Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Down under. The most remarkable thing was the darkness. Ten feet below, the surface lost its last faint luminescence and I only knew which direction was up by way of my own buoyancy. It was like death, I could imagine, but I was breathing, sucking air from the tank with a ragged throttling sound, incredibly loud, and I could feel the trail of bubbles sifting across the side of my face and up toward the surface. Then Racine’s light snapped on and I saw him easily rolling over and gesturing, a true frogman, then swimming away with me after him, following the fading light, the fins on my feet propelling me forward with a good deal more verve than I felt. The first night it was only swimming and breathing and getting used to the long periods underwater. On the second night he started me swimming with some weight strapped to my belt, and on the third the weight was more. Driving back to the city just before the dawn of our fourth day in Antwerp, Racine declared that I was ready, though I myself was not so sure.

  On the fourth night we went prowling among the interlinked branches of the Haven, equipped with a Starlite scope with which we could read the lettering on the stern of our ship: the Eleusis, a Greek freighter, bound for New York by way of Dover, now moored in Havensdok 2e. We worked back from the Eleusis toward the Schelde, measuring angles and estimating times, once flattening ourselves beneath a truck when a port guard passed by.

  That was the dress rehearsal, and next was opening night. Racine and I dropped ourselves into the Schelde near the Royersluis canal. There was something to be said for the practice I’d had; I was used to the feel of the water now, though here it was an inky oily black, darker by far than at the beaches. Somewhere ahead Racine’s light came dimly on and I churned away after it. I felt competent, unconcerned even by the rubber-swathed package that was bound to my belly like a pregnancy.

  But it seemed to be taking a long time. Too long, I thought, though Racine had the watch. He veered to the right (were we through the channel?) and after a little while more, to the left. Another long swim and then a turn to the right, which should have been our last. But Racine stopped and let me catch up. Treading water, he made some odd gestures with his hands, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to get across. I motioned him on. He shrugged and swam back in the direction we’d come from. I followed, trying to resist the fear: if we were lost we might run out of air, but the more I panicked the faster I’d breathe.

  Then Racine stopped and when I reached him he gave the thumbs-up sign. I nodded, and he switched off the light and floated upward. He would take the risk of surfacing for a brief final orientation. We’d decided that earlier, on a toss. I waited, hovering, like a fish holding itself stationary, in the total darkness. The light reappeared and Racine swam ahead. I followed more closely this time, until abruptly we were against a wall of curving steel, the hull of our Eleusis.

  Then there was a quick flurry against the steel plates, the two of us rushing to secure the magnets and the steel webbing that spanned them, a net across the package. Lighter now, I swam toward the surface while Racine double-checked, my hand stretched out above me counting rivets, five, ten, fifteen; at twenty-one my fingers broke the surface and I dove again.

  The lamp was already some distance away. I swam and after a while I lost track of our turns. Again it seemed much too long, and my air supply, I noticed, was now in the warning zone. I had no idea at all of how far we’d come, how close to safety. I began counting to myself, one thousand, two thousand, as much to calm myself and slow my breathing as to restore my sense of time.

  At somewhere around two billion, the light ahead went out, which might have meant either good news or disaster. I stopped swimming and let my body rise. When I broke water I tore off my mask and saw I’d made it; I was in the Schelde, only twenty or thirty yards from where we had gone in. Treading water, I heard Racine bursting out of the river behind my back, and I swam in his direction.

  “We did it!” he was calling. There was not much need for caution here.

  “We did it!” I shouted back. I swam to him, and we hugged and pounded each other’s shoulders, right there in the water. We did it, we did it, the words beat in my brain, and I danced in the dirty water, perfectly euphoric, though I knew it was really only half done.

  PART IV

  AVAILABLE LIGHT

  16

  STAY FOR THE OTHER HALF is what the limeys are supposed to say, and I’ve always thought it was a fine old expression, implying, as it seems to, that the second half can be extended to equal whatever you may have chosen to consume up to the given moment. A sort of eternal flotation of the median. I could hear the line the instant I stepped into the Paddington flat, as plainly as if it really had been spoken by the jolly tar on the label of the half-empty bottle of rum I’d left there roughly a month before.

  As the dog returns ...

  It had been a long time since I’d really tied on a good one, I realized, slapping the bottle firmly against my palm as I sank back into one of the greasy armchairs. Though for once I’d hardly thought about it, I hadn’t been really drunk in an age, what with the long illness and then the abstinence required for the diving. “Now, I discovered I’d had the forethought to refill the ice trays before leaving. The top couple of plastic cups had molded, so I took one from the middle of the stack.

  Again it was hot, uncharacteristically hot, in London, and after my first drink I got up and pounded the sashes of the window with the heel of my shoe until the paint loosened up again and I could open it. The air outside, however, was scarcely any cooler than the air within. I refilled my cup and sat down. It was very humid. I drank, more quickly now, and watched dusk begin to darken the edges of the window frame; with nightfall the temperature did seem to drop but only by a fraction. I did not turn on the light, but remained sitting in the darkness until I had finished the bottle. Then the bottle was empty, and yet it seemed to have had no effect.

  Curious. My mind remained as clear as a new windowpane. I looked all around the room; everything was shadowy but my eyes had adjusted and there was enough ambient light from the street to make the objects in the room reasonably distinct. After considering for a moment, I stood up. Then the rum asserted itself; I reeled to one side and barely saved myself from falling by flinging one hand out against the wall. My body was drunk as a lord, no question, but there had not been the slightest balm to my brain. A bizarre sensation.

  Oh, leave it till the maid comes in the morning to sweep.

  I straightened up and went into the bathroom, where I switched on the fluorescent tube over the sink. There was a heavy sweat beading all over my face. I dabbed a finger in it and discovered that it smelt of rum. My eyes were red and itchy. I took off my shirt and splashed my head and upper body with cold water. Afterward I remained leaning on the edge of the sink, staring into my own eyes, tracing the lines of my face. Water ran down the creases and stubble, and soon sweat began to burst out again behind it.

  Myself.

  Well, this was not the maudlin drunk I’d had on my last night in Rome, nor yet the fit of consuming despair that had followed my visit to the Trevi Fountain. No longer was I on the verge of the void. If I did have a problem, rum couldn’t touch it, and in my queer invincible sobriety I felt that perhaps I was instead stumbling toward the solution. A solution, of sorts. Yes. It was possible, likely even, that I was coming into possession of myself, though I was not at all sure that I really wanted the inheritance.

  Despair begins with division of the will, says Kierkegaard, and mine was not divided anymore, though I knew the demanding old Dane would not approve of what was happening to me — oh, no. It was not any higher self I was discovering, but the beast within, the reptile living in the glands and the serpentine winding of the spinal cord, its blind unity of purpose. Sweat was pouring out of my forehead and even my eye sockets now, a burning sweat, and my hands had gone white from their grip on the edge of the sink. I was afraid, afraid of myself, and locked in that confrontation with my reflected image, I knew that I must have been so for
a very long time.

  I washed my face again and went into the outer room, where, with some awkwardness, I let down the bed. Slowly I lowered myself onto the mattress. Though my head was still lucid, I felt drowsy now.

  You are a student of theology, I see.

  Ethics, really. And in any case I am only an amateur.

  I chuckled a little in my doze; that exchange seemed perfectly ridiculous now. An amateur, indeed, I’d been giving myself too much credit. Discomfort at that thought brought me fully awake once more and I remembered abruptly why I had felt it was necessary to get drunk tonight. I switched on a light and sat up in the bed. My bag was on the floor, just within reach, and I rolled over and snatched it by the strap and dragged it up onto the bed with me. The movement gave me a second’s worth of vertigo — again, a purely physical sensation. I felt in the side pocket of the bag and found the letter by touch.

  A pale blue airmail envelope weighing no more than a Kleenex, addressed in red with the characteristic backward slashes of Lauren’s hand. I had been carrying it unopened since Brussels, since the day I had really gone to the post office there. Because there’d been no opportunity really to have a long drink and I strongly felt that I would need one before I opened it.

  It might just as well have been a telegram:

  Whatever you’re doing, stop it and come home. Everything is different now. Everything has changed.

  Of course it was a good deal more substantial than the blank sheet I hadn’t sent her. And not quite what I’d expected, either. I’d looked for a longer letter, full of equivocation, nothing so brief or so definite. The definiteness in particular ran a tingling finger down my backbone.

  Whatever you’re doing, stop it …

  Not bloody likely, of course. But for a moment I let myself imagine it. Could I turn my back, just walk away? I couldn’t. I was in. Come home, she wrote, only where was that supposed to be? New York? The farm? Wherever I found her? It would certainly have required some serious changes to bring that bit about, and I urged myself to be suspicious. I reminded myself that those qualities of endless change, life constructed as a series of moments, belong to the seducer, the betrayer. And still that idea went against the grain and I forgot it, dozing off happily enough, with the letter pressed against my ribs.

  The telephone woke me and I struck out for it in the dark, tumbling it with a crash and jangle on the floor. It was Grushko, and after he repeated himself a couple of times my head cleared enough for me to gather that he and his charming nephew were waiting for their new passports at a pub on the King’s Road.

  I hung up and, blearily, checked my watch. There was an hour and a half before closing time. At least I was mostly dressed already. I washed my face and slipped the passports into my inside jacket pocket and went down the stairs. My landlady was standing behind the desk, apparently in a chatty mood.

  “And was it the foreign gentlemen, then?” she said. The call had come through her switchboard, which was the only way a call could come.

  “I suppose,” I said, not really listening, headed for the door. Then it registered and I stopped.

  “Which foreign gentlemen?”

  “Why, the ones who came round the day before yesterday,” the landlady said cheerily.

  “For me?”

  “Yes, to be sure. But they only stayed a moment and wouldn’t leave a message. You were away,” she added, a little superfluously.

  “I see.” I thought for a second and then went down to the street. God bless the old lady for a Nosy Parker; she just might have saved my neck. There were no loiterers near the building, but I walked all the way around the block to make sure. It was easy enough to spot my second floor apartment in the rear, since I had the only open window. The brick facing of the wall below was rough and an agile person might have been able to climb it without much difficulty. Of course there hadn’t quite been time for that, yet. I wound my arms in fast little circles, loosening up — my elbow had healed pretty well by then, and a good thing too —and then went back inside. The landlady, conveniently, was engaged in the rear, so I could dart in and out to retrieve my bag without her knowing anything about it.

  Time was really a factor now, so I caught a cab and had the driver wait outside Paddington Station while I went in to drop my bag in the cloakroom. Maybe they’d put it next to the package, or maybe they would not. I had the driver wait again in the King’s Road, outside the pub, which was, appropriately enough, called the Lion’s Mouth. There was no sign of Grushko or Yonko in the main room and for a moment I almost panicked, thinking I’d miscalculated the whole play. I wandered around the edge of the bar and found a staircase which led down to a game room. Downstairs there were several pool tables and one billiard table. Grushko was deeply engrossed in a game of billiards with a younger man, a punker with spiky hair — so involved he did not notice my arrival, as a matter of fact. Yonko was not in evidence, not much to my surprise. I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. Again the time was beginning to matter, but Grushko finished his game before I was done with my smoke. He was starting for the stairs when I stood up to greet him.

  “Bien, bien,” he said. “You’re here at last. A drink?”

  We went together up the stairs; I let him lead. On the main floor he started for the bar, but I caught him by the elbow.

  “No time for that, I’m afraid,” I said. Grushko’s smile became distinctly uneasy.

  “But I must pay you a beer,” he said. “You paid last time, in Brussels.”

  Not terrifically convincing. My theory was looking better every minute.

  “I haven’t got the papers here, you see,” I said. “We have to go back to my place so I can get them for you.”

  “No, no, but we must wait for Yonko,” Grushko said. “He had to go out for a moment, you see. He will not be back for twenty minutes, a half hour ...”

  “A pity,” I said, tightening my grip on his elbow. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to catch up with him later. I have a taxi waiting for us just outside the door.”

  It didn’t turn out to be my most amusing cab ride. Even the driver was sullen because I’d made him wait so long. It would have been a little impolitic for Grushko and me to have had much conversation, even if there had been no other cause for tension. A deadly silence fell and endured for the five or ten minutes of the trip. I had the driver stop a good block and a half from my building, and improved his mood slightly by overtipping him.

  Grushko was no happier, but perhaps resigned; he seemed stolid enough, at any rate, as we walked down the street.

  “Worried about Yonko?” I said, to needle him a little. “Don’t fret, I’m sure you’ll find each other again soon enough.”

  “Yes, yes,” Grushko said. “No doubt.”

  I escorted him up the pair of steps to the glass door of the lobby. For the second time that evening the luck of circumstances stuck with me; the landlady was not at the counter. The hum and glow of her little black-and-white television issued through the crack of the door behind the desk, but she herself did not appear in the few seconds it took us to reach the stairs. In the stairwell, Grushko hesitated; he was listening for something, apparently enough. Again, I took him by the elbow and urged him on, keeping a comfortable half step behind.

  Walking into the hallway turned out to be the rough spot I hadn’t anticipated, the place where I almost blew it, blinded by overconfidence and the rising excitement of action. It was a good thing I’d kept Grushko a pace ahead of me, because I could see in the tensing and relaxing of his shoulders the preparation for making some sort of major noise. He might have been planning some too-loud piece of conversation, or maybe a real shout that would have completely obliterated the nervous amenities we’d maintained up to then, but he never got a chance to do either. I fell in behind him and jammed my thumbs up under the back of his jaw on either side, blocking the big veins there, stopping him cold. The casual ease with which I slipped into this brutality surprised me a little. I noticed, dis
tantly, that he was exactly a head shorter than I, so that his bald spot fit neatly under my chin.

  I edged him forward to the door. To reach my key I had to let go with one hand, but the pulse of the artery kept him immobilized for that extra beat I needed for the lock. Then it didn’t matter anymore because it was all starting to happen and I was doing everything by reflex, door open, light switch, keeping Grushko in front of me as a shield. Over his shoulder I saw Yonko whirling around in the area of the bed, holding only a flashlight though. I suppose the machine gun hadn’t fit into his cat-burglar routine, and I was grateful for that.

  Though he hadn’t had all the time they’d bargained for, the time I should have spent hoisting a few with Grushko at the Lion’s Mouth, Yonko had done an impressive job on the place. He’d slit the chair cushions and the mattress and torn a lot of paneling down from the walls and even begun on the hollow spots behind the bathroom tiles. Of course it was later that I totaled up the damage, because at that instant I just barely had time to register that Yonko for once, wasn’t carrying. I shoved Grushko out of the way — his circulation was still enough impaired that it would take him a few minutes to become a factor in whatever was going to occur — and bent my knees. Yonko was coming at me, and I could sense his confidence in his superior height and reach. It was a pure animal response, but there was plenty of raw hate in his face also, and did I imagine it or was there a flash of recognition too? There was little time to imagine anything, though, no time for the subjective qualities of the experience, because although Yonko seemed to be moving rather slowly I already had to take a step back to make room for the side kick, setting my heel against the doorsill. That always tends to surprise people without training — they see you backing up and then you’ve hit them. It was either an inspired technique or just a very lucky one. I hit him just under the sternum and he sailed backward over the wreckage of the bed and collapsed into the cabinet behind it, like a vampire sinking back into its coffin.