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.