by Robb T White
More like curiosity. Like seeing him in a new, dangerous, and exciting light.
Violence was an aphrodisiac, nature’s music. Men used to believe in a music of the celestial spheres. It was a cacophony, not a symphony, Wöissell knew, and it played in a slum for filthy human ears, not for angels in Paradise.
Chapter 41
‘YOU’VE GOT NOTHING TO worry about, Mr. Wöissell. Am I pronouncing that right?’
He made it sound like weasel. ‘Close enough,’ Charley said.
‘Your family—that is, your brother and your sister, as initiators of this suit—they really don’t have a legal leg to stand on. Heck, once the judge throws this out, we can turn around and countersue if you wish.’
‘That won’t be necessary. I just want it dismissed,’ Wöissell said.
‘Leave it to me. You have nothing to worry about,’ his lawyer replied.
At the door, the lawyer held out his hand.
‘Ow, quite a grip you have there, my friend.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Wöissell’s hiring the lawyer was perfunctory, an afterthought. He picked the name out of the phone book and set up an appointment in his office near the Union Station Brewery. Then he put it out of his mind.
What was on his mind was a scrap of paper bearing her name and phone number: Call me—Rissa.
He thought about the look again. His lack of companionship, a Gobi of celibacy, was self-imposed like his solitary life. He had thought the one a necessary complement to the other. Now he wasn’t sure.
Wöissell hated people, with few exceptions, but certain types elevated themselves into special categories from which he selected his targets: abusers of children and animals, the greedy, the gluttonous, the violent. He created a lesser canon for people like the musclebound morons who tagged along behind Big Steve Misrach. Not so big anymore, recovering at one of the many hospitals named for Roger Williams.
Before his meeting with the lawyer, he called Joe’s Gym, disguising his voice and claiming to be ‘a concerned friend’ of Steve. The receptionist—he recognized her voice—told him no cops had been around. It could mean Steve’s buddies fobbed off the EMT people with a story of an ‘accident’, or they could be planning some revenge of their own. An homage, like a catafalque of soldiers surrounding their fallen leader.
He didn’t understand why he had to punish Steve when his longest-held axiom was never kill in his own back yard. It could have been a fatal mistake. Rhode Island collected DNA from all arrestees, regardless of any future judicial outcome. His prints, albeit under a false name, were in the national criminal database since Buffalo. Rhode Island hadn’t executed anybody since 1845. Was he subconsciously trying to get caught?
How many people, he thought, walking about the downtown on a gorgeous New England fall day like this had thoughts like his? Nature’s beauty and his own morbid thoughts made for a surreal downtown walk.
Am I never going to learn?
He took the paper out of his pocket and looked at it again. He thought of her—another Reggie at best, another female who chose to mate with a clown. She was his height, a woman with a sensual body trimmed and toned from weight-lifting. She wasn’t faking anything and she didn’t, he was sure, lift for men’s approval. He liked that about her.
Her image chirped in his brain, a faulty smoke alarm, that wouldn’t stop.
He wandered for hours, unaware of people passing. He found himself in the Upper South district and called her from a payphone outside a Dairy Mart on Prairie Avenue.
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s me,’ Wöissell said.
She told him to take a cab to an address on Broad Street.
A bad pun, he thought.
Her rental was a one-storey dump. She shared the place with a roommate who was asleep in a downstairs bedroom. Posters of Leonardo DiCaprio from The Revenant, David Beckham in soccer shorts, and LeBron James doing a backward stuff covered one wall. He didn’t expect to see a David Hockney.
When she let him inside, he paused in front of the DiCaprio poster.
‘I saw What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,’ Wöissell said. ‘I thought he was retarded.’
‘Look who’s talking, Apple Cheeks,’ she said. ‘Bet you don’t shave more’n once a month.’
‘Is someone else here?’
‘My roommate Denise,’ she said. ‘She works nights. She waitresses at a club downtown. Ever heard of Roger’s Oak Room?’
‘Every third business in Providence is named for Roger Williams.’
‘Who?’
‘Forget it,’ Charley said. ‘You look … nice.’
What a gawky teenager would say. She wore a tank top cut off just under her small breasts.
She led him to a couch and offered him a drink. He looked at his watch, a stupid bourgeois gesture: too early to drink—unless you were Freddie Wöissell.
‘Do you have beer?’
‘No, I hate the stuff,’ she said.
‘Whiskey?’
‘Tequila OK?’
‘That’ll do,’ Wöissell replied. He had not had liquor in a long time.
‘No limes,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to mix it with Coke. Denise says it takes the edge off. It’s called Charro Negro.’
She served them drinks on a plastic tray that had writing on it. He read upside-down: Dear Karma I Have a List of People You Missed.
The nape of his neck tingled. He felt like an actor at a cattle call under klieg lights. A casting director out there somewhere, looking on with disapproval.
She sat close, her knees touching his.
‘Too bad about the limes,’ she said.
‘Why? Sorry—I mean, yes, too bad.’
‘You’re not very good at this, are you?’
‘No, I’m out of practice,’ Charley said.
He focused on her face. The human face with its credit-card configuration of eyes, nose, mouth. Her lips, full with the upper-lip notch, chin dimple, graygreen eyes of a cat.
‘I’m not sure I remember the steps,’ Charley said. ‘You lick the salt first or is it after?’
‘I’d rather you licked something else,’ Rissa said. She bored into him with her unusual eyes.
Wöissell felt panic. Tracker of human prey. Vanquisher of little FBI agents and outsized bullies. Slowly, as if reaching for a wounded bird, she took him by the hand into her bedroom.
The light was still fading between the same two Venetian blind slats as though the sun had made a conscious decision to pause at this angle. She reached over and pushed his cheek playfully and said, ‘You were saving that up.’
Wöissell turned his head to look at her. He didn’t know what he felt like just then. Someone home, someone lost at sea. A man who didn’t recognize himself anymore.
She cocked her head on the pillow and smiled at him.
‘That was great. God knows, I’ve been needing it. Steve’s been making sure I don’t get any lately.’
Hearing his name made him wince.
‘Sorry,’ Rissa said. ‘I won’t talk about him. Want to smoke?’
He looked at her, surprised. Dedicated body-builders, he knew, were antismoking fanatics and drugs of choice were Ex or Oxy, hillbilly heroin, not weed.
‘No, thank you,’ Wöissell said.
‘You’re so polite, Johnny. Not like those guys at the gym. They want something, they don’t ask, they take it.’
‘Call me John,’ he said. He hoped she didn’t ask for his surname. He forgot it. Something Irish like Mahoney.
‘My real name’s Clarissa. I shortened it up in high school. Too girly.’
He recalled a novel by that name and said it was over a thousand pages long.
‘Bullshit,’ Rissa laughed. ‘No such thing. The fuckin’ Bible ain’t that long.’
‘My father sent me to a prep school,’ Wöissell said. ‘Some Fortune 500 families sent their children there.’
He thought she might think he was bragging instead of remembering. She tol
d him she grew up in Federal Hill, ‘where the dagos all live. I’m part wop myself,’ Rissa said.
‘You don’t look Italian,’ he said.
‘You’re a strange guy, John,’ she said. ‘Steve said you were gay as a tangerine when you came in that first time.’
He rolled over onto her and he was soon inside her while she was kissing him hard on the mouth.
When they left the bedroom, her roommate was gone. Rissa showed him her note mentioning she was going to buy groceries tomorrow and added a few salacious comments about ‘keeping the noise down’ next time. She misspelled some of the words in a loopy handwriting. They ate SpaghettiOs, the only thing left in the pantry.
Rissa told him, when they moved in together, they were both going to be cocktail waitresses and make big money. She and Denise practiced fellatio on bananas at the kitchen table.
He started dressing. She reached out to unzip him, but he grabbed her hand.
‘That’s a grip.’
‘Sorry. I have to go,’ Charley said.
‘Be careful, you. Steve and Corey went to prison for boosting, selling ’roids, whole bunch of shit.’
He told her he had to go. Before he knew what he was doing, he kissed her hand.
‘What the fuck…?’
‘Sorry. I don’t know what—’ he apologized.
‘Kissing a lady’s hand and all,’ Rissa said, laughing. ‘That’s the only part of me you didn’t kiss.’
She wore a Celtics jersey, nothing below. The rucked-up sheets at her knees revealed a dark brown wedge. She had an angel’s wing tattoo across her back and a devil with a pitchfork and an arrow tail that curled into the crease of her buttocks.
At the door, Wöissell told her he wouldn’t go back to Joe’s.
‘Don’t matter, John. Those guys, they’ll be looking for you.’
She didn’t ask him where he lived, where he worked or what he did. When he turned around at the bottom of the steps, she was still standing in place, one hip thrust out, no expression on her face.
‘I want to see you again,’ he said. It took an effort to say.
Rissa shrugged, exposing her pubic ruff. ‘Then call me,’ she said.
He walked a couple of blocks, his mind emptied of thought. Wöissell walked aimlessly in the dark like the phone zombies he’d seen on the street earlier, except that he had nothing in his hands except his own two clenched fists.
Chapter 42
WÖISSELL KNEW HE WAS in trouble. Steve and his friends Corey and Nick were aware of him leaving her house. She recognized Steve’s car and Nick de Pasqualone’s, too, for that matter.
It surprised him she didn’t share his concern. He knew from their pillow talk she’d had a rough upbringing with many siblings and extended family clamoring for attention, growing up poor, and having to fight for everything. None of which he knew personally. She teased him, calling him Silver Spoon to get a rise out of him. He took her to some good restaurants downtown and she ate whatever he suggested from the menu.
She had a dark side, too; she was moody, often irascible. At times, he wondered if she were bipolar. One afternoon, driving Downcity, as the locals called it, just off Canal Street, she hiked up her short dress beside him and gave several passing vehicles a good view.
‘Just taking an air bath,’ she said. He told her not to do that. ‘Guys like to go free-balling. I like to go commando.’
She never asked him to take her to his house, but he suspected she wasn’t buying the explanation of his dying father upstairs. He told her his stepmother was ‘a nice woman’ and she laughed at the obvious lie. He knew there was little he could do about Steve’s stalking her. She said he harassed her at work but he wasn’t yet up to lifting weights with his pals.
‘He still looks like shit,’ she told him, ‘you really choked him out, man. Were you trying to kill him?’
‘No,’ Wöissell replied. ‘I was trying to get a message to his tiny lizard brain not to bother me.’
‘Whatever,’ Rissa said. ‘I hope you never get that pissed at me.’
He laughed. ‘I’d never hurt you.’
‘Oh yeah, see these purple spots all over me? Those are your fingertips, asshole.’
‘I didn’t realize I was—’
‘Shut up. Want a blowjob?’ Rissa asked him.
‘Oh God. You know it,’ he said.
She was an expert fellatist, and he marveled at her own pleasure as well as what she gave him. She kept her fingers busy strumming while she played him.
His lawyer left him three messages about the lawsuit. Sometimes he returned calls but mostly ignored him. The last one, however, was worrisome. He was no longer using phrases like ‘it’s in the bag’ or ‘not to worry’; more legalese crept into his speech.
Wöissell bought a Tracphone and told Rissa to call him.
‘I can handle Steve,’ she said. He watched her preparing to go to work. She said she’d done waitressing jobs like the I-Hop since she was seventeen.
He watched her put her hair up in the dressing mirror.
‘You’re pretty,’ he said.
‘Shut up, you,’ she said. ‘I got no time to blow you.’
She had a GED. Before that life-changing faculty-grad student party, he was a summa cum laude graduate who thought a Ph.D. in philosophy and teaching in college was the desideratum of his future life. He was ashamed of that now. Sartre would have called it inauthentic, a dupe of a system of privilege that took harmless social drudges and converted them to silly eunuchs of consumerism and capitalism.
‘I know you’re sick of me asking you this, but what is it that you do for a living?’
‘I sell hot dogs, fries, burgers, soda, coffee. Sometimes, tacos and fresh salads.’
‘You fuckin’ liar, John.’
‘Wait and see,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you with me.’
Was he crazy? He wondered more and more.
As soon as this lawsuit was settled, he was leaving Providence for good. He’d sell out his portion to Fred and Min, take the money, buy a new truck and leave for parts unknown. He spent long moments thinking how and when he’d ask Rissa to accompany him.
He dreaded it and it exhilarated him at the same time. He’d have to make it work: keep the books, shop for bargains, try to make a modest profit, travel the country. But not for that. The important thing was to keep moving, never stop.
He’d learned quite a bit of information about Special Agent Jade Hui of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It took hours at the computer and dozens of phone calls from land lines around Providence at different times of the day. But it was worth it. Know thy self, know thy enemy.
Charley had one more thing to do in his old life. One well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim. Something else the wily Sun Tzu counseled. Nothing about forgive your enemies.
Chapter 43
JET LAG WAS THE ENEMY; you might say things that would boomerang and you were stuck with eating them. The OPR board reviewing Jade’s case reserved an upper-level conference room on the E Street side overlooking the trapezoidal courtyard below, but wasn’t convening for another day. The tension added to her fatigue coming into Reagan International on a turbulent flight. She planned to do some light stretching on the yoga mat when she returned to the motel that evening. Not exactly another big date night anyway. Nothing in DC appealed to her.
One of the members of that session, a legal expert in these matters named Barnicle, had flown into DC from Richmond to offer counsel. He seemed pleasant and often interrupted the chair’s proceedings with off-the-cuff remarks that implied he had most of the real power in the room. The other three were drones who would do or say as led. She couldn’t read him. The chair obviously disliked her and grilled her hard on the events of that day; he implied Agent Silva’s death was on her hands—guilty—now prove your innocence. A few courteous enquiries about her injuries at the beginning. They had the doctor’s report addendum in their files but it never
came up. That was a little worrisome. None of her injuries had lasting effects and her once swollen face was normal. The fight in the cabin cruiser didn’t occupy more than three sentences in the fifteen page report, and it was that one, a collaborative summary, not her prepared remarks that would carry or lose the day.
At one point, the DC supervisor dropped a hint that Gilker’s supplemental report wasn’t admissible as it was superseded by her temporary appointment to Youngstown. She didn’t know what to make of that.
One thing was made clear: she had two more weeks on the case before she was re-assigned to new duties until and unless the Chicago supervisor called her back to complete unfinished work there. She pointed out that she was already splitting time.
‘They need full-time agents in both field offices, Agent Hui,’ the chair observed, as if sending her on a roving mission for the last half year across the Midwest was somehow logical proof of that. Chain of command overruled all sense and nonsense alike; a superior officer’s word was never merely a suggestion to a subordinate.
The hearing over in three hours, she took a cab back in a thunderstorm. That night in her motel room, she worked on the mat until she felt stabbing pains in her chest, reminding her that bones knitted at their time, not when you wanted them to. Her days as a fast healer were over. She remembered the letter of resignation that lay dormant in a file on her desktop. Time to look it over, she thought; polish a few more phrases. She had taken her pursuit of the sandwich man as far as she could. Every field office, law enforcement agency, including US Marshals and state cops, were alerted to him. When she wasn’t preoccupied with one of Gilker’s tasks, she sat at her desktop computer checking for bulletins, scouting databases, like a spider sitting in the middle of her web, touching strands for that one vibration that said There you are.
Gilker was attending some meeting in Cincinnati, which made the environment around the office more relaxing, according to a surprise late night call from Pete Grandbois. She thought she’d never hear from him again, but her battle in the cabin cruiser was notorious in FBI scuttle butt.