As he walked into his office he made a quick sign with his head in the direction of two men who were in the process of shifting bulky cardboard cartons around. "Sorry about the mess, but we're in the middle of moving offices: I hope their presence won't disturb you." I recognized one of the movers as the reader of newspapers I had seen reflected in a fragment of mirror on the pillar at the restaurant the day we had lunch. The cartons were placed just behind the armchair Vinner offered me. The speed with which he embarked on this meeting smacked of a well-prepared operation. He had doubtless managed to contact our alleged mutual friend in China, or else the man had already returned. Furthermore, over two days he had been able to verify that I was in Destin on my own. Glancing at the cartons, I noticed that some of them were big enough to hold a man's body.
"I owe you something," he said, opening a drawer in his desk. "The journal you gave me so as not to alarm my wife. Here it is back, but with something extra."
Vinner handed me an English newspaper. He had certainly envisaged a theatrical effect but could not have been aware of the force of the shock. There were various articles on the arms traffic controlled by the Russian Mafia. Photos, statistics. And suddenly this headline: "Death of one of the barons of the nuclear network." Very clearly in the photograph I recognized the face of Shakh.
I did not take in Vinner's opening remarks. He was probably asking me if I had known the man in the photograph well. I gave no reply, still blinded by the expression of the eyes, the movement of the lips I sensed behind the immobility of the photo. All the article did was to list the usual components of the criminal web: dubious contracts, the leakage of military technologies from a Russia in decay, exorbitant commissions, rivalries, the settling of accounts, the death of an "arms baron." As I was skimming through these paragraphs I caught up with Vinner's voice. Curiously enough, it sounded the same vaguely contemptuous and triumphant note as the style of the article.
"… a strange character. I only met him once and that was for highly technical reasons. And he could find nothing better to do than talk about the war. His war, that is. It was so beside the point that I almost asked him if he'd driven a tank himself. I thought that would bring him to his senses. And then-"
I noticed that the two men behind my back had stopped their commotion but were still in the room. I interrupted Vinner, "He would have told you he had. First of all in the Leningrad area, then in the battle of Kursk."
"In the ' Saint Petersburg ' area, you mean? Ha, ha…" "I don't know if we should start pronouncing it in the American way."
"That'll come in time. Anyway, what an irony of fate! He who struggled so valiantly with the arms traffickers is shot down and labeled as a Mafia man. What an end to his career! It's true that he didn't have the good fortune that you have of working 'in tandem,' as you put it. A loyal companion can always come to your aid or, if need be, rehabilitate your honor posthumously. But in his case…"
He went on talking with an increasingly disdainful smile. I was sure now that on the evening of our meeting in the rain he had been very much afraid and much too uneasy to think about his wife's beautiful body and that he had spent the past two days in humiliating anxiety, which he was attempting to dispel through this contemptuous conqueror's tone. I also understood that I was highly unlikely to be leaving that office alive. The two men behind my armchair were no longer even pretending to move the cartons around. But Shakh's death had thrust me into a strange remoteness whence I viewed Vinner: his face resembled a twitching mask. I interrupted him again, and, as I was speaking, I became aware of his tenseness as he listened to me and also the tautness of my own lips.
"You promised me some notes on… on you know who."
"I haven't been able to get very much together but… here."
He passed a folder to me, held shut with elastic bands. There
was a somewhat mechanical precision about his gesture, as if he were
afraid I would refuse it, as if the sequence of actions in this office
were dependent on the precision of this handover. Without taking my eyes off his face, I took the folder, put it on my lap. Vinner stared hard at me, then threw a rapid glance at my unmoving hands. I guessed he was waiting for me to lower my gaze, to start tugging at the elastic bands. Everything was geared to this moment of distraction. A floorboard creaked behind my back. I began talking very softly so as not to upset the unstable equilibrium.
"I would like to pass on to you the greetings of a person who is very dear to you, who lives in Warsaw. I could also offer you some documents recounting the story of your loving relationship but one folder wouldn't be enough. There are cassette tapes, films. I suggest we meet tomorrow morning at nine a.m., on a pretty beach near Destin, far from all those metal detectors. You will come alone, with your reports under your arm. I imagine what you've given me today is a bunch of virgin sheets."
I opened the folder: a single photo had been slipped in between the blank pages, it seemed to be all part of the presentation. Out of the corner of my eye I intercepted a signal with his head that Vinner gave his men. They started work again.
As I went out I gave one of the cardboard cartons a kick. "Thanks for giving me the chance to see my own coffin." Actually, this little dig occurred to me as an afterthought, when I was back at the hotel. At the moment of my departure all there was between us was the banal awkwardness of two men who cannot shake hands.
That evening, when I was back in Destin, I read the page from the English newspaper that had published the photo of Shakh. Weariness, disgust, and fear now flooded in on me with the delay of a shock wave. But the strongest of these delayed emotions was surprise. I could not bring myself to believe that Shakh was dead. Or rather, granted that they had succeeded in killing him, I nevertheless pictured him alive and living a freer life than my own, one I sought vainly to understand. It now seemed to me like the lives of those soldiers in the war, protecting an army's withdrawal and sacrificing themselves, knowing that their deaths would enable the retreating troops to gain a few hours. I thought of the strange existence of such men in that interval, consciously accepted, between life and death. A few hours, perhaps a day. A fresh intensity in their eyes and a relinquishing of everything that only yesterday had still seemed important.
As long as one stayed on the bench that was half sunk in the sand one did not notice the wind's force. In that sheltered space behind the dune the first light of the morning already made it seem like a fine sunny day, idle and warm. Only on getting up did one feel the breeze that had made the sea white and stung one's face with tiny pricks of sand. But, even as I sat there, I could see whirlwinds arising on the ridge of the dune for a moment, then settling again with a dry rustling sound as they collided with the tall tufts of tangled plants. Two or three times, launched from the beach, a kite sliced the air above the ridge then disappeared, swerving in a tensed, hissing trajectory.
I had risen well before dawn, without having really slept, and, as I approached the sea, I had caught it still in its vigilant, nocturnal sluggishness. I had swum in the midst of a darkness rhythmed by long silent waves, gradually losing all awareness of what awaited me, all memory of the country massed behind the coastline ("America," "Florida," a perplexed voice within me proclaimed), all connection with a date, a place. Occasionally a livelier wave rose up out of the blackness, covered me with its foam, disappeared into the night. I recalled the man I was going to see again (an involuntary memory: Vinner's cheek with a fine scratch left by the razor). I was surprised to realize that my hatred of this man was the very last link that still connected me to the lives of those who lived on this sleeping coastline, to their time, to the multiplicity of their desires, their actions, their words, that would start up again once it was morning. Vinner's face faded and I returned to that state of silence and forgetfulness that one day, without finding the right word for it, I had called an "afterlife," it being, in fact, all the life that was left to me to live out, in what was now a bygone age, that past I had never succeeded in leaving behind. I had remained sitting on the sand for a long time, leaning against the hull of an upturned boat. The night above the sea formed a deep, black, vibrant screen, like the restless darkness behind closed eyelids. Against this nocturnal background the memory drew faces from long ago, a figure lost among those ruined days, a look that seemed to be searching for me across the years. You. Shakh. You… The ghosts of this afterlife did not obey time. I saw people I had hardly known, people who had died well before I was born: that soldier, his glasses spattered with mud, carrying a wounded man on his back; that other one, lying in a field plowed up by shellfire, his lips half open, and a nurse holding out a tiny mirror toward them, hoping, or not hoping, to capture a slight trace of breath. I also saw the one who had told me of these soldiers, a woman with silvery hair, at rest in the endlessness of the steppe, gazing at me across that plain, across time, as it seemed to me. A man, too, with a face of quartz, a strip of bandages around his forehead, who smiled as he spoke, defying the pain. Shakh walking along in a crowd in an avenue in London; he was keeping our rendezvous, but had not yet seen me and I surprised him in his solitude. You, at a dark window lit by the ruddy glow of fires in neighboring streets. You, your eyes closed, lying beside me one night after the fighting was over, telling me about a winter's day, the forest silent under the snows, a house one could discover by crossing a frozen lake. You…