The Land Across

by Gene Wolfe

  I nodded. “Makes sense.” After I had told Naala all that she told the driver to turn around and go back to the magic shop. He looked at the guy sitting next to him for a minute, and that was when I realized he looked like the guy who had been sitting next to the cop who had stopped his car to talk to me in Puraustays. Also that he looked an awful lot like that guy I had been seeing on posters.

  Maybe I should have asked Naala whether she wanted us to get out, too. But I did not. I just assumed she did and got out and helped Rosalee get out.

  The shop was bigger than I had expected, narrow but it went a long way back. The old guy behind the counter had white hair. He was pretty bent over.

  Naala smiled at him, very friendly. “I hope you can help us, sir. This Amerikan lady has become separated from her husband, and we are trying to bring them together once more. You must know many magicians.”

  The old guy nodded. “I know every magician in the city, and many in the provinces. I will be glad to help you if I can, officer.”

  So he had seen right away that Naala was some kind of cop. I wondered if he knew what kind.

  “He is an Amerikan magician. Do you speak German?”

  The old guy straightened up a little. “I do, officer. English likewise. He would not have to speak German with me.”

  “That is fortunate. I believe he speaks German, but perhaps not well. Amerikans speak no language well, not even the English. You have had no Amerikan magician come here?”

  “Not in many years, officer.”

  “This is unfortunate, but perhaps he comes. You will tell him his wife seeks him?”

  “Of a certainty, if you wish it.”

  “I do, you may be sure. We strive to assist her. Let me leave you my card. You will be able to tell him at once where she is to be found.” Naala pulled a card out of her purse and handed it over.

  “I will guard it with care. It may be that he comes.” The old guy took the card and it disappeared before I could blink.

  “You yourself do magic.” Naala was still smiling, very friendly. “Show me more.”

  “I fear I am out of practice.”

  “I will make allowances. What you do with my card is most clever.”

  “Do you see many customers in my store?”

  Naala made a little show of looking around. “No. None at all.”

  “I have not much money.” The old guy looked awfully sad. I had the feeling it came easy to him.

  “Nor I. Who does, in these bad times? Do you fear I will take your tricks away? I will not.” Naala raised her hand. “You will tell me if you see the Amerikan magician?”

  The old guy nodded hard. “I will, at once!”

  “Then I take nothing of yours. You have my word. Show me another trick.”

  “This is one of the best. You will not take it? Or ask how it is done?”

  Naala promised again, and he took a long yellow pencil from a pocket of his dusty old coat. When he passed his hand over it, it turned into two pencils. I guess I must have looked pretty surprised because he grinned, and there were three pencils. Rosalee clapped, and as soon as she started Naala clapped, too.

  He handed a pencil to each of us. “You may keep these if you like,” the old guy told Naala and me. Then he said the same thing to Rosalee in English. He had a pretty thick accent.

  Naala said, “You did not wish us to keep your tricks,” and handed her pencil back.

  “That is not the trick,” he told her. I had figured that out already.

  “Another I show.” He got down a narrow, wooden box and took a man-doll with no face out of a cardboard box. He let us look into the wooden box, but I was looking at the doll. When he put it in the box, its head and feet stuck out the ends. “I need a knife, a big one. Do you have such a knife, young man?”

  I said, “I don’t even have a little one.”

  “In the back there is a gas ring and a loaf of bread. You must excuse me.”

  He came back with a big bread knife. “Now I cut the box in two without damaging the doll. This you must watch carefully!” He flourished the bread knife so it really looked like it was slashing through the box, but the box was wood and the knife was for cutting bread so I knew it had not.

  As soon as he had made the flourish, half the box fell off. He pulled the doll out of the other half and showed it to us. “When the magician uses a big sharp knife this is a very good trick,” he said.

  “I want that doll,” Naala told him.

  “Please! To me you swore, only a moment ago.”

  “I do not collect for evidence. I will pay.” She opened her purse.

  He relaxed quite a bit. “It belongs to another trick. I borrowed it for this.”

  “It is that other trick I buy from you.”

  “Let me get the things.” He took down the cardboard box again and pulled out a plastic lens in a blue plastic stand. “In this way it must be arranged.” He put the doll on the counter and set up the lens to show her. “We must have a picture. Wait. I will find one.”

  “I have one here,” Naala told him. “This is the lady’s husband, the Amerikan magician.”

  The old guy did a double take, and I do not believe he faked it. “That face I know….”

  “Tell us!” Naala leaned toward him.

  “He was here,” the old guy said. “Not this year. Some while ago.”

  “Twenty-five years ago, perhaps? Twenty-six? Such a number as that?”

  “No. That is too long. Two years? Let me think.”

  I was thinking, too—thinking that Russ had talked like he had never been in this country before.

  The old guy snapped his fingers. “Two years … No, three Christmases ago. He comes the day I reopen. He buys … the snake that foretells the future, and the vanishing cigarettes. In Germany I lived three years, and we talked about it.”

  I said, “I guess he showed you one of these dolls and how it worked.”

  The old guy shook his head. “That is another man, a man in Amerika. He writes and sends a sample.”

  “You said it had been many years since an Amerikan magician had been in your store. Now you say it is only three years. That’s not so long.”

  “This man?” The old guy pointed to Russ’s picture. “He is not Amerikan. He is German.”

  Back in the police car I wanted to know why Naala looked so pleased with herself. “Do you think Russ’s been after the old guy for help? If he has, the old guy’s the world’s best actor.”

  “That I do not think,” Naala said. “Rather I think we have done much and rub my hands. We have showed this woman to him, which was all I wished when we came. Now more. We have learned Rathaus is German, or if he is not German he is enough fluent to make others think. Also Rathaus was here not many years ago, when he uses another name. These three things in the past half-hour, and none of them are nothing. Do you wish for more?”

  I nodded.

  “We have eliminated one of the three customers. It may be as you think that he has come to one for help. You say it was not that one, with which I agree.”

  I was holding the box with the hand on my lap when she said that, and I felt the hand move. That was the first time. It may have moved before, but if it did I had not noticed. Not until I was sitting in the police car when we were taking Rosalee back. It just moved the once, and I told myself I was crazy, I must have tilted the box, and thought about other things.

  Such as Rosalee, and what I would give to get her in the sack. She had promised me, and now she was going back. I leaned over toward her a little bit and whispered, and of course I talked English: “You’re going back to jail, but I got you out once and I’ll get you out again. Trust me.”

  She did not look happy, but she nodded.

  So we let her out at the gate after Naala explained to the guards and told them we would be back to get her again tomorrow. They were mad because we did not have her prison clothes, but Naala was a JAKA operator so they did not say it.

  When we
were rolling again I said, “What if Russ comes to the prison to try to get her out?”

  “This is what I seek to prevent. His son knows we have her. The old man who shows us tricks knows, too. Tomorrow we take her again, perhaps.”

  “Why don’t we keep her in your apartment?”

  “We must sleep and she would go away. Let us suppose Rathaus learns of us as we wish. He comes by night and all is lost. Be happy that you are no longer in prison. Now I must think.”

  So I shut up, but I was thinking, too. The JAKA had gotten me released to Naala’s custody so she could use me to find Russ. Suppose she decided that Rosalee was better than me, which seemed to be where she was headed. I would be back behind bars, right?

  Only if Rosalee escaped I would be more valuable than ever. So how could I work that?

  Now let us get real. I could escape a lot better than Rosalee. I was not doing it because I had no money, no passport, and no friends.

  Except Russ. And Russ was out. He would help me, if I would help him, maybe. How could I get in touch when all I had was a pencil? You will be way ahead of me on that, probably.

  I did it while Naala was in the shower. She had told me to shower first, which I did. Then she said she wanted to wash her hair and fix it up in various ways, and if I slept she might wake me up with a kiss.

  So fine. Only first I sharpened my pencil with a nice sharp kitchen knife I found, and second I tore a couple of flyleaves out of one of Naala’s books.

  Afterward, when we had both cleaned up a little, she told me she had done it a lot for the JAKA when she was younger.

  I said, “No kidding? Well, you’re sure good-looking enough, but I wouldn’t have thought…” I just let it peter out, like I was thinking about it.

  “We wish information. It is easy when one knows how. First I must get the man to buy us drinks. Two for each is better. There is no man anywhere who will not boast after two drinks.”

  “Sure,” I said. “He’ll brag, but will you get what you want?”

  “Very likely I do not. Not then. I look impressed but—this is important—it is in such a way I look that he believe I am trying to hide my impress. I lie with him and it is oh, so good for me. Now he wish to impress more than ever. He tells me what he should not tell. When there is no more I caution him. He should not speak of these things to anyone, not even to me. I stop my ears. The least word, I say, might shake the world. Now he is very proud and tell me more.” She laughed.

  Women always say the guy goes to sleep first and too quick, and maybe I did. She wanted to be cuddled, but she was too proud to say it. So I cuddled her and pretty soon I thought she was asleep only maybe not. Then I went to sleep for sure, and when I woke up Naala was snoring.

  I have known some guys who got very mad because some lady snored with them, but I have always thought that was really, really juvenile. I was not mad, but I had a big problem.

  If I just lay there and listened to her, I was pretty sure I was never going to get back to sleep. I would be awake the rest of the night, and it was only a little bit past one, meaning I would be yawning all day. Not good.

  If I poked her in the ribs she might not stop. And if it really woke her up she was going to be mad. She had a gun, and anytime she wanted to she could send me back to prison. So even worse.

  Well, suppose I was to sneak out of her bed and go to bed in my room? If I made it and got back to sleep it would probably not be too bad and something I could smooth over. Great. But if she caught me while I was sneaking, she might think I was giving her the slip. From then on I’d spend my nights in the steel-bar Sheraton.

  I had just about settled on trying to roll her over when something like a rat ran across my chest. I froze.

  Next thing was that Naala’s snore sounded more like gagging and then it went silent. She sat up fast, but not before her elbow had socked me in the face.

  Maybe I should have known right off. Maybe I should have done something else even if I did not know, Heimlich maneuver or something.

  Maybe a lot of things. What I really did was jump out of bed, run to the doorway, and switch on the light.

  Something gray had Naala by the throat, and she was trying to pull it off. I had rats on the brain and figured it was a rat and would bite the hell out of me if I grabbed it. I grabbed it anyway, squeezing it as hard as I could, jerked it off and threw it against the wall, all in one motion. It landed on its back and for maybe a quarter of a second had trouble turning over. It looked to me like a big spider then, and I tried to stomp on it.

  That was when Naala started yelling. I looked at her and looked back quick, but by the time I looked back it was gone.

  So that was a mess. I tried to quiet Naala down, and it did not work. Then all of a sudden she shut up and went for her gun. I had not known where she kept it, but it was hanging from a hook in her closet behind some clothes.

  “There was a woman who strangles me. Where is she?”

  I said there was not, that at first I thought it was a rat, but it was really just a big spider or something like that.

  “A woman! Her I see! Her I remember! Where she is?”

  I wanted to say I thought she had crawled under the bed, but I did not. I got the broom instead and swung it back and forth underneath the bed without finding anything except dust bunnies. To put the broom back next to the stove, I had to walk across the living room. That was where I saw it. It was climbing back into its box, which was on a little end table there. Only when I saw it, it seemed like it saw me. It must have gone over the edge of the table on the far side. That is how I thought then and how I think now.

  When I brought the empty box to Naala she wanted to know what I had done with it. I had seen that one coming a mile and should have had an answer all ready, but I had not been able to think of one. “It isn’t really a cut-off hand, like we thought,” I told her. “It’s more like some kind of animal somebody has fixed up to look like a hand.”

  “Rotting garbage,” she said. (It is one word in their language.) “It is a hand, and if you do not in this box have it the woman who chokes me has taken it.”

  So after that we searched the apartment, and I mean we searched it good. I did, particularly. That was because Naala was looking for a person, but I was looking for the hand, which could hide in a pretty small space. I did not find it and neither did Naala. Finally we had a couple of drinks and she went back to bed and made me lie down beside her. It must have been about two-thirty by then. Maybe three. This time she put her gun under her pillow.

  Right here I probably ought to say something about that gun. It was pretty small, but not the smallest I have ever seen. It was also pretty light, but there are lighter ones. On the side of the slide it said, “CAL 9 BROWNING COURT,” which I had never heard of. Naala told me not to touch it, and I said I would not. Later I got one pretty much like it.

  She had some bad scratches on her neck, which I should have talked about before. She had put iodine on them and I had put little strips of some kind of surgical tape on a couple of the worst ones, and I figured they would keep her awake. Wrong. She went right to sleep, but I did not.

  To tell the truth, I was too scared. First and mainly I was scared of the hand. I knew it had been just a hand and not a whole woman. It was not some kind of animal that looked like one, either. It was a hand, and somehow somebody had found out how to keep a hand alive after it had been cut off. It could probably jump using all five fingers and it would jump up on the bed, and this time it would go for me.

  Or else it would grab the bedspread where it hung down and pull itself up. Then it would crawl really quietly, crawling up toward me until it could grab my neck.

  Second, I was scared about the gun. I was not afraid Naala would panic and shoot me. I was pretty sure that was not going to happen. I was afraid I would sneak it out from under her pillow and shoot her.

  Then I would be on the loose, with no way out, a gun, and no place to hide. I could see how that might start look
ing like a swell idea when I got sleepy. That was one thing. The other one was that I do not trust myself when I have had much of anything to drink. Generally two beers are my limit for the night, especially if I am going to have to drive, which I generally do. That night I had drunk two stiff shots of some dark stuff that was probably local whiskey. It tasted so bad it had been hard not to gag, and the first one just about knocked my head off. I felt like I was falling-down drunk and might do anything. Pretty soon I got up and puked in the bathroom.

  The funny thing was it made me feel better. I was still drunk, but I knew I was and knew I was getting over it. Also I got some ice out of the refrigerator and made ice water. I must have done for five or six glasses of that, just sitting at the little table, staring at the door, and sipping water.

  I was thinking about the hand. What I had told Naala was bullshit, and I knew it. It was a hand, and it was still alive. It did not matter how it was done, that was the fact. If it had gotten out of the apartment, how had it done it? If it had not, where was it? Those questions went round and round in my head, and I kept telling myself that if I thought of a way it could have gotten out, or a place where it could be hiding, I would go and look there.

  Only I never had to stand up.

  There was only one door, and it was bolted on the inside. Maybe the hand could have climbed up and unbolted it. Maybe it could have turned the doorknob somehow. But how the heck could it have bolted that door again after it went out?

  And I had looked everywhere. In the fridge. In the stove. In every closet. In the bedclothes on both beds. Under both beds. I had even looked in the flush tanks of the toilets, and eventually I went back to bed.

  Next morning Naala did not want to talk about it. That was fine with me, because I had a headache and knew I did not have anything useful to say. So instead of that we argued about what I was going to wear. She wanted me to put on the wool sport jacket, which I knew was going to be too warm. Eventually we went out for breakfast, and I said maybe it would be better to pick up Rosalee first so she could eat breakfast with us. Naala said no and it was her money, so we did not.

  On the way to the prison I had another brainstorm. I said how about this? What we really need is to know who Russ’s other customers here were. So we send somebody to America. He contacts the new owners and finds out. I am here, I am American, I know the case, and I knew Russ, so I would be the perfect person.