Henry turned slowly to stare at Hammond across the room.
“Best you keep your tongue in your face about your wife,” Hammond concluded, returning Henry’s stare levelly. Only his voice dropped away slightly at Henry’s gesture.
“I do my shift now,” Henry breathed. “Then I do your shift tonight. That squares us.”
“That’s polite, but I’ll do my own work.”
Henry’s face tightened. “How many hours you put into my shift?”
“Who cares. Too many. One’d be one too many.”
“You let me know how many hours you put in,” Henry said, moving now toward the door, “and I pay you my wage for it.”
Hammond preceded Henry into the hall. Henry closed the door behind.
“You ain’t my boss and you don’t get to go paying me for my labor.”
Henry left him. The cool walls radiated chill to his warm skin; his heart seemed too full.
“Nope, no way brother,” Hammond called down the corridor, but the words receded, faded in scale, and were attenuated. Henry closed the door on him even as he said, “No siree, I like it that you owe me one and can’t pay.”
Henry proceeded directly to the pasture. Usually he would go on up the stairs, onto the roof, and across to the bunker for breakfast. But he had no appetite this morning.
“He was a philosopher, this Diogenes, and he lived in a bathtub in the marketplace in Athens.”
Henry summoned all his attention and directed it at Lupi’s mouth.
“And all Diogenes owned, besides the bathtub, all he owned was a cup, this wooden cup. And then one day he noticed someone take a drink of water by putting his hands together like this.”
“That’s cupping,” said Henry.
“And so Diogenes threw away his cup, it was something he no longer needed. And then once, Alexander the Great came to Athens, and visited Diogenes and asked him if there was anything he could do for him, and Diogenes said, Yes, you can stand out of my light.”
Henry laughed.
“So Diogenes has always been a great symbol of what men can do without. But all I was saying was that I envied Diogenes for his bathtub, you see. At least he had a home.”
Henry stopped smiling; putting his hands together palms upturned he switched into his role, self-assigned, as finishing teacher in the subject of English: “What’s this?”
“That’s cupping,” Lupi said without hesitation.
5.
AN UNHAPPY TASK it was that Carlos undertook—informing his brother that the boy Bautista had been murdered, had been asesinado (in war one cannot be asesinado but only matado, killed, butchered, but Bautista had not been—strictly speaking—at war). The task caused him trepidation not just because the fat man would be upset by the inescapable fact his boy, his son, was dead, but also that the death represented an encroachment, an untimely drawing up of the curtain upon a stage not considered set, propsmen caught unawares, the lights all wrong, actors not yet fully in their makeup.
The bolsón was refuge only so long as the counterrevolutionaries allowed it to remain inviolate, for it consisted of nothing tangible besides the several crude houses which abided the restraints made by incursions of forest and the disposition of hillsides’ declivities—the walls and roofs offered shelter only from rain and wind. What the fat man’s survival depended on more than anything else was the kind of benign indifference of those few who knew of his presence here—indifference, underscored by the sense that he was someone who so recently had been looked upon as superior; educated and while possibly not now wealthy certainly one who knew how to be wealthy (to their minds, a dark art indeed), and who seemed to promise an authority that one day, when power was retaken, God and foreign powers willing, would be of use.
All this was spoken through the appeasement of capital. Not large amounts, for he played a careful double game of having (symbol of his frightful transcendence) and not having (Symbol of his common suffering), but a steady stream that here could buy such necessities as gasoline and drugs. The double game worked on both sides of the frontier, if only because what constituted the border was with each new day less clear.
Carlos told the fat man, dispatching the information in a series of laconic phrases the last of which was a request to leave the room. Outside the sky seemed heavier as he picked his way, footfalls flat, across the dirt courtyard to the other small house where he found Krieger and in his slow Spanish repeated to the world the same news.
6.
LUPI CAME AWAKE even before her hand touched him lightly on the shoulder and above it his name was whispered. He might have responded—acknowledgment, assent—in order to recover from sleep, to bring himself up one more time to bear against this dark which hovered like the filth of so many human fingers that had in reverence and by routine touched the bottom of a fount, the one seen up in San Alessandro, always touched by the pilgrims and the tourists, but almost never filled with holy water, as the priest had often been too ill to bless it. It was as if the fount were there on his face, the same fount he’d seen from where he and his friends hid in the shadow-black nave watching people genuflect with their dry fingers tapping forehead, heart, left breast and right breast, muttering Nome Padre Figlio Spirito Santo, leaving behind film of their own dark sweat in the dry, carbon marble of the basin. He might have said something, but a palm (not a fount) was laid across his mouth and the words were smothered.
Maddie helped him find his clothes in that same dark, and had hardly to explain what it was she had decided to do.
“Does Hannah know—” he began, but her hand rose across to touch him on the mouth; he finished dressing, woke Olid, got him dressed, and followed her out.
In the cab which bounded up the nearly deserted avenue, she said, “We’re just making the last train up there tonight. I take you up to him, deliver you, then I leave, I won’t stay I won’t see him. I deliver you and I’m gone, understand?”
He began to nod.
Grand Central was surprisingly busy for the late hour, although clearly some of those who meandered over the broad distension of stone shined to gloss by innumerable soles were not travelers looking to make night trains, but the station’s denizens, people who created a constant echo shuffling about the cavern. Having bought their tickets—for herself round trip, for Lupi and the old man one-way—Madeleine led them to the gate, down-ramp, into an empty car. It was apparent her timing had been planned with some care for, as they took their seats, the doors drew flush and the train pulled away.
“Why does everything have to be so complicated?” She exhaled over her shoulder, hunched up as she’d spoken, and the shoulder fell, actually dissolved into an obtuse angle against the vertical line of her neck.
Lupi almost spoke. It was as if he intended to attempt some answer to her question, face averted to the window that reflected hers not in profile but directly on. Their eyes met on the reflective glass; unlike his, Madeleine’s gaze persisted beyond the plane of the window itself and out into the train-yard rocking away under its eerie glow. The train picked up speed as it pulled clear of the city, north into the night. Madeleine’s eyes refocused to catch his stare: she immediately invented meaning for her having looked through the glass and him at it: what that signified (nothing, she would conclude in a moment) was at first flatteringly plumbed. Soon it became muddled into neutrality.
Half an hour trailed away before she spoke again. What she said came from the same pattern of thought as her earlier statement, the question this time not rhetorical.
“Can you tell me why it’s this money stuff, power, whatever it is drives everybody, I don’t know off the brink, makes them so willing to get involved in such silliness?”
When he saw the question was as serious as the cast of her face, a candid stare now, stiff-necked, he fumbled for his response. “I, well, people get afraid—” yet she kept speaking as he found his own words, and hers plaited his.
“What are you so afraid of you’d be willing to do al
l this, I mean how much can they possibly be paying you?”
“I, my, why I got involved with these men, it wasn’t just for, I had to …”
Both stopped.
“You had to? don’t you think that’s everybody’s answer? they had no choice, just had to?”
He yielded to the dramatic degree of letting his chin drop and fingers trace the back of his head from crown to hollow down the neck. What did he look like? He wondered whether she would consider any argument and decided she wouldn’t. Olid, who slumped in the seat in front of them, snored, and Lupi reached forward and patted him on the shoulder fraternally.
Maddie smirked. Her words persisted: “… not that I think you stood or stand to gain much in all this, as you pointed out before. I think you don’t, and didn’t. Not that that’s a virtue.”
She waited and the silence was obligingly filled by a shudder of the carriage as it ran over a rough section of track. “I’ve made all kinds of mistakes,” Lupi said, “and I, well this certainly couldn’t be the worst but what I mean is, there weren’t many other ways for me to go. I had no place to live, was cut off and as they told me down there these well, things were closing in.”
“And so you came to the New World to escape the powers of tyranny and oppression, and to drag a poor old man around in the middle of the night.”
“You’re cynical,” he countered. “No; there weren’t to be any violence, wasn’t to be, and there hasn’t been. There won’t be. All I am supposed to do is I am supposed to carry this proposal up to your father, accompany this gentleman, that’s all, and then I am paid enough to set up somewhere in Italy, go clean, get work, be quiet. It’s all I want.”
“It hasn’t occurred to you they want you to fend for them because they wouldn’t want to be caught with him themselves.”
“Yes, sure certainly.”
“There have to be easier ways for you to exist than this—not that I care really since, like I said, if it wasn’t you it’d have been somebody else,” pointing up (like people always pointed up) his expendability and the venal nature of his crime, he saw. The car had remained empty until the conductor came through with his ticket punch. An air of intimacy began to grow, measured by the rhythmic clacking: a primitive intimacy which submitted to her growing cruelty and his grasping away at worthiness.
“I am sorry I don’t seem to fit some idea you have about how people should be.” (This was an awful line of shit, he knew.)
“You should know what a terrible thing all this is, this insipid idea, four-hundred-and-sixty-year-old specimen—”
“How do you know that?”
“Hannah told me all about this. It’s kidnapping you know, fraud, God knows what else.”
“Not fraud, this guy really is, I—”
Madeleine laughed, a surprisingly husky laugh. “A few people get sold some fake antiques, some money passes hands, you collect yours and go back to business as usual, am I wrong?”
The train made its second or third station. A young man walked the aisle of the car and exited by its rear door. During the time it took him to do this Lupi sat in silence. He considered leaping off the train and disappearing into mysterious, night-clad America.
“Why is it I have to be put in a position where everything I count on is put into the hands of somebody who doesn’t care about anything at all?”
“I didn’t mean, what I—”
“You don’t think I know that?”
“I mean—”
“You don’t mean anything. I don’t know you and I don’t want to, but I can tell when a person doesn’t mean anything.”
“All right. Whatever you say.” His voice dropped away. He lay back in his seat to stare first at the mosaic of lights on the ceiling, then at the red handle (if he shattered the glass and pulled it down, would the train skid to a clamorous halt in a storm of sparks?) and thereafter, for no reason other than to evade Madeleine, at the double doors at the front of the car. He saw it then.
It was inconceivable to him the fat man had been willing to go to such lengths to have shown his humble courier all that sham omnipotence, all that supposed omniscience, merely to work himself around to this. Posing (presentation, as Krieger’d said). The maneuvering had been deft, yet still more desperate than he could have fathomed until just now, when the face appeared and vanished in the half-light down within the rectangulate windows of those doors connecting theirs with the car ahead. A grand conceit, an apparently necessary one, if the face he glimpsed proved to be Krieger’s.
It slipped, past Olid’s head, into view and out. Had seemed quicker than it should, a rind of vellum caught in the open corridor and buffeted into sight, the dichotomous moon blinked at only long enough to recognize that deadpan face that has looked down, mute and frozen, upon a trillion deeds each night, one less admissible than the next.
Res ipsa loquitur once more, though this time (partly because Madeleine would not in any case listen to him) he would live up to his resolve to be more mendacious, a little subtler. In his peripheral vision he remained attentive to the twin dark fields beyond the empty seats of the car; were the face to reappear, he could pretend that he was looking at the billboards inside the car—the Steinberg Manhattan, the bikinied woman who emerged, a brown Venus, from pearly water onto the white beach of Jamaica (or wherever). He scratched his face: an act in keeping with the turmoil he felt within but which couldn’t be allowed to show. He could excuse himself to find the toilet. Madeleine would probably not trust him to leave her with Olid unaccompanied; nor would Krieger, if accosted, be likely even to show any sign of recognition much less explain what he was doing. Lupi crossed his legs, not meaning to brush the tip of his shoe over Madeleine’s calf; nonplussed, he watched her draw in, feet pressed together, arms crossed, eyes fixed on the window.
The train was already making its curve, slowing, as Madeleine stood to clutch the overhead strap, then lead them up the aisle to the car ahead.
The night was damp, outside. November rose off the river in chill fingers to come at one in snatches. Seeing the old man shiver, he turned the collar up on his coat.
Glancing behind he could not see that any other passengers got off the train. The gravel first and afterwards the hollow bell-like tone of the iron stairs under their feet sounded into the peace of the closed-up place. No one was around. Lupi was not disappointed, but a little disconcerted at Krieger’s nonappearance on the platform.
Above, along the gradual hill that lifted away from the river and the station where the last car vanished, were houses hidden in the trees, from which the glow of an occasional light was apparent. As they crested the first rise and came to the road something happened to cause his suspicions to be stirred up again; the chiming resonation echoed so softly behind, one dull musical note repeated more or less—each a possible requital of all the invalid visions, the bad ideas, the mistakes he had made these several weeks. He said nothing, followed a step behind at the woman’s side.
Madeleine neither heard the footfalls on the iron stairs, nor would they have evoked the monotonous bell of San Apollinaire in Classe had she. The connectivity of everything presently fired Lupi’s imagination: Krieger’s presence here (?) and how it had to signify (or so he thought) that he and the fat man in fact didn’t know just where Owen Berkeley was (no—that couldn’t be); how they’d expected Madeleine to take him up the river; how once they did know of what further use would he be to them …? (Where was she turning now up this narrower lane, the streetlamps shimmering along the wires that swung low between?) Like a boule player, he tried to think out the gamut of strategies. He stopped to retie a shoelace and was able to catch sight of the figure. It was Krieger’s build and height, walking close by what seemed to be a privet hedge gathered in the shadows. The figure froze, blended into the aberration of light like a hint of blackness, an underexposure mark in a photograph.
Already Madeleine’s doubts about being here began to crowd in. Finding her way up through the village after s
o many years was easier than she might’ve thought, even in the dark. To think of those she had known as a girl—the Schianellos, Henry’s mother, friends at school, her own family—and how some of them could no longer be alive, and how the death of, say, Mr. Schianello could (did) take place in her absence. The day she ran away with Henry. Schianello must have been so upset. Her decision (made so long ago, it seemed), how it temporarily changed everyone’s lives, but how time passes and all these lives—even Madeleine’s—weren’t forgotten as much as put aside at first and then turned under in the continuous march of things, personal histories piling up and each individual event seeming significant beyond all else in the instant of its own birth, then being buried, instant by instant by instant, under other instants devoted only to their own ascendancies. How at Mr. Schianello’s funeral not a single person gave a thought to little Maddie Berkeley, wherever she was, whomever she had become after that day she dropped her brother off at the barbershop. She could picture her father, perhaps in dark glasses, seated in a front pew.
Because of her love for Henry and “plain obstinacy” (Henry’s phrase, one learned from his mother) tinged by pride—the same pride that saw her through the worst years early in their marriage—she had never once considered begging her father’s forgiveness. Only twice was she tempted to contact her family. When she’d miscarried, and when Henry had the boxing accident. (In the waiting room of the hospital, her skirt rumpled from the ride in the station wagon, Henry’s head a weighty stone on her lap, she conjured Alma; a sister could talk to a sister no matter what. She didn’t place the call.) She could wonder what became of them, Alma, William, Jonathan, and she often did, but Henry had become like a particle of her (she of him) and she’d come to believe it would be a transgression against herself to break that resolve, though Henry sometimes urged her to. The idea was fixed.
Come Sunday Page 40
