by Craig Nova
“No,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “Nothing I can do about it. Say, how many people are working on Gaelle?”
“Oh, a lot of people are working on it,” she said.
“I bet it’s only you,” he said. “I’d bet a lot. Come on. You need some help. Why, I’d sure like to get the guy who did it.”
“Would you?” she said. “You’re sure about that?”
“This thing is driving me nuts, you know that?” he said. He touched his leg. “It just won’t leave me alone. It’s a funny kind of pain, like slow, constant lightning. Like electricity. Come on.”
They went off the path to the meadow, where they left a darker trail of footsteps in the evening’s first dew. The birds flew overhead, seemingly playing with one another, one chasing another as they turned sharply at the edge of the meadow. Up ahead the green wall on the far side of the meadow faced them.
“It figures that it would only be you,” said Felix. “Who cares about Gaelle? Just a woman with a funny face who still is young. Why, I was the only one to look after her. I used to wash her stockings.”
“Did you?” said Armina.
“They’d get dirty and I’d wash them out and hang them up to dry. She sat around with no clothes on when I did it. Slept that way on her bed. I never bothered her.”
“You don’t have to walk so close to me,” said Armina.
“Sure, sure,” he said.
They came to the edge of the field and began to go into the green shade of the woods. A screen of undergrowth went around the top of a gully, and if she pushed her way through it, she would be able to look down below, into the depression where more brush grew. The leaves of the plants in front of her were small ones with a serrated edge, like a saw, and some of them trembled and sprinkled water on her as she pushed through them. She glanced at every detail, as though each one had some significance she could understand if she was only alert enough, or smart enough. The gully was like a dark green pool. Low plants, some grass at its edge, all dense enough to cover the ground.
Felix stopped in some brush, turned sideways into it, grabbed his leg, and lifted it over a low-growing branch. He grunted. Armina continued into the bottom of the gully. She looked from one end to the other for a bright piece of clothing, or a scarf, or any sign that something or someone was here, and as she started going over the landscape again as though to see what she missed, she realized that she had let Felix get behind her. She had thought that he was going to show her another woman here, but now she realized she had been left alone, at the bottom of a swale, the scent of the dead leaves rising slowly from the ground.
She stood still. He must have been still, too. She imagined him behind the scraggly brush that was frost burned, his acne scars perfectly blended with the brownish leaves. She waited for him to move. The birds sang, and in the distance a car tootled on the avenue and engines ran with a steady popping. A breeze came up and the leaves made a hush. A low, panting huff came from the top of the gully, and then a black dog emerged from a scrim of branches and leaves.
She started up the gully, back to the top. How could she have worn such shoes? Heels too high, soles too thin, and the soles were already wet. Her stockings had run in narrow ladders. And as she stumbled over a rotting trunk halfway up the slope, a hot spike pierced the back of her thigh, and then she turned to see that a limb had snapped back at her. For an instant, she imagined that a snake had bitten her, but could there be snakes in the middle of the city? Had one escaped from a private zoo? Then, as she twisted to see what had happened, she fell backward, as in a dream, and she landed on a hard spike, a broken stump of a piece of undergrowth, the wooden point sinking into the back of her thigh. The throb, the trickle of blood, the cold ache of the puncture left her more desperate than before. How clumsy, she thought. How could I let something like that happen now. Then she thought, that is just vanity. Get up.
At the top, behind a screen of brush, Felix waited, his gray face in an expression of extreme lassitude, as though it was difficult for him to stay awake. His eyes blinked with a slow repetition, like a lizard who sees a fly.
“So,” he said. “Here we are. In the middle of the park.”
The birds stopped singing, and the other sounds that she had become accustomed to, the slight movement of the leaves, which made a hush, the distant laughter of couples on a path, all ceased: the silence moved around her like the scent of a smoldering fire.
“Listen,” said Felix.
“I don’t hear anything,” said Armina.
“That’s right,” said Felix. “Why, I wonder if you have ever thought of being out here alone like this, and what had happened to those women in the park. It’s not safe, is it?”
She reached into her handbag.
“Oh,” said Felix. “No. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to do that.”
“No?” said Armina.
“I just thought it was important for you to hear that silence. It’s like a warning, see?”
“About what?” said Armina.
“This city is a hard place,” said Felix. “Why, all kinds of things are going on. And you can’t see it.”
“And you can?” said Armina. “Maybe you should tell me about it.”
“You’re not listening,” he said. “It’s all in the silence. It’s not what you know, but what you don’t know. That’s where the trouble is. And so like a friend I am trying to help you. Why, all kinds of things can go wrong. Look at Gaelle.”
“I want to talk to you about a mark in the dirt,” said Armina.
He looked right at her.
“You made one by the side of the grave,” said Armina.
“Why, you are going to try and take it out on my leg,” he said. He slapped it. “Why, that’s another thing I have against it. You won’t even let me grieve for my friend.” He looked around. “You’re going to need a lot more than a gimpy leg.”
They stood opposite each other.
“And you see out here how easy it was for me to get behind you? Why, that could happen anytime. I’m not saying me, you know, but that’s what you’re up against. Someone coming up behind you.”
The birds went on flying, as though nothing had happened, in that same looping pattern, rising when they flapped their wings, then gliding, swooping back toward the earth.
“So, if all you’ve got is a gimpy leg, I’d forget about that. I’d worry about my own troubles. Like some night you hear something behind you in the dark.”
He plunged up and down, pushed the leafy branches aside, and disappeared into the undergrowth. The branches throbbed back and forth, the leaves shedding the drops of water, which made a steady pattering on the ground. Armina stepped forward, looking one way and then another, and as she circled back, afraid that he had gotten behind her again, she saw the path that she had made in the leaves. Underneath them the dirt was black and rich. She pushed her toe into it, turned some of it over and saw the dark purple worms begin to move with the serpentine movement of such creatures. She thought of Gaelle and the women she had seen in the park, the weight of all of them anchoring her right here, as though they were somehow pulling her down.
She sat in the leaves, if only to think for a moment. She tapped the barrel of the pistol against her head, the hard whack of it reassuring, bracing, and she concentrated on it, as though if she could just clear her head sufficiently, she could do the right thing. The cadence of the pistol was the same as the pounding of her blood. She put her fingers along the back of her thigh and felt the cut stocking from the branch that had hit her, and when she stood up, in a moment of uneasiness, she saw a series of little flashes of light, like bits from a sparkler, that hung in the air and then popped, just like a soap bubble. She was surprised they didn’t make a sound as they disappeared.
It was twilight and the sky was gray and pink. The air cooled quickly, and the grass, the frost-burned leaves were shiny in the first, sudden dew. She thought of the barometer on her wall, the lit
tle needle with the shape of a spear, the script that was as formal as that in a legal document: what did the instrument say now? Change? High pressure? She stood up and held her leg.
Felix’s footsteps showed in the film of moisture on the grass of the meadow, and the pattern he left looked like a period next to a comma: one foot went directly ahead and the other swung around to keep up. She supposed that Felix might not have been alone in this. Was that right? Was she getting dizzy because she was afraid? He was just a kid, a boy with a limp, and yet he was right to invoke that silence: it was large enough and mysterious enough and so associated with the women in the park, the memory of Gaelle’s face, as though the scar had been a monument to silence, to all those things that are unchangeable. It was as though Felix were an apostle of the worst silence there is: the kind that lingered around the women she had found in the park. And yet, he was just a limping boy, right? So why was Armina in such a state?
Then she tried to think of something else, and as she looked at the sky, she thought of Rainer, of sitting on top of him, of dragging a nipple across his lip, of letting him smell her, of dragging an underarm across his face.
She wished her hands would stop shaking and that she could breathe a little more slowly, but when she inhaled, she wanted to pant. And even in the cool air of the park at this hour, she was sweating.
Felix was up ahead. The brush moved, and that large black dog came back again, as though it had been hunting and was retrieving a shot bird. It panted and went by, leaving the scent of its breath.
At the entrance to the park, she saw that up-and-down locomotion, like a carousel horse. Businesslike, frank, not too hurried.
She caught him in front of the restaurant where the funeral had been. The street fight had stopped for a while, but then reinforcements had arrived on each side. The thugs had come in groups of four or five, dressed in plus fours, ties tucked into their shirts between the second and third button. Members of the Ring had scuffled with the thugs for breaking up the funeral, but then they had retreated. What, after all, they seemed to say, was the point of this? It was time for another drink.
But as the members of the Ring had retreated, the Red Front had arrived, their clothes rough, faces scarred, hands large with the jobs they had done: bricklayers, machinists, brewers, truck and train drivers. They arrived with a sullen attitude and something else, too, which was an obvious interest in finding a way to do the most damage. What would really hurt these assholes?
Now small groups mixed together, a few of the Red Front opposite a few thugs. The shoving and hitting still had a tentative quality, as though the right thing were to wait a minute to see who was here, where people were, and how to do some damage. Karl stood among them, exhausted, grief stricken, his head above the other members of the Red Front.
The Red Front had sticks and they tried to hit the kneecaps of the men in brown pants and white shirts who rushed them in squads of three and four: the street was filled with a mass of shoving men, fists raised, arms pushing—the entire group looked like a number of scrums going on at the same time.
Armina took Felix’s arm.
“You,” she said. She was surprised by how thin he was—his bicep was like a broomstick in a sheet.
“If you’re smart,” he said. “You’ll leave me alone. Why, we just talked things over. Next time we might do more than talk. Nachtmann will help me. Nachtmann.”
She gave him a shake.
“Leave me alone,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said. “What did you do?”
“I’m looking for Nachtmann,” said Felix. “He runs the Ring. He knows some other friends of mine.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Get lost,” he said. “Go away.”
She gave him a shake.
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
Armina pushed him toward the members of the Red Front who were hitting and pushing into the mass of men. Every now and then the sound of a direct hit, a muffled snap, came out of the scrum. A man fell here and kneeled on all fours, his nose dripping.
“I’m going to give you to the Red Front,” said Armina. “Do you think they’d like to have someone who is an assassin for the thugs? That’s what you are, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you killed Gaelle?”
He shook his head.
“Karl,” yelled Armina. “Karl!”
Karl hit a man who fell to the pavement like a puppet whose strings had been cut. And as the man lay there, among the shoes and legs that moved back and forth, Karl stood over him, head down, as though grief and fury combined to make a variety of invisible but still heavy rain. The man on the ground lay perfectly still, either wise enough to hide, to play dead, or because he was protected by his unconsciousness. Finally, as though profoundly tired, Karl turned toward Armina, and then he started walking in her direction, pushing people out of the way, his large hands almost the size of the heads of the men he shoved out of the way.
“What do you want?” said Karl.
“You know Felix, don’t you?” said Armina.
“Yeah,” said Karl. “I had to pay him once.”
“We were just talking,” said Armina.
“About what?” said Karl.
“I was wondering what you would do if you could get your hands on the man who hurt Gaelle,” said Armina.
“You’re asking me?”
Felix pulled his arm against Armina’s grip. What would it take, this small gesture implied, to break away? He glanced down at Armina’s leg. Would she be able to catch him? Then he looked up at Karl, and when he did so he turned his head back, as though looking at a star overhead.
“Yes,” said Armina.
“Maybe I’d take my time with him,” said Karl. The men went on fighting behind him, and the sound of their scuffling, their kicking, hitting, the rough dragging sound as someone was pulled away onto the sidewalk, combined to make a sort of disturbance, a sound that was felt as much as heard. “Yeah. That’s what I’d do.” He looked down at Armina. “Maybe I’d take my time.”
Felix tugged again. Armina tightened her grip.
“You’re bleeding,” said Karl.
“I fell down in the park,” said Armina.
They all stood there in front of the fighting men. Felix kept his head down, looking one way and another. Little flashes of light appeared again, small burst of spectral colors, like pinpricks in the buildings, the spectacle of fighting men, the sky. The blood ticked in a long rill of moisture that ran down the back of Armina’s leg, into her shoe, and then out onto the cobbles of the street.
“Where’s Nachtmann?” said Felix.
“I don’t know,” said Karl. He turned to Armina. “Have you heard anything?”
“Have I?” said Armina to Felix.
Felix shook his head: it wasn’t the gesture of refusal so much as the angry disbelief of having run out of things to do.
“Psssst,” he said to Armina. “Get me out of here.”
She gave him a shake so there would be no misunderstanding.
“Well?” said Karl.
“No,” said Armina.
“Let me know if you do,” said Karl. “I’ll be around. Don’t wait. Come to me if you have something. I’d consider it a favor.”
“Come on,” said Armina to Felix. “Over this way.”
“Yeah,” said Felix.
She gave Felix another shake.
“We understand one another?” said Armina.
“Yeah,” said Felix.
They walked along the storefronts and over the broken glass on the sidewalk. For a moment Armina thought that the triangular pieces were related to those flashes she had seen. Then she said to Felix, “Well, well?”
He looked around, biting his lip.
“Yes,” said Felix.
“Yes what?” said Armina.
“I’m ready to work something out. But don’t say nothing here. See?”
In the stairwell of the Inspectorate Felix told Armina he didn�
�t know how old he was. Maybe sixteen, he guessed, seventeen. But not twenty. He had lived for a while with his mother and sister in a basement, but his sister had asthma, and Felix couldn’t stand her breathing, which took such effort. “Like she was digging a ditch with a pick,” said Felix.
The stairs had the usual scent: soap and cigars. Felix sniffed it and looked around, as though this stink were a sign. Typing in the distance. They went around the landings, Armina with her hand on Felix’s arm, and as they went, he pressed against her hand, as though they were on a date, as though he liked her touch. It made her want to let him go.
“Maybe we could come to an accommodation,” said Felix. “Maybe I could work this off. You know, do something to make up for Gaelle.”
“I don’t think so,” said Armina.
“I see all kinds of things,” said Felix. “Why, I wouldn’t even charge you much. It would be a bargain. Like some of those women in the park. Why, you’d be surprised at the things I hear.”
She turned and looked at him.
“I’d like to work it off,” said Felix.
They went by the second floor where the frosted glass glittered.
“Where are we going?” said Felix.
“Upstairs.”
“Is that where your office is?” he said.
“No,” she said.
“You didn’t get hurt, did you, when you fell down?” he said.
She gave him a shake that made his teeth click.
“If I were you,” she said, “I’d keep quiet about it.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “That Gaelle. Just look at the trouble she got me into. And after all I did for her.”
“What you did for her?” she said.
“Stop jerking me,” he said.
“What about Hauptmann?” said Armina. “He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”
“He’s a serious man,” said Felix. “You don’t want to look into this.”
“Hauptmann paid you?” she said.
“I made a little something,” said Felix.
“But you did more, didn’t you?” she said. “You did other things. You took a cigarette … to Gaelle.”
“I know what I did,” said Felix.
