Exotic

My name’s Harlan Mosser. I thought I’d better scribble this out while I have time, not that it’ll probably make a lot of difference. Thing is, if I do it at least there’s a chance someone will see it. There’s a chance it will make a difference.

The oddest thing about being here, I think, is the moaning and whimpering that seem to emanate from almost every cell. Well, after you’ve grown accustomed to the stench. Who knew human beings could emanate such a powerful stink?

But the moaning, the whimpering. Sometimes I have to wonder, have I ever sounded like that in my life? I don’t think so. Definitely not now.

Those sounds don’t come from our cell, ever. Neither of us would give the bastards the satisfaction. I’ve tried to talk myself into moving into one of the other corners, where perhaps I wouldn’t be able to hear them so well. But it’s comfortable here, so I’ll stay. There’s something reassuring about being out of the guards’ direct line of sight from the hallway.

My back is against the wall that’s common to the hallway, and there’s a solid dirt wall a few feet to my left. Follow that one about twenty feet and you’ll come to another corner. A pail sits there. Follow that wall another twenty feet or so and you’ll come to a wall of iron lattice, welded in what look like three-inch diamonds. It connects the back wall to the front wall on the other side of the door, which is about ten feet to my right.

When they brought Gregor back, he was breathing as if he had a few broken ribs. One hand was curled into a permanent claw thanks to a newly snipped tendon. But even then, he didn’t utter a sound while the guards were here.

They carried him halfway into the cell, one carrying his feet, the other his arms. They were laughing lightly and one of them was saying something about his wife and supper, as close as I could tell. I made out the words for “chicken” and “peppers.” Then they swung Gregor back, then forward and the same man grunted like an animal as they flung him toward the corner with the pail we use for a pot.

They turned away before he hit.

Even to those men, there should have seemed a great harshness to the act of tossing aside a human. But not so. Not to them. They had robbed the act of any possibility that it might cause them emotional anguish by couching it in the normalcy of their otherworldly conversation.

They might have been walking along a Sunday sidewalk on their way to Mass as dragging a prisoner along a mildewed stone hallway. They might have flicked a bit of dried dog feces off the curb in passing with the toe of a shoe as they chatted amiably about wives and chickens and peppers.

Their light, fanciful conversation had provided distance between who and what they actually were and who they supposed themselves to be. They were without souls.

For Gregor too the act was both harsh and indifferent. He splatted into the corner heavily but with no effect, muscle and bone jostling about in a skin bag.

Well, there was some effect. He hit on his left side. His shoulder flipped the pot up and to the left, and Gregor himself melded into the rough dirt wall.

And in that instant, with the angle of his face pressed into the angle of the floor and the wall, it was as if he had been heading toward that marriage of angles his entire life.

The pot gouged the wall, and bits of adobe dirt and rock rained down on Gregor’s head and neck. The pot then caromed off and danced elliptically across the floor. Fortunately there hadn’t been much in it.

It sounded like a brass spittoon falling off a bar in Acadia, southern Louisiana. Or at least that’s how I imagined it would sound when I listened to a Cajun joke some years before. I never did figure out why the spittoon was on the bar in the first place.

My vision blurred slightly as I peered at what was left of Gregor’s shirt. I was trying to see whether his back was moving with his breathing, but I couldn’t tell. For several seconds he seemed a part of that corner.

I thought maybe he had died. A light wave of anxiety washed through me. What would my next cellmate be like? Would he be congenial like Gregor? Would he be as animalistic as the guards? Would he perhaps fall somewhere in between?

Then Gregor shifted a bit.

I blinked my eyes to be sure.

He shifted again, rotating his right shoulder toward the wall. He dragged his face along the floor, tearing it away from the angle. And finally there came the faintest whisper of a groan. After a long moment he shifted again and his gaze fell on me. I swear he almost smiled, a co-conspirator successful in his misery.

Finally, his back against the dirt wall, his right elbow still wedged into the corner of the floor and the wall beneath his waist, he twisted his right hand around a bit to flip the finger to the guards.

Bastards can’t get Gregor down. Can’t get me down either.

* * *

Gregor’s the calm one.

The car came around the corner two blocks distant. It crept in heavy traffic toward the offices across the street.

Carrying a single bag, Gregor entered the hotel. He casually took the elevator to the 9th floor. He walked past the incinerator chute and the utility room and entered the room across the hall from the one that adjoined mine.

He glanced out the window.

The car was still almost a block away.

He laid his bag on the bed, opened it, and assembled his VanDyke .338 SuperMag rifle. Then he laid the rifle carefully on the bed. It was as if he was handling an infant. A real pro, Gregor.

He moved a chair from near a round table to a position about two feet inside the window. He steadied his rifle on the back of the chair, sighted-in on the head of a parking meter, and waited.

A short moment later, the car pulled up alongside another one already at the curb and stopped.

A thin, wiry man stepped out. He scanned the sidewalk and the street, seeming to take in every detail, then glanced up, scanning the facades of the buildings across the street.

Finally he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and a tall, heavyset man exited the car. According to the news report, he was going to dinner where he would meet a new business associate.

The thin man reached past the heavyset man and closed the door of the car, which pulled away. Still looking about, the thin man turned his back to the street and placed a protective arm around his heavyset brother’s shoulders.

The heavyset man said something, and the thin man laughed, then clapped his hand on the heavyset man’s neck and squeezed.

In the hotel, Gregor squeezed the trigger.

The bullet pierced the thin man’s right hand and severed his brother’s brain stem, turning the man off as if he’d thrown a switch.

The thin man reflexively jerked his hand away and fell away to the right, frantically searching for the source of the shot. The second bullet entered the right side of his forehead, scattering what had been his brain over the sidewalk, the wall, and the angle of the two.

In my room at the hotel, I had just finished getting dressed. I thought I heard the report of a shot.

I moved toward the door of the adjoining room. I had just reached for the doorknob when a second shot sounded.

My entire body shuddered, yet I jerked open the door. I jerked it open even as I wondered why it wasn’t locked. Even as I wondered why I wasn’t locking it myself. Such is the way of thoughts in a hurry. And I plunged into the next room. “Did you hear— Oh.”

A tall, slim man with a closely trimmed but full beard had just laid a rifle on the bed. He was dressed all in sleek black, as if for a funeral where the director would not require formal clothing. And of course, it would not be his funeral.

But the rifle. Magnificent. I don’t know a lot about rifles, but I could tell his was a good one. It was a piece of art. Quality advertises itself.

I stared at him, and I swallowed. “I— I thought I heard something. But probably I was mista—”

“Yes. Yes, you did hear something.” He looked directly at me, as if reading everything that was me in a matter of seconds. Then, decision made, he turned away and lit a cigarette.

I felt neither dismissed nor shunned. Merely released if I wished to go. He ignored me not out of arrogance but courtesy.

He bent over his rifle and separated it into three parts, seemingly by waving his hand over it. Smoke curled from his cigarette up around his jawline and past his left ear. “The something you heard, it was gunshots.”

He picked up the largest piece of the rifle, the broad piece at the back, and stored it in a particular place in the bag. “Or if you like, it was just ‘something.’ That is fine with me.” He took his cigarette from his mouth and flicked the ash toward the open door that led to the balcony.

Then he put the cigarette between his lips again and picked up another piece of the rifle. This was the part with the trigger and the nylon part that extends forward beneath the barrel. He put it into its own place in the bag. “Either way,” he said, “what you heard, it was me.”

He picked up the barrel, that part I know, and placed it into his bag too, then glanced at me again. “Well, I mean what you heard was me doing my job.”

He took his cigarette from his mouth again, tapped some more ashes in the direction of the open balcony, then shrugged. “Probably you should go now. There will be some trouble here soon I think.”

He zipped his bag decisively, an exclamation point on his suggestion that I go.

Then he turned away, picked up the chair, and placed it carefully, so its feet were in the original depressions in the carpet.

When he turned back, I was still standing there. I was unsure of what to do or even why.

He looked almost apologetic. “Please understand, I did not know there was someone in the next room. You should not have been there. But you cannot stay now. The time, it is too close.”

As if on cue, sirens wailed in the distance.

Still I didn’t move.

He picked up his bag and walked directly toward me. Shifting his bag to his right hand, he clapped me on the shoulder with his left as he moved past me. “I have to leave now. You must go as well.”

My feet seemed mired in Louisiana clay. I wanted to go with him, but somehow I was unable to move. The sirens had stopped. He was gone. I was alone.

The television was on behind me, in my room. In what would have been my room if I had met with my new big client. If I had attended the conference and perhaps enjoyed a sexual liaison with an exotic woman.

It droned on with an interruption to regular programming. I could make out that much. And I heard the words for shot and kill and assassination. A big word they use for big men. A word for people who are not common. A word for people who change the lives of little people, such as accountants from Cleveland, Ohio, USA.

I twisted my neck to look over my left shoulder at the door through which he had exited. I tried to twist my hips in the same direction, but still they wouldn’t move. The television continued. It droned on, pouring cement around my shoes.

How long had he been gone? A few seconds? A few minutes? He had returned the stability of blandness to my life. He was my hero. I missed him. I wished I had left with him, even followed him. What chance did I have now to follow?

He reappeared in the door. For a moment he looked at the floor, then up at me. “My name is Gregor. It seems you are my friend.” He stepped into the room, grasped my left arm and tugged me from the mire. “Come. We have to go now.”

Turning his back on the elevator, he led me to the other end of the hall. When we reached a door marked Stairs, he released my arm for a moment. He shifted his bag to his left hand and opened the door with his right. He looked at me and gestured toward the door with his head. “Go,” he said.

I did, and he followed me through the door.

I had watched too many movies in which the bad guys climbed higher and higher. I suppose they do that so they would fall farther and more dramatically when the good guys finally caught up with them. I angled to the right and took the first step up toward the 10th floor.

“No,” he said. He gestured with his bag toward the descending staircase. “We will go this way, to whatever will be. I think we are late.”

He started down the stairs and I followed him.

On the 5th floor landing heavy footfalls echoed up to us.

Gregor gestured with his chin toward the hallway access door. “Come.”

We walked briskly toward the elevator. I thought perhaps he might have outsmarted them, but Gregor knew better.

He stopped just past the utility room and opened the incinerator chute. He looked for a long moment at his bag, then dropped it in. As the chute banged shut, he moved to the elevator access and pressed the Down button.

The ride to the lobby was strangely calm and uneventful. Like any other two people in any other elevator anywhere in the world, we did not speak. When the doors scraped opened, we were greeted by four armed police officers.

Gregor nodded toward me. “This man is not with me.” He got to his knees, then lay on the floor, his arms outstretched.

I gaped at the weapons, three of which were trained on me. “I— Like he said, I’m—”

“Shut up!” Two officers grabbed me and took me to the floor. One put his knee hard on my neck as the other jerked my arms behind my back and handcuffed me. The carpet ground into my face. A rifle butt flashed toward me in my peripheral vision.

“Classy place,” I said. “How odd that the carpet smells like cat urine.”

Then the lights went out.

When I awoke, I was in a cell with my new friend, Gregor. Admittedly, we were an unlikely pair, an apparent assassin and a mild mannered accountant from Cleveland.

Two weeks earlier I’d lucked out and landed a major client for my company. A week after that the boss had called me into his office.

As I walked in, he got up and came around the desk, a broad smile plastered across his face. “Harlan, my boy, we’re gonna get you some excitement. I need a representative at this conference. You’re not married, and you’re a go getter.”

He handed me a folder. “Here are the tickets, hotel info, the lot. Go, have a good time.”

He clapped me on the shoulder and his voice dropped to a stage whisper as if we were suddenly confidants sharing a special secret. “Hey, sit in on a session or two at the conference while you’re there too, eh?” He nudged me with his elbow, then laughed and turned back to his desk, effectively dismissing me. So three days ago I caught a flight.

Of course, the whole thing seemed too good to be true. I mean, me maybe getting laid by exotic women? That was obviously part of the boss’ implication. But I had a difficult time even talking to the secretaries at the water cooler without my throat closing up. Still, it would be nice to escape Cleveland for a few days.

I got to the hotel around 11 a.m. I looked so helpless they allowed me to check in two hours early, but the room on the reservation was still being cleaned so I had to take another one.

My luck always had been bad. I’m Clark Kent without the looks, the cape or the tights. I’m timid, afraid of everything and everyone. I put myself through college working anonymous jobs.

When I received my lackluster BS in Accounting and Business Management I went to work for a young, lackluster firm in Cleveland. It is the palest, blandest, most anonymous place I know.

I’ve never had a beer with the guys after work. I’ve never been invited to a superbowl game or a martini lunch on the sly. For that matter, I’ve never had a friend. The only good luck I ever had was landing that major client.

Well, and being early to the hotel so I had to take that room. And hearing that shot.

I have to be honest here. I owe that much to Gregor. My friend.

I will never know why I opened the door to that adjoining room. I will never know why I didn’t just make sure it was locked and then turn up the sound on the TV. And I will never understand why, once I did open the door and saw what was going on, I didn’t immediately flee.

To his credit, Gregor even told me to run. He told me I was too close, that I should get away. And when I was rooted in place and unable to move, instead of getting away himself and letting me take the rap for him, he came back for me.

He was known and I wasn’t. He should have gone. They could never have kept me.

Finally, Gregor had pulled himself out of the corner. He managed even to pull himself into a sitting position. He looked at me again. “So what next?”

Without looking away from him I shrugged.

An understanding came into his eyes. How did he know my thoughts?

He looked at the floor and nodded. He released a short sigh. “I could not just let you stand there.”

“You could have killed me, Gregor.”

He glanced up at me. “No. You were an innocent.”

He had no idea.

* * * * * * *