by Peter Craig
She smiled, showing small wine-colored teeth, then covered her mouth.
After another silence, Kevin pantomimed rocking a baby in his arms and asked, “And the father?”
She smiled in a tight pucker, gestured to the kitchen, and said, “The baby’s father is not my husband. He is married, but not to me. Complicated.”
The radiator in the room seemed to have intensified, and she was sweating around the temples. With a rush of excitement, Kevin reiterated the time and restaurant, gave her an awkward Parisian kiss—more head butt than farewell—and left the apartment, passing the bodyguard who stood fiddling with a cigarette lighter. On the stairwell, he met Jirka plodding back upward, red from exertion and cold, carrying a white paper sack. Jirka blocked the path and lay his palm against Kevin’s sternum, using the gesture both as a threat and a chance to rest his tired weight. “So? Everything is happy?”
“Ecstatic,” said Kevin.
Jirka continued up the stairs, then turned at the landing to make a throat-cutting gesture, calling back, “Now you keep your big American mouth shut, or I cut out your tongue and nail it to this door.”
TWENTY-NINE
He saw Irina four times in the next week, bringing to each rendezvous a thicker bundle of stolen passports wrapped in shopping bags. They would meet for lunch, then stroll the city. Lunch merged with dinner, dinner matured to drinks, until Kevin believed he was engaged in the first traditional courtship of his life. They would talk idly about fantasies as they walked along the Seine. “I always dreamed about someday tapping into an automated clearinghouse,” said Kevin. “In the States, they’re these regional computer centers, they store millions of electronic transactions every month, all of it on magnetic tape. Everything for electronic deposit. I used to get a knot in my stomach dreaming of those places.”
Dryly she replied, sliding her arm through his, “I always prefer to break into credit card bureaus. Do you know Chaos? And Inner Circle? They hack into credit bureau computers every week.”
“Sure, sure, but they’re mostly hacking into the TRWs just to check the limits on cards that are already hot. I know all about that, and I actually had offers when I was in the Northwest. Mostly that’s older credit card thieves offering kids a little gum money for some research. But you can use those time-sharing services now—like Compuserve—and order stuff with just account numbers, never even showing your face. It’s not as developed yet as it will be. Mark my words.”
In a break of sunlight through the first cherry blossoms, she told stories about the European ATF1 car phone in the early eighties and how with simple hardware and an FM receiver, it could make free calls to anywhere in the world. She recommended Jan Jacobs’s seminal work, Kraken en Computers, which mentioned, not by name, several of her contacts in the Netherlands, who were responsible in their impulsive youths for rerouting all the phone lines between Holland and Denmark. They strolled past street painters and talked whimsically about art fraud. Perched together on bridges, shoulders touching, they watched the barges move up and down the Seine, and she told him about the mythical French con man who had once gathered investors for diverting the Ourcq River in order to speculate on water.
Sitting outside at a café in slanted winter sunlight and breeze fragrant with approaching spring, he told her he admired anyone who could work so deftly with magnetic ink. She blushed. She waited silently and patiently in her chair, espresso steaming, chin beneath the raised collar of her coat.
“I don’t want to brag or anything,” Kevin said, lowering his face. “But I once encoded a MasterCard account onto a strip of VCR tape.”
“Yes, I’ve done it with audiotape.”
They sighed together and sipped their espressos.
By the third date, they made self-conscious efforts to discuss their families, though it was clear neither was comfortable during these moments. Kevin admitted his father was doing time for fraud, and she said that her mother and father would disown her if they knew of her activities. Her parents had grown up in Odessa, sophisticated people, but they had been relocated to the country in the seventies. Her brother had been killed in the early eighties. She would only say that he had made “deliveries” for a living. “You remind me of him. But of course you are nothing alike.”
Motored on caffeine, adrenaline, and sunlight, Kevin slapped the table and said, “It’s like we had the same childhood. I was constantly relocated.”
She watched him with sleepy eyelids, sipping, and finally responding with a wry smile, “But you are terrible. Such distractions. A week already and I do no work on your passports.”
At first Pierrick was irritated by the lost business, but he became so curious about the mysterious document forger that he actually trailed them in order to spy on dates. Often Kevin noticed his little car parked outside cafés. He made no effort to hide his snooping, and instead criticized Kevin’s itineraries, claiming no woman would ever sleep with a man who frequented such tacky places. They were behaving as ugly tourists from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Kevin explained that Irina shared his aesthetic of junkyards and plastic, and his fondness for her only grew with the realization that she was indifferent to all the social minutiae of Paris.
Still Kevin had no clear idea what she thought of him, until one afternoon as it grew dark, Irina was suddenly, irrationally afraid to return home alone. This anxiety was the first vivid emotion Kevin had seen from her, so he seized upon it as a show of intimacy. Together they rode the curling oxbow of the pink line, never taking their eyes off each other; and on the walk along the Canal St.-Martin, he reached out and held her hand, feeling her surrender hers to him as delicately as an heirloom. He kissed her once outside, once again in the stairwell, and she deflected his impulsiveness with patient, close-mouthed volleys. He whispered that he wanted her so badly he was dying. She had a furrowed, concerned look on her face, as if he were becoming unmanageable, whispering his devotion between kisses, until she relented with a stoical tone, “Yes, okay. But do not talk so much about dying, please.”
She guided him upstairs, then across the living room, and in ten silent strides he was inside a strange hot bedroom between a gurgling radiator and an empty crib. He sat on the unmade bed and listened to the mumble of a conversation. The baby fussed. The grandmother raised her voice. Irina finally returned to the room dandling the infant against her shoulder, blouse still unbuttoned from a breast-feeding. Shushing either the baby or Kevin, she did a rocking dance and sang songs in Ukrainian with a susurrus of kisses and whispers, before finally laying the infant into his crib. When the room was silent, she stood upright and said, “Okay, quick now and not too noisy.”
She had the matter-of-fact demeanor that Kevin expected, undressing herself and nestling into the bed beside him, complimenting his adroitness with bra straps. She talked to him throughout their encounter in a whispering tone, as if they were collectively breaking into a vault. “Not quite right,” she said, “a little lighter touch—yes, yes, better. More like that.” Her body was a rolling pale terrain in the moonlight, moving purposefully, and when he sank down under the covers, she said, as if responding to a business meeting, “We could try that.” Once they had finished together, technically proficient, as synchronized as an ice-skating team, Kevin was satisfied, but oddly distant; and he wondered why he felt like he had made a terrible mistake. She was everything he wanted. She was a genius. True, the sex was mercilessly calculating, but Kevin mistrusted the sort of bluster and abandonment of romance novels.
With their own swelter of humidity over the radiator’s warmth, a trace of breeze slipping through the open window, Kevin soon faded into an uneasy sleep. When he woke a few hours later, Irina was sitting on a chair across the room nursing the baby. The room was filled with gasping sounds, and Irina looked lovely and ruffled, dark hair spilled down over white shoulders, naked in the chair.
“What’s the baby’s name?” asked Kevin in a drowsy voice.
“Jirka,” she said.
/> Every trace of sleepiness was gone immediately, and Kevin leaped out of bed and hunted down his clothes on the floor, whispering, “Oh no, no, no. Okay—Irina—I really like you, but—”
“I can have my own life, Jack. He is married, he has a big family—and I don’t want to sit here and be a slave. I am a grown woman. I am independent of him. I am not one of his whores.”
“Holy shit. Irina, listen, I don’t want this to end either, okay. I’m really happy—theoretically. But then we need to go deep, deep, deep underground with this stuff—I mean, if we’re really going to stand a chance here, we need to take precautions. Seriously. Disguises, hotel rooms, fake IDs. I mean there’s just no other way.”
The baby had fallen asleep and Irina stroked his forehead. “Yes, okay. But as you see, I can deal only with one child at a time.”
THIRTY
Kevin had only briefly introduced Pierrick and Colette, so he was sur-prised that during the weeks of his preoccupation with Irina the two had become friends and gossiping partners. Pierrick attended all of her readings and eventually assumed the role of her steady matinee date. Though Kevin was troubled by the familiarity that had developed between them, he was relieved to witness her allowing Pierrick to correct her French pronunciation, something she wouldn’t have tolerated from a legitimate suitor. What bothered Kevin most was how centrally his affair with Irina figured into every conversation. They had created an entire cinematic fiction of his romance, filled with inside jokes; and now Colette demanded that they meet Irina officially, with all due pomp and circumstance.
Three nights later, Irina met them for dinner on the Left Bank, stepping out of the cab so made up that Kevin believed she might be in disguise. Colette was warm and friendly, kissing Irina’s cheeks and telling her she must be a saint to put up with Kevin. Irina responded dryly that Colette looked just like her passport photograph.
“Oh, let’s please not talk about work, honey. Someone might be wearing a wire.” Then Colette whispered into Kevin’s ear: “She’s adorable.”
Throughout dinner Irina’s posture was as stiff as her hair, and Kevin slumped down around his soup bowl like a prisoner. Colette would occasionally disrupt the flow to ask questions about the Ukraine, hobbies, and future plans, while Irina answered in stern monosyllables. Kevin had expected Colette at her loudest to dominate Irina’s retiring manner, and initially she did. But soon it seemed, inexplicably, that Colette was in the more strained position. She tried to engage Irina in a hunkering private conference of whispers, but when Irina wouldn’t lean away from the table to meet her, Colette waved it off, launching into a series of self-effacing jokes. Soon the isolated flurries of conversation between the two women seemed like a bitter tennis match, in which the improvisational player becomes flustered by the robotic consistency of her opponent. Colette spiraled off into a long soliloquy about how all she ever wanted was “some kind of life.” Her face was flushed in blotches, her lips heavy with wine. She threw her hands around comically, but with a tremulous threat of hysteria.
Kevin paid the bill, and outside they walked in silence, until Colette saw an alley cat and stooped down to beckon it with wiggling fingers. She pursued it under a parked car, dampening her coat and dress to offer her hand. Brushing herself off as they continued onward, she seemed devastated by the rejection from the cat, and, twice as drunk as Kevin had thought earlier, she talked in a sighing tone about how dreadfully unfair the French were, spoiling their awful little dogs and treating their cats like viruses. As they were about to say good-bye, she broke into a fit of sneezing, first suppressing each into a cranial hiccup, and then finally bursting outward with full force. Kevin and Irina waited for a pause to wish her a good night, but each time they tried, she halted them while holding her palm like a partition over her nose and mouth. Finally she regained her normal respiration, and she grabbed Irina by the shoulders, speaking with woozy melodrama, and said, “He’s my good friend, and I’m glad he met someone … so … like the way you are. I mean that.”
“Yes, all right,” said Irina. “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Exactly,” said Colette. “To a new era! And don’t ever forget—” She closed her eyes for a moment as if falling asleep, clutching Irina’s shoulders now to maintain her own balance. “If you hurt him—don’t do it. Because he’s, like—important. To me, that is—not to those people over there. But to me. So—that’s what I have to say. I’m a dangerous bitch, honey, when I want to be.”
“I believe you, yes. You seem like it.”
Pierrick smoked with a sepulchral disappointment on his face. After all the promising weeks under his tutelage, Colette had regressed into a living, breathing faux pas. He took her arm and nodded to Kevin that he would make sure she got home safely. Pierrick led her away, his strides tugged off course by her staggering.
Finally alone on the Métro, Irina said, “She wants you for herself, I think.”
“No, no, no—she just drank too much. I’ve actually never seen her that drunk. So don’t judge her based on that.”
“She does nothing but embarrass herself. I don’t judge, I pity her.”
“There’s no reason to pity her. She was trying to be friendly to you, and she got frustrated. You were a little icy.”
Irina shrugged and looked away.
He tried to temper his comment by adding, “It’s all right. I didn’t expect you two to get along anyway.”
“There is no problem. She is like every American woman. She talks, blah blah blah, and she says nothing. We don’t have to think about her anymore now. She is stupid and I don’t have time.”
“She’s not stupid. In fact, she’s excellent at her work. She’s just not very organized. There’s a big difference. I don’t want to have an argument, Irina. She wanted to be your friend tonight, and you were so superior. You were just determined to snub her all night long.”
When they reached their exit, he saw from the accelerated pace of her stride that she was offended. As they walked to the apartment, he tried to apologize by placing his arm over her shoulder, but she twitched away. Though her face looked angry and unforgiving, she still asked, “Are you coming upstairs?”
“You know I can’t. I’ll work it out, I’ll figure out an arrangement, but I just don’t feel comfortable—”
“Fine,” she said. “Go sleep with your stupid friend.”
“Stop that. We don’t have anything between the two of us. I’ll come by tomorrow, during the day. We’ll talk over the plans.” He leaned down and kissed her on her cold cheek, and she walked away under spaced yellow lights.
When he was back in his grim room, undressing for bed, there came a tentative knock on the door. It was his Algerian landlord in his undershirt, hair mussed and eyes bloodshot. Kevin hadn’t been there in three days and he expected this was some confusion over his weekly rent. The Algerian spoke slowly, making sure that Kevin understood: the police had been here earlier. They had looked through his room and asked questions. With a series of reassuring shoulder pats and handshakes, Kevin promised him that everything was fine, he had nothing to hide, except a collage of wallet photos, which they had evidently confiscated.
With the landlord pacified, Kevin stayed away from the room all night, returning only to shower at the first clatter of trucks. Standing at the counter of a bar downstairs, he drank one espresso to open his eyes, then he raced to Irina’s, hoping the night had quelled her anger enough for him to describe his near miss. Head down, he took the stairs two and three at a stride; he burst into the hall, and noticed only at the last moment that her apartment door was wide open.
Police were everywhere. The old couple sat on the couch, shouting orders as if to movers, while the cops emptied cabinets and sorted through files. Irina sat on the floor, hands cuffed around her baby. She glanced at Kevin and gave him a look of pure contempt. Then she straightened her shoulders and pointed at him, saying to the police that a “buyer” was right outside.
&n
bsp; Kevin stumbled backward, clambered downstairs, and hit the street running. For the next few hours, he stopped at every phone booth, repeatedly trying Pierrick’s and Colette’s answering machines. He couldn’t return to his room. Irina was a linchpin; the police would trace lines outward from her, tacking document fraud on each thief and racketeer up the ladder. She would have two incomplete passports for Colette and himself, so he needed to warn her. By late afternoon, he still couldn’t find Pierrick or Colette, and he cursed his incompetence and his pathetic connections. He was resting his forehead against the inside of another phone booth when he was startled upright by a jeweled ring tapping on the glass.
Outside stood Jirka’s bodyguard, with two other men beside him, both in blazers and stiff blue jeans. One of the men opened the door. “You,” said the bodyguard, reaching inside. Kevin thought of biting his hand. “Come,” said the bodyguard, with a tortured accent. “Come heyre. Beekh traughvle.”
There was a sinister courtesy about the bodyguards. As they walked, the youngest fanned three cigarettes in his mouth, lit each, then, with an expression of having drawn the shortest straw, handed one to Kevin. They humored him by using crosswalks and waiting for the lights to change. They turned down an alley and entered the restaurant through the clanking prep kitchen with its simmering smells of chicken stock and garlic; and they guided him up the stairs. From the stilted friendliness of the men, three bad actors on their way to a surprise party, Kevin expected a gun to click against his temple at any moment.
He sat on the couch and waited. Jirka stood in the bathroom, his thinning hair slicked down with water, his shirt buttoned partway, a towel over one shoulder. He focused on the mirror while lathering his face. The only light in the front room was from a shadeless lamp sitting on the floor, which cast top-heavy shadows against the chipped wall. The windows were blotted with steam. Humming a muddled rendition of an old country song, and eyeing Kevin sideways as if he meant to be clever, Jirka began shaving himself with a straight razor, over his cheeks with a sculptor’s care. When he had finished, he buried his face in the towel and grunted, then paced over to Kevin with dabs of cream still on his ears. He said something to the three men, then made a crumpled smile at Kevin, nodding with an expression that evolved into a strange, fatherly look of disappointment. “My boy,” he said. “We have some tragedy here. Terrible news.”