Straight Cut

by Madison Smartt Bell

  Clean as a whistle. For luck, I went straight over to Paddington Station. It seemed just as well if I put some space between picking up the box and booking my next passage to faraway romantic places. I dropped the parcel in the Paddington checkroom and then walked back down to Leinster Square. Up in the rented flat again, I sat down and wrote that letter I’d promised Mimmo. Then I remembered I probably couldn’t afford to mail it.

  That pretty well took care of the serious business for the day. I went out and had a big soggy pub lunch and then went to the Islamic Room of the British Museum, where I killed most of the afternoon looking at incomprehensible calligraphy and things like that. Toward evening, I went back to American Express and booked on the next morning’s boat-train to Brussels. I’d thought of asking Miss Blondie out for a drink, but she seemed to have clocked out for the day, and besides, the Brits don’t talk to strangers much, and besides that, it would have been a poor moment, strategically speaking, to break my solitude.

  So the next morning it was back to Dover, the reverse of the very same train ride I’d made two days before. If I wasn’t in the jet set, I was at least in the wheel set, or something like that. This time around I was prepared with an armload of newspapers and magazines. English, English, English. I gobbled it down. It didn’t matter very much that the news was not terrifically interesting for its own sweet sake. I hadn’t had any English for weeks and I didn’t know how long it might be before I got a chance to have any more.

  This time around I was booked on a hydrofoil instead of the boat. It was faster but at the same time more boring. There was no deck. We were all strapped into our seats as if on an airplane. The water and sky spun by outside like a one-shot ribbon of film. I wanted to sleep but I was too jumpy for that. When the duty-free offer was made, I bought a good bottle of vodka for Racine.

  It was at Ostend that the worst finally did happen, or almost. I got myself pulled out of the line over money, or at least that was the initial problem. So far as Belgian customs was concerned, it seemed that I had too much of it for the plausibility of my stated duration of visit (two weeks to a month) and purpose of visit (tourism, yet again). Two inspectors beckoned me not to a private room but simply to one side of the line for a more extensive conversation. They were speaking to each other in Flemish, which tended to rattle me. I might have followed their general drift in any of the Romance languages, but Flemish left me with no clue at all.

  Of course there was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the money situation, which even had the virtue of relative truth: I was taking a long trip through several countries, I had earned money in Italy and converted it to traveler’s checks for ease and safety of transport, et cetera, et cetera. But my delivery was off and in the middle of it I noticed that, sure enough, my hands had begun to shake, and one of the customs men had already noticed it too. I’d had it. The second customs officer was already rooting through my shoulder bag while the first one, who spoke clumsy but authoritative English, recommended that I open the Halliburton.

  It was as if someone had slapped me or dumped a bucket of ice water over my head. I calmed down at once.

  “So sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid that will take up a lot of your time.”

  “How?” said the customs man. He was rather unpleasant looking, I thought: yellow and lean, with a brush cut and an obnoxious pencil-line mustache.

  “You see, the locks are broken,” I said. On a sudden inspiration, I set the combination dials to six digits of my New York phone number and snapped at the catches. Nothing happened, to be sure.

  “So,” the customs man said. He was the laconic type, in English anyway. He tried the catches himself. Nothing doing.

  “It’s been that way since yesterday,” I said. “Rust, maybe. I’ve had no time to repair it. If you could find a locksmith ...”

  “Hm,” the customs man said. His partner had reclosed my shoulder bag. “And the contents?”

  “Oh, only papers,” I said, with what I hoped was a hearty smile. After all, the statement was true in the literal sense. “Business papers, of no great interest to anyone but me.”

  There was a brief exchange in Flemish. I decided it was time to push my luck a hair.

  “Of course I realize you can’t very well just take my word for this,” I said. “And I will have to have it repaired very soon in any case. Only I would prefer not to damage the bag itself, it was rather expensive, you see. But if there is a locksmith nearby ... Of course I understand you have to inspect the contents. Only I do hope that I won’t miss my train ...”

  The customs men spoke again in Flemish as I continued to babble in this vein. Finally the English speaker silenced me with a raised hand.

  “Not necessary,” he said. He handed me back my bags and waved me through.

  Kevin would have been proud of me for that one, I thought, and I did my best to be proud of myself, but that life-saving surge of confidence was gone now, as if it had never been. I was so limp that I literally stumbled as I moved out toward the train platforms, and finally I stopped and propped myself up on what turned out to be a letter drop. Once I noticed that, it occurred to me that it would be safe enough to mail Mimmo’s letter here; the Ostend postmark would be sufficiently misleading. So I slipped it in. Bonne chance, Mimmo. Then I looked over the signs and plotted my course out to the Brussels train.

  It was the late afternoon of a splendidly clear day and here in the north the air still tasted of spring. My spoke of the platform was empty; it appeared that I was the only one off that particular boat who was bound for the city of Brussels. Amber sunlight came tilting from the west, wrapping over the old green train, which was already sitting in the station, though the doors were locked. I smoked cigarette after cigarette while I waited (nothing like a brush with death or danger to make them really taste good) and the fabric of smoke coiled around me like an animate cage, the only life in the motionless air, the sun shocking it through with color.

  Ten or fifteen minutes passed, and I saw a trio of people approaching from the station end of the platform, slowly as figures in a mirage of some kind. They came nearer, and I saw they were a family or looked like one: father, mother and a teenage daughter, all burdened down with too many suitcases. The man began to ask me in awkward French whether this was the train to Brussels, and when I replied in English I was rewarded by all their obvious relief. They were American, Southerners like me, it developed, and we talked a little while we waited for the train to open. The daughter said nothing, but she was very pretty, with hair so brilliantly red that unconsciously I almost reached out to touch and fondle it, before I realized what consternation that surely would have caused. I wondered at the impulse, naturally, but it was not until later, when the train had finally been unlocked and I withdrew to my own musty green compartment, that I understood it was Lauren whom that quiet girl’s hair had so reminded me of.

  It was not so far from the Gare du Midi to the Rue d’Irlande, where Racine lived now. I made a couple of wrong turns, walking up the hill in the dark, but I did find the place without using a map. It was an old abandoned bar Racine had rebuilt to live in, and there was still some of the bar’s lettering on the big plate-glass window in front, though not enough to decipher. Tonight the window was dark and there was no answer to my ring.

  I had not let Racine know that I was coming, but somehow I was certain that he would be in town all the same. He conducted a great deal of his business in bars and cafés and I’d probably arrived at a poor part of the evening to catch him in. Since for once I seemed to be in a daring mood, I decided to go ahead and seek ingress. The place was on the corner. I went around the side street to the right. There was a one-story wall there which looked to be climbable. I slung the bags over it and scrambled up after them. On the other side was a low roof with a heavy fiber-glass skylight set in it. The sheets of glass had been fixed in the frame with silicon caulk and it was easy enough to loosen one. I lowered my bags and then dropped down into the house.
>
  Now I was in a little catty-cornered tiled room, roofed over entirely with fiber-glass. There was a drain in the middle of the floor. Back when the place had operated as a bar, this area had been an open courtyard on the way to the pissoir, which was off to my left. A door to the right let into the main part of the house. I went in and stopped for a moment to listen. It was dark and quiet and there was no sign of movement. I padded into the little kitchen and groped for the light switch. Nobody there. Someone’s dinner dishes had been left in the sink. I pulled the duty-free vodka out of my bag and stuck it in the freezer.

  A stairway back to the kitchen led up to the bedroom, the only room on the second floor. I tiptoed up, lest Racine or someone be asleep, but there was no one. Nothing to do but wait a while. I opened a Stella Artois I found in the refrigerator, and repositioned the glass in the low ceiling. Then I lit a cigarette and strolled out into the big front room, which was full of sound equipment, but mainly with all of Racine’s horns.

  Racine was not the same Racine of the French classical theater, of course, nor was he any relation, so far as I knew. The name was very likely an assumed one, though he’d been using it for some time and I’d never known him by any other. It was probably not the same name under which, according to one rumor, he was listed as a terrorist on the Interpol computer. It might or might not have been the name he was using when, according to another rumor, he’d spent a few days sighting a silenced rifle on the ear of some Common Market dignitary, never quite making up his mind to pull the trigger.

  I wasn’t sure I really believed that last story anyway, though it was the sort of tale that tended to crop up around Racine. The terrorist bit derived from a couple of minor raps from ten or fifteen years before — a knife one time, a hot car another — the sort of thing that would make you a probable in the eyes of almost any Western European police force. None of it really fit well with the Racine I knew from New York, a quiet equable man so patient and even-tempered that I had almost never seen anything unsettle him.

  People do sometimes change, of course. Mais plus ca change ...

  It happened that Kevin had been the one to dig him up originally. Kevin had heard an obscure foreign release of one of Racine’s tapes on WQXR and decided that it had the perfect je ne sais quoi for the soundtrack to something we were working on at the time. With the persistence he could sometimes summon when he got truly hung up on something, he wrote to the station and then to a Paris music publisher and to several other places too, finally to discover that Racine had been living on the Lower East Side, more or less our neighbor, the whole time.

  So Kevin did finally get the tape he wanted, but he and Racine never really hit it off. They were too much opposites of each other, I suppose. Racine was deliberate, phlegmatic almost, and also in those days his English was not good. Kevin, with his fast-changing moods and general impatience, must have looked like some sort of leaping insect to him. For me it was different. There was something in Racine’s even pace that appealed to me from the very beginning, so I kept on calling him after Kevin had quit. Over the three or four years he spent in New York Racine’s name as a sax player began to be known in a small but significant way, chiefly among backroom cognoscenti, while I remained a less erudite fan. By the time he cleared out for Brussels we knew and trusted each other well enough that, for example, I didn’t think he’d be upset that I’d broken into his apartment full of horns.

  There were a lot now, more than I remembered, ranged in a row of stands along the wall. He’d always had the tenor, the alto, the soprano, but now there were several more on either side of those three, whose exact names I couldn’t have really called. Great old big ones and little old bitty ones … Racine must be prospering in Belgium, I thought, picking up the smallest horn, a miniaturized sax just slightly bigger than the palm of my hand. There was a click behind me, from the rear of the apartment, and I felt a cold pulse in the small of my back that told me I was certainly being watched. Maybe someone had been asleep somewhere after all.

  “T’inquiète pas,” I called out. “It’s only me.” I turned around. Nothing, though the door in the glassed-over atrium was ajar, when I thought for sure I’d shut it. Of course it might have drifted open on its own. The sound might have been a mouse or something too, though I really didn’t think so. I set the little horn back on its stand, so as to have both hands free. The door swung all the way open and Racine came into the room.

  It seemed like a sort of lengthy moment, and I wondered if maybe I should have behaved like a normal person and called before I’d come. Racine did not seem to have changed a bit, I had time to observe. He was a short man, well under my own height, but wiry and always in the very best of shape. In his younger days he’d been an acrobat, and he still looked it. He had blunt features of the kind people like to call Gallic, and kept his hair cut to stubble against his skull. Tonight he was wearing a plain gray shirt and trousers that looked a little like a uniform, with a multicolored scarf wound several times around his neck.

  “Bienvenu,” Racine said finally. He walked across the room and kissed me on the cheek. Custom of the country. I returned the gesture.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “Maybe I should have knocked. Actually I did but there wasn’t anybody home.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Racine said, and now he really did seem completely unconcerned. “You like a beer maybe?”

  We moved into the kitchen where I put my bottle on top of the refrigerator with the other empties and took another beer. Racine sat down at the square wooden table in the middle of the room.

  “You want some vodka?” I said. “It’s probably not quite cold yet.”

  “Me wait,” Racine said. His English was good now, a hell of a lot better than my French, for one thing, but he sometimes didn’t bother declining pronouns. I joined him at the table.

  “I came in through the roof, which I guess you figured out,” I said. “Probably I should have put a note on the door or something.”

  “No problem. Only I see the lights on coming down the street. So I decide to come in the back way myself, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll get some silicon and close it up for you.”

  “Not serious.”

  “It’ll leak, though.”

  “True.” Racine leaned back in his chair. He spoke English very softly, rounding off the corners of the words. “So. How are you doing?”

  “Passing through,” I said. “Thought I’d stop in and say hello.”

  “Good. You like to stay?”

  “A few days, maybe. If you can handle that. I have money, though, enough for a hotel.”

  “No. Stay here. There’s no one else around. I have a mattress for the room in front. “

  “Well, thanks then.”

  “No, it’s been a long time since you were here. Two years about, no?”

  “Almost,” I said. “You’re looking good, anyway. Got some new brass out there I see.”

  Racine smiled. “Not so badly. I’m a little bit a local hero now.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “When’s the U.S. tour?”

  “Soon, I hope.” Shrugging, Racine got up and went to the refrigerator. He drank a lot of beer and drank it fast too, though it never seemed to do him that much damage. He offered me another but I waved it away. Brussels beer can be a bit tricky, though Stella, as I recalled, was fairly safe.

  “There’s been talk about that,” Racine said. “Nothing definite. And you?”

  “Same old jive,” I said. “I just cut a documentary in Rome, so I thought I’d roll around some before I went back home. “

  “Nice. What about?”

  “Junkies,” I said. “Ex-junkies, I should say. It wasn’t much good of a picture. “

  Racine lit a Gauloise and flicked the square blue pack across the table in my direction.

  “Lauren?” he said. I took a cigarette.

  “Comme ci, comme ca,” I said. Now it was my turn to shrug.

  �
�You’re here on business, or just for fun?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What if it turned out to be business?”

  “Not a film.”

  “No.” Racine knew a little bit about the underside of our endeavors, though not really all that much, I didn’t think. “Remember, I can stay in a hotel if it should happen to be more convenient that way. I was just in the neighborhood, like I said.”

  “No, we’re friends,” Racine said. “Stay here. Just —”

  “Compris,” I said, and it was too. I would do my damnedest not to expose him to any risk, including no contraband on the premises, and like that. The arrangement was simple, it didn’t even have to be directly discussed, and it made me quite happy. I found it pleasant, for a change, to be around someone it was so uncomplicated to trust.

  13

  I LIKED BRUSSELS, THOUGH I’D only been there once before I had fond memories of the place. It seemed to me to be an undemanding city, far less intimidating to the relative stranger than Paris or Rome or even London. It was uncomplicated to get around, partly because if I went anywhere very far Racine went with me as a rule. If I did end up on my own, at least people were a lot more tolerant of my pidgin French than they would have been anywhere — in France, for instance.

  So it was easy, indeed very pleasant, to spend a couple of days just hanging out. Racine was not too busy, it seemed, so we spent a good deal of time doing not much. He took me to the Wiertz Museum to look at peculiar paintings and to the Natural History Museum to inspect the bones of dinosaurs. We ate big lunches, then slept them off on the grass of the parks. Like good lotus eaters, we devoted some serious attention to actual food, and Brussels is a good place for that, from local specialties like tomates aux crevettes to the couscous made by the Moroccans and Algerians who lived in Racine’s quarter.