by Bill Granger
He slumped but he was not unconscious. The first one took the pistol and slapped him with it. They dragged him across the cobblestones to the car. One of them went into the house and came out and said that Damon was dead. That made both of them want to hit him again. He felt the blows but he did not fall into unconsciousness.
He felt the car moving and looked hurriedly out the side window at the narrow street along the canal and the sleeping, shuttered houses with their quaint rooflines. The canal stretched out to the edge of the city and there was a towpath and barges sleeping at their piers. He saw a green sign printed in two languages:
BRUGES CENTRE VILLE
BRUGGE CENTRUM
He must have fallen unconscious then. When he opened his eyes, he was between the two men, his hands were tied again. The countryside was bright and flat under moonlight in the clear, November sky. The highway went on straight, without curves or rises. After a long time, they turned into a dirt road.
The headlights framed a weathered white house in the middle of farm fields. At the edge of the horizon, a slight gray light began to kindle dawn.
They dragged him out of the car and over to the house. One of them propped him against the wall with a pistol under his chin and Devereaux did not move. They were knocking on the door and making a lot of racket that echoed strangely in the silence of the autumn countryside.
The door opened and revealed a yellow rectangle of light. The man inside stepped back.
They pushed him inside and the place smelled stale and unused. The light came from a single lamp on a wooden table in the center of the room.
Devereaux blinked at the other man. He had a broad forehead and dark eyes. Devereaux felt the pain pulling him back to unconsciousness again. Someone said in French, “Put him in a chair, he’s going to pass out again.”
He felt the chair under him and opened his eyes.
He stared at the man in the chair opposite while the other men talked to each other in French.
The man in the chair on the other side of the table wore handcuffs as well and stared at Devereaux with a look of both shock and despair. His look mirrored the sick feeling in Devereaux’s guts.
It was Miki.
15
COINCIDENCES
Anna sat on the floor in her jeans and listened. She never wore anything but jeans unless she had to go to court with Stephanie. Those times, somewhat truculently, she agreed to dress as a little girl because Stephanie thought it best and because Stephanie had bought her the jeans in the first place. First one pair, then two, and now three. She washed them by hand, with reverence.
The music was acid, full of words that expressed an unearned contempt for the world. The blocks of notes had a comforting sameness and the boy with a girl’s voice on the tape lisped his contempt with ritual cant. It was like listening to the words in church.
“Can you turn it down, dear? I’m talking on the phone.”
Anna sighed and turned down the tape on her boom box and went to the door and looked at Stephanie.
Stephanie was sitting at her desk in her blue terrycloth robe. From the first, she had sheltered Anna—from the press, from the representatives of the United States and the Czech governments, from the various and inevitably strange religious figures who wanted to contact the little girl who saw a miracle. She had installed Anna in her own apartment on Seminary Avenue in the quaint Victorian neighborhood around DePaul University on the north side. The rooms were not so large, but the ceilings were high and the tall windows filled the rooms with the gloomy November light during the days.
Stephanie listened for a long time and Anna Jelinak listened at the door. Something made the little girl frown. She crossed back into her room and turned the boom box off and went back to the door.
“I don’t know, Kay,” Stephanie said at last. “You’re sure you’ll be fine with—”
She broke off and listened some more.
“You really should come here.”
She listened more.
“All right, then. All right. No. No. I won’t. No, it’s all right. Yes. I will. Yes. Yes. All right. See you in the morning. All right.”
She replaced the receiver. The night scratched against the tall windows. The street side of the apartment was colored by immense sodium vapor lights with an orange glow. The trees in the parkway were bare and the wind made the panes rattle.
“Are you all right?”
Stephanie glanced up at Anna at the door as though she were startled. Then she nodded and got up. She went through the apartment to the kitchen and checked the locks on the large kitchen door. There were grates on the kitchen window that opened on a gray wooden back porch. The door had a small pane of glass. The door carried three locks. She tugged at the door with her thin arms extended.
Next to the kitchen was a maid’s room with another window that opened above the gray backstairs that led down to the second floor of the three-flat building. The window was ungrated but someone would have to prop up a ladder on the stairs in order to reach the window. She checked the lock in the sash.
Stephanie went from room to room of the narrow flat, checking the locks on the tall windows that opened on narrow light wells between the row of brick three-flats along the block.
Anna trailed behind her. Because Stephanie said nothing, Anna felt afraid.
The front door led to the common hall and the stairs that connected the three apartments in the tall building. The stairs were steep and lighted. The front door was solid oak. She checked the locks on the front door. The top lock was a chain, the second a deadbolt, the third a second deadbolt.
When she was finished, they went into the front room and sat down in front of the nonfunctioning gas fireplace that contained a television set in the hearth. They always sat in front of the television set but Stephanie rarely turned it on.
“Kay called just now,” Stephanie said. Her voice sounded odd to Anna. There was a cold edge to it that did not contain life. Stephanie’s voice was usually loud or angry or even gentle, but it had life in it.
“Kay said a man attacked her in her apartment. She said she was fired this afternoon when she refused to dump the story.”
Anna sat on the straight chair and did not understand. She tried to smile through her puzzlement. It was the way you smiled at old people or crazy people, to make them understand you meant no harm.
“I’m sorry,” Stephanie said. She shook her head. She had very white skin and small dark curls. She tried to wear her hair straight and boyish and it came out curly and too feminine for her taste.
Anna appreciated the returning smile. Stephanie talked to her like an adult. Stephanie told her the first day she really didn’t believe in miracles or God but that she could appreciate people who did. They got along.
“I’m afraid because Kay is afraid and because I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What about this afternoon? When your mother talked to you?”
“I told you. She talked such a lot of nonsense to me.”
“Did she bring any message? From Anton or any of them?”
“No,” Anna said.
“Are you sure, Anna?”
Anna made a face and didn’t answer.
“Anna, are you sure?”
“Yes.” Her face got tighter.
“Anna, Kay Davis got fired.”
Anna blinked. What did it mean?
“Anna. Kay, our friend, Kay was fired and was told not to work on the story. On the story about you, Anna. And then she went home and a man got into her apartment and tried to kill her.”
Anna understood now. It was not so uncommon. On television, women were always being threatened, attacked, even killed. A man tried to kill the woman last night. Or the night before. And the woman who was raped and beaten. Was it last night? And Stephanie told her to keep the doors locked and not to answer the doorbell if it rang and everyone around her acted so afraid all the time, as though they expe
cted the worst to happen at any moment.
“Kay is all right,” Stephanie said, answering an unspoken question.
“That is good,” Anna said.
“You see why I’m upset,” Stephanie said. “Why I want you to think over very carefully if your mother said anything to you.”
What did she want to hear? Anna thought and frowned.
“Did she tell you anything might happen if you did not come home? Did she say that Anton Huss or someone might try to snatch you? You know, to kidnap you home? Did she say anything like that?”
Anna let her frown lighten. Was that it? “No. I don’t think so. My mother threatened me the first time. I told you.”
“But she threatened you like a mother.”
“She said she should have beaten me some more when I was a little girl. Before I became a movie star. Well, I told her it was too late for that.”
Stephanie concentrated. Her eyebrows almost met above her pretty straight nose. There was an air of intense, thin nervousness in all her gestures and facial expressions. She was pretty and men were a little afraid of her.
“I am really worried. I want to get police protection reinstalled.”
Anna nodded. She liked the policemen who had guarded them. The tall, blond one was nice to look at and he taught her to play cribbage. It would be nice to have a man around, Anna thought, and let a smile creep across her serious face.
Stephanie concentrated right through the smile. “I’ll get an order. I talked to Kay. She said she had a place to stay tonight, she said she would meet me in the morning at court. I am really worried about this—”
A tree branch scraped a window in the wind. The wind rattled the panes again. The night howled.
“Jesus,” Stephanie said. She got up and checked the locks on the front door again. She walked through the apartment and turned on lights and checked the windows again. She said aloud, “This is stupid, I am not going to be afraid.”
She made Anna afraid.
Anna went to her room and put on her robe and lay down on her bed and listened to heat clatter up through the radiator pipes. She closed her eyes and thought of the woman named Elena.
Elena Jelinak had a very pinched look to her as though she had been crying or drinking too much. Her hand shook when she talked to Anna.
“You have to stop this foolish thing,” Elena had said. “You shame me, you shame yourself, to say you are an orphan in the world. You know I am your mother.”
She said nothing to Elena that afternoon in the interview room. There were just Elena and Anna, two women who had lived together in four rooms in the old section of Prague down by the Charles Bridge. They had nothing to say to each other, Anna thought. She even thought Elena would agree with that.
“You did not see Jesus weep,” Elena said.
Anna said, “I saw it. My Infant of Prague.”
“Blasphemy,” said Elena. “This is nonsense. You have gotten so famous and proud because of the films—well, you are causing no end of trouble. What if I told you that the government is very worried about this?”
The thought had not occurred to Anna. Why would it possibly interest her what the government thought of anything?
“What do you want, Anna? You have everything.”
Anna had stared at the woman. She would never understand, not any of it. How could she explain to Elena that the Child was in the statue in their rooms in Prague, that she could pray to the Child and even talk to it? You had a mother and a father and you knew love. What is it that no one can love me? And then, one day in a strange city in a strange country, the Child comes to her again, and this time the Child weeps for her, for Anna Jelinak, who is not loved. In that act of love, the world opens for her. There is Stephanie with soft, kind words who shares her house and her warmth, and there is Kay Davis, who listens to her, who holds her in her arms when she weeps about the miracle she has seen. There is love and she feels it as solidly as she feels warmth, as she feels the luxury of silk beneath her fingers, as she can smell the newness of the world.…
She opened her eyes.
Stephanie had turned on the television and was watching the local news. The windowpanes continued to rattle and the steam pipes clanged and hissed their merry sounds of warmth. Comfort in the sounds, in the wind that cannot penetrate the windowpanes.
Anna padded on bare feet out of her bedroom and down the lighted corridor that connected all the rooms. She went into the living room and curled up on the couch without a word to watch the TV and to be in Stephanie’s presence. In the silence of the darkened room, they watched the images of the world on the screen and comforted each other with their presence, with the sounds of the artificial fireplace. Anna fell into a soft, drowsy sleep and Stephanie wrapped a blanket around her and she felt Stephanie’s light touch and the warmth and it was so good and safe to be here, she thought. It was almost the pleasant dream of her life to be here. It was the dream she could not explain ever to Elena, to anyone else except the beautiful Child who had wept for her when He saw her loneliness.
16
THE PRICE OF A SPY
The third man knew what he was doing. He made a plaster cast in the morning and put it on Devereaux’s left hand and it felt pretty good. The pain went away. They talked a lot in a strange language about his leg and finally wrapped it from knee to ankle in a stretch bandage. They gave him water and soup and bread.
He slept.
For the first time in his captivity, he had been fed enough to eat and he slept without restraints in a small bedroom at the back of the house. He thought of escape right away and the head man—his name was Cernan—told him that there was no real escape and that it was tedious to put a guard under his window, so they had locked the window and nailed it shut and if Devereaux wanted to break the glass, well, then they would catch him but they would have to chain him after that and his leg would never get healed that way. Cernan spoke English like a man measuring a room. The words were all very careful and exact.
He slept for a very long time. He made love to Rita in his dream again, the one that took place on the hill. After they made love, they were in Lausanne together, eating at the café below the university, and later they were talking about something in the apartment on the Rue de la Concorde Suisse when, suddenly, Colonel Ready walked into the room and he shot Devereaux without a word. Devereaux was dead and yet he was still conscious after death of what was going on. He couldn’t speak. Ready took Rita in his arms and she resisted him at first and she slapped him. Then, after a while, she began to kiss Ready as passionately as she had kissed Devereaux on the hillside earlier. Her lips opened wide and she devoured him, scraping at him with her teeth bared. She made growling noises and little moans and they fell on the floor and Ready was between her legs. He could see all this and he was dead and couldn’t speak.
He was bathed in sweat when he awoke. In the dim morning light, he saw he was not in chains and that his left hand was plastered. He groaned because the dream had been more real than all the other dreams. He still wore his blood-spattered, urine-soaked trousers. He limped to the window and looked out at the flat, wet landscape all around, without sign of life or other houses or cars.
The door opened and the third man stood in the frame. He nodded at Devereaux and made a “come on” motion with his finger.
Devereaux limped across the room on bare feet to the door and through to the next room. He sat down at a table in the kitchen of the house. Miki was not there. Only the first man, the one who had been waiting for him with Miki the night before. Or was it two nights before? The dreams mixed up the days and once, in dreaming, he thought he was making love to Rita in the cold bedroom of the safe apartment in Lausanne.
He picked up the bowl of coffee and drank the milky hot liquid until his mouth was scalded. He put it down and stared at the man.
The man made a motion to the third man to join the second one outside the house. There were three of them and there was Miki. This one was the leader
they called Cernan.
Cernan made a face. He opened a package of Marlboro cigarettes and offered one to Devereaux. Devereaux shook his head. Cernan lit the cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter.
“You are a problem, Mr. Devereaux,” Cernan said.
Devereaux waited and said nothing. Silence is always an edge if you can maintain it. The advantage might be nothing but a gram on your side of the scale, but it was just that much more.
“I came here for a defector, not an American spy. We were told nothing about you.”
Devereaux picked up the bowl and sipped the coffee again. The warmth spread through him.
“Are we barbarians? We fix your hand and your leg and let you sleep. But there is not so much time and I need to know some things.”
“Why are you waiting here?” Devereaux said. The question was unexpected and Devereaux watched Cernan to see if it hit the mark.
Cernan was pretty good, Devereaux thought. But the eyes betrayed him. They were flat brown eyes and sometimes they opened like traps and showed the depth on the other side.
“I will ask questions.”
“I have nothing to say. Except you wait here in Belgium. If you have what you came for, why are you waiting?”
“You were not part of the equation, Mr. Devereaux.”
“My name is Peter Nolan. I’m a journalist with Central Press Association, an American agency, and I’m stationed in Brussels. I was kidnapped out of my hotel room a week ago—I think it was a week ago—by men I’ve never seen before. This is a terrible mistake.”
Cernan sighed, put out his cigarette. “You are an American intelligence agent with R Section. You arranged the defection of Emil Mikita from a party at Brussels city hall eight days ago. You are now my prisoner, a gift from the private contractor whom we have paid for the return of Emil Mikita.”
