Basic Law

by J Sydney Jones

  The Pillow. Gerhard’s other nickname, but not quite so kind. How much does being the cuckold hurt? Kramer thinks back to 1974, when he received word from Reni that she was not coming back to him. That she was staying in Germany with Gerhard instead. Being the cuckold hurts a lot, he knows. A hell of a lot. And revenge is a powerful motive.

  A hawk calls overhead, the ends of its wings tipped upward like feathery fingers.

  They say nothing for a solid hour, until they come on the opening of a cave that beckons them out of the heat. They sit close to the mouth in the cool shade, with the moist-dirt smell coming from the darkness at their backs, and eat lunch. Kramer has brought several loaves of bread and wax paper–wrapped chunks of feta. There are also mild yellow onions, a jar of olives, some lemons, and in Randall’s pack, a bottle of raki. They squeeze lemon juice on the bread, slice onions and cheese, and make open-faced sandwiches, sipping lightly from the raki between bites. From the cave mouth, they look back down the side of the mountain. The day is so clear that the view extends all the way to the coast, an indistinct blue line in the mid-horizon, darker than the sky.

  They eat in silence for several minutes; then Randall burps contentedly, rises, and starts examining the cave.

  “You might want to play Ariadne,” Kramer calls to him, his voice echoing in the cavernous space. “Put a string on your finger if you don’t want to get lost.”

  Which is enough to bring Randall back into the light of day.

  “I don’t think I’ve got the spelunker spirit in me, Sam. It’s black as night in there.”

  “Some of these go for hundreds of yards underground,” Kramer says. “Branching all over the place so you never know where you’ve been. Ancient religious shrines.”

  “I think I prefer Gothic.” Randall tosses another olive in one side of his mouth, spits the pit out the other. “How far up do you think he’ll be?”

  “No idea,” Kramer answers him. “He left Timbaki a day before we did. It’s a couple of days up there, maybe more. Depends on how much you dawdle. Kariakis said he was coming back to Timbaki after the climb. There’s only one path on this side of the slope. So he’ll either be going up or coming down. We’ll find him somewhere, I guess.”

  “Very reassuring.” Randall tosses another olive into his mouth. “Why don’t we just pitch camp here then and wait for him?”

  Kramer gets to his knees, repacking the lunch things, stabbing his old Swiss Army knife into the earth to clean it off, then closing it and sticking it in his pants pocket.

  “You stay, if you want. I’m enjoying the climb. We’ll meet you back here.”

  “I’m not staying here alone, Sam. There are bats and all sorts of wild animals in the night. Why do you have to be such a masochist?”

  Two hours later, they are well above the tree line; the terrain is a jumble of boulders and thyme bushes half a man high. An occasional black pine survives on the dry slopes and lizards dart past them on the path, making Randall start. The sun is past its zenith, a fact to be grateful for. Kramer feels sunburned on the neck and face. He has no hat with him, no sunscreen. It’s almost winter, isn’t it? Weather like this makes a man a believer in global warming.

  The saddle of the mountain comes in and out of view as they drop down ridges cut by narrow cols and ravines; the goat trail twists like a snake up the side of the mountain, following the path of least resistance. On one such ridge, they come upon a shepherd with a small flock of goats feeding placidly on dusty scrub brush on the steep uphill side of the track. The bells on the goats clang softly in the warm afternoon. The man is seated on a rock midway along the exposed ridge, looking down the ravine that borders the other side of the trail. He is decked out in mountain wear: tall black boots, wide pants, a black vest with red cummerbund, a tasseled black scarf on his head. He sports a rakish mustache, greased and twirled upward at the ends. He has a lean hawk face and startlingly blue eyes, which turn from the ravine to watch them with suspicion.

  Kramer is happy to come across him. It is the first of the traditional Cretan dress he’s seen and he’s been afraid that it, like so much else of traditional island life, has passed away with the coming of the tourists and the joining with united Europe. Homogeneity as the great killer.

  “Yassou,” Kramer greets the man as they approach.

  The Cretan says nothing, merely nods his head as they pass. But Randall has not been fooled.

  “What the fuck are you in that get-up for, Gary?”

  Kramer turns, startled, and now he too sees beneath the disguise. The blue eyes; the sharp nose.

  “Hi, guys.”

  “Christ,” Kramer says. “Twenty some years and that’s all you can come up with?”

  Gerhard gets up from the rock, shrugs shyly and puts his hand out to them.

  “I thought I was seeing things,” he says.

  His hand is cool and hard as Kramer grips it. Not the soft fish it once was.

  “I mean, what the hell would you two be doing on a goat trail in Crete? It was too bizarre to contemplate.” He takes his hand back, twirls his mustache and squints at the thought. “What are you doing here?”

  Randall hums the theme from Twilight Zone, flashing wild eyes at him. “We are in cyberspace, old chum. A blip on somebody’s computer screen.”

  Kramer shakes his head at Randall, then turns to Gerhard. “Kariakis told us where you’d be. I need to talk with you.”

  Gerhard laughs dryly. “It must be pretty important to track me all the way here. I thought you were living in Vienna.”

  Kramer nods. “How’d you know?”

  Gerhard takes a wad of gum from his mouth, examines it like a diamond merchant counting facets, then chucks it into the brush.

  “Reni told me. She kept track of you, Sam.” He looks at the feeding goats for a time, his lips pursing, eyes unblinking. Then he turns to Kramer again, “I figured we’d have to do this one day. You still hate me?”

  Kramer thinks about it momentarily; it deserves an honest answer.

  “I did for years,” he finally says, shaking his head. “But no more. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time.”

  “Then this isn’t a vendetta journey?” Gerhard says. There is laughter in his voice, but an edge of fear as well. “It would have been very in-scene, very apropos, tracking me down in the mountains of Crete, where vengeance is a way of life.”

  Kramer does not want to come to the point just yet; looks for other small talk.

  “What are you doing with a herd of goats?”

  Gerhard looks at them fondly again. “Not mine. I’m just following them. Have been for the past day. We could learn a lot from the ruminants.”

  “Such as?” Randall says, taking off his pack and sitting on the rock Gerhard just vacated.

  “Such as patience,” Gerhard says. “Infinite patience and total concentration. You need both to survive on the side of this mountain. But you didn’t come all this way to talk about goats. It’s Reni, isn’t it? What’s wrong? Did she send you after me?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Kramer says, and suddenly wishes he had not come looking for him; wishes that it would not have to be him to tell the story.

  “She’s dead,” Randall says, looking not at Gerhard, but at Kramer. “They’re calling it suicide in Germany, but …”

  Gerhard looks at them with incomprehension for a moment.

  “Is this some kind of stupid joke, Sam?”

  Kramer shakes his head, looking at the ground. “No joke.”

  Gerhard stands for a moment wide-eyed, jerking his head between Kramer and Randall.

  “It’s true,” Kramer says, looking into his eyes now. “I’m sorry.”

  Gerhard says nothing, then suddenly crumples to the ground, moaning as if in pain. His shoulders heave as he sobs.

  Randall looks at Kramer
and they walk a few yards away for a time, looking down the col as it winds treacherously beneath them, the result of some old run-off. Scree covers most of its length; a scattering of dusty blue-green bushes cling to the bottom tract. A splashing sound catches Kramer’s attention: Randall is peeing onto the rocks.

  Turning, Kramer sees Gerhard is still huddled in the trail, but his shoulders are heaving less violently now. He has taken the black scarf off his head and is using it to wipe his eyes. Thin wisps of his hair float above his head in a light breeze.

  They walk back to him and Kramer swings his pack off, setting it on the ground next to Randall’s, and then pulls the bottle of raki out of Randall’s pack and uncorks it.

  “Drink some of this,” he says to Gerhard’s hunched shoulders, to the bald spot on top of his bowed head.

  Gerhard looks up, red-eyed and pained, takes the bottle and tips it up, swallowing twice, three times. The liquid splashes out the neck of the bottle as he lets it down and hands it back. He wipes his eyes and stands.

  “Sorry. I’m being a melodramatic baby. People die all the time, don’t they?”

  A sudden determination crosses his face as he looks at Randall, “You said it was a suicide?”

  “The police say that,” Randall says, leaving the rest implied, and sitting again on the rock.

  Gerhard looks at Kramer, now alarmed. “But what do you think?”

  “I think somebody killed her.”

  “What! Why would anyone …” But he cuts himself off. “She did make enemies. No use denying that.”

  Kramer says nothing. The day is deadly still but for the rhythmic sounding of the goat bells.

  Gerhard thinks some more, then sits down next to Randall.

  “So, did you come to tell me about Reni’s death or to see if I’m the killer?”

  Kramer smiles. “A little of both.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” Gerhard says, slapping the knees of his jodhpurs and raising dust. “But I’ve been busy trudging the Minoan way, old friend. Besides, why would I want to kill Reni?”

  “Eva Martok says you inherit her estate. Plus you might have been left at home one too many nights.” There are better ways to phrase it, but Kramer does not want to search for them. He wonders if, in fact, he has forgiven Gerhard; if he is not, in fact, trying to inflict pain with his questions.

  “That bitch,” he hisses, but offers no particulars.

  “Why did you leave, Gerhard?” Kramer asks.

  He shrugs. “There was nothing there for me anymore.” Another dry laugh. “Never really was, in fact. I was her companion, Sam. Not much more. There were times when she felt some pity for me, the loyal dog, and conferred connubial gifts, but mostly I was her campaign manager and general factotum. Even dogs get tired of being kicked eventually.”

  “Come on, Gerhard,” Kramer says. “You two ran off together. There must have been more to it than that.”

  Gerhard looks up at Kramer, amazement on his face. “Is that how you read it? That we ran off together? Bolted to Gretna Green like a couple of young lovers? Jesus, Sam, how strange the world is and how much simpler it was once, huh? Just a bunch of proto-hips freewheeling around Europe, not giving a shit for anything but having a good book in the pack and enough money till the end of the month. I liked me better then.”

  Kramer does not respond, but he knows the feeling. Remembrance of things past. But it doesn’t make the present any easier to get through.

  “How should I have read it?” he asks, taking a swig of the raki now himself and handing it to Randall.

  “I was handy, Sam. That’s all. Reni hated to be alone. I was her buffer. It helped that I was crazy in love with her anyway. But that had nothing to do with it. I was just handy.”

  “You went to Germany together,” Kramer says. “There were lots of handy men there.”

  Gerhard shakes his head, squinting with a grin. “Don’t you get it, Sam? She wasn’t running from you. She was running from herself. She didn’t mean to leave you. In ways, she never did.”

  Kramer and Randall exchange glances. “I don’t follow,” Kramer says.

  Another shake of the head from Gerhard, but this time it means finality rather than frustration. “I can’t get any clearer, Sam. I promised Reni I’d never tell. I don’t think it’s a promise her death can alter. But you should know that she didn’t want to leave you. She always loved you. That’s all that matters.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Kramer says, suddenly angry. All those years, all that lost love and emotion. Was it all the matter of a misunderstanding?

  “Look, Sam. Reni was one of those people who didn’t belong in the real world. She set herself a strict code of moral conduct and was screwing up all the time. No one could toe her party line, not even her, and she was the biggest loser. She just couldn’t face you anymore, is all. Not after what she learned.”

  “What the hell did she learn?”

  “I’ve said too much, already.”

  “Look,” Kramer says, “maybe this has something to do with her death. With her killer.”

  Gerhard considers this for a moment, then shakes his head. “No way.”

  “Did she tell you she was writing memoirs?” Randall asks.

  Gerhard takes the bottle from his hand, thinks better of it, and fishes out a stick of gum from his vest pocket.

  “That was all she cared about anymore.” He slowly unwraps the gum, rolls it into a coil, and plops it in his mouth.

  “Did you read any of it?” Kramer says.

  “She wouldn’t let me near her precious papers.”

  “Did she ever mention a man named Vogel? Reinhard Vogel?”

  Gerhard tries the name out like a taster washing his mouth with wine. No bouquet.

  “She never mentioned him. I know the name. Who doesn’t? Our new Germany’s answer to Adolf. It’s jerks like him who made me leave that country. I mean, I’ve loved Germany like only a convert could all these years. Forgiven her all her sins.”

  Randall makes a sour face. “They call it the Fatherland now. It’s a male country, Gary.”

  But Gerhard ignores this, warming to his theme as he would in the old days.

  “I became more German than American, for Christ’s sake. And then you know what some skins tell me one day in the street in Bonn?” But it’s rhetorical; he has all the answers himself. “I should get my sorry ass out of their country. I’m a miserable foreigner stealing their jobs. Me, who speaks German better than any of those shaved-headed Cro-Magnons, and who’s never drawn a day’s wages in all the years I’ve lived in Germany.”

  He rises suddenly, pulling down the vest where it has ridden up.

  “I loved that country, Sam. I gave up America, never went back. And now Germany’s turned into a cesspool. You can’t live in a cesspool. Reni loved it, though. Gave her something to fight against, she was always saying. Me, I don’t want to fight. I want to blend. What a wish, huh? Just to blend. Not stand out in any way. What’s wrong with us, anyway?”

  It’s oblique, but Kramer understands the question. The generation of 1968, all those brainy talented dropouts who stayed dropped out, who distrusted success like it was Nixon in drag, afraid of achieving, like it was compromising values.

  “Did Reni mention seeing Rick?”

  The suddenness of the question catches Gerhard by surprise. He has to process the name.

  “You mean Fujikawa? Rick, the painter? Where?”

  “In Munich.”

  “No. I didn’t know she met up with him again. What’s he doing?”

  “Painting,” Kramer says. “And recovering from a beating the skinheads gave him.”

  “See? A cesspool. He should get out of there.”

  Kramer wonders why Reni would not have told Gerhard about Rick, or about Vogel. Unless she did, and reasons he’s lying fo
r his own reasons. Or unless she thought she would be protecting Gerhard by not telling.

  “But it’s funny you mentioning Rick,” he says. “’Cause Reni did track down another of the Magnificent Seven.”

  “Helmut,” Randall says, nonchalantly, as if to one-up. “We saw him in Hamburg.”

  Gerhard smiles, interested. “Did you, now? Old home week. But it’s not Helmut I’m talking about.”

  It’s an easy calculation to make for Kramer: process of elimination. “But that means …”

  “Yeah,” Gerhard says, grinning broadly. “She found Maria. She’s still alive.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kramer feels the blood hum in his head. “Where is she?” he finally says.

  “Prague. She’s working at some publishing house. At least she was when Reni last saw her,” Gerhard adds.

  “When was this?” Kramer asks.

  Gerhard twirls the ends of his mustache, twists his mouth in concentration.

  “Wasn’t long after I came down here. You lose sense of time on the trail. The letter came to the Poste Restante in Athens, so it couldn’t have been long after I arrived. Six weeks ago, maybe?”

  “What did Reni say exactly?” Kramer says, trying to fit this new bit of information into the burgeoning mosaic.

  “Not much. Just that she’d met Maria again, and that she had news. You know Reni. It was always what she didn’t say that mattered.”

  “What didn’t she say, Gerhard?”

  He counts them off on his long fingers, “Well, number one, what news? Number two, how she found Maria after all these years.” Then he angrily fists his hand. “Jesus, Sam, I could go on for hours with what was left out.”

  “You remember the name of the publisher?” Kramer asks.

  Gerhard ponders this for a while, shaking his head. “I threw the letter away, too.” More squinting of his eyes. Then, “Hold on. It begins with a K. Something like Kareesia.” He rubs his beard. “Didn’t seem important at the time. The address was a bunch of Czech words full of acute accents and those upside-down chevrons.”