by George Foy
It was interesting, the pilot thought, it was even hopeful that the Spargnapani should subscribe to the Gazette.
Out of some sense of obligation to the greater geopolitics of this planet he tried to read the Trib. Dire headlines announced a worsening of the Mexican crisis. The daily feature on the back page described the discovery a group of University of Rhode Island scientists had made in a salt marsh in Narragansett Bay. ‘The scientists claim a form of organic life, with a DNA whose structure closely replicates the logic system of a factory-built microchip, is invading the marshes beside this former Navy yard,’ the New York Times reporter wrote. ‘These cold-water algae not only incorporate the digital on-off switches of a computer inside their tiny leaves and branches, but duplicate this structure fractally, on a larger scale, so that the various algae colonies are multiplying in exactly the same way that microchips are lined up in a computer.’
‘Dag,’ the pilot muttered.
The photo accompanying showed a man holding a piece of complex moss in his tweezers. A stretch of cattails, with the dark arch of the New Davisville Bridge, lay behind.
‘What is even more bizarre than this marsh becoming the world’s largest living computer,’ the article continued, ‘is that no one has the slightest idea where the algae came from. But computer buffs from as far away as California are flocking to Rhode Island to dig up the weed and put it in anything – test tubes, thermos flasks, even discarded Zero Cola cans – with the idea of growing memory circuits in their own basement.’
The sight of the Davisville marshes made the pilot nervous. The warmth and smoke of the kneipe, the backlog of exhaustion were stronger than his nerves. Five minutes after he put down the Trib his eyelids started to feel heavy as Polish cooking so eventually he left a message for van der Lubbe with the bartender and went back to the hotel and bed.
*
Pressure sought its own release, and the following day Rocketman, PC, Ela, and the pilot all went separate ways, each cozy in the belief the others were still sleeping off jet lag: the pilot to buy rat food; Ela to visit a hairdresser, and mail postcards home; Rocketman to walk the streets, picking up tips on how to look German, or Polish; PC to sit in a café on the south side of the square called Rynek and watch the girls flit by in leather skirts.
It was a pretty day, a fast-boots-and-apples day, with a low, cool wind that felt like high octane fuel in the lungs. After buying pet food the pilot walked to the river, noting the dozens of Polish flags flying defiantly across the river in Lvov-Dwa, the dug-in anti-tank units on both banks.
Signs announced that the tomb of the Blessed Czezlaw, patron saint of the town, had been closed by EU military authorities until further notice.
When the pilot got back to the Silesia he knocked on Ela’s door and asked her if she wanted to go to the kneipe with him.
She opened the door and he said ‘Christmas!’ involuntarily.
She’d got her hair cut and frazzled in long waves like fusilli. There were streaks of white-and-purple dye on one side. She had put on makeup, and lipstick the shade of dark cherries.
‘Whaddya think?’ she asked, cocking her head.
‘I think,’ he said, with deep conviction, ‘I think you’re more beautiful than ever,’ though he also thought those streaks were not going to make it any easier to cross borders unnoticed. But there was such uncertainty in her eyes that he would sooner have chewed glass than tell her so.
PC was sitting in the restaurant drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream when he saw Ela and the pilot go by the window together. The suspicion he’d kept glowing gently in one corner of his mind grew hot and caught fire. He ran his UCC through the counter swiper and hurried after them, brushing by a large, deeply suntanned German in lederhosen, hiking boots, loden hat, and cape, as he rushed out the revolving doors of the hotel.
Rocketman adjusted his loden cape and watched PC hurry through the insect crowds after the pilot and Ela. His face was set in anger. He had suspected something like this for some time. They’d had way too easy a time escaping North America for his liking, Rocketman thought. The pilot was under indictment for AGATE offenses under the McCarren-Williams Act, he himself was wanted for evading protective custody, and maybe criminal arson, and probably contravening FAA regulations concerning the firing of ballistic missiles from a City hospital roof without proper authorization.
The Feds by all rights should have pulled them in long ago, the pilot’s precautions notwithstanding. If they had not, Rocketman reasoned, it followed that maybe BON knew where they were the whole time. Maybe they were trying to trap the pilot into revealing his illegal contacts. Maybe the Feds were still after Hawkley, and hoped to follow Ela to his lair. Maybe – Rocketman pulled the cape tight around his face as the logic of it all completed its cycle, locking solid onto one single, inescapable fact – maybe the Feds had let them go because they already had an informer close to the pilot and Rocketman. A police plant. A BON agent.
Not Ela, as Rocketman had previously suspected.
PC!
Rocketman fired up a cigarette. He adjusted his sunglasses and left the hotel. Walking as he had seen Germans do, in a fashion conducive to group hikes, he carefully shadowed PC as PC followed the pilot and Ela down Pilsudski toward the Kneipe Spargnapani.
*
The pilot and Ela stayed so long at a corner table in Spargnapani that the regulars stopped glancing at them.
They talked easily – had done from the first, actually. Something clicked, something deeper and more important than mere verbalization. Rhythm, perhaps; the use of pauses.
The way he sat on one side of his ass, as if impatient to get on with the next project. How she hunched over her drink and let her hair drift over her face when she thought.
His freckles. Her nose-bump.
Most of all they had in common a respect for lebensraum – not the perfume, but of the mental kind. Both instinctively believed in the potential for change in any issue. Both allowed a DMZ around every word spoken or body-talked to preserve that ability to alter, to deny the lie of permanence. Indiana had temporarily pressured that DMZ in Ela, buried and crushed it under the well-meaning and brutal mass of couple intimacy, but the instinct went too deep for the roots to have died, and in the sudden absence of Roger Taylor it sprouted back like weeds between paving-stones. Therefore, as they talked, they both let the issues change shapes and colors even as they framed them with words and syntax. In the final analysis it was a gloss of childhood, something left over from being solitary with odd grownups, and it was symbolized for them by a single image:
‘Look at that hat,’ Ela said. A woman, coming in to tack up posters for a Node demonstration, was wearing an outrageously battered fedora of the type worn by Edward G. Robinson in movies about SD agents.
‘That’s not a hat,’ the pilot replied, ‘that’s a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.’
She glanced at him. Her pupils dilated, a couple of microns, no more.
‘Draw me a sheep,’ she challenged him.
He looked at her for a long moment.
‘Nothing in the universe is the same,’ the pilot said finally, ‘if, anywhere, a sheep we do not know does, or does not, eat a rose?’
‘The Little Prince,’ she agreed. ‘You know it.’
He nodded.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, after a beat or two. ‘Somehow it figures you’d have read Saint-Exupéry. There’s something in you – something not satisfied.’ Her voice trailed off. ‘He was a pilot, too, wasn’t he . . .?’
Then her eyes clouded, as if the memory of the children’s book dragged in other images that were not so pleasing.
Her eyes grew wary often, and sometimes her voice would take on caution. An obvious connection emerged; the caution had to do with America, Lakewood, Roger. When they got going on something else she talked easier and easier as the conversation progressed, like a freight train picking up momentum downhill. When she was involved in banter her laugh often
sprang loose before she could control it. Her face would go pink with the effort of suppressing it. But often her speech centers were constipated by the thought of home. Then, she didn’t stop talking, or even laughing, not entirely; but there was a smoke around the way she said things.
‘You’ve taken to this like you were born to it,’ he insisted. ‘Fake UCC-cards. False names. Living on the run.’
‘I’ve been living like that for years,’ she told him. ‘One way or another. Like I’m two people; one of me is normal, and legal, and goes to the wall-mall for groceries, and buys tube socks for Roger. And the other is this, like, total outlaw who doesn’t even know who Roger is.’
‘Poor Roger,’ the pilot said.
‘Roger’s okay,’ she said, ‘he knows what I’m doing.’ The caution was out in the open now, red lamps waving in circles.
He looked up at her sharply.
She shook her head.
‘Nothing specific,’ she said. ‘But I told him, in my e-mail. I’ve been sick for months. I’ve been feeling bad for months. I think it’s because I just wasn’t happy, down deep. He’ll understand.’
‘And your mother?’
The girl made a face.
‘She’ll understand better than Roger. And she’ll like it even less. She thinks I’m doing what she did, when she was my age. Rebelling or something. Which is crazy.’
‘You don’t think you’re rebelling?’
‘Against what?’ she said, and smiled. ‘There was nothing to rebel against in Lakewood. That’s the whole point. There was nothing wrong with Lakewood. No one abused me. Nobody held me back. Nobody tried to make me do anything I didn’t want to do . . .
‘On the other hand, I never really wanted to do anything. And I always had the feeling that if I ever did, it would be so, like, different from Lakewood that, even though it wasn’t really wrong, they would try to bring in zoning to ban it, ’cause, ’cause it brought down their property values or something.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You sounded so upset, at my parents’ house. You said, nothing good ever happened.’
She picked up her glass, and put it down in exactly the same circle of condensation.
‘I didn’t say “nothing good.” I said, “nothing important.”’
‘OK.’ He opened his hands as if to ask ‘What’s the difference?’
‘Well, that’s true,’ she continued, staring at his hands. ‘It used to drive me crazy. I used to feel like I was dead; like when I died I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. That’s what really scared me about that hospital, if you want to know the truth. If I didn’t know when I was dead, how could they? The lines on their machines would read the same. After a while they could just roll me down to the morgue, and nobody would stop them . . . But there was nothing wrong,’ she insisted. ‘I mean, if there was, it wasn’t planned, it was without malice aforethought.’ She did not look up. This created an absence.
‘You just seem to shed it so easily,’ the pilot said, ‘your whole life up to now. You don’t seem to think about it, even.’
‘Jeezz,’ she said, whooshing the word out with her breath. Her eyes, looking straight at him now, cut light into bright and angry angles. ‘You ever heard of not being sure about how you feel? Ever heard of being in two minds about something? Not everybody has everything figured out in black and white like you.’
‘OK—’ the pilot raised his hands. He did not want to fight the point. ‘OK.’
‘OK,’ she agreed, but looked away. After twenty or thirty seconds had passed she said, ‘You know, I had two dreams when I was younger. Well, three, if you count the best one, which was to be Ella Fitzgerald, or at least have her voice and, like, sing Cole Porter the way she did, but I always knew that was impossible. So if I couldn’t have that, I wanted to be a majorette.’ She looked down at her glass and twisted it on the table. ‘It seemed like the peak of everything. To be out marching, maybe even leading the squad. Those crazy hats, with the big pompoms, the white boots, those sexy short skirts. And all the boys and everyone in town looking on as you marched down the football field.’
Again she twisted her drink on the table, pushing down on it so hard the glass squeaked.
‘The other dream,’ she said, ‘was to die. In a big flaming car wreck. I know it sounds weird. But I used to imagine it, almost every night. Always with whatever boy I had a crush on at the time. We’d do it because we were different, we’d do it because our parents disapproved. We’d drive real fast down the Fairview ’pike and not stop at the Forest Lane lights, we’d go right through the barrier and onto the overpass they never finished and over the edge and die with our arms around each other and that’s how they’d find us.’
She sighed.
‘It was just a fantasy. But it went kinda deep. When the space shuttle blew up – we were all watching it live, in class – I felt terrible, of course, about that teacher and her family, but another part of me was saying, “God that’s beautiful, to die like that, way up in the sky, trying to get away from earth.” I watched it over and over, on the news, every chance I got. It was so pure, that explosion. Just a clean white line going up into deeper-and-deeper blue; then the blast, the white cloud, starting at the base of the rocket and quickly going up till it covered the whole thing; and then, like, nothing. The end of the white line. No downlink. Just peace and utter quiet and a few chunks of wreckage, falling into the sea . . .’
‘Do me a favor,’ the pilot said.
‘What?’ She did not look up at him; she still watched her glass as if she could see the Challenger again in its reflections.
‘Don’t ever mention that to Rocketman.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just – don’t. It would bother him a lot.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not about to go mentioning it around. You’re the first person I’ve ever said that to, as a matter of fact, since high school anyway.’
*
Ela and the pilot spent the evening and most of the next two days at the Spargnapani. Van der Lubbe was nowhere to be found but the pilot used the waiting time to trade his American surveillance equipment through the bartender for a deal on Deutschmarks plus six compact, high-powered Czech night-vision goggles.
The encryption chips he was more careful with. Eventually one of the Akmba players introduced him to a friend of his who worked the Wildnets. Hacking into a Motorola-system satellite from a laptop in his Wolfburg, the friend set up an auction that brought in eighty thousand Deutschmarks for the chips from an ID-screened buyer in Luxembourg. The cash came by Purolator, the next day; delivered, minus ten percent, via the hacker.
PC gave up following Ela and the pilot. There was no point, they never went anywhere else, they never seemed to do anything. In the great bruise of his pride he decided the pilot had gone back on an implied agreement, and stopped using words any longer than ‘any’ when speaking to either of them.
‘I should leave,’ he would say vaguely, whenever anyone was around to listen. ‘What good am I here? What good is any of this?’ But he never left. Instead he went to cabarets and discos, mostly on the Rynek or in the University quarter – restless, drinking beer out of glass boots, scoring jisi – semiconsciously looking for trouble to signal Ela that he was destroying himself, probably because of her.
Ela did not notice. But Rocketman did. He tracked every move PC made. He shadowed him in taxis, on foot, on city trams. When PC signed on with a tour group visiting the ‘historic’ town hall of Breslau, Rocketman was in the next group, hunched almost double, hiding behind a gaggle of Japanese in Day-Glo hats. When PC crossed the Oder to Lvov-Dwa, Rocketman followed him, negotiating the Wyspa Piasek checkpoints six or seven people behind his compatriot.
He took notes. He changed disguises in alleyways.
He enjoyed himself thoroughly in the process.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘Not the Cargo, but the run.’
Hawkley-ite slogan
At 2:16 a.m. on their fifth night in Breslau someone knocked softly on the pilot’s door.
A stooped thin man stood in the putrid neon. He had a pronounced chin, glasses. He was clean shaven, and wore a leather jacket and jeans. The pilot recognized him, vaguely, as one of the Akmba players in the Kneipe Spargnapani.
‘I am Alois van der Lubbe,’ he said. ‘I think we both have a friend. In the Connie Bar. Yes?’
‘But,’ the pilot said. ‘I mean, you don’t have a moustache.’
Van der Lubbe smiled. ‘Vladislav, the bartender, he is a friend,’ he explained. His accent was thick and Rheinlander-ish. ‘He does not say who I am, when people ask. I have to check up on you. I need time. I have been very busy this week. Get your girlfriend,’ he continued. ‘Do not get your other friends. Two is enough. I must show you something.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ the pilot began, but the thin man just shook his head impatiently.
‘I don’t know where Hawkley is,’ van der Lubbe told them later as he drove his rattling old Citroën down Europa Avenue then left, toward the river. ‘He has been here, several years before. I have met him. But he has gone east, I think. His gay-hatch-ahs are declining.’
‘What?’ Ela said.
‘Gay hatches,’ the pilot said: ‘Homosexual trapdoors.’ He looked at van der Lubbe, expecting an explanation, but the German only smiled. He had bad breath, and his smile was full of gaps. He stopped the car in the lee of some oaks that were part of a large park stretching to the east and south. A sign said ‘Panorama von Raclowice,’ over an arrow pointing left. A long glare of white light and steel towers behind the trees marked where the Oder River cut through the city. Police dogs barked insanely in the distance. A sign to the south flashed out the message; ‘Zero Cola: Frisch mit Nix!’ An ozone shower sprayed cold spittle at them, and gave up. To the north and west the pilot made out a stretch of black river and a bridge, covered in checkpoint boxes, tank barriers, leading to the stone bulk of what looked like a monastery.