Skillful Death (54 page)

“Passport?” he says.

“Got it,” I reply. I pat my pocket.

“I mean, give me your passport,” he says.

“Oh.” I fish it out of my pocket and hand it to him. He puts it in a zippered bag and tosses it in the trunk. There’s a green bag and a blue bag in the trunk. They’re both small carry-on looking bags. From the pocket of the green one, he pulls a passport out, checks the photo and then hands it to me. He takes out another one and stuffs it in his pocket.

I open it and see my own face looking back. It seems that I’ve been to France, Germany, and Mexico in the past year, according to the last page of stamps.

“What’s this for?”

“Check the name,” he says.

“Who’s Leonard Jenko?”

“You are,” he says. “They’ve probably got Malcolm Harrison on a watch list.”

“Huh.”

“You want blue or green?”

“Blue, I guess. What’s in it?”

“Just some clothes. It’s too suspicious to travel with no bag. You’ve got to carry something.”

“I’ve got my backpack, but I see your point. Maybe I should combine my bags,” I say. I unzip the blue suitcase and push the contents around. I see socks, and boxers, a couple pairs of pants, a bunch of t-shirts, and a paperback copy of
The Shining
. I decide to keep the suitcase and the backpack. That way I’ll be able to keep some things close, under the seat.

“What are you doing?”

“They always ask you if anyone else has packed your bag. I don’t want to lie to the authorities, do I?”

Bud nods. He probably thinks I’m joking, but there’s a point to what I’m doing.
 

“Do we have visas?”

“We’ll pick one up at the consular point in Minsk. I can arrange for letters of introduction to arrive there with us.”

“I hope so,” I say. “I haven’t traveled extensively, but I know that some of the countries don’t mess around.”

“It’s not hard getting into Belarus if you pose as a tourist,” he says. “Getting back into the U.S. can be difficult. Once we get past security, I’ll give you some more papers: medical insurance, driver’s license, all that.”

“It’s nice of you to have fake documents for me ready at all times,” I say. “Do you have passports for anyone else in there?”

He’s just closing the trunk of the car when my question stills his hand.

“You know, that’s a good point,” he says. “Let me make sure I don’t have any extra passports.”

He does. Several fake documents—I don’t even look to see who they’re for—come out of his bag. He stows them in the trunk and then we’re off. The trip is not as streamlined as our entrance into Canada, but Bud definitely knows his way around an airport. He gets us tickets without waiting in any lines and he guides me to a security checkpoint that seems to be waiting just for us. This is all under an assumed name, too. I can’t even imagine what kind of service he would get as billionaire Bud.

We’ve got a bunch of hours to kill before our plane leaves. Bud knows about a quiet corner of the airport where some chairs face a window and you can watch the planes take off. I plug in the laptop and he fills in more details of his life story.

I
TRANSFER
THE
BAGS
to my left hand so I can open the door. I go shopping every day. I have three reasons: it gives me practice with my Russian, I only have to carry enough water for one day, and it’s something to do. The boss doesn’t shop. Even here, we’re afraid that someone might spot him. Apparently, it’s not easy to go unrecognized as a billionaire. We don’t have a car, so I have to walk two miles to the store.

We’ve got another few days to kill before our next expedition. Our tourist visas run out next week, but Bud says that we’ll be okay. I don’t know how they’d catch us. We don’t have any interaction with the authorities. On one of our boat trips, the guy asked to see our passports. I think he wanted to make sure that we weren’t cops. The boss was asking about borders and branches of the river, and the guy started to get pretty nervous. He settled right down when he saw our Canadian passports. Everyone likes Canadians.

Except for my accent, which makes everyone laugh, I think I could fit in here. People are a little less focused on rules and regulations than in the States. When you see a group of men together, there’s a certain lawless feeling about them. Individually, they’re pretty nice. The other day I saw a cop who was hassling a guy because the back of his truck was full of kids. I can’t understand them when they talk fast, but it seemed like the cop was telling him not to carry kids around like that. The guy started arguing with the cop and then suddenly there was a whole group of guys arguing with the cop. The cop just put up his hands and walked away. In New York, that same confrontation would have ended with night sticks and cuffs.

So what does that say about these men? That they don’t like authority? To me, it just says don’t mess with a group of them.

We’re renting the left half of a house that’s been split into two apartments. I broke into the other half one bored day. It was uninhabitable—all busted walls and ripped out plumbing. A family of cats was living in the kitchen. Our place isn’t bad. It could use a few coats of paint and a water filter. And every evening the lights dim until the bulbs just emit a hissing, orange glow. Aside from that it’s okay.
 

As for our expeditions, we’ve found nothing. I don’t know why I would expect different. The boss already said that he had tried and failed before. We’re just following his old footprints and achieving the same results.

I set my bags down on the table and one of the heavy bottles of water falls over. Bud’s hand shoots out and stops it before it rolls off.

“I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake,” he says.

“Yeah?” I ask. This trip was my idea. I told the boss that I thought if we went to eastern Europe that we could track down where he grew up. Bud approaches things with an orderly, logical approach. I imagined that he systematically toured every inch of every river, comparing what he saw to his childhood memories and trying to retrace his journey. It’s like when you’re trying to find your car keys. But sometimes, your keys are in the freezer.
 

I’m good at finding hidden things because I don’t see the world in the same way as everyone else. If you’re looking for your keys, you’ll start at the table by the front door, search the kitchen, search your bedroom, and then work your way into your living room. That’s not my approach at all. I’ll start by climbing up onto the arm of the sofa and trying to find all the red things in the room. I know that the key ring is blue, but I’ll try to tune my eyes to only find red things. I have this thought that people get a vision in their head of what they’re looking for, and that prevents them from seeing what’s around them. That’s why I always do two things. First, I get a different perspective. Second, I look for the opposite of what I’m trying to find.

Unfortunately, Bud didn’t quite buy my approach. When I told him that my plan was to take bus trips around all the major cities, he vetoed the idea and said that we would take trips up the rivers to try to find stands of bamboo. I couldn’t talk him out of it, so that’s what we’re doing. Meanwhile, I’ve learned enough Russian on my daily shopping trips so that I can start my own search.

“I’m going shopping,” I say.

Bud is hunched over a big paper map, tracing contour lines.

“Didn’t you just go shopping?” he asks, without looking up.

“Different kind of shopping,” I say.

“Okay.”

I don’t mention when I’ll be back. I’m not sure how long this trip will take. I’ve got a pocket full of money, most of which I’ve embezzled over the past couple of weeks. Bud manages the budget, but he doesn’t have a complete grip on what things cost, so I’ve been skimming. I met a guy who drives a van into the city every day around noon. He will give me a ride for a small fee.

♣
   
♢
   
♡
   
♠

In geographic areas, people seem to agree on how they’re all going to walk. It might look like everyone has their own style of walking around, but there are more similarities than differences. Where I’m from, they’re all business. The pace is quick, the arms don’t move much, and heads stay high. Out west, I’ve been to places where everyone has their hands in their pockets and chins tilted up.
 

Here, it’s the hunch and shuffle. Once you’ve got the walk down, you can blend in no matter how you’re dressed.

I hunch and shuffle to a block with shops and people I can talk to in my broken Russian.

The first place I go is a jewelry shop.

“Hello,” I say.

“Good afternoon,” the woman says. She has a smile that doesn’t cover her whole mouth.

“I’m looking for something unusual, for my girlfriend,” I say.

“Earrings. Every woman loves these.” She’s keeping her words separated and her sentences simple because of my clumsy foreign pronunciation. Very considerate.

She has a nice selection of silver earrings in the shapes of musical notations. It’s interesting stuff, but not unusual enough.

“Anything more strange?” I ask.

She knits her brow and moves her jaw to the side.

“Like?”

“Something unusual?” I ask. I’m not sure how to convey it any better than that. I’m looking for a place that is out of the ordinary, so I need to find artifacts that may have come from there. In my experience, art and jewelry always lead to the fringe. If this shop doesn’t come through for me, I’ll start looking for a gallery next.

“Another shop is one block over,” she says. “Try there.”

She writes an address on the back of a business card and hands it to me. I thank her and find my way back out to the street. I’m glad she wrote the address. I wouldn’t have thought to look for shops on this block. It seems a bit industrial. The number on the card is over a black metal door with no indication of any retail presence. I’m starting to wonder if the nice lady perhaps steered me towards a mugging.

Two women bang through the door. They’re laughing and swinging bags. I catch the door before it closes and see a hallway with signs next to the doors. It seems there are little shops in there. I’m not sure which one might carry unusual jewelry, so I start on the left.

It’s almost too small to be called a shop, but the little room is draped with beaded necklaces with price tags. A woman is sitting at a little bench against the wall. Her hands move with quick darts as she assembles her next piece.

“Hello?” I ask.

“Just a moment,” she says. She finishes the bracelet, or whatever it is, and stands to greet me. “May I help you?”

“I’m looking for something unusual, for my girlfriend,” I say.

She answers with a smile and grabs my arm. I think she’s ejecting me from the building, but instead she guides me across the hall. This tiny shop seems to glow purple with ultraviolet light. It has four shelves displaying rings, buzzing with radiant light.

“Yes?” a woman asks.
 

The woman who guided me, the bead woman, disappears.

I repeat my request. “I’m looking for something unusual, for my girlfriend.”

“A ring?”

“Sure,” I say.

The rings are soldered wire—nothing special—but the stones are really peculiar. The flat surfaces on the stones give off weird colors, like gasoline on water. They’re shiny and some have tiny little holes.

“Very pretty,” I say.
 

“Maybe not a ring?” she asks. She points me towards a display of earrings. Again, the metal is cheap, but the stones are fascinating. One pair has green rocks that are translucent and they diffuse the light in a way that makes them look like they’re emitting it.

“This pair,” I say. She tells me the price.

I pull money from my pocket one bill at a time and count. I’m hoping the money will entice her to talk.

“Where are the stones from?” I ask.

“I make them,” she says. She gestures towards a closet where the curtain is pulled aside to reveal an arsenal of rock cutting and polishing equipment.

“What about the raw stones?” I ask.

“They’re local,” she says.

“Do you get them?” I ask. My Russian is failing me. I search for the words.
 

“Yes, I have them here?”

“Yes. Do
you
get them?” I ask, pointing at her.
 

“I don’t understand.”

I have to check my dictionary. There’s a hierarchy to being dismissed in Belarus. If you have a foreign accent and you can’t make yourself understood, you’ll command about seventy-five percent of someone’s attention. If you pull out a dictionary, it drops to fifty. If you resort to technology—pull out a computer or a phone to look up a word—the local will walk away. I’m lucky; she waits while I check my dictionary.

“Collect. Do you collect or gather the stones yourself?”

“Ah, no. My sons get them when they’re with their father.”

“May I speak with him?”

“The father? No. You would not want to speak with him.”

I’m going to take her word.