The Informer (26 page)

Armina worked her way through the crowd, back to the bar where Felix finished a pig’s foot, his fingers slick with gelatin.

“Oh,” said Felix. “You again.”

“Do you know a man by the name of Hauptmann?” she said.

“Hauptmann?” said Felix. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, you do,” said Armina.

His dark, ash-colored eyes moved from the bar to look at her.

“You better by careful, missy,” he said.

Another window broke with a tingling, almost festive sound. The mob from the dinning room went by Armina, and as she struggled against it, Karl took her by the arm. He pulled her out of the stream of men who were going to the front of the room, and said, “Come on. Out this way.”

The fighting started outside on the curb in front of the restaurant. The women screamed and tried to get their coats. Outside the leg of a chair hit a man on the side of the head with a sound of bones being broken with a cleaver. A pistol went off, and the air was filled with potatoes stuck with nails, and here and there fists emerged from the mass. A few signs waved this way and that, like battle flags at the moment when all is won or lost. In the distance police whistles were frail and useless.

“But there’s something else, too,” said Armina. “Isn’t there?”

“Yes,” said Karl. He looked around. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“But there’s something else,” said Armina.

“Yes,” said Karl. “I was there when Breiter got it.”

“And it was politics?” said Armina. “Is that why Gaelle was killed?”

“Yes,” said Karl. “But I don’t know who did it. Someone on the right? The man from Moscow? I wish I knew. Oh yeah.”

Karl took Armina by the arm and pulled her against the stream of men who tried to get to the front of the room. “Out this way. I’ll show you.” Karl pushed through the men, dragging her by her arm, and in the crush she saw Felix. He finished the last of the pig’s knuckles, and as Armina went into the hallway with Karl, Felix went on staring at her. He mouthed, “Careful.”

Armina saw the back door, where Karl let her go, and as she came out the door, she thought about that mark in the dirt by the grave and Felix’s nicotine-stained fingers.

A
rmina came out of the rear of the building and walked around to the front where the voices of the men sounded like machinery in the midst of an accident: the intensity of the garbled threats, of the shouts, was like the shriek of brakes, the grinding of steel as an engineer tried to stop hundred of tons of locomotive. Here and there on the cobblestones, beneath the funeral pants of men from the Ring, bodies lay with their shoes in a V. The limbs of the unconscious were oddly loose, like rubber, and the shoes flipped back and forth as they were trampled.

Felix came out of the restaurant, looked one way and another, and pulled his head down, the gesture at once protective and familiar. Like a turtle, thought Armina. That’s what it is. Felix kept his eyes on the men in the street, and when they surged one way, like surf sliding up a beach, he moved along the storefronts. Felix didn’t look like much, but she guessed that was part of what made him dangerous. Just a kid, a limping boy who seemed to be stunted no matter how old he was. Forever shrunk. She put her hand in her purse and touched the pistol—sleek, heavy, and yet not giving her what she wanted, since the pistol seemed like hard chaos rather than the order she needed.

A little privacy, thought Armina. A chance to get him by himself. A chance to talk with no one around. An out-of-the-way place, quiet and private.

She stayed some distance behind as Felix dragged his leg and leaned forward, as though into a wind. He seemed harmless as he moved with that stopping and starting, and yet his awkwardness still suggested the coiled nature of a hidden danger, like a sapling trapped under a log. It was the stiff leg, she thought, that made that mark in the dirt.

Felix turned into the park, his up-and-down, stumbling gait scaring the pigeons, which rose in a trembling, shimmering mass against the sky. The shadows of the park at this time of year seemed blue-green, like dirty seawater. He went along the path by the benches where lovers sat in the evenings.

Armina went along the path, too, and she thought about that mark in the soft dirt of the stone shed where they had found Gaelle—about two feet long, vaguely curved like a new moon—about the depth someone would make to plant seeds, carrots, say. Armina tried to reassure herself with the memory of carrot tops, bushy and bright green with the texture of lace.

The birds seemed cheerfully insistent, and she tried to remember the names of the birds she had learned as a child.
Chettusia gregaria
. The Sociable Plover.
Gregaria
. She was reassured by that. Or a Eurasian Woodcock,
Scolopax rusticola
. Or the Bohemian Waxwing,
Bombycilla garrulus garrulus
. That was another one.
Garrulus
. She reached into her handbag to touch the pistol. Time seemed to collapse ahead of her, as though the future were so close as to deny almost any possibility she liked. She knew something was coming and yet she was amazed that everything seemed the same: ordinary late afternoon, birds flitting from tree to tree.

Felix sat on a bench, hands in his pockets. In the afternoon light, the trees and the grass were different shades of green, one a little more intense than the other, and the brush was a muted color, like military fatigues.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Have you?” said Armina.

“Sure,” said Felix. “I can tell when someone wants to talk. It’s my job. Why, people always get this look when they’re going to ask for something, you know, something kinky. Kind of shifty. Why, they say, will Gaelle do this or that?”

He stopped and looked around.

“She’s not going to be doing any of that,” said Armina.

“No,” said Felix. “At least where she’s gone she’s not going to have to do that. Why, you wouldn’t believe what people wanted to do to her. And she was such a tough mutt, you know. There’s nothing she couldn’t take.”

He stood up.

“Come on, let’s walk,” he said.

He stepped closer to her, almost as though he wanted to take her arm.

“Your perfume smells nice,” he said. He put his nose a little closer and sniffed, the gesture so frank and intimate that Armina began to slap him, but then she stopped. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. “You know what I heard? Perfume reacts differently with different skin. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’d heard that.”

His head rose and fell as he walked next to her.

“So, where are we going?” she said.

“Just a walk,” he said. “I talk better when I’m walking, don’t you?”

“Sometimes,” she said.

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Let’s get off the path. Over here.”

“You seem to know the park pretty well,” said Armina.

“You could say that,” said Felix. He smiled and showed his bad teeth.

“OK,” she said. “How about here? What do you have to say?”

“Don’t you want to walk with me? Or are you too good for that? There’s a nice gully on the other side. Over there.”

He raised an arm toward an open field covered with silver highlights from the moisture in the grass. A bird dipped as it flew in a looping path, like wires hung from one telegraph pole to another. The mark in the dirt had been about an inch deep, shaped like a scythe.

“It’s private,” he said. “We can talk.”

He reached down and rubbed the side of his bad leg.

“It aches so much these days,” he said. “Must be the damp, or something.” He went on caressing his thin leg with a repeated touch, as though he were pushing the pain into the ground.

“You think I’m just a kid with a limp and bad teeth,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “Nothing I can do about it. Say, how many people are working on Gaelle?”

“Oh, a lot of people are working on it,” she said.

“I bet it’s only you,” he said. “I’d bet a lot. Come on. You need some help. Why, I’d sure like to get the guy who did it.”

“Would you?” she said. “You’re sure about that?”

“This thing is driving me nuts, you know that?” he said. He touched his leg. “It just won’t leave me alone. It’s a funny kind of pain, like slow, constant lightning. Like electricity. Come on.”

They went off the path to the meadow, where they left a darker trail of footsteps in the evening’s first dew. The birds flew overhead, seemingly playing with one another, one chasing another as they turned sharply at the edge of the meadow. Up ahead the green wall on the far side of the meadow faced them.

“It figures that it would only be you,” said Felix. “Who cares about Gaelle? Just a woman with a funny face who still is young. Why, I was the only one to look after her. I used to wash her stockings.”

“Did you?” said Armina.

“They’d get dirty and I’d wash them out and hang them up to dry. She sat around with no clothes on when I did it. Slept that way on her bed. I never bothered her.”

“You don’t have to walk so close to me,” said Armina.

“Sure, sure,” he said.

They came to the edge of the field and began to go into the green shade of the woods. A screen of undergrowth went around the top of a gully, and if she pushed her way through it, she would be able to look down below, into the depression where more brush grew. The leaves of the plants in front of her were small ones with a serrated edge, like a saw, and some of them trembled and sprinkled water on her as she pushed through them. She glanced at every detail, as though each one had some significance she could understand if she was only alert enough, or smart enough. The gully was like a dark green pool. Low plants, some grass at its edge, all dense enough to cover the ground.

Felix stopped in some brush, turned sideways into it, grabbed his leg, and lifted it over a low-growing branch. He grunted. Armina continued into the bottom of the gully. She looked from one end to the other for a bright piece of clothing, or a scarf, or any sign that something or someone was here, and as she started going over the landscape again as though to see
what she missed, she realized that she had let Felix get behind her. She had thought that he was going to show her another woman here, but now she realized she had been left alone, at the bottom of a swale, the scent of the dead leaves rising slowly from the ground.

She stood still. He must have been still, too. She imagined him behind the scraggly brush that was frost burned, his acne scars perfectly blended with the brownish leaves. She waited for him to move. The birds sang, and in the distance a car tootled on the avenue and engines ran with a steady popping. A breeze came up and the leaves made a hush. A low, panting huff came from the top of the gully, and then a black dog emerged from a scrim of branches and leaves.

She started up the gully, back to the top. How could she have worn such shoes? Heels too high, soles too thin, and the soles were already wet. Her stockings had run in narrow ladders. And as she stumbled over a rotting trunk halfway up the slope, a hot spike pierced the back of her thigh, and then she turned to see that a limb had snapped back at her. For an instant, she imagined that a snake had bitten her, but could there be snakes in the middle of the city? Had one escaped from a private zoo? Then, as she twisted to see what had happened, she fell backward, as in a dream, and she landed on a hard spike, a broken stump of a piece of undergrowth, the wooden point sinking into the back of her thigh. The throb, the trickle of blood, the cold ache of the puncture left her more desperate than before. How clumsy, she thought. How could I let something like that happen now. Then she thought, that is just vanity. Get up.

At the top, behind a screen of brush, Felix waited, his gray face in an expression of extreme lassitude, as though it was difficult for him to stay awake. His eyes blinked with a slow repetition, like a lizard who sees a fly.

“So,” he said. “Here we are. In the middle of the park.”

The birds stopped singing, and the other sounds that she had become accustomed to, the slight movement of the leaves, which made a hush, the distant laughter of couples on a path, all ceased: the silence moved around her like the scent of a smoldering fire.

“Listen,” said Felix.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Armina.

“That’s right,” said Felix. “Why, I wonder if you have ever thought of
being out here alone like this, and what had happened to those women in the park. It’s not safe, is it?”

She reached into her handbag.

“Oh,” said Felix. “No. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to do that.”

“No?” said Armina.

“I just thought it was important for you to hear that silence. It’s like a warning, see?”

“About what?” said Armina.

“This city is a hard place,” said Felix. “Why, all kinds of things are going on. And you can’t see it.”

“And you can?” said Armina. “Maybe you should tell me about it.”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “It’s all in the silence. It’s not what you know, but what you don’t know. That’s where the trouble is. And so like a friend I am trying to help you. Why, all kinds of things can go wrong. Look at Gaelle.”

“I want to talk to you about a mark in the dirt,” said Armina.

He looked right at her.

“You made one by the side of the grave,” said Armina.

“Why, you are going to try and take it out on my leg,” he said. He slapped it. “Why, that’s another thing I have against it. You won’t even let me grieve for my friend.” He looked around. “You’re going to need a lot more than a gimpy leg.”

They stood opposite each other.

“And you see out here how easy it was for me to get behind you? Why, that could happen anytime. I’m not saying me, you know, but that’s what you’re up against. Someone coming up behind you.”

The birds went on flying, as though nothing had happened, in that same looping pattern, rising when they flapped their wings, then gliding, swooping back toward the earth.

“So, if all you’ve got is a gimpy leg, I’d forget about that. I’d worry about my own troubles. Like some night you hear something behind you in the dark.”

He plunged up and down, pushed the leafy branches aside, and disappeared into the undergrowth. The branches throbbed back and forth, the
leaves shedding the drops of water, which made a steady pattering on the ground. Armina stepped forward, looking one way and then another, and as she circled back, afraid that he had gotten behind her again, she saw the path that she had made in the leaves. Underneath them the dirt was black and rich. She pushed her toe into it, turned some of it over and saw the dark purple worms begin to move with the serpentine movement of such creatures. She thought of Gaelle and the women she had seen in the park, the weight of all of them anchoring her right here, as though they were somehow pulling her down.

She sat in the leaves, if only to think for a moment. She tapped the barrel of the pistol against her head, the hard whack of it reassuring, bracing, and she concentrated on it, as though if she could just clear her head sufficiently, she could do the right thing. The cadence of the pistol was the same as the pounding of her blood. She put her fingers along the back of her thigh and felt the cut stocking from the branch that had hit her, and when she stood up, in a moment of uneasiness, she saw a series of little flashes of light, like bits from a sparkler, that hung in the air and then popped, just like a soap bubble. She was surprised they didn’t make a sound as they disappeared.

It was twilight and the sky was gray and pink. The air cooled quickly, and the grass, the frost-burned leaves were shiny in the first, sudden dew. She thought of the barometer on her wall, the little needle with the shape of a spear, the script that was as formal as that in a legal document: what did the instrument say now? Change? High pressure? She stood up and held her leg.

Felix’s footsteps showed in the film of moisture on the grass of the meadow, and the pattern he left looked like a period next to a comma: one foot went directly ahead and the other swung around to keep up. She supposed that Felix might not have been alone in this. Was that right? Was she getting dizzy because she was afraid? He was just a kid, a boy with a limp, and yet he was right to invoke that silence: it was large enough and mysterious enough and so associated with the women in the park, the memory of Gaelle’s face, as though the scar had been a monument to silence, to all those things that are unchangeable. It was as though Felix were an apostle of the worst silence there is: the kind that lingered around the women she
had found in the park. And yet, he was just a limping boy, right? So why was Armina in such a state?