“But what do you do,” Mother said, “when the bosses say everybody has to work more for less, but they give themselves bonuses. The people with money—they don’t give a penny more than they have to. If you don’t watch them, they’ll rob the pension fund.”
“That is American thinking,” Mike said. “It is one reason why America’s time is passing.”
Marie Laure got up to go to the toilette. I took the baby. She woke up and started to cry. I gave her the pacifier. Anna Geneviève sucked experimentally. She was not fooled. She spit the rubber out and wailed for reality. With a sigh Marie took her back.
“I like the Austrian spirit. We will invest here,” Mike Hayakawa said.
“Who’s we?” I asked, as the hardworking waitress, aware of her importance in the scheme of Austrian tourism as a whole, slammed our dishes down in front of us.
“Musashi Company,” he said. “We will invest here.”
“In Japan you all work for the common good?” my mother asked.
“I am very lucky to be with my company, Musashi,” Mike said. He was fervent about all of this—evangelical for Japan, Inc. “I know that I will have lifetime employment. If I want to buy a house, they will make a house loan. Even if I want to join the golf club, they will make me a loan to join the golf club. So I know that what is good for Musashi Company is good for me and what is good for Musashi Company is good for Japan.”
“Did you study this in college?” my mother asked.
“University of California, Berkeley,” he said. “I studied economics and sociology.”
“Do you know who is following you?” I asked him.
“You mean the Little Dragons? Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore? Yes, the Japanese way is widely imitated.”
“No, I mean the blue Ford that followed you from St. Anton.”
He looked shocked. As I had intended. It made me feel better. I ordered an extravagant dessert, then suggested that Musashi Company pick up the check. “I’ll take it off my fee,” I said.
I had a pretty fair idea of who was following us. But I didn’t expect to be accosted by him in the men’s room.
He was standing at the urinal in the classic pose, face forward, hands low and in front. He was watching the door through the mirror over the sink. When I came in he turned around abruptly. I jumped back, expecting a spray of urine. But he was completely zipped up. “I’m glad you finally came in here,” he said. “It’s been a strain standing here. There was one guy kept staring at me. He must have thought I had a bladder problem.”
“That’s one description of guys who hang out in men’s rooms.”
“Oh, come on, I don’t look like one of them.”
“Send in the clowns,” I said.
“Okay, now, enough of that. I want to know what you’re doing!”
“Having lunch.”
“Don’t get wise with me, Cassella! I can have your ticket punched. Right now if I want to!”
“Hey, whatever agency you’re with, Chip—didn’t they teach you how to tail someone?”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean my mother spotted you behind us!”
“No. You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“I never joke about trade craft. But it doesn’t matter about my mother. She’s Sicilian—she doesn’t get nervous about stuff like that. But the Jap—he spotted you too, Chip, and he’s squirming.”
“I want to know exactly what’s going on here!” Chip said. “Are you on our team or not?”
“Am I on your team? Who is your team?”
“America’s team, darn it.”
“Tell me something, Mr. America’s team, what am I looking for? Don’t tell me it’s financial records. I know it’s not.”
“There are some things I’m not at liberty to disclose.”
“And you want to know what team I’m on. Maybe I’m on the first team that tells me what the fuck is going on.”
“Let me warn you of one thing,” Chip said, waving his finger in my face. “I see you have your whole family with you. If you try to make one move over the border …”
“What border?”
“Any border, any airport, any train. One move, Mr. Wiseguy, and I will shut you down, round you up, and take you away. The closest you’ll get to snow will be the prison exercise yard, back in the States.”
“Back off, Chip. Now listen to me. We’re going to Vienna …”
“All of you?”
“Just listen, dammit. I’ll be staying at one of two pensions, probably. The Schwarzer Adler or the Marie Louise. They’re listed in the phone book. So in case I lose you, you’ll know where to find me. And my wife and baby and my mother.”
“What about the Japanese guy?”
“Does one of the Musashi companies own hotels in Austria?”
“Yes. Five Star. They just acquired the Imperial Eagle. It used to be a Hilton.”
“That’s where he’ll be. Come to think of it, that’s where I’ll be too, if I can get him to put me on his tab. Can we put it on your tab?”
“You’re going a little too fast here, guy.”
“You ask me what team I’m on. The other guy—I assume Tanaka is the other team—he’s ready to pay my tab, and you’re not. You just want to blackmail me, push me around, take my laundries. Then you say you want me to be on your team.”
“I …”
“Well, goddammit, I am. I’m on America’s team. Because I’m a goddamn red-blooded, dyed-in-the-wool American.” I try to talk to people in terms they can understand. “Now, I have to work with the Japanese because he was close, in some way that I have not figured out, to Hiroshi Tanaka. With him, I have access. I got Tanaka’s keys from him. For Tanaka’s office and apartment in Vienna. So just relax.”
“Can I trust you?”
“Of course you can, Chip. Two Americans in a foreign land—you bet!” I said. I shushed him abruptly. I opened the men’s room door and looked out. I shut it quickly and turned back to Chip. I shoved Chip into the toilet stall. “It’s the Jap!” I whispered urgently. “Get in there. Don’t let him see you. As soon as it’s clear, I’ll come back and tell you. Remember Pearl Harbor!”
I left the men’s room. I left the restaurant. Mike Hayakawa had picked up the check. Everyone was already waiting for me outside the restaurant. I found the blue Ford and flattened the tires. It impressed Mike no end. He thought it was something right out of a TV show. The next time I spoke to Chip I would tell him that vandals must’ve done it. Or Hayakawa.
TRUST
MY MOTHER LIKED MIKE Hayakawa. She thought he was polite, well educated, and intelligent. She likes people with strong opinions. I asked her how Guido was. Guido is her closest male friend. I don’t know exactly what their relationship is except that he does the cooking. He’s a priest and I initially did not like him for that reason. But he was the one that helped me leave America, disappear, and end up with the ridiculous passport that I now carry.
Guido had been sick, she said. But she wouldn’t be specific. Just sick and had not felt up to coming with her.
It was a long and grueling drive. My left knee ached. I’d hurt it skiing but it only bothered me when I was in the car. It was late when we arrived in Vienna, so I didn’t really appreciate the hotel.
The Imperial Eagle looked like a wealthy woman of forty who had been recently widowed—it had just had a complete makeover. To pursue the metaphor any further would be sexist and in the worst of taste. It existed for businessmen with serious expense accounts and the name of the game was service. I was not the only man in the hotel in jeans, but I was the only one in jeans who was not associated with a camera on a professional basis. These people wore very serious clothes. They were not there for vacations or frivolity—though they knew how to enjoy themselves with brandy, a cigar, and an escort service after a hard day of der Schilling machen.
I was the only man in the hotel with a wife and baby and a mother. Mike got us a suite with his Musashi ca
rd. Japanese was featured in all the multilingual signs and services. A sign at the reception desk pointed out that they were happy to accept travelers checks in yen denominations.
By the time we entered the room the phone was ringing. It was Chip. He was calling from a phone booth somewhere near Linz. He accused me of letting the air out of his tires to escape. I told him that was ridiculous and that in any case I was exactly where I’d said I’d be so that he had nothing to worry about. I told him it was a very nice hotel and he should come and stay there too. It was far more, he said, than his expense account permitted. I told him not to worry—that there were many excellent pensions in Vienna at a price he could afford. Even if he didn’t have yen.
There was a thorn-free rosebud and a chocolate on each pillow. A maid entered by force and insisted on turning down our covers. Complimentary fruit was set out in a bowl. There was a minibar with a wide selection of beverages to be charged at three to five times their value. I had a half bottle of wine for $30. Marie, a nursing mother, had a mineral Wasser for $7.50. My mother couldn’t bring herself to have anything at that price. I heard her in the bathroom drinking a glass of tap water. God bless her.
The sheets were soft and so clean they glowed dimly in the dark. It was nice to lay there in that broad expanse of mattress with Marie Laure and Anna Geneviève, so small, so serious, between us.
The phone woke me in the morning. It was Chip. The baby woke up and began to wail. That woke Marie Laure. She glared at me as if it were my fault.
“I’ll take it in the living room. When I get in there, hang it up.”
She glared at me ferociously when I handed her the phone. When I picked up she slammed the extension down.
“What time is it?” I asked him.
“It’s six.”
“Asshole,” I said. “Okay. Here’s today’s schedule. I’m going to get up in two hours. At eight. Then I’ll be down for breakfast at nine. Then we go to Hiroshi Tanaka’s office. It’s on Josefstädterstraße, number forty-eight. We should be there around ten. Rent a different car if you’re going to hang out out front, and get a moustache or something.”
“I’m downstairs,” he said.
“Well, don’t be,” I said.
“How do I know you’re going where you say you’re going?”
“What are you going to do, sit in the coffee shop for three hours? This is his place. Maybe he’s not smart enough to have the house detective on watch for you or someone like you. But maybe he is. Just do what I tell you and if we’re both lucky we’ll both go back to the States.”
“I’m going to wait down here. I have sunglasses and I’m combing my hair differently.”
“Chip, don’t do that. Eat some breakfast, have a good shit, get the Herald Tribune, and go sit in the park and read.” I hung up on him.
“Why do you treat them that way?” Marie Laure said, standing in the doorway.
“What way?”
“I want you to clear up this mess you have and I want you to have your real name and to be able to go where we want, even to Brooklyn. You are very rude. Like they are idiots or clowns.”
“To keep them off balance. If I treated them nice they would think I was afraid of them. They’re dangerous. Or one of them is. One of them probably killed Hiroshi Tanaka, Wendy Tavetian, and maybe even Hans Lantz.”
Breakfast, included in the price of the room, was sumptuous. Fit for a German appetite. Prepared in a country that has not yet heard of cholesterol. There was coffee, rich Viennese coffee, or decaf, and a selection of teas. Fresh juice, fresh fruit, stewed fruit, eggs however you wanted them. There was ham, sausage, schnitzel, wieners, bacon. There was butter, cream cheese, yogurt, and eight varieties of cheese. There were four different kinds of cold cereal plus packaged cereals, nuts, raisins, mixed dried fruit, and sunflower seeds. There were three different kinds of rolls, four different breads, a selection of jams, marmalades, and honey. There were grilled tomatoes, hollandaise sauce, béarnaise sauce, waffles, American pancakes, syrup, and seven miscellaneous.
Mike Hayakawa ate sparingly. I made something of a pig of myself.
“How come,” he asked, “you’re dressed like a Catholic priest?”
“I am one,” I said. I wore my ancient Irish tweed sports jacket over my clerical collar and black dickie. I reached in the pocket and took out my passport. He’d never seen it. It looks real. It is real. Sort of. He read the entry for profession, then reread it and looked upstairs as if he could see Marie Laure as he’d seen her at lunch in Innsbruck, lush swollen breast coming out of her blouse, the nipple bursting with milk to feed my daughter, her dark eyes full of woman’s knowledge of both having babies and making them.
Oh, I was impatient for that vagina to heal so I could spread her legs and slide inside again, my chest pressing against her heavy breasts—I wondered how much they would change from birth and nursing; I wondered if it would matter to me—and her hands on my back and on my buttocks, pressing me into her, taking me into her, into the passage through which our daughter had traveled. Would it feel different in there to my cock? to my mind?
“The idea of clerical celibacy came relatively late,” I said. “Originally married men could become priests and priests could marry. The rule forbidding priests to marry after they were ordained wasn’t proclaimed until 325. Then there were two classes of priest. The premarried and presumably sexually active. The unmarried and supposedly celibate. Marriage, as a Catholic rite, is indissoluble. So in 385 Pope Siricius made the somewhat bizarre decree that married men who were ordained had to remain married but had to stop having sex with their wives. This is in contrast to the rabbinical tradition, which makes sex a duty to health and marital well-being. They suggest Friday night.
“In any case, clerical marriage wasn’t actively attacked until 1089 under Pope Urban II. To prove they were serious about it, the Pope and his council said that priests’ wives could be sent into slavery. But even after that, celibacy was honored more in the breech, if you’ll pardon the pun, than in fact. John XII and Benedict VII were both murdered by jealous husbands who caught them flagrante delicto.
“Innocent VIII was the first pope to acknowledge his bastards. Pope Sergius III was the father of Pope John IX, Pope Sixtus IV of Pope Julius II. Sixtus was also the first pope to license the whorehouses of Rome and he imposed a tax on priests who kept a mistress. Alexander VI, who was Rodrigo Borgia, had ten illegitimate children. A celibate clergy is an idea that seems indivisible from the Catholic Church, but history, theology, and the study of comparative religions all suggest that it is a questionable practice.”
I sound very authoritative doing that. Enough so that Mike looked at me with the suspicion that I might really be a priest and that it was the detective part that was an act.
“Tell me of the pagan rites in your country, my son. Does the Buddha require his followers to forswear their manly nature? Must the Shinto comport himself as a castrato?”
I had spent three months in a monastery cell next door to a Capuchin monk named Luther who was dying to have a sexual relationship with a woman, but he was the unfortunate sort of fanatic that wanted to change the world to fit his dick rather than simply break a rule and be happy. When Marie visited and we went down to the beach he would spy on us, then take long cold showers during which he wept. When she was away he eagerly shared the results of his research with me, particularly the more salacious tales of papal profligacy.
“Your mother,” Hayakawa said, “is a very nice person. It is good to see elder people who are vigorous and involved in life.”
“I like her too,” I said.
“She is an Italian-American from Brooklyn,” he said, looking at my passport.
“Yes, but she doesn’t conform to the stereotype, does she? Neither do I.”
“That’s true,” he said, and handed me back my passport.
I looked at the selection of pastries. There was one in particular with lightly glazed blackberries that I found terribl
y attractive. “We’d better get going,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “You never dressed this way in St. Anton.”
“Look around you. What should I wear—jeans and a T-shirt? ski clothes? This is a cheap way to look respectable. I don’t have a pinstripe suit and a power tie,” I said. “But I’m glad that you do.”
Vienna was re-created in the nineteenth century by its last emperor as a monument to empire and all the statues are larger than life. They tend to be static, stolid, and sturdy, as compared, say, to the statues of Rome, which are so often languid, frolicking, and, no matter how rippled their stomach muscles, ready to eat grapes off the vine. A lot of Vienna’s statues are female nudes. They have that pornographic perfection that one expects from a Penthouse or Playboy spread, their granite tits even harder and more upthrust than silicone enhanced flesh. They are stockier than the current Western standard, but it’s all muscle, as if the sculptors of Vienna, en masse, had fallen in love with a gang of German masseuses. There is also, as in today’s men’s magazines, an ongoing lesbian motif. Constantly sculpted two together, they touch in ways that are either suggestive or possessive. Whichever they are, lesbians or masseuses, surely a pair will someday come to life when the right man falls to his knees before them crying, “Pummel me, beat me, hurt me. Teach me what true love really means.”
There were two pair of these females on either side of the entrance to Hiroshi Tanaka’s office building. They held up the portico with casual strength and teamster solidarity. Across the street, Chip Sheen gazed at them intently. He had changed his car to a minimalist green Opel from Hertz. He also had sunglasses and some sort of tweedy golf cap. He gave me a sidelong look, then he made some sort of recognition signal, flicking his nostril with his thumb. He’d seen it in a movie.
“What now?” Mike asked, as if I knew.
“Wait here,” I said. “I’m going to go up and reconnoiter.”
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 14
