Contraband

by George Foy

  Van der Lubbe noticed his glance. ‘University Library,’ he said, simply.

  ‘Aha,’ the pilot said, remembering the tourist infoterminal in the Silesia. ‘Gestapo headquarters, right? Last stop for Jews and gypsies.’

  ‘It wasn’t only the Nazis,’ van der Lubbe replied, seriously. ‘You know the first two things the Poles did after the war?’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘The first was, they restored the Chopin Museum, in Warsaw.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘They killed the Jews that were left. Pogrom.’

  ‘Charming,’ the pilot commented, thinking of his mother and her stories of Lidice.

  ‘Yes,’ van der Lubbe replied. ‘But it is not the Poles who waste the Manila node. Or the Germans.’

  A thin group of people walked down the sidewalk, under the trees, muttering among themselves. They had the bald heads and scabbed faces of hibakusha, from the region around Ignalina, in Latvia, where an RBMK-type reactor core had melted down three years previously. They turned off the sidewalk, behind a stand of cedars, and disappeared. Van der Lubbe waited till they were gone. Then he stepped into a small copse of oaks and rhododendrons and began fiddling in the bushes. He gave a deep grunt and pulled up a filthy, moss-ridden hunk of concrete, revealing a brick-lined hole that seemed to lead to China, it was so black.

  ‘Follow me,’ van der Lubbe instructed. ‘Pull the stone back over you when you come down.’

  ‘Down’ consisted of a dozen rusted rungs to a thin tunnel that smelled violently of subaquatic life. The tunnel ran north and south. Van der Lubbe pulled out a flashlight and they started walking. The walls were fuzzy with moss. You could tell water had once occupied this tunnel and was infiltrating again. Water dripped and streamed from the arched brick roof. It sloshed underfoot. It soaked their fingers when they touched the walls. The pilot shivered in distaste. He pulled his jacket high over his neck and put his arm around Ela’s waist to haul her over the deeper pools. She put her arm around his. Perhaps in response to the darkness, they both used pressures uncalled for by the simple mechanics of lift and carry.

  The tunnel ended after a couple of hundred yards. Hanging his flashlight on a nail, van der Lubbe felt around a rusted support beam in the end wall. He stuck his hands in a puddle, picked out a crowbar and levered the support beam from the bricks. It moved easily; the beam was a fake, it supported nothing. Weak light shone from the long rectangle where the beam had been. A much larger tunnel ran at right angles to the one they were in. They heard the chug-chug of a pump. A smell of coal tar slid into their nostrils.

  ‘Lvov Dwa,’ van der Lubbe whispered, pointing toward the opening. His sibilants resonated in the circled space.

  ‘Free Poland,’ Ela whispered back, in awe, like an echo.

  The pilot tightened his arm around her waist. His heart was beating hard, from exertion, from excitement, but all the adrenaline highs were as nothing compared to the feeling of her softness and warmth, the privilege of touched skin, the gentle burning under and above his stomach. The stink of moss and stale water smelled to him at this moment like the glorious funk of first life.

  Ela’s arm tightened in response.

  ‘We are under the Oder, here,’ van der Lubbe continued. ‘Right under the frontier, where it follows the river.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Now I explain.

  ‘This is my tunnel,’ he pointed at the rectangle. ‘I am an architecture student, I find it in the archiv – the history plans, yes? It is part of an old tram repair adit, before the war, but everybody thinks the SS troops dynamited it, when the Red Army came in 1945. They think it is drowned, flooded with water from the river. Well, it is.

  ‘But I find it. I make excuse to pump it out. I say this is an architecture project. Everybody says, he is crazy, let him do what he likes. There is only a small hole, and I put a caisson in. Old trams were in the dry part of the tunnel when they dynamite it; I put in engines I buy from junkyard. With two friends only I do this. Then, one night, I open the tunnel on both sides. For nine-and-a-half months I run cargo and people between Free Poland and EU-Schlesien. Every month.’

  Van der Lubbe cocked his ear to the next-door tunnel but apparently heard nothing, for he continued, ‘This is how we do not get caught. The BND – the German secret service – they have machines for listening underground. The Milicza too, yes? But the tram bridge is four hundred meters to the west from here. What we have done, we have waited for the heavy tram repair train, 0317 hours to Ostrow Tumski station. Every run, we have moved our train at the same time exactly. They think we are repair train, too. It is pretty, no?’

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ the pilot whispered. ‘I thought Hawkley groups were three people. And you never tell anyone else.’

  ‘That is right.’ Van der Lubbe nodded hard. ‘That is exactly right. Three people in group. Maximum three groups, nine people. Gruppe Elefant, Gruppe Löwe, Gruppe Wolf. Always word-of-mouth communications.

  ‘But one of the groups was not good. Gruppe Löwe. They were greedy. They wanted more cargo, more money – they wanted to distribute, in Lvov Dwa. They let in eight new people last month. I think they have let in BND. But that is life, no? I wanted to show you, so you can tell Hawkley, if you find him. Tonight, the Gruppe Löwe is bringing back the tram. Tonight we will know, for sure.

  ‘Wait here,’ van der Lubbe continued. ‘I am back in ten minutes.’ He unhooked his flashlight and went through the opening into the larger tunnel, slotting the beam carefully back in place behind him.

  Ela and the pilot stood in utter darkness with a fear they tried to ignore and arms around each other’s waist and the water of the Oder invading everywhere around them. Darkness hid more than the details of matter; it screened all but the messages of touch and taste. When they could not pull closer without causing serious internal bleeding they folded in on each other, each part of one body crying out for, and finding, sympathetic vibrations from the same part of the other: lips touching lips, hands hands, groin groin.

  ‘I want to make love with you,’ Ela said. ‘I want to make love with you so much. I want to make love with you under the river.’ She pulled at his belt. He leaned against the support beam, so they’d have warning if van der Lubbe came back too soon.

  Lifeless objects tried to kill the clear thrust in their brains – belts snagged, zippers jammed, hooks would not unhook – but nothing could stop them. The struggle only added to the tensions of warmth and muscle. The absence of all other input magnified what input there was. The touch of human epidermis was multiplied by contrast with all the lifelessness around. Her lips were ten times more soft, her hair a thousand times richer. The consistency of her breasts made ragged imbalance of the most perfect theorem. She was so hot his fingers burned on her skin.

  As for Ela, she wound her fingers through the hair on the pilot’s chest, and the smooth wiry strength of it seemed to reach into the depths of her. The strength in the tendons at the root of his thighs was a truth she could do handstands on. The warnings of Plague, of stigs, drummed into them as they were into all other members of their generation, carried no weight against the cold mass of the river above them and the limitless potential created when they touched each other. The made love like flamingoes, keeping their clothes out of the dead water with one bent knee. The water inside her was as pure and warm as the river water was cold and filthy around and under them. ‘Come into me,’ she whispered. ‘Oh come, Joe,’ and he did, making silly choking sounds, seeing birds spread out in V-formations from some golden marshland in his mind. ‘Oh,’ she yelped. ‘Oh jeezz’; her fingers felt the sweat pour out of him the instant before coming and she locked her ankles around his ass in response.

  ‘Take that, Bundesnachrichtendienst,’ he thought as they swayed against each other in the aftermath. He felt as if somehow by fucking each other, by touching in ways that allowed no borders or defenses, they had made the river and razor ribbon and anti-tank barriers above them vanish in
some basic way, sabotaged by laws of particle more elemental than the molecular adhesion of concrete or steel wire or water even, and clear angry joy leaped in him at the victory. The soft hot curve of her bare ass under his palms seemed powerful enough to cancel out the frontier, not just the Oder but all the Silesian border’s 150 miles of barbed wire, fixed machine-gun arcs, Todeszonen, minefields, and searchlights. The revenge of the half-zero, he thought, still giddy from the Mazurka of sperm and egg.

  She started coughing again, even after they had their pants and shirts rucked back around them. He rubbed her shoulder blades, outside anger gone now, cursing himself for not realizing how bad this place was for her. It had been so long since he’d made love with anyone. He’d forgotten how his thoughts floated, afterward.

  She took a quick hit from her vaporizer.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked, when her cough had died down.

  ‘I was thinking about borders,’ he replied, ‘how much I hate them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Prob’ly from when I was a kid.’

  She waited.

  He listened, but there were no extraneous sounds.

  ‘We went to so many camps after we left Prague. Austria, the Netherlands, Germany. Every time I got used to one place, some men with uniforms and papers would come and send us to another town, another country. Once I even got lost – separated from my parents.’

  She put her forehead against his chest and butted him, lightly, repeatedly. He put a finger on her nose and stroked the bump there gently.

  ‘We never really believed in any of it, after Eduard,’ he said. ‘Home, homeland, national boundaries. It was all just a lot of barbed wire to us. Wire, and ghosts. The ghost of Eduard, the ghost of borders. It became something bigger than us. I don’t know. The hopelessness of war. The Phantom of Checkpoint Charlie . . .’

  A rumbling grew through the tunnel. The beam scraped as it was pushed out of the wall. The sound increased by a factor of five.

  Van der Lubbe slipped through the hole the beam left. His flashlight was switched off. He shoved them aside, missing their wide eyes, chopped breaths, untucked shirts. He squatted by the fake beam, leaving it open only a half inch. The sound was very loud now; the puddles beneath them, the braced wall beside them trembled with the power of whatever was coming.

  The pilot put his eye to the crack above van der Lubbe’s back.

  The ties and support beams of the old Ostrow Tumski-North Park tram branch made black Xs in the ‘O’ of tunnel. The tracks leaped with silver. An ancient trolley car tottered out of Poland in the reddish light. It was shaped like an amusement-park ride. Cinderella’s carriage with Edwardian coachlights. It was black from rot and run-off. Someone had sprayed a slogan on the front panel; ‘Nicht die Ladung, aber die Bewegung.’ Paint flaked from every surface. The trolley’s windows were blown out. It glowed from inside with a dull scarlet sheen. Sparks jumped blue and flew from a huge copper engine made of batteries and bushings and coiled wires at the rear. The pilot had a sudden flash of recognition, and his spine prickled in response. The Death Train, he thought, inbound from Flushing, inbound from Lwów Dwa, under the Chingado, under the East River, under the Oder, under the black desire at the heart of every mythic watercourse.

  ‘Next stop, Hell,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘What?’ Ela whispered, and slid her lean hand down his pants.

  The train trundled into Silesia.

  Nothing for a minute. Then van der Lubbe tensed beside him.

  Dark shapes were following the tram, like the shades of dead commuters.

  In the red glow from the tram’s windows the pilot made out the helmets of the Polish paramilitary. They wore dark tunics. Some carried machine guns, some oddly shaped metal tubes. The latter had canisters strapped to their backs.

  Behind them came men in different uniforms. They held short ugly machine-pistols and wore night-vision goggles not unlike those the pilot had purchased in the Spargnapani. He recognized their caps; the traditional high peaks of the German Bundesgrenzpolizei. In the backwash of rail noise the assault team moved silent and solemn as mourners in some strange funeral for forgotten rail links, for people not yet dead.

  She brought her hand up to his waist, feeling the strain.

  ‘What is it,’ Ela whispered. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Shhh. Milicza. It’s a bust,’ the pilot told her.

  Van der Lubbe pulled back. The rumble of iron wheels slowed and stopped.

  Nothing happened for a couple of minutes. Then someone shouted, clear and far away. Shots echoed down the tunnel in pairs and threes. The thin rectangle van der Lubbe looked through turned bright orange. The color died, flared, and died again. A dim hissing took up all space. It sounded like the breath of dragons. Van der Lubbe pushed the support beam all the way back into the bricks and lit his flashlight. The small light dug caves all over his face. His eyes were hollow as well.

  ‘Flamenwerfer,’ he whispered. ‘How do you say it? Flamethrowing. I should have thought of this.’

  ‘Flamethrowing?’

  ‘Yes. They burn the tram.’

  ‘I saw Grenzpolizei. Behind the Milicza.’

  Van der Lubbe nodded.

  ‘It is no surprise. They are working together now. They work with BON too. No one wants trouble, ja?’

  ‘But your group,’ the pilot said. ‘Your men. What’s happened to them?’

  ‘He escapes, I think,’ van der Lubbe said. ‘I have told Konrad this is big Gefahr, big danger tonight. I do not think he has sold to the BND. He has stopped the tram by his escape place, I think.’

  ‘But your route is finished,’ Ela said, watching the tiny edge of red define where the beam slotted into the bricks.

  ‘Every run must finish sometimes,’ van der Lubbe said. ‘In the Smuggler’s Bible Hawkley says, the perfect run is one that includes its own end in every segment. It is born, it grows; when it grows old it must die. Then you start again. Hawkley says, you must run your life like this too; like a smuggling operation.’

  ‘He should know,’ Ela said, a little bitterly. ‘He was always very good, at ending things.’

  ‘Flamenwerfer,’ van der Lubbe said again. ‘I should have thought of that. Europeans like fire. Fire and Freikorps. We try and try. We can never get rid of them.’

  An explosion shook the tunnel behind them. Black dust filled the air. The dust made dark lines on van der Lubbe’s cheeks. The smuggler was crying.

  ‘If you find him,’ he went on, ‘if you find Hawkley, you must tell him. He is right. The six-six-seven. The ratio. Remember this. It is essential.’

  ‘The six-six-seven,’ Ela repeated. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘How do we find him, then?’ the pilot whispered.

  ‘Go east,’ the German said. ‘You have another contact that way. Go east.’ He pointed down the tunnel, in the direction from which the Milicza had come.

  ‘That is where it always comes from,’ he said. ‘The East.’

  ‘What comes?’ Ela asked him.

  ‘History,’ van der Lubbe replied, simply.

  The woman giggled. ‘What a lot of baloney,’ Ela said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  12-Mile-Limit Cocktail

  2 oz. bush rum

  2 oz. fresh OJ

  2 oz. tamarind juice

  juice of two limes

  3 No-Doz, crushed, or juice of three cola nuts

  3 tbs. brown sugar (5 if you use cola nuts)

  Blend contents with ice at high speed. Drink up. This will keep you high, alert, and on top of things when you cross the line.

  Hawkley

  The Freetrader’s Almanac and Cookbook

  What happened in the tunnel under the Oder unhooked some catch in Ela.

  The combination of secrecy, escape, and the threat of being caught bypassed blocks in her own brain, and allowed nerve impulses she had never felt before to touch and light her in places she had not known
existed.

  One of those places was a tightness in her chest that used to hinder her ability to laugh. The tightness had started to dissipate the moment she met the pilot but the incident under the Oder had vanished it. When she laughed now it was without control, as if before the impulse stemmed from a mere chemical reaction and now it came from a shift in nature. She saw absurdities everywhere, and they made the change happen, and she came to terms with it in deep, gasping, almost masculine brays of mirth.

  Another symptom of sea-change lay in her ability to touch. Where before she had been held in from touching the pilot the way she knew she wanted to, she now found it easier to touch him than not. Nothing drastic was called for; a finger laid on his hand at the breakfast table, a calf against his leg; even letting the Herald Tribune she was reading brush his frayed denim jacket was enough. She preferred light contact, pulled strokes at this stage. There were no shackles in such a caress, no vows she could not keep.

  As for lovemaking, the memory of it was sufficient to sustain her. She did not need to sleep with the pilot; in the halls of her imagination she carved a niche for the feeling that had touched her in the tunnel.

  And when timing and space fell right – like dice on neural felt – she would come to him as quickly and naturally as she had under the river between Free Poland and Silesia.

  Somehow timing and space fell right more and more often as they traveled east, following, on van der Lubbe’s advice, the last clue they possessed as to Hawkley’s whereabouts.

  The day after the incident under the Oder they took a plane to Frankfurt and changed to the daily Airbus bound for Karachi.

  Ela got the window seat this time. This time she was not sleeping; that need, too, seemed to have slackened, been released. She rode glued sideways against the plexiglass porthole as the jet rose to forty thousand feet. They flew over the pinched blue-white-greens of the Austrian Alps, folded and whipped in their own shadows. Down the length of the Balkans, her mind buzzing with echoes from largely exaggerated TV myths of what these places were like: vampires and sniper-fire, virgins and brigands; Turks, mass graves, and dying archdukes. As they flew south and east the greens below them became more olive, took on an infinite complexity of umbers and yellows. They crossed the Aegean north of Thessalonica, and blue reached its maximum development, a sort of robin’s-egg to the Nth power – and evaporated.