by Dan Taylor
“Wow, I know I’m really good looking, but—”
She snatches her hand out of mine. “Not because of that, you stupid ass. I figured you for a spy of some kind as soon as you started chatting me up.”
“So you knew all along?”
“I thought I’d go along with you wooing me, so I could try to find out who you were and if you were a threat to mine and Cole’s life. I knew why you were here in Oslo as soon as you started talking about the observation station. I was just playing along to find out what I could.”
“I take it that Cole’s quit the Agency and is, what? Scared of one of our lawyers coming after him for breach of contract, so he faked his own death?”
“That’s right.”
That’s not the whole story, of course. He’s also left behind a wife and kids back in L.A., but I don’t mention it to Bertha.
“What was that about on the first night, when you slapped me after kissing me?”
“I found out I couldn’t go along with it as soon as you put your hand on my breast. I went home to Cole, and he looked a little nervous when I said there was a guy sniffing around me, who I suspected could just be wooing me so that he could find out about you. So he said that if I were to encounter you again, I should do whatever it takes to find out who you are.”
“Anything?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Who says chivalry is dead?”
She playfully slaps me on the forearm. “Cole’s a nice guy.”
“I’m sure he is. So that’s why you were asking about my job during the love…fucking?”
“Yeah.”
I smile and shake my head. “So we were both trying to bonk secrets out of each other. What are the odds?”
She doesn’t answer, but asks, “So, you didn’t answer my question. Where do we go from here?”
“I’ll need to speak to Cole, so I can find out what happened at the observation station, naturally. And to tie up a few loose ends. He didn’t happen to mention it to you?”
“He goes all strange when I ask him. Starts shaking and demanding strong alcoholic drinks. Will you tell him what happened between you and me?”
I pull a theatrically confused face. “What do you mean?”
“The love…oh, I get it now.” She laughs her frying-bacon laugh. “You’re a good guy, Jake. But what will we tell Cole? You know, about how you revealed your identity to me, letting me know you’re not the enemy, but just interested in his whereabouts?”
I think a second then smile. “I have just the story.”
40.
BERTHA AND I TAKE a cab to her apartment, where Cole will be waiting. According to Bertha, he’s home often during the day, and is “struggling to get a job because he doesn’t know the language.” She calls ahead, letting him know it was me who was looking for him, and that I’m just coming for a friendly chat.
There are a few things on my mind as we ride: One, why would Cole go to such trouble to quit his job and leave his wife and kids? Two, from what Bertha said, he sounded a nervous wreck when he found out she suspected someone was looking for him; why was that? Three, why was there some guy tailing me as soon as I arrived in Oslo?
Oh, and there’s a fourth. Why does this cab driver’s Sat Nav keep on instructing him to make a U-turn?
I say, “You really should make that U-turn, chief.”
The cab driver’s a young Somali guy. He turns and says, “The damn thing is broken. If I listen to it, it’ll have me driving around in circles.”
Seems some quirks follow you around the globe. I’ve traveled thousands of miles from ‘I Could…’ and getting chauffeured from one place to another still isn’t as simple as it should be.
Speaking of being simple. I don’t expect this to be a quick debrief with no complications.
Bertha’s been quiet during the drive.
I say, “Are you okay?”
“I just feel bad about sleeping with you. I shouldn’t have done that to Cole.”
“If it makes you feel any better, it was just business. You needed to find out who I was, and sleeping with me was the only way you could.”
She looks at me, hopeful. “So if I hadn’t, there was no other way you would’ve revealed who you were?”
There’s some logic to it. My mission was to sleep with her, and after having slept with her and it producing no results, there was only one course of action after that: to confront her, to reveal who I am and what I knew. But was that the only way she could’ve found out? I’m not too sure about that.
“I’m absolutely sure about that, yes.”
“Good. Then I don’t feel so bad. Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Did you enjoy it, Jake, the love making, I mean?”
Now here’s a question and a half.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”
“Oh. Me too.”
We ride in silence awhile.
Then she says to the driver, “Here we are.”
She pays the guy, and we go in an apartment building. We go in the elevator, and she presses the button for the tenth floor.
There’s a weird tension, like that of getting in an elevator with an ex you haven’t seen for a couple years.
What she does next surprises the shit out of me. She presses the emergency stop button, making the elevator jar to a halt.
And then she pounces on me, wrapping her legs around me as she hangs on to my neck with one hand and is…massaging my face with the other?
She starts to kiss me, and I have no choice in the matter. And I’m trying to avoid her lips, believe me. I imagine if you were a fly on the wall, looking from above, the scene being played out would look like a cross between a Mexican professional wrestling match and a kissing contest between two forty-year-old virgins.
She says, “Are you sure there are no other secrets, Kent?”
“Kent?”
She holds my face in place with both hands, and face rapes me: licking, biting, and sucking. Then she says, “I’m getting the impression you haven’t told me everything you know.”
“I kind of did.” I try to pry her off of me, but she’s got a grip like an alpha male chimp. “Let me go, Bertha. Think about Cole.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. I just know there are more secrets I need to fuck out of you. And I’m not starting the elevator until I hear them.”
“This is wrong, Bertha.”
She reaches down with one hand and cups my crotch. “Does it feel wrong, now?”
“Yep, still feels wrong.”
I give her this. She’s got perseverance. This chimp isn’t letting go until she’s turned half mast into full.
Before I know it, she’s taken my pants and briefs down, and taken off her panties, all the while holding on to me. It’s quite the feat.
She whispers in my ear, “So, Kent, is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Come to think of it, Bertha…”
That’s all the cue she needs. We fuck like a pair of kangaroos engaged in make-up sex, she doing most of the work. All the work, in fact.
After we’re done, we put on the few items of clothing we took off. She’s racked with guilt again. “I can’t believe I did that.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Bertha.”
“Tell me that wasn’t wrong and that it was all your fault.”
I look at the elevator, find that I don’t understand any of the button labels—besides the numbers—and the instructions beneath them. “Will you start the elevator again if I do?”
“Yes.”
I roll my eyes. “Then that was all my fault. And it definitely wasn’t wrong.”
To start the elevator again, she simply presses the tenth-floor button. I curse under my breath.
When we arrive at the tenth floor, the doors open to reveal an elderly couple, who have been waiting for the elevator.
They take in our appearances, and the lady shakes h
er head as the guy, supporting himself by a cane and looking ninety pounds soaking wet, winks at me.
Bertha and I awkwardly walk past them, letting them in the elevator. I hear the lady say something as the doors close.
I ask, “What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Don’t get any funny ideas.’”
I catch a glimpse of our appearances in the reflection of the glass in the door leading to the hallway. Our hair’s sticking up like we’re a couple of poodle rockers, my shirt’s hanging out, and the top couple of buttons on Bertha’s shirt are undone, revealing a bit of bra and bulging cleavage.
I say, “I have no idea what she could’ve meant.”
We walk up to the glass, stand side by side, taking in our appearances.
Bertha says, “Shit!”
“What’s wrong?”
“We look exactly like we just made love to each other in the elevator.”
I turn and look at her, see hair sticking up every which way. “Love making might be stretching it a little.”
She starts rearranging her hair, but then stops, sighs. “It’s no good. Do you have a hairbrush?”
“No, I left it in my vagina.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. If you had it in your vagina, it would be here.”
“Ouch!” I think a second. “Let me take another run at it. I left it in my handbag.”
“Too clichéd.” Despite my jokes, her panic hasn’t abated. She’s poking at her hair with one hand as she tucks her shirt in with the other.
She gets her appearance in order as I try to do the same.
She says, “So, how do I look?”
“You look like a woman who’s just fucked a man but had the decent sense to rearrange her appearance afterwards.”
“Jake!” She punches me on the arm.
“I was just joking. You look like a woman who gave a hand job she immediately felt guilty about.”
“Jake!”
“Again, yanking your chain. You look fine. But you forgot to button up the second-to-top button on your shirt.”
She looks down. “Oh, that’s the way I wear it.”
“You must be popular at work.”
Naively, she says, “No, the other ladies at work hate me, and the guys rarely make eye contact with me.”
“I can’t guess why.”
“Come on. He’ll be expecting us.”
She leads me through to the corridor and then the apartment. Bertha knocks on the door.
I say, “Why don’t you just open it? It’s your apartment, right?”
“He’ll have the security latch on. He always does.”
“Even if he knows you’re on your way home?”
She knocks again.
I hear padding footsteps. Cole’s at the door.
I whisper, “What’s taking so long?”
As she smiles and waves, Bertha says, “He’s checking who it is through the peephole. Do this with me.”
I do as she says. I smile creepily and wave mechanically, as though I’m some college kid dressed up as Goofy at Disney World.
I hear him fumbling with the latch.
“By God it worked.”
Bertha shushes me.
The door eventually opens, revealing a tired-looking Cole Baxter wearing a dressing gown that’s slightly too small for him. He takes in our appearances and then says, “Well, you two look like you’ve fucked each other.”
41.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, Coley baby?” Bertha says.
Cole takes in our appearances again. “Just what I meant. You two looked like you fucked each other.”
I say, “Relax, Cole, I look disheveled because this is my new style. And Bertha here had to evacuate her building today because of a bomb threat. And you just know no one listened to the appointed fire officer and ran like hell. She’s lucky she made it out alive.”
Cole thinks a second. “How did you get around to revealing your identity, Hancock?”
“Cute story. I admit, I masqueraded as a jazz musician to get close to Bertha, as we thought she had something to do with your disappearance. After I’d introduced myself at the club, one thing led to another, we got a little drunk, and had a game of Truth or Dare.”
Cole looks me in the eyes, which become narrow slits. “So I take it you won?”
“Won what, Cole?”
“Truth or Dare.”
I ignore the fact that Truth or Dare isn’t the type of game that has a winner or a loser, and say, “That’s right.”
I hold out my hand for him to shake. He says, “No thanks. I suppose you better come in.”
We go inside. Cole takes a seat in a rocking chair, by the side of which is a bottle of whisky. Bertha and I sit on the sofa opposite it, thigh touching thigh, until she realizes and moves to the far end.
Cole stops rocking momentarily to pick up the whisky bottle. He doesn’t take his eyes off me while he drinks. I look to Bertha, who smiles an apology.
After he’s finished drinking, Cole says, “I’d offer you a drink, but I hear whisky isn’t your thing.”
“I’ll take a beer if you’re offering.”
Bertha goes to get up, but Cole stops her. “I wasn’t. So, Bertha said something about you wanting to know about the observation station?”
“I do. Andre sent me. The old boy’s a little worried about you. You still haven’t stamped your time card.”
“Tell him he can shove it in his—”
Bertha interrupts him, “Cole!”
But Cole’s been trained by the best, too. He says, “What? I was going to say, ‘…he can shove it in the drawer he keeps the others, unstamped.’”
I look to Bertha, expecting her to say, “Nice save!” But she just says, “Oh.”
Cole says, “I’m done with the Agency. You can go back there and tell them that.”
“It might surprise you, Cole, but I’m not here in a human resources capacity. We’re just interested in what happened at the observation station, is all. Now if you could stop with the macho whisky-drinking bullshit and stop rocking in that damn chair, we can clear everything up and I can go back to a place where a round of beers doesn’t cost more than an angioplasty.”
He stops rocking in his chair and then leans forward, looks me dead in the eyes. “The observation station was…it was…”
I lean forward. “Yeah?”
Cole’s eye flit to Bertha, and then back again. Then he says, “Say, why don’t you get Jake here a beer, Bertha?”
She runs off and then shouts from the kitchen. “We’re all out.”
“Could you go to the store and get some?”
“Sure.”
Cole goes back to rocking and drinking whisky as we listen to Bertha busy herself in the hallway, getting her handbag and keys and whatnot together before she heads out.
After she’s left, Cole does something that surprises the shit out of me. He doubles over and starts blubbering like a five-year-old who’s just fallen off his tricycle and scraped his knee.
I wait for him to finish.
And wait.
And wait.
Until snot starts dribbling out of his nose in one long string, mixing with the long saliva string hanging out of his mouth. At this point I can take no more. So I say, “Cole, get yourself together. Or at least wipe your face.”
He sniffles and wipes away the saliva-snot string with his sleeve, and I recoil in disgust, but recover to my professional demeanor just in time before he sits up. He says, “Sorry, it’s been a trying time.”
“What has?”
“You wouldn’t understand.” He thinks a second. “Why did they send you in the first place? You were never much of an investigator.”
“Good enough to be saving your dumb ass for the second time.”
“I’ll give you the last time, though even that’s dubious. But what are you saving me from this time?”
“Fair point. Okay, Cole, time to tell me what happened in Antarctica.”
He tells the story of the first day in the observation station, about his suspicious partner, Dmitry, and about him calling Cole American, despite Cole telling him he was Canadian. About how he searched the place high and low, the German whose bones were lying in the septic tank, and the fight they had outside of the bathroom.
He stops at this point.
I say, “You haven’t told me much, Cole.”
“I’m getting to it. It’s difficult.”
“Oh, stop being a baby.”
Cole presses his hands to his ears. “Don’t say that!”
“What? Oh?”
“No.”
“Stop?”
“No.”
“A?”
“Of course not. Baby! Don’t say that word.”
I go over to Cole, kneel down next to him, and guide the whisky bottle to his mouth so he can take a pull. Then I say, “Cole, what happened there?”
Cole wipes the whisky from his mouth and then says the last thing I expected to hear. “Jake, do you remember what it was like to shit in diapers?”
“To do what now?”
42.
Somewhere in Antarctica…
COLE REITERATES WHAT he said. “What did you mean by it’s your station?”
Dmitry’s still grimacing from the pain of Cole hyperextending his shoulder joint, but he manages to say, “I suppose I’ve let bag out of the cat, already, so I may as well tell you the rest.”
Cole shakes his head. “It’s cat out of the bag, Dmitry. In that order.”
“Not in Russian, it isn’t, ass smart!”
Cole gets up and dusts himself off. Whenever he’d fought anyone in America—in college, one time at a bar on a Friday night, and at his nephew’s christening—he and his combatant had always shaken hands afterwards, having found new respect. It was the American way. Cole momentarily forgets that he’s a long way away from America, and helps Dmitry up, expecting Dmitry to have found new respect for him. But the only thing that Dmitry has that is newfound is the element of surprise, born out of the American’s naivety.
Cole holds his hand out for Dmitry to shake, and for a moment it looks like Dmitry will take it, until he shoots from the hip, throwing a right cross from the…hip, blindsiding the American.