“Adina.”
“Yes.”
His lips curled as he squatted down. Was he smiling? What was it about his eyes? He stroked her forehead and everything began flickering. He lifted her up, carried her over to the sofa.
“It was one of Olek’s men, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It was him or you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good that you got him. I’m happy about that. But it’s best that you disappear now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to get out of the country. I’ll take care of all this. Give me the gun.”
She had completely forgotten the pistol she was hugging to her breast, but he untangled it from her stiff fingers. He sat a moment looking at her, he hummed a little tune, the melody from the film, Do not forsake me…
Adina ran down to the taxi. But of course it was gone. A rusty Mazda 323 with Polish plates was parked in front of the gate. She tried the key. She would have said more to Henry, explained. But he just kept on. It was all going to be okay, he said. He also wanted to give her half the money. She would leave first, he would follow in a few weeks when everything had settled down. He would get through all this. Wouldn’t be charged. He kept his wits about him surprisingly well, considering there was a dead Polack on his living room floor, shot in the face. She ended up taking seven thousand.
The key turned in the lock, and suddenly she was behind the wheel of her executioner’s car. She started it and flipped on the blinker and drove off. But she didn’t head for the airport. She drove out of the city. She just wanted to get away! She didn’t know where, but it felt good tearing out into nowhere. She held the ticket, Copenhagen-Frankfurt-Melbourne, in her free hand, checked the rearview mirror, no one, she doubted she could get anything for it. She rolled the window down. Do not forsake me, oh my darling… Then she heard a pop, and the car began swerving. She threw the ticket on the passenger seat and steered off onto the shoulder. But when she turned to get out of the car she saw a girl in the backseat, asleep under an old gray windbreaker. She grabbed hold of the girl and shook her.
“Who are you?”
“Ludmilla… Where’s Marek?”
“Marek is dead. What are you doing here?”
“I’m going to school in Sweden. I have money. See?” Ludmilla took a crumpled brown envelope out of her jacket pocket and waved it around.
“No, you were going to work as a prostitute for a bastard called Olek.”
“I don’t believe you. My mother said I was going to school in Sweden.”
“All right, fine.”
“You’re lying,” Ludmilla persisted. “Who the hell are you anyway? Where is Marek?”
The spare tire was in the trunk. Adina dropped it, and it rolled onto the sidewalk; something rattled when she took hold of it again. She grabbed it with both hands and shook. There was something inside. She removed her pocketknife from her bag, made a slit in the tire, and stuck her hand in, and there she stood with a roll of hundred-euro notes! She sat back inside the car and cut the tire all the way around-it was filled with rolls. Ludmilla still sulked in the backseat. She began slitting the brown envelope open with her finger, turned it upside down. A birth certificate, a physician’s statement, a stack of tourist brochures about Copenhagen in Polish. The girl looked unhappy and started hammering her knuckles into the front seat. Then she let her head fall between her knees. Adina laid an arm around her neck, squeezed her, and then stuffed the money into the bag; she could count it later. Ludmilla sat crying with her head in her hands.
“Come on,” Adina said, and she got out of the car and started looking for a taxi.
“Where are we going?” Ludmilla asked, following her outside. She was skinny as a reed.
Adina didn’t answer immediately. She felt strangely weightless, and the pale, thin girl made her feel sentimental. She wasn’t dead, Henry had saved her. The girl could sink to the bottom as quickly as a stone. She put her hand on Ludmilla’s cheek, wiped the tears away.
“Where are we going?” the girl asked again.
“I’m going to Australia, and you can come along.”
“What will we do there?”
“Wait for a man. A good man.”
ALL I WANT IS MY BABY, WOAH WOAH, WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH
by Susanne Staun
City Center
So let us go then, you and I, down the dark streets we know so well we no longer see them, let us eat the last sidewalks of Knabrostræde and turn down Læderstræde, stomp off in the light from the last breathing windows of the night, you, my towering steaming rage, and I, who must recognize that things probably can’t be a whole lot different right now.
Unless you decide to bug off?
Before I do something stupid?
To be preferred.
But noooh, you won’t do it, you’ve dug in, you insist on reaming my ass like a dog, and I’m not talking poodles and puppies, I’m talking a big filthy doberman with long brown teeth, a rotten mouth, and a snout with no honor. Well good luck, and excuse me if I’m not wild about this. But I’m not, amigo, just like I’m not wild about how I wasn’t any good this evening. I was somewhere else, funny, sure, they laughed, got their money’s worth, but I was somewhere else, and I hate it when someone like you gets me way out there, which is also out where my rage grows so huge that my body can’t contain it and I have to ship off the rest to Nowheresville, where it belongs, a grim place, far from me and me.
So take a hike! Can’t you see what you’re making me do, cawing and glowering on an empty street, as if talking to myself? It’s so very lonely, I’m a thousand light years from home.
You’ve been following me for precisely a week, since last Saturday, when you said it, when it rolled right out of you like an old belch: You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer?
It was just past three in the morning. I was standing there, minding my own business and a large draft, trying to ease stage-adrenaline out of my body. But: your wit, your speech, your repartee, impressed me almost instantly. I’d been present, really present, on that stage, had them in the palm of my hand, never better. And then it slipped in, ruined my night, day, week, month:
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer?
And me? Didn’t say a word, stood there gawking, didn’t mention your gut, your watery eyes, and your fat cheeks. Not a word. Not that I’m polite, I’m not, but words just wouldn’t cut it, no matter how ugly. And I lacked the courage for the kind of brutality it would take. Plus I didn’t have the time. I was way too busy watching my life fall apart.
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer? But if you’d just smile a little…
I’m not smiling, not at you, at any rate. If the show must go on, let it go on without you. Bereaved of my illusions, I pondered whether it was the young Keith Richards, the one with the teen acne and all the scars, that you had in mind. The one who recorded people’s toilet visits on his tape player? Or the old sod with his Grand Canyon-junkie face, the silver skull ring and bandana and girlie crap in his hair? Is my face really already a map of the twentieth century?