The Land Across (16 page)

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ve got that, anyway. But the archbishop lives in a palace?”

Naala lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “In a big house. Always this is called a palace. For bishops also. It must be big because offices are needed, not just rooms for sleeping and eating. What is your new idea? Still you do not say?”

“Because it isn’t much of an idea, really. Anybody would think of it.”

“I, not.” She touched her chest. “Tell me.”

“Well, Russ has a wife. Her name is Rosalee, and she got arrested the same time he did.”

“Ah! He will try to arrange the escape for her.”

“If she’s still in prison.” I nodded. “She may have been released by this time. If she has, she’s probably back in the States. That’s the first thing he’ll try to find out—whether she’s safe back home. If she is, he might try to get her to help him. It’ll depend on what he needs.”

I stopped for a minute to think. Russ and I had been pretty good friends. “He’s not really a spy, you know. He isn’t dangerous to your government at all.”

“About him I do not care,” Naala told me. “It is those who have freed him who concern me. You say he is not a spy, and it may be you are right. If you are, why it is they free him?”

I thought I knew, but I just shook my head.

“In time, we learn this. I think your new idea most good. This surprises you?”

“Yes. I’m surprised all right.”

“It is good first because we can begin before we speak with His Excellency. The Harktay—the prison for women—is here in this city. We will go there and speak with them. Perhaps also to this wife.”

11

NO TORTURE

As soon as we got there I saw I had been right when I told Russ they were easier on women. I had been expecting a big gray building, but it was not like that at all. There was a wire fence, maybe ten feet high, with barbed wire on top. Inside it were regular streets and buildings. Some were apartment buildings like the one Naala lived in, some had been stores once, and some had been houses. There were trees and grass around each building just like always, and you could see the women in there were proud of them and were taking care of them as good as they could. It looked to me like the trees were all fruit trees.

Here I have gotten ahead of myself again. I ought to have said first that the guards who let us in were women. They looked tough and they had uniforms and guns, but they were women. When they saw Naala’s badge they got very polite, and one of them walked us inside and pretty close to the middle of the compound where the warden’s office was. It had been an office supply store before, Naala said. We went in there, and a woman with no gun showed us into the warden’s office.

She was probably fifty-five or sixty, a big raw-boned woman with gray hair. Seeing her, I figured she had most likely been around while the communists still had power, and I wondered what she had been doing back then. People here do not shake hands much, but she stood up and shook Naala’s, and mine, too.

“Welcome!” She motioned toward a couple of swivel chairs. “You will get whatever it is you ask, if it is possible. We at the People’s Detention for Women are always glad to cooperate.”

Naala thanked her, and she clapped her hands and told the women who had showed us in to bring tea.

Naala said, “Eighteen months ago two Amerikan spies, husband and wife, were arrested at the border. The husband was taken to the Rural Reeducation Center. The wife was taken here.”

“I see. He has been released?”

Naala shook her head. “He has escaped. That he will try to communicate with her we think certain. He may try to free her as well.”

I said, “She could have been released.”

“So you think. It would be a major error.”

The warden asked the wife’s name, Naala gave it, and the warden turned to her computer. “She sleeps in Building One Twenty-four.”

“She is outside it now? Perhaps at work?”

“She should be, yes. Now it is the work-time. She will be…” More typing and tapping the screen. “Sewing. Building Seventeen. We make uniforms for the army.”

Naala spoke to me. “We can have her brought to us, or we can go to her. You think which?”

“Go to her,” I said.

“Why is this?”

“If we go to her, we can see what she’s doing, what her surroundings are like, who she’s working with, and so on. We can bring her here later if we want to, or take her someplace else.”

The warden wanted to know if I was Russian, and Naala shook her head. “You need not take us to the place where she works. I know you must be busy. Tell us where it is, and we will find it.”

“I could never be so discourteous,” the warden said. “I will assign a guide.”

“That will not be necessary. Where is it we must go?”

Stuff like this went on for a while, and I would not give it all here if I could. Pretty soon I could see that Naala wanted us to be free to snoop around, and the warden wanted to keep us from doing it.

Finally we got the guide, a short fat woman with a whistle around her neck. She lectured us about the prison the whole way. Most of the women were in for shoplifting, and they got reeducation to teach them that stealing from stores was wrong. I could tell it was strictly the company line and did not pay a lot of attention to it.

The factory had been a barn at one time, and not a very nice barn either, a long, low, whitewashed building that could have used a lot more windows. The floor was dirty and splintery, but the walls were covered with pictures—some torn out of newspapers and magazines, some photos, stuck up there with pins.

Right then is when I got a surprise. All the women prisoners had big numbers just like the ones we had worn in prison sewn on their uniforms, and I could see our guide was looking at those. She did not know what Rosalee Rathaus looked like. We passed on a bunch of women who were working at sewing machines and making quite a racket, and finally our guide asked one of the guards, women with uniforms but no guns who were lounging around here and there. The guard just pointed.

She was a blonde, pretty thin and not much older than I was. Of course she had no makeup and she looked tired, but right off I noticed the bones in her face and her blue eyes. Fix her hair and give her a good night’s sleep and she would be a whole lot better than decent. Give her the right makeup, too, and the right clothes, and she might knock your eyes out. She was working a machine I had never seen before. You stacked cloth on it, then laid a pattern on top of the cloth and cut around it. It was sort of like a band saw but not exactly.

Naala said something to our guide, and she went over and pulled Rosalee away from her machine. After that we marched her outside where we could hear ourselves talk.

“You are Amerikan?” Naala asked. “The wife of Russell Rathaus?”

The blonde nodded. She looked a little angry and a little dazed, like she had just been smacked hard.

“Where is he?”

The blonde shrugged.

“He has communicated with you?”

She did not understand that, and you could see it. I said, “Maybe I’d better translate.”

Naala turned to our guide. “You! Get out of here!”

The guide objected.

“You were to show us where this woman was. You have done so. Now go!”

The guide argued, pretty loudly.

Naala’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. “Do you know who we are? We are the JAKA, you fool. Go, or you will wish you had never seen me.”

It is funny, but when somebody with a bad complexion goes pale, you don’t notice it. What you notice is that all the zits and things seemed to have jumped out at you.

I said, “We ought to go where she lives.” I had a couple of reasons for saying that, but the main one was I wanted to sit down.

Naala agreed, so I told Rosalee we wanted to see her cell block or whatever it was they called them here. It was the first time she had heard me speak English, and her eyes got big. While we were walking along, she told me it was called a group house. For three or four steps she held my hand.

The group house was pretty big and there were beds everywhere, real beds and what were probably army cots, and others that were just places various women had rigged up to sleep on. All the beds were sort of straightened around, and all of them had quilts sewn together out of scraps of uniform cloth. Those were about the color of mustard. Rosalee showed us hers, meaning a pad of scrap cloth on the floor.

There was a real bed not far from it. I sat down on that and said, “How much younger are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. He’s sixty-three.” She had known what I meant right away.

“Has he been in touch with you?”

There was a little tiny pause before she shook her head. “Can that woman understand what we’re saying?”

I did not think Naala really knew much English, but that did not matter. I knew what I had to say to get Rosalee to talk. “Hell no!” I made it definite.

“Then listen, please. Please, please listen because I mean every word. Get me out of here, and I’ll do anything you want me to do. Everything! Just get me out. Can you get me back to America?”

I said, “Maybe. It won’t be easy.”

“Russ’s rich, and there’s a joint account. I’m not sure how much is in there, but at least fifty thousand. I’ll give you the entire amount, every last dollar.”

I nodded and turned to Naala, keeping my voice down and talking fast. “I don’t know how much she’s going to understand, but she’ll have picked up a lot while she was in here. She probably knows more than she’s willing to let on.”

Naala nodded.

“I asked if Rathaus had been in touch. She said no, but she was lying. She wants out of here really bad. If we get her out but show her we can pop her back in anytime we’re pissed off at her we’ll get cooperation.”

Naala nodded again. “Outside we can beat her, also.”

I did not like that, but I think I covered it pretty good. I said, “Right. And if Rathaus finds out we’ve got her, he may want to bargain. Or try to get her away from us.”

“Either is good. In the last he will not succeed. Do you wish to take her now?”

“This minute, no. But today?” I shrugged. “Probably yes, if we can do it.”

I turned back to Rosalee. “How close were you to Rathaus’s business?”

“I was his secretary.”

“I see.” Of course I was trying to figure out whether she had heard what I said to Naala, and how much she had understood. “Up until you two were married?”

“And afterward, too. He didn’t want me sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, and I didn’t want him getting another secretary. Then they sold the business—he and Mr. Debussy did. That was when we came here.”

“Got it. Now listen up. I may be able to get you out, but I’m going to have to have some cooperation. Do you seriously want out—want it really bad—or are you just stringing me?”

“Oh, my God!” Rosalee looked like she was about to cry. “Please, please listen! I meant every word I said.”

“Okay. You’ve got an aunt who married some guy from this country.”

“Did Russ tell you that? Yes, I do.”

“Maybe he talked to your uncle about doing some business over here?”

“They argued about it. Russ wanted to make the dolls in our factory, but Uncle Eneas kept saying he could make them just as good and much cheaper here. I think Russ was thinking about setting up a little factory here, and that was why he agreed to come.”

“I thought he’d sold his company.”

“You didn’t know him.”

It took me a minute to digest that, because I had known Russ really well. Pretty soon I decided she was right. I said, “He thought dolls might go over here?”

She nodded. “There were two or three places here that were buying them.”

That was what I had been waiting to hear. “You say you want out. This is your chance to prove it. I can get you out, and if you can name all three I’ll do it.”

“Oh, Lord!” Rosalee backed over to another bed and sat down. “I can’t. I really can’t. The company names were, you know, so ordinary. If—if I had a keyboard, maybe. Two were stores and the other one was just a man’s name, and it was terribly foreign. I remember that. I—do you have to have this?”

I shook my head. “We have other ways of finding out. Only if you can tell us now it will impress my partner, and that’ll be good for you.”

She tried and tried hard. I could see that. But in the end she came up empty.

Naala said, “Ask where Rathaus is now. This she may know.”

So I did.

She thought about that one, too. Finally she said, “He’s outdoors someplace. That’s all I can tell you. Not in a building.”

That one threw me. I asked why she felt like that.

“He was in prison, wasn’t he? I think you said that.”

“I don’t think I did. I just asked if he’d been in touch.”

“Oh. Well, they put me in prison, so I always thought they must have put Russ in prison somewhere, too. If he weren’t in prison he would have been trying to get me out. That’s what I thought.”

I said, “Okay, let’s say that he was in prison from the time you were arrested until last week. What then? Take it from there.”

“He would want to get outdoors, that’s all. He liked to get out. He hardly ever stayed in the office all day, unless the weather was just awful. The weather’s been nice lately.”

“You’re holding something back,” I told her. “What is it?”

“I—” She started to cry, so I put my arms around her. I figured that if Naala and I were going to do good cop/bad cop, I was going to be the good cop. So there was no harm in trying to calm her down.

Naala said, “We will take her. Then you will have more time. That will help, I think.”

“Take her now?”

Naala shook her head. “No. We must speak with the archbishop. We leave her here and come back when we are finish. You may tell her this. She will fear we do not come and that will be good for her.”

So we gave Rosalee Naala’s handkerchief, which was a good big one, and when she had stopped crying I told her, “I’m going to get you out, I promise. Like we talked about, okay?”

She nodded.

“Only not right now. I can’t. Soon. Are you going to cooperate when I do?”

She was not up to talking yet, but she nodded hard.