Thomas Trofimuk - Waiting for Columbus

This is a vulnerable position, he thinks. To expose one’s back and buttocks like this speaks about trust and faith, and comfort. She trusts the picture-taker. Perhaps this speaks of love. Does love follow trust, faith, and this level of comfort? Are these dependent on each other?

He thinks he ought to know this horizontal woman. There is some nuance he cannot put his finger on that resonates with familiarity. But what? He looks closer. If only this mental image would move. If only she would sit up and turn toward the picture-taker and smile. Then his heart would break with a yearning tenderness. But at least he would know.

Sitting up in one of the cheap seats on the night train from Paris to Madrid would have been a painful experience, but Emile had a new company credit card, so he booked a berth on the Elipsos hotel train. He slept for most of the trip-let the clicking of the tracks soothe away all the rough edges. In Madrid, Emile reinterviewed two of the witnesses. A student at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid remembers yelling at a man on the stairs. “He was going the wrong way,” she said. “His eyes were steely, hard. He ignored me. I just remember his eyes and that he was going the wrong way.” Another witness, a lawyer, said he was pushed by a man carrying a bag under his arm-a leather bag. “This man, he said nothing-just pushed his way through the crowd-he seemed desperate, agitated.” The confounding thing is that these witnesses seem to have a different idea of what this man looked like. Emile was intrigued. Either these people who claim to have seen the guy each saw somebody different, or this man was some sort of chameleon.

He’s driving south from Madrid. The day before, the woman at the rental-car agency at first did not believe Emile’s new credit card was real. This woman, who teased with her smile-a sort of titillating playfulness was her default-was flummoxed by the black card and embarrassed when her boss took over. He saw the card and began fawning-upgrading, double-checking the readiness of the car, offering a free map, offering to get coffee, and waiving fees. Emile was grateful for the muffled silence of the car when he finally drove away. This credit card, he decided, was a pain in the ass.

There are many roads that lead south from Madrid. If this mystery man, this person of intense interest, went south, he had his pick. South was a guess, based on the flimsy newspaper story about a man in Valdepeñas. And if south was a guess, well Valdepeñas was a leap of faith. Emile didn’t have much to go on. He had the usual checks in place, and a junior agent in Lyon was monitoring newspapers for anything about a lone, disoriented, or suspicious man-anything out of the ordinary.

It’s a bit of a drive to Valdepeñas. Perhaps it was this man of interest wandering around town asking for directions, Emile thinks. He could certainly have found a ride. This is Emile’s only clue right now. He thinks back to the rental-car woman, the one who’d questioned his credit card. This was the sort of woman he would have felt comfortable asking out. There was nothing severe about her. In fact, there was a natural playfulness, which was shunted aside when the sycophant manager stepped in. He’d have enjoyed looking across the table into those eyes and seeing that smile. Emile presses the button on the door panel and the window opens. He lets the car-rental woman slip out the window into the hot day.

Emile enjoys being on the road, driving long distances and thinking. For him, it’s a good place for those bits of subconscious-the renegades-to float to the surface. It’s a good place to figure things out. One sits still behind the wheel, motionless, while at the same time engaged in movement. The Paris shooting is suddenly there demanding attention, but Emile pushes Paris away-he elbows aside the reason he’s been off work. He has been turned inward long enough. His wounds are only scars now. He’d rather think about the rental-car woman and her teasing smile.

In Valdepeñas, Emile decides to check bars and cafés near the train station and around main thoroughfares. He asks his questions in four bars and two cafés the day he arrives. This morning, he had an espresso in the café in his hotel and made inquiries. Just before noon, he visits his fifth Valdepeñas bar. He sits down at the bar and asks the same questions regarding any strangers making an impression or acting oddly.

“Ya, there was a guy here a few months back. Thought he was noble or something. Went after a group of our regulars with a pool cue.”

Emile sits up straight. He nods his encouragement at the bartender who had put down a copy of Don Quixote when Emile came in. If that’s not a sign from God that this is some sort of idealistic, absurd adventure, Emile thinks, I don’t know what is.

“He pulled it out of the rack on the wall and snapped it on the table,” the bartender says. “Held it like a goddamned sword. Pushed Pablo up against the wall, made him apologize.”

“What had this Pablo done?”

“He was a little rough with his wife. Verbally. Not physical or anything. Pablo is a mean drunk, that’s all.”

“And?”

“The guy looked crazy-like he might actually push the pool cue through Pablo’s neck. Pablo apologized.”

“What did this swordsman look like?”

“Scraggly. Greasy hair. Dirty clothes. Definitely not from around here. He was fairly tall. Obviously he was crazy. I had to toss him. He was very polite about it. Understood completely.”

“Did he say anything else? Anything to indicate where he was going? Anything? Even the most insignificant bit of conversation.”

“Look, I told him that what he’d done was something a lot of us in the bar had wished we’d done ages ago. Pablo is a big fucking mean bastard of a drunk but his father employs most of the men who drink here.” He picks up a cloth from inside the sink and begins to wipe down the bar, adrift in this automatic action. “Why are you looking for this guy?”

I wish I knew for sure, Emile thinks. “He’s missing,” he says, thinking, well, it could be true-this man might be missing. “I’m just trying to get him back home,” he adds.

The bartender weighs this. It seems to Emile that he is being protective. He’s protecting a man he barely knows, a man he’d tossed out of his bar, a man who had attacked-or at least threatened-one of his customers.

“Let me see your identification again,” he says.

Emile hands him his badge. The bartender looks it over carefully and hands it back.

“He asked me which way it was to Morocco. When I told him to go south, he looked confused. I told him to head for Córdoba. I had to point. He had no idea about directions. Clueless. I think he was going to try and hitchhike.”

Emile is more confounded now than he was when he first read the alerts. As the details of this man’s journey pile up, clarity is not forthcoming. The newspaper story about the mysterious stranger in Valdepeñas who asked for directions to almost every city and town on a map of Spain could be his man. But one of the witnesses in Valdepeñas said the man spoke Russian, or at least had a Russian accent. Another witness, who provided a nice meal and a bottle of wine for the stranger, said the man was short, no more than 170 centimeters. And now add this man in the bar and a bartender who is protective of a patron who threatened to kill a favored customer.

Emile gets out of bed. He finds the bottle of cask-strength Laphroaig on the desk across the room. He pulls the cork out and pours a hefty portion. In the quasi-darkness, Emile fumbles with the minibar key and locates a bottle of spring water in the back. He spills a couple of spoonfuls of the water into his glass and takes a sip of the smoky whiskey.