I had been to every corner of the room, done all there was to do except for the letters. Even the handwriting made me wince. But—the consciousness made me start back—I did have to write Hobie: not the self-pitying wobbles of drunkenness but a few businesslike lines, whereabouts of checkbook, ledger, deposit-box key. Probably just as well if I admitted, in writing, the furniture fraud, and made it crystal-clear he’d had no knowledge of it. Maybe I could have it witnessed and notarized at the American consulate; maybe Holly (or whoever) would take pity and call someone in to do it before they phoned the police. Grisha could back me up on a lot of it without incriminating himself: we’d never discussed it, he’d never questioned me but he’d known it wasn’t kosher, all those hush-hush trips out to the storage unit.
That left Pippa and Mrs. Barbour. God, the letters I’d written Pippa and never sent! My best effort, my most creative, after the disastrous visit with Everett, had begun, and ended, with what I felt was the light, affecting line: Leaving for a while. As a would-be suicide note it had seemed at the time, in terms of concision anyway, a minor masterpiece. Unfortunately I’d miscalculated the dose and awakened twelve hours later with vomit all over the bedspread and had to stagger downstairs still sick as a dog for a ten a.m. meeting with the IRS.
That said: a going-to-jail note was different, and best left unwritten. Pippa wasn’t fooled by who I was. I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from. Jail would only confirm what she knew. The best thing I could do was break off contact. If my father had really loved my mother—really loved her the way he said he had, once upon a time—wouldn’t he have done the same?
And then—Mrs. Barbour. It was sinking-ship knowledge, the sort of extremely surprising thing you don’t realize about yourself until the absolute last ditch, until the lifeboats are lowered and the ship is in flames—but, in the end, when I thought of killing myself she was the one I really couldn’t bear to do it to.
Leaving the room—going down to inquire about FedEx and to look at the State Department’s website before I called the consulate—I stopped. Tiny ribbon-wrapped bag of candies over the doorknob, a handwritten note: Merry Christmas! Somewhere people were laughing and a delicious smell of strong coffee and burnt sugar and freshly baked bread from room service was floating up and down the hall. Every morning I’d been ordering up the hotel breakfasts, grimly plowing through them—wasn’t Holland meant to be famous for its coffee? Yet I’d been drinking it every day and not even tasting it.
I slipped the bag of candy in the pocket of my suit and stood in the hallway breathing deep. Even condemned men were allowed to choose a last meal, a topic of discussion which Hobie (indefatigable cook, joyous eater) had more than once introduced at the end of the evening over Armagnac while he was scrambling around for empty snuffboxes and extra saucers to serve as impromptu ashtrays for his guests: for him it was a metaphysical question, best considered on a full stomach after all the desserts were cleared and the final plate of jasmine caramels was being passed, because—really looking at the end of it, at the end of the night, closing your eyes and waving goodbye to Earth—what would you actually choose? Some comforting reminder of the past? Plain chicken dinner from some lost Sunday in boyhood? Or—last grasp at luxury, the far end of the horizon—pheasant and cloudberries, white truffles from Alba? As for me: I hadn’t even known I was hungry until I’d stepped into the hallway, but at that moment, standing there with a rough stomach and a bad taste in my mouth and the prospect of what would be my last freely chosen meal, it seemed to me that I’d never smelled anything quite so delicious as that sugary warmth: coffee and cinnamon, plain buttered rolls from the Continental breakfast. Funny, I thought, going back into the room and picking up the room service menu: to want something so easy, to feel such appetite for appetite itself.
Vrolijk Kerstfeest! said the kitchen boy half an hour later—a stout, disheveled teenager straight from Jan Steen with a wreath of tinsel on his head and a sprig of holly behind one ear.
Lifting the silver tops of the trays with a flourish. “Special Dutch Christmas bread,” he said, pointing it out ironically. “Just for today.” I’d ordered the “Festive Champagne Breakfast” which included a split of champagne, truffled eggs and caviar, a fruit salad, a plate of smoked salmon, a slab of pâté, and half a dozen dishes of sauce, cornichons, capers, condiments, and pickled onions.
He had popped the champagne and left (after I’d tipped him with most of my remaining euros) and I’d just poured myself some coffee and was tasting it carefully, wondering if I could stomach it (I was still queasy and it smelled not quite so delicious, up close), when the telephone rang.
It was the desk clerk. “Merry Christmas Mr. Decker,” he said rapidly. “I’m sorry but I’m afraid you’ve got someone on the way up. We tried to stop them at the desk—”
“What?” Frozen. Cup halfway to mouth.
“On the way up. Now. I tried to stop them. I asked them to wait but they wouldn’t. That is—my colleague asked him to wait. He started up before I could telephone—”
“Ah.” Looking around the room. All my resolve gone in an instant.
“My colleague—” muffled aside—“my colleague just started up the stairs after him—it was all very sudden, I thought I should—”
“Did he give a name?” I asked, walking to the window and wondering if I could break it with a chair. I wasn’t on a high floor and it was a short jump, maybe twelve feet.
“No he didn’t sir.” Speaking very fast. “We couldn’t—that is to say he was very determined—he slipped right by the desk before—”
Commotion in the hall. Some shouted Dutch.
“—we’re short-staffed this morning, as I’m sure you understand—”
Determined pounding at the door—coarse nervous jolt, like the never-ending burst spraying out of Martin’s forehead, that sent my coffee flying. Fuck, I thought, looking at my suit and shirt: wrecked. Couldn’t they have waited until after breakfast? Then again, I thought—dabbing my shirt with a napkin, starting grimly to the door: Maybe it was Martin’s guys. Maybe it would be quicker than I thought.
But instead, when I threw open the door—I could scarcely believe it—there stood Boris. Rumpled, red-eyed, battered-looking. Snow in his hair, snow on the shoulders of his coat. I was too startled to be relieved. “What,” I said, as he embraced me, and then to the determined-looking clerk in the hallway, striding rapidly toward us: “No, it’s okay.”
“You see? Why should I wait? Why should I wait?” he said angrily, flinging out an arm at the clerk, who had stopped dead to stare. “Didn’t I say? I told you I knew where his room was! How would I know, if not my friend?” Then, to me: “I don’t know why this big production. Ridiculous! I was standing there forever and no one at desk. No one! Sahara Desert!” (glaring at clerk). “Waiting, waiting. Rang the bell! Then, the second I start up—‘wait wait sir—’ ” whiny baby voice—“ ‘come back’—here he comes chasing me—”
“Thank you,” I said to the clerk, or his back rather, since after several moments of looking between us in surprise and annoyance he had quietly turned to walk away. “Thanks a lot. I mean it,” I called down the hall after him; it was good to know they stopped people charging upstairs on their own.
“Of course sir.” Not bothering to look around. “Merry Christmas.”
“Are you going to let me in?” said Boris, when finally the elevator doors closed and we were alone. “Or shall we stand here tenderly and gaze?” He smelled rank, as if he hadn’t showered in days, and he looked both faintly contemptuous and very pleased with himself.
“I—” my heart was pounding, I felt sick again—“for a minute, sure.”
“A minute?” Disdainful look up and down. “You have some place to go?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Potter—” half-humorously, putting down his bag, feeling my forehead with his knuckles—“you look bad. You are fevered. You look like you just dug the Panama Canal.”
“I feel great,” I said curtly.
“You don’t look great. You are white as a fish. Why are you all dressed up? Why did you not answer my calls? What’s this?” he said—looking past me, espying the room service table.
“Go ahead. Help yourself.”
“Well if you don’t mind, I will. What a week. Been driving all fucking night. Shitty way to spend Christmas Eve—” shouldering his coat off, letting it fall on the floor—“well, truth told, I’ve spent many worse. At least no traffic on the motorway. We stopped at some awful place on the road, only place open, petrol station, frankfurters with mustard, usually I like them, but oh my God, my stomach—” He’d gotten a glass from the bar, was pouring himself some champagne.
“And you, here.” Flicking a hand. “Living it up, I see. Lap of luxury.” He’d kicked off his shoes, wiggling wet sock feet. “Christ, my toes are frozen. Very slushy on the streets—snow is all turning to water.” Pulling up a chair. “Sit with me. Eat something. Very good timing.” He’d lifted the cover of the chafing dish, was sniffing the plate of truffled eggs. “Delicious! Still hot! What, what is this?” he said, as I reached in my coat pocket and handed him Gyuri’s watch and ring. “Oh, yes! I forgot. Never mind about that. You can give them back yourself.”
“No, you can do it for me.”
“Well, we should phone him. This is feast enough for five people. Why don’t we call down—” he lifted up the champagne, looked at the level as if studying a table of troubling financials—“why don’t we call for another of these, full bottle, or maybe two, and send down for more coffee or some tea maybe? I—” pushing his chair in closer—“I am starving! I’ll ask him—” lifting up a piece of smoked salmon, dangling it to his mouth to gobble it before reaching in his pocket for his cell phone—“ask him to dump the car somewhere and walk over, shall I?”
“Fine.” Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heart-sink at the actual sight of him.
“What?” Licking his fingers noisily. “You don’t want Gyuri to come? Who’s been driving me all night? Who went without sleep? Give him some breakfast at least.” He’d already started in on the eggs. “A lot has happened.”
“A lot has happened to me too.”
“Where are you going?”
“Order what you want.” Fishing the key card out of my pocket, handing it to him. “I’ll leave the total open. Charge it to the room.”
“Potter—” throwing down the napkin, starting after me then stopping mid-step and—much to my surprise—laughing. “Go then. To your new friend or activity so important!”
“A lot has happened to me.”
“Well—” smugly—“I don’t know what happened to you, but I can say that what happened to me is at least five thousand times more. This has been some week. This has been one for the books. While you have been luxuriating in hotel, I—” stepping forward, hand on my sleeve—“hang on.” The phone had rung; he turned half away, spoke rapidly in Ukrainian before breaking off and hanging up very suddenly at the sight of me heading out the door.
“Potter.” Grabbing me by the shoulders, looking hard into my pupils, then turning me and steering me around, kicking the door shut behind him with one foot. “What the fuck? You are like Night of the Zombie. What was that movie we liked? The black and white? Not Living Dead, but the poetry one—?”
“I Walked with a Zombie. Val Lewton.”
“That’s right. That’s the one. Sit down. Weed is very very strong here, even if you are used to it, I should have warned you—”
“I haven’t smoked any weed.”
“—because I tell you, when I came here first, age twenty maybe, at the time smoking trees every day, I thought I could handle anything and—oh my God. My own fault—I was an ass with the guy at the coffeeshop. ‘Give me strongest you have.’ Well he did! Three hits and I couldn’t walk! I couldn’t stand! It was like I forgot to move my feet! Tunnel vision, no control of muscles. Total disconnection from reality!” He had steered me to the bed; he was sitting beside me with his arm around my shoulders. “And, I mean, you know me but—never! Fast pounding heart, like running and running and whole time sitting still—no comprehension of my locale—terrible darkness! All alone and crying a little, you know, speaking to God in my mind, ‘what did I do,’ ‘why do I deserve this.’ Don’t remember leaving the place! Like a horrible dream. And this is weed, mind you! Weed! Came to on the street, all jelly legs, clutching onto a bike rack near Dam Square. I thought traffic was driving up on the sidewalk and going to wreck into me. Finally found my way to my girl’s flat in the Jordaan and layed around for a long time in a bath with no water in it. So—” He was looking suspiciously at my coffee-splattered shirt front.
“I didn’t smoke any weed.”
“I know, you said! Was just telling you a story. Thought it was a little interesting to you maybe. Well—no shame,” he said. “Whatever.” The ensuing silence was endless. “I forgot to say—I forgot to say”—he was pouring me a glass of mineral water—“after this time I told you? Wandering on the Dam? I felt wrong for three days after. My girl said, ‘Let’s go out, Boris, you can’t lie here any more and waste the whole weekend.” Vomited in the van Gogh museum. Nice and classy.”
The cold water, hitting my sore throat, threw me into goosebumps and into a visceral bodily memory from boyhood: painful desert sunlight, painful afternoon hangover, teeth chattering in the air-conditioned chill. Boris and I so sick we kept retching, and laughing about retching, which made us retch even harder. Gagging on stale crackers from a box in my room.
“Well—” Boris stealing a glance at me sideways—“something going around maybe. If was not Christmas Day, I would run down and get something to help your stomach. Here here—” dumping some food on a plate, shoving it at me. He picked up the champagne bottle from the ice bucket, looked at the level again, then poured the remainder of the split into my half-empty orange juice glass (half empty, because he had drunk it himself).
“Here,” he said, raising his champagne glass to me. “Merry Christmas to you! Long life to us both! Christ is born, let us glorify Him! Now—” gulping it down—he’d turned the rolls on the tablecloth, was heaping out food to himself in the ceramic bread dish—“I am sorry, I know you want to hear about everything, but I am hungry and must eat first.”
Pâté. Caviar. Christmas bread. Despite everything, I was hungry too, and I decided to be grateful for the moment and for the food in front of me and began to eat and for a while neither of us said anything.
“Better?” he said presently, throwing me a glance. “You are exhausted.” Helping himself to more salmon. “There is a bad flu going round. Shirley has it too.”
I said nothing. I had only just begun to adjust myself to the fact that he was in the room with me.
“I thought you were out with some girl. Well—here is where Gyuri and I have been,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “We have been in Frankfurt. Well—this you know. Some crazy time it’s been! But—” downing his champagne, walking to the minibar and squatting down to look inside—
“Do you have my passport?”
“Yes I have your passport. Wow, there is some nice wine in here! And all these nice baby Absoluts.”
“Where is it?”
“Ah—” Loping back to the table with a bottle of red wine under his arm, and three minibar bottles of vodka which he stuck in the ice bucket. “Here you go.” Fishing it from his pocket, tossing it carelessly onto the table. “Now”—sitting down—“shall we drink a toast together?”
I sat on the edge of the bed without moving, my half-eaten plate of food still in my lap. My passport.
In the long silence that followed, Boris reached across the table and flicked the edge of my champagne glass with middle finger, sharp crystalline ting like a spoon on an after dinner goblet.
“May I have your attention, please?” he inquired ironically.
“What?”
“Toast?” Tipping his glass to me.
I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “And you are what, here?”
“Eh?”
“Toasting what, exactly?”
“Christmas Day? Graciousness of God? Will that do?”
The silence between us, while not exactly hostile, took on as it grew a distinctly glaring and unmanageable tone. Finally Boris fell back in his chair and nodded at my glass and said: “Hate to keep asking, but when you are through with staring at me, do you think we can—?”
“I’m going to have to figure all this out at some point.”
“What?”
“I guess I’ll have to sort this all out in my mind some time. It’s going to be a job. Like, this thing over there… that over here. Two different piles. Three different piles maybe.”
“Potter, Potter, Potter—” affectionate, half-scornful, leaning forward—“you are a blockhead. You have no sense of gratitude or beauty.”
“ ‘No sense of gratitude.’ I’ll drink to that, I guess.”
“What? Don’t you remember our happy Christmas that one time? Happy days gone by? Never to return? Your dad—” grand flinging gesture—“at the restaurant table? Our feast and joy? Our happy celebration? Don’t you honor that memory in your heart?”
“For God’s sake.”
“Potter—” arrested breath—“you are something. You are worse than a woman. ‘Hurry, hurry.’ ‘Get up, go.’ Didn’t you read my texts?”
“What?”
Boris—reaching for his glass—stopped cold. Quickly he glanced at the floor and I was, suddenly, very aware of the bag by his chair.
In amusement, Boris stuck his thumbnail between his front teeth. “Go ahead.”
The words hovered over the wrecked breakfast. Distorted reflections in the domed cover of the silver dish.
I picked up the bag and stood; and his smile faded when I started to the door.
“Wait!” he said.
“Wait what?”
“You’re not going to open it?”
“Look—” I knew myself too well, didn’t trust myself to wait; I wasn’t letting the same thing happen twice—
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“I’m taking this downstairs. So they can lock it in the safe.” I didn’t even know if there was a safe, only that I didn’t want the painting near me—it was safer with strangers, in a cloakroom, anywhere. I was also going to phone the police the moment Boris left, but not until; there was no reason dragging Boris into it.
“You didn’t even open it! You don’t even know what it is!”
“Duly noted.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe I don’t need to know what it is.”
“Oh no? Maybe you do. It’s not what you think,” he added, a bit smugly.
“No?”
“No.”
“How do you know what I think?”
“Of course I know what you think it is! And—you are wrong. Sorry. But—” raising his hands—“is something much, much better than.”
“Better than?”
“Yes.”
“How can it be better than?”
“It just is. Lots lots better. You will just have to believe me on this. Open and see,” he said, with a curt nod.
“What is this?” I said after about thirty stunned seconds. Lifting out one brick of hundreds—dollars—then another.
“That is not all of it.” Rubbing the back of his head with the flat of his hand. “Fraction of.”
I looked at it, then at him. “Fraction of what?”
“Well—” smirking—“thought more dramatic if in cash, no?”
Muffled comedy voices floating from next door, articulated cadences of a television laugh track.
“Nicer surprise for you! That is not all of it, mind you. U.S. currency, I thought, more convenient for you to return with. What you came over with—a bit more. In fact they have not paid yet—no money has yet come through. But—soon, I hope.”
“They? Who hasn’t paid? Paid what?”
“This money is mine. Own personal. From the house safe. Stopped in Antwerp to get it. Nicer this way—nicer for you to open, no? Christmas morning? Ho Ho Ho? But you have a lot more coming.”
I turned the stack of money over and looked at it: forward and back. Banded, straight from Citibank.
“ ‘Thank you Boris.’ ‘Oh, no problem,’ ” he answered, ironically, in his own voice. “Glad to do it.’ ”
Money in stacks. Outside the event. Crisp in the hand. There was some kind of obvious content or emotion to the whole thing I wasn’t getting.
“As I say—fraction of. Two million euro. In dollars much much more. So—merry Christmas! My gift to you! I can open you an account in Switzerland for the rest of it and give you a bank book and that way—what?” he said, recoiling almost, when I put the stack of bills in the bag, snapped it shut, and shoved it back at him. “No! It’s yours!”
“I don’t want it.”
“I don’t think you understand! Let me explain, please.”
“I said I don’t want it.”