Basic Law

by J Sydney Jones

The stairs are another point of pride for him, something to keep the pig’s revenge from his own veins, and he is breathing hard, the carry-on and portable typewriter feeling twice their weight by the time he reaches the third floor.

  But he stops halfway to the lock with his key: the door is already open a crack. He looks quickly right and left in the dimness of the hall and sees nothing. The radio is on in Frau Bechmann’s flat next door: opera. Otherwise no sign of life on the third floor. He gets the same eerie feeling he had at Reni’s farmhouse yesterday and is tempted to simply retrace his steps downstairs and fetch Frau Kulahy and her dog.

  But there are a thousand explanations for my door being ajar, he tells himself. Maybe I didn’t lock it properly before leaving.

  But he knows he did, knows he always double-checks locks and gas burners before leaving the flat.

  Or Frau Kulahy had to check on something while I was away.

  Which is another crock: Frau Kulahy never checks on anything.

  Kramer is still doing mental calculus when suddenly the door opens inward, and he jerks into an approximation of a combative posture, holding the key like a stiletto.

  The person on the inside comes into view finally, and Kramer lets out air like a punctured tire. “Randall! What are you doing here?”

  Randall, too, is startled to come face-to-face with somebody at the door and drops the string bag he is carrying, then immediately embraces Kramer. Kramer allows the embrace but does not return it. Randall hugs some more, then finally notices the lack of response from Kramer.

  “It’s nice to be wanted,” he says, letting go of Kramer and bending down to retrieve the shopping bag. “No ‘How you doing, buddy?’ or ‘Where you been?’” He glances at the key in Kramer’s hand, still gripped like a knife. “Put that away, Sam, before you do someone harm.”

  Kramer pockets the key and grins at his old friend, still sporting the signature shaved scalp and thick ginger beard like an upside down head. Still the lanky down-at-the-heels appearance that oddly wins the most beautiful of women for him. They want to protect him, feed him. Randall ends up sleeping with them as if he’s doing them all a favor.

  “I was just going out to the local pub to get some beer. You used to keep it by the case, Sam. What’s the deal?”

  “You’ve got money to buy beer with?” It’s news to Kramer. “What have you done, joined the great working washed?”

  “Ha-ha. Take that as a laugh. Actually, I found a few schillings around the flat.” Unembarrassed, no contrition. The most natural thing in the world to go poking around another person’s belongings and pocket any money you can find.

  Which gives Kramer another idea. “How did you get in here?”

  An impish grin from Randall. “The porter. She remembered me from last time. I told her I was invited. Nice woman. She needs work on her legs, though. Painful.” He shakes his head. “Could have been attractive in her day.”

  Kramer can think of many adjectives to fit Frau Kulahy, but attractive is not one of them. Another Randall conquest.

  “I brought a bone for the dog,” Randall adds. “She seemed to think that made me okay.”

  Kramer stands on the landing a moment longer, saying nothing, wondering if he can deal with his old friend now, feeling as low as he does. He finally decides that, in fact, Randall may be the perfect tonic to his experiences in Germany.

  “You heard about Reni?”

  Randall nods, raising his eyebrows. “Couldn’t come to the funeral, Sam. Don’t believe in them. Too damn sad. Like hospitals. But I thought maybe you could use a little diversion when you came back. A little of the old arm-bending at the local pub?”

  Another smile from Kramer: he has cut down on the booze in the last two years. Told himself the old hard-drinking days are past. But Randall—the global village idiot with a network of friends around the world whom he visits on a nonstop basis—is right. A little therapeutic drinking may be in order. A little of the old Wirkungstrinken, drinking for effect, as the Austrians say.

  “Funny thing is she called me only a few weeks ago.”

  This surprises Kramer. “Reni?”

  “Yeah. I mean, didn’t call me. No one knows where I’ll be day to day. Not even me. But she called my dear old mom in Boise. Only address Reni had for me, I guess. I finally got the message a couple of days ago at the Poste Restante in Pisa. Just after I saw the notice in the papers of her death.”

  “What did she want?”

  Randall tugs at his thick beard, squints incomprehension.

  “No idea. Just wanted to find out where I was, according to the Mater. But was very particular that the old girl get her name right. Spelled it out R-for-Richard style at long distance rates.”

  They continue standing in the gloomy corridor for several moments, the faint strains of opera coming from Frau Bechmann’s.

  “Why the suspicious look, Sam? Maybe she just wanted to say good-bye to old friends. Maybe she already decided on ending things and just wanted to tie everything up.”

  Kramer is sure of very little in the world, but knows for a dead certainty that Reni was not the tying-up sort.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kramer awakens with a headache of monumental proportions, fumbles with the sliding off-button on the clock radio before it has a chance to jangle his nerves, and then suddenly swings his legs out of bed.

  Fight the pain with movement, he figures, sitting upright abruptly.

  By the time his head stops spinning, he has decided that speed is not a good idea. Take it slowly this morning: slow and easy.

  Randall is still snoring on the couch, the floor in front of him littered with empty green and brown bottles of Gösser beer, a nearly empty bottle of not very old slivovitz menacing from the marble-topped end table. Kramer makes a cross with his fingers to ward off evil as he passes by the scene of carnage, hurrying to the bathroom.

  A shower and shave later, with a cup of coffee in hand, he feels a little more human, but very little. Randall is still snoring; morning ablutions do not disturb him, so accustomed is he to sleeping on other people’s couches.

  Kramer forces himself to eat dried toast, to get something in his stomach to soak up the bile, and thinks about last night. Dinner at the local gasthaus accompanied by several beers until closing time at ten, then more beers to-go and sitting up till two in the morning blathering on. Randall discovered the slivovitz somewhere in between, in the hidden recesses of the old Tyrolean hope chest Kramer uses as both liquor and record cabinet. He refuses to upgrade to CDs; just one more ploy to keep people consuming. Just as he refuses to give up the Underwood at the office; let the bright young kids fresh out of school click away on computers. He’ll stick to forefingering the old typewriter, thank you very much.

  By the time the schnitzels arrived last night, Kramer had told Randall about the missing memoirs, or the memoirs that never were, and about the general bad vibes he had in Bad Lunsburg. By the time they got onto the slivovitz back at the apartment, Randall had convinced him that it was all paranoia.

  “Reni’s dead, Sam. That’s the bad vibes you’re getting. Gone. Out of your life forever. Not just out of the picture. So maybe now you can get on with your own life.”

  Kramer acted like he didn’t know what Randall was getting at, utterly clueless. But it was Randall’s old message: “You fuck up your marriages, Sam, because you’re still half in love with Reni. A woman needs more than half a man.”

  “Lovely advice coming from the perennial bachelor,” Kramer would generally counter on these occasions, but not last night. He knew Randall was right. Finally right.

  Kramer goes into the living room, puts the pot of coffee and places an empty cup on the floor by the couch for Randall when he awakens, clears away some of the bottles, and then gets his Barbour oilskin from the hall wardrobe. R
andall’s beat-up old leather pack rests in the bottom of the wardrobe: it contains a change of clothes and a book or two, Kramer figures. That’s called traveling light through life. No home, no job. The last twenty or so years spent on the road, crashing with friends.

  Kramer leaves a message on the hall table for Randall to meet him at Koranda’s in the late afternoon, one of the few inner-city taverns not to have gone all modern and glitzy. No ferns, no postmodern frills. He picks his cap off the benedictory hand of the fifteenth-century, four-foot wooden Madonna standing by his door. He was lucky enough to find her at a flea market outside Budapest; now she has become his good luck totem. He touches her cheek coming and going from his flat. Today, he gives her a double rub.

  Kramer walks to the office under a sky showing blue once in a while between high, scudding clouds. Brisk wind, not cold but bracing. Last night’s snow has turned to filthy slush in the streets, leaving a white blanket in the parks and on tree limbs. The air is therapeutic.

  By the time he gets to the office of the Daily European, he wishes he carried a hip flask, but fetches a coffee from the stand-up bar on the street level instead. Lots of cream; he leaves a brown lace collar of residue on the lip of his cup after he drains the coffee.

  Kate is at the front desk when he enters.

  “So he talked to you?” she says looking up from the copy she’s editing.

  Kramer chooses to ignore this, knowing the implication is that Marty ordered him back.

  “We got any stringers at the Belgrade conference?” he asks.

  She’s gone back to copyediting, shaking her head at his question.

  “Marty called yet this morning?”

  Another shake of her head.

  “Good.” He heads to his office and sags into his desk chair.

  Kate has arranged the last two days of wire service clippings on his desk. The rip sheets of today’s are there, as well. He glances at these, gets a feel for terrain from a Reuters story datelined Belgrade and another from AP. Then he remotes the small TV in the corner on to the CNN channel, volume down low until a story comes up from Belgrade, and he gets pad and pencil out, taking notes.

  Two hours later, he’s got five hundred words on a conference he hasn’t been to in the flesh. There’s a snappy one-graph lede, extensive quotes, a second-graph exclusive in the form of doubts from an unidentified source that the conference will succeed, and a zinger of a wrap that resonates of Hemingway at the Paris peace talks in the 1920s.

  He pulls the last of three double-spaced sheets out of the carriage of the old typewriter, scrawls a pound sign at the bottom of the page to note the end, and then straightens the three pages together by sliding them through his hands, clacking the bottom of the pages on the desktop.

  Kate is checking her eye makeup in a compact mirror as he opens his door, and she quickly puts the mirror away. She does not like people to know she is vain: her good looks are supposed to come naturally. Kramer knows that she actually eats meat if it is disguised well enough, though she professes the strictest vegetarian diet. It’s the sort of intimate knowledge that makes them enemies. He hands her the story, and she looks at the pages quizzically for a moment, as if it is a pastrami sandwich. She flips through the pages, and her look changes to one of outrage.

  “Oh no you don’t, Kramer. I thought I heard the TV on in there. This is called plagiarism.”

  “Nonsense. Simply the highest form of flattery. Creative journalism.”

  “Like creating something out of nothing. Who the hell is this anonymous source in graph two?”

  Kramer shrugs. “He refuses to be identified.” Kramer is having fun with her; Kate is always so easy to shock.

  “You made that up, didn’t you? That’s illegal. You’re faking the news.”

  “No legalities involved, Kate. I assure you.”

  “Unethical, then.” She scowls at the pages.

  “More accurate. But since when have ethics had anything to do with journalism? Marty will love it. Our little scoop. Now do a quick edit and fax it off to Paris, please.”

  He says the last like a command, not a request, and she stops protesting.

  Kramer is happy with himself. For once, he’s won a battle with the high priestess of ethics. He turns to go back to his office, but she gets the parting shot, “If you insist on using that Stone Age typewriter, at least change the ribbon periodically. You do know how to change ribbons, don’t you?”

  After lunch, Kramer does penance for the night of debauchery, for the faked article—there’s a laundry list of sins—by editing a backlog of “when” pieces—articles supplied by stringers throughout Central Europe, which can be used on slow news days when there is space, or when Kramer just doesn’t feel like coming into the office.

  A couple of good pieces among the detritus: one on preparations for the fortieth anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, still three years off; another on the former communist mayor of Bratislava, now a garbage man in Vienna.

  Three hours of good work; rewriting, rearranging, almost like doing real writing. Kramer loses himself completely in time, a good feeling, but by four thirty, the lazy part of him is beginning to nudge and insinuate itself. Thirst and indolence set in.

  He leaves his desk as is, goes out into the front office, and is surprised to find Randall there, chatting up Kate.

  She reddens when she sees Kramer and looks down to her desk, as if she’s been talking about him.

  “Didn’t know you two knew each other,” he says, going to fetch his cap and coat.

  “Koranda’s is closed,” Randall says, perched on the edge of Kate’s desk. Her desk is the least perchable place in the world, Kramer thinks. “I thought I’d meet you here, the navel of news production, as it were. The nexus of the information empire.”

  He is being the grand Randall, Kramer notices. The transatlantic schizophrenic with his phony accent somewhere between New York and London. His wise-guy routine sure to please the girls.

  Randall turns his gaze on Kate now. “And Miss Ferguson and I are only just now getting acquainted, no thanks to you. You’ve been hiding her. Not nice, Sam.”

  She smiles at this, a blush. A flutter of mascara-free eyelashes.

  Coquetry! Kramer is aghast.

  “I thought Koranda’s was only closed on Mondays.” Kramer throws on his coat, wraps a Kelly-green wool scarf tight around his throat as if the warm scarf will protect him from a virus—he’s felt a tickle there all day, and the last thing he wants is a sore throat.

  “Closed as in closed down,” Randall says, and hops off the desk, looking pleased with himself.

  “No,” Kramer says. “Don’t tell me. Another groovy coffee shop opening? A boutique for infants and Afghan hounds? I liked this frigging city better when it was stone-cold poor. When having a camera was a big deal. Shit.”

  “Easy, Sam. We’ll go somewhere else.” Randall smiles at Kate to show how unconcerned he is. “It’s just a restaurant, after all.”

  “Just a restaurant! You know Heimito von Doderer had a Stammtisch there? Even wrote part of his last novel there? That Girardi himself used to tipple there after walking the boards at the Burgtheater?”

  They are both looking at him in incomprehension.

  “We’re talking about tradition,” he goes on, knowing he’s sounding like an old fart ready to embark on the one about the younger generation having no morals. “About the soul of a city rooted in its public places. But this city is going all private on us, all consumption-oriented. Might as well be in the States.”

  Randall rolls eyeballs at this. “Yikes, Sam. Not the old expatriate’s lament, please. We’ll be after boring the pants off Miss Ferguson here.” He looks her up and down lasciviously, “Which would not be a bad idea, come to think of it.”

  She laughs at this. Well, actually giggles. Giggles! For Christ’s sake, Kr
amer thinks. Had anybody else said this, she would be suing for harassment.

  “Come on, Randall. Let’s be off. You’re embarrassing the woman.”

  “Oh, not at all,” she says, looking all business once again.

  Randall smiles at Kramer; his ‘didn’t I tell you so’ grin. But it is soon wiped away.

  “I think he’s cute,” Kate says. “In a retro sort of way. An aging Don Juan with a definite Peter Pan thing. Anthropologically interesting.”

  Kramer suppresses a laugh. Two minutes later, they set off into the late afternoon. It has already gone dark and streetlamps glow orange, snow gently whorling around the orbs of light. Pedestrians bustle along the Kärntner Strasse, shopping bags in hand, hats pulled down, collars up. The lights from shops spill out onto the busy street, and for a moment, everything is okay with Kramer. This is the old life he has come to love; this is the heart of Europe that he feeds on, this scene like a set piece out of a movie.

  By the end of the week, Kramer is feeling liverish. Too much booze; too many late nights. He can’t face an entire weekend of more of the same.

  Late Friday afternoon, home from the bureau, he’s about to give Randall the fish-and-friends speech, ready to be on his own again. Ruin his health in his own good time, not in Randall’s. But Randall’s already packed and at the door when he arrives. No good-byes for him.

  The phone sounds from the kitchen before either of them can speak. Kramer lets it ring for a moment.

  “Get it, Sam. It might be my ride.”

  Kramer reaches it on the sixth ring and identifies himself by his phone number.

  “Herr Kramer?”

  The voice is tentative, young-sounding with that softness of tone he usually associates with the Left or New Agers.

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Klaus Pahlus from Real Editions in Berlin.”

  A pause for Kramer to pick up on it. He does not recognize the name or the publishers.

  “Yes?”

  “I was notified by Renata Müller’s solicitors that you are her literary executor.”