The Box (18 page)

“I spoke to your consulate, and a passport has been issued to you!”

Goddammit, thought Quinn. He’s smiling!

“Mister Quinn?” and Remal cocked his head. “I thought you would be pleased.”

Quinn picked up his glass, looked at Bea in the far corner and, for a moment, held his breath. Then he put the glass to his mouth and drank all the liquor down.

I stick the pig and make it, he thought. I stick him good and he’s down!

Then why do I feel like the pig that got stuck. Why now, after making it!

“Mister Quinn. I do not pretend to understand you, but I do understand this. You and I cannot be friends, though there seems some hesitation about our being enemies. I do not pretend to know why. Or you may reverse the sentence and it comes perhaps to the same thing. Under the circumstances, for you and for me, the best has really happened. You now have your papers. You can now leave.”

Quinn still did not answer. Something just went down the drain, he thought. I’m drunk. Or something just opened up and like only once before I can be rid of him. He looked up when he heard the heels on the tile.

“I just told Mister Quinn that he has his papers,” Remal said to Bea.

“Yuh,” said Quinn. “He just gave me my traveling papers.” He watched Bea sit down.

“Yes, as I just said,” Remal added.

“He didn’t mean it that way,” Bea told Remal. “The way he used the phrase, it means you just threw him out.” Then she turned to Quinn and saw how he sat there, as if hiding behind drunkenness. “On the street,” she said, “you told me you couldn’t leave. You had no papers.” She put her hands on the table but didn’t know what to do with them. She put them into her lap. “But now, Quinn, what is there to decide?”

“You don’t even know my first name,” he said and felt really drunk.

“Please—” she said.

Remal coughed. He understood little of this but suspected it was some private language, the kind lovers might have. He got up, smoothed his shirt.

“I will leave you alone,” he said. “I will leave the papers at the desk of the hotel. In addition, I will leave you some money.” And then he added the part which made everything wrong for Quinn, though it made him suddenly sober. “Because I want you out.” He made his bow and left.

Quinn watched him go out and then turned back to the table. He felt small and pushed and he felt he looked ugly sitting there, but that Remal looked large and the woman, Bea, was terribly beautiful.

“I’m thinking,” he mumbled, “that it was easier in the box.”

She got up and took his arm. “Walk with me,” she said.

He got up and they walked out.

Chapter 18

With unusual suddenness the white light of day had changed into the yellow light when siesta is over. Okar was no longer quiet, empty-looking, but full of voice sounds, feet sounds and motion. But Quinn heard mostly the sounds inside: indecision like a squeak, anger a noisy scratching getting louder, and the hum, the constant hum, of his tenacity. To stay put and not jump.

But this is the time to decide, he thought, and please, Bea, do not interrupt me. To leave or to stay. And to go with Cipolla means no new change at all.

They walked down to the quay, saying very little.

Once he said, “Maybe I look like a bastard—”

“I think you act like one, yes.”

They walked the length of the quay, away from the warehouse and the town. Quinn remembered having been that way once, with Turk.

“You want to know something, Bea?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes I don’t enjoy any of this, you know that?” She nodded, which was enough.

They walked through the rocks and then on the pebbles. He held her arm and said there was a scorpion, she should step around it. They walked around it and when they were by the water the reflections jumped and darted at them and they turned away. There was a rock big enough for a black hood of shade and they went there and sat down. The water had been full of sun flash but on the rocks which tilted away the sunlight seemed gray. Sun-gray, he thought. All day long like a heat death under the light and now everything is ashes. I’m tired.

“Quinn?”

“Yes.”

“You asked me if I thought you were a bastard, you remember? I don’t like the word and feel awkward with it and only used it because you did. And to tell you that I don’t think you are now.”

“I don’t feel like one now.” And he looked at the rocks and they did not remind him of ashes any more. They were just rocks. “And I want to tell you something else,” he said. “Not for apology or anything like that, because what’s done is really done, but that thing I did to Whitfield, using him like that, it happened so smoothly and I did it so well I’m frightened about it.”

“Why frightened?”

“Because I didn’t like it. Not even when I was doing it.”

She looked at him but said nothing.

“I hurt him and didn’t care. All the circuits were set, and then after pressing the button it’s out of my hands, because that’s how I’m set up. You know what I’m talking about?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I’m talking about Remal. I’m set for him, all set up, to get him down and out of my way, and then I press the button and after that nothing can be done about it.”

“And tonight,” she said, “you’ll take the boat to Sicily.”

“Yes,” he said. “For the same reason.”

She saw now that he had never acted from nastiness or because he was stubborn, or from total blindness, but that this was something else.

“You sound like a condemned man,” she said.

He waited a moment, not looking at her, and then he said, “Yes, that fits.”

She said nothing else to that, though she wished she could tell him, there are other ways, even better ones maybe, and why don’t you try—She dropped that, because it made her feel like a hypocrite. How much did she herself try, and still ended up with the same things she had done before, a hundred or more times.

She took his hand and put it over her breast, holding it there. They sat like that and looked at the gray terrain tilt away.

“You know what will happen to you, if you go through with all this?” she said. It was a real question, the way she asked it, not an admonition or a trick introduction for working up to a lesson.

“I probably do,” he said, “because it’s happened before.”

“Back into the box,” she said and gave a small, disconnected laugh.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been out of it.”

He got up and brushed at his pants. Then he held out his hand for her and helped her up. When she stood next to him she put her hands on his arms and her face into the side of his neck. If there were nothing else now but to feel the skin warmth there, she thought, his and mine, and other simple things like that—

“You’re wrong,” she said. “Once, at one point there, you were out of it.”

She stepped away from him a little, to see his face when he would answer, but he did not say anything. He isn’t saying anything, she thought, because he’s afraid to say yes, I’ve been out of it, I can be out of it.

Her hands were still on his arms and she curled her fingers into him very hard for a moment and said, “Please stay.”

It was as artless as anything which comes at the wrong moment, which comes too late.

His face was in the sun now, the sun yellow now and his face looking not very alive. His eyes were closed. “And what do you want from me?” he said, but even when be opened his eyes he was not looking at her.

For a moment she did not know what to answer, feeling helpless trying to make sense.

“What?” he said and looked at her.

“I don’t want anything, Quinn,” she said. “I love you.” He held her for a moment. It was as artless as the phrase she had used.

Chapter 19

After the sun had gone down there was still light for a while, a very fugitive light to which no one paid much attention because it would soon be gone. On the pier the lights went on and made an immediate night even though everything still showed where the orbs of the lights did not reach.

And then, when he stood with her on the pier, he had one other chance.

“Have you heard about Turk?” she said.

“What?”

“Some children found him behind the town, in the desert. They recognized him by the army jacket. The dogs had already been there.”

All the softness went out of Quinn with the shock. And then he stayed that way, stiff and hard.

“Never mentioned a word, did he, the mayor? Too polite. He could have said, take the passport or else. For example, like Turk or else. But no. Much too polite to pressure a man right to his face.”

“Quinn, you don’t understand him. He is not playing word games and he doesn’t think that way. He kills Turk because Turk is staying. He tells you nothing because he does not even assume that you might stay.”

“I’ll show him,” said Quinn. He looked over her head, at nothing.

“There is nothing to show him, Quinn. Don’t you understand? Look at me.”

He looked at her, not really wanting to.

“Don’t go with the boat,” she said. “Go with me.”

He was stiff and cold and made no decision. Making no decision, he muffed his chance. And he saw this.

“And you,” she said, “you can’t be shown anything either, can you, Quinn?” And she walked away without waiting for an answer.

The water was black and slick like hot tar and the sky was losing the red of sundown and moving into the no-color dark, a very solid dark of night sky without moon. There would be no moon this night. In this shift of color there is the point where the sky is a heavy gray, gray being no color at all but still light, so that on the other side of the bulbs on the pier Quinn could see the fences where the warehouse ended. There was a child at the fence at one end. Quinn was sure it must be a child because of the size. It hung on the fence like a spider and seemed to be looking at him. The child made no sound and there was just the wet slap and suck of the water now and then, under the pier.

At the other end of the warehouse, on the pier, lay the box. It was on its side, as before, with one edge broken, as before.

Quinn smoked and watched the sky turn from gray to blue, and then it was dark.

No one saw him off because after all, he would be back.

When Cipolla came, he did not say anything but just went to the edge of the pier where he whistled for someone on the water to come rowing across to the pier. They had moved the boat when the loading had been done and it lay somewhere in the dark. There were no lights. Quinn walked over to Cipolla and listened for sounds.

“How long does she take, to Sicily?”

“Why?” said Cipolla.

In the afternoon, when Quinn had walked in and interrupted the conference, there he might have felt uneasy about this. Here was Cipolla being suspicious in order to add character to his store-bought status. But now on the pier Quinn felt bored with the man.

“I just asked,” Quinn said, and listened for sounds from the water again.

“I mean,” said Cipolla, “so far you’re not taking over anything, Quinn, so why in hell should you know how fast she can make the trip.”

Quinn did not discuss it, feeling as before. The lights on the warehouse wall were behind him. They showed the bare pier very clearly, but beyond that they reached a limit which was much like a wall, so that Quinn could see nothing at all on the water. He thought he heard oar sounds now.

“She doesn’t look it,” said Cipolla, “but it takes just a night and part of a day.”

Quinn could see the rowboat now. It came out of the dark and a man stood in the bow, skulling. He came out of the dark the same way he might come gliding out of a curtain.

“For the whole run, from here to the South coast of Sicily,” said Cipolla.

“Fine,” said Quinn.

Cipolla had his cigar out and was fingering it with small, rapid movements. Quinn was not watching.

“You got any kind of interest in this thing?” said Cipolla. “Don’t it strike you funny we get there in the middle of the day?”

When he was five, Quinn thought, I bet he was a brat and used to whine.

“That’s all fixed up,” said Cipolla. “We got that all fixed up. Yessir.”

“You’re shredding your cigar all to pieces,” said Quinn, and then looked elsewhere.

Cipolla started to curse to himself for any number of good reasons and then the rowboat bumped the pier where the ladder went down to the water. Cipolla climbed down first and then Quinn.

Now the pier was really empty. There was no child hanging like a spider on the wire fence any more. The two men no longer stood at the edge, and not even a dog trotted out, to watch or to look for something.

This was the first time Quinn had been on a boat since the time in the box and the motion underfoot reminded him of it. Then the motion no longer reminded him because the boat, once out of the bay, revved up to a great speed and seemed to lunge through the water rather than roll or sway. A black wind cut into Quinn on the deck and he went below, to a small space with a leather couch and a table and a desk in one corner, captain’s quarters perhaps. The captain must be on the dark bridge, thought Quinn. He had not seen anyone else either. Cipolla was in the cabin, but when Quinn walked in Cipolla left. Quinn sat down on the couch. It smelled of office—a small country office for an old lawyer, perhaps—or like a photographer’s waiting room. In the same country town. Quinn did not think of the country town and stretched out on the couch.

There was a vibration in the stuffed leather. Two big diesels, he thought. Two big diesels in the root cellar of the same country lawyer’s house in the small town. I once had a relative. I called him uncle. I know he wasn’t my father. He lived elsewhere. He was a lawyer and the uncle was a lawyer and every Christmas he gave me five dollars. God, I’m tired. And once, later, when I really needed money, he said, wait till Christmas.

Quinn took his jacket off and put it under his head so he would not smell the leather so much. When he closed his eyes there was the motion again, and more of the vibration, and it reminded him of the box. It was not the same motion and not the same vibration, he knew that, but he was reminded. Without transition Quinn went to sleep.