The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “How do you live?”

  “How do you think I live? By wits and cunning, that’s how a girl lives. Even a streetwalker knows that. You give until you can take.”

  “Don’t you have anyone?”

  “What? Should every woman be some man’s pet? Keep me and I’ll obey you, kneel before you, kiss your filthy feet. The hell with it. Men are pigs who think with their pricks, that’s all. Use them for pleasure when you have to. No, I don’t have anyone, little lamb. I have me. I’m sufficient for myself.”

  “I can’t call you Rat.”

  “You don’t have to call me anything. Get out of here. It must be morning, and those morons called cops won’t be waiting around. You can go up the stairs this time if the chute doesn’t suit you.” And the little laugh again, just as horrible as it ever was. He knew why. There was no amusement in the laugh, no humor, even no satisfaction. It was just punctuation used by an illiterate.

  He took thirty marks off his roll of bills and held them out.

  The girl crouched now, staring at him with the wild look of a bewildered animal.

  “Take half. I need some cash. I can use the credit card to get out of Berlin, go to Frankfurt, get a flight to Brussels.”

  “What do you want me to do, lamb? Suck your prick for you? That’s all right. There’s girls on the Ku’damm do it for you cheaper. Or boys if you’d prefer them.”

  “Are you crazy? Are you from some insane asylum?” He made a face. “You talk crazy.”

  “I talk sense, lamb. I talk to you the way you need to be talked to. A couple of pigs want to off you up there and you talk like a lamb going to the slaughter.”

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  Sober silence for a moment.

  The girl rocked on her heels and examined him with those tan, glittering eyes. A little smile curved on her thin face. “Little lamb. Who made thee?”

  Michael blinked.

  “You really are in trouble, aren’t you?”

  “Trouble enough,” Michael said. He watched her carefully.

  “You’re really going to Brussels,” she said. “I should have known you were Johnny Square. Too square to lie even.” She laughed again. “I’m getting too clever for myself.”

  “Take half,” he said. She had saved his life. For a moment, he had understood her in her bleak universe of deprivation, pain, fear of authorities. What was he now but another creature like her?

  “I will,” she said and snatched at the paper money and crumpled it in her thin hand.

  “I’ll leave you the knife. I can’t take it with me.”

  “Why, Michael? Why are they chasing you?”

  He began to tell her. He had to tell someone. He had to enlist sympathy. From somebody. Rena seemed a million miles away and the idyll of that gray bedroom in the old Savoy Hotel was a century ago.

  The words tumbled out in the same soft, low voice that Rena loved. His moment of rage and his scream of anger had passed so completely, it was as though the moment had never happened.

  “So what was on the tape?”

  “If I tell you, they hunt you as well.”

  She smiled. The sharp teeth glinted in candlelight. “They hunt me down every day. It is part of life, like eating or drinking or taking a shit. What do you think I do?”

  “You live by your wits, like all women,” Michael said.

  She nearly snarled and then stopped. “You mock me, but it’s true. One day the old father beat me up, and he shouldn’t have done it—but that’s the way he saw you treated women and children. So I cut his heart out.” She made a face. “I should have cut off his balls.”

  “Your father.”

  “That’s what he said he was. I don’t remember.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When I was twelve, they said I had an accident. Fell down the stairs. Coma. For two months. Then I didn’t die.” She laughed. “There was this man who said he was my father, but I couldn’t remember a damned thing. I just lived with him, cooked for him, cleaned after him, never went to school.… Can you imagine such a thing in such a modern, progressive society? He wanted to touch me all the time. Well, I let him. Why not? I didn’t care. But I thought I would just have to take it. Kinder, kirsch, kitsch; a woman’s lot. My lot. He got crazier, though, and that’s when he started beating me, and I hurt very much. I had the headaches back. I wondered if I really had fallen down the stairs. I got the idea he pushed me down the stairs. I told him that once, and he beat me. So I killed him. Cut his heart out, and it was still warm. When you do that, you have done everything.”

  Silence. Tomb. Damp. Even the rats made no sound.

  “I believe you. You must be the strongest woman who ever lived. I thought you were going to kill me. It was like fighting with a cat, a leopard or something.”

  “You surprised me, that’s all. I didn’t mean to cut your cheek, and when you cried out, I pulled the knife back. I shouldn’t have.”

  “I have to get out of here. My friend will meet me. Get me some money.”

  “And then what? Just keep running? If you’re going to just keep running, you might as well stay in Berlin. I can show you how to live here. There are many places, and you can always find shelter and a little food. And if you need some money, wait until the taverns close and find some amiable drunk who wants to give you his marks as long as you put it to him nicely, and that means putting the knife to his throat.” She smiled at him.

  Michael shook his head. “I was a translator and interpreter. Two days ago. A million years ago. I shouldn’t have gotten involved in anything, but it was my curiosity. And it was their carelessness, I see that now. It was their fault. They want me to run because I’m the scapegoat. I won’t. I’ve thought about it and thought about it. There’s one chance. A place of sanctuary, you might say.”

  “Sanctuary,” she repeated. Her eyes glowed in the candlelight, and her whole being seemed to soften.

  He lowered the knife he had held at the ready.

  “Can you make it safe? Should I really believe that, that there is such a thing? I don’t believe in anything, little lamb,” she said.

  He felt strange. He felt detached from himself and his words. He reached across to her. He touched her hand. She pulled it away. He reached to her, and she let him touch her hand. He looked into the tan, violent eyes. “I can’t run forever. I don’t have the wit. I can see one way out of this, just one. If I can get out—”

  “Sanctuary,” she said.

  “Yes. There’s a chance. I think I can.”

  “How?”

  “Use what I know. What I learned on the tape.”

  “How can you use it?”

  “There’s one way.”

  “Sanctuary,” she repeated. It seemed to warm her in the damp of this coal cellar.

  “If I can get there,” he added.

  “Is it far?”

  “Far.”

  “Take me,” she said.

  He was startled.

  “Take me,” she repeated.

  He shook his head. “It’s dangerous.”

  “You’re an innocent,” she said. She smiled at him and took her hand away to button her shirt. “What would you have done if there had been no coal cellar? Bang bang, lamb, and you are slaughtered. These agents after you. Already in Berlin. Do you think you walk out of Berlin like a stroll in the country? They are already looking for you, Michael. You won’t survive getting to the airport. I’ll get you to Belgium, and you’ll get your money and you’ll take me to sanctuary.”

  “But they aren’t after you.’ ” And he paused because it was so egotistical.

  “They are after me every day, Michael. I told you that. Six years running, Michael. Do you think you could do it for six years? I have. I know everything, Michael. I know how to cut a throat so that they can’t make a peep, and I can walk out of the delicatessen with sausages under my dress and have the grocer open the door for me. I steal and I survive, little lamb.” She smiled at
him in a dreamy way, as though considering something faintly regrettable. “Six years. You have only been on this side of things for two days.”

  The desperation in her words cut him.

  He stared at her. For the first time he saw the vulnerable creature behind the tough façade. Her eyes were wide still, but they had lost the wildness. Her small mouth was not so grim.

  “You don’t have a passport—”

  “I have everything I need. Passports are the least of my worries,” she said. “What do you say, little lamb?”

  “Then why didn’t you leave before?”

  She let the smile happen again, almost against her will. Her eyes glowed. “I know this Berlin. This old city is my mother and it hides me. Berlin is the world, lamb. Maybe I’m such an old case the cops don’t look for me too hard anymore. Maybe I didn’t cut his heart out of his body. Maybe nothing I just told you ever happened.”

  He stared at the crazy creature who rocked on her heels just at the edge of the darkness.

  He shook his head. The girl touched him. In her rage, he could see his own. “What can I offer you?”

  “Sanctuary. You know sanctuary, and because I have survived six years running does not mean that I want to survive another day in this filth and degradation. I told you I’m not crazy. I had a man once for almost six months. Very gentle to me. He took me in and bought me things. I wore dresses. I put on such lingerie.…” She was dreamy again. “I was sixteen, not so long ago, and he took me to the best restaurants on the Ku’damm. I was going to love him all his life, so gentle to me, so kind. He didn’t know I would have done anything for him. He woke one morning and gave me a kiss. We had a wide bed and always slept close to each other. I would have done anything for him.” Soft, softer than the crooning of the rats. “Emil went to his shower. He came out wearing a dressing gown, all glowing and pink. He looked like a baby. I heard him fall in the foyer and I went to him. ‘Emil, Emil.’ ” Softer still. Her eyes were wet, tears on her cheeks. “He was dead. Only forty-seven years old and he was dead.… I had to get out of there, I saw it. I stayed with him all morning. I turned him over and put a pillow under his head. I closed his eyes for him. I told him I loved him and I would do anything for him. He never answered me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said.

  The girl looked up at him through the tears. The eyes glittered again. “You don’t believe that, do you? How wonderful you are, Johnny Square. I come to your store and put sausages under my skirt, and you beg me to take more. I think you are a lamb after all.” And she laughed without any mirth, rocking on her heels.

  “My sanctuary is not certain. Not certain at all. It’s just a hope.”

  “You need me, Michael. I need hope. You need experience. I’m surprised you’ve survived at all.”

  “I can take you to Belgium. If you have a passport. That’s as far as I can take you. I’ll give you money there—”

  She scuttled away into the darkness. The rats crooned at her. She came back into the light with a West German passport. She handed it to him as though he might have been a control officer.

  He opened it and stared at the gamine’s face.

  Marie Dreiser.

  “Is this you?”

  “It looks like me, doesn’t it?”

  “As much as passport pictures look like anyone.”

  “But it looks like me, doesn’t it?”

  He stared at her.

  “Is it you?”

  “For now. It’s me for now.”

  17

  BRUGES

  Rita Macklin had red hair and green eyes, and she had loved him for a long time. Perhaps she still loved him, but he wouldn’t think about that. She had decided something, the last time, the time they had almost come back together. They had made love, and when it was over, it was over. She didn’t even try to explain that to him. Dead. If not dead, then it would be killed. Put in a box and buried under the dirt of everyday life. Life goes on, life is compromise.… To save your life, leave your love and find another. They had parted one day and they never expected to see each other again.

  The train rocketed along the track across the broad, rolling face of Belgium, where a thousand armies had marched in all the years of history, back and forth from France to Germany or France to the Netherlands, back and forth in ceaseless battle from the beginning of man in Europe. Not an acre of ground was without remembrance of bloodshed. Devereaux sat across from Rena Taurus and did not see her but saw his memory of another woman.

  The train lurched from side to side. Kilometer posts flashed by, the ground near the train seemed to stream away from it like the wake of a ship. The train was grubby, close, damp. The heaters worked too well. Dirty windows were streaked with beads of rain.

  Rena’s coat was open, her arms were folded beneath her breasts, she stared out the window as though she found the bleak, brown countryside utterly fascinating.

  Rita Macklin had said to him the last time: “Run away tomorrow and I’ll run with you. If we have to run for the rest of our lives to get away from them. I don’t need my career. We can live on a beach in Tahiti. We can live outback down under. We can live in the Alaskan bush, I don’t care. Pioneer wife. I’ll make you children. I’ll wash your clothes and clean your house. I’ll make love to you all day and all night. I’ll bury myself in living with you. Just you and me. Just us in the world. Maybe we’ll have ten years or thirty, I can’t tell. Then we die. I hope we die together, but even with the sadness at the end, it would be worth it. Ten years, fifteen, twenty years. We’ll quarrel and get into long, stupid arguments, that’s all part of it. But we’ll sleep together every night in the same bed for however long it lasts, until we are dead.”

  That was the choice. She stared at him with her brave green eyes and waited.

  Of course he would do it.

  Except it was a fantasy.

  The train swayed back and forth through the drizzle that streamed across the windows. The conductor would come into the car from time to time and tramp up and down the aisles, checking tickets, examining each one as if he were a border guard. The forests along the way bent to the wind. The ground was flat and stretched to the unseen sea. Bare branches were raised like arms from the tree trunks; the trees shivered in the wind; the deluge had come again to the world.

  Rena stared at him as he stared out the window, and saw the bleakness in him. She shivered at it and spoke to warm herself. “Michael and I went to Bruges. It was the first time we were… together.”

  He said nothing, made no sign that he had heard her.

  The shot in the courtyard had deafened her, and the deafness was louder now in the silence between them. She remembered the morning past in vignettes that were not connected. He had bought tickets at the train station. He had taken her arm on the platform. The train was moving. She must have told him about Bruges, about how she and Michael had first gone there as lovers, but she could not remember it. It was the place where she was supposed to meet Michael with money and comfort. Had she betrayed him again to this American agent? But then, she had betrayed him in Malmö, and now he was in danger because of her.

  In that moment, her heart was as bleak as Devereaux’s face. What had the nuns taught her when she was young? It was evil to do the wrong thing, even for the right reason. The ends did not justify the means. She had agreed to all that when it had not meant anything. And now what had she done to Michael, even for the purest of reasons?

  “We stayed at the Hotel Adornes on the canal. It was so beautiful, even in the rain. We walked all over the city,” Rena said. “I was in love.”

  I was in love, Devereaux repeated to himself. Am in love. Was it past for Rena now? Had something happened in Malmö between her and Michael? He turned from the window and searched her face.

  “We went to the museum on the Dyver Canal because Michael wanted to see the Bosch there. He loved the chaos of Bosch—it freed something in him, a part I never saw.…”

  Now it was fanta
sy, Devereaux decided. She was rattling on to run away from the deaths of two agents in the courtyard of her building in Brussels. She would talk and talk until those two men were not really dead. Like Rita Macklin’s fantasy of running away to a desert island with him.

  The train slowed for a junction and began the arcing turn toward the ancient city. Medieval Bruges was canals and houses that leaned against each other along narrow, cobbled streets.

  “You’ll meet him at the Hotel Adornes,” Devereaux said. She had not mentioned the hotel until a moment before.

  “Yes. Can I trust you? Not to harm him?”

  Devereaux said nothing. They think you are involved with Michael, and someone in the bureaucracy in Washington wants you to be sanctioned. But I mean you no harm.

  “Can I trust you?”

  “There’s no choice,” he said.

  No comfort. Words of comfort were always lies. Why didn’t he just lie to her?

  He stared at her lovely, pale face. “Michael has to stop running because there is too much danger. You and he. Can go to ground.” Devereaux paused. “Why did Michael get the stolen tape?”

  She was so startled that she brushed her purse from her lap to the floor. She bent to pick it up. Her cheeks flushed. “What do you mean?”

  He noted everything in that moment and did not understand what he saw. “You brought the question to me. Why did this happen to Michael? If this was no accident, why does Michael have the secret and not someone else?”

  “I said that because I was afraid for Michael.”

  “Were you?”

  She had to look away. She stared at the comfortless fields bare under the bleak clouds, stripped by the rain.

  “I don’t want him to be hurt,” she said so softly that it was a whisper or a prayer.

  “Can you do anything to stop it?” Devereaux said.