Strawberry Fields Page 2

  We were all hounded about the mistress and we sympathized with one another, but we all wanted her, we tried everything stupid. Charlie—who was Vietnamese and had chosen this nickname for himself when he got his doctorate in Moscow, he explained to the Americans, who found other ways to address him with a desperation that I think was his one true pleasure—had what we agreed was the worst story. Following a lead he had gone out to one of the old Jewish neighborhoods, neighborhoods none of the present-day residents would refer to this way. He’d heard that a man lived there who had been a handler of sorts for the mistress, had escorted her to the General’s stronghold up north, the one rumored to have had the most opulent bedroom of them all, though there was no way to verify even this, it had been stripped bare after the overthrow. But the man had turned out to be no one—a former football player, Charlie said, now blind in one eye. The man said he knew nothing, sometimes there was a woman at the games who was said to be her, but no one had ever known anything. The son of the General had earned international notoriety for his torture of the football team after they had for the third year in a row failed to make even the regional championships. Which admittedly had been a real disappointment to many. Charlie said the man cursed him and shouted him out of the house, the man’s children trailed him down the street waving pipes and shouting slurs that Charlie, with his proficiency in languages, translated for our benefit.

  We spent a long time that night experimenting to see how much the loss of an eye might affect one’s game, taking turns shooting goals at the beer can tower until the ball, which had been soft at the start, was limp and disc-like. It was a serious disability, we determined, but certain head movements could nearly compensate.

  I learned all I was to learn of the mistress six months later, when the inquiries had dwindled, the son hanged. By then I had rented a room not far from the hotel. The hotel had since rented out a large block to subcontractors’ fixers, men who were essentially hustlers but answered to no one, they claimed, and brought in whore after whore at night, no old-fashioned discretion, despite the lobby’s still intact chandelier and ornate balustrades. Half the girls were barefoot and from the basement we could hear too much. I left, as did most of the journalists, though a few of the old diehards stuck it out, as though to insist that there was no experience they wouldn’t have in this country.

  My new landlady lived by herself. The rooms were clean and the neighborhood almost quiet and my time there was on the whole the most peaceful I had those years. The house had a garden, bare but shaded, and the story between my rooms and the landlady’s remained unoccupied.

  The landlady and I rarely spoke—it was clear she thought sociability with a young foreign man like myself would be inappropriate—and often only her scent in the stairwell or the nearly indiscernible murmur of the radio betrayed the fact of her presence. But one day I interrupted her on the terrace. I had left my bag there, having gotten a phone call mid-smoke and needing to run up to my computer to dispute some idiotic line edit. When I came back down an hour later, she was sitting at the table and looking at my passport, holding it close to her face.

  Picture’s dreadful, I tried to joke, and of course the name is a fake.

  She looked at me and arched her eyebrows. She said, The name is yours, and she tossed the passport down onto the table, not replacing it in my bag’s inner pocket as I had expected.

  She said, It’s a bit cheaply done, for such a rich country.

  I said, I had no idea.

  I stood for a moment, meaning to gather my things and go in, but that too seemed impolite.

  She gestured me toward the chair across from her and I sat; she poured half the contents of her tea cup into the cup I’d left on the table. I offered her a cigarette, which she lit with matches that had been tucked into the corner of her tea tray.

  I used to make glue, she said. She laughed at my look of surprise, a squawking laugh that shook the vacant twigs of the lemon tree above us. She said, Glue for passports, and tapped mine lightly, pushed it back toward me.

  She said, My husband worked in the passport and visa office, and so it was a sort of favor, or useful thing to do. During the bad years people would come in, important people, businessmen or dignitaries, and they’d all be shouting about their passports, how their passports were falling apart though they were brand new, the photos peeling off, they would never last, on and on. We couldn’t use the good glue because of the sanctions. There was some ingredient in it. I don’t know how that worked. But I started making some glue, homemade, you know. It took a few tries and then it was very good.

  She looked at me, tucked her scarf back around her hair, away from her cigarette.

  Then, of course, you make it on the side, and you’re very good, everyone comes to you. Everyone wants to get out of the country, but they can’t get a fake passport, not with the right glue, it turned out to be sort of special, particular. I know these things do not seem important. But it was very brittle, so that the pictures would all start to crack a little in the same way, and could not be peeled off, but you could see the small cracks in them. I’m sure you cannot imagine. So I started doing this for the black market, which paid much more. I sent whole families out of my country, they paid me in old jewelry, cash, deeds to tracts of land in the south, and there I was, taking it all, holding their babies as they counted out the fee, singing little songs to shush them.

  She ashed her cigarette and I opened my passport to its photo, closed it when she resumed: The fighters came too, very suspicious, they would deal only with me, and every time they came they would tie my husband up and gag him, it was terrible. We think this very much added to the strain on his heart. I made them what they wanted. They came here from all over the world and now they live among us with nice family names.

  Do you still—?

  She shook her head.

  I stopped once the occupiers arrived, I didn’t want to be caught. But the whore came to me then, in those last days. You know who I mean, yes—she waved a finger at me, nearly smiling—the one they say the father and the son both had, kept in the palace they built after the massacre of the northern villages. The whore was there, sitting in my basement, a neat pile of cash and a European visa prepared, very hard to get. She was very young. This is what you thought when you saw her, not that she was beautiful, but that she had the sort of face, very far-apart eyes, that you could rely on to look like the face of a woman who had had no experiences. The strange thing is—this was after I sent my children and my family abroad, meaning to follow them, but then my husband died and I had to tend to his affairs and to his people alone—the strange thing is that her real name, or the name on her passport, was the same name I had used on my daughter’s. Either the same fake name, or we had chosen for my daughter a name which was truly the whore’s. The whore, the one in the sunglasses, the infamous one!

  I said to the whore, you have the same name as my daughter, and she nodded, though of course this was not something she could have known. Nor should I have said anything, surely her guard could have struck me. I worked tenderly and well on her passport for this reason, and because—this you will not believe—because she and my eldest daughter, they also wore the same perfume.

  She leaned forward to brush ash and leaves off the table.

  What visa? I asked.

  She shook her head and smiled.

  When I told this story to Charlie he clapped me on the shoulder and shook his head. He was neither discreet nor indiscreet, and if there had been more of a story, I’m sure he’d have told it widely and as though it had happened to him. But I don’t think he did. By then in that city even the journalists were dying at unprecedented rates, which seemed to multiply the stories that circulated among us, and often you felt that your work could never end.

  Alice

  I didn’t see Modigliani for a few days, then we met for coffee, if you could call it that. He didn’
t call, just turned up outside my hotel, coffees in hand. I remembered you like to stop home to clean up about now, he said, which was true, that’s what I like: just before dinner, wherever home was. Come on, he said, gesturing with the cup, let’s walk.

  Modigliani was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and the undersides of his arms were so pale they were almost bright. That city was too sunny, wouldn’t cool off until late.

  The coffee was black, the only way I drink it.

  We walked around the corner and said nothing until we reached the park a few blocks over, sat at one of the picnic tables, and soon enough the young mother on the far end got up and left. With one finger beneath my sunglasses I rubbed at the mascara I knew must have bled in the heat.

  How’s it going? I said.

  He shook his head.

  Off the record? I said.

  He said: Even less.

  Chatter on the airwaves? I said, pushing my sunglasses onto the top of my head.

  Modigliani smiled, which only emphasized the fragility of the skin beneath his eyes. None of us were as young as we’d been after the hurricane. Nothing useful, he said, not one damn thing.

  Are we talking domestic or foreign? I said.

  He looked over my shoulder, where a couple boys had arranged themselves by the entrance to the park, do-rags darkening with sweat.

  You look tired, Modigliani said.

  I went to see one of the widows today, I said. Kareem’s wife, Simone. Did you know they moved here—I gestured around us, although she lived in a very different part of town—just for the veterans’ hospital? They sold her family place and moved across the country. Their condo is unfinished. I guess he was supposed to do all the handy stuff and now she’s a wreck, there are paint cans and rolls of tiling all over and the shower’s not caulked. She was wearing a huge paint-stained sweatshirt but these boots with stiletto heels.

  You’ve probably met her, I said.

  Modigliani nodded, noncommittal.

  I went on: She said that he was tall and she’s short, so she always wore heels. She asked me if I wanted to see the nursery. The baby is nine months old and Kareem couldn’t be trusted with him, anxiety attacks, all the time. The nursery—I looked at Modigliani, eyebrows raised, and he shook his head—has a menagerie theme, that’s what she called it. Bears on balls, unicorn, flowers with huge round-cheeked faces, a chimera with this sparkling mane. Glitter in the paint, Simone said, which she’d mixed in herself. She needed a project, she said, because she wasn’t working and she’s always worked. The nursery walls weren’t finished, on the fourth there were only tape outlines, the next batch of animals. The animals were very well done, if you looked at them individually, but altogether the room was a nightmare.

  She told me that she tried to get Kareem interested in it, in the nursery, but he wasn’t. Not because he was sick, just that it wasn’t ever his kind of thing. I asked about Kareem staying nights at the hospital. She said it was temporary, a stage in his treatment, just a few days. Which isn’t what the PTSD doctor had said, but I think that’s a normal sort of incongruity.

  Modigliani was rubbing a hand over his stubble.

  I think she’s been sawing off her boot heels, I said. I saw them in the trash in the kitchen, six or eight boot heels, it took me a sec to figure out what they were.

  The coffee was still too hot to drink. It was dinnertime and the last two mothers in the park were leaning against the swing set, chatting and ignoring the teens, one toddler on a swing, one wrapped around her mother’s leg, mother’s hand fiddling with the girl’s hair.

  No one on the next flights out was of interest, Modigliani said, everyone’s still on alert but hopes aren’t high. No descriptions, he said, we don’t know if they drove, flew, or swam away. He looked at me with an air much like frankness. The bullets revealed nothing, the reconstruction established what anyone would have thought: two experienced shooters, moving fast. So far no group has claimed any kind of responsibility, he said, in fact, in the usual places no one’s even talking about it, at most an offhand mention, like someone just reading the news.

  Take this, he said, and gave me a card, contact info for a recruiter at Xenith, the private military company that two of the victims had signed with after their tours ended. But I had this info already.

  I have to go, he said, though he only looked at his phone after he said it, then added, I’ll walk you back.

  I stopped at the corner store for chocolate milk and a magazine. Modigliani took his leave at the front of my hotel, which was quiet, no one coming or going, the revolving door tinged orange by the lowering sun. He took a keychain out of his pocket and clicked it vaguely at the lot, as though needing the beep to determine which car was his.

  I’m going to look at my notes and make some calls, take a bath, I said, though he hadn’t asked.

  Get some sleep, he said, and rested his hand on my shoulder again, a gesture he must have acquired in recent years. He smiled suddenly, then he walked to his car. I remembered a night in the trailer we’d shared after the hurricane: he had come in late, so late it was morning. By then we rarely traveled together, both deep in the investigation; if I tried to tail him he called me out. That morning I was lying on my bunk in the corner, light coming through the thin blanket hung over the window. I was touching myself and had been for a while, not even wanting a climax, just to pass the time until I had to get up. I didn’t know Modigliani was there and how could he not have seen my wrist’s rhythm shifting the sheet? I looked up and there he was. He had what you might call no expression. Get some sleep, I said to him and rolled over, my hand beneath me, invisible.

  Felicia

  When was your most recent sighting of the Kind cat, and what evidence are you prepared to present of the Kind cat’s existence?

  Kind.

  I’m sorry?

  Not kind, Kind. Note the short I. German for child.

  Ah yes, thank you. When, then, was your most recent sighting of the Kind cat?

  Ten months ago, about forty kilometers northwest of here, in the forest, not far outside one of the little towns along the old railway. She was burying a kill, a small deer. It is very rare to see this. I was at a great distance, so as not to disturb her. I returned to the kill, of course, numerous times over the next week, but I did not see her again. The kill was soon scavenged by foxes and the like, which perhaps she knew and is why she abandoned it.

  But neither this nor any of your previous sightings have been confirmed by other scientists, or by physical evidence of any kind?

  Kind.

  Sorry?

  No, no, a little joke. No, it has not been confirmed, but no one else cares, so who would confirm it? They do not know anything and would dismiss my bite mark analyses as inconclusive. And the photographs were certainly not what I had hoped.

  I understand that there is also a government research program devoted to—

  There is a gentleman in the government wildlife bureau who will return phone calls regarding the Kind cat, yes. But a research program that does not make. His actual work is with their bear racial purity program.

  I’m sorry?

  The government is very concerned that the bears who have always populated this region, from west of the Carpathians through this forest and up to the peninsula in the north, are now interbreeding with a smaller bear species, the red bear, which traditionally has lived much further east, all the way to Siberia, but which because of habitat destruction has recently been crossing the Carpathians for the first time.

  It’s called the red bear?

  I know, this is truly his name. Isn’t it wonderful? He is often a scavenger and will live under porches or in barns or sheds, he is seen as quite a pest. And thus unworthy as a mate for the noble bear of this nation. [Waves his hand.] So you can see the government’s priorities.

  You are not a citizen of this
country, but emigrated here from—

  Yes, of course, the country I was born in no longer exists. We were amalgamated by the communists and then broken apart again by their successors and the UN, all this you know. I came to this country in the ’70s.

  What inspired your emigration?

  I no longer wished to receive money from the government, which was, naturally, the only way of operating a laboratory under the communist regime.

  So you moved your research here.

  You are a very optimistic young woman. No, I moved myself. I worked for some time as an electrician illegally, and attempted to establish to the government that my education was legitimate and my scientific skills useful. I was then hired in a disease management program for dairies. I worked in this field—if you will—for eight years. A Kind cat began preying on one of the dairies on the southern border of the forest—now it is very fancy there, shops and that, what is it, paddleboating on the lake, but then it was still a very simple place, the forest surrounding it old growth. When the Kind cat came there, I was able to convince the regional government to fund my study. They are interested when extinct species return from the dead to kill off livestock.