Fields Where They Lay, page 32
He might have dozed off because when he opened his eyes, Keystone was sitting beside him and, in the next chair, Sabathia. Helmut and Werner were in the kitchen, washing things, and Autenburg was sitting back, regarding him. Morris looked around for Schmidt, and Autenburg said, “He’s in the room with the baby.”
“The other baby,” said Sabathia.
Keystone nudged Morris and nodded in Autenburg’s direction. When Morris turned, Autenburg slid across the table the piece of paper he’d been drawing on.
“The house is the rectangle on the right,” Autenburg said. “The curving line over to the left is the road, which you want to stay away from because we planted mines there. Not many, but you only need to step on one, yes? Try to stay at least ten meters from the road. The terrain slopes down toward it a little, so you can see it.”
He waited, and Morris said, “I understand.”
“The lines up here,” Autenburg said, tapping on the top of the page, “are us. Germans. Down there, in the bottom, this is you.” He frowned at the page. “Maybe, maybe farther east. If you keep this house behind, you should find them. The big square here”—he leaned over and circled it—“is a church, now—now vernichtet, destroyed. When you see it you will be going correctly.” He looked up at Morris. In the kitchen, Werner and Helmut were still and listening. “Any questions?”
“Yes,” Morris said. “What’s your first name?”
“Günther. And yours?”
“Morris. I’m Morris Stempel.”
Autenburg rose and stretched, his hands knotted into fists. When he was finished, he pushed the candle on the table, seeming dimmer now in the grey dawn, toward Morris. “We will wait,” he said, “until this candle has burned out.”
Morris leaned forward and blew out the candle. Then he stepped back and opened his arms. He said, “Merry Christmas, Günther.”
Autenburg looked at Morris’s outspread arms, shook his head, and said, “Hurry.” Then, as Morris turned away, he said, “Fröhliche Weihnachten. Merry Christmas.”
Their rifles were where they’d left them, with the pistols Schmidt had carried out right beside them, and all the guns were cold to the touch and wet with condensation. They armed themselves in silence, and then Keystone, the map-reader among them, looked at Autenburg’s drawing and set off, Morris and Sabathia trailing behind. Sabathia was limping, but not as badly as the previous night.
None of them spoke.
Four or five minutes later, Morris looked back, but the house was lost in the pearly grey fog. He said, “Slow down a little, Jerome,” and Keystone stopped and turned to watch them come. “Do you need to lean on me, Sabby?”
“I’ll walk in on my own two feet, thanks,” Sabathia said.
For a quarter of an hour or so, they moved silently. The road was to their right, but they couldn’t see it through the fog, and Keystone, checking the map occasionally, kept shading them a little left as they went. Just as Morris was about to say he thought they were heading too far to the left, the great dark bulk of the ruined church loomed in front of them. Out of the corner of his eye, Morris saw Sabathia cross himself.
It was growing lighter, and the fog was thinning. From time to time, coming from in front of them, Morris heard little drifts of noise: metal on metal, the occasional murmur of speech, in English. As the three of them slogged toward the sounds, Morris found himself thinking about the ground they were walking over. Men had died there by the hundreds, by the thousands, in 1917 and 1918 and again now, in 1944. Young men with lives in front of them, with people who loved them, with unborn children, unborn ideas and ambitions.
French, German, Russian, British, American, Italian, he thought, they fought here, and then, suddenly neutral in death, they fell here and let their blood soak the soil. It seemed to Morris, as he followed Keystone away from the house where no soldiers had died and a child was born, toward the muted sounds of the American lines, that he could feel the fingers of the dead plucking enviously at his boots, trying to slow him, trying to keep him with them a little longer on this killing ground, to keep him here on the fields where they lay.
34
What Is Nickels?
Nine-fifteen on Christmas Eve with Santa well on his way, and Shlomo’s story was still echoing in my mind as I dropped him at his car at the far border of Edgerton Mall’s dark, empty parking lot and prepared myself for whatever was going to happen. I was early, I thought.
But no, as I rounded the north end of the mall, a big black SUV blinked its lights at me, and I realized, with a jolt of panic that brought me suddenly upright, that my gun was still in my trunk. Whatever happened next would be up to Vlad.
Figuring it was a much better idea to be in a car than on foot, I pulled up on the driver’s side of the SUV. When the tinted front window slid down I was looking at Barkov.
He said, “Nice houses over there.”
“I thought you’d like them.”
“Very nice,” he said. He raised the bushy eyebrows. “You are right: is Yevginy. I have debt for you.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“I don’t forget.” He raised his hand, thumb out, and stubbed it toward the highway. “Go away.”
I said, “But I’m supp—”
“We are taking the meeting,” Barkov said. “This is what they say in Hollywood, right? Taking the meeting?” Beyond him, in the passenger seat, was someone whom I couldn’t see clearly but who was almost certainly Mini-me.
“Well,” I said. “As they also say in Hollywood, don’t take any wooden nickels.”
“What is nickels?” Barkov said. “No, never mind. You go.”
I went.
But not far. I pulled into Equestrian Acres, past the model homes, opened the garage of one of the Vlad-cleared houses, and drove in. Then I lowered the door quietly, hunched over and bent my knees to change my silhouette, and walked on the balls of my feet into the thin scrim of trees that bordered the parking lot.
Barkov had moved the van so it was all alone in the center of the lot. Because of the distance and because of the sound absorbed by the trees, what happened next felt like a silent film.
A second dark SUV pulled into the lot, took a slow loop around the perimeter as though making sure there weren’t people in other cars waiting on the far side of the building, and then drove slowly toward Barkov’s SUV, dimming its lights thoughtfully. When the vehicles were about fifteen yards apart, the new car stopped. For twenty or thirty seconds the two vehicles stood motionless, facing each other. Then the driver’s door of the second SUV opened and someone got out. He was in the headlights of both vans for a moment, until they were switched off almost simultaneously, so I was able to recognize the muscle boy I’d thought of as Brando the morning Vlad had come to the mall to give me my money. The fact that he was here tonight, when I’d told Vlad to come alone, made it fairly clear that I was not actually in line for that second $25,000.
Brando’s arms were loose and relaxed, curved slightly at the elbows; he was showing them empty hands and widespread fingers but not making a big deal about it. He moved slowly at first but then picked up the pace. From my perspective he seemed to be heading for the passenger side, but the left turn signal came on in Barkov’s vehicle. Brando slowed and changed direction to the driver’s side. Barkov’s window went down.
I heard nothing, but from Brando’s body language it was a spirited discussion. Three minutes passed, and then four, and then the headlights in Vlad’s car flashed its high beams once, then twice. So Vlad had slipped over to the driver’s side.
Small things crawled on me. A clutch of crickets began to fiddle away on all sides, as though I were in the center of an insect orchestra.
Brando lifted a hand in Vlad’s direction, universal sign language for hold on a minute, and then he nodded at Barkov a couple of times, straightened up, and ambled back toward Vlad’s SUV. He went to the driver’s side, and once he had the door open something in his right hand flamed red four, then five times, and I heard a spatter of sounds like paper bags being popped, and the crickets fell silent.
They remained silent as Brando went around to the passenger door and made a big show of tugging something heavy and hard to move onto the empty seat. Then he closed the door quietly and went back around the SUV, got in behind the wheel, closed the driver’s door behind him, and waited.
The crickets began to tune up again.
Barkov’s vehicle started to move, almost magisterially, like a galleon slowly catching the wind, and the SUV containing what remained of Vlad after his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Future followed it at a deliberate, presidential-candidate speed out of the parking lot.
I stayed right where I was for a few minutes, remaining perfectly still and listening to the crickets.
I like crickets.
35
It’s Christmas in Denver
Some of the lights were out in the enormous underground area parking beneath the Wedgwood and its sister apartment buildings, the Royal Doulton and the Lenox, now known in the neighborhood—thanks to some burned-out neon—as The Royal Doult and The nox. A few of the garage lights were always out, another strategy to discourage people who didn’t know about the place from getting out of their cars and going into the buildings, but tonight there were more out than usual, and the huge space stretched away to darkness on three of its four sides, so even if I’d been on the lookout there wouldn’t have been much to see.
I’d been mildly careful all the way home, just out of habit, and now I sat in the car for a few minutes, listening to the engine tick as it cooled, waiting for movement that I wouldn’t be able to see anyway.
It was all exactly as automatic as it sounds. First, I wasn’t actually worried about a threat; the only person on whose hate list I was guaranteed a place was Vlad, and wherever he was, I was certain that his body temperature was plummeting. Second, I didn’t really give a damn if someone took a crack at me. I probably would have welcomed it: Look, a diversion. Something to do.
The muted pops of Brando’s gun as he dispatched Vlad were still echoing in my skull, driving away the afterglow both of Morris Stempel’s miracle and the light in the faces I’d seen in the shelters where the Edgerton thieves had shared their holiday loot. It all seemed like years ago.
As vile a specimen as Vlad had been, being shot into hamburger in a parking lot on Christmas Eve was, I thought, a little stiff. And I’d been a participant, whether I pulled the trigger or not. It felt to me like I lived in a toxic zone where such things could and did happen, that I was responsible for choosing the life that put me there, and that some of the spiritual mud from Vlad’s execution had inevitably splashed on me and stained me. Again. When I could have been in a warm, well-lighted room, decorating a tree. With a family.
I thought briefly about counting my blessings, usually my go-to spirit raiser, but it seemed like too much effort. What I really wanted was to be a bear in a warm, dry cave with a lot of cozy leaves on top of me and pounds of fat beneath my skin to live on while I waited out the winter, dreaming bear dreams of blackberries and unguarded apple trees and really slow deer.
The bear thing comes on me from time to time. It’s never a good sign.
My sigh was heavy enough to fog my windshield. Seeing my malaise condense on the glass in front of me was more than I could take, so I got out of the car and popped the trunk.
There they were, all the presents I’d bought with Louie and, later, with Anime and Lilli. None of them was wrapped, of course, and I had forgotten to buy more paper and ribbon, so I’d either have to go back out to an all-night drug store and pay through the nose for being such a schlump or improvise some kind of wrapping. I wouldn’t have gone back out again to be blessed personally by the Pope, so improvisation it was.
In California, the war against shopping bags has trained all of us to drive around with a trunk full of empty bags, so at least I didn’t have to juggle all the stuff. I jammed it into a Trader Joe’s bag and a big old leather tote, and some of the good feelings that had gone into finding and buying that stuff rubbed off on me. As I handled each one I remembered why I’d chosen it, or why Anime and Lilli had, and how I felt about the person for whom I’d bought it. I was especially pleased with the two willowware saucers for my mother; she’s never cared much about material things, and this was the kind of gift she appreciated most, one that couldn’t have been bought for anyone else. Getting them had also given me a chance to make an oblique apology to poor old Will, who was, after all, just another harmless con man who’d found an edge he could use against the world. I’d been feeling a little guilty about the way I’d flattened him.
By the time I pushed the button to bring the creaking elevator, my spirits had lifted to the point where I’d mentally selected half a dozen shirts I could cut up to wrap the smaller gifts. I stopped on the lobby floor to give the Korean security guards a couple hundred bucks to divide up with the guys on the day shift and then rode the rest of the way up, my spirits ascending as I did. And then I got off on the third floor, and the reality of the empty apartment hit me across the face with a wet fish. Up and down, up and down. Maybe, I thought, I should give up the apartment and live in the elevator.
It usually takes three keys to open the door, but when I got to the third, the deadlock, it was already open. I paused for a moment, feeling a little prickle on the back of my neck. I never forget to lock it. But then I remembered that Ronnie had been the last person to leave, and she sometimes did forget, so I opened the door and went in.
I had reached for the light switch before I registered the pale light coming from the living room.
Carrying the tote bags as quietly as I could, I crossed the entryway into the hall, past the library, which was dark, and into the living room, my favorite, with its angular art deco windows and the view of downtown.
And there she was.
She was looking up at me, her head down and her fine gold hair hanging over her brow and framing her face. The coffee table had been pushed aside to let her sit on the floor with her back against the couch. A wobbly candle flame emitted shivers of light on the table beside her, where I also saw a bottle of white wine. No glass. Scattered in front of her were several small presents in various stages of being wrapped. None was finished, and they had an air that suggested they’d been abandoned. She leaned forward and swept them aside with her forearm and then kicked one halfway across the room.
I said, “How are you?”
“Almost drunk,” she said. “On the way to drunk.”
“Want company?”
She pushed her lower lip out and drew it in again. Then she rubbed her face with an open hand, refocused on me, and said, “I thought you’d never ask.” Then, with no apparent transition, she began to cry.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I said, dropping the bags of gifts, and by the time I was on the fifth or sixth no I was on my knees in front of her, and she put her arms around my neck and made deep, heartbroken whuffing sounds, interspersed with the sniffs of someone who needs badly to blow her nose. I hugged her again, got up, and said, “Hang on,” and when I came back I had a whole roll of toilet paper in my hand. She took it even before I’d finished kneeling, spooled about a yard’s worth around her hand, and scrubbed at her face. Then she blew her nose hard enough to turn herself inside out, wadded the paper up, and tossed it over her shoulder onto the couch. She said, “Surprise.”
“It is a surprise. I’d say I’m happy, but it’s hard for me to be happy when you’re not.”
“Gimme the wine,” she said, and I handed her the bottle, which was about three-quarters empty. She upended it into her mouth, knocked back a couple of inches, and put it on the table, which, judging from the force with which the bottle hit it, was about an inch higher than she’d thought it was. She looked past me at the room and then back at me. She said, “Trenton.”
“Trenton,” I said, and I could feel the pulse bumping away at the side of my throat.
“Open one of them,” she said fiercely. “Any one. They’re not really wrapped anyway.”
I took the nearest one. When I picked it up the paper fell away, and I was holding a box that said First Steps on the side. I opened it to see a tiny pair of shoes.
“I don’t even know,” she said, and then she stopped and blinked a couple of times, cleared her throat, and said, “how big his feet are now. I don’t know how tall he is now. I don’t know”—she was blinking again, rapidly—“whether his hair is still blond.” She closed her eyes for a long moment, and I watched a tear track its way down her left cheek. “I don’t know what color my own baby’s hair is.” And then she was sobbing full out and I had her in my arms although she barely seemed to register it until she finally rested her forehead, hotter than I’d expected it to be, against my neck.
I waited until it passed and said, “What’s his name?”
“Eric. Eric. He’s almost two.”
“His father has him?”
“Yes. And he told me I’d never see him, never see my own baby, again.”
“Who is he?”
“Eric Rossi. Doctor Eric Rossi. You’ll enjoy this. My baby is a junior.”
It was easy to identify the black thing blooming inside of me as homicide. “What’s he got? I mean, to keep you from taking the child and telling him to go fuck himself?”
“The Jersey mob,” she said. “The whole bunch of them. And don’t suggest anything silly or heroic because all you’ll do is get yourself killed.”
