Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

by C. J. Box

  THE HOTEL WAS FILLED with WTB people from countries all over the world. My room wasn’t ready, so I stored my luggage and shoved my hands in my pockets and went for a woe-is-me walk along the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street in Berlin, known as the Ku’Damm and pronounced “Koo-Dahm.” High-end stores, restaurants, bustle. I couldn’t believe there were still peddlers selling pieces of the Wall, whose last authentic remnants disappeared nearly twenty years before, as well as ersatz East German caps and “Stasi ” binoculars made in Asia. Jet-black-skinned Africans sold jewelry and knockoffs on blankets that could be gathered up at two seconds’ notice if a Polizist strolled down the block. There were women shopping in furs and carrying bags, and the smell of cigarette smoke hung in the cold damp air. The smell reminded me of Cody.

  Something I couldn’t explain nagged at me. I blamed the jet lag for my inability to determine what it was, but it was like a pebble in my shoe I couldn’t locate and discard.

  Berlin still had a sort of prewar men-in-hats-women-with-shoulder-pads feel to it, although every year, it seemed, there were fewer Germans and more North Africans, Turks, and Arabs on the streets.

  I walked as far as the big department store, the KaDaWe, before crossing the street and working my way back. Unlike home, where we’d been watching every penny for months since we’d adopted our baby, I was on the bureau expense account now. My wallet was flush with euros, and my CVB credit card was primed and ready. I couldn’t go crazy, but I could eat an early lunch of white sausages with a beer in sight of the Broken Tooth, a bombed-out church the Berliners had chosen not to reconstruct after WWII.

  As I sat and ate and drank I tried to figure out what was bothering me about my walk, what I’d seen that had set me on edge. Finally, as I sat back and waited for the bored waiter to bring me back my change and the hated receipt, I realized it wasn’t what I’d seen on the street but what I hadn’t seen that was eating at me.

  Children. There were no children. Obviously, the older kids would be in school. But in the entirety of my walk I hadn’t come upon a single stroller or young mother with a baby. It was as if it were a street, a city, filled only with adults. I thought how strange, how horrible it would be to live in a world without children. Until that moment, the notion had never even occurred to me. Here in Berlin, because of the choices they’d made for what ever reason, there were no little ones to punctuate the day with noise and harmless chaos. Instead, there was a sense of quiet and antiseptic order.

  As I folded my receipt into my wallet, I withdrew a photo of Angelina taken a few months ago. In it, she was beaming and reaching out for the camera to try and gum the lens.

  Even though it was just a photo, she was the only child in sight, and they were trying to take her away from us, to turn our house—our lives—into cold and quiet Berlin.

  DESPITE WHAT LINDA VAN GEAR had said about my job being in danger, I decided I would rebook a flight home the next day after my meeting with Harris. I feared for my wife and my daughter, and I already missed them. Linda would be angry, but if I returned with the AmeriCan deal in hand, she’d get over it.

  When I got back to the hotel I had a message from Malcolm Harris. He needed to postpone our dinner meeting until the end of the week. Something had come up, and he needed to return to London for several days.

  I balled up the message and threw it across the hotel lobby.

  ELEVEN

  FOR THE NEXT FOUR days, I was in hell. Waiting for Malcolm Harris to return to Berlin was torture. I was in bad humor— annoyed with cloying tour operators and journalists and the kissy-kissy greetings of Europeans (one cheek or two, two cheeks or three—it was maddening) and cigarette smoke and crowds. Our Colorado shell-scheme looked good from the outside but was held together with wires and tape and everything about my job and my life right then felt as false and cheap and ready to collapse as our booth.

  I talked to Melissa every night and things were fine but the tension was building because we both thought something could explode again at any moment. She wanted me home. I wanted to be home. Garrett could show up at our house. Luis’s friends might come calling. Cody could go on a bender. Moreland might decide three weeks was too long to wait.

  I obsessively checked my watch during the show and in the hotel room at night, trying to chart what Melissa and Angelina would be doing eight hours behind me. The only highlight of those days was when Melissa put Angelina on the phone. I talked to her and heard silence back for several beats before she squealed “Da?” with absolute wonder that made me laugh out loud with joy.

  ON THE NIGHT I was finally to meet with Harris, Melissa didn’t answer the phone.

  It was 10 A.M. in Denver, and no one was home. I felt something hot and sour rise up in my throat, and fought to keep it down. I didn’t have enough information to panic.

  I didn’t leave a message, but went through the whole procedure again to call her cell. Again, straight to voice mail. What was going on?

  Cody, I thought. So I went through the long procedure again, talking to long-distance operators, giving my phone card number … to find out his phone was off, too.

  I was running out of time. Despite that, I called home again and got voice mail.

  “Honey,” I said, “what the hell is going on? I’ve been trying to reach you and Cody. Call me at my hotel and leave a message. I’m going to a business dinner but I’ll call as soon as I get back. I want to make sure everything is okay. Love to you and Angelina. You need to keep your phone on.”

  I SMOKED A CUBAN cigar for pure defense purposes— everybody else in the dark, cramped bar was smoking—in the Habana Haus off the hotel lobby and waited for Harris to arrive. He was a half hour late. Smoking the cigar and drinking a Berliner Kindle lager gave me something to do while I fretted, running scenarios through my mind explaining why Melissa didn’t answer. I ran the gamut: Melissa and Cody were having a wonderful time together and decided to go shopping and take Angelina to the zoo and both had simply forgotten to turn their cell phones on; Melissa had taken Angelina to the pediatrician for a long-scheduled checkup she’d no doubt informed me of but I’d forgotten and she and Cody had obeyed the NO CELL PHONES sign in the waiting room (although it didn’t make sense that Cody, for once, would obey a regulation); the power went out, rendering both the landline telephone and the cell towers useless.

  Then the not-so-innocent explanations. Cody and Melissa had been arrested by the Denver PD in association with the beating and death of one Luis Cadena, and Melissa was being questioned in a spare room by detectives; Judge John Moreland and son Garrett had decided a month was too long and had shown up with a phalanx of cops to forcibly remove Baby Angelina and a fight had ensued, leading to the arrest of both Cody and Melissa; the two of them declared their long-smoldering love for one another and had bundled Angelina into the Honda and headed for Vegas.

  SEVERAL HEADS TURNED when Malcolm Harris pushed through the heavily curtained entrance. He was recognized. At the travel show, he was a prize. Returning home with his business card impressed bosses. That he strode over toward me surprised a couple of the old female tourism war horses from Florida, and one, a hatchet-faced woman who had likely once sold cars, was out of her chair with a quick movement that belied her bulk and started tugging at his sleeve. I noticed a little weave in his walk, probably because he’d been drinking already. Harris’s face went cold when she hugged him, but he smiled gamely and hugged her in return with the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old boy embracing a hated aunt, and she hung on his every word, which consisted of, “So, when did you get in?”

  And she began to tell him, not only about her flight but about her luggage that hadn’t yet arrived and her new condo and that she’d divorced and had been sick but was feeling much better now and she’d even lost sixteen pounds.

  I rescued him by standing and clamping onto the back of his shoulder and pointing toward my watch with urgency.

  “Are we late?” he asked, mock-surprised. “People have
been buying me drinks all afternoon, and I’ve lost track of the time.”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. To the woman, I said, “I’m sorry, but they started serving at seven thirty.” I lied, of course, having no idea who they were.

  As Harris extricated himself, she followed him, poking her business card at him until he took it, pocketed it, and handed her one of his own, which instantly soothed her. She retreated to her table with the prize card as if she’d counted coup with her war club, waggling her eyebrows at her companions.

  “God, thank you,” he said when we were on the street. It was cold and damp, which felt good after the smoky closeness of the Habana Haus.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, still brandishing the cigar.

  “Florida people,” he said, shaking his head. “They can be so obnoxious. It’s as if they don’t realize there is anything else in the world, you know, but Florida. Unfortunately for them, Florida is so over. But some of these marketing women will do anything for UK business, you know. That’s where we got the phrase, ‘Been there, done that, fucked the rep.’”

  I laughed politely. The lights of the Ku’Damm were ahead.

  “Are we going the right direction?” I asked. “I don’t know where we’re going to dinner.”

  “Your treat,” he said, reminding me. “This is the right way. First another drink, then dinner.”

  “Great,” I said, not meaning it and tossing the cigar aside. Thinking, Let’s get this over with so I can get the hell home.

  THE RESTAURANT WAS A twenty-minute walk. Harris prided himself on having discovered it a few years before, and said it had the best schnitzel in Berlin.

  “They make it the old way,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “You can hear them pounding the veal with mallets in the back to tenderize it. They pound it hard with mallets.”

  The place was called Der Tiefe Brunnen, and it was located on Rankestraße. It was dark and old, lit by candles, looking very much like “The Deep Well” of its name. Black-and-white photos of unknown (to me) celebrities covered the walls. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung low in the room, but through it men and women eyed us from booths as we took our table up front near the bar. The owner, a severe man in muttonchop sideburns, greeted Harris in German. Harris shook the man’s hand and pointed me out, obviously telling the owner I was new to the place and would be paying the bill. A tray of schnapps shots was sent over immediately, brought by a woman dressed to showcase her massive breasts. She wore a see-through spandex support bra under a filmy shirt. Her hair was dyed German Red, a crimson/purple color not found in nature except for buckbrush in October when the leaves turned color. When she bent over the table to dispense the glasses, I was afraid her breasts would swing out of the confines of her shirt and hit me in the face like a pleasant one-two punch. The place reminded me of something prewar, or at least pre-falling of the Wall, a throwback to the fatalistic island mentality of Berlin before that structure came down.

  “I’ve already ordered for the both of us,” Harris said, sitting down. “Schnitzel Cordon Bleu. And more beer, of course. This isn’t like most places—it takes ten minutes to pour a proper beer, which is as it should be. But everything is worth the wait in here, believe me.

  “Just listen to that,” he said, smiling. There was indeed pounding going on in the kitchen behind the bar. The blows were so powerful that silver and glassware on the table jumped. “That’s how you tenderize veal—the old-fashioned way.”

  Something about the way he said it hit me wrong.

  He excused himself to find the toilet, he said, and on the way he had an animated conversation with the proprietor that I didn’t track. The two of them laughed, and Harris followed the man through the back of the bar into his office. They closed the door. The proprietor returned to his place at the bar, but Harris remained in the office a long time. Maybe he was using a private bathroom? I checked out the photos on the walls and fought back exhaustion and sipped beer. I was sure I could lean back in my booth right there and sleep. Instead, I checked my wristwatch.

  Nine o’clock in Berlin, one o’clock in Denver. I hoped Melissa and Cody were back from wherever they’d been, or at least had turned their phones on.

  When Harris returned to our booth, his face was slightly flushed even in the candlelight, and the droplets of sweat had returned along his upper lip.

  “Fritz let me use his computer to check my e-mail,” he said, sliding back into the booth and taking a long pull from his beer. “It has to do with some urgent matters in London— the reason I had to postpone our dinner the other night. A minor crisis, it seems. The authorities are making my life miserable.”

  “Really?” I said. I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me the relocation was off after all this time waiting for him.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said, apparently reading my eyes. “Nothing I can’t deal with. But you must know that in Europe, it’s 1984. Big Brother is always watching, and they seem to be watching those of us who dare to be different.”

  I assumed he meant the entrepreneurs.

  He called to Fritz, “Another round, my friend!”

  As Fritz poured and rested the beers so the foam could subside, Harris leaned in to me and spoke sotto voce. “This is what I hate about Europe, Jack, the creeping fascism of the politically correct. It’s everywhere, but most of it comes from the EU in Brussels in the form of edicts. They want to control what we eat and how we measure it, what we say and think, how we live, those bastards. They want to control bloody everything. And what Brussels doesn’t decree, our own government takes care of.”

  Harris was getting animated, and his voice was rising. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I needed to act interested and hope—pray—he would state his intentions in regard to the reservations center.

  “Is it really that bad?” I asked, surprised at his vehemence.

  “Yes! In England these days, the worst thing you can be is a proper Englishman. Believe me, I know of what I speak, Jack. I wish I could say it’s a cauldron, and it’s going to blow up soon, that we’re going to rise up and take our country back. But the sad thing is, I don’t think we’ve got the balls anymore. I think we’ll just sit there tut-tutting while the government assumes all control.”

  The waitress with the breasts brought our veal. It was tender, all right. In fact, it was fantastic—huge palm-sized pieces of meat breaded with crispy crust that was still sizzling and the whole thing covered with ham and cheese. I should not have been so hungry, but I was. I noticed a bit of a slur in his words. This was going to be one of those nights.

  “You’ve probably heard I’m considering moving my headquarters,” Harris said through a mouthful of veal. “I need to find a place where I can breathe again.”

  Finally.

  “I have.”

  “I’m strongly considering Colorado,” he said, watching me carefully for my reaction.

  “That would be fantastic,” I said, putting down my fork to shake his hand. “We’d love to have you.”

  He shook his head as if to say, Of course you would.

  “It’s a great place,” I said. “The sun shines over three hundred days a year. We’ve got the mountains and the skiing, as well as a great airport and a mayor who really encourages international business …”

  He interrupted. “I know all that. You don’t need to sell it to me. I’m very familiar with the state and the powers that be. I’ve been in touch with several of them, although not yet officially.”

  The beer arrived, and he took a long draught before continuing. He didn’t wipe the foam away from his upper lip, which I found distracting.

  “It’s a great place to raise a family,” I offered. “The schools are pretty good, and there is lots of recreation. Here,” I said. “Let me show you…” and reached back for my wallet for my photo of Angelina.

  The look on his face was anticipatory. Most people will feign interest, but Harris was sincere. He smiled broadly at the photo of o
ur daughter. “A new one, eh?” he said. “Recent?”

  “A couple of weeks ago,” I said. “She’s almost walking now.”

  “She is still an angel, just like her name,” Harris said, handing the photo back. I was confused.

  “You probably get so many photos shoved at you that it’s easy to lose track of which kid is which,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I don’t remember showing you a picture of her before,” I said.

  “Of course you did,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I just can’t remember it, I guess.”

  “Have another beer,” he said, and laughed roughly. He seemed to be studying me all of a sudden.

  When did I show him a photo before? I wanted to know. But I remembered, This isn’t about you.

  As discreetly as I could, I settled back into the booth and reached for my beer. Unaccountably, I seethed with a sudden rage. I had no idea where it came from, or why it was so intense. All Harris had done was contradict me, show that he had a better memory than I did. But big shot or not, it would have been very easy that moment to smash my fist into his face, to wipe the foam off his lip with my knuckles. I could feel an explosion just beneath the surface, anger that wildly outmatched the transgression itself. Maybe the past week was catching up to me, I thought, coming to a head. All this miserable waiting while my family was vulnerable thousands of miles away. I was ready to unload everything on a British tour operator who brought thousands of tourists and millions of dollars into my city and who might soon be moving his business there.

  “Looks like you could use another one of those,” he said, nodding toward my beer glass.

  “That’s okay,” I said, tight-lipped.

  “Meaning you’d like another one,” he said, his face animated again. “Me too. Fritz!”

  He paused. “Are you all right? You look pale.”

  “I’m okay. Just tired.”

  “Buck up, man. This is the world of international tourism. You’ve got to hit the ground running.”