Taking Lives
Page 5
Still, he walks to the restaurant car and eats sliced veal and dumplings, in honor of his old Swiss hosts, and pays with the credit card.
He’s nobody now, nobody in particular, on a moving train, staring out first at forest, then factories, then at the Rhine. He can’t trust his name. He isn’t ready to take a new one. He counts castles that are stuck in mid-river or on horror-movie crags. If he can’t trust Raven’s name, he’ll need to make money, fast. He stares at the white sun behind the clouds. It might be easier in Amsterdam, he thinks, weak for once; the fact that he speaks Dutch would entitle him to a community. He knows the rules of the place.
The train runs on from Cologne into Amsterdam. Nobody will know him; Amsterdam was a foreign country to him growing up. He can surely find a job.
The office, a room over a red-light brothel, gleams like hellfire when he starts the evening calls. Six schoolroom desks, six phones. Six men wheedling.
“. . . wanted you to know before anyone else . . .”
“. . . unique opportunity. I tell you, we’re not sharing this with just anyone . . .”
He sits with a list of dentists, one of pensioners, all suckers just longing to be told they alone were going to do something so clever, so profitable, it would dazzle the world. Naturally, he always says he has to be discreet, and so do they.
“. . . this gold mine,” he says, “unworked for thirty years. Astounding assays. Of course, anyone could have mined there, but the only people who thought . . .”
“. . . casino in Las Vegas. Yes, a casino in Las Vegas. And you’re in on the ground floor. They want to be very careful about their sources of financing . . .”
“. . . the world’s waiting for this device. Antitheft. Anticorrosion. Antigravity. Antimatter . . .” And he says all this matter-of-factly, trying not to make it into a song, trying to keep it flat as though he were barely suppressing his own excitement.
If they ask—an accountant in North London, a company director in Kent, sometimes expatriate bankers in Brussels or Paris—he tells them, “We wouldn’t ordinarily share this unique investment opportunity but you are a client so valued we want your goodwill more than anything.
“I’ll need your check by Tuesday,” he says.
Occasionally, they’d be difficult. “Where,” a Scots voice asks, “are these shares traded?”
“Spokane,” Arkenhout says with absolute authority, or “Denver. There’s a huge market in penny shares.”
“You want more than a penny,” the Scots voice says, weak with sarcasm. Three minutes later, he buys; the ones who think they know the right questions are always the easiest.
Arkenhout finds he likes this game, likes the regularity and the sense of occupation. It’s a holiday from the way life averages out, which to him is mansions and palm trees and lakesides.
It can’t last, of course. He’s made a life out of staying alert to the moment when trouble starts to start, when people look as though someone has been asking questions, when a credit card takes a minute longer to pass scrutiny. So he’s alert in Amsterdam, too, even though he’s cocooned in all this ordinary life.
He senses being watched. He doesn’t take it personally, because he’s on home ground. There are a few strange phone calls to the office that, strangest of all, come from the Netherlands.
There is a smell of police on the air.
In this occupation, you don’t hang around for the cops. Arkenhout and the others shut up the office one night and never go back.
They do, however, find the manager in an agreeable apartment down by the American Hotel. He is at first unwilling to concede that he owes them money, let alone favors. He becomes prissy and sure like a schoolmaster. There is a discussion, some of it physical. The manager is full of praise now for such good salespeople, promises to pay all the commissions due and perhaps to hire the team again. Then he passes out.
Surprisingly, he keeps most of his words.
In the new office, between a piercing parlor and a greengrocer, there’s even a brass plaque, although not for the company name the salesmen use. There are scripts, and a line of product: a brand-new Denver share issue every three days or so, a rush of money, followed by stock prices sent out sea mail so as not to alarm the punters. This time Arkenhout, who was so effective getting the due commissions, has a privilege: he can buy on credit to sell again on the first day of issue to the rush of punters who really believe in secret information, runic keys to gold, gadgets with magic. He makes money.
There is a price, of course. He is summoned to a concrete bunker of a hotel close by Schiphol Airport. A billboard outside says the hotel is nine feet under sea level, because there is nothing else to say.
He sits in a room with a view of grass and more grass.
After an hour, a very short man called Moe appears. He does not let Arkenhout say more than “Good morning.” He explains that he is saving capitalism by finding money for people the banks turn down. He tells Arkenhout that the rules about stocks and shares are unconstitutional. He says, including Arkenhout, that we are all good Americans here.
In case Arkenhout’s attention should wander, Moe has a few stories to tell: how he started in the vending machine business on Long Island before friends—and he says “friends,” not “buddies” or “associates”—invited him to take over their stock business in Denver. He preaches a bit more. Then he offers Arkenhout the job of running the Amsterdam operation.
There is no question of refusing, of course.
“Cookies?” Moe says, producing a box from the deep pockets of his jacket.
“I’m very honored,” Arkenhout says.
“We’ll tell your boss tomorrow,” Moe says. “He’s coming to see me tomorrow.”
The implications sink in while Arkenhout is driving back to Amsterdam. Here he is, stuck in honey, which will drown you as fast as shit. At least as a salesman, he gets to leg it when trouble arrives; if he were Moe he could preach about being a stockbroker to the risky classes; but he’s middle management, and middle management goes straight to jail.
“. . . we’re calling out of office hours,” he breathes down the phone, “to keep this call absolutely confidential.” We’re also hoping you had a bit too much to drink at lunchtime, he thinks, that your pulse is up and your skin flushed and you’re ready to see Jesus in a slice of bread. “This opportunity won’t happen again,” he says, which is true— unless the sucker lists circulate and the man is cold-called again, or unless he buys, in which case he becomes a supersucker and they won’t waste the really good salesmen on him anymore.
He leaves the office as usual and goes back to his apartment in North Amsterdam for the last time.
He thinks, on the ferry, how proud his parents would be that he has a career, an office, a promotion: a proper citizen. This, he thinks, is ironic, if irony is a bad enough, spiky enough word for the situation.
Tomorrow, the old Amsterdam manager will be his enemy. But the old Amsterdam manager is not in the custody of the police; he is free-ranging, with spiteful friends. Moe, too, is around the place, and he is not accustomed to being refused or even disappointed. Arkenhout can’t please both men, but he senses a whole criminal city behind each.
So the next morning, when the banks open, he draws out his money and closes the accounts. He takes a train to Utrecht and puts himself in a small hotel.
This particular night, he doesn’t want to be alone. He has cash. He calls an escort service, asks for a very Dutch girl, pays her for the night. She doesn’t like the idea of a whole night, maybe she has children she must care for; so he throws in another hundred guilders over the agency fee. In the middle of sex, he knows he’s fucking to put away his fear.
Being scared is something new. When situations are bad, he calculates his way out; he anticipates, he researches and checks, he operates in communities where people do come and go quite abruptly and nobody asks questions. But now he’s in a nation of settled, documented people, and he has no time at all.
The girl has soft, wandering breasts with huge nipples. He puts his head between them. She lies there, eyes closed fiercely, keeping herself asleep by sheer will.
He’s awake early. He’s angry with himself, which he knows is not useful. He has to find a life to take and he has days, not months, and he is starting from scratch. His heart scampers, his eyes seem to dive into situations and read them out; he is wound and ready.
Grietje leaves early, a bit disgruntled at all the intimacy on top of the sex.
He’s left blank. He scarfs breakfast, stokes up on coffee. He thinks about starting in the bars, even though it is barely ten in the morning; he needs an easy victim. This time, the money doesn’t matter. He just needs a new name.
It is the strangest time he has ever known. He works the streets like a kind of whorehound, looking at everyone male, twentyish, thirtyish with the same starved eye: as substitutes for himself. He might be cruising for sex, except there’s no sense of play and he wants information first, not afterward with a cigarette or a coffee.
In two days, he finds nobody. Nobody at all. He doesn’t even have a candidate. He starts going farther afield, although he knows he’s in the absurd position of seeking the perfect random encounter.
He goes to the border towns that stand by raised river courses, eats pizza, drinks beer, hangs out. He looks for the unconnected one, the outsider. He draws out people’s stories by the simple trick of staying quiet. Sentences hang in the air. People feel they owe him another detail, and another. Usually, all he hears is the beer bubbling in the voice box.
Christopher Hart is different. He doesn’t have the usual saga of injustices done him, politicians despised, marriages survived. He doesn’t, at first, launch into any simple, one-side-of-the-paper explanation of himself. He just drinks like a hero.
Arkenhout tries being a talker, for once. He starts off in Dutch and Hart says nobody ever talked Dutch to him. He says “dank u wel,” and that’s all he knows.
Arkenhout says he’s just back from Germany and looking for work. He doesn’t lay the burden on Hart; he just shares the story, two men looking at the bottles behind the bar from parallel lives.
Hart says he teaches at a university. Arkenhout almost backs away. Professors belong to place and institution. They can’t travel without a grant form in triplicate, or think without a subsidy, or write a book without putting their institution under their name on the title page. They go about in specialties where they’ve watched the same faces and reputations for decades. He could never take on a professor’s life.
But Hart is the outsider in this place, the vulnerable one. He’s the best Arkenhout can find.
“You’re at the local university?” he asks.
“Sort of,” Hart said. “I’m on sabbatical. To write a book. So I can’t very well complain if I don’t have a social life. I suppose.”
“You’re here long?”
“Another half year. If I don’t just run away. You can get awfully tired of all the straight roads and the flat fields.”
“You could run away?”
“I suppose so.” Hart took schnapps and pitched it into his beer. “What kind of work do you do?”
The next day Hart is not in the bar, and Arkenhout is irritated. The professor is letting him down, inhabiting the life he needs and living it without style or glory: a plain man in a bright world.
Besides, there isn’t time for all this. Arkenhout needs a change, and quickly, and then he needs to get away with reliable papers and reliable credit. This next life doesn’t have to be perfect, just feasible for a while.
He rings the local university, a modest place whose low buildings hunker among trees, and asks for Professor Christopher Hart, visiting scholar. He’s put through to the Department of Fine Art; that’s new information for him. “But Dr. Hart hardly ever comes in,” a rather blowsy voice tells him. “You’d be better off calling him at home.”
He takes the number. He’d have preferred an address, so he could go watch for the signs that Hart leaves on a landscape: what people will miss if he’s gone.
The number helps. He calls, and there’s no answer. He remembers Hart saying he couldn’t complain about his lack of a social life; so he lacks a social life. There is no answering machine to take messages from distant friends or lovers; perhaps this year people don’t call.
Arkenhout tries the local real estate agent. He needs a house, he says, for maybe six months. The agent, he says, helped his friend Christopher Hart.
And he did, as luck has it. “There isn’t much around here,” the agent says. “Dr. Hart got the last house on the market. For rent, that is.”
“It’ll be back on the market, though? In six months?”
“In six months. You want to see the details?”
The agent pulls out a loose ring binder of colored sheets. He shows a house in the countryside, painted green, high gables, a garden of shadows, all low shrubs, and a driveway that seems to be the most important feature. Arkenhout takes the address.
The next morning, he’s there at nine-thirty. The cleaning woman has just arrived, so there is no housekeeper, which is good.
There could be a girlfriend, a boyfriend of course, but the man was in a bar on his own, talking but not cruising except for simple company and someone to hear his voice. Of course, that could mean he’s just lost a girlfriend or boyfriend; but he would have spilled all that out after a few beers. At the very least, he’d have hinted at the duplicity of other people. People do.
Still, Arkenhout checks. He walks up to the door and asks the cleaning woman for some Christa or other. The cleaning woman says the professor lives there quite alone. Sleeps alone, too, from the looks of it, she says, not wanting to waste even an empty bit of gossip. Then she gets moralistic, five feet of muscle in a housedress, sermonizing on the doorstep. A bachelor rattling about in a big house like that, she says; it doesn’t seem right.
Arkenhout wonders how sound will carry on this flat, wet land.
He’s already decided the rent for this great, remade farmhouse is an excellent sign; Hart, although he’s young, must have money. He drives a VW Golf, new. He dresses sharp.
But there is always the possibility of a parallel life. So Arkenhout waits a few more days, goes for long walks in the country, goes fishing one day, then hires a car and waits for Hart to use his VW to go to his other life, whatever it is, if he has another life. All this time, Arkenhout is the bit of shadow under the tree across the road.
Arkenhout checks Hart on the Web, checks his taste for anything troublesome with a few key merchants of worldwide sucker lists: no kiddie porn, no need for mail-order sheets, not wicked, not domestic. He is nothing in particular, available to be stolen.
Arkenhout finds himself asking all the questions, except the right ones.
Hart comes out of the back door covering his head as if it is raining. But it is only mist. He gets into the car, creeps down the drive, creeps into the road. Arkenhout can’t follow like that, can’t keep him in sight without tailgating, because of the mist. Besides, he can’t drive that slowly. It isn’t in him.
Hart seems such a cautious bastard, afraid of trees and the green and the mist and the cars on the road. He parks at the station and takes the Amsterdam train. Nobody knows him. Fine.
At Amsterdam Central, Hart walks off like he is hiking mountains. He bustles down streets full of early-morning hookers suss-susssussuring from the red windows, and students piling their bicycles alongside the bookshops or the cafes. The man needs a life, Arkenhout thinks, which strikes him as funny in the circumstances.
Hart goes to the side of the Rijksmuseum, through those little formal gardens with their bits of sculpture, and through a door marked PRENTENKABINET. He is still researching, evidently.
Around lunchtime, Hart leaves to eat in a cafe across Museumplein. He o
rders croquettes, of all the low things. He eats fast, he drinks one beer, and he goes back to work.
Arkenhout decides to take a chance and come back only at closing time—watching like a father who tactfully watches his son come home on his own. The day has tired Hart. The brisk lope has turned to slack shoulders and a dutiful stride. There’s nothing ahead of him except the evening.
The station, the train, the VW, the house. The daily woman has gone. One light comes on in what must be the kitchen, another in what must be the living room: probably some huge, open, cold living room. Another in the gable of the house, which must be his bedroom, reached by sharp, narrow stairs. Arkenhout wonders why an Englishman would feel at home with what the Dutch like.
He feels his skin go cold.
Hart lets him in; why wouldn’t he? If he’s surprised, he puts it down to different manners, another country, and he’s glad of company. He brings beer into the tall, open living room, by a hearth whose huge stones seem cold and shiny damp. He waits for Arkenhout to come to the point.
There’s just one more thing that Arkenhout feels the need to know: if Hart went away, where would he go? He needs Hart’s life for only a brief time, so he wants no complications.
“I shouldn’t have come home,” Arkenhout says. He can sense Hart draw back. The man doesn’t like confidences; his alertness is pure defense, not curiosity.
“Five years in Germany,” Arkenhout says. “Frankfurt. In a bank. Better than nothing, I guess.”
Hart says, “I’m off next week, actually.” He only means he’s not available for this kind of chat, but Arkenhout can’t believe his luck has finally turned. “To Portugal. I thought I’d get as far away as possible.”
“The Algarve?”
“God, no. Somewhere in the center by the mountains. Where nobody goes.”
For the first time, Arkenhout checks out Hart as something more than a useful set of data. He’s a fine case of presentation, who does just enough at the gym to stave off scholar’s stoop in his narrow shoulders, who has one Dolce & Gabbana jacket to hang on a gawky frame, who animates his eyes and face even when he’s not interested, like a man who someday wants to be on TV.