The Land Across (12 page)

I said I thought you had to make those yourself.

“Hey, it doesn’t work, so who cares? The thing was the faces, see? Suppose you’ve got it in for the mayor. You ask around for a doll with the mayor’s face, only nobody’s got one because they’d have to have a contract with him and pay a royalty, and all that crap. Then you hear about our Imprinting Dolls. That was what we called them, Imprinting Dolls. You look at the dolls and the clerk explains how everything works. So you buy the complete kit. That will run you thirty-two ninety-nine to about forty-four ninety-five, depending on where you buy it. For your money you get one doll—male or female, your choice—an imprinting lens, about a hundred of our special pins, and our special book of spells and instructions. That’s everything you need except a picture of the mayor and a strong light source. The doll works sort of like film used to. You remember film cameras?”

I told him I did, and I even owned a few.

“Then you’ll understand a lot better than most people. Well, the book shows you how you set up your Imprinting Doll and the imprinting lens, and the guy’s picture and the light. You set ’em up and leave them like that for six or seven hours. How long depends on how good the picture is and how strong your light is—how many lumens. When the time’s up you’ve got a voodoo doll with the mayor’s face, see? If he’s got fat cheeks, the cheeks swell. And the eyes are his eyes, just like in the picture you used. It was neat and people loved it.”

I said he must have sold a bunch of them.

“You bet we did. We were selling to shops all over the country, and getting orders from overseas. Suppose you had it in for somebody else, too. Let’s say there was this lousy actor and you hated him and everything he’d ever been in, see? So you decided to get another doll. Well, this time you didn’t have to buy a whole kit. You already had the lens and the book, and a bunch of pins. All you needed was another doll and you were set. The same place that sold you your kit would sell you a new doll for nineteen ninety-nine, if you were lucky. Twenty-nine ninety-five in most outlets. Actors will sell anybody a nice big glossy for ten or fifteen bucks—get one and you’re set. Only if you’re smart, you’ll cut a picture out of a magazine.”

“I’ve got it,” I told him. “You must have made quite a bit of money.”

“We did.” For a minute he smiled. “We made quite a pile, and the big doll manufacturers were all after us to sell out. Finally we did. I handled the negotiations, and got us quite a bit more than the company was worth. Pete actually ended up with more than I did, because he’d held on to fifty-five percent of the patent. But I got quite a bit, and we get royalties, too. Two bucks on every doll they make doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up.”

“They must make thousands of them,” I said.

“Hundreds of thousands, and a hundred thousand dolls is two hundred thousand bucks. So I get my cut of that, and I got half the money from our company. Only I don’t have it here.”

“Yeah. I know how that is.”

“Damn these bastards anyway!”

I waited.

“Rosalee and I had decided we’d tour Europe, see? We started in Germany because my folks were German way back. We bought a nice Mercedes there. I figured we’d drive it around Europe for a couple of years, sell it, and go home. We went to Austria next, then east and south.”

“They don’t get a lot of tourists here,” I said.

“We didn’t think we were tourists.” Russ looked a little mad and a lot sad. “Tourists go around and look at certain things, old churches and all that junk, and never see the country. We called ourselves travelers, and that’s what we felt like.” He took a big breath and let it out.

“So you came here.”

“No. Not really. Rosalee’d had an aunt, her aunt Lilly. Aunt Lilly’d married some guy from Europe, but he got hurt on the job and had to quit work. He was disabled, see, and couldn’t work. But he got disability benefits. He’d get those for the rest of his life.”

“Sure,” I said.

“He’d get them anywhere he lived. The government would mail him a check or just stick the money in his account if that was what he wanted. So he told Aunt Lilly that this was a nice place and they could live here cheap. With the money he’d be getting they’d be rich here, okay?”

“Right.”

“So off they went, only the family never heard a thing after that. Lilly didn’t write letters or anything, or if she did, they didn’t get through. So Rosalee wanted to find out what had happened to her. We’d come here and look in phone books and like that, and ask around a little. I thought sure somebody at our embassy would know about her.”

I said, “You could have written to them from the States.”

“We did. Or Rosalee did, anyhow. Only she never heard back. We figured the mail here was lousy and maybe somebody at the embassy had written, except we never got it.”

“Diplomatic mail goes special,” I told him.

“No shit? Well maybe nobody ever got Rosalee’s letter.” Russ’s voice, which had been pretty loud, went soft. “Rosalee’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, anyway. Know what I mean?”

“Sure. I’ve dated a couple of those.”

“That’s your private life.” Russ had been sitting on his bunk. He stood up when he said it and went over to the window. “I don’t want to stick my nose into that. That’s not my way.”

I said I had nothing to hide, which was the truth.

He turned around to look at me. “Damned nice of you, but everybody’s got something to hide.”

“Not me. I’ll level with you, and here’s a question. Will you level with me?”

“About everything? Hell, no. But you probably won’t ask about that stuff. It was a long time ago, see? So you can ask me anything you want to. If I have to lie, I’ll lie. But I won’t get my back up.”

“Swell, I will. Do you speak any languages besides English?”

“A little German I picked up in Germany and Austria.”

“Anything else?”

He shook his head.

After that I asked him two or three questions in German, but he did not understand any of them, or said he did not. It was a long time before I found out how good his German really was.

I switched back to English. “Who’d you talk to before they put you in here with me?”

“All the names?”

“If you can, sure.”

“Mostly they don’t give you their last names, and I’m not sure I remember them right. They probably didn’t give me their real names anyway.”

“Okay,” I said, “but try.”

“The first one was a young guy who kept playing with his gun. At first I thought he was just a jerk, later I could see he was trying to make me nervous. Hell, I was nervous as a cat already. They’d separated us. Did I tell you that? About Rosalee?”

He had not and I said so.

“Well, they arrested her, too. They didn’t say what for. They just marched her away. That was the last time I saw her, and I keep thinking I may never see her anymore. Will I? What do you think?”

“You want a guess?”

He nodded. “An honest guess. Sure I do.”

“Okay. I think they’ve released her already and she’s gone back to Austria or Germany, and she’s trying to find out what happened to you. She doesn’t know whether they’ve still got you, or what. If you get out of here, you’ll see her again, but if you don’t you won’t.”

“I hope it’s really that good,” Russ said.

“I was just guessing,” I told him, “but that’s what I think. They’re probably not as tough on women as they are on men. Do they think you’re a spy or something?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Same here,” I said.

And he said, “Well, are you?”

So that was Russ Rathaus, my cellmate. We got to be pretty good friends. I had never been in a prison before, but here is the way I figured it. You are going to have to spend a lot of time with the guy you are locked up with, and if you are not friends that is going to be pure hell. He was a lot older than I am and got a little patronizing sometimes. But I put up with it and I have to say I learned a good deal about business just listening to him. It was something I had never known a lot about or cared much about, either. Only after I had heard him talk a couple of times I realized that it was something I ought to know more about. Every time you buy a hamburger or a car you are dealing with somebody’s business, and business is not like government. It is more like poker.

Another thing I learned from Russ was the language. He had been locked up for over a year and had learned a lot more of it than I had. He coached me as well as he could and sometimes he got other prisoners to coach me a little, too.

I have already told you most of the important things about Russ, but there are others. One was the spells. He got to talking about the spells in his voodoo book, and being a writer myself I asked him who wrote them. That shut him up hard and right away, and he would not even say why he did not want to talk about it.

Another thing was that when they pulled me out of our cell to talk to me, they always asked about him. He said he had been questioned by five different guys at one time or another, but then they had had him a hell of a lot longer. For me it was just two. Butch was the good cop and Aegis was the bad cop. You probably know what I mean.

Butch would offer his cigarettes and give me coffee and see that I got little stuff I wanted, like soap. Aegis would knock me around and yell. I tried to fight him a couple times, but he was bigger and stronger than I am, and a better fighter, too. I suppose he could have yelled for help if he had needed it, but he never did. Both of them always asked me about Russ, and after a while I noticed that.

Reading over all the stuff about him that I have just written, I see that I have never mentioned anything about Russ’s smoking. That is mostly because he did not have any cigarettes when I first met him. He would bitch about it now and then, but I never paid a lot of attention to that. After we had been in that prison for almost a year, I asked him whether Butch did not offer him a cigarette sometimes and if he took it. And he said yeah he did, but he could not keep it. He had to smoke it right there.

That gave me an idea. The next time Butch offered me a cigarette I took it and explained that it was not for me, I was going to take it back and give it to Russ. Russ was always wanting to smoke, I said, which was pretty much the truth.

“You’ll need matches,” Butch told me. “I can give you some, but if you set fire to your mattress or any dumb shit like that, I’ll get in trouble.”

I said I would not do anything like that, and I would light Russ’s cigarette for him and not let him touch the matches.

“Oh, that’s okay. Russ will behave. How about a drink?”

I said I would love one but could I have the matches first?

He gave me a folder of matches after that. It was pretty beat up and did not advertise anything. It just had the name of the match company on it, and a price. I had bought big wooden matches back in Puraustays and they had been the same way. I have probably told you about them. There were only three matches left in the folder I got from Butch.

When a screw took me back to my cell, I gave the cigarette and the matches to Russ. His eyes sort of lit up, you probably know what I mean, and he thanked me. I asked if he was not going to smoke it, and he said no, he was going to save it awhile, a few hours at least, and get used to the idea that he had it and could smoke it anytime he wanted to.

After that I went to bed. I am not sure what time I woke up, but midnight would probably be about right. It was the smell of smoke that woke me. It was sort of like the smell of cigarette smoke, but there was other stuff, a lot rougher stuff, in there, too. I opened my eyes and turned my head, and there was Russ sitting cross-legged on the floor with a tiny little fire in front of him.

He was not looking at me, and he was not looking at his fire either. He was looking up at the window. I watched him for a while and listened to him murmuring to himself in some language that was not English, French, or German, or even Japanese. It was not the way they talked where we were, either. Something else.

Then his fire went out. He blew on it and got it to burning again for a couple of minutes, but he quit praying or whatever it was he had been doing.

The fire went out again and he blew some more, but this time he could not bring it back to life. So he cleaned it up and got into bed, and I was about ready to go back to sleep when somebody came into our cell without opening the door. Here I want to say that I knew him right off, and I should have. But it would be a lie. I did not, and he was standing in the corner with his pale face really plain and his black clothes just about invisible before I recognized him. Russ’s little fire had gone out and its ashes had been dropped into our slop jar, and the big stone fireplace at the Willows was miles and miles away, but fire from somewhere was still reflected in his eyes.

9

FREE ALMOST

When I woke up next it was still really early, but the man in black had gone. Or anyhow, that was how it looked. I sat up and put on my shoes and more clothes, and went to the window to look out. The sky was gray, but the sun was not up. You probably know that time. I knew I would be able to see it out of that window when it rose, and it was not there.

Then it came to me that he was like the sun. He was still there, I just could not see him. I tried to remember whether he had said anything to me and whether I had said anything to him. We had not talked at all. I had looked at him and sort of smiled, meaning I am glad to see you. He had not smiled. (His eyes never did smile, even when his mouth did.) But he had nodded just the tiniest bit, meaning I am glad to see you, too. You know how you do.

Of course I remembered pretty soon that the next time I was questioned they would ask about Russ, but that was an easy one. I had been asleep and had not seen a thing. I had given him the cigarette and the matches, and I was pretty sure he must have smoked the cigarette by this time.

So that was a piece of cake. The big question was whether Russ had seen the man in black, too. I did not know and did not want to ask because I would not have trusted the answer either way. If he had, there was a good strong chance he would say he had not. If he had not, there was an even stronger chance that he would say he had so as to try to find out what the heck I was talking about.