The Scent of the Blueberry --11

Michel knew that he would have to bring Evelyn to the predetermined meeting place by himself. This, of course, wasn’t his preference – but Allen’s absence meant that Michel would have to pull double-duty. So the next step was to stop by his own apartment to quickly pack for the trip.

Since he was carrying a corpse in a rug, Michel knew that he didn’t want to encounter any of his neighbors, so he took the stairs to his apartment. Of course he realized that, if he had bumped into anyone who lived there, they might wonder why anyone would carry a rug up the stairs when they could have taken the elevator, but Michel didn’t really expect that to happen. And, miracle of miracles, for once that evening everything went smoothly, and Michel leaned the Allen-filled rug against the wall while he fumbled for his keys. He could have picked the lock rather easily, but that would have been showing off.

Michel’s apartment was similar in size and lay-out to Evelyn’s, but it did not betray the slightest concern related to the different effects of earth colors and the cooler portion of the spectrum. No tables, no lamps, bare walls, a mattress on the floor of the bedroom. An old mattress. Next to the bed was a chess set – standard Staunton design – a dog-eared copy of “The Art of War,” and a single manila file folder (containing photocopies of Karen’s recent letters to Evelyn. Michel’s security-related abilities included an easy familiarity with the locks on the apartment building’s mailboxes.) A few clothes were piled on the floor. The only grace notes were a bulging bookcase in the living room – prominently featuring works on physical fitness, nutrition and military history – and a 110 pound set of barbells in the far corner. The bathroom featured a single copy of the King James version of the Bible, as well as Michel’s laptop computer – primarily used to view the video from the secret camcorder that he had installed in Evelyn’s apartment in September.

At this point, all of this stuff seemed totally irrelevant. If the trip went well, Michel knew that there would be plenty of time to come back and tie up the loose ends. If it did not go well, none of the loose ends would matter. To tell the truth, Michel thought wryly, not much else would matter, either. So he stuffed some clothing into the backpack along with some trail mix, filled his old Army canteen with water, threw the “Allen rug” back over his shoulder, and wondered whether a man carrying a rug with a corpse and a backpack on the stairway would seem any more suspicious than a man merely carrying a rug with a corpse. At some point, maybe he could pose that question in a discussion group but, in the meantime, Michel adjusted the positioning of the rug on his shoulder and descended the stairway to Evelyn’s apartment.

Evelyn, surprisingly enough, was asleep. Sound asleep. This gave her a new respect in Michel’s eyes – he suspected that most women, drugged, manacled and left alone by their captors, would be far too hysterical to do anything as logical as renewing the stamina to deal with whatever lay ahead. Waking her was out of the question, he thought – the sleep was absolutely necessary for her to deal with the journey and, even though he had trained his own body to accept the strains of challenges that he faced, he had to admit that lugging Allen around the city, not to mention up and down the stairs, had left him just a little tired as well. A few hours of sleep wouldn’t hurt – particularly since the Adversary seemed to have no idea where they were, and Michel felt that they would blend into the city’s population more easily in the daylight, anyway. So he left the carpet on the floor in Evelyn’s bedroom, stretched out on the sofa in the living room, and fell into a deep sleep.

1,943. . . 1,944. . . that was the wonderful thing about push-ups, he thought. Such a simple exercise, such a remarkably simple exercise, but so easy to modify to escape the boredom and multiply the positive effects. Move the hands slightly out or slightly in – and you attack the muscle groups from a totally different angle. Fingertip push-ups, thumb push-ups – shifting easily from one variation to the next like a guitarist changing chords. 1, 950. Time for crunches.

The hours before dawn – he dreaded the expectation. His living room window faced the southeast—every day he finished the morning exercises at 5 minutes before dawn. Then he would sit on the floor in front of the window—holding the stick in his hand. The stick was shaped like a wooden billy-club with five 18- inch lengths of chain attached to the far end. Each link of each chain had a different type of barbed wire attached. Michel had made the stick himself – researching and replicating the different types of barbed wire used by the ranchers in the American West to mark the borders of their land. Every day the sun would rise, and every day Michel would raise his arm. 6. . . 7. . .8. Left hand, right hand. The back, the front, the legs. The had been a time when Michel – or more precisely, Michel’s spirit – would have found the practice barbaric, would have screamed and cried and well, it didn’t matter at this point. At this point, Michel only knew that it was necessary. A minor inconvenience, a mosquito bite, compared to what he might be called on to endure in the real world without flinching.

As he did every day, Michel thought of Bud Grant. Bud Grant had been the head coach of the Minnesota Vikings in the National Football League. In the days before domed stadiums, football games in Minnesota played in December or January could be extraordinarily cold – dangerously cold. The players could not, of course, wear mittens or overcoats – they would have to play in the middle of an open field that provided no protection against a wind-chill that would frequently fall well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. None of the visiting teams looked forward to playing in Minnesota and, to tell the truth, the hometown heroes weren’t thrilled about it, either.

To try to combat the effects of the cold, the teams would built makeshift shelters, almost like tents, on the sidelines, and have hot air blown into them. That was, at least, the players could keep warm – relatively warm, anyway – while they sat on the bench. After all, when they were on the field at least they were moving around and were directly involved in the game – on the bench, it was a different story.

All the teams, that is, except the Vikings. Bud Grant would have none of it. Grant reasoned that a player who had been toasty warm on the bench would not be prepared and would not perform as well when he ran on to a field that featured a minus 20 degree wind-chill factor. On the contrary, at least some of the players would want to get back off the field as quickly as possible – back to the relative warmth and comfort of their heated bench. Grant had decided that that was no way to win football games – so his players would freeze on the sidelines, while their opponents encountered far fewer cases of frostbite.

Of course, maybe it was because he had superior talent but, in those days, Grant’s Viking teams won a lot of football games. And Bud Grant, as the coach, stayed on the sidelines with his players for the entire game – freezing his ass off, leading his troops, without ever changing expression.

Michel knew that he might not always have a superior team – not like that day so long ago. He knew that preparation was key and, if a little pain was involved well, so be it.

But Michel wasn’t in his apartment anymore – or even on a frozen football field in Minnesota. He was posing with Evelyn, morphing into the long, incredibly difficult poses that were part of his discipline.

Michel wasn’t too worried that Evelyn would notice, let alone question, the scars associated with the creation of his navel. There were too many scars all over his body, he knew, for any particular mark to draw a lot of attention. He was concerned that she was close enough to see them at close range – far closer than anyone had ever been to his naked body before. Michel realized that they appeared to be more prominent under close examination. He fully realized that the condition of his skin was probably the subject of a certain amount of idle gossip among the artists – that was to be expected, and Michel did not believe that this posed a threat to his privacy. But close examination might be more revealing to a trained eye, and Michel’s limited surveillance opportunities had furnished no clues as to whether Evelyn would react to his condition.

The other issue was that, other than the night they posed together, Michel had never been this close to an unclothed woman before. He did not have, nor did he fear, any kind of involuntary physical reaction to this situation. He knew that his training would protect him against that temptation. At the same time, he did have a deep, not to mention surprising, feeling of . . . what? Pity? – well, not exactly. It was born from an understanding of a kind of history – a history of the pain that was associated with this particular female. The sexual and emotional pleasure that had been so surprisingly transformed into her pain – multivaried: physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological. A systemic reaction that Michel channeled in a very personal, visceral way – even more visceral than his own daily floggings. He didn't know an English word for this feeling -- although there was a word from an ancient language in another galaxy that came close to describing it. He felt a strong and immediate urge to hold her, to tell her that he would take her pain and simply add it to his own burden. Then he would lie to her, and tell her that everything would be alright.

And that was the real temptation, he thought.