Straight Cut (18 page)

As luck would have it I tripped over the Halliburton on the way to the bathroom. It popped my little toe out of joint, the one I’d snagged in a sparring accident one afternoon some years before, and I had to sit down and painfully snap it back into place. Not the best of starts for my day. I made a cup of espresso and carried it out to the front room, where I stood looking out the big bar window. It was a market day and the women of the quarter were carrying their string bags and baskets down the street toward the square.

I got dressed and checked my pocket date book. Last day of the bracket. I think I’d known that all along, somewhere down the winding spirals of my unconscious mind.

So I worked out, took a shower, got dressed again. Back at the front window, I could see that the sky had clouded over suddenly. Maybe it was going to rain, a common event in Brussels.

I went into the kitchen and cleaned the coffee pot. The clock on the kitchen wall said nine forty-five.

It might turn out to be a long day, I thought.

Then it was sunny again on the street. I decided to go for a walk. Since the weather seemed so iffy, I took an umbrella along. But it was not yet raining, though it was cold for summer. At the Porte de Halle I stopped for a moment and stared at the round medieval tower there, a windowless, weathered silo. To the south, a block down the Chaussée de Waterloo, a new subway stop was noisily under construction. Racine had told me that all the noise came from a gigantic refrigeration unit; it seemed that the sandy soil of Brussels had to be frozen before it was solid enough to dig in. A curious enterprise. Though the line was complete in one direction, a subway ride did not entice me. I walked north toward the Grand’ Place.

What I really wanted to look at was Manneken-Pis, just a shade south of the Grand’ Place at a minor intersection in an obscure niche. For a long time, ever since the first time I had seen it, it had been my favorite city monument anywhere, partly because of its lack of ostentation. The little bronze reminded one not of a cherub or cupid but of an authentic human infant, peeing into the small fountain below the niche; I probably was imagining the trace of a smile and wink I saw around his greening features. Not nearly so grand as the Trevi Fountain, but maybe a little truer. It was here above all other places that I was impressed with the great age of Europe and the fact that its people do conduct a daily life amid the visible and palpable evidence of the centuries. It deserved to take centuries for any capital to learn to construct its symbol so exactly on the human scale.

The old joke goes that mankind was invented by water for its transportation from one place to another. Another curious enterprise. Well, wasn’t it the truth?

Then the weather finally did break and it was rainwater splashing in the fountain now. I opened my umbrella and walked up to the Grand’ Place after all. The rain had cleared the square and I was almost alone, turning round and round on the rain-slicked cobbles, peering out from the black rim of my umbrella and trying to remember which one of those lunging Gothic buildings was the Amigo. It had been called that since the days of Spanish rule, when it was the city prison, when the soldiers addressed you as “amigo” when they took you by the shoulder to lead you there.

The jail had been moved by this time, naturally. I could quit while I was ahead, or else I stood a good chance of finding out where they had moved it to.

Back at Racine’s place, I dug out the number Lauren had given me and dialed. There wasn’t any answer, though. Not for the rest of the day. It dawned on me then that if the other end of this transaction was a traveling man like myself I just might have missed the connection altogether. And that thought was a comfort, in its way.

Racine was up and out early again the next morning, on the same mission as before, so I had the house all to myself, and the telephone too. I had stopped believing anything was ever going to come of that number, but I’d already dialed it enough to have it memorized, so I gave it another spin. What do you know, somebody picked it up before it even rang at my end. I was so startled I didn’t even say hello.

“Qui est-ce?”
the voice said. A man. There was a little pause and then he said something in a language I didn’t recognize. Something Slavic, possibly. On a hunch I said nothing and waited to hear what would happen.

“Who is, pliss?” the voice said, in densely accented English. “Who is?”

I hung up. Something about that voice had been familiar, but it was irritatingly just beyond my range of recognition. I thought about it for a half hour, drinking a Stella in hopes it might loosen up my memory. It didn’t. I called again. Another quick pickup and the French salutation; it was almost like they were expecting something.

“Anne Morrison regrette qu’elle ne peut pas venir,”
I said.
“Mais je suis son ami … et je suis venu pour finir son affaire, ca va?”

“Vraiment?”
the voice said. I heard muttering in the background.

“Spik American, pliss?” the voice said.

I started laughing. Couldn’t help it.

“Why you laugh for?” the voice said. Very suspicious. I wiped that smile off my face.

“Nothing,” I said. “Only, in America we call it English.”

“Is not same language, no?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not. Well? Do we meet?”

“No. Give your number, we call you.”

“But I am in a café,” I said.

“Then which might be your hotel?”

“I only just arrived,” I said, improvising. “I have no hotel so far.”

Another pause.

“Call back one hour,” the voice finally said. I agreed to that and hung up. Deadlock over my phone number went on for the rest of the day. I talked to the accented voice several times, and it remained very stubborn. It wanted the number, I presumed, so it could trace it and check me out. But I wasn’t giving Racine’s number away, and I couldn’t think of any workable way to use a different one. My proposal was a neutral meeting place, but the voice kept saying no to that. By the fourth call I was getting impatient.

“Anne will be sad if you don’t get the present she sent,” I said. “Do you want me to have to send it back to her?”

“No, of course,” the voice said. “Also there is a present here for her.”

“It brings good luck to exchange gifts,” I said, a little facetiously. There was more whispering beside the other phone.

“Call back one hour, pliss.”

“The hell with you guys,” I said as I hung up. But when I did call back the voice made a date with me at an address on the Rue des Capucins for noon the following day.

It all started out in the wrong way, because it seemed that Racine didn’t have a rehearsal scheduled for that morning. I’d slept in more or less on purpose, but when I woke up he was still in the house, and he wasn’t dressed to go out. At first I thought little of that. I went into the tiled atrium and stretched and worked out, about double the usual. Something about my plans for the day made that seem like a good thing to do. Racine was practicing in the front room; I could hear the muffled horn from time to time over the sound of my accelerated breathing.

I took a shower and wandered back into the apartment. Racine suggested a café breakfast, but I pleaded letters to write. Racine put on a headset, sat down in front of his wall of tape decks, and began to noodle around on a sopranino sax, occasionally reaching forward to adjust a dial. I took a position at the kitchen table and tried to think of someone among my acquaintances so innocent and so harmless that I wouldn’t mind letting him know I was in Brussels. After about an hour of that I took blank sheets of paper, folded them into two envelopes, and addressed them left-handed in block capitals to Kevin and Lauren.

“Post office,” I said to Racine, heading for the door. He pushed the headphones back and lowered the horn.

“I could lend you some stamps,” he said.

“I need to stock up. It’s not much of a walk. “ And I slipped out. Passing along the outside of the window, I saw that Racine had not resumed playing the horn, though he’d put the headphones on again. He’d shifted his chair to face the window, but somehow our eyes didn’t seem to meet.

Rue des Capucins was part of the derelict snarl of streets down the hill to the west of the Palais de Justice. The slope was a steep one and the streets were shady and dark, even a little cold, it seemed. At the east end of every street the view up the hill was completely blocked by the wall of the Palais, which seemed to suck all the light from the sky. I recalled an apocryphal report that the building’s architect had either jumped or hung himself from the dome on the day of its completion.

The address they’d given me turned out to be a café with no name, only a number. Even the term
café
was a little grand for these circumstances, but that is what they called them. I knew the quarter and I wasn’t surprised, had even dressed my shabbiest for the occasion. The goddamn Halliburton stuck out like a flare, however. Most of the clientele had left the whole concept of suitcases behind years before. I ordered a Stella and the siege began. Belgian winos are not nearly so shy and retiring as the kind we have in the States, or at least not if you’re in one of their bars. They get right in your face and stay there till you’ve surrendered whatever it is they want; be it a drink or a smoke or some change. Or else you have to hit them, or something. Without the bag I might have passed, but I couldn’t very well have come without it.

So I bought a drink for a grizzled old soak with what looked to be a recently broken nose, and set him up in a chair next to mine. I couldn’t understand his patois, but he made a nice buffer between me and most of the others. Five minutes passed, then fifteen. There was nobody around who could have been who I was looking for. Everyone in the place was too old and too thoroughly marinated for the part.

When the guy finally did show he appeared from the back, so I didn’t spot him until he came up to the bar. He was younger than anyone else, including me, probably around nineteen or twenty. An unnecessarily tall guy, with longish shaggy hair hanging around an urgent lupine face, a big wedge of bone set in a stubbly neck. At first glance I thought he might be the one, and I got a chance to look him over in more detail, because he ordered a beer and sat down to my left. I didn’t much care for the looks of him, really. He was so tall and emaciated he seemed to have been stretched, and the effect was a little ghoulish. To cap it off, on his right hand he wore a massive silver ring in the shape of a skull with a vulture perched on top of it, wings outspread toward the palm side of his finger. Another silver skull, sans vulture, swung on a two-inch chain from his right ear. Not exactly the Brussels look, I didn’t think. He wasn’t the most prepossessing thing I’d seen all day, even taking the locale into account, but I was pretty sure he was my man, and I was right.

“Vous êtes l’ami de —”
he said.

“Anne Morrison,” I finished the sentence.

He drank off his beer in three long gulps, stubbly Adam’s apple hobbling. I saw him scope out the Halliburton, which was sitting on the floor with my foot on it.

“Yonko,” he said. I took that to be his name.

“Alfred,” I said. Why bother with the truth? Yonko pushed his glass away and stood, beckoning me with a gesture of his thumb. I picked up the briefcase and followed him toward a door in the rear of the place. The room we entered was generously proportioned for a closet, but a bit on the small side for anything else. There was hardly room for the three bar chairs that had been put in it. The third party, a short man with blondish frizzy hair and a bald spot, was already seated in one of them, with a sort of Alpine rucksack between his knees. Since there was little room to stand I sat across from him; Yonko took the remaining chair.

“Grushko,” Yonko said, indicating his companion, who looked up and smiled. I knew him. I knew I knew him but not how or where from ... it was connected with the familiarity of that accent, somehow. I gaped at him like a fish, and then I had it.
He was Dario’s cameraman, how do you like that.
Tumblers began to turn over in my head; this was a new combination.

“Alfred,” I said. Grushko nodded and smiled. If he knew or recalled what my real name was he gave no sign of it. Now I vividly remembered that rather feckless air he had about him that had irritated me so much the single time we’d met before. What had Mimmo told me? I only remembered that Grushko didn’t speak English and came, in the first place, from Bulgaria. Where skull-shaped accessories were no doubt the very latest thing among the young.

Grushko, smiling happily, said something to Yonko in what I now assumed was Bulgarian, and Yonko left the room. Grushko and I sat in forcedly amiable silence for the five or so minutes he was gone. It was close in the little room and I was beginning to sweat. I supposed Yonko was checking to see if I had any cohorts waiting in the wings. When he returned he said something which must have been the all-clear, because Grushko went on nodding and smiling.

“Now,” Yonko said to me, switching over to his version of “American.” “We show? You try?”

I nodded. Yonko stretched out a hand for the Halliburton and I let him have it. Grushko opened the top of the rucksack and pushed it across the floor to me. Inside were a lot of heavy plastic bags full of a crystalline white powder. Yes, it did look like cocaine. I opened the third one. Grushko, meanwhile, had passed a slip of paper to Yonko, who began to tinker with the combination dials on the briefcase. The taste of the dust was not too familiar to me, but then it had been a while. I scooped up a reasonable finger full, gave it a hearty snort, and sat back.

Not much effect at first, only a slight numbness. Yonko was having some difficulty with the briefcase locks, it seemed. I was beginning to think I had a knapsack full of benzocaine on my hands. Then it hit, a blue flame roaring out of my vitals into my limbs and head, rocking me back in the chair for a moment. Silence — I heard the locks of the Halliburton snapping back at last and knew that Yonko was now getting an eyeful of the display I’d fixed up for him in Rome — but I no longer cared about any of that because I was already throwing myself clumsily across the room at Grushko, clutching at his lapels and the skin of his neck, hissing at him, though I knew he couldn’t understand, “Why you bastards, you bastards, it’s heroin.”