Zwerfster Chic

by Billie Kelgren

  “Under my American name: Elise McNeil. M-C-N-E-I-L. FBI,” I add. I don’t know if they even hear me.

  It’s like some kind of game show, watching the two of them racing against one another. They’re on either end of a four-seat outdoor sofa — from IKEA, I’m pretty sure, given that we’re in Sweden. There’s a long, glass-topped table between us where three glasses of wine and two empty bottles stand and I’m in one of two chairs that face them directly, apparently acting as the emcee. The seat is comfortable, padded with extra thick cushions, and I have my feet pulled up under me because that’s something you can do when you’re small. I didn’t have much to drink, half a glass, but still it gives me a warm buzz because up until this trip the only alcohol I’d had in a decade was a celebratory glass of some white-in-a-box Tonya forced upon me so that she could deliver a welcome home speech that I could tell she had rehearsed. It came out bitter and ironic, reflecting upon all of the things happening in her own life at the time. Before that, before going on the BOP, I was on too many painkillers to be drinking any alcohol. It scared me, the possibility of my becoming an addict.

  I look up from the sisters and find that Mia is watching me. She’s behind them, leaning against the rail that defines the rooftop terrace, her own glass in her hand. Behind her are the rooftops of Lund, the twin spires of the cathedral at its center. Somewhere around there is the University, where Iben teaches Art Theory because, according to Anna, Iben takes more after Papa while she is definitely more like Mam.

  Mia notices that I’m watching her and she gives me a look that’s meant to convey something between us but, for the life of me, I can’t say for certain what it is. Still, I like the attention and I move to get up, to go over to her side, when the sisters begin reporting on what they’ve found, forcing me to sit there and simply smile at them, embarrassed, as though I’m a contestant trapped on my own version of To Tell the Truth. (A show Dad watched religiously, though they were repeats, because it came from a time when game shows needed actual skill, he said. Not like the modern game shows that only demonstrate your ability to reach over and spin a wheel without falling on your face. No modern show is worth a shit to Dad. Not until it’s off the air and shown as a rerun. Then it suddenly gains some form of cultural significance with him. His logic never really made sense to me.)

  “Elise McNeil, born Elsja deVries, is a former FBI undercover agent, convicted of conspiracy, racketeering, and obstruction of justice,” Iben reads aloud. Anna is probably reading the same entry on her own phone, but Iben feels the need to make it into an announcement as proof of her winning, “stemming from her involvement with a Los Angeles criminal organization that she was actively investigating.

  “Gud, they have your whole life here.”

  “Born in Cape Town, South Africa.” Anna gets into the spirit of discovery. “Hey, you and Iben’s birthdays are only a day apart.”

  “Cool,” Iben adds. “Sister Libra.”

  “Yes. A much younger sister," Anna clarifies.

  “Shush,” Iben shoots back.

  “Oh, shit,” Iben then says in a much softer voice. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  They have reached the part about my early life, about Ma. No real detail — only that she’s dead and I moved to the States. The person who wrote the article could not possibly know more because the family kept the whole thing quiet. The Old Man was apparently a powerful person in the former South Africa. I have no idea how they’re faring now.

  “Boston College’s good,” Anna says, trying to liven things up again. “I had a boyfriend who went there once. He was a penis-head, but the school seemed nice.”

  “Were you really a Sergeant in the Army?” Iben asks.

  Military Intelligence — six years. FBI Academy. Counterintelligence for a year in Baltimore before switching over to Organized Crime out to the West Coast — Seattle and then L.A. — Byr’s org. At least, Byrone’s little piece of it.

  Then they reach the last heading: Assault and Conviction. They become suddenly silent, their expressions draining away and hands move to mouths. Anna is visibly shaken and the embarrassment of it, of having my life on display like this, brings tears to my eyes. I feel stupid and ashamed and I know they are going to look at me differently in just a few seconds, once they finish reading. The thought of it scares the shit out of me. I hate how people look at me.

  “For fanden,” Iben swears. It’s the only response from the two of them.

  Which is she referring to?

  The three people dead?

  The dog attack?

  Or the rape?

  At South Station, Tonya told me that Mariame needed her nap and Rama was moments away from exploding and that she had no one else to help her, hinting at the burden it would present, them coming with us to the Coolidge House, the RRC out on the Orange Line. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get there myself. I only wanted a familiar face with me. The entire process was disorienting, like when you first go into Basic.

  “Where’s Naddie these days?” I asked.

  Suddenly, all the fussing with the children came to a stop. Tonya gave me that face.

  “I’m so sorry that I’m the only one left to welcome you home from prison,” she said, her tone very flat. “But I guess you can just manage it on your own.”

  She then turned on the platform and lifted Rama from her feet with a tug of her arm that caused the girl to squeal and giggle with her sudden ability to fly. Within seconds, the three of them disappeared in the rush of people released from an arriving train, leaving me wondering what the hell I said that would cause her to act this way.

  Tonya is so emotional sometimes.

  “Look. This one’s the Bal du Moulin de la Galette,” Anna announces. She’s sitting sideways on the sofa with her legs stretched out, her feet resting on Iben’s thighs. She’s looking at an iPad, which she holds up for her sister to see. Iben glances, then snorts.

  “I told you. He thinks he’s sophisticated, but he is so provincial.”

  “Snob.”

  “Populist.”

  “Bitch.”

  Iben smirks at the declarative as Anna turns the tablet and holds it out so Mia, sitting in the seat next to mine, leans forward for a closer look. Mia then waves it off with a gesture of her hand and says something to them in Danish, which makes me think the painting has something to do with our business there, because when they talk business, they speak Danish.

  Or maybe Swedish.

  As if I can tell.

  Anna swings her legs around, rocks forward onto her feet, and leaves the rooftop terrace, disappearing through a skylight hatch that leads down into the hallway outside their kitchen. They own a three-bedroom condo that occupies the entire top floor over shops in the center of town and it shows signs of recently being renovated. Their bedrooms and ensuites are decorated to reflect each of their personalities — Iben’s very clean and spare while Anna’s pops with color and whimsical touches. The kitchen is enormous by European standards, with a gourmet-quality oven, six-burner stove, and a humidity-regulated wine rack that’s kept stocked with names and years that mean something to people who know something about their wines. I don’t.

  Their place is nice, but it’s too nice. Experience tells me that the bulk of their income isn’t coming from teaching theory at a university and managing an art gallery.

  Mia sits back again and lets her head drop onto the top of the cushion behind her. It’s warm, though the sun has gone and all that remains is its vivid, fiery glow silhouetting the surrounding buildings. Anna had said that it was unusually warm for mid-spring, but she said it as though it was a blessing. It means more time up on the roof, I guess. Back in Boston, it essentially means that things are going to suck over the next couple of months. The summer will be oppressive. What are the chances we might miss it while on this trip?

  It also suddenly strikes me that it’s autumn back in Die Baai, and I wonder why I’m thinking about that place.

  Iben sa
ys something in passing to Mia, who responds in English for my benefit. “I don’t know. I think we’ll just hang out here for a few days, if you don’t mind. We can’t really plan anything until we see what we get.”

  The prospect pleases Iben and she talks about possibly taking me into the city to see the old places where they and Mia used to hang out. Mia shrugs this off, as though I might not find it interesting, but my heart skips — it’s of great interest to me. I mean, we’ve come this far already and it still feels like I know very little about her. Maybe seeing pieces of her past will give me a clue into who she is — her motivations or, at least, what the hell she’s doing. I still have no idea what we’re doing at that very moment.

  When Anna returns, she shows Mia a memory card she holds with her fingertips before handing it across the table to her while telling her sister, “He really over-saturated the greens, and blew out the shadows. It was obvious.”

  “It’s fuckin’ impressionist. Of course he’s obvious.”

  Anna mocks her sister’s tone with an exaggerated expression of the face. Iben swats her away with the back of her hand and turns her attention to Mia as Anna sticks her tongue out at her, knowing she won’t be caught.

  Jesus, maybe me and my sisters are normal.

  8

  Bogense

  “What are you doing?”

  I look back at Mia, think about it for a moment before I answer.

  “Nothing.” Pause. A shake of the head and a shrug. “Nothing really.”

  I am the master of this bit of maneuver, all thanks to my lonely, loveless days of high school and the last time Mom ever entered my room without knocking first. On that night, she learned that I was of the age where I required some privacy, and I learned to lock the fucking door. It was a singular point in time that colored nearly every offhand comment Mom has made to me since and it lingered as an unspoken secret. That is, it should’ve, except she tended to bring it up on occasion because she saw our talking about it as an important part in our relationship as parent and child, and my development as a sexual being, as she liked to put it.

  No, Mom. No. Jesus!

  Mom and Dad came to visit me a couple of times when I was in Danbury, which is about two and a half hours from Boston. Dad more than Mom, because Dad would sometimes come alone and Mom never came without Dad. Words had been said between Mom and me when I was still in the hospital out in L.A. Words that created a tension between us that, over time, hardened until we found that they were holding us apart. We each made the decision to put this problem aside, though, until a later time, because there was too much other shit going on with our lives — the recovery, the investigation, the trial,…whatever it was Mom was doing. We both hoped that it would go away on its own. In hindsight, that was a mistake.

  For one thing, Mom was pissed with me because I had disappeared from their lives for over a year and then came back, broken and damaged.

  During one of their visits, I became distracted because Luciana — Luzi — had her children visiting for the first time. I didn’t hang out much with the other inmates because of my somewhat tricky position of having once been a Fed. I was warned to keep it to myself, not only by my attorney and my debriefing team at the Bureau, but also by the BOP staff, who didn’t want to create any extra problems for themselves. As far as any of the other inmates knew, I was part of the West Coast gang culture, busted and moved east for some vague reason having to do with security. No one knew what to make of me — if I was some major player or someone who had turned on one. The rumor was that I killed a man. Killed him because of a comment he made about my scars. Did it matter? No, not really. No one really cared.

  Anyway, Luzi was a thirty-one-year old Latina from Providence doing short time for becoming involved with the stupidest ATM cracker alive. (Yes, I called him a cracker!) According to her, Paulo, her Brazilian boyfriend, attempted to bust open seventeen different ATMs and succeeded with only one. That last one was the one that got him caught and her thrown into prison, though she swore she thought he was joking about robbing ATMs because he never had any money. She had been given a choice: felony accessory after the fact, or have her children taken away. She had Rhode Island’s shittiest attorney.

  Luzi was in for a short stay — sixteen months — and she spent her time trying to keep herself involved with the lives of her two children: Becket, a surly teenager (which is understandable, given a name like Becket), and cute little Ignacio, a toddler everyone called “Nachos,” which seemed pretty iffy to me but when she showed me his picture, I must admit, Nachos seemed to fit for some reason. He was really cute, in a Little Corporal sort of way, staring into the camera with all the intensity a toddler can muster. He and Becket stayed with Luzi’s sister and Nachos ruled the home with a tyke-sized iron fist.

  She was driving the other Latinas nuts, though, talking endlessly about her two mijos. She was a borderline paranoid schizophrenic, believing the government was plotting to take her children away because they considered her an unfit mother. What Luzi needed was someone to listen to her, and because I was seen as a someone who generally kept to herself, las chicas pushed her in my direction. She followed me around for three days, jabbering incessantly before I finally broke down and turned on her. I was planning to shoo her away, tell her to leave me the fuck alone, but she became immediately silent, staring at me with hopeful eyes as her whole body quaked as though she was freezing to death. That’s when I took a breath, calming myself as an unexpected moment of empathy washed through me. I understood how she was feeling — I felt much the same way when I was nine years old.

  I asked her to show me the pictures, the ones she was always clutching in her hands as she wandered about the facility, and the expression of relief on her face nearly broke my heart. She opened her mouth to say something, to tell me about the pictures, I guess, but she instead put her arms around my neck and held me tight as she whimpered in my ear. It freaked me out a bit, seeing that she might be crazy, but she eventually let go, kissed me a couple of times on my good cheek, and started describing each photo in turn as she stepped through the entire stack, handing them to me one by one.

  Hey, after that, the Latinas had my back, which was cool with me. I wanted to be Hispanic when I was thirteen. Their families always seemed so much more fun than mine.

  So during their next visit, I became distracted because Luzi’s children were there at the same time as Mom and Dad. I was watching little Nachos — who couldn’t speak clearly yet — become frustrated by everyone’s lack of understanding of the point he was trying to make, so he put his little hands behind his back and stomped his feet in those little brick shoes that toddlers wear and looked very much like he was marching in place. It was so damned cute, and Luzi was beaming at me, saying ¡Mira! ¡Mira! with her big, brown eyes and unrestrained grin.

  My conversation with Mom and Dad had run its course and when Mom stood to leave, I was watching Nachos stomp with great determination as he turned a circle in place. She knocked on the table, to get my attention, and asked me if I was taking care of myself.

  I was mortified, blushing immediately as I covered my face and loudly — much too loudly — said, “Jesus, Mom!”

  Dad froze in middle of standing and he looked from me, to Mom, and back to me again because he could see on Mom’s face that she had no idea as to why I had responded this way. It only embarrassed me further, because if she really wasn’t meaning what I thought she meant, then I just jammed the idea into her head.

  “I meant make sure you eat,” she said, maintaining her poise. “You’ve lost a lot of weight.”

  I looked at myself and wondered how she could tell with the baggy clothes we wore. I sheepishly told her I would. Dad had no idea what was going on, which was good because that meant that Mom hadn’t told him. I was always afraid that she might tell him but Mom is a woman of principle. And discretion. Thank God.

  They didn’t visit at all after I was moved to Aliceville, which is down in Alabama
. And shortly after I was moved, they moved to Montreal so Mom could take a position with the IGSF at McGill.

  “I found this,” I say, holding up a framed photo I had spotted the day before. It’s of a large number of young people marching in the street of some European city, looking very fashionable in their ’80s clothes and their ’80s hair.

  Mia takes the picture from my hand and smiles as she looks at it. She seems utterly amused.

  “That’s Iben and Anna, isn’t it?”

  I point out two girls, in their late teens, behind the lead row, both sporting short, spiky blonde hair. Mia nods, then points at someone I hadn’t really noticed.

  “And that’s me.”

  I try to grab the frame away from her, but she keeps holding onto it so that her finger will not move from under the chin of a dark-haired, dark-eyed college-aged woman with hair piled high on her head in a disorganized tangle, as though she had just emerged from a brawl. She’s linked, arms over shoulders, with a tall, cute guy with long, blonde hair, a full beard, and aviator glasses that makes him look like the quintessential West Coast outlaw biker.

  “And that’s Rémy, my husband.” She looks at me, to gauge my reaction, and I show the appropriate amount of surprise. “Though not at the time.”

  Rémy. Of course she would have a husband named Rémy. Mia would never marry a Frank, or Bob. I ask her what happened, between her and Rémy.

  “Oh, we got on okay,” she says, handing the picture frame back. “We just couldn’t live together.”