Waxwings

by Unknown

  His phone calls were nearly always made from planes, giving the impression that a brief moment of leisure was possible only in the sky. Tom took these calls with some unease. He wasn’t the department chair—that was Bernard Goldblatt, the ineffectual eighteenth-century scholar—but Ray had announced, during a conference call while he was stranded by bad weather in Denver, that Tom was his man. “We shall understand each other’s jokes, you see?” So far, however, there had been no jokes, at least none that Tom had managed to detect.

  “I have been brainstorming again,” Shiva Ray said. “Gabriel García Márquez!”

  Well, Márquez was still alive, unlike some of Ray’s earlier candidates, including Graham Greene and William Golding—“You know, the Lord of the Flies chap.”

  “It’s a thought,” Tom said, distracted by a sudden glimmer of turquoise in the holly tree below the gabled window. Then the Steller’s jay took wing and fled from sight.

  “You think he’d bite?”

  “I doubt it, somehow. But we can always try.”

  “Pessimism bores me, Thomas. I am always the optimist. Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”

  So many of his literary quotations came from Measure for Measure that Tom suspected the play must have been Ray’s A-level set text at Harrow. “I can find out how to reach him,” he said. “But you know, Shiva, I wonder if perhaps we shouldn’t aim for just a little more in the way of balance .”

  “Yes, balance is good.”

  “I mean, suppose we get Márquez, or Bellow, or Morrison? It would be wonderful, of course, for the students to be able to actually meet and talk with them, and I can’t think of a more inspiring gift for young writers. But to meet only the great, who also tend to be the old, could be a shade inhibiting, don’t you think? If we could sort of alternate the great with the good, and bring the students into contact with some lesser stars—but still stars, definitely—then we’d be introducing them to people they could identify with a bit more, you know? Than with Saul Bellow, or Márquez.”

  “Who do you have in mind?”

  Tom was suddenly stumped. The jay had reappeared in the holly tree. “Well, I was at a reading last night, a lot of students were in the audience. They turned out in force to hear this English writer— David . . . Dave Rice.”

  “That rings a definite bell.”

  “He’s got a book out which seems to be enjoying a kind of cult success.”

  “I like ‘cult.’ ”

  “He’d be the wrong person for us. Too old, for one thing, and his writing isn’t really up to scratch. But it was the audience reaction that interested me. They could see themselves in Dave Rice’s shoes, in a way they’d never see themselves in Saul Bellow’s.”

  “Title?”

  “Oh—Crystal Palace, but I wouldn’t bother. I was just pulling his name out of the hat as an example. But it’s not the right example. Assuming that DeLillo says yes, do you think we might look around for one or two people who are a little less exalted and maybe a little more accessible to students? The other thing of course is that they’d come cheap.”

  “Thomas—I do not like ‘cheap.’ I do not think cheap. Money is easy. Money is cheap. We are talking about Modern Literature here, and one can’t build a global platform with the shillings and the pence. Ah, Tennessee!”

  Oh, God, now Williams, Tom thought. Still chasing the dead.

  “We’re over Tennessee, I think. Yes—those are the old Smokies, I am certain of it. Quite beautiful, though I wish I were there in Seattle. I dream of it, you know, my little house on the lake? I have been harassing my architect. He is so slow, and I hate slow. I love fast. But when at last my chappie pulls his silly finger out and the miracle happens, I am going to be happy there. I know it. I see it every day—the shore, the water, the shaded patio . . . Yes, there I shall Write. And—”

  But as so often happened with Shiva Ray’s calls, the connection broke off and Tom was left listening to the long-distance crackle of the skies. The question he always wanted to ask, and never did, was whether these curious conversations were conducted from a seat on a scheduled passenger flight or from Ray’s personal jet. He thought it funny that this prince of the virtual world spent most of his time haring around the actual one, when the Internet was always said to have dissolved geography. You’d think Ray could’ve done it all with his famous switches. Or something.

  A few minutes after eight, an ultramarine Jeep Cherokee with a barred cage built into the back arrived at Pier 28, carrying Special Agents Quillian, Kiminski, and Lai, along with a trained beagle. An hour later, the dog found something deep in the Auriga’s hold—a canvas-topped container, one of six, visible only through the foot-wide crack between containers down on 3-Deck. The beagle lodged its head in the crack and jubilantly yodeled, its tail beating as fast as a hummingbird’s wings. There was no getting at the container until the cargo above it had been craned out of the ship and the hatch-plates lifted. Three dock-cranes and two Mack forklift trucks were on the job, burrowing into the ship and stacking the unloaded containers on the dock. The port police had cordoned off the Auriga with yellow crime-scene tape. A knot of paramedics hung out beside their two ambulances, and a Seattle Police Department squad car was parked, headlights glaring and doors open, at an oddly self-important angle to the rest.

  Captain Williams, chalk-faced and in shock, clung to a clipboard with the cargo manifest. To make himself heard over the racket of trucks and cranes, he shouted, “It says ‘Seasonal Ornaments.’ ” He’d already said as much to the INS agents, a port policeman, and two of the paramedics. The pages of the manifest flapped wildly in the breeze that had sprung up since dawn and was raising dust-devils up and down the docks.

  The Chief Engineer—who’d changed his mind about going ashore— turned to Bob Stenhouse. “Worse things happen at sea.”

  “I wouldn’t tell the Captain that if I were you, Chief.”

  During the long morning, two more squad cars showed up, followed by an INS bus. The quarantined ship drew an audience of off-duty longshoremen and delivery-drivers, each of whom stayed long enough to smoke a cigarette and trade a joke or two, then drifted off because nothing much was happening. It wasn’t until after noon that a space had been cleared around the container found by the happy beagle.

  A padlocked chain wound through the metal door on the container, but the Chief Engineer cut it loose with a pair of enormous shears. When Agent Kiminski lifted the securing bar, the door swung open, releasing an enormous bubble of foul gas.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” Kaminski said.

  Their first sight was of faces—bloodless faces, blank as stones— crowding at the doorway.

  “No one goes in there without protective gear!” Kaminski shouted. “Stacy! Get on the phone! We need haz-mat gear! Masks! Stacy?”

  One of the faces became attached to a body. It tottered into the dark rectangle of the doorway: a sexless, ageless thing in sneakers, jeans, and a raspberry-pink anorak. Quillian reached out his hand, and it came stumbling forward.

  “Today!” it said in a thin dry voice.

  A second creature stepped out—a man, this one, wispily bearded, with eyes so far receded in their sockets that they seemed on the verge of disappearing altogether behind pouches of bruise-colored flesh.

  “Count them!” Kaminski yelled. “I need them counted out!”

  Quillian helped a third man from the doorway. His head was bowed, his shoulders shaking, and someone handed him a Kleenex.

  “Half an hour,” Sakiyama called. “They say they can get the gear out here in half an hour.”

  From behind the waiting faces, there was a sudden animal explosion, a squall of stink, and where there had been three, there were a whole lot more than anyone could count.

  “Holy shit!”

  “Get him!”

  Like a kitten climbing a curtain, one was halfway up a ladder on the side of the hold before getting picked off. H
obbling, scuttling, others tried to bolt behind the remaining containers. A port policeman stood guard over the sobbing heap he’d chased into a grimy bulkhead corner. Martinez got two so entwined with each other that at first he thought they were one.

  All men, it now appeared, they were cuffed and led to the bus with barred windows. Paramedics were looking after those who couldn’t walk. The SPD was sending out two German shepherds with their handlers.

  “Today!” It was the first to leave the container, the blankness on his face gone, replaced by a look of shriveled woe.

  Special Agent Lai spoke to him in Cantonese, and he talked back in Fujianese.

  “He says there are two dead guys in there. ‘Two die’ is what he’s saying.”

  “The fuck there are,” Kaminski said, gazing into the repulsive cave beyond the doorway.

  “They died of seasickness, he says.”

  “No one dies of seasickness. It makes you want to die, but you don’t—and that’s the problem.”

  The man was jabbering in a high-pitched, metallic whisper.

  “He doesn’t know how long ago they died. He lost count of the days. Maybe a week, maybe more. One die a day before the other . . . One he know—Chen Xianshen. The other, he forgot his name. First they threw up . . . Everybody was throwing up . . . Then they tried to drink, but they couldn’t hold it down. They got weak, and then they died, is what he says.”

  “It was rough,” Captain Williams said, his voice a croak. “We ran into some funny weather, this tropical depression . . .” He began to cry.

  Sakiyama touched him on the shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

  “No one goes in there,” Kaminski said. “Tracy? Get an update on the haz-mat stuff, will you?”

  “I’ll call Pathology,” a cop said, “on the car radio.” He made his escape up the ladder from which the stowaway had been plucked minutes before.

  Everyone gave the container a wide berth. Overhead, the cranes and trucks had stopped working, and aboard the ship a spooked silence was broken only by the mechanical heartbeat of the generators.

  “Mostly they ate crackers,” Lei said. “Crackers and apples.”

  The last of the Chinese were carried off on stretchers, then a minibus came with protective clothing. White-masked, space-suited, carrying black rubber flashlights, two policemen, then Kaminski and Quillian, entered the container in single file.

  Inside, the flashlight beams wandered, crossed, and came to a brief, shuddering halt whenever they found something recognizable in the putrid darkness of the container: a scarlet JAL airline bag; a car battery, evidently dead, with wires running to a six-inch fan and a lamp clipped to a metal flange above the doorway; a heap of empty plastic water cans; four stacks of thin mattresses, ranged along the wall like a low couch, with neatly folded blankets on top; a disheveled magazine; a backpack; a toothbrush; a plastic bucket.

  The soles of the men’s shoes made a crackling noise as they came unstuck from the floor with each new step. The flashlights showed a surface glazed with something that had once been liquid but was now so thickly embedded with crumbs, hair, and dirt that it had taken on the texture of an old and filthy carpet. There were still enough pale flecks of color to identify it as a layer of dried vomit.

  Nearly half the container was occupied by a mountain of swollen garbage bags with knotted tops. What had begun as a pile in the far right-hand corner had climbed and spread, crowding the stowaways into a space that must have grown smaller by the hour. Rivulets of goo trickled from the myriad folds and creases in the bags’ distended skin. Some attempt had been made to sop up the mess at the bottom with rolled-up blankets, now black and sodden with the stuff that was leaking from the bags.

  “Shit!” one of the men said, his voice muffled by the mask.

  Below the bags in the far-left corner, a thin blanket was contoured to the shape of two bodies, lying as close together as lovers. One of the police bent down, reached out a long fastidious arm, and pulled at the blanket.

  “Leave that! Leave it to Path!”

  The blanket was dropped.

  When the story was reported in next morning’s Post-Intelligencer, the cause of the two men’s deaths was still unknown. Fifteen survivors were now in a secure ward at Harborview.

  Eight of the 15 fled, but were caught yesterday afternoon, said INS spokeswoman Irene Mortensen. “Seven of them turned themselves in willingly,” Mortensen said. “The rest were running around on the ship. But we are pretty sure we got everybody.”

  Ping. Ping. Ping. E-mails were erupting on the screen at Beth’s work-station, where she was talking urgently on her telephone headset. Within the last minute and a half, two messages had popped up from Robert, her assistant, whose industriously bobbing head she could see over the top of the Sheetrock partition that divided their cubicles.

  “No,” she said. “They have to live there. We’ve tried using outsiders, but they turn in ‘travel writing’ and that always sucks. Can’t you find some bright kids who work for the Observer or the Voice?”

  “Hi, Liz. Liz?”

  She glanced over her shoulder and saw Steve Litvinof. At least two weeks had passed since he had last been seen on the ninth floor, which Editorial shared with the gym and massage room, and his unannounced visits were always alarming.

  He smiled at her—an economical twist of the lips that was over almost before it had begun.

  “Sorry, I have to go. I’ll call you right back,” she said into the phone, then swiveled around on her chair.

  “I’ve been looking at Phoenix,” Litvinof said. “I like what you’re doing there, Liz. Good job.”

  Rake-thin and narrow-faced, Steve Litvinof was bald on top, with the back and sides razored to a blue shadow. He was not the usual start-up boss. His background was Money, not Tech, and it showed: winter and summer he wore identical black two-piece suits, tailored in lightweight silk, and white shirts buttoned to the top. The absence of a tie was possibly a gesture of informality—his concession to the khakis and T-shirts worn by every other male in the company—but in combination with his suits it made him look, as Robert had once said, like an Iranian cleric with a taste for Italian fashion.

  “But,” he said ominously. “Here, scoot over for a moment, will you?” He wheeled her spare chair over to her terminal, and sat down at the keypad. Scorning the mouse, he typed and Entered, typed and Entered, until he reached Phoenix. Thick black hair sprouted from beneath the French cuffs of his shirt and framed the blue dial, rimmed with gold, of the watch on his left wrist. Beth was close enough to read the lettering: PATEK PHILLIPE, GENῈVE.

  “See?” He nodded at the screen. “The tours are kind of samey. And the neighborhoods have to be more hip. We need more upscale property, but that’s not your problem—I’ve got them working on it. I want to see Phoenix looking more like San Francisco, which is working great.”

  Checking his beautiful watch, he slid the chair back. “You have kids, right, Liz?”

  “Yes—a boy, Finn. He’s four and three-quarters.”

  He held up three fingers. “But only one’s still living at home with us. She’s a senior at Bush.”

  “Finn’s at preschool on Queen Anne,” Beth said, wondering why, after thirteen months, they were suddenly having this domestic exchange, especially since Litvinof still didn’t seem to know her name.

  “We should see more of each other,” he said. “Socially.” And then he was gone.

  What could that mean? Surely not. It was always said of Steve Litvinof that he led a blameless suburban life out in Issaquah and was a creepily devout Episcopalian. Whatever this was about, Beth felt half-flattered, half-disturbed, and throughout the morning she found herself returning to the image of Steve’s wrist-hairs surrounding his midnight-blue watch like otter fur.

  She checked Robert’s second message, which said: “steves coming!!!!!!!!!!”

  Beth and Robert were among the nearly two hundred peons who occupied five o
f the ten floors in the Klondike Office Plaza, formerly the Klondike Hotel, which had been closed down in 1994 after the bodies of murdered prostitutes began turning up in the bedrooms on a regular basis. The new landlord had gutted the building, tearing down walls and replacing them with orange-painted steel joists. A few plaster moldings, the Cutler mail chutes, and the regal brassbound elevator cages were all that was left of the old hotel, which had been Seattle’s grandest when it began life in 1901. Now it was Start-up Central. Most of the companies it housed moved in and out almost as fast as hotel guests, but Steve Litvinof’s had stayed and grown. He’d begun with half a floor but currently was rumored to be negotiating the outright purchase of the whole building.

  “We’re evolving a new paradigm here,” he said when Beth was given her ten minutes of face-time with her new employer in October of 1998. Everybody was evolving a new paradigm then, but Litvinof made it sound believable.