Exiles (20 page)

“It’s not just Aaronson,” Tracy said. “It’s Iris.”

“Iris? But we agreed, before I left, that we would both be free—”

“How would you feel if you learned she was with somebody else?”

“I’d feel all right,” Spiegel said, without much conviction. “I haven’t heard from her once. I don’t even know where her head’s at right now.”

“But she’s my best friend,” Tracy said.

“And she sent me to you.”

“It would be too confusing for me,” Tracy said. “You’re too much like him. I don’t know.” She shook her head, and turned away from Spiegel. “I have to think about it,” she added.

“Yes, there’s a lot to think about,” Spiegel said. “It’s been a hell of a long day.”

What he thought about, that night, as he lay across the thin mattress on Tracy’s living-room floor, looking up through the tall windows at the circles of lamplight and the bare branches that tipped in the night breeze and scraped against the casements and the glass like bony fingers, was the image of Tracy, hovering above him like a cloud, permeating the room, the air, his flesh, as if she were a thick fog that surrounded him, smothered him, and he was lost inside her, groping to find his way out into the clear.

In the next room, Tracy lay quietly, straining to hear the sounds of Spiegel’s fitful sleep. She could hear him rustling against the sheets, shifting and tossing like a ship held at anchor on stormy waters. She flicked on her light and shook loose her long hair. She walked softly into the living room and stood by the window. The night had grown wild and stormy. The street lamp cast Tracy’s long shadow across the floor, to the edge of the mattress where Spiegel sprawled, a castaway washed up on an island, wrestling with his dreams. Tracy stepped closer to the window, and she leaned back against the cold glass so that her shadow moved and her image spread itself toward Spiegel like an inky tide. She waved her hands and let the shadows dance over the walls and the floor, enjoying the sensation of being a solitary form at play over a sleeping figure, shielding him from the storm, keeping him in the dark.

10

“Hej,” said the man
at Tracy’s doorway. He had walked right up to the second-floor landing. She had been careless and left the foyer door unlocked. It had been a crazy night.

“
Kan ni prata svenska?
”

“Only a little,” she said. “English would be better.”

“English it is,” he said, with a goofy enthusiasm, as if Tracy had just guessed the answer to a profound and complex riddle. “I like to speak English, every chance I get. Especially with Americans. The English of the English, that’s almost a dead language, don’t you think so? Like Latin.”

“I really don’t know.”

“But you Americans speak the living tongue. Westward the course of empire, and so on.”

The man was tall, even for a Swede, but gangly, Ichabod Crane–like, and he seemed to stoop even in Tracy’s high-ceil-inged Victorian entryway. He had thick brown hair that stuck straight up like the bristles on a shoe brush, and he wore heavy eyeglasses set in square steel frames, like girders that seemed to brace his eyebrows together, giving his face the look of a project under construction.

“Who are you?” Tracy asked. “What do you want?”

“To talk, of course,” the man said. “You’re Tracy Green, aren’t you? I have been following your career for some time. So I consider us to be practically old friends, you know.”

“But I don’t know you,” Tracy said.

“A technicality!”

She grabbed the handle, ready to shut the door on him.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You know that they’re all going to want to talk to you, once they find out where you live. But I think you should talk only to me.”

“Because we’re old friends?”

“Because I was the first to find you.”

“Great, you win the scavenger hunt.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s sort of a game that kids play, that—why am I talking to you? I don’t know you.”

“But you do know something about my character. Here,” he said, and handed her a business card.

Gunnar Mendelsohn.
Uppsala Tidskrift
.
Editor och ecrivit
.

“You’re a reporter,” she said.

“And editor. It’s good that way. So when I fall asleep on the job or take the day off to go fishing, my editor, I mean me, does not get too mad. Unfortunately, I also have to fill in for myself when I take a holiday because someone has to be there to do the work.”

“How many people work there?”

“It’s very small.”

“I don’t really want to talk to the press,” Tracy said.

“Have you read the
UT,
though?” Mendelsohn said. “Probably not, because it’s printed in Swedish, of course. I mean that’s the language that we speak here, in Sweden, and—”

“I try to read the paper,” Tracy said, “as a way to keep up on the news, and the language, but I read the—”

“
Svenska Dagbladet
. But that is the paper of—how do you say it? The Establishment. Or maybe you have not noticed?”

“Well, I don’t read the editorials,” Tracy said. “My Swedish is not that good.”

“You can tell things without reading the editorial page, though. For example, the kind of stories they write, or do not write. Have they, for example, written at all about the Americans in Uppsala?”

“A little.”

“And when they write about Americans, do they come here, to see you?”

Despite herself, she was beginning to like this guy. Maybe she should invite him in for coffee. She wouldn’t have to give him an interview. But it might be a good idea to have a friend in the press, someone to turn to if the hounds got too close to her heels.

“So if they’re the Establishment press, what are you?”

“We? We are the journal of ideas. People read the other newspapers in Sweden if they want just the facts. They read the
UT
if they want to think. Our readers expect us to question authority.

So we never accept the official version of the news events. We follow our leads as far as they will take us, until we find the truth, the real story.”

“You’re saying you print stuff that no other paper prints? Like
Ice Age Creature Devours Helsinki? Girl Gives Birth to her own
Grandmother
?”

“No, no, no, not like that. We are interested in political stories, issues, investigations. We have sources in many agencies that speak only to us, especially when they want to expose their views to the Swedish people. So when people read an article in the
UT
, even if no other paper has the story, they know there is some truth, or somebody’s true beliefs, behind what we write. You have to read the
UT
to get the whole picture.”

“Even if I don’t read Swedish?”

“May I come in?”

Tracy apologized about the condition of her place. Spiegel’s belongings spilled from his upturned duffel, and his clothes from the night before lay scattered about the living-room floor. Somehow, Spiegel had rolled up the mattress and pushed it into a corner beside the couch. The sheets and thin blanket had been tossed over an armchair, like a shroud. She could hear Spiegel fumbling with the faucets in the bathroom.

“I’m sorry,” Mendelsohn said. “You have company.”

“No. He lives here,” Tracy said. “You’ll meet him in a minute. He slept in.”

“I see,” he said. And Tracy was afraid that he did see, that as he scanned the scene, like a classicist among the ruins of ancient Troy, he would detect that he was walking on the grounds of a battlefield, not poking about among the pottery and utensils that would mark the site as a family domicile.

She was pouring coffee through the drip filter as Spiegel stepped into the kitchen, toweling dry his hair. She introduced him as Aaronson, “my old man.”

“Yes, yes, great to meet you,” Mendelsohn said, holding his bony hand out to Spiegel. “Your group, wonderful, the things you’ve done for the Americans in Uppsala, I couldn’t agree more.”

“Thanks,” Spiegel said, and he gave Tracy a look, as if to say: Who is this nut?

“Gunnar Mendelsohn is with the press,” she said.

“I thought—”

“Now I’m not doing a story on the Americans, per se,” Mendelsohn said. “Though I think it’s a great topic, and I would like to, someday—”

“Then why is he here?” Spiegel asked Tracy. “He’s a reporter, and I thought we were going to stay clear of all that—”

“Yes, I don’t blame you, not a bit,” Mendelsohn said. “Saw you on that panel. It was horrible, what they did to you. But as I was explaining to Tracy, here—”

“He’s on our side,” she said. “The left-wing press. And in fact—”

“In fact I was telling Tracy that I’m here to try to find out about somebody else, you see, another American, a friend of yours I suppose.”

Spiegel joined them at the table. “Do you mean Lenny Spiegel?” he said.

“That’s the one.”

“Yes, we read about him,” Tracy said. “He tried to carry a gun onto the ferry.”

“Oh? You did know him then?”

“Of course. There are so few Americans in Uppsala. We pretty much all know one another.”

“And he was from your college, back in the States.”

“Yes,” Spiegel said. “But we didn’t know him there.”

“Just a coincidence he came here?”

“Not exactly,” Spiegel said. “He did look us up once he got to Uppsala. We have friends in common at home. So maybe he decided to stay here because of us, because he met us.”

“But then, he didn’t stay, did he?”

“What paper did you say you’re from?” Spiegel asked. This guy’s goofy looks were deceiving. With a strange acuity, he could spot the chinks in a story.

“The
UT
. We’re more like—how do you say it?—a weekly: commentary and analysis, the odd feature story, that sort of thing. You should give us a look.”

“My experiences with the press have not been all that good.”

“Wrong press then, I think. Have they been bothering you, trying to find out everything you know about this Spiegel fellow?”

“No,” Tracy said. “You’re the first to bother us.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just that, you know, we didn’t know him all that well.”

“Are you sure?” Mendelsohn said. He took a long, greedy sip of the coffee. “Fellow American, same college, he looks you up once he gets to Uppsala, surely he must have told you something about his travel plans.”

Maybe Mendelsohn knows that we’re putting him on, Tracy thought. Maybe he has been watching us from a distance for weeks, months. Maybe he’s leading us along, playing a game with us before he pounces.

“We don’t really know him or his plans,” said Tracy. “Could be it was Lenny Spiegel they’re looking for at the border. Or it could have been that they want someone else. It might be a case of mistaken identity.”

“Such things do happen,” Mendelsohn said. “But usually not as a mistake. Perhaps they are seeking someone who was using Leonard Spiegel’s passport. Or someone who has stolen it.”

“Why do you think that?” Spiegel said. “Do you have any information about Spiegel?”

“Do you?” Mendelsohn asked. “If you do, perhaps I can, as the saying goes, put two and two together and make—five.”

Spiegel and Tracy looked at each other. This guy had to know something. He was plugged into the circuit, and the circuit was alive. How else would he have known that Aaronson, Tracy, and Spiegel were connected? How else would he have followed the loose wire back this far, right to their lair? They didn’t speak, but somehow the understanding passed between them: They should open the door a little to Mendelsohn, let him learn a little bit about what they knew, and see if he could somehow lead them to Aaronson.

“Lenny Spiegel is not in Denmark,” Tracy said. “We believe that someone else was using his passport.”

“As I thought,” said Mendelsohn.

Spiegel swallowed and tried to catch Tracy’s eye again. How far would she go? He thought she had gone far enough already, maybe too far.

“It just made no sense to me that someone carrying a gun into Sweden, if in fact he was doing so, would carry his own passport,” Mendelsohn said. “But then, why would this Spiegel give up his passport? Was it politics? Money?”

“What makes you think he gave it up?” Spiegel said.

“Well, how else would the gentleman have come upon it? A passport isn’t something that one finds lying about in a hedgerow, is it? I think someone must have approached your friend with an offer. Just wanted to borrow his passport, for a week, you see.”

“And who would have done this?”

“Whoever wanted the services of a man with a gun. Perhaps the Sweden First Party. They’re the ones you had your little tiff with, on the air. They don’t like immigrants, as you know.”

“I don’t think Spiegel would have had anything to do with those creeps,” Tracy said.

“But he wouldn’t have known who they were. They might have told him they were part of the resistance, your antiwar movement. Maybe he loaned someone his passport in the mistaken belief that it was for the cause. Was he foolish enough to do that?”

“Lenny is sort of naive. I mean, he had very little to do with the antiwar movement back in the States, or here for that matter. But he’s no fool.”

Spiegel was relieved to hear Tracy say that. The words sounded good to him, even though he knew that she was just blowing smoke.

“Or maybe he knew he was helping that fascist group,” Mendelsohn said. “Maybe he only pretended to be sympathetic to your antiwar movement. Maybe his real mission in Sweden was to help crush the movement. Maybe he was an enemy agent, placed in your midst. Did you do a background check on him, ever?”

“No,” Tracy said.

“That’s too bad. No telling what might turn up. They say that his father works for the American government, you know.”

“America’s a big country. Lots of people work for the government,” Spiegel said. “But that’s beside the point.”

“I think the real point,” Mendelsohn said, “is to find him.”

“That won’t be easy,” Spiegel said. He was anxious. Mendelsohn was the first person he had come across in Uppsala who seemed to know about his father’s work. How could that be? Spiegel wondered. Had Mendelsohn been sent to convey a message, to him, or to Tracy?

“It shouldn’t be so hard to find him,” Mendelsohn said. “If he gave up his passport, how far can he have gone? He must be somewhere in Sweden, of course.”

“I don’t think so,” Tracy said. “We were told he went off on a trip, to Denmark.”

“Yes, he could have sold his passport there,” Mendelsohn said. “Then he would report the papers missing, stolen, whatever.”

“No, you’ve got him all wrong,” Tracy said. “He wasn’t hard up for cash. And he wouldn’t have sold his passport for a kick.”

“But you said that he was . . . naive. And I had heard that, too. That he was a bit of a simpleton, a fool. Came here looking to get involved, not sure why, one of those aimless, wandering Americans that one sees in all of the train stations of Europe, asleep on the benches, their blue jeans ripped at the knees, resting their heads against aluminum-framed backpacks that cost as much as a small Italian car.”

“Spiegel wasn’t like that,” Spiegel said, a bit defensively. Who was it, he wondered, who called him a simpleton? Or was he being baited?

“He was maybe naive,” Tracy added. “But he learned from experience. Maybe he did come here to find himself. But he came here with a purpose as well. . . . ”

“Which was?”

“Let’s just say, to help the movement.”

“Then why would he leave?”

“Maybe he’d served his purpose.”

Mendelsohn shook his head no. “You have told me some things, and now I will tell you some things, in the hope that we can work together. I will help you find your friend. And you will help me to get my story. Because when we find him, I want to talk to him. I want to be the only one.”

“An exclusive, we call that in America. A scoop.”

“What is it you can tell us?” Spiegel said. “Because I don’t think there’s that much we can do until Spiegel surfaces, you know, comes up for air. As you say, he’s not going to get far without his passport.”

“Well, that’s just it,” Mendelsohn said. “He hasn’t gone very far. In fact, I think that he is still in Uppsala.”

“Why do you think that?” Tracy said, and Spiegel thought that he could detect a slight weakening, a hesitation in her voice. Did Mendelsohn know much more than he had let on? Maybe they had been far too trusting in talking to him.