by Don DeLillo
“You know American TV?”
“Three years,” he said. “All countries where the U.S. has strong interests stand in line to undergo a terrible crisis so that at last the Americans will see them. This is very touching.”
“Beware,” Ann said. “He is leading up to something.”
“I know what he’s leading up to. When he says two countries fight, I understand him to mean the Greeks and the Turks. He is leading up to poor little Greece and how we’ve abused her. Turkey, Cyprus, the CIA, U.S. military bases. He slipped in military bases a while back. I’ve been wary ever since.”
His smile broadened, a little wolfish now.
“This is interesting, how a U.S. bank based in Athens can lend money to Turkey. I like this very much. Okay, they are the southeast flank and there are U.S. bases there and the Americans want to spy on the Russians, okay. Lift the embargo, give them enormous foreign aid. This is Washington. Then you also lend them enormous sums privately, if it is possible to call a bank the size of yours a private institution. You approve loans from your headquarters in the middle of Athens. But the documentation is done in New York and London. Why is this, because of sensitivity to the feelings of Greeks? No, it is because the Turks will be insulted if the agreements are signed on Greek soil. How much face could a Turk bring to such a meeting? This is considerate, I think. This is very understanding? His shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table. “You structure the loan and when they can’t pay the money, what happens? I will tell you. You have a meeting in Switzerland and you restructure. Athens gives to Ankara. I like this. This is interesting to me.”
“Oh dear,” Ann said. “I think you have the wrong man, Andreas. This is not David Keller. You want David. He’s the banker.”
“I am James. The risk analyst.”
Eliades sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. It wasn’t much of an offense, the facts being what they were, but the small error had robbed his moral force of its effectiveness. A boy was clearing the table. Charles leaned my way to collect some money.
“Need a ride?” he said.
“Came with David.”
“That doesn’t answer my question?
“Where is the cowboy?”
Eliades poured the last of the wine into my glass. His fingers were coppery with nicotine. For the first time all night he stopped his determined observing. Names, faces, strands of conversation. The old man sang alone, a cat walked the rail above the beach.
“What is a risk analyst?”
“Politics,” I said. “Very definitely.”
“I am glad.”
Dick and Dot offered to take the German to his hotel. Charles moved next to me while he waited for the change to come. The man who made change, the most important job in the country judging by the look of such men, sat at a desk full of papers, with a hand calculator and a metal box for money in front of him, and he wore a tie and jacket and knitted V-neck sweater, and had graying hair cropped close and shadowy jowls, and was wide, thick and despotic, the only stationary presence in that part of the room, where waiters and other family members moved back and forth.
Eliades walked as far as the parking area with the departing people. I heard the Bordens laughing out there. The waiters wore tight white shirts with the edges of their short sleeves folded back. There were three of us at the table now.
“Not a bad evening,” Ann said. “As these things go.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not a bad evening.”
“How do these things go?” Charles said.
“They simply go.”
“What, they shoot out toward infinity?”
“I suppose they do in a sense. James would know.”
“No French tonight to tell us how shifty the Lebanese are,” he said. “No Lebanese to tell us how the Saudis pick their feet in business meetings. No one to say about Syrians from Aleppo, ‘Count your fingers after you shake hands with them.”
“No one from the Midlands selling smoke alarms.”
“Yes, remember Ruddle.”
“His name was Wood.”
“The fellow with the bad eye. The eye that drifted.”
“His name was Wood,” she said.
“Why would I think Ruddle?”
“You’re tired, I suppose.”
“What does fatigue have to do with the name Ruddle?”
Charles coughed into the hand that was curled around his cigarette.
“What about you?” he asked her. “Tired?”
“Not very. A little.”
“When are you off?”
“A seven o’clock flight actually.”
“That’s mad.”
“Isn’t it insane? I’ll have to be out the door at five.”
“But that’s mad,” he said without conviction.
“No matter. I sleep on planes.”
“Yes, you do, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“By what?”
“James heard. A note of accusation. Are people who sleep on planes less mentally alert? More in touch with our primitive nature perhaps? How easily we descend. Is this what you’re saying?”
“Christ, what energy.”
There was a long moment in which we seemed to be listening to ourselves breathe. Ann toyed absently with the remaining utensils, a knife and spoon. Then she stopped.
“Does anyone know why we’re sitting here?” she said.
“That gangster is counting out change.”
As Eliades headed back, there was a stir at a far table, people talking in loud voices, laughing, someone getting up to point. Others looked over the rail. I watched Andreas walk over there and look down to the beach. He motioned us over.
A woman came out of the sea, tawny hair clinging to her shoulders and face. It was Lindsay in her sea-jade summer dress, twisted slightly at the hips, sticking wet. Her laughter rang among our voices, clear as bell metal, precisely shaped. Using both hands she scooped hair from the sides of her face, head tilted back. Ten yards behind was David, bent over, retching in knee deep water.
Happy babble from the taverna.
He emerged now, still in his blazer and Italian pants, his sleek black slip-ons, and Lindsay laughed again, watching him walk sopping in small circles, making those coarse noises. He moved heavily, like a plaster-cast man, arms held out from his body, legs well apart. A waiter aimed a light nearly straight down, helping Lindsay find her shoes, and she stopped laughing long enough to call efharistó, merci, thank you, and the sound of her voice set her laughing again. She stepped into the shoes, her body glistening a little, beginning to tremble. David was standing nearly upright now, limbs still spread wide. Only his head was lowered, as though he’d decided to study the sandy-wet shoes for an explanation. He was coughing hoarsely and Lindsay turned to point him toward a stone path. People started returning to their tables.
David called up, “The water’s no good to drink.”
“Oceans ordinarily aren’t,” Charles said.
“Well I’m just advising people.”
“Did you swim or wade?” Ann said.
“We swam out to the float but there is no float.”
“That’s a different beach. You want the one just south of here.”
“That’s what Lindsay said.”
We went back to the table as they started climbing the path through the trees. Charles got his change, he and Ann said goodnight. Eliades disappeared into the kitchen, coming back a moment later with four glasses of brandy clustered in his hands.
“The owner,” he said. “Private stock.”
I thought of Kathryn, who liked a fingerbreadth of Metaxa on raw nights, sitting up in bed to read and sip, her mouth warm with it, later, in the dark. Prophetic significance. All those northern nights lapped in snow, the world shocked white under Polaris, our hushed love smelling of Greek booze.
“Tell me, Andreas, what were you doing in the States?”
>
“Refrigeration systems.”
“Cheers,” I said.
“Cheers.”
Swallowing slowly.
“You’re connected with the German fellow then.”
“Yes, Stahl.”
“And Stahl is here to do business with Dick Borden?”
“No, with Hardeman.”
“Who is Hardeman?·”
“He is the banker’s friend. I thought your friend.”
“David’s friend.”
“But he didn’t come. We think his flight was delayed. A sandstorm in Cairo.”
Lindsay stood ten feet away, shyly, as though we might send her from the room. She’d been wringing out the hem of her dress and the fabric was full of spiral twists. Andreas extended a glass and she came forward, followed by a boy with a mop.
“This is so nice. Thank you. Cheers.”
“Where’s David?” I said.
“He’s in the men’s room, freshening up.”
This set her off again, laughing. She barely got the sentence out before her face went tight with glee. I put my jacket around her shoulders. She sat there rigid with laughter, her face looking synthetic, an object under measured stress.
“Freshening up,” she said again, and sat there shivering, crying with laughter.
In time she began to settle down, whispering her thanks for the brandy, drawing the jacket more closely around her, whispering her thanks for the jacket. A mood of soft withdrawal. She was too self-conscious to return the pampering smiles of people at other tables.
“I don’t have to ask if you like to swim,” Andreas said.
“I don’t think what we did was really a swim. I don’t know what to call it.”
“A David Keller,” I said.
“Right, it was a Keller. But I went willingly.”
“Have you been to the islands?” he said.
“Only the one-day tour,” she whispered. “I’m waiting for my curtains.”
“That’s a line she uses,” I told Andreas. “No one knows what it means.”
“We’re still moving in really. This is all new to me. I’m only learning to count. The numbers are fun. Do you know the alphabet, James?”
“Yes, and I can tie my own shoes.”
“Andreas, is it absolutely necessary to know verbs? Must we know verbs?”
“I think it will help,” he said. “You seem to be very active.”
Both men were singing again. The customer, a man with dark hair and a full mustache, was looking directly at the guitarist, who stood against the wine casks, one foot up on a chair, head slightly tilted toward his bent left hand. The song gathered force, a spirited lament. Its tone evoked inevitable things. Time was passing, love was fading, grief was deep and total. As with people in conversation, these men appeared to go beyond the soulful routine woe of the lyrics. Their subjects were memory and tragic narrative and men who put their voices to song. The dark man was intense, his eyes still fixed on the old musician, never wavering. He was charged with feeling. His eyes were bright with it. The song called up a luminous fervor and he seemed to rise slightly in the chair. The men were twenty feet apart, voices shading into each other. The guitarist looked up then, a spare figure with gray stubble, someone’s second cousin, the man we see asleep at corner tables all through the islands. For the rest of the song they looked at each other, strangers, to something be yond. A blood recollection, a shared past. I didn’t know.
I sat with David on his terrace above the National Gardens, across from the Olympic Stadium, looking toward the Acropolis. Pentelic marble old and new. The prime minister lived in a two-bedroom apartment in the next building.
“They pay some heavyish coin.”
He was talking about his more difficult postings. He sat in his damp clothes, minus the shoes and blazer, drinking beer. He was a fairly large man, just beginning to flesh out, slow-moving in a vaguely dangerous way.
Noise in short bursts issued from motorcycles crossing the dark city. Lindsay was asleep.
“The gamier the place, or the more ticklish politically, or the more sand dunes per square mile, obviously they sweeten the pot, our New York masters. The dunes in the Empty Quarter reach eight, nine hundred feet. I flew over with a guy from Aramco. Forget it.”
In Jeddah the fruit bats swooped out of the night to take water from his pool, drinking in full flight. His wife, the first, came out of the house one day to find three baboons pounding on the hood and roof of their car.
In Tehran, between wives, he invented the name Chain Day. This was the tenth day of Muharram, the period of mourning and self-flagellation. As hundreds of thousands of people marched toward the Shahyad monument, some of them wearing funeral shrouds, striking themselves with steel bars and knife blades affixed to chains, David was hosting a Chain Day party at his house in North Tehran, an area sealed off from the marchers by troops and tank barricades. The partygoers could hear the chanting mobs but whether they were chanting “Death to the shah” or “God is great,” and whether it mattered, no one knew for sure. The thing he feared in Tehran was traffic. The apocalyptic inching pack-ice growl of four miles of cars. The drivers’ free-form ways. Cars kept coming at him in reverse. He was always finding himself driving down a narrow street with a car coming toward him backwards. The driver expected him to move, or ascend, or vanish. Eventually he saw what was so fearful about this, a thing so simple he hadn’t been able to isolate it from the larger marvel of a city full of cars going backwards. They did not reduce speed when driving in reverse. To David Keller, between wives, this seemed an interesting thing. There was a cosmology here, a rich structure of some kind, a theorem in particle physics. Reverse and forward were interchangeable. And why not, what was the difference really? A moving vehicle is no different moving backwards than it is moving forwards, especially when the driver regards the whole arrangement as if he were on foot, able to touch, to bump, to brush his way past vague obstacles in the street. This was the second revelation of David’s stay in Tehran. People drove as they were walking. They veered idiosyncratically, these fellows with their army surplus field jackets and their interesting sense of space.
In Istanbul, earlier, he used to tell people he wanted to get Mainland New York to approve purchase of a jeep-mounted recoilless rifle, plus jeep, to get him to and from the rep office. More seriously he talked about armoring his car. “Armoring your car,” he told me, “is known as a major expenditure proposal. Forty thousand dollars. Allowing your driver to carry a gun is known as a small arms shipment to the Marxist-Leninist Armed Propaganda Squad. Not that the driver would give them the piece. They’d take it after they blew you both away with anti-tank grenades and AK-47s.”
This summer, the summer in which we sat on his broad terrace, was the period after the shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken, before the Grand Mosque and Afghanistan, The price of oil was an index to the Western world’s anxiety. It provided a figure, $24 a barrel, say, to measure against the figure of the month before or the year before. It was a handy way to refer to our complex involvements. It told us how bad we felt at a given time.
“How’s Tap doing?”
“The kid writes novels, he eats octopus.”
“Good. That’s great.”
“How are yours? Where are they living?”
“Michigan. They’re doing fine. They love it. They swim.”
“What’s your first wife’s name?”
“Grace,” he said. “That’s a first wife’s name, isn’t it?”
“Does Lindsay talk about having kids?”
“Shit, Lindsay’ll do anything. She’s crazy. Did she tell you she found a job? Great break, she’s been getting antsy for something to do. She’ll teach English at one of these language schools. It’s an escape from the bank wives and their get-togethers.”
“I haven’t noticed you two hosting any dinner parties for Mainland people here on business. Or evacuees from disturbed areas. You’re the credit head, aren’t you
?”
“Disturbed areas. That’s what we call them all right. Like snow flurries on a weather map. Dinner parties in this division are famous for eyewitness accounts of very large groups of people marching on embassies and banks. Also famous for unrelenting politeness. All the ethnic groups and religious subgroups. Can you seat a Druze next to a Maronite? They’re all more or less multinationalized but who knows what lies underneath? We have a Sikh who carries the mandatory sect knife somewhere on his person. Sometimes I’m careful what I say without knowing precisely why. Grace used to handle things when we were in Beirut and Jeddah and Istanbul. She handled things beautifully in fact. Lindsay I don’t think would be all that adept. I think she’d stand there laughing.”
“What about the Americans?”
“Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends. That swim made me hungry.”
David drank slowly but steadily whenever possible. In the course of a long Sunday lunch on the eastern shore or a night almost anywhere, his voice would begin to rumble and drone, grow friendlier, taking on paternal tones, and in his large blond face a ruined child would appear, barely discernible in the slack flesh, a watcher, distant and contrite.
“Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That`s all he does. He goes to employees’ houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.”
“What’s he called officially?”
“The snake catcher.”
“That’s remarkably direct,” I said.
“They couldn’t come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.” This was the summer before crowds attacked the U.S. embassies in Islamabad and Tripoli, before the assassinations of American technicians in Turkey, before Liberia, the executions on the beach, the stoning of dead bodies, the evacuation of personnel from the Mainland Bank.
“Does Kathryn ever get to Athens?”
“No.”
“I meet my kids in New York,” he said.
“That’s easier than going to the island.”
“We eat banana splits in the hotel room. They cost eight dollars each.”
“Did Grace ever attack you physically?”
“She’s not a physical person, Grace.”
