Potboiler

by Jesse Kellerman

  “We knew. We have a profile on you running back to the seventies. You were emotionally needy, financially strapped, alternately self-congratulatory and self-loathing, led to believe that your more successful friend held you to be the superior writer. It was the perfect storm of ego and greed. And, like I said, you showed big promise. We were all set to bring you in and give you the hard sell when forty percent of our covert network, including all of Zlabia, was scrapped due to budget cuts. Believe that? Thirty-three years of work—gone, overnight.” Paul shook his head forlornly. “Politics.”

  “How does Blood Night fit into all of this?”

  “Thithyich got wind of the cuts. From Savory, presumably. So he hurried up before our operatives in the field were recalled and had Savory slip you a doctored code—”

  “Blood Night.”

  “Right. Sayonara, Dragomir Zhulk.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Pfefferkorn said. “Thithyich got Savory to get me to get my publisher to get your men to do his dirty work.”

  “Give him points for creativity. We don’t communicate with the operatives directly. They only scan for the flags. There was no way for them to tell the difference between a real code and the doctored one. It was a masterstroke. With Zhulk gone, nobody’s driving the bus. There are at least half a dozen factions vying for control: the Party, sure, but also the anarcho-environmentalists, the Trotskyites, the Chomskyites, the nihil-pacifists, the open sourcers. It’s a total free-for-all. All the East Zlabians have to do now is pick their moment and they’ll waltz right across the border.”

  Pfefferkorn massaged his temples. “So who kidnapped Carlotta?”

  “That would be the May Twenty-sixers. West Zlabian counter-counter-revolutionaries. Third-generation hard-liners raised during perestroika on a steady diet of disinformation, believing themselves the last great hope for Communism and dissatisfied with what they perceive as Zhulk’s passivity, although ironically, it’s his propaganda machine that created them in the first place. They’ve seen Thithyich building up his forces and they’re spoiling for a fight. They’re also short on firepower. So that’s what they’re asking for.”

  Pfefferkorn thought. “The workbench.”

  Paul nodded. “Capital W. Encryption software. You plug in a source code and out pops a blockbuster thriller, complete with message. Our working theory is that the kidnappers came to the mansion looking for it. They didn’t find it, of course, because we erased it, remotely, after Bill died. So they took Carlotta instead.”

  It dawned on Pfefferkorn that she had been at the house at his insistence. If he had allowed her to come to his reading, like she’d wanted to, she would be safe right now.

  “We have to get her back,” Paul said. “She’s too valuable to leave out in the field.”

  Pfefferkorn found it disturbing that such an accounting could be made at all. “She’s an agent, too.”

  “One of the best. Co-architect of the original fictocryption program.”

  “So you’re going to hand over the Workbench.”

  “No way. Are you kidding? It would give them the capacity to generate an endless supply of encoded blockbuster thrillers. It would give them access to most of our worldwide covert arsenal.” Paul paused. “Including several dozen nukes.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “We’ll use a dummied version. It’ll produce authentic-looking novels but the codes will be gobbledygook. Your challenge is to sell the Twenty-sixers on it.”

  There was a silence.

  “Why do they want me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on that,” Paul said.

  Pfefferkorn shook his head.

  “It’s highly irregular,” Paul said. “You’re not a trained agent.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I’d much rather send a strike force.”

  “I’d much rather you did, too.”

  Pfefferkorn stared at the map, at its impenetrable combinations of consonants. “And if I say no?”

  Paul did not reply. No reply was necessary.

  Pfefferkorn looked at him. “Who are you.”

  “I’m family,” Paul said.

  There was a silence.

  “Please tell me she’s not in on it, too,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Your daughter? No.” Paul put a hand on Pfefferkorn’s arm. “And let me just say, for the record, because I’m sure you’re wondering: I really do love her.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “It didn’t start out that way, but I do now. And I want you to know that, whatever your decision, whatever the result, you have my word that she’ll be taken care of.”

  Pfefferkorn regarded him skeptically. “You framed me for murder.”

  “Just showing you what we’re capable of. In case you got cold feet.”

  “You stranded me naked in a motel.”

  Paul shrugged. “We had reward points that were going to expire.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “Carlotta really does love you, too. I know what it must look like, but that’s the truth. One of the reasons we picked you as Bill’s successor was because you already had an established relationship with her.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Paul said.

  Pfefferkorn shut his eyes. He saw Carlotta fighting to save herself. He saw her beaten and thrown into a cell. He saw her forced to recite a speech. He saw her begging him to come alone. He saw her need, and her need was him.

  He opened his eyes.

  “When do we begin?” he said.

  65.

  His reeducation lasted eleven days and consisted of intensive cultural, linguistic, and tactical training. The goal was not merely to cram him with information but to give him the tools to process that information like a Zlabian would. To this end, a large staff was brought in. He was given weapons lessons (from Gretchen), acting and elocution lessons (from Canola), makeup lessons (from Benjamin), moustache lessons (from Blueblood), and so forth. Dozens more agents showed up for an hour or two to instruct him in some minor art before departing on the seaplanes that came and went round the clock. The safe house was a hive of activity, all of it centered on him and none of it with any regard for his comfort. He had never felt so important and yet so demeaned. He understood the need for his teachers to be hard on him. As a teacher himself he knew how much of what passed for education was wishy-washy navel-gazing designed to avoid, at all costs, damaging students’ self-esteem. That didn’t mean he enjoyed slogging through G. Stanley Hurwitz’s magisterial six-volume A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. Nor did it make any more palatable the endless variations on root vegetables and goats’-milk dairy, meals meant to accustom him to Zlabian cuisine. He wasn’t any less crapulous after swallowing vast quantities of thruynichka, the stupefying concoction made from root vegetable greens fermented in goat’s whey that he would be expected to consume as part of every Zlabian social interaction. He wasn’t any less sore after an hour of Sockdolager punting him around the karate studio.

  Aside from the sheer stress of the routine, Pfefferkorn had to grapple with several nagging doubts. He did not doubt that his handlers were American. For one thing, they had demonstrated their power to manipulate the criminal justice system. And there were other, less overt signs. One night, for example, the safe house ran out of toilet tissue, and Gretchen commandeered a helicopter to go to Walmart. To Pfefferkorn, this incident, with its gloss of ultrasophistication overlying gross shortsightedness, embodied the Americanness of the operation. He knew he was on the same side as his native land. What he doubted, rather, was whether that was a virtuous place to be. He doubted the completeness of the information he was being given. Most of all, he doubted himself.

 
By far his least favorite part of the day was language class. His instructor was Vibviana, a pretty but severe West Zlabian defector. She explained that the agency had developed its methods based on developmental psychology research that pinpointed the years from birth to three as the critical period for language acquisition.

  “To facilitate better, you must return please to frame of mind of young children’s.”

  Twice a day, for two hours, Pfefferkorn became a Zlabian. In his first lesson he assumed the role of a newborn. He submitted to being diapered and burped while Vibviana, his fictive mother, sang him lullabies and told him stories based on the Zlabian national poem, Vassily Nabochka. Every successive lesson advanced him through one developmental year, so that by the end of the second day he was four years old and already well acquainted with the horrors of West Zlabian childhood. His fictive family, played by a rotating cast of agents, included a beloved and mentally retarded older brother, a crone of a grandmother, and countless aunts, uncles, cousins, and goats. Everyone lived under one tiny thatched roof, so that when Vibviana suffered at the hands of Pfefferkorn’s fictive father (a violent, alcoholic factory hand), Pfefferkorn was forced to sit in the corner and listen to the sounds of slaps, screaming, and broken crockery, followed by maudlin apologies and vigorous make-up sex.

  It was not fun.

  That was the idea, Paul said. The Zlabian psyche was steeped in abuse, degradation, and poor hygiene, and the sooner Pfefferkorn got used to it, the better.

  Never before had he had so much one-on-one time with his son-in-law. In his daily policy briefings, Paul—or op com, as the other agents called him—shed his bumbling accountant’s façade, revealing himself as savvy, quick, and cynical, the kind of oversmart young patriot capable of smoothly steering his country into a disastrous foreign war. He had a way of talking around the issue that inspired confidence and dread in equal measure.

  “You love her,” Pfefferkorn said.

  Paul turned from the projection screen, which showed a timeline charting the ramifications of the 1983 West Zlabian currency devaluation. He stared at Pfefferkorn for a moment, then switched off the laser pointer. “I thought I made that clear.”

  “I need to hear it again.”

  “I love her.”

  “How much.”

  “Well, it’ll take me some time to prepare a full report.”

  “You proposed to her after what? Three months?”

  “Five.”

  “And before that? How long was it in the works?”

  “People get married for lots of different reasons,” Paul said.

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “I love her,” Paul said, “with all of my heart.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “How did you know it before?”

  “I didn’t,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Then you’re no worse off,” Paul said. “Better, in fact, because I’ve shown you my hand.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “Don’t forget Carlotta,” Paul said.

  “I haven’t forgotten her.”

  “You’re doing this for her.”

  “I know that,” Pfefferkorn said.

  There was a silence.

  “What really happened to Bill?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “Boating accident,” Paul said.

  The grandfather clock chimed.

  “Time for your language lesson,” Paul said. “Vibviana says you’re coming along nicely.”

  The fourteenth year of Zlabian boyhood had been an annus horribilis in which Pfefferkorn’s beloved and mentally retarded older brother died of tapeworms, his pet goat was clubbed to death by an irate neighbor, he flunked his Vassily Nabochka qualifying exam, and he lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute who taunted him mercilessly after he ejaculated prior to entry. On the plus side, he had mastered the subjunctive.

  “I feel hollow inside,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “That’s the spirit.”

  66.

  The night before Pfefferkorn’s departure, the core members of the team threw him a graduation party. Vibviana played the accordion and sang folk songs taken from Vassily Nabochka. Sockdolager got thunderingly drunk and tried to kiss her. Pfefferkorn delivered him an elbow to the solar plexus that left the larger man sinking to his knees, gasping for breath. Everyone applauded and commended Pfefferkorn on the unified fluidity of his motions. Gretchen applied a sparkly gold sticker to his shirtfront. The sticker was in the shape of a shooting star and said SUPERSTAR!

  The next morning he awoke to an empty house. It was his first moment of repose since his arrival, and it allowed him to reflect on the ordeal ahead. For all their efforts to prepare him, nobody, not even Paul, could predict with confidence what would happen once he crossed into West Zlabian territory. Pfefferkorn realized the hectic training schedule had served a dual purpose: first, to ready him for grueling undercover work in a burgeoning war zone, and second, to prevent him from dwelling on the fact that there was a strong chance he would not make it back alive.

  He heard the drone of an approaching seaplane.

  He took his wheelie bag and walked to the kitchen. He cupped his hands and drank water straight from the tap, possibly for the last time. He wiped his hands on his pants and headed down to the dock.

  The seaplane nosed toward the surface of the lake, skipping twice before splashing down. As it drew near the dock, Pfefferkorn did not move to greet it. He was in no mood for air travel. He was frightened, lonely, and hungover. But these were not problems he could afford to admit. He had a mission, one demanding intestinal fortitude and stoicism. He stared hard at the sky. It was the hard stare of a man hardening himself to hard truths. He sensed changes, hard ones, taking place within his soul. He peeled the sparkly gold star from his chest and cast it, in a hard and masculine manner, into the wind. From this point on, he would have to earn his stripes. He grasped the handle of his wheelie bag and strode purposefully toward his destiny.

  FOUR

  (Welcome to West Zlabia!)

  67.

  Like an aging actress too proud to pack up the greasepaint, the Hôtel Metropole had hobbled along bravely in the service of increasingly ill-fitting roles. The kings and potentates who had inaugurated her beds had, over the last one hundred and fifty years, been steadily supplanted by a procession of apparatchiks, spooks, journalists, and johns, and the quoined limestone façade, once smart and coquettish, was now grim with soot. Nobody had informed the staff, who continued to wear their red melton jackets with indefensible dignity, addressing without irony the haggard tarts prowling the lobby as “madame.”

  The desk clerk transcribed Pfefferkorn’s false passport number into the registry. “It is honorable to welcome you, Monsieur Kowalczyk.”

  Pfefferkorn smiled somberly. At the far end of the desk, bluebottles mobbed a bowl of rotting fruit. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and swabbed his greasy forehead. If he ever wrote another thriller, he planned to make the travel scenes more realistic, with plenty of page space devoted to stale coffee and smelly upholstery. The past twenty-four hours had taken him through five different countries and as many security checkpoints. His disguise was working. At no point had he been subjected to more than a cursory inspection, and he had found it surreal to stand at a newsagent in Schiphol Airport, stroking his false moustache, gnawing a round of Edam, and reading about the manhunt still on for him, while a lady beside him reached for the rack of best sellers and selected a copy of that international blockbuster Bloed Ogen.

  His back throbbed, he was jet-lagged, and he reeked, but he had made it.

  The clerk eyed his wheelie bag. “You linger inside us for these two weeks, yes?”

  “I travel light,” Pfefferkorn said, sliding a ten-ruzha note across the marble.

  The clerk bowe
d. In an instant the money had vanished up his sleeve. He touched a bell and three bellhops materialized. They fought like dogs over Pfefferkorn’s wheelie bag until the desk clerk sent two of them packing in glum retreat.

  The elevator car rose unhappily, stopping half a foot shy of the fourth floor. The bellhop jumped out and raced down the corridor, the wheelie bag bouncing wildly behind. Pfefferkorn followed, careful not to trip over the soiled ridges in the carpeting where it had pulled up from the floorboards. Radios and murmurs and oscillating fans could be heard. From the border a mile away came the stutter of automatic weapons.

  Once inside the room, the bellhop made a show of adjusting the thermostat. The dial came off in his hand. He pocketed it and gave up trying to seem useful, waiting by the door until Pfefferkorn had located another ten ruzhy, at which point he smiled brownly and bowed his way out, leaving Pfefferkorn alone in the paralyzing heat.

  68.

  Pfefferkorn’s time on book tour had taught him that the comfort of an American hotel room arose out of a fantasy mutually agreed upon by hotelier and guest: you were the first person to stay there. The virginal linens, antiseptic artwork, and neutral color schemes were all designed to maintain this illusion, without which it would have been difficult to sleep.

  The Hôtel Metropole made no such attempt to conceal its past. To the contrary: room 44 provided a rich historical document. The ceiling, dark and malodorous, attested to thousands of cigarettes. The bedspread showed a broad archipelago of stains, chronicle of many an unsavory act. The molding was Second Empire, the furniture was Constructivist, the carpet was shag, and the curtains were missing. Soft spots in the wallpaper told of listening devices put in and ripped out. He didn’t know what had caused the crimson blotch along the baseboard—it could have just as easily been the result of a rusty leak—but he suspected it had been left there as a rebuke to the chronically optimistic.