Matala (9 page)

“Well,” I said, “are you going to tell them no?”

“Judas priest,” the woman said.

One of the guards took our passports and left us there in the dark and the cold. Up ahead we could see that the first group was inside the shed now, standing at some sort of counter.

“This is really crazy,” the woman said.

“It's like here we are,” Darcy said, “behind the Iron Curtain. No passport, no coat, no luggage, no nothing in the middle of the night. If they wanted to totally screw us, they could do it.”

“That's right,” the woman said. “Who's to stop them?”

“It's not exactly the Iron Curtain. It's Yugoslavia.”

“Close enough,” the woman said.

“Wow,” Darcy said. “Look at the moon.”

It was full and huge, and it illuminated us. It was the only light, in fact, in the emptiness between the train and the guard's shed.

“At least there's that,” I said. “The same old moon.”

Darcy and I pressed together. She hugged my arm to her chest, and as we crept forward, I felt her trembling. Then a shout came from inside the shed. One of the guards was yelling something in whatever language they spoke there. Another one shouted something back, and then one of them came out. He was leading a passenger by the arm. It took a beat for me to realize that it was Justine.

Darcy looked at me but did not say anything. I had told her what Justine said, and Darcy seemed to accept it without question, as if it were a normal thing to have happen on a night train heading into Yugoslavia.

The guard walked Justine back along the line of shivering Americans, Canadians, and Brits. Two other guards, looking very important, followed. It was a procession, a parade, perhaps meant as a demonstration: This is what you get in the late General Tito's Yugoslavia if you do not behave.

In the moonlight I could see her face plainly as they led her past, but it revealed nothing, and she did not so much as glance at me. They led her to the train, which the three of them boarded with her.

“Oh, shit,” I said to myself, though apparently not silently because Darcy said, “Stop it.” Then she said, “You know what to do.”

She sounded like Justine at that moment, and I looked at her, half expecting her to be Justine, half not believing that I was here with this woman, a different woman, a woman I had just met, and that Justine, with whom I had lived and slept and cried and made love for two years, was being interrogated by storm troopers, and maybe she would be gone then. Maybe this was how it happened, the big things, the huge shifts and changes—just like that. You got on a train, and when you got off a couple days later, your life was different.

After a few minutes, Justine and the three guards emerged from the train, one of the guards carrying her pack. They led her back past the line and into the shed.

Darcy would not meet my eyes. She was refusing me even the exchange of a knowing glance. She was cold inside, I thought, as cold as Justine could be. Maybe that was a truth about all women, that they could be as hard and chilly as they needed. I hadn't known too many women, and none nearly as well as I knew Justine, but that was the impression I'd gotten.

I looked back toward the train and let myself sink into the coldness until it became warmth. Darcy had moved in front of me, with her back against me, so I could smell her hair and her skin, and was able to lose myself in that. Soon we were at the shed door. It was simply a makeshift processing center where they matched your passport to your face and mangled your name, and you nodded and agreed with them. They stamped a forty-eight-hour transport visa in your passport that allowed you to travel through the country but not to get off the train.

When we got up to the counter, we could see into a back room where Justine's pack had been gutted and its contents laid out all over the floor. The three guards who had taken her into custody had been joined by two others, one a woman, the other in a darker uniform that I guessed marked him as a superior of some kind. Justine sat on a straight chair, hands pressed between her knees, staring at nothing. Her sweater had been removed, and her blouse was unbuttoned to her belly and opened so that her breasts were visible. She made no effort to hide them. The man who had led her away was talking excitedly to the others, and they back to him, all of it sounding like yelling.

“Do you understand anything?” I asked Darcy.

She shook her head.

Now the superior officer was holding up a flashlight with one hand and pointing with the other toward something farther back in the shed. He was speaking to the female guard, and she in turn said something to Justine and motioned for her to get up. Now Justine looked up at me. She held the gaze, and I held it, too, so that we had a moment together. I wanted to cry out to them to leave her alone, to not take her into the back room with the flashlight, please not to, she had done nothing, she carried nothing. Then she rose to her feet and went back with the woman guard.

She had known, I realized. She had anticipated everything.

“Okay,” said the guard behind the counter and handed me my passport. “You go.”

W
E WERE BACK IN THE
warm darkened compartment, Darcy holding tightly on to me and resting her head against my arm, for over an hour before the train finally began to move again. I was certain the delay was because of Justine. I wondered if she was on board. Only after we began to move and I felt down alongside the seat for the plastic bottle of pills, which was still there, did I doze.

Sometime before dawn, while Darcy was sleeping, I extricated myself from her grasp and found the small penlight I kept in an outside pocket of my pack. I opened the pack, shined the light in, and moved things around. I found nothing missing and nothing other than what I'd packed. Then I opened Darcy's pack, which was next to mine on the steel rack. It had two large zippered pockets on the face of it and several long ones along the side, but I opened the main compartment. Tucked into an inside pocket and secured beneath a couple pairs of socks I found a narrow package, a box wrapped neatly in plain brown paper and heavily sealed with clear packing tape so that there was no possibility of opening it enough to have a peek inside. It was the package Maurice had delivered to us at the restaurant. I had seen it the previous morning when Justine was repacking. I asked her what it was or what she thought it was, but she'd merely shrugged.

Now, whatever it was, Darcy was the one transporting it. As always, Justine had known exactly what she was doing. She'd continued to use this girl, who was now an unwitting, unknowing mule in the service of Maurice's operation.

I
N THE RUSH OF LEAVING
and in the face of Darcy's coming with us, of her altering her life and ours, I had not thought enough about laying in supplies. Plus I had assumed, although Justine had intimated otherwise, that we could get something on the train. But there was nothing to be had, and those who had thought ahead tended to hoard. The two bottles of wine and the bread that Darcy and I had brought were gone by the end of the first night, and the effect of the wine was to make us thirstier than we would have been otherwise. So by Monday afternoon, as we passed into the heart of what was still a discrete political entity, we had stopped remarking on the primitive countryside or the bits of our respective pasts that we'd started to whisper to each other or the unexpected pleasure we felt in simply being there together, because we had begun to die of thirst. We were not on the verge of death—probably we'd have made it to Athens with no lasting ill effects—but we were dehydrated enough that it changed the way we acted, altered how we felt, and began to frighten us. I had even decided, although I had not grown quite desperate enough to act on it, to find Justine if she was still on the train and break my vow to ignore her and ask her how to solve the problem of water—because surely she would know.

But before that happened, we arrived at the station in Belgrade. We were dozing on each other, a light sticky uncomfortable sleep, the sleep of escape and boredom and desperation, when the slowing of the train awakened me. I looked out from my slumped-down vantage and saw the overhead wires of a city and then the scaffolding over the platform of the depot. I was not roused to sit up and look outside until one of the other passengers stood, lowered the central window of the compartment, and leaned out. People in the hallway were hanging out the windows, too, and there seemed to be some excitement about it. I sat up further. Lines of people, local Belgradians become temporary vendors, had massed along the platform and were holding up wrapped sandwiches and cans of Coca-Cola. The other passenger, an Italian man, was waving a thousand-lira note and shouting something that sounded fairly desperate.

“Darcy,” I said, nudging her awake. “Hurry up.”

“Hmm,” she said.

“Dollars.”

“What?”

“Do you have some dollars? Anything?”

“Why?”

“Coke.”

This brought her up. She did not even look to see what I was talking about but stood on her seat and dug into her purse, which was on top of her pack on the shelf above us. She handed me a five.

“No ones?”

“Just take it.”

I leaned out with the note pinched between my fingers, and a boy was there immediately.

“Coke,” I said.

The boy held up a single can.

“No,” I said. “More.” I held up five fingers.

The boy said something and looked around. There wasn't time to barter here.

“Three,” I said.

“No,” the boy said and held up two. I gave him the five.

We got sandwiches, which Darcy was loath to trust but hungry enough to risk.

“Does anyone have water?” she said.

“I don't know.”

“Let me try.” She leaned out the window and called out “water” in four different languages, but none of the sellers reacted. “Coke!” she said, and several came running then. She managed to buy four more cans (at a much better rate than I'd managed) just as the train began to move.

And so we were saved by Western goods and currency. The following morning we awoke, stinky and miserable and foulmouthed, to Greece gliding past our windows.

“I'd pay a thousand dollars for a shower right now,” Darcy said.

“All right. You give me a thousand dollars, and I'll see that you get a shower as soon as we hit Athens.”

She laughed.

“Are you having fun?” I asked her.

“I'm not sure if that's exactly what you'd call it, but it's something.”

“You're happy.”

“Mmm. I am now.”

“Amazing what a few cans of Coke'll do for you.”

“That and you.”

“You'd rank me up there with a can of Coke?”

“Higher, even. A little. Are you amazed?”

“No one's ever said anything so nice about me.”

“Oh, I know lots of nice things to say about you.”

“Really?”

“Shall I say them?”

“Yes, please.”

“Not now.”

“When?”

“Mmm, we'll find a time—and a place.”

“I'd kiss you—”

“I'd let you—”

There had been no way for us to brush our teeth during these forty hours.

“Soon.”

“Soon,” she said.

J
USTINE FOUND THEM SITTING ON
a wooden bench near the front doors of the Athens station, looking displaced and tired. Exhausted. As if they'd been made to walk all the way from Venice. She couldn't figure it. She'd dozed most of the way after the little pseudo-Commie-fuck shakedown—a desperate bit of post-Tito machismo, even by the woman, that you knew was a kind of last hurrah because that slum country was coming apart at the seams, or was going to soon enough, and everyone knew it, even the pathetic border guards. That she'd been sitting upright the whole way and that she'd had nothing to eat or drink mattered not at all. She could think of nothing she'd rather have done than just sit somewhere, alone, unknown, unspoken to, and looked to by no one for sustenance or courage or sex or ideas or even a goddamn smile. That and sleeping. It was all she was planning to do on the ship to Crete as well and once they got there. To sleep—it was her highest, most gnawing aspiration.

“You two jessies look scared shitless,” she said to them. “Are you nervous or what?”

“Do we know you?” Darcy said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we allowed to talk to her highness now?” The girl delivered this in her most exaggerated Little Bitch tone. “To be seen with you? To acknowledge that we know you?”

“You did understand what that was all about, didn't you?” Justine sat down beside them. “I mean, you did happen to notice what went on?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“Then why are you taking the piss now?”

“That's just me, I guess,” Darcy said. “Always making fun. But what else can I do? I'm just the stupid little girl along for the ride who you can use for whatever you need. Some cash? Some heavy lifting? A sucker for a little cross-border transportation? I'm your girl.”

“You'd better shut up, sweet, or you'll fuck us all up.”

“Oh, you don't know the half of it.”

“So you couldn't help it?” Justine said to Will. “Couldn't manage to keep a secret from your new squeeze? Are you in love already, ickle boy?”

“He didn't say a word about anything,” Darcy said. “Not one. It's just the same old boring thing—me not being quite as stupid as you make me out to be.”

“Yes, yes, well, I can take it off your hands now if you find it so upsetting.”

“The only thing that upsets me is that you didn't ask. Didn't bother to explain anything. You just set me up to take your fall.”

“My fall?”

“If that's how you want it, then fine. Consider me set up.”

“I was trying to keep us all from copping it, you stupid little cow.”

“And we didn't,” Darcy said, “so you're a genius. But keep this in mind: You're also without your precious little package.”

Justine looked at her and then at Will. “What does that mean?”

Darcy shrugged.

“Will?”

“I have no idea, Justine. You didn't bother to tell me anything, either. She didn't tell me anything. So how am I supposed to know anything? I don't.”

“Well, that's true. Christ forbid you should have to climb out of the bliss of your ignorance for a moment. Can we just get on with it? I'm very bored right now.”

“And I'm tired,” Darcy said. “Can we sleep?”

“Not yet,” said Justine. “We need to be on the ship that leaves today.”

“Tonight,” said Darcy. “I picked up a
Let's Go
in Venice, and I've had a lot of time to read it. I found a place where you can pay for just half a day—the Merry Trumpet Guesthouse.”

Justine said, “It's not some posh hotel, just dorm rooms and cots, like a hostel.”

“So you know it.”

“Course.”

“Well, I don't care at this point. And I assume I'm still paying, so I don't really want a hotel. The credit cards are finished now. Whatever we have, that's all there is.”

“It's never all there is.”

“You're right,” said Darcy. “But I just want a nap, so can we go there?”

“You do still have it, don't you? The package?” said Justine.

“Probably,” Darcy said.

J
USTINE REMEMBERED A LITTLE GYRO
stand in the alley behind the guesthouse and took them there after they'd dropped off their bags. They stood against a wall, eating like refugees and drinking Pepsis.

“God,” said Will, “it's the best food I've ever had.”

“The best?” Little Bitch said in her finest faux petulance.

“Second best. Rome was the best.”

Now the girl smiled.

“It's so cute,” said Justine. “The two of you already collecting memories.”

“Justine,” said Will, “can we stop now?”

“I assumed we had stopped,” she said. “I thought that's what this was all about.”

“I didn't mean that.”

“Really?”

“Listen,” said Darcy, “I'm beat. You two can work this out. I'm going to lie down.” She left them, but Justine could tell that Will didn't want her to go.

F
OR A TIME THEY WALKED
without speaking. The day was glorious, and when they passed along certain roads where the city opened up, they could see the Acropolis. When that happened, Justine felt the way she had felt that day in Venice—as if she were inhabiting a postcard. There were no clouds or even hints of clouds in the sky, and the color of it was so concentrated, so simultaneously sharp and deep that after a while it hurt to look at it. It was not usually like that here with the city's chronic polluted haze. Before, the sky had always looked diluted, washed out, but today it could be a sky from Montana or Iowa or that place in Virginia where she had finally found Will. It was certainly not a sky you ever saw in England.

“So,” she said.

“So what happened on the train?”

“I managed to get my name on a list a number of years ago. It was a stupid thing that shouldn't have happened, but it did. I got out of any real trouble, but I was on the list. Apparently I still am.”

“How bad was it?”

“It wasn't pleasant.”

“Right.”

“So,” she said again.

“I don't know,” Will answered. “I don't know what's going on.”

“With regard to what?”

“Anything. Any fucking thing.”

“Poor Will.”

“Don't make fun of me.”

“I'm not, baby boy. I'm really not. I feel bad.”

“Why?”

“For you. About all of this.”

“All—”

“This shit. We have to do this, and I'm sorry about that. I wish I hadn't had to drag you into it.”

“Did you? Have to, I mean.”

“I don't know. Maybe not. You can leave.”

“When?” “Anytime you want. Right now.”

“I don't want to leave.”

W
HEN SHE FINALLY FOUND HIM,
she'd been looking for a year. The family who had taken him from England many years before had done a real job covering everything. They had changed his name and had even gone so far as to get him a U.S. birth certificate with a new name, which she wasn't sure was even legal. She'd had nothing to go on except the name of the man in London who had arranged everything. And it hadn't been strictly legal either, of course, which had made finding him after all that time tricky. When she knocked on the door of a scrubby flat in Roxbury, he answered. She said who she was, and he just looked at her as if she were a dream he'd forgotten to wake up from.

“How ever did you find me?” he said.

“With some difficulty,” she told him.

“I can imagine.”

“But I had a bit of a head start. I'm Maurice's ex-wife. Did you know we'd got married?”

“I had no idea.” It was through Maurice, in fact, this business they were in, that she had met this man during the marketing of the infant Will.

“I want to find him,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don't know. I need to.”

He shook his head and then asked her in. After he brewed a pot and poured for them both in large stained crockery mugs, he said, “Leave him alone. Why upset things now? He was a baby. I doubt he knows he had a life before the one he has now.”

“I'm sure he doesn't.”

“So why?”

“I said I don't know. Maybe I won't bother him. Maybe I just need to see him, see that he's okay. Maybe I'll just look and leave.”

“I'm sure he's fine. They were a good family. Solid. Well enough off.”

“What did he do? The father.”

He looked at her for a long and uncomfortable moment, as if he were deciding something, then finally said, “It was some kind of foreign service.”

“He was a diplomat?”

“I don't know, really. He was with the American government, and he could afford our fees, yours and mine and Maurice's. I kept no records, you know.”

“Nothing?”

“It was safer that way for everyone.”

“Except maybe the boy.”

“Do you really think that's true? You didn't then.”

“No,” she said. “I still don't.” She began to cry then and didn't know why. She had no stake in this, not really. He'd be an utter stranger to her if she were ever to track him down. Perhaps it was just out of frustration at running into a wall after months of on-and-off looking for this man. Perhaps underneath it all she still felt something for the boy. Perhaps that was what this was about, although she didn't know how it could be.

“I could pay you,” she said. The flat was as shabby inside as the neighborhood was outside. What he had been two decades earlier, whatever sort of hustler deal maker, he wasn't anymore. She imagined he had done some prison time, though she had no way of knowing that.

“How much?”

“How much would you need? And what would it buy me?”

He crossed his legs and looked out his window into the cracked but quiet street. “I remember a last name,” he said.

“That's all?”

“And that he, the father, had a certain mark, an extreme mark.”

“No first name?”

“I'm afraid not, though I remember his wife's, oddly enough. She was so happy, she wept all the way from Winchester back to London.”

“How much?”

“I don't care.”

She had two hundred quid with her, which she laid on the low table in the center of the room.

“Dolores,” he said.

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all. And the husband was Mr. Symons, with a
y
and one
m.
”

“Right.”

“His hands were all scarred. He'd been burned.” He rubbed his own together when he said this. “You almost never saw it. He wore gloves most of the time, but on the day we picked up the boy, he didn't for some reason.”

“My God,” she said. “I'd forgotten that. The scarring.”

“Yes. It looked rather like plastic, didn't it?”

J
USTINE AND
W
ILL WALKED FOR
nearly an hour, saying little until they finally approached the guesthouse once more. Justine felt nicely exhausted. It was a good idea that Little Bitch had had, to find a place to nap before their departure. She really was a smart girl.

“What do you want, Will?” she asked when they turned back onto the street of the Merry Trumpet.

“Just not to have to worry so much.”

“Then don't.”

“That's easy to say, but starvation makes it kind of hard to do.”

“You haven't starved. Don't be dramatic.”

“I've been hungry. Weak from being hungry. Dizzy. It was never like that before. We had fun and plenty of whatever we needed. But something happened. You changed.”

“I know.”

He sat on a bench and looked across at the guesthouse. He said, “And that's all right. But if I need to start making my own way, I have to know.”

“What about us?”

“What about us? I don't know what you want. That little thing at the hostel was the first time in like two months.”

“Little thing,” she said. “That's what it was?”

“No. I liked it.”

“I did, too. But you're shagging the little bitch now, aren't you?”