early. He’s moving to New Orleans to be with his son.”

  I close my eyes, try to picture it. But it sounds like just so much bullshit, a fantasy that couldn’t possibly be true.

  Then, as if reading my mind, she holds up a postcard. “Here,” she says. “He wanted you to have something. A snapshot he took. A photo.”

  She holds the postcard forward, a small black-and-white print: a street scene, a black man in an open-collar shirt and ratty old fedora laughing as he walks down the street, pointing his finger at a shop window. Whatever he’s laughing at is out of the frame, but his expression is joyous, the light undulating over the lines of his face, his delight in this moment, this thin slice of a second, complete and total. New Orleans? Maybe. Must be. That’s why Terrance sent it. Look, he’s telling me, look at the kind of happiness that’s possible here.

  I imagine him lifting the old Leica to his eye, seeing the shot before it happens, knowing this is the one, the four-by-six-inch rectangle of light and shadow that will be my window into the real world.

  And on the back, a note:

  G,

  I don’t know how to write this, but I know why I need to. I’m sorry. But it was the only way I could save your life. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do. The only thing that would make it worth it is knowing that you’re alive and healthy again. That’s all that matters to me.

  Love always,

  T

  Dr. Simon allows me to take it back to my room, where I lie on the cot and hold it up to the light, wondering what I’ll find—a secret message, something erased and written over? But there are no secrets in the words themselves. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actually write anything, but the letters feel like the letters he’d form with those slender, aristocratic fingers. I don’t know his handwriting, but I know those fingers’ touch, and this is it.

  But the proof of the thing isn’t in the note at all. It’s in the photo on the other side. This is his photo, the evidence of his eye. Taken from up close, an intimate moment, as if he were speaking to the photo’s subject, sharing a joke. He wanted me to see this, the subject’s smile, a code that means it’s all going to be all right. If I cooperate. As he did.

  I press the photo to my face. Chemicals, that’s what love smells like.

  * * *

  The slot in the door shuttles open, and the chessboard slides in. I expected this somehow, as if something so weird simply had to be repeated. So I slide down the wall next to the board and move my white knight in an L.

  Today, Max is in fine form and it’s a slaughter for the white forces due to their inept leadership. But at least I’m trying.

  “You like being CIA, or are you a contractor, too?” I move a rook, and as soon as my fingers leave the piece, I see how he’s going to kill it.

  “Just play,” Max says with a flat voice. He can’t talk about it, his tone means. My rook is replaced with his bishop.

  “Either way, it must get tiring, keeping all these secrets.” One of my knights makes a mad, suicidal charge and takes one of his knights.

  Max kills the knight with a pawn. “Yes. Very tiring.”

  I oblige him with a neutral, pointless move of a bishop. “I guess if you don’t like it, you can always quit.”

  Max laughs. “You don’t quit this. You know that.” He advances a knight. “A helicopter ride over the ocean. That’s what happens. For real, they do that.”

  “So run away,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Run away,” I repeat.

  “Because it worked out so well for you,” Max says. “Move already.”

  I tip my king over. “Oops,” I say. “You win.” I hear his body slide over the concrete floor.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t like games.” I lean down to the slot, peering through it to the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. “Let me see your face.”

  “It’s not allowed,” he says.

  “But playing chess is?”

  A pause as he considers, then his chin appears, then pale lips and his left cheek. Finally, his left eye, greenish-brown, speckled. We stare at each other for a moment across a distance of only six inches, but at least two of them are steel. From what little of him I can see, I guess his age to be about twenty-five.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” Max says.

  * * *

>   My hand is in his hand, and the snow is falling. It’s not cold, though, or I’m not cold, even though December in Moscow is always cold.

  Pavlik spins me, and I hit a patch of ice under the snow and nearly fall.

  But he catches me because he’s good at catching girls after he spins them, which he does a lot.

  Which is why my dad hates Pavlik. Arrogant Little Shit is my dad’s nickname for him, as in: Did you see the Arrogant Little Shit at school today? Who walked you home, that Arrogant Little Shit?

  And Pavlik is arrogant and shitty, to other people. But not to me. A dozen flowers today, produced with a flourish and a bow of his head as we walked out of school. They’re white as the snow that’s falling, even the stems, because they’re made of tissue. It took him, he said, all of last night.

  You were up all night? I ask.

  How could I not be? he says. I was thinking about you.

  An eye roll at nineteen, but at just-turned-fifteen, a wave of delight that’s indistinguishable from nausea.

  So—

  Sure, I’ll come back to your apartment.

  Snow falls on my face like I’m in a movie about love. I gather up a snowball and throw it at him. He throws one back. It misses me and hits something else instead.

  A pedestal, almost two meters high, with no statue on top.

  That’s what they did after the Soviet Union died, tore down the statues of their heroes, left the pedestals for whatever heroes came next.

  I squint in the light at the plaque. Faded. Hard to read. Hey, I say, hey—he has your name. Pavel. Pavlik.

  Morozov, he says.

  Pavel Morozov, 1918–1932, I say, reading the rest: Child hero. Example to all.

  Pavlik’s arms are around my waist and he pulls me in. I feel his open mouth on my neck, and his saliva is cold when he moves on.

  What’d he do? I ask.

  Who?

  Pavel Morozov.

  He pulls back, strokes the side of my head with his thumb. Pavlik’s father hoarded grain to feed his family, he says. So the secret police shot him.

  They shot Pavlik?

  He smiles at me in the way Russians often smile at Americans.

  No, dummy. Pavlik turned his father in.