“We’ll find a room in San Francisco, cheap and anonymous. I’m practiced at lying low. We have enough cash for the time being. I’m relieved, actually. From this point on, at least we know.”
K seemed familiar with all the fleabag hotels in San Francisco. We ended up in the Haight in a narrow little building called the Algonquin, squeezed between an Asian grocery and a store that specialized in posters, bongs, and Betty Boop dolls.
The hotel had ten rooms, a tiny lobby, and a small couch sagging and fading in front of a flyspecked window on the street. K rented a double with the air of an experienced, upper-crust European traveler, temporarily down on his luck while awaiting a draft from his London bank.
He paid cash.
The room was small, with two single beds, a dresser, a tiny closet, and an adjoining bathroom. The sink in the bathroom was chipped. I was too exhausted to care.
I took off the ugly green shirt, lay back on the bed, and thought about withdrawing my remaining three hundred dollars from the bank. Repaying K for my hospital tab.
Phoning my mother and asking for a loan.
K pulled the chair over to the window. He rubbed his temples with his hands, as if trying to focus psychic energy on the brick wall across the narrow shaft.
“Churchill forced him to do it,” he muttered. “That isn’t where it began, but it led to where we are now.”
I slipped in and out of his ramble.
“It was the Jews,” he continued. “Krupp was a secret Jew, did you know that? Rockefeller. A Jew. They wanted the whole world to go to war. Read my last book if you disagree. Thoroughly annotated. We have lived a century of shams and deceptions.”
“I’m really tired,” I moaned, and curled up on the bed.
K turned his face toward me. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I was the best there was at winnowing out the dark underside of contemporary history,” he said. “The very, very best. I still am.”
“Then why are you so full of shit?” I asked, uncharitably, considering what he had done for me in the past few hours.
“Am I?” he asked with deep sadness. He pointed to his temple with a long, knobby finger. “I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand the twentieth century. A hundred years of hobnail boots grinding human faces into hamburger. I’ve uncovered the darkest documents, the most heinous official papers ever concocted by human beings. It was my duty to read them, absorb motivations, plumb psychologies, to understand how such things could be. I imagined myself a doctor diagnosing a long and hideous disease. Perhaps my mistake was having an open mind. Ghosts got in. Bad and unhappy spirits.”
I rolled over and stared at him.
“Why did my brother ever come to you?” I asked.
He wiped sweat from his forehead. “I wish I were a Jew myself. Then I would have the final answers. I would be given access . . . if I knew the secret signs, the genetic identification. They wave a special . . . box . . . over your head, and it sways left and right if you carry the blood of Aaron, front to back if you’re of the Levites. Then they tell you—”
I had had enough. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, sat up with an effort, feeling my bandaged neck bind and my hand throb, and fumbled for the shirt.
“Don’t leave,” K said, a hitch in his voice. “Please. I surely do miss your brother. He could see me as I really am.”
“What’s your real name?” I demanded.
“Banning. Rudy Banning. My mother’s maiden name was Katkowicz. She was Polish. I am Canadian by birth and British by nationality. I have written twenty-three books on the history of Germany and Eastern Europe, and for twelve years I was a respected professor at Harvard.”
He pulled himself together and stood, then went to his coat and drew forth a wrinkled pack of cigarettes. He tapped out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth, patted all his pockets, but could not find matches. The cigarette dangled, its tip bobbing as he spoke. “I was researching a Soviet program for the creation of artificial silk, in the 1930s. I located important documents. To make a very long story short, I came too close to the flame. They burned my wings.”
“What does this have to do with my brother? Or with Jews?” I asked.
His eyes glittered, and his lips squirmed as if they were fighting. “They saw how close I was.”
“The Jews?”
He shook his head, pointed his finger into his right ear, and lifted one eyebrow. “No need to kill me . . . better to discredit me. I have a defect in my character, put there by my father and my grandparents. A little rip of tribal fear. We all have them. They pulled mine wide open.” He jerked the cigarette from his mouth. “The subjects I studied became objectified. I began to hear them at night, whispering vast truths. Some people feel the touch of guardian angels. Mine is the monster I have studied most of my adult life.” His lips curled. “A fine companion in the wee hours.”
Banning approached my bed, cigarette held in his bandaged left hand, filter squeezed flat between two tobacco-stained fingers. “I am pariah,” he whispered. “I am unclean, unemployable. The Jews have made sure I can’t publish, can’t teach. And that is the truth. But however hard I try to ignore my dark and hate-filled angels, they circle and strike like harpies. I have offended the gods.”
I didn’t want to be in the same room with K, or Rudy Banning, any longer. I felt sick. “I have to leave,” I said, and tried desperately to get to my feet. I slid to the floor.
“Don’t be silly,” he said, and gently helped me back onto the bed. “Where would you go? You need sleep.”
Despite anything I could will or do, my eyes closed.
“We’ll try to make sense out of things tomorrow,” Banning said. “I’ll call Mrs. Callas and make an appointment. And I’ll tell you more about your brother.” His voice seemed to slide down a long slope. “And about Lake Baikal.”
22
The brick red reflection of morning bounced across the air shaft into our room. I sat up in bed and reached for Rob’s package. It was still on the nightstand. Dog claws had scraped through the paper and bent back a run of tape, but the contents were unharmed.
Banning slept on his side in the other bed, snoring. I went into the bathroom, blew my nose, and washed my face quietly, hoping to have some time alone with the package.
My back was a network of bruises and pulls. My throat hurt, and my hand felt as if it had gone through a meat grinder. I was clearly not cut out for adventure.
I examined my bandages delicately, then changed them using the gauze and tape and disinfectant from Alta Bates. That done, I dropped the lid on the toilet and sat, then slid the blade of my pocketknife under the envelope’s taped flap. Cutting through the hairs seemed significant, fresh from sleep as I was; had I dreamed about this? Rehearsed the moment?
The envelope had been hastily stuffed with papers, well over a hundred pages of typing paper, lined notebook paper, leaves ripped from a notepad, hotel stationery (the header in Cyrillic and Roman) from Intourist hotels in Irkutsk and Listvyanka. Pages of scribbled notes had been jammed between three slender manuscripts, two produced on a typewriter, one from an inkjet printer, the type smeared at the bottom by damp. All three manuscripts had been accented with yellow highlighter.
A postcard showed steam rising from Lake Baikal. It had no message, had never been mailed. On the back the caption read, “World’s deepest, largest, oldest: One Fifth of Earth’s Fresh Water, Drink and You Are a Year Younger!”
I tried to remember what I knew about Lake Baikal. There was volcanism in the area—gases warming the lake and frequent earthquakes. Heated baths and healing waters.
