Exiles (18 page)

“Umm, yes,” Melissa said. “It was on. But I wasn’t focused.”

“Look, fellas,” Spiegel said, turning around. “Thanks for the wine. But I wasn’t on television. It wasn’t me. Wrong guy.”

“No, we saw you, for sure,” said the brush cut.

“Maybe we should send this wine back,” Spiegel said to Jorge. “I just don’t like the vibes here. These guys are getting to me. I mean, this is not a friendly gesture. This is . . . ”

“Enemy action,” said Melissa.

“Yeah, this is not normal, man. I mean, I don’t want to be paranoid, but just who are those guys? Why are they here? Are they, like, great lovers of flamenco guitar? Big fans of Mario’s cuisine?

Your basic Uppsala pub crawlers? No. You know what they look like to me?” He leaned forward so that he could whisper. He spoke so softly that his words barely swayed the candle flame. “Cops.”

“Like what?” said Jorge.

“Police. Fuzz. Pigs. Gendarmes.
Polizei
. Whatever word you have for it in Portuguese.”

“Oh, you are being paranoid,” said Lisbet. “I mean, they’re not even Swedes. I don’t know what they’re talking. Finnish, I think.”

“I think they’re following me,” Spiegel said.

“From where, though? All the way from Flogsta? I would have seen them in the mirror, you know. But the roads were empty, after the rain.”

It was true. No one had been near them when they drove into Gamla Stan, and no one knew they were coming to this club. Maybe Lisbet was right and Spiegel was being paranoid, a remnant from his early student days when he imagined that behind every cloud of marijuana smoke lurked a narcotics detective and a federal drug agent. It took him years to settle down and realize that no one cared what kind of chemicals he was mixing into his bloodstream. It was just as well, to the feds, if every student in America majored in pharmaceutical applications. Keep them high, keep them happy, and let us wage our war. Opiates are the opiate of the people.

But once Spiegel abandoned drugs for politics, he found himself in faster, more dangerous company. No cops ever bothered the potheads, but the activists, as he had learned, were likely to find themselves at the receiving end of a billy club. Though Spiegel felt safer, and more free from police harassment, in Sweden, he knew that he would be wise to keep in mind one of the tenets that he had often heard preached from the pulpits of the movement: The pigs are the same all over.

“I don’t know. I just don’t like their attitude is all,” Spiegel said. “Maybe we should call it a wrap.”

“Sorry?”

“Call it quits. Splitsville. I mean, let’s go.”

“But Lenny,” Jorge said. “You can’t mean that. It’s—how do you say it? The night is young?”

“Well, maybe I oughta go alone, and if either of those guys makes to follow me . . . ”

“We call the cops, right?” said Melissa.

“I guess not. I guess you and Luis come after me, carrying wine bottles. Unless you’ve got a knife, Luis.”

“Sure, I’m a real bandito,” he said. He smiled and pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his jeans pocket. “It’s got a corkscrew.”

“That’s ridiculous. You guys can’t go chasing those two thugs out to the alleyway. They’ll carve you up. They’ll kill you.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Spiegel said.

Melissa screwed her face up into a childish pout. “So let’s just stay here and wait them out. They won’t do anything to you as long as we’re in the club.”

“They won’t do anything at all,” said Lisbet. “You Americans are so crazy. Too many Westerns. Shoot-out at the old salon.”

“Saloon,” Spiegel said.

“America is a violent country, honey,” Melissa added.

“Now let’s not talk about these things,” Jorge said. “What I wanted to do here, if I might, was sing a song for my dear friends, and I was hoping that I might borrow Luis’s guitar.”

“You’re going to sing?” said Lisbet.

“Of course. Why not?”

“In Mexico we have a saying,” Luis said. “Not my gun, not my horse, not my woman, not my guitar. But I will make an exception for you, Jorge.”

“And lend him your horse?”

Everyone laughed, and Jorge took Luis’s guitar and stepped up onto the stage. He sat on the three-legged stool, hit one loud chord, and began to sing, early Beatles.

“Jorge has no trouble tuning,” Spiegel said to Luis.

“Because I had tuned it for him,” Luis said.

“Or because his ear is not so good as Luis’s,” said Melissa.

“Or because it’s better,” said Lisbet.

Here we go, thought Spiegel.

“Do you two play together,” Melissa said. “Duets?”

“Oh no,” Lisbet said. “I just listen. He’s the caballero.”

“The wandering troubadour, huh?”

“He doesn’t wander so much. Not so much as you think,” Lisbet said to Melissa. “When he does, he always comes back home, you see.”

“Oh? I thought he spent many nights out with the boys. Playing cards.”

Lisbet turned away to look at Jorge. But Jorge’s eyes were locked on Melissa as he sang.

“Bravo, bravo,” Melissa shouted, applauding over the music.

“Cool it, Melissa,” Spiegel said. “Let him sing.”

Spiegel felt a hand on his shoulder. The drunk with the brush cut was standing beside him. His face was flushed, and his stance was unsteady. He stared down at Spiegel with pig-red eyes.

“You are the guy. The American who was on television,” he said. He pronounced it:
tele-wision.

“Not me,” Spiegel said. He was looking directly into the man’s round gut. He was getting annoyed. “Now just leave us alone.”

“But you are a hero,” the man said. “I hate America. I hate your fucking war. I hate Wiet-nam. You are a good man. Let me buy you another bottle of wine.”

“It’s not my fucking war, and I don’t want your wine,” Spiegel said.

“We can drink to the death of America!”

Spiegel turned to check out brush cut’s partner. He was gone. To wait for them in the alleyway? To slash the tires of Lisbet’s Volvo?

“That’s fine, you hate America,” Spiegel said. “I don’t. I’m going back there. I live there. Now get your paws off me.”

Spiegel looked around furtively to see if anyone could help extricate him from this guy’s grip. No one was paying any attention to him. Mario was clearing the back table. He was agitated, worried that the drunks were trying to slip out without paying the bar bill. Lisbet and Melissa were staring at each other. Jorge had eyes only for Melissa, and Luis had his gaze fixed on the precious guitar.

“Fuck President Nixon. Fuck Henry Kissinger. Fuck the war!” the guy shouted.

Jorge was leaning into the mike, trying to boost the volume.

“I am not so blind. I know what goes on,” Lisbet was saying to Melissa. “I am only saying: It is over. I am warning you. We have made our announcement. He is mine now. You touch him, you die.”

“What makes you think I have any interest in Jorge?” said Melissa. She leaned across the table and kissed Spiegel hard on the lips. The music stopped.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jorge shouted to Melissa.

“He’s my date,” she said, stroking Spiegel’s face and neck. “I dig him.”

Lisbet stood and turned to Jorge. “Why do you care who she’s fucking?” she cried.

“I don’t care. I’m just . . . interested,” he said. The mike began to screech with feedback.

“Then take her!” Lisbet yelled. “The two of you! She’s nothing but a whore. And you—”

“Fucking Americans,” said the brush cut.

“Who’s fucking Americans?” Luis said.

“He is, she is, they all are,” Lisbet shouted, gesticulating wildly.

“I don’t care what you say about him,” Melissa said. “But watch what you’re saying about
me
, bitch.”

“You watch this,” Lisbet said. She reached back and then her arm uncoiled and her fist shot out as if it were on a spring and she landed a shot right to Melissa’s jaw. Melissa went down.

“Why did you do that?” Spiegel called. He tried to step between them, in case Lisbet planned to continue her assault.

“Baby,” Jorge yelled, but not to Lisbet. He jumped off the stage to help Melissa, and as he did so he dropped the guitar. It hit the floor with a deadening
thwunk,
followed by the asyn-chronic reverberations of a popping fret board.

Luis screamed. “
Madre de dios
,” he yelled. “You bastard!”

Luis jumped toward Jorge, with his hands stretched out as if to throttle him, but Spiegel held him back. “Calm down, calm down,” he hollered, in anything but a calm tone.

“You get away from her, Jorge,” Lisbet shouted. “She’s a
putain
! American whore!”

Melissa sat up and wiped a smear of blood from her mouth as Jorge leaned above her, solicitous and terrified. With a silk handkerchief, he dabbed the blood from Melissa’s lips.

“Take her then, you twig, you coward,” Lisbet went on. Her face was red with tears and excitement. “I could rip each of you apart with my hands. You deserve each other, you puff of smoke, you blade of grass, you nothing!”

Luis was gently fingering his damaged guitar, like an archaeologist studying a shard of rare pottery. He was muttering in Spanish, bringing down the curses of the ancient Mayan gods on Jorge and all his descendants for three generations.

“Come on, let’s go,” Spiegel said to Lisbet. He steered her away from the wreck she had made, hoping to extricate her before she could bring about any more carnage.

“Oh sir, sir,” Mario called as Spiegel walked to the steps. “Your bill, sir. You have not paid, not to mention these damages—”

“I thought this was on Jorge,” Spiegel said.

“He said the Americans would pay, sir,” Mario said. “The Americans.”

“What’s he talking about?” Spiegel asked Lisbet.

“Then get it from
her
,” Lisbet said, pointing to Melissa. Melissa was standing, wobbly, leaning her hand on the table, as Jorge fluttered around her like a hummingbird. “She’s an American.”

“But you must see what you have done to my club,” Mario cried. He looked ashen in the smoke-strained light.

“Let’s go,” Lisbet said. She grabbed Spiegel’s hand and pulled him to the stairway.

“You will hear about this,” Mario called after them. “I know people at the embassy!”

At the doorway, Spiegel, like Lot’s wife, took one look backward to assay the scene of destruction. The guy with the walrus mustache had vanished. The brush-cut drunk had collapsed beside a pine bench in the corner, his feet propped against an upturned table, his thick hands resting on his gut. He looked as if he were dead to the world, but his eyes, two red-rimmed slits of ice, were fixed on Spiegel, as they had been all night.

“Fucking Americans,” he said. “Make trouble wherever you go.”

9

Spiegel’s mouth felt like
sandpaper and his head like a Japanese lantern, a thin membrane filled with hot tongues of light. Every movement churned his stomach, and waves of dizziness flowed through his body as he tried to stand. His legs trembled and his knees fluttered. He sat on the edge of the bed to steady himself. He breathed deeply. His stomach calmed a little. The pain in his head narrowed to a spot of fire that burned behind his eyes. Slowly, sensation returned to his limbs, and eventually he felt that if he were to stand and walk to the bathroom his body might be willing to comply.

How did he let himself come to this? He hadn’t been so drunk, nor so hungover, since . . . when? Since he had discovered, in a sense, who he was. And perhaps that was why he had let himself go last night. He felt that he was losing that self-awareness. Since returning to Flogsta, it was no longer clear to him that he was on a mission, that his presence in Uppsala was part of some grander purpose. He had come all this way, and at such great expense, jeopardizing his academic standing and, as a result, his draft deferment, to what end? What was he doing here? Whom had he become? He had never enrolled in the university, he had pretty much dropped out of the language class, he would probably earn no academic credits, the friends he had made as Spiegel he had spurned when he posed as Aaronson, the celebrity he had gained as Aaronson he had renounced when he returned to his life as Spiegel. His abnegations and sacrifices had, so far, led only to confrontations and confusions. The movement in Uppsala, without Aaronson’s leadership, was drifting aimlessly, no more able to stop the war than a skiff can stop the tide. Across the world, the firefights raged in the tropic air, the bombs dropped on the rice paddies, the body counts tolled on the news night after night—and the Americans in Sweden were up in arms about housing vouchers and vocational training. If they knew how ineffective we are up here, how mired in trivialities and in petty bureaucratic disputes, they would put all the would-be deserters and resisters on the Baltic Express, Spiegel thought. The war machine runs more efficiently without us.

Perhaps they want us here.

But no, that couldn’t be. For life in Uppsala, in Sweden, despite the cavils and complaints by the Zekes, the Worms, the Aaronsons of the world, was, all in all, pretty soft. The housing was good, the government took care of your most basic needs, the wages were decent, the working conditions were excellent, there was always an open door to further education, and, let’s face it, the girls were stunning. And if most of them turned out to be as cold and unfathomable as glacial ice, there were some whose hearts would melt at the approach of an American war resister, a streak of light across the dark skies of their isolated and seemingly predestined lives. If the American soldiers, the kids being drafted out of the deadliest urban ghettos or the remote Midwestern prairies knew that, with little risk, with near impunity, they could lay down their arms and establish a new life in a secure and prosperous nation, how many more would desert? How many would shed their citizenship like a second skin and slip into the silky borrowed robes of expatriate sanctuary? The movement would be like a river flowing north, spreading like a flood across the plains, obliterating the landscape, soaking the dry earth with a great tide of peace.

And if that were so, if the army’s criminal-intelligence division had any concerns at all that the trickle toward the north could become a stream and then a torrent, the smartest thing that they could do would be to let the resisters alone to squabble among themselves, to pick one another apart, to complain like spoiled children about their mistreatment by the Swedes, to gripe about their rights and to file grievances about perceived wrongs, in short to present a tear-streaked, pouting face to the world and to make the movement seem to be petty, impulsive, and doomed.

I must have been a fool, Spiegel thought, to agree to stay in Uppsala until Aaronson comes home. How long might that be? Tracy had heard nothing from Aaronson for weeks. Maybe Aaronson would remain out of touch for several more weeks, maybe for months. Maybe he had left forever. If that were so, Spiegel had no more reason to stay in Uppsala. He could go to the American embassy, tell them he had lost his passport, and apply for a replacement. And if his doing so threw a spotlight onto Aaronson, so what? Spiegel had already given him enough time to get himself home free and out of danger.

Yet how could he explain that he had lost his passport? The American officials would believe that he had given, or sold, his documents to the antiwar movement. They would hold him, interrogate him, threaten him with fines and with prison. They would open his case again, back in the States, figuring that he had been part of Aaronson’s conspiracy from the beginning, that he had not been just an innocent dupe busted because of police incompetence. They would suppose that he had been a straw man, set on fire to distract the pigs, a blaze that burned bright but quick to give Aaronson enough time to escape.

Maybe if he did walk into the embassy, they would spring the trap. They would sit down across from him with steely eyes. They would hold the pen out toward his shaky hands, and when he signed his name to the long confession that they had typed, they would pat him on the shoulder, hand him a new passport, and look at him as if to say, “What took you so long?”

Grappling with these thoughts cleared Spiegel’s head. He swung his feet out of bed and took a few long gulps from the glass of water that he had with foresight set on the floor. His tongue felt like a cardboard blotter, and it swelled as his body absorbed the liquid, seemingly directly into his cells. Sunlight was streaking through the slats in his window blinds, and from the courtyard below he heard the sounds of the students rushing out to catch the early bus into town. He heard the rise and fall of Swedish, the vowels skipping over the hard consonants like rocks bounced off the surface of a lake. He could decipher a phrase now and again, but he could not fit the elements together into a coherent structure. He had been exposed to the language long enough so that he could see some phrases as distinct units in his mind. But when he heard the language spoken, the sounds all jumbled together.

Spiegel stood and stepped gingerly toward the desk. He picked up the letter to Iris that he had begun the day before. He folded it and slipped it in among his books. Maybe writing to her, at least while Aaronson was still out of the country, was not such a hot idea. Who knows who might see the letter? Spiegel fingered through his language book,
Svensk för er
—Swedish for you. Or, Swedish for the ear, as he called it. Maybe he should get back to the classroom. It was a new week, and he could make a fresh start, pick up where he had left off, consummate that sundered relationship with Fröken Fält. If he took a quick shower, he might catch the late bus and get to class before the first break. As he set the book back on his desk, he heard a rapping at his door.

“Lenny, Lenny, are you awake?” It was Jorge.

He had been with Melissa, evidently. It looked as if they had spent the night in a state of war. Jorge’s eyes were dark, his skin scored with scratch marks. His hair, usually sculpted with architectural precision, was a matted tangle of black wire. He was wearing a silk robe without a belt. He clutched the folds closed with his fist.

“It was your little dish Tracy on the telephone,” Jorge said. Spiegel had given her Melissa’s number—Melissa was the only one he knew in the complex with a phone in her room—in case she had to reach him in an emergency. “I think she must be interested in you, still.”

Spiegel was in no mood to snap at the bait. If Tracy had called him, at this hour, something had gone wrong. “Tell her to hang on,” Spiegel said, slipping into a pair of jeans. “I’ll be right over.”

“No, don’t go anywhere,” Jorge said. “That was her message.”

“You mean she hung up? Didn’t she want to talk to me?”

“She said she would be coming to Flogsta. She wanted me to make sure you stay here. She is on her way.”

“Okay,” Spiegel said. “I’ll shower and get dressed.”

“Then come to our suite. She will meet you there.”

“Lisbet’s?”

Jorge looked at Spiegel and laughed. “Of course not. Melissa’s.”

Spiegel had not been in Melissa’s room for several weeks. The place was much more cluttered than it had been when he first visited her. The walls were still hung with her neatly arranged displays of black-and-white photography and psychedelic poster art. But the floor was almost unnavigable. Heaps of clothing, men’s and women’s, had been tossed into the corners. The bedding was scattered across the floor. The rya rug was strewn with matchsticks and ashes. Candles and wads of incense were massed on the desktop and the bureau. Many of the candles had been toppled, and they sat in pools of hardened wax. The room had the air of a votive shrine that had been sacked by Vandals.

Melissa stood at the mirror, brushing her hair.

“How are you feeling, after last night?” she asked.

“What’s the Swedish word for Alka-Seltzer?” Spiegel said.

“I don’t know. Maybe,
skål
?” She turned to look at him. There was a slight cut above her lip.

“Your mouth okay?” he asked.

“Bitch wears a ring.”

“Her engagement ring, perhaps.”

“Look, it’s broken,” Melissa said. She leaned close to Spiegel, and touched the top of her finger to her mouth.

“Her ring?”

“My tooth.”

“You could get it capped.”

“I think it will make my smile more sexual. It will give me the damaged look.”

“Yes, you’ll look feral,” he said. She looked at him, puzzled. Let her guess, he thought.

Spiegel could hear the shower running. Tails of steam puffed from beneath the jamb of the bathroom door. He imagined that Jorge would be in there a long time, tending to his grooming.

“I’m sorry Tracy woke you up,” Spiegel said.

“I’m late for rehearsal, anyway,” Melissa said. “Can you hand me that?” She pointed to a small steel box, jammed between her mattress and the wall. Spiegel had to sit on her bed and lean over the feather pillows to reach the box. A spicy scent rose to him in a little cloud as he sat back on her crumpled coverlet. He felt a slight stirring of sexual arousal until he realized that the perfumes he had detected were not from Melissa’s hair and skin. The scent was Jorge’s.

“Thanks,” Melissa said, and popped open the case with a small key. She removed a stack of papers and shuffled through them.

“What are you doing?” Spiegel asked.

“It’s my script.” She was mouthing lines to herself as she tucked her blouse into her black jeans.

“I thought you were in the chorus.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve been discovered. I might get to play Kristin, if I can learn to cook. She spends most of the first act fucking around in the kitchen.”

“I don’t think you want to do that,” Spiegel said, remembering her curry.

“Yeah, I really want to be Julie.”

Spiegel leaned back against the wall and asked Melissa about Tracy’s call.

Melissa turned to him and spoke quietly, her voice almost drowned by the steady cascade of Jorge’s marathon shower. “She was worried,” Melissa said. “She thought you had gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Jorge told her he thought you had gone home with Lisbet.”

“He what? Why would he think that?”

“It would have made things more interesting.”

“You mean, more convenient. For him.”

“What about for you?” Melissa said.

“Maybe I still have a little sense of loyalty to Jorge. I think you’ll be through with him soon enough, and he’ll go back to her like a dog with his tail between his legs.”

“And until then? What’s wrong with Lisbet?”

“I’m not sure I’m a match for her.”

“No? That’s too bad,” Melissa said. “Then I guess I’ll have to beat the shit out of her myself.”

She might be serious, Spiegel thought, and he was about to answer when there was a knock on the door. “It’s me,” a voice called from the hallway. “Tracy.”

Melissa let her in.

“Thank God,” she said, and she dashed across the room. She clutched Spiegel tight to her, startling him with the strength of her embrace. “I’m so glad I caught you here. You haven’t gone out this morning yet, have you? You haven’t been out at all?”

“I was thinking about going back to class,” Spiegel said. “But I was afraid I missed too much and they’d make me sit in the corner.”

“Well, you’re not going back, so don’t worry.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Spiegel said. But he was starting to resent her presumptions, the way she had begun to appropriate his life as if he were no more than a tool in her hands, a little chisel with which she could chip away at a block of wood or, if necessary, pry open a door.

“I see we have a visitor,” Jorge said. He emerged from the shower followed by a cloud of steam and cologne. His silk robe swished as he stepped into the room, and Jorge’s thin frame and hollow chest seemed lost amid the voluptuous folds of the fabric. He set down his chestnut-wood hairbrush and took Tracy’s hand to his lips. “Welcome to our house,” he said.

“Look,” Tracy said. “I think the shower was a good idea.”

Jorge let her hand drop and looked at her in amazement. “You would like to shower?” he asked, puzzled.

“No, the water. Keep it running. In case anyone is trying to tape us.”

“Tape-record?” Jorge said. “But why? I do not sing in the shower.”

“Anything could be going on here. This place could be bugged. With the water going . . . ”

“You’ve read too many spy novels,” Melissa said.

“Or not enough.”

“Okay, forget it. I’m probably being paranoid,” Tracy said. “I can trust you guys, though, right? I have to.”

“What’s the problem, Tracy?” Spiegel asked. Despite his smoldering annoyance at her untimely visit and at her proprietary tone, he realized that she would not have driven out to Flogsta on a whim. Something must have troubled her, frightened her. He had no idea how he could help, or even if he should.

“You don’t read the newspapers, do you?” Tracy said. She looked around at all three of them.