by Gene Wolfe
I told her, “I’ve lived all over, but I’m an American. I won’t betray my country.”
She smiled. “I do not ask for that. We do not seek the destruction of Amerika, which you yourselves have too much destroyed already. We can make use of you in many other ways, and this we will do.”
You know what I was thinking. I would get back to the States and tell the JAKA to kiss off. Naturally I did not say that. Instead I asked what she wanted me to do.
“First, you have hear me tell of the operators who visit dress shops.”
“Sure.”
“I wish you, also, to visit those shops. You I give a different question. Who comes and asks such questions but has not the JAKA badge? How does this one appear? What does he say and do?”
That one took me a little time. I watched Naala sip coffee and saw how her eyes sparkled, but it did not make me any smarter.
“You do not understand.”
“You’re right,” I said. “What’s going on here?”
“Who is it who gets credit for closing a case? I know but ask even so. Who is it?”
“Whoever solves it, I suppose. If it’s not that, I don’t know.”
“Those who ask at the dress shops now are not me. To someone they make the reports, but he is not me.” Here I got the mean grin again. “You are mine.”
“O-o-okay.”
“Let us look back. The Rathaus woman escape. It seem to me there are three ways. First, it may be that Rathaus help her.”
I nodded.
“That is what I hope when we begin. In the prison for women I ask and ask, but I see no tracks of Rathaus. Now I hope you understand. Does she have help? What is it this help do? There is nothing.”
“I’ve got it.”
“Second, the cult who pull strings of Martya. They wish Rathaus dead, I think. If no, why send her with the hand to Papa Iason? I see no tracks of them, no more than Rathaus. All I learn, the Rathaus woman could have done alone. This I think she did.”
I probably scratched my head.
“We take her out, buy for her the dress and good food. She have hope. We take her back and all hope is gone. You understand how she feel, I think.”
“Then she’s outside, but without friends or money. Hell, she’s only a kid.” Just thinking about it made me feel sick.
“She has no money, but friends she has. These are you and I. If Rathaus knows she has escaped, perhaps he seeks to find her. If those of the cult know also, they too will seek her, perhaps to kill, perhaps for bait. Let us find out who seeks if either does. For this I send you.”
“If it can be found out, I’ll find it,” I told her.
Naala put down her cup. “Now a second task. Go to the priest. You are Martya’s friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want to help her. If the cult’s got her I want to get her away from them.”
“Good. Tell him the truth. When the truth will serve, it is better than a thousand lies. Find out from the priest what he did not tell us, all that she says to him when she brings the hand. Has he see her before or since that time? What of the housekeeper? What did your Martya tell her? Find the shawl she wrap the hand in. Examine it closely. Bring it to me if this is possible.”
“All right,” I said. “Where will you be?”
“In my apartment. If you knock and none answer…”
“I’ll wait,” I said. “Outside, under the trees.”
Naala shook her head. “Go to the police. Tell them I am perhaps dead.”
You can guess the questions I asked her after that. I am not going to give them here because she would not answer any of them. After four or five, she told me to start with the dress shops and get going.
I had said that about Rosalee having no money and no friends, and now that was me. Or at least that was how I felt then. I did not have a single euro. Naala had been my friend and pretty close to being my girlfriend, even if she was twice my age. Heck, I had scored with her. Now she had sent me off on what she figured was a really safe errand while she did the dangerous stuff.
I would have hidden and tried to follow her if I had thought I could get away with it. Only I knew I could not. She was an operator and had been one for ten or fifteen years minimum. She would have forgotten more about tailing somebody than I knew. On top of that, there was a good chance she would call a police car as soon as she finished her coffee. What was I supposed to do? Jump in a cab and say, “Follow that car?” There were not any cabs and I did not have any money.
So I went to dress shops instead. At first it was pretty tough for me to find them because I could not read the signs, but I looked in the windows and pretty soon I started recognizing certain words that were in the signs of a lot of the shops. My guess is that one meant “dresses” and one meant “women,” but I still do not know what is which.
The first two were duds. Maybe they knew something, but if they did they were not telling me. By the third I had sort of put together my story, which was that my sister’s bags had been stolen and my mom and dad were out trying to get clothes she would like, only I had bought her some so she could go out and choose her own. That got me some cooperation, especially when I said what a nice shop this was and I would bring her here. The truth is a great tool if you can use it, but I could not. If I went around saying the JAKA had sent me, which was the truth, they would want to see some ID. I did not have any, so they might call the cops.
Pretty soon somebody described a woman who had been in there, only she had not bought anything. She had only described a man and asked if he had been in. I would give the number of that one if I remembered it, but I had lost count by then. It could have been six or seven, or even eight. I got a pretty good description of the woman and said she sounded a lot like my mom, but she was too young. The lady said maybe it was my sister only she did not sound American, and I said if she talked pretty good it could not have been.
Finally I went into a shop and had that feeling. You know how it is? You go someplace you would swear you had never seen before, only there’s something familiar about it. I was already talking to a lady when it snapped into place for me. It was the shop where Naala had bought the red-and-white-checked dress for Rosalee. Then the lady, who seemed pretty nervous, said she had to talk to another lady before she told me anything, and I had to stay up front while she did it.
You can bet the rent I did not. I let her get a couple of steps ahead of me and edged along behind her. The shop ended with a metal door and I figured there was an office or something back there, but I was dead wrong. She opened it, and I could see into an alley. Then she closed it, and I figured she had gone for the cops and I had better get out of there. I turned around and took a step, and one of the mannequins grabbed me by the shoulder. I about jumped out of my skin.
It was Rosalee, and when she saw how scared I was she grabbed me and kissed me. Then she said, “Remember me? You promised you’d get me out of that place.”
I said, “Yeah.” Then when I had my breath back, “It seems like you got yourself out.”
“I had to. Somebody was going to kill me.”
I wanted to hear a lot more about that, but I was afraid we did not have much time and said we had better get out of there.
“I can’t go out where they’ll see me. The police have already been here twice. I hid in a fitting room. Did you really think I was a dummy?”
I said, “I wasn’t paying any attention to you. What if the lady calls the cops?”
“She won’t. She was hiding me—I remind her of her daughter. She thought you were going to arrest her.”
I told her, “Okay, what I have to do is come back with Naala. She’s JAKA, so nobody’s going to take you away from her.”
“She’ll put me back in the prison! There was a girl in there called Yelena who looked like me. A man came in during the night. My bed was on the floor, remember? I slept on the floor.”
I nodded.
“He stabbed Yelena. I saw it! He stabbed her and
walked out. He never made a sound. He was looking for me, and he thought he’d found me.”
I said, “I was there today, and nobody said anything about any girl getting stabbed.”
“Well, they wouldn’t unless you went into our building!”
“We did. That’s where we went.” I shut my face and thought a lot.
“Don’t tell Naala. Promise me you won’t tell Naala?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not if you don’t want me to. Sure.”
“I’m not going out on the street til after dark, no matter what you say. It’s too dangerous.” Rosalee went quiet for a minute, too. “I’ll go out with you then, if you promise not to take me to Naala. But I’m safe here for now—”
A lady had come in, and Rosalee froze, chin up, one hand bent back a little. You see that on mannequins more often than on real women.
I went to the front of the store to keep the lady from coming back where we were to talk to me. She said, “Where is Madame? You do not work here, do you?”
I shook my head and said I was looking for her, too, but it seemed like she had stepped out.
“You are foreign. You did not take her cash box, did you?”
“Hell, no!” I raised my hands to show I was not carrying anything. “I don’t even know where it is.”
“I do,” the lady said.
I do not know where we would have gone with that, if the lady who ran the shop had not come back. I waved to her and said hello. She still looked scared, but she kept coming.
The other lady, the customer, said, “I do not know what he wants. He may have taken your cash box.”
I shook my head hard, and the lady who ran the store went and looked at her cash box. It was all right, which got me off the hook.
The customer wanted to look at hats and the lady must have showed her a dozen of them. Plain hats, hats with ribbons, hats with feathers, and one with a toy bird on it. The customer did not like any of them, and finally she went out of the store.
I said, “I don’t think she wanted a hat at all. She just had some time to kill.” All the hats had reminded me of Martya, how I had bought the fox-fur hat for her, and how she had posed in it in front of the store’s big mirror. I had not expected that to hurt, but it did.
The lady said, “She had time and nothing to do. I see many such. Later, it may be, they come back and buy.”
I said I hoped she would.
“Mostly not,” the lady told me. “You are foreign, so not police.”
“I’m American,” I explained. “I was talking to His Excellency the archbishop yesterday, and he asked me to ask a few questions for him.”
“You were speaking to the archbishop? Speaking the way we speak now?”
“Not exactly like this,” I told her. “We were both sitting down in his study.”
“He gave you his blessing?”
I shook my head. “I should have asked for it, but I forgot. I’ll ask when I come back with answers to his questions.”
“In the cathedral you spoke?”
“In his palace,” I said. “That’s what they call it. It’s really just a big house. He’s got a study upstairs.”
“You talk face-to-face? With His Excellency?”
I said I had and asked whether she knew he climbed the bell tower of the cathedral every morning.
“He is so old! God must give him the strength.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, too. I’m supposed to ask you if there’s been a man or a woman in here buying clothes for a woman that size.” I pointed to Rosalee, and she stepped down off the little platform and said, “He’s my friend, Petya. He’s trying to help me, to keep me safe from those who want me back in prison.” Part of that was English and part was not. A lot was pointing to herself and grabbing imaginary bars. I am going to skip all that stuff.
Petya shook her head. “No! No one! It is what the woman asks, also. I say no. I tell the truth, always!”
I said, “Wait a minute. What woman are you talking about?”
“The woman just now! The woman who tries so many hats!”
“And I missed it! Oh, my God….” I felt like shit in the street.
Naturally Rosalee wanted to know who the hat woman had been, but I did not want to tell her much with Petya there. Petya was plenty scared already and that might have tipped her over the edge. So I got out as soon as I could.
As far as Rosalee was concerned, I felt like I could relax a little. The police had been in that shop twice and had not found her. The hat lady had been from JAKA and had not found her either. It did not seem likely that more cops would be around anytime soon.
As for Russ and the cult, they were not going to go to dress shops trying to get clothes for Rosalee until they had her, which they did not. What was more, she would not be in prison clothes even if they got her later, because Petya had given her nice street clothes from her shop. So snooping around dress shops was out, but where should I go now?
The way I saw it then, there were two pretty strong possibilities. First I could go see Papa Iason, which was what Naala had told me to do. That would be good if it worked because right now I was more worried about Martya than I was about Rosalee.
Also I felt a little dirty every time I thought about Rosalee. Sure, I had gotten it on with Martya when she was married to Kleon, knowing damned well it was a crooked sort of thing to do. But I had not liked Kleon anyway and he sure as hell did not like me.
“On the other hand there’s warts,” is something my dad used to say a lot. What he meant is there are just about always some negatives to get in the way of the positives. Or every silver lining has a cloud, which is something I have heard some other people say. The thing on the other hand here was that Russ had been my friend. He had liked me and I had liked him, and we had talked about what our lives had been like when we were out and all that stuff. Sure, Russ had never told me he had been in this country before, but he had not lied to me about it, either. And how the hell could I blame him for not telling me that he had knocked up a girl here and now his son was a priest? If that had gotten out his son would have been washed up, most likely. No way did I have a bitch coming because he had not told me about it, and now I was thinking about screwing his wife.
I was thinking about that a lot.
You will be way ahead of me on the other one. I could go back to Naala’s apartment. If she was there, I could tell her what happened and explain that Rosalee was scared of her and why. But if she was not, I was supposed to tell the cops. It was early yet, and I thought the odds that she would not be there were pretty good. So I would have to tell the cops, probably make a fool of myself, and maybe get sent back to the prison.
A third thing was that I could have ditched the whole business and gone to the American embassy, if I could have found out where it was. I did not know and Rosalee did not know, but maybe Russ knew if I could find him.
Which got me nowhere, so I went off to see Papa Iason again—if I could find him.
15
REVISITING
Like I said in the last chapter, I was planning to go back and look up Papa Iason. What stopped me was looking to my right down one of those short, crazy streets and seeing the front gate of the women’s prison. I was tired and hungry and my feet hurt, and it seemed to me that if I went there I could sit down and question a bunch of people—eight or ten, easy—and probably promote a sandwich and a cup of coffee or a beer. As far as anybody there knew, I was some kind of minor JAKA guy, and that ought to be plenty.
So I tried it. I went to the gate and said hello to the guards and told them I wanted to talk to the warden. They said it was too late. She had gone home, and the deputy warden was in charge. I said that was fine, I would talk to her, it was just routine anyway.
The deputy warden was a little skinny lady in a black dress with black hair that I would bet the rent was dyed and a face that had worn out three bodies. By the time I saw her, I had cooked up a story. I started by asking if she was familiar
with Naala, a lady who was high up in JAKA, and the deputy warden said she had heard she had been here.
“I’m working for her,” I explained, “and she sent me here to do a little follow-up. We found out there’s a prisoner here who looks quite a bit like Rosalee Rathaus. This prisoner’s name is Yelena, and I’m supposed to ask her a few questions.”
I expected the deputy warden to say, “Yeah, no sweat,” or words to that effect. But she did not. Instead she looked like she had just tasted something sour. “She is in the infirmary.”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
“I do not jest. Ordinarily I do not know her. I would look up the name and so discover her full name and number. In this case I need not. She collapsed in the prisoners’ dining hall and was carried to the infirmary. She is turn blue. This I am told when I come in, and I look her up then.”
I said, “Are you sure this is the right Yelena? There must be plenty of them.”
“A scant handful, yes. More it might be. The Yelena you seek is where to sleep? Do you know?”
“Building One Twenty-four.”
“You must look here.” She pointed to her screen and I went over and looked at it. There was a picture of a blond girl who might have been a little bit younger than Rosalee. She did not look exactly like her because she did not have the cute nose or the cheek bones, but except for those they were pretty much the same type. The deputy warden pointed to a number in one of the spaces on the screen. I could not read what that space was for, but I could guess pretty easily because the number was 124.
Naturally I said I would have to go to the infirmary and ask her some questions and after that I would probably want to go to Building 124 and talk to some of the women there. I got a guide, not the same one, to take me to the infirmary. This one was a trustee and did not want to talk, which would have been super with me except that I was still hoping for certain things. So when I was sitting next to Yelena’s bed I pointed at her and said, “You! Go get me a sandwich and something to drink.”