Straight Cut (20 page)

The trouble was that people always got so goddamn serious when it was heroin. Although the distinction was false once you really thought about it, trading in coke always seemed comparatively innocuous, a game of sorts that you could delude yourself was played by rules. In spite of the fact that you could get shot with real bullets and do real time and, of course, make very real money if those more unpleasant kinds of possibilities didn’t come to pass. And at least you did deal with a slightly better class of people, on the receiving end anyway. People might try to kill you for a big box of coke, but not for a little syringe full of it, and that, I suppose, made the fine split-hair’s worth of difference.

It was not pleasant to think about getting involved in heroin trade, whether by accident or design. What the hell had Kevin really been up to with this movie? I could picture him more clearly now, moving among the junkies and ex-junkies with his usual smoothness, the long easy smile, the charismatic flourishes which must have done a lot to draw those terrible confessions I’d seen in the rushes out of the people who had made them. Again I felt the sprockets engage — forward, reverse, back in slow motion — I saw Kevin juggling all his options, Kevin finishing the shoot itself of course, Kevin setting up his deal with Grushko (who was in there too, right? standing with Kevin just outside the frame), Kevin maneuvering me into position, Kevin making friends with all those junkies ... Well, that last feature might just have been a singular failure to relate the cause to the effects, not unusual for Kevin, but if he was using them to set up distribution contacts …

If so, there might be more people eventually wanting to kill him besides just me.

Bad scene. Again I saw those needles scattered through the rusty brown grass above the Piazza del Popolo, and then looked past that, through that, into all the other needle parks I’d ever wandered through (a tourist, an untouchable) in my time. I remembered faces, not just from the film but the street too: the face of a hundred-dollar habit on its way to one-fifty, two hundred; that look in the eyes; or the face bent over the needle in the swollen vein, in a doorway, any doorway, no thought for exposure anymore, while from other doors along the street you’d hear the dealers calling softly,
Star, star.

A bad business. No question about that.

Then, just when I thought I had got over the flu or the shipping fever or whatever it had been, it got a whole lot worse and I couldn’t worry about anything anymore. I sank through layer after layer of amnesia into what seemed like an endless sleep. How much time was passing I could not have said. I was aware of almost nothing. Vaguely I realized that Racine was around a good deal more than he had been lately, and that he was keeping me supplied with juice and soup and the like, but I didn’t have the power to thank him, and sometimes I suspect I didn’t know who he was. Staggering to the bathroom, which was the only thing I could get up for, I’d pause and stare at my reflection in the curtained glass pane of the door, would cautiously raise an arm and hand and point out my cloudy features to myself, examining them with hardly any recognition.

Kierkegaard, who suffered from paralytic fits, among other things, used sometimes to fall out in the midst of dinner parties and the like. From the floor he’d call out to his friends, referring to his body, “Oh, leave it till the maid comes in the morning to sweep.”

My dreams, of course, were lurid, and in the middle of one I was awakened by a sound hardly more dramatic than the rattle of an electric typewriter, but when I opened my eyes there was a shower of glass all over the room, and Racine was kneeling in the corner with something in his hands. I passed out again, not interested, and the next time I could look around the room I saw the big front window had been partly boarded up. Racine was not going out anymore at all, it seemed to me, except very briefly and hurriedly to the little grocery shop next door, and I also noticed that the sniper rifle had come out of the hole behind the tiles and was now assembled and prominently displayed in the front room.

It was about this time that the drumming began. It was a complicated, constantly changing beat, sometimes accompanied by a kind of chanting, sometimes not. It never stopped; I seemed to hear it even when I slept, and therefore I did not quite believe it was real — I thought it might have been coming out of my own body, from my outraged lungs or heart. Whether it was real or imagined, inner or outer, I listened to it with some fascination, letting it rock me in and out of the phases of my fever.

And then, one night, I was not sick anymore, as simply as that. I woke up and knew the fever had broken. When I got off the bed the room stayed in one place. I walked over to the boarded window and looked back up at the ceiling, where you could see the pattern of holes from the machine gun burst. A funny sort of angle. It must have been meant for a warning shot. Outside, the drumming continued; it had been real after all. Hungry as a horse, I headed for the kitchen.

Racine was sitting at the table under the light, smoking a cigarette, drinking a Stella. As I entered his hand left the bottle and floated softly to the stock of the little rifle which lay across the table, pointed toward the door.

“C’est
moi, seulement,”
I said.

“Bon,”
Racine said.
“Tu vas mieux?”

“Ouais,”
I said, investigating the refrigerator. There was beer and bread and cheese, all of which I brought over to the table.

“How long have I been out of it?”

“About five days, altogether. “

I made a crude sandwich and began to chew.

“I might have had the doctor,” Racine said. “Only it seems not such a very convenient time to go out. “

“I understand,” I said. “I gather we’ve had visitors.”

“C’est évident.”

“Once?”

“All that was really possible. There was some difficulty with the police after the first time. “

“Not too unpleasant for you, I hope.”

“Not so much,” Racine said, laughing out of one half of his mouth. “I think they are not very concerned about my health either.”

“Well.”

“It has its advantages, true. But — “

“I know. It would be nice to be able to walk down to the corner occasionally.”

“I agree.”

“I think we could get to work on that more or less right away.”

“When you feel well enough.”

I finished my bread and cheese and took a cigarette from Racine’s pack. Outside, the drumming shifted gears and a high wailing began.

“What’s with the drums?” I said.

“Haitians. “

“I didn’t know they had Haitians here,” I said. “I thought only the North Africans.”

“There are not so many,” Racine said. “But they’ve been there about a year. A block over, on Rue de la Victoire.”

“So what are they so excited about?”

“They do the voodoo, I think.” Racine pushed away from the table. “No, it’s interesting. I heard yesterday, in the store. One of their priests sent a spell against an enemy, and the spell, what would you say, turned back on him.”

“Backfired.”

“Yes. The Haitians call it
choc en retour.
The enemy turns the spell back on you. So this one got sick. And the people were drumming and singing to try to bring him back again. But they say the spell is reflected back as strongly as it was sent at first.”

“So?”

“He died this morning. Now they drum for the funeral.”

“It must have been a very bad spell,” I said. “And a strong enemy.”

“Yes.”

“Choc en retour.
It’s an idea, isn’t it?”

“They’re interesting, the Haitians,” Racine said. “They know more than you think.”

N
EXT MORNING
I
WAS
out of the apartment, for the first time in over a week, walking down Rue d’Irlande, and then crossing over to Rue de la Victoire, where those Haitians were. Although the sky was overcast, the outdoors light was shocking to me, and it felt peculiar to walk too, my out-of-shape tendons creaking whenever I went uphill. I walked south on Rue de la Victoire. Couldn’t tell exactly where the Haitians lived. The drumming had stopped the previous night and had not resumed, but I was still thinking about them, still intrigued with the notion of
choc en retour
and its various possible ramifications. The unaccustomed brightness of the open daylight made my eyes run, even behind sunglasses. Every so often I glanced to the side, checking to make sure the blue Peugeot hadn’t lost me yet.

Two blocks up the street I went into a bar. There was no one there except for the proprietor and a man with a tight potbelly and slick black hair who was practicing his bumper pool, alone. I ordered a beer and took a table by the window. The coasters on the table had cartoon illustrations printed on them, covering the history of the beer I was drinking, and I began to line the coasters up side by side. Two car doors banged outside, one after the other, and I looked out. Grushko and Yonko were crossing the street. Yonko looked grim, while Grushko seemed merely unhappy. Yonko was wearing a pink tank top, which tended to highlight his least attractive anatomical features. There was a light bandage on his upper arm, but his movement was free enough. Racine had only nicked him, evidently; he’d probably be displeased to hear that. Yonko had given up shaving, I noticed, so maybe he
was
a little sore. His raincoat was wrapped around his right forearm and hand. He’d be in a pretty fix if it rained, wouldn’t he? And it did rain a lot in Brussels. One day he was going to drop that package and get himself in a lot of trouble. The two of them walked into the bar and took seats at my table without waiting for an invitation.

I waved to the bartender for two more beers. No one said anything until he’d set the glasses down and gone back to the counter. The Bulgarians didn’t touch their glasses. The hell with it, I thought, and tossed off mine. Then I pointed at Yonko’s beer and when he didn’t react I picked it up and had a belt. It was a clear provocation and at first I didn’t understand why I’d done it; it came from some sort of reflex. Then Yonko drew back the folds of his raincoat and thrust the exposed inch of submachine gun muzzle under the table into me. This was the tricky and difficult part, the moment I wanted to get to and past as quickly as possible.

“So shoot me,” I said. Yonko was the English speaker, but I was hoping that Grushko might at least pick up the tone. “Shoot me now and you won’t get any money and you won’t get any dope. “

Yonko was leaning out to the edge of his chair, looking more wolfish than ever. His teeth were pointed and blackened in places, I noticed now for the first time, and his breath was not good. He was just a no-account kid, I thought, and I really wouldn’t have put it past him to pull the trigger right there in the bar in spite of the witnesses and the difficulty of escape, but I reached down, slowly, no sudden alarming movement, and pushed the gun muzzle off my hip, down toward the tobacco-littered floor. Grushko nodded.

“Get rid of him,” I said, indicating Yonko with my thumb. “I need to talk to you alone.”

Grushko spoke shortly in Bulgarian and Yonko withdrew to another table deeper in the bar, where he sat down facing us, baleful as ever. The bartender brought him a fresh beer and after a moment he set the rolled raincoat down on an empty chair, picked up his glass and drank from it. I found I was breathing more easily once I saw that, and the knotted muscles in my neck and back began to unwind.

At my table, Grushko leaned forward and began to knead the top of his head, slowly and with great concentration, working around the edges of his bald spot, which began to turn pink under this massage. His fingers were thick and stubby, and on one I noticed he wore a plain gold ring. I waited, finishing Yonko’s beer, and after a moment he lifted his head and began to speak.

“My nephew is impulsive,” he said.
By cracky, he spoke English after all.
It might be a good omen if disinformation was beginning to work in my favor. Maybe ... It had not occurred to me that Yonko and Grushko were related, but I supposed that was no more improbable than any other thing. “He has a problem with his self-control. But he is not really a bad boy.”

“Yonko, you mean?”

Grushko nodded. It wasn’t quite my picture of Yonko, but it wasn’t worth arguing about either. Grushko’s face, side-lit from the window, was deeply lined around the eyes and mouth. I saw the gray in his crown of hair and realized he had to be ten years older even than me, which put us both a bit past it for this sort of activity.

“All his life he has wanted to live in America,” Grushko said. “What he wishes more than anything in the world is to become an American policeman.”

I restrained my emotion at learning this interesting fact. And after a moment of reflection the picture of Yonko as, say, a New York City cop seemed much less ridiculous than it had at first.

Grushko rubbed his eyes. “It’s very serious for us now, at the moment. Bulgaria is … not such a free country. You understand?”

“You can’t go back?”

“I am an artist,” Grushko said, but in a tone of such little pretension that I took him quite seriously despite the lapses I’d detected in his camera work. “Not well respected by the government of now. And not for many years. My work may be … what it may be, but to me it is important. You are an editor and you understand this.”

“Oh. You did recognize me, then.”

“Of course. And I have seen your work.”

I inclined my head, though I thought he was probably fibbing about this last part. Any place he might have seen my cutting, a person wouldn’t have been likely to hang around for the credits.

“Your camera work was very fine and it was a pleasure to edit it,” I said. Half-truth for half-truth. I was losing track of where this conversation was leading, though Grushko apparently was not.

“Then there is the other matter ...”

“Our business?” I said.

“Yes. You see … ah … let me only say that it makes it even harder to return ... impossible, you see?”