Breed (34 page)

“I don’t know,” she says softly. Seeing their looks of dismay, she defends herself: “I’m not myself, okay?”

Leslie hands the card to Alice and the twins go off to the ATM to try their luck. The first four numbers they try constitute their birth date, and they are still too young to fully appreciate how amazing it is that it works.

“Ask for five hundred,” Adam whispers. “We’ll give her one hundred and keep the rest.”

Alice agrees with a nod and they move to block their mother’s view and stand shoulder to shoulder, shoving bills into their pockets.

“Take us to a very nice hotel, please,” Leslie tells the taxi driver, and he brings them to a section of the city that is familiar to her, though not to the hotel where she and Alex stayed nearly eleven years ago. For which she is grateful. Her missing of him is a dull ache that seems to spread—from her heart, to her stomach, to her bowels, to her eyes, to her throat, to her arms and legs. It occupies her as if it were a parasite and she its host.

The driver is a good sort. He wears a brown leather jacket over a T-shirt bearing the picture of Tito. The driver has a round, youthful face, though his short hair is turning gray. His left ear is missing, and in its wake is a little pink ripple of flesh that looks like one of the folds of the labia.

“This is good place,” he says, pulling his black Renault in front of the VIP Hotel.

It is the kind of place that Alex would never have stepped foot in—even on his way to bankruptcy, covered in coarse dark hair, and subject to the whip and rattle of unspeakable temptations, he maintained the tastes and sense of entitlement of his forebears and to the end saw himself as a man who simply did not stay in hotels frequented by software salesmen and budget tourists.

“How much?” Leslie asks.

“Forty euros, please,” he says. After she pays him, the driver takes a business card from a plastic holder attached to the car’s sun visor by rubber bands. “If you need anything, I want you please to call me. Slavoj Bucovec. You need drive. Sights. Maybe go to ski mountains. Slavoj Bucovec is on standby. I am here seven twenty four twelve.” He hands her his business card. It shows a cartoonish car with long eyelashes over its headlights and little Valentine hearts pouring out of its exhaust pipe. She reads his name.

“Slavoj?”

“Slave-oh,” he says. “The
J
at the end is silent, silent like so much is in this country, where most secrets are taken into the grave.”

“Well, if you would wait here while we check in,” Leslie says. She looks at her watch. It’s a little after 9:00 a.m.; Kis is probably in his office or on the way. “We need to go to a doctor, and you could take us.”

“Of course. Do you have the street and the number?”

“That’s the problem right there,” Leslie says. “But I think I can remember how to get there. Or maybe you know the way—he’s rather well known.”

“Slovene medical doctors are among the finest in the world,” Slavoj says.

“This doctor, we crossed the bridge with the… what do you call them? Monsters.” Leslie spreads her arms and waves them up and down.

“Mom,” Alice says, warning, imploring.

“Dragon Bridge,” says Slavoj.

“Yes!” Leslie says. Color rushes to her face. She knows now, with a kind of calm certainty, that this is all going to work itself out. “And it was on Castle Street.”

“Very close by,” Slavoj says. “I can take you.”

“Oh, thank you thank you thank you,” Leslie says. “Come on, kids, let’s get checked in, washed up, and ready.” Then to Slavoj she says, “Fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Massive okays to that,” Slavoj says.

When they check into the hotel, once again Leslie has to show their passports, and again all goes smoothly. The desk clerk makes it clear there are plenty of rooms available right now—if Ljubljana has a high season, November is not it—and it is no problem at all to give them two rooms right next to each other.

“It might be better if we had a little… space,” Leslie says. “Do you have anything maybe one floor up, or down?”

If the clerk finds anything strange in this request, he masks it expertly, and moments later the twins are in room 404, and Leslie is in 511. Her window looks out onto a public square, where a stage and several grandstands have been set up and now stand empty and forlorn in the morning’s cold rain. Old posters bearing the face of Gustav Mahler peel gradually from the lampposts.

“Oh, Alex, Alex, Alex,” Leslie says, falling to her knees in front of the windows and holding the hem of the long curtain to her face. For the first time since his death, the loss of him exerts its full weight upon her, and it is like being pushed facedown by a giant hand, invisible, implacable, pitiless.

There is still a faint odor of cigarettes, though housekeeping has left the windows open. The room is painted white, with turquoise trim, and there is only one bed for the two of them. A business card advertising a local nightclub and featuring a drawing of dancing girls in elaborate ostrich-feather headgear has been left on top of the television set. Adam picks up the card, looks it over, lets it drop from his fingers, and watches it as it flutters to the floor.

“So, when we become teenagers,” he says.

“I know,” Alice says. “Or puberty or whatever. I hate that word anyhow. It’s like
pee-you.
”

“If we turn out like them,” Adam says. He opens the minibar and takes out a Toblerone chocolate bar, which he tosses to Alice; he keeps the Three Musketeers for himself. On the inside of the door, there are breath mints, a deck of cards, and a combination corkscrew and bottle opener, which Adam takes and puts in his back pocket.

“Isn’t the doctor supposed to have something for us too?” Alice says.

Adam shrugs. “I wish Mr. Medoff was our father.”

“He’s as dead as Dad.”

“Whatever happens, Alice. Us forever.” He extends his arm, as if to read a wristwatch, and moves his eyes along the length of it.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeing if it’s got a bunch of hair.”

“There’s something so sick about what happens to people,” Alice says. “Even if nothing happens to us, it still sort of makes me nauseous.”

There’s a knock at the door. “Kids?” Leslie says. “It’s time to go.”

“I’m scared,” Alice says, as softly as possible.

Adam pulls the corkscrew/bottle opener out of his back pocket and shows it to Alice.

“Just let her try something,” he whispers.

Slavoj drives the three of them to Castle Trg. It would have been a short walk, but by car they must contend with one-way streets and streets closed to vehicles. Despite the city’s attempts to make life easier for pedestrians, Ljubljana feels deserted. Low baguette-shaped gray clouds race from west to east; plump, piebald pigeons hop along the cobblestones unmolested.

“There it is!” Leslie exclaims when they finally reach Castle Trg. There is the stone Art Deco building, the two carved women holding their swords.

The twins stare at the swords, remembering their teacher and the agony that inch by inch ended his life.…

“I wait here,” Slavoj says.

“It could be a while,” Leslie says.

“Everything is very quiet today,” he says, gesturing to the empty street. He adds, under his breath, “And every other day.” He opens his door and hurries around to the back of the car to open the door for Leslie and the children. “I’ll be here,” he says with a small salute. He seems a little out of breath. The picture of Marshal Tito swells and shrinks with the rise and fall of his chest.

It’s as if she and Alex were here just a few weeks ago, or yesterday. Over the years, Leslie has done her best not to think about that day when they came to Dr. Kis, but now the memories of it come rushing back, shockingly detailed and eerily vivid. She climbs the stone stairs with her children behind her. She can smell rice cooking. On the third floor, the door to someone’s apartment is open. She can hear the TV or the radio, can see an umbrella stand holding six or seven umbrellas, the wooden handles like a bouquet of question marks.

“How you guys holding up?” she asks.

“Is he going to give us shots?” Adam asks.

“We’re okay,” Alice says quickly.

They hear claws clicking on the stone steps, coming in their direction. A few moments later, a man appears. He is stocky, with the empty left sleeve of his leather jacket pinned to the flap of the pocket. He holds a metal leash, at the end of which is a shaggy, panting Great Pyrenees, a hundred pounds at least, ice white except for a saddle of pale brown fur.

For the moment, it seems likely to Leslie that this man and the giant dog are connected to Dr. Kis—just as that little Englishman was connected to the rottweiler.

“Excuse me,” Leslie says to the man once he is in front of her.

He looks warily at her, tightens his grip on the leash.

“Do you know Dr. Kis?” she asks. “Is he still…”

But her question is all but obliterated. The sound of her voice has triggered some guarding instinct in the dog, and his dark eyes flash furiously and he lets out a series of deep booming barks, attempting to lunge at her with each one. Each bark seems to have the power to push her back.

The one-armed man pulls the dog away and continues down the stairs. He calls out to them over his shoulder. From the tone, it sounds as if he is apologizing, but they can’t be sure.

“I could kill him,” Leslie says, wearily. She realizes that the children have heard her. “You okay?” Leslie asks them.

“That dog was scared,” Adam says.

“It’s just a bad dog,” Leslie says. She feels her children’s eyes on her, can feel their gaze like little fingers looking for a way into her, a way of prying her open and peering in. It strikes her:
They know everything.
The next flight of stairs awaits them. And the next. And the next. She tells herself that the appearance of that terrible dog was, in fact, a good omen. It means Kis is here.…

This much she knows: her mind is not reliable. At this point, half the people in nursing homes can think circles around her. But Leslie is sure that Kis’s office was on the top floor of this building, and, indeed, once she is in front of the door that once led to his suite of offices, she is more certain than ever that she has come to the right place. Yet the plaque on the door says something complex in Slovene, and etched into the metal of it is a silhouette of a woman doing yoga. And the smell of incense wafts through the crack at the bottom of the door. Nonetheless, Leslie knocks. Silence. She looks nervously at Adam and Alice. They are holding hands like two urchins who have been left alone on board a ship that is taking on water.

At last, the door is opened by a woman in her thirties with a pixie cut dyed dark orange and wearing a gray sports bra and cargo pants, rolled-up yoga mat in one hand and a mug of something in the other. She looks at Leslie and the twins with unconcealed puzzlement.

“Sorry to bother you,” Leslie says. “Do you speak English?”

“Not so good, but yes, I try.” The woman’s voice is soft, melodious. She smiles.

“I’m looking for Dr. Kis,” Leslie says. It sounds too blunt to her ears and she amends it. “We’re all three of us looking for him.”

“There’s no doctor here,” the young woman says. “Are you…? Do you need to come in? Rest here for a moment? I can show you the hospital.”

“We don’t need the hospital,” Leslie says.

“But thank you,” Alice is quick to say.

“Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot,” says Adam.

“Was this a doctor’s office before?” Leslie asks.

The woman is silent. Her once mild gaze intensifies as she looks at Leslie and then the children.

“It was empty when we came. We are leaseholders, you understand?”

“I’m looking for a Dr. Kis,” Leslie says. “Dr. Slobodan Kis.”

“No doctors are here. This is a place for…” The woman gazes upward, as if the correct word might be hanging by a thread directly above her. “Illumination. Mind and
spiritus
. Not invasion of Western so-called medicine.”

Leslie smiles—at least she means to smile, though judging from the woman’s reaction, Leslie may not have managed more than a simple show of teeth.

“You don’t want to fuck with me,” Leslie says in a rather soft voice.

“Mom,” Alice says.

The woman’s eyes widen as she quickly translates what she has just heard.

“Sorry?” the woman says, feeling suddenly burdened by having to hold on to her yoga mat and her cup of tea.

“Yeah, you’re sorry,” Leslie says. “I know all about sorry.”

“Mom,” Alice says. She puts her hand on her mother’s back, more or less between the shoulder blades.

“Let’s go, Mom,” Adam says. “The doctor isn’t here.”

Leslie turns and nods. Her eyes look stunned; her arms hang limply at her side. When she turns again to speak to the orange-haired woman, she sees that the door has been closed. “All right. We can…” She gestures toward the stairwell, moving her hand in a kind of tumbling circle. “Leave,” she says at last.

Slavoj awaits them. He has bought himself a soda and a box of crackers and he is reading a Slovene translation of
The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
When he sees Leslie and the twins approaching his car, he scrambles out to greet them and open the passenger door.

“Very fast,” he says.

“He wasn’t there,” Leslie says.

“He’s gone,” adds Alice.

“Oh, sorry for this,” Slavoj says.

“Maybe you know him,” says Adam. “Dr. Kis?”

“Please?” Slavoj says, wrinkling his brow.

“Slobodan Kis,” Leslie says. She pronounces it like
kiss
. But then thinks to spell it, at which a look of guarded recognition crosses Slavoj’s face.

“Not here,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “Very famous.” He rubs two fingers against his thumb, the universal sign for money. “But then what? Many problems. The judges don’t accept his proofs. And so…” He lets out a low whistle and makes a dipping motion with his hand, signifying someone disappearing underground.

“Fucking hell,” Leslie says, and glances at her children. “Sorry.”