12 Drummers Drumming

by Diana Deverell

  Against the laws of Oregon, letting a fourteen-year-old behind the wheel of his precious Mustang. After he tiptoed from my room, I lay on my bed, pain forgotten, my heart filled with the same perilous excitement that I felt now. Outside the law, recklessly imprudent, the amphetamine rush of risk embraced. Pilots thrive on it.

  I dozed off close to eight, momentarily soothed by the clatter of cars on the cobblestone street to the north. I slept too lightly, strange sounds jerking me awake suddenly, with my heart pounding. About one o’clock, I heard a murmur of voices from below, accompanied by the clink of cutlery against pottery. My dreams filled with images of steamed potatoes and fried onions. The smells grew as the crowd noises subsided. By two o’clock, I was too hungry to sleep.

  And too keyed up, thinking of what lay ahead. Today, I’d start my approach to Krüger. According to Erika, the best place to begin was with a Hungarian who made his money from the sale of Soviet-standard equipment to embargoed states. Working with a local shipping agent and the gun dealer who employed Erika, the Hungarian had recently gotten a load of Bulgarian-made mortars past Antwerp customs. His fake end-user certificate gave the destination as Bolivia, but the real buyers were sitting in Tripoli. And the deal-maker reaping a fat commission from the illegal sale was one Gunter Storch, the identity carefully prepared long ago by the former Stasi major, Reinhardt Krüger.

  There were others in Antwerp involved in the black market in armaments. But Erika said the Hungarian was more eager than most to do business for questionable clients. I’d call on him at the bar he owned downtown. I’d ask him to broker a deal between me and his German colleague. After that, I’d have all the attention I wanted from Krüger.

  Simple enough. If I could believe Erika.

  But my qualms didn’t interfere with my appetite. When the rooms below me grew quiet again, I went downstairs in search of whatever smelled so good.

  Bert was sitting at one of the two tables crowded up beside the bar. When he heard my boots on the linoleum, he looked up from the earthenware bowl in front of him. The slowmoving jaws were clean-shaven now and he was wearing a blue wool sweater. But the yellowed cotton visible in the V neck of the sweater looked like the same undershirt I’d seen that morning, and I was betting his pants bore stains in identical spots. Then I smelled food again. Downstairs, the pungent odor of well-cooked fish overpowered the vegetables. I felt a sharp pang in my stomach. My hunger must have shown on my face.

  “More in the pot on the stove,” Bert said, bending back over his bowl. “Help yourself.”

  I found the kitchen beyond the stairway. A gleaming stock pot sat on an immaculate gas range. Spotless utensils hung on the wall behind it, lined up precisely from largest to smallest. Recently washed bowls and spoons made an equally orderly array in the drying rack. I had doubts about Bert’s personal hygiene, but his kitchen would have passed inspection in any barracks. I took the lid off the pot and the vapors hitting my face were rich enough to make a meal. The soup was so thick, heat bubbles erupted like volcanoes, plopping back into viscous craters. I ladled a bowl full and carried it into the front room. I draped my jacket over the back of a chair, sat down across from Bert and spent the next five minutes enjoying waterzooi made the old way with fish instead of chicken. I quickly emptied one bowlful, along with a bolleke of DeKoninck. I’d drunk it before, with Stefan. I stared idly at the singular ball-ended glass, found myself wondering if Erika also liked the Flemish brew.

  Then I forced Erika out of my mind. I wasn’t going to let her poison Antwerp’s best beer.

  No one came in while I ate. Bert emptied the glass in front of him and refilled it. He extended the bottle toward me. The label read “Oude Antwerpsche.” That was the source of his foul breath: not gin but geneva, a near-eighty-proof spirit flavored with juniper and swilled by inhabitants of the Low Countries with the same single-minded devotion they gave to maintaining their dikes. I shook my head and asked instead for another beer.

  As I ate, I studied the wall behind the bar. It was covered with a collage of posters, photographs, postcards and beer ads—the usual barroom decor. Discreetly centered above the cognac bottle was a familiar red-and-blue pictograph. The same picture of the lion beneath the crown graced the brochure for the Brussels military hotel—insignia of the regiment of Grenadiers. I looked at Bert. “You were in the army,” I said.

  He grunted assent.

  “That where you met Major van Hoof?”

  “Second lieutenant when I met him,” Bert corrected me. “Came south straight from the academy.” He sipped the geneva. “So green he’d never have survived that first tour without me.”

  “You were an old Congo hand?”

  “Not so old. But a man learns fast if his first time into Africa he gets kicked out of a plane over Stanleyville.”

  I asked, “In ’64?”

  Bert nodded.

  The paratroop drop into Stanleyville in 1964 was a counter-terrorist legend. Bert must have been one of the Belgians sent in when leftist Congolese rebels threatened to massacre their white hostages. The Belgian paratroopers moved so swiftly that most of the two thousand foreigners were rescued. I felt my tension ease a notch. Bert was in the same business as I was. Fighting the bad guys for more than thirty years. Maybe a better ally than I realized. “But you’re not in the army anymore?” I said.

  Bert picked up my beer glass and stepped behind the bar to refill it. His voice was muffled. “Me and the army parted company some time ago. I have my own business now.”

  I glanced around. The glass door was covered with faded gold script that had been invisible the night before. Now, from the inside, I could read “Café Ebertus.”

  Bert put the beer in front of me and sat. He inclined his head toward the door. “See that van on the other side of the drawbridge?”

  A tan Ford with smoked windows was parked a hundred yards from the café entrance. My fingertips grew cold, the familiar chill creeping toward my wrists. “You think someone in there is watching this place?”

  He leaned toward me. “Not some one.”

  “You can’t see inside the van. How do you know there’s anyone in it?”

  “Van’s been there since midmorning. Figured it was empty. Then, around noon, I spotted exhaust fumes.”

  “Whoever’s in there got cold, ran the heater. Sounds pretty innocent to me. No professional would give himself away like that.”

  “Figured the same,” Bert said. “But had me a new customer for lunch. Foreigner.”

  “From where?”

  He said, “Raghead.”

  I rephrased it: “Middle Eastern type?”

  He snorted. “Not exactly. But the same-type Allah lover. And let me tell you, I don’t get many of them in here.”

  “Can’t imagine why not,” I said, hoping the joke would cover the sound of lunch roiling in my stomach.

  “Maybe they don’t like my cooking. Anyway, this one picked at his stew while he eye-fucked the place. Then disappeared up the street. Pretty damn sure he got into the van.” He gave me a long look. “You got at least two of them watching you.”

  “I was expecting them.” I tried to make my voice as cool as my words, but my pitch was too high to pull it off. I tried again. “But not this soon.”

  “They can move plenty fast,” Bert said. “Their kind runs things in this neighborhood.”

  “Their kind? You called him a raghead.”

  “You been reading them damn tour guides, I bet. About how the Russian mafia controls this section of Antwerp.”

  “No one ever told me that Islamic fundamentalists had taken charge.”

  “ ‘Russian mafia’ is a general term for the scum doing it. They speak Russian. But they’re Chechens, most of them.”

  “Chechens,” I said, suddenly recalling the most significant fact about Chechnya. “Muslims.”

  “Right. The ragheads stick together. Some camel driver wants you watched, he gets a local pair to park down the road. Maybe without a
ny experience doing surveillance, but willing to help out until the pros arrive.”

  I asked, “You think the pros are coming?”

  “I’m not stupid.” He leaned closer and sour geneva vapors filled the air between us. “I know they’re coming.”

  “What do you mean, know?”

  “I mean, I know what’s going on.”

  “Do you?”

  “The major’s using you to set a trap.”

  “Why would I let him do that?”

  “I’m thinking probably he didn’t give you much choice. I read the papers. American woman with a terrorist connection evades arrest in Hamburg. Next day the major sends me an American woman who needs somebody to watch her back.” He gave me a sly grin. “You don’t look much like your picture now, but you’re the one the cops are looking for. And to keep them from finding you, you’ll do what the major wants.”

  “And you think he wants to set a trap.”

  “For the ones who did his daughter. That’s who he wants. Pretty obvious from what she said to you. ‘Let the right people know.’ The major’s set a trap, all right. When the ‘right people’ get here, he’ll take out the lot of them.” Bert’s eyes gleamed, blue sapphires. “I told you. I’m not stupid.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

  But maybe I was. I hadn’t volunteered to draw terrorists so van Hoof could kill them. Yet if van Hoof wanted to create a dramatic diversion, what would be more effective?

  I asked, “You think the major would use your place for a battleground without warning you?”

  “He’ll do more than warn me. He’ll make sure I get in on the shooting.” This time his wink seemed less flirtatious than bloodthirsty.

  “You’re living in your dreams,” I said. “Nobody’s going to assassinate anyone. I’m more worried about what I’ll run into downtown than I am about those guys in the van.” I stood up and lifted the leather jacket off the back of my chair.

  Bert said, “If you’re going downtown, you better work on your act a bit more.”

  “What?”

  “You dress the part fine. But it still shows. You like men, probably more than you should.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  Bert cut me off. “You want to keep the horny sailors away, you got to change that. Look at the girls, not at the boys. Let people see you enjoy the same pleasures as a man.”

  I gave him a glance filled with loathing. “Go piss up a rope,” I said.

  He wheezed out another laugh. “Better.” Then his face got serious again. “You’re sure nobody’s going to blow you away soon as you go out that door?”

  I pulled on black leather gloves and made my voice as tough as I could. “There won’t be any shoot-out in your front yard.” Sure or not, I had to get moving. It was four o’clock—according to Erika, the best time to contact Sándor Biczó, the Hungarian arms trader/bar owner we’d picked to act as the go-between in my dealings with Krüger. I shrugged the jacket on over my bulky sweater and patted the pockets to reassure myself that I had my cap, pencil and paper and Belgian currency—supplies I might need if Biczó didn’t show up. “You watch,” I said. “They’ll be tagging along with me.”

  Bert stood up. “To be on the safe side, I’ll keep you covered from upstairs.”

  Bert knew van Hoof better than I did. If he’d figured things correctly, my going outside would ignite a war. I hoped that van Hoof was better disciplined. That the plan we’d discussed was the plan we’d follow.

  My boots thumped loudly on the floor and the snaps and zippers on my jacket rattled tinnily. My fingertips had gotten colder and my hand shook as I reached for the doorknob. I pulled the door open and stepped outside.

  It clanked shut behind me. The afternoon sky was charcoal gray, the wintry light fading toward dusk. Moist air dropped like a veil on my bare head and the smell of the sea was strong. I took several deep breaths and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Before I turned right, into the alley beneath my window, I glanced casually toward the drawbridge and the street beyond.

  The tan Ford shuddered on its suspension, as though its passenger had jerked into alertness.

  Then my back was to the van. My cheeks tingled and the skin over my skull tightened against the cold. All my muscles were pulled tight, too, from fear as well as the cold. I didn’t look up at my window. But I imagined Bert kneeling there, behind the lacy scrim. Hopefully with a powerful rifle in his hands.

  My thick-soled boots scraped over the damp cobblestones as I crossed the bridge toward downtown Antwerp. A car door slammed. Eager footsteps sounded behind me like an echo.

  As the seconds stretched into a minute and no shots were fired, a wave of relief flowed over me. And with the relief came an exhilaration I hadn’t been expecting. Yet it felt familiar. Slowly I realized why. I’d felt this same giddy excitement the night I bound myself to a man I believed to be a Communist agent. Stefan. Warsaw. 1986. It had been a long time since I’d gone out looking for trouble. Long enough to forget the thrill when I started to make my own.

  After I passed the street called Godefriduskaai, I turned right and then left again, moving steadily into that part of Antwerp most hospitable to men employed in Europe’s second-largest port. Off-duty seamen were trolling the streets. I pushed between pea coats and uniforms, jostling men who muttered at me in Russian, Spanish and something atonally Asian. No one looked at me for longer than a second. They were all more interested in the glass-doored closets lining the streets. The men controlling Antwerp’s prostitution trade rented out the stalls in eight-hour shifts. The women working that late-Wednesday afternoon were paying prime-time rates.

  I stepped into the indented doorway of a ship chandlery. The odor of urine was so strong my eyes watered. Beyond the glass were the shadowy outlines of sailors’ necessities, made from brass and hemp.

  I saw myself in the darkened window. My reflection was appalling, a blend of my bald mother after chemotherapy and the haunted look of a World War II collaborator being punished by the French Resistance. Beneath my shorn skull, my eyes burned darkly, the skin around them bruised-looking. Below the bulk of jacket and sweater, Erika’s pants outlined a frame worn gaunt over the past few days.

  I turned and lounged against the door, bracing the sole of my right boot against the wooden frame, my leather-encased arms folded across my chest to display all the zippers to best advantage. I kept my face turned toward the hookers across the street, as though I were in the market for love. But my eyes were busy searching the sidewalks.

  I spotted a man with the angular body that comes from an ill-fed boyhood in the Caucasus Mountains. He became suddenly engrossed by a tattered handbill on a kiosk a hundred feet away. I shoved myself upright as though making a decision. Directly across the street, sandwiched between a stall occupied by a fleshy blue-black woman and one housing a near-albino blonde, was a solid wooden door. The neon glowing above it read “The 21 Club.”

  All I had to do was go into The 21 Club, order a beer and nurse it while I waited for Sándor Biczó to make his customary late-afternoon visit to his bar. I’d identify myself to him as the notorious Casey Collins. I’d let the Hungarian know I had something to sell to his most important German contact. If his reputation was accurate, the Hungarian would move quickly to alert Reinhardt Krüger that a deal was in the works.

  My eyes went back to the man tailing me. I hadn’t counted on performing for an audience. The surveillance had kicked in ahead of schedule. But it might prove helpful if the man watching me reported my visit. If Sándor Biczó didn’t think my offer worthy enough to pass on to Krüger, a report on my movements might spur Krüger into demanding to know what I’d been doing in the Hungarian’s bar.

  I rubbed the heel of my hand across my forehead. All these assumptions, any of which might be wrong. Nothing to guarantee I’d provide the distraction that Stefan needed. But I had to create some activity. Van Hoof had said they had no better options.

  A burly man elbowed
me out of the doorway. His eyes had the unfocused look of the seriously drunk and he reeked of the cheapest brand of geneva. He faced the entry and shot a stream of urine onto the sidewalk between his feet. I jumped sideways to avoid the splash and shambled into three uniformed Japanese sailors. The exchange of polite apologies didn’t take ten seconds, but it placed me ten feet farther down the sidewalk. I moved into another malodorous doorway and checked for my tail. I’d led him so carefully to this point. I didn’t want him to miss my entrance into The 21 Club.

  A late-model BMW idled across from me, two men huddled inside. I squinted, thought I saw one pass something to the other. Probably a drug deal going down. I looked quickly away, spotted my tail on the same side of the street as I was, standing near five or six men who’d clustered behind a British sailor. The Brit had opened one of the doors to negotiate with the thin Asian woman inside. My tail was scanning the street.

  I took a step toward the curb. A Vespa buzzed past from the left, carrying a pair of women. The driver had a bleached-blond ducktail and wore a long-sleeved jersey tie-dyed in shades of purple. Her passenger was covered by an oil-stained mechanic’s coverall that matched the dirty streaks of silver in her equally short hair. The driver swerved to avoid me and sprayed slush over a jaywalker. A male voice yelled something and one of the women responded with a Flemish expletive. The woman riding pillion grinned at me and raised her clenched fist in a salute. Looking at her, I saw the real value of my outfit. I was one more woman in the army of militant feminists visible on the radical fringe of every European political movement from the Greens to the Bader-Meinhoff gang. We were sisters. It felt strangely right. I saluted her military-style, with the ninety-degree flourish my father always added.