27
The Runners Portal
I know a man who once stole a Ferris wheel.
DASHIELL HAMMETT
IT WAS A MILD LATE AFTERNOON beneath high cloud cover. He staggered out of the villa with his painful hand pressed to his chest. Nobody followed him. His knees were weak. He leaned against a wall above which sycamores towered. When he closed his eyes briefly, he heard quiet music.
The wall was part of an estate that was somewhat smaller and less showy than the one he had just left. Directly in front of him, a group of elegantly dressed men stood on the sidewalk before an art deco portal that had two strange marble statues of runners embedded in it. As he pushed his way past the men, a police car came driving up and stopped right next to him. Two men in civilian clothes got out of the car and headed for the portal.
“Karimi is an idiot,” he heard one of them say. He stuck his bloody hand in his pocket and went past them with his head bowed. The entire way down through the serpentine streets to the Sheraton he kept asking himself what made the white-haired man so sure he wouldn’t go to the police.
There was actually only one explanation: he was obviously entangled in serious crime and what he could expect from the authorities must have been even more nasty than what the white-haired man was threatening. But what could be worse than threatening his life and the lives of his family?
Only as he had nearly arrived at the bungalows did a second possibility occur to him. What if the white-haired man was himself with the police? A high-ranking representative of state authority. He turned to a few street merchants and motioned with his arm up at the coastal range and asked whether they knew who the giant villa belonged to, the one that was by far the most ostentatious of anything around, right next to the villa with the weird runners portal; he learned that the owner was a man named Adil Bassir. They pronounced the name with a certain reticence, awestruck. Finding out the man’s line of business was much more difficult than finding out his name. When someone finally told him, it wasn’t actually a line of business at all: King of Crooks.
28
In Atlas
Jesus said: Perhaps men think that I am come to cast peace upon the world; and they do not know that I am come to cast dissensions upon the earth, fire, sword, war. For there will be five who are in a house; three shall be against two and two against three, the father against the son and the son against the father, and they shall stand as solitaries.
THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS
“THE TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD suspect, whose blood-besmirched clothing irrevocably placed him at the scene of the crime—my God, whose blood-besmirched clothing… irrevocably… the press here still has a ways to go. At any rate the completely blood-soaked perpetrator drove a stolen Toyota into the commune in which for years disreputable foreign hippies… no, there’s not much here. Overwhelming evidence, confession… threat of the death penalty… Look at this, he had the weapon with him. A Mauser, the bullets of which matched to the holes exactly… to the holes, what kind of expression is that? Hey, my colleague has holes in him! Anyway, his fingerprints were found on the weapon. I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.” Helen lowered the newspaper to look at the man lying on the sofa in his bloody and dirt-crusted suit, legs up, a fresh bandage on his head, the bandage on his hand already turning red again, an ice pack next to him.
He groaned.
“I called home again, by the way. A friend of my mother’s knows about this sort of thing, and she said that as long as it went through cleanly and didn’t hit anything, it’s not a big problem. You just have to make sure it doesn’t get infected. Although I would love to revisit the idea of going to a doctor.”
“Read on.”
“The pain is your problem, but I don’t want to get in trouble because an unidentified man keels over in my bungalow from blood poisoning. The twenty-two-year-old murderer—he was only a suspect a minute ago—the twenty-two-year-old, who shed bitter tears of remorse during sentencing, managed to escape while being transported to the place of execution when the prison vehicle was involved in a credible accident… a credible accident, dear God, either there’s something wrong with my French or they’re totally crazy. Anyway, there’s nothing here about memory loss. And it was also Tuesday. No, sorry. It would have been such a nice name for you: Amadou Amadou.”
“How old do you think I am?”
“I’d say about thirty. Certainly not twenty-two. And I have to ask you again: why didn’t you tell the guy about your amnesia?”
“What is so hard to understand?”
“If I’d been nailed to a desk with a letter-opener I’d have told him a thing or two.”
“I had the feeling that I didn’t know what he didn’t know. He just didn’t know that I didn’t know. If I had told him, what would he have done with me?”
“But you could have told him about the four men in white djellabas. About the guy on a moped. And the thing that astounds me most of all: that he let you go.”
“Maybe he thought I was the only one who could fix things? And he has my family.”
“They’re in a bad spot. Because you can’t fix anything. Mine, Cetrois, Adil Bassir: you don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on. You don’t want to go to the police. You can’t wait around. The best thing in my opinion would be to see a doctor. Someone who could have a look and see what the story is with the amnesia.”
“Do you not understand my argument somehow?”
“No. But you could consult a third party. I have money. I’m worried.”
He looked at Helen pensively for a long time, then he said: “The mine. Show me the map again.”
Helen handed him the map, stood up and filled the coffee press with water. “Forget it,” she said. “If it’s a mine as in a hole in the ground, what did the guy ride off with into the desert on the moped?”
“Maybe a deed of sale.”
“The King of Crooks and deeds of sale?”
“Or I’m a mining engineer and I’m the one who developed the mine.”
“How does that change things? It’s all nonsense. What were the guy’s actual words? Then I’ll have it again? Then it will belong to me again?”
“Then it’s mine. Seventy-two hours, then it’s mine again.”
“And you were speaking French the whole time?”
“What’s the gray stuff here?”
“Granite.”
“And the green?”
“Phosphorous, I think.”
“What do you need that for? Is that what’s in those luminescent paints?”
“It’s dung. But it’s hundreds of kilometers. Phosphorous is nonsense. Granite is nonsense. It’s all nonsense.”
“And the round bit here with the spike in it?”
“We’re here.”
“Yeah, but what about this? It’s here and here and here.”
“That’s agriculture.”
“Or maybe it’s a tiny mine that’s not on the map at all.”
“What was the fourth thing again?” asked Helen. “You said before that you thought of four.”
“Mien, as in facial expression.”
“That still leaves me with only three.”
“Mien, mine as in a hole in the ground, the kind of mine that explodes, and the stuff in a pencil.”
“That’s what it’s called in French? La mine? I didn’t know that,” said Helen pensively. “But I can’t imagine someone would make such a big deal over it, kidnapping and killing people, if it was about the pencil lead. Even if it was made of gold.”
“How much would something like that be worth?”
“A couple hundred dollars maybe. A hundred. No idea. But not more than a wedding ring. And you said the guy is unbelievably rich? Landmines are the most obvious thing. Except that as far as I know, landmines aren’t worth much either. They blow up and that’s it.”
“What if it were something bigger? Real weapon technology?”
“You know my opinion. First the doctor. S
econd Bassir. Because you can tell me all sorts of things about pit mines and landmines. But the most concrete thing you have to go on is still the guy in the villa.”
“And what about this? Look, the little black box with the red dot inside. That’s uranium.”
“That’s almost an entire finger’s distance away.” Helen put her finger down on the map to measure. Her finger was 300 kilometers long. “It’s halfway to the Congo.”
He thought for a long time and then asked, without looking Helen in the eyes: “Where’d you get it anyway? What are you doing running around with a map of natural resources?”
“It’s an ordinary map,” said Helen, turning the map over. “I never even looked at the back. And—why are you looking at me like that? What, am I a suspect now, too?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to ask again. Cosmetics?”
“Yes.”
“Are you’re a saleswoman?”
“Larouche is the second-largest cosmetics company in the US, and I’m supposed to—”
“And when you were disembarking the ship, your sample case, of all things, happened to fall overboard?”
“A boy yanked it out of my hand.”
“And you don’t have anything else… I mean… that could perhaps…”
“Legitimize me? Heavens. The replacement case won’t arrive for a few more days.”
“I know, I shouldn’t—”
“Don’t start again. Why don’t you tell me what sausages are supposed to mean. Two little sausages.”
“My friend and I. Cetrois.”
“That’s what I mean. What makes you so sure that it’s a friend of yours? Because the enemy of your enemy is your friend?”
“It just makes the most sense.”
“And even if he is your friend: the fact that he snatched the moped and left you behind in the barn, couldn’t that have been the end of a friendship?”
“It could have been anything.”
“Right. And nothing about it makes sense. Maybe Cetrois is a friend of the four men and is trying to cheat them? Maybe he is your friend after all and he smashed your skull, and the fat man was just taking credit for it?”
“This is getting really far-fetched now.”
“Or there is no Cetrois. The three men made him up because they wanted to cover up their own deceit.”
“They didn’t seem that way… I heard them before the fourth one was even there. They seemed helpless and dimwitted.”
“Fine. Let us suppose they’re helpless and dimwitted, and helplessness and dimwittedness induces one to tell the truth, which I doubt. Then the only thing you can conclude from the sentence ‘Cetrois took off with it into the desert’ is: first, there is a Cetrois. And second, that he took off into the desert with something. But whether that has anything to do with you and Adil Bassir’s mine is still completely up in the air.”
“If he destroys the mine.”
“Yes, but you heard: What if he deploys the line. And even if that is the case, how do you want to find this Cetrois in a city of a million people, and five million with the slums? Have you ever seen the phonebooks here? And I seriously doubt they have a population registry anywhere.”
29
Tourist Information
I am certain that in summer he must have worn light prunella shoes with mother-of-pearl buttons at the side.
DOSTOEVSKY
IN THE RIGHT WEATHER CONDITIONS and when the wind came from the ocean, it was possible all the way up at the bungalow to hear the soft lapping of the waves through the open window. The bay, surrounded by mountains, focused the sound and carried it into the ears of those who lay half asleep. The man without memory had turned away from the window and closed his eyes. Fatuous thoughts of eternity and exalted heights that contrasted with his own unimportance swirled around his tired night-time brain, and he awoke with pain in his entire body. There was a shadow in the middle of the room. At first he thought it was an illusion. But the shadow moved: a woman in jeans and a tight T-shirt, barefoot. She was standing in front of the chair where he had laid his clothes the preceding evening. She was in the process of turning out the pockets of his suit. She felt the waistband and then noiselessly placed the pants down on the chair again. Next she examined the jacket, from which clumps of sand fell. She checked the inside pocket, the two other pockets, and ran her thumb and forefinger along the seams. She picked up a brown loafer, pulled out the liner and looked inside the empty shoe. Shook the heel, put the shoe back down and reached for the second one. Before she could turn around and look at the bed he closed his eyes. But he couldn’t hold out for long.
“Did you hit pay dirt?” he asked.
“Only a pencil stub,” answered Helen without the slightest hint of guiltiness.
“I know.” He sat up in bed.
“And a keychain.”
“Yeah.”
“Does the name mean anything to you?”
She held his jacket up by both shoulders. A little white square of cloth was sewn inside the collar. On it, in dark-gray thread: CARL GROSS.
“Isn’t it the name of the maker?”
“I think so, too. Though I’ve never heard of that company.”
Helen retrieved a razorblade from the bathroom and cut the tag out while sitting on the corner of the bed. On the back the threads were neat, long, dark-gray parallels, machine-sewn, very obviously the manufacturer’s name. Helen pressed the tag to his forehead.
“Would you object to my calling you that anyway? Because, somehow I just have to call you something. Carl.”
“Carl?”
“Carl.”
“There must be something else,” he said, fishing a little reddish snippet of paper with blackened edges from out of the pocket of the suit pants. Name, colon. Nothing else.
During breakfast, Helen leaned her head in her left hand, her cigarette sticking straight up, and made a game of addressing him as Carl in every sentence. “Sugar with your coffee, Carl? Why did you burn your ID, Carl? There was no talk of hippies yesterday. Carl.”
“What did I say?”
“Guys.”
Helen brought a yellow blazer and salmon-colored Bermuda shorts out of the bedroom. It took her two cups of coffee and four cigarettes before she had convinced Carl to at least try on her clothes. They fitted him like a glove.
“You can take your things to the hotel later.”
“I look like a canary.”
“They’ll be ready by tomorrow.”
Afterward Helen drove the Honda to the American consulate, where, she said, she needed to get a little information, while Carl took a walk up to the Sheraton. After he had dropped off his clothes at the hotel cleaners (and used the opportunity to present himself for the first time as “Carl Gross, number 581d”), he asked the hotel employee whether he knew on the off chance a Cetrois, Monsieur Cetrois. Yes, a native of Targat. No, not a hotel guest. Probably not.
But the man didn’t know any Cetrois and summoned a second employee, who likewise didn’t know anything. The first employee called a third employee and the second a fourth, and before it could become a scene, Carl gave the men a baksheesh from a bundle of small bills Helen had given him, thanked them and left.
Against the explicit advice of his friend, he headed down toward Targat. He saw friendly faces, he saw unfriendly faces, he read street signs and company plaques. A lawyer named Croisenois. On a stone was written: In memoriam Charles Boileau. He tentatively asked a passer-by, but the nearer he got to the center of town the more frequently he himself was spoken to. With the yellow blazer and Bermuda shorts he looked like a very eccentric, very rich tourist, and in the streets around the souk he couldn’t take five steps without men rushing up to him with the most affectionately familiar words and gestures. Helpful young layabouts, charlatans, merchants greeted him with handshakes. What they wanted from him was written on most of their faces, but he was plagued by the suspicion that they might know him from a previous life.
But asking
the men questions was futile. With an eager “How are you?” they put a heavy arm around the shoulders of their dear old friend and tried to steer him into little shops where they or their cousins indiscriminately hawked spices, sandals, thuya-wood boxes, colorful cloth, plastic spoons and sunglasses.
In order to abbreviate the process, he suddenly changed his strategy. In a slightly less lively street he put a look on his face as if lost in thought, then went up to people giving every indication that he was happy to run into them again, and asked where they had last seen each other or whether Monsieur Cetrois had already been there that morning. He acted as if he were meeting his friend, his enemy, his brother-in-law, his debtor. He acted as if he had seen him only fifteen minutes ago, or gave the impression that Monsieur Cetrois lived right around here, just forgot his address. He described an average Arab, a Frenchman, a black man. But nobody seemed to have ever heard of a man by this name. The only result of his research was a cluster of street kids who trailed along behind him and promised to produce a Monsieur Cetrois of any description, tall, slim, short, bearded, fat, light-skinned, black, rich, stinky or wiry, for a couple of copper coins or a ride on a bumper car. In the end he sat down at a street café, exhausted.
He had already drunk half of his mint tea when his gaze fell on the sign above the entrance to the next-door building: Central Commissariat.
His fear of the police was unshakably strong, but at the same time he had to fight the gravitational pull the building seemed to have on him: where if not there would one find information about missing persons?
He saw two policemen step out of the door, talking, not more than twenty meters away. One of them clearly had a weapon bulging underneath his clothes and he let his eyes glide over the crowd while he ran his fingers through his hair. He froze with his finger still in his hair, nudged his partner’s arm, and gestured with his chin in the direction of the café where the lone guest sat there in a yellow blazer… or had been sitting there until two seconds ago.
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