Download Excerpts CODE of the Running Cross 05.16.09
“Well there you stand and shadows fall on those that are no more…”
In the Morning Light, Joan Baez
PART I 1933
Ely and Lisel stowed their skis in the racks outside the inn and hurried inside. So far, his plan had gone well. Getting to Geneva from Paris partly by train, had been without incident. But with patrols everywhere, getting back safely to France from Geneva was a different matter. The twenty-six year old artist, a French-Jew, glanced at his companion but kept this thought to himself. What they needed now was food, drink and rest.
Ely guided Lisel into the cozy pub and looked around for the innkeeper’s familiar face. The barmaid nodded toward a table in the corner near the fireplace. Lisel pulled off her gloves and furred hat while Ely helped tug open her ski jacket. Their faces were warm, red from skiing, from the excitement, but Lisel felt cold. Trembling, she shoved her hands into her sleeves hoping Ely wouldn’t notice, then smiled up at him. Ely, his artist eyes missing nothing, moved in beside her, taking her hands, rubbing them between his own. He looked away to order brandy from the barmaid.
The buxom girl handed him a menu, then she examined the slim, pale woman beside him. Making a decision, she leaned against the table, a move that revealed her plump breasts. She pulled a bar towel from her waist and wiped slowly at the table. The girl’s voluptuous charms were not lost on Ely. She’d make a splendid nude model, he thought, but now, his mind was on survival, for himself and for Lisel, not painting.
At the girl’s suggestion, Ely ordered the stew of the day. Lisel, exhausted and agitated, asked for the same. She was relieved not to have to think. She handed the menu back to the barmaid, who smiled to herself, hoping Ely’s lingering gaze on her breasts meant the promise of something that Jan was reluctant to give her. She tucked the bar towel into her skirt and headed for the kitchen. The girl’s father brought a bottle of brandy and three glasses.
“Ah, I see you’ve met my daughter Gretle. She’s getting food for you?” Hans settled next to Ely with the plopping sound of a tired inn-keeper. He poured hefty helpings of the brandy for each of them, and drank his in one long swallow.
“Well, Ely?” he sighed, relieved. He looked around cautiously at the almost empty room. “It went well? Jan was a good guide?”
Ely raised his glass toward the older man. “Yes, Hans. It went well. Exactly as planned.”
“A good thing, too,” Lisel laughed, a bit nervously. “My heart couldn’t stand a second try at this!”
Hans reached across the table and patted Lisel’s hand in a fatherly way. He looked back at Ely. “And our contact, Jan’s sister, Stephanie? She made arrangements?
“Yes, Hans.” Ely answered in a low voice. “A good banker. Quiet, efficient. A business arrangement for her. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“More, not less,” Hans smiled, gulping his drink.
“I don’t understand,” Lisel said.
“More, my child,” Hans replied soberly, “because Frau Lorensen hates the coming....”
“Not here, not in public, Hans,” Ely cautioned.
“You’re right, Ely. You’re young, but you are right. These days, even the windows have ears.
*****
At dawn, almost in France, Jan insisted they stop to rest. He offered Ely and Lisel the bottle of tea and a flask of brandy and searched out a big tree he could stand behind to take a piss. Suddenly, shots rang out. In a moment, the German soldiers had examined Ely’s papers, tied his hands behind him, and were dragging him to a car.
“Lisel!” Ely cried out. His words were so terror-filled they could hardly leave his mouth. He could do nothing for the small helpless bundle lying in the snow.
“Leave the bitch, Weimer,” one of the men said. “If she were fat and healthy, we could have some fun with her. But I think you’ve shot her.”
“Yah, Schroeder,” his companion agreed, kicking at the woman with his boot. “She is bleeding from the mouth. She will die.” He raised his gun and aimed at her head.
“Leave her to the wolves,” Schroeder said, remembering his own wife at home in Berlin. "I’ve no stomach for shooting a woman, even if she were a Jew. I only wanted you to stop them! The man is different. He’s one of those degenerate artists from the Bauhaus, and with a name like Rosenberg, probably a Jew too. Get him into the car! We’ll get a promotion for this catch!”
*****
Lisel reached up and kissed Jan’s cheek. “Yes, I would like to dance at your and Gretel’s wedding,” she sighed. “And for the troubles to be over, and for Ely to reach Paris again. Jan,” she said quietly, “There is something I must tell you.”
“If you must, Lisel. You can trust me. Is it a message for Ely?”
“It is for the future Jan, and if I die, it is a message only Ely and you will know.”
When he felt Lisel sleeping, Jan got out of bed and pulled on his pants and his jacket. He opened the door slowly and went outside to piss against a tree. He watched the golden liquid sink into the snow as if into quicksand, leaving only a dull yellow circle. He looked up at Van Gough’s starry night and made wishes for Lisel and Ely, for himself, for Switzerland and France and all who stood in the path of the coming locusts of destruction.
Freezing, he stood there numbly, contemplating the stain in the snow, which, in his mind at least, had leaked out tentacles, and formed itself into a lop-sided star. If only urinating like animals could mark out territorial claims made by men, he thought, instead of wars.
“Oh piss on the Nazi bastards,” he shouted angrily at the tree, the bushes, the night, as if the curse could make a difference.
Jan closed the door quietly, then slumped into a chair beside the fireplace, poking at the dying coals. He rocked, drifting into agitated dreams, then woke suddenly. A dull stream of sunlight light crossed the floor and climbed the bed. He listened, worried, to Lisel labored breathing, and stood quickly when he heard her whisper his name. He sat on the floor beside the bed, and took her hand in his. She did not open her eyes.
“What, Lisel?” Jan asked, bending closer. “Are you calling for Ely?”
She squeezed his hand. “Please...remember...” She whispered a single name into his ear. Her grasp relaxed. She was gone.
Jan cradled Lisel's body into his arms. His tears fell on her lifeless face. He cried for Lisel, for Ely, for all of them and the days to come.
*****
PART II
MEXICO, CURRENT TIME
The two men in the marketplace made me nervous and it wasn’t like me to get nervous, not even in Mexico. Even the reports of increased violence in Juarez, Tijuana and Mexico City did not really concern me. There was political chaos, religious extremism, drug-related mayhem and bizarre and mindless crimes committed everywhere. I could as easily get kidnapped, dismembered or shot in California or New York, or back home in New Mexico, as in a country beyond U.S.A. borders, I’d told my DA friend, Tony, in Taos, and I wasn’t about to let CIA warnings keep me from where I wanted to go. I’d come down to this coastal area often on my own photography self-assignments and had always enjoyed a sense of freedom and abandonment.
Now, however, I couldn’t quell a growing sense of anxiety. Probably the tension in my stomach was just hunger. Still, I glanced out the window again. One of the men appeared to be American, my guesstimate of his army fatigues, long hair and sandals. His companion might have posed for GQ, with his short-cropped hair and form-fitting pants, open-necked shirt. He turned to looked toward the motel, and the sun glinted off the silver bling around his neck. I pushed back a paranoid thought that the guy looked familiar, locked the door and leaned against it for a minute. When I glanced out the window again, they were talking to a woman. Probably they had just been waiting for her.
(Excerpt 2):
Earlier that afternoon, I’d aimed past two men to catch a shot of a woman chopping the tops of pineapple with a machete. The men may have thought I was photographing them on purpose. Maybe they had reasons to not want to be photographed. Smart, Claudia, I said, talking aloud to myself again. Alone in Mexico, and you photograph a couple of drug dealers!
I pulled the film out, wrapped it and two more exposed rolls, in a sock, and stuffed that into the toe of my high-topped walking boots. With the other sock hanging from the top of the second shoe, I set the boots in a casual arrangement in the bathroom, leaving my panties and bra on the floor. I put a new roll into my camera, put it back into my bag, and set that on a bureau near the door. If somebody was going to steal something, a camera was replaceable, but not the shots I’d taken. I left the digital in the bag too. I hated using it. I needed a zoom lens I could manipulate, I’d told François when he gifted me with the digital. He laughed, teasingly offering me his cock if I wished to manipulate something.
I took a deep breath and drank the scotch down like water. I wasn’t accustomed to being frightened. I’d lived through a revolution in Guatemala, photographing young Quiche Indian men as they emerged, terrified, out of the tall fields of corn leaving behind two friends, decapitated by drugged guerillas. I’d photographed a Paris workers strike turned violent by youthful, neo-Nazis. I’d done a photojournalism piece for Roberto, hiking along with some illegals climbing under a fence at San Ysidro. I’d even volunteered at Ground Zero in New York during holiday time off from my fall, 2001 film and photography studies at Harvard. We’d served meals, and dry socks and empathy to firefighters and police officers during that bittersweet time. And before that, and no less after that, had not, hating fear for fear’s sake, gotten caught up in the xenophobia of foreign grown, imported terrorism, or even home-grown for that matter, after 9/11. So what the hell was wrong with me now? It was one thing to watch. It was another thing to be watched.
(Excerpt 3)
I pulled the lace curtains aside and looked out again. The men were still there, drinking beer at a table, apparently talking to the two younger men I’d photographed earlier. Workers inside the ceviche stand, they’d posed and grinned, while wielding their machetes to hack at fish and coconuts. Suddenly, the Latino man, pulled his sunglasses down slightly to peer over the top of them, gesturing towards the motel.
*****
(Excerpt 4)
François stood in the doorway and watched them walk away. Looking past him, I saw someone approach Mariana and slap her hard across the face. François stepped outside and started toward them but Daniel shook his hand in a gesture of no, and hurried Mariana down the street. François locked the door and checked the windows.
“Those men across the street. I saw them in the café when I asked for your room. They have bothered you?”
“Uhm? No,” I mumbled, determined not to let him know I was afraid. “No more talking. Not tonight.” He started to close the balcony doors. “Leave them open, love,” I said. Now that he was there I felt absolutely safe again. I lay across the bed. “I want to hear the ocean.”
He came to the bed and pulled me up. “Let me hold you ma chěrie,” he said, whispering to me in French. I leaned against him. What could I say? I’d no idea how much I had missed him until I saw him walk in.
We showered together, then, stood, for a while on the balcony until the moonlight began to surrender to dawn and we surrendered to the bed, our bodies merging together in sweet, sensual, remembered ways.
François pulled the netting down around the bed, then took my face in his hands to kiss me. I ran my fingers through his hair, caressing him like a child. For a while, I could pretend that we would never be apart again, and there would be nothing to be afraid of. Suddenly I remembered my missing camera. and my eyes popped open with the unpleasant thought.
*****
(Excerpt 4)
TAOS, NEW MEXICO, CURRENT TIME:
Tony drained his beer. “Claudia, I don’t think the kids here in New Mexico
would give a damn about real neo-Nazi stuff. They don’t know a Zionist from a Zuni. But if
somebody successfully morphed Zionism with the shit they think they are suffering from, with the
U.S. or with Anglos, they could be convinced to do some destruction I think.” For now, he wouldn’t
tell Claudia about the swastikas, the running crosses, spray-painted on the canyon wall.
*****
(Excerpt 5)
GENEVA, 2000:
Salvador finished reading the excerpt from Mein Kampf but was not convinced. “Hitler and his Nazis lost.”
“But they didn’t have these.” Fernando held up an airplane ticket, and his cellphone, and pointed to his laptop. “And millions of dispensable young Latinos, poor, illiterate, willing to blame the
U.S. and Zion, as they should, for their status in life. Your words, and my vision, Salvador, and our
Paseo de la Cruz Corrinda will lead them. We will finish what our grandfathers failed to do.”
“And money?” Salvador shrugged bitterly. “Don’t count on my brother, or your father for money to fund the Running Cross.”
*****
(Except 6)
MADRID, SPAIN , CURRENT TIME:
“The photographs, señor, and the paintings,” the badly typed note said. “Or your woman could end up like this.” François stared in horror at the photograph of Claudia he had placed on table beside his bed in the hotel room. It was torn in half.
*****
(Excerpt 7)
NEW YORK, CURRENT TIME:
“In Madrid luv,” François said quietly, “somebody broke into my room.” I listened with horror: the torn photo, the threatening note, the information he’d gotten from Maurice, trying to put it all together with Mitchel’s concerns. “Somebody, maybe more than one person, is definitely following us.” He was holding something back.
“But why? To get some photographs? And a painting? That’s crazy!” I said, as close to hysterical as I ever allowed myself to get.
*****
(Excerpt 8)
TAOS, NM:
“Tony said you were Navajo, Sr. Villanueva. Perhaps I’m being too personal?” I apologized.
“Mother was Navajo,” John said. “Father was New Mexican from Shiprock.” He smiled. “English is from public school.”
We settled around a small conference table. “I want us all to take a look at this printout,” Tony said, pouring three mugs of coffee. “Dad was in World War II, Claudia. He thinks maybe…Well, I’ll let him explain.”
*****
(Excerpt 9)
TAOS, NM, CURRENT TIME:
“It will never be over!” Fernando shouted, flinging his cigarette at me. It fell short, and he ground the butt against the tile floor with his foot. “Hitler was right! Maybe they made mistakes, the Nazis, but we are younger, smarter, we don’t need armies! We have an army, every discontented kid in the world with a gun, a cell phone and the internet who can be made to understand the truth that the US and Zion are their enemies. You, François, and you Claudia, a French Jew and an American. You are the perfect symbols of the enemy!”
Now, I felt certain Fernando was going to kill us.
*****
(Excerpt 10)
TAOS, NM, CURRENT TIME:
Convulsing with anger, Fernando’s finger jerked on the trigger. I fired at almost the same time as David. Deputy sheriff Billy Garcia, his pistol held between two hands, burst into the room from the patio. Tony Villanueva kicked the front door open, directing his shotgun at the man on the floor.
“It’s over Tony!” I said. I’d killed a man and I wasn’t even sorry. Tony took the Walther from my hand, and held on to my arm with the other, looking at me with concern. “Rattlesnake or coyote?” he asked.
François took me in his arms, and then I cried.
*****
PART III
(Excerpt 11))
PARIS
François had immediately taken the two paintings, The Mountain of Roses, and Snow on the
Mountain of Roses,
to Monique at the d’Orsay. After a week to look them over, she’d come to
agree with Laina, the New Mexico Art History professor’s assessment of the numbers on the back
of Snow on the Mountain of Roses
. “That number 18 probably does stand for Adolf Hitler,” she said, the paintings laid out on a table
in her office. “But I don’t see anything on either of these that’s going to get a bank vault opened for
you. Renate was here from Geneva for a World Bank conference, so I asked for her expertise.”
*****
(Excerpt 12)
CHANTILLY, FRANCE
Devon pushed open the heavy iron gate of the tiny chapel, then took the key Chantilly
offered, and opened a wooden door. “Come François,” the old woman said. “Take off the quilts. I
tried to protect them from the weather.”
François felt numb. There, stacked carefully side by side, were paintings, perhaps fifty, perhaps more.
“Look at the signatures,” Chantilly urged. “And here, François,” she said, picking out a single painting. “Look at the signature and the inscription on this one.”
(Excerpt 13):
PARIS, FRANCE
(note: “three roses” are a key to the mystery).
François lifted my face toward his and kissed me. “You were brave,” he said, in that odd way he had of picking up a thread of conversation I thought he’d missed. “I meant to tell you… I meant to say….” He took both my hands, holding them between his, seeming to want to say something else. Suddenly I understood how this man, so independent, so free and comfortable in his relationships, this man for whom words to business associates, to his staff, to his musician friends, to women, came so easily, was unable, with integrity, to say words easily to me. He needed me, and needing anyone was so unfamiliar to him, he had no words to express it.
“I meant to tell you… all that… all that shit about being non-exclusive, when I thought I would lose you … ” If there had been more than light, I would have not been surprised to see him blush.
“Shh,” I said, pulling my hands from his, and placing them on his mouth. We walked back to lean against the railing, where steep steps led down to the funicular, and the city below. François reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, silver foil box.
“Open it my love,” he said, his mouth brushing my hair.
“François! I don’t need another medallion of Our Lady!” I said, suddenly terribly tired and irritated that I had, all night probably, allowed him to see how vulnerable I was in my love for him.
He shook his head and smiled. “Regarde ma cité des lumières! Look! Look at my city of lights!”
There, below us, lay Paris, the Paris of my dreams, the Paris I would leave soon, the Paris that would forever separate me from the one man I’d ever really loved. François took my hand in his, and reaching around me, tried to slip the diamond ring over my finger. “Je t’aime, mon amour. Je voudrais t’épouser. I love you my darling,” he whispered. “I want you to marry me.”
“François, I...” I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t let him do this, not exhausted the way we were. I closed the box, and put it in my pocket. He covered my hand with his, touching both, in a gesture of “shh, be still” to my lips.
“Cette nuit, pense seulement que je t’aime et que je t’aimerais toujours, toujours.
“Tonight,” I smiled, repeating his words, “know only that I love you and will love you forever...”
He held me close. “Forever.” He sighed with relief.
“This ‘forever,’ luv,” I said, teasing him with his own familiar question. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Don’t think you’ll get off so easy,” François laughed, tugging at my hair the way he must have pulled a girl's braids when he was a kid. “Tomorrow we talk about everything, about Taos, about Paris, about us,” he said, his enthusiam contagious. I said nothing, knowing that sometimes we talked ourselves right out of the thing we wanted the most.
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