by Peter Craig
“Mr. Lubek, I just want you to know that I’m as upset about this as you are.”
He pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhhhhh. Shut your fucking mouth now. I want to know. Who fucks up here? Who talks to the police?”
Kevin’s throat felt clogged.
“Let me explain something to you. And listen very good. Irina—she does work for people only if I approve them. Maybe forty or fifty clients. Some very important people. She is always careful—she is a serious person.”
“That’s what I really like about her—”
“Please, don’t talk. Only understand. Five years now, she works—no trouble. Nothing. I love her, I protect the family. She is my secret.” He breathed so hard that his center of gravity seemed to move between his shoulders and waist. “Now you. You come, and—how long I don’t even count. And police. Police, police. Everywhere. Now, I wait right here—and you tell me why.”
“Mr. Lubek, I swear to you, I have no idea what happened.”
Jirka sat on the arm of the couch, stared at the windows with a lamenting face. Kevin could feel how the other men moved around him in predatory circles. He tried to perform for them, showing a relaxed respect and mutual concern, but he betrayed the facade with gulping breaths, like a caught fish on the deck of a ship. Kevin said, “I want to know what happened. I’m as angry as you are.”
“You think I am angry?” Jirka stood again and wandered around the room, and then turned and gave Kevin a look of exaggerated pity. “Angry like a little child? Right? I kick and scream, boo-hoo. I lose my favorite toys. Yes?”
“No, not like that. I didn’t mean like that.”
“I want to explain to you. I am angry when the cooks fuck up downstairs. I am angry when my children don’t go to school. This is very different. When I am twenty-four years old, in Pizen—close to your age, I think—I have to kill a man who steals from my boss. I cut off his fingers, and I let him bleed—because I want him to know what he has done, to learn something—and then I cut his throat. I am not angry when I do this, I know this is part of the contract.”
With his voice quivering, Kevin said, “I’m sorry if I was careless, but I don’t see how anything is my fault.”
Jirka sat and brusquely put his arm around him, rocking Kevin back and forth until the amiable pose changed into a firm clamp at the side of his neck. “You don’t see because you are still a boy—grabbing things. You don’t even know the rules. When you steal from tourists, you borrow from us. It’s okay—you can cry if you are afraid. You need to learn some things, and I can teach you.”
With a rill of saltwater coming from his nose, Kevin said, “I didn’t do anything.”
“Listen to me, my boy. I work for people, and sometime—tomorrow, next week, I don’t know—they will come to talk to me. Because they have problems now. These are people you don’t want to meet. They don’t care about your pretty girlfriend, and how you are angry, and it was all—accident. Yes, I know about you and Irina. But that is nothing compared to this. Maybe they will kill me. Because this is my responsibility. You are my responsibility, and my mistake. Do you understand?”
“I could try to find out what really happened.”
“It doesn’t matter what really happens. You are thick in your head, my boy.” He flicked Kevin on the tip of his nose. “Are you so surprised? You think life is so valuable? It’s nothing. I take it whenever I want. It is just another thing you carry with your wallet and keys. You live like a thief—anyone can take it from you. You Americans don’t know anything. You think you steal what is already yours. You make this deal with me a very long time ago, my boy. Don’t you see? Every time you put your hand in someone’s pocket, that is just a little handshake with me. But I’m tired of talking now.”
Two men grabbed Kevin under the arms and hoisted him over the back of the couch. At first Kevin cooperated, but when he saw Jirka click open the straight razor, he swam frantically against their weight, sprawling his legs around the doorjamb to hold himself outside the bathroom. They threw him onto the floor, where he scrambled away like a mouse, until they caught him again, someone pinning him down with a kneecap in his back. They carried him this time like pallbearers, a man to each writhing leg, fat hands cinching his wrists together. In a flurry of clawing they threw him into the bathtub, where his head struck the faucet and his tailbone bruised against the porcelain. He lost his wind for a few moments and strained to breathe. When Kevin finally sat up, Jirka was perched on a waste bin beside the tub. He grasped Kevin’s cheeks in his palms, squeezing and steering his head around loosely. “So sloppy,” he said. “You are such a little boy, you cannot even shave right. Your father should be ashamed.”
They sprayed and piled a froth of shaving cream onto him, into his hair and eyes, over his nose and mouth until he was drowning in menthol. He felt the first pass of the razor up his cheek. “What does she see in him?” asked Jirka. One of the men laughed in low hiccups. “Let me ask you something.” The razor moved up the curve of his neck with the sound of a striking match. “You think of no one but yourself.” There was the flashing burn of small cuts, and Jirka said, “Oh, stop moving. You don’t want me to have another accident.” He pinched Kevin’s nose tight in his fingers. “Lift up. Like a rat.” He raked the blade over his top lip and Kevin felt another cut. “So many people are hurt.” Within a few seconds, Kevin felt a searing burn as they doused cologne over him. Someone turned on the faucet, scalding hot, and they shoved his head down into it as he flounced from side to side to protect his face and eyes. One of the men cursed that he had burned his hand, while Kevin climbed up, scalp throbbing with heat. Jirka stood at the washbasin, rinsing the razor. “You are as pretty as she is now!”
He took a long time replacing the blade, then tested the new one against his fingertip. “Okay—stick out your tongue. Like this.”
Kevin clamped his mouth shut, and one of the men stomped him on the head, so hard that he felt momentarily dazed. “Open, open, open. I am tired of your crying and your big fucking mouth.”
Kevin wept in a paroxysm, reddened and sick, and he barely had the air left in him to say, “Please.” The bodyguard grabbed him around the throat with both hands and squeezed until Kevin thought his neck would snap, and as his mouth gaped open, Jirka tilted the razor and held it sideways against the inside purse of his cheek. The bodyguard released him. Kevin jolted for air, trying to recover his breath without moving his lips, feeling the cold blade nudged against the hot skin.
“Yes, good. Very still. If you move, I think you lose your tongue.” Jirka’s eyes were yellow around the edges, flat, and Kevin thought he looked dead, skin graying and a wisp of decayed breath through his teeth. Then he smiled, and said in a tone that sounded almost loving, “I wish you would be a man and stop crying. Show some courage, some—what is the word?” Kevin closed his eyes and waited with the steel rubbing faintly on his teeth, while Jirka hunted through his vocabulary: pride, faith, respect—he couldn’t remember. “God will know. His English is better than mine.”
With a sudden yank, Kevin’s face was tugged upward and dropped with the sound of a fishhook pulled loose. He fell against the side of the tub and saw a scattered spray of blood along the porcelain. He tasted thick, sweet iron; but he was unsure where it came from. He didn’t recognize his own blood. He sank lower and, with one eye open, he watched as Jirka shook the syrupy blade, washed his hands, unbuttoned and changed his shirt. Then Kevin saw the redness mixing with the lingering water around the drain, thinning like wine must. The pain was far away. Whatever had happened, Kevin hoped that this might be an insignificant slash on the corner of his mouth. He felt his tongue—still intact. As the blood netted in his eyelashes, he had faith, even as the pain began to clarify into a sloppy strand across his cheek. When he touched his mouth, a surge passed through his eye socket, jaw, the hammer of his ear; he felt his heartbeat in the gash along his mouth, and he saw blood as thick as resin in the creases of his palm.
The
men wrapped towels around Kevin’s face and lifted him from the tub, their gentle caution seeming to be inspired by a fear of touching his blood. They carried him downstairs as he stumbled between them. He heard the kitchen, the cymbal crashes of pans, the knocking on cutting boards. The smells seeped through the towel. Someone called, a door swung open, the air outside was cold and the wind sounded like fleeing steps through trash. Blood dampened his collar as they guided him through a network of alleys until he could hear the trickle of water through metal grates, a barge splashing ahead, carousel music in the distance. One of the men yelled for someone to clear out of the area, and from the sound of voices over water, and the feeling of bottled wind, he knew he was right at the branching dead end off the Canal St.-Martin, across from Stalingrad Square. He felt a gun press against the bunched towels.
The man holding Kevin was stiff and upright, pressed too close, so that Kevin saw his chance: bending in a snakelike twist, he coiled his legs back around the man’s feet; then he threw their collective weight backward, tripping them both. They fell together, and Kevin felt the suddenness of the dip as a move he knew from his childhood karate classes and play-fighting with his father. While the man panicked at his loss of balance, throwing out his arms and losing hold, Kevin was patient, and in the split second of falling, he untangled himself to roll gracefully off the pavement. In a few racing heartbeats, he leaped to his feet and ran, the towel unwinding behind him. Each stride burned the cut in his face. As the two men chased him, Kevin bypassed Stalingrad Square and kept running. He was already dead, it seemed, so unreal were all the lights and windows. Farther south, he lost his strength again and needed to hold tightly onto the rail to descend the Métro steps.
He came to the turnstile and found a ticket in his pocket like the inheritance from a previous life. He heard the men coming through the tile labyrinth behind him, so he climbed onto the tracks and ran into the Métro tunnel, through the darkness full of rats and electrical conduits. The train was approaching and he ducked into an alcove between girders, where he crouched down and watched the lit windows rush past like a flip book of bright faces, each a small wallet photograph, until with diminishing clanks the train was gone.
He didn’t know if he had passed out; another train startled him, crossing near his extended legs, a bright, shrieking alley of coats and fluttering newspapers, which left behind a whispering, hollow recoil, draining into silence. Then he heard voices. Echoing. They were coming. Someone was howling, amused by the echo. Laughter. No, they were younger voices: children. He saw their thin figures coming through the fretwork of tracks and wires. How long had he been down here bleeding? He saw them leap the rungs, avoid the voltage along the central conduit, he saw the swinging movements of their arms, the spray paint cans, the backpacks, a saunter in their shoulders: they were African kids. Graffiti taggers. One found him and frantically waved for the others. “Regarde!” They stooped around him, whispering. Kevin muttered, “Ne m’amenez pas à l’hôpital. Go to—Place Monge.” They picked him up and walked him down the tracks and raised him onto the platform. With a dreamlike efficiency, they were on a train; Kevin was across from a woman in a brown business suit who asked startled questions he couldn’t understand. Kevin was shivering and one of the boys laid his coat over his shoulders. “Place Monge? Quelqu’un pourra vous aider là-bas?”
Kevin nodded his head, then mumbled, “Just no hospitals. Je suis recherché.”
Soon they were out in the darkness again, under a smudged pattern of windows and streetlights, shadows and voices moving past; and as the boys helped him onward, he heard passing reactions to him, as if he were cutting a wake right down the path of onlookers. He told them, right, left, gauche, droite—seeming to make decisions indiscriminately; until suddenly he recognized a street market and knew all of the buildings, and he said to the kids, “Ici, ici, très bien.” They carried him up steps to the intercom, where he had a sudden moment of doubt: was this the old apartment or the new one? As if it were no more than a lucky number, he pushed a button to the flat, leaving a bright spot of blood, and within seconds heard Colette’s voice through the speaker. The tallest boy said, “S’il vous plaît, s’il vous plaît! Il y a un monsieur américain ici qui vous demande et il est blessé avec un grande coupure au visage.”
She responded in rapid French, which Kevin didn’t understand. Then in English she said: “Kevin? Is that you? Come through that door in front of you. I’ll be on the stairs.”
They pushed forward, everything accelerating through rooms and doorways to a spiral staircase where Colette rushed down on bare feet. She was fluttering in clean white organdy and a skirt, and she grabbed him around the waist, gasping as all of them ascended the corkscrew of stairs, repeating, “Oh shit, oh shit,” until they were through her open door and into the soft lights of the front room, where he heard a jazz trumpet, smelled dinner, saw plants and books and cozy shadows. She led him to the bathroom where a fluorescent tube flickered overhead. He watched her turn and touch one of the boys’ faces, and thank him profusely, “Merci, merci, mille fois!” and the boys scattered throughout her living room at some offer of food and drinks. There was another man, British, who wandered into the doorway with a wineglass close to his sweater vest, who looked pale and bewildered, and said, “Good lord, Augusta, this man needs a hospital.”
“Richard, if you want to be helpful, go get a pad and pencil from the kitchen and let’s write down everything we need.”
“Who are these people? There are three black children ransacking your cupboards.”
“Now!”
She crouched over Kevin, and he saw that her sleeves and the front of her blouse were already drenched with his blood. Her face, pale and scared, had streaks of red across the chin and cheek. “We can do two things. I can take you to the hospital, and then we—handle the police when they come. That may be our only choice. Okay? Or I can try to close this myself.”
“You,” said Kevin.
“Don’t just say that! Just because I was a seamstress for a bunch of foster kids, that doesn’t make me a surgeon. You don’t see yourself. Okay—calm down. I can try.” Her face scrunched up into a panic, until she relaxed herself again with determined puffs. “I’ve done a stitch before when I was in jail. It’s called the vertical mattress, and it’ll just close it. That’s all. But this is a complicated spot, sweetie, and even if I can clean it and do this, I’m going to leave a scar like you can’t believe. Do those kids know how long this cut has been open? Richard—there you are, shit. Get one of those kids in here. I need to ask him something. Wait, write this down first. Go to the pharmacy right down the street, and get—write it down!—spray-on Lidocaine. Have one of the boys help you, your French is a wreck. Get catgut sutures, antibiotic ointment, and saline. I don’t know the needles, so just get all of them, and—tape! Closure tape. Tons of gauze—and some sanitary napkins, we need something to soak this blood up. God, what am I forgetting? I’m a fucking mess. Did you write it all down?”
“You’re mad, you realize that.”
“Let’s step up in a crisis here, Richard! Move. And don’t answer any strange questions or I’m calling your wife!” She petted the damp hair from Kevin’s eyes, shushed him, and said, “I’m shaking a lot. I don’t know if I can do this.”
He grabbed her hand. Bloody fingers dovetailed.
“I’m going to get you a little whiskey, sweetie.”
He faded out and back. Beside an arrangement of end tables and reading lamps, he lay on his back and saw the ceiling’s intersecting rings of shadow and light. He felt a bee-sting pierce and a flutter through his skin; the thread slithered into his cheek with a rustling sound straight under his ears. Under her half-moon reading glasses, she was sobbing as she wound each stitch, so that it appeared to Kevin as if she were absorbing the spilled pain off his skin. Slowly, she grew more focused, and finally showed the same frowning concentration she gave to her drawings. The tugs were sturdy now. Her pupils widened and he sa
w little coin-shaped images of himself. Her hair was unraveled and stuck together at the tips with his blood. She paused, momentarily distracted by his watching eyes. He mumbled, “I love you.”
“Shhhh, stay still.” She picked up his hand and kissed the skin between his fingers, then in her airy, play-acting voice, said, “And please don’t say anything that you’ll regret in the morning. I might just follow through and sew your whole mouth shut.”
THIRTY-ONE
In the greasy mirror of the truck stop bathroom, Kevin peeked under the flayed edge of the surgical tape to see a dried crimson groove, cinched together in an upward curl of stitches like a baseball seam. She had done a tremendous job for a novice. Along the buckled pink riverbanks of skin, he saw no sign of infection, despite a hangover in his bones. He didn’t remember much after having found Colette last night, but as he now walked back outside into a wind scented with gasoline, he noticed a change in her behavior. From the car she trotted toward him, hair in streamers, blouse like a wind sock. She lay her fingers on his face and neck. No fever, no swelling. It was a miracle, she told him. “We’ll get some antibiotics when we get there, just to be safe.”
As Kevin groaned and struggled into the car, a few fat raindrops fell against his arm. Pierrick pumped the gas, cigarette pushed into the wind, trailing ash and sparks.
By afternoon they’d made it to an abandoned cottage, beside a small farm plot of lumpy, fallow mud, where crows swarmed between the eaves and a crooked fence. Around back, behind the cottage, in tall grass bowed down under the weight of a recent drizzle, Colette and Pierrick pried off the boards over the windows, all the while Pierrick swearing that the owners—his aunt and uncle—lived in Paris and wouldn’t return until summer. After they had broken in and helped Kevin through the door, Pierrick reminisced about his youthful imprisonment here, and the years in which this was a functioning fifteen acres of sweet-smelling alfalfa crops, chickens, and fat farm cats.