The Gordian Knot (21 page)

Jill? Fran’s life revolved around Jill. At the same time, Georg saw that in dealing with Jill she was strangely businesslike; Jill was a practical problem requiring practical solutions. When Fran breastfed her it was a technical procedure of providing and receiving nourishment. There was no mother-child intimacy. Georg recalled paintings in museums that radiated more warmth than the sight of Jill at Fran’s breast.

And me? Is she interested in me? Does she love me? Georg often had the feeling that for her he too was a piece of the world that one can’t change, that one had to accept, happy when he was happy, and bending under his blows. Every day she was happier with him. He noticed it. And why not? He took care of Jill, cleaned up and cooked for Fran, and slept with her. When she had her orgasm, when cries burst from her and she held on to him tightly—Now, he thought, now I’ve gotten through to you, shaken you. But when afterward she stretched out, she reminded him of a dog eagerly splashing through water and shaking itself dry, the drops spraying all around. He had not gotten through to her, shaken her, but was simply one of the pleasures the world offered.

Sometimes he wanted to grab and shake her. As if there were another Fran in the Fran he was with, as if he could break through the shell in which she, whether happy or sad, seemed uninvolved and unreachable: to hack his way through the hedge of roses and shake the sleeping princess awake if he couldn’t kiss her awake. He knew the feeling from Cucuron. Once, leafing through Helen’s books, he had come across the fairy tale of
Sleeping Beauty
. He knew that the king’s son who kissed the sleeping princess awake had simply come at the right time. The hundred years had passed,
and the day had come when she was to awaken again. Sleeping Beauty is not to be awakened simply by a kiss.

Once Georg did grab Fran and shake her. It was on a Sunday, and for the first time she hadn’t gone to the library to translate, but spent the whole day with him. They took Jill into their bed, and the three of them bathed in the bathtub. They had Bloody Marys and eggs Benedict for breakfast, and read their way through the thick Sunday
Times
. At two, the phone rang. Fran picked up, said “yes” and “fine” and “till then.” At three she began saying that Sunday together was lovely, but she wasn’t used to their being together so much. She needed her space, and time to be alone. He agreed, and went on reading. She asked him whether he didn’t feel that way too, and whether he wouldn’t like to go out for a few hours.

“In this weather?” He shivered.

“It’s just a little rain. It’ll be like a blanket, you won’t be seen or recognized. You’ve been cooped up in the apartment all week.”

“Maybe later.”

At three-thirty she got to the point. “Somebody’s coming at four, and I’d be happy if you could leave me alone with him for a while.”

“Who’s coming? What’s going on?”

“Sometimes … a man comes to see me and we …”

“You sleep together.”

She nodded.

“Is he the one who called up before?”

“He’s married, and only knows at short notice when he can get away.”

“Then he calls up, comes over, you fuck, and he buttons up his pants and leaves.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you love him?”

“No. It’s … he is …”

“Benton?”

She looked at him, afraid. How he knew and hated that glance. And the small, shrill voice in which she finally asked him: “You’re not going to do anything to me? Or to Jill?”

The old feeling of helplessness and fatigue came over him. No, he thought, I won’t put up with that anymore, but I won’t beat her either. “Fran, I don’t want this. I’m not sure what our relationship is, but everything will be ruined if you sleep with Benton now, and I don’t want everything to be ruined. Don’t open the door when he comes.” Should he tell her he loved her?

But she had already started rationalizing, sentence after sentence, in a whining voice. “No, Georg, that’s impossible. He knows I’m here and that if I’m here I’ll open the door. He’s coming all the way from Queens. He’s my boss, and Monday I’ve got to go back to work—Monday, that’s tomorrow. I won’t let you mess up my life. You’d like that, wouldn’t you! And how do you imagine it? Joe is outside the door, hears Jill screaming and me running around, and I don’t open it? Have you thought of that? It doesn’t work that way. You come bursting into my life and make demands. I never promised you anything. And what do you think Joe is going to do when he’s outside and I don’t let him in? Do you think he’ll shrug his shoulders, go down the stairs, get in his car, and go home? He would obviously think something happened to me when I tell him he can come over and then don’t open the door. He’ll call the super and the fire department, and I wouldn’t like to think what would happen then. I …”

He grabbed her, shook her, and screamed into her face in which her voiceless mouth went on forming sentences: “Shut up, Fran, stop!” She screwed up her face. “You’ll write a note saying you had to take Jill to the hospital, and you’ll leave it on the door downstairs. And if he comes up anyway—I’ll deal with him, which is perhaps the right end for this crazy story! I’ve had it!” Jill had
woken up and was screaming, and Georg saw the fear again in Fran’s look. “Do it, otherwise you and Jill will regret it.”

She wrote the note and stuck it on the door downstairs. Benton didn’t buzz. They finished reading the paper, cooked together, and went to bed early, because Fran had to be up early. They made love, and it seemed to Georg that she was so passionate because he was so remote.

In his thoughts he was with Townsend Enterprises, Gorgefield Aircraft, and the Russians. He wanted to bring the story to an end. The way the players were placed and the cards dealt, it looked bad for him. The cards needed to be called in, reshuffled, and dealt again—and why not bring in a new player? If the Russians weren’t in the game, he’d have to bring them in.

IF THE THIRTY MILLION JOE
had gotten from Gorgefield Aircraft wasn’t enough, and Joe wanted another thirty million from the Russians—how would he go about it? He would make contact, present them with a model construction sketch, and name a price. Joe wouldn’t do this as head of Townsend Enterprises—in fact, he would perhaps go through a straw man. How would the Russians react? They would study the designs thoroughly, want details about all the material, haggle over the price, find out whom they were dealing with, and whether they were being taken for a ride. And how would he, Georg, set his trap?

By the time Fran came home from work Monday evening, he had a plan. Up till then, he had celebrated Fran’s return home according to the image of the ideal American housewife he had gotten from the movies, with Jill on his arm, dinner on the stove, cocktails in the fridge, and candles on the table. It was an ironic game, but an affectionate one. On this evening, Georg was playing another game.

“Which do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad?” he asked.

Fran realized that something was up, and smiled uncertainly. “The good news.”

“I’m leaving in a few days.”

“But you have to … I mean, we …”

He waited, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. She looked at him; the dimple above her right eyebrow was trembling. He was hoping that she would … he himself didn’t know what he was hoping.

“And the bad news?”

“Either you and Jill go with me, or I’ll take Jill alone.”

“Go where?” There was alarm in her voice.

“To San Francisco, for a week.”

“Are you crazy? I started work today and can’t take another week off.”

“Then I’ll go alone with Jill.”

She put down the brown shopping bag and put her hands on her hips. “You really are crazy. You and Jill … What are you up to? What do you hope to gain from it?”

“I’m taking Jill as a hostage if you really want to know. As a hostage so that you won’t say a word to anyone until I come back and get away for good. So you don’t run to Joe Benton and betray me.”

“I would never do that. I haven’t done it all the time you’ve been here.”

“I’m taking her as a hostage so you don’t confess to Benton that you copied the Mermoz documents and gave them to me. For that’s exactly what you’ll do tomorrow or the day after.”

“Oh no! I don’t know what game you’re playing, but it won’t work. Even if I wanted to—I just can’t, I have no idea where he keeps the documents, how I could get hold of them, how I should copy them—”

“You can photograph them. You know how to do that. And
don’t try telling me you can’t.… You’ve been his lover for years, you still sleep with him, you know he got thirty million from Gorgefield Aircraft, which you couldn’t have learned from the assets report of Townsend Enterprises, you know he arranged Maurin’s murder and …”

“And your cats, don’t forget your cats,” she said. He looked at her, dumbfounded. She again had her shrill little girl’s voice, but at the same time scorn and sheer hatred in her voice and her narrowed eyes. “You on your high horse! You think you’re better than him and better than me. You look down on us. But that’s just the way life is, everyone fights for their own piece of the cake, you too, only not as well! Joe didn’t make the rules!”

“You don’t understand the key point,” he said calmly. “All these years you’ve known Benton well enough to be able to find out where he keeps the Mermoz documents and how you can get hold of them. The point isn’t who made the rules. Okay, Benton didn’t make them, you didn’t make them, I didn’t make them. But the thing is that I’ve finally understood them, just the way you and Benton have long understood them! I have Jill. You get hold of the Mermoz documents. You’ll also get hold of the names of Benton’s contact at Gorgefield Aircraft and a letterhead of Gorgefield’s, a brochure, whatever has the firm’s logo on it. If you want Jill back, you’d better get to it.”

“You really mean it!”

“Yes, Fran, I really mean it.”

“And how do you imagine you and Jill managing in San Francisco?”

“What’s to imagine? There must be thousands of fathers on the road with their little daughters. Once I’m there, I’ll take her along with me if I can’t get a babysitter, and I’ll feed her and change her diapers.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. If you have any advice, I’m all ears. I could buy one of those baby carriers and sling it across my chest—you know the ones I mean.”

They looked at each other. In her glance there was no longer hate, only sadness. Sadness? Georg had seen her frightened, anxious, remote, rejecting, hostile, cheerful, but never sad. If she can look like that, he thought, then she really is Sleeping Beauty behind the hedge of roses. Whether she could gaze happily with the same seriousness and collectedness … Could she? Now her glance pierced though him—Georg would gladly have asked her what she was thinking. Then there was a bright gurgling in her throat, a smothered laugh that she covered with her hand—perhaps she was amused, imagining Georg with Jill in a sling across his chest. But just for a moment.

“If you really do do that, Georg, I’ll never forgive you! Never! To take Jill from me, use her to blackmail me—I can’t find words for how despicable I think that is, how low, how cowardly! You haven’t been able to fight like a … like a man for your piece of the cake, or perhaps you tried and missed out, and now you want to try in some kind of backhanded way, after the fact.… What you didn’t destroy back then in Cucuron you’re destroying now. I know I never should have let myself in for the job in Cucuron, and I ought not to have let it happen between us, or for it to get serious and go on for so long. It was a mistake. I always knew it, but somehow … was it the sex? But never mind. Don’t destroy everything now. Stay here or leave the country—I’ll talk to Joe, and see to it that you can leave without any problems and go back to Cucuron. But don’t take Jill away from me and force me to break into Joe’s safe like a thief!”

“No, Fran. I’m going to bring this to an end. You think it’s already at an end. But it isn’t, not for me.”

Late in the evening she tried once again to change his mind. She
tried the next day and the day after. She tried being calm, then with tears and shouting, with reasoning, pleas, threats, swearing, and seduction. Sometimes he noticed with both shock and relief how afraid of him she was, in the same way she was afraid of Benton.

The next day she brought him the letterhead from Gorgefield Aircraft and the name of Benton’s contact there. The day after she brought the cans with the negatives of the construction drawings. On the copies Georg had, the Mermoz logo was barely visible in the lower right corner, where the original had a majestic double-decker plane stamped with the letters
M, E, R, M, O
, and
Z
between the upper and lower wings. On a copy, Georg pasted on the Gorgefield logo and covered it with White-Out until even the
G
, whose arc formed the curve of the earth and whose crossbar formed the fuselage of an airplane, could only dimly be made out. He had Fran make a copy of this copy, and to accompany it wrote a short letter on Fran’s typewriter:

He mulled over whether he should address the letter to “Dear Sir or Madam” or just “Dear Sirs,” and whether the code name “Rotors” was good enough, but both issues were unimportant. Beneath the address, he simply wrote “Re: Attack Helicopter.” He put the letter and the prepared copy in the envelope, addressed it
to the Soviet embassy in Washington, and on Wednesday evening dropped it in a mailbox. He did this in the dead of night with Jill on his arm. He sat for a long time in front of a lamp with the negatives Fran had brought, trying to assess their authenticity and completeness. When he rolled them up again and stuck them in the cans, he wasn’t much the wiser.