The Gordian Knot (26 page)

“What are you doing?” the professor asked, grabbing Georg’s arm.

“Come on!” Georg shouted and, seizing the professor by the hand, began running, pushing, dodging people, and jumping over luggage, dragging the professor behind him. They reached the escalator and began to descend. He let go of the professor, who was
gasping and cursing, and reached for the cans of film in his pockets. Buchanan came into sight, as did the door to the hall.

Georg’s actions had not aroused any suspicions. A man bangs his hand against the glass wall, setting off a false alarm, and then runs with another man to the escalator. The two men running could be father and son, late and frantically making their way through the crowd. Nothing unusual in that.

It all happened in a flash. The glass door slid open, Joe came out of the arrivals area, Georg threw the cans. His aim was good: a few of them hit Joe, the others landed close by him. Joe looked at the cans, and then in the direction from which they had been flung.

The bullet hit Joe in the forehead. Georg saw him fall, saw Buchanan turn and aim again. So it’s with both hands, Georg thought, you shoot with both hands. He saw Buchanan’s face, his eyes, his tight lips, the gun’s muzzle. He wanted to duck, but the shot rang out.

People screamed and ran for cover. Buchanan shouted something, Georg couldn’t hear what. The professor, who had been standing above him on the escalator, fell onto him and slid down, collapsing onto a woman who was cowering next to Georg. Georg heard the rasping horror of her shrieks close to his ear.

Then he saw the briefcase, which had slipped out of the professor’s hand. The escalator came to a halt. Georg automatically reached for the briefcase and scurried doggedly, hunched forward, up the escalator. He stepped on hands, pushed people out of the way, and at the top of the escalator elbowed his way through the crowd that had gathered to see what was going on downstairs. All these people had been near the atrium and heard the shots and screams. Those who were farther back hadn’t noticed anything, and Georg casually walked past them and out of the building.

He drove back to San Francisco. He parked at the end of
Twenty-fourth Street, took the briefcase out of the car, and slowly walked to a bench near the waterfront. He sat down and put the briefcase at his feet. It was low tide, and rocks, car tires, and a refrigerator were looming out of the water.

He sat there for a long time, watching the sun’s rays dancing on the waves. His mind was empty. Of course, he finally looked into the briefcase. And later, as Jill was asleep next to him, he turned on a table lamp and opened the briefcase again. It didn’t contain two million. It didn’t even contain one. He counted $382,460. There was a disarray of hundred-dollar bills mixed in with fifties and twenties, and between them the tie with the garden gnomes, tied and ready to be slipped on.

The following day all the newspapers featured the shooting at the airport. Georg read that Townsend Enterprises had been involved in industrial espionage for the Russians at Gorgefield Aircraft, and that Benton and a Russian agent had fallen into a trap set by Gorgefield Aircraft. Benton had attempted to shoot his way out, and had been shot dead by Buchanan. The Russian agent had been hospitalized, critically wounded. There was a picture of Richard D. Buchanan Jr., security adviser at Gorgefield, looking grim.

Georg read the newspaper the following morning at the airport. He was wearing sunglasses, and Jill was in the carrier sling. Nobody was paying particular attention. It was shortly before ten. The Pan Am flight from New York was scheduled to land soon. Fran had said that she would pick up Jill and take the one-thirty flight back to New York.

“Come and stay forever,” Georg had told her.

She had laughed, but then had asked him what the weather was like. “Does it get cool there in the evenings?”

THEY DROVE SOUTH AND TOOK A FLIGHT
from Mexico to Madrid, and from Madrid to Lisbon. Today they live in a house by the sea. Jill is five, and Fran sometimes tells her a bedtime story about a crazy guy who once upon a time ran off to San Francisco with her when she was a baby. They have two more children. Georg is translating again, because he couldn’t go on doing nothing.

“Why didn’t you write your story yourself?” I asked Georg, as we were sitting beneath the stars on his terrace above the sea. He had read my manuscript and was quibbling over this or that detail.

“Fran didn’t want me to. This might sound strange, but since San Francisco we never talk about any of this. Fran won’t have it.” Georg laughed. “Whenever I bring up the subject she dismisses it as water under the bridge, and says she doesn’t want me to spend weeks on end at my desk mulling over the past.”

Georg poured more wine, Alvarinho from Monçäo, light on the palate but it goes straight to your head. He leaned back. By now he was almost entirely bald; the wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth had turned into deep furrows, and the groove in his chin had become more pronounced. But he had a healthy complexion, and seemed relaxed and content.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve come to realize that Fran is right. When I read your manuscript, everything was so distant, a faraway echo; you don’t know whether it was your voice or someone else’s. It’s like when someone finds an old photograph of his father, who died young, and knows perfectly well that it’s his father, even though he barely remembers him. When I told you about my final weeks in New York and San Francisco and you came up with the idea of turning it into a book, I was pleased. I thought that if I read what you had written I’d see things more clearly, that I’d see a structure and a pattern where I could … oh, I don’t know. I was a real mess back then. But I guess it’s true that we can never see clearly what we are doing or what happens to us, we can’t even hold on to it. Sooner or later it ends up as water under the bridge—so I guess the sooner that happens, the better.”

The summer after Georg’s return from America, I was sitting at my desk in my apartment in the Amselgasse one evening when the downstairs bell rang. I wasn’t expecting anybody, but buzzed whoever it was in. In our age of telephones, unexpected guests are rare. I looked down the stairwell, but recognized neither the hand that was groping its way up the banister nor the sound of his tread. When he came into sight on the landing below, I was quite relieved: after my visit to Cucuron in September I hadn’t heard from Georg, except for a brief phone call from New York asking me urgently to send him some money. Not to mention that Jürgen had opened the sealed envelope Georg had sent him and had read to me Georg’s predicament in New York, and I was afraid for his safety. His parents had no information about his whereabouts, he hadn’t contacted the Epps again, nor had he been in touch with Larry or Helen, whose addresses the Epps had given me.

Georg and I hugged. I went to get some wine, and he told me all about New York and San Francisco, and about Fran, who was waiting
for him in Lisbon. He talked all night. The sun came up, and I prepared a bed for him. He was in the shower, and I stood by the window smoking a final cigarette. Was I just tired? I couldn’t believe his luck. Or was I jealous? He was doing great, he said, and Fran was perfect, Jill a treasure, and the money a blessing. He had fidgeted all night with his sunglasses, turning them about in his hands, putting them on, sliding them down to the edge of his nose, taking them off again, chewing on them, folding and unfolding them.

He had only come to Heidelberg for a short time. He was going to see his parents the following day and fly back to Portugal the day after. He had to be careful: not enough water had flowed beneath the bridge; they might still be after him. It was at breakfast that I told him I wanted to turn his story into a book. He liked the idea. But I should take my time, he said, it would be best for the book not to appear too soon; not to mention that names and places had to be changed. He again put on his sunglasses.

Some years passed. He called me from time to time, and once we met at the airport in Frankfurt. For a long time the notes I had made for the book lay tucked away in my drawer. I completed the manuscript a year ago, but couldn’t send it to him, since he had never given me his address; then I recently got a call from him inviting me to Lisbon.

Fran picked me up at the airport. I didn’t recognize her, but she recognized me. I had only met her once, briefly—in Cucuron, at Georg’s party—and I’m bad at matching faces to photographs. I’d pictured her quite differently. Maybe it was also that she’s changed, become somewhat matronly. He too strikes me as heavier and more settled.

While I was writing the book there were times when I asked myself whether this was a story of
amour fou
. But I saw the two of them together—with their children, in their house, their garden,
cooking, eating, doing the washing up—I realized they were just living the quiet life that Françoise had always wanted to live.
Amour fou
, perhaps, but a quiet
amour fou
.

Georg was fiddling with his sunglasses again. He had worn them all day until dark. “There is something I noticed in the manuscript,” he said, “that passed me by when it actually happened. Something I didn’t understand at the time. You describe the exchange I had with Buchanan where he asks me if I am my cousin, and then asks if my cousin isn’t in fact my uncle. He asked me that quite specifically, it all came back to me. When I read it, I was surprised that I’d told you about it and that you’d remembered it. It seemed like one of those weird, funny little details. But maybe it’s neither funny nor weird. I’d always thought that Buchanan shot Joe and the professor because his foremost concern was the security of Gorgefield Aircraft, or because he didn’t want a court case that would end up in a scandal for Gorgefield, or that he hated Benton for double-crossing him, or simply because he was trigger-happy. I thought it would be one or all of the above—or something along those lines—and that he meant to shoot me, not the professor.”

“He saw you and thought this proved you were the Russian agent, that the cousin story was just a cover, and that in fact there was no cousin—which there wasn’t.”

“But there
was
an uncle,” Georg insisted, “the uncle Buchanan asked me about, the uncle who was a Russian agent: a man too old to be my cousin but just the right age to be my uncle: the professor.”

“What do you mean?”

Georg jumped up and began pacing about the terrace. “Why would Buchanan have asked me if my cousin was in fact my uncle? Because he knew there was a man of that age in the Russian secret service who was involved with the helicopter deal. If he hadn’t known that, he wouldn’t have had any reason to ask. The only
other reason would be his having a weird sense of humor—his way of telling me that he thought my cousin story was nonsense. But I don’t think that was the case. I’m not saying my story about the cousin was particularly convincing. But I don’t think Buchanan regarded it as nonsense. Not to mention that I don’t think Buchanan had such a weird sense of humor. So the bottom line is that he knew there was a man from the KGB who was old enough to be my uncle and who was involved in the helicopter matter. How did he know?” Georg stopped pacing up and down the terrace and looked at me challengingly.

I began to see his point. “Because he …”

“Because he knew him!” Georg cut in. “Buchanan knew him because the other seller wasn’t Joe, but the professor. The two must have met at some point, and though they wouldn’t have exchanged business cards, Buchanan recognized the professor. And he knew that the professor would recognize him too.”

“Furthermore, he knew that he and the professor didn’t have the appointment you spoke about on the phone,” I added, “and regardless of how you sounded on the phone, it was clear you weren’t the professor.”

“So something was wrong,” Georg said, “and to figure out what was wrong, Buchanan went to the airport. And suddenly Joe turned up!”

“And he suspected that Joe had heard about Buchanan’s offer to the Russians and was about to expose him. So he wiped the slate clean: no Joe, no professor, no traces, no evidence.”

Georg stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the ocean. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he spoke again. “I was really thrown for a loop. Not because of all Buchanan’s shady dealings at the expense of Gorgefield Aircraft, but because of how I tended to overlook critical issues and ignore them, thinking they were just insignificant details.”

“Do you have a specific detail in mind?”

“Helen told me once,” Georg began, but then turned and looked at me. “You know all the details, you wrote them down. Why should I go over it all again?” He went to the table and raised his glass. “To Joe Benton!” We drank, and he refilled our glasses. “And to the nameless professor, who tried to teach me how to cut through the Gordian knot.” He sat down. “I reread the story about Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot. It was just as the professor said: many had tried to unravel the knot, but Alexander simply cut through it with his sword. Whoever was to unravel the knot would rule Asia, and the promise came true for Alexander. And yet he fell ill in Asia and died. You see, he ought to have tried untying the knot. All knots can be untied, because we are the ones who tie them.” Georg smiled at me. “There are no Gordian knots, just Gordian ribbons.”