122 S FREEMNT A BALMORE
Baltimore, thought Middleton. A 40-minute drive from this bar stool. A train ride from Union Station kitty-corner to the hotel. A few blocks north of the train station was a bus depot from which silver boxes roared up Interstate 95 to Charm City where Middleton spent a lot of time at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
Middleton wrote the address inside the novel’s cover.
He went to the men’s room and, in the clammy locked stall, counted his remaining cash: $515 American, $122 in Euros. Credit cards, but the second he used one to buy a ticket, meal or motel, he would pop up on the grid. He checked the ammo magazine in his scavenged Beretta: eight bullets.
Can go a long way and nowhere at all on what I’ve got, thought Harold Middleton.
Back on the bar stool, he realized he reeked of frenzy. The bar mirror made him flinch. He looked terrible. Burned out and all but buried. Worse, he looked memorable.
Middleton left enough cash on the bar, walked toward the night.
He turned away from well-lit streets, still not ready to risk a phone call or a train or a bus or shelter for the night. Walked past empty office buildings.
Out of the darkness loomed a man brandishing a butcher knife.
Middleton froze two paces from a blade that would’ve punctured his throat.
Butcher-knife man growled: “Give it up! Cash. Wallet. Hurry!”
So Middleton reached under his gray sports jacket and came out with Beretta steel.
“Go, baby!” yelled the robber to a waiting car. He dropped the knife.
“Freeze, baby,” Middleton shouted, “or I’ll blow his head off, then kill you too!”
Middleton kept the robber in his vision while turned toward the rusted car idling at the curb, its front passenger door gaping open like the maw of a shark.
Never heard it roll up behind me. Never saw it coming. Wake up!
The robber said: “We want a lawyer!”
Middleton jerked his head toward the open car door — but kept his gun locked on the robber. “Get in and you might get out of this alive.”
The hands-high scruffy man eased into the shotgun seat of the idling car. Middleton slid into the backseat behind him, told the boney young woman with blazing eyes behind the steering wheel, “Do what I say or I’ll blast a bullet in your spine.”
“Baby!” yelled her partner. “You were supposed to beat it outta trouble!”
Not anger, thought Middleton, that’s not the music. More a plea. And sorrow.
“Fool! He’d have lit you up! Word, Marcus: I ain’t never gonna leave you go.”
“’Knew you weren’t meant for no thug life.” Notes of pride. Sorrow.
“Where?” the woman asked the dark silhouette in her rearview mirror.
“We’re going to Baltimore,” Middleton said. “Drive.”
Chapter Four
SJ Rozan
Swift and silent as a cheetah after an antelope, the dust cloud chased the approaching Jeep. Almost, you could imagine it putting on a burst of speed, catching the Jeep and devouring it. Squinting over the sun-baked soil, Leonora Tesla gave in to an ironic smile as she found herself rooting for the dust.
Since she’d come to Namibia she’d seen this contest often, the predator running the prey. Conscientiously, she told herself not to take sides — they were all God’s creatures, and they all had to eat — but her heart was always with the prey. And her heart was usually broken, because the predator usually won. Now she was on the other side, but—as usual, Leonora! — in a hopeless cause. The dust would lose this race, settling into defeat as the Jeep came to a stop in front of her hut.
At least this time, she wouldn’t have to worry about heartbreak: This would not be a life-and-death struggle, only an annoyance in her day.
“He’s a funder,” her program manager had said over the village’s single crackling telephone, calling from Windhoek, his voice equal amounts sympathy and command. “You will have to see him.”
Leonora Tesla had come to the bush so she wouldn’t have to see anyone, except the HIV-positive women she worked with. After The Hague, after the hunting — after the shock of being called together and told by Harold the Volunteers must disband — even the smaller African cities had been too much for her. So she’d gone to the bush, traveling from village to village, staying not long in any one place. Her mandate was to establish craft co-operatives, micro-financing women’s paths to independence. The work suited her. Her days were filled now with distracting minutiae — finding hinges in one village so another’s kiln door could be repaired; lending the equivalent of four American dollars so a group could buy paper on which to keep records of baskets sold. And with beauty: the color-block quilts, the Oombiga pots whose tradition had almost been lost. Beauty suited Tesla too. Visual beauty: the way the women weaved echoed the stark subtlety of the African landscape. And musical beauty: The only artifact of 21st century technology she’d brought into the bush was an iPod loaded with — among other things — Bach preludes, Shostakovich symphonies and Beethoven sonatas. Reluctantly, she removed it now, cutting off Chopin as the Jeep neared. She hoped this wouldn’t take long. She’d ferry him around, this funder from…She’d forgotten to ask. She’d show him the kiln, the looms, the workshop. She’d rattle off her statistics on life-span extension and self-sufficiency, give him her little speech about hope for the next generation. The women would present him with a quilt or a pot for which he could have no possible use and he’d be patronizingly pleased with them and inordinately proud of himself for making this all possible. Then maybe he’d go away and leave them in peace.
Oh, Leonora, at least try to smile.
The other Volunteers used to say that regularly, and precisely because their work gave them little to smile about, she’d try. She did it now, a polite smile for the angular blond man who stepped from the Jeep. He smiled back and slapped his hat against his thigh to shake off the dust. He took off his sunglasses: well trained in the art of courtesy, at least.
“Leonora Tesla? I’m Günter Schmidt.”
He spoke in English with a soft accent she couldn’t quite place. Not German, but no law said his German name meant he was brought up in that country. That’s what the permeability of European borders was about. It was supposed to be a good thing.
They shook hands. Schmidt’s was soft and fleshy, as befit someone who dispensed money from behind a desk. “You’ve had a long drive,” she said. “Sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.” She indicated a stool on the hard clay under the overhang, but he followed her into the house. He’d learn, she thought. In Africa the indoor, though shadowed and appealing, was never cooler than outside.
Still smiling, Schmidt dropped himself onto one of the rough-hewn chairs at her plank table. She handed him a bottle of BB orange soda. In a hut without electricity, of course she had no refrigerator, but she’d learned the African trick of burying bottles in a box in the hut’s clay floor, so the drink was relatively cool. “We’ll be more comfortable outside,” she suggested, resigned to try to be pleasant to this intruder.
“No,” he said, “I’d rather stay here. Leonora.”
She bristled at the odd way he said her name, but his expression was mild as he looked about her hut. So she shrugged, wiped her brow with her kerchief and sat beside him.
“You’ve lived here long?” Schmidt asked, taking a pull from his soda bottle.
“No. I don’t live anywhere long. My work takes me many places.”
“That would account for the…simplicity.”