The Other Joseph (18 page)

Joni shook her head. “That sounds so scary.”

“More than scary, at least to me. I can't do it justice. The storm got even worse, and we huddled there in the culvert for what seemed forever. Like we were about to be flushed down a pipe.”

“But you guys were also safe. Maybe that's what you remember most?”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe. Not much of a best memory, but I think that might have been the last time we were together, just the two of us.”

Joni was patient and listening, her green eyes twinkling as she waited for me to finish.

“That's it,” I told her. “That's the whole story.”

IN THE APARTMENT
that night I showered and shaved for the second day in a row, then went with the suavest of what I had in my duffel bag: khakis, a wrinkle-free button-down, and a navy blazer I'd bought at a Men's Wearhouse in Colorado. I hadn't dressed for a date since my year at LSU, but preparing for Marina reminded me more of readying myself, panicky and alone, on the morning of my plea-agreement hearing. Me, home on the farm, fumbling to put on my dead father's tie and wanting to call time-out, wondering whether going with the public defender had been idiotic, wondering whether I was about to make a huge mistake.

Before Joni and I parted at Fort Miley she'd asked if we could meet somewhere after school tomorrow, said she would text me during lunch with the details. She appeared bent on taking command and that was fine by me—because, truth be told, Fort Miley had kicked my ass. I was Tommy, dripping blood in a gas station so he could buy those two RCs.

Sam was in the yard still, and I was letting him in when the apartment bell rang. I bumped my way through the dim garage and saw Viktor standing behind the gate. He had on his black-suit, white-shirt work getup, and he looked down at my leather topsiders and chuckled. “A sailboat man,” he said. I opened the gate, and he squeezed my arm. “It is almost time to get Marina, no?”

“I'm leaving in one minute.” I returned to the apartment, and he followed. “You were gonna make reservations for me somewhere?”

“Yes. But I am driving you.”

I shook my head. “You don't have to do that.” My muscles were on fire from hauling that DieHard around, but the problem with
the LeBaron did seem to have just been the battery—not the alternator or a short or whatnot. She was back among the living again, waiting to carry me away on that fifth working day. “I got a battery,” I said. “My car's working now.”

Viktor knelt, and Sam fell into him in a curl, mouth smiling, tail wagging. “I have walked by your car. Good battery. Bad battery.” His face brightened as he began to laugh. “This makes no difference! Russian women do not come to America to ride in ugly cars.”

THE HOUSE WHERE
Marina was staying backed up to the southwestern edge of the Presidio. There was a sidewalk and strip of grass, then a three-story post-and-beam Tudor. Viktor parked his hearse-black Mercedes on the street, and I was getting to my feet when he honked the horn.

“You should have brought a gift,” he said. “I forgot to tell you this.”

But then the front door swung open, and there she was—the future Mrs. Roy Joseph, perhaps. It was a cool evening, and she was wearing high silver heels. A buttoned black coat stopped right above her bare knees, fitting her body like a wrap dress.

“Ah,” said Viktor. “This Moscow lady.”

The yard was split by a short concrete walkway that led to a clamshell of porch, and Marina stepped out, waved me toward her. Viktor shrugged, so I closed the door and headed up. She had gone back into the house and was waiting just inside the parlor, the foyer—whatever rich people call the first little room in a house full of large rooms. “Hello,” I said, glancing around for any Colemans.

“That is Viktor you are with?” Marina's arms were folded, and her eye makeup had her looking even more like Cleopatra than on Monday. She didn't seem happy. Her cat eyes went to the Mercedes. “Why is he here? You have car, no?”

I nodded. “I don't know what's going on. He said it had to be this way.”

Viktor gave the horn another pop, but she ignored him. The small purse resting on her hip was fashioned from woven sections of tiny, chromed chain, and the strap was sashed across her. She was almost tall in her stilettos, but not quite, and she had a different perfume on now. Something more subtle and expensive smelling. Something I was willing to bet she had pinched from Mrs. Coleman.

“Nyet,”
she said.

“No?”

We went out to the porch, and she locked the door behind us. I was making for the Mercedes when she began to herd me toward the side of the house. “Hurry,” she said. “Be quicker.”

I couldn't tell what she was playing at, but I did as she ordered. The house was even bigger than I'd thought, about three times as deep as it was wide, and security lights flicked on one after the other as we sloshed down a pea gravel path. Those lights had me imagining phone calls to the police. Tasers and pepper spray.

Marina must have seen I was leery. “No one is home,” she said. “They have gone to a baby party.”

“What's a baby party?”

“Some party where people bring babies.”

We turned the corner of the house, and a final floodlight tripped, illuminating a sweep of flagstone patio. There was a red scooter parked there. A Vespa. Marina freed a key out from under a flowerpot and pointed at the scooter.

“We will take a ride,” she said. “See the city. They will never know.”

I watched as she wriggled her long coat up around her waist and straddled the leather seat. She was Eliza Sprague, mounting her quarter horse, and beneath that coat Marina was wearing a sparkling silver skirt that matched her shoes, her chain purse. Her
earrings were hammered metal squares about the size of postage stamps. She took them off and put them in the purse.

“Viktor won't like this,” I said. “And do you even have a motorcycle license?”

There were two helmets hanging from the handlebars, a pink one and a blue one. She pulled the pink helmet on and handed me the other. “You are afraid, Mr. Buffalo?”

In the distance, beyond the glow of the security lights, the trees of the Presidio were just shadows. “Kind of,” I said.

“Then be afraid. Be afraid and I will go be by myself.” Marina pushed the key into the ignition and started the Vespa. “Have your night with Viktor.” She flipped the kickstand with her stiletto and began to hump the scooter backward. The seat was wedged into her silver skirt, and I could see the dimpling on her thighs.

“Wait.”

She got the Vespa lined up like she wanted and looked over at me. Fuck it. I slid the blue helmet on, and I was barely settled on the seat when we went wobbling through the pea gravel. I put my hands on her hips, and we crossed the yard and then the sidewalk. Viktor's Mercedes was facing east, but we were hightailing west. Marina already had us two blocks away before I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket.

SOON WE WERE IN THE PRESIDIO
—not far from Baker Beach, really—and at a stop sign Marina told me we had to be done by ten o'clock, that she needed to have the Vespa back in place before the Colemans returned home from their baby party. In some ways I was enjoying the sense of freedom that had come with our unexpected flight, but I'd also gone and riled up Viktor in exchange for three hours of tooling around on the back of a toy, staring at the heart tattoo on Marina's neck, breathing her stolen perfume. There are all types of families, and as a teenager my
father night-swam across the Cane River fifty times in one summer before Mom admitted she loved him. But this mad dash seemed nothing like swimming the Cane River. It felt a lot like what it was: a man holding on to a stranger.

The Vespa was brand-new. A peaceful, purring four-stroke. But with our helmets on I couldn't make myself heard as we drove. We exited the blackness of the Presidio and passed a sort of Greek temple-ruin. I've seen more old movies than a nursing-home couch, and I was pretty sure I recognized that domed and columned structure from a film in the video collection on the Loranger Avis.
Vertigo,
maybe. I thought of Joni the temple child, alone in her room on Marvel Court, door locked, writing a fresh batch of dead-man questions into her notebook as she prepared to get me on the witness stand again.

Marina turned right at the next street, cruised east for three blocks, then went north again toward the bay. In a scrubbed, SUV neighborhood of pale stucco walls, crimson-tiled roofs, and other Mediterranean pretensions we were forced to take a street called Prado, and another called Cervantes, before we came to a red light at Marina Boulevard. Marina pointed at the street sign. “I have road,” she said.

“Yeah you do.” I checked my phone and saw I had four missed calls. “I should call Viktor.”

The light was green now, but I felt Marina slump. “Fine, then,” she said.

We clipped along the bay, the cold wind watering my eyes, but finally she stopped in the parking lot of a Safeway across from some Marina Boulevard boat docks. Even from the outside I could tell this was a much cheerier Safeway than the one in the Outer Richmond. Not a place where felons bought coffee for old men in warship caps.

I hopped off the Vespa and removed my helmet, shook out my hair. Marina left hers on but spun sidesaddle in the seat as I
drifted. One ring and Viktor answered. “Explain what it is you are doing,” he said.

“She kidnapped me.”

He didn't laugh. “We will speak tomorrow.”

“So you're okay with this?”

“Tomorrow,” he said again.

I put the phone away and walked to Marina. She was perched on the Vespa and watching me. “What did he tell you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “He says have fun.”

“Have fun? Like we are his pets?”

She unzipped her chain purse and took out her cigarettes, some foreign brand that came in a thin, flat box. I lit her import, then one of my Winstons, and she asked how things were going with him, whether I'd been on any other dates since coming to San Francisco.

“No,” I told her. “Uh-uh. You're the only woman I've met.” I attempted to explain, but made myself sound weirder. “And I'm leaving in two days. This is a one-shot deal for me. If it's meant to be, it's meant to be. Right?”

She didn't answer.

“We could go eat,” I suggested. “He made us reservations. I can call him back, try to find out where.”

“I am not so hungry yet. Let us see more first.”

I was game. We'd be moving again, and I think that was all I really wanted now as well. Music, then—the tinkling and clanging ching-chings of halyards against sailboat masts from the docks across the street. A reminder that not every port of call has to be a bruised and blue-collar Grand Isle.

“Do you miss Russia?” I asked.

The helmet had a lock of Marina's black hair pasted across her mouth, and she hooked it to the side with her thumb. “Yes,” she said. “I left someone there that I love.”

“What?” I assumed this was a conjugation error, that she'd meant to say
loved
and not
love,
but then she looked at me like she was about to apologize and tell me this was all wrong. Like she was about to ask if I'd mind if she just took me to my apartment. “Who?”

“A man.”

In that pink helmet Marina came across as much younger, closer to Joni's age than mine. She was a TV movie runaway, a heartbroken lost innocent, and I'd been cast as the redneck detective hired to find her.
Miles from Moscow,
tonight on Lifetime. “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Please.”

FISHERMAN'S WHARF. NORTH
Beach. Downtown. The high buildings of the city. Union Square was a noisy day of bright lights, a flat of concrete plaza that traffic edged around and around in a snarl. In the square center: a man on one knee proposing to a woman in a Vespa-red dress. Above: a stone goddess-with-trident on a hundred-foot pedestal. I was sure Marina saw them too—the man, the woman, the taunting goddess—but she didn't let on.
I left someone there that I love.
That was still tumbling around in my brain as a nutcase in fatigues went tottering sideways across our lane. “You should be in bed licking that bitch!” he screamed. “You heard?”

AMONG RENOVATED WAREHOUSES
of lofts and art and espresso, nightclubs and tech companies, we passed a carousel enclosed in glass. The lights were off, the flying horses a halted stampede for the night. I wondered if this could be the same carousel that had once been out by the ocean—the one Lawrence Sorensen had
fought his dizzy brawl with the locals on. I wanted to call him on his emasculating cell phone and tell him. Take a break from the futile search for your doomed grandson and come see, Mr. Lawrence. Maybe not everything is lost. Maybe not everything is gone.

WE WERE DEEP
in the bodegas, street murals, and produce stands of the Mission District before Marina stopped again. “I am sometimes here,” she said. “My favorite food in U.S. is burritos.”

I'd only been through the Mission District during the day, on one of the buses that had returned me from the bayfront shipyards, and what I remembered as a mostly Hispanic neighborhood appeared to have been taken over by elfish, thirty-going-on-sixteen kids in plaid shirts and girl jeans. Marina had parked outside a place that looked well lit and clean—so now there we were in a room with orange walls, sitting opposite each other at a wooden table, helmets at our feet, sipping at tall cups of watermelon juice and eating American burritos.

Marina still hadn't taken her coat off, and even in my cheap blazer I was still chilled from our ride myself. This was my first clear view of her since the Safeway, and all of the spirit that had been in her while leaving the Colemans seemed killed. I let her eat in peace, but once we were done I decided to risk irking her. “Tell me about him,” I said. “Your guy.”