Fire Point

by John Smolens

  When on leave, Sean, like most of the military, took the train to one of the coastal towns. Some went to Venice, others to the resort town of Rimini, which was popular with German tourists. Sean visited these places, as well as small medieval towns such as Macerata and Recanati, tight stone labyrinths that had been perched on a hilltop for centuries. But it was the seaport of Ancona that he continually returned to, once Bobby Loomis introduced him to Gregor. Gregor had girls. He was Albanian and he usually could be found in a bar called Mare Adriatico. The place was on a narrow street above the harbor, and it reeked of tobacco. The regulars at Mare Adriatico were mostly Eastern European. Though Bobby and Sean always wore their civvies, their haircuts were a dead giveaway that they were American military. They were treated well because it was assumed they had money.

  Gregor’s girls were young, some no more than fourteen or fifteen. The first time Sean didn’t want anything to do with it, and he waited in the bar while Loomis went out back with one of the girls.

  “Where do they come from?” Sean asked. It was their second visit.

  Gregor was in his late twenties. His teeth were already rotten, but he had liquid brown eyes that had the sympathetic appeal of an injured animal. Sean knew he was pretending not to understand the question.

  “The girls,” Sean said. “Where do they come from? Albania, like you?”

  “Ah, yes,” Gregor said happily. “Many countries, many bad places.”

  “I read where girls are kidnapped and brought to Italy.” Sean knew Loomis had turned his head to look at him, but he ignored him. “It was in a newspaper,” Sean said. “Il Resto del Carlino. My Italian’s getting to the point where I can figure out the newspaper.”

  “No, no!” Gregor said. When he spoke English his voice tended to explode in unexpected ways. He raised his hand, indicating to the waiter that they needed another round of mistra. “The girls want to escape and I help them. They want to come here. You have no idea what it’s like there.” Then he held his hands out in a gesture that commonly meant, But what can I do? “They have much difficulty finding work because they have not had school. So they do this because you have to eat, no? Look and see which one you like. I make presentazione.” From the inside pocket of his leather jacket he produced about a dozen small photographs of girls, which he spread out on the table.

  Loomis studied each photo carefully, pausing over two. “God, will you look at this one?” he said. He’d already been out back once tonight, and Sean knew that after another drink he’d want to go again. Loomis looked forward to the trips to Ancona all week. It was all he could talk about; it was like being hooked on a drug. “I can’t make up my mind.”

  Gregor smiled.

  “He’s ugly and he’s from Minnesota,” Sean explained. “They don’t have many girls in Minnesota.”

  Gregor leaned forward and looked seriously at Sean’s mouth. “Nooo girls?”

  “Not like these,” Sean said. “It’s so cold—freddo—and you can never get them to take all their clothes off. Loomis never saw a naked woman before coming here.”

  Loomis had a long head with ears that stuck straight out sideways. Acne scars covered his neck and cheeks. “He’s never even been to Minnesota,” he said to Gregor. “So how would he know?”

  Gregor reached into another pocket and removed a small notebook, which he laid on the table between their drinks. On each page was taped a photo of a girl. Some of them were bare breasted; some stared longingly at the camera as they sucked on their fingertips. Loomis flipped through the pages and stopped at a photo of a dark-haired girl. “Look at those tits,” he whispered. Turning the page, he looked at a blonde. “Oh, Mama.”

  Gregor sipped his mistra. “You like two? I can get you two, non c’e problema.”

  IT WAS ON a Saturday night in November that Sean first saw her. Loomis had been gone nearly an hour with two girls. Mare Adriatico was not very crowded because of the rain, and there were a lot of girls sitting around, coming and going, looking bored. Sean first saw her back—something about her shoulders, the shape of her red hair—and then she leaned forward on her bar stool and turned. She had long legs. Her profile was somehow familiar. Her white blouse rose up from her black jeans enough to expose the arc of her hip. She leaned on the bar and lit a cigarette.

  Sean got up from his table and walked toward the toilette; at the door he paused so that he could see her face in the mirror behind the bar. She had Hannah’s cheekbones and mouth. The eyes were too made up and appeared large and startled. She caught his eye in the mirror and her stare was even, then abruptly she ignored him. He stepped into the bathroom and realized that he was sweating.

  He arranged it with Gregor. Not in a car—cars in Italy were very small—but in an apartment. She said her name was Nikki and she seemed nervous. After a few minutes she said, “Why you look at me this way? What you want? You must tell me.” They were sitting on a brown corduroy sofa with frayed armrests. The place smelled of cigarettes. When he didn’t answer, she shrugged as she stood up. She went into the bedroom, undressed quickly, and lay down on her back on the bed. There was a poster on the wall above her of the medieval town of Ascoli Piceno. He only knew that Piceno was the name of an ancient people who had inhabited this part of Italy.

  Finally, he got up off the sofa and sat on the bed. “You pay just to look?” She pushed out her lips and shrugged. It was a common gesture, which meant This is strange but what can you do? She was imitating it; she wasn’t Italian. Her hair was the awful dyed red, but the roots were dark.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  “I want to know.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “All right, I don’t. You’re here now.” He reached out tentatively and touched her hair. “This isn’t—” But he didn’t finish.

  “Isn’t? Isn’t what? I don’t understand you. What’s isn’t?”

  “Nothing.” He took his hand away from her hair and began to unbutton his shirt. “It isn’t important.” He unbuckled his pants. “You know what I want?” She watched his mouth, to make sure she understood him. “Guess,” he said.

  “Guess?”

  “Yes, sì. You can figure it out.”

  SEAN KEPT CLEAR of his father. He only went upstairs when he knew his father wasn’t home. He’d lived in this basement room since he was six years old, listening to the floor creak overhead, and he used to imagine that it was giants roaming about in the kitchen. When he did something to upset his father, the door at the top of the stairs would be locked. Sean could still come and go through the sliding glass door that went out to the yard, but he was not permitted upstairs. At such times he used to think of himself as a prisoner in jail. He was doing time. Eventually his father would unlock the door and tell him to come upstairs so they could discuss what Sean had done wrong.

  Once, when he was fourteen, he refused to come up the stairs when his father called. His father said, “You come up here now, mister, because if I come down there, you’re not going to like it.” Sean stayed put. When he heard his father coming down the stairs, he locked the door to his room, then sat on the bed. He was shaking. His father broke the door open with his shoulder—it was a cheap door that was hollow inside, and wood splinters sprayed all over the carpet. Once inside the bedroom, he removed his belt and used it on Sean’s legs and fanny.

  GREGOR ARRANGED FOR Nikki to be at Mare Adriatico whenever Sean and Loomis came into Ancona on leave. She would take Sean to the small apartment on the third floor of a building that had stucco walls the color of egg yolk. The wood shutters were always closed and they often rattled in the raw north wind that came off the sea in winter, called bora. On sunny days the shutters cast bars of light into the bedroom. Nikki had a cigarette lit almost constantly and the smoke drifted up through the bars of light above the bed. When they were finished they would take a shower together—she liked that—and then towel each other off. The tile floors were always cold.

 
After a month Sean asked her if she would change her hair.

  They were sitting in Mare Adriatico with Gregor, Loomis, and a tall Russian girl named Zoya. Nikki was wearing the green-and-gold Packers T-shirt Sean had given her. “No,” she said.

  Gregor put both elbows on the table. “What color?” he asked Sean.

  “I was thinking blond.”

  Nikki looked away.

  Gregor tapped out one of his Chesterfields and lit it. “Boh. Make you think of girlfriend in Stati Uniti?”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Sean said.

  “But what if other men like red?” Gregor shrugged, pushed out his lips. His eyes suggested true pain. “What—red, blond, red, blond, red, blond?”

  “Just blond,” Sean said to Nikki. “Stay blond.”

  She got up and walked over to the bar and sat on a stool, keeping her back to their table. Gregor shrugged again, then he laughed. “See why I get paid for this trouble? I try to help, but it’s always to be trouble.”

  Loomis rarely went with the same girl twice, but he liked Zoya. He thought Sean was out of his mind not to try other girls. “You’re not going to make Nikki into some girlfriend in friggin’ Michigan, you know.”

  “You’re so ugly you never got laid without paying for it.”

  Loomis only grinned. So did Gregor, though they had been speaking English so fast that he really couldn’t keep up. Zoya looked bored as she lit another cigarette.

  “You ever even get a date in Minnesota?” Sean asked.

  “You need to lighten up,” Loomis said.

  “I hate this,” Sean said. “Sometimes I think prison would be better than the army.”

  “It does suck—big time. But prisoners don’t get to go on leave. Why don’t you try that girl with the lips? I tell you, she can roll up your eyelids like a window shade.”

  The next weekend they went to Ancona, Nikki was blond and she’d had about two inches trimmed, which made her hair seem fuller. It curled around her ears much like Hannah’s hair, though there were dark roots. Nikki wouldn’t look back at Sean.

  “Happy now?” Loomis said to Sean. “That ought to put rebar in your concrete.”

  “Shut up.” Sean said to Gregor, “How much?”

  “Hair salons, allora!” Gregor said. “Charge a lot, I can tell you. Lot of what they call product.” He sipped his mistra. “Think I will go into that business. You know, diversify.”

  At the apartment Sean saw the bruises on Nikki’s ribs. “Gregor?”

  She smoked her cigarette.

  “I didn’t want that to happen,” he said.

  She cut him a look as she inhaled.

  “Why don’t you get away from Gregor?”

  Nikki sighed, exasperated.

  “No,” he said. “I mean it. Why don’t you just leave Gregor?”

  “Nobody just leave Gregor.” She sat up and put her cigarette out on the nightstand. “He shot up a Hungarian last year and she OD. Found in—” She nodded her head in the direction of the harbor. “You think you be blond, you wear ugly Packer shirt, you look American, you be free?” She turned her head away. “Boh.”

  “I could help you.”

  “Help me what? Che?”

  “Get free.”

  She got up off the bed and walked to the bathroom door. The horizontal bars of light created an optical illusion; her body seemed to be comprised of a stack of illuminated disks. “Why don’t you ask for other girls? That would get me free.” She shut the door.

  SEAN LISTENED TO his father’s footsteps come down the basement stairs. It had to be in the nineties outside; even with the drape drawn across the sliding glass door, the heat invaded the room. His father stood outside the door for a long moment, and Sean almost expected him to break the door down. But then he knocked gently.

  “It’s open,” Sean said.

  His father came in with two cans of beer. “Awful dark in here.”

  “Stays cooler that way.”

  His father handed Sean one of the beers. He brought the desk chair over next to the bed and straddled it, propping his forearms on the backrest. After opening his beer, he sipped the foam that rose out of the top of the can. “Got a call from Dan Schofield.” Dan Schofield was on every board or committee that had something to do with how Whitefish Harbor was run. He was a retired investment banker who played a lot of golf. Sean’s father played three, maybe four times a year. When he did, it was usually with Schofield. Every time he came home from the golf course, he talked about how much he couldn’t stand the game or Schofield. “He says the town commissioners have been working the phones real hard since that article came out.” His father took another sip of beer. It was so dark Sean could barely see his father’s face, but what little light came through the drapes lit up the sheen of sweat that coated his forehead and jaw. His father’s voice was too even and it occurred to Sean that he was frightened. “Some of them think this could lead to a lawsuit against the town. Something to do with our hiring practices. Nepotism, Schofield said.”

  “I’m not even sure I know what that means,” Sean said. “In this case, a father who gets his son hired?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “I have qualifications. A high-school degree. Military background. Christ, you’ve hired summer cops who have studied law enforcement in college for a couple of semesters.”

  “Uh-huh,” his father said. “But they’re not related.”

  “I could give you a list of people who are related that work for the town. On the road crew, in town hall, at the library.”

  “I know, I know. When I was young family mattered. It was the best qualification you could have. Not anymore, thanks to the Democrats.” His father’s patience was disconcerting. Sean really wanted his father to start shouting or something. “That’s part of it, I gather. They start to look at how we came to hire you, and then they might ask why Anne Templeton works in the library and Dean Cooley drives a snowplow all winter. Because we all know a perfect stranger could do a better job.”

  “Fuck ’em.” Sean waited, expecting there to be some reaction, some admonition.

  But his father said, “People have been calling Schofield and the others on the commission, saying they have to get to the bottom of this.”

  “What do they want? I’m out of a job now. Go hire a stranger.”

  His father took a long pull on his beer. “What this is really about is not your job.”

  “What, then?”

  “My job.”

  They were silent for a while. The cold beer can felt good in his hand and he finally remembered to take a sip. “So what do we do?”

  “First, I need to know exactly what happened over there in Italy.”

  “I told you, we got into a little trouble with the local authorities. The brass thought it might be embarrassing to them, so they cut us loose and got us out of there. There are enough scandals in the military as it is.”

  “What kind of trouble exactly? You’ve never really been clear, and we’ve pretty much let it go, thinking you were young and what you got into over there didn’t concern us.”

  “You mean ‘couldn’t hurt you.’ ” His father didn’t answer. Sean dropped his head back against the cinder-block wall. He could feel the coolness of the concrete against his skin. “Jesus, this is all in the past, this is . . . history.”

  “And I want to know who else knows about this.”

  “You mean like Arnie? I haven’t told him anything.”

  “I mean like who was involved over there. That bleeding-heart liberal who owns that fish wrap is already trying to track down people who knew what happened. Christ, she called some kid—what was his name?”

  “Loomis. Billy Loomis.”

  “Yeah, way out in Minnesota.” His father waited, and when Sean didn’t say anything, he said, “I mean, was it girls? Or drugs, or what?”

  After a moment, Sean said, “You could beat it out of me.”

  “I’ve thought about that, but you�
�re too big now.” His father was trying to make a joke, but he wasn’t buying it himself.

  “The only one who really knew anything was Loomis, and you don’t have to worry about him. And the brass that sent us packing, they’ll never say anything because then it’ll come back on their heads. I can’t believe this could mean your job. You’ve been there forever.”

  “What you don’t realize is some people have wanted me out for a long time.” His father tilted his head back and finished his beer. “You can’t trust any of ’em. Schofield, Buzz, they’re all politicians. They’ve been waiting for this chance.” He looked at the can for a moment as though he didn’t know how it got in his hand. “Listen,” he said, his voice now—finally—angry, even threatening. “I want to know exactly what happened.”

  “No you don’t,” Sean said.

  “You’re going to bury me.”

  Sean lifted his head away from the concrete wall. “Eventually.”

  “All right.” His father got up off the chair and went to the door. “Then I want you out of here. After tonight, this isn’t your room anymore. Not free, at least. You want to stay here, you live by the rules, and you pay room and board.” He went out and closed the door behind him.

  ON A WARM night in March, Gregor wasn’t at Mare Adriatico. The bartender told Sean that Nikki was at the apartment. He found her waiting down in the lobby. She had a bandage over her left eyebrow.

  They went out into the street and walked up over the steep hill to the cliffs above the Adriatic, then took the path that wound down to the rocky shore. The pale stones underfoot were soft and brittle as sticks of chalk. They came to a long row of caves that fishermen had cut into the cliffs to store their boats. Each cave had a large wooden door, most painted bright colors. Nikki had a key to one of the caves. Inside she lit a gas lantern. There were tables and chairs, a sofa in back. The air in the cave was cool and smelled of fish and damp stone.