Potboiler

by Jesse Kellerman

  He waited for the fan to be delivered, and when it wasn’t, he called again.

  “Immediately, monsieur,” the desk clerk said.

  The clanking kept on going. Zhulk’s photo was jumping all over the place. Pfefferkorn stood on the bed and took it down. Then he pounded angrily on the wall.

  “It’s late,” he said.

  The clanking ceased.

  At midnight he gave up waiting. He threw back the duvet and lay on the sheet, basking in the silence, aware that five a.m. was just around the bend.

  75.

  The next morning, following the forecast and public reading, he went straight to the front desk. The clerk from the first day was back on duty. Pfefferkorn made sure to tip him in advance.

  “Monsieur will to partake of breakfast buffet.”

  “In a minute. First things first. I need to change rooms, please.”

  “Monsieur, there is problem?”

  “Several. I’ve asked for a new fan at least ten times. How hard could that possibly be? Apparently very hard. So I’d like a new room.”

  “Monsieur—”

  “And the couple next door to me is making a tremendous amount of noise. They sound like a pair of oversexed gorillas.”

  “Monsieur, I am regretful. This is impossible.”

  “What is?”

  “Rooms cannot be exchanged.”

  “Why not?”

  “Monsieur, there is no availability.”

  Pfefferkorn looked at the back wall, where they hung the keys. “What are you talking about? I can see for myself there aren’t more than ten guests in the whole place.”

  “Monsieur, reassignment of rooms requires six months’ notice.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  The clerk bowed.

  Pfefferkorn took out a ten-ruzha note. It disappeared up the clerk’s sleeve but the clerk did not otherwise move. Pfefferkorn gave him another ten ruzhy. Still nothing. He gave him ten more and then he threw up his hands and walked across the lobby to the restaurant.

  “Friend, good morning. But what is the matter?”

  Pfefferkorn explained.

  “Akha,” Fyothor said, knitting his brows, “yes.”

  “It’s really true that I can’t get another room for six months?”

  “That would be soon, friend.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Have no fear,” Fyothor said. “Today we are going to have some real fun.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  They made the rounds. Meeting after meeting ended identically: with promises of memos, sweltering embraces, and thruynichka. Between appointments they took in the sights. There were more museums, more memorials. Virtually every street corner featured a sign commemorating some momentous event of the people’s revolution. On the few unclaimed corners, metal plaques had been set into the earth:

  THIS SPOT RESERVED FOR FUTURE HISTORICAL EVENTS.

  They stood before a seedy-looking building.

  HERE THE PEOPLE’S REVOLUTION FOREVER IMPROVED THE LOT OF THE ZLABIAN WOMAN

  They entered the strip club and sat down. A waitress pecked Fyothor on the cheek and set down a bottle of thruynichka. Techno music beat relentlessly.

  “You enjoy breasts?” Fyothor shouted.

  “As much as the next fellow,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

  “I come here every day,” Fyothor shouted.

  Pfefferkorn nodded.

  “It is different from America, yes?” Fyothor shouted.

  “I’m not American,” Pfefferkorn shouted back.

  It was different: both the patrons and the strippers were in equal states of undress.

  “This is our collective principle of equality,” Fyothor shouted. “Every article of clothing the woman removes, the man must do the same. Fair, yes?” He tucked a five-ruzha note inside the G-string of a writhing woman and started unbuttoning his shirt. “To your health.”

  The highlight of any West Zlabian vacation was a visit to Prince Vassily’s grave. Pfefferkorn, expecting grandeur, was surprised by the spot’s humility. Tucked in among a busy thoroughfare was a small brick plaza, at the center of which stood a raggedy tree.

  HERE LIES IN ETERNAL SLUMBER

  THE GREAT HERO

  FATHER AND REDEEMER OF THE GLORIOUS ZLABIAN PEOPLE

  PRINCE VASSILY

  “HOW LIKE A ROOT VEGETABLE SWELLS MY HEART TO GAZE UPON THY COUNTENANCE

  HOW LIKE AN ORPHANED KID GOAT DOES IT BLEAT FOR THY LOSS”

  (canto cxx)

  Fyothor bowed his head. Pfefferkorn did likewise.

  “Next month we celebrate the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the poem. The festivities will be unforgettable.” Fyothor smiled slyly. “Perhaps you will extend your stay, yes?”

  “One day at a time,” Pfefferkorn said.

  En route to the Ministry of Double Taxation they passed a throng of people waiting to enter a dilapidated wooden shack.

  “The home of our dearly departed leader,” Fyothor said.

  Pfefferkorn tried to appear appropriately respectful.

  “Come,” Fyothor said, and began bushwhacking to the front of the line.

  The interior of the hut was easily twenty degrees hotter than it was outside. The furniture had been cordoned off and easels set up with photographs of Dragomir Zhulk orating, scowling, saluting. People used clunky Soviet-era twin-lens reflex cameras to photograph the desk, still set with Zhulk’s fountain pen, datebook, and a dented tin mug with an inch of tea left at the bottom. A spotlit glass case housed his well-used copy of Vassily Nabochka. Soldiers lined the perimeter of the room, using their Kalashnikovs to jab at the visitors and hasten their circuit around the rope protecting the room’s centerpiece: a burlap-lined coffin, inside which Zhulk’s embalmed body lay in state. Pfefferkorn blinked the sweat out of his eyes and stared. He felt himself going tingly and light-headed. Here was a man he had killed.

  A soldier shoved him with the butt of his gun and told him to move along.

  Out in the street, Fyothor was adamant. “Enough death for one day,” he said.

  They skipped their meeting and went back to the strip club.

  The schedule repeated itself for several days running. Following a restless night spent sweating into his sheets, banging the wall, and plugging his ears with toilet tissue, Pfefferkorn would be shouted awake at dawn. The woman in the majorette hat would declare that the weather would be pleasant beyond compare, that the price of root vegetables had reached an all-time low, that miraculous advances had been made by the Ministry of Science, that the East Zlabian aggressors had been repelled and were cowering in fear. It was unclear to Pfefferkorn whom these lies were intended to fool. Still, he began to enjoy the pageantry of it. He read along from Vassily Nabochka. He sang the anthem lustily while he shaved around his moustache. He had just about forgotten it was fake.

  Having established him as a friend of Fyothor’s, Yelena took more of a shine to him. She never gave him more than his ration, but she did it with a hockey linesman’s gappy smile.

  He spent close to every waking moment with Fyothor. It was clear enough to Pfefferkorn that he was being watched, but as he didn’t see what he could do about it, he tried to spin it for the best.

  “You know all these people and you can’t get me a new hotel room?”

  “Some things are beyond even my power, friend.”

  In the evenings they would dine together in the restaurant, talking about literature and polishing off several bottles of thruynichka. Then Fyothor would head home to his wife and Pfefferkorn would stop by the front desk to check for messages. The clerk would say there were no messages. Pfefferkorn would ask for a new fan. The clerk would promise it immediately.

  Up the ancien
t elevator Pfefferkorn went, down the whispering hallway, past mumbling rooms, rooms full of ghosts, rooms more men had entered than left.

  Stretched out on his bed, listening to the honeymooners getting to work, he reflected on the similarities between spying and writing. Both called for stepping into an imagined world and residing there with conviction, nearly to the point of self-delusion. Both were jobs that outsiders thought of as exotic but that were in practice quite tedious. Both tested one’s ability to withstand loneliness, although Pfefferkorn decided that in this respect, spying was harder, because it demanded that the spy resist, at every moment and with all his power, the human instinct to trust. One of life’s minor consolations was the presumption that you could ask most strangers most questions and get an honest answer most of the time. Not always, of course, but often enough. Absent that, conversation became an exhausting, depressing labor, more so in the face of the sort of unflagging cheer Fyothor threw at him. Pfefferkorn felt like he was being forced to stand on one foot for hours on end. He thought of all the faceless men and women doing their duties in hotel rooms the world over. He admired them. He felt for them. He wished them well. Their loneliness was his, and his theirs.

  And he thought of Bill. In reevaluating their relationship Pfefferkorn had seen himself as the survivor of a house fire, returning to pick through the ash. There might be one or two scraps of authentic friendship, but they were buried under so much falsehood that it seemed wiser and less pathetic to let them go. But perhaps Paul had been right when he said that it didn’t have to be one or the other. Now that Pfefferkorn was a spy, he understood. He remembered Bill’s copy of his novel, the dense scribblings in the margins. What else could that be but love? He was almost afraid to accept this, because if Bill truly had loved him, the pain he must have endured in deceiving Pfefferkorn all these years was unimaginable. Heroic, even.

  The clanking got louder.

  Pfefferkorn turned on the television and put the volume way up.

  There were three channels. Channel one was the flag. Channel two aired round-the-clock footage of Party rallies and speeches. For entertainment, it was hard to beat channel three. Pfefferkorn watched a soap opera about goatherds. He watched the news, anchored by the woman in the majorette hat. Like the rest of West Zlabia, he was waiting for the game show that came on at nine. The national curriculum included poetic composition, and teachers nominated their best students to appear before a panel of celebrity judges, who would then proceed to tear the poem apart mercilessly, reducing the student to tears and bringing burning shame upon him, his family, and their entire neighborhood. To be humiliated in this way was considered a great honor, and The Poem, It Is Bad! was the second most popular show on West Zlabian TV, its ratings topped only by those of the show that followed, a live broadcast of the teacher being flogged.

  76.

  “Rise, citizens of Zlabia. . . .”

  Pfefferkorn opened the dresser. The day’s itinerary included a visit to a goat farm on the outskirts of town, which seemed as good an occasion as any to use his one polo shirt. Still coursing with sweat, he unwrapped his towel and pressed it to his face. When he took the towel away from his face he saw that his moustache had come off in his hands.

  There was no cause for panic. He had been in West Zlabia for a week, and the epoxy was supposed to last ten to twelve days. Constant perspiration had likely hastened its dissolution. He picked the old moustache out of the folds of his towel and flushed it down the toilet. He put his wheelie bag on the bed, pried up the first false bottom, removed one of the moustache kits, tore it open, and dumped its contents across the bedspread. Swatches of fake hair in a wild multitude of sizes, shapes, colors, and textures spilled out. It looked like a caterpillar pride parade. He selected two pinkie-length pieces in a medium brown and carried them into the bathroom along with the thimble-sized tube of adhesive and the instruction sheet.

  Superficial identity alteration package (male)

  1. Choose the part which is sorted appropriately of the hairpiece at size.

  2. In order to meet to the most desirable size, carve the hairpiece

  3, Solicit moisture with the surface area of the face where the hairpiece will have in application.

  4. Using the cotton stick, solicit Mult-E-Bond™ in verso of the hairpiece to receive the influence which ties on with moisture.

  5 Solicit the hairpiece, maintain for thrity second..

  6. You look so good!

  He didn’t remember the process being quite so esoteric. Then again, Blueblood had been there to help. Flummoxed, he turned the page over.

  MADE IN INDONESIA

  There was a knock at the front door.

  “Good morning, friend!”

  What was Fyothor doing here? Breakfast didn’t start for another half hour. Pfefferkorn poked his head out. “Just a minute,” he called.

  He ducked back into the bathroom. He uncapped the tube of adhesive, squeezed a dollop onto his fingertip, and put his finger to his lip, instantly fusing the two surfaces together.

  77.

  It was ugly. His left middle finger was stuck to his upper lip midway between the left corner of his mouth and his philtrum. The angle of contact was particularly grievous. Had the finger been pressed down at twelve o’clock, he might have been able to pass off the pose as one of contemplation. As it was, the finger was between nine and ten o’clock, making it look like he was about to excavate a booger. He dashed to the bed and combed through the pieces of facial hair.

  Next door the banging started up, steady as a metronome.

  “Really?” he yelled. “Now?”

  “What?” Fyothor called.

  “Nothing.”

  He found what he was looking for: the enclosed Q-tip, or what the instructions called a “cotton stick.” In his haste, he had forgotten all about it. Knowing where he had gone wrong didn’t get him any closer to fixing the problem, though. At present he was holding his own face, and Fyothor was tapping at the door, and the lovebirds were going at it like a pumpjack.

  “I apologize for the rude awakening,” Fyothor called, “but today we must stick to the schedule.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Pfefferkorn raced back to the bathroom, threw on the hot water, and stuck his head under the tap, without effect. Despairingly he stood up, wet all over again. There was a way to dissolve the epoxy, he knew. Blueblood had told him. The banging was driving him crazy and making it hard to concentrate.

  “I recommend closed-toe shoes,” Fyothor called.

  “Right-o,” Pfefferkorn called.

  He remembered: a solution of saltwater, twenty-two percent by weight. Simple enough, except that he had yet to see a saltshaker (or any normal condiment, for that matter) anywhere in West Zlabia. A bit of ketchup would do wonders for root vegetable hash, he thought. Then he told himself to focus. He needed salt water. He could cry. He dug deep for the saddest memories he had. He thought of his father. He thought of all his failures. It was no use. Shortly after his life had taken a turn for the better, he had worked to put his misery behind him. Instead he imagined awful things that might yet happen. He pictured Carlotta in her cell. He pictured himself getting treated for cancer. With distaste, he pictured his daughter . . . but his brain refused to go there, and his eyes remained dry as toast.

  “The driver is waiting. We can still beat the traffic.”

  “On my way.”

  He tugged at his lip again. He was stuck fast, his options dwindling. What distinguished men like Harry Shagreen and Dick Stapp, he thought, was their monomania. They did whatever it took—anything at all—for failure was not an option. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, took a deep breath, and yanked as hard as he could, spinning himself around and landing in the shower with a crash.

  “Friend? Is everything all right?”

  “Fine,” Pfe
fferkorn said weakly. He had been somewhat successful. His finger did feel looser. He climbed out of the shower, took hold of his hand, and braced himself for another go.

  In retrospect he would not be able to decide which was worse: the pain or the wet, ripping sound. It took all his willpower not to scream. He bent over, silently heaving, his eyes finally (and pointlessly) blurring, blood dripping from his lip onto the tiles. He wasn’t finished, either. The very tip of his finger was still attached. With a grunt he pulled it free. He wadded toilet tissue against his bleeding face.

  “The early goat gets the peels,” Fyothor called.

  Pfefferkorn used the Q-tip to apply a fresh coat of adhesive. It stung going on, and he realized he had smeared an assuredly toxic substance directly into his bloodstream. The epoxy worked like a chemical cauterization, coagulating the blood on contact. With trembling hands, he pressed the two matching pieces of moustache to his lip. He held them in place for a ten count, then tested each side with a gentle tug. The right side was fine. The left side yodeled with pain, but it, too, remained secure.

  He ran to the bed, swept the spilled moustaches into the wheelie bag, replaced the first false panel, zipped the bag up, and threw on his clothes. By now Fyothor was pounding loud enough to compete with the pipes.

  “Must I break down the door?”

  “Ha ha ha ha ha.”

  Pfefferkorn ran back to the bathroom for one final mirror check and recoiled.

  He had glued his moustache on upside down. Instead of following the downward curve of his upper lip, it shot upward, like a set of surprised eyebrows. Seeing this did in fact surprise him, and when his actual eyebrows went up, he seemed to have two sets of surprised eyebrows, one above his eyes and the other above his lip. “I didn’t expect this,” the top of his face seemed to be saying. “Me neither,” the bottom half seemed to be agreeing, “any of it.” He tried to bring his moustache back into alignment by frowning, hard. It worked, sort of. Assuming he could keep it up all day long, Fyothor might not notice anything amiss.