Potboiler (16 page)

65.

His reeducation lasted eleven days and consisted of intensive cultural, linguistic, and tactical training. The goal was not merely to cram him with information but to give him the tools to process that information like a Zlabian would. To this end, a large staff was brought in. He was given weapons lessons (from Gretchen), acting and elocution lessons (from Canola), makeup lessons (from Benjamin), moustache lessons (from Blueblood), and so forth. Dozens more agents showed up for an hour or two to instruct him in some minor art before departing on the seaplanes that came and went round the clock. The safe house was a hive of activity, all of it centered on him and none of it with any regard for his comfort. He had never felt so important and yet so demeaned. He understood the need for his teachers to be hard on him. As a teacher himself he knew how much of what passed for education was wishy-washy navel-gazing designed to avoid, at all costs, damaging students’ self-esteem. That didn’t mean he enjoyed slogging through G. Stanley Hurwitz’s magisterial six-volume
A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict
. Nor did it make any more palatable the endless variations on root vegetables and goats’-milk dairy, meals meant to accustom him to Zlabian cuisine. He wasn’t any less crapulous after swallowing vast quantities of
thruynichka,
the stupefying concoction made from root vegetable greens fermented in goat’s whey that he would be expected to consume as part of every Zlabian social interaction.
He wasn’t any less sore after an hour of Sockdolager punting him around the karate studio.

Aside from the sheer stress of the routine, Pfefferkorn had to grapple with several nagging doubts. He did not doubt that his handlers were American. For one thing, they had demonstrated their power to manipulate the criminal justice system. And there were other, less overt signs. One night, for example, the safe house ran out of toilet tissue, and Gretchen commandeered a helicopter to go to Walmart. To Pfefferkorn, this incident, with its gloss of ultrasophistication overlying gross shortsightedness, embodied the Americanness of the operation. He knew he was on the same side as his native land. What he doubted, rather, was whether that was a virtuous place to be. He doubted the completeness of the information he was being given. Most of all, he doubted himself.

By far his least favorite part of the day was language class. His instructor was Vibviana, a pretty but severe West Zlabian defector. She explained that the agency had developed its methods based on developmental psychology research that pinpointed the years from birth to three as the critical period for language acquisition.

“To facilitate better, you must return please to frame of mind of young children’s.”

Twice a day, for two hours, Pfefferkorn became a Zlabian. In his first lesson he assumed the role of a newborn. He submitted to being diapered and burped while Vibviana, his fictive mother, sang him lullabies and told him stories based on the Zlabian national poem,
Vassily Nabochka
. Every successive lesson advanced him through one developmental year, so that by the end of the second day he was four years old and already well acquainted with the horrors of West Zlabian childhood. His fictive family, played by a rotating cast of agents, included a beloved and mentally retarded older brother, a crone of a grandmother, and countless aunts, uncles, cousins, and goats. Everyone lived under one tiny thatched roof, so that when Vibviana suffered at the hands of Pfefferkorn’s fictive father (a violent, alcoholic factory hand), Pfefferkorn was forced to sit in the corner and listen to the sounds of slaps, screaming, and broken crockery, followed by maudlin apologies and vigorous make-up sex.

It was not fun.

That was the idea, Paul said. The Zlabian psyche was steeped in abuse, degradation, and poor hygiene, and the sooner Pfefferkorn got used to it, the better.

Never before had he had so much one-on-one time with his son-in-law. In his daily policy briefings, Paul—or op com, as the other agents called him—shed his bumbling accountant’s façade, revealing himself as savvy, quick, and cynical, the kind of oversmart young patriot capable of smoothly steering his country into a disastrous foreign war. He had a way of talking around the issue that inspired confidence and dread in equal measure.

“You love her,” Pfefferkorn said.

Paul turned from the projection screen, which showed a timeline charting the ramifications of the 1983 West Zlabian currency devaluation. He stared at Pfefferkorn for a moment, then switched off the laser pointer. “I thought I made that clear.”

“I need to hear it again.”

“I love her.”

“How much.”

“Well, it’ll take me some time to prepare a full report.”

“You proposed to her after what? Three months?”

“Five.”

“And before that? How long was it in the works?”

“People get married for lots of different reasons,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“I love her,” Paul said, “with all of my heart.”

“How do I know that?”

“How did you know it before?”

“I didn’t,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Then you’re no worse off,” Paul said. “Better, in fact, because I’ve shown you my hand.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Don’t forget Carlotta,” Paul said.

“I haven’t forgotten her.”

“You’re doing this for her.”

“I know that,” Pfefferkorn said.

There was a silence.

“What really happened to Bill?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“Boating accident,” Paul said.

The grandfather clock chimed.

“Time for your language lesson,” Paul said. “Vibviana says you’re coming along nicely.”

The fourteenth year of Zlabian boyhood had been an annus horribilis in which Pfefferkorn’s beloved and mentally retarded older brother died of tapeworms, his pet goat was clubbed to death by an irate neighbor, he flunked his
Vassily Nabochka
qualifying exam, and he lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute who taunted him mercilessly after he ejaculated prior to entry. On the plus side, he had mastered the subjunctive.

“I feel hollow inside,” Pfefferkorn said.

“That’s the spirit.”

66.

The night before Pfefferkorn’s departure, the core members of the team threw him a graduation party. Vibviana played the accordion and sang folk songs taken from
Vassily Nabochka
. Sockdolager got thunderingly drunk and tried to kiss her. Pfefferkorn delivered him an elbow to the solar plexus that left the larger man sinking to his knees, gasping for breath. Everyone applauded and commended Pfefferkorn on the unified fluidity of his motions. Gretchen applied a sparkly gold sticker to his shirtfront. The sticker was in the shape of a shooting star and said
SUPERSTAR!

The next morning he awoke to an empty house. It was his first moment of repose since his arrival, and it allowed him to reflect on the ordeal ahead. For all their efforts to prepare him, nobody, not even Paul, could predict with confidence what would happen once he crossed into West Zlabian territory. Pfefferkorn realized the hectic training schedule had served a dual purpose: first, to ready him for grueling undercover work in a burgeoning war zone, and second, to prevent him from dwelling on the fact that there was a strong chance he would not make it back alive.

He heard the drone of an approaching seaplane.

He took his wheelie bag and walked to the kitchen. He cupped his hands and drank water straight from the tap, possibly for the last time. He wiped his hands on his pants and headed down to the dock.

The seaplane nosed toward the surface of the lake, skipping twice before splashing down. As it drew near the dock, Pfefferkorn did not move to greet it. He was in no mood for air travel. He was frightened, lonely, and hungover. But these were not problems he could afford to admit. He had a mission, one demanding intestinal fortitude and stoicism. He stared hard at the sky. It was the hard stare of a man hardening himself to hard truths. He sensed changes, hard ones, taking place within his soul. He peeled the sparkly gold star from his chest and cast it, in a hard and masculine manner, into the wind. From this point on, he would have to earn his stripes. He grasped the handle of his wheelie bag and strode purposefully toward his destiny.

FOUR

(Welcome to West Zlabia!)

67.

Like an aging actress too proud to pack up the greasepaint, the Hôtel Metropole had hobbled along bravely in the service of increasingly ill-fitting roles. The kings and potentates who had inaugurated her beds had, over the last one hundred and fifty years, been steadily supplanted by a procession of apparatchiks, spooks, journalists, and johns, and the quoined limestone façade, once smart and coquettish, was now grim with soot. Nobody had informed the staff, who continued to wear their red melton jackets with indefensible dignity, addressing without irony the haggard tarts prowling the lobby as “madame.”

The desk clerk transcribed Pfefferkorn’s false passport number into the registry. “It is honorable to welcome you, Monsieur Kowalczyk.”

Pfefferkorn smiled somberly. At the far end of the desk, bluebottles mobbed a bowl of rotting fruit. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and swabbed his greasy forehead. If he ever wrote another thriller, he planned to make the travel scenes more realistic, with plenty of page space devoted to stale coffee and smelly upholstery. The past twenty-four hours had taken him through five different countries and as many security checkpoints. His disguise was working. At no point had he been subjected to more than a cursory inspection, and he had found it surreal to stand at a newsagent in Schiphol Airport, stroking his false moustache, gnawing a round of Edam, and reading about the manhunt still on for him, while a lady beside him reached for the rack of best sellers and selected a copy of that international blockbuster
Bloed Ogen.

His back throbbed, he was jet-lagged, and he reeked, but he had made it.

The clerk eyed his wheelie bag. “You linger inside us for these two weeks, yes?”

“I travel light,” Pfefferkorn said, sliding a ten-
ruzha
note across the marble.

The clerk bowed. In an instant the money had vanished up his sleeve. He touched a bell and three bellhops materialized. They fought like dogs over Pfefferkorn’s wheelie bag until the desk clerk sent two of them packing in glum retreat.

The elevator car rose unhappily, stopping half a foot shy of the fourth floor. The bellhop jumped out and raced down the corridor, the wheelie bag bouncing wildly behind. Pfefferkorn followed, careful not to trip over the soiled ridges in the carpeting where it had pulled up from the floorboards. Radios and murmurs and oscillating fans could be heard. From the border a mile away came the stutter of automatic weapons.

Once inside the room, the bellhop made a show of adjusting the thermostat. The dial came off in his hand. He pocketed it and gave up trying to seem useful, waiting by the door until Pfefferkorn had located another ten
ruzhy
, at which point he smiled brownly and bowed his way out, leaving Pfefferkorn alone in the paralyzing heat.

68.

Pfefferkorn’s time on book tour had taught him that the comfort of an American hotel room arose out of a fantasy mutually agreed upon by hotelier and guest: you were the first person to stay there. The virginal linens, antiseptic artwork, and neutral color schemes were all designed to maintain this illusion, without which it would have been difficult to sleep.

The Hôtel Metropole made no such attempt to conceal its past. To the contrary: room 44 provided a rich historical document. The ceiling, dark and malodorous, attested to thousands of cigarettes. The bedspread showed a broad archipelago of stains, chronicle of many an unsavory act. The molding was Second Empire, the furniture was Constructivist, the carpet was shag, and the curtains were missing. Soft spots in the wallpaper told of listening devices put in and ripped out. He didn’t know what had caused the crimson blotch along the baseboard—it could have just as easily been the result of a rusty leak—but he suspected it had been left there as a rebuke to the chronically optimistic.

A picture of the late Dragomir Zhulk hung over the bed.

Pfefferkorn unpacked. Because the United States and West Zlabia had no formal diplomatic relations, he was traveling as a Canadian expatriate residing in the Solomon Islands. “Arthur S. Kowalczyk” was vice president of a small-time fertilizer distributor seeking bulk suppliers. His wheelie bag contained an assortment of business attire, pressed white shirts and pilled black socks. He hung up his blazer, arranged his shoes at the foot of the bed, and stowed his passport in the safe, which was a cigar box with a flimsy padlock. He stared edgily into the empty suitcase. Beneath its false bottom was a secret compartment containing two additional moustache kits. There was also a supplementary disguise: a traditional Zlabian goatherd’s costume of baggy pants, a peasant shirt, and brightly painted boots with curly pointed toes and six-inch heels. These items were not illegal, per se, but they were suspicious enough to merit concealment. The illegal items were in a second secret compartment, hidden beneath a second false bottom. There he had a roll of cash the size of a soda can and an untraceable cellular phone. Possessing either of these was grounds for immediate arrest and/or expulsion. But the truly risky stuff, the stuff that would get him killed outright, no questions asked, was hidden in a third secret compartment, located underneath a third false panel. Extra precautions had been taken. What looked like a bar of lavender-scented soap was an X-ray-impervious high-density dubnium polymer surrounding a flash drive with the dummied Workbench. What looked like a bottle of designer eau de cologne was an industrial-strength solvent powerful enough to strip the polymer away. What looked like a toothbrush was a toothbrush switchblade. What looked like a stick of deodorant was a stun gun, and what looked like a tin of breath mints held fast-acting poison pills for use in the event he was captured and facing the prospect of torture.

After ensuring that everything had survived the journey, he replaced the false panels and went to take a cooling shower. The water was foul and hot, the towels abrasive. Another picture of Zhulk hung over the toilet, scowling at Pfefferkorn as he stood before the cracked bathroom mirror, pressing the moisture out of his false moustache. It was medium brown, the color of his hair in his youth. In point of fact, it closely resembled the moustache he had kept in college. There was a reason he had shaved it off: it wasn’t a good look for him. Bill had the right amount of manly jowl to justify facial hair. Not him. He ran his fingers over it. It was dense, bristly, both of him and not. He appreciated the restraint Blueblood had shown in creating it.

While he waited to stop sweating, he surveyed the room’s remaining amenities. There was a lamp, a bedside clock, an oscillating fan, and a painted radiator gone piebald—the last of which would be useless for the next three months, minimum. If he was still here then, God help him. He made sure it was screwed tightly off, then switched on the fan. It was dead. He picked up the rotary phone and dialed zero. The desk clerk answered with a smarmy “Monsieur?” Pfefferkorn asked for a replacement fan and was told one would be brought without delay.

A clanking started up from inside the wall, near the headboard. It was a noise he was unfortunately well acquainted with: hot water pipes coming to life. In his old apartment building it had sometimes sounded as though his neighbors were having shootouts. Why a hotel guest would possibly want hot water on a day like today, he could not venture to guess. Then it occurred to him that all the hotel’s water was likely hot, whether guests wanted it that way or not. The clanking was loud and rhythmic. It made the picture of Zhulk vibrate and jump on the wall. To drown it out, Pfefferkorn aimed the remote control at the television. The screen filled with a stern young woman in an unflattering uniform, her tight hair topped with a majorette hat. She was standing in front of a paper weather map, barking the five-day forecast as she tacked up little paper suns. Her voice was even worse than the clanking, so Pfefferkorn muted her and lived with it.

In the top drawer of the nightstand he found the government-mandated copy of the West Zlabian edition of
Vassily Nabochka.
He sat down on the bed and leafed through it while he waited for his fan. The poem was familiar to him, having played a major role in his fictive life, as it did for every Zlabian. It told of the heroic quest of the disinherited Prince Vassily to find a magical root vegetable with the power to cure his ailing father, the king. The masterwork of itinerant bard Zthanizlabh of Thzazhkst, it reminded Pfefferkorn of the
Odyssey
crossed with
Lear
crossed with
Hamlet
crossed with
Oedipus Rex,
plus tundra and goats. The first two volumes of Hurwitz centered on a discussion of its history and symbolism, information essential for understanding the present state of affairs, as the Zlabian conflict traced its origins to a blood feud over the fictional protagonist’s final resting place. The East Zlabians claimed Prince Vassily was “buried” in the East. The West Zlabians claimed he was “buried” in the West. Because the poem was unfinished, there was little hope of resolving the dispute. Each side staged its own parade on the day it marked as the prince’s day of death. Often shots were fired or Molotov cocktails thrown across the Gyeznyuiy. And that was in times of peace. At its worst the conflict had pitted brother against brother, goat against goat. According to Hurwitz, an estimated one hundred twenty-one thousand lives had been lost over the years—an incredible number, given the size of the population as a whole.

Pfefferkorn glanced at the clock. It had been fifteen minutes and he still hadn’t gotten his fan. He called the front desk again. The clerk apologized and promised it would be there shortly. Pfefferkorn hung up, picked up the poem again, and began flipping to random pages. He admired and pitied a people so fiercely devoted to their cultural heritage that they would spend four centuries slaughtering themselves over fictional burial places. Such a thing could never happen in America, because Americans lacked a sense of investment in their own history. The entire American enterprise was based on jettisoning the past in favor of the Next Big Thing. He wondered if this might make an interesting premise for a novel. The clanking died down, leaving Zhulk’s picture askew. He didn’t bother to fix it. It was nearing eleven a.m., time for his first appointment. He turned off the television, got dressed, and hurried downstairs.