by Tom Lutz
“There are no innocent people. But that aside, I do regret the carnage, Franky, more than you can know.”
“So you did do it.” He finally admitted it to himself: he hadn’t quite believed it.
“Oh, very good, Franky, that was a bluff, was it? Well done. I thought you actually had figured it out. Regardless, my little Oirish colleague claims that the size and timing of the blast was unintended; we had agreed on a much more contained conflagration and at night. Then again, he is probably lying since, as I’m sure you can see, he is a bit of a sadist. Still, like the man said, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
“Nicely performed.” He was an utter, callous brute.
“You gave me that book, Franky.”
“That speech isn’t in the book. It’s in the movie. Orson Welles wrote it on set.”
“And as you also showed me, there is something absolutely beautiful about useless information.”
“You remember when Welles says it, right? His friend has found out he isn’t dead, and so have the police, and he’s about to get caught.” He finished his drink again.
“Yes, Franky, why else would I have quoted it? Try to stay on track.” He winked and smiled at him. “But, hey, really, how can I get caught? There is no crime. There are no fingerprints — didn’t they have fingerprints in The Third Man?”
“Faking your own death is an admission of guilt. I’ll let the cyberpolice take it from there.” He didn’t think he was drunk, but he felt like throwing up.
“I never faked anything, Franky; this is a very different story, is it not? I was in shock and feared for my life, and in hiding — someone had just murdered my colleagues! We had no memorial service, we collected no insurance, I came back to my family’s home, all completely normal and understandable. I’ve been here the whole time, as you know, since you spent some hours in my little attic room, and as the servants will testify. The police report, which will be released shortly, will explain that the blast was the result of a gas leak — no bombs involved. And this is interesting: we calculated the length of time it takes people to stop caring about traumatic events, based on how many people die, and the cause, and came up with a date about two weeks from today. And in any case, Franky, no crime, no evidence, no nothing. A pity that so many records were destroyed in the blast. Oh, and the copies I had? The ones you were so assiduously nosing through? They are all digitized and shredded now. And the encryption is done by Assange’s people. Neither you nor anybody else can possibly see them, unless I decide you should.”
“Maybe I should just turn you over to the other side, let Robert Mugabe and Omar Bongo and Han Sen and Vladimir Putin get their revenge.”
“My goodness, Franky. Delusions of grandeur. Even if they were in the slightest bit interested, how would you manage that?”
“Just let them know you are alive and where you are.”
“You must love her very much.”
Frank didn’t have much to say to that.
“Did you really think, by the way, old man,” he asked, again with the Orson Welles smirk, “that you could make her forget everything she’s ever known?”
Frank had never understood, until that very moment, what it meant to want to murder someone. He started to get up, but Smith and Jones, on some signal of Dmitry’s, had stepped into the room.
“What up, Hollywood?” the short one said. Dmitry gave him a look and they both took a step back.
“Frick and Frack,” Frank said. “They’re yours.”
“Good boy! Yes, they’re mine. Charming, aren’t they? So American. Like from a movie!”
“All those cops, too?”
“No, one of the Taiwanese detectives was really after me, the other on my payroll. And the Jakarta cops, well, they wouldn’t have been a problem if it came to that.”
For some reason Frank remembered that horrible loud POP of an elbow snapping out of its socket in Fullerton. He felt stiff, could barely move. He sat down, drank more of his replenished Bloody Mary — he hadn’t notice Setiawan come back — thought of the first one he had had with Yuli. Maybe he dropped a tear.
“Atta boy, drink up! But there is something you must understand. The men you mentioned — whatever their alleged crimes — they are all in a very small club, and that club is also now my club. I don’t need to do business any more, I really don’t, but I don’t want to become persona non grata in the various places you know nothing about but where I will now spend most of my time. The rumor that I somehow ripped these people off would definitely make it difficult to renew my membership in that club, as it were, and it would be untrue. I didn’t rip them off.”
“Yes you did — where else did you get the plane and the island. You just said you got them with Mugabe’s money.”
“Mugabe, Mugabe, why this obsession?” He turned to the short man in black. “Erase the security system mainframe and leave it off — I’m fine here.” They stood there a moment too long, Kafka’s assistants, but then left in unison. Dmitry turned back to him. “Franky! Zimbabwe’s entire economy rolls not much more than thirty billion US per annum; he rakes off one or two percent, has to dole out at least half of that to his cronies to keep himself propped up, and ends up with pretty small potatoes — one hundred million US a year or so. He invests half of that with us and we get a return of ten or twelve percent, of which the company takes one and I skim maybe two. In my five years with him he was worth maybe a million US a year, no more. Real money, but not Forbes money.”
Frank tried to get up, but couldn’t. He couldn’t feel his legs.
“Credit Lyonnais,” he said. “They have better people than Mutt and Jeff there. I’m sure they’d be interested to know you took their clients for twice what they were getting.”
“Such a hedgehog, after all, Franky! But again, don’t be silly — would you be hearing any of this if it were documentable? The accounting software was modified to hide much more than that, company-wide, and we modified it back in time for the blast. Everything we did along those lines is thoroughly untraceable, unfindable, vanished.”
“Along those lines.”
“Very good, Franky, you’re paying attention. The real money came from the access all these relationships gave me. A new oil refinery in Angola? I buy bundles of the contractor’s stock through complicated strings of holding companies, passing through the countries that make a living being lax about such things. The contract is announced, the stock jumps, my people sell it. The Indian government hires a French company to build a dozen nuclear reactors? I am in Areva stock a week before the announcement, out of it a week or even a day later. The Angolan interior minister and the Indian undersecretary of energy get large payoffs, but the payoffs are a minor business cost as well as great insurance against exposure. I couldn’t have done one fiftieth as much without the highly irregular temporary use of massive Credit Lyonnais assets, but they were all returned safe and sound. Thankfully, there were no major disasters — one always has to worry about a new war breaking out in Angola or some democratic or religious madness in India. But we had no unrecoverable losses, and all the working capital is back where it started, no regulatory agency the wiser.”
“Then why do you have to hide? Who is still looking for you?”
“Ah, Franky, I’ll admit that one thing that still puzzles me is the question of how much of your ignorance is willful. You can’t pull down a few billion dollars a year without people noticing — and any number of people, some for good reason, some with no reason at all, believe that they should get a taste of that money. Some of them feel, unjustly in my view, that because I was so much more successful than they were, my practices were somehow unfair. That I violated some unspoken pact amongst us thieves.”
“Honor,” he said. “Honor among thi
eves.” He felt stupid, and his tongue had now followed his legs into dullness. He might have said theivth.
“Yes, but these are not just thieves, they’re pirates. The government ministers, the CEOs, the fixers: they all look at my pile of money, and like all pirates everywhere they are willing to destroy a lot of people to get their hands on it. Not because it’s mine — they feel the same way about any pile of money they see. They wouldn’t be who they are if they felt any other way. And when we’re talking this kind of loot, things get murderous quite easily.”
“I thought you said your ‘pile’ was all hidden in different people’s names and that kind of thing,” he said, again slurring a word or two. “How do they even know it’s there, how do they know enough to covet it?”
“‘Covet’? — really, Franky? So biblical, and your Freudian slip is showing.” He was right. Frank was not in control of what he was saying. “But to answer you, it’s a small world. I retired at thirty-one and bought a sixty-million-dollar jet, took a half-dozen very profitable small- and mid-cap companies private, and bought quite a lot of real estate on several continents. Everyone in my business can do that kind of math. They may not know any of the details, but the central story may as well have been printed in the New York Times. They won’t know whether I put together five billion or fifty, but they know that is somewhere in that range. They have less, and think they should have gotten a taste. I think not.”
“And they are willing to hurt you to get it. Show — I mean so — you are putting yourthelf and everyone you know at rithk by reappearing now.”
“Touching of you to worry about me, Franky!” he smiled, patronizing. “And who could you possibly be referring to with ‘everyone I know’? Maybe you mean our Irish friend. He will be so moved to hear of your concern.” He laughed. Frank didn’t bother responding.
Heckle and Jeckle returned. Dmitry nodded to them and they went out the front door.
He rolled one shoulder. “Do you think I’m getting too old for jiu-jitsu, Franky? I seem to take longer recovering after a good scrimmage these days.” Frank let that stand as the rhetorical question it was. “To be clear, though, I’m not sure I am reappearing quite yet, although I am itching to reenter international competition before I really do get too old. It’s a question of staying out of the limelight long enough for everyone to save face, to not look like I’m flaunting things. This is more a leftover business courtesy than anything else.”
Frank was hardly listening to him. Thinking about Yuli caught him up. She had known all along that Dmitry was alive. He must have told her to take Frank to bed. She hadn’t cared about me at all, he whined to himself. I am an unmitigated idiot who will spend the rest of my life bereft. And her? If someone asked her if I was blond- or brown-haired, if I had a mustache, would she even know?
Meanwhile, he was on the verge of passing out — was he going to faint? Dmitry blathered on and on.
“Franky, are you there?” Dmitry asked and waited as Frank zoned back in from unconsciousness. “If I have your complete attention, nod.” Frank couldn’t move his head. He blinked. He was drugged. Something in his drink. “As I was saying, these people may want to break my legs, but if you go shooting your mouth off they’ll break yours first. You’re a bigger threat to them than I am. They know I’ll keep my mouth shut.” God, that smirk. Frank wanted to punch him in it. But he couldn’t move his arms.
“I wuv Wuwi.” He heard himself saying it before he realized he was going to say it.
“Of course you do, Franky. She is exquisite, as you told her so many times the other night.”
“You don’ de-zuv huh.” Aglow with rage, unable to move, his tongue a mess.
“Deserve her, hm. I’m not sure we have time for rehashing our various arguments about just desserts, Franky. The Jews didn’t deserve the Holocaust, Mickey Rourke deserved an Oscar, I don’t deserve my life — let’s agree to agree that people don’t get what they deserve and move on.”
Nothing Frank said appeared in his consciousness until it was already said. He tried to say You humiliate her. Make her do things, cheat on her, but the consonants were smushed and vowels disappearing — megadofings, cheenr. He wanted to say something else, but couldn’t remember what it was. He mumbled a version of gynecologist…
“Well, if you are going to start impeaching my sexual conduct, let’s review for a moment, shan’t we? You couldn’t grow up in time to stay with Tracy, you’ve recently sent that poor little girl Isa packing — she really loved you, Franky, you know that, don’t you? — when all she wanted was a child, a child you could well afford, even a nanny or two, no nappies for you, no work — but no, after selfish Franky takes poor Isa off the marriage-and-children market for her five most sellable years, he dumps her off at the Goodwill when he’s done. You’ve been having sex with desperate older women and confused younger women in Los Angeles without a thought to their happiness or their financial wellbeing, and as you know, I am the opposite — I do take some pains to see to everyone’s finances, helping to support many women on a daily basis. And let’s not forget, closer to home, my home, that is, you slept with your good friend’s grieving widow, not only before the corpse was cold, but before it had even been found. Oh, and sleeping with her sister, too! Tacky!”
Frank realized he was paralyzed. The drug in his vodka — was it lethal or just incapacitating him?
“I’m a sexual criminal because I help pay their rent? Please.”
Dmitry stood up and Setiawan came in and took their glasses. Frank’s head fell sideways toward his shoulder, and he couldn’t lift it back up. Was he drooling?
“Ah, I see the drug is achieving its full result. I thought you’d appreciate the Chandleresque effect. And I wasn’t sure how far your misplaced chivalry might take you. Even if this does kind of make me the Fat Man.”
“S’Hammett, na Shandler,” he mumbled. He was definitely drooling.
Setiawan, the driver, and the Blues Brothers were going by, loaded down with suitcases.
He wasn’t sure why, but Frank started remembering a certain evening in Connecticut, at dusk, as they were taking their baths in the pond, he and Dmitry — he remembered it fondly, odd as he knew it might sound, the sun setting, his body aching from a long hard day, sinking into the water, chilly at first, but regulated by the sun and the Earth to be the exact temperature the local beasts might find amenable, the grime of sawdust and cement dust melting away, the magic of immersion doing its work, and he thought of the Ganges and the innumerable watery rituals of birth and rebirth the world over, listening to the katydids in the trees among the myriad insect sounds and frog burps and birdsong: primal, pastoral, pacific. Was this part of their perverse bond? That particular night they were washing up as usual, which meant one guy soaping up for a while, handing off the bar while the other rinsed, then handing it back for the other to do his hair or whatever since they used the same soap for shampoo, and in the course of things Dmitry, absentminded, handed him the soap directly after rubbing it around his genitals and the crack of his ass, straight from his ass to the handoff.
“The fuck the fuck the fuck, Dmitry!”
“What, Franky?”
“You just had that soap in your crack!”
“Well, truth be told, Franky, that particular bar of soap has been in both of our cracks every day for a week or more, twice on Sunday.”
“At least rinse the damn thing off.”
“It’s not necessary, Franky, it’s soap.”
“It’s soap with your asscrack gunk on it.”
“Don’t be neurotic, Franky,” he said. “Soap is by its very nature clean, cleaner than what it comes in contact with. Otherwise it couldn’t work.”
He wasn’t sure why this memory seemed to sum things up for him, but, at that moment, debilitated by whatever was in his drink, devolved into a junky nod, it did.
“I should thank you for taking such good care of my wife, and frankly, Franky, we have enjoyed everything so far —
quite a good show the other night, by the way — much more acrobatic and inventive than when you fucked my girlfriend in Connecticut — although, as I’m sure you can appreciate, a tad sappy for my taste in the verbal department.”
Dmitry looked at him for a moment with pity. Then the smirk returned.
“As we know, though, all good things, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera as the king says, and you are starting to make people nervous. Our petite Irish friend. My policemen. Even the normally unflappable, always exquisite Yuli. So. Our revels now must end. Go home, or go to Taipei and buy your boat. Enjoy my money. Turn around and face the wind.”
Yuli came out, as if on cue, wearing a bright yellow sleeve of a dress, seemingly made of leather.
Frank was not sure if he was weeping or not. “Don’t leave me,” he said, and then thought, again: how stupid! Could not even this night dampen his colossal illusion? At least it sounded like dahlimi, he thought — maybe nobody caught it.
She walked over to him and framed his face gently with her hands. She kissed him tenderly on the forehead, straightened his head out and then kissed him once on each cheek. She looked him in the eye, and he thought maybe she teared up a little. “You are a very sweet man,” she whispered in his ear, “and you made me feel as good as I have ever felt, ever. Nothing he can say or do will ever change that.” Then she kissed him on his numb mouth and turned and walked toward the door. It was — well, it was a smart thing to say, a way to keep him loyal to her. Yes, smart. She was a smart woman. Was that all it was? He didn’t know and didn’t care. He felt ridiculously grateful. Dmitry kept smiling.
“Don’t forget to give Setiawan cash for the movers,” Yuli said to Dmitry as she reached the front door, without looking back, and he felt like Caraway, seeing Tom and Daisy in their familial mode — he felt betrayed by their domestic chatter. Then she left. Forever.
“I shouldn’t say this, Franky, but I can’t resist.”
He took a wad of cash from his pocket, and counted out a number of bills.
“I am a bit disappointed in you. I had always fancied you behaving like a Henry James character in such a grand moment, renouncing your own gratification, careful to get nothing for yourself — your favorite line, yes? I always knew that in the small ways you were as selfish as the rest of us, but you were always so preachy — do you remember the night you said loudly to all my colleagues that Wilcox, the new guy, was a ‘prissy fucking tool’? He remained ‘P. F. T.’ around the office until his untimely death in the blast; not nice of you, Franky, however accurate. You are not altogether, in your great solemnity, kind. But I thought providing you such a splendid stage, such a magnificent set-up for a renunciative declaration, you might finally live up to it all. It occurs to me that ‘renunciative’ may not be a word. Pity. Should be.”