that he’s already found what he spent his twenties looking for. How this came to be seems every bit as mysterious now as it did seventeen years ago. A geopolitical event got him sent halfway around the world, and he stumbled across the right person. That his domestic happiness is firmly grounded in happenstance sometimes unsettles him, but when he looks around at other contented couples, their stories are often similar. You can’t say why fate smiles at some and sneers at others.
In a moment he and his brother-in-law, who writes fiction and lives it too, will go back inside and join their families for dessert. Mustafa will send over some cognac on the house, and Stefan will pronounce it the best he’s ever tasted. Christmas plans made, they’ll say their good-nights, and when Richard bends to hug his sister-in-law, she’ll balance on her toes and whisper, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Don’t be angry.” She will kiss him on the mouth, something she’s never done before. It will surprise him, but he’s going to forget it within the hour and will not think of it again for a long time.
Before any of that can occur, though, while they’re still out there on the balcony, he asks Stefan the obligatory question: “What is it you want but haven’t got?”
“I don’t know. I have some of it—I just don’t have all of it. And truthfully, Rysiu, if I were to find the missing element, you know what I suspect would happen?”
Richard takes a deep draft from his cigar, then blows out a cloud of smoke. He watches it disperse, the tiny particles spreading over the hillside, beyond the treetops, growing farther away from each other as they disappear into the night. “What?”
Stefan brushes a few snowflakes from his hair. “I feel all but certain that it would spell the end of me. With no need to hunt, I’d be a dead duck. One day I might show up on your plate.”
He's had a good bit to drink, and his bladder’s sending distress signals. So he asks Julia and Anna to wait in the foyer while he pays a visit to the bathroom.
To write news the way he does, you need to notice plenty of seemingly random details because life isn’t just the big things, it’s all the little ones too. For instance: a makeshift clock mounted on the wall in the bedroom of a boy killed by a stray bullet in Delano, California, in May of ’93. The clock’s hands were wooden skewers, one longer than the other, both of them glued to the hub of an electric motor that jutted through the spindle hole of a 33-rpm record which served as the clock face. The title of the record: Internal Exile. By the Chicano rock band Los Illegals. Where the boy came across the recording, which by then was more than ten years old, or what it might have meant to him, his grandmother who had raised him couldn’t say, but she knew he’d built the clock for his seventh grade science project. Any good reporter notices a few things like that, but Richard likes to think he notices more than most.
Retained from his visit to the bathroom tonight: in the urinal there’s a cherry deodorant cake.
The correct term for these items is “urinal deodorant block.” They’re also known as “piss pucks.” If you look into the question more deeply, you’ll find that in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, with their large concentrations of Polish immigrants, Polonophobes used to dub them “Polish mints.” The thing is, you seldom see urinal deodorant cakes in Poland. Why this particular receptacle contains one is puzzling, yet there it is, lodged near the trap.
He finishes, zips up, washes his hands, and goes back to the foyer.
Julia’s lips have officially pursed themselves, and her eyes somehow seem to have defied the laws of physiology and drawn closer together than they were three or four minutes ago. He calls this her You fucked my sister look, though she has no sister and what he thinks the look really means this evening is You drank too much. Now I have to drive. It will remain in place, he figures, until she pulls up outside their building and switches off the engine.
He’s right about one thing: she hates driving and isn’t happy to have to do it tonight. She never drove before she met him. He taught her himself, on long, empty stretches of Central Valley farm roads. Her car back home is a Honda Accord that she rarely drives farther than the grocery store. She dislikes the old Mercedes and has only driven it two or three times since they bought it.
That’s not why she looks troubled, though. When Richard was out there on the balcony with her brother, Monika addressed her in the Russian every schoolchild of their mutual vintage had to learn: “You know what I appreciate about you, Julisia? If you think I’m a fool, you conceal it beautifully.” Richard and Stefan returned before Julia managed to formulate a reply, which is fortunate. She doesn’t know how she might’ve responded. What can you say when another woman, who happens to be your brother’s wife, makes that kind of statement?
Anna, in contrast to her mother, could not possibly appear more radiant. Her golden hair brushes the shoulders of the white faux fur they bought her a few days ago at Macy’s, and her face is flushed with excitement. She raises one hand and points at the ceiling. “It’s her,” she tells him. “It’s like she’s following us everywhere we go.”
At first he doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about. Then he hears that unmistakable voice wafting from the restaurant sound system. “Well,” he says, “there are worse folks to be followed by than Miss Ella Fitzgerald.” He puts one arm around her shoulders and the other around her mother’s. Then he steers his family out the door.
When Bogdan climbs out of the car, more snow seeps into his shoes. Earlier, on their initial foray through the woods, his feet got soaked, and now his toes are numb. He has poor circulation anyway. “Let’s hear the sequence again,” he says.
Marek studies him across the roof. “Sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asks, holding up the bottle. “Just to steady your jangling nerves?”
The bottle is small, and in the dark it looks almost empty. Earlier, when his partner first produced it, Bogdan came close to punching him, his fist rising as though it had a mind of its own. All evening he’s been feeling like one of those drones the Americans are supposedly using. It seems as if some strange force has seized control of his body. “Give me the sequence,” he repeats. “If you don’t, you can count me out.”
“I already told you four times.”
“So tell me five.”
Marek screws the cap off and takes another sip. “Four . . . two . . . one . . . six. Satisfied?”
“Not really. I won’t be satisfied until I’m home in bed.” Saying even that much represents wishful thinking. He’ll never be satisfied again, whether they pull this off or not. Some places you can’t come back from, and he’s in one of them now.
“Time to do it.” Marek crams the bottle into his coat pocket, grabs a crowbar from the backseat, and slips on his mask. It’s black like Bogdan’s, except above the eye slits there’s an oddly shaped orange letter C and, next to that, the head of an orange bear.
Bogdan pulls on the balaclava and immediately begins to itch. His partner steps into the woods, and for the second time tonight he sets off behind him.
Marek made the proposal a couple of weeks ago, the day after their produce supplier notified them that their account would soon be suspended. He would have suggested it earlier, he said, but he wanted to wait until his cousin had been in Ireland a while, to keep suspicion from falling on him.
When he recovered from the shock, Bogdan said, “You think this guy’s smart enough to get rich but too fucking stupid to change the gate code after your cousin leaves to work in Ireland?”
