Steve Cash - The Remembering

On the long flight to Paris, neither Sailor nor I could sleep, so we talked at length about all things Meq, including the Gogorati, the Remembering. What was it? Would it be a beginning, an end, or some kind of transition? Would we find out why we are the way we are? Would we learn the truth? I asked Sailor what he expected to happen. He laughed and said, “The unexpected.”

“But what if we can’t find the sphere?”

“Be patient, Zianno. It may take years, but we shall find this sphere and you shall read it.”

“That is what Opari told me.”

“She is correct, and she is your Ameq, Zianno. Believe her for your own sake.”

Sailor was right, of course. Once we landed and made our way across the city to the Canal St. Martin and the Giselle , and I looked into Opari’s eyes, those black and beautiful eyes, I didn’t care how long it took to find the sphere. I, she, we … would wait.

But it is odd how things sometimes play out and turn around. Just under five months later, on April 16, Cardinal sent us a message. A sport-fishing yacht, a sixty-four-foot Bertram, was found drifting in the Gulf of Mexico, four miles off the coast of Matagorda Island in South Texas. On board, the Coast Guard discovered the bodies of two men who had been dead for several days. They had each been shot once in the back of the head, execution style, and their throats had been slashed ear to ear. No money, jewelry, or valuables of any kind were missing. The name of the yacht itself was Cowboy’s Dream , and the name of one of the men, the owner of the yacht, was Blaine Harrington, Captain U.S. Army, retired.

Ten days later, on his birthday, April 26, Jack received a small package in the mail. The package had no return address, but was postmarked West Berlin. Jack tore open the brown paper wrapping to find a book titled The Gashouse Gang: The St. Louis Cardinals of the 1930s by Cappy Briant. That was Jack’s favorite period of St. Louis Cardinals history. Whoever sent the package knew a great deal about Jack, intimate knowledge that he shared with very few others, which would imply that whoever it was also knew everything about Jack’s family, including where they lived and what they did every day. It was a subtle message, yet it was there and meant to be noticed.

Stuck between the pages of the book was a handwritten note. It read:

Dear Jack,

Happy Birthday, Comrade. I hope you enjoy the book. I did. The American game of baseball is perhaps your best export. It has been a long time since Manchuria, has it not? You are an admirable adversary, Jack Flowers. You play a good game. On the back of this note are the instructions for the one called Zianno Zezen. I pray you follow them.

The instructions were brief and simple. They told me to come alone to a certain intersection in West Berlin on a certain day at a certain time. The certain day happened to be May 4, my birthday, which sent another message that Valery knew much more than we suspected. But why had Valery surfaced now? And why me? Was it some sort of sacrifice, or trap, or exchange? Jack advised me not to go alone. However, that was the price and there was only one way to get the answers to my questions.

I waited the eight days, then boarded a plane in Paris and flew to Berlin, telling the stewardess and the woman sitting next to me I was on my way to spend the summer with my grandparents. After landing and clearing customs, I took a taxi to the designated intersection, only a block from the Anhalter Bahnhof train station. I was forty minutes early. It was a warm and sunny day, so I rolled up my shirtsleeves and leaned against the street sign, waiting. In exactly forty minutes, a blue Volkswagen pulled up to the curb and the passenger side door opened. The driver, a man about seventy or seventy-five years old, waved me inside. I got in and without ever saying a word to me the man drove across West Berlin to a checkpoint into East Berlin. The border guard waved us through, never looking at me and barely glancing at the man, as if he knew him well. We drove on to the outskirts of East Berlin, where the man stopped in a parking lot and pointed toward a pickup truck parked twenty yards away. The driver of the pickup was a woman at least as old as the man with the Volkswagen. “Danke,” I said and walked over and got in the pickup. From there we drove northwest for about thirty miles. The woman spoke to me occasionally, but it was with a thick accent and I didn’t understand a word. Finally, we turned off the highway onto a winding asphalt road that took us into a stretch of hills running along the east bank of the Elbe River. The hills were dotted with small farms and a few larger, older farms with landscaped terraces overlooking the river. After about five miles, the old woman slowed the pickup and turned into just such a farm. Two-hundred-year-old oaks and firs lined the driveway leading to and around the main farmhouse and a dozen other structures. All the structures had been built with stone sometime in the early 1700s and had been renovated many times since. She parked the pickup near a lavish flower garden. When we got out, she pointed west, past the flower garden and over a hill. Then she turned and walked away without a word.

I chose the central path through the enormous garden. The flowers were lush and well tended, especially the roses, which were in bloom, abundant, and all red — the fullest, richest red I’d ever seen. They looked beautiful in the bright glare of the sun. At the far end there was another path leading up the hill through a broad meadow full of wildflowers to a grove of oak trees. Beyond the trees the meadow sloped gently another fifty yards to a cliff overlooking a wide bend of the Elbe River. It was a stunning view, peaceful and magical.

As I came closer to the grove, I could see something moving in the dappled light between the trees. It was a man, or it looked to be a man. He wore a loose, baggy white suit, with oversize white gloves and a large white hat and veil, which completely covered his face and neck. He was tending to a long row of rectangular cedar boxes. I watched him lifting out panels or wooden frames from each box and scraping off a thick liquid, then returning the frames into the boxes. And then I saw the bees. They were swarming and buzzing around the man and the boxes. I got a sudden prickly feeling down my arms and legs. I reached in my pocket and took hold of the Stone. Was he the Beekeeper? I walked into the grove and the man kept working. He looked too tall to be the Beekeeper. Could he be Valery? I stopped twenty feet away and waited. The only sound was the buzzing of the bees. After he pulled and scraped one more frame, he took off his gloves and walked over to me. In my pocket I gripped the Stone a little tighter. He removed his hat and veil. He was not Valery. He was just a friendly old man, like the man in the Volkswagen and the woman in the pickup. He smiled and walked past me, making his way back up the hill through the meadow to the garden.

Then I turned and saw him. He was standing ten feet from the last wooden box in the row. I hadn’t seen him before because he was standing in the shade, but he was no taller than I was. He wore a baggy white suit, gloves, and a big white hat and veil. His “cane” was at his side. The Beekeeper.

Neither of us moved. The bees quit buzzing. I could not help but think of the horror in Dallas. He started out of the shade toward me, taking off his gloves as he walked. I felt a strange sensation as he came closer, but it wasn’t fear, it was something much more familiar. He stopped three feet in front of me. Slowly, deliberately, he raised his veil. I saw his green eyes, his ruby earrings, and his bright white teeth. I stared back at him.

“You!” I snarled.

“Alles Gute zum Geburtstag,” he said. “Happy Birthday, mon petit .”