The New Republic

by Lionel Shriver

  “See?” Edgar fingered the byline. “That’s me.”

  She squinted. “This is not about Barb-a.”

  “I’ve never written about Barba in my life.”

  She melted a degree, but rejoined, “Then why you start now?”

  “This was the only job I could get!”

  Barba-as-desperation-move won him one degree more, but the slight thaw only loosened a floe of tremulous emotion. “I would not put my foot in that efluentes for the last job on earth!”

  Passengers in line grumbled; only three stations were open.

  Recovering herself, the official grilled Edgar about where he planned to reside, entering his new address on Rua da Evaporação into the computer, but making no move to stamp his passport. You have friends in Cinziero? You have contacts in the SOB? Edgar fell all over himself denying any such unpalatable acquaintances, adding gratuitously, “Creeps. Dirtbags. No sympathy whatsoever.” The lady eyed him with jaundice; terrorists probably shoveled this shit all the time.

  “How long you are planning to stay, Senhor—” she checked his passport—“Kellogg?” Nobody ever seemed to remember Edgar’s name.

  “I can’t say. I’m filling in for someone else. He disappeared. He might come back. Barrington Saddler.”

  Bingo. Thus far Edgar had been flicking a Bic at this woman’s glacial demeanor, and finally he’d blasted her with a blowtorch. Her eyes went gooey, her head assumed a fetching tilt, and her smile was positively human.

  “You know—Barrington?”

  “Yes,” said Edgar. “Yes, indeed. Bear and I go way back. Whenever he’s in New York, we do the town. ’Til five a.m., getting kicked out of bars. We’re thick as thieves. Couldn’t be tighter. See?” He shoved the scrap scribbled with Saddler forward. “Bear’s address.”

  The functionary touched the paper with a kleptomaniacal expression, as if having to restrain herself from jotting down the phone number. “Disappeared . . . Is true, I hear something of this months ago.” Her olive brow rumpled; her lips pouted with worry. The woman’s transformation recalled the sitcom spinster who unpins her hair and removes her horn-rims: voilà, a pretty dishy broad. “I am concern. Barrington come through here many times. Sometimes,” she admitted shyly, “he let others go first so he pass through my station. We always have joke. I hope nothing bad happen to him, sim?”

  “That’s my first assignment: find out what happened to our friend Barrington. Make sure he’s all right.”

  Bam. The stamp.

  “Adeus. You find Barrington, tell him Isobel say hallo. Be very careful, senhor.” She even waved.

  Because he’d been headed for Barba, Edgar hadn’t been allowed to check his luggage through to his destination, unlike passengers headed anywhere else in continental Europe. Immigration had taken so long that at least his bag was already bumping around the belt, but re-entry into the airport after customs mandated another security check, and yet another at the entrance to Departures. X-rays, hand-frisk, ticket-check, every time.

  At the gate itself, Edgar was consternated to confront another queue for another security check. This time, they took his luggage apart piece by piece—riffling every book, unwinding ten feet of dental floss, squeezing the toothpaste up and down and insisting he dab Cool Mint Crest on his tongue. They depressed the PLAY button on his microcassette, and Edgar’s test recording echoed down the corridor: “This is Edgar Kellogg, your caped correspondent in Big Bad Barba, interviewing yet another SOB freedom-fighter in shit-hot shades.” Oh, swell.

  After that, they were naturally suspicious when his portable printer wouldn’t light up, and just try explaining that an appliance doesn’t have a battery and needs a converter to work on European current to troglodytes whose entire English vocabulary comprised “open please” and “turn on.” By the time he’d hooked up the converter with lots of hand-signals, the security staff had poked and pried at his Bubblejet until they broke the tabs off his paper feeder.

  His flight was already boarding, and all his remaining worldly possessions were spread out over three square yards of table. Stuffing and muttering, Edgar didn’t have time for all the ingenious wedging that had taken him an hour on West Eighty-Ninth Street, and he had to ask for a plastic bag for the overflow.

  Beyond security, another interview: had he accepted any packages, had his luggage been out of his sight at any time, did he pack his own bag? Edgar had answered these same questions half a dozen times already and his replies were getting testy. Any minute boarding would close. Meanwhile the same cautions about tending to your luggage crackled incessantly over the intercom. Posters plastered around the gate gaily advertised the Telefone Confidencial, just in case en route to Cinziero after peanuts you had a larkish impulse to rat out your SOB buddies on the credit-card phone.

  But when Edgar wheeled from the desk to board he couldn’t stop himself from shrieking, “You cannot be serious!” Right before the Jetway was another security check.

  Edgar hurled his carry-on, laptop, and plastic bag onto the belt.

  “Turn on, please.”

  “Look!” Edgar shouted. “I have booted up my computer ten times on this trip and the goddamned battery’s running out! Now just shove the fucking stuff through, because my fucking plane is taking off!”

  Another official oozed up from the shadows, and his better English was ominous. “There is some problem, sir?”

  “Fuck yeah, there’s a problem!” Edgar knew he shouldn’t curse, but toadying at immigration had left him determined to reestablish his manhood. “You just searched my luggage down to the skid marks on my boxers. What’s next, a particle separator? How could I possibly have slipped a Stinger missile in my carry-on in the last twenty feet?”

  “Sir, you have just threatened the airline. You will have to come this way, please.”

  They did a full body-cavity search, and he missed the plane.

  One of Edgar’s contacts at US Air, a Lee & Thole client, had shared confidentially that much of modern airline security was theater, often a front for jaw-dropping laxity behind the scenes. They made you sample your toothpaste with everyone watching, but postal freight was routinely loaded unscreened. Despite showy pawing of passengers’ Tampax and Trojans, any sleazebag with the wit to wear a brown technician’s coverall could waltz on and off airplanes as he pleased, and most security violations were arranged through corrupt caterers or bribable baggage handlers. Trying to think with the nimble opportunism of his new occupation, Edgar wondered if he might get an exposé out of today’s fiasco.

  For now this wasn’t good copy but bad life, though the two seemed often to go hand in hand. Edgar had nine hours to kill before the evening flight, and sitting was uncomfortable; his asshole was sore. Edgar hoped idly that staging scenes in airports signaled that his apprenticeship to the larger-than-life was getting off to a smashing start. Yet a little voice murmured in the back of Edgar’s head that Barrington Saddler would never have arranged matters so that some sadistic joker was shoving a Latexed index finger up his backside. More likely that crowd would be refolding Saddler’s slacks so the creases aligned while scrambling to arrange his free upgrade to first class.

  That little voice. It had a British accent.

  Chapter 6

  Only Edgar

  GRATEFUL FOR A task with so much time to kill in the Lisbon airport, Edgar cashed a traveler’s check and got change for the pay phone. To smooth logistics, he really should have contacted this Nicola person from New York, but he’d put the call off. It was a bit embarrassing, acting on Wallasek’s assumption that she must have a key to Saddler’s house because she was one of his known floozies.

  “I see,” said the woman, once Edgar had haltingly explained his business; her accent vaguely English, at least it wasn’t the ram-it-down-your-throat variety. “So you’re Barrington’s replacement.” She sounded both mournful and bemused.

  “I’m supposed to move into—” Edgar scrambled to avoid Saddler’s name, whose mention from the
first had seemed to constitute a torment—“the house on Rua da Evaporação. No one at the Record had a key. I can always stay in a hotel tonight and bring in a locksmith tomorrow. But my editor thought maybe . . .”

  “I do have a key,” she admitted gravely. “When do you arrive?”

  “Tennish, tonight.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, and she did sound incredibly sorry, though perhaps most of all that the phone had rung and it was just another visiting journalist. Nicola had answered, Hello? with breathy anticipation; her subsequent downshift of timbre recalled Angela’s, on realizing it was only Edgar. “I’d have liked to have met your plane. But a few odds and sods are coming over this evening, and leaving my guests would be rude. Not that I won’t be tempted.” A small laugh, minor key. “After all, the members of our incestuous set run into each other every day—”

  The call was interrupted by an unintelligible recording. Edgar felt an irrational urgency to keep this melodious voice on the phone, and shoveled more escudos in the slot. “Please,” he pressed. “You were saying?”

  “It’s just the local hacks. But this is the first time we’ve gathered socially since Barrington left.” She said the name firmly, as if granting Edgar permission to employ it at will. Equally firm was the word left—not vanished, not was kidnapped, not even fled, much less was assassinated. The verb wasn’t merely descriptive; it was a verdict. “You’d be welcome to join us, Mr. Kellogg.”

  She remembered his name! “Edgar,” he corrected. “I wouldn’t presume—”

  “Please, you’d not impose. Everyone will be terribly interested to meet you.” She refrained from asserting that her guests would be glad to meet him, but the interest might be real enough.

  “I’m afraid I’ll be just off the plane—”

  “We’ll try not to detain you. And I’ll make every allowance for the fact that you’re exhausted.” After dictating her address, Nicola reduced her volume another notch. “There’s only one thing, Edgar. That I have that key? If you’d please not call it to anyone’s attention. Simply say you’re calling by to meet your new colleagues. Which you will be.”

  “I’ll be discreet,” Edgar promised.

  “God knows what you must think of me,” Nicola whispered.

  “Hey, it’s none of my business,” Edgar protested.

  “You can’t think any worse than I think of myself.” Without saying good-bye, she hung up.

  Innocently whitewashed and cheerfully lit, the tiny square building of the Cinziero Aeroporto Internacional was roofed in scalloped terra-cotta like an Arizona community center. While VÓS AGORA ENTRAS NA BARBA OCUPADA! was boldly spray-painted across an outside wall, the graffiti’s red lettering was neatly outlined in green, the second B painstakingly extended to make it as tall as the first, its exclamation mark dotted with a daisy. The slogan less resembled the threatening defacement of a terrorist insurgency than a day-camp crafts project.

  Deplaning onto the tarmac struck Edgar as quaintly retro-chic until he emerged from the cabin to be broadsided, foom, by a gale wind, which threw him so violently against the portable staircase rail that he nearly pitched over it. As another gust slapped his face in reproof that he’d ever considered air the same as nothing, Edgar clutched the railing hand-over-hand to the runway—skin tightening, eyes tearing, ears roaring. Once he exited through baggage claim’s revolving door, whose flaps swish-swished without aid of electricity, he was again blindsided by a solid atmospheric wall. After stumbling to the taxi stand, using his bags as ballast, Edgar clutched a post while the cabby loaded the trunk. Eyes shielded by protective plastic goggles, the heavyset cabby hunched with a widely planted stance, tilting into the wind and lifting his feet as little as possible. The maneuver looked practiced.

  Edgar slumped into the rattletrap taxi, glad that darkness spared him gaping out the window. He didn’t have the energy to be fascinated, and wanted to appraise his new home with a fresh eye. Edgar had already formed a nascent affection for Barba, if only because Lisboners seemed to hate it so much. A kicked cur as a kid, Edgar identified with outcasts more than most of his countrymen, whose reputation for sympathy with underdogs was in his view highly exaggerated.

  Such a piercing whistle sang through window cracks that Edgar’s headache was immediate. As the hump-fendered sedan galumphed down the road, it swayed in and out of lane, though the driver wrestled manfully with the wheel. Now and again a thud sounded against the doors as if a linebacker had assaulted the cab with a running tackle.

  “Is it always this windy?” Edgar shouted over the teakettle shrill.

  “Windy? Is no so windy,” the cabby yelled cheerfully back.

  Fighting nausea as the taxi threw him from door to door, Edgar kicked himself for promising to stop by Nicola’s little soirée tonight. Better to have picked up the key tomorrow and sprung for a hotel. He vowed to get in, then get out. So far his “fellow” journalists had hardly constituted a mutually supportive intellectual fraternity, and one carelessly ignorant remark about the SOB could take him months to live down; Edgar admonished himself, Keep your pie hole shut. This Nicola broad sounded all right, but Edgar had minimal taste for socializing at the best of times. The truth was he didn’t like people much, even if he was never sure whether a misanthrope was allowed to deduct himself, like taking a standard personal exemption on a 1040.

  Most of all, after a half day in Portugal he’d already had it up to the eyeballs with Barrington Fucking Saddler. Edgar had to write that mop-up article on what might have befallen his predecessor, bringing the story, for the paper, to a close. But the last thing he planned to blather in his free time was, “Gee whiz, guys, whadda ya think mighta happened to lovable old Bear?” Were Edgar to solicit any more gushy hog slop about Saddler, he would have to be paid.

  The taxi drew up to a villa whose flat left-hand side loomed three stories high, unperforated by a single window. From this sheer blank edifice, a frivolous hodgepodge of turrets, porticos, and balconies with curlicued grillwork tumbled off to the right. From its fanciful leeward end, the villa resembled a set for Carmen; from the windward side, a nuclear power plant.

  Foom. Edgar had trouble getting the taxi door shut. Doubled over, he dragged his luggage toward the entrance, his heavy leather bomber jacket flying horizontally to the right. Grains of sand stung his left cheek like acupuncture. Once he lunged onto the porch and tucked behind that mammoth wall, the roar ceased, the jacket dropped, and Edgar staggered from no longer having to lean into the squall to stay upright. Leonard Cohen dirged from inside.

  The door opened only wide enough for Edgar to see in the porch light that the young man’s face presented the same impenetrable façade of the villa’s windbreak.

  “Barrington the Second, right?” the boyish-looking Englishman said joylessly. “Surprised they sent someone else. Thought we’d all spend the rest of our poxy lives moping about and waiting for stigmata proof that Our Redeemer liveth.”

  This was well too much for two hours’ sleep and a six-hour time difference. “I was looking for Nicola—”

  “Naturally,” said the young man savagely.

  “Henry, please,” whispered from inside. “If you have to, take it out on me. That poor bloke never did a thing to you.”

  “In your version, you done bugger-all to me yourself, remember? I’m ‘paranoid,’ so I’m acting my part.” Henry turned heel, and retreated.

  “Edgar! Do come in.”

  Edgar thunked his luggage in the candlelit foyer. The taxi was still within hailing distance; after Henry’s warm reception, Edgar was considering a curt request for the key, so he could scram right away. But that was before he got a good look at Nicola.

  She was a pre-Raphaelite vision. Tall, narrow, and delicate, the woman’s figure echoed the precision of her speech, the sharply articulated wrists, clavicle, and cheekbones as exactingly wrought as haiku. Tressing in wavelets to her waist, her hair reflected a range of hues from blond to red. She was draped in an asse
mblage of scarves and shawls that Edgar would have found cockamamie on most women, but Nicola could get away with as much flourish as she liked. She belonged in a tower, weaving by a shattered looking-glass, or banished eternally from Camelot in a longboat drifting downstream.

  The crimsons and cobalts of her fabrics set off a shocking pallor. Nicola’s pained expression captured the very inchoate yearning that Edgar had been too embarrassed to express to Wallasek, and echoed the ruinous cycle of desire and disappointment tyrannizing his own life. How many times had Edgar confronted the mirror ball of a sparkling new acquaintance, only to reach for the facets and cut his hand—to complete another soul-sickening inversion as in the cold light of day the bauble revealed itself as a cheap disco trick? How many times had he met the likes of Nicola and vowed to see through the gaudy gypsy get-up as tacky theatrics, to remember that behind every pretty face lurked yet another grasping, lying, scheming, petty, faithless shrew? And how many times had these warnings to himself successfully protected him from heartbreak?

  Not once. Taking the slim white hand, Edgar had to stop himself from kissing it.

  “Nicola Tremaine.”

  Edgar burst out, “That sounds like a movie star!”

  She must have thought him a complete rube. “Thanks. I’ve felt selfish keeping the Tremaine, but Nicola Durham simply sounded too prosaic. I’m afraid Henry was rather offended.”

  “You’re an aesthete,” said Edgar, hoping that in candlelight it wasn’t too obvious his countenance was crestfallen.

  “Almost nothing but,” she confessed easily, leading him around a bend and down a few stone steps. “I care mostly about names with a ring, juniper berries in jasmine rice, or soup bowls and dinner plates from different sets that uncannily go together. Grace, taste, appearances. You’ll soon learn that I’m a shamefully superficial person.”