One thing that hadn’t improved with time was the coffee. I’m not sure when bitter coffee became cool, but I don’t like the trend. Still, I drank away, because that’s what one does when one wants to fit in with the upscale crowd these days.
* * *
The update on the murders in the morning paper (reading the paper two days in a row had to be some kind of record for me) wasn’t any more enlightening than the initial story had been. It was mostly a lot of puff about Gary and Nate and how everybody loved them and so on. Attaching presumptive sainthood to murder victims is a time-honored tradition, so I can’t say I was surprised by any of it. Can’t say I knew them well enough to contradict anything either, and they were nice enough for me to want to go through the trouble of finding out who killed them, but still… You’d think there was someone, somewhere—other than Jerry—who didn’t like them.
On the hard news front, the papers were a day earlier than predicted with the artistic rendition of my face. It was a pretty good likeness.
It was a bit unsettling seeing my own face in the newspaper. Historically, I’ve gone to great lengths to keep myself in the background, just in the interest of survival. I’ve lived through one Inquisition already, you know? I moved on.
Paging through to the crossword puzzle, a full-page ad caught my eye, mainly because it was addressed to me. Also, it was in classical Latin.
The Latin was pretty rough, penned no doubt by a modern scholar who didn’t appreciate the subtleties of the spoken language. And since nobody spoke Latin outside of the Vatican, I guess this was understandable. But I understood it all right.
Translated, the message read:
For the Eternal Man
We are trying to find you. You do not have any reason to fear us. You do not have to run. We want to help you and we believe you can help us. We have the answers to many questions. Stay where you are and we will find you. Do not make this any harder than it has to be.
The message was unattributed and the paper did not note who purchased the ad.
I didn’t know what to make of it. On the one hand, it sounded like a friendly attempt to establish a dialogue. On the other, it made it clear “they” were after me in some capacity, possibly the same capacity that resulted in two dead college students. It was an offer of knowledge and a threat all wrapped up into one cryptic passage—don’t run, don’t be afraid, don’t move and don’t make this any harder than it has to be. Very convincing. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that the minute someone feels obligated to tell you not to be afraid of them, that’s the time to start being afraid of them. I wondered how long these little letters had been getting printed. Maybe I should have started reading the newspapers sooner.
* * *
As I sat there at my little, two-persons-max table, contemplating the passage and deciding whether I should wait until I’d heard from Iza before hopping aboard a transatlantic flight to someplace remote, someone sat down opposite me.
If you’ve ever hung out long enough in a Starbucks you know this isn’t a terribly uncommon experience, especially when all the other tables are taken. Usually people bother to ask first if the chair is being saved, but… Anyway, I tried to act nonchalant and flipped ahead to the crossword puzzle to look busy.
“Hello,” my tablemate said. I looked up briefly. He was dressed in a sports coat and a white shirt, no tie. He had a couple of gold chains around his neck with symbols hanging from them that he probably couldn’t identify the meaning of at gunpoint. He was white-skinned, stocky in build, and looked to have some Norwegian ancestry in him. I was singularly disinterested in having a conversation, so I pretended to be a foreigner. Which I sort of am.
“I don’t speak any English,” I said in German. Middle-high German, which nobody speaks any more. I didn’t feel like running the risk that he was fluent in the modern form. Most of the time when someone hears a foreign language they don’t probe. And they almost never ask what language it is, just so long as it sounds like an actual language. This doesn’t always work. I once spent a half hour trying to get rid of an inquisitive elderly wino in a bar in Ontario while speaking Sanskrit. Sometimes people just can’t take a hint.
This appeared to be one of those times. He smiled as if I had responded in the King’s English and said, “I’m fine, thanks.”
I nodded and tried to go back to my paper. Five letter word for draining aid. Sieve?
“How about this weather?” he added.
“You are ugly and smell like pig dung,” I suggested helpfully.
“Yeah, it looks like snow to me, too.”
This would have been amusing, if it weren’t so very annoying.
“Look,” he whispered, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I know you speak English. You’re reading the fucking paper. Okay?”
“Your mother eats raw salmon,” I offered. Was this guy slow?
He snatched the paper from my hand. Now we were past the “invasion of personal space” phase and fast approaching “punch you in the nose” phase.
He slapped the paper down on the table and pointed to the artistic rendition of my face, circa two days ago.
“I know who you are. Now let’s talk in the same language for a bit.”
For the first time, I noticed that the coffee shop was half empty. There were four other empty tables he could have chosen from. I should have been paying better attention.
I snatched the paper off the table. “I am the god of cabbage,” I declared angrily. With any luck somebody would step up and ask him why he was bothering the foreign guy.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Do me a favor. Look under the table. I have a gun pointed at your balls right now.”
Well now, that was obviously a trick, right? If I peek under the table, I clearly understand English. And for all I know he’s got his penis out or something. The correct response was to ignore him. Except I knew as soon as he said it that he wasn’t kidding. So, I peeked. He wasn’t kidding. I sat up again.
“What is that, a .22?” I asked.
“It’s a .38. Makes a little ‘pop’ when you pull the trigger, sounds like a wine bottle uncorking.”
“That’s nice. What do you want?”
“I want you,” he said, smiling.
“I’m charmed. Are you a policeman?”
He laughed. “Hardly.”
“Well then. If you’re not a member of law enforcement, why should I go anywhere with you?”
“Because I’ve still got a gun pointed at your balls?”
“It would look terribly silly if I got up and we walked out together with you holding a gun to my groin, don’t you think? One almost never sees that sort of thing.”
“You could give me your word that you’ll leave quietly,” he suggested.
“Supposing my word isn’t worth anything?”
“I think it is.”
“That’s mighty trusting of you.”
He leaned forward and grinned. “Here’s what I know. I know you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no words.”
He was wrong, I think. I don’t remember any fully preliterate societies. But close enough. Who the hell was this guy? Did he work for the people who sent me the message in the paper? Was he the guy who sent it?
“Do I have your attention now?” he asked.
“Sure. What do you want?”
“I want you to sit right there for a second.” He pulled a black case out of his jacket and slid it across the table. “Open it.”