Chapter Twenty-one

I woke early, becoming gradually aware of the rhythmic swaying of the railway coach. Beyond the curtain, the day was still gray and uncommitted. There was stale cigarette smoke in the corridor and stale sweat on my skin. I rubbed my eyes, pulled down a window and stuck my head out into the rushing cool morning air. The mixed smell of damp vegetation and polluted air swirled about me. In my stomach was an emptiness made up of one part morning hunger and nine parts loneliness.

The corridor was filled with sleeping forms. I stepped over them on my way to the toilet.

Every summer, the same pattern recurs. As June gives way to July and then to August, more and more passengers take to the trains, but the authorities make no attempt to provide space for them. Trains that were half empty in May and full in June, are packed in summer with twice as many passengers as there are seats. They sit on the seat-arms and in the aisles, in the corridors of the compartment cars, taking jump seats or sitting on suitcases, or sprawling on the floor, wedged against backpacks. Ragged backpackers and old Italian ladies in black, the youthful and the outworn, the poor and the middle class (the rich are in their reserved compartments, sleeping in their couchettes), having nothing in common but their humanity.

Crowded hip to hip, stepped on, pickled by cigarette smoke, jostled and sleepless – you would expect irritability and bitterness. It is not there. Instead, there is gentleness, kindness, politeness, and a warmth of underlying laughter at the absurdity of it all.

I made my way to the washroom at the end of the compartment. It was early. Most of the passengers were still trying to sleep, so the line was short. After ten minutes, I wedged the door shut behind me to dry shave and wash my face in the untreated water. I brushed my teeth, remembering not to dip the brush under the tap. Finally I lifted the lid on the toilet and spat toothpaste and saliva down onto the ties that were flashing by underneath.

I have always found something satisfying in the simplicity of that arrangement. A turd hitting the ties at fifty miles per hour will explode into a spray of material that dries and decomposes as naturally as a cow pie in a pasture. But try telling that to an American tourist.

Ah, Europe. With the most modern train system in the world and a hole in the floor to shit through. With two hundred mile per hour luxury trains running the same tracks with others that crowd their passengers like emigrants in steerage. The last time I was here, I had become tired of its foreignness after a couple of months. This time it was like a homecoming.

And today, Venice.

Any day that has Venice in it has to be glorious. more tomorrow

The local police hauled him away. Susyn explained, not entirely accurately, that the drunk had attacked me when I tried to stop him from harassing her. The drunk’s hundred proof breath went a long way toward supporting Susyn’s story. It helped even more that the officer had seen Susyn in daily conversation with his chief.

When they had gone, and we were settled in at the table, Susyn turned angrily and said, “What the hell was that all about?”

I didn’t have anything to say.

“I thought I knew you better than that. You didn’t have to beat up that bastard; he was harmless enough.”

“I know.”

“So why . . .?”

I put my hand over hers and said, “Please.”

Her eyes were inches from mine. I watched the fire die down in them, and watched sympathy replace it. She said, “You’re hurting.”

I shrugged.

She said, “Why? What did I miss?”

“I can’t tolerate drunks.”

“Why?”

I had told Raven about my drunken father, but I could not tell Susyn, so I did not reply. She chewed her lip, looking puzzled, and said, “You don’t drink, and you hate drunks. A lot. There has to be a reason.”

“A few of years ago,” I answered, “I woke up from a fourth of July spree and found out I couldn’t remember June.”

It was an exaggeration, but basically true. A small part of the larger truth that I could not share.

Susyn looked puzzled and angry. She could tell that was not the whole story. But it was all she was going to get.

*       *       *

We went down to Venice the next morning, to find Raven. It was a twenty hour journey that sent us through the eastern fringes of the Alps. We sat in desultory conversation, alternately reading and watching the scenery.

During the last week, I had begun reading newspapers again. When I was with Raven, there had been no time, and when she first left me I had had no interest. Now I read that East Germans by the thousands were going down to Hungary on summer vacation and not returning home. The Honecker government had sent protests to Hungary and some kind of international incident was in the offing. It didn’t seem like much to me, or to any western observer. Communist eastern Europe was falling apart before our eyes, and no one understood what was happening.

Including me. I had other things on my mind.

For the second time in a few months, I had been thrown into daily intimacy with a stranger. For the second time, that stranger moved me deeply. As we crossed the fields and forests of eastern Austria, Susyn went to sleep slumped against me. I shifted my arm around her and settled her into a more comfortable position. The miles slid by with the soft, warm weight of her against my side, and the smell of her hair in my nostrils.

Susyn had reserved a couchette compartment. After she was asleep in the upper berth, I lay awake a long time thinking. After a while, Susyn’s hand and arm slipped down to hang above my head. I wondered if she was asleep. Then her fingers twitched in a come-here motion. I reached up and took her hand in mine. We rode on that way for miles, silent, hand-clasped, saying nothing. Finally she gave a tug and pushed her tousled face over the edge of her bunk. I stood up. She put her arms around my shoulders and drew me closer. Her lips on mine were soft and undemanding. When we broke, there were tears in the corners of her eyes, but she put her hand on my mouth when I would have asked why. She simply said, “Good night, Ian,” and drew the covers up around her until only her violet eyes showed. more tomorrow

The next morning, I had made my rounds and was waiting in our favorite outdoor cafe for Susyn to return. For four days, we had made it our own, sitting through the early afternoon watching the tourists go by while we compared notes. From a table near the low stone wall that separates the patio from the narrow cobbled walk, I could see through a curtain of geraniums as I watched for Susyn’s return.

When I finally saw her, she was coming out of a cross street a block away, looking over her shoulder in conversation with a stranger. Something in her stance brought me fully alert. Her heels were tapping the cobblestones angrily. The stranger kept pace with her, but there was something wrong with his stride. His feet seemed to find the cobbles a bit sooner than his mind had anticipated. He did not exactly stagger, but he was by no means stable.

Not falling down drunk, but drunk nonetheless.

I rose and stepped over the low stone wall to wait on the sidewalk. Something black and old was rising up inside of me, compounded of remembered and half-remembered indignities.

When Susyn reached me, I turned her so that I stood between her and the stranger. Over my shoulder, I said, “Do you know him?”

“Not really. I met him an hour ago when I was showing Raven’s picture around. He has been following me since.”

His eyes met mine, and he tried to blink me into focus. He was further gone than I had thought. He said, “Wo sind sie?” and his breath would have taken paint off a wall.

Then he reached for me. It might have been an innocent move, but I don’t like to be touched by drunks.

I caught his right hand in my left, with my thumb in the cup of his palm, my fingers hard against the back of his hand, and rotated outward and downward. He winced. He should have cried out. Aikido locks are painful, but he was mostly anesthetized.

He jerked loose and I let him go. He staggered back a step and his face finally registered pain. He began to mutter obscenities, gradually growing louder, rocking from one foot to the other as he worked himself up to act.

I waited, letting the red haze build up inside me.

He threw a looping right. I stepped inside it, caught his collar with my left hand, broke his stance and dragged him forward in one rapid movement. At the same time I hit him in the side of the face. I caught his neck with that same hand and spun him in a tight circle. He lost what little balance he had and fell forward against the low stone wall. I stepped back and waited.

He rolled over on his hands and knees, and came up slowly, weaving and trying to find me with his unfocused eyes. I was aware of Susyn shouting at me, but it was distanced by my rage. He drew back his fist again. I hit him again as he threw his punch, a twisting blow to mid-sternum. He was coming in when I hit him. His ineffectual blow snapped the edge of my ear, and I felt the shock of my fist against his chest all the way to my shoulder.

His eyes rolled up and he sank bonelessly to the sidewalk. more tomorrow

By the fifth day I was restless and worried that Raven and Eric might have decided to skip Salzburg in favor of Venice. Susyn argued that we should spend one more day in Salzburg before we moved on.

Susyn had a sunny, open disposition. Every day was an adventure to her. When she made her rounds each morning, the head of the local police treated her with an avuncular familiarity that would probably have gotten steamy if she had let it. She described his antics every noon when we met to compare notes. Her mobile, comic’s face made him so real that I could almost see his moustache.

“You are very good with people,” I said.

“But, Ian, that’s easy if you like people.”

“You must be very valuable to Senator Cabral.”

She grinned. “He says so. But, of course, he is valuable to me, too. Without him, I would be secretary to some insurance salesman.”

“No. Not you.” It was not so much a compliment as an observation. Beneath her competence and friendliness, Susyn had a burning core of ambition. “How did you meet Senator Cabral?”

“I was working as a secretary – for an insurance salesman.” She grinned at me. “I didn’t like it and I was looking for a way out. The Senator was just running for his first term then. He looked like a winner, so I joined his team as a volunteer and worked my way up to a staff job. Six years later, here I am in Europe.”

“For the first time,” I said. She had told me early on that she had not been to Europe before.

“For the first time, and loving every minute of it. I want to find Raven, but I’ll miss this when I take her back. And I’ll miss you.”

“Tell me more about this drug dealer. I don’t understand why he is still after Raven. Surely he has figured out by now that she was not sent damaging information.”

“How could he be really sure? For a man like that, it would be better to act than to worry, and if that action includes murder, it wouldn’t bother him very much.”

“But a senator’s daughter? He should know that the Feds would never let him alone after killing her. Somehow, they would get him.”

“How could anyone know what happened to Raven if she simply disappeared in mid-ocean? After that, I can only speculate, but perhaps he is afraid to have her come back to California and testify. Anyway, why isn’t really important. It’s just important that we find her.”

I thought about the forces we were facing. They remained unreal in my mind. I had seen them through binoculars when they threw Raven into the sea. I had seen them up close on board the Wahini. Sitting now with Susyn, I stared at the livid scar across the back of my hand, trying to bring the skinny thug into focus. It was no use. My loss of Raven made them seem small and unimportant.

My mistake. more tomorrow

Chapter Twenty

Susyn and I waited in Salzburg for a week. There had been no hope of finding them in any of the lesser towns they might have gone through; there were dozens of routes from Montreaux to Salzburg. We divided duties as before; Susyn went to the authorities and I went to the youth hostel, the campground, and the street.

You don’t find many street musicians in Salzburg. Whatever their musical tastes might normally be, when tourists visit Salzburg, they have only Mozart on their minds. Salzburg lives on Mozart, from the museum they have made of his birthplace, to the the unending cascade of Mozart memorabilia, to the silly Mozart chocolates, the entire city is a shrine to the commercialization of his name. Every summer, productions of his operas are staged, bringing in the finest talents in the world and drawing on a worldwide clientele. The book and record stores in the old city are a classical music aficionado’s heaven. There is even a puppet opera – not a watered down children’s version of the operas, but a staged in the ancient European tradition of fine art marionettes, set to the music recorded during the previous year’s live productions.

After the first day, our routine became established. We stayed in adjoining rooms in a small hotel across from the old town. Once a day, Susyn would stop in at the police headquarters to ask if anything had been found, and to remind them that we were still there. I called Will every evening, and made the rounds of the hostel, campground, and cheap hotels. During the day, Susyn and I played tourist, wandering about Salzburg on the off chance of seeing them on the street.

Salzburg is a lovely small city, and the first two days were enjoyable. Susyn was a lively companion. The tourist’s were a cut above the ordinary. Beyond their obvious snobbery, there was a sense of intellectual curiosity about them that made them interesting even in casual encounters. But after two days we had seen what was there to be seen, and I was going crazy. Somewhere out there, Raven and Eric were in danger and did not know it. And somewhere out there, Raven was with Eric, instead of with me.

We walked the city, sat for hours in street cafes watching people go by, attended the puppet opera and a real one, and went to the park where the Sound of Music was filmed. And all day, every day, I played the game of “what went wrong?” No matter how many times I replayed my time with Raven, the crux of our relationship always came down to that day on the beach outside Marseille. A game of one-upmanship that revealed a depth of striving against each other. I had won that day; and in winning, I had lost Raven.

To Eric. That was a big piece of the puzzle. Why Eric? Beneath that friendly-dog expression there had been an essential uncertainty; a lack of intensity. It had put me off. Within five minutes I had known that we might be friendly, but we could never become friends. Had Raven been drawn to the same thing that repulsed me? Had she gone with him precisely because he was my opposite? more tomorrow