The Goldfinch (117 page)

Water reflections wavering on the ceiling. Outside, somewhere, tinny Christmas carillon music and off-key carolers singing.
O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter.

I didn’t have a return ticket. But I had a credit card. I could take a cab to the airport.
You can take a cab to the airport,
I told myself. Schiphol. First plane out. Kennedy, Newark. I had money. I was talking to myself like a child. Who knew where Kitsey was—out in the Hamptons, for all I knew—but Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, Janet (who still had her old job despite the fact that Mrs. Barbour had nothing much she needed assisting
with, any more), was the kind of person who could get you on a plane out of anywhere with a few hours’ notice, even on Christmas Eve.

Janet. The thought of Janet was absurdly reassuring. Janet who was an efficient mood system all her own, Janet fat and rosy in her pink shetlands and madras plaids like a Boucher nymph as dressed by J. Crew, Janet who said
excellent!
in answer to everything and drank coffee from a pink mug that said
Janet.

It was a relief to be thinking straight. What good was it doing Boris, or anyone, me waiting around? The cold and damp, the unreadable language. Fever and cough. The nightmare sense of constraint. I didn’t want to leave without Boris, without knowing if Boris was okay, it was the war-movie confusion of running on and leaving a fallen friend with no idea what worse hell you were running into, but at the same time I wanted out of Amsterdam so badly I could imagine falling to my knees upon disembarkation at Newark, touching my forehead to the concourse floor.

Telephone book. Pencil and paper. Only three people had seen me: the Indonesian, Grozdan, and the Asian kid. And while it was quite possible Martin and Frits had colleagues in Amsterdam looking for me (another good reason to get out of town), I had no reason to think the police were looking for me at all. There was no reason they would have flagged my passport.

Then—it was like being struck in the face—I flinched. For whatever reason I’d been thinking that my passport was downstairs, where I’d had to present it at check-in. But in truth I hadn’t thought of it at all, not since Boris had taken it away from me to lock in the glove box of his car.

Very very calmly, I set down the phone book, making an effort to set it down in a manner that would look casual and unstudied to some neutral observer. In a normal situation it was straightforward enough. Look up the address, find the office, figure out where to go. Stand in line. Await my turn. Speak courteously and patiently. I had credit cards, photo ID. Hobie could fax my birth certificate. Impatiently, I tried to beat back an anecdote Toddy Barbour had told at dinner—how, upon losing his passport (in Italy? Spain?) he’d been required to haul in a flesh-and-blood witness to vouch for his identity.

Bruised inky skies. It was early in America. Hobie just breaking for lunch, walking over to Jefferson Market, maybe picking up groceries for the lunch he was hosting on Christmas Day. Was Pippa in California still?
I imagined her tumbling over in a hotel bed and reaching sleepily for the telephone, eyes still closed, Theo is that you, is something wrong?

Better a fine and talk our way out of it in case we are stopped.

I felt ill. To present myself at the consulate (or whatever) for a round of interviews and paperwork was asking for far more trouble than I needed. I hadn’t put a time limit on waiting, on how long I would wait, and yet any movement—random movement, senseless movement, insect-buzzing-around-a-jar movement—seemed preferable to being cooped up in the room even one minute more, seeing shadow people out of the corner of my eye.

Another huge Tiffany ad in the
Tribune,
bringing me Season’s Greetings. Then on the opposite page a different ad, for digital cameras, scrawled in artsy letters and signed Joan Mir
ó
:

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Centraal Station. European Union, no passport control at the borders. Any train, anywhere. I pictured myself riding in aimless circles through Europe: Rhine falls and Tyrolean passes, cinematic tunnels and snowstorms.

Sometimes it’s about playing a poor hand well, I remembered my dad saying drowsily, half asleep on the couch.

Staring at the telephone, lightheaded with fever, I sat very still and tried to think. Boris, at lunch, had spoken of taking the train from Amsterdam to Antwerp (and Frankfurt: I didn’t want to go anywhere near Germany) but, also, to Paris. If I went to a consulate in Paris to apply for a new passport: maybe less likelihood of connection with the Martin stuff. But there was no getting away from the fact that the Chinese kid was an eyewitness. For all I knew I was on every law-enforcement computer in Europe.

I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. Too many mirrors. I switched off the water and reached for a towel to pat my face dry. Methodical actions, one by one. It was after nightfall when my mood always darkened, when I began to be afraid. Glass of water. Aspirin for my fever. That too always began to climb after dark. Simple actions. I was
working myself up and I knew it. I didn’t know what warrants Boris had out on him but though it was worrying to think he’d been arrested, I was a lot more worried that Sascha’s people had sent someone else after him. But this was yet another thought I could not allow myself to follow.

ii.

T
HE NEXT DAY—
C
HRISTMAS
Eve—I forced myself to eat a huge room-service breakfast even though I didn’t want it, and threw away the newspaper without looking at it since I was afraid if I saw the words
Overtoom
or
Moord
one more time there was no way I could make myself do what I had to. After I’d eaten, stolidly, I gathered the week’s accumulation of newspapers on and around my bed and rolled them up and put them in the trash basket; retrieved from the cupboard my bleach-rotted shirt and—after checking to see the bag was tied tight—slipped it into another bag from the Asian market (leaving it open, for carrying ease, also in case I happened to spot a helpful brick). Then, after turning up my coat collar and tying my scarf over it, I turned around the sign for the chambermaid, and left.

The weather was rotten, which helped. Wet sleet, blowing in sideways, drizzled over the canal. I walked for about twenty minutes—sneezing, miserable, chilled—until I happened upon a rubbish bin on a particularly deserted corner with no cars or foot traffic, no shops, only blind-looking houses shuttered tight against the wind.

Quickly I shoved the shirt in and walked on, with a burst of exhilaration that sped me four or five streets along very rapidly, despite chattering teeth. My feet were wet; the soles of my shoes were too thin for the cobblestones and I was very cold. When did they pick up the garbage? No matter.

Unless—I shook my head to clear it—the Asian market. The plastic bag had the name of the Asian market on it. Only a few blocks from my hotel. But it was ridiculous to think this way and I tried to reason myself out of it. Who had seen me? No one.

Charlie: Affirmative. Delta: I am proceeding with Difficulty.

Stop it. Stop it. No going back.

Not knowing where a taxi stand was, I trudged along aimlessly for
twenty minutes or more until finally I managed to flag down a taxi on the street. “Centraal Station,” I told the Turkish cab driver.

But when he left me off in front, after a drive through haunted gray streets like old newsreel footage, I thought for a moment he’d taken me to the wrong place since the building from the front looked more like a museum: red-brick fantasia of gables and towers, bristling Dutch Victoriana. In I wandered, amidst holiday crowds, doing my best to look as if I belonged and ignoring the police who seemed to be standing around nearly everywhere I looked and feeling bewildered and uneasy as the great democratic world swept and surged around me once more: grandparents, students, weary young-marrieds and little kids dragging backpacks; shopping bags and Starbucks cups, rattle of suitcase wheels, teenagers collecting signatures for Greenpeace, back in the hum of human things. There was an afternoon train to Paris but I wanted the latest one they had.

The lines were endless, all the way back to the news kiosk. “This evening?” said the clerk when I finally got to the window: a broad, fair, middle aged woman, pillowy at the bosom and impersonally genial like a procuress in a second rate genre painting.

“That’s right,” I said, hoping I didn’t quite look as sick as I felt.

“How many?” she said, hardly looking at me.

“Just one.”

“Certainly. Passport please.”

“Just a—” voice husky with illness, patting myself down; I’d hoped they wouldn’t ask—“ah. Sorry, I don’t have it on me, it’s in the safe back at the hotel—but—” producing my New York State ID, my credit cards, my Social Security card, pushing them through the window. “Here you go.”

“You require a passport to travel.”

“Oh, sure.” Doing my best to sound reasonable, knowledgeable. “But I’m not leaving till tonight. See—?” indicating the empty floor at my feet: no luggage. “I’m seeing my girlfriend off, and since I’m here I thought I’d go ahead and get in line and buy the ticket if that’s all right.”

“Well—” the clerk glanced at her screen—“you have plenty of time. I’d suggest you wait and purchase your ticket when you return this evening.”

“Yes—” pinching my nose, so I wouldn’t sneeze—“but I’d like to purchase it now.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Please. It’d be a huge help. I’ve been standing here for forty-five minutes and I don’t know what the lines will be like tonight.” From Pippa—who had gone all over Europe by rail—I was fairly sure I remembered hearing they didn’t check passports for the train. “All I want is to buy it now so I have time to run all my errands before I come back this evening.”

The clerk looked hard at my face. Then she picked up the ID and looked at the picture, then again at me.

“Look,” I said, when she hesitated, or seemed to hesitate: “You can see it’s me. You have my name, my Social Security card—here,” I said, reaching in my pocket for pen and paper. “Let me duplicate the signature for you.”

She compared the two, side by side. Again she looked at me, and the card—and then, all at once, seemed to make up her mind. “I can’t accept this documentation.” Pushing my cards back to me through the window.

“Why not?”

The line behind me was growing.

“Why?” I repeated. “It’s perfectly legitimate. It’s what I use in lieu of passport to fly in the U.S. The signatures match,” I said, when she didn’t answer, “can’t you see?”

“Sorry.”

“You mean—” I could hear the desperation in my voice; she was meeting my gaze aggressively, as if defying me to argue. “You’re telling me I’ve got to come all the way back here tonight and stand in line all over again?”

“Sorry, sir. Can’t help you. Next,” said the clerk, looking over my shoulder at the next passenger.

As I was walking away—pushing and bumping my way through crowds—someone said behind me: “Hey. Hey, mate?”

At first, disoriented from the ticket window, I thought I was hallucinating the voice. But when, uneasily, I turned, I saw a ferret-faced teenager with pink-rimmed eyes and a shaved head, bouncing up and down on the toes of his gigantic sneakers. From his darting side-to-side glance I thought he was going to offer to sell me a passport but instead he leaned forward and said: “Don’t try it.”

“What?” I said uncertainly, glancing up at the policewoman standing about five feet behind him.

“Listen, mate. Back and forth a hundred times when I had the thing,
and they never checked once. But the one time I didn’t have it? Crossing into France? They locked me up, didn’t they, France immigration jail, twelve hours with they rubbish food and rubbish attitude, horrible. Horrible dirty police cell. Trust me—you want your documents in order. And no funny shit in your case either.”

“Hey, right,” I said. Sweating in my coat, which I didn’t dare unbutton. Scarf I didn’t dare untie.

Hot. Headache. Walking away from him, I felt the furious gaze of a security camera burning into me; and I tried not to look self-conscious as I threaded through the crowds, floating and woozy with fever, grinding the phone number of the American consulate in my pocket.

It took me a while to find a pay phone—all the way at the other end of the station, in an area packed with sketchy teenagers sitting in quasi-tribal council on the floor—and it took even longer for me to figure out how to make the actual call.

Buoyant stream of Dutch. Then I was greeted by a pleasant American voice: welcome to the United States consulate of the Netherlands, would I like to continue in English? More menus, more options. Press 1 for this, press 2 for that, please hold for operator. Patiently I followed the instructions and stood gazing out at the crowd until I realized maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to let people see my face and turned back to the wall.