Exiles (31 page)

With a click, like a case snapping closed, Spiegel remembered where he had come upon the words uttered by the face in the mirror. He scanned the framed posters and the photographs on the walls. The thumbtacks had been removed from the lower corners of a poster of a surf bum, and the picture had begun to curl toward the ceiling, like a tailing ocean wave. Two months’ worth of grime and smoke stains had clouded the plastic laminate that protected Melissa’s art photographs. The images, which once had given the room the look of a gallery, had become blurred and obscure. With the side of his hand, Spiegel wiped away an oily palm print and leaned close to peer at the double-exposed image of the Venus flytrap and the Botticelli Venus. He could read the legend beneath the images:
Which one am I?
Next to the photograph, a display case was hanging limply from a single hinge.

“Tracy, look,” Spiegel said, in a voice that startled him because it was once again his own. “Someone pulled it from the wall.”

The case used to rest on a set of brackets, directly over Melissa’s bed. One of the brackets had been wrenched half-loose from the plasterboard. The other had been twisted, as if a hand had tried but failed to tug it free.

“Yes, so what?” Tracy said. “The way this place looks right now, wall decor is not an issue.”

“It’s what used to be there,” Spiegel said. “Her gun. That’s where Melissa kept her pistol. Someone took it.”

“Are you sure it’s not buried in this clutter?”

They looked, but found no sign of the gun. A whip and a long sword and a scabbard that Melissa had also placed on display had been tossed into a corner among the bedding. The gun was gone.

“My God,” Tracy said. “What do you think—”

“We’ve got to see if he’s in his room,” Spiegel said.

They rushed back across the hall, and Tracy began bashing her palm against Jorge’s door. “Jorge, if you’re in there, open up,” she called above the tattoo of her slapping hand. “Unlock the door, Jorge.” But there was no answer. Spiegel could see tears on her face, tears that seemed to have been wrung out of her by sheer exertion. She leaned her forehead against the door frame, panting for breath.

Lars had stepped out of the kitchen. He was watching Tracy, placidly, from his station in the hallway. Spiegel turned to look at him. He felt like telling Lars to screw.

“I thought I could help,” Lars said.

“We have to get into this room,” Tracy said. “Jorge may be hurt.”

“Does the housing office have a master key?” Spiegel asked.

“But it’s closed,” Lars said. “Closes at six.” He tilted his wrist to show Spiegel the face of his watch. “Maybe you could call the police. Just press emergency.” Spiegel knew what he meant: the red button with the Munch scream that had startled him the night he arrived at the Uppsala station. The last thing Spiegel wanted would be to bring the police onto the scene.

Spiegel thought for a moment. “The girl from building one who came here,” he asked. “Did she say anything to you? About Jorge?”

“I can tell you exactly what she said. She said she would like to kill him. She said he’d stolen her fucking car.”

“Her car?” Spiegel looked at Tracy.

“I think we have to talk to Lisbet,” Tracy said.

Spiegel and Tracy found her standing at the edge of the parking lot, her hands squarely on her hips. She was wearing a tight mini and black fishnet stockings. Her short hair had been tousled by the gentle evening breeze.

“Lisbet!” Spiegel called.

She turned to him, and squinted. She was no longer wearing her owlish eyeglasses. Her face was done up with black eyeliner and purple mascara that made her milky skin look so white it gleamed like fresh paint. “I knew you hadn’t gone away,” she said.

“No, I never left Uppsala. I just moved into the city. I moved in with Tracy.”

Tracy introduced herself to Lisbet. Lisbet took her hand. “Forgive me,” Lisbet said. “It has been a strange day.”

An hour back, Lisbet explained, she had been on her way out to meet some other “birds” at a club in town, but when she got to the lot she couldn’t find her car. Now it’s true she’d had nights where she came in so late and tired—smashed, in other words, Spiegel interpreted—that the next day she couldn’t remember where she had parked, and other nights she’d lent her car to a friend who had to leave after the last bus—in other words, Spiegel thought, to some guy she’d picked up who had to get out of her life by dawn—but this was different, she was sure. She had come in at a reasonable hour the night before, gotten some sleep, awakened in the morning in time for her classes. She rode the bus into the city and spent the afternoon in the library, thinking about studying for her exams. She caught the bus back to Flogsta at four o’clock and fixed herself an early dinner, or some semblance thereof, most likely—from what Spiegel remembered Jorge’s saying about the diet he would have been subjected to had he let Lisbet cook—jam smeared on a roll and potato soup sipped cold from the can. She changed, did her hair, stepped out for the night with a lucid mind, and her car was gone, vanished.

Her first suspicions lit on a guy she had been seeing since Jorge left, one of the workmen who had been stringing electrical cable in building five. An expert on wiring, he told her that if she refused to come home with him to the Bosporus, he would give her car a “hot start” and drive it all the way by himself. The Volvo would give him something to remember her by. So she suspected Arne, but she couldn’t very well wander into the workers’ quarters to find him, not dressed like this. The men were breaking down the encampment, packing up for home, blasting away their final payments with a night of beer and herring and bonfires and who knew what else? Who could go there for her? She didn’t want to involve the police, if she could help it. She thought of Jorge. He was crazy enough that this kind of mission would appeal to his Mediterranean sense of chivalry. There was still a force between them, Lisbet felt, a connection that united them despite Jorge’s peregrinations and her own, like a thin span crossing a gorge high above the waters of a swift and sinuous stream. She went to his room to call on him for help, and only as she was rapping on his door, under the sidelong observations of the seemingly indifferent but curiously ever-present Lars, did the truth strike her. Jorge had kept her spare set of keys. Jorge had taken the car.

“So you haven’t called the police,” Spiegel said.

“No. They wouldn’t believe me. They would think I have lousy screws.”

Spiegel didn’t correct her idiom. He rather liked it, the hidden truth her malapropism revealed, for the police would be sure to think that Lisbet got just what she deserved. They would look at her, hear her story, and determine that she was a slut who liked foreign boys, hippies, longhairs, drug addicts, perverts, and naturally those guys would rip her off, rob her blind, and if one of them even took off with her car, well, what else would you expect?

“I’m glad you kept the police out of this,” Tracy said. She didn’t want to tell Lisbet about the gun. There was no point in further upsetting her. “I think Jorge might be in trouble. It will be better if we find him ourselves.”

“Not better for him,” Lisbet added. “I am not as tolerant as the police.”

Spiegel drove Lisbet and Tracy directly to Mick’s flat in the commercial district. He sensed that Jorge would have gone there first. They circled the block, trying to spot Lisbet’s Volvo. If it were parked nearby, they would see it, for the shops were closed and the lots nearly empty.

“Jorge’s not here,” Tracy said.

Lisbet cared less about seeing Jorge than about recovering her car. If they saw her Volvo parked on the street, she was prepared to hop in and drive it home and have the ignition pulled the next morning. She would rather do that than make Jorge hand back her spare key.

“What if we see him driving it?” Spiegel asked. He thought that maybe Jorge was cruising the city, trying to find his way to Mick’s apartment.

“Can you follow him and wait till he gets out?”

“Not without him seeing us. He knows this VW. He’ll know we’re tailing him.”

“Then knock him off the road.”

She’s seen too many American movies, Spiegel thought. He had no intention of using a car, particularly a VW, as an attack weapon, and he knew that a chase through the city streets would probably get all of them arrested, or even killed. Plus, there was the matter of the gun Jorge might be carrying. A gun would tip the balance, in any confrontation, in ways that Lisbet, who was unaware, had not considered.

They turned a corner onto the street directly behind Mick’s building. “Shit, look at that,” Spiegel said.

“What? I can’t see,” said Lisbet. She was crowded into the backseat, her legs folded up almost to her chin.

Spiegel tapped Tracy on the knee and pointed. Tracy saw it, too. Spiegel looked at her, wondering what to do. He had forgotten that they had told Melissa to go to Mick’s, never thinking that they would show up an hour later with her old sparring partner. Maybe they should just drive on and pretend they hadn’t seen anything. But what would they say to Lisbet? And where would they go?

“What’s the matter?” Lisbet asked.

“It’s just that I think Mick might have company,” Tracy said.

“Cool, a party,” Lisbet said. “Let’s crush it.”

Spiegel pulled Tracy’s VW in next to Melissa’s car. It doesn’t matter if Melissa is entangled with Mick, he thought. Let Lisbet draw what conclusions she will. Maybe she will be happy to see Melissa flinging herself at someone else. In any case, they had to find out about Jorge.

Mick’s flat was on the fourth floor, in a garret below the eaves. Even from the ground floor, they could hear the sound of human voices raised in anger, and as they climbed the stairs the random sounds became more distinct. Gradually, like a picture slowly coming into focus, the declamations sorted themselves into words until at last, by the time the three of them had reached the fourth-floor landing and stood breathless before Mick’s doorway, they felt as if they had already been part of the argument that was raging between Mick and Melissa.

Spiegel knocked, and Melissa pulled the door open without even a pause in her tirade.

“Well, you’re goddamn lucky it isn’t the fuzz, and if I had anything to say about this it would be, ’cause you keep this up and—”

“Me keep this up? What about you!” Mick was collapsed on a beanbag chair, drinking whiskey straight from a bottle. “How could you let him in like that? And now you just open the door to whoever—”

“It’s not whoever,” Melissa said.

“It’s us. I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to intrude,” Spiegel said, “We just—”

And at that moment, Lisbet pushed her way through the doorway. She was so quick Spiegel didn’t even feel her rush by. She was like the wind, passing through him as if he were just a spindly branched tree. One moment she was behind him in the hallway and the next she was nose to nose with Melissa, swinging her short arms in a blur, like a window fan, trying to get at Melissa’s face, to grab her by the collar. But Melissa, quick and strong, her strength fueled now by pure fear, batted Lisbet’s peppery punches away while she crouched slightly, spread her feet apart for balance, refused to give ground.

“It’s you again, you bitch,” Lisbet screamed, her voice ratcheted instantly up to the high decibel level that Melissa and Mick had already reached. “Where is he? What did you do with my bloody car!”

“Get her the fuck off me,” Melissa called. But Mick didn’t move and Spiegel hardly dared. He had seen these two go at it before and he didn’t want to mix. Only Tracy, out of bravery or ignorance, stepped forward.

“Back off,” she said to Lisbet as she struggled to grab her from behind in a bear hug, immobilizing her arms. “She didn’t do anything. It’s not her fault.”

“Fucking-A right it’s not her fault,” said Mick, nearly supine. “It’s that wag of hers, the greaseball teddy, he’s totally bonkers, off his nut, he is, tried to fucking kill me—”

“You? He tried to kill you?” Spiegel said.

“Stop her, stop her and I’ll explain,” Melissa said. She had her arms raised to eye level now, like a karate boxer, ready to snap to the defense.

“
Låt mej gå
,” Lisbet yelled in Swedish, but Tracy was not about to let her go until she calmed.

“I won’t hit you,” Melissa said to Lisbet. “Just back off, and I’ll explain—”

“Fuck-all explain,” Mick said. He was really drunk. He took a final swig from the bottle, finishing it off, and tossed it into a cardboard box near the kitchenette. “There’s nothing to explain except this guy comes in, she lets him in—”

“—I thought he was hurt,” Melissa said. “I thought you’d beat him to death. I was worried sick—”

“—Well I guess I bloody well didn’t beat him hard enough, because he shows up here and she opens the fucking door for him and tries to give him a big kiss on the lips—”

“—I only asked him was he okay,” Melissa said.

“—When he shoves her aside and comes at me, firing, like this is a fucking Western saloon.”

“He what?” Lisbet said. “A fire?”

“A gun,” Mick said. “He had a gun. He shot me. Look!”

“Oh goddammit,” Tracy muttered through her clenched teeth. She relaxed her grip on Lisbet.

“He didn’t shoot you,” Melissa said. “That’s what I’m trying to say!”

“Then what’s this?” Mick pulled up his shirt and showed an ugly red gash along the side of his chest. “Bastard just missed my heart, he did.”

“He didn’t shoot you,” Melissa said. “That’s a burn, a powder burn. There was no bullet.”

“I think your heart’s on your left side,” Spiegel said. “Unless it’s different down under.”

Mick looked at Spiegel as if he were made of dirt.

“It’s just a damn starter pistol. It fires blanks. It’s a prop for a play. Hedda Gabler shoots herself with it—although she better not hold it to her ear or she’ll be deaf for a week.”

“It’s not a gun. It’s not a gun,” Tracy said, repeating the phrase like a mantra.

“Nobody told me,” Mick said. “It sure as hell felt like a gun.”

“How would you know?” Melissa said.

Mick backed off to the corner to soothe his wounds and to get out of the next round of fire.