The Uninvited Guest (7 page)

“You still have your wallet?”

“No, I don't still have my wallet, but as I said, I don't regret a thing.”

“Still have the keys to the hearse?”

“Yes, I do. Them girls wouldn't go near a hearse if you paid them. Very superstitious bunch, the erotic entertainment crowd.”

“Who would have guessed?”

“You think they took my wallet, but you're wrong. These girls each make more in a night than you and I combined make in a week. What the fuck do they want my wallet for? I'd be more likely to steal from them.”

Tony ordered an omelette for himself, a bagel and cream cheese for Fred, and more coffee. They had to be at the funeral home for ten, and he wanted to hit the highway as soon as possible after that. There was another funeral home waiting for Stan in Toronto, and the Cup was expected to make a trip to Florida at the end of the week. The office had gone into a frenzy at the news of Stan's death. There was no contingency in place, like everyone expected Stan to just keep doing his job forever.

The young driver straightened himself and leaned across the table, grabbing at Tony's arm. Clearly, the story of his night would continue, with or without Tony's co- operation.

“So then, I'm walking back along Sainte-Catherine's there, way over in the east end, and I've got three different kisses to think about, still on my mouth, you know. I can still feel that last one. I think they were all trying to outdo each other, you know, and she wins. Ouch. And I'm walking along—this is just a couple hours ago now. There's a few people on the street, the early workers, you know, picking up garbage and opening up the depanneurs, and it's like the greatest morning of my life all of a sudden, you know, all zoned on the hash and the sun shining, and suddenly there's this dog. It's like this big German shepherd thing with a yellow bandana around its neck, and it's limping around on the sidewalk in front of me, holding one of its front paws in the air. I can take a lot of things man. I mean, I move dead people around all day, right, but I can't take seeing a hurt dog. Breaks my heart to see a hurt dog.”

During breakfast, the street outside the hotel, Boulevard René-Lévesque, filled with the morning rush, cars and buses and business people walking fast to their offices. Montreal's second face, the desperate, struggling centre of commerce, came out to replace the cooler, more relaxed Montreal of the night.

“And it belongs to this street kid, this girl with hair dyed all purple and shaved up the back and sides. You know, you see them all downtown these days; they live in the empty lots. A lot of them keep dogs, for protection I guess, or maybe they just like dogs. She's sitting off the sidewalk in this overgrown lot. I guess maybe that's where she lives, just her and her dog among the rocks that used to be a building.”

“She took your wallet?”

Tony kept his involvement in the conversation minimal. The less he talked, the sooner it would be over. Stan had told him about this part of the job. “You're not really supposed to be there, so everyone gets uncomfortable and starts telling you the story of their fucking lives. After a while, you figure out where it's going, and you can try to nudge it there a bit faster.”

“She won my wallet. I wanted to give her some money so she could take her dog to a vet or something, or at least buy some food for the thing, and for herself—something, but you can never tell where that money's going to go. I don't usually care about that. What someone on the street does with the money I give them, that's their own business, but there was a dog involved. I'm standing there, trying to tell her what to do with the ten bucks I just gave her and she's just smiling up at me. She can probably smell the hash and booze coming off me so who am I to give lectures at that point? But she sees that I have more than ten bucks in my wallet. That's when she offers to play me for the rest of my money.”

“Play you?”

“She's got this plastic chessboard with her, keeps it set up all the time on one of the pieces of broken concrete. That's her thing, right. They've all got a thing. Hers is she'll play you chess for money. Jocelyn, that's the name she gives me. You put however much money down that you want to risk and if Jocelyn wins, she keeps it.”

Fred looked out the window, took off his cap and scratched a shaky hand through his hair. The hair stood on end where the fingers left it.

“My guess is Jocelyn almost always wins,” he said.

The restaurant was filling with other travellers, groups of older Americans in town on a tour. They sat in the seats surrounding Fred and Tony, wearing comfortable clothing, staring at Fred in his rumpled black suit.

“I know a little bit about chess. My uncle taught me when I was just a kid and I got really good at it for a while there. Won a bunch of tournaments at school and travelled around a bit with it. But this girl, man, she was a monster. You know chess? It's all about them four middle squares, right? Take control of them four middle squares and you're on your way. But this chick, man, she didn't give a shit about them four middle squares. She sees me setting up in the middle and she just laughs because she's already kicking my ass somewhere else.”

“And you're still stoned at this point?”

“I know, I know, I thought the same thing. The first game I lost—twenty bucks—I figured it was probably because of the hash. And I didn't even mind losing the money because I wanted her dog to get to a vet. I was going to give her the money even if I won. I wanted her to feed the damn dog today, you know. So, I give my head a shake and play for all I've got left—another fifteen bucks.

“And this time I'm really watching, really paying attention to what it is she's doing, but you know, it's like she and I, we're not even playing the same game. I'm playing chess and she's playing this other game that makes chess look like tic-tac-toe. You know the best players in the world have entire games memorized, with thousands of variations to every move. If you make this move, say you bring out your bishop on the third move, that's standard, they look into their big box of games in their head and say okay, bishop out on the third move is when I throw my knight into the middle. Then let's say you try to mix it up a bit and bring out your queen. Unless it's an absolutely stupid move, they've already anticipated it, and they have three possible moves at their disposal to pick from.

“For these people, chess is a room with a thousand doors, each door leading into another room with a thousand doors, and on and on. And they always know which door is best. In their minds, there is a red carpet on the floor of each room, leading directly to the best possible door to the next room. You and I step into these rooms, all we see are doors, but these people have a red carpet. It's not really about being smarter than the other person. It's some kind of extra sense, like mind reading. There's this place out there, you know, in the air, where all the answers are, a place where the doors are marked with the red carpet, and if you can access that place, well there you are.

“That's what this chick was like. She'd make a move and then she'd sort of stare off into the street, looking after her dog, or just watching people go by until I made my move. And as soon as I made my move, you could see her seeing the right door. If you play the game to any competitive level, these are the people you eventually run into, the ones who let you know it's time to sit down; you've reached the end of your winning streak and now it's time to take your seat where you belong.”

“So she won the second game as well?”

“She didn't win it. She owned it from beginning to end. These people don't win, they just are. You just don't expect to find one of them living on the street in Montreal, you know, begging food for their dog. Yeah, she took my fifteen bucks. Then she sees my wallet is empty and she gets this smile on her face, like she knows I'm a fighting fish and I'm not letting go of the hook. She smiles at me and says she'll play me for the wallet itself, and everything in it. If she wins, I can cancel my credit cards, but I have to give her a day before I do it. She's got it all figured out, so you know she's done this shit before. She gets a day to throw as much on the card as she can and I don't have to pay for it because I report it stolen. I just say I had my pocket picked and didn't notice it for a long time and the card company forgives me all the charges that aren't mine. They're insured for just this kind of delayed reporting, so it's all covered. Just a cost of doing business for those guys.

“And if I win, she says, I get whatever I want. I get all my money back, I get the dog if I want it; and if I want, I get her. She says she'll come back to my room with me if I win, if that's what I want. I'm still thinking of walking away, and she must know that because that's when she pulls out the blindfold. She's going to play the whole game without being able to see the board. I'm supposed to tell her my moves, and move her pieces for her when she decides on a move. This I've got to see, so I put my wallet down and she blindfolds herself. She plays the entire game looking only at a board in her head. She has to keep a picture of where every piece is on the board at all times. It's not impossible, but I've never seen it before, so we play.”

“And that's when she took your wallet.”

Fred gave Tony a weary look.

“Yeah, and that's when that happened. You know, I might just have brought her back to my room if I'd won. I might just have done that, because right now I'm thinking I'm in love with that girl. She beat my ass blindfolded.”

Tony picked up the breakfast cheque, put it on the League's expense. He brought the Cup down to the parking garage. Fred dozed in the driver's seat while Tony loaded it into the back of the hearse. On Ontario Street, two guys from the funeral home loaded Stan for them. A block from the highway entrance on René-Lévesque, Tony had Fred pull over and took charge of the wheel himself.

“You know, you need a special licence to drive one of these things, man.”

“And right now, neither one of us could produce one. If we get pulled over, I'll just show the cop the Cup.”

“That's one all-powerful cup you got there, man.”

It was Tony's turn to shoot a tired look.

“Fred,
man
, I have to say, I'm not buying this line you keep handing me where you have no idea what's in that black case back there. I mean, we live in the same country, right? You're younger than me, but what difference does that make? You're telling me you've never heard of that trophy.”

“What's your question? Have I heard of it, or do I care?”

“Yeah, that's what I thought.”

“I mean, do you know what the international cricket trophy looks like? The Ashes—it's called the Ashes.”

“Absolutely not, but that wasn't my point.”

“Because about a billion more people care about that thing than about your shiny little cup back there.”

“I'm aware of that.”

“No offence buddy, but get your head out of your ass. Hockey is a money game.”

“I can't argue against that.”

“You know, when India plays Pakistan at cricket for the Ashes, people die. Did you know that?”

“I think I knew that.”

“With all due respect, who gives a crap about your cup?”

Fred smiled the smile he'd learned from tired strippers that morning, threw his cap on the floor and climbed over the seatback to lie down beside Stan.

Tony drove the limit on the 401, a six-hour trip, with Stan's casket locked into the back, the Cup in its case on one side of him and Fred stretched out asleep on the other side. He stopped for gas in Brockville, coffee and a doughnut in Kingston. He was surprised to find a radio installed in the dashboard. It brought him a minor league baseball game from across the lake in New York somewhere, until it faded out in the crowded airwaves around Toronto. Somewhere, the Trojans were doing the unexpected and beating the Bulls by one run. Off the highway, on the crowded streets of Toronto, Tony woke Fred and let him drive the final few blocks to the funeral home where Stan would lie three days, visited by hockey players and League dignitaries, but no family or friends other than Tony, who showed up every day.

On his first overseas trip of the new off-season, during eight turbulent hours between Toronto and Italy, Tony sits in an aisle seat in first class beside the trophy. Across the aisle from him is Dragos Petrescu, the first Romanian-born hockey player to play on a Cup- winning team. He is flying to his homeland days after his family and friends have already arrived there. The promotions schedule for a new champion is making him very nearly late for his own wedding.

Beside Dragos, a young woman reads a book and glances now and then out the window. She is Diana Petrescu, the young player's cousin, also travelling to his wedding. Her mother, a sour looking woman dressed in black, snoozes in the window seat. Tony was introduced to them, and to Dragos's tall, imposing father in the first-class departures lounge in Toronto. He felt surrounded by family, and enjoyed the atmosphere while understanding almost nothing of what was being said around him, the group switching from Romanian to English so quickly here and again that all the words ran together unless someone spoke directly at him.

“My cousin is a very talented athlete,” Diana had told Tony, “but he could lose his own ass trying to get from one place to another. He has been known to show up at the airport twelve hours late for a flight. It's amazing to me he can find the ice whenever he falls off his skates.”

Tony had watched Dragos submit himself to Diana's verbal abuse, and had wondered at his almost instant attraction to her because of it. “What a horrible girl,” he'd thought, wanting her. She'd nagged her cousin until everyone was safely belted in, at which point she pulled out her book and treated the two of them like they had never existed for her. About the trophy she'd had only one thing to say. “You'll ruin your back in a job like that,” she told Tony, as he heaved the bulky trophy case toward the boarding gate. “You'll be no good to anyone in a few years.”

“My uncle has already called to tell me my picture has been in the Bucharest papers every day since the seventh game,” Petrescu tells Tony. The jet has levelled off, the warning lights relaxed and the first round of drinks is being circulated through the cabin. “They've even published pictures of my fiancée. It feels very odd to return this way. It's not my first time back, of course, but I think it will be the first time I can't come back unnoticed.”

“It bothers you, being noticed?” Tony asks.

“I don't know that it bothers me, Tony. It's not as though I am a player on the national soccer team. That would be trouble for me. Those guys can't take a drink of water without people fighting for the glass afterwards. I think it will be odd to return this way, that's all, especially considering how it was that I left Romania.”

“Kicked out for sucking too much blood?” Tony smiles at the younger man.

“A joke about Dracula. That's good, Tony. I've never heard anything like it.”

Tony lifts his glass of orange juice to Petrescu, toasting the successful sarcasm.

“Does Canadian hockey mean anything in Romania?” he asks.

“It's a game. That's what means something. I won a very important game, and to Romanians being the best at any game is what matters the most.”

The young hockey player's father sits on the other side of the Cup, in the window seat of Tony's row. On his chin he wears a manicured goatee, midway in its transition from black to grey. In the airport he had not said a word in English, had never addressed Tony, but now he leans across the trophy and looks Tony in the eye.

“Romanians are masters of all games,” he says, slowly and with a growing smile. He waves down a passing steward and orders his first of many transatlantic drinks. “I am master of all games.”

When he says this, Diana sighs loudly and closes her book.

“Master of all games,” she repeats, rolling her eyes. “That's good, Miki, play the foreigner for our new friend. You know, we're in an Italian airplane, and soon we'll be over the ocean. Who gets to play the exotic foreigner then?” She leans her body forward a few inches and addresses Tony. “He works for a department store in Montreal. He is a master of nothing. He is a master of talking about being a master.”

There is a brief exchange between everyone in Romanian. It is not in the least heated, more bored than anything else, and at the end of it, Diana sighs again and pulls a silky black mask from her seat pocket. She fits it on her eyes, pulls a blanket up over her shoulders from her knees and collapses sideways against her mother's shoulder. Dragos watches her and makes an attempt to adjust the blanket for her, to bring it more securely over one shoulder. She bats his hand away blindly and says something decidedly affectionate. The two of them laugh, and Dragos turns back to Tony.

“For me,” the older man begins again, “the very act of living is the playing of a game against the greatest opponent. So, we meet then. I am Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae. Call me Miki. Everyone does.”

“That's a lot of Nicolaes.”

“Everyone of a certain generation in Romania has Nicolae somewhere in their name. We are also lucky enough to have it also as a family name, though. Some, like my son, have chosen to use only the first last name. It makes it easier to fit on his hockey sweater. This is what he says.”

Tony hears a bitterness in Petrescu's voice he didn't expect. He looks across the aisle at Dragos, who is listening while pretending not to. Not for the first time he notices the young player is fidgeting almost uncontrollably with his hands. Tony had seen this nervous habit in the departures lounge as well. Dragos Petrescu is clearly agitated by the flight, as though the return to Romania terrifies him in some way.

“And do you expect to win the game,” Tony asks the older man, “you know, the game of living?”

“One always expects to win. For me, life is playing. Everything, every game, even the most serious, the most full of consequence can be contested. Perhaps if I'd had more of a choice, my son would not have satisfied his father so well by becoming excellent at his own game. But he is very good at hockey. What can he do about it? Are you very good at anything, Tony?”

Tony takes a slow sip of his own traditional flying drink, double rye and ginger ale, and looks past Nicolae to the dense blackness of the night outside the window.

“So, how did you come to leave Romania?” Tony asks. Across the aisle, the masked Diana sighs heavily again and shifts in her seat.

To enter Israel when Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae did, and more importantly how he did, with a young wife of working age and a son not too many years away from mandatory service in the army, was to be certain of a very difficult time. His visa to leave Romania depended on his being Jewish, but in fact he was not Jewish.

His mother was Jewish by birth but not practice and Nicolae, having been born into the great socialist republic of Romania was officially without religion. But a Jewish mother is a Jewish mother and that made him officially a Jew in the eyes of Israel, which meant he received a visa for himself and for his non-Jewish wife and non-Jewish son. Nicolae and his family were permitted to take very little with them, as there was really no such thing as personal property in the Romania of the day, and even family heirlooms were considered to be cultural treasures of the Revolution.

In the months before their departure, Nicolae was regularly removed from the street by the police and taken to the station for questioning. Every neighbourhood in Bucharest had its own station, responsible for its own small district and population. Nicolae was well acquainted with his local police station from his days as a juvenile delinquent, but this was something different entirely. This was the central station, off Victory Square. This was the home of the state police. Securitate. Invisible men. Nicolae was removed from the street, he was told, for being publicly drunk.

“It is certainly true I was publicly drunk,” Petrescu laughs, “though I doubt they could actually tell. I can drink an entire bottle of vodka and look as fresh as though I'd just had a cup of coffee. Drunkenness was simply the easiest and most common excuse for arrest and detainment.”

Until his departure from Romania, Nicolae still attended his job every day, though he felt very little reason to continue doing work. Many of his very good friends worked with him, and as they were all upset that he would soon be leaving, they made it a point to get him drunk each day before three in the afternoon. So it was that every day of his last months in Bucharest, Nicolae walked home from work completely without legs, and so it was on many of these days he found himself spending some time with the dreaded secret police.

On the first of his series of detainments, Nicolae was placed alone in a large dark room on an upper floor of the downtown station. He had been made to climb at least five flights of stairs, though he couldn't be sure because of his condition. On his way up the stairs he had concentrated on sounds. There were stories of the unmistakable noise of torture coming through the walls of this station, but all Nicolae heard was the mechanical hum of the ventilation system and the occasional cough or laugh from behind a closed door. The two Securitate pushed him into a hard wooden chair beside a large table, and then left the room. While they were gone, Nicolae twisted in the chair and observed his darkened surroundings.

The room was mostly bare, no wall decor, no windows, just the large wooden table like something designed for feasts or large meetings, and seven identical wooden chairs with no padding on the seats. When he looked down at his own chair he saw markings in the back rails near the seat, dents and rubbing marks, like those made by handcuffs or chains. Nicolae wiped the palms of his hands on his pant legs to remove the sweat that was accumulating there. In one murky corner of the room there was a dark shape, something hulking or piled. Nicolae stood from his chair and took a few tentative steps into the gloom. He expected at any moment for a voice to stop him and leave him sweating and silent on his feet, but the only sound he heard was from his own shoe soles dragging across the wooden floor. As he approached the corner, he found himself laughing low and uncontrolled. There was a small table, a folding table like he himself used for playing bridge with friends, and on the tabletop was a backgammon game, set for fresh play.

Nicolae taps his forehead with a finger. “You could never tell in a police station in Bucharest if what you were seeing at any moment was really what was there, or just something constructed for you to see and wonder about. The police station was a house of games. Games of the mind. Not such nice games like we play.”

The backgammon set was in the same place each time Nicolae was brought into the room. He never saw anyone playing it nor any evidence of play. He imagined the police must have played it on their lunchtime, or in the morning before it was time to interrogate. It looked foreign, not the table sets you would normally see in Romania. It was made of something heavy, like marble or even a slab of steel, and the pieces were actual stones. In Romania, one almost always played table sets from the mountains of Transylvania. Peasants in the mountains would construct wooden box sets out of a light wood, bass or pine—quite thin and with little heft. They would include quick, rural carvings on the outside of the boxes, and the pieces were nothing more than round wooden chips painted red or black.

But the game in the station was something else entirely, an alien-looking thing, something confiscated perhaps. At that time in Romania, in the late 1970s, it was possible to travel from Romania if you knew the right people and had the right job—if you were in, or connected to, the Party. And everyone who travelled brought back some little thing, sometimes many little things. There was always something tucked away in the suitcase. At the border it was only a matter of packing cigarettes, a small cheese or fine chocolates on the very top of the suitcase, some small gift for the border guards, and everything else in the case made it through safely. It was a game in itself to discover the desires of certain border guards.

The very best players at contraband kept lists of the likes and dislikes of all the customs men at Otopeni Airport, and at the rail borders. They kept work schedules and knew when vacations were due. In this way, they could be certain of who would be greeting them on their return to Romania, and what little token to pack on the top of the clothes in the suitcase. Nicolae knew of one fellow who had no interest in the traditional bribes—the cigarettes, cigars, cheeses or chocolates. And he wanted nothing for a woman. He was a very successful bachelor and never had to bother with winning the attentions of ladies. All this man wanted was fishing tackle.

This particular border guard fished in every spare moment. When he was not at Otopeni, opening the suitcases of visiting dignitaries, thumbing through their underwear for state secrets, he was at one of the many lakes in Bucharest. He fished for carp, mostly, and also brown trout, though these were quite rare in the city. To get past this man was a simple matter of visiting a sporting goods store on your travels and picking up the most extravagant and ridiculous looking piece of fishing tackle you could find. You would do well to buy some spare fishing line as well, and a few plain hooks; but some colourful piece of fish silliness was a certain free pass back into the country. Something from Finland was best, shaped like a fish and painted like no fish in nature, something with feathers and beads and parts that flutter or twirl in the water.

“I'm not sure if this man ever used any of this crazy Finnish tackle—he was always just as pleased to see the line and plain hooks—but he was certainly amused by it.”

In fact, this guard's crazy foreign fishing tackle fed that significant and mysterious national pride all border officials seem to possess. He looked at these strange and wonderful lures as evidence of Western decadence and the futility of the capitalist system. “Look at this ridiculous contraption,” he could be heard to say. “What self-respecting fish would ever try to eat this thing with its feathers and beads and funny noises? Maybe Finnish fish need to be amused before they are caught, but a good Romanian carp wants just a bug on a hook.” Nevertheless, an absurd Finnish piece of tackle, some cheap line and plain hooks cleared the path for, no doubt, hundreds of kilos of contraband chocolate from Geneva, or cigars from Amsterdam, Camembert from Paris, or prosciutto from Rome.