We should have realized that something was dangerously wrong during our Tuesday Morning Group while Russell lied about garroting the Serb colonel.
“Get this,” said Russell as sunshine streamed past the jail bars over our windows and drew parallel shadows on the Day Room’s lemon wood floor. “That whole scene was like a flipped coin spinning in the air, one side ordinary, one side surreal.”
Like us then: five men and one woman perched on circled metal folding chairs.
“There I was,” said Russell, “walking another patrol in the Balkan slaughterhouse. Main Street buildings were smeared smoke black. Busted windows. Rubble littered the road. We tramped past a fire-bombed Toyota. Every step, something crunched under your boot. A laptop computer. A woman’s purse. Three ropes dangled from a street lamp, but they were cut empty, so the rumors about a cleanup were probably true.”
“What isn’t true?” said Dr. Friedman.
Dr. Leon Friedman had brown hair. Emerald eyes inside gold metal glasses. As he had for each of the fourteen days he’d spent with us, he wore a tweed sports jacket. That last day, he had on a blue shirt, no tie.
“Place like that,” said Russell, “everything is true, nothing is true.”
“I see,” said Dr. Friedman.
“No you don’t,” I said. “Not if you’re lucky.”
“’Xactly,” said Zane, who looked like an albino Jesus.
“We’re listening to Russell now,” said Dr. Friedman.
Russell was fronting his rock star look: midnight lens aviator shades, a black leather sports jacket over an indigo T-shirt emblazoned wilco for the band, not the military response he’d been taught. He wore blue jeans, retro black-and-white sneakers.
“Make it late May 1992,” said Russell. “We were jazzed to get somewhere safe.”
Hailey picked scabs into her ebony-skinned arm, mumbled: “No such place.”
Russell ignored her. “That once-was-Yugoslavia town smelled like gunpowder and burned wood. Rotten garbage and rats, man, I can still see badass rats with red eyes.
“The restaurant had cardboard over two windows but a sign that read open. When the Colonel swung the door in, a bell tinkled. He turns to us nine guys, says: ‘We take turns.’ Then he beckons me and his two favorite goons, a couple of thrill-kill boys Milosovic sprang from prison and made ‘militia.’ We go in. The place has a handful of customers, all true Serbs like us, and fuck everybody else.”
The white Styrofoam cup trembled as Russell raised it to his lips. “Where was I?”
Dr. Friedman said: “You just said, ‘Fuck everybody else.’”
Russell swallowed more coffee. “I mean, where was I in my story?”
“Ahh,” said the therapist: “Your story. Of your spy mission.”
“Got it,” said Russell. “The maître d’ glides through the restaurant like he’s skating on ice. He’s hairless. Pale as a bone. Milky eyes. Stone cold. Four werewolves in army fatigues with AK-47s walk in and ding his bell but he doesn’t blink. He’s wearing a black bow tie, a white shirt, blue jeans, a black tuxedo tails coat like Dracula. Plus, one hand ballerina waitress style, he’s balancing an empty tray.”
“Sounds like an LSD trip,” said Dr. Friedman.
“Doc!” Russell grinned. “Who knew you’re such a rebel!”
“I have an interesting father. What about you?”
“Nah,” said Russell, “Dad never did nothing that could get him in trouble. He never had to. And he isn’t in the story—in the restaurant, that was just me, all me.”
“And who else?” asked Dr. Friedman.
“I told you: Colonel Herzgl, the fat fuck. Smelled like garlic and vodka. They claim vodka doesn’t smell, that’s another lie. Believe me, it smells, and I . . . I . . .”
“You’re in the restaurant,” said Dr. F. “With Colonel Herzgl, his men.”
“And the maître d’. Who glides up to us through the tables holding his empty tray, Nazi pin on his lapel, man, he lets us fall into his milk eyes.
“Colonel Herzgl glares at him, says: ‘You got crap on for music.’
“Tunes are coming from a boom box on the bar, and the Colonel is dead-on right: it’s crap. Some accordion flute zither ethnic bullshit. Colonel Herzgl is an Elvis freak. He’s carrying a torch for a bloated icon who bought it in a . . . ah . . . in a bathroom—”
Dr. Friedman blinked. And I caught him.
“—who bought it in a bathroom while Herzgl was still a Commie punk in Belgrade. Now he’s got this one lousy tape, the soundtrack from Viva Las Vegas! Not the worst Elvis movie, not even his worst bunch of songs, but man: after the first forty times you hear it and get ordered to translate it and teach the Colonel to sing along . . . !
“Colonel Herzgl gives the Elvis tape to the maître d’, who leads us to a table and on it is a bottle of that plum brandy. Rakija. No glasses. We sit, pass around the bottle.”
“Please say you didn’t put your lips where theirs were!” said Hailey.
“Shit, yes! You think I’d bust cover by playing the snob?” said Russell. “So the maître d’ says: ‘Potato soup,’ which is all this war zone café has, except for rakija. Off he goes. A few swigs later, and boom box Elvis blasts out ‘Viva Las Vegas’!”
The Ward Room door swung open, pushed inward by a rolling mirror metal box.
The meds cart rolled across the sun-swept floor. I checked out the nurse driving it who, like Dr. F, had rotated in while the regular staff were on furlough.
The substitute nurse was a pretty woman who’d walked miles of hospital corridors. She wore the uniform white slacks and top with a black cardigan sweater. Wore her brown hair pinned in a bun. She unlocked the meds cart, stacked tiny paper cups on the metal top, checked her clipboard.
Dr. Friedman said: “What did it smell like?”
“Why do you want to know that?” said Russell.
“We know what outside the café smelled like—gunpowder, burned wood, smoke, rubble. What did it smell like at that table?”
“What difference . . . There’s that rakija plum brandy. Plus us four unshowered army fatigue guys. And kind of a salty smell. Potato soup from the kitchen, the—”
“What kind of salty smell?” asked Dr. Friedman. “Like . . . tears?”
“‘Like tears,’ what the hell difference does that make, it’s all about what I do. And now, with Elvis blasting ‘Viva Las Vegas,’ I finally got my chance to do.”
The nurse shook pills into a paper cup.
Dr. Friedman said: “You finally got your chance to do what?”
“To kill Colonel Herzgl.”
“But that wasn’t your mission. You weren’t an assassin.”
“Don’t you tell me who I wasn’t!” yelled Russell. “I
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Imprint: Forge Books
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 06-26-2007
Pages: 352
Measurements: 6.69in X 4.13in
