by Peter Craig
“Who?”
“You play a sport and you’re fantastic. If you think, you fall apart. That I love. So don’t think. I’ll order something you can eat with your fingers.”
Kevin endured the criticism, used Pierrick’s connections to move stolen cards and cameras, and was content for a while with the pattern of his days. But the more money Kevin made, the more he supplemented a radically different lifestyle on the Left Bank. Mademoiselle Augusta “Gussie” Gordon (a.k.a. Colette, Esther, Elizabeth, etc.), despite a few intricate cons of her own, developed such an exorbitant routine that she needed constant loans. Paris, for her, seemed a lavish form of denial. Her apartment near the Jardin des Plantes was well over twelve thousand francs a month, all for a garret with a sloped ceiling and an obstructed view of the Seine through the steel bridges around the Gare d’Austerlitz. When Kevin toured the flat, he needed to duck his head, and he was distracted by the rising volume of traffic and teeming children who wandered below in field trips outside the natural history museum.
They would stroll slowly, arm in arm under the bare trees, feeling a tremor in their ankles as the Métro passed beneath the ground. She would offer to buy him lunch at a favorite brasserie, then ask to borrow money when the bill came. She dragged him through her haunts, the open-air markets along tight streets, where she would linger over a bracelet and he would buy it for her, claiming he was branching out with his stolen phone cards and long-distance PINs. “Don’t take any extra risks for my sake,” she said.
She knew a thousand people, all of them believing some nonsense about her being a rich American studying art: stylish girls in burgundy coats on their way to music classes; handsome men who pulled over on mopeds to offer rides. With expensive lessons, her French had improved dramatically; and she seemed, like so many of the “good” Americans, to live in constant gratitude to the Parisians who tolerated her. He would tag along with her during her weekly pilgrimage to the Musée d’Orsay where she liked to sit and sketch, or through the park in a break of sunlight; she loved to be watched. He even attended expatriate poetry readings with her at cluttered bookstores, where she was friendly with the other Americans, all seeming intoxicated with their faux exile. After she began writing her own poetry in the empty spaces around her drawings, Kevin brought Pierrick along to one of her own readings. Kevin was charmed only by the look of thankfulness in her eyes each time she glanced up at the small audience. She had found a style so lovely, so fitted to her seductive shape, the designer skirts and blouses, the anachronistically coiled hair, that men surrounded her afterward to bombard her with compliments, and Kevin left the store feeling panicked and lonely, with Pierrick walking beside him and mulling over his cigarette: “Horrible! Every poem she read was worse than the last. It was some kind of fantastic torture in there. Oh, but there was that something, just something about her that said: America. I looked at her and I thought—that woman is the Statue of Liberty.”
“Oh, fuck, Pierrick. Don’t start with her now.”
“I have to meet her.”
“Just shut up about it, all right? I’m warning you.”
“What? She’s with you? No, no—I don’t think so. She wants to improve herself—you can see it on her face, every word she says. She wants to climb as high as she can. You—you live in the sewer. You could never have a woman like her. Women like her have to give up on themselves completely before they’ll go with a man like you. They have to be married for twenty years and weigh a hundred kilos. They need disasters. Catastrophe. They have to have a choice between suicide—or you. That’s your only hope, really, that she’ll have a fabulous breakdown. If you’re really determined, I can get her some heroin. With a junkie, you might stand a chance.”
“You know, I have a boiling point.”
“You want my advice? Get her on the needle.”
“I don’t want your advice.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
In late February the police detained Kevin again. It was a cold day with dirty flecks of snow dappling the windshield, and he listened to questions in French while answering in English. Kevin was astounded to realize that the police knew about the Interpol green notices and the charges facing him in America. They knew Gussie on the Left Bank, his contacts on the Right, and they were curious about the Eastern Europeans in the nineteenth to whom Kevin paid protection money and sold phone cards. They seemed to have neglected to arrest him only out of some jaded big-city indifference to outside pressures, a sort of tacit insult to the American authorities. After Kevin played dumb for hours, they finally let him go with a threat: stop stealing on their beat or they would spread a rumor that he was an informant, then wait for him to float ashore in a canal. Kevin left the squad car admiring the gendarmes, feeling that he had just witnessed a great display of street pragmatism, an ethos not much different from a veteran crook’s.
He went to Colette that afternoon to ask her to leave the city with him. He had guidebooks for trendy expatriate hubs like Amsterdam and Katmandu.
“I’m not leaving, Kevin. Extradition is probably twice as easy from those places. You said yourself, no one can convince the French to do anything.”
He urged her to change apartments at least. It was likely they knew about her ongoing con, in which she had fabricated an American realty company and arranged house exchanges, taking fees from businessmen as they left the country. Working from a migrating office with only a broken computer and a stalwart plant, she duped three people into paying sublet deposits for fictional apartments in New York and Los Angeles.
“It’s the same routine, Colette: dye your hair, pick another pretentious name, change flats. I’ve been buying protection from some people up in the nineteenth, and I can get decent new passports through them. I figure if we don’t do any more work, we’ve got a few weeks. But this is serious, Colette. We’ve gotten too comfortable here.”
The following day, Colette gave him a strip of passport pictures along with an opened letter addressed to him that she’d retrieved from the mail drop outside the city. It was from USP Lompoc, and throughout the Métro ride Kevin was furious that she would read his mail.
He read the letter on the train.
Dear (YOUR ALIAS Here):
Thanks for the postcard. I figure you’ve written me an average of one word for every month I’ve been in here. I cherish them all. This month I’m going to dedicate myself to savoring your creative grammar, which has a nice Daniel Boone quality to it. By the way, the postcard itself really brightens up the place … ah, Valencia! I’m a big hit around the yard with such fancy shit coming to me. Several people have already offered me punks and cigarettes for the thing, but I’ve turned them all down. How could I part with your groundbreaking spelling? You also say you’re traveling with “an American woman, but plutonically [sic].” I’m not sure if that means she’s a nuclear element or Mickey Mouse’s dog, but she sounds like a keeper. Perhaps she could write the next letter for you, so that I can feel less guilt about your miserable public education (no wonder I had so many goddamn parent-teacher conferences).
Sincerely (notice how it’s spelled with two e’s), Your indestructible father
The letter stayed in his mind all the next day, and, despite the mocking tone, Kevin imagined his father watching over him as he went about his errands. He believed that if Jerry could see him moving among the powerful and dangerous, that he would approve of his son’s ease and competence. The best chance of buying foolproof documents would be to talk with the Czech off the rue du Crimée, Jirka, to whom Kevin already paid a weekly cut of his earnings. Never go alone to ask for a big favor, Jerry had once told him. But, at the last minute, Pierrick backed out, claiming he had a peptic ulcer and would be unable to handle the diplomatic drinking of Eastern Europeans. He promised to trail Kevin and periodically check the windows for trouble.
Late afternoon, the skies already dim and heavy with approaching snow, Kevin knocked on the chained restaurant door. A goon in a stiff sport coat frisked
him and led him inside, dorsal muscles so lumpy that his arms hung outward as if toting pails of water. Chairs lay upside down on the tables under a stopped ceiling fan. Jirka stepped out from the bathroom in a shirt with a tic-tac-toe design printed across it, Adidas sweatpants, and loafers without socks. Kevin handed him an envelope full of cash while he was still drying his hands, and, after tossing aside wet paper towels, he counted through the money.
“Very good, Jack.” For some reason, Jirka had always called him Jack, and Kevin was too nervous to correct him, both because of the man’s formidable demeanor and because it was possible that Kevin had once used the name. “The rate goes up next month.”
“Why?”
“Spring—big time for tourists. There will be money on the street, my friend. Ask the taxi drivers. Everyone pays more in the spring.”
“I already pay more than anyone, sir—”
“Because you are new here, my boy. And you are American. You are the only American stealing in Paris right now. You should be proud. You are like the writer Henry James. You steal only from other Americans.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Of course not. Americans don’t even know their own writers. In Czechoslovakia, we watch all the cowboy movies; we read your best writers, drink your best whiskey, we know everything about your bank robbers and gangsters. Then we meet Americans and they don’t know anything but what happened yesterday. I wonder what you do all the time over there.”
“I’m probably not the best ambassador.”
“Oh, very sly. You do know your Henry James.”
“Okay, if you say so. Listen—I need help with something, sir. I have a small problem.”
He was a head shorter and he put his moist hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “Of course, of course. We have a drink first, my boy. The American thief!” He hummed the theme song from some movie, which Kevin recognized only from ice-cream trucks. “Let me guess. You need a loan? You get some bitch in trouble?”
“Nothing like that, sir.”
“Okay, then we have a toast to nobody in trouble!”
Jirka shouted in loud Czech at the bodyguard, who poured three ample glasses of whiskey. They toasted while the bodyguard drank with the gasping sounds of a thirsty child. Kevin was irritated by the smile on Jirka’s face. Cautiously he explained that he needed passports, first-rate documents. The best money could buy. Jirka reddened with swallowed laughter and replied, “Yes, it is no problem to do this. There is a woman who works for me, ten minutes from here. But you must understand: her family is very close to me. To my heart.”
“You know how discreet I am.”
“You American boys, you always say something. Anything for pussy.”
“I know better, sir. I don’t know anything about whiskey or American writers or any of that, but I know what’s important. This is an emergency, and I need two passports. One for myself, one for my lady friend.” He slid the picture of Colette onto the table. “And there’s no reason she needs to know anything about where they’re coming from.”
Jirka peered for a long time at the photographs, nodding his head as if reading a letter full of expected news. Then he glanced at Kevin with his hard, sallow eyes, and said, “Who is she? A girl you fuck?”
“No, no. Just—it’s a long story. A friend.”
“A friend,” he said with a sneer. He waited a long time, staring furiously at the picture, then he lightened all at once and replied, “Okay! Whatever you say, my boy! You’re a good worker and I take your word.”
He stood with a groan, paced to the bar where he picked out a bottle of wine. He yelled at his bodyguard to unlock the chains, and gestured for Kevin to follow him. Quickly the three men set out into a dirty snowfall, flakes melting as they touched the ground. The two Czechs jaywalked without looking, so that a few drivers leaned on their horns. In the wintry darkness, children were running in stone playgrounds of grinding, rusty carousels. Across the street, Kevin saw Pierrick, who stood watching as they entered a tall drab building.
The elevator was broken, so they climbed the stairs past a swirling sound of televisions. But the bodyguard became so out of breath after two flights that he lit a cigarette and gestured for them to continue without him. Jirka was still berating him as they reached the ninth level and pushed through a fire door into a hallway of painted cinder blocks, where Jirka knocked on a door and shouted, “Immigration!”
A very old man greeted them, hoary eyebrows shagged over his eyes; he smiled painfully and hugged Jirka with a series of little pats on his back. Immediately a stewed, vegetable odor filtered into the hall. Kevin stepped inside, heard the mewling of an infant, felt the blast of a radiator. Through a sheet hung over the kitchen doorway, an old woman pushed out, strong torso over the pleated drape of a wide skirt. The old couple and Jirka vanished behind the sheet and Kevin listened to a mix of greetings in French and what seemed to be Russian. The curtain brushed back for a moment to show a fleeting postcard of squalor: hanging pots on a line overhead, a dark, snow-streaked window, light the color of weak broth. Kevin studied the clutter of the front room: porcelain ballerinas, a music box with a revolving Star of David.
The young woman who emerged next from behind the curtain was so improbably clean and well dressed that it seemed as if she had stepped out from a wholly different setting. She wore a black sweater with a loose weave, cinched around the waist by a silver belt, and airy slacks that billowed as she walked. Kevin thought it must be the incongruity that made her seem so lovely. The sleepy quality of her face, matched with the contrast between her black coiling hair, pale skin, and dark eyes, made her appear so beautiful that Kevin felt unprepared to negotiate.
When she asked if he spoke French, he told her: “Pas suffisament bien pour parler affaires.”
Her English accented with damp consonants, she said, “You are American then.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to have an American passport.”
“Americans can’t have anything less.”
Jirka introduced the young woman as Irina Pashutinskaya, and when Kevin shook her hand, he felt crusts of Super Glue dried over her fingertips. They poured the wine, toasted, and talked business. Kevin explained that he had access to stolen passports, but he was out of his element here and didn’t have equipment to do the plastic laminate and dry seal. Irina responded that her work wasn’t the cheap tampering done by most of these people-trafficking rings; on the contrary, she used the same magnetic ink as the consulate to re-codify the inside covers; she legitimized each page with real entry and exit stamps. She had helped physicists, engineers, and artists into North America and western Europe. “People who come to me are not fugitives,” she said. “They are intellectuals. But I cannot talk business as much as normal, because my baby is sick—his stomach. Excuse me for one moment.”
Kevin sat stunned: all his life he had fantasized about working so easily with magnetic ink and printers. Jirka and Irina were arguing about the baby. They also seemed to assume that his French wasn’t good enough to understand their comments about him. Irina first said that Kevin was handsome, launching Jirka into a crude tirade. She calmed him by saying that Kevin (Jack) didn’t seem to have any money; Jirka assured her that he earned well. But over the course of the conversation he referred to him as the “crétin d’amerloc” (American dumb-ass), and expounded some theory that all Americans believed their farts were too precious for their asses. Irina scarcely reacted, but when Jirka ordered her not to sit so close to Kevin, pointing at his crotch and saying, “C’est un dégueulasse de pervers!” she yelled at him in Russian, and abruptly lowered her price a thousand francs per passport. Jirka shouted in Czech, while in calm, arbitrator’s English, Irina replied, “Instead of worrying about me, why don’t you go to the pharmacy for the baby?” He lunged forward as if he might slap her, while she stretched out her neck to offer a smooth cheek as a target, her martyr’s expression disarming him, sending a surge of violence rebounding inward around cringing shoulder
s. He whisked his coat off the rack, plunged his arms through sleeves, and slammed the front door hard enough behind him to shake the pictures crooked.
“He worries,” said Irina.
They waited in silence in the hot room.
“So you’re from Russia?”
“No, no, no—we are Ukrainian. And you see, my family is Jewish, and when you are Jewish in Soviet Union, you have Jewish passport. You cannot have same travel privileges. This is why I have so much experience and I charge a higher price. To be Jewish in Ukraine, very dangerous. You have to be smart. He is angry now because he thinks my price is too good. So he says I must like you. But he says this—dirtier.”
“Yeah, I caught some of it. Listen, I want to talk to you about something beyond this deal.” His eyeballs tingling with excitement, Kevin explained that he had a cache of stolen documents. “I never have enough room to keep the stuff, it’s coming in so fast.” He wondered if they could work out an arrangement by which he could fence passports directly through her, not his current middleman—“because he’s kind of a snob and I’m tired of him dumping on me all the time.”
Her eyes widened throughout his speech, but Kevin wasn’t certain if it was for the offer, the passion of his delivery, or his difficult slang. “Fine, yes,” she said. “I can use them maybe.”
Blatantly Kevin suggested an exchange over dinner, at a restaurant near the Bastille Opéra—dark, private, free of cops. The faint rhythm of uncertainty in her English made him exaggerate his gestures, until she began to watch his swooping hands rather than his face. She agreed to the restaurant, and there followed an uncomfortable pause, broken when she asked pointedly about Colette’s pictures: what were the specifics of her order?
“Oh, don’t worry about her. I mean, her documents don’t have to match mine, if that’s what you mean. Make her from anywhere. Make her an Albanian refugee.”