Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (18 page)

“Naw, I’m fine. I’ve got to sneak down to my place and get some clothes.”

“Should I tell Melissa you’ll be here all next week?”

“Tell her what ever you want. Just make sure she’s okay with that.”

“Cody …”

He waved me away. “Don’t worry,” he said.

I walked him to his car. “You’ll be back in a week, right?” he asked.

I said yes.

“By the time I see you next, I will have talked with my uncle Jeter,” Cody said.

I froze.

“Don’t worry. I’m just making sure he’s still around and available if we need him.”

“Don’t you know someone around here who could do the job?” I asked, uncomfortable with the fact that I’d acquiesced, that this all just seemed so inevitable. That I’d said “the job” like some kind of low-rent mobster.

“I know people,” he said. “But for something like this, I can only trust blood relations. I can’t risk somebody talking, and neither can you.”

“Jeez,” I said, “I don’t know.”

“I’m just checking on availability,” he said. “That’s as far as I’ll go. If you want to talk to Jeter, you’ll have to make that decision yourself.”

I nodded.

Cody grinned at me, then held out his hand. “Have a good trip,” he said. “And don’t worry about anything. She’ll be safer with me around than she is with you, for God’s sake.”

I think he meant it to be a joke.

LATE THAT NIGHT
, Brian called. He said, “Get Melissa on the phone—you’ve both got to hear this.”

“Where are you?” I asked while Melissa scrambled to the other room to grab the extension.

“San Diego. Seventy-two degrees constantly. I don’t even know why they have weathermen.”

Melissa picked up, and Brian launched, speaking in his rat-a-tat-tat manner, “I talked to a friend of a friend who went to high school in Asheville with John Moreland. He didn’t paint a happy picture of our boy growing up. Apparently, John was the unwanted son of his wild-about-town teenage mother, who gave the child to her older sister and her husband, the Morelands. Just
gave
John to them. Apparently it wasn’t all that unusual down there. So John grows up in this tight-assed, repressive house hold where his ‘mother’ is actually his aunt and his ‘father’ is his uncle. They go to court and get John’s name changed to Moreland—I don’t know what it was before and it doesn’t matter. Anyway, John hates his parents. He doesn’t say a lot about them in high school, other than they ‘
try to keep him down,
’ what ever that means, but my friend’s friend thinks it has to do with his ambition. Maybe they wouldn’t sign scholarship or financial aid applications, something like that, but I’m just speculating. But when they pass on as a result of that car wreck, well, our boy not only gets two insurance-policy payoffs, but the whole world of financial
aid must have opened up to him. That’s how he could afford to leave and go to CU. And he just washed his hands of his upbringing, from what I understand. Never went back to North Carolina for reunions or anything like that. Never went back to visit the graves of his parents, according to my source.

“So,” Brian said, “we’re dealing with one cold bastard.”

“But he had an alibi the night of the crash,” I said. “You told us that.”

“And he brought his alibi with him to Colorado,” Brian said. “Later, he married her. And later, she died, too.”

Monday, November 12

Thirteen Days to Go

T
EGEL AIRPORT WAS AS it
always was—too small, bustling, confusing, metallic, and round. Gray-white morning light seeped through windows that seemed dirty but weren’t—it was the quality of the light itself—and I waited for my luggage at a squeaking, lurching, stop-start-stop carousel in a crowd so dense there was no way not to touch shoulders with others and be jostled. I was still lost in the familiar fuzzy twilight of jet lag. I had the feeling of being alone in my head, looking out through dry and bloodshot eyes. My skin felt gritty. I needed a place where I could regroup and shower.

Arriving passengers were a mix of Euros from the east and west on business, North Africans in flowing robes, large extended families of Turks. The crowd was veined with distinct groups of four or five who were no doubt arriving to attend WTB, as I was. Jamaicans, Thais, Argentines, Cubans—all sticking together, waiting not only for their luggage but their display booths, boxes of tourism brochures printed in German, and in the case of the Cubans their cigar-making gear so they could hand-roll smokes for select German tour operators. Everybody in the world sought the well-heeled and determined German travel market. We all wanted these people who got five to six weeks of mandated vacation time,
who thought of travel as a right and not a privilege, who many times knew more about us and our geography and culture than we knew ourselves.

It was easy to pick out the Americans, with our open and animated faces, our loud talking as if no one else could understand English, our inadvertent and instinctive élan that so annoys others. A contingent from Las Vegas, including tanned men with dark, slicked-back hair and showgirls who, without their costumes and feathers, were simply too tall, pale, and thin, looked like a Mafia excursion to Tahoe or Atlantic City that had taken the wrong airplane.

As I checked my wristwatch to see how long we’d been waiting for our luggage, I thought I heard my name called out and raised my head. I recognized no faces and decided it was simply a similar-sounding word barked out in another language. Then, in an English accent, “Jack! Are you lost, my boy?”

Malcolm Harris of AmeriCan Adventures, wearing a tailored English suit with his trench coat folded over his forearm, clapped me on the shoulder from behind.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, trying to snap out of my dreamlike state so as to be as sharp as possible for the most important tour operator to our area. “The last time I saw you, you were wearing jeans and a cowboy hat and sitting on a horse.” I remembered how much he’d loved playing cowboy on a dude ranch.

Malcolm Harris was pale, with thin black hair and a twitchy smile that slid back to reveal two rows of bad teeth. His suit hid his paunch. His sharp nose was discolored with the red and blue road map of a serious drinker and there was a strand of sweat beads along the top of his upper lip.

Harris tipped his head back and laughed. “I wish I were back out in Colorado now instead of this bloody place.”

“Me too,” I said.

“So, when did you get in?”

They always ask “So, when did you get in?” even though it was obvious I had just arrived.

I said, “I’m just hoping my luggage got here with me.”

Then I recalled Linda Van Gear’s first maxim of tourism marketing:
It is always about them. It is never about you.

“It’s good to see you,” I said. “You’re looking very good. Do you have a booth at the show?”

“It’s good to be seen,” he said as an aside. “No, I never get a booth here. You think I want to talk to bloody Germans?” He whispered that last part, but not quietly enough, I thought. “No, I’m here because it’s the best place to see all of you and get some business done. All of you all in one place—it’s brilliant, even though I despise Berlin. And the whole bloody Fatherland, for that matter. They have no sense of humor here, and that’s just to start with.”

I quickly looked around to see if we were being overheard. I locked eyes with a green-uniformed
Polizist
who looked back at me, dead-eyed.

“Where are you staying?” he asked.

“The Savoy. On Fassenstraße.”

He nodded with recognition. “Fine place. I know it. English ownership. Still have that great cigar bar?”

“I think so.”

“Brilliant. How about I meet you there to night, and we go to dinner afterwards. Your treat.” And he laughed.

“Perfect,” I said enthusiastically, thinking I would rather put a bullet in my head—or at least get some sleep.

“Seven o’clock then,” he said, patting my shoulder again. “I was hoping I’d see you. I have a lot of questions for you— important concerns. All on the QT, of course.”

I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.

The carousel belt groaned, and luggage appeared. The crowds rushed the apparatus, as if their items would appear sooner as a result of their aggression.

“I’ve got to get out of this hellhole,” Harris said, sneering at the crowd and patting the carry-on he’d brought with him from London. “See you at seven, then.”

I reached out to shake his hand goodbye, but he’d already shouldered his way through a family of Turks toward the exit. The
Polizist
who’d overheard his remarks watched him the entire way, burning eyeholes into the back of his suit jacket.

THERE WERE SKIFFS OF
dirty snow in the shadows between buildings and along the River Spree as my cream-colored Mercedes taxi—something I still got a thrill from, a Mercedes taxi—sliced through the traffic of midmorning. The skies were leaden. Through breaks in the trees, I could see sky cranes in the east bobbing their heads like prehistoric ocean birds.

I looked at my wristwatch again. It was 2:30 A.M. at home. I couldn’t wait to call. I envisioned Melissa and Angelina sleeping in their beds, and Cody tossing and turning on the couch. And—it came out of nowhere—Garrett Moreland sitting in his Hummer down the block, watching my house in the dark.

I straightened up and shook my head, trying to shed the image.

The taxi driver was observing me in his rearview, and when I locked eyes with him, he looked away.

THE HOTEL WAS FILLED
with WTB people from countries
all over the world. My room wasn’t ready, so I stored my luggage and shoved my hands in my pockets and went for a woe-is-me walk along the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street in Berlin, known as the Ku’Damm and pronounced “Koo-Dahm.” High-end stores, restaurants, bustle. I couldn’t believe there were still peddlers selling pieces of the Wall, whose last authentic remnants disappeared nearly twenty years before, as well as ersatz East German caps and “
Stasi
” binoculars made in Asia. Jet-black-skinned Africans sold jewelry and knockoffs on blankets that could be gathered up at two seconds’ notice if a
Polizist
strolled down the block. There were women shopping in furs and carrying bags, and the smell of cigarette smoke hung in the cold damp air. The smell reminded me of Cody.

Something I couldn’t explain nagged at me. I blamed the jet lag for my inability to determine what it was, but it was like a pebble in my shoe I couldn’t locate and discard.

Berlin still had a sort of prewar men-in-hats-women-with-shoulder-pads feel to it, although every year, it seemed, there were fewer Germans and more North Africans, Turks, and Arabs on the streets.

I walked as far as the big department store, the KaDaWe, before crossing the street and working my way back. Unlike home, where we’d been watching every penny for months since we’d adopted our baby, I was on the bureau expense account now. My wallet was flush with euros, and my CVB credit card was primed and ready. I couldn’t go crazy, but I could eat an early lunch of white sausages with a beer in sight of the Broken Tooth, a bombed-out church the Berliners had chosen not to reconstruct after WWII.

As I sat and ate and drank I tried to figure out what was bothering me about my walk, what I’d seen that had set me
on edge. Finally, as I sat back and waited for the bored waiter to bring me back my change and the hated receipt, I realized it wasn’t what I’d seen on the street but what I
hadn’t
seen that was eating at me.

Children. There were no children. Obviously, the older kids would be in school. But in the entirety of my walk I hadn’t come upon a single stroller or young mother with a baby. It was as if it were a street, a city, filled only with adults. I thought how strange, how horrible it would be to live in a world without children. Until that moment, the notion had never even occurred to me. Here in Berlin, because of the choices they’d made for what ever reason, there were no little ones to punctuate the day with noise and harmless chaos. Instead, there was a sense of quiet and antiseptic order.

As I folded my receipt into my wallet, I withdrew a photo of Angelina taken a few months ago. In it, she was beaming and reaching out for the camera to try and gum the lens.

Even though it was just a photo, she was the only child in sight, and they were trying to take her away from us, to turn our house—our lives—into cold and quiet Berlin.

DESPITE WHAT LINDA VAN GEAR
had said about my job being in danger, I decided I would rebook a flight home the next day after my meeting with Harris. I feared for my wife and my daughter, and I already missed them. Linda would be angry, but if I returned with the AmeriCan deal in hand, she’d get over it.

When I got back to the hotel I had a message from Malcolm Harris. He needed to postpone our dinner meeting until the end of the week. Something had come up, and he needed to return to London for several days.

I balled up the message and threw it across the hotel lobby.