B004U2USMY EBOK (40 page)

“What are you, a Zionist? No, soon as my
papers come through I’m off to Brooklyn. I’ll take my chances with
the Americans.” David looked at Gabriela. “You’re looking good,
Gaby. Finally put a little flesh on those bones, it suits you.”

“I’m getting fat, you mean.”

“Hardly. But I no longer feel the urge to
stuff you with croissants. And you, you must be
Señor
Reyes.” He held out his
hand and then picked up the older man’s hand and shook it for both
of them. “Your daughter is quite a woman, it does you credit.”

“
Merci, jeune homme. Muchas gracias.
”

“Come with me, sir, I have a car waiting.”

Her father looked at Gabriela.

“It’s okay, Papá, David is a friend. And I’ll
be there in a minute.”

“Okay,
hija.
”

David carried her heaviest bag and wheeled
her father out of the station.

Helmut gave her a sad smile after the other
two had gone. “I guess this is it.”

“Does it have to be?”

“Another year, two maybe, then this goddamned
war will finally be over.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said.

“I know.”

“But you’ll be okay, right?”

“Maybe, who knows. The Allies are in Italy,
what about that?”

She knew some of it. The Americans had
mounted a full-scale invasion of Italy since summer. The Italian
government fell, the Germans occupied the north of the country.
Seemed like the Americans were making slow but sure progress
driving the
boches
north.

“But that could be good,” she said. “The
Yanks are in Europe, at least.”

“Say the Americans conquer Italy, how will
they cross the Alps? But it’s got them committed, that’s the
problem. They should have come through Marseille. Now it could be
another six months before they come at France. Meanwhile, the
Soviets are pushing west, hard. You know, I heard a whisper the
other day about a new plot to kill the Fuhrer, then arrest
Goebbels, Himmler, and the lot.”

“Could it work?”

“A coup? Sure, but you know what they’re
after? They want to put a general in charge, maybe Rommel, with
the idea of better fighting the war. They still think we can win.
No hope, it will only prolong the misery.” He sighed. “I suppose
I’m nothing more than a defeatist.”

She took his hand. “So stay with us in
Geneva. There’s nothing left for you there.”

His face clouded with pain. “I can’t, Gaby,
you know that.”

“Because of your wife?”

“Yes, in part. Loise won’t leave, she needs
me. I have to stay behind.”

“So you’re going back to Germany to die?”

“To see what happens. Maybe rebuild after. Or
yes, maybe to die.”

“Oh, Helmut, no.”

“We had a good run for awhile. Germany could
have ruled the world if we’d gone about it the right way. We
didn’t, we did everything wrong. Now it’s only fair to be punished
for our crimes.”

“But what does that have to do with you? You
didn’t do any of that. You’re a good person, you helped people.”

“Gaby, I cast my lot with Germany a long time
ago. It made me rich. Now I need to pay the price for that
loyalty.”

“It isn’t fair. You’re just one man, you
don’t deserve to suffer. Please. Don’t come with me, then, if you
don’t think it’s right, but you have to get out.”

“Gaby.”

There was so much more she wanted to say, but
then David returned from the car. He waited a few meters away.

Helmut put a hand to her face. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For making me feel alive.” He took out a
piece of paper folded up in his pocket. “Christine left this in
Marseille. I don’t know if you want to keep it or if it’s too ugly
to remember. You can throw it away if you want, but I wanted you
to decide.”

She unfolded the paper. It had got wet at one
point and the colors smeared along the side of one wall, but there
was still a dark, chilling power in the gray building with its
smokestacks. And the little bit of color, the red rooster with the
human face standing on the roof of the asylum.

When she looked up, Helmut was walking away.
He disappeared into a mass of men and women, all jostling on the
platforms, arguing with station guards, haggling with porters,
struggling with children, wrestling too much baggage evacuated in
too little time, hurrying to catch a train, trying to communicate
in some obscure language, and waging the millions of other
individual battles being fought from London to Paris, to Berlin,
to Moscow and every other station, street, and corner across the
continent.

The individual battles of people, surviving.

-end-

Read on for author
bio, discussion questions, and an excerpt from The Devil's Deep,
by Michael Wallace.

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About the author:

Michael Wallace has trekked across the Sahara on a
camel, ridden an elephant through a tiger preserve in Southeast
Asia, eaten fried guinea pig, and been licked on the head by a
skunk. In a previous stage of life he programmed nuclear war
simulations, smuggled refugees out of a war zone, and milked
cobras for their venom. He speaks Spanish and French and grew up
in a religious community in the desert. His suspense/thrillers
include The Devil's Deep, State of Siege, Implant, and The
Righteous, and he is also the author of collections of travel
stories and fantasy books for children. His work has appeared in
print more than a hundred times, including publication in markets
such as The Atlantic and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction.

The Devil's Deep
by Michael Wallace

Chapter One:

It was ten minutes to midnight when Rosa
Solorio entered the darkened room to kidnap the retarded man.

She found Chad Lett twitching in his bed, his
arms curled into clubs, biceps stretched like cords. His hands
formed claws. Muscles strained on his neck and his eyes fluttered.
No sound came from his mouth, but it grimaced as if in pain.

“Dios mio,”
Rosa whispered under her
breath.

She knew Chad’s every spasm and moan. Three
other beds lined the room. They held the other residents of Team
Smile and after five years she could recognize each of their
cries, moans, or screams from the other side of the facility.

But eighty minutes had passed since night
meds. Team Smile took theirs ground into applesauce and spooned
back until reflex made them swallow, and one of Chad’s pills was a
muscle relaxant. He should have been asleep by now. Instead, that
grimace, the right eye rolling, but the left staring straight
ahead.

Rosa hesitated, doubting everything. Every
question she’d asked herself, every time she’d studied Chad on
nights like this, his face in shadows cast by the sterile,
fluorescent light coming from the hallway. Maybe she was wrong.

She couldn’t pull her gaze from Chad’s eye.
Not the rolled-back right eye—
the evil eye,
she thought—but
the left. The
living
eye.

It had begun as a fantasy, spun in her own
head. She’d dreamed about Chad Lett, not the profoundly retarded
man warehoused at Riverwood, but a man who had walked by her side
along the beach.

“Are you sure?” the man in her dreams had
asked. “Absolutely sure? Look me in the eye, Rosa. Look! Then tell
me that you’re sure I’m gone.”

And she found herself watching his eyes while
she bathed him or fed him. The right showed only the glassy stare
so typical of the lowest-functioning residents. But she couldn’t
help but watch the left, wondering and afraid, as it blinked.

She stood over his bed one shift after
Riverwood sank into its nighttime slumber. “Are you alive? Blink
if you can understand me.”

And the left eye had answered.
Blink.

He was alive. Not just a body that breathed
and a heart that beat while the brain sat cold and still. But a
man, alive inside that body. A man who had just blinked his
answer. As if to say,
Yes, I’m alive. I’m alive and trapped in
this hell. For God’s sake, help me!

“Forgive me!” she cried. “I didn’t know. I
swear, I didn’t.”

And still, it took two weeks to work up the
courage to take Chad away from this place. Yet, here she was.
Ready. “You’ll get help,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Rosa had five minutes before Anne Wistrom
finished her cigarette break and returned to the nurse station
across the hall. Rosa liked Anne and her cynical sense of humor.
And she’d use a few words of Spanish, easy stuff like
hola
and
buenos días,
but it was the effort that won her
points. But Rosa couldn’t let the nurse see her carting Chad off
in the middle of the night.

She brought Chad’s wheelchair from the
closet, then untied his restraints. Rosa lowered the bar on his
bed and maneuvered the man into position to lift him to the chair.

Most of the bed-ridden residents at Riverwood
Care Center—those handful so profoundly retarded they would never
walk or feed themselves, wishful thinking and years of therapy
aside—lived in wasted shells and could be lifted easily from bed
to wheelchair and back again. Not Chad. The spasms kept his
muscles strong. It didn’t help that he kept twitching as she
half-dragged, half-dropped him into the chair. She paused to catch
her breath and listen for sounds from the hallway before fastening
Chad’s head restraints and wheeling him out.

She heard the floor cleaner down the west
wing and knew that this early in the shift, the other night
janitor would still be loading sheets into the wash, also in that
direction. So she took Chad toward the east wing doors. The hall
was silent but for the squeak of the chair’s wheels on the floor
and an occasional cough from the darkened rooms on either side of
the hall.

A moment later Rosa pushed Chad into the
chill February night. The cold sucked the warmth from her lungs.
She wheeled him down the ramp, beneath icicles and a light, dry
snow that glittered as it hung around the porch light. What had
possessed her to move from the warm, perpetual summer of the Osa
Peninsula to the mountains of Vermont?

Rosa’s father was a fisherman. Rosa’s
grandfather had been a fisherman and her brother was a fisherman.
But from the time she was a child, her father had promised her
something else. “You are a bright girl.
Muy lista.
God
means for you to be something else than a fisherman’s wife, or a
maid for American tourists.” A doctor, Papá decided eventually.
That’s what she’d be.

He thought she was in the United States,
studying. That had been the arrangement with Dr. Pardo. And in her
letters, she always told him about her classes and the things her
professors said. And then, when she couldn’t stand to lie any
longer, she told him how she was struggling with chemistry and
calculus, thinking she could fail the supposed classes and thus be
forced to drop out of school.

He’d returned encouraging letters. Don’t give
up,
hija.
You’re a smart girl. As smart as any of the
others. I believe in you. He returned the money she sent the
family, urging her to hire a tutor.

She couldn’t bear to let him down, so when
the end of the semester came at the school she did not attend, she
wrote back, exulting that she’d passed both classes she had not
been failing, even earning a B+ in calculus. Oh, he was so proud.

Chad was calm now, but still awake. His eyes
stared blankly to one side, where his head rested against the head
shield. He gave no sign of noticing the cold. She’d seen him take
shots without flinching. Once, a careless therapist put his chair
too close to the radiator and his stocking feet had burned badly
enough to raise blisters, all without movement or sound.

To all the world Chad Lett looked like any
other low-functioning resident of Riverwood—one of the ruder
therapists called them the slugs—only less responsive to light and
pain. Only now, she knew differently. She imagined that he felt
every prick, burn, and pinch.

Rosa checked for Dr. Pardo’s car in the back
lot and breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t see his
Mercedes. She’d told Pardo about Chad’s blinking and he’d urged
her to keep quiet. And why should that be a surprise? It was Pardo
who had promised Rosa’s father to pay for her schooling in the
United States, and that had been a lie. Why would he care about
one paralyzed man?

Rosa wheeled Chad away from the globe lights
on the end of the building, then looked beyond the gate to the
street. There was an SUV parked down the street, by the park, but
she couldn’t see anyone inside.

She heard feet crunching through snow. Rosa
turned quickly, her breath coming in a puff of steam that
disintegrated in a halo around the globe light. A storm had
dropped eighteen inches in late January, but since then it had
been cold and dry. Under the eaves of the building, the
untrammeled snow had eroded underneath, leaving a crust through
which someone walked.

Who? Not staff, surely. A resident? Maybe
Jason, coming to check the break room door and look for
half-smoked cigarettes. But why walk across the snow instead of
cutting through the courtyard? Besides, Jason knew he’d catch hell
if anyone caught him out of bed at this hour.
Doctor Pardo.

The crunching grew louder and a man emerged
from the shadows. She let out a second breath, this one of relief.
It wasn’t Doctor Pardo.

“You said to meet in the street,” Rosa said.

“Thought I’d have a look around while I was
waiting.”