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.