Nowhere (4 page)

“Me?”

“We’ve decided to send you there,” said he. “Isn’t snooping your profession? Obviously if you’ve survived in New York City you know how to lie and cheat and dissemble: spying should be just your meat.”

I chewed on this remarkable proposal for a moment, then said, “Don’t think I’m not flattered by your offer, Rasmussen, but really, I can’t leave town at the moment. I’ve got to find a new home, and then I have to reconstruct my play. It’s true that I have had some experience as an investigator, but that’s pretty remote from being a spy, if you think about it. A principal difference is that if you do a bad job of private detection, it is not routine to be executed.”

He failed to acknowledge these sentiments. “Your cover will be this: you’re an American playwright who’s gone to Saint Sebastian because it’s a nice quiet place to hole up and lick your second-act problems.”

I must say his information was uncannily accurate in assessing my dramaturgical difficulties. How he could have known about them was beyond me. Had I talked aloud in my sleep in the bugged room?

“Well, if you put it that way, I’ll think it over.” The fact was that with the winding up of the Rothman Deli job I had no employment. Indeed it would not have been easy to name a time when I had ever been overwhelmed with work. “I don’t want to be vulgar,” I said, “but am I naïve in assuming you folks pay some kind of fee to the free-lance?”

Rasmussen rose suddenly from his camp chair and hurled himself at the rear doors. I tried to follow him, but he opened the right-hand panel, leaped out, and slammed it in my face: furthermore, locked it from outside. After pounding awhile impotently, I went to assault the windowless metal wall that separated the rear compartment from the cab. The engine roared into life and started to move with a vicious lurch. I fell backwards, striking something adamantine with my head.

I
WAS SHAKEN AWAKE
as the vehicle hit a procession of the profound potholes with which Manhattan streets are pockmarked... except that I was not in the van or on a street anywhere, but rather in an airplane, aloft, and the bumps were caused by faults in the sky!

It was a commercial craft, and the approaching stewardess was a substantial fairhaired girl who wore a short dress of green jersey. She brought me a little tray which held a cup of café au lait and a plump croissant.

“Goot morning,” said she. “Wilcom to Sebastiani Royal Airline, Meester Wren!” The bosom of her dress yawned open as she bent with the tray. I stared into her luxurious cleavage as something to do while I collected my wits. She asked, “Vould you like to skveese the breasts?” I should say her smile was more genial than sensual.

“Uh, no, thank you,” said I, and then, courtesy being my foible even when far from home, I saw fit to add, “Perhaps another time. They look very nice.”

“Oh yes,” she said with vigor. “Mine body is beautifool.” It would be hard to explain that this statement did not sound like boasting when it was pronounced. My natural taste in females is for a more slender sort of blond, but I must say that this statuesque person put me at ease, or at any rate at a good deal more of it than I could have claimed in her absence.

“Miss, please don’t think me mad if I ask where we are, where
I
am. Did you say ‘Sebastiani’? Is that what it would seem, a reference to the little principality of Saint Sebastian?”

She smiled grandly with the largest of white teeth and an expanse of rosy lips: she was a spectacularly healthy specimen. “Ve vill be landing there soon.”

I took a sip of the coffee, which proved hot and delicious and thus reassuring. “You may not believe this, but I haven’t any idea of how I got here. When I was last awake, I was in a vehicle on a street in New York City.”

She nodded sympathetically. “You had had some drinks before your friends brought you aboard, I think. You vent to sleep and only now have you awakened up. Vot puzzles me, sir, is how you have retained your you-reen all the night long.”

“Pardon me...?”

She frowned. “Don’t you have to make peepee?”

I wasn’t prepared for her frankness, which I began to suspect was habitual. I shook my head. I had had nothing to drink since the cheap plonk of my wretched supper: it seemed clear enough that that swine Rasmussen had drugged me. I would be mighty indignant when this flight touched down. Meanwhile there was nothing to do but eat breakfast. Both the coffee and croissant were excellent.

The stewardess said her name was Olga. She seemed to be working alone.

I asked whether there were any other passengers.

“Now, no. Your friends left in Vienna.”

“Did one of them have a bad complexion?”

“To be sure,” said Olga. She vivaciously sat down in the aisle seat. Her skirt was so short that her columnar thighs were now altogether bare. “I did not like him, forgive me!”

“Neither do I,” I freely admitted.

She lifted the hinged seat-arm between us, leaned against me, and peered into my face. Her eyes were very blue. “Foreigners sometimes do not understand our vays. Ve do not have to screw under
every
circumstance. For example, rudeness is a reason not; opening the trousers first, or foul language, or violent seizings! All of these your friend did, forgive me.”

“Let me apologize for him,” said I. “He’s not, thank heavens, typical of my countrymen.” I felt some security in expressing this patriotic sentiment. “The average Yank, whom perhaps you haven’t been fortunate enough to meet, is a hardworking family man whose simple idea of pleasure is to burn meat on a charcoal grill. He is definitely not a cryptofascist religious-fanatic warmonger, though he is, at work, no Nipponese zealot. He may even be something of a slacker, speaking industrially, but—”

“
You
can screw with me, to be sure,” said Olga. She grasped the hem of her perfunctory skirt and raised it, lifting her bottom. She seemed to be wearing no underthings.

I have seldom been found lacking in carnal appetite, but no element in this state of affairs was propitious.

“I’ll tell you,” I told her, somehow sensing that it would not be considered a rejection, “I’d prefer, right now, to drink another cup of coffee and eat a second croissant.”

I was right: she popped up, her skirt falling after a long and not at all unattractive moment, and smiling sweetly as ever, went to do my bidding. This time the croissant was accompanied by a fluffy pale mound, not a poisonously golden pat, of sweet butter and a little Limoges pot of an extraordinarily fragrant honey. Having delivered these, Olga sat down next to me again. She, too, exuded a lovely bouquet similar to that of the honey. I mentioned it to her, and she told me that both honey and scent traced their origins to a wild flower peculiar to the high meadows of her country. I must say that the associations the name Saint Sebastian had today were preferable to those of the evening before.

I could not forgive Rasmussen for the manner in which he had shanghaied me, but while finishing my breakfast I did remember the job for which I had been hired.

“Tell me, Olga,” I said, gesturing with half a croissant, “about your prince.”

“What is to be told?”

I nibbled and swallowed. “Is he loved by the people of Saint Sebastian?”

“Why nawt?” She laughed
hahaha.

“Umm. But you know what I mean: is he
really
liked, admired, and so on, or does he simply hold power by brute force?”

“Ah,” she sighed. “I could never know about that. My job is to be stewardess, and not to deal in social theoretics, you see.”

It occurred to me to ask, “Do you even have the vote?”

“No, indeed, God be thanked!” Her negative enthusiasm seemed genuine enough.

I swallowed the remainder of the buttered and honeyed croissant and finished the coffee. They seemed to have a soporific effect. I barely had the energy to put another question.

“You are aware, are you not, of an anti-Prince Opposition? In fact, a terrorist group that blows up buildings in New York to get attention for its cause? The Sebastiani Liberation Front?”

Olga smiled prettily at me throughout my questions, in that fashion in which the questioned seems amused by some ad hominem reflections on the questioner and gives little heed to what is being asked. I wondered whether she was a nymphomaniac or merely weak-minded: I had known both sorts, sometimes even in combination, but never had they been so magnificently salubrious. I confess that Olga had an odd effect on me at this point: I would rather have trained her for some sporting event than taken her to bed.

I waved my hand before her eyes. “Did you hear me?”

She filled her great bosom with air and released it in a happy kind of gasp. “I am too beautiful for such matters. I vas selected for the job I have now soon after my breasts began to grow.”

The gentle gong-sound that accompanies the seat-belt sign was heard, and Olga informed me that the airplane was about to land. She went to the little fold-down perch beside the door to the cockpit, giving me another vista of her breathtaking thighs. I reluctantly turned from this spectacle to the view from the window. I saw some neat checkerboarded farmland below, in various shades of earth colors, and then soon enough we were over clustered dwellingplaces, crooked streets, and free-form shapes of greenery, several of which surrounded bodies of water that reflected the cerulean sky, and on a higher elevation what seemed to be a crenellated stone fortress, and then the airplane made a great sweeping, banking turn and smoothly descended onto a very simple blacktopped landing strip, coming to rest nowhere near the terminal building, which in any event was too small to be equipped with an extensible gangway.

Olga opened the door, and I went to join her. To see outside, I had to lean around this magnificent specimen of young-womanhood, who was at least as tall as I. Beyond the airfield in that direction the farmland began, and in the distance I saw a blue range of mountains. I knew no more of the geography of this part of the world than I knew of its language, politics, history, or culture. Why Rasmussen felt it necessary to hustle me off so quickly, with no preparation or opportunity for research, made no sense, unless it could be explained by calling him a bureaucratic scoundrel and having done with it.

At this point a fairhaired functionary on the ground outside began to maneuver a portable stairway into place at the door of the aircraft.

“Good-bye, sir,” said Olga. “I hope you did enjoy the flight anyway.”

“Good-bye, Olga. You’re a nice girl.” On an impulse I added, “I regret not being in the mood to screw this morning. Perhaps another time.”

“When you want!” she answered ebulliently, performing a little curtsy.

I went down the metal stairs and stepped onto the tarmac. The man who had wheeled the stairway into place was gone. Olga was still the only person I had seen since the night before, and no one was in sight on the airfield. The terminal building was a good half mile away from where I stood. Just as I decided that I would have to hike for it, I heard the distant racket of a noisy engine, and a vehicle came onto the field and rapidly approached me. When it got nearer I recognized it as an ancient station wagon of American make, a vintage model with a body of real wooden panels. It had been indifferently maintained: black smoke gushed from its tailpipe, and much of the wooden paneling was in a sorry condition, rotting or splintered. The windshield was cracked, the tires were bald, the front bumper was loose at one end. Instead of glass, plastic sheeting covered the driver’s window. This was so dirty and discolored that I could not identify the person at the wheel until he stopped the car and cried out in a voice that seemed to come from the throat of a man with a mortal illness.

“You Wren?”

I could not see the speaker, but I confirmed the identification.

“Climb aboard!” The passenger’s door was flung open. When I had rounded the old station wagon at the rear—the windows of which had been glazed with water-stained cardboard—I saw that the door had been opened so violently, and had been so feebly hinged, that in fact it lay on the runway.

I leaned down and looked in at the driver.

He fell across the seat in my direction, hand outthrust in greeting. “Clyde McCoy. Good to see somebody from Home.”

Of course, he was the man Rasmussen had mentioned.

I thrust my hand in and shook his. “What should I do about the door?”

McCoy managed to sit up. He was a skinny, sinewy individual and dressed in a dark-gray suit that I suspected to be properly light gray. His urine-yellow shirt had surely begun life as white. The hue of his tie could be called grease-green. He left the car and staggered around the hood to reach the fallen door. He was one of those persons who owing to slightness of figure and lifelessness of hair could be any age. Using what seemed the strength of sudden madness, he lifted the door and got it back on its hinges. He closed it gingerly. Then he reached through the glassless aperture, found a twisted coat hanger that hung there, and fastened the wire to the upright post of the frame. This took a few moments of intense application in which he breathed in upon me, and when the job was done I felt half drunk.

When he returned to fit himself in back of the wheel I asked apprehensively, “You wouldn’t want me to drive?”

He peered at me through lids that were almost closed. “It’s understandable you think I’m under the influence. I suffer from a disease that resembles drunkenness so closely that my breath even seems to smell of alcohol. That’s why I first came to this country. Saint Sebastian had the only doctor in the world at the time who knew how to treat this ailment. You know what he prescribed? Schnapps. Lots of it. You’d notice if I were to take a drink or two now I’d be sober in no time.”

The vehicle was so old that its starter was mounted on the floor, and after making his statement McCoy began to look for it with the toe of his right foot, which was shod in a battered old shoe from which a section had been cut out, presumably to favor a bunion.

“I suppose you know that Rasmussen sent me,” I said. “But what you might not know is that I’ve had no preparation for the assignment. I don’t even have any money or a passport. And what language is spoken here? I want to get hold of a dictionary or phrase book.”