One Big Joke

by Laurence Shames

  “Okay, okay, I get the picture,” Fat Lou interrupted. “But what I can’t quite figure is why you give a shit about my guys maybe falling on their faces.”

  “Why?” said Bert, and he took a moment to think the question through. “Well, call me sentimental, but I still have certain loyalties. Up to a point, at least. And aside from that, it’s like this. In my book, there’s bad guys and there’s worse guys. Bad guys at least admit they’re crooks, outlaws, whatever. Worse guys pretend they aren’t. I got no respect for that. Frosts me to see shitheads like that keep comin’ out on top.”

  “You forget he’s my partner on this.”

  “You picked him. I didn’t.”

  Fat Lou brought forth a leisurely and thoughtful belch. “So now you’re sayin’ I gotta worry about him screwin’ me?”

  “I’m just sayin’ that if there’s an edge to be grabbed, he’ll grab it, and your knuckleheads got no chance.”

  Lou’s wife silently removed the empty frittata plate and presented her husband with a prune Danish the size of a laptop. He poked his finger into the prune part and licked it. Then he said, “Okay, how much you want?”

  “Want for what?”

  “Ya know, for kind of overseein’ the negotiations.”

  “I don’t recall ever sayin’ I was interested in doin’ that.”

  “Fifty? A hundred? Come on, Bert, name your price.”

  The old man hesitated, staring rather blankly at the chihuahua in the drain board. Too late, as happened to him from time to time, he realized he’d been talking his way into a deeper involvement than he’d intended at the start or even thought he wanted; except apparently he did. Finally he said, “Lou, there is no price. I don’t take money. You know that.”

  “And I don’t take up a guy’s valuable time and expertise wit’out I pay for it. Call it one twenty-five if things work out.”

  “And what if they don’t?”

  “Then no one makes bupkis and hopefully we’re still friends. Okay, I’ll go one-fifty. Final offer.”

  “But this is nuts. One-fifty for what? I don’t even know—”

  “You’ll come up to speed. You always have before. You’ll take a meeting or two, you’ll find out everything you need to know.”

  Bert frowned and looked at his dog. The little creature shot him back a knowing and somewhat smug glance, as if it had figured from the start where things were headed. Wanting to hold his ground on something at least, the old man said, “The money, Lou. All I’m gonna do is give it away. Humane Society. Kittens. Puppies. Baby birds that fell onna ground.”

  “What you do with it, I don’t give a shit. I only give a shit I pay it. I feel much better having you involved. I’ll tell my guys you’re in on everything from now on.”

  24

  Over eggs Benedict and a bottle of Prosecco at a rolling table in their room, Carla said, “I don’t want to be a nag, but I really think you owe Lenny an apology.”

  She was braced for a denial and a disagreement, but none came. Instead, Ricky said in a mild, even momentarily humble, monotone, “Yeah, you’re right. I owe Lenny an apology. I owe Pat an apology. I owe my agent an apology. I owe everybody an apology. I’ve been messing things up for everyone.”

  Disarmed by this spasm of remorse, she reached gently for his wrist and said with partial accuracy, “No one blames you, honey. And one of these days you’ll get a chance to make it up to everyone. Especially yourself.”

  He didn’t seem to believe it. He gave his eyebrows a dubious and gloomy lift and sipped some wine.

  She said, “You regret it, Ricky?”

  “Hm?”

  “Picking me up.”

  At that he finally smiled. “Hey, I didn’t pick you up. You picked me up. With the whole cast of The Sopranos sitting right there at your table. Pretty ballsy. And no, I don’t regret it.”

  It didn’t occur to him to ask her if she felt the same. Why wouldn’t she? He stabbed an egg yolk with a spear of toast and asked her how she was enjoying brunch.

  “Oh, it’s great,” she said, but she said it in the underwhelmed tone of a three-star review. “I mean, the sauce is yummy and I love Prosecco but I wouldn’t say it exactly feels like brunch. Brunch is, like, ya go out, there’s ferns, other people, waiters, you smell bacon, maple syrup when the trays go by. It’s, ya know, a going out thing, a being around people thing. You think we could open up the doors to the balcony, at least?”

  He said nothing, just glanced uneasily at the closed and double-locked doors with the translucent curtain still drawn across them. Beyond the balcony there was nothing but the pool area and the twinkling green water of the harbor, seamed and cross-stitched with the wakes of yachts and skiffs, made somehow jovial by the roly-poly movement of red and green buoys on the surging current. The tableau could hardly have been more peaceful, but no scene is peaceful to a man who feels hunted.

  Nevertheless, trying to be accommodating, Ricky stood up, sidled with cat-like movements toward the dreaded window and twitched back the curtain. He undid the locks with slightly trembling fingers, and threw open the doors while simultaneously diving away from the flood of sunlight that poured in. He edged around the room’s dim perimeter to return to his seat at the rolling table and was in a sweat by the time he got there.

  Mopping his forehead with his napkin, he said, “I think my pulse just went up to a hundred forty. Look, this is pathetic. I admit it. I’m a wreck and I need to get out of this town. Travel awhile. Go someplace else.”

  “And what would that accomplish?” Carla said. “Just more running. You can’t hide out forever, Ricky.”

  “No, but I don’t have to sit here like a quailing zombie either.”

  She tapped her long red fingernails against her wine glass. They made a muted bell sound that was almost like her laugh. “Well, you know what I think? I really think the safest place you could be for now is right where you are.”

  “Here? Trapped with him on this dinky little island?”

  “The whole world’s a dinky little island if you’re running scared. But think about it; here we have a big advantage. We know he’s here. He doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “What makes you so sure of that?”

  “For one thing,” she said, “we had pretty good disguises. And he never even looked around at us. Not once. Believe me, if he had any inkling we were there, he would have come after us, like, pronto. I know the man. That’s how he is. Doesn’t plan. No restraint. He just goes. So if he didn’t go for you, that means he had no idea.”

  Ricky chewed a knuckle and thought that over. “But if he doesn’t know we’re here, why the hell’s he here?”

  With as much certainty as she could muster, she said, “Well, it wouldn’t be for fun, that much I’m pretty sure of. He hates Florida. I used to ask him to take me to Miami. He’d say it was too far. I said I’d settle for Orlando. He’d just shake his head and say Florida don’t show me nothin’. Besides, if he was here for fun he’d have a girlfriend hanging on his arm, and there wasn’t any girlfriend. So it must just be a job.”

  “Oh, just a job,” said Ricky as he reached into the ice bucket and poured out the last of the Prosecco. “Just a little head-bashing or throat-slitting or stuffing somebody into the trunk. Just another day at the office, la-di-da.”

  “Actually,” said Carla, “his being on a job, that’s like the best news we could get. He’ll have other things on his mind. So he does the job, he leaves town, maybe he calms down by then, maybe we have a better read on him by then. In the meantime you and I can chill a little. Maybe even see Key West. Kind of a shame to be here and not really see it.”

  “Kind of a shame to see it from a car trunk,” said Ricky.

  “It’ll be okay,” said Carla. “Trust me, the guy has no idea we’re here. How’s the supply of disguises holding up?”

  25

  Lenny should not have been surprised that his call to Marsha got forwarded to voicemail. That’s what happened to
most calls, after all. Even so, he was disappointed to be hearing the robo-voice instead of his wife’s, and the tedious interval in which the caller’s options were recited for the millionth time somehow threw him off his rhythm. The message he left sounded, even in his own ears as he was leaving it, rushed and rambling and maybe a little bit hysterical.

  While the message was landing in her silenced phone, Marsha was teaching a class to a couple dozen bored sophomores. It wasn’t their fault they were bored. Their teacher was hung over from her unaccustomed binge the night before and was giving a very uninspired and disjointed lecture about the themes of honor and vengeance in The Iliad. Marsha herself was bored by what she was saying and it was all she could do not to yawn back at the yawning faces in front of her.

  As she labored through the seemingly endless fifty minutes, her mind began running on two very separate and parallel tracks. On one track, more or less by rote, she continued extolling the glories of great literature by dead geniuses; on the other track, she was thinking about the messy, sloppy, unelevated but precious business of real life. She’d been neglecting that side of things lately; the haze of her hangover, paradoxically, was allowing her to see that very clearly now. She’d been reading life too much and living it too little, letting the politics of the moment and her presumably sturdy academic judgments stand in for raw emotion. Life unfolded day to day…and she regarded it and criticized…and wondered why these two strands, the actual and the perfect, didn’t quite connect.

  The parallel strands of her thinking didn’t stay parallel for long, however. Inevitably, they began to muddle up together, and she found herself vaguely blaming The Iliad for the troubles she and Lenny had been having. She’d accused her husband of not being serious. Why? Because he didn’t strut around like an epic hero, sure of his cause, righting wrongs with grim determination, out to change the world? Face it, that just wasn’t Lenny. He wasn’t hero material. Funny people hardly ever were because irony killed certainty; and without certainty, heroism was just showing off. No, Lenny and Lenny’s destiny were actual-size, ordinary, modest. No shame there; so was almost everybody’s. So was hers. How many women got to launch a thousand ships, after all? So why couldn’t she put aside the bloated ideals of grad school and just accept the small, sweet, unheroic satisfactions of a married life that didn’t change the world and didn’t count for much to anyone except the people living it?

  Distracted, detached, feeling increasingly blue and at odds with herself, she soldiered through to the end of the lecture then walked to her favorite coffee shop at the edge of campus. She ordered a macchiato and was waiting for it to be delivered when she checked her phone and saw that she had a message from her husband. The coffee shop was noisy with the hiss of steaming milk and the clank of trays on tables, so she had to squeeze the phone hard against her ear to hear; the intimate pressure of cold glass against her face lent a frosty urgency to the message and made her husband’s voice sound especially breathy and pinched.

  “Marsha? It’s me. So glad we talked last night. Maybe we’re okay now. I hope so…But listen, I have no idea when I might be coming home. It’s not about us. Not anymore…But what’s going on down here, it’s gotten pretty scary. The guy who wants to kill Ricky, he’s in Key West. I was sitting maybe twenty feet away from him last night. Watching comedy. Trying to laugh. Kind of terrifying. Don’t know how this plays out, just know I have to see it through. No choice, really. I have to. Okay, gotta go. Take care. Love you. Bye.”

  Sitting there alone in the bustling coffee shop, she listened to the message three times, four, and grew more agitated with each hearing. Was this really her Lenny? Just ten minutes before, she’d been reconciling herself to the fact that he was not cut out to be a hero, and now all of a sudden he was sounding like he was one. But with no experience, no training, no natural leaning toward that sort of thing. What the hell was he thinking?

  He was in danger, that much was clear. Sitting twenty feet from a killer. Determined to stay. Doing this to protect someone who wasn’t even a friend, not really, just a guy in trouble. Why? Could it be because she’d thrown it in his face that he should be more serious? Was that why he was doing these reckless and possibly fatal things now? To prove himself worthy in her eyes and his own? Would it be her fault if God forbid…

  The questions tweaked her, but the more she thought about them, the more she realized they really didn’t matter. All that mattered was that her husband was in danger, and far away. And that, in turn, made a lot of things seem simpler and clearer than they had for a very long time. Quite suddenly, without even exactly making a decision, she knew what she had to do. She had to be near him, share the peril, help deal with this bit of down-and-dirty seriousness that real life had thrown in their way. Sitting there in the coffee shop, she got busy on the phone and started making arrangements for a trip to Florida.

  26

  “Bert,” said Ted Clifton, rising from an impressive chrome-and-leather chair behind his desk, “this is an unexpected pleasure.” He said it with a pinched smile that enhanced rather than muted the sarcasm.

  “Likewise,” the old man said, flashing the smile right back at him while at the same time flexing his chihuahua’s paw in a sardonic little wave. “Hello from Nacho, too.” The dog bared its teeth and whimpered.

  “But I don’t quite understand,” the businessman went on, “what you’re doing at this meeting.” He didn’t look at Bert as he said this, but rather at the two young mobsters who flanked him, looking tough but somewhat sheepish.

  Neither Peppers nor Carmine answered, so Bert did it for them. “So happens the gentleman who employs these fine fellas—Fat Lou, or probably Luigi or maybe even Louis Benedetti as you would know him—asked me to advise or counsel or maybe you could even say mentor these relative newbies in the business so that if they happened to find themselves out of their depth or let’s say at a disadvantage vis-à-vis someone who was the type a person to take advantage of someone at a disadvantage…Hang on a sec, where was I goin’ wit’ this?...Right. So because I think a deal should be a fair deal and if someone’s gonna get fucked he should at least be well-informed enough so that he can pick the appropriate moment to bend over, I agreed to serve as kind of an interpreter of our local customs and to make sure that Peppers and Carmine here didn’t, either from an excess of enthusiasm or lack of perspicacity, do something they would later regret, possibly in prison. In other words, to put it simple, I’m here to help.”

  With a sourness he couldn’t quite mask, Clifton said, “That isn’t what Mr. Benedetti and I agreed. We agreed that he was sending down two men.”

  “And he did,” said Bert. “Me, he didn’t have to send. I was already here.”

  Flicking his eyes back and forth between Peppers and Carmine, searching as always for some psychological edge, Clifton said, “Doesn’t suggest a lot of confidence in you two gentlemen.”

  “Ain’t about confidence,” Carmine growled, though he couldn’t come up with an alternate explanation.

  After an uncomfortable pause, Bert said, “So, are you gonna invite us to sit down or are we going to conduct this sit-down standing up?”

  Grudgingly, Clifton motioned his visitors toward chairs. Bert took a moment to look around the office. It was a beautiful office in a beautiful building on the waterfront in Truman Annex. Everything had been so painstakingly refurbished to look like old Key West that it didn’t look like Key West at all. The wood floors gleamed, the whitewashed walls showed just a hint of the grain of the timbers underneath the paint. Big windows gave onto an immaculately level brick walkway, beyond which was a snug marina full of polished sailboats of which no parts seemed to be broken. Real Key West boats never looked like that.

  “All right,” Ted Clifton said, “I assume you’ve been filled in on the nature of our business.”

  “Only briefly,” said Bert. “As I understand it from our young friends here, you hope to launch a ferry service to Havana, and in order to do that y
ou have to build a terminal, and in order to build a terminal you have to procure a suitable location, and it’s my guess or let’s say inference based on the out-of-town partnership you’ve put together, that procuring said location might very possibly require the maiming or murder or at least scaring the shit out of the current occupant of the premises.”

  The businessman made a steeple of his fingertips and flexed them lightly. “I’ve never said anything like that. Let’s be clear. What I’ve said is that I wish to lawfully obtain a lease on such a property and that I hope to lawfully persuade the current lease-holder that it is in her interests to sell the lease to me.”

  “Okay, let’s be clear,” Bert echoed, swiveling in turn toward each of the two men sitting alongside him. “Ya see, this is where having an interpreter comes in handy. When he says lawfully persuade and this and that other bullshit, what he means is maim, murder or scare the shit out of, except he personally is somewhere else and has an alibi. Capeesh?”

  He was unhurriedly turning his eyes back toward Clifton, when something unsettling finally hit him. “But wait a sec. Did you just say her interests?”

  Innocently, the businessman said, “Yes, I did. The current lease-holder is a woman. Your friends here didn’t tell you that?”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Hey, no one told us neither,” chimed in Peppers, sounding more than a bit miffed about it.

  “Kinda changes things,” Carmine added.

  “No it doesn’t,” said Clifton. “Business is business. It doesn’t a change a thing.”

  Peppers said, “If it comes to roughin’ up somebody—”

  “I’ve never suggested violence,” the businessman interrupted.

  “If it comes to roughin’ up a woman,” Carmine put in anyway, “I just don’t see where we would do that.”