Bharati Mukherjee - The Middleman and Other Stories

The tourist went out a lot. Sometimes a car came for him. From the Tourist Office, Mr. Venkatesan imagined. How nice it would be to tour the city, take a boat trip! Meantime he had to eat his meals upstairs. That was the sad part. Otherwise he felt he had never been so happy.

Every morning as soon as he got the chance he called Rammi, though he was no longer keen for Rammi to find a crooked captain. He called because he didn’t want Rammi to catch on that he was feeling whatever it was that he was feeling for Queenie. Like Rammi, he didn’t want complications. What he did was remind Rammi that he wouldn’t go into the hold of a ship that dumped its cargo into the Atlantic. He told Rammi that both in Trinco and in Tuticorin he’d heard stories of drowned Tamils.

Mr. Venkatesan’s roommates stopped going out for meals. They paid Queenie’s girl to buy them cold meats and oranges from the corner store. The only thing they risked going out for was liquor. He gathered from fragments of conversation that they were all sailors, from Indonesia and Nigeria, who’d jumped ship in Hamburg harbor. Whenever they went out, he could count on the girl prowling the attic room. He let her prowl. It was almost like having Queenie in the room.

There was only one worry. The girl lifted things — small things — from under pillows. Sometimes she played under the beds where he and the other men stored their suitcases, and he heard lids swish open or closed. He didn’t think the things she stole were worth stealing. He’d seen her take a handful of pfennigs from a jacket pocket once, and another time envelopes with brilliant stamps from places like Turkey and Oman. What she seemed to like best to pilfer were lozenges, even the medicated kind for sore throat. It was as if covetousness came upon her, out of the blue, making her pupils twitch and glow.

He didn’t mind the loss to his roommates. But he worried that they’d get her in trouble by sending her to the store. He would have to stop her. He would have to scold her as a father might or should without messing things up with Queenie.

One morning Queenie showed up in 3A herself. “I have good news,” she whispered. Two of the four men were still in bed. Mr. Venkatesan could tell they hated having a grown woman in their room. “Rammi should have word for you tonight. I’m meeting him to find out more.” The morning light, streaming in through a cracked stained-glass panel in the window, put such a heavenly sheen on her face that Mr. Venkatesan blurted out in front of his roommates, “I love you, I love you.”

Queenie laughed. “Hush,” she said. “You’re not there yet. You don’t want to wake up our Teuton. I need the legitimate business too.”

It seemed to Mr. Venkatesan like an invitation. He followed her down into the front hall in his night clothes. In Tamil movies heroes in his position would have been wearing brocade smoking jackets. It didn’t matter. He had made his declaration. Now fate would have to sink the crooked captain and his boat.

Queenie fussed with a pink, plastic clip in her hair. She knotted and reknotted the wispy silk square around her throat. She tapped the longest fingernail he’d ever seen on the butterfly buckle of her belt. She was teasing him. She was promising he wouldn’t really have to go. He wanted to stay, Anne Frank or not.

“Tonight should be a champagne night,” she grinned. He saw the tensing of a dainty calf muscle as she straightened a stocking. “I’ll see to coffee,” she said.

Upstairs the man from Lübeck had hot water running in the bathroom sink. The pipes moaned. It was best to hide out in the kitchen until the man was back in his own room. Mr. Venkatesan joined Queenie’s daughter at the dinette table. She had lozenges spread out on the tablecloth, like a sun spiked with long rays. She didn’t look like a thief. She looked like a child he might have fathered if he’d married the bride his mother had picked for him in the days he’d still been considered a good catch. He hadn’t married. Something dire had shown up in the conjunction of their horoscopes.

What if, just what if, what had seemed disastrous to the astrologer at the time had really been fate’s way of reserving him for a better family with Queenie and this child in Hamburg?

“I’ll sell you some,” the child said. “I have English toffees too.”

“Where?” He wanted to see her whole loot.

She ducked and brought out an old milk bottle from under the table. He saw the toffees in their red and blue wrapping papers. He saw a Muslim’s worry beads. Some things in the bottle were shiny — he made out two rings among the keys and coins and coat buttons. There were two ID cards in the bottle. She reached for the cards. She had to have stolen one of the cards from a man in Room 3A. In the ID picture, which was amateurishly doctored, the roommate looked like a playboy sheikh, and not at all like a refugee without travel papers. He grabbed the roommate’s card from her. It wouldn’t hurt to have the fellow in his debt. The other card belonged to a very blond, very German man.

The child was shrewd. “I didn’t steal anything,” she snapped. “I don’t know how the stuff got in that jar.”

She tossed the blond man’s ID to him to get rid of it, and he caught it as he had paper flowers, silk squares, and stunned rabbits hurled to front-row boys by magicians on fete days in his kindergarten. He had loved the magicians. They alone had given him what he’d wanted.

As in dreams, the burly blond man materialized out of thin air and blocked the doorway. The man had on a touristy shirt and short pants, but he didn’t have the slack gait of a vacationer. He had to be the man who lived in the nice upstairs room, the man who slept under the cozy duvet , who brushed his teeth in a clean, pink sink he didn’t have to share, the man from whom transients like Mr. Venkatesan himself had to hide out. This man yelled something nasty in German to Queenie’s daughter. The child cowered.

The man yelled again. Mr. Venkatesan started to back away. Minute by minute the man ballooned with rage.

“No deutsch ,” Mr. Venkatesan mumbled.

“You filthy swine,” the man shouted in English. “We don’t want you making filthy our Germany.” He threw five passports down on the kitchen table and spat on the top one. “The girl, she stole something from each of you scums,” he hooted.

Mr. Venkatesan recognized his in the heap of travel documents. The child must have stolen it. The child must have filched it from under his pillow while he’d slept. She was a child possessed with covetousness. Now, because of her sick covetousness, he would rot in jail. He yanked the girl by her braids and shook her. The girl made her body go limp, taking away all pleasure in hate and revenge. The tourist from Lübeck ignored the screaming child. He got on the pay phone, the one Mr. Venkatesan called Rammi on every morning. Mr. Venkatesan heard the word “Polizei!” He was almost fifty. By fifty a man ought to stop running. Maybe what seemed accidental now — Queenie’s daughter’s kleptomania blowing away his plans for escape — wasn’t accidental. He remembered what had consoled Dr. Pillai at the time of his arrest. Fractals. Nothing was random, the math teacher used to say. Nothing, not even the curliness of a coastline and the fluffiness of a cloud.

Mr. Venkatesan thought about the swoops and darts of his fate. He had started out as a teacher and a solid citizen and ended up as a lusty criminal. He visualized fate now as a buzzard. He could hear the whir of fleshy wings. It hopped off a burning car in the middle of a Trinco intersection.

Then, suddenly, Queenie the beauteous, the deliverer of radiant dreams, burst through the door of the kitchen. “Leave him alone!” she yelled to the man from Lübeck. “You’re harassing my fiancé! He’s a future German citizen. He will become my husband!”