Exiles (32 page)

“And the Oscar goes to . . . Mick Ryder,” Melissa said.

“Oscar?” Lisbet said. She was lost.

So was Spiegel. “What happened?” he asked.

“He sure acted like it was a gun,” Melissa said. “Would’ve convinced me.”

She explained. She had just got to Mick’s place, ready to give him hell for what he’d done to Jorge, when they heard a screech of tires out on the street. They looked out the window. A red Volvo had pulled halfway up the curb and was tilted precariously onto the street.

“My car,” Lisbet said, mournfully.

Jorge nearly toppled out the door, then called something, incoherently, from the sidewalk.

“Like in
Streetcar
,” Melissa said.

She realized later that Jorge had no clear idea where Mick lived. She should have kept quiet. Jorge might have gone away. But she was so startled to see him, and relieved to see him, in a way, that she leaned out the window and called to him.

“Like Juliet,” Lisbet put in. Melissa looked at her as if to say: Idiot. She went on with the story.

Jorge didn’t answer her call. He just darted into the building’s foyer, and they could hear him pound his way up the steps, across the landings. When he got to the fourth floor, he called her name. Then she made her second mistake. She opened the door. He pushed his way past her into Mick’s flat. She tried to hold him, to soothe him, to make sure that he was okay. He didn’t want to see her or to touch her. “Where is he?” Jorge called. That’s when Melissa noticed that Jorge was carrying a gun. She recognized it right away.

“Me, you looking for me?” Mick had said, as he stepped in from the kitchen. “Didn’t you get enough last night?” He moved toward Jorge, fists held high, not really wanting to go at it, but trying to scare him off, when he saw a flash of silver. Goddamn, he yelled as he tried to dive for cover, but in the tight space there was no room to maneuver. Mick backed into the couch as Jorge stepped toward him, pushed the gun into his chest, and fired. There was a flash, a pop, a wisp of smoke, and Mick fell over the back of the couch and onto the floor, landing squarely on his shoulder. No, Melissa screamed, no—meaning he’s not hurt, there’s no bullet, but Jorge, in the face of what he had done or thought he had done, turned and ran. Melissa vaulted over the couch to see what had happened to Mick. She could hear Jorge wailing as he scrambled down the four flights of stairs.

“I thought he fucking shot me,” Mick said. “I really did.”

“You did not,” Melissa said. “You took a dive to scare him off, you bastard.”

“So you’re saying,” Spiegel put in, “that Jorge left here thinking he’d shot Mick? Maybe killed him?”

“And just as well,” Mick said. “He tried to. Let him think he did. Let him sweat.”

“But where did he go? Where is he?”

“And my bloody car, he took my bloody car,” Lisbet whined.

“Should we call the cops?” Melissa asked.

“Let’s keep them out of it,” Tracy said.

“What about my car?”

“If he’s driving the way he was when he took off out of here, they’ll be after him.”

“If they catch him,” Spiegel said, “who knows what he might do? He might hold the gun on them—”

“Are they armed, Swedish cops?” Tracy asked.

“I bloody well hope so,” said Mick.

“I think we ought to find him,” Spiegel said. “Maybe Tracy and I can go. If we tell him everything’s cool, Mick’s okay, he should just kind of settle down—”

“And bring me back my car,” Lisbet said.

Spiegel didn’t say anything about it until he was alone in the VW with Tracy, but he was pretty sure he knew where they could find Jorge, if he could remember how to get there. He knew it was a long country road heading north from Flogsta, out into the untended fields, past the town limits, out beyond the farthest hills, the burial mounds that according to legend housed the remains of the Viking warriors. He hadn’t been among those hills for months. In his memory, they were a kind of icy blue, and the fields were a sheet of white snow. But at this time of year the hills were mottled, brown and green, clusters of pine interlaced with windings of rich mud. The road forked in several places and they seemed to proceed for long stretches in a great arc, so after a time Spiegel was no longer sure if he was heading back toward the city or deeper into the heart of the country. He would not have found his bearings at all except that almost by chance, at a junction in the highway, he saw off to the side down a long embankment to his left a farmhouse painted the color of mustard, and he remembered that place, although the last time he had been here he had seen it not from the roadside but from across the vast expanse of snow-crusted fields.

He pulled to a stop. Behind the farmhouse he could see a large pond, almost a lake, blue-green in the late sunlight. Along the margins, in the shadows of a row of spruce, the waters looked dark, black as pitch.

“Jorge used to come here,” Spiegel said. “He took me here once.”

He turned the car down a long dirt driveway that led past the farmhouse, bumped a rocky course alongside a barnyard and some outbuildings used for silage and milking. Several cows stood by as the car crawled along the edge of their pasture. The road diminished into a grassy landing near the weedy shore of the lake. Spiegel pulled the car up beside a tree stump. Someone had recently cut a clearing, perhaps for firewood or for lumber. The smell of pitch hung in the still air.

“Here?” Tracy said. “Jorge took you here? What on earth for?”

“We came that way,” Spiegel said. “Over the hills once, in the snow. He did it for kicks. For a thrill.”

“Did what?”

“Drove onto the lake. Onto the ice.”

“Oh God,” Tracy said. She pointed off by the row of spruce.

In the waning light, they could just make out a metallic dome breaking the surface of the water like a smooth rock. Beside it, like a single reed, a steel antenna pointed toward the sky.

JUNE

15

Spiegel felt a hand
on his shoulder, shaking him awake. He didn’t know if it was day or night. Even a quick peek at the alarm clock—a little past two—was no help. Day and night, by now, looked exactly the same to him. Out of habit, he had been keeping the blinds closed at night, to help him sleep. Out of inertia or indifference or perhaps a secret wish for more security, he had taken to leaving the blinds shut in the day as well, so when he was indoors, which was much of the time, he went about in a gloomy half-light that reminded him of dusk.

“Come on, Lenny, wake up.” It was Tracy’s voice. “You have to get moving.”

Two o’clock. Spiegel began to realize that it was two in the morning. There was no noise whatever from the streets and shops outside. Tracy herself spoke in a whisper, as if she were afraid of disturbing the stillness of the night.

What had he been dreaming? For the past few days, his dreams had been filled with images of the dead: a body floating facedown in the muddy waters of a harbor, a blackened human figure dangling from a steel pipe that protruded from a wall of concrete. The figure reached out to him with a spectral hand. Spiegel tried to bat it away, but the hand kept coming toward him, pointing at his eyes and then closing into a clenched fist that grabbed at his clothing, his skin, his flesh. He tried to shake the bony hand away, but he couldn’t do it. And that’s when he slipped out of his dream and saw Tracy.

He closed his eyes and nested his face within the folds of the coverlet. He would rather sink into the deepest torment of his dreams than emerge from sleep and have to confront his thoughts and feelings and memories. The last days were a blur, or more precisely they were a wreck, a scene of turmoil, an explosion. It was as if his mind had been blown apart and all the pieces shattered, and on waking he would have to resume the task of reassembling the fragments into some semblance of a whole.

All he could remember, as he cast his mind backward, was kneeling on the pebbled shore, oblivious to the sharp, gray rocks pressing into his shins and his knees. He’d lifted his hands up toward the pewter-colored sky and cried out, a pure and unanticipated howl of lamentation, a scream that came not from his throat or his lungs but from somewhere deeper inside, from a region that no terror or sadness he had felt before, not even the death of his mother or the pain when he was beaten by the city police, had ever touched. He tried to raise himself, to run to the shoreline, and he would have plunged forward into the cold, black water, but a hand gripped his shoulder, squeezed the cloth of his shirt, and held him in place.

“That’s Jorge! He’s down there,” Spiegel called, and a voice behind him said, through clenched teeth: “I know, I know. You have to let him go. We have to leave.”

Leaving Jorge’s body, untended and unmarked, entombed in the sunken Volvo, mired in the watery grave, felt to Spiegel like a sacrilege, like a sin against the laws of a God in whom he no longer thought he believed.

Tracy let him stay by the lakeside, crying himself out, for what seemed like hours but what really might have been no longer than a moment, yet it was a moment wrested out of temporal context by its intensity, like a picture snapped in darkness by the light of a flash. Tracy sat beside Spiegel, wrapped her arms around him, and stilled his sobs and eased the spasmodic shivering of his shoulders and his limbs. She knew that it was okay, even desirable, for Spiegel to drain himself of anger and remorse. She wanted him to be able to think clearly before they returned to town. He had to see that it would be reckless to report Jorge’s death to the police. She dreaded being caught in the web of an investigation. Jorge’s death, she understood immediately, could wrap itself around them like the snarled filament of a fishing line, and the more that they fought against it, the more they tried to clear themselves away from its tangles, the harder it would tug on them until they were immobilized and dragged to the bottom.

She urged Spiegel to leave Uppsala before the police came upon Jorge’s body. Though Spiegel thought about breaking away from Tracy and cutting his own deal, offering to tell Inspector Svenson what he knew about Jorge Ramos in return for, say, a U.S. passport or even a valid Swedish residency permit, in the end Spiegel decided to play the game by Tracy’s rules—for in truth he was scared. The warning Svenson had offered to him after the May Day rally had turned out to be on the mark. Once again, someone wanted Aaronson, and Spiegel had drifted into his sights. It had become obvious that whenever Tracy went into town she was being trailed. A uniformed member of the Uppsala police department had stopped by one day, with a well-dressed American along to help interpret, and tried to ask Tracy some questions. They told her that they knew she had been living with Leonard Spiegel and that they had reason to believe that Aaronson was back in the country. They asked if she would inform them as soon as she had contact from Aaronson—for his own safety. She demurred, but she and Spiegel both got the message. The noose was tightening. Whoever wanted Aaronson—the American military police, the enforcers hired by the church, some rogue operation within the Swedish government, the CIA, the KGB—had been informed, through a network of contacts, that Spiegel was the wrong guy. But Spiegel also knew that if the American authorities wanted to make an arrest for purely political purposes, to discredit the deserters or to advance a rightist agenda in the Swedish elections, it didn’t matter which of the Americans they nabbed. His own head would be perfectly acceptable, if served on a platter.

And in fact, Spiegel began to suspect that he might have become the real quarry. What good would it do for the military police to arrest Aaronson and ship him home so that he could stand before a court of law and become a martyr? But if the military police were to arrest Spiegel instead and send him home in shackles, that could be devastating to the movement. If the police could frame him by revealing his patrilineal ties to what till now Spiegel had referred to euphemistically as the “foreign service,” he would be exposed as an infiltrator, a fifth columnist. The movement would be wrenched by spasms of rancor, accusations, incriminations; it might never recover. Yes, the authorities might want to grab Spiegel, but when, where, how? They could take him at any time, he knew. The Uppsala police had demonstrated that once by plucking him to safety during the May Day uprising on the bridge. They just had to wait for the opportune moment, when his arrest would do the greatest possible damage to the cause.

So Spiegel agreed to leave Uppsala right away. Once the police discovered Jorge’s body, they would be sure seek out Spiegel for questioning, for there was really no one else left in Uppsala who knew anything about Jorge’s life. Lisbet had gone home for the summer, believing that eventually Jorge would drive her Volvo into a lamppost or park it illegally outside some Stockholm disco where the police would find him drinking champagne from a shoe. Melissa, far less sanguine, believed that she was under a constant threat while Jorge was at large. She knew that he was crazy, volatile, and obsessed, and that if he learned that Mick had survived the shooting he would return to her, an abject slave. Unable to face him, unwilling to turn him in, she and Mick packed what they could fit into Melissa’s Saab and set off for Paris, where they hoped to revive
Ms. Julie
with an
en plein air
performance at Place Bastille.

“Let’s go,” Tracy said, nudging Spiegel once more. “Monika will be here soon.”

“I’m awake,” he said. “I was dreaming.”

“It’s good you slept. I’ve been up.” Tracy, even more than Spiegel, had trouble with the constant daylight. She said it was her concern for Spiegel’s safety and her thinly veiled paranoia that kept her from sleep. “Who knows what might happen once I shut my eyes?” she said. But Spiegel thought that he might be to blame for Tracy’s condition. She had been avoiding the small brushes of intimacy, a foot tap under the table, a hand resting lightly across the other’s wrist, that had graced the early days of their relationship. Sex with her had become not perfunctory but strangely aggressive, as if they brought their bodies together to fulfill an appetite rather than to express intimate feelings. He had begun to think that perhaps she wanted him to leave not for his well-being but for other reasons. Maybe she was worried about her own safety and she wanted to be out of the range of the moving target. Or maybe she had simply grown tired of living with him, as she had, earlier, to Spiegel’s advantage, become impatient waiting for Aaronson.

Spiegel slipped into jeans and a sweatshirt. He had packed in the evening. Nearly all his gear fit snugly into a backpack and small duffel. He had come to Uppsala with very little, and it seemed that he had been shedding belongings ever since he arrived, leaving bits and pieces of his life, scat and detritus, at every turn. I’ll be lucky if I can leave this country with even a change of clothes, he thought.

While Tracy made coffee, Spiegel sat by the window. He was watching for Monika’s car. They had agreed that the quicker the turnaround, the better. They had no idea who might be eyeing Tracy’s flat or from what vantage. But they were willing to risk that there would be no surveillance at this hour. If they were wrong and someone saw Monika stop by and pick Spiegel up, it would be easy to spot a tail on the highway. If anybody was after them, they would abort the journey and come back to Uppsala. Spiegel, still shaking the dreams from his skull, thought that their plan was crazy. Maybe he should have gone off alone and met Monika somewhere outside of the city. Or they should have set up some sort of decoy, a late-night party or cell meeting, to distract the attention of any external observers, allowing Spiegel and Monika to slip away unnoticed. But his qualms had come too late, he realized. They had plunged ahead in their usual reckless fashion, and now they were committed to the journey. To delay would lead to further anxiety and risk. If anyone really wants to follow us, Spiegel thought, let them. They’ll have little to see.

* * *

The night was so silent, he could hear Monika’s car approach long before he saw it nose around the tobacco shop and pull into the courtyard. Monika parked by the doorway. Spiegel knew that she wouldn’t touch the horn. He tilted the blinds twice to let her know that he had seen her approach. “Trace,” he called softly.

“Yes,” she said. “Here, take this.” She handed him a china mug, filled with black coffee.

“No, we’ll stop,” he said.

“No.” It was one of those ridiculous conversations about practical matters that one clings to in times of stress, a floating log in a sea of trouble. There were a thousand things they should have said to each other, but neither wanted to acknowledge the gravity of the moment. They hoped that by treating the departure lightly, casually, they might alleviate the intensity of their emotions. But they were wrong. We always remember endings and departures, so much so that they sometimes eclipse the entire antecedent experience, crushing all the subtleties and nuances into a single sensation.

Tracy followed Spiegel out the doorway and watched as he dropped his bags into the trunk. There was nothing more to say. They held each other, and he took in the scent of her hair, a grassy perfume, rising above a slightly astringent aroma of soap. I’ll be okay, he assured her. She told him she would be okay, too, and that she would send word to Spiegel as soon as she had worked out his passage to safety. Yes, he said, I’ll see you soon, but the words felt dead even as he spoke them.

Tracy turned to Monika. Take care, she said. Monika nodded and pulled Tracy to her for a quick embrace. Spiegel got quickly into Monika’s car, according to plan. He was pretty sure that nobody had been posted in the tobacco shop or in one of the adjacent apartments to observe them go through the gestures of departure, but still—it was no time to take chances. It was time to go.

The highway out of the city was a good, four-lane road that traversed the west shore of the Baltic all the way to the far north, Norland, where they would veer away from the coast and head into the spruce-covered mountains near the Arctic Circle. They were bound for Monika’s village. Her family lived on a small lake beside a little fishing resort. Behind her house was a summer cottage that she and her sister had once used as a playhouse. They had long outgrown the cottage, but it was still furnished and it even had a working sink. Monika had suggested that Spiegel could stay there until the situation cleared back in Uppsala. In the north, no one cared about anyone else’s background or political views. It was a land of tremendous conformity, but also of tolerance. Her family, her village, would accept Spiegel’s presence among them, Monika said, and they wouldn’t question him too closely. They understood full well why people moved to the north, and they knew that a man will share his history with strangers only if and when he pleases. Usually, never.

Monika said little, conserving her energy for the long drive. The radio played softly, some old jazz numbers, Lionel Hampton or someone from that era on the xylophone. Spiegel thought about trying to drop back into sleep, but his mind was too stirred by thoughts about what he had left behind and worries about what lay ahead. He turned and looked out the window, where he sometimes caught a glimpse of the Baltic when there was a break between the monotonous, seemingly endless forest.

“It’s not really very pretty,” Spiegel said, breaking the silence.

“The Swedish countryside? Please don’t judge it all by this,” Monika answered. “There are parts you haven’t seen, beautiful places. Maybe you’ll get to see them, if you stay.”

“We have a saying in English, though. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you understand it?”

“Hmm. Yes,” she said softly, considering the words. “When you feel beautiful, things look beautiful to you. I think it’s true. I hear people complain a lot, for half the year about the darkness and then the rest of the year about the constant light that keeps them awake. I think these people are just saying that they’re unhappy.”

“Foreigners, mostly?”