Читать книгу The Unmade World - Steve Yarbrough - Страница 5

“You’re lucky I love Ella Fitzgerald,” his daughter says. She’s standing on the chair he brought in from the kitchen, and she’s just positioned the angel atop the tree. They bought that ornament this morning at a stall in the enormous Cloth Hall, which dominates the market square, and they bought the tree yesterday outside Galeria Krakowska, and then he dragged it ten blocks through the snow and up five flights of stairs. He was still jet-lagged, and though he goes to the gym twice a week and is in decent shape, he had to pause on each landing. Somewhere between the third and fourth floors, in the offhanded manner in which the most contented among us entertain such notions, he realized that his wife, who’d grown up here with her brother, had been right a few years back, warning that one day he’d wish they’d swapped it for a flat in a building with an elevator. He doesn’t have that many regrets, but the lack of a lift may become one.

Anna cocks her head, looks hard at the angel, then reaches out and makes an adjustment. “We’ve listened to this same CD three times since we started decorating. Did you realize that?”

“It’s a short disc.”

“Not that short.”

“And it’s the greatest ballad album ever recorded.”

She tosses her blonde bangs. “One could argue.”

“If one did, what might one propose as an alternative?”

“Dexter Gordon’s Ballads. Clifford Brown with Strings. The Intimate Ellington. Alternatives do exist.”

He’s having fun. He always looks forward to decorating the tree with her, but never more so than this year. They flew six thousand miles for the pleasure. “We started with Ella,” he says, “so we’re staying with her. It’s important to maintain continuity when doing something as momentous as decorating your first Polish Christmas tree.”

“This tree came from Norway.”

“How do you know?”

“The sign above the booth where you paid for it said, ‘Norwegian Wood.’”

“I didn’t see that.”

“You weren’t looking.” She puts out her hand, sticky from sap. “I’m finished,” she says. “Help me down. I’m too mature now to jump.”

He opens his arms. She steps into them, and as he lowers her to the floor, he gets a whiff of the scent she started wearing back in October after developing a crush on a kid who sits beside her in the string ensemble. She’s no longer a child. She has breasts, for Christ’s sake. “What do you weigh these days?” he wonders aloud.

“I would’ve hoped that by now you’d know not to ask a person of the feminine persuasion such a question. But I’ll answer it anyway: a hundred and eight pounds, give or take an ounce.” Gently, she pokes his stomach. “What do you weigh?”

“About a hundred and five kilos.”

Like many musicians, she’s also a proficient mathematician. “In other words, two hundred and thirty freaking pounds? Truly?”

“It sounds a lot better in kilos.”

“You need to take it easy on the pierogi, Dad. Not to mention the goose-liver pâté.”

A shade over six three, he’s got broad shoulders that suggest he might have made a good linebacker in his youth, though the only competitive sport he ever played was baseball. He can carry a good bit of weight. Yet he can’t deny that not long ago he had to let his belt out. He’s been eating and drinking a little more than he should. The last few months have not exactly been stress-free.

He covers Central California for the Los Angeles Times. He’s held that job for more than two decades, the only break coming seventeen years ago, when his Polish fluency brought him here to report on the revolutions sweeping Eastern Europe. Back in September, the Times’s publisher was ousted after protesting cuts proposed by the parent company. Then just last month, his editor-in-chief, a close personal friend, had also been forced out. What do you do if you can no longer do what you’ve done your entire adult life? Until recently, he hadn’t thought he’d ever have to ask himself that question. Even now, he’s not overly concerned. Still, when they return to Fresno in January, he’ll send out a few feelers, just to stay on the safe side.

Julia Mirecka Brennan: she’s forty-six, a year younger than he is in December of 2006, her hair as dark as their daughter’s is light. Her eyes are large, brown, and mildly convex, and they often roll out of focus when she’s on top of him and an orgasm ripples through her. During their years together, she’s taught Richard a great many things, one of which is to walk on her left, cantering along beside her like her personal Saint Bernard. If she decides to make a left turn, either to go around a corner or enter a shop where something has captured her attention, she drops her shoulder and nudges him in the proper direction. The single time he remarked upon it, she said, “What’s a person my size to do when walking with someone like you?” He told her she could just say, “Hey, let’s go in there,” or “Why don’t we walk down that street?” She responded that she liked how her approach was working, and he abandoned his inquiry because, basically, he did too.

Back in the ’80s, when the country was under martial law, she had carried an extra toothbrush everywhere she went in case joining a demonstration led to her arrest. She has never been fainthearted, nor has she ever been one to conceal her opinions. There’s a particular way her mouth twists when she thinks you’re full of shit. He doesn’t see that expression very often these days, but it’s definitely on display when she steps into the flat this evening, her cap and the shoulders of her sheepskin dusted with snow, and spots him and Anna standing there in the darkened living room, admiring the brightly lit tree, neither of them dressed for dinner. He’s wearing slippers and an ancient pair of red Boston University warm-ups.

“Does either of you have the slightest idea what time it is?” she asks. She sets her shopping bag down in the hallway, then shrugs out of her coat.

He and Anna exchange glances. They had promised to be ready at a quarter till seven, and he knows it’s at least six-thirty now. “I don’t,” he says.

“Me either,” says Anna.

Julia lays her scarf aside, then bends to remove her boots. “It’s six forty. The reservation’s for seven thirty. You two are both hopeless.”

“But what about our tree?” Anna asks.

Her mother pulls the boots off, stands them on the mat, then walks into the living room for a closer look. They await her assessment, pretending that it matters, even though all three of them know that this annual festive act belongs to him and Anna.

“The tree,” she finally concedes, “is not hopeless. Unlike both of you, it appears to have a bright future, if only a very short one.”

The Car is a ’79 Mercedes diesel that they bought several summers ago. For much of each year it rests under a tarp. Until yesterday, he’d never driven it in cold weather. Mostly white, it features a beige rear quarter panel from a salvage shop and is missing its back bumper. The upholstery is a fungal shade of green, and at some point in the distant past, somebody had deemed the dashboard lighter the perfect tool for artistic expression, using it on the front passenger seat to burn little rings in the vinyl arranged to spell the name Klaus. Mercedes or not, it’s a wreck, but it runs and is that rare European vehicle with an automatic transmission. He hates stick shifts. Truth be known, he can’t drive one.

Julia and Anna climb in while he brushes snow off the windshield and the back glass. Five or six inches have fallen. It’s coming down pretty hard now, but the forecast calls for it to quit by eight or nine o’clock.

He starts the car and pulls away from the curb, heading toward the Old Town. While he drives, Julia calls Monika, and from the conversation, he can tell that Stefan is still in the shower and that they’ll be late too, something you can generally bank on. He thinks the world of his brother-in-law, but if he had to hold a real job, his life would be ruined. Fortunately, he doesn’t need one. He’s a successful crime novelist, his work published in more than thirty countries.

In Krakow, with the exception of approved vehicles, automobiles are banned in the Old Town. So they have to go around it rather than driving straight through. Traffic is surprisingly heavy. Everybody must be doing last-minute shopping. Stores will be open again tomorrow—Saturday—but virtually everything will remain closed on Sunday for Christmas Eve. He finds the country’s transformation into a consumer culture both exhilarating and disquieting. Sometimes it seems that the profusion of color and the proliferation of choices have come at the cost of clarity.

“We’re going to be pretty late,” he says. “You better call the restaurant. The reservation’s in my name. Ask for Mustafa and tell him who you are.”

“Who am I?”

“The wife of the guy who wrote an article about his establishment for the L.A. Times. If Brad Pitt ever eats there, it’ll be because of me.”

She pulls out her cell, and from memory he rattles off the number. It used to amaze her that he could recall such minutiae, but she long ago accepted it as a by-product of his profession.

While she’s on the phone, they pass the café where they met. It’s called Bunkier and is attached to an art gallery that represents the purest example of Brutalist architecture in the city. Open to the air in warm weather, it’s presently protected from the elements by clear plastic drop panels. The heaters must be turned up pretty high. Icicles hang from the eaves, and steam is rising off the roof. He’s promised Anna they’ll stop by for dessert tomorrow afternoon. They’ve logged many an hour beneath that canopy, whenever possible sitting at the table where he met her mom, whom he’d gone to interview for an article about women in the Solidarity movement. A couple of summers ago, while they waited there for their order, Anna rapped the tabletop. “So,” she said, drawing the syllable out, “this is where the idea that resulted in me began to get a little traction. Right?” She told him later that he looked like a figure in a Renoir, with a scarlet splotch on each cheek.

Julia ends the call. “They’ll hold our reservation,” she says. “Your friend Mustafa’s exact words were ‘Please inform refulgent Mr. Richard that upon arrival he will receive supreme justice.’ If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d think he was threatening to execute you.”

“You probably should’ve spoken English to him.”

“Why? Is his English better?”

“No, but it’s considerably less florid.”

They cross the Vistula, then start west on Monte Cassino. Once they reach the outskirts, traffic begins to thin. Before long, they’re traveling through the countryside on a two-lane highway. A lot of the nouveau riche have built villas along this route, many of them with four or even five stories. Interspersed among these new constructions are traditional Polish farmhouses.

Twenty kilometers from the city, he slows down. They turn onto the narrow blacktop and drive up the hill, where they finally see the sign. He takes a left onto an even narrower road and drives another half kilometer, and they find themselves in the snowy parking lot.

The popular dining spot is housed in a pseudo-alpine castle built by the Nazis, originally as a vacation site for Luftwaffe pilots. By the end of the war it had become a Wehrmacht hospital, and under the Communists it had served as the Institute of Forestry. Now it belongs to a wealthy Kurdish family who fled Saddam in the ’90s, then bought and remodeled the rundown structure and established a Polish-Kurdish restaurant. The idea was disjunctive enough to make it wildly appealing, which explains why even on a night like this, the parking lot is jammed. He eventually locates a place between a Maserati and a Land Rover, the latter displaying a Croatian license plate. Someone else has come a long way for dinner.

Bogdan Baranowski is sitting on one of the checkout counters in the dimly lit grocery, watching it snow. The store occupies the ground floor of a dingy gray block that was purchased eighteen months ago by a young developer. So far he’s succeeded in evicting over half the tenants from their flats. He plans to renovate the property and turn it into luxury condos.

Around a quarter past eight, a silver BMW pulls up to the curb and blinks its lights three times. At first, Bogdan can’t believe it, so he doesn’t move. Fifteen or twenty seconds pass. Then the lights blink again. “O Jezu,” he says. “Matko boska.”

He reaches under the counter and grabs the sack of kielbasa. Then he puts on his coat and sticks his hand in the pocket to make sure the balaclava is still there. It’s black and made of wool and has holes for the eyes and mouth. When he tried it on in the bathroom, he immediately began to itch. He’s always been allergic to wool, but this was the only one he could find. In the mirror he looked like a Chechen terrorist.

He steps outside, locks the front doors, lowers the security grating, and locks it too. Then he walks over to the gleaming sedan and opens the door. “Is this your brother-in-law’s car?” he asks, lowering himself into the passenger seat.

Marek grins, his teeth white and perfect. Unlike Bogdan, he still has a head full of dark hair only slightly shorter than it was in his teens. “Nice, huh?”

Bogdan reaches for the door but hears a faint whooshing sound as it slowly closes itself. “Did you tell him what you planned to do?” he asks. “If you did, admit it right now, and I’ll get out. I’ll probably get out anyway.”

Marek throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb. “Of course not. They flew to London to spend Christmas with their son and his family and asked me to feed their cats. I borrowed it for the evening.” His wife’s brother launched a small brewery around the time he and Bogdan founded their grocery chain. Five years ago Heineken bought it. Now his brother-in-law has a big house here, a smaller one in Zakopane, and a BMW.

It does happen. It just doesn’t happen to Bogdan. “What model is this?” he asks.

“Seven sixty something. Under the hood, there’s a V-12. If we need speed, we’ve got it. But we won’t need it.”

“How many of these cars do you suppose there are in the whole country?”

“More than you’d ever guess.”

The emphasis doesn’t pass unnoticed. Despite everything that’s gone wrong for both of them, Marek has maintained his sunny outlook. He’s been like that as long as Bogdan has known him, all the way back to elementary school. He’s enough of a realist to admit he’s never had a truly great idea but too much of an optimist not to think he’ll have one eventually.

As a rule, Bogdan finds perpetual good cheer grating. But lately, the presence of a hopeful friend, no matter how deluded, may be the only thing stopping him from walking into the frozen-food locker, lying down, and closing his eyes. The truth, which he’s incapable of admitting, is that he needs Marek. Almost everybody needs a Marek, if only to resent his existence.

“Since we’re stealing your brother-in-law’s car,” he grumbles, “why don’t we go over to their house and rob them instead of some stranger?”

Their business losses can be traced to the arrival of heavyweight Western retailers like Carrefour and Tesco, with huge inventories and cutthroat prices. They owned four stores in ’99, three in 2003, two in 2005. Now they’re down to one, with a rent payment due on January 15 that they lack the funds for. They’re in trouble with their suppliers too.

In all fairness, he and Marek aren’t complete fools. Both of them have been to Western Europe, and Marek once visited relatives in the U.S. When they first started out, they knew what Western supermarkets looked like: bright colors splashed everywhere; countless versions of the same product, all packaged differently and positioned at various price points, the label on each item fronted with military precision; aisles as broad as the Champs-Elysées so shoppers can roll their carts past one another without toppling floor displays. They understood what was coming and believed they could counter it. They took over formerly state-run shops and made few if any cosmetic changes. They offered Polish products, kept prices low, and retained the employees who’d worked in the stores when they were owned by the state. This last practice produced the first hiccups.

In a country where nearly everything belonged to the government and nearly everybody viewed it as corrupt, cheating was tolerated. Bogdan never did it, but back when he managed the warehouse, he knew that the guys who loaded and unloaded produce took a little bit home. A few apples here, a few pears there. As long as it didn’t get out of hand, he looked the other way.

The people who worked the checkout stands in the first stores he and Marek opened were mostly women in their forties and fifties. They’d learned the appropriate survival tactics. Initially, they skimmed a few zlotys from the cash registers, but he put a stop to that by switching the drawers out several times a day. So they began overcharging the customers or shortchanging them, and complaints escalated. Finally, he called a meeting. “Listen,” he told them, “things aren’t like they used to be. You just can’t keep cheating our customers. It has to stop.”

A woman who reminded him of his grandmother asked, “Why do you care? It’s not your money.”

“If you steal from the customers, they’ll quit shopping here. They’ll go someplace where they don’t get cheated. It’s really pretty simple.” Even as he made the statement, he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t simple for her, and it wasn’t simple for lots of others. The world was changing faster than they could. Once people accept the notion that an old car ought to cost more than a new one because the old one is readily available but you can acquire the new one only by paying up front, putting your name on a list, and waiting ten years, it’s hard to sell them the opposite reality. If you’ve lived your whole life upside down, living right-side up is like walking on the ceiling.

“I don’t want to work here anymore,” the woman said. He realized tears were on the way, and he prayed they wouldn’t flow right there in front of him and the other employees. She pulled her apron off, flung it on the counter, grabbed her coat, and walked out. He stayed awake a long time that night, drinking vodka and feeling like a predator. Now he’s become prey himself. And by this time tomorrow, if he’s not dead, he’ll be a thief as well.

Marek hangs a left, bound for the Grunwald Bridge. The snow is falling harder, in defiance of the forecast. “You know how this guy we’re about to pay a visit to got started?” he asks.

“How?”

“Summer of ’90, he begins hanging around the Auschwitz train station. This is before you had all those fancy tour buses ferrying visitors around from one concentration camp to another, giving them the Zyklon B tour. When he sees some Americans waiting on the platform for a train to Krakow, he ambles over and tells ’em the train’ll take nearly three hours, that the bathrooms are filthy and smelly and there’s no soap or toilet paper, and then he offers to deliver them in under an hour for fifty dollars. You know how impatient and finicky Americans are. A couple of times a day, all summer long, somebody accepts his offer. He converts the dollars on the black market, and come September he’s got enough to start his construction business. Next thing you know, he’s the go-to guy if you’ve made a bundle and want to build your own private swimming pool.”

They’re crossing the Vistula. Right in the middle there’s a sheet of ice, though the water’s still flowing on either side. “How rich can you get,” Bogdan asks, “building private swimming pools in Poland?”

“Did it ever occur to you that if you’ve got enough money and a big enough house, you can put the swimming pool inside?” With a gloved finger Marek thumps the steering wheel. He can only stomach so much defeatism. Even if you think the world is shit, why not call it manure? It leaves a better odor. “No, it didn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “Besides, that’s not all he does.”

“So what else does he do?”

“Builds hot tubs, saunas, and heated doghouses. He’s got branches in Warsaw, Gdansk, every major city. By the way, you didn’t forget the kielbasa?”

“No, I didn’t. Did you get your stuff?”

Marek pats his coat pocket. “Right here.”

“I hope you’ve got the dose right.”

“I guarantee you I do.”

“I don’t know how you can guarantee that when you’ve never laid eyes on the creature.”

“The average weight of a German shepherd is thirty to forty kilos, and my cousin says this one’s just regular-sized. To be on the safe side, I’m estimating forty.”

“The safe side for who? Us or the dog?”

“We’re people. It’s a member of the animal kingdom. Besides, if it gets a little extra juice, all it’ll do is sleep a bit longer.”

Bogdan loves dogs. He’s always loved them. As a boy, he wanted one more than anything, but his father said no. He and Krysia had to put down their chocolate Lab three years ago, and they’ve never gotten another one because they can’t afford to take care of it. He’d rather starve to death than harm a dog. “You’re sure about that?” he asks.

“Totally.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked the vet.”

“What vet?”

“The one who sold it to me.”

This is not a good sign. “You said you were getting it from a farmer.”

“I had to say that to keep you from backing out. See? You’re scared now.”

“Of course I’m scared. We’re driving around in a snowstorm, in a stolen BMW, on our way to commit a crime. And you’re telling me you bought a controlled substance from a vet . . . and asked his advice about how to tranquilize a guard dog? Stop this car right now. Let me out.”

“Relax. The vet’s in Rabka.”

“In the mountains? What were you doing down there?”

“Going to see the vet.”

“And telling him what?”

When you know Marek Ficowski as well as he does, you can tell when inspiration pays him one of its not infrequent visits. His face, young beyond its years, becomes even more boyish. In the greenish dashboard glow, the corners of his mouth have advanced with wide delight. He looks as happy as he did in fifth grade when they slipped away at recess with a bottle of vodka they’d stolen and drank it behind the wall of the Jewish cemetery. Bogdan got sick that day, and he’s feeling sick right now. This night could end badly. It will end badly. He can all but guarantee it.

“The vet wasn’t really a he,” Marek announces. “It was a she.”

“I don’t care if it was a plow horse. What did you tell him, her, or it?”

“Funny you should mention a plow horse. Because the day I went to see this vet, her foot was in a cast. She’d been trying to vaccinate a horse the night before, and it stepped on her and crushed her instep. I told her I needed to knock my dog out for several hours because we were having our kitchen painted and a couple of years ago he’d bitten a plumber. This poor young woman was in terrific pain, and she just gave me what I needed, no questions asked. She was drugged herself and probably didn’t remember the encounter an hour later. I felt pretty bad for her. I hugged her before I left, and the way she pressed herself against me . . . well, I’ll be honest. If she’d offered to give me a rabies shot, I would’ve seized the chance to drop my drawers. You’ve got to take that first step somehow.”

He probably walked into the closest veterinary office, greased the palm of some assistant with access to the medicine cabinet, and walked out with a syringe and a vial of liquid. Bogdan will just have to hope that he didn’t say enough to become memorable. Because the truth is that if they don’t come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand zlotys in the next few days, their last store will go the way of all the others. And then what?

He’s forty-eight years old, with thinning hair and a potbelly. Sometimes in the morning, while they move around the kitchen making their separate breakfasts, he catches Krysia staring at him. She’s quick to look away, but there’s no mistaking her expression. It’s not distaste, it’s not disappointment, it isn’t even pity. It’s astonishment. How can someone who used to do so many things so well suddenly become incapable of doing even one thing right? When they were young, had almost nothing, and were still sleeping on the folding sofa in her parents’ small flat, all he needed to do was lay his hand anywhere on her body—even someplace supposedly nonerogenous like her kneecap—to make her quiver. Now, if he touches her, she stiffens. He can’t even recall the last time they kissed.

Marek turns off the highway, and they soon start to ascend, the road snaking past the occasional brightly lit villa that looks like it must’ve been transported here from Disneyland. When Bogdan was young, his grandmother lived out in this direction, in a two-room farmhouse that she’d once shared with his long-dead grandfather. Though there was always plenty to eat when he visited, Bogdan never quite understood where the food came from. For a while she owned a cow that she milked twice a day, had several chickens, and apparently sold eggs in a nearby village, though that was never talked about. At some point in the early ’50s, as a result of remarks she’d made about the local collective farm, she’d been sent away for “reeducation.” After that she kept her business to herself. She got by. That was all that mattered.

“You ever wonder who lives in these new houses?” he asks.

Marek shrugs. “Folks like our pool builder. He gets tired of the cold, so he and his young wife fly off to spend Christmas in Fiji. He has imagination. We’ve got imagination too, but so far we haven’t tapped into it. When we get past this next little hurdle, we’re going to have to innovate. Either innovate or deteriorate—that’ll be our new slogan.”

The snow falls harder, and they climb higher, finally cresting a big hill and then beginning their descent into a valley. You can see several clusters of lights down there, each one distant from the others, all of them gauzy, as if viewed through a layer of cheesecloth.

Leaning back, Stefan Mirecki pats his stomach. With his wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard, he looks strikingly like Jerry Garcia and is, appropriately, a devotee of the Grateful Dead. “I just ate a meal,” he announces, “worthy of a German field marshal. By the way, did you know one of them died upstairs, Rysiu? In ’45, right before our liberators arrived.”

Richard is still working on his duck. Roast duck with apples is his go-to dish in Polish restaurants, even one offering the potential for exotic fare. Stefan thinks that since his mother was a Polish immigrant, this must have been his favorite meal growing up and that he orders it in homage. Richard knows this is what his brother-in-law believes because he’s read all his novels. In the most recent, a minor character clearly based on Richard appeared in a couple of scenes. When he ordered his duck, he was assigned a point of view for all of two paragraphs, solely so the reader could learn just how mawkishly sentimental a certain type of Polish American could be. The reality, at least in Richard’s opinion, is more revealing than the fiction. His mother never cooked Polish food. His father, north-of-Boston Irish, doesn’t like much of anything except roast beef, fried cod, lamb stew, and boiled potatoes. Richard never got to eat roast duck until he came here back in ’89, and the first time he had it, he was with Julia. And now she won’t cook it either, because she’s worried about his cholesterol. He orders the goddamn duck because he loves it. That’s why most people choose one dish over another.

“I guess I didn’t know that about the field marshal,” he says. “Which one was it?”

His brother-in-law rolls his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, admiring the inlaid crystals. The Jaziri family spared no expense when it came to renovation. The enormous ivory chandeliers must have cost many an elephant life. “Von Hötzendorf, I think.”

Stefan has his own personal relationship with truth, and it seldom involves adherence to fact. Right now he’s probably trying out the field marshal business because he likes the atmosphere and is thinking of setting a scene here. Generally, Richard lets these moments glide by, but sometimes he can’t resist calling him out. “Von Hötzendorf’s from the First War,” he says. “He died eight or nine years before Hitler took power.”

“Well, then, it must have been some other von,” Stefan says cheerfully. He turns to Franek, who’s laboring over his wild boar and hasn’t said two words since they sat down. “You better get moving on that,” he tells his son. “They’ve got some great desserts here, and you’ll be ineligible if you leave that much on your plate.”

The boy’s cheeks turn red. Looking at him now, Richard senses that he feels very much alone. His mother plays viola in the Philharmonic and is often away at night, and his father makes frequent jaunts to foreign countries as new books are released. The poor kid’s by himself too much, and puberty’s on the way if it hasn’t already struck.

“Give him time, Uncle Stefan,” Anna says. “I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than the young.”

“Little lawyer!” To Richard: “I see she takes after my sister.”

“Yeah,” Richard agrees, “she’s absorbed a few of her mom’s character traits.”

“You two are discussing them as if they weren’t sitting at the same table,” Monika says. “Like it’s guys’ night out. It’s offensive.”

To Richard, his sister-in-law has always been a mystery. A small, shapely woman who dyes her hair so black it’s nearly blue, she usually doesn’t say much. But when she does speak, she stares at you like you’re the score of a concerto she’s playing. This never fails to cause him discomfort, and he’s occasionally had the feeling that she knows and enjoys it. Why that would be, he can’t imagine. But she’s the person who kindled Anna’s interest in violin and gave her her first lessons, so he thinks maybe he should apologize, though he’s not sure what for.

As though reading his mind, Stefan says, “I think maybe it’s time for the guys to go have a smoke.” He pulls a pair of cigars from inside his jacket. “Guess where these came from?”

“They’re Cuban?”

His brother-in-law grins. “The benefits of being un-American.”

Richard chews the last bit of duck and lays down his knife and fork. “The balcony?”

“Of course.”

They excuse themselves and wind their way between tables. The other diners are all well dressed—a couple of women glitteringly so—and Richard hears a smattering of German, a phrase or two that he thinks might be Croatian, a fair amount of English. There’s jazz on the sound system, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” That’s the only kind of music they seem to play here, and it’s a big reason he loves this restaurant. His father ran a seedy jazz club in one of Boston’s northern suburbs, and though it went out of business nearly thirty years ago, Richard thinks about it often, easily summoning the sight and smell of nineteen overflowing ashtrays, one on each table and three on the mahogany bar.

They step outside and light their cigars. The snow has slackened. Down below, they can see the lights of a few villas and farmhouses and, to the southwest, the airport’s runway lights. It’s cold but not that cold, especially because they’re full of food and wine.

“Is it my imagination,” he asks, “or is Monika on edge?”

“Rysiu, I’ve always felt you were wasted on journalism. With your sense of seismography, you ought to be a novelist.” He looses a puff of loamy smoke. “I had this little thing going on locally. And Monika’s not used to that.”

The protagonist in his novels, a middle-aged detective in the Krakow police department, repeatedly cheats on his wife, often with three or four different women over the course of a three-hundred-page book. The twist is that he never pursues younger lovers. They’re always at least his age and sometimes even older. His forte is highly atmospheric mature sex. He calls on them with weary eyelids, a bottle of Egri Bikaver, a tin of pasteurized roe, a chunk of smoked sheep cheese, cranberry relish. The world may be changing, but his actions affirm that in matters of the heart he adheres to the old ways: he kisses their hands coming and going.

“What kind of little thing?” Richard asks.

“She’s twenty-two, works at that record store on Florianska.”

He wouldn’t be able to conceal his dismay if he tried. “Jesus. The blonde with that milky-white complexion?” The girl looks about as old as Anna.

“If you think what you’ve seen of her is milky white,” Stefan says, “you ought to . . . Well, you don’t like hearing this. Do you?”

“Not especially.”

Stefan laughs and pats his shoulder. “I felt sure you wouldn’t. But the setup’s perfect, and I couldn’t help but want to watch your reaction.” He sucks hard on the cigar, the tip of it glowing bright orange. “Two brothers-in-law alone outdoors on a snowy night. One of them utterly, blindly infatuated with his wife. The other a hedonistic rake. Don’t be surprised if this appears in a novel.”

Richard won’t be. “What surprises me is her age.”

“Several of her predecessors were a year or two younger. Rysiu, our good detective’s consorts are camouflage. They serve their purpose, though you should see some of the women who hit on me at book signings. The problem with this latest one’s not her age. It’s the fact that she lives in Krakow. I broke it off last week, but just yesterday I glanced out the window and saw her standing on the sidewalk watching our building. I suspect I may have fucked up.”

“And Monika knows?”

“She does and she doesn’t. In other words, she hasn’t been told. I’m sure she has no idea who it is, at least not yet.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“Is that what you’d do if you were in my shoes?”

He’s not about to say that he’d never be in Stefan’s shoes. The only people who can truthfully say how they’d behave in any given situation are, by and large, people Richard Brennan does not want to know. “I think I probably would,” he says.

“I think you probably would too. Of course, you’d never put yourself in this position to begin with.” He gestures toward the dining room. “In there at that table, you’ve got everything you need. You’ve even got everything you want.”

Why argue with the truth? In Richard’s profession, you travel a good bit and see a lot of different people, a fair number of whom are women. He spends the occasional night in L.A., where he sometimes has dinner with a film producer in her early thirties, whose love life, he knows, is a disaster. The melting nature of her good-night hugs has led to the suspicion that if he wanted to, he could get himself invited back to her place or entice her to his room. It’s not that he finds her unattractive or that her relative youth summons scruples an available woman closer to his own age might breach. It’s just that he’s already found what he spent his twenties looking for. How this came to be seems every bit as mysterious now as it did seventeen years ago. A geopolitical event got him sent halfway around the world, and he stumbled across the right person. That his domestic happiness is firmly grounded in happenstance sometimes unsettles him, but when he looks around at other contented couples, their stories are often similar. You can’t say why fate smiles at some and sneers at others.

In a moment he and his brother-in-law, who writes fiction and lives it too, will go back inside and join their families for dessert. Mustafa will send over some cognac on the house, and Stefan will pronounce it the best he’s ever tasted. Christmas plans made, they’ll say their good-nights, and when Richard bends to hug his sister-in-law, she’ll balance on her toes and whisper, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Don’t be angry.” She will kiss him on the mouth, something she’s never done before. It will surprise him, but he’s going to forget it within the hour and will not think of it again for a long time.

Before any of that can occur, though, while they’re still out there on the balcony, he asks Stefan the obligatory question: “What is it you want but haven’t got?”

“I don’t know. I have some of it—I just don’t have all of it. And truthfully, Rysiu, if I were to find the missing element, you know what I suspect would happen?”

Richard takes a deep draft from his cigar, then blows out a cloud of smoke. He watches it disperse, the tiny particles spreading over the hillside, beyond the treetops, growing farther away from each other as they disappear into the night. “What?”

Stefan brushes a few snowflakes from his hair. “I feel all but certain that it would spell the end of me. With no need to hunt, I’d be a dead duck. One day I might show up on your plate.”

He's had a good bit to drink, and his bladder’s sending distress signals. So he asks Julia and Anna to wait in the foyer while he pays a visit to the bathroom.

To write news the way he does, you need to notice plenty of seemingly random details because life isn’t just the big things, it’s all the little ones too. For instance: a makeshift clock mounted on the wall in the bedroom of a boy killed by a stray bullet in Delano, California, in May of ’93. The clock’s hands were wooden skewers, one longer than the other, both of them glued to the hub of an electric motor that jutted through the spindle hole of a 33-rpm record which served as the clock face. The title of the record: Internal Exile. By the Chicano rock band Los Illegals. Where the boy came across the recording, which by then was more than ten years old, or what it might have meant to him, his grandmother who had raised him couldn’t say, but she knew he’d built the clock for his seventh grade science project. Any good reporter notices a few things like that, but Richard likes to think he notices more than most.

Retained from his visit to the bathroom tonight: in the urinal there’s a cherry deodorant cake.

The correct term for these items is “urinal deodorant block.” They’re also known as “piss pucks.” If you look into the question more deeply, you’ll find that in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, with their large concentrations of Polish immigrants, Polonophobes used to dub them “Polish mints.” The thing is, you seldom see urinal deodorant cakes in Poland. Why this particular receptacle contains one is puzzling, yet there it is, lodged near the trap.

He finishes, zips up, washes his hands, and goes back to the foyer.

Julia’s lips have officially pursed themselves, and her eyes somehow seem to have defied the laws of physiology and drawn closer together than they were three or four minutes ago. He calls this her You fucked my sister look, though she has no sister and what he thinks the look really means this evening is You drank too much. Now I have to drive. It will remain in place, he figures, until she pulls up outside their building and switches off the engine.

He’s right about one thing: she hates driving and isn’t happy to have to do it tonight. She never drove before she met him. He taught her himself, on long, empty stretches of Central Valley farm roads. Her car back home is a Honda Accord that she rarely drives farther than the grocery store. She dislikes the old Mercedes and has only driven it two or three times since they bought it.

That’s not why she looks troubled, though. When Richard was out there on the balcony with her brother, Monika addressed her in the Russian every schoolchild of their mutual vintage had to learn: “You know what I appreciate about you, Julisia? If you think I’m a fool, you conceal it beautifully.” Richard and Stefan returned before Julia managed to formulate a reply, which is fortunate. She doesn’t know how she might’ve responded. What can you say when another woman, who happens to be your brother’s wife, makes that kind of statement?

Anna, in contrast to her mother, could not possibly appear more radiant. Her golden hair brushes the shoulders of the white faux fur they bought her a few days ago at Macy’s, and her face is flushed with excitement. She raises one hand and points at the ceiling. “It’s her,” she tells him. “It’s like she’s following us everywhere we go.”

At first he doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about. Then he hears that unmistakable voice wafting from the restaurant sound system. “Well,” he says, “there are worse folks to be followed by than Miss Ella Fitzgerald.” He puts one arm around her shoulders and the other around her mother’s. Then he steers his family out the door.

When Bogdan climbs out of the car, more snow seeps into his shoes. Earlier, on their initial foray through the woods, his feet got soaked, and now his toes are numb. He has poor circulation anyway. “Let’s hear the sequence again,” he says.

Marek studies him across the roof. “Sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asks, holding up the bottle. “Just to steady your jangling nerves?”

The bottle is small, and in the dark it looks almost empty. Earlier, when his partner first produced it, Bogdan came close to punching him, his fist rising as though it had a mind of its own. All evening he’s been feeling like one of those drones the Americans are supposedly using. It seems as if some strange force has seized control of his body. “Give me the sequence,” he repeats. “If you don’t, you can count me out.”

“I already told you four times.”

“So tell me five.”

Marek screws the cap off and takes another sip. “Four . . . two . . . one . . . six. Satisfied?”

“Not really. I won’t be satisfied until I’m home in bed.” Saying even that much represents wishful thinking. He’ll never be satisfied again, whether they pull this off or not. Some places you can’t come back from, and he’s in one of them now.

“Time to do it.” Marek crams the bottle into his coat pocket, grabs a crowbar from the backseat, and slips on his mask. It’s black like Bogdan’s, except above the eye slits there’s an oddly shaped orange letter C and, next to that, the head of an orange bear.

Bogdan pulls on the balaclava and immediately begins to itch. His partner steps into the woods, and for the second time tonight he sets off behind him.

Marek made the proposal a couple of weeks ago, the day after their produce supplier notified them that their account would soon be suspended. He would have suggested it earlier, he said, but he wanted to wait until his cousin had been in Ireland a while, to keep suspicion from falling on him.

When he recovered from the shock, Bogdan said, “You think this guy’s smart enough to get rich but too fucking stupid to change the gate code after your cousin leaves to work in Ireland?”

“If somebody’s in Ireland, why worry? He can’t rob you from Dublin.”

“No, but he can tell somebody the code, and they can rob you.”

“He trusted my cousin.”

“Well, that’s an argument for his stupidity, I’ll grant you. But he was still smart enough to install a burglar alarm—and smart enough not to give your cousin the code for that.”

They were having this conversation in the meat locker, surrounded by carcasses suspended from hooks. Marek wore a bloodstained apron and was holding a cleaver. They’d had to let their butcher go last summer. “When the alarm’s triggered,” he said, “it sends a signal to the police station in Alwernia. We’re talking about a town with a population of less than four thousand. On a typical Friday night, there are two cops on duty, and it’s a safe bet at least one of them’s drunk. Anyhow, it’s nine kilometers away, on the other side of a mountain.”

“What about the neighbors?”

“There aren’t any. This guy bought everything nearby to guarantee his privacy.”

“And the safe? How much does it weigh?”

“It’s small, probably no more than forty kilos. You’re telling me two healthy guys can’t carry the damn thing a couple hundred meters?”

“I’m not healthy. I’ve got high blood pressure, and you’ve made it spike. Besides, you seem to be overlooking the guard dog.”

“It’s apparently pretty vicious,” Marek admitted, “but we’ll drug it. And you don’t need to worry that it’ll freeze to death, because it’s got a fully heated doghouse. That animal lives better than we do.”

He said absolutely not, hell no. Then he went home and found Krysia sitting at the kitchen table, and though her eyes were dry, he could see she’d been crying. The stove had just quit. She didn’t complain or level any accusations, didn’t tell him he was a loser or a fool, but the weight of their collapsed hopes was more than he could bear.

So now here he is, tromping through snowy woods right before Christmas. An hour or so ago, as they’d approached the back gate, the German shepherd had let out a growl that sounded like it was being amplified over a stadium PA and hurled himself at the gate so hard Bogdan thought it might rock off its hinges. The dog began to bark and snarl, and the noise continued even after Marek flung the medicated kielbasa over the wall. By the time they got back to the car, the barking had stopped. “Enjoy your dinner, you fucking Nazi,” Marek muttered. Out came the vodka.

Bogdan stumbles over a fallen limb and staggers into a tree, banging his shoulder. “Shit,” he groans.

“Quiet!”

“Quiet? You want me to be quiet?” He’s almost shouting. “It’d be smarter to make as much racket as we can. Because if that dog’s not out cold and we go through that gate, he may eat us for dessert.”

“Don’t be so goddamn dramatic.”

“Don’t you be so goddamn nonchalant.”

At the edge of the woods, they pause. The clouds have parted, and they can see the house better than before. The wall is blocking their view of the grounds and the bottom floor, but you can tell the place is huge. It’s got a couple of towers that make it look like something from the late Middle Ages or the Italian Renaissance, Bogdan isn’t sure which.

There’s plenty he doesn’t know. He used to read a good bit, mostly popular history, books about the Second World War, the settling of the American West, polar exploration, the lives of various kings, queens, kaisers, and czars. But these last few years he hasn’t read anything. He’s worked ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, and there’s nothing to show for it except unpaid bills, unrealized dreams.

Inside that house, if Marek’s cousin can be believed, stands a safe that always contains a couple hundred thousand zlotys. It supposedly rests in a concealed crevice on one side of the rock fireplace, behind a stack of logs. All they’ve got to do is bust in and, while the alarm is blaring and sending a signal to a police station, hurl the firewood aside, grab the safe, and carry it out the back door, across the lawn, through the woods, and to the car. When they return to Krakow, Marek will take it to his sister’s empty house and go to work on it with a blowtorch. Bogdan will open the store tomorrow morning, and before they close the doors again their problems will be solved. The guy will miss the money. But he won’t miss it.

“You know what bothers me?” he asks now.

Marek sighs. Most things bother Bogdan. But the main thing bothering him, his partner suspects, is that he hasn’t gotten laid in the twenty-first century. If so, it must constitute excruciating torture, because his wife still has the kind of body that made God invent the fig tree. Marek has fantasized about her for years. “What bothers you?” he says to humor Bogdan and keep him moving in the proper direction.

“Somebody that builds swimming pools for a living must know everything there is to know about cement. Would you agree?”

“So what?”

“So when he’s designing a secret compartment to hide his safe, why wouldn’t he use cement to anchor it in place? Did you ever wonder about that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he didn’t. And that’s all that matters.”

“You know what else bothers me?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t your cousin rob the guy himself?”

“If he wanted that hotel job, he had to be in Dublin on a specific date. Besides . . .”

“Besides what?”

Marek pulls the bottle out and finishes it off, then drops it on the ground.

“He got bitten when he was little. He’s terrified of dogs. Big or small, it doesn’t matter.”

The cousin clearly is not desperate enough to attempt anything this dangerous. Like most people, he probably just goes to work, gets paid, and accepts his lot. Whereas they convinced themselves they were destined to be tycoons.

Bogdan bends, picks up the bottle, and sticks it in his own pocket.

“Why’d you do that?” his partner asks.

“Because I’d bet that when you bought it, you weren’t wearing gloves. Were you?”

Marek chucks him on the shoulder. “Good old Bogdan. We’ll make a thief of you yet.”

Without another word, they step out of the woods. Both of them served the military stint that used to be required of physically capable young Polish males, and they stride forward now in good order, as if a band that only they can hear has struck up “Dabrowski’s Mazurka.” Cross the Vistula and the Warta, and Poles again we shall be. We’ve been shown by Bonaparte the way to victory. He feels like he’s marching to his own execution.

Without casualty they reach the wall. It’s at least two meters tall. Trying to find out if the dog is ambulatory, Bogdan kicks the gate. This time Marek doesn’t protest. His vodka-fueled bravado seems to have waned during their advance over open ground.

Nothing happens. He kicks it again. Still nothing.

“Well,” he says, “if we’re going to do it, now’s the time.” Operational command, he understands, has passed to him. He pulls a small flashlight from his pocket and shines it on the gate.

Above the steel handle there’s a digital keypad. He suspects it allows a limited number of chances to enter the correct numerical sequence. He wonders if it might not also somehow be linked to the alarm, so that the final failure will set it off. A part of him would be relieved if that happened, because then they could turn and run before actually breaking the law. The other part knows how badly they need money. “Give me the code,” he says.

Marek hesitates. “Four . . . four . . .”

“That’s not what you’ve been saying all night. You’ve consistently said four two one six.”

“Four two one six. That’s right.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes . . . Bogdan?”

“What?”

“You’re feeling pretty good about the dog?”

“No,” he says, bending and pressing the four key, “I don’t feel good about the dog at all. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is how the dog might be feeling about us.” He punches the two key, then the one, then the six. Hearing a faint droning sound, he takes a deep breath, grasps the handle, turns it, and pushes the gate.

It budges but doesn’t open wide enough for him to enter. “Too much snow’s piled behind it,” he says. Together they lean against it and finally manage to create barely enough space to step through. He goes first, and Marek follows.

No sound from the dog, and no sign of him either. About twenty meters ahead, on their left, is a small outbuilding that gives off an eerie blue light. Most likely the electrified doghouse. Bogdan hopes the animal got back inside before passing out, because if not he’ll have to drag him in before they leave. Otherwise, he could easily freeze to death.

The big house itself is dark, not a light on anywhere as far as he can tell. He’s thinking how strange that is when he takes another step and the night is suddenly ablaze.

Powerful spotlights are mounted on the roof and at various points along the security wall. For an instant, both of them are blinded. When he regains his vision, the first thing he notices is the kielbasa. It lies about two meters away, embedded in the snow, completely untouched.

A moment passes before the full import registers. “Oh, my,” he says.

Marek, who to the best of Bogdan’s knowledge has never attended mass in his life, crosses himself.

Simultaneously, they turn toward the gate. The dog stands before it, blocking their exit.

He’s an impressive animal: his body is longer than it is tall, with powerful shoulders, straight forelegs, and a gently sloping back. He displays the classic wedge-shaped muzzle, oval eyes, and erect ears, and his nose is perfectly black. A showstopper for sure—and the show he’s stopped tonight has two actors, each of whom will react to the threat in his own definitive manner.

For Bogdan, the event is simply the latest in a string of failures that started several years ago. Until then, he thought life was about addition: you worked hard for somebody else and saved a certain sum of money. Eventually you started your own business, and then you bought a place of your own. You and your wife had your own bedroom, with a bed that didn’t have a crevice in the middle so it could be turned back into a couch the next morning. You had a new TV, a nice computer. Then one day, with little or no warning, you found yourself in the subtractive phase. Something went wrong, and that led to something else. You lost this, you lost that. And the next thing you know, you’re standing in the snow, in the middle of the night, with a wall and a German shepherd separating you from your tomorrows. Only modest hopes remain. Maybe if they embrace their fates, conceding the dog’s right to take a chunk out of their butts and make up for the kielbasa he’s too smart to eat, they can get on with the business of living their shitty lives.

Marek, on the other hand, experiences the onslaught of terror, laced with no small amount of rage at the injustice. He’s a person, yet he’s been outfoxed by a dog. Before he can be cautioned to remain motionless, he brandishes the crowbar.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Bogdan says.

As if to express agreement, the shepherd tilts his head to the right, studying Marek with those intelligent eyes.

“It’s okay, boy,” Bogdan whispers. “He wouldn’t hurt you. He never hurts anyone but us.”

The dog steps forward.

Marek yells, “Son of a bitch!” Then he hurls the crowbar at the animal, who drops his head. The crowbar sails right over him, clanging against the wall. Marek turns and runs toward the house, and the dog launches himself, halving the distance between them with a single graceful leap.

Bogdan is familiar with the concept of collective memory. Krysia, for instance, used to have a recurring dream in which she was pursued by German soldiers. Like him, she was born in ’58, so she’s unencumbered by recollections of life during the Occupation, yet that nightmare disturbed her sleep for years. One of his sisters has told him of a dream in which she’s being force-marched through a frozen landscape, obviously bound for the Gulag. If he’s ever experienced anything like that, he doesn’t recall it. But when the dog bounded after his partner just now, he heard the thud of jackboots.

A few meters shy of the house, the shepherd takes Marek down. Within seconds he’s on his back, flailing at his attacker, his high-pitched cries a pathetic counterpoint to the animal’s basso profundo.

Later, usually when he’s alone late at night and the vodka’s all gone, Bogdan will try to convince himself that the instant he stepped through that gate, he lost the capacity to make rational decisions, and in a manner of speaking that’s true. When you run out of good options, you just do what you do. In an altogether different sense, it will be a terrible lie, the worst one he’s ever tried to tell himself, and he won’t believe it for a minute.

The spotlights are still blazing. In the dark, he might not have found the crowbar. But there it lies against the wall, on top of a frozen drift.

Blood stains the snow. The dog has already bitten his partner numerous times: mostly on the hands and forearms. His claws have shredded the ski mask and made a mess of Marek’s face. In a minute he’ll go for the throat.

The big animal doesn’t swerve from the task at hand. He maintains his focus. He must hear Bogdan’s footsteps, the snow crunching beneath his inadequate shoes. But this is a diligent dog. His teeth remain embedded in Marek’s flesh even as the crowbar shatters his skull.

“Let’s hear your favorite Polish joke.”

He looks away from the road long enough to see Marek’s chest rise and fall. His eyes are closed, and the seatbelt appears to be the only thing holding him upright. He’s definitely in shock. In the military Bogdan learned it’s important to keep a shock victim conscious until he can receive medical attention; otherwise his brain may get too little oxygen. He knows a doctor he can trust. Anyhow, he hopes he can.

“Let’s hear one,” he says again. “Come on.”

His partner groans but doesn’t open his eyes. Both he and the car are covered in blood. “What?”

“You’ve been to the U.S. Don’t they still tell Polish jokes there?”

“A few . . . But not to Poles.”

Bogdan is breathing hard himself, sucking plenty of oxygen. His chest feels like it might burst. He’s starting to wonder if he missed a turn a while back. There seems to be a lot more snow on the road than he remembers, and it doesn’t look like anyone has come this way in the last couple hours.

“I bet you heard hundreds of them. Just tell me the best one.”

“Two Poles . . .” Marek begins, then stops. His head lolls against the door post.

They crest a hill, and on the downslope Bogdan slows to avoid braking. At the bottom, next to a creek, he recognizes an abandoned farmhouse where a friend of his grandmother used to live, so he knows they’re on the right road.

He picks up speed again, then reaches over and shakes his passenger. “Two Poles are doing what?”

“Walking.”

“Walking where?”

“To California.”

“And what happens?”

“In Arizona they get tired . . . so they buy . . .”

“They buy what, Marek?”

“A camel.”

“And then?”

“I can’t . . . I don’t know.”

He drives on. Before long, the road dead-ends at Route 780. They’re no more than twenty kilometers from Krakow, and as he prepares to make a left, he thinks of calling the doctor to alert him that they’re coming. The problem with that, though, is that he’d ask why they’re coming.

He turns onto the highway. It’s past eleven, the snow has quit falling, the road’s in much better condition here, and as far as he can see, it’s empty. So he lays his foot down on the accelerator. He’s always wanted to drive a car like this one, and if he weren’t terrified, he might be reveling in the BMW’s response. He’s never had such power at his disposal.

“You know what?” he says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Marek. But together, we’ve got the IQ of a hedgehog. That’s why we believed we needed to rob somebody smart. Just cut out the thinking part and get what he’s got. The problem is, one of the things he had was that poor German shepherd.”

They top a slight rise. Ahead he sees the taillights of an old Mercedes.

“Compared to us, Marek, that dog was fucking Einstein. Are you with me?”

“Aah.”

“Or maybe a better comparison would be to Rommel. Because the dog staged a flanking movement and took us from behind.”

The Mercedes must be a diesel. It’s belching soot from its tailpipe, needing a ring job as badly as any car he’s ever seen. The oncoming lane is clear, so he darts into it. As they pass, he glances toward Marek and catches a glimpse of the other driver, a woman bending over the steering wheel, peering through the windshield as if she either can’t see well or doesn’t know the way.

He shoots back into the right lane. And that’s when he hits the patch of ice.

He doesn’t know that the BMW’s iControl system has already sensed the skid and taken corrective action. So he reacts as he would have if driving his old Polish Fiat, slamming on the brakes.

In the rearview mirror, he sees the Mercedes swerve to avoid hitting them. It does a full three sixty, then disappears.

The roadbed is elevated a good three meters above the surrounding countryside. It’s the kind of physical detail you can’t fully appreciate just by driving through. Back when his grandmother was still alive, he traveled this stretch countless times, and if he ever noticed the raised roadbed, he doesn’t recall it. His attention was never on the road itself but on the sights outside the window. Green fields and pastures, languid cows. The children of peasants frolicking barefoot, country dogs lapping at their heels. After he started school, he began to understand that terrible things had happened here. The Germans had used the road during their hasty retreat, the Red Army in its relentless pursuit. Plenty of people had suffered violent deaths in this bucolic setting. But for him, the highway represented escape from the tiny flat his family occupied in a Communist high-rise.

On the embankment, he loses his footing, falls, and slides to the bottom. He jumps up, pulls the flashlight from his pocket, and turns it on. The Mercedes is several meters away, its engine no longer running. It must have rolled over at least once. The roof has compressed like an accordion.

He runs to the driver’s side. The glass is shattered, only fragments remaining in the frame. The woman’s eyes, when he sees them, make him gasp. They’re looking right at him—brown eyes, a little too convex, but they’re pretty, those eyes, and completely unfocused. They don’t see a thing.

He crosses himself, then touches her neck to check for a pulse. Immediately, his hand recoils. He shines his light into the rear seat, and after seeing the blonde hair and the arterial blood gushing onto the white coat, he bends over and retches into the snow.

Before clawing his way up the embankment, where he will climb into the BMW, put it in gear, and drive back to Krakow as fast as he dares, he stumbles around the front of the car to the passenger door and takes a look.

A few shards of glass have embedded themselves in Richard’s cheeks and forehead. His mouth is full of salty fluid. His right arm and shoulder, though still attached to his body, don’t respond when he tries to move them. He wants to push the light away, it’s blinding him and he can’t find Julia or Anna. As if the man with the flashlight understands that, he turns it off, and Richard gets a look at his face.

A pair of soft jaws that taper into a weak chin. A receding hairline, graying eyebrows, thin lips, a chipped tooth. Smallish eyes. To the left of an unremarkable nose, a large mole cleft in the middle, as if two separate growths have tried and failed to merge. It’s a face destined to be forgotten by everyone who ever sees it, except the man who’s seeing it right now.