The Messenger (4 page)

One of the attendants has her back turned and Daria touches
her on the shoulder, and returns the cup for the recycling. Then she brushes close by the other, rounds the corner and begins the long trek toward first class, careful to touch each seat back as she goes.

At the end of her lap around the cabin, Daria arrives back at her seat to see that her fashionable neighbor is awake and reading, a pair of elegant gold-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. “It’s a long flight,” she says.

“Yes, very.”

“It’s good to move around.”

“Yes, it is. I get uncomfortable,” Daria says, stretching theatrically.

“Your muscles cramp.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“My husband sometimes works with the air force and they have to fly terribly long missions. They have rules that they have to move around so the blood in their legs won’t pool, but it’s impossible in those little planes.”

“I would think so.” Daria looks at the woman for a moment. “Is that a good book?”

The woman makes a face. “It’s okay. They’re always the same,” she says with a shrug. Perhaps embarrassed to be caught reading something so insubstantial.

Daria puts one hand over her mouth, as if to stifle a yawn, stretches her back from side to side. “Do you have family waiting for you?” the woman asks. The question is hesitant. Almost as if she were afraid to ask something so intimate.

“No. I’m on business.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Writing an article. A travel article.”

“Oh, really. A writer!”

“It’s my first assignment.”

“Well, you must do a good job. That’s exciting. It’s good to travel, especially when you’re young.”

“I know. I’m lucky.”

“And plus they pay you for it!” The woman laughs. It is a beautiful laugh. Infectious.

Across the aisle, someone in a blanket rolls over; the woman goes back to her book, and Daria goes back to her movie. The action hero and the ingénue have been separated. The villains are all ugly, sexually predatory, dark skinned and have scraggly beards. Just more of the same Hollywood propaganda.

Berlin. Only last night—a lifetime ago, Daria thinks.

The message from Ali was that she should come there for a job interview while on leave from her publisher.
Klic!
is a weekly magazine based in Rome, and she is a “sponsored intern.” Not quite a job, it is a way for corporations to kick-start a reporter who might later do them favors. There are girls and boys who do this all the time, she has learned. You just have to be halfway attractive, able to use a digital camera, and prepared to cough up two hundred words on the latest celebrity scandal. She was hired at the magazine for her final summer at the school. And that meant it was goodbye to Leonardo, whom she had only just met.

But it was a job, the first step on the career ladder. She was moving up, and, since she had been ordered to, still enjoying the ride.

It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t really work. Mostly it was fun. She had met Roberto Benigni, and Mariacarla Boscono, which was great because she said they could have been twin sisters, footballer Francesco Totti, who was posing for a fashion shoot and was a complete dream, and Camilla Ferranti, who was famous because Berlusconi called the head of RAI to get her a part in a TV series. The worst part of the job amounted to standing around outside some fabulous club, because reporters were hardly ever allowed in. The internship was set to run out after Christmas, and she was already wondering what she was going to do, when the message came that her cousin had bought her a ticket to Berlin.

It was nothing special, nothing cinematic. Just a pink message slip.
Please call the personnel manager. Everything has been arranged
. All she had to do was get to the airport on time. She arrived yesterday afternoon. At the Regent there was a note waiting in her room. No signature. The company was called Seyylol AG and was
interviewing applicants to join their public relations department. They had a suite at the Adlon and she was to be there at 9:00 p.m.

She knew immediately what it was really about.

For the rest of the day, she tried to be like the Berliners. It was cool and windy, the leaves of the lindens starting to turn. The end of a hot summer. She walked around the inner city, avoiding the fabled shopping opportunities on the Ku-damm, and instead heading up to Friedrichstrasse and losing herself in the maze of streets around Hackescher Markt.

Germany was like everywhere else, she decided. Maybe more ironic, but they had earned that the hard way. Riding on the S-Bahn, she saw the colors of skins and fabrics running the full range. There were women in saris and women in headscarves. They all avoided one another’s eyes. There were artists who’d just gotten out of bed. Retired couples returning from their visit to the doctor. There were the gray-faced ones who were still trying to adjust to the fall of the Wall, and then there were the invisible ones, the students and slackers and the lost, who sat in the corners, grabbed a smoke on the platform and were happy just to get through the moment. Always there were tourists—obese, obsessed with their waterproofed sun hats and digital cameras, maps bristling from every pocket.

The German language was insane; she could catch only a few words. Uppermost in the news on this particular day was a financial scandal—photos of middle-aged politicians and energy magnates captured in casual conversation while walking across a busy street. Whatever they’d done didn’t translate, but it seemed more incriminating seen through a telephoto lens.

She went into an Internet café and bought an excellent espresso and spent two euros to surf for a half hour, hoping to find a clue for her sudden mobilization. But beyond the latest environmental crisis and the continuing deterioration of the capitalist economies … there was nothing.

She thought the choice of the Adlon odd. It was a famous hotel, certainly not the most invisible place. She had imagined a creaking walk-up in an immigrant ghetto. Maybe it was a real job interview? They could have decided she needed to acquire more cover.

She ate street food and did everything with plenty of time to spare; showed up on time, dressed just as she would for a day at
Klic!
Hip but quality. A short skirt with black tights. Boots that looked strong and scuffed. A peacoat-inspired jacket, and an expensive blood-red top for the only touch of color.

At the desk, they directed her to the suites Seyylol AG had booked for the interviews. When she knocked, the door was opened by a young man she had never met before. Very thin and yellow skinned. There was a sliver of chrome clamped to his ear and maybe he was listening to someone, but whatever, he couldn’t meet her eye. Or maybe it was the tights.

“If you have a mobile?” He held out his hand, and she dropped her backpack down on a chair instead of giving it to him, draped the jacket over it.

The young man walked away a few steps. “If you require tea,” he said, pointing to a table across the room. Then he went out of the room and down a short hallway. Across from her was a window, from which she could see the blocks of the Holocaust Memorial, a few lonely Jews wandering in and out of the labyrinth, indulging their grief over man’s inhumanity to man.

A moment later and the young man was back. “This way,” he said.

The man in the bedroom was a stranger. Over fifty, she would have guessed. A high crown of graying hair, white on the sides, barbered carefully around the ears. This was it, she realized.

“Hello, Daria,” the man said. “I am honored to meet you.”

“Hello.” She waited to see if he would take her hand. He didn’t.

“Please sit. We do not have a lot of time. Your cousin tells me you are still committed?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“We have changed our tactics.” As he speaks to her he looks beyond her to the television, where a documentary about lions and water buffalo is playing.

“You are intelligent and I’m certain you can see what’s happening. If the timing was better, if it were not so important, we could have allowed you to make a farewell message. But, unfortunately …”
For a moment she sees her mother, her face laced with wrinkles, eyes always on the floor, never talking, lost inside herself after her sons had been murdered. Her husband gone somewhere, and her never knowing …

“It doesn’t matter. They know I love them.”

“I’m sure.” He looks at her for a long moment. “Daria, no one is forcing you, but our friend has told me that you are very strong and true to your word. You volunteered, yes? Of your own free will?”

“Yes.”

“You are a beautiful young woman. Any man would be proud to make you his wife. You have your whole life before you.”

“I know what I am doing.”

“Fine. Good.” He nods. For a moment his gray eyes stare at her. “Then … this is how we do it now. We try to make our effectiveness last. This is why we are using germs. Not bombs.”

“Germs?”

He takes a breath, almost a sigh. Glances toward the television. Is it to see the time? “You understand, Daria, that it is better if you don’t know some things?”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” she says, a little embarrassed. “How it happens, it doesn’t matter to me,” she says, but actually she has never imagined anything other than an explosive ending to her life. Never.

“It is a very special pathogen we have made. It is an old disease, Daria. A disease that everyone thinks has gone away. They used to immunize everyone for this disease … myself as a child, but now, not for many years. It is smallpox, have you heard of it?”

“Yes …” Now the taxi across Rome makes sense. She remembers the word “smallpox” in the same way she remembers “chlorophyll.” It’s just a science term. It has no relevance to her life.

“Smallpox comes in different varieties. The old kind could kill one in three, eh?” He holds up fingers for her to count. “The only samples of smallpox in existence are hidden away in very secret government laboratories. Obtaining a sample was extremely expensive.
And then we had to modify it, we had to make it into a weapon, something we could use, you see?”

He sits back against the headboard, adjusts the pillows piled behind the small of his back. “It was easily done, once we had the equipment.” He shrugs.

“Now the virus is …” He searches the television again. “… like an athlete on steroids, a technological feat we can be proud of. That
you
can be proud of,” he tells her.

She nods her head. “Fine, then.”

He reaches out as if to pat her on the shoulder, but stops himself at the last second. “To take this step … it has always been a problem. After all, to spread a plague, something that could even come back and hurt your own people, this always has been a last resort, otherwise someone would have already used it, yes?”

“I would think so, yes.”

“So, the time has come. This is the last resort.” The man stops. Waits. Seems to be getting his breath. Is he sick?

“You are to be a carrier, Daria. You are an arrow. You are going straight to the heart.” He uses his fist to rap at his own chest.

Almost without her noticing, the young man crouches beside her, a syringe in his hands. He swabs her shoulder and gives her an injection. Painless.

“Without this you would surely die and then your usefulness would be over. Everything, of course, is untested. We are not a drug company.” The older man smiles at his little joke. “All I can guarantee is that this will slow it down. You may have a few more weeks, or you may live to be a grandmother,” he says. He’s not smiling now. Looking at her sadly, she thinks.

After that it is simple. Go into the adjoining room. There is luggage and new clothing for you. Take off everything you are wearing and put it in the garbage bag. On the table there is a bottle; it contains the virus. It is just like a bottle of cough medicine. Go into the bathroom and wash your hands with it. Close the drain so you don’t lose any. Run your fingers through your hair, it lasts longer that way; when you dry your hands, wipe them on your skin. Leave the
empty bottle in the wastebasket in the bathroom. Later, for when you bathe, there’s a shower cap and a pair of rubber gloves in your luggage. Get dressed in the clothes on the bed. Everything should fit.

“If there’s a problem, tell Youssef,” the older man says. “When you are ready you will be taken to your hotel. Stay alone in your room, if you are hungry order whatever food you require. In the morning, retrieve your papers. The bill has been paid. You don’t need to worry. A cab will take you to the airport. All you have to do is follow your itinerary, don’t wash your hands for a few days, touch everything you can. You’re going as a journalist and a travel writer. But you know all about that, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Instructions will be sent to you by email. As a draft, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You are very brave,” the man says. He is wearing a blue shirt with a white T-shirt beneath it. Newspapers are spread out across the bed and kept in place with two cell phones. Across the room an opened briefcase is on the writing table.

In the next room she does exactly what she’s been told—strips down and even throws in her underwear like a good girl. The clothes they’ve picked out are conservative—a pantsuit, a white fitted office-girl shirt. Shoes with good soles for walking.

In the spotless bathroom she plugs the sink and then pours a dollop from the bottle into her hand. It is a thin oil of some kind. There is no smell. She looks at it pooled in her hand, pokes her finger in and swirls it around.

Smallpox
.

Really the name of the disease doesn’t matter. It could be anything, anything they could buy and turn into a weapon. Typhoid. Plague. Ebola.

In the mirror—the face of death. She rubs until her hands are dry, then pours another puddle into her hands and runs it through her hair, massaging her scalp. And then again. Like a vain woman, she takes too much time, apparently, because Youssef comes knocking at the door.

“Un momento …”
she calls, and finishes the last of the liquid in a hurry, using the last on her face, neck, up the forearms.

When she opens the door, Youssef is right there. She makes him wait while she puts on lipstick. He’s almost trembling, looking at her in the mirror. She finishes and pouts. Digs in the little bag, looking for perfume, and gives herself a little spritz.