Matala

by Craig Holden

  “Darcy,” I said, nudging her awake. “Hurry up.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Do you have some dollars? Anything?”

  “Why?”

  “Coke.”

  This brought her up. She did not even look to see what I was talking about but stood on her seat and dug into her purse, which was on top of her pack on the shelf above us. She handed me a five.

  “No ones?”

  “Just take it.”

  I leaned out with the note pinched between my fingers, and a boy was there immediately.

  “Coke,” I said.

  The boy held up a single can.

  “No,” I said. “More.” I held up five fingers.

  The boy said something and looked around. There wasn’t time to barter here.

  “Three,” I said.

  “No,” the boy said and held up two. I gave him the five.

  We got sandwiches, which Darcy was loath to trust but hungry enough to risk.

  “Does anyone have water?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me try.” She leaned out the window and called out “water” in four different languages, but none of the sellers reacted. “Coke!” she said, and several came running then. She managed to buy four more cans (at a much better rate than I’d managed) just as the train began to move.

  And so we were saved by Western goods and currency. The following morning we awoke, stinky and miserable and foulmouthed, to Greece gliding past our windows.

  “I’d pay a thousand dollars for a shower right now,” Darcy said.

  “All right. You give me a thousand dollars, and I’ll see that you get a shower as soon as we hit Athens.”

  She laughed.

  “Are you having fun?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you’d call it, but it’s something.”

  “You’re happy.”

  “Mmm. I am now.”

  “Amazing what a few cans of Coke’ll do for you.”

  “That and you.”

  “You’d rank me up there with a can of Coke?”

  “Higher, even. A little. Are you amazed?”

  “No one’s ever said anything so nice about me.”

  “Oh, I know lots of nice things to say about you.”

  “Really?”

  “Shall I say them?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “Mmm, we’ll find a time—and a place.”

  “I’d kiss you—”

  “I’d let you—”

  There had been no way for us to brush our teeth during these forty hours.

  “Soon.”

  “Soon,” she said.

  Eight

  J USTINE FOUND THEM SITTING ON a wooden bench near the front doors of the Athens station, looking displaced and tired. Exhausted. As if they’d been made to walk all the way from Venice. She couldn’t figure it. She’d dozed most of the way after the little pseudo-Commie-fuck shakedown—a desperate bit of post-Tito machismo, even by the woman, that you knew was a kind of last hurrah because that slum country was coming apart at the seams, or was going to soon enough, and everyone knew it, even the pathetic border guards. That she’d been sitting upright the whole way and that she’d had nothing to eat or drink mattered not at all. She could think of nothing she’d rather have done than just sit somewhere, alone, unknown, unspoken to, and looked to by no one for sustenance or courage or sex or ideas or even a goddamn smile. That and sleeping. It was all she was planning to do on the ship to Crete as well and once they got there. To sleep—it was her highest, most gnawing aspiration.

  “You two jessies look scared shitless,” she said to them. “Are you nervous or what?”

  “Do we know you?” Darcy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are we allowed to talk to her highness now?” The girl delivered this in her most exaggerated Little Bitch tone. “To be seen with you? To acknowledge that we know you?”

  “You did understand what that was all about, didn’t you?” Justine sat down beside them. “I mean, you did happen to notice what went on?”

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “Then why are you taking the piss now?”

  “That’s just me, I guess,” Darcy said. “Always making fun. But what else can I do? I’m just the stupid little girl along for the ride who you can use for whatever you need. Some cash? Some heavy lifting? A sucker for a little cross-border transportation? I’m your girl.”

  “You’d better shut up, sweet, or you’ll fuck us all up.”

  “Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”

  “So you couldn’t help it?” Justine said to Will. “Couldn’t manage to keep a secret from your new squeeze? Are you in love already, ickle boy?”

  “He didn’t say a word about anything,” Darcy said. “Not one. It’s just the same old boring thing—me not being quite as stupid as you make me out to be.”

  “Yes, yes, well, I can take it off your hands now if you find it so upsetting.”

  “The only thing that upsets me is that you didn’t ask. Didn’t bother to explain anything. You just set me up to take your fall.”

  “My fall?”

  “If that’s how you want it, then fine. Consider me set up.”

  “I was trying to keep us all from copping it, you stupid little cow.”

  “And we didn’t,” Darcy said, “so you’re a genius. But keep this in mind: You’re also without your precious little package.”

  Justine looked at her and then at Will. “What does that mean?”

  Darcy shrugged.

  “Will?”

  “I have no idea, Justine. You didn’t bother to tell me anything, either. She didn’t tell me anything. So how am I supposed to know anything? I don’t.”

  “Well, that’s true. Christ forbid you should have to climb out of the bliss of your ignorance for a moment. Can we just get on with it? I’m very bored right now.”

  “And I’m tired,” Darcy said. “Can we sleep?”

  “Not yet,” said Justine. “We need to be on the ship that leaves today.”

  “Tonight,” said Darcy. “I picked up a Let’s Go in Venice, and I’ve had a lot of time to read it. I found a place where you can pay for just half a day—the Merry Trumpet Guesthouse.”

  Justine said, “It’s not some posh hotel, just dorm rooms and cots, like a hostel.”

  “So you know it.”

  “Course.”

  “Well, I don’t care at this point. And I assume I’m still paying, so I don’t really want a hotel. The credit cards are finished now. Whatever we have, that’s all there is.”

  “It’s never all there is.”

  “You’re right,” said Darcy. “But I just want a nap, so can we go there?”

  “You do still have it, don’t you? The package?” said Justine.

  “Probably,” Darcy said.

  JUSTINE REMEMBERED A LITTLE GYRO stand in the alley behind the guesthouse and took them there after they’d dropped off their bags. They stood against a wall, eating like refugees and drinking Pepsis.

  “God,” said Will, “it’s the best food I’ve ever had.”

  “The best?” Little Bitch said in her finest faux petulance.

  “Second best. Rome was the best.”

  Now the girl smiled.

  “It’s so cute,” said Justine. “The two of you already collecting memories.”

  “Justine,” said Will, “can we stop now?”

  “I assumed we had stopped,” she said. “I thought that’s what this was all about.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Really?”

  “Listen,” said Darcy, “I’m beat. You two can work this out. I’m going to lie down.” She left them, but Justine could tell that Will didn’t want her to go.

  FOR A TIME THEY WALKED without speaking. The day w
as glorious, and when they passed along certain roads where the city opened up, they could see the Acropolis. When that happened, Justine felt the way she had felt that day in Venice—as if she were inhabiting a postcard. There were no clouds or even hints of clouds in the sky, and the color of it was so concentrated, so simultaneously sharp and deep that after a while it hurt to look at it. It was not usually like that here with the city’s chronic polluted haze. Before, the sky had always looked diluted, washed out, but today it could be a sky from Montana or Iowa or that place in Virginia where she had finally found Will. It was certainly not a sky you ever saw in England.

  “So,” she said.

  “So what happened on the train?”

  “I managed to get my name on a list a number of years ago. It was a stupid thing that shouldn’t have happened, but it did. I got out of any real trouble, but I was on the list. Apparently I still am.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “It wasn’t pleasant.”

  “Right.”

  “So,” she said again.

  “I don’t know,” Will answered. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “With regard to what?”

  “Anything. Any fucking thing.”

  “Poor Will.”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I’m not, baby boy. I’m really not. I feel bad.”

  “Why?”

  “For you. About all of this.”

  “All—”

  “This shit. We have to do this, and I’m sorry about that. I wish I hadn’t had to drag you into it.”

  “Did you? Have to, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. You can leave.”

  “When?” “Anytime you want. Right now.”

  “I don’t want to leave.”

  WHEN SHE FINALLY FOUND HIM, she’d been looking for a year. The family who had taken him from England many years before had done a real job covering everything. They had changed his name and had even gone so far as to get him a U.S. birth certificate with a new name, which she wasn’t sure was even legal. She’d had nothing to go on except the name of the man in London who had arranged everything. And it hadn’t been strictly legal either, of course, which had made finding him after all that time tricky. When she knocked on the door of a scrubby flat in Roxbury, he answered. She said who she was, and he just looked at her as if she were a dream he’d forgotten to wake up from.

  “How ever did you find me?” he said.

  “With some difficulty,” she told him.

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I had a bit of a head start. I’m Maurice’s ex-wife. Did you know we’d got married?”

  “I had no idea.” It was through Maurice, in fact, this business they were in, that she had met this man during the marketing of the infant Will.

  “I want to find him,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I need to.”

  He shook his head and then asked her in. After he brewed a pot and poured for them both in large stained crockery mugs, he said, “Leave him alone. Why upset things now? He was a baby. I doubt he knows he had a life before the one he has now.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t.”

  “So why?”

  “I said I don’t know. Maybe I won’t bother him. Maybe I just need to see him, see that he’s okay. Maybe I’ll just look and leave.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. They were a good family. Solid. Well enough off.”

  “What did he do? The father.”

  He looked at her for a long and uncomfortable moment, as if he were deciding something, then finally said, “It was some kind of foreign service.”

  “He was a diplomat?”

  “I don’t know, really. He was with the American government, and he could afford our fees, yours and mine and Maurice’s. I kept no records, you know.”

  “Nothing?”

  “It was safer that way for everyone.”

  “Except maybe the boy.”

  “Do you really think that’s true? You didn’t then.”

  “No,” she said. “I still don’t.” She began to cry then and didn’t know why. She had no stake in this, not really. He’d be an utter stranger to her if she were ever to track him down. Perhaps it was just out of frustration at running into a wall after months of on-and-off looking for this man. Perhaps underneath it all she still felt something for the boy. Perhaps that was what this was about, although she didn’t know how it could be.

  “I could pay you,” she said. The flat was as shabby inside as the neighborhood was outside. What he had been two decades earlier, whatever sort of hustler deal maker, he wasn’t anymore. She imagined he had done some prison time, though she had no way of knowing that.

  “How much?”

  “How much would you need? And what would it buy me?”

  He crossed his legs and looked out his window into the cracked but quiet street. “I remember a last name,” he said.

  “That’s all?”

  “And that he, the father, had a certain mark, an extreme mark.”

  “No first name?”

  “I’m afraid not, though I remember his wife’s, oddly enough. She was so happy, she wept all the way from Winchester back to London.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t care.”

  She had two hundred quid with her, which she laid on the low table in the center of the room.

  “Dolores,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Not at all. And the husband was Mr. Symons, with a y and one m.”

  “Right.”

  “His hands were all scarred. He’d been burned.” He rubbed his own together when he said this. “You almost never saw it. He wore gloves most of the time, but on the day we picked up the boy, he didn’t for some reason.”

  “My God,” she said. “I’d forgotten that. The scarring.”

  “Yes. It looked rather like plastic, didn’t it?”

  JUSTINE AND WILL WALKED FOR nearly an hour, saying little until they finally approached the guesthouse once more. Justine felt nicely exhausted. It was a good idea that Little Bitch had had, to find a place to nap before their departure. She really was a smart girl.

  “What do you want, Will?” she asked when they turned back onto the street of the Merry Trumpet.

  “Just not to have to worry so much.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “That’s easy to say, but starvation makes it kind of hard to do.”

  “You haven’t starved. Don’t be dramatic.”

  “I’ve been hungry. Weak from being hungry. Dizzy. It was never like that before. We had fun and plenty of whatever we needed. But something happened. You changed.”

  “I know.”

  He sat on a bench and looked across at the guesthouse. He said, “And that’s all right. But if I need to start making my own way, I have to know.”

  “What about us?”

  “What about us? I don’t know what you want. That little thing at the hostel was the first time in like two months.”

  “Little thing,” she said. “That’s what it was?”

  “No. I liked it.”

  “I did, too. But you’re shagging the little bitch now, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t, please.”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “Where would we have? We’ve been on a stinking train for two days, and you can’t do much there.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you two.”

  “Look, I don’t know what I’m doing—with her, with you, with whatever.”

  “Who do you want?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “If you’re not going to do anything, if you’re just going to be a meth-crazed depressive, then I don’t know if I want to be around you.”

  “But you still love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you shagging her?”

  “No, Justine. Fo
r Christ’s sake.”

  “Well, that night in Venice you sounded awfully fucking friendly.”

  “I didn’t know you were there. I was pretty plastered.”

  “All right,” she said. “Don’t get excited.” She sat beside him and put her hand on his arm, and when he didn’t pull away, she took that as a promising sign.

  HE HAD NEVER GLOMMED ON to the fact that their connection predated his meeting her in Virginia, though she knew that at times he had glimpsed the deeper linkage, recognized it—their physical similarity—but had no form to put it into, and so was unable to name it. There had been from the first a palpable vibe between them, and it had made things awkward as well as easy in the beginning, especially regarding their physical relationship. She’d never told him the story, in any case. She just showed up in his life one day, a happenstance meeting of strangers at a bar he frequented. He had no idea she’d been watching him for weeks, that she had managed with nothing more than his father’s last name, the fact of his government service, and the help of a very expensive private investigative service out of Arlington to track him to this small, pretty town on the suburban edge of northern Roanoke. He knew only that she was a woman who bought him a drink and with whom he’d felt an instant bond—and that he was looking for something the likes of which he hadn’t figured out until she offered him the chance to go on the road with her to see some of his country and who knew what else.

  Now, across from the Merry Trumpet in Athens, he stood up. What a lad he was, so strong and so tall.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Yes? Is it?”

  He nodded. “Now can we sleep?”

  “Do you still have that little bottle of candy I gave you?”

  “She’s got it.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I told her about it on the train. I was just going to leave it there. I didn’t want to worry about having it on me anymore. But she said she’d carry it.” He paused. “You don’t need one anyway. You should sleep while you can.”