Sixteen

Sheri looked up as the warden returned, his face red with morning air. Another man accompanied him, a man with a longer, softer face—a composite visage, she thought, of the entire Georgetown humanities department. His grey hair hung in long feathers on either side of his matching turtleneck. He looked at Sheri with veiled interest, making an effort to appear nonchalant. Tourists usually left the town untouched and, should they chance to pass through, they were invariably older, fatter and louder than he. None of them, he had learned over the years, cared for Chomsky or poetry. A criminal tourist might be a welcome change.

“Hello,” he said, in a soft tone of richly feigned boredom, “my name Adrianne. I’m here to translate for you, since you evidently don’t speak Romanian. He’ll need to know your name and where you’re from.”

She felt her color rise. That the man was insufferable, there was no question. And probably a Princeton washout. But he certainly wasn’t a bureaucrat, which meant that the warden hadn’t called the embassy yet.

“Thank god,” she said, with the realization that half-truths were her only option. “how is the man who was attacked? Is he ok?”

Adrianne shrugged his shoulders. “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry, my name is Sheryl. Sheryl Peary. It’s nice to meet you.” She held out her free hand, but he was already leaning back, cultivating a stale air of hippie chic against the peeling wall.

Fifteen

Tullia’s face, white with shock, spread a frightened and indignant crimson as she stood and walked toward the table. The man followed closely behind, his gun a breath away from her spine. She tried to catch Serban’s glance as she chose a seat at the corner, but he looked, expressionless, at nothing.

The second man spoke, and Tullia looked at him fully for the first time. He was dark-eyed with close-cut hair—a steely version of the men her mother had sometimes found at the bottom of a pint. His voice was joyless. “Mr. Balcescu, I am authorized to kill you, and I am fully aware of your language capabilities. We have been following your career closely, so it would be pointless to pretend innocence. We also know that you have undiagnosed c-10 Huntington’s disease. It’s a viral holdover from the cold war, a slow intellectual decay that kills its victims over years. The Soviets used it on American scientists-- NASA, the CIA, even a few university researchers. None of them could feed themselves by the end.”

He paused and drew an orange-capped plastic vial from an inner pocket with his free hand. “Look at me,” he demanded. The Serb set his jaw and looked up without moving his head. The man continued, “We know that you refuse on principle to deal with the east. That’s why we’re here. If you see our offer through, you retire to Romania with seven courses of the c-10 antidote. This is the eighth. Take them all and it’s a full cure.” He threw the vial onto the placemat at Serban’s elbows. “Refuse, and we’ll make sure that you die a slow death in a Bolivian jail. A senator of the United States and two businessmen will visit your home in Romania. They’ll travel as vacationers following The Historian. When they arrive, we think that they’ll negotiate for your participation in an arms transaction with a Yemeni rebel group. Set your terms and leave the rest to us.” He paused.

“Not agreed,” Serban said without seeming to move a muscle. “Not yet.”

“You have two weeks to consider. Return to Romania, leave the weapons here. Make any other choice, and you'll remember this as the last time you saw daylight.”

To be continued . . . .

Even though I am thoroughly convinced that my mom is my only fan, and that she only reads this fab story when I print it out for her, I want to say that I'm so sorry for missing last Friday's post. My muse abandoned me a Wednesday ago for a spot playing keytar in a camera commercial, and then I caught SARS on an interminable Southwest flight to the Windy City, where the Hancock Tower reminded me of Batman again. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that it's time to go to bed, even though I am nowhere near done with my fourteenth slice. If you check back next week, you might find the thrilling conclusion, replete with CIA cunning, masquerading as post #15.

Sweet dreams,

s.

Fourteen

Tullia looked at her friend asleep on the bed, the hard line of his jaw etched against a thin, white pillow. She ached to kiss his forehead, to take him home and keep him safely by, to return to their everyday routine.

Two weeks ago, they had been in Greenland. The brisk air was good for Serban’s health, and they’d stayed in a cabin inland from the shore. She was in the kitchen, making oatmeal with walnuts and drinking in the pungent scent of the rough-hewn logs, when a knock at the door jarred her from her morning reverie. Although he was in another room, she could feel Serban’s eyes narrow and his muscles clench. They were not expecting visitors, and the cabin’s laundry room and closets were bristling with guns, some new, some used, stacked in rows against the walls alongside galoshes and beneath fuzzy hats and knitted scarves left behind by better-intentioned vacationers.

The door was her province. She cut back the flame on the enormous gas stove and quickly wiped her hands on a gingham kitchen towel. A few early rays of sunshine straggled through the trees and settled on the stoop, making half-silhouettes of the men outside. As she made her way down the narrow hall, she saw that they were too robust to be European and too tall to be Zapotec. They were probably tourists, lost. She opened the door about the width of an apple muffin. “Morning,” she said with forced cheer. “We are a little under the weather today. Is there something I can help you with while you wait outside?”

She felt the blunt muzzle of the man’s gun in her stomach as her head hit the side of the door. Her hand held fast to the knob as the man pushed through, shoulders first. “Back up” he yelled. “Face the kitchen. Sit down on the floor, hands behind your back.” His handcuffs, cold from the morning air, sent pins and needles into her forearms as the he planted the flat of his boot between her shoulders. “Where is Balcescu?” he demanded, as a second man swept past her.

The force of the blow knocked the air from her lungs. She gritted her teeth and said nothing as shouting erupted in the next room. The second man plunged back into the kitchen with Serban in front of him, right arm wrenched sharply backward. Gun still drawn, he pushed his unwilling captive into the breakfast table and then motioned for Tullia. The man lifted his boot from her back, and she leaned forward but could find no purchase on the stone floor as an unforgiving arm hooked her shoulder and threw her forward. She looked up at the blue and white striped silk robe that Serban wore, a birthday present from his sister. It was streaked with newspaper ink. “Don’t bother talking,” the second man hissed. “Get over there and sit down. Not next to the gun runner.”

Thirteen

The man left, locking the door behind him. Sheri closed her eyes and thought of the postcard above her desk at home. She wondered if it was still there, with its foggy harbor, a wharfman’s little green house perched above its own reflection, the wooden pier beneath waiting for the tide to change. There were seventeen red lobster buoys, each with a horizontal yellow stripe, queued across the white trim. On the shore an old blue sailboat slept, its wooden deck covered with pine needles and sap. The deep keel that once held her steady at sea now laid her low against the rocky, tree-lined coast.

She and Daniel had taken a summer trip to the Maine shore. The memory was a luxury now, and it met her unbidden in a grey meadow of half-sleep. He looked at her from the driver’s side, his long, straight lashes unable to veil the steel blue intensity of the one hundred and eight things that he wanted to say but couldn’t. They talked about his parents’ dog instead—a polar bear of an animal whose not-entirely-straight tail waved a furry white flag of joyous surrender and whose appetite occasionally ran to socks. Later, as they walked along the jagged beach, she’d said that God was a pointillist whose creatures were his medium, each tiny dot wondering what the picture looked like. “A marshmallow peep,” he said without blinking. “A fried marshmallow peep.”

The remembrance of laughter brought her once again to wakefulness. She stretched her free arm and reached for the roll. It tasted fresh and sweet, and the smell of it reminded her that she was hungry. Still, the postcard stayed with her as she ate. She had no idea where he’d gotten it, but the postmark read “Boothbay Harbor.” On the back, he’d written, “You’re the peeps” next to a stick-figure chicken. It was funny and she’d loved it, and it had been hanging above her desk ever since. If she ever made it back, she thought, she’d turn it postmark-side out and never forget him again.

Twelve

Although he hid his interest from the warden, Christof was curious about the American girl. Andre had found her, after hours of searching, exhausted and hiding in the bottom of a rusted phone booth just blocks from the train station. She tried to run three times on the way to the prison, twice with her wrists cuffed together, and radishes had fallen from her skirt pockets. “Thank God,” Andre had muttered, “she is too thin to be very fast.”

Christof opened the door and peered in. She looked like a muddied Calvin Klein ad. Her strong-boned face was gaunt, and her wide-set eyes were black against white skin. A days-old pony tail barely fettered the mass of matted, curly hair resting at the nape of her neck. When she didn’t look up, he closed the door and set off to get some food, wondering if he could sell a radish-only diet.

The door clicked shut but never locked, and Sheri squirmed in the chair. She knew that she could stand up and drag it behind her but, frankly, she had nowhere to go. It would be better, she thought wryly, to wait until she was chained to something smaller, like a train ticket to Bratislava, or maybe Istanbul. Like a postcard from her teens, They Might Be Giants popped into her head. Why did Constantinople get the works? She smiled at the song in spite of herself. After a year and a half on the run, she had become skilled at waiting for the right moment to nestle beside her, and the only thing nestled beside her now was the jarring metal arm of a naugahyde office chair.

The door opened again, and a tall man entered. He set a peach-colored fiberglass tray on the warden's desk and pointed at it. "Okay?" he asked. Sheri looked at the tray and then at the man. "Okay," she replied.

Eleven

The Serb woke up wearing a tissue paper negligee with a peek-a-boo back. His room, which smelled like bubble gum and iodine, was bright, boxy white with a thin, moss green blanket.

Tullia was sleeping in a chair by the door, a half-eaten croissant in her lap.

"Tulli?" he ventured. She moved only to breath. "Tulli?" he tried again, louder this time, and watched as she pressed her eyes tightly closed.

"Oh," she stretched. "Oh my goodness. I must have fallen asleep. Are you awake now, then?"

"Yes, damn it." He was pale, like a spent storm cloud, but his eyes flashed anyway. "Where in Sallah's name are we?" he asked, hoping that she wouldn't say Mexico. "It smells like jello."

Tullia looked at the i.v. in his arm and wondered what was in it. It must be something interesting, she thought. Morphine super plus. Serban always knew where he was.

She steadied her eyes on his. "Romania. We went to the house yesterday. You had a run-in with a woman there, and a dog or two." She paused, waiting for him to remember. "We brought you to the hospital this morning."

His eyes narrowed. "Why the hospital?" It was a demand, not a question.

She heard the confused edge in his voice and hesitated. The doctor had been unequivocal. His recovery would take months. For a well man, it would be quicker, but Serban was not a well man. She pressed her back teeth together and took a deep breath. "You were hurt badly, and Dr. Badgku . . . ." Her words trailed off and left her behind. "We'll have to stay here for a while, so you may as well rest."

He marshalled his voice again. "Fine for now, but the pols are coming this week." It sounded like he'd said "prols," but she would know what he'd meant.

Tullia thought briefly of calling him emperor but didn't want to be the only one in on the joke. "If you're up to it," she said, "they can come here. If not, they'll have wait, or figure things out on their own. They found you didn't they?"

He scowled and wiggled his fingers under the blanket. They all worked. He tried his toes next. Same. "I will be fine by then," he announced, suddenly tired. The jello smell was closing in. He thought of the house with its garden, of the stone wall pressed against the distant view of the town below. His mother had taken afternoon naps there, her linen dresses yellow with sunshine. He hoped that he would, soon, too. But Mexico, or wherever he was, would do for now.

"Will you stay by the door?" he asked Tullia.

"Yes. I will."

Nine

The prison hallway held the chill of dawn even though the morning outside was well underway. The warden wrinkled his nose at the parallel walls. Their yellow paint was peeling in papery dried-icing sheets, revealing the pea green beneath. They reminded him of baklava. He took a short breath and bellowed, “Christof! Christofor!” and nearly twitched with excitement.

A man walked around the corner. He had a deliberate gait and slate-colored blue eyes that were striking. He was a foot taller than the warden, and several years his junior.

“Chris, the woman that Andre arrested yesterday is not mute,” the warden said, as he bounced down the hall. “She has a fine voice. A strong voice!” He raised his fist into the air for emphasis and chuckled.

“I didn’t say that she was mute,” Chris answered. “I said that she didn’t speak to Andre.”

“Well, with a smile like his, who would?” They were walking in the same direction now, and the warden’s step quickened to keep pace with the younger man. Christof gave an obligatory laugh.

“She is an American,” the warden continued. “A tired one. She could probably eat some breakfast. And I don’t think she speaks the language.” He stopped in front of his office and turned to face his companion. “Have you seen her yet?”

Christof shook his head. The warden smiled as he pointed his right index finger at his squinting left eye, which sparkled with mischief. “She’s a gypsy. Like you.” He paused for effect, but the young man looked more opaque than amused. He continued, “She is here in my office. We’ll need a translator. In the meantime, bring her a roll and some cheese. She knows something about the Serb.”