Babayaga

sea and ocean, and every atomic element she had ever learned about in her science classes were bursting into smithereens, exploding around her on the stage. When the thunder finally subsided, the judges were still there, staring blankly as they waited for her to exit the stage, while her father and mother, seated near the back, sat grinning, entirely blind to her failure, their eyes aglow with the hollowness of hope.

Her first attempt to kill herself had been a botched and desperate affair: in a hysterical fit, she had gulped down a well of dark pen ink, and immediately vomited it up again like a squid, retching the blackness out all over her father’s well-organized desk.

Next she had slashed her wrists, but they had found her in time, flailing and weeping in the blushed, warm water of her rose-tinted bath. That was what had brought her to the institution. And now here she was, scarred, ugly, and alone.

As she finished her tale, the old woman nodded. “Yes, this is bad. In my time, we would put you to work, slap you into shape, make you wake up from your miseries through the penance of toil. But this place makes you lie down on your cot, or wander the grounds like a stupid park pigeon, waiting for them to fill you with more treats from their pharmacies. They are not here to cure you, you know, they are only here to make the pharmacist’s pockets fat.”

Noelle nodded. She was only waiting for the doctors’ signatures of approval, she said, so that her parents could take her home. There, she confided with a deep breath, she would surely try to kill herself again.

“Bah,” said the old woman. “If you wanted death, you would have death. It’s too easy. Bang your head into that stone wall there until you crush it. Right there.” She pointed at the cold masonry. “Do it now.” Noelle looked at her, wide-eyed and confused. The old woman shrugged. “See? You do not want death. I tell you what, we can give you instead a whole new better life, one more beautiful than any idiot ballerina’s. What are dancers, really, but silly whores without the fucking? You give them money and they twirl around in frilly colored costumes before your eyes. They twirl until they drop. You don’t want that. You want what we can give you.”

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?”

“We? Oh, from now on we is you and me.” Elga patted her hand. “If you want it, we do this. I’ll help you. But it is a great secret. And if you do it, you’ll have to help me too. I will need your help with a very tough job.”

“What job?”

The old woman rubbed Noelle’s shoulder in a soft and reassuring way. “We have to kill a witch.”

VIII

Tuesday morning, Will had risen early and tried calling Oliver; then he had tracked down the address of The Gargoyle Press, and now, having been pointed to an unsteady, uncomfortable chair, he sat waiting among the piles of books and galley proofs in the journal’s “lobby.” The office was merely a large apartment with a few desks and telephones. Papers sat stacked and bundled along its tables, empty chairs, and windowsills. There were five people there, none of them the ones Will had met with Oliver at the bar. One sat at her desk reading, one sat typing in a concentrated hunt-and-peck fashion, and two more were at the far end of the room, apparently having a meeting. The assistant who had greeted him, an attractive, narrow-waisted French girl in a red sweater, had briefly disappeared after letting him in and then returned to her seat, where she slowly, studiously paged through the thick copy of Vogue that sat beside the big black telephone on her desk. He assumed she had told someone to find Oliver, but no one appeared. After a few moments, the phone rang and the girl answered it. For the next quarter hour she stayed on the phone, ignoring Will while she gaily chatted with the caller. Will suspected she was talking with a close friend. He thought of interrupting her but found it almost relaxing watching a pretty girl laugh and gossip as if he were not even there. Finally, one of the other young women who had been busy reading came over. “Je peux vous aider?”

Will stood up. “Oui, je cherche Oliver.”

The woman smiled politely and switched to English, which came with a stern British accent. “You’ve come to entirely the wrong place to find him. He is almost never here, I’m afraid. You’re a writer?”

“No.”

She grinned. “So sorry, we always assume our visitors are writers; that is why we have Nicole leave them out here unattended. Sooner or later they wander away.” She stopped to correct herself. “That sounds bad. It’s not that we don’t fancy writers, we adore them, honestly, only just not the ones who tend to stop by. What do you do?”

“I’m in advertising, but—”

Her eyes lit up. “Advertising! Oh, right, then”—she firmly took him by the arm and guided him toward the door—“we should get you to Oliver right away. At this hour he’s probably at home still curled up with his coffee and a paper, it’s only a short walk from here.”

“I tried calling him at his home number earlier.”

“He rarely answers it. Oliver says the phone makes him a slave of technology, though he does love dialing me up at two a.m. with his tipsy editorial tips. Most Luddites are so charmingly inconsistent.”

Like many of the British girls Will had come across in Paris, she was chattier than she was friendly. Her name was Gwen Knight and she told him she had come over after graduating from Cambridge. She kept up a brisk pace and though she never stopped talking, she never smiled, even at her own small jokes. Will found that oddly reassuring. As good as his French was, a slight gauze still separated him from Parisian culture, and so, whenever the locals grinned at him or laughed, instead of reassuring him it actually made him a bit more insecure, since he was never sure if they were expressing sincere pleasure, indulgence, politeness, or, perhaps, mere amusement at the silly American.

Rounding the corner, she led him across the narrow street to an apartment building that had two small statues of lions sitting on either side of the door. She rang the buzzer and a fuzzy “Hullo?” came squawking out through the intercom.

“It’s Gwen, I—”

The door buzzed before she could finish her sentence. Instead of taking the elevator, Gwen climbed the stairs. Following her up, Will thought there must be circles of heaven where all one did was ascend staircases behind slender women wearing tight wool skirts. On the third floor, they reached the apartment door. It was unlocked and Gwen walked right in.

Oliver’s apartment was spacious, with a guest room by the side of the entrance and a long hallway of densely packed bookshelves leading down to the main rooms. Newspapers were stacked up in the corner, Times Heralds and Le Mondes. There were piles of opened baby blue airmail envelopes from America lying on the narrow hall table with their telltale red-white-and-blue- striped stamps. “In the back!” they heard Oliver call out from the kitchen. Gwen and Will followed the voice and, rounding the corner, they found a silk-robed Oliver smoking and leafing through a copy of Paris Match. Beside him, sitting with her morning coffee, was an only slightly dressed Zoya.

Oliver looked up with a bit of a confused grin. “Oh, hullo, Will, Gwen. What are you two doing together?”

“He came by the office,” Gwen began. “Nicole was ignoring him but I took pity. When he said he was in advertising, well, considering the straits we’re in I thought it could hardly wait—”

Oliver smiled. “Are you really here to help with our advertising, Will?”

Will looked at Zoya, her hair hung loose and tangled down her shoulders, and all she had on was one of Oliver’s tailored Oxford shirts. She sat looking at him, a slight friendly grin on her lips as if she were waiting for him to speak. Then he realized they were all waiting for him to answer. He felt confused and speechless, surprised to find his feelings all twisted, like a clumsy boy tripping on his laces while chasing some elusive bouncing ball. He paused to restart his thoughts. “Yes. I mean, no. You were supposed to drop a package off at my office yesterday.”

“That’s right!” Oliver said, lightly slapping his forehead. “I was, wasn’t I?”

“Right, so I’d like to pick that up, but I also need to talk to you, privately, about another issue. It’s very important.”