Nico just shrugged. “You know. People,” he said.
After a baffling series of turns, they reached what appeared to be a student neighborhood. Layers of torn posters were pasted across buildings, and outside corner bars young people sat cross-legged on the pavement, drinking beer from dark bottles.
“Not so much more,” Nico assured her.
They turned onto a quieter street. Garbage floated on the canal, plastic bottles, soaked sheets of newspaper. An upside-down doll, pink legs groping up from the murky green. The houses here seemed more drastically uneven than those nearer the Dam, as if they were bobbing directly on the water. Phoebe had to trot every few paces to keep up with Nico. Again the anxiety seized her; how would she find her way back?
They turned again and the canal disappeared. The street narrowed. Abruptly Nico stopped. “Okay,” he said.
“I hope he’s home,” Phoebe said.
“Yes, I am hoping also.”
They walked up a few steps to a red wood door with a pane of glass at its center. Nico rang the bell. He rang it in a particular way: two short rings, one long, then another short. Each ring followed a pause, like something landing a long way down.
Phoebe heard a sound overhead and glanced up, catching a flash of dark hair from a high window. A moment later the front door jerked open as if released by a hook. Nico pushed it wide into a cool, dusty foyer. The floor was a coarse-looking marble covered with dry leaves.
“So,” Nico said, leading the way up a cramped staircase. Phoebe followed, nervous yet determined. There was no stopping now; if she lost this opportunity, she would despise herself. At the second landing Nico stopped, breathing hard. “Please,” he said, motioning Phoebe ahead.
Landings came and went. Finally, on what seemed a sixth or seventh floor, the staircase ended. Nico seemed virtually undone by the climb. Drops of sweat glistened through the hairs of his eyebrows, and he breathed in quick, shallow gasps. Phoebe decided he must be unwell in some way.
“Okay,” he breathed. “So we meet Karl.”
“Fine.” Phoebe was looking forward to different company.
Nico pounded on the door, calling out something in Dutch. It opened quickly, and Phoebe glimpsed a set of striking, almost womanly features before their host about-faced without a word, leading the way down a narrow hall. Nico and Phoebe followed him into a room that struck her immediately as a place where one person had lived for many, many years. At the focal point of the room stood a large black sewing machine on a table, surrounded by bright, jumbled fabrics piled so high that they seemed on the verge of overwhelming the machine itself. The remainder of the room was overgrown with plants, ivy around the windows, lily pads floating in a shallow tub, long vines dangling from hanging pots. A breeze pulled the algae smell of the canal inside and made the leaves and stems shiver gently.
“Welcome welcome” said their host, smiling broadly. He was beautiful, olive-skinned with an Asian lilt to his eyes. He wore a pair of loose Turkish pants belted with a cord of brightly colored yarn and a short-sleeved black T-shirt. “Please,” he urged Phoebe, “take a seat.”
Oriental carpets covered the floor, a kaleidoscope of golds and crimsons and blues overlapping crazily, disappearing near the windows beneath a heap of pillows piled like a kind of bed. Phoebe chose a cushion at the edge of this mass and folded her legs underneath her.
Karl spoke to Nico curtly in Dutch. With military swiftness the boy turned on his heel and disappeared through a curtain of beads into another room, where Phoebe heard cupboards being opened, a running tap.
Karl seated himself at the sewing machine. “You are visiting Amsterdam the first time?” he inquired politely.
Phoebe told him yes. Slivers of muscle flicked in Karl’s arms as he poked through his mountain of fabrics. His hair fell to his chest, heavy and dark as an Asian’s hair, but wavy. Phoebe guessed he must be forty.
“What are you sewing?” she asked.
“Everything,” he said. “I am a tailor.”
His accent was strange to Phoebe, clearly not Dutch, for it was nothing like Nico’s. His English sounded British, in fact, but underneath that a deeper accent leaned at the words.
Karl pried a green velvet vest from the heap, threaded a needle and began sewing a square yellow button on it. Nico returned to the room holding three beers, wisps of steam rising from their throats. Karl addressed him sharply in Dutch and the boy answered meekly, then seemed on the verge of returning the third bottle to wherever it had come from. But Karl waved a hand and grinned, suddenly easy. Nico sank onto the cushions near Phoebe, cupping both palms protectively around his bottle.
“You are traveling alone?” Karl asked, finishing with the yellow button and snapping the thread with his teeth.
“No,” Phoebe said instinctively. “My friends are at the museum.”
Nico began prattling in Dutch. Karl listened with more patience than he’d shown his friend thus far, nodding over his sewing, asking occasional questions. Phoebe listened, too, hoping for some familiar word, some clue to what they were saying.
Finally Nico pushed at her arm. “Show him,” he said. Phoebe looked at him. “The photo.”
She’d forgotten it. Hastily Phoebe produced the picture of Faith and brought it to Karl at his sewing machine. He glanced at it briefly and nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I remember.”
“You do?” Phoebe cried.
“She was here some years ago, yes?”
Her heart flinched. “Eight years.”
Karl pressed the pedal that operated the sewing machine and began coaxing a piece of blue fabric under the needle. The machine was an old black Singer, curved like a woman’s waist, the name in gold lettering.
“So … you knew her,” Phoebe prompted him.
“Knew her, no, I did not. I remember her,” Karl said. “There were people coming, people going all the time, but that one I do remember.” After a moment he added, “Dead?”
Phoebe stared at him. “How did you know?”
“If she is alive, then why you are coming to me with a picture in your hand?” He flashed a white grin, his needle greedily gobbling the fabric. “OD?”
“Oh no,” Phoebe said, but stopped short of divulging the truth. “So,” she said, at a loss, “I mean, what did you think of her?”
Karl turned the fabric under the needle to pull it through in another direction. “You know, there were so many people,” he said. “She was a nice girl. Fun, a little crazy? Beautiful,” he said. “Lots of boyfriends.”
“Did she ever come here?”
Karl worked the pedal, prompting the machine’s rhythmic mutterings to increase in speed and pitch until they seemed to verge upon speech. When he lifted his foot from the pedal, a hush fell over the room. Karl shut his eyes. “Yes. I think yes,” he said, opening his eyes again. “I can remember her there.” He pointed to the cushions beneath the windows. Turning, Phoebe was surprised to see Nico, whose presence in the room she’d entirely forgotten. He sat erect and pale. Karl laughed at him, muttering something in Dutch.
“She was actually here, in this room?” Phoebe said, overjoyed. “I can’t believe it.”
“I’m not saying for sure, you understand me,” Karl said, resuming his sewing. “She was here maybe one minute.”
But a minute was enough, a minute was everything. Spellbound, Phoebe watched Karl’s hands sift among his silks and linens. “She was here,” she said.
Though the sun was still high, it had a worn-out feeling about it. Karl pried open a nugget of tinfoil, breaking off a piece of something brown and damp-looking inside. He placed it in the tiny copper bowl of a long Chinese pipe, lit, puffed, and passed the pipe to Phoebe. The smell was strange. She took the pipe and deeply inhaled the soft smoke, sweet inside her throat. God knew what it was. She returned to her spot on the cushions and passed the pipe to Nico, who accepted it halfheartedly. Karl did not resume his sewing. He leaned over the pile of fabrics and looked straight at Phoebe for
what seemed the first time. Yet even now his gaze was absent, as if her face were merely a resting place for his eyes.
“Do you ever miss those times?” Phoebe asked.
“What times?”
“You know. The sixties.” The term sounded foolish.
Karl sucked at the pipe, eyes narrowed. “It was good,” he said, breathing smoke. “Like falling in love. Sure, you want the beginning. But you know already the end.”
Phoebe took the pipe. The smoke was soft as felt in her lungs. “What’s the end?” she asked.
Karl shrugged. “Same like everything,” he said. “Goes too far, becomes the opposite.”
Phoebe puzzled over this. She tried passing the pipe to Nico, but the boy waved it away impatiently. He looked dreadful. Phoebe was suddenly very high, and not a high she recognized. The room appeared smeared. She blinked to straighten out her vision. “Opposite of what?” she said, her voice seeming to waft in from a distance.
Karl lifted a pile of fabric scraps from his lap and set it on the floor. Then he spoke with sudden intensity. “You want peace, finally you take guns to find it. Use drugs for opening your mind so everything will come inside—now you think only where to get more smack. You love to live, but you die and die and die—so many dead, from that time,” he said. “Like your sister.” And as he looked at Phoebe, something opened in Karl’s eyes like a camera shutter, as if, for a moment, he actually saw her.
Then he looked away. Phoebe took a long hit of satiny smoke from the pipe. The fishy canal breeze filled the room. Things becoming their opposites, yes, she thought, it made sense. Karl’s voice sounded oracular, the single and absolute voice of truth. Opposites, she thought, yes …
Nico broke the thread of her meanderings. He lurched from his seat and crawled toward Phoebe across the cushions, his face gray, moist with sweat. Revolted, Phoebe tried to draw away but achieved this only by faint degrees, her motion stalled by the drug.
“Look,” Nico said, smiling uneasily. He was still on all fours, his face thrust toward Phoebe’s. She smelled a terrible sweetness on his breath and thought of hospitals, the sweet smell that covers death. “So look, okay?” he said. “I am brought you here.”
Phoebe turned to Karl, expecting him to heap scorn upon Nico for this grotesque performance, but Karl was sorting with renewed absorption through his heap of fabrics. “Yeah,” she finally conceded to Nico. “You brought me …”
“So now, if you have some money, I have none.”
“Money!” Phoebe said. She turned again to Karl, but clearly he’d removed himself from this discussion. “Why should I give you money?” she asked, more querulously than she would have liked.
“Because how you would come here without me, yes?” Nico said in a high, trembling voice. He looked ready to explode.
Karl was sewing again, cocooned in the whir of machinery. Clearly he’d seen this moment coming, agreed to it beforehand. Some larger plan was revealing itself. Phoebe felt a shudder of awful comprehension, as if a part of her had known all along, and been silenced. Alone in an apartment with two strange men, in a foreign country. Her heart clambered against her ribs, but her stymied brain lagged behind it, thickened by the drug. “Well—how much?” she asked Nico.
“Maybe, let’s say fifty guilders?”
Phoebe was too stoned for arithmetic. It seemed like a lot. She opened her purse and took out her wallet. Only seventy guilders remained of the money she’d changed at the station that morning. “Here,” she said, handing Nico two twenty-five-guilder notes. Through the sleepy flow of her thoughts certain piercing worries were beginning to penetrate—time, banks, paying for the hostel—like the prickling of a numbed limb regaining sensation. But more painful still was her injury over Karl’s betrayal, his willingness to abandon her to this parasite.
Money in hand, the whimpering Nico became a man of action. He sprang to a shelf obscured by wandering Jew and opened the lid of a black lacquered box. There was a sudden pressure in the room. Phoebe felt it bodily, a ripple of sickness, a faulty quiver in her heartbeat. But she was afraid to move, to call attention to herself in the smallest way, for fear of causing an explosion.
Nico returned to the cushions holding a syringe. Of course, Phoebe thought. Of course. She stared at the rug, hearing the babble of Karl’s sewing machine. Here was the underground world, here it was; after a lifetime of stolen glimpses, she was right in its midst. A sense of deep inevitability bore down on her. Nico sat on the cushions near her, holding a teaspoon to which he added liquid from an eyedropper. He flicked a plastic cigarette lighter and held its flame beneath the spoon. A faint, sweet burning filled the air.
Karl left his sewing machine and knelt beside Nico. He filled the syringe with the liquid from the spoon, then yanked the yarn belt from his Turkish pants and knotted it tightly around the boy’s arm, just above the elbow. He took Nico’s forearm in his hands and held it, touching the tiny eruptions of scabs with the gentleness of a doctor. Phoebe turned away, her amazement eclipsed by horror, but as the seconds passed, she felt compelled to look again. She whirled back around. Gently, almost lovingly, Karl pushed the needle into Nico’s flesh.
Karl eased the plunger down. Nico’s eyes fluttered shut and he sighed. When Karl withdrew the syringe, there was blood at the bottom. He set it on a windowsill. Nico gazed at Phoebe, his face so peacefully settled that for the first time all day he looked his real age. “Cheers, okay?” he said softly. His eyes kept falling shut, despite his valiant efforts to keep them open. Again and again they closed, Nico rocking slowly forward, then catching himself, jerking back, drooping to one side and jerking straight again. He looked like a jack-in-the-box.
Karl moved close to Phoebe. She noticed his forearms were scarless, full of long rivery veins. He touched Phoebe’s shoulder in the same gentle way he’d touched Nico’s arm. No, Phoebe thought, no, but she was so tired, the drug had sapped all the energy from her body, and now a part of her longed, like Nico, to shut her eyes and hand herself over. Karl pushed her backward onto the cushions, stroking her hair, glancing toward the open window, where a church bell rang faintly. Then, in a swift, effortless motion he flattened himself on top of her. Phoebe lay still, not paralyzed so much as dulled. Someone was calling out instructions; she strained to catch them. Nico continued bobbing from side to side, teetering between sleep and wakefulness. Phoebe wished she could lay him down flat. Karl began to kiss her, pushing his tongue deep inside Phoebe’s mouth, pressing himself to her leg. From below the windows she heard children. She wanted Karl to stop, but the fierce efficiency of his desires seemed to muffle her own. In a single, fluid gesture, he lifted her skirt and eased aside her underpants. She felt his bare hand.
Phoebe shrieked, and the hand withdrew. Nico’s eyes blinked open. He stared at Phoebe, seeming about to speak, then was folded helplessly back into sleep.
“Hey,” Karl said, moving his long body to one side of Phoebe. “Hey, so relax.” He touched her bare thigh. She saw the shape of his penis through the Turkish pants and began groping for support, wanting to stand now, certain even in her murky state that no redemption awaited her. But she couldn’t stand, Karl was making it hard to balance. “Hey,” he said, as if Phoebe were a cat lost among the cushions, and even now she felt a longing to believe he was somehow good, if she could just … find her balance … Karl’s breath at her ear—No. She clawed the cushions, the struggle giving her focus; for an instant the murkiness cleared and she felt a charge of bright terror—No! She had to stand up, a sound was moving through her, up toward her throat. It emerged painfully, like a bubble breaking. “Stop,” she cried, a strangled sound, then louder, “Stop!” fighting him now, fumbling to her feet, but Karl just laughed and leaned back looking up at her, not even trying anymore, his laugh not cruel so much as surprised that a stupid, meaningless thing was costing him this much trouble.
“Get out of here,” he said.
Clutching her purse, Phoebe tottered down the narrow hall, past ph
otographs, drawings under dusty glass, the shadowy kaleidoscope of Karl’s life. She opened the door and careened down the curving staircase to the lobby, half expecting him to pursue her, but no, he wouldn’t. Outside, the light broke painfully against her eyes and she reeled, thinking she might be sick. There was a pain between her legs, a burning, as though he’d chafed her.
Phoebe rounded a corner, half ran, half fumbled alongside the canal until she was gasping for air. When she noticed people watching her, she slowed to a walk. She felt a horror of being discovered, as if fleeing the scene of her own crime. For some time she wandered without direction, trying to still her panicked breathing. She thought of going to the police, but she’d forgotten where Karl even lived, had never known in the first place—doubtless the reason for all the twists and turns she and Nico had taken on their way. And anyhow, what did she have to report? Drugs were legal in Amsterdam as far as she knew, and Nico hadn’t robbed her—she’d given the money freely. But why? Why not leave the apartment right then, when things started to turn? Why go there at all? It was her own behavior, more than theirs, that Phoebe couldn’t bear to recall—so vulnerable, so easy. She saw this now with a painful clarity. And of course they’d seen, too. To people like them, a weakness like hers must be obvious, must cling to her like a smell.
Beneath everything else lay a single, terrible fear, worse than the needle or what Karl had done to her: the possibility that he’d lied about Faith, had not really known her at all. Phoebe’s mind touched this thought and instantly veered away. It wasn’t possible. She’d seen in his eyes that he was serious.
Still, the adventure had been a failure. An unmitigated disaster. It would never have happened to Faith.
After nearly an hour of aimless wandering, Phoebe asked directions back to the train station and managed to find it. Discovering her backpack still in its locker seemed to her nothing short of miraculous. It was seven o’clock; she’d missed the youth hostel check-in by hours. She prayed that Diana and Helen had saved her a place.
The Invisible Circus Page 12
