Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  “What.”

  “Hear of Mr. Ed?”

  “No.”

  “No? but I thought you were such an aficionado of the medium, but anyhow this Mr. Ed, the talking horse you see he was a horse and he could talk, that was the bit, great camerawork the way they got his mouth to sync with the, anyhow it was a great program and its theme song went:

  ‘And no one can talk with a horse of course

  That is of course unless the horse

  Is the famous mister’—etcetera …

  You never heard that?”

  “No.”

  “You remember that Beatles song, ‘I Am the Walrus,’ you play it backwards it says Paul is dead?”

  “Who cares?”

  “Dante’s got circles in hell for guys ignorant as you, boy, so anyhow you play the Mr. Ed theme backwards and it says something like, Your mama sucks Satan—”

  “Krieger, don’t ever call me boy again, I’m tired of this, I just want to finish up here and be on my way, I don’t care about talking horses, I don’t care about intelligentsia, I think what we’re doing here is wrong.”

  “Yeah yeah, what am I supposed to do, applaud?—run down some sort of lick like—life’s tough, life’s this, life’s that? Look b-o-y, it’s like you can put lipstick on a hog but it don’t hide the ugliness down underneath.”

  Surprising himself, and Krieger as well, Lupi sat up, spat to the side on the carpet, and said nothing.

  Krieger’s voice hardened, “Time to do your Latin thing, come on, rise and shine,” and while he spoke he produced an envelope from his briefcase (briefcase? Lupi hadn’t noted a briefcase the night before). “Here’s your ticket, a few hundred bucks, a new passport, just in case for some reason we happen to get separated this morning.”

  “Why would we get separated?”

  “We won’t but look, better to be safe than sorry, to coin a phrase right?”

  Lupi opened the ticket folder and saw the flight left New York for Miami, and thence to Managua.

  “Managua? I’m not going down there again.”

  “How welcome do you think you’ll be in Tegucigalpa? They’re probably looking high and low for you.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “There’s a hotel in Managua, the Hotel Intercontinental, looks like a prefab Aztec ruin, very comfortable, booze, chicks, very historical place, great favorite of the old dictatorship. We’ll meet there. And yes, I think they are looking for you in Honduras.”

  “I’m going back to Rome.”

  “You can do whatever you want, we’ll talk about it in Managua, just you and me. If you want to go home, you can go from there. I know your feelings about my colleague, but you never can tell, we might be able to branch out on our own, you know. There’s a lot we could do, and you’ve handled yourself brilliantly with this particular expedition.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “You’ve done what you were supposed to do just like any good mercenary. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “I won’t be there.”

  “For reasons I’m not at liberty to explain right now I would strongly urge you to do what I’ve said. In any case, you’d better get up, we’ve got to finish here.”

  Painfully, for his joints already ached, Lupi pushed himself out of the bed. Cristóbal had been quartered in a smaller bedroom that adjoined theirs, directly connected by a low-paneled gallery. The sun was coming up, and its winter purple suffused the room where Lupi threw on a bathrobe with a monogrammed “B” on the pocket, rubbed his sore eyes with his knuckles, then followed the other man down the gallery to the anteroom. At the entrance Krieger stood aside and let him pass.

  Olid lay there in this hermetical light stiff and motionless on the bed. The instant Lupi saw the old man a strong feeling of the loathsomeness of their procedure came over him. From far away over the hills a Mahleresque passage was played by a phantom orchestra. Lupi willed the symphony away as his eyes darted the length of the slender figure wrapped in bedclothes and it was as if his own soul suddenly went rotten, or else apperceived its inherent rot, since how could it be possible to arrive at such a juncture without the soul having already decomposed to a certain state of rottenness?—but this instant carried the bittersweet of an apple fallen to the ground where once the wasps were done with drinking at it, it browned in the breeze, was adopted by a worm, say, sank into the soil, producing a spoiled place. The sour taste of phlegm rose at the back of his throat. He coughed and swallowed.

  “Say something to him, tell him it’s time to wake up, tell him we’re here this is his new home or something.”

  Lupi stared at Cristóbal’s face. It was still. The narrow jaw lay slack into the pillow. Fingers of his hand curled palm up on the coverlet as if they were grasping an unseeable ball, holding tightly some invisible orb. The gesture reminded Lupi of an owl’s claw.

  “He’s going to ask me about Sardavaal.”

  “So what?”

  “So what am I supposed to say? All along I’ve been putting it off about Sardavaal by saying he would meet us here.”

  “Who the hell told you to say that?”

  “You didn’t tell me not to. I still don’t understand why you sent me up here alone with him if you intended all along to follow us up the river.”

  “Strategy, Lupi, in any case never mind, just say, what, say Sardavaal will be coming along, he was detained, whatever, anything to get us through the transaction and the hell out of here, just make it so he doesn’t bring Sardavaal up with Berkeley.”

  “Since he can’t speak English I don’t see what difference it would make.”

  Krieger waved his arms and cried in a low voice, “Tell him whatever you want, just wake him up he doesn’t look that great.”

  “You shouldn’t have given him so much of those drugs.”

  “What? the Nembutal? dosage weak enough you couldn’t put a fruit fly out with it.”

  “That stuff wasn’t necessary.”

  “Spare me the medical opinions, would you.”

  “He wouldn’t have said anything, is all I am saying.”

  “Fine, I’ll make a note of your objection to procedure now come on, hurry up. Tell him it’s time we get cracking.”

  “I think he’s dead.”

  “Oh for godsakes,” and Krieger moved forward, raised his hands toward Lupi’s shoulders and reached to pull him away from the bed. Lupi withdrew. Krieger quickly said, “How do you say rise and shine in lingua Latina?”

  Lupi thought. “Surge et … surge …”

  “Sirgay? fine okay, got it. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Surge et … ”

  “I got it. Why don’t you go take a shower, you smell more like a barn than a businessman, same stink but a matter of degrees of pungency.”

  Lupi took a step back, and as he did Krieger noticed in the morning light how deep an olive color his face was. He had never really looked at the surface of Lupi before, and the recognition of so tiny a particular struck him.

  “What are you staring at?” Lupi said.

  “What?”

  “Listen, Krieger. Who is this poor little fellow?”

  “Huh?” Krieger managed an incredulous frown, although he had anticipated this question for some time. He had begun to believe Lupi’s participation in the project might have been a mistake.

  “Well, that is, he’s not any four hundred years old, you know.”

  “So you’re the scientist now, right?”

  “What about the Latin? How is it he speaks the Latin?”

  “Listen honey, history’s full of missionaries with hard-ons for two things: acolytes and Indians. The washed, the unwashed. It’s a different kind of AC/DC. All on the same frequency. The Latin didn’t have to come all the way from Europe with him, it’s true. One fucking missionary with a Vulgate and the right emotional chemistry and if it’s a bit of Latin they want? well, him who wants water give him water, who wants wine, wine.”

&n
bsp; “What planet are you from you come so cold?”

  “Hey, champ?”

  “What.”

  “Hit the showers.”

  Lupi left without saying anything. Once Krieger heard he was down the gallery hall he turned to the viejo; a look of intense impatience in his face, he furtively felt for some pulse at the wrist, but it was hard, cold, and Krieger noted the greeny circles beneath his eyes.

  This was reprehensible, no matter what angle it was approached from: disgraceful, he thought, as a piece of ancillary business, to be sure, but also unquestionably revolting as (what?) simple human conduct … simple, not so simple, human, well, not so human either—but Krieger reiterated mutely for the benefit of the cobwebbed light fixture that never before had he himself perpetrated a … death, yes a death, and even this …?

  Invariably Krieger had left it to others to sacrifice themselves for this unjustifiable cause or that. With a sort of mechanical abstraction he placed the wrist down, and at once began contemplating the various plausible scenarios: immediate flight; and if not that, then what stories might be concocted in order to push through the agreement?

  On the floor was Cristóbal’s satchel. It lay where Krieger had put it the night before after administering another dose of the drug to the old man. He had arranged the shoulder strap of the satchel over its closed mouth to make it look as if it had casually been tossed there. He memorized the position of the strap so that if during the night the satchel was tampered with he would be able to tell. Evidently no one had come into the room, and by all appearances the bag had not been searched. Krieger looked over his shoulder to see if Lupi had come back. The entryway was empty. Swiftly, silently he opened the satchel, removed the few articles Cristóbal had brought with him for the journey—a small pipe, a candle, the passport with its maroon covers—then with his pocketknife cut the stitched threads along one edge of the false bottom. Feeling with his fingers under the woven wool layer of fabric he was satisfied that the plastic envelope remained just where he had so carefully planted it back in El Paraiso; proprietarily his forefinger pressed at that hidden parcel, its layers of plastic, coffee grounds, and the white powder. He tamped the false bottom back into place and replaced Cristóbal’s effects, considered for a moment where best to keep the satchel now that it was obvious his original agenda had been altered by this unfortunate death. The back of his hand brushed over the weave of the mochila as he pondered. Other considerations aside, it was still too early to displace the ownership of those contents from Olid (characterized by Krieger’s current fantasy as not only a smuggler but a suicide) to himself. He did take the precaution of half-hiding the satchel under the bed; it would have to wait until later to be retrieved.

  Hastily, Krieger dressed. The knot in his tie came out right on the first attempt which, since he always had difficulty with this little task, he took for a positive omen. Lupi was still in the shower when he left the room to go downstairs.

  “Good morning,” as he walked casually into the kitchen. He would approach this in as cheerful and professional a manner as possible, and thus wore on his face the countenance of any ambitious young banker possessed of formulae, blueprints, means of pushing forward through the bizarreries of commerce. Alma watched in continuous disbelief as he took a mug from the cupboard and poured himself coffee from the Pyrex pot on the stove. Being very strange, the spirit has an obligation to create … Krieger experienced the maxim once more before contriving, “Well to skip the hustings and trivia, I mean if you don’t mind, that is your hospitality much appreciated and so forth but I can see your father’s not down yet, what I’m wondering is whether he’s had the opportunity to go over the papers as yet.”

  “You’re in a rush,” Jonathan said.

  Always the dangerous-innocent around to gum up the works, he thought, looking on Jonathan with eyes of disgust. “As a matter of fact I’d hoped to get all this settled last night by the way you never did tell me how that went with Sardavaal that time.”

  Jonathan refused to answer.

  “I was glad to be of service, always trying to help.”

  Krieger drank, careful to maintain such a look of dispassion locked in his features that some of the more obvious questions these two might want to ask would be at least flustered, if not altogether suppressed, by his air of tranquility. That is, the esteemed Corless (here embodied by Mr. Krieger) should consider these circumstances prosaic in the extreme—it was just a day in the life. Too, Corless-Krieger (as the spirit invented him) worked strictly with the principals in any such deal, and should make it known that meddling could result in trouble for all. Ceremoniously Krieger drew up a chair to the refectory table where Jonathan sat, and as he did a twinkle of threat passed across his eye appreciable to Jonathan for precisely what it was, including its underlying sense of fallacy—the fallacy of the thin perfectly knotted tie on a Sunday morning, of the accommodating manner with which he had accepted the “gracious invitation” to spend the night here and trade thus an absurdity for an absurdity, and now this stylish drawing-out of the impossible situation like a vaudevillian looking for his last joke before the big hook appears from offstage to loop around his waist and drag him away. “When,” Krieger smiled, and the smile felt like candy on his teeth, “can we expect Mr. Berkeley to come down?”

  “I’m not sure you can expect him to come down.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “This is insanity,” Alma inserted, as she shuffled the black-and-white photographs of Cristóbal in his former state of grace in the mountainside village. The sameness of background and foreground in the frames suggested all the shots had been taken with a telephoto lens. “I don’t know why we just don’t call the police.”

  Krieger answered quickly, and very calmly: “I can think of several reasons, but what interests me right now is why after we’ve come all this way at your father’s insistence you’re telling me I can’t expect him to come down a flight of stairs to discuss our project.”

  “He never insisted,” Jonathan guessed.

  “I have it in writing, which is of course one of the reasons the police would not best be involved here. Not only that but he—Mr. Berkeley—agreed to reimburse for all expenses if he determined against custodianship.” Krieger turned to Alma: “Would you mind putting those back in their envelope, dear? Can’t have grease all over them, kind of ruins the prints.”

  “Well I determine against custodianship,” Jonathan continued.

  “That’s fine but I have no business with you nor you with me, so if you don’t mind I’ll just wait here for a bit, or better yet maybe you could go up and tell him that some of us have schedules to keep and anyway l’exactitude est la politesse des rots.”

  “Let me see what you have in writing.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. If you don’t mind, I’ll finish my coffee here and wait for my translator to join us and then, well, if it turns out Mr. Berkeley has changed his mind we can settle up and be on our way.”

  To Krieger’s intransigence Jonathan could make no response, yet in the silence that passed between them none heard the paltry resonation through the wide-planked floor where Lupi had caught his shoe on a footstool and fallen with the corpse, which he’d wrapped in its sheets together with the satchel he had found under the bed. He moved quickly and with a combination of tenderness and mortification lifted the body again into his arms, to start quietly once more for the door. Krieger was being abandoned to his own genius and the punishments of Mircea Eliade’s dictum. Lupi had decided his own participation in this death (this ucciso) was inescapable, and when in the shower (the banality of the setting for this epiphany did not escape him) it all came so clear in its perversity, its horror, he began to weep not only for himself but for what he saw as the great calamity all people routinely—with such deftness and enthusiasm—bring upon themselves and others.

  This was it. This was it. He owed Olid what he had owed ambassador Milo, that other casualty, so long a
go in the Fiesolean winter.

  It would be the first of many necessary atonements. Somewhere he would find a pleasant meadow, perhaps near a stream or spring so that once he had succeeded in digging past the hard ground along the surface where the long dead grass lay, softer soil beneath might make the task easier. Maybe there could be a grove of trees there, like the trees Cristóbal had been accustomed to seeing down in El Paraiso. That would be comforting. And if he was able to locate a rather private edge in that meadow where the roll of the earth just began to ascend, say, up toward a knoll that faced eastward, then every day could commence with an unfolding of dawn over his place, and when April and May came around the grasses and reeds would grow thicker, some white violets, snowdrops, and other early flowers would emerge. Also Lupi had thought it wisest to bury him with all his earthly possessions, what few articles he had brought along in the mochila for the journey; he was ignorant, he knew, of what customs or rites the villagers of Olid’s tribe practiced during the burial of a man, but he speculated it would be proper to send him forth furnished with what he had been familiar with, and with what was rightfully his own. He had—he thought, feeling cleansed for once by the water, feeling clean in fact for the first time in so many years—he had it all worked out.

  As light as the bundle was he had some difficulties negotiating his way down the back stairs and out into the morning. The keys were in the ignition and the engine turned over quietly. He drove down away from the house, glimpsing the baroque facades and collection of chimneys he was leaving in the rearview mirror. A willowy film of dust lifted out from under the tires and made it difficult to see whether anyone followed him out onto the flat terrace where the car had been parked. Since at the foot of the hill he could see that there were no figures on the parapet waving their arms frantic at the sight of this escape, no one running headlong down the lawn in pursuit, he knew he had cleanly gotten away.

  Once he reached the short stretch of road beyond the gateposts that were hidden by a thick forest of ivy-shrouded, leafless trees he stopped the car long enough to move the body and satchel from the backseat to the trunk.