Hard Rain (15 page)

Mr. Mickey helped her up, half-dragged her to a fishing seat in the stern. He yelled something in her face. It might have been an apology. She couldn't hear over the engine noise. Mr. Mickey yelled again.

“What? I can't hear you.”

He made drinking motions.

“No,” Jessie shouted at him. “Nothing.”

Mr. Mickey smiled and made more drinking motions. He turned and went into the cabin. A column of yellow light poked out of the doorway for a moment. Jessie glimpsed a wall full of electronic equipment, lit with a swinging Tiffany lamp, before the door closed. A television had been on. John Wayne was manhandling a saloonful of greasy customers. Even with all of MGM's help, he didn't look quite as powerful as Mr. Mickey.

Jessie's eyes readjusted to the darkness. The boat flew through the fog on a boiling white V. She'd never been on such a fast boat. L.A. had already vanished in an orange cocoon.

A hand touched her shoulder. Mr. Mickey. He set down two crystal snifters and a bottle on the table between the two fishing chairs. Armagnac. Le Comte de Quelque-Chose. Mr. Mickey poured, held out a glass to Jessie. The smell of the Armagnac rose up, a good smell. She drank. Mr. Mickey smiled and, leaving the bottle where it was, took his own drink inside.

The Armagnac began to drive the chill out of Jessie's body. She took another sip and another. Stop it, she told herself. She had a long night ahead. Mr. Mickey's supervisor. The plane to Boston. She looked at her watch. Only 8:45. Plenty of time: must be almost there. What direction were they headed? She'd be able to tell better from the bow.

Jessie rose. Her legs felt weak. She took a few steps toward the bow. The orange cocoon lay on the right side: they were heading north. Above she saw the man in the torn straw hat, his bare feet planted on the platform.

She turned and went back to her chair. On the way she noticed a life ring hanging from the gunwale. Something was written on it in block letters. She went closer—it took a long time—and read the word:
Ratty
.

Was that the name of the boat? Jessie made the long journey to the stern. Holding tight to the rail, she leaned over, her head directly above the point of the boiling V, throbbing with the noise of the engines. There was nothing written on the stern. She touched the point where a name should have been. It felt sticky.

Jessie stood up. She felt dizzy. Seasick? No, just dizzy. She moved toward the fishing chair, but so slowly. Dizzy. And sleepy, too. A sudden, irresistible sleepiness was metastasizing through her body, up to her brain. “Oh, God,” she said.

Jessie didn't quite reach the chair. The boat dipped over a swell, making her lose her balance and fall over the table, knocking the bottle of Armagnac and the crystal snifter to the deck. Jessie went down too. She lay in a puddle of Armagnac, feeling the sharpness of the broken glass against her skin and the power of the big engines, down below.

14

Thursday night was Bela's night. That meant slivovitz in thimble glasses, the “Opera Box” on the radio and Bela saying things like, “This is a pansy country, Ivan. It always was; I just didn't see it at first.” Then he'd lean forward in his armchair, the way he was doing now, a little man who'd once been built like a pit bull, with stubby legs and a barrel chest; now all that remained was the fighting instinct.

“Do you mean sexually?” Zyzmchuk asked. “Homosexuality exists in the old country, too, Bela.”

Bela knocked that argument aside with the flat of his hand. “I don't mean that,” he told Zyzmchuk, who knew it already; he'd just been hoping to sidetrack the old man. “Not just that, anyway. I'm talking about the whole mentality. Macho!” he snorted. “Bankers with manicures! Politicians with dyed hair! Pleaders, beggars, whiners. They call that macho. I'll tell you what macho is, Ivan. Macho is pansy. It has to be, right? It's Latin. Latins can't fight. Everybody knows that. You know who can fight, Ivan?”

“Who?”

“And I'm not talking about the Koreans, the Japs, the fucking Russians. You know who can really fight?”

“Who, Bela?”

“The Brits. I don't mean the little Lord Pansies. I mean the lower-class Brits.”

“The ones who riot at soccer games?”

Bela's eyes hardened; his jaws snapped shut. Björling was on the radio.
Dein ist mein ganzes Herz
. Not Zyzmchuk's kind of thing, but definitely the old man's. His eyes misted over, all anger gone. His hand reached for slivovitz, poured it into his mouth. The sweet voice filled the room. Bela had excellent sound: a CD from Nakamichi, Acoustic Research speakers that could handle two hundred watts, an amplifier that could provide them. Was that pansy too?

Zyzmchuk kept that thought to himself. Björling came to the last big note and blew it effortlessly away. Björling had always been a big favorite in Bela's family. Zyzmchuk remembered the chipped Blaupunkt, stolen from the Germans, that had sat on a kitchen table, long ago. The radio was gone, the house was gone, the family was gone, the country, in a sense, was gone too; but Björling was as good as ever, maybe better, on Bela's sound system.

Bela drained his glass but didn't let it go, cradling it in his hard hands. When he spoke again, his voice was much softer. “You know why the Brits, the lower-class Brits, are such great fighters?”

“No.”

“They're not afraid to die. Get them mad and they don't give two fucks about dying. That's the secret. Everyone else these days is afraid of dying. They're so scared of dying they're dying like flies. Like flies, Ivan.” Bela began to laugh. His face reddened, his laughter turned to choking, Zyzmchuk crossed the little room and banged him on the back.

“Like flies, like flies,” he gasped as soon as he recovered his breath. “It's the funniest thing I've seen in my whole Goddamned life.”

At that moment, Zyzmchuk found himself looking at the photograph of Leni on the mantel. He glanced down at the old man and saw that his eyes were on it too. “Any beer, Bela?” he asked. He didn't want one of those evenings: slivovitz and Leni.

“In the fridge.”

Zyzmchuk snapped open a can and returned to the living room. The old man was still gazing at the photo. “Good pansy beer,” Zyzmchuk said. “Want one?”

“I can't drink that piss,” Bela said, filling his glass with slivovitz. “Americans don't know how to make beer. They don't know how to do anything.”

Zyzmchuk knew that Bela meant the Americans hadn't known how to do one specific thing: keep the Russians out of Budapest. An unforgivable sin. But he didn't say it. “What about me, Bela? I'm American.”

“Ja, but it didn't take.”

“Come on. I've been a citizen all my adult life.”

“Don't make me laugh. You're a big Czech—too smart to be smart, like most of your countrymen—but you're not an American.”

Bela's eyes shifted back to the photo; so did Zyzmchuk's. Leni sat in a cafe, smiling at someone out of the frame; not a very good photograph, but it had Leni's smile going for it. “You know what I'm thinking?” Bela asked.

“Don't say it.”

Björling polished off a few more beauties. Bela swallowed more slivovitz. He was going to say it. “I'm thinking what kind of boy a big dumb Czech like you and my Leni would have had.”

“It wasn't necessarily going to be a boy,” Zyzmchuk said.

“You don't know what you're talking about. It was lying up high in her belly. That means a boy.”

“That's an old wives' tale,” Zyzmchuk said, but not with the conviction he'd meant: his mind had suddenly jumped a groove and tossed up the image of number 22 in white and gold, distracting him.

Bela pounded the padded arm of his chair. A puff of dust rose in the air. “There would have been a boy eventually. You know what I'm saying.” He leaned forward, ready to fight again.

“I know what you're saying,” Zyzmchuk said.

Bela sat down and lowered his voice. “Maybe two.”

Zyzmchuk got up. The room was small and overheated, full of gemütlich bric-a-brac from a Central Europe that no longer existed. “How about a beer instead of that shit,” he said. “Nobody drinks it in Hungary anymore.”

“Nobody does a lot of things in Hungary anymore.”

Zyzmchuk went into the kitchen and got another beer. A calendar hung beside the fridge. All the days were blank, except Thursdays. On Thursdays it said: “Z. + Opera Box.” Zyzmchuk stayed in the kitchen, drinking his beer. He didn't want to go over it all again—the mix-up at the kiosk, the broken carburetor, the crumby little village near the border, Colonel Grushin. A classic operation, according to Langley. But the patient died.

“Hey,” Bela called, “did you get lost?”

Zyzmchuk went into the living room. Bela's glass was empty again. His eyes were blazing. “That son of a whore at the kiosk.” The conversation had gone ahead without them.

Zyzmchuk sighed. “You had your revenge.”

“It wasn't enough. I should have done it with my bare hands.” He lifted them, grasping, in the air. His thimble glass fell to the floor and smashed. Zyzmchuk went into the kitchen for the broom. The phone rang. He picked it up.

“Mr. Zyzmchuk?”

“Hello, Grace.”

“One moment for Mr. Keith.”

There was a click. Then the line went fuzzy as Keith was patched through. He sounded far away. “Greetings,” he said. “Little Miss Muffet is on the move.”

“You're not tapping their house?”

“I thought about it. No. Actually it's public knowledge. It was listed on the daily schedule put out by his office. She's on her way to some ceremony. Grace has the details.”

“Okay.”

“And Zyz?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't say tapping. This is an open line.”

“You just did.”

Keith laughed; he'd been very jolly since they'd reached their agreement. “What fools we mortals, huh, Zyz?” Zyzmchuk said nothing. He listened to the bad connection: surf rolling on a sandy beach.

“Where are you?”

“Red Square,” Keith said. “Any more questions?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. On your horse.”

“Sure.”

“Bye bye.”

The line cleared. Grace came on and gave the details. Zyzmchuk hung up the phone. He knew Bela was watching from the kitchen doorway before he turned to see him.

“Back to the office?” Bela said.

“Nothing pansy like that. They're letting me out.”

“To do what?”

“The usual. Dangerous top-secret capers.”

Bela made the chopping motion with the side of his hand. That got rid of the sarcasm and left the naked words. Bela always tried to get to the basics. He'd never learn. “Does that mean the Russians?” he asked, eyes narrowing.

“Worse than the Russians.”

“Worse than the Russians?”

“Much. A stadium full of English soccer fans.”

Bela didn't laugh. He didn't smile. He thrust out his pit bull chin and said, “You know something? I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“You. You are an American. You don't understand anything and you don't know you don't know. That's the part that makes you American. Even a Bohunk like me knows when I don't know.”

“Time for one more drink,” Zyzmchuk said, putting his arm around Bela's shoulders and leading him back to the living room. Björling was singing the Ingemisco. “That's more like it,” Zyzmchuk said. He swept up the broken glass, tossed the fragments into the grate, poured slivovitz for two. “Here's to Verdi,” he said.

“And to killing Russians,” Bela added.

“Shit, Bela.”

They drank. Zyzmchuk rose. “Ivan?” said Bela.

“Yes?”

“Can I go with you?”

“Where?”

“Wherever you're going.”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Is it because of the danger? I can still fight, damn it.” Bela balled his right hand into a fist as proof.

“There's no danger. It's stupid and boring. To get me out of the office, that's all.”

“I won't be bored.”

“Sorry, Bela. See you next week.”

Zyzmchuk let himself out. Bela was turning up the volume as he left. Björling, now in the role of Dick Johnson, followed him outside and all the way to the car.

Zyzmchuk sat behind the wheel, watching the lights in Bela's apartment. They went out; but he thought he could still hear “The Girl of the Golden West,” drifting down.

Grace had booked him on the last flight to Logan and reserved a hotel room; that would give him plenty of time to be ready for the arrival of Little Miss Muffet's flight in the morning. But Zyzmchuk didn't like hotel rooms, and he preferred driving to flying. Why not? He had a change of clothes in the back of the Blazer; he had his sweats and his J. C. Penney sneakers; he had his toothbrush and his toolbox. The only thing he didn't have was his gun, and you didn't need guns for following people like Alice Frame.

Zyzmchuk turned the key and began the long night's drive to Boston, the taste of slivovitz in his mouth and Leni on his mind.

15

A voice. Familiar. “Horse,” it said. “Bye bye.”

No more voice. Just the sea, very near. Jessie opened her eyes.

A Picasso hung on a white wall: Rose Period. The subject was an angular woman on a pale beach, a woman who looked something like Barbara. She gazed out to sea with mismatched eyes.

Jessie was lying on a rattan bed. She sat up. The movement made her head pound. She stayed still for a few moments, waiting for the pounding to stop. When it didn't, she got off the bed and crossed the room. It was a long trip: the carpet was deep pile; her body weighed a ton; her legs were flab.

Jessie stood before the painting. It had the familiar signature in the bottom corner, a work of art in itself, and it wasn't a print: a real Rose Period Picasso on a white wall, in a room with a rattan bed, a deep-pile carpet and the ocean very near.