The Enemy

“The night of January fourth,” I said. “Did you commit a crime?”

His deep-set eyes came up to meet mine. Locked on.

“OK,” I said. “Time to choose up sides. Was it a worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head?”

He said nothing.

“Did you go up to Washington D.C. and rape the president’s ten-year-old granddaughters, one after the other?”

“No,” he said.

“I’ll give you a clue,” I said. “Where you’re sitting, that would be about the only worse crime than shooting Brubaker in the head.”

He said nothing.

“Tell me.”

“It was a private thing,” he said.

“What kind of a private thing?”

He didn’t answer. Summer sighed and moved away from her map. She was starting to figure that wherever Trifonov had been, chances were it wasn’t Columbia, South Carolina. She looked at me, eyebrows raised. Trifonov moved in his chair. His handcuffs clinked against the metal of the legs.

“What’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“That depends on what you did,” I said.

“I got a letter,” he said.

“Getting mail isn’t a crime.”

“From a friend of a friend.”

“Tell me about the letter.”

“There’s a man in Sofia,” he said.

He sat there, hunched forward, his wrists cuffed to the chair legs, and he told us the story of the letter. The way he framed it, he made it sound like he thought there was something uniquely Bulgarian about it. But there wasn’t, really. It was a story that could have been told by any of us.

There was a man in Sofia. He had a sister. The sister had been a minor gymnast and had defected on a college tour of Canada and had eventually settled in the United States. She had gotten married to an American. She had become a citizen. Her husband had turned out bad. The sister wrote about it to the brother back home. Long, unhappy letters. There were beatings, and abuse, and cruelty, and isolation. The sister’s life was hell. The communist censors had passed the letters, because anything that made America look bad was OK with them. The brother in Sofia had a friend in town who knew his way around the city’s dissident network. The friend had an address for Trifonov, at Fort Bird in North Carolina. Trifonov had been in touch with the dissident network before he skipped to Turkey. The friend had packaged up a letter from the man in Sofia and given it to a guy who bought machine parts in Austria. The machine-parts guy had gone to Austria and mailed the letter. The letter made its way to Fort Bird. Trifonov received it on January second, early in the morning, at mail call. It had his name on it in big Cyrillic letters and it was all covered in foreign stamps and Luftpost stickers.

He had read the letter alone in his room. He knew what was expected of him. Time and distance and relationships compressed under the pressure of nationalist loyalty, so that it was like his own sister who was getting smacked around. The woman lived near a place called Cape Fear, which Trifonov thought was an appropriate name, given her situation. He had gone to the company office and checked a map, to find out where it was.

His next available free time was the evening of January fourth. He made a plan and rehearsed a speech, which centered around the inadvisability of abusing Bulgarian women who had friends within driving distance.

“Still got the letter?” I asked.

He nodded. “But you won’t be able to read it, because it’s written in Bulgarian.”

“What were you wearing that night?”

“Plain clothes. I’m not stupid.”

“What kind of plain clothes?”

“Leather jacket. Blue jeans. Shirt. American. They’re all the plain clothes I’ve got.”

“What did you do to the guy?”

He shook his head. Wouldn’t answer.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s all go to Cape Fear.”

We kept Trifonov cuffed and put him in the back of the MP Humvee. Summer drove. Cape Fear was on the Atlantic coast, south and east, maybe a hundred miles. It was a tedious ride, in a Humvee. It would have been different in a Corvette. Although I couldn’t remember ever being in a Corvette. I had never known anyone who owned one.

And I had never been to Cape Fear. It was one of the many places in America I had never visited. I had seen the movie, though. Couldn’t remember where, exactly. In a tent, somewhere hot, maybe. Black and white, with Gregory Peck having some kind of a major problem with Robert Mitchum. It was good enough entertainment, as I recalled, but fundamentally annoying. There was a lot of jeering from the audience. Robert Mitchum should have gone down early in the first reel. Watching civilians dither around just to spin out a story for ninety minutes had no real appeal for soldiers.

It was full dark before we got anywhere near where we were going. We passed a sign near the outer part of Wilmington that billed the town as a historic and picturesque old port city but we ignored it because Trifonov called through from the rear and told us to make a left through some kind of a swamp. We drove out through the darkness into the middle of nowhere and made another left toward a place called Southport.

“Cape Fear is off of Southport,” Summer said. “It’s an island in the ocean. I think there’s a bridge.”

But we stopped well short of the coast. We didn’t even get to Southport itself. Trifonov called through again as we passed a trailer park on our right. It was a large flat rectangular area of reclaimed land. It looked like someone had dredged part of the swamp to make a lake and then spread the fill over an area the size of a couple of football fields. The land was bordered by drainage ditches. There were power lines coming in on poles and maybe a hundred trailers studded all over the rectangle. Our headlights showed that some of them were fancy double-wide affairs with add-ons and planted gardens and picket fences. Some of them were plain and battered. A couple had fallen off their blocks and were abandoned. We were maybe ten miles inland, but the ocean storms had a long reach.

“Here,” Trifonov said. “Make a right.”

There was a wide center track with narrower tracks branching left and right. Trifonov directed us through the maze and we stopped outside a sagging lime-green trailer that had seen better days. Its paint was peeling and the tar-paper roof was curling. It had a smoking chimney and the blue light of a television behind its windows.

“Her name is Elena,” Trifonov said.

We left him locked in the Humvee. Knocked on Elena’s door. The woman who opened it could have stepped straight into the encyclopedia under B for Battered Woman. She was a mess. She had old yellow bruises all around her eyes and along her jaw and her nose was broken. She was holding herself in a way that suggested old aches and pains and maybe even newly broken ribs. She was wearing a thin housedress and men’s shoes. But she was clean and bathed and her hair was tied back neatly. There was a spark of something in her eyes. Some kind of pride, maybe, or satisfaction at having survived. She peered out at us nervously, from behind the triple oppressions of poverty and suffering and foreign status.

“Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?” Her accent was like Trifonov’s, but much higher-pitched. It was quite appealing.

“We need to talk to you,” Summer said, gently.

“What about?”

“About what Slavi Trifonov did for you,” I said.

“He didn’t do anything,” she said.

“But you know the name.”

She paused.

“Please come in,” she said.

I guessed I was expecting some kind of mayhem inside. Maybe empty bottles strewn about, full ashtrays, dirt