Why Me?

25

The five men seated around the kitchen table drank retsina and smoked Epoika cigarettes and spoke in guttural voices. Machine pistols hung on their chairbacks, dark shades covered the windows, and a small white plastic radio played salsa music to confound any bugging apparatus that might have been placed here by their enemies, of which there were many in this troubled old world, including the six men who abruptly crashed through the service stairwell door, brandishing their own machine pistols and in four languages ordering the men at the table not to move, nor speak, nor react in any way to their sudden appearance, lest they die like the dogs they were. The men at the table, wild-eyed and frozen, clutching their glasses and their cigarettes, muttered in three languages that the new arrivals were dogs, but made no other rejoinder.

After the first few seconds, when it became apparent that the shooting of machine pistols was not to be the first item on anybody's agenda, a cautious kind of relaxation eased all those bodies and all those faces, and everybody moved on to whatever would happen next. While two of the intruders made determined but clumsy efforts to reclose the door they'd just demolished, their leader (known as Gregor) turned to the leader of the group at the table (code name Marko) and said, "We are here to negotiate with you dogs."

Marko grimaced, scrinching up his eyes and baring his upper teeth: "What kind of debased language is that?"

"I am speaking to you in your own miserable tongue."

"Well, don't. It's painful to my ears."

"No more than to my mouth."

Marko shifted to the language he presumed to be native to the invaders: "I know where you're from."

Gregor did his own teeth-baring grimace: "What was that, the sound of Venetian blinds falling off a window?"

Speaking Arabic, another of the men at the table said, "Perhaps these are dogs from a different litter."

"Don't talk like that," Marko told him. "Even we don't understand it."

One of the invaders repairing the door said over his shoulder, in rotten German, "There must be a language common to us all."

This seemed reasonable, to the few who understood it, and when it had been variously translated into several other tongues, it seemed reasonable to the rest as well. So the negotiation began with a wrangle over which language the negotiation would use, culminating in Gregor finally saying, in English, "Very well. We'll speak in English."

Almost everybody on both sides got upset at that. "What," cried Marko, "the language of the Imperialists? Never!" But he cried this in English.

"We all understand it," Gregor pointed out. "No matter how much we may hate it, English is the lingua franca of this world."

After a bit more wrangling, mostly for the purpose of saving face, English was at last agreed upon as the language they would use, with the solemn understanding by all parties that the choice of English should not be considered to represent any political, ethnological, ideological, or cultural point of view. "Now," Gregor said, "we negotiate."

"Negotiation," asked Marko, "comes from the barrel of a gun?"

Gregor smiled sadly. "That thing hanging on your chair," he said, "is it your walking stick?"

"Only a dog needs a gun for a crutch."

"Fine," said Gregor, switching off the radio. "Your guns and our guns cancel each other. We can talk."

"Leave the radio on," Marko said. "It's our defense against bugging."

"It doesn't work," Gregor told him. "We've been bugging you from next door, with a microphone in that toaster. Also, I hate salsa music."

"Oh, very well," Marko said, with bad grace. (The radio as a defense against bugging had been his idea.) To his compatriot opposite him across the table, he said, "Get up, Niklos, let this dog sit down."

"Give my seat to a dog?" cried Niklos.

"When you negotiate with a dog," Marko pointed out, "you permit the dog to sit."

"Be careful, Gregor," one of the invaders said. "Watch where you sit, that dog may leave you fleas."

The two repairman-invaders at last wedged the door shut and came over to the table. One of them said, "Did you ever notice how you don't get the same effect when you call somebody a dog in English?"

One of the men at the table said, "The Northern peoples are cold. They put no fire in their tongues."

Seating himself in Niklos' place at the table—Niklos sullenly leaned against the refrigerafor amid his enemies, arms folded—Gregor said, "We have been enemies in the past."

"Natural enemies," the other said.

"Agreed. And we shall be enemies again in the future."

"God willing."

"But at this moment, our requirements intersect."

"Meaning?"

"We want the same thing."

"The Byzantine Fire!"

"No. We want," Gregor corrected, "to find the Byzantine Fire."

"It's all the same."

"No, it's not. When we know where it is, we can contest properly for its possession. At that time, our desires shall again be in opposition, and we shall again be enemies."

"From your lips to God's ear."

"But so long as the Byzantine Fire is lost, we find ourselves, however uneasily, on the same side."

There was general bristling at such an idea, until Marko raised his arms in a commanding gesture, as though calming a multitude from a balcony. "There is sense in what you say," he admitted.

"Of course there is."

"We are all aliens in this godless land, however many contacts we may have among the émigrés."

"Émigrés," spat Gregor. "Petty merchants, buying aboveground swimming pools on the installment plan."

"Exactly. You can force a man to fetch and carry and obey orders if you threaten him with the death of his grandmother in the old country, but you can't get him to think, to volunteer, to show you the inner workings of this debased and sensualist society."

"Our experience precisely."

"Strangers in a strange land would do well to combine their forces," Marko mused.

"Which is just what I'm here to recommend. Now, we have made an initial exploratory contact with the police." (Gregor wore black corduroy trousers.) "And you have made initial exploratory contact with the New York underworld."

Marko (it was his uncle who knew the landlord at the O.J.) looked surprised at that, and not at all pleased. "How do you know such a thing?"

"Your toaster told us. The point is, we can complement one another's scanty intelligence, and we can be prepared to act decisively when the Byzantine Fire is found, and—"

"Also the thief," Marko said.

"We have no interest in the thief."

"We do. For religious reasons."

Gregor shrugged. "Then we'll turn him over to you. The main point is that, combining together, the chances of our finding the Byzantine Fire are much improved. Once it's found, of course, we can discuss the next step. Are you agreed?"

Marko frowned around at his men. They looked tense and bony-cheeked and grim, but not violently opposed to the suggestion. He nodded. "Agreed," he said, and extended his hand.

"May the souls of my ancestors understand and forgive this expediency," said Gregor, and grasped his enemy's hand.

The phone rang.

The men all stared at one another. The leaders wrenched their hands apart. Gregor hissed, "Who knows you're here?"

"No one. What about you?"

"No one."

Getting to his feet, Marko said, "I'll deal with it." He crossed to the wall phone, unhooked the receiver, and said, "Allo?" The others watched him, saw his expression darken like the sky before a summer storm, saw it then redden (sailors take warning), saw it then look merely confused. "One moment," he told the phone, and turned to the others. "It's the Bulgarians," he said. "They've been bugging us from the basement, they heard everything, they say it makes perfect sense. They want to come up and join us."