Straight Cut (21 page)

“Burned your bridges.” I engaged in the thought experiment of supposing that Jerry Hansen had been armed with a submachine gun when he debarked from the Nova Scotia ferry that day. Well? In one way it made me sympathize with Yonko, and in another way it didn’t.

“And we depend very much on the money. You see. Otherwise ...”

“Yes.”

“So.” Grushko put his hands palms down on the table and leaned forward onto them.

“You are the friend of Mr. Carter?”

“We’ve met,” I said, sliding my hands down to my knees so that they would not tremble.

“He promised to send someone who would help us through to America.”

No fooling? This was getting presumptuous even for Kevin. It wasn’t just scag he wanted anymore; I was supposed to start smuggling
people.

“Not to mention the money?” I said.

“Of course.”

“But I can’t give you the money ...”

Grushko sat back. “I let Yonko shoot you then?”

Just when everything was going so nicely, too. I smiled, though I no longer really felt like it.

“What good would that really do you?”

“Maybe in the arm? The leg?”

“No, thank you. Look. There’s been a mistake; You saw what was in that bag yourself. “

“A mistake?”

I had to admit myself it didn’t sound all that convincing, but it was what I had.

“I didn’t have the combination. That was the setup, wasn’t it? I know how it looks. But I’m just the delivery man.”

“Then you must give us back our knapsack. “

“But then I have my own obligations too, you see, back in America.”

“It’s not good,” Grushko said. He dragged his fingers back across the table and folded his hands in his lap. He really did look pretty worried about everything, which I could hardly blame him for.

“I know,” I said. “Look.” And I hesitated. I’d thought it all through before this morning, it was almost as if it had been worked out unconsciously in my fever, and yet now it seemed hard to begin to say the necessary words. “We have to solve the problem, don’t we? I can’t get the money yet, it’s impossible, but maybe I can get you to New York. That’s part of it, no? Does that help you?”

“You know we need papers.”

“Of course,” I said, though I really hadn’t considered it. “I’ll work on it right away. “

“To deliver here?” Grushko looked a little happier.

“No,” I said, improvising. “In London. In two weeks.”

I gave him the telephone number of the flat near Paddington. The landlady would think them peculiar, I knew, but I
had
warned her I needed the place for business.

“It’s not what we had hoped,” Grushko said.

“I’m sure,” I said. “But you would have killed me, wouldn’t you? Could you blame me if I’d just disappeared altogether after the last time, we met?”

“No,” Grushko said. “It’s arranged, then.”

“It’s arranged,” I said, and he pushed back his chair.

“Wait,” I said, and for a second it was hard to breathe and I had to gulp before I spoke. “You’ll need everything you have here in New York again.
Everything.
You understand?” Grushko nodded and I knew he’d grasped the message. Then I felt what Kevin must have felt sometimes, a shadow of unacknowledged intent welling up behind my eyes and for a moment darkening them, a pulse steadily pounding, like the drums.

Racine solved the immediate technical problem which arose out of all this by introducing me to Clermont, who seemed to be another hangover from “the old days of
la politique.”
Clermont was a big stooping man, very jovial in manner, with a head shaped like an ostrich egg, which he kept shaved completely bald. Even his eyebrows were shaved and naked. Clermont had enormous double-jointed hands, which were adept at delicate niggling tasks. He was a graphic designer during the work week, a printmaker by personal vocation, and somewhere in between he was also, well, a forger. He was a fast and good one too, to the extent of my ability to judge. One night Racine and I went over to see him, taking along two passport snaps of Yonko and Grushko, along with some other baggage. We sat at one end of Clermont’s long narrow workshop drinking beer and planning the immediate future, while Clermont himself perched on a high stool over a drafting table in the rear. Clermont bent low over the papers on the board, working away with his various inks and glues and a couple of little tools that looked like dental picks. His hands made spidery shadows under the high intensity lamp. Every so often he’d smile or mutter something, but he didn’t seem to require any reply. It took him two hours, maybe a little longer, to finish, and even as a novice I was impressed with the job; even the embossing looked okay. He’d turned Grushko and Yonko into a couple of Dutchmen. That struck me as a little odd; I’d have had an easier time picturing them as Turks or Hungarians or something. But Dutch passports were what Clermont had around, and I didn’t have any extra passports at all, so Dutchmen is what they had to become.

By the time we were done admiring Clermont’s work it was late, probably after midnight, and time to make the next move. Clermont was letting us borrow a car for the maneuvers out of town. So I put on a djellaba and a khufi hat I’d brought along in my bag, which were supposed to make me look like a Moroccan. I suppose it might have deceived someone in the dark. Well, however silly I felt, there was no such thing as too careful, and although there’d been no blue Peugeot following us earlier, there might always have been something else. I thought the personal disguise was pushing it, but it hadn’t been my idea.

Clermont helped me load up the car with our bags and the tube that concealed Racine’s little rifle and a sizable tin trunk, which was no joke to carry. Then I shook hands with him, standing in the dark under the broken streetlight where he’d had the foresight to park, and then I jumped in and drove off. About ten miles down the road to Ghent I pulled onto the shoulder. There’d been no headlights behind me for ten minutes, and that was good enough for me.

I got out and opened the back door of the car and dragged the trunk down, as gently as I could, until it rested with one end on the pavement. There wasn’t a sound from inside it and I grew anxious as I fumbled at the catches. But when I opened the lid I could hear Racine breathing in there, though he didn’t say anything at first. After a moment he clambered stiffly out, stumbled, and stood leaning against the car on the shoulder of the road, rubbing at his joints.

“I think we overdid it,” I said. And remembering the djellaba, I pulled it off over my head. “There wasn’t anything behind us the whole way out of town.”

“Probably. But what everyone knows about Clermont is that no one ever caught him doing anything. “

No one had ever caught me either, I reflected then, at least not yet, but I said nothing to Racine on this subject. We remained standing by the car for long enough to smoke a cigarette. A heavy fog had begun to lower over the road, and it roiled across the headlight beams, which I had left turned on. When it began to rain we both got into the car. Racine took the wheel and piloted us around to the north of the city again, to take the road for Antwerp.

“It can be done,” Racine had said a few days before, after I’d outlined the difficulties as I perceived them, after we’d agreed that a full partnership was the only way to go from here and were settling down to the details, across his kitchen table. “No, I’m sure, I know the way.”

“Let me in on it, then,” I said.

“You’ve never done any diving?”

“Never.”

Racine leaned back in his chair, blowing smoke up at the ceiling.

“It’s okay, though,” he said at last. “Because I have.” And that was how the labor was divided; like usual, I had the theory, and this time he had the technique.

The drill for Antwerp was strictly Racine’s responsibility, and he decreed that we would see little of the city. We arrived in the dark and he checked us into a waterfront hotel and we scarcely left it again during daylight. Racine went out to procure the Aqualungs and the other gear while I stayed in and studied shipping schedules, my part of the first day’s chores. Racine ordered no beer and as few cigarettes as possible, because we were in training now.

So it was a wound-up few days I was in for, though I never completely lost control. Racine found it easy enough to switch to daytime sleeping, but for me it was harder, and I spent many hours of each day standing at the window, staring out at the Schelde River through the slits of the Venetian blinds. What wears people down, as I knew very well, is the boredom of waiting, which can make a person rush out and make a fatal mistake for the sake of doing
something.
Even when I was where I preferred to be, far, far away from the actual transaction, the tension had always told on me, and now it was smoldering, like a fine electric network stippled all over my skin. I didn’t get used to it exactly, and it didn’t go away, but after a day or so the anxiety lost its negative value and became a sensation I could savor like a drug.

For the first three nights, after darkness had fallen, we left the hotel and Racine drove us to the empty beaches down the coast. On the drive down he’d try to explain parts of it, talking about breathing, about relaxation, while I stared out the window, half listening, at the flat black sea slipping by. It was cold on the beaches, cold sand between my toes, and the air tank was chilly and heavy on my back, but the water itself was freezing, so impossibly cold that I could feel my organs shrinking inside me as I went under.

Down under.
The most remarkable thing was the darkness. Ten feet below, the surface lost its last faint luminescence and I only knew which direction was up by way of my own buoyancy. It was like death, I could imagine, but I was breathing, sucking air from the tank with a ragged throttling sound, incredibly loud, and I could feel the trail of bubbles sifting across the side of my face and up toward the surface. Then Racine’s light snapped on and I saw him easily rolling over and gesturing, a true frogman, then swimming away with me after him, following the fading light, the fins on my feet propelling me forward with a good deal more verve than I felt. The first night it was only swimming and breathing and getting used to the long periods underwater. On the second night he started me swimming with some weight strapped to my belt, and on the third the weight was more. Driving back to the city just before the dawn of our fourth day in Antwerp, Racine declared that I was ready, though I myself was not so sure.

On the fourth night we went prowling among the interlinked branches of the Haven, equipped with a Starlite scope with which we could read the lettering on the stern of our ship: the
Eleusis,
a Greek freighter, bound for New York by way of Dover, now moored in Havensdok 2e
.
We worked back from the
Eleusis
toward the Schelde, measuring angles and estimating times, once flattening ourselves beneath a truck when a port guard passed by.

That was the dress rehearsal, and next was opening night. Racine and I dropped ourselves into the Schelde near the Royersluis canal. There was something to be said for the practice I’d had; I was used to the feel of the water now, though here it was an inky oily black, darker by far than at the beaches. Somewhere ahead Racine’s light came dimly on and I churned away after it. I felt competent, unconcerned even by the rubber-swathed package that was bound to my belly like a pregnancy.

But it seemed to be taking a long time. Too long, I thought, though Racine had the watch. He veered to the right (were we through the channel?) and after a little while more, to the left. Another long swim and then a turn to the right, which should have been our last. But Racine stopped and let me catch up. Treading water, he made some odd gestures with his hands, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to get across. I motioned him on. He shrugged and swam back in the direction we’d come from. I followed, trying to resist the fear: if we were lost we might run out of air, but the more I panicked the faster I’d breathe.

Then Racine stopped and when I reached him he gave the thumbs-up sign. I nodded, and he switched off the light and floated upward. He would take the risk of surfacing for a brief final orientation. We’d decided that earlier, on a toss. I waited, hovering, like a fish holding itself stationary, in the total darkness. The light reappeared and Racine swam ahead. I followed more closely this time, until abruptly we were against a wall of curving steel, the hull of our
Eleusis.

Then there was a quick flurry against the steel plates, the two of us rushing to secure the magnets and the steel webbing that spanned them, a net across the package. Lighter now, I swam toward the surface while Racine double-checked, my hand stretched out above me counting rivets,
five, ten, fifteen;
at twenty-one my fingers broke the surface and I dove again.

The lamp was already some distance away. I swam and after a while I lost track of our turns. Again it seemed much too long, and my air supply, I noticed, was now in the warning zone. I had no idea at all of how far we’d come, how close to safety. I began counting to myself,
one thousand, two thousand,
as much to calm myself and slow my breathing as to restore my sense of time.

At somewhere around two billion, the light ahead went out, which might have meant either good news or disaster. I stopped swimming and let my body rise. When I broke water I tore off my mask and saw I’d made it; I was in the Schelde, only twenty or thirty yards from where we had gone in. Treading water, I heard Racine bursting out of the river behind my back, and I swam in his direction.

“We did it!” he was calling. There was not much need for caution here.

“We did it!” I shouted back. I swam to him, and we hugged and pounded each other’s shoulders, right there in the water. We
did it, we did it,
the words beat in my brain, and I danced in the dirty water, perfectly euphoric, though I knew it was really only half done.