The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  I find it all marvelous.

  My eyes sting, from the smoke and exhaustion, but also from the brightness of even this dull light. Erzgebirge is where the lab was. Ore Mountains. Where communist East Germany went for iron for steel and uranium for nuclear missiles. We’ll head west for a time—Max at the wheel, me in the backseat, pistol on my lap—skirting along the border between Germany and the Czech Republic, then turn southwest through Bavaria. We’ll be in Zurich by late afternoon.

  I dig through the bag of food we’d gathered from the lab, tear the plastic off another perfectly circular cookie. I’ve been at it for an hour, devouring whatever I can, circular cookies, square sheets of ham, rectangles of chemistry-set orange juice. My blood tingles with sugar and salt and fat.

  “How’s the wrist?” I call out to Max, bits of cookie falling from my mouth.

  “Okay,” he says, eyes not leaving the road.

  “Still hurt?”

  “Like hell. Thanks for asking.”

  He had moved like a robot as we left the lab, terrified and doing everything I said without complaint or hesitation. Why, yes, he knew where the food was kept. Why, yes, he knew where Dr. Simon kept her things. He dug a gym bag out from a closet, stuffed with her workout clothes. I cleaned myself up as best I could and changed into her yoga pants and pink neoprene athletic jacket and purple-white sneakers a size too small. In her purse, I found three passports, all with her photo but none with the name Dr. Simon. Each identity had two credit cards and a few other supporting documents—library cards, gym memberships, dog-eared electric bills.

  There’s no way I can pass for her, not even with the new white in my hair, and it’s too dangerous to use the credit cards. But I packed it all up in her gym bag anyway, along with the hard drive and her laptop, and keep it by my side in the backseat.

  The shush of the tires on the highway stretching like a black satin ribbon through the smoky forest is making it hard to keep my eyes open. Five more hours, I tell myself. Six tops. We’ll get to the bank in Zurich just before it closes; then I’ll pay Max off and we’ll part ways. At least that’s what I told him.

  “Eighth of a tank,” Max announces.

  I slide forward in the seat, look over his shoulder. “Next town,” I say.

  We pull off after another few kilometers. A large way station, a section for trucks, one for cars, and a restaurant in between. I climb out of the car with Max and never leave his side. In the restaurant, I buy some junk food, a German newspaper, a phone, and spare SIM cards, paying for it all with Dr. Simon’s cash.

  As we leave, my eyes go to the date on the newspaper.

  Four months. I’ve been away four months.

  The paper rattles in my hand and I wind it into a tight roll. I could kill him with it. They showed us how at Orphan Camp.

  “You took four months of my life,” I say quietly.

  But the drive has done much to ease his terror, and he looks at me dispassionately. “Better than taking all the months,” he says. “And anyway, it wasn’t me. I had no choice.”

  “No choice,” I repeat. “Really.”

  “Once you’re in—there’s no leaving. Ever.” Max unlocks the back door, motions for me to get in.

  “Helicopter ride over the ocean,” I say. “Yeah, you already said.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Just a victim then, huh, Max?” I say. “Poor you.”

  * * *

  We ride for another hour without speaking, the anger like steam in the small confines of the VW. Finally, I roll down the window a little for some air. He tells me to roll it up. I tell him to fuck off. Then we’re silent again.

  Somewhere past Nuremberg, I take a try at the newspaper, but right now I’m so exhausted that my mind skitters and slips over words that are too long and sentences with the verbs all piled up at the end.

  “You read German?” Max asks cheerily, as if trying to start fresh.

  “I try. Do you?”

  “Never could get the hang of it.”

  “Why bother, right?” I say. “You’re American.”

  He ignores the jibe. “For what it’s worth, you didn’t miss much. I mean, you picked a good four months to be, you know, off the grid.”

  I open a bottle of Coke from the gas station and drink.

  “A few celebrities died, old ones, no one big. Some bill in Congress, Republicans were pissed. Or Democrats, I forget.”

  I set the newspaper aside and look out the window. The roads are like something from the future, sleek and dark with rain that must have just passed. Buildings that look like they’re made of ice cubes are stacked tidily just beyond the Autobahn barrier. No speed limit here, and the low, aerodynamic cars that pass us with a hiss rather than a roar remind us our old Volkswagen simply won’t do.

  “What’s it like?” Max asks. “Being on the run?”

  I turn my eyes back and see him glancing at me in the rearview mirror. “Tiring,” I say.

  “But you get used to it, though, right? After a while.”

  “No.”

  But I can tell he wants more, so I sigh and lean forward. “It’s not the running,” I say. “It’s the—watching. Over your shoulder. You never see them coming. That’s what my dad said.”

  “Is that true?”

  “You tell me. I’m not the one who’s CIA.”

  “Former,” he says, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Same as everyone there. We were all contractors.”

  “Still. You’ve seen it. A steamroller that never runs out of steam.” I play with the Coke bottle, watch the brown high-fructose diabetes-juice slosh around, wish I hadn’t gotten rid of all the Theta. “You’ll need a new passport, first thing. For you, Australian would be good. Learn the accent.”

  “Gwendolyn…”

  “Grow your hair out. Get a job on some beach. I hear Belize is nice for that.…”

  “Except, Gwendolyn, that’s not how this ends for me, is it?” His eyes on mine again in the rearview mirror. “I appreciate it, though. Beach bum in Belize. Nice touch.”

  Idly, I flick the safety on the pistol back and forth.

  * * *

  An hour outside Zurich, the highway comes to a standstill. I seethe with impatience in the backseat, carving ridges in the upholstery with my thumbnail until I actually break through the fabric. A police car, then a second one, races down the shoulder and disappears as the road curves behind a mountain.

  Max turns on the radio, twists the dial—a commercial in German for an appliance sale, this week only; a news program in French, the interior minister will surely have to resign this time!—until he finds some chipper, bleating American pop music. A woman’s voice I recognize but whose name I forget, singing about wanting a second chance. Backup rap vocal by a male: No such thing as second chances, he says.

  Eventually, we make it around the curve, and an overturned tractor trailer comes into view. A spray of logs from its flatbed is tossed carelessly along the highway like a spilled box of toothpicks. Police are directing traffic to an off-ramp.

  Max glances at the clock. “We’re not going to make it to the bank before five.”

  I close my eyes, feel the impatience swell.

  “So what do we do?” Max says.

  I put a SIM card in the phone I’d bought and look for lodging. “Take a left at the exit. There’s a little motel ten kilometers away. Cheap.”

  But we’re not the only ones with that idea. When we arrive, only a single bed is available, and even this we have to argue for. Our lack of passports is a problem, and so is our insistence on paying cash. Sehr unregelmässig, mutters the clerk over and over as we fill out our registration, sehr unregelmässig. Very irregular. Max quietly suggests we offer her a bribe, but judging from the tightness of the clerk’s hair bun, this would only get us kicked out. So in the end, I speak to her in pleading French, pretending to be a clueless foreigner.

  The room is shabby and worn but clean. A bed for one abuts the wall and we have
to climb over an armchair with blue-turning-threadbare-beige upholstery to reach the tiny bathroom. It’s a weirdly intimate stage set for a captor-captive relationship, but neither of us has a choice. He showers first, door open at my insistence. I shower next, putting my pistol on a shelf with the shampoo, and making him sit on the toilet until I’m done.

  “You take the bed,” he says when we’re dry and dressed. “I’ll take the floor.”

  But I tell him no, order him to move the armchair against the door, then settle into its collapsed comfort for the evening. We turn on the TV, watch an engineer from Leipzig win a vacation to Disneyland on a game show. When it’s over, we watch an American reality series about desperate housewives plotting against one another that culminates in a blond throwing a glass of chardonnay in the face of a brunette in a strangely empty restaurant. Such a waste of alcohol, I think.

  “There it is,” Max says from the bed, head propped up on a pillow. “What I’m going to die for.”

  I’m so tired, I can’t detangle the sentence in my mind. “For—what?”

  “This,” he says, gesturing at the TV. “Them. America. This show.”

  Not even a hint of blame in his voice, though. Like it’s an inevitable conclusion in his mind. He’s going to die, and it’s me who’s going to kill him. I open my mouth to respond, but really, what can I say.

  “Mind if I turn the channel?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  He scrolls through a weather report, a soccer match, a symphony, back to the soccer match, forward to the symphony. It’s the music they use in a lot of movies, always at the climax, a big full-throated orchestral drama complete with an entire chorus chanting in the background like a magical incantation.

  “Carmina Burana,” Max says.

  “Never heard of her,” I say.

  “It’s the name of the piece. Carmina Burana,” Max says. “My nana took me to see it. Detroit symphony. Blew my mind. I was, I don’t know, seven maybe. Started piano lessons the next week.”

  In the blue light of the TV, his face is happy and sad at once. “Sick soup,” I say.

  “Sick soup?”

  “Nana’s recipe,” I say. “Or was that bullshit, too?”

  He clicks off the TV, rolls over on his side, head balanced on his hand. “I had leukemia, when I was a kid. Fennel soup was what kept me from puking. After the chemo.”

  “I don’t care, Max.”

  He shrugs. “And I don’t care that you don’t care.” He flops onto his back, stares at the ceiling. “I told Dr. Simon you weren’t going to make it. She said that it didn’t matter, that you were just a data point. I said if we get the intel, we’ll get more funding. She said, okay, try it your way.”

  “My hero,” I say. “I’m sure Nana would be proud.”

  Max closes his eyes, breathes in deep. “The cottage, the care, all that. I wasn’t just in it from the beginning, Gwendolyn. It was my idea.”

  “Sorry it didn’t work.”

  “Sure it did,” he says. “You’re alive.”

  * * *

  He falls asleep sometime after midnight, snoring softly. I stay awake by reading a tourist brochure and translating it in my head into Spanish and Arabic and Russian. It works for a time, but my eyes keep going back to Max. It’ll have to be tonight. I’ll get to the safe-deposit box and be out of the country on Lila Kereti’s passport before they even find his body.

  The gun is too loud and obviously out of the question. A megadose of Theta would be best, but I’d use it myself if I had any. So the pillow then. Quiet and quick. Or at least quickish.

  Leukemia. Chemo. Nana’s sick soup. Fucking liar. But even if it’s true, what a cheap ploy. Hold on, Max, let’s try again, this time with violins while you gaze through a rain-spattered window. I slide the tourist brochure onto the seat next to me and move to the bed, sitting down on the mattress carefully so as not to wake him.

  But there’s only one pillow, and it’s under his head.

  So I’ll have to cover his mouth, jerk the pillow away, and do it. My hand moves slowly, trembling just a little, and hovers over his face.

  I touch his cheek instead.

  The clock reads 1:50. No rush, I tell myself. Let him have another ten minutes.

  I lean over, rest my head on the mattress next to his arm, and watch the clock turn to 1:51.

  * * *

  Terrance in a suit, looking sharp as hell, reclining in the plush red banquette just so. “You remember my mother,” he says to me. The woman next to him reaches across the table and shakes my hand softly. Gorgeous umber skin, and with that same warm glow Terrance has, as if there were a lamp inside her. Her hair is clipped short, and she looks great in a cream-colored dress that’s probably real silk. I make out her age to be about twenty.

  “I thought you died in a sailing accident,” I say.

  Mrs. Mutai pours me a glass of water from a carafe. “You look thirsty.”

  “I’m just tired,” I say.

  I look down at the necktie and blue blazer with brass buttons the maître d’ had loaned me and feel ashamed I’d shown up in filthy pink hospital scrubs. “There are no prices on anything,” I say.

  “Everything is free here,” says Terrance. “I already ordered oysters for the table.”

  “Very rude, Terrance,” says Mrs. Mutai. “What if Gwendolyn keeps kosher, then what?”

  “Gwendolyn doesn’t believe in God, Mom,” Terrance says. “She used to be Hindu, then kept getting reincarnated as something she didn’t like.”

  “You don’t believe in God, Gwendolyn?” Mrs. Mutai says. “So what happens to us when we die?”

  I struggle for an answer and am grateful to be interrupted by a band starting up on a stage in the center of the room, a full orchestra, and a chorus, too. Carmina Burana, loud, almost deafening.

  “This was Hitler’s favorite piece of music,” a woman’s voice says.

  I look up and now there’s someone new on Terrance’s other side. Hair in a bob, colored red with cheap drugstore dye, and pale skin like a translucent sheath pulled over something darker. She’s barely out of her teens and wears a green sequined gown with an army name tape sewn over her left breast that says SAFIR.

  “Like you even know what Hitler’s favorite piece of music was.” I’m angry for some reason. Here I liked the music so much, and now this newcomer ruined it.

  “Eat your oysters or no dessert,” she says. “I mean it, Gwen.”

  I pick an oyster out of the water glass that Mrs. Mutai poured for me, bend it open. The inside is filled with gray gel, and I gag at the smell.

  I look up at her defiantly. “It’s against God’s will to eat shellfish, Mom.”

  She looks at Mrs. Mutai. “Children, they think they know everything.” Then she turns to me and smiles with kindness. “So save them for your dad. He’ll be here any minute.”

  I stand up, something pulling at me to leave, compelling me to do it right now. Weaving my way through crowded tables of men in suits and women in gowns, I nearly knock over the maître d’, who comes complete with haughty mustache and red carnation in his lapel.

  I strip off the blazer and necktie, then start counting off bills from a brick of 1,000-franc notes that never gets any thinner. “Here,” I say, shoving the bills at him. “Just don’t let him have any oysters.”

  “Everything is free here, Ms. Bloom,” the maître d’ says, voice offended. Then he points over my shoulder. “Alas, little goat, you missed the boat.”

  I look. My dad’s at the table in my spot, laughing with my mom and Mrs. Mutai and Terrance, adding an empty oyster shell to the pile growing in front of him.

  * * *

  I jump upright and feel Max’s hand over my mouth. My elbow fires back, lands hard in his stomach, and he lets out a pained yelp. My feet crash across the floor, catching on the handle of the gym bag and sending me to the ground. I’m up again in less than a second and leveling the pistol at Max’s chest.

  “Jesus, Gwen,
” he hisses. “Jesus, don’t shoot.”

  “You were trying to suffocate me,” I hiss.

  “You were screaming, Gwen. A nightmare. Jesus, I was trying to help you.”

  The light in the room is dim blue, and the clock says 5:33. I lower the trembling gun, sink into the armchair.

  He climbs out of the bed, kneels down on the rug in front of me, touches my arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I whisper. “Wash up. We’re going.”

  He nods, gets up, heads to the bathroom. Too late for the pillow. So maybe a pit stop on the way to Zurich. A quiet side road, a ditch. Or not.

  * * *

  By some miracle, we find a punishingly tight parking space for the VW between a Bentley and Lamborghini only a block away from Feldman Capital Services. We walk to the front doors in rain just heavy enough to remind us, next time, to bring an umbrella. Behind the brass doors shined as bright as gold, a trim clerk in a gray suit and starched collar gives us a curt nod. You’re welcome to come in, the nod says. Sneakers and pink neoprene jacket are fine. Really. Just don’t steal the pens.

  But evidently this happens sometimes with clients who use the biometric safe-deposit boxes. A young woman greets us with an actual smile once we’re buzzed into the anteroom of the vaults on the floor below. We’re shown to a comfortable leather couch, and coffee is served to Max and me with ceremonial manners.

  The young attendant asks me to look in the retinal scanner, then shows me to a booth and sets down my steel box on the counter. Thumbprint like so, she says, indicating a reader along the front. Take all the time you need. I follow her with my eyes as she exits and shuts the door behind her. I’m certain she’s seen her share of moguls on the run and fugitive ex-dictators going into the booth dressed like bums and coming out in a suit, clutching a shiny Gucci overnight bag fat with cash. How disappointed she’d be at my own meager kit.

  I raise the lid slowly, stare down at the stack of children’s notebooks, a plastic bag of identical SD cards, a passport, a packet of 1,000-franc notes. My lips tremble and broaden into a relieved smile; it’s all here.