bonds

LINDA HAD TO GO to Pakistan and she left me in charge of her house. This was a three-storey Scandinavian style mansion full of personal libraries and well-stoked fireplaces where staircases rolled and ascended. It stood at the top of the hill overlooking a foggy harbor that in winter was frozen over and packed with ice. It was here that she slept in a grand canopy bed.

Before she had left, Linda had shown me the place, including a stack of green, government-issued bonds, made out to her and members of her family, with the instruction to guard them with my life. She was a tawny, vivacious Estonian woman with two very thrilling gray eyes. In the old black-and-white photos of Linda on the shelves, the ones taken during her youth in the faraway 1980s, I had detected a superficial beauty, a kind of dewy, youthful innocence that was somehow neutral, asexual and unappealing to me. But over the years, through the kicks and betrayals of time, her puissance sexuelle had grown only more abundant and her pull had bloomed. Imagine the sun, that glowing hot orange globe, sizzling and radiating heat and fire.

That was Linda.

Next my friends came over and made themselves at home. Toomas was an older sort with thick orange-yellow hair, some dark-rimmed glasses. He was also a career criminal and immediately looked for ways to rip poor Linda off. Markus was younger with a thin mustache and tended to go along with whatever Toomas dreamed up. His idea was to rewrite the government-issued bonds in our own names, but only a handful of them. These he would pocket and later cash in, and Linda and her prestigious family would be a little less richer, but so what. They would never notice. Beneath a lamp at an old desk, Toomas went to work with his forgery. Neatly and precisely he amended them with some ink and a pen knife while firewood crackled in the hearth. I watched him slumped over in concentration in the blue light of a February afternoon. By the time Linda got back, Toomas had already departed, the revised bonds tucked neatly in his pocket. Markus drove. They both imagined themselves to be rich.

I was left behind to clean up. In the waste bin, I found the shreds of the bonds that had been altered and tossed them in the fireplace. Then I rearranged the library, which contained volumes of artwork by Miro, Modigliani, Kangilaski, and others, so that the money stash place would be obscured and Linda might never go to look for the bonds again. It was snowing when her car pulled up, and I went out to greet her. The snow was tumbling down, collecting on the white birches, making them look all fuzzy. Linda got out of the car and leaped into my arms, wrapping her legs around my waist. “Well,” she said to me, making me blush. “How was it? At least you didn’t burn the house down.” I tried to tell her the truth, that my friends were thieves, and that I was one too, but I just couldn’t. It didn’t feel good to keep such secrets.