Potboiler (19 page)

76.

“Rise, citizens of Zlabia. . . .”

Pfefferkorn opened the dresser. The day’s itinerary included a visit to a goat farm on the outskirts of town, which seemed as good an occasion as any to use his one polo shirt. Still coursing with sweat, he unwrapped his towel and pressed it to his face. When he took the towel away from his face he saw that his moustache had come off in his hands.

There was no cause for panic. He had been in West Zlabia for a week, and the epoxy was supposed to last ten to twelve days. Constant perspiration had likely hastened its dissolution. He picked the old moustache out of the folds of his towel and flushed it down the toilet. He put his wheelie bag on the bed, pried up the first false bottom, removed one of the moustache kits, tore it open, and dumped its contents across the bedspread. Swatches of fake hair in a wild multitude of sizes, shapes, colors, and textures spilled out. It looked like a caterpillar pride parade. He selected two pinkie-length pieces in a medium brown and carried them into the bathroom along with the thimble-sized tube of adhesive and the instruction sheet.

Superficial identity alteration package (male)

1. Choose the part which is sorted appropriately of the hairpiece at size.

2. In order to meet to the most desirable size, carve the hairpiece

3, Solicit moisture with the surface area of the face where the hairpiece will have in application.

4. Using the cotton stick, solicit Mult-E-Bond™ in verso of the hairpiece to receive the influence which ties on with moisture.

5 Solicit the hairpiece, maintain for thrity second..

6. You look so good!

He didn’t remember the process being quite so esoteric. Then again, Blueblood had been there to help. Flummoxed, he turned the page over.

MADE IN INDONESIA

There was a knock at the front door.

“Good morning, friend!”

What was Fyothor doing here? Breakfast didn’t start for another half hour. Pfefferkorn poked his head out. “Just a minute,” he called.

He ducked back into the bathroom. He uncapped the tube of adhesive, squeezed a dollop onto his fingertip, and put his finger to his lip, instantly fusing the two surfaces together.

77.

It was ugly. His left middle finger was stuck to his upper lip midway between the left corner of his mouth and his philtrum. The angle of contact was particularly grievous. Had the finger been pressed down at twelve o’clock, he might have been able to pass off the pose as one of contemplation. As it was, the finger was between nine and ten o’clock, making it look like he was about to excavate a booger. He dashed to the bed and combed through the pieces of facial hair.

Next door the banging started up, steady as a metronome.

“Really?” he yelled. “Now?”

“What?” Fyothor called.

“Nothing.”

He found what he was looking for: the enclosed Q-tip, or what the instructions called a “cotton stick.” In his haste, he had forgotten all about it. Knowing where he had gone wrong didn’t get him any closer to fixing the problem, though. At present he was holding his own face, and Fyothor was tapping at the door, and the lovebirds were going at it like a pumpjack.

“I apologize for the rude awakening,” Fyothor called, “but today we must stick to the schedule.”

“I’ll be right there.” Pfefferkorn raced back to the bathroom, threw on the hot water, and stuck his head under the tap, without effect. Despairingly he stood up, wet all over again. There was a way to dissolve the epoxy, he knew. Blueblood had told him. The banging was driving him crazy and making it hard to concentrate.

“I recommend closed-toe shoes,” Fyothor called.

“Right-o,” Pfefferkorn called.

He remembered: a solution of saltwater, twenty-two percent by weight. Simple enough, except that he had yet to see a saltshaker (or any normal condiment, for that matter) anywhere in West Zlabia. A bit of ketchup would do wonders for root vegetable hash, he thought. Then he told himself to focus. He needed salt water. He could cry. He dug deep for the saddest memories he had. He thought of his father. He thought of all his failures. It was no use. Shortly after his life had taken a turn for the better, he had worked to put his misery behind him. Instead he imagined awful things that might yet happen. He pictured Carlotta in her cell. He pictured himself getting treated for cancer. With distaste, he pictured his daughter . . . but his brain refused to go there, and his eyes remained dry as toast.

“The driver is waiting. We can still beat the traffic.”

“On my way.”

He tugged at his lip again. He was stuck fast, his options dwindling. What distinguished men like Harry Shagreen and Dick Stapp, he thought, was their monomania. They did whatever it took—anything at all—for failure was not an option. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, took a deep breath, and yanked as hard as he could, spinning himself around and landing in the shower with a crash
.

“Friend? Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Pfefferkorn said weakly. He had been somewhat successful. His finger did feel looser. He climbed out of the shower, took hold of his hand, and braced himself for another go.

In retrospect he would not be able to decide which was worse: the pain or the wet, ripping sound. It took all his willpower not to scream. He bent over, silently heaving, his eyes finally (and pointlessly) blurring, blood dripping from his lip onto the tiles. He wasn’t finished, either. The very tip of his finger was still attached. With a grunt he pulled it free. He wadded toilet tissue against his bleeding face.

“The early goat gets the peels,” Fyothor called.

Pfefferkorn used the Q-tip to apply a fresh coat of adhesive. It stung going on, and he realized he had smeared an assuredly toxic substance directly into his bloodstream. The epoxy worked like a chemical cauterization, coagulating the blood on contact. With trembling hands, he pressed the two matching pieces of moustache to his lip. He held them in place for a ten count, then tested each side with a gentle tug. The right side was fine. The left side yodeled with pain, but it, too, remained secure.

He ran to the bed, swept the spilled moustaches into the wheelie bag, replaced the first false panel, zipped the bag up, and threw on his clothes. By now Fyothor was pounding loud enough to compete with the pipes.

“Must I break down the door?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Pfefferkorn ran back to the bathroom for one final mirror check and recoiled.

He had glued his moustache on upside down. Instead of following the downward curve of his upper lip, it shot upward, like a set of surprised eyebrows. Seeing this did in fact surprise him, and when his actual eyebrows went up, he seemed to have two sets of surprised eyebrows, one above his eyes and the other above his lip. “I didn’t expect this,” the top of his face seemed to be saying. “Me neither,” the bottom half seemed to be agreeing, “
any
of it.” He tried to bring his moustache back into alignment by frowning, hard. It worked, sort of. Assuming he could keep it up all day long, Fyothor might not notice anything amiss.

“I am counting to three. One.”

Still frowning, Pfefferkorn ran from the bathroom.

“Two—”

Frowning, he threw open the door. Fyothor was waiting, smiling, his big hand raised with two fingers up. Pfefferkorn then saw himself in his mind’s eye, frowning and staring back fearfully. It wasn’t very convincing. As if to confirm this, Fyothor’s smile faltered—the tiniest flicker imaginable, but more than enough for Pfefferkorn to know that the jig was up. His cover was blown. He was a dead man. With any luck he could get to his weapons. He was reasonably adept with the toothbrush knife. The deodorant stun gun was neater but more cumbersome, as it entailed the added step of removing the cap. He wasn’t sure it would work on a man of Fyothor’s girth, either. He decided to go with the knife, cleanup be damned. As he had been trained to do, he visualized himself diving to the floor, rolling to the closet, grabbing the bag, opening the zipper, flinging aside the first false panel, flinging aside the second false panel, flinging aside the third false panel, seizing the toothbrush, flicking open the blade, driving it home. It was a lot to contend with. Still frowning, he started to move backward. Fyothor smiled wider and took him firmly by the arm.

“We will be late,” he said, drawing him toward the elevator.

78.

Frowning for hours at a stretch was more physically taxing than Pfefferkorn would have guessed. As they squelched through the goat stalls, ankle-deep in muck, his face pulsed hotly with exertion. He was distracted, too, by something that had escaped earlier notice: the pad of his left index finger was totally smooth, having gained a thin new layer of skin, grafted there from his upper lip. In theory he could commit a crime without leaving prints, provided he just used that one finger. Fleetingly he wondered if this might make an interesting premise, not for a novel, perhaps, but for a screenplay. Then he refocused on frowning.

At the end of the tour, he received a parting gift, three vials of nutrient-rich animal waste.

He and Fyothor stood under a tree by the side of the road, waiting for the driver to return and take them back to town. On another day, Pfefferkorn might have found the smell of hay and the clang of neck bells relaxing. Still frowning, he remarked upon the resemblance between the farm’s interim ancillary director of droppings and the tertiary auditor-adjutant of the Ministry of Gas-Emitting Semisolids, with whom they had met the previous day.

“Cousins,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn raised his eyebrows—his real ones—at this frank admission of nepotism.

“We are all related. Geography is destiny, yes?” Fyothor gestured to the steep hills that bounded the Zlabian valley, cupping its inhabitants in uncomfortably close proximity. “In this light, our tragic history appears even more tragic. We harm no one but ourselves.”

Pfefferkorn, still frowning, nodded.

“As I said, it is a rare honor to meet someone new.” Fyothor patted Pfefferkorn’s shoulder and left this hand there, as though Pfefferkorn was a wayward child. Pfefferkorn’s heart hiccuped. Before he could think of something to say, the troika appeared in a slowly churning cloud of dust. It came to a halt and they climbed aboard. Fyothor murmured to the driver and handed him some notes. The driver nodded. Rather than execute a three-point turn to take them back toward the city center, he cracked his whip and the troika began to inch forward.

Pfefferkorn’s frown was now genuine. “Where are we going?”

“It is a lovely day, yes?” Fyothor said. “Let us enjoy it.”

They rumbled alongside fields amok with clover. Sunlight enameled the languishing carcasses of Soviet tractors. Soon the space between farmhouses lengthened, as pitted asphalt turned to dried, rutted mud, and the whirr of insects rose high enough that Fyothor had to bellow to be heard. Pfefferkorn wasn’t listening. The thought of being outnumbered and outweighed, with only his fists and feet for weapons, had him in such a state that for a moment he neglected to frown. He felt the ends of his moustache turning skyward and brought them back down.

They came to a fork in the road. A corroded sign indicated three kilometers to the ruined nuclear reactor. The driver took the other, unmarked road. Pfefferkorn stirred.

“It is not far,” Fyothor said.

Up ahead, a line of trees demarcated the northern edge of the Lykhabvo Forest, off-limits to tourists and locals alike as part of the exclusion zone. Fyothor had the driver pull over. He handed him a few more notes and told him to wait.

“Come,” Fyothor said, putting his arm around Pfefferkorn’s waist and marching him into the woods.

79.

The effects of high-dose radiation were evident all around them. Oaks and maples bore asymmetrical leaves the size of guitars. Psychedelic ferns genuflected in the breeze. Nine-toed squirrels with patchy fur scampered over boulders blackened by lichen. Beneath the smells Pfefferkorn associated with a normal forest (sweet decaying vegetation, savory sunlit rock) lay an unnatural, chemical base note. He could get cancer just by being here. But that concern was overridden by a more pressing one. He and Fyothor were alone.

“Pretty, yes?”

Pfefferkorn, frowning, did not reply. He was trying to figure out why Fyothor had left the troika driver behind. If two men went into the forest and only one emerged, that demanded an explanation—unless it was the expected outcome. So the driver had to be in on it. But then why trade four arms for two? The answer must be that Fyothor didn’t consider Pfefferkorn dangerous. This had to be counted as an advantage, albeit a slight one that might not hold much longer. The sooner he acted, the better. He spied a half-buried stone with a sharp edge. He visualized himself diving to the ground, rolling toward the stone, prying it up, and using it—all before Fyothor had a chance to react. Too many potential snafus, he decided. He didn’t know how big the hidden part of the rock was. It might not come up easily or at all. He passed. They walked on, following a widening creek. Fyothor, his hand around Pfefferkorn’s waist, was talking about the hardships he had endured growing up, a large family and a tiny hut. There was no word for privacy in Zlabian, did Pfefferkorn know that? Pfefferkorn, still frowning, scanned the forest floor. It was spongy with mutant foliage, pine needles as long as pool cues curling in piles. There were countless broken branches, any one of which would have made a decent club had he stopped to pick it up. He waited for his training to kick in. Yet his body was rubbery and accepting as Fyothor urged him on. Muscle memory, Pfefferkorn shouted to himself. Solar plexus! Pressure points! It was awful, being jostled along toward death like a rag doll.

The creek fed a murky pond. At long last Fyothor released him and walked to the water’s edge, standing with his back turned, looking out. Now or never, Pfefferkorn thought. He crouched noiselessly and pulled a stone from the mud. It made a sucking sound but Fyothor did not notice. He was talking about coming to this spot as a boy, pouring out his troubles to the fish and the trees. He had not visited in years but he felt happy to be here now with Pfefferkorn, his friend. Sockdolager had said that the right place to inflict blunt-force trauma was at the temple, with its abundance of blood vessels and nerves. The important thing was to commit. A pulled punch was worse than no punch.
Pfefferkorn rolled the stone in his hand. All the moisture in his mouth seemed to have been redirected to his palms. He was thinking of his one experience inflicting violence on another living being. His old apartment had mice. Usually they were clever enough to skirt the glue traps he put out, but one evening while reading he heard a series of frenzied squeaks. He went to the kitchen and found a mouse stuck by its hind legs. It was trying to pull itself across the linoleum by its front paws. He had given up on ever catching any mice and so had no plan for what to do if he did. He’d heard of people drowning them in a bucket of water. To him that sounded sadistic. He gave it some thought, then picked up the trap by the other end and put it in a shopping bag. He tied the bag shut and took it down to the street. The bag twitched and squeaked. He untied the handles and looked inside. The mouse was going berserk, like it knew what was coming. Pfefferkorn thought of removing it and setting it free but he was afraid of ripping its legs off. So he just looked at it for a long minute as it shrieked and clawed at the plastic. At times like that he wished he had become an electrician or a bus driver. Real men did not stand around, staring dumbly into a shopping bag. They knew what to do. But did the job make the man or vice versa? He retied the bag, lifted it high in the air, and smashed it against the curb. There was a crunching sound but he could still feel the mouse squirming. He smashed the bag again. The squirming stopped. He gave the bag one more whack and dropped it in the sidewalk bin before running upstairs to take a shower. Then as now his whole body shook. He broke the problem down into steps. He visualized. The problem with visualization was that, done well, it made the task ahead more concrete and divisible but also intensely tangible and gruesome. He was feeling the stinging reverberation in his palm as the rock made contact with Fyothor’s skull. He was seeing the bloom of blood and hearing a sound like a fistful of potato chips being crushed. He swallowed back acid and tightened his grip. He supposed he had killed plenty of spiders in his day, too, but they didn’t count. He stepped forward. Fyothor turned and saw what was happening and smiled knowingly and said “Ah yes” and with breathtaking speed his hand darted out and snatched the stone away. Pfefferkorn wheeled backward and dove to the ground, rolling with his arms clamped around his head for protection. He ended up crouched behind a log, poised and ready for action. But Fyothor was not charging him or taking out a gun. He was staring at him in unadulterated confusion. Pfefferkorn stared back. There was a silence as they stared at each other. Fyothor shrugged and wound up and sent the stone skimming across the pond. It bounced three times before sailing into the bushes on the far bank. He picked up another stone and offered it to Pfefferkorn. “Your turn.”

Pfefferkorn did not move.

Fyothor shrugged again and skimmed the second stone.
“Akha,”
he said. “Very poor. When I was young . . .
pip, pip, pip,
seven times or more.” He extended his arm along the imaginary trajectory. Then he addressed Pfefferkorn with a look of concern. “How is your lip?”

The back of Pfefferkorn’s neck prickled.

“To continue making that face for so long must be tiring. Certainly, there is no need to perform on my account.” Fyothor smiled faintly. “I can see the glue where it pushes out.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“There have been others like you, before. None of them have survived.”

There were no other rocks within easy reach.

“You have secrets. I understand. Who among us does not? Who among us does not suffer because of them?”

There were no broken branches, either.

“You may speak freely. There are no listening devices here, I can assure you.” Fyothor paused expectantly. “Very well. This is something I understand, to be afraid to speak. We Zlabians understand it too well. But you must believe me, friend: the burden does not get lighter with time. It gets heavier. I know, because I am fifty-five years old and my own burdens are so heavy that often I feel I cannot go on. I think, sometimes, that I would like to sit down forever, to let the dust and the cobwebs cover me over. I might become a little mountain. I would like this very much. Mountains feel nothing, yes? Because I know that change will not come for me. I know this. Perhaps, though, if I become a mountain, others will climb upon me and stand upon my shoulders, and from there they will look into the future.”

There was a silence.

“No listening devices,” Pfefferkorn said.

“None.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I am sure.”

There was a silence.

“A tour guide,” Pfefferkorn said.

“In my spare time.”

“And in the rest of your time.”

Fyothor bowed. “I am but a humble servant of the Party.”

“Serving in what capacity.”

“Executive director for electronic monitoring,” Fyothor said. He bowed again. “Ministry of Surveillance.”

There was a silence.

“I see why you’re so popular,” Pfefferkorn said.

“I have thousands of friends,” Fyothor said. “Not one of them likes me.”

He looked out at the water.

“I know how it feels to live with your tongue pressing at the back of your teeth. I believe, friend, that my form of service to the state was not an accident but the work of a God with a sense of humor. Yes? The man with secrets, he lives by destroying others through their secrets. This is a constant punishment for me.” He looked at Pfefferkorn. “Please speak.”

“And say what.”

But Fyothor did not answer. He turned away again.

“It would be easy for me to turn you in,” he said. “I could have done it at any time.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Do you believe I would do such a thing?”

There was a silence.

“I don’t know,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor bowed his head. “You cannot know how sorry I am to hear that.”

There was a silence.

“What do want from me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Give me hope,” Fyothor said.

There was a silence.

“How,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Tell me it would be better for me elsewhere.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Tell me about America,” Fyothor said.

There was a long silence.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor’s shoulders sagged. He went ashen. It was as if his soul had been siphoned off.

“Of course not,” he said. “My apologies.”

Silence.

The cell phone squawked. Pfefferkorn flinched but Fyothor did not move. The phone rang six times and stopped. Then it started up again. Wearily Fyothor reached into his pocket.

“
Tha.
Okay. Okay.
Tha.
” He closed the phone. “I regret that my wife requires my presence at home.” His voice had taken on a new quality, a listless formality. “My apologies.”

He bowed and turned and walked back into the forest.

A moment later Pfefferkorn followed, trailing at a slight distance.

They remained silent throughout the long, bumpy ride back to town, and when they got stuck in traffic, three blocks from the hotel, Fyothor instructed the driver to take Pfefferkorn the rest of the way and started to slide out of the seat.

“What about you,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor shrugged. “I can walk.”

“Oh,” Pfefferkorn said. “Well, then, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, I am sorry, I have appointments I must keep.”

It was such an obvious lie that Pfefferkorn saw no point in arguing.

“All right,” he said. “Another time, then.”

“Yes, another time.”

“Thank you,” Pfefferkorn said. “Thank you very much.”

Fyothor did not reply. He lowered himself to the sidewalk and walked off without a backward glance, weaving through the crowds and soon becoming lost to sight.