“Bon,” Racine said. “Tu vas mieux?”
“Ouais,” I said, investigating the refrigerator. There was beer and bread and cheese, all of which I brought over to the table.
“How long have I been out of it?”
“About five days, altogether. “
I made a crude sandwich and began to chew.
“I might have had the doctor,” Racine said. “Only it seems not such a very convenient time to go out. “
“I understand,” I said. “I gather we’ve had visitors.”
“C’est évident.”
“Once?”
“All that was really possible. There was some difficulty with the police after the first time. “
“Not too unpleasant for you, I hope.”
“Not so much,” Racine said, laughing out of one half of his mouth. “I think they are not very concerned about my health either.”
“Well.”
“It has its advantages, true. But — “
“I know. It would be nice to be able to walk down to the corner occasionally.”
“I agree.”
“I think we could get to work on that more or less right away.”
“When you feel well enough.”
I finished my bread and cheese and took a cigarette from Racine’s pack. Outside, the drumming shifted gears and a high wailing began.
“What’s with the drums?” I said.
“Haitians. “
“I didn’t know they had Haitians here,” I said. “I thought only the North Africans.”
“There are not so many,” Racine said. “But they’ve been there about a year. A block over, on Rue de la Victoire.”
“So what are they so excited about?”
“They do the voodoo, I think.” Racine pushed away from the table. “No, it’s interesting. I heard yesterday, in the store. One of their priests sent a spell against an enemy, and the spell, what would you say, turned back on him.”
“Backfired.”
“Yes. The Haitians call it choc en retour. The enemy turns the spell back on you. So this one got sick. And the people were drumming and singing to try to bring him back again. But they say the spell is reflected back as strongly as it was sent at first.”
“So?”
“He died this morning. Now they drum for the funeral.”
“It must have been a very bad spell,” I said. “And a strong enemy.”
“Yes.”
“Choc en retour. It’s an idea, isn’t it?”
“They’re interesting, the Haitians,” Racine said. “They know more than you think.”
15
NEXT MORNING I WAS out of the apartment, for the first time in over a week, walking down Rue d’Irlande, and then crossing over to Rue de la Victoire, where those Haitians were. Although the sky was overcast, the outdoors light was shocking to me, and it felt peculiar to walk too, my out-of-shape tendons creaking whenever I went uphill. I walked south on Rue de la Victoire. Couldn’t tell exactly where the Haitians lived. The drumming had stopped the previous night and had not resumed, but I was still thinking about them, still intrigued with the notion of choc en retour and its various possible ramifications. The unaccustomed brightness of the open daylight made my eyes run, even behind sunglasses. Every so often I glanced to the side, checking to make sure the blue Peugeot hadn’t lost me yet.
Two blocks up the street I went into a bar. There was no one there except for the proprietor and a man with a tight potbelly and slick black hair who was practicing his bumper pool, alone. I ordered a beer and took a table by the window. The coasters on the table had cartoon illustrations printed on them, covering the history of the beer I was drinking, and I began to line the coasters up side by side. Two car doors banged outside, one after the other, and I looked out. Grushko and Yonko were crossing the street. Yonko looked grim, while Grushko seemed merely unhappy. Yonko was wearing a pink tank top, which tended to highlight his least attractive anatomical features. There was a light bandage on his upper arm, but his movement was free enough. Racine had only nicked him, evidently; he’d probably be displeased to hear that. Yonko had given up shaving, I noticed, so maybe he was a little sore. His raincoat was wrapped around his right forearm and hand. He’d be in a pretty fix if it rained, wouldn’t he? And it did rain a lot in Brussels. One day he was going to drop that package and get himself in a lot of trouble. The two of them walked into the bar and took seats at my table without waiting for an invitation.
I waved to the bartender for two more beers. No one said anything until he’d set the glasses down and gone back to the counter. The Bulgarians didn’t touch their glasses. The hell with it, I thought, and tossed off mine. Then I pointed at Yonko’s beer and when he didn’t react I picked it up and had a belt. It was a clear provocation and at first I didn’t understand why I’d done it; it came from some sort of reflex. Then Yonko drew back the folds of his raincoat and thrust the exposed inch of submachine gun muzzle under the table into me. This was the tricky and difficult part, the moment I wanted to get to and past as quickly as possible.
“So shoot me,” I said. Yonko was the English speaker, but I was hoping that Grushko might at least pick up the tone. “Shoot me now and you won’t get any money and you won’t get any dope. “
Yonko was leaning out to the edge of his chair, looking more wolfish than ever. His teeth were pointed and blackened in places, I noticed now for the first time, and his breath was not good. He was just a no-account kid, I thought, and I really wouldn’t have put it past him to pull the trigger right there in the bar in spite of the witnesses and the difficulty of escape, but I reached down, slowly, no sudden alarming movement, and pushed the gun muzzle off my hip, down toward the tobacco-littered floor. Grushko nodded.
“Get rid of him,” I said, indicating Yonko with my thumb. “I need to talk to you alone.”
Grushko spoke shortly in Bulgarian and Yonko withdrew to another table deeper in the bar, where he sat down facing us, baleful as ever. The bartender brought him a fresh beer and after a moment he set the rolled raincoat down on an empty chair, picked up his glass and drank from it. I found I was breathing more easily once I saw that, and the knotted muscles in my neck and back began to unwind.
At my table, Grushko leaned forward and began to knead the top of his head, slowly and with great concentration, working around the edges of his bald spot, which began to turn pink under this massage. His fingers were thick and stubby, and on one I noticed he wore a plain gold ring. I waited, finishing Yonko’s beer, and after a moment he lifted his head and began to speak.
“My nephew is impulsive,” he said. By cracky, he spoke English after all. It might be a good omen if disinformation was beginning to work in my favor. Maybe ... It had not occurred to me that Yonko and Grushko were related, but I supposed that was no more improbable than any other thing. “He has a problem with his self-control. But he is not really a bad boy.”
“Yonko, you mean?”
Grushko nodded. It wasn’t quite my picture of Yonko, but it wasn’t worth arguing about either. Grushko’s face, side-lit from the window, was deeply lined around the eyes and mouth. I saw the gray in his crown of hair and realized he had to be ten years older even than me, which put us both a bit past it for this sort of activity.
“All his life he has wanted to live in America,” Grushko said. “What he wishes more than anything in the world is to become an American policeman.”
I restrained my emotion at learning this interesting fact. And after a moment of reflection the picture of Yonko as, say, a New York City cop seemed much less ridiculous than it had at first.
Grushko rubbed his eyes. “It’s very serious for us now, at the moment. Bulgaria is … not such a free country. You understand?”
“You can’t go back?”
“I am an artist,” Grushko said, but in a tone of such little pretension that I took him quite seriously despite the lapses I’d detected in his camera work. “Not well respected by th
e government of now. And not for many years. My work may be … what it may be, but to me it is important. You are an editor and you understand this.”
“Oh. You did recognize me, then.”
“Of course. And I have seen your work.”
I inclined my head, though I thought he was probably fibbing about this last part. Any place he might have seen my cutting, a person wouldn’t have been likely to hang around for the credits.
“Your camera work was very fine and it was a pleasure to edit it,” I said. Half-truth for half-truth. I was losing track of where this conversation was leading, though Grushko apparently was not.
“Then there is the other matter ...”
“Our business?” I said.
“Yes. You see … ah … let me only say that it makes it even harder to return ... impossible, you see?”
“Burned your bridges.” I engaged in the thought experiment of supposing that Jerry Hansen had been armed with a submachine gun when he debarked from the Nova Scotia ferry that day. Well? In one way it made me sympathize with Yonko, and in another way it didn’t.
“And we depend very much on the money. You see. Otherwise ...”
“Yes.”
“So.” Grushko put his hands palms down on the table and leaned forward onto them.
“You are the friend of Mr. Carter?”
“We’ve met,” I said, sliding my hands down to my knees so that they would not tremble.
“He promised to send someone who would help us through to America.”
No fooling? This was getting presumptuous even for Kevin. It wasn’t just scag he wanted anymore; I was supposed to start smuggling people.
“Not to mention the money?” I said.
“Of course.”
“But I can’t give you the money ...”
Grushko sat back. “I let Yonko shoot you then?”
Just when everything was going so nicely, too. I smiled, though I no longer really felt like it.
“What good would that really do you?”
“Maybe in the arm? The leg?”
“No, thank you. Look. There’s been a mistake; You saw what was in that bag yourself. “
“A mistake?”
I had to admit myself it didn’t sound all that convincing, but it was what I had.
“I didn’t have the combination. That was the setup, wasn’t it? I know how it looks. But I’m just the delivery man.”
“Then you must give us back our knapsack. “
“But then I have my own obligations too, you see, back in America.”
“It’s not good,” Grushko said. He dragged his fingers back across the table and folded his hands in his lap. He really did look pretty worried about everything, which I could hardly blame him for.
“I know,” I said. “Look.” And I hesitated. I’d thought it all through before this morning, it was almost as if it had been worked out unconsciously in my fever, and yet now it seemed hard to begin to say the necessary words. “We have to solve the problem, don’t we? I can’t get the money yet, it’s impossible, but maybe I can get you to New York. That’s part of it, no? Does that help you?”
“You know we need papers.”
“Of course,” I said, though I really hadn’t considered it. “I’ll work on it right away. “
“To deliver here?” Grushko looked a little happier.
“No,” I said, improvising. “In London. In two weeks.”
I gave him the telephone number of the flat near Paddington. The landlady would think them peculiar, I knew, but I had warned her I needed the place for business.
“It’s not what we had hoped,” Grushko said.
“I’m sure,” I said. “But you would have killed me, wouldn’t you? Could you blame me if I’d just disappeared altogether after the last time, we met?”
“No,” Grushko said. “It’s arranged, then.”
“It’s arranged,” I said, and he pushed back his chair.
“Wait,” I said, and for a second it was hard to breathe and I had to gulp before I spoke. “You’ll need everything you have here in New York again. Everything. You understand?” Grushko nodded and I knew he’d grasped the message. Then I felt what Kevin must have felt sometimes, a shadow of unacknowledged intent welling up behind my eyes and for a moment darkening them, a pulse steadily pounding, like the drums.
Racine solved the immediate technical problem which arose out of all this by introducing me to Clermont, who seemed to be another hangover from “the old days of la politique.” Clermont was a big stooping man, very jovial in manner, with a head shaped like an ostrich egg, which he kept shaved completely bald. Even his eyebrows were shaved and naked. Clermont had enormous double-jointed hands, which were adept at delicate niggling tasks. He was a graphic designer during the work week, a printmaker by personal vocation, and somewhere in between he was also, well, a forger. He was a fast and good one too, to the extent of my ability to judge. One night Racine and I went over to see him, taking along two passport snaps of Yonko and Grushko, along with some other baggage. We sat at one end of Clermont’s long narrow workshop drinking beer and planning the immediate future, while Clermont himself perched on a high stool over a drafting table in the rear. Clermont bent low over the papers on the board, working away with his various inks and glues and a couple of little tools that looked like dental picks. His hands made spidery shadows under the high intensity lamp. Every so often he’d smile or mutter something, but he didn’t seem to require any reply. It took him two hours, maybe a little longer, to finish, and even as a novice I was impressed with the job; even the embossing looked okay. He’d turned Grushko and Yonko into a couple of Dutchmen. That struck me as a little odd; I’d have had an easier time picturing them as Turks or Hungarians or something. But Dutch passports were what Clermont had around, and I didn’t have any extra passports at all, so Dutchmen is what they had to become.
By the time we were done admiring Clermont’s work it was late, probably after midnight, and time to make the next move. Clermont was letting us borrow a car for the maneuvers out of town. So I put on a djellaba and a khufi hat I’d brought along in my bag, which were supposed to make me look like a Moroccan. I suppose it might have deceived someone in the dark. Well, however silly I felt, there was no such thing as too careful, and although there’d been no blue Peugeot following us earlier, there might always have been something else. I thought the personal disguise was pushing it, but it hadn’t been my idea.
Clermont helped me load up the car with our bags and the tube that concealed Racine’s little rifle and a sizable tin trunk, which was no joke to carry. Then I shook hands with him, standing in the dark under the broken streetlight where he’d had the foresight to park, and then I jumped in and drove off. About ten miles down the road to Ghent I pulled onto the shoulder. There’d been no headlights behind me for ten minutes, and that was good enough for me.
I got out and opened the back door of the car and dragged the trunk down, as gently as I could, until it rested with one end on the pavement. There wasn’t a sound from inside it and I grew anxious as I fumbled at the catches. But when I opened the lid I could hear Racine breathing in there, though he didn’t say anything at first. After a moment he clambered stiffly out, stumbled, and stood leaning against the car on the shoulder of the road, rubbing at his joints.
“I think we overdid it,” I said. And remembering the djellaba, I pulled it off over my head. “There wasn’t anything behind us the whole way out of town.”
“Probably. But what everyone knows about Clermont is that no one ever caught him doing anything. “
No one had ever caught me either, I reflected then, at least not yet, but I said nothing to Racine on this subject. We remained standing by the car for long enough to smoke a cigarette. A heavy fog had begun to lower over the road, and it roiled across the headlight beams, which I had left turned on. When it began to rain we both got into the car. Racine took the wheel and piloted us around to the north of the city ag
ain, to take the road for Antwerp.
“It can be done,” Racine had said a few days before, after I’d outlined the difficulties as I perceived them, after we’d agreed that a full partnership was the only way to go from here and were settling down to the details, across his kitchen table. “No, I’m sure, I know the way.”
“Let me in on it, then,” I said.
“You’ve never done any diving?”
“Never.”
Racine leaned back in his chair, blowing smoke up at the ceiling.
“It’s okay, though,” he said at last. “Because I have.” And that was how the labor was divided; like usual, I had the theory, and this time he had the technique.
The drill for Antwerp was strictly Racine’s responsibility, and he decreed that we would see little of the city. We arrived in the dark and he checked us into a waterfront hotel and we scarcely left it again during daylight. Racine went out to procure the Aqualungs and the other gear while I stayed in and studied shipping schedules, my part of the first day’s chores. Racine ordered no beer and as few cigarettes as possible, because we were in training now.
So it was a wound-up few days I was in for, though I never completely lost control. Racine found it easy enough to switch to daytime sleeping, but for me it was harder, and I spent many hours of each day standing at the window, staring out at the Schelde River through the slits of the Venetian blinds. What wears people down, as I knew very well, is the boredom of waiting, which can make a person rush out and make a fatal mistake for the sake of doing something. Even when I was where I preferred to be, far, far away from the actual transaction, the tension had always told on me, and now it was smoldering, like a fine electric network stippled all over my skin. I didn’t get used to it exactly, and it didn’t go away, but after a day or so the anxiety lost its negative value and became a sensation I could savor like a drug.
For the first three nights, after darkness had fallen, we left the hotel and Racine drove us to the empty beaches down the coast. On the drive down he’d try to explain parts of it, talking about breathing, about relaxation, while I stared out the window, half listening, at the flat black sea slipping by. It was cold on the beaches, cold sand between my toes, and the air tank was chilly and heavy on my back, but the water itself was freezing, so impossibly cold that I could feel my organs shrinking inside me as I went under.
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