Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  “Take up the bag,” Yonko said shortly, checking his watch again. There seemed no point in complaining about the quality of his “American.” I lifted the rucksack and slung it over my left shoulder, leaving my good arm free on the off chance I’d get an opportunity to use it for anything. Yonko draped the raincoat over his gun and waved me toward the door. I stepped out into the main room of the café with him following close behind. My arm had stopped hurting for the moment, and the scag gave me a weird detachment from the whole predicament, though in a distant way I realized that it wasn’t getting any better. The people in the café didn’t seem very interested in us just then, though I thought we had to be showing a little strain. I wondered if Yonko would really have the nerve to pull the trigger if I dove in among the crowded tables, say, but I didn’t quite have the nerve myself to try.

  Then we were out on the street and my heart sank some more when I saw Grushko in the driver’s seat of a blue Peugeot, pulled up to the curb. If I went anywhere in that car I was quite sure I would never come back, and Yonko was already urging me into the back seat. I opened the rear door and turned around. Yonko was standing back, well out of my reach. He wasn’t entirely stupid, I had to give him that. Up and down, the street was very empty. I looked up at the Palais de Justice, but no one was looking back down, of course. It was my last chance for a break, but Yonko could probably shoot me more conveniently here than he could have done in the bar.

  Then there was a sort of spitting noise and Yonko clapped his left hand to his right shoulder, lowering the gun long enough for me to reach him. I hit his wrist with a low block — got it right this time — and booted the gun under the car. Yonko backed up against the wall of the café; he was bleeding from the right shoulder, and for the moment, off the count. Grushko was staring at him round-eyed from behind the wheel of the car, and I decided that I’d bet my money that he either didn’t have a gun or couldn’t hit a moving target. With the rucksack still over my shoulder, I ran down the block to where Racine, improbably, was waiting.

  “A souvenir or what?” I said.

  It was a good deal later, and I was admiring the little silenced sniper rifle, which broke down into three sections small enough to fit into an innocuous cardboard tube. In fact, the camouflage was so good that Racine had insisted on taking me by a doctor’s to check the elbow (over my protest, to be sure) before we even went home to drop the stuff. But the medical news was favorable: no important new damage to the joint; a week of hot water and Ace bandages and I’d be all right.

  “From the old days of la politique,” Racine said.

  “Get much use out of it back then?”

  “I was only keeping it for a friend.”

  “Sure. “I looked down the sight, a telescope with cross hairs.

  “No, it’s true,” Racine said. “Once I did think of some use for it. But, I didn’t.”

  “Well, you’ve got a flair for trick shooting, anyway,” I said, handing him the sight.

  “I think it needs adjustment. I intended to kill him.”

  Racine packed the pieces of gun into the tube.

  “You don’t know how much worse that makes me feel,” I said. “What made you decide to follow me, by the way?”

  “One doesn’t always take a suitcase to the post office,” Racine said. “Besides, it is the other way from the way you went. “

  “Well, don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” I said. “Bien obligé.”

  “De rien,” Racine said. He tucked the tube under his arm and walked out of the kitchen, where we’d been unwinding with the aid of a little beer and vodka, into the tiled atrium. I went after him. A good-sized tile was missing from a spot halfway up the wall and Racine was slipping the tube into the hole behind it.

  “I think I might be beginning to understand something,” I said. “That night I broke in —” Those little clicks I’d thought I’d heard were falling into the pattern now. A person armed with a pocketknife could slit the flexible caulking and get into that hidey-hole rather quickly …

  “Only a precaution,” Racine said. “You’re not offended?”

  “Bien sûr que non,” I said.

  “And now you understand also why I have silicon around.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Quite so.”

  “There is room to unload the pack in here too, I think.”

  I hesitated.

  “You know something?” I said.

  “What?”

  “This might not be such a good time to be my friend.”

  Racine lit a cigarette. “Why not?” he said. “It’s when you need one.”

  “True for you,” I said, and later when we’d caulked the gun and the dope up into the wall and started to talk over some details of the matter, it occurred to me that, sentimental considerations aside, he really did have a point.

  14

  THEN A RATHER SILLY thing happened, which was that I got sick. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the problem was. After my little runaround with Grushko and Yonko, I’d expected to feel pretty bad for a few days. One of the especially unpleasant things about heroin is the hangover, which is fully as intense as the rush and lasts a lot longer — from three days to a week. I felt as though my entire body had been crushed under an enormous anvil, which shut out the air and sky and turned everything a rusty black. I could think of nothing else but the misery, and it was pointless to try to plan the next move in the game until I rediscovered the ability. It didn’t help a bit to know that one more little toot would make me feel just fine again, fix me right up. It especially didn’t help to know that there was maybe a million bucks’ worth of just the very thing I wanted sealed up in the wall by the bathroom.

  So I went out a good deal, in spite of not feeling my best and all, and spent a lot of the next two or three days walking around in the streets. If I stayed around the apartment, that siliconed tile seemed to call out to me whenever I walked past it, or even when I didn’t. Away from the house it seemed easier to manage that impulse, so I stayed in the street. I was drinking a good deal, mostly beer, to try to blunt the other symptoms, and whenever I felt too bloated I’d switch over to the mint tea you could get in the Moroccan cafés, where alcohol is forbidden.

  It was in one of these tea houses, after a couple of days of this kind of wandering, that I realized that one form of my malaise was giving way to another. I was sitting at a small round table, drinking a long glass of hot sweet tea. Men in djellabas were murmuring at other tables all around me, occasionally giving me short glances of dislike and suspicion (they aren’t partial to intruders, on the whole). A cone of sunlight entered the room from a high window and struck an edge of the metalwork tray on my table; the light was sharply, painfully bright. I glanced up, around the room, and it began to ripple from side to side, as though the scene were not real but had been printed on some wild-fluttered fabric. It came to me, the thought ringing in my head like someone else’s voice, that it was imperative for me to get back to Racine’s immediately before I passed out.

  Walking was like a journey up the down escalator. The many steps I felt I was taking did not seem to make me much progress. I was walking up the curl of a great wave made of cobblestones, then as suddenly the street dropped away from beneath me. My head was bobbing like a cork awash and I could hardly feel my arms and legs. Finally I drifted up in front of Racine’s door, where it required unreasonable effort for me to operate the key. I stumbled in to my mattress and fell down to sleep.

  When I woke up it was night, and looking across the floor from the mattress, I saw that the landscape had stopped swinging up and down. But when I got up, forget it. Racine had come in and fried up a skillet of potatoes and mushrooms, but I wasn’t interested. I had some water and went back to bed. And so it went. Sleeping was the only thing I displayed any talent for over the next couple of days. The one good thing about it was that the bug, whatever it might have been, was completely distinct from withdrawal symptoms from the big H, and in fact seemed to di
splace them altogether.

  But it was hard to be grateful even for that. I felt lousy. The big activity of each day was unwinding the bandage off my elbow and giving it the ritual hot soak, and sometimes I was barely up to that. Then it would be stumbling back to bed, nuzzling into the zebra-striped coverlet on the mattress, trying to accustom myself to the new variations in the bob and sway which the room now seemed constantly to maintain. I was flat on my face so often for so long that I got very used to a worm’s-eye view across the floor, the texture and details of its surface irregularity, the flocks of dust floating across it.

  A couple of days went by like that, and then I got a little better. That’s to say, so long as I remained prone or sometimes even propped up on the mattress everything seemed to be stable. But if I rose and tried to walk, the rooms would begin to wiggle again. I didn’t venture far from the mattress, and went on sleeping a lot of the time. If wakeful, I read a bit (nothing serious, only a few old Babar and Tintin books that Racine had lying around), or else I worried.

  How could Kevin do it? How could he handle such circumstances as these without ending up crawling the walls? It was hard to imagine. The great wondrous secret of Kevin’s successes was that he didn’t plan anything, or at least that was the conclusion I’d come to. But if he was stuck in a bind like this one — i.e., laid up helplessly sick in a foreign land with a million dollars in the form of nearly raw heroin and with a couple of irritable Bulgarians trailing their automatic weapons around in the shadows by the sickbed — I didn’t see how he could survive without planning a little.

  Well, maybe it was all just a failure of my perceptions. Or maybe Kevin wouldn’t have let his tail get caught in a crack like this to begin with. Maybe he would just leverage someone else into the uncomfortable position. Someone who did plan, like me.

  The ability to delegate is the mark of a true leader, don’t you know.

  Of course I mustn’t forget that this assignment had originally been delegated to Lauren. Had been set up with her definitely enough in mind that the whole “Anne Morrison” fiction had been laid in on both sides in advance. Well, I could just picture her going through that scene at the no-name café on Rue des Capucins, and when I did it brought the vertigo back, only this time the cause of it was just plain old rage.

  Of course it could be argued that I had fouled up the arrangements myself, in a way. “Anne Morrison” might have got a better reception than I did, or at least been received at a better address. Certainly Grushko and Yonko would have been a great deal happier with the contents of that briefcase. So it all might have worked out for the best.

  Possibly.

  It was getting to be like opening a series of containers within containers, each one concealing a smellier, slightly more unpleasant surprise than the one before. That deliberate exposure of Lauren was almost the nastiest thing of all, so far as I was concerned. But it’s part of the character of an infinite recession that the final box is much too small to open or even see. And anyway, there isn’t one.

  More fool I for not being able to see it coming. You could chalk it up to my being overly involved with my own methodology. Even in the very depths of not thinking about it, I’d always kind of featured it as a coke deal. Or maybe pharmaceuticals, or maybe (outside chance) some change of pace on the order of currency smuggling. Heroin just hadn’t entered my mind, despite the fact that from the very beginning we’d had Belgium, and next we had Bulgarians, who live next door to Turkey, where the poppies grow. I knew people had been running scag out of Turkey through Belgium. The reason I knew was they’d been getting caught, which did not make me very happy now, as you may imagine. What kept me from putting it all together before was that I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have had no theoretical problem (not much at least) with the idea of shipping coke through Brussels. If I’d got into scag, which I wouldn’t have on purpose, I’d probably have tried to bring it in through Colombia.

  So this was the first time I’d even met any Bulgarians, and already I didn’t like them much. So far I supposed I liked Yonko the least. Grushko seemed a comparatively approachable sort, someone you might be able to really talk to, provided you had a language in common with him, whereas Yonko struck me as your typical trigger-happy juvenile-delinquent street animal, give or take a few cross-cultural variations like that jewelry. Of course that might be the generation gap, or something like the fact that I tend to hate all people who have ever pointed guns in my face. It was not terrifically comforting to think of Yonko and Grushko combing Brussels for traces of me, as they were no doubt doing at this very moment, armed with one or perhaps more machine guns. They hadn’t been very inexorable so far, to be sure, and in my moments of semidelirium they even seemed a little funny in some ways, but I knew it would be a risky mistake to mix them up with the cartoon villains in Tintin.

  The trouble was that people always got so goddamn serious when it was heroin. Although the distinction was false once you really thought about it, trading in coke always seemed comparatively innocuous, a game of sorts that you could delude yourself was played by rules. In spite of the fact that you could get shot with real bullets and do real time and, of course, make very real money if those more unpleasant kinds of possibilities didn’t come to pass. And at least you did deal with a slightly better class of people, on the receiving end anyway. People might try to kill you for a big box of coke, but not for a little syringe full of it, and that, I suppose, made the fine split-hair’s worth of difference.

  It was not pleasant to think about getting involved in heroin trade, whether by accident or design. What the hell had Kevin really been up to with this movie? I could picture him more clearly now, moving among the junkies and ex-junkies with his usual smoothness, the long easy smile, the charismatic flourishes which must have done a lot to draw those terrible confessions I’d seen in the rushes out of the people who had made them. Again I felt the sprockets engage — forward, reverse, back in slow motion — I saw Kevin juggling all his options, Kevin finishing the shoot itself of course, Kevin setting up his deal with Grushko (who was in there too, right? standing with Kevin just outside the frame), Kevin maneuvering me into position, Kevin making friends with all those junkies ... Well, that last feature might just have been a singular failure to relate the cause to the effects, not unusual for Kevin, but if he was using them to set up distribution contacts …

  If so, there might be more people eventually wanting to kill him besides just me.

  Bad scene. Again I saw those needles scattered through the rusty brown grass above the Piazza del Popolo, and then looked past that, through that, into all the other needle parks I’d ever wandered through (a tourist, an untouchable) in my time. I remembered faces, not just from the film but the street too: the face of a hundred-dollar habit on its way to one-fifty, two hundred; that look in the eyes; or the face bent over the needle in the swollen vein, in a doorway, any doorway, no thought for exposure anymore, while from other doors along the street you’d hear the dealers calling softly, Star, star.

  A bad business. No question about that.

  Then, just when I thought I had got over the flu or the shipping fever or whatever it had been, it got a whole lot worse and I couldn’t worry about anything anymore. I sank through layer after layer of amnesia into what seemed like an endless sleep. How much time was passing I could not have said. I was aware of almost nothing. Vaguely I realized that Racine was around a good deal more than he had been lately, and that he was keeping me supplied with juice and soup and the like, but I didn’t have the power to thank him, and sometimes I suspect I didn’t know who he was. Staggering to the bathroom, which was the only thing I could get up for, I’d pause and stare at my reflection in the curtained glass pane of the door, would cautiously raise an arm and hand and point out my cloudy features to myself, examining them with hardly any recognition.

  Kierkegaard, who suffered from paralytic fits, among other things, used sometimes to fall out in the midst of dinner parties and t
he like. From the floor he’d call out to his friends, referring to his body, “Oh, leave it till the maid comes in the morning to sweep.”

  My dreams, of course, were lurid, and in the middle of one I was awakened by a sound hardly more dramatic than the rattle of an electric typewriter, but when I opened my eyes there was a shower of glass all over the room, and Racine was kneeling in the corner with something in his hands. I passed out again, not interested, and the next time I could look around the room I saw the big front window had been partly boarded up. Racine was not going out anymore at all, it seemed to me, except very briefly and hurriedly to the little grocery shop next door, and I also noticed that the sniper rifle had come out of the hole behind the tiles and was now assembled and prominently displayed in the front room.

  It was about this time that the drumming began. It was a complicated, constantly changing beat, sometimes accompanied by a kind of chanting, sometimes not. It never stopped; I seemed to hear it even when I slept, and therefore I did not quite believe it was real — I thought it might have been coming out of my own body, from my outraged lungs or heart. Whether it was real or imagined, inner or outer, I listened to it with some fascination, letting it rock me in and out of the phases of my fever.

  And then, one night, I was not sick anymore, as simply as that. I woke up and knew the fever had broken. When I got off the bed the room stayed in one place. I walked over to the boarded window and looked back up at the ceiling, where you could see the pattern of holes from the machine gun burst. A funny sort of angle. It must have been meant for a warning shot. Outside, the drumming continued; it had been real after all. Hungry as a horse, I headed for the kitchen.

  Racine was sitting at the table under the light, smoking a cigarette, drinking a Stella. As I entered his hand left the bottle and floated softly to the stock of the little rifle which lay across the table, pointed toward the door.

  “C’est moi, seulement,” I said.