Gene Wolfe - The Land Across

“Her name was Yelena,” I said. “I don’t know her last name.”

“You were there to extort information from her.”

I shook my head. “Just to ask her a few questions. She was awfully weak, though. She couldn’t tell me much.” Maybe I should have shut up after that, but the look on Papa Zenon’s face forced it out of me. “I held her hand while she died.”

Everybody was quiet for a minute or two after that. I guess I could have been looking around the Great Square Café then, so I could give you a big description of it now, the army officer and the girl he had probably paid to spend the night with him and all the rest of that shit. But the truth is that I was just staring down at the tablecloth and thinking about Yelena and sugar bowls. In the States we have sugar bowls at home because we trust the people there. In restaurants you get your sugar in little paper packages, because the government knows better than to trust you. Yelena had probably died because somebody made a crazy mistake. America is full of crazy people who might put anything into a restaurant sugar bowl if they got the chance, and maybe you are one of them. Cocaine or sand or powdered bleach. Rat poison. Anything. It had always seemed to me that life in America was a whole lot better than life where I was then, but in some ways it has to be a lot worse because it drives so many people crazy with hate. I have gone on a lot about a crazy country, and while we were quiet and the café was emptying out and quieting down I wondered if my own country was not crazier.

Naala touched my arm. “Papa is speak to you. You do not hear him, I think.”

I apologized like you do.

“I do not ask what she tells you,” Papa Zenon said, “but I would much like to know what questions you asked her.”

I asked Naala if we were partners.

“Already partners I do not think. You may tell him if you think it wise. Or not. You must decide.”

I nodded. “I’ll tell you, Papa, if you’ll tell me how you knew Martya was here.”

“This I must tell before, I think, because you do not trust me. I must speak first?”

“That’s all right. I’ll trust you.”

“Ah! I win the bargain.” He grinned. “We priests are bad bargainers, all of us. Rarely do I win. Tell me and I tell you what you wish to know. Also I show you. That is better.”

Two things happened at once then, neither one of them in words. Naala stiffened up, and I felt the hand come out of my left jacket pocket. At first I thought it was hers, but it was not. I sipped coffee, choked a little, coughed, and sipped some more.

“You are disturbed, my son.” Papa Zenon sounded really sympathetic. “I have spoil your breakfast. I apologize.”

“Not me, Papa. I was just trying to remember all the questions. I think I’ve got them now. I asked how she was feeling, and didn’t people get her mixed up with Rosalee. You probably know who Rosalee is.”

“You will tell me?”

“Sure. She’s Russ Rathaus’s wife. She and Yelena looked quite a bit alike, which was why I was talking to Yelena.”

Papa Zenon nodded. “I see. If one cannot question a witness one questions another who resembles her. Science progresses.”

Naala said, “We explain this later, it may be.”

“After that, I asked Yelena if there was anybody who might want to kill her.”

Papa smiled. “I see.”

“She said no. Then I asked if there was anybody who hung around her a lot when she didn’t want him to. We call those guys stalkers in America, but I don’t think I told Yelena that.”

“Your next question?”

“There wasn’t any. She wanted a nurse, and I tried to get one for her but nobody came. Then she wanted to sit up, so I cranked up her bed. After that all I did was hold her hand, but she jerked it away just before she died. She was shaking and everything by then.”

Naala put her arm around me, and the hand squeezed my left thigh. There was some talk I missed after that. I did not really start paying attention again until my food came. I know how that sounds, but that is how it was.

Naala was saying, “It is like this. We believe those who say the Unholy way free Rathaus. We seek him, yes. But it is not him we desire, or not so much. It is they. You also, for His Excellency. But what is His Excellency to do but summon us? He commands no police.”

“He will investigate,” Papa Zenon said. “He wishes to drag them from their dark places, not just a few but every one of them. If so many cannot be imprisoned, they can at least be made known. Let their neighbors understand what it is they do.”

I said, “One of the things they did was kill Yelena.”

Nobody said anything for a minute, so I said, “She was some sort of criminal, I guess. I don’t know what kind, and I don’t even know her last name. But I mean to get them for it. Only right now, here and now, I mean to straighten you out. Your Unholy Way didn’t free Russ. He freed himself, and they’re trying to kill him for it. When we find him—which we will—maybe we’ll find out enough about them to keep him safe, and that’s what I want. He was my friend, and he’d do the same for me.”

“Already I know what you believe,” Naala said. Her voice was gentler than I had ever heard it. “Also what the JAKA believe.”

I felt the hand stir.

Papa Zenon said, “It may be good for us to differ on certain points. It is when one side corrects the other that both progress.”

I said, “Thanks, Papa. After that, you don’t have to tell me how you knew Martya was here if you don’t want to. But if you do, I’ll sure listen.”

“Photographs.” Papa Zenon was smiling the way you do when something hurts. “His Excellency was able to provide me with photographs of three persons I may be sure are among the black magicians. He asked me to look at them, and to identify them if I could.”

Naala glanced around the café, which was starting to fill up. “You will show them to us?”

“Yes. We are partners already, though we have not yet agreed. So much information already has been shared. In a moment I will ask you to show me the hand.”

“Ah. What if I refuse? Does our partnership remain?”

I put my left hand on the hand then. This was under the table where they could not see me doing it, but the hand was there. It seemed like something dead to me, cold and flaccid, until it started to tremble.

“It does.” Papa Zenon was answering Naala’s question. His eyes shone, and I had the feeling that the mouse would run but circle around behind us. He would be friendly and understanding if Naala cooked up some bullshit to explain why we did not want him to see it, and pretty soon he would come up with a way to put pressure on us.

Naala said, “Let us see these pictures.”

“I will. You understand, I hope, that I am not the only investigator His Excellency has looking into this matter. There are several of us, but he fears that one may be a spy. Which one he does not yet know. For that reason and others, none of us knows the identity of the rest.”

“It is a poor system,” Naala told him, “but it is one we, too, are often forced to employ.”

Papa Zenon had reached down and pulled up a scuffed black leather case with a zipper. He unzipped it and got out three photos maybe three by five, all old-fashioned black-and-whites. He offered them to Naala first.

She shook her head, but when I spread them out to look at, she leaned over so she could look, too. The first one was Russ and the second one was Rosalee.

The third one was Martya.

I gave them back to Papa Zenon and said, “Okay, that answers a question Naala and I have had for quite a while.”

That got me the elbow. “Her he knows in Puraustays?”