“Tell Chip,” Alfred told Chip, whom he didn’t recognize, “there’s trouble in the East.”
Real daylight came at eight. A shouting in the street woke him up. His room was cold but not freezing; a smell of warm dust came off the radiator — the city’s Central Boiler Facility still functioning, the social order still intact.
Through the branches of the spruce trees outside his window he saw a crowd of several dozen men and women in bulky overcoats milling outside the fence. A dusting of snow had fallen in the night. Two of Gitanas’s security men, the brothers Jonas and Aidaris — big blond fellows with semi-automatics on straps — were parleying through the bars of the front gate with a pair of middle-aged women whose brassy hair and red faces, like the heat in Chip’s radiator, gave evidence of ordinary life’s persistence.
Downstairs the ballroom echoed with emphatic televised Lithuanian declarations. Gitanas was sitting exactly where Chip had left him the night before, but his clothes were different and he appeared to have slept.
The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break. Chip went to the kitchen and poured Vitasoy Delite Vanilla soy milk on a bowl of Barbara’s All-Natural Shredded Oats Bite Size cereal. He drank some of the viscous German organic black-cherry juice that he’d lately been enjoying. He made two mugs of instant coffee and took them to the ballroom, where Gitanas had turned off the TV and was sniffing his fingernails again.
Chip asked him what the news was.
“All my bodyguards ran away except Jonas and Aidaris,” Gitanas said. “They took the VW and the Lada. I doubt they’re coming back.”
“With protectors like this, who needs attackers?” Chip said.
“They left us the Stomper, which is a crime magnet.”
“When did this happen?”
“Must have been right after President Vitkunas put the Army on alert.”
Chip laughed. “When did that happen?”
“Early this morning. Everything in the city is apparently still functioning — except, of course, Transbaltic Wireless,” Gitanas said.
The mob in the street had swelled. There were perhaps a hundred people now, holding aloft cell phones that collectively produced an eerie, angelic sound. They were playing the sequence of tones that signified service interruption.
“I want you to go back to New York,” Gitanas said. “We’ll see what happens here. Maybe I’ll come, maybe I won’t. I gotta see my mother for Christmas. Meantime, here’s your severance.”
He tossed Chip a thick brown envelope just as multiple thuds were sounding on the villa’s outer walls. Chip dropped the envelope. A rock crashed through a window and bounced to a stop by the television set. The rock was four-sided, a broken corner of granite cobblestone. It was coated with fresh hostility and seemed faintly embarrassed.
Gitanas dialed the “police” on the copper-wire line and spoke wearily. The brothers Jonas and Aidaris, fingers on triggers, came in through the front door, followed by cold air with a sprucey Yule flavor. The brothers were cousins of Gitanas; this was presumably why they hadn’t deserted with the others. Gitanas put down the phone and conferred with them in Lithuanian.
The brown envelope contained a meaty stack of fifty-and hundred-dollar bills.
Chip’s feeling from his dream, his belated realization that the holiday had come, was persisting in the daylight. None of the young Webheads had reported to work today, and now Gitanas had given him a present, and snow was clinging to the boughs of spruces, and carolers in bulky coats were at the gate …
“Pack your bags,” Gitanas said. “Jonas will take you to the airport.”
Chip went upstairs with an empty head and heart. He heard guns banging on the front porch, the ting-a-ling of ejected casings, Jonas and Aidaris firing (he hoped) at the sky. Jingle bells, jingle bells.
He put on his leather pants and leather coat. Repacking his bag connected him to the moment of unpacking it in early October, completed a loop of time and pulled a drawstring that made the twelve intervening weeks disappear. Here he was again, packing.
Gitanas was smelling his fingers, his eyes on the news, when Chip returned to the ballroom. Victor Lichenkev’s mustaches went up and down on the TV screen.
“What’s he saying?”
Gitanas shrugged. “That Vitkunas is mentally unfit, et cetera. That Vitkunas is mounting a putsch to reverse the legitimate will of the Lithuanian people, et cetera.”
“You should come with me,” Chip said.
“I’m gonna go see my mother,” Gitanas said. “I’ll call you next week.”
Chip put his arms around his friend and squeezed him. He could smell the scalp oils that Gitanas in his agitation had been sniffing. He felt as if he were hugging himself, feeling his own primate shoulder blades, the scratch of his own woolen sweater. He also felt his friend’s gloom — how not-there he was, how distracted or shut down — and it made him, too, feel lost.
Jonas beeped the horn on the gravel drive outside the front door.
“Let’s meet up in New York,” Chip said.
“OK, maybe.” Gitanas pulled away and wandered back to the television.
Only a few stragglers remained to throw rocks at the Stomper as Jonas and Chip roared through the open gate. They drove south out of the city center on a street lined with forbidding gas stations and brown-walled, traffic-scarred buildings that seemed happiest and most themselves on days, like this one, when the weather was raw and the light was poor. Jonas spoke very little English but managed to exude tolerance toward Chip, if not friendliness, while keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror. Traffic was extremely sparse this morning, and sport-utility vehicles, those workhorses of the warlord class, attracted unhealthy attention in times of instability.
The little airport was mobbed with young people speaking the languages of the West. Since the Quad Cities Fund had liquidated Lietuvos Avialinijos, other airlines had taken over some of the routes, but the curtailed flight schedule (fourteen departures a day for a capital of Europe) wasn’t equipped to handle loads like today’s. Hundreds of British, German, and American students and entrepreneurs, many of their faces familiar to Chip from his pub-crawling with Gitanas, had converged on the reservation counters of Finnair and Lufthansa, Aeroflot and LOT Polish Airlines.
Doughty city buses were arriving with fresh loads of foreign nationals. As far as Chip could see, none of the counter lines were moving at all. He tallied the flights on the Outbound board and chose the airline, Finnair, with the most departures.
At the end of the very long Finnair line were two American college girls in bell-bottom jeans and other Sixties Revival wear. The names on their luggage were Tiffany and Cheryl.
“Do you have tickets?” Chip asked.
“For tomorrow,” Tiffany said. “But things looked kinda nasty, so.”
“Is this line moving?”
“I don’t know. We’ve only been here ten minutes.”
“It hasn’t moved in ten minutes?”
“There’s only one person at the counter,” Tiffany said. “But it’s not like there’s some other, better Finnair counter someplace else, so.”
Chip was feeling disoriented and had to steel himself not to hail a cab and return to Gitanas.
Cheryl said to Tiffany: “So my dad’s like, you’ve got to sublet if you’re going to Europe, and I’m like, I promised Anna she could stay there weekends when there’s home games so she can sleep with Jason, right? I can’t take a promise back—right? But my dad’s getting like all bottom-line, and I’m like, hello, it’s my condominium, right? You bought it for me, right? I didn’t know I was going to have some stranger, you know, who, like, fries things on the stove, and sleeps in my bed?”