Chapter 12. The Rendezvous Point

Barbour’s would have to be the longest, as they were the persons who most deserved an explanation and also because they were the only persons who, if I died, would actual y care. But I would write to Kitsey as wel —to assure her that it wasn’t her fault. Pippa’s letter would be the shortest. I wanted her to know just how much I loved her while also letting her know that she bore not one particle of blame for not loving me back.

But I wouldn’t say that. It was rosepetals I wanted to throw, not a poison dart. The point was to let her know, briefly, how happy she had made me while leaving out al the more obvious part.

When I shut my eyes, I was struck by clinical y sharp flashes of memory that the fever brought bursting up from nowhere, like tracer rounds going off in the jungle, lurid flares of highly detailed and emotional y complex material. Harpstrings of light through the barred windows of our old apartment on Seventh Avenue, scratchy sisal matting and the red waffled texture it left in my hands and knees when I was playing down on the floor. A tangerine party dress of my mother’s with shiny things on the skirt I always wanted to touch.

Alameda, our old housekeeper, mashing plantains in a glass bowl.

Andy, saluting me before stumbling down the gloomy hal of his parents’ apartment: Aye, Captain.

Medieval voices, austere and otherworldly. The gravity of unadorned song.

I didn’t actual y feel upset, that was the thing. Instead it was more like the last and worst of my root canals when the dentist had leaned in under the lamps and said almost done.

December 24

Dear Kitsey,

I’m terribly sorry about this but I want you to know that it has nothing to do with you, and nothing to do with any of your family. Your mother wil be receiving a separate letter which wil have a bit more information but in the meantime I want to assure you, privately, that my course of action has not been influenced by anything that has happened between us, especial y events of late.

Where this stiff voice, and unnatural y stiff handwriting had come from—incongruous with the cloudbursts of memory and hal ucination crashing in on me from al sides—I did not know. The wet sleet pelting against the windowpanes had a kind of deep historical weight to it, starvation, armies marching, a never-ending drizzle of sadness.

As you wel know, and have pointed out to me yourself, I have numerous problems that began long before I met you, and none of these problems are your fault. If your mother has questions for you about your role in recent events, I should urge you to refer her to Tessa Margolis, or—even better—Em, who wil be more than delighted to share her views on my character. Also—completely unrelated matter, but I also urge you not to let Havistock Irving into your apartment again, ever.

Kitsey as a child. Fine hair straggling in her face. Shut up you goofbal s. Cut it out or I’l tel .

Last but not least—

(my pen hovering over this line)

last but not least I want to tel you how beautiful you looked at the party and how touched I was that you wore my mother’s earrings. She was crazy about Andy—she would have loved you too, and would have loved for us to be together. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But I do hope things work out for you. Real y.

Best love,

Theo

Sealed; addressed; put aside. They’d have stamps at the front desk.

Dear Hobie,

This is a hard letter to write and I’m sorry to be writing it.

Alternate sweats and frosts. I was seeing green spots. My fever was so high the wal s seemed to be shrinking.

This isn’t about the bad pieces I’ve sold. I expect you’l hear soon enough what it’s about.

Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like al living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time.

The effects of time, visible and invisible.

and, I don’t quite know how to say this but I guess what I’m thinking about is this sick puppy my mother and I found on the street in Chinatown. She was lying in a space between two garbage cans. She was a baby pit bul . Smel y, dirty. Skin and bones. Too weak to stand up. People just walking by her. And I got upset and my mother promised me that we’d pick her up if she was stil there when we finished eating. And when we got out of the restaurant, there she stil was. So we hailed a cab, I carried her in my arms, and when we got her home my mother made her a box in the kitchen and she was so happy and licked our faces and drank a ton of water and ate the dog food we bought her and threw it al right back up.

Wel to make a long story short, she died. It wasn’t our fault.

We felt like it was. We took her in to the vet, and bought her special food, but she only got sicker and sicker. We were both real y fond of her by this time. And my mother took her in again, to a specialist at the Animal Medical Center. And the vet said—this dog has a disease, which I forget the name of, and she had it when you found her, and I know this is not what you want to hear but it is going to be a whole lot kinder if you euthanize her right now

My hand had been flying in reckless jerks and starts across the paper. But at the end of the page while reaching for another, I stopped, appal ed. What I’d experienced as weightlessness, a sort of sweeping, last-chance glide, was not at al the eloquent and affecting farewel I’d imagined. The handwriting sloped and slopped al over the place and was not intel igent or coherent or even legible. There had to be some much briefer, and simpler, way to thank Hobie and say what I had to say: namely, that he shouldn’t feel bad, he’d always been good to me and done his best to help me, just as my mother and I had done our best to help this baby pit bul , who—it was actual y a pertinent point, only I didn’t want to spin the story out too long—for al her sweet-tempered qualities had been incredibly destructive in the days leading to her death, she’d pretty much destroyed the whole apartment and ripped our sofa to pieces.

Maudlin, self-indulgent, tasteless. My throat felt as if the lining had been scraped out with a razor.

Off comes the upholstery. Look here: we have woodworm. We’l have to treat it with Cuprinol.

The night I’d overdosed in Hobie’s upstairs bathroom, expecting not to wake up and waking up anyway with my cheek on the trippy old hexagonal floor tile, I’d been amazed at exactly how radiant a pre-war bathroom with plain white fittings could be when you were looking at it from the afterlife.

The beginning of the end? Or the end of the end?

Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever.

One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar. The aspirins rasped and stuck in my chest, like swal owing gravel, and I pounded trying to get them down, the booze had made me feel a whole lot sicker, thirsty, confused, fish hooks in my throat, water trickling absurdly down my cheeks, gasping and wheezing, I’d opened the wine as a treat (supposedly) but it was going down like turpentine, burning and razoring around in my stomach, should I run a bath, should I cal down for something hot, something simple, broth or tea? No: the thing was simply to finish the wine or maybe just go right ahead and start in on the vodka; somewhere online I’d read that only two per cent of attempted suicides by overdose were successful, which seemed like an absurdly low number although one unfortunately borne out by previous experience. It aint gonna rain no mo’. That was somebody’s suicide note. It was only a farce. Jean Harlow’s husband, who kil ed himself on their wedding night. George Sanders’s had been the best, an Old Hol ywood classic, my father had known it by heart and liked to quote from it. Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. And then, Hart Crane. Pivot and drop, shirt bal ooning as he fel . Goodbye everybody! A shouted farewel , jumping off ship.

I no longer considered my body my own. It had ceased to belong to me. My hands, moving, felt separate, floating of their own accord, and when I stood it was like operating a marionette, unfolding myself, rising jerkily on strings.

Hobie had told me that when he was a young man he drank Cutty Sark because it was Hart Crane’s whiskey. Cutty Sark means Short

Skirt.

Pale green wal s in the piano room, palm trees and pistachio ices.

Ice-coated windows. Unheated rooms of Hobie’s childhood.

The Old Masters, they were never wrong.

What did I think, what did I feel?

It hurt to breathe. The packet of heroin was in the night table on the other side of the bed. But though my dad, with his unflagging love for show-biz hel , would have adored the whole set up—dope, dirty ashtray, booze and al —I couldn’t quite bear the thought of being found sprawled out in my complimentary hotel robe like a has-been lounge singer. The thing to do was clean up, shower and shave and put on my suit so I didn’t look too seedy when they found me and only then, at the last, after the night chambermaids were off duty, take the Do Not Disturb sign off the door: better if they found me first thing, I didn’t want them to find me from the smel .

It felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I’d been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I’d stood on the corner to savor it

—the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.

Suit from the closet. Shirts al dirty. Why hadn’t I thought to send one out? My shoes were waterlogged and wrecked which added a final sorry note to the picture—but no (pausing muddled in the middle of the room), was I going to lay myself out ful y dressed, shoes and al , like a corpse on a slab? I’d broken out in a cold sweat, shivers and chil s again, the whole routine. I needed to sit down.

Maybe I was going to have to re-think the whole presentation. Tear up the letters. Make it look like an accident. Much nicer if it looked like I was on my way to some mysterious dress-up party, just having a bump on the way out—sitting on the edge of the bed, little too much, black sparklers and fizz-pops, keeling over deliciously.

Whoops.

White wings of tumult. Running jump into the infinite.

Then—at a blare of trumpets—I started. The liturgical chant had given way to a burst of inappropriately festive orchestration. Melodic, brassy. A wave of frustration boiled up in me. Nutcracker Suite. Al wrong. Al wrong. A ful -blooded Seasonal Extravaganza wasn’t at al the note to go out on, dashing orchestral number, March of the Something Something, and al at once my stomach heaved, violent pitch right into my throat, it felt like I’d swal owed a quart of lemon juice and the next thing I knew almost before I could lurch for the wastebasket it was al coming up in a clear acid gush, wave after wave after yel owy wave.

After it was over, I sat on the carpet with my forehead resting on the sharp metal edge of the can and the kiddie-bal et music sparkling along irritatingly in the background: not even drunk, that was the hel of it, just sick. In the hal way I could hear a gaggle of Americans, couples, laughing, saying their loud goodbyes as they parted for their respective rooms: old col ege friends, jobs in the financial sector, five-plus years of corporate law and Fiona entering first grade in the fal , al ’s wel in Oaklandia, wel goodnight then, God we love you guys, a life I might have had myself except I didn’t want it. That was the last thing I remember thinking before I made it swaying to my feet and switched the annoying music off and—stomach roiling—

threw myself face down on the bed like throwing myself off a bridge, every lamp in the room stil blazing as I sank away from the light, blackness closing over my head.

iv.

WHEN I WAS A boy, after my mother died, I always tried hard to hold her in my mind as I was fal ing asleep so maybe I’d dream of her, only I never did. Or, rather, I dreamed of her constantly, only as absence, not presence: a breeze blowing through a just-vacated house, her handwriting on a notepad, the smel of her perfume, streets in strange lost towns where I knew she’d been walking only a moment before but had just vanished, a shadow moving away

against a sunstruck wal . Sometimes I spotted her in a crowd, or in a taxicab pul ing away, and these glimpses of her I treasured despite the fact that I was never able to catch up with her. Always, ultimately, she eluded me: I’d always just missed her cal , or misplaced her phone number; or run up breathless and gasping to the place where she was supposed to be, only to find her gone. In adult life these chronic near misses pulsed with a messier and much more painful anxiety: I would be stricken with panic to learn, or remember, or be told by some implausible party that she was living across town in some terrible slum apartment where for reasons inexplicable I had not gone to see her or contacted her in years. Usual y I was frantical y trying to hail a cab or make my way to her when I woke up.

These insistent scenarios had a repetitive and borderline-brutal quality that reminded me of the wound-up Wal Street husband of one of Hobie’s clients who, when he got in a certain mood, liked to tel the same three stories of his Vietnam war experience over and over with the same mechanical wording and gestures: same rat-a-tat of gunfire, same chopping hand, always in the exact same spot.

Everyone’s face got very stil over the after-dinner drinks when he spieled off into his routine, which we’d al seen a mil ion times and which (like my own ruthless loop of searching for my mother, night after night, year after year, dream after dream) was rigid and invariable. He was always going to stumble and fal over the same tree root; he would never make it to his friend Gage in time, just as I would never manage to find my mother.

But that night, final y, I did find her. Or more accurately: she found me. It felt like a one off, although maybe some other night, some other dream, she’l come to me like that again—maybe when I’m dying, though it seems almost too much to wish for. Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty’s death, Andy’s death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because—writing this now, I’m close to tears—I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he’d known, and liked, who’d ever died. So—

maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it’s

stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it’s more stupid not to.

Either way—one-off or not—it was a gift; and if she had only one visit, if that’s al they al owed her, she saved it for when it mattered.

Because al of a sudden, there she was. I was standing in front of a mirror and looking at the room reflected behind me, which was an interior much like Hobie’s shop, or, rather, a more spacious and eternal-seeming version of the shop, cel o-brown wal s and an open window which was like an entry point into some much larger, unimaginable theater of sunlight. The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and speech; where al was stil ness and clarity, and at the same time, as in a backward-run movie, you could also imagine spil ed milk leaping back into the pitcher, a jumping cat flying backward to land silently upon a table, a waystation where time didn’t exist or, more accurately, existed al at once in every direction, al histories and movements occurring simultaneously.

And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless.

Somehow I knew I wasn’t al owed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was al about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hel o! Fondness, intel igence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stil ness, stil ness and modulation, and al the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was al a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t

yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I.

And I knew that she could tel me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to al questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: wel , you’l just have to wait and see, won’t you? But just as she was about to speak—

drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very wel , the sound of which I can hear even now—I woke up.

v.

WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was morning. Al the lamps in the room were stil blazing and I was under the covers with no memory of how I’d gotten under them. Everything was stil bathed and saturated with her presence—higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints—not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.

Stil half sleeping, I drifted in the bedclothes, buoyed by the sweetness of the dream washing quietly about me. Even the ambient morning sounds in the hal way had taken on the atmosphere and color of her presence; for if I listened hard, in my half-dreaming state, it seemed that I could hear the specific light, cheerful sound of her footsteps mixed up with the clank of the room service trays up and down the hal and the rattle of elevator cables, the opening and closing of elevator doors: a very urban sound, a sound I associated with Sutton Place, and her.

Then, suddenly, bursting into the last wisps of bioluminescence stil trailing from the dream, the bel s of the nearby church broke out in such violent clangor that I bolted upright in a panic, fumbling for my glasses. I had forgotten what day it was: Christmas.

Unsteadily, I got up and went to the window. Bel s, bel s. The streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops;

outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intel igent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cel ular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.

First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.

I took a shower, shaved and dressed. Then, quietly, I cleared up and packed my things. Somehow I would have to get Gyuri’s ring and watch back to him, assuming he was stil alive, which I was increasingly doubtful he was: the watch alone was a fortune—a BMW 7 series, a down payment on a condo. I would FedEx them to Hobie for safekeeping and leave his name for Gyuri at the front desk, just in case.

Frosted panes, snow ghosting the cobblestones, deep and speechless, no traffic on the streets, centuries superimposed, 1940s by way of 1640s.

It was important not to think too deeply. The important thing was to ride the energy of the dream that had fol owed me into waking.

Since I didn’t speak Dutch, I would go to the American consulate and have the consulate phone the Dutch police. Spoiling some consulate member’s Christmas, the festive family meal. But I didn’t trust myself to wait. Possibly a good idea to go down and look at the State Department’s website and apprise myself of my rights as an American citizen—certainly there were many worse places in the world to be in jail than the Netherlands and maybe if I was up front about everything I knew (Horst and Sascha, Martin and Frits, Frankfurt and Amsterdam) they could run the painting down.

But who knew how it would play. I was certain of nothing except that evasive action was over. Whatever happened, I would not be like my father, dodging and scheming up until the very moment of flipping the car and crashing in flames; I would stand forward and take what was coming to me; and, to that point, I went straight to the bathroom and flushed the glassine stamp down the toilet.

And that was that: fast as Martin, and just as irrevocable. What was it my dad liked to say? Face the music. Not something he’d ever done.

I had been to every corner of the room, done al there was to do except for the letters. Even the handwriting made me wince. But—

the consciousness made me start back—I did have to write Hobie: not the self-pitying wobbles of drunkenness but a few businesslike lines, whereabouts of checkbook, ledger, deposit-box key. Probably just as wel if I admitted, in writing, the furniture fraud, and made it crystal-clear he’d had no knowledge of it. Maybe I could have it witnessed and notarized at the American consulate; maybe Hol y (or whoever) would take pity and cal someone in to do it before they phoned the police. Grisha could back me up on a lot of it without incriminating himself: we’d never discussed it, he’d never questioned me but he’d known it wasn’t kosher, al those hush-hush trips out to the storage unit.

That left Pippa and Mrs. Barbour. God, the letters I’d written Pippa and never sent! My best effort, my most creative, after the disastrous visit with Everett, had begun, and ended, with what I felt was the light, affecting line: Leaving for a while. As a would-be suicide note it had seemed at the time, in terms of concision anyway, a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately I’d miscalculated the dose and awakened twelve hours later with vomit al over the bedspread and had to stagger downstairs stil sick as a dog for a ten a.m. meeting with the IRS.

That said: a going-to-jail note was different, and best left unwritten. Pippa wasn’t fooled by who I was. I had nothing to offer her. I was il ness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.

Jail would only confirm what she knew. The best thing I could do was break off contact. If my father had real y loved my mother—real y loved her the way he said he had, once upon a time—wouldn’t he have done the same?

And then—Mrs. Barbour. It was sinking-ship knowledge, the sort of extremely surprising thing you don’t realize about yourself until the absolute last ditch, until the lifeboats are lowered and the ship is in flames—but, in the end, when I thought of kil ing myself she was the one I real y couldn’t bear to do it to.

Leaving the room—going down to inquire about FedEx and to look at the State Department’s website before I cal ed the consulate

—I stopped. Tiny ribbon-wrapped bag of candies over the doorknob,

a handwritten note: Merry Christmas! Somewhere people were laughing and a delicious smel of strong coffee and burnt sugar and freshly baked bread from room service was floating up and down the hal . Every morning I’d been ordering up the hotel breakfasts, grimly plowing through them—wasn’t Hol and meant to be famous for its coffee? Yet I’d been drinking it every day and not even tasting it.

I slipped the bag of candy in the pocket of my suit and stood in the hal way breathing deep. Even condemned men were al owed to choose a last meal, a topic of discussion which Hobie (indefatigable cook, joyous eater) had more than once introduced at the end of the evening over Armagnac while he was scrambling around for empty snuffboxes and extra saucers to serve as impromptu ashtrays for his guests: for him it was a metaphysical question, best considered on a ful stomach after al the desserts were cleared and the final plate of jasmine caramels was being passed, because—real y looking at the end of it, at the end of the night, closing your eyes and waving goodbye to Earth—what would you actual y choose? Some comforting reminder of the past? Plain chicken dinner from some lost Sunday in boyhood? Or—last grasp at luxury, the far end of the horizon—pheasant and cloudberries, white truffles from Alba? As for me: I hadn’t even known I was hungry until I’d stepped into the hal way, but at that moment, standing there with a rough stomach and a bad taste in my mouth and the prospect of what would be my last freely chosen meal, it seemed to me that I’d never smel ed anything quite so delicious as that sugary warmth: coffee and cinnamon, plain buttered rol s from the Continental breakfast. Funny, I thought, going back into the room and picking up the room service menu: to want something so easy, to feel such appetite for appetite itself.

Vrolijk Kerstfeest! said the kitchen boy half an hour later—a stout, disheveled teenager straight from Jan Steen with a wreath of tinsel on his head and a sprig of hol y behind one ear.

Lifting the silver tops of the trays with a flourish. “Special Dutch Christmas bread,” he said, pointing it out ironical y. “Just for today.”

I’d ordered the “Festive Champagne Breakfast” which included a split of champagne, truffled eggs and caviar, a fruit salad, a plate of

smoked salmon, a slab of pâté, and half a dozen dishes of sauce, cornichons, capers, condiments, and pickled onions.

He had popped the champagne and left (after I’d tipped him with most of my remaining euros) and I’d just poured myself some coffee and was tasting it careful y, wondering if I could stomach it (I was stil queasy and it smel ed not quite so delicious, up close), when the telephone rang.

It was the desk clerk. “Merry Christmas Mr. Decker,” he said rapidly. “I’m sorry but I’m afraid you’ve got someone on the way up.

We tried to stop them at the desk—”

“What?” Frozen. Cup halfway to mouth.

“On the way up. Now. I tried to stop them. I asked them to wait but they wouldn’t. That is—my col eague asked him to wait. He started up before I could telephone—”

“Ah.” Looking around the room. Al my resolve gone in an instant.

“My col eague—” muffled aside—“my col eague just started up the stairs after him—it was al very sudden, I thought I should—”

“Did he give a name?” I asked, walking to the window and wondering if I could break it with a chair. I wasn’t on a high floor and it was a short jump, maybe twelve feet.

“No he didn’t sir.” Speaking very fast. “We couldn’t—that is to say he was very determined—he slipped right by the desk before—”

Commotion in the hal . Some shouted Dutch.

“—we’re short-staffed this morning, as I’m sure you understand—”

Determined pounding at the door—coarse nervous jolt, like the never-ending burst spraying out of Martin’s forehead, that sent my coffee flying. Fuck, I thought, looking at my suit and shirt: wrecked.

Couldn’t they have waited until after breakfast? Then again, I thought

—dabbing my shirt with a napkin, starting grimly to the door: Maybe it was Martin’s guys. Maybe it would be quicker than I thought.

But instead, when I threw open the door—I could scarcely believe it—there stood Boris. Rumpled, red-eyed, battered-looking. Snow in his hair, snow on the shoulders of his coat. I was too startled to be relieved. “What,” I said, as he embraced me, and then to the determined-looking clerk in the hal way, striding rapidly toward us:

“No, it’s okay.”

“You see? Why should I wait? Why should I wait?” he said angrily, flinging out an arm at the clerk, who had stopped dead to stare.

“Didn’t I say? I told you I knew where his room was! How would I know, if not my friend?” Then, to me: “I don’t know why this big production. Ridiculous! I was standing there forever and no one at desk. No one! Sahara Desert!” (glaring at clerk). “Waiting, waiting.

Rang the bel ! Then, the second I start up—‘wait wait sir—’ ” whiny baby voice—“ ‘come back’—here he comes chasing me—”

“Thank you,” I said to the clerk, or his back rather, since after several moments of looking between us in surprise and annoyance he had quietly turned to walk away. “Thanks a lot. I mean it,” I cal ed down the hal after him; it was good to know they stopped people charging upstairs on their own.

“Of course sir.” Not bothering to look around. “Merry Christmas.”

“Are you going to let me in?” said Boris, when final y the elevator doors closed and we were alone. “Or shal we stand here tenderly and gaze?” He smel ed rank, as if he hadn’t showered in days, and he looked both faintly contemptuous and very pleased with himself.

“I—” my heart was pounding, I felt sick again—“for a minute, sure.”

“A minute?” Disdainful look up and down. “You have some place to go?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Potter—” half-humorously, putting down his bag, feeling my forehead with his knuckles—“you look bad. You are fevered. You look like you just dug the Panama Canal.”

“I feel great,” I said curtly.

“You don’t look great. You are white as a fish. Why are you al dressed up? Why did you not answer my cal s? What’s this?” he said

—looking past me, espying the room service table.

“Go ahead. Help yourself.”

“Wel if you don’t mind, I wil . What a week. Been driving al fucking night. Shitty way to spend Christmas Eve—” shouldering his coat off, letting it fal on the floor—“wel , truth told, I’ve spent many worse. At least no traffic on the motorway. We stopped at some awful place on the road, only place open, petrol station, frankfurters with mustard, usual y I like them, but oh my God, my stomach—”

He’d gotten a glass from the bar, was pouring himself some champagne.

“And you, here.” Flicking a hand. “Living it up, I see. Lap of luxury.” He’d kicked off his shoes, wiggling wet sock feet. “Christ, my toes are frozen. Very slushy on the streets—snow is al turning to water.” Pul ing up a chair. “Sit with me. Eat something. Very good timing.” He’d lifted the cover of the chafing dish, was sniffing the plate of truffled eggs. “Delicious! Stil hot! What, what is this?” he said, as I reached in my coat pocket and handed him Gyuri’s watch and ring. “Oh, yes! I forgot. Never mind about that. You can give them back yourself.”

“No, you can do it for me.”

“Wel , we should phone him. This is feast enough for five people.

Why don’t we cal down—” he lifted up the champagne, looked at the level as if studying a table of troubling financials—“why don’t we cal for another of these, ful bottle, or maybe two, and send down for more coffee or some tea maybe? I—” pushing his chair in closer—“I am starving! I’l ask him—” lifting up a piece of smoked salmon, dangling it to his mouth to gobble it before reaching in his pocket for his cel phone—“ask him to dump the car somewhere and walk over, shal I?”

“Fine.” Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heart-sink at the actual sight of him.

“What?” Licking his fingers noisily. “You don’t want Gyuri to come? Who’s been driving me al night? Who went without sleep?

Give him some breakfast at least.” He’d already started in on the eggs. “A lot has happened.”

“A lot has happened to me too.”

“Where are you going?”

“Order what you want.” Fishing the key card out of my pocket, handing it to him. “I’l leave the total open. Charge it to the room.”

“Potter—” throwing down the napkin, starting after me then stopping mid-step and—much to my surprise—laughing. “Go then.

To your new friend or activity so important!”

“A lot has happened to me.”

“Wel —” smugly—“I don’t know what happened to you, but I can say that what happened to me is at least five thousand times more.

This has been some week. This has been one for the books. While you have been luxuriating in hotel, I—” stepping forward, hand on my sleeve—“hang on.” The phone had rung; he turned half away, spoke rapidly in Ukrainian before breaking off and hanging up very suddenly at the sight of me heading out the door.

“Potter.” Grabbing me by the shoulders, looking hard into my pupils, then turning me and steering me around, kicking the door shut behind him with one foot. “What the fuck? You are like Night of the Zombie. What was that movie we liked? The black and white?

Not Living Dead, but the poetry one—?”

“I Walked with a Zombie. Val Lewton.”

“That’s right. That’s the one. Sit down. Weed is very very strong here, even if you are used to it, I should have warned you—”

“I haven’t smoked any weed.”

“—because I tel you, when I came here first, age twenty maybe, at the time smoking trees every day, I thought I could handle anything and—oh my God. My own fault—I was an ass with the guy at the coffeeshop. ‘Give me strongest you have.’ Wel he did! Three hits and I couldn’t walk! I couldn’t stand! It was like I forgot to move my feet! Tunnel vision, no control of muscles. Total disconnection from reality!” He had steered me to the bed; he was sitting beside me with his arm around my shoulders. “And, I mean, you know me but—never! Fast pounding heart, like running and running and whole time sitting stil —no comprehension of my locale—terrible darkness!

Al alone and crying a little, you know, speaking to God in my mind,

‘what did I do,’ ‘why do I deserve this.’ Don’t remember leaving the place! Like a horrible dream. And this is weed, mind you! Weed!

Came to on the street, al jel y legs, clutching onto a bike rack near Dam Square. I thought traffic was driving up on the sidewalk and going to wreck into me. Final y found my way to my girl’s flat in the Jordaan and layed around for a long time in a bath with no water in it. So—” He was looking suspiciously at my coffee-splattered shirt front.

“I didn’t smoke any weed.”

“I know, you said! Was just tel ing you a story. Thought it was a little interesting to you maybe. Wel —no shame,” he said.

“Whatever.” The ensuing silence was endless. “I forgot to say—I forgot to say”—he was pouring me a glass of mineral water—“after this time I told you? Wandering on the Dam? I felt wrong for three days after. My girl said, ‘Let’s go out, Boris, you can’t lie here any more and waste the whole weekend.” Vomited in the van Gogh museum. Nice and classy.”

The cold water, hitting my sore throat, threw me into goosebumps and into a visceral bodily memory from boyhood: painful desert sunlight, painful afternoon hangover, teeth chattering in the air-conditioned chil . Boris and I so sick we kept retching, and laughing about retching, which made us retch even harder. Gagging on stale crackers from a box in my room.

“Wel —” Boris stealing a glance at me sideways—“something going around maybe. If was not Christmas Day, I would run down and get something to help your stomach. Here here—” dumping some food on a plate, shoving it at me. He picked up the champagne bottle from the ice bucket, looked at the level again, then poured the remainder of the split into my half-empty orange juice glass (half empty, because he had drunk it himself).

“Here,” he said, raising his champagne glass to me. “Merry Christmas to you! Long life to us both! Christ is born, let us glorify Him! Now—” gulping it down—he’d turned the rol s on the tablecloth, was heaping out food to himself in the ceramic bread dish—“I am sorry, I know you want to hear about everything, but I am hungry and must eat first.”

Pâté. Caviar. Christmas bread. Despite everything, I was hungry too, and I decided to be grateful for the moment and for the food in front of me and began to eat and for a while neither of us said anything.

“Better?” he said presently, throwing me a glance. “You are exhausted.” Helping himself to more salmon. “There is a bad flu going round. Shirley has it too.”

I said nothing. I had only just begun to adjust myself to the fact that he was in the room with me.

“I thought you were out with some girl. Wel —here is where Gyuri and I have been,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “We have been in Frankfurt. Wel —this you know. Some crazy time it’s been! But—”

downing his champagne, walking to the minibar and squatting down to look inside—

“Do you have my passport?”

“Yes I have your passport. Wow, there is some nice wine in here!

And al these nice baby Absoluts.”

“Where is it?”

“Ah—” Loping back to the table with a bottle of red wine under his arm, and three minibar bottles of vodka which he stuck in the ice bucket. “Here you go.” Fishing it from his pocket, tossing it carelessly onto the table. “Now”—sitting down—“shal we drink a toast together?”

I sat on the edge of the bed without moving, my half-eaten plate of food stil in my lap. My passport.

In the long silence that fol owed, Boris reached across the table and flicked the edge of my champagne glass with middle finger, sharp crystal ine ting like a spoon on an after dinner goblet.

“May I have your attention, please?” he inquired ironical y.

“What?”

“Toast?” Tipping his glass to me.

I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “And you are what, here?”

“Eh?”

“Toasting what, exactly?”

“Christmas Day? Graciousness of God? Wil that do?”

The silence between us, while not exactly hostile, took on as it grew a distinctly glaring and unmanageable tone. Final y Boris fel back in his chair and nodded at my glass and said: “Hate to keep asking, but when you are through with staring at me, do you think we can—?”

“I’m going to have to figure al this out at some point.”

“What?”

“I guess I’l have to sort this al out in my mind some time. It’s going to be a job. Like, this thing over there… that over here. Two different piles. Three different piles maybe.”

“Potter, Potter, Potter—” affectionate, half-scornful, leaning forward—“you are a blockhead. You have no sense of gratitude or beauty.”

“ ‘No sense of gratitude.’ I’l drink to that, I guess.”

“What? Don’t you remember our happy Christmas that one time?

Happy days gone by? Never to return? Your dad—” grand flinging gesture—“at the restaurant table? Our feast and joy? Our happy celebration? Don’t you honor that memory in your heart?”

“For God’s sake.”

“Potter—” arrested breath—“you are something. You are worse than a woman. ‘Hurry, hurry.’ ‘Get up, go.’ Didn’t you read my texts?”

“What?”

Boris—reaching for his glass—stopped cold. Quickly he glanced at the floor and I was, suddenly, very aware of the bag by his chair.

In amusement, Boris stuck his thumbnail between his front teeth.

“Go ahead.”

The words hovered over the wrecked breakfast. Distorted reflections in the domed cover of the silver dish.

I picked up the bag and stood; and his smile faded when I started to the door.

“Wait!” he said.

“Wait what?”

“You’re not going to open it?”

“Look—” I knew myself too wel , didn’t trust myself to wait; I wasn’t letting the same thing happen twice—

“What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“I’m taking this downstairs. So they can lock it in the safe.” I didn’t even know if there was a safe, only that I didn’t want the painting near me—it was safer with strangers, in a cloakroom, anywhere. I was also going to phone the police the moment Boris left, but not until; there was no reason dragging Boris into it.

“You didn’t even open it! You don’t even know what it is!”

“Duly noted.”

“What the hel is that supposed to mean?”

“Maybe I don’t need to know what it is.”

“Oh no? Maybe you do. It’s not what you think,” he added, a bit smugly.

“No?”

“No.”

“How do you know what I think?”

“Of course I know what you think it is! And—you are wrong. Sorry.

But—” raising his hands—“is something much, much better than.”

“Better than?”

“Yes.”

“How can it be better than?”

“It just is. Lots lots better. You wil just have to believe me on this.

Open and see,” he said, with a curt nod.

“What is this?” I said after about thirty stunned seconds. Lifting out one brick of hundreds—dol ars—then another.

“That is not al of it.” Rubbing the back of his head with the flat of his hand. “Fraction of.”

I looked at it, then at him. “Fraction of what?”

“Wel —” smirking—“thought more dramatic if in cash, no?”

Muffled comedy voices floating from next door, articulated cadences of a television laugh track.

“Nicer surprise for you! That is not al of it, mind you. U.S.

currency, I thought, more convenient for you to return with. What you came over with—a bit more. In fact they have not paid yet—no money has yet come through. But—soon, I hope.”