Byzantium Read online

  The days we didn’t take trips we spent in my apartment, and the days we did take trips we always ended there. As soon as we closed the door we’d shed our clothes and scurry to bed, me getting up and dressing only to fetch our dinner from the dimly lit takeaway—Indian food, pizza, schnitzels—four doors down. We never talked of our lives beyond the age of nineteen, only of prom, football games, and the bored, unending nights spent driving the Longview loop. One afternoon she went through the catalog of girls we’d known, asking which ones I’d had crushes on, and giggled anytime I said yes and for at least two declared, “Skank!” Another time I brought up our date.

  She blushed. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”

  “So you do remember?”

  She looked at me. “What about you? What do you remember?”

  “You barely spoke to me. I took you to the Jalapeño Tree and we ate fajitas, then I asked you what you wanted to do and somehow we ended up at a soccer game. We sat in my car and all I wanted to do the whole time was feel you up, but I could tell you just wanted to go home.”

  “I was horrible!” she said. “I was really into you when you asked me out, but by the end of the week I wasn’t. I was like that all sophomore year.” Then she kicked back the sheets and sat atop me, leaning down so that her breasts pressed against my chest. “Have I made up for it now?”

  I admitted she had.

  SINCE ARRIVING IN WIESBADEN, I’d been trying, off and on, to find out where Dostoevsky had lived during his time in the city. I’d had no luck (even Google had turned up nothing) until early in November I spent an afternoon hiking on the Neroberg. At the Russian cemetery I happened upon a faded display, in Russian and German, recording the history of Russian notables in the area, and next to Dostoevsky’s name I saw Hotel Viktoria.

  I was going to wait until Saturday to look for the hotel, but Amy said she wanted to come with me. As we were walking together down Wilhelmstrasse, the street where most of the old spa hotels had stood, she asked me why I wanted to find where Dostoevsky stayed. The truth was I hadn’t read him since college. But he’d lived in Wiesbaden, and now I did: there was hope in the parallel, depth I could glom on to. If nothing else, the search for his hotel would be a good detail to drop over drinks in Ann Arbor. Before I could make up some different, better answer, though, Amy took my hand in hers and swung it a little and said, “If you wrote something, what would you write about me?”

  I thought for a moment. We passed the Meissen shop, its porcelain goat staring mutely through the window, and then I said, “That you had nice thighs and you helped me through a bad time.”

  The question had been asked in a jokey tone, and I had answered in a jokey tone, but at my reply she grew quiet.

  After we walked another block she slipped her hand from mine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what you wanted me to say.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was just being stupid.” When I glanced at her she smiled. I was practiced at detecting false smiles, but I was practiced at ignoring them, too.

  I’d asked about the old Hotel Viktoria in the tourist office, and the woman behind the counter had first consulted a book and then made a phone call before telling me that it stood on the northeast corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Rheinstrasse. We arrived there and I stopped and looked up. The Viktoria was dressed in red stone and had curving, wrought-iron balconies. It wasn’t a hotel anymore but offices, its bottom floors given over to an interior design firm and a shop selling ballet clothes. In the summer of 1865 Dostoevsky had holed up here and feverishly churned out his first draft of Crime and Punishment. Judging by the names on the plate next to the main door, his room belonged now to either a notary or a foot doctor. I’d expected to feel something, for inspiration to zap out from the stones and grip me, but it was just a building.

  Later, as we lay in bed, bellies full of chicken korma from down the street, Amy’s head resting on my chest, she said, “I like you.”

  Since our conversation on Wilhelmstrasse, things had been unsettled between us. “I like being with you, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “I like being with you, too.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Clara called. It was a Thursday and I’d spent the day teaching and had had to keep reminding myself that it was actually Thanksgiving. Clara and I hadn’t talked in two months, and after she wished me Happy Thanksgiving we didn’t say much else until she asked, “Are you flying home for Christmas?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Do you want to fly back?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I need to know what to tell my parents.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Well, what should I tell them?”

  There was the slightest quaver in her voice. I couldn’t hear the murmur of family behind her. She must have been up in her room, sitting on her bed, the door shut. In my mind I saw her there, the lights turned off and light coming in from the street, her face pointed toward the stable of horse figurines from her girlhood. Through the deadness of my heart I felt a throb.

  “Well?” she said again.

  I told her, “I’m not sure,” and she hung up.

  THE PHONE CALL was still troubling me when, a day later, Amy and I were sitting in bed. It was rainy and cold and we’d stayed in. Pulling closer to me, Amy told me that she and Macy were going to Rothenburg with Beth and her husband next week and she wanted me to come with them.

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “It’ll be fun.”

  I tried to picture the five of us on a jaunt together. I couldn’t.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said, and added something about grading.

  She put a leg on top of mine, rested her chin on my chest, and looked at me. She was smiling, but I didn’t know how long I had.

  “Fine,” I said. “Okay. Yes.”

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, the day set for the trip, a beat-up red Opel honked for me at nine. Amy introduced me to Beth and then Wesley, whom I gave a shy glance. His face was red and pitted and his upper lip bore a sparse brown mustache. We’d been at war for eight years and I hadn’t yet talked to a soldier. I was assigned the passenger seat, and Amy and Beth sat together in the back, Macy buckled into her car seat directly behind me.

  As Wesley guided us out of town he didn’t speak, but once we were on the highway he started talking. He drifted from the trips he and Beth had taken to Cologne and Neuschwanstein to karaoke at the Irish Pub to run-ins between his fellow soldiers and the polizei—one soldier caught flying up the autobahn, drunk, throwing beer bottles at the cars coming the other direction, another found passed out in his car, four in the morning, beneath a traffic light deep in the Wiesbaden suburbs. “Don’t fuck with the polizei,” he warned me. “They’ll fine your ass.” I waited for an opportune moment to mention my father’s combat in Vietnam. Those rare times I felt guilt over not going to war in this our decade of troubles, he was my excuse. He did that, so I didn’t have to—he’d actually said that to me once. But Wesley didn’t bring up Iraq or Afghanistan, though Amy told me he’d been to both, and at the end of each of his stories I simply smiled and laughed politely.

  We arrived at Rothenburg and found the place already filled with tourists, half of them American: I spotted their SUVs in the parking lot, imported Explorers and Escalades with Frankfurt or Munich plates, the owners army officers or expat bankers. We squeezed the Opel between twin Denalis and walked in through a gate in the town wall; I pushed Macy’s empty stroller while Amy held her. At the platz a brass band played in the Christmas market and crowds swelled like tides beneath the high old buildings. We bought sausages and glühwein from a booth, then started the cycle through the tidy medieval streets. A couple of times Amy took pictures of me and Macy in front of a fountain or one of the leaning, half-timbered houses. I wasn’t sure what to do with her—I’d only seen Macy a coupl
e of times since that day in Langgasse—and I held her awkwardly against my chest or rested my palm on her head as she squirmed next to my leg. By the third picture I began to get nervous. I said something to Amy about it and she gave me a blank look and said, “I just want some pictures.” I let it go.

  “Jason would have loved this,” Wesley said, stopped in front of a shop selling souvenir knives. Jason was Amy’s ex-husband, from whom, she’d told me, she’d divorced a year ago. It was through him Amy and Beth had met, army wives at Fort Bragg. But Wesley’s eyes were red. I looked to Amy and she was teary, too, and at that I felt the bottom of my stomach sink open. Amy caught me looking and said, “Please.” I stayed quiet and we left soon after.

  WHEN THE RED OPEL PULLED UP TO MY APARTMENT, Amy got out. She kissed the still-sleeping Macy on the forehead, then asked Beth, “You’re sure you don’t mind?” and Beth waved her toward me.

  Once inside she told me what I’d already figured out, that Jason was dead, not divorced. He’d been killed a year ago in Afghanistan, she said. I started to say something, though I had no idea what, and she stopped me before I could.

  “I needed to talk to you about all this tonight anyway. You get to stay ninety days without a visa.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “My ninety days are about to run out.”

  I was a little stunned. “Really?” I said.

  “I’ve got ten days—I have to leave a week from Monday. But if we got married—” She broke off, glanced away.

  “I’m already married,” I said.

  “You could divorce.”

  “That would take time.”

  “Only thirty days in Michigan. I looked it up. I could go home, then come back once you were divorced.”

  I felt the blood drain from my body. The newly risen ghost of Amy’s husband sat in the corner of the room. “My visa’s only good until August,” I said, to say something, even though she knew I’d been offered an extra year. Despite myself, I’d kept the university here happy. Unlike my predecessors, I had resisted throwing stacks of student essays in the toilet or claiming that people in the department were passing secret messages to me in their lectures.

  “It’s not just about staying here,” she said. “I like you. I’ve been thinking about us, together.”

  She seemed her prettiest then, looking up at me. She shook with a slight tremor—she was fighting hard. And the truth was, I liked her, too. But as I stood over her, the twelve years that usually disappeared when we were together returned. All I could see was her watching her old reality TV shows dubbed in German, Macy throwing a fit, and me, who liked a silent apartment filled with nothing but the noise that drifted from the street, trying to read behind a shut door.

  I told her she was being ridiculous, this wasn’t what I’d wanted, and how could I trust her after today? For a moment her face remained still, but then she bolted up, hand jerked to hide her eyes, and rushed out. I stood there and watched her go.

  NEARLY A MONTH LATER, the week after Christmas, I flew to London, summoned by Clara. Her sister lived in the Surrey suburbs, and Clara had flown over to visit. She asked me to come for a day, and there wasn’t a way for me to say no. I took a late flight and spent the night in a bland, business travelers’ hotel near Heathrow that Clara’s sister’s husband, still technically my brother-in-law, booked for me with his points.

  In the morning I took a cab to Windsor Great Park, where I was to meet Clara beside Virginia Water. The cab driver dropped me off in a parking lot, and beyond the lot spread the park, or one corner of it. People were out, walking dogs they’d dressed in raincoats and plaid quilted capes. The trees were lifeless, their bare limbs seemingly all that kept the gray, pressing clouds from tumbling to earth.

  Clara was up ahead, her back to me as she watched the swans floating in the lake. I called to her, and she turned. There was her auburn hair, spilling out of her parka’s hood, there was her dainty pointed nose, red with cold. Seeing her, I felt the last months erased, as if I’d just come up from a dream.

  “Do you want anything?” I asked, nodding at the concession cart a hundred yards away.

  “Tea,” she said.

  I’d been nervous ever since Clara called to ask me over, and as I waited for the tea and my hot chocolate I studied the cart’s case of British snacks and tried to think through what I might do next. I had a suspicion of what was happening, but still my mind refused to work.

  After I gave Clara her tea we took the path that went to the right, up the eastern branch of the lake. For a while we said nothing and watched the trotting dogs. Then, as I was testing my hot chocolate—still scalding—Clara said, “Do you plan to move back in with me next summer?”

  That had been the plan once, the idea that Germany would be a cure.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”

  There was a pause. Then, with a changed, efficient tone I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”

  I stopped, but she kept walking. I jogged to catch up with her. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going to file for divorce.”

  As we walked she kept a few inches between us. I sipped my hot chocolate. It was cooler now.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll let you know what you need to do.”

  In that moment I decided the last thing I wanted was to cause her more pain, so I told her I’d agree to whatever she asked.

  We passed through a part of the path lined on both sides with chain-link fence. Behind the fence workmen had left tools and some kind of tractor.

  “What have you been up to, anyway?” she said.

  “Fucking a war widow,” I answered. I tried to smile, like it was some kind of joke, and only when I kept walking did I notice that this time she’d stopped. I turned and saw she’d started to cry. I went to her, but she batted me away. Dog walkers passed us, shifting their eyes.

  “Really?” she said. “That’s what you’re going to say?”

  I tried to put my arm around her, but she backed from me. “You don’t deserve anything,” she said, and the words cut like broken glass.

  I FLEW BACK TO FRANKFURT. On the plane I tried an exercise whereby I emptied my mind bit by bit. It didn’t work.

  From the airport I took the S-Bahn to Wiesbaden, and as we came to the Main I looked up, as I always do for rivers. I’d taken an early flight. The Main was still and narrow, and as the train turned to cross it the morning sun shot through the windows and the river suddenly glistened. Across from me two plump girls with spiked raven hair giggled over their cell phones, indifferent, their thick thighs stretching the weave of their matching leopard-print tights, their stout pimpled faces held close together. In the aisle a Turk or Romany, accordion folded shut and slung over his shoulder, shook his knitted change purse. I closed my eyes and listened as the bridge clacked beneath us. I felt Clara’s words, Amy’s silence, wounds beneath my skin. But the winter sun shone on my face and I said to myself: I am blameless. I said: I owe no one. I said: Surely something better has been promised me.

  THE MOOR

  The Moor’s Origins

  The earliest record we have of the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke—the Moor—is an advertisement he ran in several Berlin newspapers in 1873, promising discretion and modest fees. Nothing is known of his cases from this period, but, tracing the address given in the advertisement to one of the city’s poorer quarters (Prenzlauer Berg), we believe they would have been limited to the lowest kind of work: finding stolen dogs, tracking suspected adulterers. After the advertisement, Burke drops from history until the fall of 1876, when he leaps onto the scene with a single feat of deduction.

  All of Berlin had been baffled by the disappearance of the renowned theater critic Wolfgang Metzger. The police searched the sewers, dug up his mistresses’ back gardens. They questio
ned actors whose abilities he had maligned, impresarios whose shows he had damned. Neither the body nor evidence of foul play was found. Then, two weeks later, a letter appeared in the newspaper: Metzger had not disappeared, but had murdered his twin, a wealthy hay merchant, and replaced him. The letter, signed by Burke, described how he had uncovered the truth when he visited the twin’s villa to offer his services. He’d been directed to the stables and, finding the man there, noticed the horses shying from his touch. “With that I understood all,” he added with the confident flourish he would keep for the rest of his career. The twin’s servants might not have recognized a difference between Metzger and his brother, nor the twin’s wife, but the horses, with their keen animal sense, had betrayed the critic, who had hoped, by impersonating his brother, to avoid his debtors.

  The city was shocked by this revelation and amazed by its deliverer. Everyone had the same question on their lips: who was this man, and where had he come from? Even now we can only speculate. Burke never spoke of his past, nor of how he came to detection. One rumor holds that he was born a slave on a Texas sugar plantation in the early 1840s, another that he was the son of a New Orleans freedman. References in certain archives suggest that a black detective—called, simply, El Negrito—practiced in Havana during the Civil War, but no proof connects him to Burke. We only know that Burke was American, that he was in his thirties when he arrived in Berlin, and that at the start of his career—in which he would solve over seven hundred cases and be memorialized in dozens of dime novels—he already possessed powers to rival the French masters Vidocq and Devergie.