Babayaga: A Novel (17 page)

It had happened a few nights earlier, just after her melancholy had crept back like a black beast coming to eat at her heart. Noelle was sitting up in her bed, looking out her hospital window and wondering if she would ever trust herself again, out there in the wilds of the world. Every thought that came into her mind tortured and oppressed her. Recalling her mother’s eyes, or remembering the swarms of small children playing wild in the schoolyard, or even the memory of the sea of shiny black umbrellas that filled the rainy boulevards, all these random recollections made her chest ache.

“So, tell me, what do you see up there in that night sky?” said a voice behind her.

She looked and found the old woman standing by her bed. Noelle was not frightened, the staff often came through after-hours to check on the patients. “I don’t see anything out there but darkness,” she said.

“Ah,” said the old woman, sitting down beside her and roughly patting her on the back. “That is good. Very good. I have known Gypsies that will tell you they can read your fortune in the stars. But they only do this to trick you into looking up. They say, ‘Look close! There is the Leo, there is the Aries!’ and while you are squinting up into the blackness, these Gypsies stay plenty busy picking your pockets below.” They were both silent for a moment. “I hate Gypsies,” the old woman said, and then she got up and waddled off, disappearing down the hallway.

The next day the old woman returned after the lights had been turned off, coming out of the gloomy blue shadows carrying a comb and brush. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a
sucette
. “Here,” she said.

The girl happily took the lollipop as Elga sat down on the corner of her bed and began working the knots out of the girl’s black hair. As she worked, the old woman asked questions in her short, blunt way and, knot by knot, with a mouth full of the sweet
sucette
, Noelle told her the short, sad story of her life.

Ever since she could remember, she had wanted to be a ballerina. She had trained and practiced, starving herself to be as thin as those beautiful creatures she watched flitting about the spot-lit stage draped in silk ribbons and tulle. Her mother had been more than encouraging, pressuring her to always be top of her class, taking her to the city to see the Opera Ballet and then sitting in on all her lessons. Her father had paid sums far beyond what they could afford for the best schools and most highly regarded teachers. They lived outside Paris in a small country village, but there was a bus, and Noelle and her mother rode in for classes three times a week, often not returning home until long after her father was asleep. Finally, although her teachers intimated that she might not yet be ready, Noelle’s mother insisted it was time to try out for a spot in the Academy.

The audition had been even more rigorous than she could have imagined. She felt tense and nervous and it all went wrong, her
battement frappé
was too weak, her
déboulés
awkward, and every arabesque painfully unsteady. As she finished her final routine she did not even need to see the distracted and bored expressions on the judges’ faces. In fact, she knew she had failed before the music even finished. Stopping there on the empty stage and listening as the piano’s last small high note echoed out into the air, she felt the ancient theater creak, crack, and begin to collapse around her, breaking apart into a hundred thousand splinters that fell at her feet. The walls caved in and the ceiling came down as her entire world tumbled and crashed in around her—her little village, the rolling countryside, waves of sea and ocean, and every atomic element she had ever learned about in her science classes were bursting into smithereens, exploding around her on the stage. When the thunder finally subsided, the judges were still there, staring blankly as they waited for her to exit the stage, while her father and mother, seated near the back, sat grinning, entirely blind to her failure, their eyes aglow with the hollowness of hope.

Her first attempt to kill herself had been a botched and desperate affair: in a hysterical fit, she had gulped down a well of dark pen ink, and immediately vomited it up again like a squid, retching the blackness out all over her father’s well-organized desk.

Next she had slashed her wrists, but they had found her in time, flailing and weeping in the blushed, warm water of her rose-tinted bath. That was what had brought her to the institution. And now here she was, scarred, ugly, and alone.

As she finished her tale, the old woman nodded. “Yes, this is bad. In my time, we would put you to work, slap you into shape, make you wake up from your miseries through the penance of toil. But this place makes you lie down on your cot, or wander the grounds like a stupid park pigeon, waiting for them to fill you with more treats from their pharmacies. They are not here to cure you, you know, they are only here to make the pharmacist’s pockets fat.”

Noelle nodded. She was only waiting for the doctors’ signatures of approval, she said, so that her parents could take her home. There, she confided with a deep breath, she would surely try to kill herself again.

“Bah,” said the old woman. “If you wanted death, you would have death. It’s too easy. Bang your head into that stone wall there until you crush it. Right there.” She pointed at the cold masonry. “Do it now.” Noelle looked at her, wide-eyed and confused. The old woman shrugged. “See? You do not want death. I tell you what, we can give you instead a whole new better life, one more beautiful than any idiot ballerina’s. What are dancers, really, but silly whores without the fucking? You give them money and they twirl around in frilly colored costumes before your eyes. They twirl until they drop. You don’t want that. You want what we can give you.”

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?”

“We? Oh, from now on we is you and me.” Elga patted her hand. “If you want it, we do this. I’ll help you. But it is a great secret. And if you do it, you’ll have to help me too. I will need your help with a very tough job.”

“What job?”

The old woman rubbed Noelle’s shoulder in a soft and reassuring way. “We have to kill a witch.”

VIII

Tuesday morning, Will had risen early and tried calling Oliver; then he had tracked down the address of
The Gargoyle Press
, and now, having been pointed to an unsteady, uncomfortable chair, he sat waiting among the piles of books and galley proofs in the journal’s “lobby.” The office was merely a large apartment with a few desks and telephones. Papers sat stacked and bundled along its tables, empty chairs, and windowsills. There were five people there, none of them the ones Will had met with Oliver at the bar. One sat at her desk reading, one sat typing in a concentrated hunt-and-peck fashion, and two more were at the far end of the room, apparently having a meeting. The assistant who had greeted him, an attractive, narrow-waisted French girl in a red sweater, had briefly disappeared after letting him in and then returned to her seat, where she slowly, studiously paged through the thick copy of
Vogue
that sat beside the big black telephone on her desk. He assumed she had told someone to find Oliver, but no one appeared. After a few moments, the phone rang and the girl answered it. For the next quarter hour she stayed on the phone, ignoring Will while she gaily chatted with the caller. Will suspected she was talking with a close friend. He thought of interrupting her but found it almost relaxing watching a pretty girl laugh and gossip as if he were not even there. Finally, one of the other young women who had been busy reading came over. “
Je peux vous aider
?”

Will stood up. “
Oui, je cherche Oliver
.”

The woman smiled politely and switched to English, which came with a stern British accent. “You’ve come to entirely the wrong place to find him. He is almost never here, I’m afraid. You’re a writer?”

“No.”

She grinned. “So sorry, we always assume our visitors are writers; that is why we have Nicole leave them out here unattended. Sooner or later they wander away.” She stopped to correct herself. “That sounds bad. It’s not that we don’t fancy writers, we adore them, honestly, only just not the ones who tend to stop by. What do you do?”

“I’m in advertising, but—”

Her eyes lit up. “Advertising! Oh, right, then”—she firmly took him by the arm and guided him toward the door—“we should get you to Oliver right away. At this hour he’s probably at home still curled up with his coffee and a paper, it’s only a short walk from here.”

“I tried calling him at his home number earlier.”

“He rarely answers it. Oliver says the phone makes him a slave of technology, though he does love dialing me up at two a.m. with his tipsy editorial tips. Most Luddites are so charmingly inconsistent.”

Like many of the British girls Will had come across in Paris, she was chattier than she was friendly. Her name was Gwen Knight and she told him she had come over after graduating from Cambridge. She kept up a brisk pace and though she never stopped talking, she never smiled, even at her own small jokes. Will found that oddly reassuring. As good as his French was, a slight gauze still separated him from Parisian culture, and so, whenever the locals grinned at him or laughed, instead of reassuring him it actually made him a bit more insecure, since he was never sure if they were expressing sincere pleasure, indulgence, politeness, or, perhaps, mere amusement at the silly American.

Rounding the corner, she led him across the narrow street to an apartment building that had two small statues of lions sitting on either side of the door. She rang the buzzer and a fuzzy “Hullo?” came squawking out through the intercom.

“It’s Gwen, I—”

The door buzzed before she could finish her sentence. Instead of taking the elevator, Gwen climbed the stairs. Following her up, Will thought there must be circles of heaven where all one did was ascend staircases behind slender women wearing tight wool skirts. On the third floor, they reached the apartment door. It was unlocked and Gwen walked right in.

Oliver’s apartment was spacious, with a guest room by the side of the entrance and a long hallway of densely packed bookshelves leading down to the main rooms. Newspapers were stacked up in the corner,
Times Herald
s and
Le Monde
s. There were piles of opened baby blue airmail envelopes from America lying on the narrow hall table with their telltale red-white-and-blue-striped stamps. “In the back!” they heard Oliver call out from the kitchen. Gwen and Will followed the voice and, rounding the corner, they found a silk-robed Oliver smoking and leafing through a copy of
Paris Match
. Beside him, sitting with her morning coffee, was an only slightly dressed Zoya.

Oliver looked up with a bit of a confused grin. “Oh, hullo, Will, Gwen. What are you two doing together?”

“He came by the office,” Gwen began. “Nicole was ignoring him but I took pity. When he said he was in advertising, well, considering the straits we’re in I thought it could hardly wait—”

Oliver smiled. “Are you really here to help with our advertising, Will?”

Will looked at Zoya, her hair hung loose and tangled down her shoulders, and all she had on was one of Oliver’s tailored Oxford shirts. She sat looking at him, a slight friendly grin on her lips as if she were waiting for him to speak. Then he realized they were all waiting for him to answer. He felt confused and speechless, surprised to find his feelings all twisted, like a clumsy boy tripping on his laces while chasing some elusive bouncing ball. He paused to restart his thoughts. “Yes. I mean, no. You were supposed to drop a package off at my office yesterday.”

“That’s right!” Oliver said, lightly slapping his forehead. “I was, wasn’t I?”

“Right, so I’d like to pick that up, but I also need to talk to you, privately, about another issue. It’s very important.”

“Fine, fine, ladies, please excuse us for a moment.” Oliver led him down the hall and into the main bedroom. Will could not help but notice the top sheet and blankets were all off the bed. He saw Zoya’s shoes and blouse on the floor on one side, the skirt lay in a bundle on the other, signs of a night and maybe a morning’s passion that caused some emotion, envy, or jealousy perhaps, to well up inside Will. He tried not to think about it. “What’s up?” Oliver asked.

“Okay, well now, we have some trouble,” said Will, focusing on the issues at hand. “In fact, we have some very serious trouble.” He then told Oliver about the photographed Hoffmann-La Roche file and the Soviet embassy. As Will sketched out the details, Oliver sat down, stunned, on the corner of the bed and stared at the floor, quietly taking it all in. He looked as close to being serious as Will had ever seen him.

“How did Brandon know the file came from your office?” Oliver asked. “There was no letterhead on any of it.”

“The agency knows what our files look like,” Will said, feeling as though he was confessing. “They’ve seen a lot of them before.”

“Yes, I see.” Oliver gave Will a funny look. “You’ve been keeping secrets, Will.”

“Here’s the deal,” Will said, ignoring the accusation. “I’m supposed to hand our personnel files over to the two guys Brandon has working on this—”

“What are their names?”

“I don’t remember their names, Mitchell and something.”

“Odd that Brandon wouldn’t take care of it himself—you’re his boy, right?”

“No, I’m not his boy. He says he’s working on something more important, he says he doesn’t have time for this.”

“More important than espionage at the Soviet embassy? Very interesting. The man does stay busy.”

“The point is, I’m not going to hand over personnel files to his guys so that they can go digging around in a bunch of innocent people’s lives. Who knows what they’ll uncover? Maybe they’ll find our janitor’s a member of the Communist Party, and then what?”

“Well, I doubt they’d be surprised at that. All the janitors in Paris are Communists,” said Oliver.

“You know what I mean. It’s serious, very serious.”

“Yes … Christ, of course it is … it’s the Soviets.” Oliver didn’t say any more as he drifted into thought, and then he nodded, as if reaching a decisive conclusion. “The wisest plan is to do as you say, confess the whole truth. Make a clean breast of it.”