The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series)

by J. S. Drangsholt

  Peter looked down into his beer glass.

  “Maybe not,” said Ingvill, “but incidents like that aren’t good for bilateralization. They lead to people looking for scapegoats. Studies have shown when that happens people tend to hammer down the nail that sticks out, so to speak. According to Ivan there’s a heated search under way at the university right now. Apparently the dean is up in arms. And that’s not good for anyone. I was supposed to meet Ivan tonight, but now he can’t. Luckily we get to go to the Hermitage together now.”

  She stood up and walked over to the bar to buy another glass of wine. Peter gave me an odd look. He opened his mouth, but then closed it again.

  “What is it?” I asked wearily.

  “You know that icon . . .” Peter began.

  “The Dean Icon?”

  “Whoops.”

  “What do you mean ‘whoops’?”

  “I have it. In my room.”

  “What do you mean ‘I have it in my room’?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “You have it? You mean you took it?”

  I half expected him to start laughing and say the whole thing was some silly joke, but he just nodded gloomily and drained his beer glass.

  “I thought it was a present!”

  “A present?”

  “I mean, they’ve been giving us gifts the whole time! Here, have some vodka. Here, have some chocolate. Here, have some mints. Here, have some of this and some of that. He was standing there talking about friendship and war and peace and, well, I was just absolutely sure he meant the icon as a gift. So I accepted it. On our behalf. On behalf of Norway. And a little bit for the Queen.”

  “You mean Queen Elizabeth?”

  He nodded.

  I tried to wrap my brain around what was actually an un-brain-wrappable situation. Blood pounded in my head, and the soles of my feet started to tingle. I pictured a flaming sinkhole. I took another large gulp of wine.

  “When did you take it?”

  “While you guys were hugging and kissing each other. I’d already stepped away from the table, but I went all the way back over and put it in my bag so we wouldn’t come off as impolite. I mean, it’s bad enough that we didn’t bring any presents for them. Not bringing presents is a terrible move for internationalization.”

  “Not as terrible as stealing the dean’s icon.”

  “It’s not funny! Do you know what they’re going to do to me? People get arrested for being gay here! I’m going to end up in one of those cages that punk band had to sit in. What was their name again?”

  “Pussy Riot.”

  “Yes. And that finance guy . . .”

  “Khodorkovsky.”

  “Yes, Khovsky! Pussy! In a cage! And then they’ll send me to the gulag.”

  He glanced nervously in Ingvill’s direction.

  “Don’t say anything to Ingvill,” he whispered urgently.

  “Why not? She’s such a nice person, right? Plus, she’s the hard-liner, not the bad cop, like me.”

  He gave me a resigned look.

  “Ingvill is a nice person, but she’s also a little too . . . into Ivan. She’s sure to tell him. And then it’s curtains for us.”

  “What do you mean ‘us’?”

  “We’re in this together!”

  “We are not—”

  I was interrupted by Ingvill’s return to the table with a fresh glass of wine. She looked even more dissatisfied now than when she first noticed I was in the bar. Actually her facial expression was kind of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, which scared me.

  “What is it?”

  “I just talked to Ivan. He can’t go to the Hermitage with us. He’s too busy at the university. Artemis is going to take us.”

  “Artemis is going to take us?” Peter repeated, looking a little happier. “Oh, I like him. He’s a hoot.”

  “Who’s Artemis?” I asked.

  “I have to call Ivan back,” Ingvill said, getting up. “He can’t do this to us.”

  “No, don’t bother. It’s fine by me if Artemis takes us,” Peter tried to say, but she brushed him off.

  “It’s not fine,” she said and stormed out of the room with her phone in her hand.

  “Who’s Artemis?”

  “The one who grew up in Libya.”

  “Who?”

  “The one whose father was a military adviser for Gaddafi. The one who had private lessons with Saif.”

  “Saif Gaddafi?”

  “Correct.”

  “Have we even met this man?”

  Peter chuckled.

  “You can be quite funny. He stopped by a little while ago. I met him in the lobby. Had a lot of questions. Tons. He was particularly interested in you, actually.”

  “In me?”

  Peter winked.

  “But I don’t even know who he is.”

  “You’ll get to meet him soon.”

  “What kind of questions did he ask?”

  “What kind of art we were interested in and what historical periods we liked, things like that. Clearly he’s taking his job quite seriously. I think he really wants to help us get the most out of our visit to the Hermitage.”

  I pondered this information. I didn’t like it.

  “He’s definitely a secret agent,” I finally said.

  “Who?”

  “Artemis.”

  Peter chuckled.

  “He’s no agent.”

  “Hello? Libya? Military adviser? Gaddafi? Of course he’s a secret agent!”

  “He’s definitely no agent! I served in the British Army and I certainly think I could spot an agent if I saw him. Or her. There are female agents, too, you know. Honey traps.”

  “No doubt he’s coming to keep an eye on us,” I said. “To find out if we have the icon. If it’s as valuable as Ingvill says, anyway. No one really cares about these internationalization things.”

  “But internationalization is the reason we’re here!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Of course. But then you stole an icon and now we’re in danger of being sent to the gulag or tossed into a burning sinkhole. And I can’t sit in one of those little cages! I’m claustrophobic.”

  Peter sighed and we sat there, each staring into our own glass.

  “What if we just take it back,” I finally said. “Say it was a misunderstanding? Or a bad joke?”

  “Take what back?”

  “The icon.”

  “Oh, right. The icon.”

  I sighed as heavily as I could.

  “Where is it now?”

  “It’s still in the gift bag with some chocolate.”

  “OK, I know what we’ll do. We discuss the whole thing with Artemis when he comes to take us to the Hermitage. We tell him the truth—that you’re not very bright, that you thought it was a present, and that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Then everyone can stop searching for it. And we can have a good laugh.”

  “Yes,” said Peter with a little start, “quite right.”

  But when I saw who Artemis was, I felt less confident about my own plan. Pretty Putin gave us a clipped bow.

  “Are you ready?”

  I gulped.

  “Why isn’t Ivan coming?” Ingvill whimpered.

  “Ivan had an important meeting, unfortunately. So now I have the honor of escorting you.”

  He leaned forward and kissed Ingvill’s hand, which made her look a tad more satisfied.

  “Aren’t you going to tell him now?” whispered Peter.

  I pushed him away.

  “Don’t spit in my ear,” I said. “I’ll tell him when the time is right.”

  “Tell what?” asked Ingvill with a pout.

  “Tell him about Norwegian wildlife,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said and walked unsteadily toward the front door with Pretty Putin, a.k.a. Special Agent Artemis, while I swallowed the surprisingly large amount of saliva that had accumulated in my mouth. We were in trouble, big trouble.

>   23

  Pretty Putin informed us that unfortunately he did not have a car at his disposal, and even though Saint Petersburg’s subway system was supposed to be top-notch, he chose to place us in the icy wind next to a gray winter canal. By the time we finally reached the Hermitage, Peter’s face was pale blue, and Ingvill’s wine buzz seemed to have disappeared into a burning sinkhole.

  We took off our coats and left them at the coat check, then waited for Pretty Putin to buy our tickets.

  “What would you like to see?” he asked.

  “Hmm,” Ingvill said indecisively.

  “I’d like to see the Italian Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age,” Peter said. “About suffering they were never wrong / the old Masters . . . Isn’t that how the poem goes?”

  Our guide bowed briefly to Peter.

  “The old Masters,” Ingvill repeated, moving tentatively to stand beside Pretty Putin.

  Then he looked to me, and I could feel his gaze trying to penetrate my skin and bones and all of me. Was this psychosomatic? I focused with all my might on blocking this out and wished I hadn’t used up so much of my strength on panic attacks in the last few months.

  “And you?” he asked. “What kind of art are you interested in seeing?”

  “The Golden Age.”

  He nodded, sizing me up with his Putin eyes, and I swallowed again. In a panic. Because this wasn’t psychosomatic. This was Voight-Kampff, the test they give replicants that measures contractions of the iris and invisible particles emitted by the body, to determine whether the suspect’s response is empathic enough to tell if you’re dealing with a human or not.

  Someone informs you that your mother just died. How do you react?

  You’re at the Hermitage and are asked what kind of art you want to see. What do you say?

  “Rembrandt and Brueghel,” I whispered.

  He got a triumphant look in his eye and I wondered what I had revealed. I didn’t have time to think anymore about it, though, because now we were sweeping through the first floor at a whirlwind pace, up the ornate stairs and down three hallways, by niches and crannies, heading for the Golden Age.

  I was grateful that Ingvill had laid claim to Pretty Putin. She was obviously a hundred thousand percent fascinated by everything he said, and he guided and gestured while she nodded, smiled, and giggled. At one point she even took his arm, but he wriggled free from her grasp by pointing at a painting.

  Meanwhile Peter and I followed along behind, looking around at the paintings more or less at random.

  “Why haven’t you said anything about the icon yet?”

  “Because I think he’s giving us the Voight-Kampff test.”

  “The what test?”

  “All you need to do is to act like you care about your fellow humans and say as little as possible.”

  “But I do care,” he said, insulted.

  “You didn’t exactly give me the impression that you cared when I was the faculty coordinator, did you? Or when you forced me to be the bad cop? You act like you care, but you don’t actually give a hoot!”

  “That’s—”

  “Don’t act like you have no idea what I’m talking about. We both know that you’re mostly interested in covering your own ass.”

  He grinned.

  “I could have helped you, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, you don’t have to be the one who gets reassigned to the preschool-teacher education program.”

  I stared him in the eye.

  “If not me, then who?”

  He surreptitiously nodded his head toward Ingvill, who was still trying to sneak her arm in under Pretty Putin’s.

  I closed my eyes and turned my face to the ceiling.

  “Fine,” I said. “If you guarantee that I won’t be transferred, I’ll do my best to clear up this icon business.”

  We shook hands.

  “Alea iacta est,” I said.

  “Omnes mundum facimus,” Peter said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We all make the world.”

  We were standing in front of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, and I stared at it blankly. Looking at a father who believed he had lost his child forever. At a son, who finally found himself, in a space where he could raise his arms and stretch them into the air and feel free.

  We all make the world.

  My eyes filled with tears, until I could no longer see the son hugging his father tightly or the father receiving the son and saying that everything was OK.

  Now you know who you are.

  Now you have a center.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” I told Peter.

  He took me by the arm and said, “Remember what’s at stake. You can’t give in.”

  I hurried through the grand rooms and down hallways that were so cold the grandmothers guarding the art had to wear coats, shawls, hats, and gloves. I didn’t pay much attention to my surroundings until I reached the bathroom and an intense ammonia smell hit my nose and eyes. Most of the other people in there had come prepared and were holding handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, but I didn’t have anything, so I threw up into my mouth several times before I was done.

  Nor did I realize that the reason for the smell was that the toilet paper couldn’t be thrown into the toilet, so I had to fish it out again using the toilet brush before depositing it in the open bin beside the toilet.

  When I finally made it to the sink, there was no soap, but hopefully ice water would knock out the worst of the bacteria. My reflection made me think of the gulag again and how abysmal the toilet facilities there must be. I tried to distract myself with thoughts of unicorns and fields of wildflowers and had almost managed to pull it together by the time I found my group by da Vinci’s Benois Madonna, where they were waiting in line behind a group of schoolchildren who were all trying to preserve the artwork for perpetuity on their cell phones.

  “Weird how famous paintings like this are always so small,” Ingvill said.

  “You know so many things, Ingvill,” I said, a statement that resulted in her mumbling something that sounded suspiciously like slut.

  I tried to focus on Leonardo’s interpretation of Mary’s motherly love. She seemed so young. And I suppose she was, too.

  When I had Ebba, I was twenty-nine. And with Jenny I was thirty-one. That was OK. But with Alva I was thirty-six, and I felt it right away: My body didn’t want to be pregnant, and it definitely didn’t want to give birth. The midwife said there was a kind of lip in there that hadn’t gone away. The other two babies had just slid out without any problems, but Alva had built herself a wall so she could stay in the womb. For a second I felt like I’d made her homeless when I held her in my arms.

  I longed for her little body, her rubbery rain-boot smell.

  “Would you like to see the icon collection?” a voice suddenly whispered into my ear.

  I closed my eyes and put up a mental wall before I remembered this was a Voight-Kampff test and that a wall wouldn’t work. So I put on a smile and showed it to Pretty Putin in the hopes that it would dazzle him.

  “The icon collection?” I repeated. “Definitely.”

  He stared at me and I sensed there was a battle burgeoning between us. The difference was that he’d trained in Gaddafi’s Libya, whereas I pretty much only had what I’d learned from American movies. But maybe that would be enough?

  “You’re in a desert,” I said, staring back at him. “You see a tortoise and flip it over so it’s lying with its belly up. It can’t flip itself back over without your help, but you do nothing. You just stand there and watch it suffer. Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “The tortoise must take responsibility for its own fate.”

  “But why did you flip it over to begin with? Why didn’t you just let it be?”

  He watched me without blinking.

  “It needed to think things over a l
ittle,” he replied, “reflect on its actions. No one is completely innocent.”

  24

  That night I was constantly woken up by doors slamming shut and the heater cycling on and off, and every time I was pulled out of sleep, I felt the iron fist clench my heart a tiny bit harder. My throat responded by contracting as well, and my tongue was so dry it felt like it was made out of cardboard.

  The bottles of water the hotel had set out as welcome gifts were already empty and no one answered the phone at the number labeled “Room Service,” so I ended up drinking water from the sink in the bathroom, even though it was probably radioactive. At any rate it tasted strongly of chlorine, and I was dizzy and nauseated and wondered if I might have a fever.

  In the end I got up, even though the night could hardly be described as over. It was snowing outside, but the ground was still bare. The canal was lit up a sickly yellow color and the streets were deserted.

  I tried to go online, but received the same error message as before. Something about a PTC connection? That sounded strange, but everything was so strange in here, from the fluctuating heating system to the weird yellow carpet with its baroque-psychedelic pattern. Suddenly I felt the snow globe closing in to just this room.

  Trapped in finite infinity.

  And I would never find my way home. Not in time, not in space. Not on the inside, not on the outside.

  If only I could get home, I thought. Then everything would work out.

  If only I could find my authentic self, make myself a moveable home that could let me exist. That could pulverize the iron fist.

  I turned on the shower. The water ran over me, and I closed my eyes and leaned my head back.

  This wasn’t one of those bathtub showers. This was a shower stall. A stall that was a portal that could start the process required to get me back.

  To get me home from Russia. Home to us. Home to myself.

  I’m not a replicant, I repeated.

  I am a human being.

  We all make the world.

  It was all going to be OK.

  I blow-dried my hair and slowly donned my socks and pants and sweater, then my coat, and peered cautiously out into the turquoise hallway. I slowly made my way down the stairs to the colorful lobby with its big black marble tiles and purple and yellow walls. There was an enormous sculpture in the middle of the room that at first I had thought was Atlas, until I realized that he wasn’t carrying the world on his shoulders after all—he was trapped inside it. His body was muscular and sinewy, and it looked like he was pushing with his shoulders and his knees in an attempt to break out of the bonds that held him. This person was all about his intense need to escape, to free himself.