The Land Across

by Gene Wolfe

  “Last night there is a death at the Harktay,” Naala told Baldy. “Already it is report a natural death, saying in a young woman the heart fails. This report is what the warden believes.”

  “You do not,” Baldy murmured. He had a desk as big as a boat, and a high-backed leather chair that looked like a throne.

  “Better we know. It is murder. She is murdered by a youth of the Unholy Way.”

  Baldy sat up straighter. “You have identified him?”

  Naala nodded. “He is Ferenc Narkatsos.”

  “You have proof?”

  “He has confessed. To Grafton,” a wave of her hand showed who she meant, “and to me. Intelligence have him now. He will confess to them, also.”

  Baldy put his fingertips together. “Tell me of the murder.”

  “I have learned from Grafton. I will let him speak.”

  I said, “We were interested in a young woman named Rosalee. Blond and quite attractive. She had been a prisoner in the Harktay but had escaped. Naala sent me there to investigate. I was told that a man had entered the building where they sleep in the middle of the night. Everybody else had been asleep, but the woman I spoke to was awake and saw him. He went from bed to bed looking at faces. When he came to a young woman named Yelena, he looked like he was stabbing her in the chest. Naturally, I went to the warden to ask why we had not been informed of the stabbing.”

  Baldy nodded.

  “She told me there had been no stabbing, but Yelena had collapsed about noon and been taken to the infirmary. I went there to question her. She was weak and couldn’t tell me much, but when I asked whether anybody had it in for her she named Ferenc Narkatsos. He’d had the hots for her and she had turned him down. That was all she was able to tell me before she died.”

  Naala started to say something, but Baldy motioned for her to keep quiet and said, “Had she been stabbed? Did you look at her for a stab wound?”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir, after she was dead. There was no knife wound in her chest, but there was a little speck of dried blood between her breasts. It looked to me like somebody had stuck a needle in there.”

  Naala said, “This concerns the Unholy Way, sir. In them Grafton and I are most interested. Grafton found a shop where many suspicious things are sold. He searched this shop and to me reported much I found of interest. The owner’s name is Abderos Narkatsos.”

  “Ah! I see.”

  “This morning we go there. Abderos Narkatsos is not present, but his son Ferenc watch the shop. We identify ourselves, and I say you think you kill and escape the law? We have found you most quick. Soon he breaks down, weeps, and confesses, as I have said. In the shop are many poisons. He showed us the one he used and told us how he made a paste of this poison and smeared it on a hat pin. In my purse I have a sample.”

  She opened it and got out the little glass vial I had found for her back at the shop. “Here is it, sir. What need have I to tell you be most careful?”

  That one made Baldy smile. “I will not open before I turn over to Chem. What about the Unholy Way? Might this man’s father be their Undead Dragon?”

  Naala shook her head. “He is not so high, I am sure. We must watch him. He will know his son is of a sudden gone. Perhaps even he learns his son is arrested. He will be most careful or perhaps run. If he runs, where? To whom does he speak? To these the answers will be of much interest.”

  Baldy nodded, I think mostly to himself. “You will receive cooperation, operator. I will see to it. This foreigner is useful to you?”

  “As you have heard.” Naala smiled. “That, and much more besides. He is of talent.”

  Baldy spoke to me. “Already you are working for our JAKA. This you must know.”

  I nodded and said I did.

  “Now you join us formally. You will be paid, which is always important. More important, you will know we trust you.” He got up and went into a little storeroom or walk-in closet that opened off his office, and came back with a badge in a black leather flip-case and a gun in a black cardboard box. Of course I had to swear and so on, and my fingerprints were taken again, just like they had been at the prison, and there was another mug shot. But I am going to skip all that. It was not very interesting.

  There was something else first that was interesting to me. It still is, but I can only tell you about it. If you can explain it, I would like to hear from you.

  About the time Baldy handed me the badge case and the box, the door of his office opened and somebody else came in. I wanted to look around at him, but I did not. Only when we left to go get me fingerprinted, I saw him. It was the man who looked a little like my father, I mean the third border guard, who was the man I had seen sometimes riding next to the driver in police cars. He was not in uniform this time, and he looked more than ever like the man on the posters. He was sort of short, and had a round face like my father’s and a stiff black mustache with a little gray in it like his. After that, I saw him pretty often. I will not always mention him, because it would get boring. Once or twice I asked Naala about him, but she did not know what I was talking about.

  So anyway, when we got back to Naala’s apartment I opened the badge case first. I wanted to open the black box and have a look at the gun, but I had the feeling it would piss her off, so I did not. My badge was silver instead of gold, and she explained it meant I was a plain operator and not a senior operator. She also showed me the little slot where my ID card would go when it came. It would come by messenger, she said. I put my badge case in the side pocket of my jacket, along with the hand.

  After that I got to open the box. My new gun was in there, and it was brand new and very cool. It looked a lot like Naala’s, but not exactly, and I ought to say that. With it was a small box of ammo. I counted them, and it was twenty rounds. There were two holsters, too: a belt holster and an ankle holster that I never did use. I loaded the gun, put it in the belt holster, and put it on.

  After that, Naala wanted to know if I was hungry. I said I was not; what I wanted to do was go someplace where I could shoot my new gun enough to get used to it.

  “You are thrill.” She grinned at me.

  “Yeah, I guess I am. I’ve fired guns before, but I’ve never owned one til now.”

  “You do not own that one. It belongs to JAKA, which will take it back when you return to Amerika.”

  I nodded. “Sure. They’ll have to, because they’re not allowed on the plane. That’s okay, because it’s mine for as long as I’m here.”

  “You wish to shoot.”

  “Yeah. A lot.”

  “Then I say this. We will go to a range. There I will buy more ammunition, also teach you to shoot. When we are finish, we eat. It will be for us lunch. Dinner also. You agree?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Absolutely!”

  “After this, you must find Rosalee, if she is still where you say you know. You must bring her to me.”

  I said okay, so that is what we did. The range would have been a really stiff hike, but we got lucky and a car stopped for us. It belonged to a guy who was pretty high up in JAKA, according to Naala, although I do not think he was as high as Baldy who was probably the top man. The neat thing about it was that I got to flash my badge, the first time I had ever done it.

  The sportsman’s club we were going to was out on the edge of town and about the classiest thing I saw in the whole country. The JAKA had an organizational membership according to Naala. That must have been right, because all we had to do was flash our badges and they let us right in. I got the feeling that most of the members were high up in the government, and the ones who were not, were. You know what I mean. Officially they were not, but they did a lot of favors, and got a lot of favors, too. There was a golf course, a big swimming pool, a casting pool for fishermen, a rifle range, a shotgun range, and a pistol range. All that and more besides, including a bar, a restaurant, a ballroom, and a library. Everything very posh.

  Also there was a shop where you could buy various kinds of ammunition, c
leaning supplies, and things like that. We rented eye protection and earmuffs, electronic ones that were unbelievably cool.

  My gun was a lot simpler than I expected. There was the trigger, the magazine release, and a disassembly lever. That was it. No safety, no grip safety, no little lever in the trigger, nothing like that. Just a long pretty hard trigger pull like you were shooting a revolver double action. The semi-auto I had shot back in the States had a three-position safety lever. Up for safe, down for fire, and down farther for decock. My new JAKA gun did without all that.

  That one had a staggered magazine, too, to hold more rounds. This one did not. Just a single column magazine, eight rounds. Like my dad used to say, KISS. It means Keep It Simple, Stupid.

  So eight in the magazine, shove the magazine into the grip, shuck a round into the chamber, and off we go. At first I spent way too much time trying to get perfect sight alignment. And to keep it while I pulled that trigger, which was a lot harder. Naala showed me that you did not need it at practical distances. You taught yourself to hold the gun right, got your front sight on the target, and fired. You could not nail the king of hearts that way, but there was not a real good chance the king was going to pull a knife on you. What you could do was score on the chest of somebody with a knife before he got close enough to cut you. Was he going to go down? Probably not, so shoot him again.

  So she shot some and I shot some and we had a lot of fun doing it. She was a lot better shot than I was when we started, and when we got finished she was still a better shot. Only just a little, not a lot. Between us we burned up four boxes of ammo, but she said that was good because you wanted to shoot at least a hundred rounds from your new gun to get it running right. Sometimes a new gun would have some problems, like maybe the slide would not close tight now and then for the first forty or fifty rounds, and then the problems would disappear because the parts had smoothed out. That did not happen with my gun, but it got easier to load and the trigger stopped feeling gritty. It still took a pretty hard pull, but the sand was out of the works.

  When we got through shooting we went into the dining room and ate. Naala said there was a lot of pricey stuff on the menu, but if we stayed away from it and did not order wine it would not be too stiff. So she had tea and I had coffee and we both had spanakopita with a big salad on the side. When we were about finished, Naala showed me what she had bought for me while I was looking at gun stuff in the shop. It was a watch, not a really nice one but a hell of a lot better than no watch. So I thanked her and we kissed. You know.

  After that Naala looked around for a ride home, but she could not find anyone. So we hiked. It had cooled off quite a bit by then and before long the moon rose, so it was not as bad as it sounds. We split up when we got back to the city, me going after Rosalee and Naala home to her apartment.

  When I got there empty-handed, she naturally wanted to know what happened. I said, “She wasn’t there, that’s all. The shop was closed, but the lady that ran it was still inside. She let me in when I showed her my badge. I told her I knew all about Rosalee’s hiding there, I was a friend of Rosalee’s, and I wouldn’t bust her if she’d open up with me. But if she wouldn’t, she was going to headquarters. I’d have no other choice but to run her in.”

  Naala nodded.

  “She opened up. When she had come in that morning, Rosalee had been gone. She had left a note, but the lady couldn’t read it—some foreign language. I said probably I could read it, and she showed it to me. I read it to her, but I kept it. She didn’t mind.”

  “You must read it to me also, I think,” Naala said.

  So I did: “My husband is ill and needs me. I must go to him. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! If we ever get home I will repay you.” It was signed: “Rosalee Borden Rathaus.”

  “This could be the best that could happen for us.” Naala was heading for the phone. A minute later I heard her telling somebody to get on the tracking device they had put on Papa Iason’s bike.

  “It does not yet move,” she told me when she hung up. “Soon, I think. Someone know where is Rosalee. About Papa Iason he know, too, I think. Now I go to Papa’s house to watch. You must go to the house near the archbishop’s palace where priests stay. Find Papa Zenon. Tell him what happen and after you do this—”

  The door of her apartment opened. It had been locked but not bolted, and maybe I ought to say that. It stayed open for just a second or so while somebody threw something into the room, then it shut quietly. Its quiet click has stayed with me. I still hear it about once a week, when I am almost asleep.

  I went to see what had been thrown in, but Naala beat me to it, rolling it over until the face showed. It was somebody’s cut-off head. Thinking back, it seems like it was a long time between the time I realized that and the time I recognized the face. It was Butch Bobokis.

  19

  OLD FRIENDS AND NEW

  The tracer guys had been right: Papa Iason was still at home. This was even after we had spent almost an hour with five JAKA men who rushed over when Naala phoned to report that Butch’s head was on her living-room floor.

  Did I know who he was? Yes, I did and I told them about him, which was a big mistake. I got about a hundred more questions after that, none of them questions that went anywhere. Naala would not even try to tell them everybody who knew where she lived. About the tenth or twentieth she told them they were wasting our time and ought to get on with the real investigation—who had been seen coming into the building, who had been seen carrying something heavy down the street, and all that—they gave up on us and we scooted. I guess it must have been about midnight by then.

  Like I said, Papa Iason was at home, but he was talking to somebody else in the parlor. His housekeeper was up, too, in a moth-eaten old robe and curl papers. She got us to promise to wait in the hall. Which we did, for maybe five minutes. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Hurry! Oh, please hurry!” I recognized that voice and forgot about my promise.

  She was standing in the middle of the floor having a cow, and Papa Iason was pulling on his boots. I yelled, “Martya!” and hugged her. Her eyes just about popped out of her head.

  Then she said, “He will want you! He will want you, too!”

  We left as soon as Papa Iason got his boots on, all four of us packed into the one police car, both women in back with me and Papa Iason up front with the driver. It was dumb, but I kept wanting to remind Naala that I had never gone to tell Papa Zenon about Rosalee. Only I could not, because I was listening to Martya. Also to Naala’s questions. And I was asking Martya quite a few of my own.

  You can split all women into two groups. There are the ones who will give you a straight, simple answer, and the ones who tell you a dozen things you don’t need to know before they get around to what you need to know, if they ever do. My guess is there are maybe a hundred in Group 1 and all the rest are in Group 2.

  So here’s Martya, definitely a Group 2 girl, with a whole bunch of editing by me. “When you disappear my husband—you remember my husband? Remember Kleon?”

  “Sure.”

  “He knows they shoot him as soon as they know you are gone. He tells me he will leave in the morning but I think he fears I tell them because when I wake up he is already gone. I wait for him to come home, but he never comes so—”

  “Where is Rathaus hide?” Naala asked across me.

  “There will be much walking. I will show. I search the whole house for money, because I know Kleon hides money somewhere, but he takes it. In cellar, even, is no money. So I take the money I find and shut up the house. I think where does Kleon not go? It is to the capital! There are the police everywhere I am tell so he does not go there. So I go. Only I have the little money.”

  I said, “Maybe you’ve got relatives here?”

  “With no money it is no travel. I must find food, find work so I am paid. Once I find a picnic. Three boys they have, also two girls. Their names…”

  And so on. Naturally I wanted to know whether Martya ha
d sold it and how often, only there was no point asking about that because I would never get the truth that way. What was also natural was that Naala wanted to know where Rathaus was, because that was the main thing for her. Only after a while I could see that Martya did not know the name of the place, only how to get there.

  Papa Iason up in the front seat wanted to know what was wrong with him. I got the feeling that Papa knew a good deal of medicine even if he was not a doctor, and I could see how he would, working with poor people all the time and going to sick beds the way he did.

  It boiled down to just about everything. Russ could not keep anything on his stomach. He could not move his arms (or not much) and his hands shook when he tried to feed himself. Plus a bunch of other stuff, and it all sounded bad.

  “So they make me sign the paper or I will go to jail,” Martya was saying. “On this paper are many terrible things I never do. If they give to the police I will hang, but I must sign or they go to the police. I sign and after this I am a slave.”

  “You were shoplifting,” I told her.

  “No! I never steal. I take nothing ever!”

  “Oh, yes you did! You were shoplifting and they caught you. Listen, it’s okay with me, only we’ve got to have the truth. You went to that shop and boosted some stuff, including the shawl you wrapped the hand in.”

  I was talking to Martya but watching Naala when I said that, and her eyes went wide for just a second. It made me feel really, really good.

  “Some of it you probably sold, but there was some of it you kept,” I told Martya. “Only you made the dumb mistake of going back there again because it had been easy the first time. The second time they grabbed you as you went out the door and found their stuff on you. So they had you dead to rights and made you sign. Was the hand supposed to kill Russ?”

  “I would not kill him, the hand does it.”

  “Got it. Did they tell you where he was?”

  “He is in Frost Forest. This they know. I find out where.”