Volk

by David Nickle

  “Probably no one,” said Annie. They were in their bedchamber, and Andrew had undressed for the night. Not Annie. She sat in front of the vanity, unpinning her hair, and she could see Andrew’s reflection behind her, his good hand behind his head, his bad . . . rested on the sheets over his chest. “But if the wrong person was bothered . . .” She pointed with the tip of a comb at the reflection of that hand.

  Andrew apprehended the gesture and lifted his hand from his chest, drew the fingers toward a fist. He grimaced as they froze in a loose cage over his palm—as close as his old maiming would let him make to a fist these days.

  “Can’t afford another bang like that one,” he said.

  “Couldn’t really afford that one,” said Annie, and they both laughed, gaily, as though they were spending an ordinary night in Paris before an ordinary trip, making light of old hardships with no care for new ones.

  “I’ll be good,” said Andrew. “Careful, I mean. I just . . . I just resent it, that’s all.”

  “I know. We came here to France so we wouldn’t have to,” said Annie. “Be careful, I mean.”

  “We always had to be careful,” said Andrew. “There are parts of this town where we can’t really walk together.”

  “And there are parts where we can,” said Annie.

  “So there are.”

  Annie set the comb down and went to the bed, slid under the covers beside Andrew.

  “I don’t like seeing you off like this,” she said. “I understand why it has to be done. But I don’t care for it.”

  “Remember,” said Andrew, “when you saw me off from Eliada? Got me a medical kit, a coat and a knife . . . that intervention saved my life.”

  “It did,” said Annie. “But you know it was old Sam Green who tipped off Jason, who did the work of getting that bag to you . . . and getting you clear of town.”

  “That’s so,” said Andrew, and he fell quiet.

  “What are you going to say to Jason, when you find him?” asked Annie finally.

  Andrew pondered. “I’m probably going to give him hell,” he said.

  “You could’ve done that this spring, when he came by to see us.”

  “Yeah.” Andrew leaned back, and shut his eyes. “I do regret missing that opportunity.”

  Annie propped herself up and pushed Andrew’s shoulder. “Hogwash,” she said. “You haven’t wanted to so much as look at that boy since he waved goodbye at the Thorns’ farm. Twenty years ago. When we did see him, that time after the war when we were all in Lyon—you proved it.” Leaning in close, Annie made to look all over the room, everywhere but at her husband . . . the way he had at the little Armistice dinner Annie had arranged for them all, pretending desperately that Jason and his chest of medals was not in the room.

  Andrew looked away himself, not smiling now. “Jason abandoned us,” he said quietly. “Abandoned Ruth.”

  “Abandoned you,” said Annie.

  Andrew pushed himself up against the headboard, so his eyes were level with Annie’s. “Well I’m not going to abandon Jason,” he said. “When I talk to him—if I can talk to him, if there’s anything left of him—I’m sure I’ll point that out. If he can’t figure it out for himself.”

  They slept late, and when they woke, they made love. So it was just past noon before they set foot outdoors, and Annie at least was famished. They found a bistro, half underground and floored with brick, and took a table near the front where they dined on omelettes and pastries, washed down with thick dark espresso coffee. They considered a bottle of wine, but Andrew suggested they wait until later. They paid their bill, then judged the day warm and sunny enough for a stroll along the banks of the Seine—taking a familiar route that Andrew had first shown Annie just prior their wedding, one he had discovered as a young medical student, more than a decade before that.

  They didn’t speak much, either at breakfast or during their walk. That was fine; silence was a familiar and not-unwelcome aftereffect. For her part, Annie found she drew into herself—into a little globe of satiety, a space all her own. It had been that way every time they made love, even that first time—sooner than either of them had ever admitted; sooner, Annie sometimes worried, than Andrew even knew.

  They fell into the shadow of Pont Mirabeau and considered, silently, whether to climb onto the bridge or continue on the riverbank.

  They had been on another riverbank, then—the west bank of the Kootenai River—and had only recently undergone a miracle. Two miracles really.

  The first was a lie, magnified in the shadow of the Juke. They did talk about that lie—that miracle—at great length. For Annie, the lie was almost absurdly banal. It was a lie of omission. The lie Andrew told himself was the lie of the city where they were now, the steps to the bridge that they quietly agreed to eschew . . .

  They had leapt into the river in a shred of time where they’d been allowed to escape, underneath the hovering mouths of the Juke in the temple it had made of the mill at Eliada. They’d emerged, downstream, a good way’s off . . . and there, found bare shelter in the ruin of a cabin, its roof staved in by bad winters and rains. It was bare, but it was enough. . . .

  And there was the second miracle, the one they made the most use of. There was wood and some scraps of cloth, which Annie used those to re-splint Andrew’s broken arm, and there was some line and a hook in an old tackle box, which she used to find them supper from the river. She made a fire, too, to cook it all.

  And as they sat by the fire she’d made, Andrew had reached for her. First he touched her face, the backs of his fingers drawing along her jawline, down her throat to the nape of her neck. The touch was . . . thrilling, in its way. She was surprised at how soft his hand was, at how easily she could differentiate between the ridge of a knuckle, the smoothness of a nail. At a point, she took hold of his hand and turned it, drew it lower, to her breast, and she drew closer to him and kissed him, and reached down and found him hard for her.

  Such detail! On the banks of the Seine, she reached over to take Andrew’s hand now, and squeezed it, remembering . . . well . . . everything. When she had climbed on top of Andrew, she felt as though she were reclaiming something—as though she had come back from that absurd delusion inspired by the Juke. She thought that same thing might have happened for Andrew, in their first moment together.

  She had always assumed so.

  But of course they didn’t speak afterward then, and rarely did later. And for a moment, as they stopped to look across the Seine, she thought about the story Ruth had told her, now days ago, and she wondered whether it had been that way for Andrew—or if when she was looking at him, he might not have been looking at some Heavenly version of this city; some other, tricky version of herself?

  These thoughts did not occur to her much in those earlier days. She had had other worries: the arrival of Jason and Ruth, not even a day afterward, made for immediate medical emergencies, and the particular emergency of Ruth’s infection also stirred another fear—that Annie might be in Ruth’s state, fertilized and infected too, and in need of a similar surgery.

  Andrew’s train left that night, at half-past eight. They ate an early dinner in their rooms, and Andrew stepped out at just before seven. There was no need to accompany him there, in fact Dominic and Bobby advised against it. Andrew would be using his own passport—the risk of getting caught out on a forgery was worse than the risk of a border guard recognizing Doctor Waggoner’s name out of the blue. But there was no sense in advertising their connection. So Andrew would leave alone, and Annie would return to Vire in the morning.

  They said their farewells when the taxi arrived. He said something reassuring, and she said something encouraging, and an hour later, as the last of the twilight disappeared and the street began to light up outside her window, Annie found she could scarcely remember what either of them had said to one another.

  She made quick work of the dinner dishes. She tried to read a novel she’d brought with her, a Hemingway book about a
mbulance drivers about which she’d heard good things. But she couldn’t concentrate enough to enjoy it. She made up the bed, retired early, but slept badly and woke at a point in the dark hours, convinced that someone was watching her. She knew it was absurd—that photograph of Zimmermann, in Zimmermann’s camera . . . it was clearly spooking her—but she flipped on the bed lamp and made sure.

  There was no one there, in one way, but in another—of course there was. Jason Thistledown, with his scalpel-cut hand and his cigarette-burned throat, was there. She couldn’t begrudge Andrew going off to find him, as dangerous as it was. But she could begrudge herself—for not doing something that day in the spring to persuade him . . . even to compel him . . . to miss that flight. To stay at Vire, where Ruth Harper and Albert Zimmermann now hid, and become well again.

  Annie did get back to sleep, and the second half of the night she did sleep better. Indeed, she slept well enough that she awoke late, for the second day in a row. It could well have been late enough that she’d miss her eleven o’clock train into Normandy, but she was woken by the ringing of the doorbell, at just past nine.

  “Bonjour—Madame Waggoner?”

  The apartment was on the first floor, and because Annie was not dressed she didn’t go downstairs but half-stepped onto the small balcony, just enough that she could see. The visitor was a lone gentleman, wearing a wool overcoat that matched his dark blue bowler hat. Annie said “Oui,” and asked if he minded waiting a moment while she dressed. He doffed his hat and said of course he didn’t, and a moment later, as Annie ran a brush through her hair and stepped into a frock, she tried to place him. She did recognize the face—round, with a long moustache, balding, middle-aged. But from where?

  She opened the window again, and saw that he had lit a cigarette and was leaned against the lamppost, smoking it. He looked up and waved, and said something that she couldn’t quite make out. So she waved back, and went downstairs to the lobby, and opened the front door and bade him good morning.

  “I am to take it,” he said in English, “that Doctor Waggoner is not present?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Annie.

  “Well that is a great shame,” he said. “I had been informed that you were both staying in the city. I had hoped we might finally meet.”

  So they hadn’t ever met. Annie squinted in the morning light and shaded her eyes.

  “Well,” he said, “perhaps you can pass along my greetings.” He reached into his coat and produced a calling card. “Do you expect him back soon may I ask? I would like very much to speak with him, on a matter of mutual interest.”

  Annie took the card, and turned it over to read it. She read it twice, looked at the visitor and read it again. Then worked saliva into her mouth, it having suddenly gone dry.

  “My apologies for the intrusion, Madame. I will be on my way then,” he said, and turned to leave.

  “No apology necessary,” said Annie, “Doctor Aguillard.”

  He paused in returning his hat to his head. Annie continued.

  “Why don’t you come in and sit? I’ll make a pot of coffee, and we’ll wait for him together.”

  Doctor Hector Aguillard smiled gratefully.

  “That would be splendid, Mrs. Waggoner,” he said.

  Five

  “You’re not from Paris, are you?”

  “No, Madame.” Doctor Aguillard accepted the cup and saucer Annie’d prepared, and Annie poured more coffee for herself from the percolator. Unlike Aguillard’s, hers was pure black. “I am from Brussels originally,” he said.

  “But you’ve travelled since then. Recently, maybe?”

  Aguillard answered with a genial shrug. He had removed his coat and his hat and hung it in the hall. He wore a grey tweed jacket, the sort that had a belt sash stitched onto the back, and under it a white shirt that was also turning to grey, and a green bow tie. He might have arrived straight from the train station. Right off a barge.

  Annie sat down on the sofa across from him. She had drawn the curtains when he came in, so that although the morning was clear and bright, in here the electric table lamp was the only illumination.

  Aguillard took a sip from his cup. “I was just in Zurich in fact, briefly, before coming to Paris.”

  “Zurich’s a beautiful city.” Annie lifted her own cup to her lips and took a sip. She recognized him from the photograph from Zimmermann’s camera roll—of course it was him. But he seemed slimmer, maybe even a little older, than the photograph portrayed. This caused her to briefly wonder if the picture might not itself have been older than Zimmermann had indicated.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Aguillard then, and Annie saw that she had been looking at him too hard—too speculatively. She smiled and set her teacup down in its saucer.

  “Nothing, sir. I’m just trying to place you.”

  “I doubt you would recognize me,” said Aguillard. “We have not met. I am . . . a colleague of your husband’s. A peer, one might say.”

  “A peer,” said Annie. “Do you work in pulmonary medicine?”

  Aguillard smiled wanly and shook his head. And now he paused and looked at Annie. As though he now, were trying to place her.

  “Your maiden name,” he said, “is Rowe, is it not?”

  “It is,” she said. “Haven’t used it in a long time. How do you come to know that?”

  “Well,” he said, drawing himself straighter in his chair. He patted his jacket pocket and withdrew a cigarette case. “Do you mind?”

  Annie brought a basalt ashtray from the mantelpiece and set it on the coffee table between them. He removed a cigarette from the case and Annie struck a match to light it.

  “You were a nurse,” he said, “working for Doctor Nils Bergstrom. Ann Rowe.”

  “In Idaho,” said Annie. “That’s right.”

  “Doctor Waggoner worked there also.”

  “That’s right too.” Annie dropped the match in the fireplace and resumed her seat.

  “I can only imagine the things you must have seen.” Aguillard crossed one leg over the other and let the cigarette dangle from fingertips over his knee. “In Eliada.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That is so,” said Aguillard. He drew deep on his cigarette. “I have never met Doctor Waggoner, or yourself. I do not work in pulmonary medicine, as you describe it. But we are nevertheless peers. We have an abiding interest in the same phenomenon.”

  Annie finished her coffee and set the cup back in the saucer.

  “Do you remember anything from Eliada?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Annie. “Hard to forget Eliada.”

  “You remember the patient Mister Juke then.”

  “Yes indeed,” she said. “He was an odd one.”

  Aguillard sighed. “Madame Waggoner,” he said, “let us drop the pretenses. I think we both understand what Mister Juke was. Not a he, or an it, but an . . . organism. It was an organism that got the better of Doctor Bergstrom. And Garrison Harper too. And somehow . . . its presence led to a terrible massacre.”

  Somehow, thought Annie. What she said was, “Terrible.”

  Aguillard rested his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, and took another sip from his cup, deeper this time, then set it down too.

  “I am being very forward,” he said. “I apologize. I suppose I am overanxious—I’ve been waiting some time to speak with Doctor Waggoner on these matters. . . .”

  “On your common interest,” said Annie. “Peer to peer.”

  “And now I have intruded upon you. Drawn up old memories.” He drew himself farther up in his chair and then fell forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “Do you expect Doctor Waggoner back soon?”

  “Soon enough,” said Annie. She leaned forward too, far enough that she could get a good look at Aguillard’s eyes, see about his pupils.

  “Doctor Aguillard,” she said, having satisfied herself, “I don’t pay the same degree of attention to your common interest as my husband does. But I think I can ke
ep up. Now why don’t you tell me where you really were last. It wasn’t Zurich.”

  “No. Not Zurich.”

  “Where?” Annie reached to slide the ashtray away from Aguillard.

  “Bavaria,” he said. Annie took his cigarette from the ashtray’s edge and stubbed it out, and when Aguillard complained that he wasn’t finished with it, she told him to relax and try to remember. She didn’t tell him that the generous dose of sodium amytal that she’d infused in his coffee would help him with both of those things. She didn’t need to; Aguillard, no fool, was figuring it out. He blinked, and felt his forehead with a hand, ran the slick of sweat that came away between his fingers, and started to rise. He did not quite reach his feet; halfway up, dizziness overcame him, and steadying himself on the coffee table he sat back down. His eyes cast down, and to the side, and finally set, wide and incredulous, on Annie. What have you done to me? they asked her.

  “Doctor Aguillard,” said Annie softly. “Don’t fear. I am a trained nurse. I know my business. I know how much is too much, and how little is not enough. Now. Could you be a bit more specific?

  “Where?”

  “Wallgau, in the south . . . a village near the border with Austria, near the mountains. Have you a map? I could show you. . . .”

  “No need. I know it. Now what were you doing there?”

  “Ha! Good question. Very good question. When I got there I thought we were looking after a Juke. But not at all, as it turned out. La bête était morte. Depuis longtemps.”

  Annie switched to French, along with Auguillard. It was likely easier for him, in his current state. “The Juke that you were looking after . . . was dead?”

  “Murdered, it so happened.”

  Annie affected a demeanor of shock.

  “We were furious when we learned. The specimen was a rarity, and moving it to Wallgau—to the valley beyond it . . . was a complicated feat.”

  “You moved it?”

  Aguillard nodded drunkenly, then shook his head. “Not I,” he said. “But . . . we did.”