Maggie narrowed her eyes. ‘Isn’t a good sign either.’
‘What did the medic say? You saw a medic?’
‘I said. There were two medics. One of them took my blood pressure. I’ve explained this already.’
‘But what did they say about the blood pressure?’
‘That it was low. High or low, that’s all anyone ever says about blood pressure.’
Maggie rolled her eyes, folded her arms to mimic Cathy. ‘How do you know this isn’t the same thing?’
Cathy turned back, defiant, walked to the kitchen. ‘Because that was my thyroid. It’s not the same thing.’
‘Tell her,’ Maggie nudged Rem. ‘She has to get this checked out.’
Cathy answered so quietly she had to repeat herself. ‘Enough. All right? Enough.’
Maggie began to ask more questions, and Cathy returned to the bathroom and locked the door.
* * *
Once Maggie was gone, Cathy came out of the bathroom and told Rem to sit down.
‘I checked the messages from work. Seven messages from Andrew Coleman. What’s going on? Have you heard them?’
Rem automatically answered no.
‘Is he asking for money? Why is he calling, Rem? He doesn’t even make sense. Listen to it.’
‘No.’
‘Are you paying the Colemans?’
Rem wouldn’t answer.
‘Jesus Christ, Rem. Why? They’ll all want money. Who won’t you pay?’
‘There won’t be any more.’
‘Rem, you haven’t done anything for the Colemans in, what, two years? At least? Why?’
‘They’re missing a ring.’
‘Since when?’ She rubbed her forehead to tease out an idea. ‘He works for the police.’
‘He’s not in the police. He works for the office for the Chief of Police.’
Cathy found herself a seat.
‘I haven’t given them the money yet.’
‘But you’ve arranged it. You’ve agreed it. Why is he calling?’
‘I was late paying him. I still have the money. I’ll call him. I’ll settle this.’
Before she walked to the bedroom he thought she paused, something too small to properly register as a pause, but a tiny measurement of doubt, and he realized that she hadn’t asked how much he was paying Coleman.
* * *
Flush with Geezler’s money, Rem took Cathy to the movies. This being their habit, at least once a month, to agree on a movie, Cathy’s preference being the Music Box, or at a push the Art Institute or MCA. For Rem, any Cineplex would do, with comfortable seats, surround sound, and a responsive crowd.
The film was Cathy’s choice, but more to Rem’s taste. She sat stiff throughout, resistant to the violence, didn’t see how it was possible, the entire plot.
The movie was fact, Rem pointed out, based in an honest actual event, a piece of uncontested history.
‘It’s not the facts, Rem. It’s the whole flavour of the thing. OK, so it happened. But how did it happen?’ It wasn’t the event she doubted, but how the event was demonstrated. They — the screenwriters, the actors, the director, whoever — had taken something real and made it implausible.
‘People don’t disappear like that.’ Cathy wouldn’t let this go. How could a young American, worldly, white, male, be abducted from a train station in broad daylight? This was Italy, supposedly, where everyone makes it their business to know everyone else’s business. How could this be possible? Come on, not without one single person noticing. At the very least? The whole thing struck her as highly improbable. It wasn’t the film, so much, as the idea that people could disappear. It didn’t matter how loved they were, how vital, how dynamic. They could just vanish.
‘And why? Was that ever explained?’
‘The book.’
‘I don’t buy it. Imagine, you’re given a job stapling plastic to a wall in a basement room, and you never ask yourself why? What might this room be used for? Come on? You never ask? It just wouldn’t happen like that. And the names? Please. Mr Wolf.’
Rem only knew things in retrospect. Only in hindsight when motives and meanings became apparent. In this regard film was the perfect media: with the answer laid out at the end.
* * *
Rem took it as his responsibility to clear out Fatboy’s room. Following Rem’s example Fatboy had moved from his assigned quarters and taken residence in a store closet in the corridor between the commissary and the PX. Rem didn’t like the idea of anyone messing with Fatboy’s possessions, and decided it was his duty to box everything up, ready to ship back to his family. The boy had mentioned a mother in Michigan, but no one else, although Rem had fashioned the idea that Fatboy came from a large family and couldn’t shake the notion. He saw Fatboy as the runt among many brothers and sisters and imagined that there were other versions, none of them quite so skinny or fragile.
The clean-out started one evening when other options were exhausted: he couldn’t face another game of poker with Santo, and didn’t want to watch another DVD, where the disc more likely than not would be corrupted. To avoid the other men in his unit he quietly roamed the PX, did the rounds of the food stalls, the vending machines, but couldn’t occupy himself. As he came out of the commissary and headed toward the showers he had to pass Fatboy’s closet.
The room: windowless and strewn with trash, the heat compacted the stench (Fatboy’s stink of sweat and sweet nutmeg). Shelving units on three of the four walls were stacked with boxes, TV monitors, radios, wholesale packages of candy, out-of-date chips, jars of chip-dip in flats of twenty-four. Fatboy lived like a shut-in; everything within reach of a makeshift bed, a modest single black mat laid across the floor with barely enough room to stretch out, a radio kept inches from his ear. How could he stand the heat? Under the bottom shelf Rem found clothes, laundry, stiff and stuffed away with things he didn’t want to see, some magazines and balled-up socks. The boy’s taste ran scattershot: small Asian girls, breasty hipster blondes in cowgirl outfits. Rem couldn’t imagine Fatboy with a woman, partly because he was so young, but mostly because Fatboy appeared innocent. He could be coy when the other men spoke of sex.
He worked with the door closed. Head throbbing when he stood up. He drank a warm Red Bull, the fizz hurt his throat, leaked through him, and he immediately began to sweat. He recognized this sweetness as the cause of the stink in the room: what he’d assumed to be the smell of the boy was only the smell of the drink.
On the bottom shelf Rem found a black folder with a notebook and a collection of loose paper. At first he thought that Fatboy had kept a diary and determined to burn this, because it was hard enough thinking about him, wondering if he had or had not ever loved anyone — and knowing, if he survived, that these injuries would blight his life.
Rem settled with his back to the door and began to leaf through the notebook. It looked like junk, just lists and scribbles, many of the pages swollen as if once wet. Fatboy had scrawled crosses on page after page; some plain, some three-dimensional with ornamentation as if wrought from iron. The notebook reminded Rem of a book of tattoo designs, demonstrating different varieties of the same thing. Loose rows and columns of crosses. On other sheets he found lists of names, possibly three to four hundred with a good number of repetitions, some from the military, but most of them contractors listed by their units. While he recognized some of the names, he couldn’t figure out what linked them. He found Santo, alongside Clark and Samuels, two other men working with Unit 409. Next to these names were the same simple crosses. Others — Watts, Pakosta, Chimeno — were annotated with a cross in a circle, others with an ornate cross with spiral arms. One, drawn in negative, in a black circle, appeared against names which had been crossed out: