by Toby Barlow
“Here he is,” said the crone, pointing to the rodent. “Say hello to your little Max.”
The mood of the group had shifted, this absurd joke seemed in poor taste, but Andrei awkwardly chuckled along until, as he gazed down at the rat, his laughter stopped. The creature stood up on its hind legs, looked directly into his eyes, and nodded. In that moment, Andrei recognized his brother. The rat not only had Max’s posture, but his face held hints of his brother’s features and expression too, and, leaning close to observe him, Andrei quickly saw how much of Max’s poise was perfectly echoed in the bearing of the little beast staring up at him. Andrei gasped and fell backward in shock. The stars now streaked down like daggers descending upon him as the world above him spun widly. He heard the women laughing and a voice he knew as his own cried out, and then the heavens all reeled into blackness.
When he awoke, he was alone in the woods, lying by the smoldering gray and white ashes of the abandoned campsite’s dead fire. He knew if he ran he could overtake the women on the road, perhaps rescue his brother, and turn them over to the magistrate. But instead he closed his eyes and slept again. His sleep was deep.
When he finally awoke again, it was nearly dusk. He rebuilt the fire and sat contemplating his path. He felt he could not return to the monastery, yet he had no other home. Walking on to the next town, he stopped only briefly, sending letters to his relatives and to the priests saying that Max had disappeared. He was certain those who knew his brother would simply nod knowingly, for Max was always the sort doomed to vanish through some misadventure or lapse in judgment. Then Andrei wandered west, finding harvest, market, and scrap work in the hamlets, villages, and larger cities, slowly working to absorb and accept the strange new truths he had learned about the world.
Along the way, the women crossed his path again, first finding him scrubbing laundry in a Kiev hospital. Andrei was not surprised when they showed up. After that, they made it their habit to come and go at their whim, whenever he could be useful to their ends. He did not know how they traced his trail, he suspected the wine bottle they had shared that night by the campfire was part of some enchantment, a binding communion, making it impossible for him to ever lose them, or maybe that rat simply had a very good nose. Whatever their methods, Andrei was amazed to see how they controlled what others called coincidence, not only finding people but drawing them in as well. They lured prey to their door when they were hungry, pushed rivals together when they needed blood, and drove lovers into fevered embrace when they desired entertainment. Once you crossed their path, any conceit of free will became a fanciful notion.
Still, he tried to break free. Always itinerant, he attempted vanishing into various careers and stations, consciously hoping that each transformation would help him escape from the past. At times a soldier, a baker, a vagrant, a drunk, he had finally drifted back to the priesthood. It had been a pragmatic decision, not any sort of idealistic reconciliation. He did not regain his piety; he felt alternately angry and agnostic toward God, suspicious of any theology that could not explain what he had seen with his own two eyes, but he felt comfortable returning to the familiar patterns of his simple roots. So, here he was, decades later, tending his small garden in the fading light. Brushing the red clay off his hands, he headed to the farmhouse. The young girl was gone and the house silent. He suspected that Elga had already packed up and taken her to the city.
In a few hours he would mount his rickety yellow bicycle and ride down the narrow road to an ivy-laden, crumbling château. Inside was a small chapel. There he would say evening prayers to a congregation composed of one very pious Orthodox couple. They were ancient and wealthy and, like him, they had been exiled from their homeland of Russia for nearly half a century. They would kneel at the analogion and confess their imagined sins as he patiently listened. Then, as always, he would read them their absolution, and they would meekly smile, and he would smile back, knowing that at the same time another ancient friend of his was driving a young child toward the city, intent on evils that no God imaginable could ever forgive.
X
After working their way across town, making many fruitless stops at empty bistros, cafés, and apartments where no one answered, Oliver had the driver drop them off on a bustling corner on Place Pigalle. Crossing the promenade, they entered a small café a few doors down from the Grand Guignol. The waitress lit up with a bright “Ah, bonjour, Oliver!” kissing him on both cheeks before leading them up to the second floor. A Line Renaud LP was playing low on the turntable in the corner. They made their way to the back of the room, where, amid a scattered assortment of oddly arranged tables, they found Boris playing cards with five other men. The thick smoke from hours of cigarettes and cigars bathed the room in various shades of milky gauze. Instead of interrupting the game, Oliver asked the girl for two espressos and led Will to a booth in a back corner.
“His chips are low, we’ll wait here till he’s done,” said Oliver. “You gamble?”
“Not a lot.”
“Probably a good thing.” Oliver grinned. “You don’t have much of a poker face, do you? What games do you indulge in?”
“I play a little euchre, some gin now and then.”
“Any sports?”
“Tennis.”
“Really? We should get a match on. It’s getting too cold now for Coubertin but there is a fine indoor court over on rue de Saussure. Boris claims to have some skills, but I’ve never played him, that would be a sight to see, wouldn’t it? Ha ha, that great Russian bear lunging up to the net?” Oliver looked over at the poker game as a player scraped in a big, noisy pot. “Gambling is funny, isn’t it? I’ve never heard any persuasive theories on its roots, I suspect its some primordial residue from our early days, similar to how we still wear the belts that once held our hunting knives, while our women carry designer purses to store all those harvested berries. We think we’re modern and civilized, but Lord knows we’re not.”
The album ended and the needle mechanically returned back to the beginning. As Renaud started singing “Mon Bonheur,” Will wondered how long the card players had been listening to that one side of the album. He tapped on the table impatiently. “You know, I probably need to head back to the office.”
Oliver shook his head. “Oh really? What, is the great wheel of capitalism going to grind to a halt without you?”
“No, but—”
“Relax, we’ll get you back to the trenches soon enough,” Oliver said. “Say, you wouldn’t have any more of those Chesterfields on you? I left my cigarettes at home.” Will gave him one and lit another himself. “Thanks,” said Oliver. “I’ll pick you up a carton at the commissary next time I’m at the embassy. So, tell me how you know that girl I was with the other night.”
“I only met her in passing, on the metro,” Will said, unhappy to have the subject brought up. He could remember the way Zoya had looked at him that first night. He had thought about it more than once in the past few days. There was a magnetic element to her gaze that had stayed tugging at him, a subtle but constant force that pulled at him, making him want to leave and walk the streets to find her right at that very moment so that he could see her or talk to her or grab her by the neck and kiss her breathless.
“What did you think of her?”
“I thought she was all right,” Will lied.
Oliver nodded. “Oh, she is more than all right. She’s an intriguing one, very beguiling. Easy on the eyes, obviously, and sharp-witted too, but also…” He shook his head, seemingly unable to find the right phrase. Will was impressed that even the thought of Zoya left Oliver speechless.
They watched Boris lose another pot and, as the winner stacked his chips, Will tried to push the girl out of his mind. There was no percentage in keeping her there. He should have stayed with her when they had walked off the metro that night. He could have asked her out for a drink and maybe found a way to go home with her, but he hadn’t. And now he did not like thinking about another man’s girl, it di
d not seem right, it was not the way he was raised. You respected those bonds, no matter what feelings you had or how strongly you felt them. These were the things that defined your character and, as his grandfather had often told him, your character was the only thing you ever wholly and truly possessed.
The waitress brought them their coffees while they kept an eye on the game. Will did not find gambling to be as romantic or intriguing as Oliver did, but, recalling his grandfather as he watched through the hazy layers of ghostly cigar smoke, he almost felt as if he were peering through some hole in time, as if he were a boy again peeking through the upstairs bannister as his uncles and his father played their poker, euchre, or gin rummy up at their small cabin by the northern shores of Lake Michigan. He realized it would be deer season back home and they might be up there right now. The temperatures would be creeping down below freezing at night and the thin pale skin of ice would be scratching at the edges of the shallow ponds and lakes, silencing the frogs and signaling the birds to start south. The dog-eared Bicycle playing cards would be slapped down and his father would be laughing as he raked in his own fat pots while his uncles smoked their short cigars, drank their beers and whiskeys, and fed logs into the old Franklin stove. The hunting rifles would already be cleaned, oiled, and stacked on the wall, ready for the next morning, while empty bottles of Stroh’s, Early Times pints, and Old Grand-Dad fifths would lie sideways on the floor.
The thought struck him that this very scene was being played out all over the world, here above an empty café in Paris, and there in that small midwestern hunting camp, but also in the back alleys of Hong Kong, warehouses in Brooklyn, guard barracks in Siberia, and out on the remote Argentiniam pampas, where the dark gauchos gambled by the flickering light of their campfires. The kings, queens, and jacks on the card faces paid no mind to the reign of the clock or the map; they ruled a borderless world that existed outside of time. Their servants lived in every land and served at every hour, punished or rewarded for their efforts by the random caprice and whimsy that so many monarchs live by. Dawn and dusk came and went, women sat up waiting and worrying or gave up and moved out while their men played on, sitting transfixed over a handful of ever-shifting faces, waiting for an ace’s late arrival or some serendipitous eight to slide in amid a broken row of sevens and nines. It was all a shorthand language for life’s cascading fortunes, an attempt to ride the random waves of fate, pulling small circles together, geometric concentrations of luck where every soul sought to shift and maneuver for a bit of extra grace. Will wondered how he had managed to steer clear of gambling’s pull while so many others had not. Watching as Boris’s last chips were scooped away, Will thought it was probably because he had always had an innate sense of how much easier it was to lose than win.
“Ah yes, it appears the game is up for our friend,” said Oliver.
Will looked across the room as the Russian pulled on his jacket, straightened his tie, and drained the last of his drink. Oliver gave him a bit of a wave and Boris nodded and started heading over.
What followed seemed to happen in a kind of slow motion as the simple steps Boris had to take to cross the room were asymetrically transformed into a mighty cataclysm.
At first there was a clattering racket of chairs as Boris seemed to misstep, stumbling into a table. He turned and, after holding himself in balance for a moment, lunged forward, quickly accelerating, shifting sideways and then tipping over. Reaching out wildly to steady himself, he collapsed, careening across another set of chairs like a massive cannon rolling loose on the yawing deck of an embattled warship. All the faces at the poker table turned with a kind of sleepy-eyed awe, watching as Boris disappeared down, tumbling onto the floor as tables fell crashing next to him. There was a shuddering, violent sound as his body landed, and then everything was still.
The other card players slowly rose from their seats, all of them apparently expecting Boris to get up and dust himself off, but he didn’t. Oliver leapt across the room with a dexterity that surprised Will. He was already kneeling by Boris’s prone body by the time everyone else arrived.
“Did he faint?” Will asked.
“No,” said Oliver, feeling at the man’s neck for his pulse. “He died.” The men had now gathered around, and someone went off to call a doctor. Oliver was now rearranging the corpse, loosening Boris’s collar and emptying his pockets. He took out a wallet, house keys, a pack of Gitanes, a comb, matches, some business cards, and a small piece of tinfoil. Nobody but Will seemed to notice Oliver palm the business cards and foil into his own jacket pocket as he placed the rest of the items in a line beside the body. Then Oliver rose and pointed down at Boris. “Nobody touch him or any of his things,” he said. “The authorities will be here soon. Be sure to give them a full report.” With that, he tipped his hat and headed down the stairs. Will followed, his head swimming with what he had seen.
Out on the street, Oliver quickly flagged down a taxi and they hopped inside. Events had unfolded so fast that Will only realized now how hard his own heart was beating. He took a deep breath and tried to relax.
“Dix-huit rue de Tournon, s’il vous plaît,” Oliver told the driver and then took the tinfoil out of his pocket and unwrapped it. Inside was a small piece of brown resinous material.
“What is it?” asked Will.
“Some narcotic, I suspect. Not sure what variety. You ever tried anything?”
Will shook his head.
“I liked hashish the few times I’ve tried it, found it fascinating,” Oliver said. “Of course Huxley’s written about the heavier stuff, peyote and mescaline, but even a bit of any mind-expanding drug can reveal a lot. Small wonder society tries to ban it. Too much illumination and people might find a way to connect the dots, they might start wondering why doughboys are dying to protect barons’ bankbooks. Can’t have that. So instead the state unscrews the tap on the greatest mind-deadening drug in the world, alcohol, while releasing the hysterical prosecutorial hounds on all that reefer madness.”
“I don’t know,” said Will, amazed at how quickly Oliver could segue from witnessing a close friend’s death to expounding a random conspiracy theory, “You might be overthinking it.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Look at the facts, look at history, our own government got Willie Hearst’s papers to spread wholesale, widespread panic about cannabis, laws were passed, people were hauled off to prison, the distribution effectively quashed. Meanwhile, people drink themselves dumb every night. Can’t have the people thinking too much, right? So, maybe you’re correct, and perhaps that’s the point, we should all be doing considerably more overthinking.”
“So was Boris a dopehead?”
“Who, Boris, what?” Oliver shook his head as if he had been suddenly pulled back to reality “A dopehead? No, Boris was not a dopehead. He was merely a man seeking solace in an incredibly hostile world. I suspect, though, he might have gotten his hands on a bad batch.” He sniffed the resin again. “I have no real expertise here, but luckily I know a few who do. We’ll take a little detour and visit some friends.” He leaned forward. “Pardonnez-moi, vous pouvez nous emmener au numéro dix, rue Jacob, s’il vous plaît.”
“What about finding Ned?”
“Under the circumstances, she’s going to have to wait.” He gave Will a forced grin. “Invisible hands are moving pieces on the board right now and I’m rather curious as to why.” As Oliver folded up the tinfoil and tucked it back in his vest pocket, Will noticed that Oliver’s hands were shaking.
XI
Zoya entered her apartment and looked around. There was still no sign of Max. Now this was odd, she thought. Usually the rat would have sniffed her out within two or three days. She thought of checking in again with Elga. But the last few visits had been too unsettling, lately there seemed to be a constant undercurrent of impatience and anger that rose like winter sap out of the old woman’s moods. Zoya wondered if Elga was finally going mad, perhaps from too many centuries of stewing those ves
tigial remnants of spent spells in the rotting murk of her mind.
Zoya caught herself in the mirror. She was in essence the same young woman she had been for so long now; little had changed. How long had it been since that day when she had almost died in those cold Russian woods, an exile, stripped of every bond and affection, her heart scraped raw and her ribs sore from weeping? She was so newly grown into the fulsome body of a woman as to be still only a child, two children really, the other nascent one not yet stirring within her, though already so hungry. She would recall that hunger, the only thing about her child she would ever know. (To this day, whenever she found herself in bustling Parisian brasseries, watching wealthy tourists abandon their uneaten baguette or cheese plates, it filled her with such a quick, intuitive anger that she would instinctively hiss maledictions at their heels.)
She could still recall stumbling upon that trace scent of food as she wandered, staggering, starving, and lost in the woods so many dawns ago. Venison, she had been sure it was venison, a thin fatty smell sneaking through the needled larch to find her. The faint aroma had caught her like a fish on a hook, pulling her step by step deeper into the forest until she finally came across the lone hut. Unlike in the fairy tales, the little house did not stand on chicken legs, but was raised instead on thick stilts of stunted birch. Stumbling out of the red twilit woods, Zoya kept her distance and quietly worked her way around the building, looking for any sign that she might be welcome. The hut was foreboding. Without any sign of a door or window, smoke crept out from the roof and sharp scratched lines of yellow light leaked out from the pitch-caulked cracks between the hut’s timbers. She thought she could make out a woman’s deep voice, either talking to herself or humming a tone-deaf tune. Zoya hid behind a thick patch of thistle, settling in, to wait for the owner to emerge. But all night and well into the next morning, no one came out. As she lay there, pains of famine now desperately screaming in her belly, Zoya dug and scratched at the earth, finally sucking on worms and beetles for moisture. Part of her wanted to bang on the cabin walls and beg for bread, water, and mercy, but another, stronger feeling urged her to stay where she was. So she kept waiting. But nobody came out. Instead, the aromatic scents from the cabin smoke grew deeper and richer; the air swam with the fragrances of clove, garlic, and ginger, all wrapped in the smells of simmering haunch fat and pinewood smoke. It was too much to bear. Drained now of all strength, Zoya collapsed flat against the earth, her tears turning the soil beneath her face to mud.
