The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill

by James Charlesworth

  It was during his time in Russia—(the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as it had been called back then) living as a journalist in a featureless apartment block surrounded by wire fencing, a soldier standing guard at a sentry box with a Kalashnikov day and night—that her presence had become haunting and continuous. He had seen her or thought he’d seen her during his monitored trips outdoors, smoking Turkish cigarettes in the plaza outside Lenin Stadium beneath the colorful mural of the old leader, a red sun setting over the Kremlin; had thought he’d seen her during digressive tours of the city in the backseats of cars designated with yellow license plates to distinguish him as a foreigner, coded messages allowing the guards along the highways he was permitted to travel (a forty-kilometer radius from the Kremlin only) to know who he was, GAI posts radioing dispatches if he took too long between checkpoints.

  He wasn’t a journalist.

  The KGB knew, had to know, for in the world of international espionage there were no real secrets, only ambiguous agreements. The age of foreign ambassadors and diplomatic immunity made it folly to keep the enemy out of your backyard—the trick was in controlling which windows of your house the enemy could see through. He was treated like vlasti. The United States government was paying ten times the rent a Russian citizen would have paid for his two-room apartment, but that was imaginary money anyway, laundered through so many foreign accounts that it never could have gone to domestic affairs. Instead it treated him to the best services the Soviet government could provide. He’d been picked up and driven to entertainment spots around the city, taken through the most luxurious neighborhoods, shown the streets whose fronts hid the darker side that hunkered down in the off-limit quadrants. They kept him under their thumb, the Snake filing stories and sending them back to the Post, his secret messages to the Pentagon encrypted amidst the news stories, which were dry and lifeless, his true mission remaining a secret until, on a balmy late spring day, taking a tip from a coded communiqué slipped under his door, he took the crowded train across town, skirting observation, crossed a stone courtyard to the columned entrance of the bathhouse, the banya.

  Inside, veils of steam collected along the green algae-stained walls and marble floors, men walking naked along the dark halls, military men and common workers, students and elderly, undressing and hanging their clothing on hooks in a dressing room decorated like an Orthodox church. On marble benches beneath a hazy light filtered through frosted windows the men lay nude, sudsy water from oak buckets applied to their backs and heads and legs by more naked men, the city dust running off their bodies and onto the benches and from there to the floor, spreading in silty rivulets along the cracks between the tiles. Two naked men with buckets and a sponge descended upon the Snake, gave him a pedicure and a manicure, a shave and a haircut. The Snake rose from the bench an hour later and made his way through the corridor to the next room, where already he heard the sound of whips being slapped against wet skin, heard the hissing and shouting.

  “Potepleye!” Just a bit hotter!

  It was a steam room, the walls lined with wood like a winter cottage, men reclining on terraced benches while others circled with flails of birch twigs, slapping the recliners on the back, generating a soft aroma of the woods. Across the room, next to the open furnace whose soaked heat was a physical presence, two men lifted buckets, shouted their repetitive cry, and tossed the water onto the red-hot stones, a hiss filling the room. The Snake selected a space in the corner and lay on his belly, eyes barely open so it appeared he was asleep while he observed the comings and goings of the naked, pink-fleshed men. When not in use, the birch twigs were always being rattled, a rustling undertone the Snake was surprised to hear approaching. Before he could turn, the twigs had been brought down painfully upon him, the Snake rising up on elbows to watch the man who’d done it stepping off through the far door, taking a single look back over his shoulder through the haze that obscured the dim light of the room.

  It was his father.

  Through the door and along the tile hallway then, another room even more murky than the last, the only light from lamps situated at corners and clouded by the steam of hot bodies and cold water colliding. A swimming pool, thirty meters by ten, rimmed with faded ionic columns worn by dampness, mosaic tile floors stained by age. Daylight radiated through a roof of paneled glass, the water tinted green as if it hadn’t been changed in decades, though it didn’t discourage the score of men who dove headfirst, glided beneath the surface, emerged gasping from the cold to climb the sides and sit on the tile with water streaming from their hair.

  He stepped over to the water and dove in.

  It was so cold it made his body turn inward. It made him hold his breath, filled him with a rush of adrenaline that carried him the entire length of the pool and out the other side, water pouring off him as he stepped through the columned door and back into the ornate dressing room, where he turned a corner amidst the classic Orthodox décor and came face-to-face with his father, his hair dried but still uncombed, a towel draped over one arm but otherwise naked, the Snake speechless and shivering, his eyes as he accepted the towel trained not on his father’s nakedness but the snub-nosed revolver aimed at his belly.

  An overweight man who otherwise looked like his brother GB drove. The Snake rode shotgun, watching the low hillsides as they headed southwest from the city toward Dachaville, where his father, verbose in the backseat, pistol still trained on his passenger, had told the Snake what he had in store for him. “I have a certain room in my dacha,” he said, the paling scenery outside the car making the Snake’s head feel dizzy, “which I think you will like very much. I call it the death room.”

  It was a two-story affair of brick and glass, embedded in the hillside with outbuildings stretching toward the road, a path leading down to the lake. The driver was dispatched to the garage, which his father pronounced in the British way, while the Snake was led up the hill to the main house.

  “That building,” said his father, “belongs to Annabelle and the twins. They do my laundry, tend my garden, fix me meals when I wish. It’s a good life. One you might’ve considered for yourself.”

  The glass-lined living room was two stories tall. “A drink before dying?” said his father, but as he made his way across the room to the wet bar, the sound of exploding glass echoed from behind the Snake’s back. His father dropped his glass and his drink, one hand moving up to his throat, where a rhythmic spurt of blood erupted. He dropped his pistol and had time for one frantic glance at the Snake before the second gunshot rang out—audible now through the shattered glass—and his head disappeared, brains sprayed across the bar. His body stayed crouched on both knees, then lay forward against a stool, and in the silence that remained, the Snake looked out the disintegrated window to the far-off balcony of the outbuilding and saw, rappelling along the rooftops, a single figure dressed in black.

  Annabelle and the twins lay dead in their kitchen, throats cut, the door to the second-floor balcony open with drapes billowing, looking out on the empty porch from which the figure in black had sighted and killed the Snake’s father. The garage lay empty, the scene of a recent escape, the keys left beneath the driver’s side floor mat. The Snake got in the Volga and started it up, not knowing how to get back to his apartment, not knowing what he was going to say to the guards at the checkpoints along the way, knowing only that he’d been saved, and that he’d seen her. In the graceful movements of the shape scurrying along the rooftop, he’d witnessed the same assurance that had saved him years ago in the tunnels beneath the desert. He knew he was not mistaken, could have recognized her anywhere. The heart-shaped face, the slender build of her youth returned now. It was she: the person who had rescued his brother GB, who’d mercy-killed Annabelle and the twins, who’d sighted along the rifle barrel on his father’s head, was none other than the nameless woman whose night visits to his cold, steel room in the underground bunker had been the only thing that kept him going, whose occasional presence had been jus
t enough (he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew that she knew) to reassure him that she’d always be there, that she’d always watch over him no matter how dangerous and disgraceful the rest of the world became, the woman who’d once held his serious face in her hands and showed him a love that had covered him in the encompassing restless sleep of decades, the woman whose memory haunted and adorned his life, the shining memory of his beautiful mother named Mary.

  “JAMIE! JAMIE?”—EVEN THE MEMORY of the voice gave the Snake pause, made him stop and listen for footsteps at his back.

  “Hey, it’s your big brother, GB! How you holdin’ up, buddy? Everything straight there in the Big Apple? Everything still hunky dory with my main man? Yeah? Good! That’s real good! Hey, listen. There’s a reason for this call, as you might’ve guessed. I’ve got some great news as a matter of fact. Some real great news. You ready?”

  It was night, the sky coming to life with the city lights. Slowly, deliberately, circuitously, the Snake had made his way across and up Manhattan Island, had watched the early September sun descending among bridges and the faded pink townhouses of Chelsea, avoiding the trains because they’d be the first place they’d look for him. He did not know why he could not stop thinking about his brother GB, did not know why he was remembering this conversation from so many years ago as he exited another bus at the park at Twelfth and 52nd, walking faster now, the other pedestrians maintaining a wide berth—did not know why he was recalling this phone call from so long ago it seemed barely real, a phone call that had seemed convenient at the time and had come to seem even more so in the years that had passed, the voice on the other end a bit too excited, a bit too friendly.

  “You ready? Well, your big brother GB is goin’ to the show! You hear that? It’s true! I’m gettin’ called up! I’m comin’ to goddamn New York City to play for the goddamn New York Yankees! Just got the news last night. Took me long enough, huh? Buddy, you don’t even know the half of it. Damn near ten years I been traipsing the minors on overnight busses, playin’ poker for per diems and luggin’ my own suitcases up ramps to crash headfirst into motel beds. I ended up a journeyman. Didn’t have what it took to be the big-time number-one-draft-pick starting pitcher so I ended up an outfielder, a roster filler, a babysitter for the younger players. Long story short, it just didn’t work out, I guess you could say. And so instead of a half dozen Cy Youngs and maybe a few World Series rings, I spent ten years wastin’ away in sunflower-seed-strewn dugouts in every half-rate town between here and El Paso. Ten years spent fightin’ mosquitoes beneath the flood lamps on heartland nights too hot and hopeless to dream. But I still dreamed, kiddo. Went through the motions cuz I’d already spent so much faith on that fantasy I couldn’t imagine what my life might look like without it. Guess it’s true what they say, huh? ’Bout you’re never too old to dream? Isn’t that right, old buddy? Old J-Bird?”

  The Snake remembered the cold feeling of the phone in his hands, the immediate uncertainty when they’d told him—at the halfway house where the federal government had set him up, masquerading as a homeless man to hide his identity, to hide his true mission—that he had received a phone call, that someone claiming to be his brother was holding the line on the phone in the office, waiting to speak to him. It was a feeling he had been unable to shake all day as he’d made his way across the city, cloaked in the shadows slung from skyscrapers, marching north now along Ninth Avenue with the river barely visible to the west.

  “Anyway, last night. I’m standin’ out in left field in some backwater town along the Mississippi, two on and two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth when a weakly hit flare that woulda been a can of corn if I hadn’t been playing shallow to take away the play at the plate sends me reelin’ in pursuit, spikes tearin’ at the turf while that tailing ball outpaces me, touches down just inside the foul line while the winning run races home and you know what I did? I just kept goin’. Trotted right off the field and up the clubhouse tunnel to the showers with my mind made up. Knocked on the skipper’s office door and sat in only my towel with my forearms resting on the back of a plastic chair turned backwards and spilled my guts out. A thirty-three-year-old man spillin’ his guts out to the skip about how I was finished, how I was finally ready to hang ’em up, finally ready to call it quits in this game that was damn near the only thing that sustained me all these years. Looked up to see the skip all grinnin’ at me like you done yet? And that’s when he told me he’d just gotten off the phone with the big club earlier that evening. That’s when he told me I had a plane to catch this morning. So long story short I’m gonna be there in three days, this weekend, in fact. Come Friday night I’ll be suited up in pinstripes shaggin’ flies at Yankee Stadium. And you know what I’d like? You know what I’d really love, bro? I’d love for you to be there. For you to be sitting in the front row above the dugout when I come running onto the field for the first time. That’s why I’m calling, see? I got a ticket for you and everything. Two tickets, in fact, so you can bring along any special lady you might have.”

  And the next day, there they were, contained in a thick, unmarked envelope that he had paused before opening in the front room of the post office where he maintained a box, weighing the possibility that this would be the inconspicuous act that would end his life, the opening of the flap serving as a trigger that would cause the iodine crystals and liquid ammonium hydroxide to mix with and ignite the powdered aluminum and iron and magnesium that would plaster him all over the walls of the post office. Instead he had found two sets of tickets in continuous perforated strips, a pair of seats reserved by his brother for him to attend each of the games on this final homestand to end the season, ten evenings in a relatively unfamiliar part of the city, beyond his jurisdiction, trapped amidst thousands of unknown civilians, the very thought of which had filled him with such misgivings that he’d had to sit down and curl up beneath the water fountain, rocking back and forth until a postal employee had come over to throw him out.

  He’d had no one to invite, so he invited the desk lady from his building. But she had backed out at the last minute, perhaps had been informed of who he really was or had been threatened. Perhaps her file had been pulled and come back with a hit and the Feds had gotten to her. At any rate he had gone himself, had taken the train through parts of the city he’d seldom ventured, the words of his brother still singing in his brain as they’d rattled over the Harlem River into the Bronx. “So what do you say, Big J? We can go out afterwards, just the two of us, get a bite to eat together. Just the two of us out on the town with nothing between us, nothing to keep us from being completely honest with one another. Just like all those years ago in that stuffy attic bedroom off Wildwood in old San Berdoo. How does that sound to you? Does that sound good? Because to me it sounds just about perfect.”

  It had sounded too easy. It had sounded like another of the agency’s ploys. Perhaps they’d been wagering he’d invite her. Still, he had marveled at the size of the stadium, had looked up the high façade at the lines extending toward the deepening sky. The beginnings of autumn had arrived, the air cooling and most people in sweatshirts and blue jeans, the vendors hawking hot chocolate and booze. He’d wanted to buy something, just to look normal, but at the souvenir stand the two workers had shared a whisper while looking in his direction. He had eventually made his way through a shifting line to a concession stand, had descended the steps along the first base line moments later with a red paper Coke cup and a hot dog wrapped hastily in wax paper.

  The seats were even more exposed than he’d expected, directly above the dugouts so you could set your drink on top of the Yankees symbol, though the Snake placed his at his feet, the grounds crew making the final adjustments and preparations, the sandy dirt of the infield receiving a final soaking to make it a lush brown, the scoreboard showing the lineups in a series of uniform numbers in a vertical column along the sides. Batting ninth for the Yankees, playing left field in place of the injured stolen base king, was an unfamil
iar number 54, though the crowd along the first base side was introduced to him now: an older-looking fellow with a sharp face standing at the railing of the dugout and turning to scan the crowd. A smile. “Jamie!” he shouted, and then was rattling along the dugout beneath them. “Jamie! You made it! Did you see?” He raised his right hand, which bore his big outfielder’s mitt. “They’re starting me! I’m the starting left fielder for the New York Yankees!” A hand reaching up and pulling him back to the dugout, and then there they all were, jogging onto the field in a pinstriped phalanx, Frank Sinatra crooning that he wanted to be a part of it. GB Hill at the front, racing across the infield dirt and onto the outfield grass to his place in left, catching a ball on the short hop from the bullpen and warming up his arm while, back in the stands, his brother’s foot began tapping, he began looking over one shoulder and then the other, began whispering in a voice so low those sitting next to him could not make out the words.