Uncertain In Greenland

I was sitting in a truly shitty bar in Godthab, Greenland, with Dirty Dick Abdallah and a midget named Rommell, when the door burst open, and an explosion of snow needles shoved an Eskimo through the door and slammed her face down on our ancient linoleum-topped table, which slammed to the floor, along with our incredibly expensive Danish beers. Blood and beer made a tarnished pink puddle on the tabletop at our feet. A dozen people jumped up to shut the door before we all froze to death, and before anyone gave the Eskimo a second look. A dozen drinkers muttered curses at the rudeness of the intruder for leaving a door open for more than a split second. It was late fall in Greenland, after all, so who could blame them?

Fall in Greenland is like a real bad winter in Fargo North Dakota.

Fully dressed for the season, which I think is most of the year, it is hard to tell the gender of an Eskimo, or anyone else up here, for that matter, until you have them pretty much unwrapped, and sometimes even then it isn't easy unless you unwrap them all the way. Somehow I knew the fur parka on the floor had a woman in it.

Once the indoor snow settled, everyone in the place stared our way.

Now, an Eskimo face down in a bar is a common sight in Greenland, especially at a table of Gringos. Booze is horribly expensive in Greenland, and it is for a reason. The indigenous folk are generally as good or bad as people anywhere else, but they lack that special European gene for dealing with booze that folk from more southern climes have so carefully nutured and evolved for eons. The Danes, who own the place, deal with rampant alcoholism by making liquor too expensive for the natives, who, generally speaking, have no cash. Free food, free housing, free heat, free everything, but no hard dinero.

More about that later. Blood in the beer on the floor, and more blood than beer, well, it is a cause for concern. It may have been as much concern for the wasted beer, to be honest, at least at first.

No one moved or spoke for a full three seconds, and then most of the handful of patrons sat down with both hands on their 15 dollar drinks in case another Eskimo came through the door and knocked their prize over. We stood there. Rommell was closest to the woman. I mean, he had no choice, being a midget and all.

Let me say now, I know you aren't supposed to say "midget" anymore, but that's what he called himself, so for now, I do too.

Rommell reached down and turned her over, and when he did, her parka hood fell open, proving my gender intuition to be right on. Her eyes were open and looking at nothing but her next stop. Rommell looked up at us and said, in his bizarre, somewhere-from-middle-Europe accent, "Well, we are now very fucked."

I had to go with him when he was right.

We weren't supposed to be here, and, in point of fact, we were illegal aliens in Greenland, although there isn't a lot of illegal alien enforcement in a place nobody in even moderate control of their senses would choose to sneak in to.

Even worse, Rommell, who had the sex drive of a goat on Viagra and always said "He who culls goes to Hell", had managed to spend many Danish colorful monies getting this very same Eskimo gal very drunk at this very same bar, at this very same table, the night before, in front of mostly the very same audience that now was staring balefully at us at this very moment. With the very same me and Dirty Dick with him.

In spite of him being Rommell, the woman had let Rommell lead her tottering and giggling out the door, like a child leading his drunk mother home, into the whiteout of the never ending sea of snow, and, doubtless, to our sad hotel room to experience his particular and embarrassing version of love.

Now, before you begin thinking that I am saying this because Rommell was, ah, height challenged, let me assure you it isn't so. It is just that he gave "little people" , and bipeds in general, a bad name. He was ill-tempered, bad natured, and didn't give personal hygiene more than an occasional passing wave. He could drink more than a normal NFL lineman, and started more fights than anyone I ever saw. He never saw a woman he didn't think wanted him, and instead of throwing out a line, he would take a bite out of his beer mug and chew it up and swallow it, looking them, all the while, dead in the eye. Mostly he ended up with hookers, of course, and hard-up hookers at that, but Greenland is different, and he loved the place as much as Dirty Dick and I hated it.

You have to know that in Greenland, there are almost no sexual taboos. A roll in the sack is more like a handshake, especially if you have the dough to buy drinks. Doesn't matter much if the girl is single, engaged or married, 16 or 66, if you can buy enough drinks, you can find someone to love, even Rommell.

I know you think I am being horrible here but consider this: when you leave the country, they give you a handful of horse pills...antibiotics, to cure their very particular version of the clap...and immigration just assumes you have it. And it is a good thing they do. And so Rommell was in heaven here.

Of course, being a progressive Danish possession, they also have telephones, and the bartender had used it. Before I could kick Rommell for living, the door exploded in again, and the snow threw in three Greenland cops. Once they got the ice off their eyeballs, they zeroed in on us, and the rat bartender, who loved us every night for having money, ran over and started singing to them like Danes do when they talk. Dirty Dick didn't look at me, but he said "Truly, we are very fucked".

Well, running for it was out of the question. Unless the cops gave us a minute or two to bundle up first, we would be ice sculptures before we got two blocks. Plus, where would you go? Godthab is sort of in a bowl, because ten months a year they push the snow out of town and pile it up. There is sort of a road out, but I had never seen anything but dogsleds get past the docks, which is how everything and everybody came to town. No way out.


The cops walked over. Two were natives, and one was a standard issue blond and blue-eyed Dane, and, of course, he was the boss. Predictable here. He stood two feet from my nose and started yodeling at me in Danish, sort of politely.


He might as well have been speaking Martian, but I let him sing on until he stopped and tried to stare an answer out of me. I finally shrugged, in the universal sign language for, "I don't have any thoughts at all". This was unacceptable. He started in again, not very politely.


One of the other cops started the upwrap process on the woman on the floor. Her last layer was soaked in blood. What looked like a piece of rusty iron or bone rod stuck out maybe two inches from the middle of her chest. It had a hole in the end.


We all stared, and even the boss cop stopped wearing me out. The cop on the floor looked up. "Unaaq," he said, looking at the boss. "What?", said I, letting him know what he would have found out anyway, sooner or later. He looked at me sharply, and said, in perfect English, "Harpoon". "Please give me your passport and any other identification you have with you." "All of you, please."

Before the policeman had the word "please" all the way out of his mouth, Rommell kicked him in the knee, hard, threw open the door, and disappeared instantly into the incoming blast of snow like a good Vegas magic trick. The blond cop grabbed his leg, hopped once and slipped on the bloody beer, then fell hard, face down, on the dead woman.

Mother of Ice Caps, were we ever very fucked now.

Nuuk is the local's name for this place, and even though it isn't pronounced exactly the same, this time of year it looks like it has been nuked by a snow-based fission bomb, at least to me. 

Like most people who do what I do for a living, I am from Texas by way of Lousiana, and I need some snakes and some big mosquitoes and some wet, dirt-smelling heat to feel at home. Here there are about 50,000 people living on the world's largest island, bigger than the entire U.S. Most of it is ice, and this is the biggest town. 14,000 thousand people and shrinking, and I didn't want to be on the last dog sled out of town.

Almost all the big buildings are gray concrete square blocks, for public housing. As the cops marched me and Dirty Dick out the door, I shivered in the frozen black air and kind of hoped Rommell was holed up in one of them and not frozen stiff in an ice pile somewhere at the end of a skinny dark street. He ran out without his parka. Even an asshole like him deserved a better fate.

Dirty Dick, all six foot four and skinny of him, shambled along in front of me, with two cops in the lead and one bringing up the rear, limping hard, and giving off very pissed vibes.

 Snow tornadoes swirled and danced on top of the black ice that paved the street. No cars, and no people. I knew some of the little stores along the road were actually painted cheerful colors, but at night they all looked gray-brown. In the fall and winter, it is almost always some level of night here.

The Government building suddenly loomed in front of us, looking like a giant concrete coffin with little long, thin windows in it.

Now let me say, Dirty Dick didn't have hygiene issues, it was just his name. We were Doodlebuggers, seismic exploration workers, marine version at the moment, and most people like us had colorful, or insulting and sometimes accurate nicknames, although some were misleading, and some understatments.

Dick was originally from somewhere in the Middle East. Doodlebuggers, especially of the seagoing sort like us, are gypsies. We were salt dome searchers, runaways, really bad husbands, whoredogs, intermittent drunks, semi-suicidals, sometimes low level CIA informants, and generally miscreant society misfits. Doesn't matter if we were from China, Europe, the U.S., Australia or wherever, you don't ask each other personal questions and you don't make good, long term friends.

 I have had shipmates (we don't actually know shit about sailing ships) eaten by sharks, thrown in prison in brand new African countries, disappear forever in whorehouses, and throw off all their clothes and go native in Sumatra, but you don't talk much about it. The turnover on crews is shockingly low, under the circumstances. Everyone has someone or something to forget or hide from.

Dirty Dick was no different. I had no idea how he got his name, but I was sure his name wasn't Dick, much less Dirty. He rarely talked, and when he drank, he talked less. He didn't drink very often, but when he did, it was always until tears ran down his face, and then he would stand up and leave. Always alone. I never saw him with a woman, or even a man, if you know what I mean, and I bet you do. He never laughed or even smiled, but he was smart and worked hard. 

He was sort of a hack scientist, or electrical engineer, really, and he ran navigation equipment.

See, when you are on the greasy gray ocean looking for where oil might be way down below, you really have to know exactly where you are, really exactly, all the time. If your data tells the drilling guys to drill right here, and they spend a couple hundred million bucks, and you are off a little bit, they drill up water, and they get really truly pissed off. The greasy grey ocean all looks alike, at least on the top side, which is all I hope to ever see. So navigation, and knowing you marked a spot within a couple feet is seriously important. Dick could do that. It took enough equipment to fill half a single-wide trailer, and he could make it work and fix it when it broke.

Dick only wore sandals, everywhere, even in the North Sea, except here because you just couldn't, and there were no toe-donors. His boots hurt his feet, and he walked like it. We went slow. I felt like the scenery looked.

We took turns going through the revolving door until we were all standing in the lobby. It was spotless, spare and gray, gray desks, chairs, tile, the whole thing. No one was there, but it was midnight on a Friday, after all. "This way, please," said the blond police officer, shrugging off his parka. His uniform name tag said "Hanson." 

We followed him to an elevator and rode up one floor. No one spoke or looked at each other in the elevator, possibly because everyone was stunned by the Muzak cover of what I am ashamed to admit I recognized as an ABBA song.  It drove us out of the elevator and into the police headquarters. Officer Hanson nodded at the ancient cop behind the gray front desk. He looked like an a squinty-eyed Fred Flintstone. "Please have a seat," he said, pointing at a row of new but uncomfortable gray straight-backed chairs. 

We all sat, me and Dick with a cop on each side. They kept their parkas on, but Dick and I took ours off and held them in their laps. 

Hanson lifted the pass-through at the front desk and disappeared through a door in the back. I looked around. Dirty Dick looked down, like he might cry, which was pretty much his routine anyway. The cops on either side of us looked straight ahead. They looked so much alike I thought they might be brothers. "Nice to be warm again," I said to the one next to me. He ignored me and looked as the wall across the room.  I followed his line of sight. There was nothing on the far wall but a framed poster that looked like a government announcement in what was no doubt Danish.  

I fidgeted. No one else moved at all. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere but I didn't see one. The Inuit cops were statues and Dirty Dick Abdallah stared at his hated boots like he owed them money. A police radio squawked painfully now and then with bursts of gibberish. I couldn't see where it was coming from either. Dick and I jumped every time it happened, but the cops on either side of us never moved a muscle. 

All of a sudden, Officer Hanson appeared. He pointed at me and Dirty Dick with two fingers of one hand, like when you give the evil eye or make the sign for "speak with forked tongue." I had never seen anyone do that before. Then he moved his hand to gesture us up, and into the maw of the police hive. "This way."

I elbowed Dick to look up, and stood, holding my hand up with my pointer and pinkie up and the rest closed and said, "Hook'em Horns." I couldn't help it. He looked confused, and then not happy, and said, "Now, please." We got up and followed him through the desk gate and down a narrow gray hall. Officers Mutt and Jeff brought up the rear.

We stopped outside of a door in the hall. Hanson knocked sharply once and opened the door, and motioned us in. Dick went first, and I followed. Hanson brought up the rear and the Frozen Twins took up positions in the hall on either side of the door.

There was a small blond man, in a carefully tailored police uniform, sitting behind a grey metal desk in the room. He had thinning blond hair, a badly tattered mustache, a long narrow neck, a narrow face, and he had watery blue eyes, rimmed with red. He pointed us to two chairs in front of his desk. There was nothing on his desk but a calendar, a pad and a pen, and two passports. We sat. Hanson stood behind us against the door.

We sat in silence for a few minutes as he stared at us. I stared back, thinking maybe he needed a tissue for those eyes. Dirty Dick stared at his hated boots, looking like he might cry too. Eventually, he got tired of trying to scare us, and picked up a passport. Wasn't mine, as it had a dark purple cover , so I figured it was Dick's. He looked from the passport to Dick a couple of times, turned the pages and read them carefully, and looked at Dick again. "I suppose it is you," he said, in English, no accent, sporting a reedy, scratchy voice. He tossed Dick's passport onto the desk and picked up mine. He looked at it and looked at me several times.

I knew what was coming next.

"What kind of name is this?"

Ok, I hate this, and it is the story of my life summed up in a handful of words.

"What do you mean?"

"Zeno Nguyen. I am familar with American names. Most of you are named Bob or Dan or Smith or something like that, or maybe something Irish?" "What is an American doing named this?"

"We have lots of different names in America. I know a girl named June Bug Delahoussey from Grande Isle, Louisiana. You just never know in the USA."

He didn't think that was funny, or interesting, I guess, because he started the evil glare trick again. Now, I have been glared at by some professionals in my young life, including my mother, who could out-glare this  guy two straight falls after drinking a six-pack of Jax beer, so I just waited.

"I am Captain Jansen, and I am in charge here. I didn't want to be in charge of a giant frozen island full of bored, stupid drunks, but I have little personality for politics or, what do you say, biting asses, which is why I am here. Now, I want to know why you are here."

"It's kissing," I said.

"What did you say?" hissed the captain.

"Kissing asses, kissing, not biting. Biting asses would get you posted someplace worse than this, if there was a worse place. Which, I admit, there is not."

His wet eyes went to wet slits.

"You think you are funny. So. I think you are more in deep trouble than funny. You are here illegally, and I find from Hanson here that you are also involved in murder. Maybe you will find some years in a cold concrete box on a giant frozen island funny too, but I think not." He looked at Dick, and then back at me. "Why are you here? Start with that, then we will get to the woman."

We sat for a minute. Then Dick said, softly, "We missed the boat."

First, let me say this is true, but before I go to why, I have to cover who, meaning me.

Zeno Nguyen. That's me. Screwed from the get-go by a name. It is true, but at least I have an excuse. 

My grandfather was from Viet Nam. He was half French and half Vietnamese, the son of a French soldier and a the daughter of a local rice farmer in Dien Ben Phu. He moved to the U.S. in 1969, after being the personal bodyguard for the President of South Vietnam, and the premier hand-to-hand combat instructor for the elite units of the South Vietnamese elite forces.

My grandmother had been a peasant in the central part of South Vietnam, the daughter of a a moderately successful rice farmer. This doesn't mean they had a car, but everyone ate well, and my grandmother attended a French Catholic school for girls.

My grandfather was posted in Dien Ben Phu as a security expert for the French Consulate. He had a family in France, but he had never seen them for more than a month a year since he was posted halfway across the world. He saw my grandmother when  her high school class toured the Consulate one day, and was smitten.

My grandfather courted my mother enthusiastically after that, following her back to the school, and then bribing, or perhaps threatening someone at the school to find out my grandmother's personal information. Much to her embarrassment, he began calling on her, and, surprisingly, was able to meet, and gain the confidence, and even respect, of her father. Eventually she fell under his spell as well, conceding the worth of her naivite and innocence to be equal to that of his relentlessness and charm.

He had been a savate champion in France, and had gone on to study Muy Thai and Jiu Jitsu before joining the army. He was a very large man, well over six feet, and, according to old fight programs, weighed  240 pounds.

Eventually, with the blessing of the old farmer, my grandmother and grandfather moved in together, in a small apartment adjacent to the Consulate compound. Her French improved from schoolgirl basics, and he learned enough Vietnamese to talk to her father , her brothers, and the old men of her village, as long as it was simple conversation, and they spoke one at a time.

There was, apparently, never any talk of his other family and life, although I am sure that my grandmother knew about them. There was never any question of marriage between them, even though the mortal sin tainted them both, even with the French Catholic laissez-faire attitude about such things, especially in Viet Nam. However, that inconvenient side effect of arrangements like this came to put a gilding of implied commitment to their relationship, a link that formalized and forever memorialized their relationship. My father.

He was born as the French began their inevitable decline in the country, a boy with classic Vietnamese features, but with a size not seen often in Southeast Asians. He was the treasure of his parents, and his father glowed for him, and rarely left his side. Their time together was so intense, the boy never begrudged his father the four or six weeks every six months that he would disappear to his ghostly primary life.

By the time he was four, my father, who they named, without foresight, Phuc, (which in southern Vietnamese means "Luck") began learning savate from his father. By the time he was ten, he was the biggest Vietnamese kid anyone could remember seeing, and was a loving, dutiful son. He was quiet, polite, and a very good student at the French school he attended. His father was a God to him. 

He could have been teased and bullied about his parents unusual situation, but his size and his skill at fighting caused all but the fastest and oldest kids to leave him alone.

The Indochina war changed it all. In 1947, when he was twelve, Phuc's father left home during the night, and hell began. The French and the Vietnamese went to war in 1946, and in a year, the war spread to the south. My grandfather disappeared, and was never seen by his wife and son again.

My father wouldn't talk much about the years that followed, but I know they were hard. In 1950, all the French were gone from his home town, and some people came and took him away from his mother to be a soldier, at 15. He was six feet tall, the biggest male around, and the soldiers never believed his mother's screaming claim, "He is only a boy, only fifteen!", as they dragged him away and pushed her back. It wouldn't have matter anyway. Fifteen is plenty old enough to die fighting in that part of the world.

He was supposed to fight the French, but he refused. They went to beat him, and I guess it wasn't easy, because apparently he beat the crap out of half a dozen would-be persuaders before he was eventually held down. Just before someone shot him, an officer intervened and had him dragged off.

He sat on the floor of a shanty house, and the officer leaned against the wall, smoked,  and stared at him for a while. "What is your name?", he asked. 

"Nugyen".

"And your first name?"

"Zeno."

The officer frowned. "What kind of name is that?"

"The name my father gave me," said my grandfather.

"And who is your father?"

"He is the greatest soldier and greatest fighter alive."

"And he is French."

The officer stood quietly and smoked thoughtfully.

"How old are you?"

"Fifteen."

After a minute, the officer said, "You are not the biggest fifteen year old I have ever seen, but almost. You are not the fastest fifteen year old I have seen, but almost that too. You are certainly the biggest, fastest fifteen year old I have seen, though. Where did you learn to fight? You have injured five of my men, all grown, some of them, I think, badly. How did you learn to this at fifteen?"

"My father taught me. He is the greatest fighter of all the French", said my Grandfather, sullenly, but with defiance and pride. "He would kill you all easily."

"Even so," said the officer smiling through a cloud of blue-white smoke, "Even so."

"I have a friend that I think would like to meet you. He likes to meet boys who can fight like you. I think you would like to meet him, and see what he can teach you."

" I just want to go home," said my father. "I am French," he said, head raised. "I will not fight the French."

"Even so." The officer smiled, dropped his hand-rolled cigarette and ground it out, without looking, on the dirt floor.

Time to Go

The Danish Policeman looked at us both, and rapped his fingers on his grey metal desk in a five-finger drum roll, little finger to big.

"What do you mean, you missed the boat?" 

Dick said, "We missed the boat. If you miss the boat, the boat leaves without you. You have a time to leave, and if you miss it, the boat doesn't wait. We missed the boat, and it left us here."

I said, "You can't miss the boat. It just isn't done."

He pointed a sharp finger at me, fast, like drawing a gun. "I didn't ask you. I asked him. I am talking to him. Let him talk."

Dick looked even sadder, if that was possible. Dick hated to talk unless he had to. I have worked a lot of twelve hour shifts with Dick where he never said a word, sitting eight feet from me. He liked digital integer talk, not words.

"What boat is this?"

"The Kristen Svenska."

"And what kind of boat is this? A fishing boat?"

"No. It is a seismic boat," said Dick, once again staring at his boots, as if they were the cause of the current sadness in his life.

WTF

"So," said Captain Jansen, "I am supposed to believe this boat of yours just left you here because you were late. Why were you late?" Dick and I looked at each other.

"We were, uh," and I was interrupted by the sound of shouting somewhere outside the door. The captain looked at Hanson, who looked at the door. The yelling was loud, but muffled enough to be incomprehensible. It got louder. A loud crashing, a scream, another smashing sound like furniture breaking, and silence. The captain motioned with his head at Hanson, still standing beside us, toward the door. Hanson opened the door, took a step out, and jumped back inside the door, and slammed it shut. A siren started blaring inside the building. Hanson shouted something in Danish to the captain, who responded by looking like he had been slapped. I heard a quiet stuttering noise, like someone playing a drumroll with hands on a table. A line of holes appeared in the door on either side of Hanson, and he arched his back, and fell forward on the floor between me and Dick.

We looked at Hanson lying between us. The back of his blue-black jacket had three holes between the letters that spelled POLITI in bright yellow. The "L" and the first "I"  were turning red fast. 

We jumped to our feet and looked at the Captain. His tiny red-rimmed blue eyes were open pretty wide now. There were two holes on either side of his head in the wall behind him. Hanson had been standing between the captain and the door. He jumped to his feet just as the door smashed open and a huge man in a black coat took a half step into the room.

Dick and I were almost against the wall, and to either side of the door, so he didn't see us at first. In guttural, heavily accented English, he barked, "Where are they?"

The captain looked at him and opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but nothing came out.

"I give you one chance! Where are the two men?"

The captain bucked up a little, and almost shouted, "You are under arrest! This is the police!"

The gunman answered with a three shot burst from a small, nasty looking gun with a long thick barrel, like a big pistol. It didn't make much noise for being inside and right there.

The captain's face changed shape, and the wall behind his head splattered with grey and red goop and white pieces of bone as the back of his head exploded. Even though he had to be seriously dead, he still stood there, frozen,  for about a half a second and then he dropped to the floor all at once, loose,  like a puppet with his strings cut. 

The man stepped into the room, and as he did, he saw Dick to his right, out of the corner of his eye. In the time it took for him to turn his head to the the right, I had time to suddenly be scared shitless,  fell sorry for myself, and kick him in the side of the knee, brutally perfectly. It made a very loud crack, and I remember being surprised he didn't scream. 

Instead, he bowed his head and sort of growled. I didn't wait to see if he would fall from an injury that would have had anyone I knew, including and especially me, shrieking on the floor. I kicked him again, just as hard, in the exact same place. This time he screamed and hit the floor, dropping his gun to grab his ruined knee. If he hadn't, I might have been willing to let him shoot me. He landed right on top of Hanson, who didn't notice, of course.

.

I looked up from the dark man to Dick. He was almost pale, and I noticed he had a white bloodless  line around his dark lips. 

The siren was still going off, but it sounded miles away at the moment.

I stepped around the writhing hulk and kicked his gun away, harder than I meant to. It slid spinning under the captain's desk, and stopped with a sodden thud when it hit something soft. Oops.

The man looked up at me, still holding his knee, his hard, ugly face contorted in agony. 

He gasped, and through locked teeth hissed, "You are dead. I kill you for this." He closed his eyes for a second, and then looked at me with complete hatred. "Before, just business." He took a deep breath. "Now, it is for me, too." 

I looked down at him, and said, "Who the fuck are you, Chester?" "What have I done to you.? Before now, I mean." 

"All three of you are dead, but now mostly you." He closed his eyes and started making his growling noises again. For some reason I noticed his teeth looked like big Chiclets, all of them almost the same size and shape.

I looked up at Dick. "Do you know this guy?" 

Dick just stared down at the man, and slowly shook his head from side to side. "What are we going to do?" 

I didn't answer, because I had no idea. I went to the door and looked out. The twins were on the floor on either side of door. One was face down, and the other had his back to the wall, head slumped forward like a sleeping drunk. I looked down the hall and could see a pair of feet sticking out from under a desk, and nothing else. The siren seemed louder out here. I had the odd but likely accurate thought that no more than five minutes had passed since we heard the first sounds of a scuffle. 

Even in Greenland, lots of people would be here very soon.

 I turned back into the room to get Dick just in time to see  the gunman roll off of Hanson's body and lurch himself almost upright on his good right leg, with his left hanging uselessly. He caught himself on the front edge of the captain's desk, braced himself with his left hand and reached under his coat with his right. Out it came, holding a small pistol. 

Unbelieveable. Any normal human would have, should have passed out from sheer agony by now. I happen to know about these things, unfortunately. My heritage, my destiny, maybe even. Fighting. Shit.

Before he could figure out a way to turn around, I kicked him between the legs from behind as hard as I could. He crashed forward onto the desk, stayed there for a moment, and then slowly slid to the floor. I gave him a minute to get his balls back down out of his throat, and reached down and heaved him over on to his back. He was heavy as hell. He rolled over with his face two feet from mine. I jumped back like I had been bitten by a snake. I heard Dick hiss, "Shit!"

There was a metal square in the middle of his face where his nose should have been, right below his wide open, unblinking eyes. The base of the Captain's memo holder. Even Super Thug couldn't keep going with a six-inch nail stuck through his nose. 

I didn't want to touch him anymore, but I had to know who wanted to kill me. Us. I searched him, trying not to look at his face. 

There was nothing in any of his pockets but a crumpled note that had my name, Rommel's and Dick's, and the name of our hotel. as well as our former bar hangout. And another word I couldn't read, because it was written in Cyrillic alphabet. Russian?

"Jesus." 

"He isn't here, I am most sure of that.  And maybe we should not be either."

Dick was right. Time to go. I pocketed the scrap of paper, and snatched our passports off the desk.

We walked out of the room, past the twins, careful to step around the wide wet bloodstains on the cheap grey carpet. The lobby was a mess. There were at least three more bodies there in uniform, and no telling if they were dead or just close. Good thing it was a skeleton crew this time of night...or morning. 

The siren was semi-deafening now. I heard noises outside and below and looked out of the window. A dark sedan pulled away from the front of the building and accelerated down the frozen, gleaming street. Before it had gone a block, I could here more sirens mixing with the one that seemed to be right next to my head. The street cops were here. Four marked SUV's stopped suddenly in front of the building, each sliding a little on the slippery street, so that they were jumbled instead of in a line. Cops jumped out in pairs and started running to the doors. 

"Stairs," I said to  Dick, and we ran past the elevators to a door at the end of the hall. Dick threw it open, and we ran through. Closet. Shit. We ran out. There was another door at the other end. As I threw open that door, I heard the bell ringing at the elevator announcing the arrival of the car, and bad news. Stairs. We ran down, the stairwell door closing as the elevator doors opened.

We got to the bottom of the stairs and there was another hall, with a door at either end again. I started to open the one closest to us, and decided to have a peek out first. Lucky. The police SUV's were ten feet outside the door. 

I closed it.

We went to the other end of the hall, and peeked out. A parking lot, with only a half a dozen  old cars in it. Probably belong to the guys on the floor upstairs.  We exited the building. I started to run and so did Dick, but then I thought better of it, and said, "Let's walk." I was starting to shake. Dick looked pretty grim, too. We crossed the parking lot and went through an alley between two short squat buildings, and ended up on another street. There wasn't a soul to be seen. I realized I could here sirens blaring behind us, several, in layers of uneven sound. I looked at my watch. It was 3 a.m. In Greenland. It was dark and freezing, and it would be just about the same at noon. I never thought it would happen, but I wished I was back in Dallas, or even Louisiana. 

We walked in silence, heading back in the direction we had come from when we were at the bar before we met the Eskimo twin policemen, after the Eskimo girl died on our table and spilled our beers. Our boots made clacking sounds that echoed off the frozen buildings on either side of the street.

Dick was the one that broke the silence. 

"Now we are truly the most fucked of all, ever. And all because the fucking midget Rommell made us miss the boat."

I thought he might cry. I thought I might too. He was so right.

Getting Out

Dick turned to face me.

"Zeno, you are my best friend."

Christ. I had spent a lot of time with Dick over the last two years, and I liked him fine, but I didn't know him at all in a way, didn't even know where he was from. He never talked.

"I am from Palestine."

Shit. I sure didn't know he was a mind reader.

"I have seen much suffering. Much violence, a lot of death. It is why I work as a doodlebug crew person, away from my country, where I would be an engineer if it were a sane place. But this is the craziest time of my entire life, worse than my home, and I feel like we are on a different planet or something like this."

Let me just say that in two years of working and drinking and generally debauching around the world together, this was the largest number of words I had ever heard Dick say, cumulatively. 

"Now I think I don't really know who you are, and I am lost where we are here in this cold and crazy place. What have we done to bring this to ourselves? I thought you were a peaceful person, but you broke and killed that terrorist like you do it every day. People are dying all around us all night, and it seems to all be about us. Everyone dead was surprised and confused. What is happening all of a sudden in this strange country? Why is this happening to us?"

I don't know if I was more shocked about what had gone down in the last three hours, or with Dick's suddden soliloquy. I wouldn't have believed he had all those words in him. Not to mention my shock at finding out that I was his best friend. Apparently he had been around a lot of really disappointing people up until now.

"Dick," I said, "I am your friend, and I will tell you my story later, but right now, we need to think about our next move so that we don't end up dead or in a very bad prison for a long time, wondering about what we did to deserve being there. What do you think we should do?"

Dick stood there for a minute, lost in thought. He looked up. " We need to get to our hotel and get our possessions and find a way to leave. The authorities in this country will not believe we had nothing to do with this. Maybe we need to try to find Rommell as well."

"OK. Let's do that. When we are out of here, we can figure out what is going on, maybe, and see if we can straighten all this out."

We started walking again. All this time, not a car or a person to be seen. It was bitterly cold, and the wind cut through my clothes like a coroner's knife.

The hotel wasn't far or hard to find, because the town was small, and laid out like a grid over a long rectangle. We turned left down a side street a block away, and I saw the car before I saw the hotel. I grabbed Dick's sleeve and jerked him into a recessed doorway with me. I was pretty sure it was the same car I had seen pull away from the police building a second ahead of the cops, and it was parked half a block from the front of our hotel door. The exhaust vapor said it was running, and it was the only car on the street for a block in either direction. 

Run Run Run

"What is it? What is wrong?" Dick was still wide and shaky.

"Did you see that car on the street? I saw  the same car in front of the police station before we ran down the stairs. It  took off when the police cars were pulling up. I think it might have been waiting for the killer guy. I think there may be more like him in that car."

Dick looked like his dog had died. I felt worse than that.

"We have to do something. I think it is only a matter of minutes before the cops show up."

"Zeno, the cops are not coming; not anytime soon, for sure. Think about it. All the police that saw us are dead."

He was right. I thought about it. The only police connection between us and the dead woman or the nutjob mass murderer were the twin patrolmen, Hanson,  the Captain, and maybe the desk sergeant. None of them were in any condition to point at us, or at anything else. 

So it was the guys in the car that were the only immediate problem. We could stand around until daylight and hope that we wouldn't freeze before then (unlikely), or take off without the stuff from our rooms. I wasn't sure what Dick had to get, but I could live without the rest of my clothes. Everything else I owned was still on the boat, which, by now was probably off the coast of Nova Scotia. 

"Dick, why don't we just blow off the stuff in our rooms? We can't get in except through the front door for the next few hours. They'll see us, and if they are happy to shoot up a police station and kill cops, they won't even think twice about blowing us up in a crappy hotel."

Dick's face hardened, and to my complete surprise, he said, "No" through clenched teeth. "I am going to my room for my belongings." 

"But Dick the guys in the car..."

"No!" he hissed, vehemently. "I will not leave my things behind for these pigs."

"Oookay. What do you suggest we do? I am fresh out of invisibility pills."

I didn't know what Dick had in his room, but whatever it was, he wanted it back, and badly.

Dick appeared lost in thought for a moment, and then he looked at me sharply. "This is something I know how to do, I am thinking. Something from my happy childhood." He was grim.

This was not a Dirty Dick Abdallah  I had known before. 

"Wait here."

Dick went back a few feet, hugging the wall of the building, and slipped into an alley. I waited. I couldn't stand it, so I followed. I turned into the alley to find Dick head down in a dumpster, barely visible in the dim edge of streetlights. Finally his feet came down, and his head popped up, and he dropped down to the ground. He was holding a long piece of cheap fuzzy twine, like the kind they use to tie stacks of packages on to shipping pallets. 

He saw me watching him, all tall and skinny and serious. "Wait here."

"Whoa, Dick, what are you going to do? You can't fool with these guys. They have serious guns, and they are very happy to use them. Plus, they seem to hate us more than a little." 

"When I was a boy, we would sometimes find an Israeli jeep parked while the soldiers patrolled nearby. There was a sort of prank we would play on them. I was never brave enough to play the prank myself, but I have seen it done. Now I will be brave enough. At least the Israelis were soldiers. These people are nothing but murderers."

OK, now Dick had surely used up his weekly allotment of words.

Before I could say a word, Dick crouched and started slinking toward the parked car. The windows were fogged enough that I couldn't tell how many people were in the car.

When he got within 30 yards of the car, Dick dropped and began a long, and no doubt painful crawl. The street in front of the hotel was old cobblestones, and they were wet and rough and colder than a banker's heart. It hurt me to watch him. 

All the way to the back of the sedan he crawled. There was no reaction from the car. I saw Dick roll over to the driver's side rear, and look. Then he moved to the passenger side rear and looked again. The he went to the back of the car and sat down, still. What was he doing? Suddenly he lifted his head, and turned around. He reached for the rear license plate. I saw it move. He pulled it down and reached behind it and began moving his arm. What? His arm came back and he put something on the ground carefully.

Ah! The gas tank! That's what he had been looking for. He continued to hold the plate down while he reached into his parka pocket. He came out with his long piece of twine. He doubled it over and began pushing it into the gas tank. He took a long time. Finally he pulled it out, and then pushed it back again. Then he picked up the gas cap and wedged it behind the license plate to hold the spring loaded door open. He had maybe three feet hanging out the back.

Dick slid backward with his feet toward me, on his belly. He reached into his pocket and a moment later I saw a tiny flame. It didn't stay tiny for long, though, as the entire visible length of the rope immediately caught fire. He had managed to get it all soaked in gasoline. 

I looked at the car rear window. Still nothing to see, still frosted over. 

Dick was crawling back toward me on all fours as fast as he could, his long skinny arms and legs moving quickly and all at once almost, so that he looked like a daddy-long-legs doing a wind sprint.

He got about 20 feet from the rear of the car when the gas tank exploded with more of a loud thud than a big boom, but with lots of very impressive flame. Dick didn't even look back, he just scuttled faster.

Both front doors flew open and to men jumped out, both holding guns identical to the one their murderous friend has used so effectively. They jumped back, hands held in front of their faces, and watched as the entire car began to burn angrily. They never saw Dick jump back into the alley with me, breathing like he had run a hard mile. I wondered if they opted for the additional insurance.

"Wow, Dick. That is some "prank". 

"Yes. Well, Palestinian children have a different sense of humor than many. The key is to make sure the rope is well soaked with petrol before lighting or it won't work."

The two men looked up and down the street. The guy on the passenger side joined the other guy on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, just as someone ran out of the hotel and saw the car burning like crazy. He glanced at the two men and ran back into the hotel before the two thugs could react. They talked quickly while looking up and down the street, on edge. A siren fired up not far away. One spoke to the other again, and they both put their guns under their heavy parkas, and began walking quickly away from the car, down the street.

 Directly towards us.

"Shit! Come on!" I pulled on Dick's sleeve and we ran to the toward the back of the alley. The sound of the car burning covered our noise, but also the sound of the men coming our way. 

We got to the end of the alley. I opened the top of the dumpster. "Climb in," I said to Dick. 

"I will not," he replied. It is filthy in there."

"You have already been in there once tonight. Besides, the people whose friend I just killed and whose car you just blew up and burned have automatic weapons and are now about ten feet from walking past this alley and seeing us. Move!"

Dick nodded, and jumped in. I followed him and carefully closed the top. It was black dark, and considering everything in the dumpster was frozen solid, it still stunk really badly. It wasn't even half full, and I was glad.

We stood crouched in complete darkness in the dumpster and waited, sirens getting louder and louder. We had heard a lot of sirens tonight. And by the way, all of them had been that weird "wee-ooo wee-ooo" sound European sirens make, not the Dragnet wailing kind.

Way more than enough time had past for the bad guys to pass, so I lifted the top open a tiny bit, just enough to peek...and lowered it again very carefully. 

Dick, right next to my ear, whispered, "What did you see? What is it?"

I turned my head and whispered back, "They are in our alley. Looking down the street. Waiting for whoever torched their car to make a move for the hotel."

It was too dark to actually see anything, but I could feel Dick deflate.

Then another siren with a different pitch started getting closer from another direction. it was going to pass our alley. I peeped again. The two killers were looking up and down the street, doing their own peeking out of the alley, not happy about the approaching siren.

Cops coming. 

I closed the dumpster top just as one of them started to turn around to look at the back of the alley.

For a place to hide.

There was nothing to do but wait for the top to open. In the gloom, the first one in would probably not see us until it was too late and we could grab him during his awkward slip into the bin. And he would sound the alarm, and the other guy would lean over the edge and shoot us like fish in a barrel. A big trash barrel.

I waited and waited, heart pounding. The siren was blaring as the police passed the mouth of the alley. Nothing happened. Dick started to whisper a question. "Shhh!," I hissed. 

Still nothing.

I waited a couple of seconds more and turned my head sideways so that I could barely lift the lid and look out with one eye.

They were gone.

"Let's go," I said, lifting the top all the way.

A New Life

He was asleep on a rice straw mat on the floor of the hut when a sharp kick to his lower back waked him, angry and scared. He came to a crouch, back against the wall, but the kicker had retreated hastily away into the doorway. Ready to run.  A scruffy sapper said, "You. Boy. It is time for you to go. Come to the truck."

Now that he was awake, he could hear a motor thrumming outside, smell rough exhaust fumes.

The soldier backed out of the door and disappeared. The boy went to the hut door, cautiously, and looked out. It was before dawn, and the camp was dimly lit by a few yellow lights strung on bamboo poles.

There was an ancient stakebed truck ten feet away, engine running. The bed was uncovered, and had a pile of melons, some burlap bags of rice and an old small engine lying it in. The soldier was standing beside the passenger door, and montioned to the back of the truck with his AKS. "Get in!"

Zeno was motionless for a moment, and then said, "No. Why? Where are you taking me?"

 "GET IN!" screamed the soldier, jabbing threateningly with his rifle. Zeno looked around. There was no one moving this early in the camp.

 "You must go. It will be good." Zeno pivoted instantly at the voice. The officer was standing behind him, slouching on the hut wall. Smoking. He smiled. "I am sending you to the city to meet a man I know. He will help you. You will help him, too, and then, he will help me. Almost like Kharma." He smiled on through the smoke.

"Where? Who is this man? I want to go home."

"All in time, young tiger. All in time. You will have a home. Now, get in truck, or I will tell him to shoot you. You might be worth something to me, but not all that much."

Zeno looked at the bare ground, then squeezed his eyes shut tightly. A tear fell to the ground, and he was mortified at the loss of face from the show of weakness. There was no denying, though. He was a boy, not yet a man, and he wanted his mother and father. He looked up. The soldier and the officer waited.

Zeno shuffled to the back of the truck and climbed in. A driver got out of the cab with rusty old shackles. The soldier came to the back of the truck and aimed his automatic rifle at Zeno's head. The driver locked one end of the chain around Zeno's neck, and then the other around the junk engine lying on the bed.

 "That will hold him. No one wants to drag a hundred kilos around with their neck. Ha!" The driver got back behind the wheel, still chuckling to himself. The soldier sneered at Zeno, and got in the passenger side.

The gears ground, and the truck lurched forward. "Make me proud," said the officer, waving, and shrinking into gloom as the truck moved forward, out of the camp.

 Soon Zeno could only see his shroud of cigarette smoke, strangely luminous in the cold yellow light of the camp. The truck smelled of diesel fuel and rust. Everything was covered in rust, the truck, and everything in it, including his clothes, his skin. The smell was so strong, he could taste it. It tasted like blood.