“I don’t think it’s that at all. It’s just survival.”
“No, it’s not survival. You don’t have to go to Sweden to survive. They are surviving in Turkey, as I just said.”
“Barely.”
“Well, that’s the Turks for you. It’s funny how their fellow Muslims are quite happy to treat them like cockroaches or close their borders altogether. That’s what they do; but we have to be Christians, whatever that means. I hear Frau Merkel is a devout Christian too. Personally—”
“There’s nothing personal about it,” Naomi protested.
“Maybe not, but personally I think we’re not being told what is really happening. The whole thing is melodrama. It’s a deliberate orchestration, and we’re the dumb fall guys on the receiving end of it. You have to wonder whether Europeans are just too stupid to survive now. We don’t seem to understand obvious things that are staring us in the face.”
“Then what is staring us in the face?”
“They’re going under like the Titanic. They’re going under and they’re going to drag us down with them. That’s all there is to it. Or else it’s something deeper. The traffickers sending them here have their reasons, don’t you think?—they don’t just arrive, as the media is trying to tell us.”
“Then what are the reasons? I want to know what you think.”
Jimmie leaned back a little and his whole body shifted in an awkward way as his anger came and went and then returned. So they had to disagree, they had to fight. Was that it?
“I think the issues are obvious,” he blustered on. “If we keep them out it destroys them; if we let them in it destroys us. Do we have the stomach for that dilemma?”
“It’s not that at all. They’re fleeing from horror. You’re dehumanizing them by thinking like that. You have no idea what’s going through their heads. It’s just tabloid boilerplate.”
He said it didn’t matter what was going through their heads. She didn’t know what was going through their heads either. She didn’t speak Arabic. Had she lived in an Arab country? He thought not. She knew nothing about them, nothing at all. Less than nothing, she was just romanticizing it. He said that people couldn’t run away from themselves. They brought everything with them, whether they knew it or liked it or not. Then you had to deal with that. But she didn’t even know what it was—she hadn’t thought about it at all. She wanted to be a Samaritan: the easiest job in the world, and perfect for the useless European middle classes.
“I’m not saying you’re useless, of course. I’m saying you don’t know anything about the Arabs. Nor do I. But my guard is up.”
“For God’s sake—”
“They’re coming from a safe haven,” he retorted. “So it’s their choice. It’s blackmail, and they know it at least. It’s a shame you don’t.”
“They’re helpless and you know it—we know it.”
“Are they?”
Then he poured her another glass and relaxed a little, as if his main point had been made and no other was now necessary.
He said, “Why—have you met any here?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Any ten-year-olds wandering the shore?”
Repulsive, she thought.
The sneering certainty coiled around a grain of truth. But she had to give way a little and deflate the animosity between them, because she had only wanted to confirm that he merited his imminent loss of property.
“You’ll change your tune,” he was saying as a wind-down, “when they start harassing you on the street. What are German women saying now? Confusion. They’re hanging from their own gallows.”
“Daddy, if you met one I’d like to think you’d give them everything you own, just to prove me wrong. Would you?”
He laughed. “Yes, I likely would. Just to keep you happy. But I’d probably ask for it back the next day. Reason always gets the better of me for some reason. Reason or neurosis.”
“Then I’m just as neurotic as you.”
“We live in a culture, Nobbins, where neurosis is all there is. There’s no escaping it anywhere.”
After dessert they reminisced about her mother. Naomi had long suspected that he had begun to see Phaine while her mother was dying of cancer. He hadn’t waited. He had been a bit of a playboy back in the day. There was a streak of Porfirio Rubirosa in him. “Sports, girls, adventures, celebrities, these were the only things that interested me,” as that playboy used to say. “In short, life.” That was life for Jimmie, too. The Charles Krafft “Disasterware” he used to collect was just a pastime to make money. He had one of Krafft’s ceramic delft hand grenades and a pottery handgun with two bluebirds painted on the grip that he kept by his bedside as a joke.
They walked home arm in arm. They dawdled their way through a few late-night bars. At the villa, Carissa opened the door and informed them that Phaine had come back earlier and was already in bed reading. Jimmie asked Carissa if they might have a herbal tea served in their bedroom to send them off to sleep. The maid replied she could make them something Greek her mother used to give her. It usually worked. “That sounds suitably mysterious and potent,” Jimmie said, and turned to go up to his wife, leaving the two young women alone in the salon.
They went into the kitchen and Carissa set about making the infusion from the packets of plants and herbs that she had bought from the old woman. It included a tiny pinch of the hemlock as well as some spearmint and valerian. While the water boiled they talked aimlessly. Carissa had spent some of her childhood in the Mani, from where she had retained some curious lore. Her grandmother there used to tell her that the woods of the mountains were still haunted by ex-communicated pagan spirits that the villagers called daimonia. When her grandmother was a small girl her own grandmother used to tell her that she saw the god Pan at crossroads in the deep forest. The gods had lived on without anyone knowing. One could become spellbound by these pagan spirits, possessed and enchanted.
The infusion had turned a pale golden green. For a moment Naomi hesitated, but then she abandoned her precautions and began to relate her plan for the robbery. She laid it out calmly and slowly, so that she would appear convincingly ethical and coolheaded, and she was sure that the maid would sympathize. Carissa for her part stood with her arms folded and listened intently until she understood what was being asked of her.
“I can’t do it without you,” Naomi said. “Nothing will happen to you afterward—things will just go on as before.” All Carissa had to do was serve Jimmie and Phaine some herbal tea, then leave the front door unlocked and go to bed. She then had to stay in her room and go to sleep as if nothing had happened. If she heard a few noises she would do nothing, just keep on sleeping. They might ask why the door was unlocked, but Naomi would think of something. She even wondered if Carissa could go up afterward and lock it again. She didn’t know yet. For herself, she would sleep at the Haldanes’ that night.