Dead Anyway

by Chris Knopf

  The first thing I did was provide First General Metallurgy Associates with the highest credit level, with notes that our Dun & Bradstreet ratings were impeccable. I backdated the entry by a year.

  Then I checked the CMT&M inventory for available product and was pleased to see a nice supply of palladium, iridium and gold, all high value per troy ounce, the standard unit of measure. Heavier than hell, but still shippable.

  It wasn’t hard to pack several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise into packages no bigger than a few cigar boxes.

  There was a hot link directly to purchasing on the inventory page, so I went there and placed my order. The confirmation, sent to First General Metallurgy’s new email account, said the metals would be shipped the next day.

  Natsumi sat with me through the whole process, transfixed.

  “I never believed you could actually do things like this,” she said. “I thought it was all Hollywood baloney.”

  “Hollywood doesn’t know the half of it.”

  WE WENT out after that on an expedition to buy food, as well as clothing and other necessities Natsumi left behind. My role was to follow her around and express enthusiasm for her purchases. I’d never really done this before, since Florencia greatly preferred to shop alone, citing my poorly restrained impatience.

  It wasn’t something I’d want to do every day, but I had to admit there was a certain thrill of exploit to the experience, a satisfying cycle of search and discovery. I shared this with Natsumi.

  “Maybe tomorrow we’ll introduce you to another activity common to twenty-first-century civilization,” she said.

  We had dinner at a pleasantly underlit restaurant connected to the shopping mall. It was late, and the place was drifting toward the end of the day. However, we felt attended to and unhurried, and slipped easily into the rhythm of our evenings out, oddly unaffected by recent tumult and revelation.

  I fell asleep that night with emotions that would have once been inconceivable. And as such, too novel to bear close examination, and thus fortunately, not of an anxious and sleep-depriving nature.

  CHAPTER 17

  Over the next few weeks we fell into a general routine. I’d get up early and run the food truck around the Hartford area, Natsumi would get up late and work on her paper until I showed up again in midafternoon. Then we’d sit together in front of my computer and she’d watch me perform a variety of tasks, including the purchase of industrial precious metals.

  My goal was to get near, but just shy of $5 million worth of product before suspending operations. I wanted to stay well inside the maximum purchase limits and sixty-day aging on my account to provide leeway for future contingencies. I supported this strategy by paying for the first shipment, thus showing good faith, and buying another two weeks before anyone took note of any unpaid bills.

  Once I hit my number, it was time for a field trip.

  “You’ve been in too long, you need exercise, and this can’t be outsourced,” I said to Natsumi when I got home from my food truck route. “How are you at weight lifting?”

  “I’m small, but game,” she said.

  “Good enough.”

  We drove the Outback to the spacejockeys warehouse in a drab, nearly forgotten New England industrial park. I checked the inventory of very heavy little boxes and was relieved to see it was all there. I wondered if the handlers guessed what they were handling—if any of them had taken basic chemistry in college and remembered the periodic table of the elements, where each element was ranked by mass. Which, when within the earth’s gravitational field, translated into weight.

  “Oh, my God, these things are heavy,” said Natsumi, when I handed her the first box.

  “The only things that pack more value in a smaller package are gemstones,” I said, “and that’s a different scam.”

  It took about fifteen minutes to load the Outback, whose valiant springs took the weight remarkably well. We drove it to Gerry’s shop at the clock factory and unloaded. The springs held up better than we did.

  “I hope I didn’t wreck anything in my back,” said Natsumi, after the last package was secured in a room behind Gerry’s dust collector. “I’m too young to be hobbling around.”

  “I’ve been hobbling around for months now,” I said. “You get used to it.”

  “You hauled more than me. I feel bad about that.”

  “I don’t. I was merely hauling my share. As were you.”

  “Sounds collectivist,” she said.

  “Buddhist.”

  I kept one bar of gold, the heaviest and most valuable of the metals by troy ounce. Then I laid out for Natsumi the next phase of the plan. To her credit, her voice carried none of the alarm I could see in her eyes.

  “This sounds a little dangerous,” she said.

  “It is, but only a little. I always do everything I can to stay safe. My objective is to move forward, not to perform derring-do.”

  “I know. The world itself is pretty dangerous. What’s the difference?”

  I explained the upcoming steps in the process, the first of which was driving to the FedEx retail outlet to send this note to Little Boy Boyanov:

  Mr. Boyanov:

  I have engineered a means for acquiring a large quantity of gold kilo bars that a buyer of the proper stature could obtain at a price seventy-five percent below market value. You are that buyer.

  Given the sensitive nature of this transaction, I have strict requirements for how we engage.

  The first meeting will entail a proof of product. I will bring a single kilo bar. You will bring the means for confirming product purity of the sample, which will be twenty-four karat. Please be careful that your test is precise. This is in your interest.

  We will meet in the sauna at the Capital City Gym on Trumbull Street at ten P.M. Thursday night the twenty-sixth of this month. The gym closes at eleven, so the sauna is mostly empty at this time. Towels only, please.

  I will come alone. I request you do as well. I will be carrying a gym bag. I will be able to identify you.

  If you agree to the first meeting, please move the flowerpot next to your front door from the left side to the right by Wednesday the twenty-fifth.

  I signed the note Auric G.

  “You’re going to be essentially naked, alone with a murderous gang leader while in possession of a gold bar,” said Natsumi, summing up the situation.

  “It’s hard to stow a gun under a towel,” I said. “Anyway, there’s no percentage in stealing the bar when he could get his hands on a truckload for twenty-five cents on the dollar.”

  “Good point.”

  IT WAS a little out of my way to drive the food truck down Little Boy’s street off Franklin Avenue, but I fit it in. The flowerpot moved well before the deadline, which would have been less encouraging if I’d known better what Little Boy actually had in mind.

  THE CAPITAL City Gym was in a rehabilitated industrial building just north of the divide between Hartford’s downtown office cluster and the edge of the busy, though impoverished North End. It was in a sort of no-man’s land of bombed out commercial relics and hopeful revitalization.

  The club was expensive to join and had the feel of an old-time athletic club, meaning it was mostly men, mostly middle-aged and mostly wide around the middle. I had bought a two-week trial membership with cash, and visited often enough to be fairly certain the sauna would be vacant from about nine o’clock on.

  I left my watch in the locker room, so I didn’t know exactly what time it was, but it felt as though I’d been sitting there well past ten o’clock. I was about to abort when a very large man accompanied by two slightly less enormous men—one carrying a gym bag of his own—entered the sauna. All were in towels, exposing massive torsos festooned with ugly scars and tattoos. The sauna suddenly felt a lot smaller. They sat down across from me, and the biggest of the three, Little Boy, said in a pronounced accent, “Sorry, I brought company. I get lonely when I’m by myself.”

  Little Boy
had a head about the size of a medicine ball, exaggerated by a rebellious wad of curly brown hair. His cheekbones protruded like fleshy hemispheres, and his eyes, in deep wells, were a glassy, pale green. He maintained a vague, somewhat unhinged smile throughout, which I eventually realized was the natural set of his face.

  “What kind of deal can I make with someone who doesn’t follow simple directions?” I asked.

  “I got another friend standing guard at the door. So nobody bother us. Nobody hear us beating the shit out of you and taking that thing out of your dead hands.”

  “So you’d settle for a single bar when you could have a truckload? I thought Little Boy was smarter than that,” I said, presenting the same hypothesis I’d floated by Natsumi.

  “I don’t like people driving by my house. I don’t like them claiming to know my face. I especially don’t like people dictating terms,” he said. “That’s my job.”

  “Not terms. Just precautions,” I said. “You would do the same if you had the keys to a gold mine. Quite literally. I know you’re a smart man, Boyanov. I wouldn’t be talking to you if you weren’t. So please don’t fuck this up by getting all aggressive with a guy who could make you richer than you could ever imagine.”

  Little Boy seemed somewhat persuaded by that, though it only showed in his eyes.

  “I got a pretty good imagination. But I’m listening.”

  “Did you bring the test gear?”

  Little Boy nudged the guy with the gym bag, who pulled out a cordless drill, a rubbing stone and a rack of little bottles of acid, calibrated to assess common degrees of gold purity, from ten karat up to twenty-four. He handed all this to Little Boy who put it on the bench. I was happy to see this array, since it both determined the karat and proved the purity held straight through the bar. You could achieve the same end by doing a specific gravity test with a tub of water and a good scale, but I figured rightly that drills and bottles of acid were more Little Boy’s style.

  I took out the gold bar and set it down next to the gear. He secured the heavy bar easily with one mammoth hand and used the other to drill straight through, extracting a slender core. Then he took the stone and rubbed the core across the stone’s rough surface. The final stage was dropping two large drops of acid from the acid bottle.

  We all stared at the wet blobs, which were still wet five minutes later, indicating that the gold in the center of the bar possessed the highest possible purity—twenty-four karat. Little Boy looked up at me.

  “How much of this can you get?” he asked.

  “Volume isn’t the problem. It’s time. The scam has a shelf life. You want in, you gotta say yes, like now. I don’t know why you wouldn’t. I take all the risk, you just take possession, realizing an automatic seventy-five percent profit by simply selling on the open market.”

  The two guys sitting to either side of him stared at me like a pair of catatonic pit bulls. It would be hard to hide weapons under their towels, but I was sure they’d found a way. They never joined the conversation, and you could tell they didn’t care what we talked about. Their job was to watch me and keep Little Boy safe.

  “Payments and transfers could be difficult,” said Little Boy, hitting on an element of the concept in least supply. Trust.

  “I have zero incentive to cheat you,” I said. “My profit margin is only twenty-five percent. That’s good enough for me. You could try to cheat me. You could steal from me. You could kill me. But then, that’s the end of the project. Because only I can bring you the goods. It’s my angle, and it dies with me.”

  Little Boy tried to project skepticism, but his eyes betrayed a different intent.

  “Okay. We give it a try,” he said. “What happens next?”

  “Before we get to that,” I said, “There’s one other thing.”

  Little Boy looked up from the gold he had sliced off the bar. His eyes were the iciest I’d ever seen. At the same time animated and inert.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “I have other types of product. More unusual stuff like iridium, palladium and rhodium. Much harder to move than regular gold, which I also have in more common purities, like eighteen and ten karat. For this I need a different kind of organization, no offense to you. I need Austin Ott. You can introduce me. It’s no skin off your back. You get all the pure gold you can handle.”

  Little Boy looked suddenly less energetic, less like a little boy than a cautious, middle-aged man.

  “Ott is made-up,” said Little Boy. “There is no such guy.”

  “Bullshit, I say respectfully. Like I told you, there’s a window on this operation. We move fast enough, everybody wins. Word to Ott is part of the deal. No word, no deal. Kill me if you want, my people will just move on to the next potential partner, with you cut out forever.”

  Little Boy sat back and put his arms around himself, as if imitating a hug.

  “Okay, we tell a guy, who tells a guy and maybe the next guy can get word up the food chain. I’ll do my part. But no guarantees.”

  “Why all this fear of Ott?” I asked. “Everyone else in the world is afraid of you. I’m afraid of you.”

  Little Boy frowned. Few know how to process an insult, even if it’s indirect, when it’s packaged with a compliment.

  “It’s not fear. We just don’t know if the guy really exists.”

  “Maybe it’s not a guy. Maybe it’s a bunch of guys. Maybe it’s a woman. Who cares? There’s somebody with a very sophisticated operation out there calling himself Austin Ott. People are dead because of him. This I know.”

  I hadn’t meant for my real life experience to comingle with the character I was playing, but it was probably for the best. The sincerity apparently cut through.

  Little Boy rolled his head around in the way strong men do to stretch their overdeveloped neck muscles. His companions leaned out of the way.

  “Okay, Mr. G.,” he said, breaching a layer of reserve by using my name. “We can send a message and ask for a reply. But we can’t make the reply happen. I write you a letter, you don’t write me back. What do I do? I go to your house and point a gun at your face and say, ‘Write back, you son of a bitch.’ But I don’t know where this man, if he’s a man, lives. So this is not an option.”

  I nodded, joining in the new level of congeniality.

  “Fair enough. Let’s split the difference. We do a deal. Say, worth a hundred thousand to you in expenses, four hundred in revenue. You put out the message, but the deal goes through no matter what. Then we see if this phantom Ott steps up. I’m thinking he will when he sees the numbers, backed by your good name. And by the way, when you secure Ott, you’re in line for a commission on every deal that happens after that. I’m talking deals worth hundreds of millions apiece. Maybe you should see at least five percent per. And that’s on top of our separate arrangement. Pure gravy.”

  It was pretty obvious that Little Boy was starting to enjoy the hook in his mouth, even though he tried hard not to let it show. I sat back and waited for his response.

  He held up the test sliver.

  “I don’t worry about this one being okay. I worry about all the rest,” said Little Boy.

  “Bring a metallurgist and all the testing gear you want to the exchange,” I said. “I won’t let something as stupid as product quality mess things up.”

  “What gets messed up is your face,” said Little Boy. “Then we move on from there.”

  I tried to look disappointed.

  “Successful relationships do not involve all these threats,” I said. “I have ways to do you terrible harm. But why constantly point that out? Better to just be civil and get on with business.”

  Little Boy looked at me as if I’d recited some poetry in ancient Greek. Yet somehow the sense of my proposition leaked through.

  “Alright. Fair dues. How do we communicate? Transplant some more shrubbery?”

  His buddies thought this was funny, as did I. We all laughed. I gave him a disposable phone, the best friend
of the felonious.

  “Call me on this. My number’s already programmed in. Tell me what you’re willing to invest, and I’ll bring the appropriate product to the meet. You bring cash and a way to confirm product quantity and quality. This is not complicated. Metal is metal. Your kids could test for karats. The price is set by international markets. You pay a quarter of the number we look up on the Internet. We all go away happy.”

  He agreed, though still exhibiting a stubborn suspicion. I was pleased with Little Boy, whom I’d figured for a common breed of thug. A certain evil craftiness was apparent, but also subtlety of thought. Yet he could be led, and snagged by simple suggestion.

  After they left, I sat in the sauna until closing time, then showered and got dressed, and left the gym by a back door which led to an alley, which led to the remote parking lot where I’d left the Outback. The night was pitch black, with no humans or vehicles in sight. If Little Boy’s people were following me, they were the best stalkers in history.

  I drove out of the parking lot and went home. Natsumi looked relieved when I walked through the door.

  “Oh, good. You’re not dead,” she said.

  “Not yet, though the possibility was raised. Ekrem Boyanov is a very big person.”

  “Did he agree to the deal?”

  “I don’t think he was completely sold, but close. But it’s a good start.”

  “I made dinner,” she said.

  “You did?”

  It was such a strange moment for me. To have a person living with me make a meal, and then wait for me to eat, was an entirely alien concept. Even when I lived with Florencia, I cooked all the meals, the default position of the partner who worked at home versus the one who worked late and usually arrived after a grinding ten-hour day.