“De motor klopt,” I told him, racing it to show how it klopt, and he said
with a broad grin, “Maar zet af, alstublieft.”
That was it. I cut the motor, departed, and when I returned the next
morning there was Goliath with the same grin, apparently the same stub of
unlit cheroot in his jaws, and with the bill waiting. I had memorized Kees’s
list so totally that the numbers on the bill instantly translated themselves into
my destinations. A double play: London to Zurich to Milan.
“Tot ziens,” I politely said as I pulled out of the garage, and he gave me
a friendly flip of the hand. “Tot straks, jochie,” he said, which “See you later,
pal,” I took to mean that I’d probably be back for a repeat performance. The
real meaning came clear when I drove into the Milan garage at the end of my
run. The Zurich stopover had gone according to rote, a lackadaisical youth
swapping the code phrases with me there and taking over, but here in Milan
was Goliath again.
“Just checking to see that all went well on our maiden,” he said. “Jago’s
the name. And it looks like we’ve put a winning team together, friend.”
So it looked. The next day, when I picked up the car, Jago was on hand
to wave good-by, and there in the dashboard compartment was an envelope
with my five thousand gulden in it.
So for the newly affluent van Zee and his lady there was a waterfront
hostel in Capri and then the Greek islands until spring showed up, and with it
another call to duty and another replenishing of funds.
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A winning team playing an easy schedule every few months that year and
the next and the one that followed, and, as far as I could see, going its winning
way as long as various fat-cat corporations felt compelled to pay bribes to
keep the shareholders happy.
Anneke was never told that my business was to transport merchandise,
not messages. Those few dangerous minutes whenever we crossed a border
would be made even more dangerous if anyone so transparent had reason to
look guilty when the inspector approached. And if she sometimes wondered
about my line of work, she never allowed questions about it to come to the
surface.
What did more and more come to the surface was a yearning for
motherhood. This would pop up at odd times and lead us into unsatisfying
dialogues. How did I feel about the idea, she would ask. Fine, I would
truthfully say. No, how did I really feel about it? Lieveling, I would say, if
that’s what you want, it’s what I want. No, Jan, I want to know how you feel
about it, especially if it means settling down.
That was the rub.
Or was it?
Playing house with anyone else would have been out of the question.
With my Anneke, well, since she was what my life was about, since she —
partner, friend, admirer, lover — was what made sense out of chaos, it was
something to think about.
“1k wit er nog eens over denken.” A fine old Dutch phrase, “I’ll think
about it.” And that, as Anneke understood, was where the discussion ended.
Until Rome. Until that morning when we were seated on the Spanish
Steps watching the world circulate below us in the Piazza di Spagna and
Anneke abruptly said, “I think I’m pregnant.”
A conversation stopper if ever there was one.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m two weeks overdue. That never happened before.”
“You think the pill let you down? That’s hard to believe.”
“I know.” She looked ready to cry. “But I haven’t been taking the pill.
And I never told you I stopped taking it. It’s been the same as lying to you.”
“All right, so maybe you’re pregnant. I’m all for it.”
“Now you’re being kind. You would be. That only makes it worse.”
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“Look,” I said, “the one thing you’re not to do is indulge in any guilt
kletskock. The sensible thing is simply to get a test taken. Otherwise, you
could be wasting a lot of emotion on a false alarm.”
“I thought of that. And there’s a very nice free clinic near where we live.
If you went there with me —”
”Why a free clinic? We have enough money for our own doctor.”
“An unmarried mother walk in on one of those old Italian doctors? Can’t
you see him looking down his skinny nose at me? No. The girls in our building
told me this clinic is different. They treat you like a human being there.”
La Clinica Gratuita In Trastevere, a few minutes walk from our place
on via Bassi, was indeed different. It had been installed in one of the ancient
tenements on the block and had been designed and decorated, it seemed, so
that one would have a sense of being in living quarters, not a medical factory.
And, considering that I was putting my Anneke in their hands, those in charge
looked alarmingly youthful, although not as young as most of their patients. The
view I got of those patients in the waiting room suggested that an epidemic of
pregnancy had struck most of the teen-age females in Trastevere within the
past nine months, few of whom took any joy in it.
When Anneke emerged from the examination she looked as joyless as the
rest of the company. “They said to come back in three days, and they’ll have
the report ready.”
“If you want your own doctor —”
”No. They’re very kind here. Now let’s just go home please and not talk
about it until we see what the test shows.”
It was a long three days. It was further extended by the time I had to sit
in the clinic’s waiting room while Anneke was off with her doctor. Finally she
reappeared and gave me a brief nod. There was no mistaking its message.
“Good,” I said. “But what took so long?”
“I was talking to the counselor. Now she wants to talk to you. Alone.”
“About what? Look, I’m in no mood for medical lectures. What I have in
mind is a celebration lunch and then a drive out to Ostia for a swim.”
“That can wait. Please talk to her, Jan.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”
“No. I’m healthy as a cow. Now please. It’s down the hall to the last
room. Signorina Cavalcanti.”
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Cavalcanti. That put me back in time to another Signorina Cavalcanti,
the one who lived in luxurious Parioli far from lowdown Trastevere, the one
with the raging head cold who had refused to let me celebrate that long-ago
New Year’s Eve in her bed. Bianca Cavalcanti. A girl with a real flair for the
melodramatic.
I opened the designated door at the end of the hall and found myself
staring at Bianca Cavalcanti.
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What was the schoolgirl dream she had
once confided to me? Some day David Shaw would come storming up on his
white steed, and she, no longer buxom and runny-nosed but slender and
glamorous, would be swept off to the Happy Ending. Well, slender she now
was, but that was about all of the dream that had been cashed in. The glamor
part of it she had missed out on entirely. The honey-colored hair was
carelessly thrust up on top of her head in a washerwoman’s knot, there were
&n
bsp; dark patches of fatigue under the eyes, the whole face looked drawn. Beautiful
in a way — Florentine beautiful like one of those portraits in the Uffizi from
Lorenzo’s time — but very distinctly the face of a tough-minded, overworked
woman just a scant year behind me on the way to a thirtieth birthday.
As for David Shaw in his shining armor on a white steed, here was bluejeaned,
broken-nosed Jan van Zee with his Volkswagen and his pregnant
Anneke.
“Come in, come in,” Bianca said. “You are Signor van Zee?”
“Yes.”
She flashed me a smile of honest amusement. “Well, nobody’s going to
bite you. I suppose Anneke’s told you the good news?”
“Yes.”
The room was very small, the one chair available to me was across her
desk, much too close to her for comfort. The desk itself was a clutter of books
and papers, empty cups, and overflowing ashtrays. “A cigarette?” said Bianca,
scrabbling through the mess and coming up with a pack.
“No, thank you.”
“Well then.” She pointed at the tattoo on my arm. “What is that? A tulip
and a knife?”
“Yes.”
“And what does it represent?”
I had long ago worked out a standard answer to this. “A warning. He
who hurts me must be hurt.”
“Very masculine,” Bianca commented drily. She lit a cigarette and
studied me through its smoke. “Haven’t we met before?”
“This is my first visit to your clinic, signorina.”
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“But it seems to me —”
”My very first visit.” I found myself fighting down an insane compulsion
to tell her who I was. To break the spell, I said sharply, “You wanted to speak
to me about Anneke. Is there something wrong with her?”
“Anneke.” She seemed to be fighting her own spell. “Well, emotionally,
there is some trouble there. You see, when she was told the news her
immediate response was to inquire about an abortion. Yet at our first
interview she had told me she planned the pregnancy. In my experience, it’s
usually the father’s attitude that leads to such a reaction. Anneke feels her only
loyalty is to you. Your rejection of the child therefore —”
”Wait a moment. Did she tell you I didn’t want us to have a child?”
“In effect, yes.”
“Then in effect, signorina, she’s all wrong about it. I will be delighted to
be the father of Anneke’s baby.”
“Oh?” Bianca lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the first one. “Well,
you certainly failed to communicate this to her.”
“Then I’ll now communicate it to her.” I started to rise, but Bianca held
up a protesting hand. “Wait, please. The girl desperately wants to bear your
child, and at the same time she’s terrified that this may somehow estrange you
from her. That’s why there was the talk about abortion, why there’s so much
emotionalism on her part right now. But if she had a convincing assurance of
your devotion —”
”She will have, signorina. My list of priorities is very small. Anneke
happens to be the only item on it.”
“So? That does make you a rather unusual man in these parts. One rarely
hears that kind of talk around here.”
“Perhaps not.” There was no longer any hint of recognition of me in
those eyes. It emboldened me to say, “And you seem to be a very unusual
young woman. Attractive, obviously well-bred, and here you are in this office
in the middle of the slums. But what brought you here, signorina? The need to
make a living, or a passion to save pregnant girls from their cruel lovers?”
She turned red. “It so happens, Signor van Zee, that my brother is a
doctor — a gynecologist — and he and some associates were concerned about
the rate of abortion in this district and the treatment of young mothers,
especially unmarried ones, in the public institutions. They founded this clinic,
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and I’m in this office because I’m an accredited therapist. Does that satisfy
your curiosity?”
“It does.”
“Then if you’ll call Anneke back in here, we three can —”
”No. I’ll attend to her myself, thank you.”
I left abruptly. She was quite a woman, this grown-up Bianca, no fool on
any count, and no one to play hide-and-seek with about my identity. Quite a
woman.
I attended to Anneke as soon as we were outside the building. “You
really are an idiot, aren’t you?” I said in a way which she correctly interpreted
as love talk.
“She told you everything?”
“At least everything you should have told me.”
“I tried to, Jan. Only you so much hate talk about the future. You can’t
see your face when that particular subject comes up, but I can.”
“All right, I promise there won’t be any more faces like that.
Meanwhile, how about rounding out the family picture with a wedding? Has
that thought ever crossed your mind?”
“No.” Anneke shook her head violently. “I don’t want us to be tied to
each other by a foolish piece of paper. I want it just the way it is.”
“Ach, de jongelui,” I said in a fair imitation of her imitation of Hendrick
Spranger.
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Lovely, mindless, sun-filled days in
Naples. On Capri’s cut-rate waterfront. In Split. In Dubrovnik. Lovely nights
too, for that matter.
The crisis was over, the baby well settled into place beneath that stillflat
belly, and Anneke glowed with its presence. Glowed clear green some
mornings, retching with sickness, but cheerfully accepted this as a small price
to pay for the impending miracle.
In Dubrovnik, December first, I made the required phone call to the
London number and learned that I was back in business. In London, two weeks
later, I deposited Anneke in the usual bed-and-board off the Kings Road and
drove across town to the garage.
Jago, the Man Mountain, shook his head when I got out of the car and
said, “See you tomorrow.”
“Not tomorrow, chum,” he said. “It’s right now.”
“You mean you’ll plant the goods in the car right now?”
“No, you’ll pull out empty right now, but you’ll be loaded up in Zurich
day after tomorrow. The night after that it’s Luxembourg, and they’ll unload
there. At night, remember.”
“That’s a switch.”
“For good reason.” He gave me a big wink. “This is for a new customer.
Pulled off a really fantastic fiddle in America. Got away with a million
dollars, they tell me. I wouldnt be surprised if there’s a little extra for us when
payday comes, handling a load like this.”
So it was back to the b-and-b in Chelsea to pick up my everunderstanding
girl who, without a question. simply tucked herself into the car,
and from there to Zurich. The Swiss attendant there who responded to the
password and relieved me of the VW was yet another of those sleepy-eyed,
pimply youths who came and went over the years. Recruited for one-time duty
only, they suggested that the garages themselves were open only that
occasional day when I had
to report to them.
Then, finally, northward through Germany on the last leg of the tour with
my million-dollar cargo, and now thinking at least as cannily as Mijnheer
Baar, I decided to forego the shorter run through France and hold to the
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roundabout German route right up to Luxembourg. Extra mileage, extra time,
but one less frontier to cross, notably the French one. French customs officials,
it had been my experience, were one and all suckled on bile.
I did currency conversion in my head as we rolled along. A million
American dollars came to about two and a quarter million Deutsch marks.
Godallemachtig, one little bang into that trunk rattling along ahead of me, and
there would be enough paper money strewn over the highway to have half
Mitteleuropa out for it with pitchforks and baskets.
So I was glad to see, after we completed the northeast run to Karlsruhe
and turned northwest straight for Luxembourg, that the traffic was thinning
steadily with nightfall. By midnight, as we approached the border crossing, I
had almost no company on the road at all. Only one steady customer a fair way
behind and very distinctive because one of his headlights was dimmer than the
other and would now and then blink as if giving me friendly encouragement in
the otherwise pitch darkness.
The crossing into Luxembourg was easy, the customs man seeming
almost as sleepy as Anneke who was out cold, and he good-naturedly gestured
at me not to wake her when I handed him our passports.
Now it was pitch blackness again, the emptiness of open fields all
around me broken only by sleeping towns, and it was coming out of
Grevenmacher, on the home stretch to Luxembourg city itself, that I again
picked up those distinctive headlights behind me. But now — chilling logic
whispering to me that while I had reason to take a roundabout route it wasn’t
likely anyone else shared that reason — that flickering headlight no longer
seemed so friendly.
Then, for the first time, the lights started moving up fast. I came down on
the gas hard, but I was badly outmatched. The car, a big one from what I could
make of it in the darkness, drew alongside the VW, deliberately crowding it
over on the shoulder of the road, steering me straight into a stand of trees, and
there was nothing left to do but jam on the brakes.
The other car came to a stop at an angle that cut me off from escape half
The Luxembourg Run Page 10
