The Travelers (32 page)

“How’s life in Brooklyn?” the pharmacist asks. “You happy that you abandoned the Lower East Side?”

Will shrugs.

“Just like generations of immigrants. One flees the Lower East Side for Brooklyn, the next abandons Brooklyn for the suburbs, the next leaves Long Island and comes back to the Lower East Side. An endless loop. Am I right?”

“You are right, Mr. Silverstein.” The pharmacist is only a decade older than Will—Malcolm’s age—but he acts of a completely different era, so he gets treated that way.

“
Or
you could skip all that
mishegoss
, and stay put, like my family. Been in the same neighborhood for a hundred twenty years.” Silverstein rummages under the counter, opening drawers. “I bet you haven’t found a pharmacist in Brooklyn as good, have you?”

“Honestly, I haven’t needed one.”

“You’re lucky.”

“I’m young.”

“Same thing.” Silverstein finally locates Will’s pills, holds up the bottle, gives it a shake-rattle. “Every four hours, not to exceed four doses in twenty-four hours. This is important, Will.” The guy actually wags his finger. “These things are habit-forming.”

“Got it.”

“I’m surprised this prescription is even refillable. Oh, I see, it was only a dozen pills to begin with.”

The pharmacist peers at Will over his glasses, then turns to his computer, makes a few keyboard strokes, frowns at his screen. This is a man who clearly hates his computer.

“Co-pay is ten. Decline counseling? Please sign.”

Will signs the digital screen with the stylus.

“It’s good to see you, Will. You take care.”

“You too, Mr. Silverstein.”

Will turns, walks past the floor-to-ceiling oak shelves with library ladders, toward the glass door with a brass bell, the meticulously hand-painted business name,
SILVERSTEIN & SONS PHARMACISTS SINCE 1922
, all the things you expect but don’t necessarily get anymore.

“Oh Will? You wanna pick up your wife’s refill also?”

“My wife’s?”

“Yeah. We called her…looks like…twice. She outta town?”

“Um…”

Will’s body is frozen, half-twisted back toward the interior of the store, his feet still facing the exterior. His imagination conjures a half-dozen explanations in one second. Antibiotic for a lingering cough, but was there one? Muscle relaxer after a back strained in yoga. Nasal inhaler for inflamed sinuses, skin ointment for a fungal rash, antidepressants for a hitherto secret depression. One plausible possibility after another.

“Yes, she is out of town.”

“I know it’s hard to get here, since you guys moved.”

Silverstein pulls open a drawer, then another, then removes a little paper bag.

Will glances at the prescription slip stapled to the front, just to confirm that it’s his wife’s name. But he forces himself not to read the label closely, not to identify the medication. Because until he reads it—until he opens the box and actually observes Schrödinger’s cat, firsthand—his world is still suspended between two possibilities: it’s alive or it’s dead, the abstract cat, and his concrete marriage.

“Here.” Roger reached out, handed Will the black hood. They were finished in the conference room with the big seal hanging on the wall. Will put on the hood for the hallway, the elevator, the garage, into the back of the car again, moving slowly, navigating a parking lot.

“Why’d she leave you?” Elle asked. “What prompted it?”

Will summarized the confrontation with Chloe. Elle didn’t say anything, didn’t interrupt, didn’t ask anything. Just listened to Will talk for five minutes, sitting there in the backseat, blind.

“Do you think she believed you?”

“About what?”

“That you’re working for the CIA?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“Did you tell her that I asked you about
Travelers
? About Malcolm? Gabriella?”

Will felt the knot growing in his stomach, tighter, like someone was twisting his insides. The someone sitting next to him.

“Are you sure she left because of this, Will? Or could it have been something else?”

PORTLAND, MAINE

Chloe walks out to the dock, stares off at the water, the islands out there. She feels a hand on her shoulder, hears a deep-voiced man saying, “Well hello, you.” She turns, wraps her arms around this man, squeezes tight.

“It’s great to see you,” he says.

She beams at him, and he rubs her upper arm, an intimate gesture, but not too intimate, and not sexual. Anyone watching would think that they’re old friends, maybe college classmates, or they’d been neighbors as kids, or they’re cousins, used to see each other all the time. But none of this is what they are.

“Thanks for coming all this way.” She smiles. “Your flight okay?”

He nods. “So how have you been? Everything okay?”

“Not really.”

The man nods again, but doesn’t say anything.

“Listen, this may sound absurd to you. In fact, it sounds absurd to me.” They’re facing the choppy water, the stiff wind. “Will told me that while he was on a trip, two people—a woman and a man—claimed to work for the CIA, and offered him ten thousand dollars per month to be an asset when he’s traveling overseas.”

“Really? To do what, exactly?”

“To tell them about the people he meets, the places he goes. The embassies, parties, politicians. To help identify recruitment candidates.”

“I don’t know,” the man says. “I guess it’s…not impossible. When did this start?”

“A few months ago.”

“And he’s been receiving money?”

“In cash. And signing receipts from someone he calls his C/O.”

The man raises his eyebrows. “You have any idea who these people are?”

Chloe takes out her phone, hands it to him. “I have a picture of the woman.”

He glances down, furrows his brow, shakes his head. “Don’t know her. But text it to me. Then give me a few hours.”

NEW YORK CITY

Will stares at the little plastic dispenser, like a baby roulette wheel, albeit anti-baby, and explicitly not a game of chance, so more like the opposite of roulette. The days of the week, the different colored pills, the tinny rattle that Will hasn’t heard in the past year, not since they’ve been trying to get pregnant.
Supposedly
trying to get pregnant.

His mind is reeling, grasping at different implications. Chloe would hardly be the first woman who pretended to be trying to conceive while at the same time taking steps to prevent it. Why? Is she having an affair? Is she using his deceits as an excuse? Is she planning to leave Will? For someone else? Has that in fact already happened?

Is Chloe really in Maine? Will keeps calling, and Connie keeps telling him that Chloe is out, and Will has assumed that his wife simply doesn’t want to talk to him. But maybe Connie’s covering. Maybe Chloe is somewhere else, with another man. Maybe that’s why she has been so elusive, so evasive, for so long. Why she rarely answers his phone calls. Why she has been on such an aggressive exercise regimen: to look better naked, for someone else.

Maybe the adultery he needed to worry about wasn’t his own. Maybe he has completely misunderstood the nature of the problem he’s facing.

NEW YORK CITY

Will’s phone rings, an unfamiliar number with a 718 area code. “Hello, this is Will Rhodes.”

“Who?”

“Will Rhodes. Who’s this?”

“Hah?”

“I’m Will Rhodes. Who are you?”

“Can you speak up? I can’t hear you.”

“My name is Will.” Loudly, slowly. “You called me. How can I help you?”

“I’m Bernie Katz.”

“Do we know each other?”

“I’m the guy you contacted about the old magazines.”

“Oh! Oh, thanks for getting back to me.”

“So I got what you’re looking for.”

“
Travelers,
May 1992 and November 1994 issues?”

“
Travelers,
every issue.”

“You’re positive you have May ’92? And November ’94?”

“I got all of ’em.”

“Super. How much are you asking for them?”

“For all of ’em?”

“No. For the one issue. I mean the two of them. Apiece.”

“Ten?”

“Ten dollars?”

“No, ten
thousand
dollars.”

Will is stunned.

“I’m kidding. Yeah, ten dollars apiece. Plus shipping.”

“Shipping? Can I just pick it up? I’m also in New York.”

“Uh, how do you know where I am?”

“Your area code.”

“Oh, right…Sure. I’m in what you people now call Prospect Heights.”

“You people?”

The guy doesn’t respond. But Will doesn’t want to pick a fight with him. “I can be there in thirty minutes.” Then Will hears cackling through the phone. “What’s so funny?”

“I’m eighty-one years old…” More laughter. “And this is the first time in my life…I’ve ever found myself…in a back-issue…emergency.”

Stonely watches the woman he knows as Ray walk toward the target, teetering on high heels. She glances at the man a couple of times as they approach each other, fleeting eye contact, meant to distract him, put him off-guard, plus make him more likely to stop, when they’re five feet apart, and this happens: she stumbles, hits the pavement.

“Oh my God.” The man kneels in front of her, a gentleman. “You okay?”

That’s when Alonso, who was just a few steps behind the target for the past block, sinks the needle into the guy’s shoulder. The target collapses.

Stonely pulls the truck to a halt right next to them, remains at the wheel while Julio hops out of the back. Three people drag the target into the truck, then climb in themselves, bind the guy’s hands with the same sort of plastic ties that the police now use for handcuffs, pull a pillowcase over his eyes.

“We good?” Stonely asks. Even though he wasn’t out there on the sidewalk, still his heart is racing like crazy. He looks in the rearview and side-view mirrors, can’t see any sign of anyone who could’ve noticed anything.

Everyone grunts. Everyone except the target, who will remain unconscious until he’s dragged out of the truck again, and deposited in a fortified room in a dank basement seven miles away, in another universe. The guy’s old universe no longer exists.

It’s a particular type of New York apartment building, a sunken lobby between two wings, dueling elevators, a neglected courtyard, cantilevered fire escapes, marble floors and plaster walls and ornate moldings, everything down-at-the-heels, chipped stone and cracked glass, wires in the porthole windows of the elevator, which is so slow that Will almost can’t believe it’s moving at all, a control panel with round Bakelite buttons and brass switches, a mechanical door that groans open, then you have to push a secondary safety door into the hallway that smells of boiled cabbage, the A and B lines in the front and C in the middle and D and E in the back, every toilet a powerful flushometer that makes you imagine the waste being sucked directly into outer space via pneumatic tube, nearly every doorway adorned with a mezuzah, even if the current occupants aren’t Jewish, because once they were, and who the hell goes through the trouble of removing these things from the jambs?

Will rings the doorbell, Katz. He waits, then rings again.

“I’m comin’,” he hears from inside. “Hold your horses, I’m comin’. Who’s there?”

“It’s Will Rhodes.”

No response.

“The guy about the magazines?”

“Oh.” The door opens. “Come on in.”

The corridor is long and dark, and at the end is a living room that’s an explosion of clutter, magazines and papers and books everywhere, some of the piles reinforced with vertically arranged three-quarter-inch planks, perhaps decommissioned shelving turned on end, and art-glass vases and framed drawings and stretched canvases and organic sculptures, musty rugs, the lingering aroma of pipe tobacco layered atop the fresh scent of takeout-Chinese garlic with undertones of litter box. This is the type of room Will has nightmares about.

“Wow.” Will turns his attention more carefully to the piles of magazines, which he sees also include the more traditional horizontal shelving as well as vertical stacks. “Why do you have all these?”

“I’m a buff! I worked in the magazine business fifty years.”

“Fifty?”

“Well, forty-eight.”

“What did you do, Mr. Katz? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“What
didn’t
I do? Proofreading, layouts, photo editing, ad sales, you name it. I was even a managing editor! Believe you me, that was a shitty job. But eventually they shuffled me into a back room where I could just collect paychecks without breaking anything.” The guy shrugs. “It wasn’t so bad. Then they gave me a fancy watch, said good-bye, good luck.”

“Is that the watch?”

“This? Nah. What they gave me was a Rolex, but I’m not a Rolex kinda guy. A watch says something, doesn’t it? This thing you wear every day, whatever else you’re wearing. It’s like a part of you, it says something about you. I wanted something more, uh,
under
stated.” The old man holds out his wrist, shows Will his timepiece, International Watch Company. Will has always been purposefully ignorant of watches, their levels of prestige. He buys old watches, in foreign places, inexpensively. But even he knows that IWC is expensive.

Will’s senses are becoming more acclimated to the clutter, and details begin to emerge. The Heywood-Wakefield furniture, the original oil paintings and charcoal drawings, the Blondie concert poster that appears to be signed, in lipstick, by Debbie Harry.

The expensive watch casts everything in a different light. This man is not poor; this man is messy, eccentric.

“So the magazines?”

“Right!” He shuffles across the room, over to an upright piano that Will hadn’t even noticed was there, pushed against built-in bookshelves. It takes Katz a good minute, but he finally locates both issues, double-checks the dates on the covers against the dates on the spines. Hands the two magazines over to Will, who in turn hands over a twenty.

“Does this break up your complete set?”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

“Why are you selling them?”

The guy holds up the bill, snaps it.

“Come on. Why are you
really
selling?”

Katz looks Will in the eye. “I been in this apartment since 1973. Rent-stabilized. I raised two kids in this apartment. My wife, she died in this apartment.” He looks around at the accumulated possessions of a life. “The building’s been sold. We’re all getting kicked out. I’m never going to be able to afford anything bigger than a studio, and that studio’s gonna be in, I don’t know,
Queens
. If I’m lucky. So all this”—he sweeps his arm across his life—“has to go. I’d rather sell my things to people who want them than just put it all out on the sidewalk, to be picked up by scavengers.”

Will thinks of the barstool he found on the street. Is he one of the scavengers?

“You wanna buy anything else? It’s all for sale.”

Will shakes his head. “Truth is I’m broke.”

“Ha! Then you shouldn’t go around buying old magazines from old men. Here.” He thrusts the twenty back at Will. “Use it to buy some flowers for your wife. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

Will doesn’t accept the money, so Katz shoves the bill into Will’s breast pocket, crushing his pocket square.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Katz.”

“Forget about it.” They walk down the dark hall, the parquet creaking.

Will presses the elevator button, waits while the mechanics groan. He wonders where he should go sit while he scours those magazines, looking for the reasons they have been redacted. He glances at his watch, this obscure antique thing that he bought in Germany, and wonders what the watch says about him, what he hopes this accessory projects, the old man’s words sinking in, but something else distracting him…

Another wristwatch…

“You again? What, you want some old
Vanity Fair
s now?”

Will shakes his head.

“Or I got a record player used to be owned by George Plimpton?”

“Mr. Katz, do you know a lot about watches?”

“A lot? I wouldn’t go that far.” The old man shrugs. “I know more than nothing.”

“Can I show you something? I’d like to draw it.”

Katz pulls the door open, and shuffles back to his cluttered living room.

Will remembers the symbol because it looked like something it probably wasn’t. He scribbles down the
JL
, which he thought was for J. Lindeberg, however unlikely. Mike with the no-longer-pierced ear and the thick accent and the cheap suit wasn’t a customer of a Swedish fashion label.

“You know what that is? I saw some guy wearing a watch with this logo.”

“Sure. That’s Jaeger-LeCoultre. Swiss.”

“How fancy is that?”

“How fancy? Very fancy. Same league as this.” The old man raises his arm a couple of inches, his wrist facing Will. “Starting prices probably seventy-five hundred, ten grand.”

“Are there knockoffs?”

“I’m sure there are fakes of everything expensive.”

“I mean Canal Street–type knockoffs.”

“Doubt it. Jaeger’s not a household-name luxury brand, not like Rolex or Gucci, all that fake crap you can buy anywhere. I’d be shocked if there’s a market for people who want to buy hundred-dollar imitation Jaegers. No, if you saw a guy wearing a Jaeger, you saw a guy wearing a five-figure timepiece.”

Will reemerges to the street, around a corner, into the tentacles of a movie shoot, the production assistants in their headsets and bell-bottoms, shunting pedestrians off to the side. The street is lined with gleaming vintage vehicles, late sixties or early seventies, tremendously long coupes with grooviness signifiers hanging from rearview mirrors, a delivery truck decorated with the names of bygone brands, a streamlined bicycle leaning against a fireplug.

“I’m sorry, we need everyone to keep moving. Keep moving, please.”

Up close, Will can see that the cars’ interiors are shabby—torn upholstery, rusted levers, missing glove-box doors. He wonders if these cars are even operable. Maybe they’re just shells, exteriors that have been given fresh powder-coats and whitewalled tires but nonfunctioning engines. Nothing but artificial constructs, created to make people think something’s going on that’s not.

Will finds a hard seat in a crowded café, the high-decibel rattle of the bean grinder, the thrum of the espresso machine, the hiss of the steaming milk, clanking spoons and clattering cups, aggressively loud badinage at the table behind him, a man clearly trying to get into a woman’s pants, tiresomely.

Will’s phone rings, Malcolm calling. Will hits Ignore.

November 1994 was the Scandinavia issue. There’s an article about every country, even Greenland. Fjords and fabrics, fermented shark and pickled herring, lingonberry compote and smoked puffin, summer cottages and the ice hotel, hot springs and geysers and volcanoes and glaciers, the midnight sun and the northern lights…

Will cares about only two of the articles, the ones written by Jonathan Mongeleach, and it doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for.

But the other issue, March 1992? No articles by Jonathan, none about Scandinavia, nothing that grabs Will’s attention. Other than being the first issue that went to press after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Will can’t see anything remarkable about March 1992.