by Gene Wolfe
I kept looking, but after a while the crowd thinned out and it started to get light. So I went up to a guy who looked pretty decent and asked the way to the park. His German was not as good as mine, but it was better than a lot of people’s and he told me.
There would be bushes in the park is what I thought, and I could hide in them and get some sleep. After I had rested up, I might be able to find something to eat. And after that I would start looking for the American embassy.
It seemed to me like a good plan, only I never even got started on it. A cop spotted the bloodstain on my shirt. When he found out I did not speak his language, he put cuffs on me, steel ones like Raincoat’s, and marched me off to a police station. By then I was so tired I could not walk fast for more than three or four steps. Pretty soon I would start lagging and he would hit me with his club. Cops here in the U.S. call that a baton, only it is really a club and not anything anybody would conduct an orchestra with.
In a way it was good that we had to walk, because it gave me time to think. I decided the way to handle things was to pretend I did not understand German. Or French, either, although my French is really pretty good.
So when we got to the station, I would talk nothing but English. They tried German on me, and a couple of languages I could not identify, maybe Polish and Russian, or Romanian and Hungarian. They were all Greek to me, and Greek might be a pretty good guess, too. How about Greek and Turkish?
Then a guy came in and looked at my wound. He could have been a doctor, but my guess is he was an ambulance attendant or something. He gave me shots and probed it a little, then he sewed up both holes.
When he had finished they shoved me in a cell. There were two other guys there already and no bunks, but one guy was asleep anyway, just lying on the floor. Which is what I did. The other guy was sitting in a corner and looking deep blue. He did not try to talk to me, and I did not try to talk to him, not even English.
I went to sleep, and pretty fast.
When I woke up it was afternoon, I think. My wound hurt again because the shots had worn off, and I had to pee. A slop jar took care of the peeing, but nothing stopped my wound from hurting. It just kept on and after a while I sort of got used to it.
Then they marched me out and put me in a car and drove me to a big gray building that might have been a couple of miles outside the city. Pretty soon I was sitting in a real honest-to-God waiting room with beat-up chairs, and old magazines I could not read, and a cop to make sure I did not run. He put cuffs on me, too, but with my hands in front instead of in back. That was really nice of him, and I tried to show him I appreciated it.
After about an hour I was taken to a little meeting room, and there was a red-headed guy in there who smiled at me and said, “How about a cigarette? Want one?” He was maybe two years older than I was, and he said it in English.
I said no thanks and asked if he was American.
“Nope. I did my growing up in Saint Louis, though. Went to high school there and all that crap.” He offered his hand. “Demetrios Bobokis—Butch Bobokis. How about some coffee?”
I shook and said I would love some, and something to eat if he could arrange for it. So he went to the door and talked to somebody out there, then came back and sat down. “It will be a while. Where you from?”
I said I had lived all over, which was the truth.
“Here?”
“No, that’s why I came here. I’d never been here before and I wanted to see it. Listen, I’m not a spy or anything like that.”
“You’re a revolutionary.” He grinned at me. “You were broadcasting for them, that crazy religion.”
“They made me, and that’s the absolute truth. I was under arrest in Puraustays. I was supposed to live with a guy there, and they were going to shoot him if I didn’t. Only I could go out in the daytime and take pictures for the travel book I’m going to write about your country. I found this very big, run-down old house, the Willows. I wanted to take a lot of pictures there. There were painted ceilings and lots of other neat stuff, and it’s supposed to be haunted.”
“You get any pictures of ghosts?”
“No.” After I said that I pulled up short to think. “You know, I really don’t know. Sometimes ghosts will show up in a picture even if you didn’t see them when you took it. I read a thing about that once, and I never had a chance to look at mine. Three guys knocked on the door, I opened it up to see what they wanted, and they grabbed me.”
He nodded to that.
“They put me in a boat and took me across the lake—”
“Up the lake.”
“Okay, up the lake to here. After that they held me in an old factory where they used to make shirts or dresses or something.”
He nodded again. “Go on.”
“They gave me a copy of their holy book that had been translated on somebody’s computer. And they—”
“Wait a minute. Is English the only language you know?”
“Huh-uh. I know German and French pretty well. A little Japanese, too, only not very much.”
“The report I got on you said that you only spoke English.”
“Yeah.” My mind was working so fast it damned near flew apart. “That’s what I pretended, okay? Put yourself in my shoes. I’m from America and I’m in big trouble. Do I want to talk to somebody who knows German or somebody who knows English?”
He nodded, slowly this time. “I’ve got it. Was this with the Legion of the Light, too?”
“No. They knew I spoke German, because that’s how I talked to them when I answered the door.”
He got out a little notebook and made a note in it. “Okay, I want you to think about this and think hard. Did you ever hear any of them speak English? Just one word, maybe?”
I shook my head. “Absolutely not. Believe me, I’d have jumped all over him if anybody had.”
“What they gave you was a computer translation? Did they say so?”
“No, it just read like one. What’s so big about this?”
“It’s my job to ask the questions. Your job is to answer them.”
“All right, I’ll take a stab at it. It seems like hardly anybody has computers here.”
I waited for him, but he did not say a word.
“It’s not like that in America. Suppose you were in America and somebody told you to go find a guy who owned a computer, it would take you about five minutes. Only not here. I’ve met quite a few of you, none of you seemed like you had a computer.” As soon as I had said that, I got the feeling it was not quite true. I could have named one guy who might have had one, and I wanted to kick myself for not having braced him on it.
“Go on.”
“So you can go looking for somebody who’s got one and software to translate your language into English.”
“Or German into English. We know they’ve got a German translation already, and we know who did that one.”
“Want to tell me?”
“Hell, no. Or anyway, not yet. You were forced to broadcast for the Legion?”
“Right.”
“Would you call them friends of yours?”
“No way!” I shook my head.
“Would you consider working for us? Coming over to our side?”
I did not say anything for a minute or two.
“Well? A straight answer.”
“Okay. The straight answer is that I’d have to think about it. For one thing I came over to your side already. I wrote all the things I said in my broadcasts. Did you know that? I wrote my own scripts.”
“I assumed it.”
“They gave me the book, like I said, and they lectured me a lot about the Light of Stability. After that I wrote myself a script. I’d found out we were in an old factory, and there was a room there with a million kinds of buttons in wooden boxes, so they’d been making clothes. Probably a lot of different kinds. I put that in a broadcast and you guys came like I knew you would.”
“We rescued you.”
I
raised my shoulders and let them drop. “I’ve been in jail, and I’ve seen enough of this building to tell it’s a prison. If you want more, one of the cops I tipped off shot me. Want to see the place?”
He waved that one away. “I’ll get our doctor to take a look at it. What else can I do for you?”
“You can let me talk to somebody at the American embassy.”
“If I can.” He sounded tired. “I can let them know you’re here, and I will. They probably won’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Ask them. I don’t know. If you’ll work with us, you won’t be in prison. That’s a promise.”
“What if I quit?”
“Get real! What do you think?”
There was more, but I do not want to write it and you would not want to read it. We talked about America and the European Union, and he did not know as much as I wanted him to, and I did not know as much as he wanted me to. So after a while a guard—not the cop I had before—came and took me to a cell.
It was not as bad as I expected, which was something Butch had promised over Danish and coffee, a nice cell. There were two bunks in it, but no other prisoner. Right away I figured there would be somebody shoved in with me pretty soon, and he would be a plant.
Do you want more? There was a little window with wire over it, low enough for me to look through. That was bad in winter until they put a cover over it, but when I got there the nights were pretty warm and it was not bad at all. There was a toilet and a washbowl, too. There was no hot water, but I used my hands and my shirttail for a washrag and cleaned up as well as I could, telling myself that if I ever saw Butch Bobokis again I would ask him for soap.
The bunk was better than the one in the old factory, and the blanket was wool. I was more than ready for both of them.
I slept all night and half the morning. Probably they had called the prisoners for breakfast, but I slept right through it. When I sat up, there was a big guy in my cell sitting on the other bunk and looking at me. So I told him, “Good morning,” in German.
He said, “I don’t suppose you understand English?” It was in English, and you could tell he had about given up hope by the sound of his voice.
I said, “Sure I do. Where you from?”
“Cincinnati. We call it the Queen City.” He sighed. “And I wish to God I was back there.”
We talked some more, and I found out that his name was Russ Rathaus and he was sixty-three. He looked quite a bit younger than that to me, maybe fifty or fifty-five tops.
“I had a neat little novelty business,” he said. “We made voodoo dolls and sold them all over the country. I don’t mean we dealt with customers direct. We wholesaled them to novelty shops, the kind of stores where they sell souvenirs and plates with the presidents on them. All that junk. My partner invented the process, and I bankrolled him, running the business out of my garage at first. You looked at me funny when I said voodoo dolls. I guess anybody would.”
I said I thought you had to make those yourself.
“Hey, it doesn’t work, so who cares? The thing was the faces, see? Suppose you’ve got it in for the mayor. You ask around for a doll with the mayor’s face, only nobody’s got one because they’d have to have a contract with him and pay a royalty, and all that crap. Then you hear about our Imprinting Dolls. That was what we called them, Imprinting Dolls. You look at the dolls and the clerk explains how everything works. So you buy the complete kit. That will run you thirty-two ninety-nine to about forty-four ninety-five, depending on where you buy it. For your money you get one doll—male or female, your choice—an imprinting lens, about a hundred of our special pins, and our special book of spells and instructions. That’s everything you need except a picture of the mayor and a strong light source. The doll works sort of like film used to. You remember film cameras?”
I told him I did, and I even owned a few.
“Then you’ll understand a lot better than most people. Well, the book shows you how you set up your Imprinting Doll and the imprinting lens, and the guy’s picture and the light. You set ’em up and leave them like that for six or seven hours. How long depends on how good the picture is and how strong your light is—how many lumens. When the time’s up you’ve got a voodoo doll with the mayor’s face, see? If he’s got fat cheeks, the cheeks swell. And the eyes are his eyes, just like in the picture you used. It was neat and people loved it.”
I said he must have sold a bunch of them.
“You bet we did. We were selling to shops all over the country, and getting orders from overseas. Suppose you had it in for somebody else, too. Let’s say there was this lousy actor and you hated him and everything he’d ever been in, see? So you decided to get another doll. Well, this time you didn’t have to buy a whole kit. You already had the lens and the book, and a bunch of pins. All you needed was another doll and you were set. The same place that sold you your kit would sell you a new doll for nineteen ninety-nine, if you were lucky. Twenty-nine ninety-five in most outlets. Actors will sell anybody a nice big glossy for ten or fifteen bucks—get one and you’re set. Only if you’re smart, you’ll cut a picture out of a magazine.”
“I’ve got it,” I told him. “You must have made quite a bit of money.”
“We did.” For a minute he smiled. “We made quite a pile, and the big doll manufacturers were all after us to sell out. Finally we did. I handled the negotiations, and got us quite a bit more than the company was worth. Pete actually ended up with more than I did, because he’d held on to fifty-five percent of the patent. But I got quite a bit, and we get royalties, too. Two bucks on every doll they make doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up.”
“They must make thousands of them,” I said.
“Hundreds of thousands, and a hundred thousand dolls is two hundred thousand bucks. So I get my cut of that, and I got half the money from our company. Only I don’t have it here.”
“Yeah. I know how that is.”
“Damn these bastards anyway!”
I waited.
“Rosalee and I had decided we’d tour Europe, see? We started in Germany because my folks were German way back. We bought a nice Mercedes there. I figured we’d drive it around Europe for a couple of years, sell it, and go home. We went to Austria next, then east and south.”
“They don’t get a lot of tourists here,” I said.
“We didn’t think we were tourists.” Russ looked a little mad and a lot sad. “Tourists go around and look at certain things, old churches and all that junk, and never see the country. We called ourselves travelers, and that’s what we felt like.” He took a big breath and let it out.
“So you came here.”
“No. Not really. Rosalee’d had an aunt, her aunt Lilly. Aunt Lilly’d married some guy from Europe, but he got hurt on the job and had to quit work. He was disabled, see, and couldn’t work. But he got disability benefits. He’d get those for the rest of his life.”
“Sure,” I said.
“He’d get them anywhere he lived. The government would mail him a check or just stick the money in his account if that was what he wanted. So he told Aunt Lilly that this was a nice place and they could live here cheap. With the money he’d be getting they’d be rich here, okay?”
“Right.”
“So off they went, only the family never heard a thing after that. Lilly didn’t write letters or anything, or if she did, they didn’t get through. So Rosalee wanted to find out what had happened to her. We’d come here and look in phone books and like that, and ask around a little. I thought sure somebody at our embassy would know about her.”
I said, “You could have written to them from the States.”
“We did. Or Rosalee did, anyhow. Only she never heard back. We figured the mail here was lousy and maybe somebody at the embassy had written, except we never got it.”
“Diplomatic mail goes special,” I told him.
“No shit? Well maybe nobody ever got Rosalee’s letter.” Russ’s voice, which had be
en pretty loud, went soft. “Rosalee’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, anyway. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. I’ve dated a couple of those.”
“That’s your private life.” Russ had been sitting on his bunk. He stood up when he said it and went over to the window. “I don’t want to stick my nose into that. That’s not my way.”
I said I had nothing to hide, which was the truth.
He turned around to look at me. “Damned nice of you, but everybody’s got something to hide.”
“Not me. I’ll level with you, and here’s a question. Will you level with me?”
“About everything? Hell, no. But you probably won’t ask about that stuff. It was a long time ago, see? So you can ask me anything you want to. If I have to lie, I’ll lie. But I won’t get my back up.”
“Swell, I will. Do you speak any languages besides English?”
“A little German I picked up in Germany and Austria.”
“Anything else?”
He shook his head.
After that I asked him two or three questions in German, but he did not understand any of them, or said he did not. It was a long time before I found out how good his German really was.
I switched back to English. “Who’d you talk to before they put you in here with me?”