The Package

by Aniko Rankine

“Are you crazy?” Pete snapped at me. He was doing that quite a bit these days. But of course he was right, as usual. More than crazy, I was probably downright stupid.

It was almost midnight, and when the phone rang, the tone was loud and it frightened me. Of all things, it was playing the “Toreador” song, and at full volume. I had set it to my favorite, a Bach tune, and I had asked him not to change it, but the phone was on his account: he was paying for it, so from time to time he had to assert his authority over it by messing around with the settings. And “Toreador” wasn’t that bad, actually. His own phone rang to the tune of the “Hokey-Pokey” song.

“Don’t answer it!” he snarled, even though I already had. “It’s late. People need to learn some goddamn manners around here.”

“Around here” was in San Francisco. Pete was from San Diego, and he complained bitterly about the cold, the fog and the general idiocy of the people. I was one of the idiots.

“You’re a freaking idiot,” he confirmed this promptly, after I told him what the call was about. “Haven’t you heard the stories? Didn’t they tell you a million times not to carry packages for people?”

I knew he was right, but I had already promised… I had taken stuff before—books, clothes, CD’s; people were always sending things. But even I knew this one was a lot worse.

“It’s medicine,” I said. “Her grandfather’s sick.”

“Medicine,” he said slowly, but I knew he was just gearing up. “For cryin’ out loud, you’re stupider than I thought. Me-duh-cine! Do you even know what the thing is? If it’s legal? And, like, don’t they have medicine in Italy too?”

“It’s some herbal thing he was recommended, and it’s not available over there.”

“Oh for shit's sake,” he offered in response to this, making full use of the sibilants and throwing his hands up in the air. I’m pretty sure he was rolling his eyes too, though it was too dark to see. He was always very theatrical late at night; he thought himself a grand actor, an unrecognized talent.

“It’s unregulated,” I said, though I was really just guessing that.

“You don’t know what the hell it is, that’s the short of it,” he pointed out. Right again, he was. “Do you even know this person?”

“Of course, she’s—she’s Anna’s—niece I think.”

He snorted scornfully, as though he knew I had only met Anna’s niece once, and I didn’t quite remember much about her. Anna was my mother’s cousin, and I didn’t even know her that well.

You don’t get it—I thought. In our culture, family is important. We have to stick together, help each other… But I kept quiet, of course. It was lame, and I hated sounding lame.

“I’ll open it and make sure it’s okay,” I said, trying to sound like a rational person.

“Right. You’re an expert on controlled substances,” he sneered. “Good God”.

“But what should I do?” I pleaded, feeling lamer than ever. “I can’t just tell her I won’t—”

“Do what you want. It’s your business,” he interrupted, as if he had been waiting for just that cue. “Stupid fool.” And he slammed the door.

I didn’t follow him to the bedroom. It’s not that I was afraid of him—he was never violent. It was all words, wind, attitude and superiority. I just couldn’t win, so I didn’t try. I slept on the sofa, with the TV on, the blinking of the screen lulling me to sleep as I was thinking he’s right and I’m an idiot…

The package was dropped off early, by Felicia’s fiancé. Pete was still asleep. I gave the young man some coffee and tried to question him about the medicine, but he said he didn’t know much about it. He just knew the grandfather back in the old country had cancer, and the doctors were saying they couldn’t do anything for him—inoperable, he struggled with the word, trying to figure out if he’d gotten it right or lost a syllable somewhere—but there was this root from Brazil, from the rainforest, that people said could work miracles.

After he left I looked in the brown bag he had handed me. There was a bottle in it, wrapped in more brown paper. I unwrapped it—it was of those dark medicine bottles you couldn’t see through well. It was clear that it contained some kind of thick liquid though, and it had a homemade label on it, announcing in a quaint, curlicued handwriting a melodious word I assumed to be the name of the miraculous root. There was no Latin formula or anything else.

I felt kind of reassured. That was silly of me, I know, but the package did look innocent, in that folk-medicine-abracadabra—quackery way that you know will not really cure anyone, but it will do no harm either. Faith itself can make people feel better, I thought. I was doing the right thing.

Pete surfaced from the bedroom just when I was about to call a taxi. He grabbed a cold bagel and his coffee and drove me to the airport. He didn’t speak much, sipping the coffee and nibbling on his food. I figured he would start up again, but he didn’t even ask about the package. He dropped me off at the airline gate with a perfunctory kiss and a mumbled “take care”.

The flight was uneventful but very long and, like all cross-Atlantic flights, disorienting – you never quite knew what time it was, where you were and why exactly you were there. I tried to read, I tried to watch the in-flight movie—one of those romance comedies with the handsome blue-eyed British-accented beau—but I couldn’t follow the story. I was getting seriously worried. They hadn’t asked about my package during the security screening at SFO, but what about customs in Rome? What would I tell them if they asked what exactly it was? If I gave them the story I had they’d be sure to open the bottle and examine its contents, maybe even send the stuff to a lab to have it analyzed—could they detain me while they waited for the results? I started thinking again that Pete might have been right. I asked for another small bottle of the complimentary wine, but it didn’t do much good; I was so nervous it just gave me stomach cramps.

But I needn’t have worried—not about the Italian authorities anyway. The immigration officer—sans mustache, and very nice and polite—noticed my name and asked if I spoke Italian. Un poco, I said, and he immediately started rattling away about the weather and some soccer match. Customs just waved me through. But of course, I thought. This was what always happened. It was silly of me to worry myself sick over a little thing like that package.

I took a cab to my hotel, the one I always stayed at during these trips. It was a nice place, and I felt completely relaxed now—everything was normal, I was at home, in a way. It was a day later, of course, than when I left San Francisco (we had flown overnight, even though you wouldn’t have noticed on the plane), and it was about midday when I got to the hotel, but the museum didn’t expect me until the next day. I called and let them know I had arrived, but I had the rest of the day to myself.

It is usually not recommended to sleep in the afternoon when you’re trying to adjust to a new time zone, but I was only staying a few days, so there was no point in adjusting anyway. I was also terribly tired, after a night of very little sleep and then another of none at all. I had lunch at the hotel’s restaurant—with my worries gone, I was now ravenously hungry—and I went straight to bed.

It was just after six when I woke up and remembered the package. Feeling rested and relaxed, I figured I might as well take care of it at once. The phone number was written on the brown bag.

But as I was so happy and calm about everything now, I decided to give Pete a call first. The home phone rang without answer, so I left a message: I arrived, everything was fine, etc. After a bit of hesitation I tried his cell phone too, but that one didn’t ring at all. That sort of thing happened with our phone company a lot. I hung up and dialed the number on the paper bag.

A low, gravelly voice answered. At first I thought it must have been the sick man himself, but the voice spoke of him in the third person. His Italian was mumbled and very hard to understand; I suspected it to be one of the regional dialects I wouldn’t have heard before. At some point I had the feeling it might be a woman I was talking to, but the person never identified him—or herself, just told me to come right away, and thanked me profusely. I was given the address: the house was just two blocks away from where I was staying.

I walked there, clutching the package. It was an old apartment block, the kind where in classic Italian movies you’d see full-bosomed, fiery wives leaning out the windows and reading their errant husbands the riot act. The kind mostly old people live in these days, or struggling artists. There was an intercom system that looked like it was from the first series ever made – and sure enough, when I pressed the button with the name beside it, nothing happened. But when I pushed on the gate it turned out to be open, so I went in, and then up the dirty stairs to the third floor.

As I turned left on the landing, the door was right in front of me, with the old man’s name spelled out on a bronze nameplate. I was about to knock when another door, the one just behind me, opened and an old woman peered out. By her looks she could have been the owner of the voice on the phone, but when she spoke, she sounded completely different: her voice was clear and kind as she asked me who I was looking for. I gave her the name and pointed at the door.

“Don Alfredo è morto un mese fa,” she told me in the same sweet voice.

It took a few moments for this to sink in, what with her cheerful tone, and the fact that I had been dispatched to deliver medicine to this Don Alfredo, the one she was saying had been dead for a month.

I stood there not knowing what to say, but she continued. I wasn’t the first person to look for him today, she said: a young man had come by before, also American. Don Alfredo had lots of relatives in America, but they hardly ever came to visit while he was alive.

I stared at the apartment door and listened to her chatter. Finally I realized what I needed to ask.

“Who lives in the apartment now?”

“Nessuno,” she said, shaking her head. Nobody lived there, but it was supposed to belong to this granddaughter in America she had never seen. Felicia or Felicità, she said.

I stood there transfixed, still staring at the door. The old woman realized something wasn’t right.

“Che cosa è errato?” she asked kindly, now concerned.

I didn’t get to answer. That moment, behind Don Alfredo’s door, a phone started to ring. You put your right foot in, you put your right foot out the tune went, followed by a muffled noise, like something falling or someone kicking a piece of furniture, and that was all I heard before I turned and started running down the stairs. I don’t know if it ever got to the shaking about or the Hokey-Pokey part.

I ran all the way to the hotel, gathered my stuff and checked out. I headed straight to the airport, ready to get on the first plane out, but then thought better of it. What had happened? Did anything really happen, or was it my imagination? Was it my nerves, aggravated by jet lag? Did I dream the whole thing? I remembered I had work to do here: I had come to examine and possibly buy a painting for my employer, a private collector in San Francisco. I was being paid pittance, of course (it was supposed to be an honor to serve as such a distinguished citizen’s Quattrocento expert), but it was a job, and one I had done before. I told the driver to take me to one of the ugly airport hotels.

Up in my new room, I took out the cursed package and examined it again. It was obviously time to open it. I screwed off the top and peeked inside. There was nothing much to be seen, but the smell was curiously familiar. I poured some of the liquid into one of the plastic cups the hotel provided for the guests’ plastic cup needs: it was a beautiful thick pink, just like – well, that pink medicine you take for upset stomach and the like. I dipped my finger in and tasted it just to be sure, but there was no need really – the magic mystery medicine was obviously simple, over-the-counter Pepto-whatever.

The meaning of this was both absolutely clear and totally obscure at the same time. I had been set up, but for what purpose? And by whom? Was it really Pete in that apartment, as I had imagined?

The next day I went to the museum, but they refused to sell for the price my employer had given me as the limit. I agreed with them, but that didn’t help either of us much – they needed to raise money and I needed a deal. I ended up with a new friend and a job offer though.

I flew back to San Francisco the day after and went straight home, hoping to find that I had imagined the whole thing. But Pete wasn’t there. I started waiting. I still wasn’t afraid of him, even though I had this feeling that if it hadn’t been for the nosy old neighbor, if I had entered Don Alfredo’s apartment, I would not have come out of there alive. But then the next moment I would be thinking that was ridiculous: what reason would anyone—Pete—have to kill me?

I waited for two weeks, but Peter was never heard from again. His passport was in its usual place, at the bottom of the drawer, and his Mercedes turned up in a garage in San Jose, but his boat was missing. So was his cell phone, by the way, but that’s not much to say. I reported him missing, but the police weren’t too excited: husbands start new lives all the time, they said.

At the end of the month I locked up the house and moved to Italy to work for the museum. The pay is not much, but it’s the kind of job I have always dreamed of. I live in another one of those, dirty, smelly apartment blocks with the nonfunctioning, antediluvian intercom.

As for Peter, I still don’t know what really happened. I have told the story to many people—anonymously, on the internet, changing names and cities, professions and all that—and they came up with many different possibilities. The majority thinks he wanted to kill me and set the whole thing up. This is hard to believe—so much planning and preparation just to get rid of little me, it’s almost flattering to think of it. And it isn’t like Pete at all; he was more sound and fury than action, typically. But then even lazy people can sometimes surprise you if they really want something. One guy thinks it was Pete, but that it was meant to be a joke, or a lesson of some kind. See above: even harder to imagine all that work just to humiliate me, when he had been doing that all the time with much less effort… Some people guess that he was arrested for breaking and entering because the old lady next door naturally called the police after she heard the noise; and that he’s serving time in an Italian jail under an assumed name, which would explain his own passport being at home, and also how he would have expected to get away with murder—not being in the country it takes place in is as good an alibi as it gets. Others figure he died in a car accident trying to make his escape. (The brain injury version was dismissed after a lengthy on-line discussion about the actual incidence of severe amnesia in the real world.)

And of course a strong minority believes I only imagined the phone ringing in the apartment: if there was any Hokey-Pokey song it came from somewhere else, and Pete is probably at the bottom of San Francisco Bay along with his boat, the victim of an accident, with the whole thing being just a big coincidence. One person suspects the kindly old neighbor could have had some designs on Don Alfredo’s apartment, and might have thought it helpful to spook away possible American heirs with weird noises.

One day last week I walked past Don Alfredo’s building and saw a couple with a young baby on what must have been his balcony.

I suppose I could find out who they are, but – it doesn’t really matter, does it?