A quiet afternoon in Mexico City, a green glass restaurant on a street named after an assassinated Czech, heir to a forgotten authorial tradition, done in by agents of Moscow. At lunch the topic was Masaryk’s murder. Flung from the window like bad faith, the stain of semen on the sill proof his death was no suicide. Was it a garrot that wrung from him that droplet, to seed out a little life before he dropped away to the dark pavement below? Sipping from his Beaujolais and in his green glass element, Piet expounded to his niece, her latest boyfriend, and me, sketching the history of that sad world, between the clearing of the ceviche and the entomatadas’ arrival. It was left to me to remind our host we were not all babes in the wood.
-Tell me, Piet, how do you know so much about Prague?
The boyfriend provided the desired diversion, mild altitude sickness or natural clumsiness upending his third Tom Collins.
-Rule Number One, Piet smiled grimly.
-it’s not a party till someone spills a drink.
The claphappy boozers totting up their blessings in the birthday suite across the street paused in their toasting as the niece spread her cellist’s legs and shifted her chair away from the spill and into the sun.
I summon up the isolated photograph of Piet, vines round his waist where he leaned against the red brick wall, in full view of his enemies. The keys were in the sleeping-kitty figurine, the skullcap tossed into the undergrowth, near the park’s dim exit.
He was caught red-handed, his sentence to be forever grateful another’s cowardice had saved him from a moment of truth.
Evening’s first breeze, brushing leaves from the verandah, flirting the curtains’ hem to a rattle too light for registry. A sniper scope would transform it into a ballet, from that running start through the dive and tumble that carries her past the outlying sentry box, the marionette’s clamber up the Gothic wall, ivy shivering at this unfamiliar intimacy, the ching of metal on glass, the otherwise complete and utter silence.
I imagine Piet, as fat as he had ever been, stretching the seams of his immense red kimono, alternating the faucets of charm and nerves, captive audience at last.
-How then did you manage that? he asks, when she’s tied off the final knot.
-in like a burglar and the dogs not worth a buried bone.
-It’s all in the wrist, she may as well have smiled, sorting out his pills and hustling the easel for a closer view.
-Isn’t this (Piet again) where you explain the plot, the hatch, the double-cross with oak leave clusters? Rub my face in your devilish cleverness?
A spine like smoke, shimmering back the easel’s shadow.
-I’m not stupid she whispers, and boffs him on the head for emphasis.
As he well knows, his own tracks covered from 21st back to Stone Age. Shoptalk between rivals, reliving dogfights and trade secrets for keeping the sun at one’s back and in the enemy’s eyes.
Had I been the one to betray him all these difficulties might have been avoided. But the pleasure of his fall, how much diminished? No summing up for the minor Ganelons, the aspirant Cressidas? Choosing to withdraw from the role of future Judas, what right had I to sniff at the competition?
Things will be loverly, as they be, the end to come and more and better, and later, nice things maybe. Look after her for me, Piet. Or so the shrunken imperialist said, walking backwards down the awninged pier, required to decamp but wishing, perilously, to stay. Piet assured him, then reassured him, touching lips to grizzled cheeks, and waited till the old boy was swaddled safely on the steamer’s shady deck, dread made contagious in the bronze-beating sun.
White buildings rose out of the jungle and Piet considered which of the many offered epics best to lose himself in. The psyche’s a rum animal, any angle you stalk it along bound to be upwind. The role of deputy-, vice-, sub-, laid out like a suit of clothes, an ever-ready tailor cringing with a smile and tape measure, mouthful of pins and vest pocket powdery with chalk nubs. He preferred the margins of the marginal, the unsuspected curl of the uncharted coast, where he could mingle his sweat with that of women whose men he’d bon voyaged through the gates of bannered hell. Seductions based upon a lie so monstrous that truth, and thereby, love, were strangled blue-faced in their yawning cribs.
That night, on a hotel balcony bathed in blue (the ocean’s murmur for once failing to soothe) the old shipwreck’s impossibly young wife sobbed What will I do without him, Piet? then shyly dropped her bath towel and offered herself to him all on the lisp of a beautiful misunderstanding.
Piet was a traitor and busy as a bee, with Mammon, Caesar, and a dozen acronyms on call for reference or denial. Put directly and the mirror cracks, fog’s lilac breathing from the wings, Odile and Odette made misty from the thighs down. Say the Czar was history’s prisoner, or say that Taffy was a thief, but Piet’s treason was a palace roofed with gold and housed with bones. First person singular has no choice but to be Memory.
The babyfaced gendarme, showing off the blisters raised on his slapping hand.
Where had they been hiding out? Surely they’d memorized the coordinates by now?
Are you questioning slap my authority slap.
Words split like tissue under a truncheon’s downswing, a torrent flooding warrantless up the hammered stairs.
-Choose your Isaac, he said, fanning the crowd photos quietly on the card table. Choose the lucky cunt who goes to martyr heaven.
Casting round for someone to pin the blame on, Piet would have volunteered his own mistress, if she hadn’t been smiling so supportively across the table at him. To die without illusion, without understanding. Tell them what you were told, they already know the worst. Tell them what you know, you’re her lover and she loves you No Matter What.
I’m going over the wall tomorrow.
That’s what the last message said.
My boyfriend’s been disappeared, I’m afraid I’m next.
That was the reason given. It was the first time some of us had heard the word used like that.
-See? That wasn’t so bad, the gendarme said, gathering up the photos and placing a pack of cigarettes and his own monogrammed lighter in their place.
-This is power. This is forgiveness. Open your eyes and lap it up. Canister of flesh, column of atoms, ant-prey, fly-meat. Doubt your faith and see what scraps are left you. Your friends will all abandon you, your comrades will be defined by the questions they respond to, not the silences we burn them with. Shall I tell you something interesting? I heard the word love three times today. Would it be worth the dislocation of your shoulders for me to hear it a fourth?
His days were landlocked, his nights lost at sea. The reverse, once imagined, was the only thing he was afraid of, at that moment, in that room, the sunlight outside and the clear skies coming to an end. He would emerge a purged phoenix, tailored in a dandy’s ash. Tatiana, fallen on a bed of snow, arms crossed over her breast, sleeping like a minor pharaoh, the blood’s black archipelago tapering from her shoulders, her spread, frozen hair. Piet opened his eyes on the lurid past and smiled into comedy’s immediate eyes …. sestra moia zhizn…
Everyone looked startled and one of the watching officers even jumped to his feet, shushing the others and crying Does anyone recognize the language this madman is speaking?
But the lights dimmed and darkness bent down against the window and everywhere was the sound of pelting rain, splashing on fallen kings.