“Maybe,” Rita said, “because that rehash happens to be our lives.”
Albin plucked a slice of toast from his rack and spread marmalade on it with an unsteady hand. He crunched a bite, washed it down with tea, cleared his throat, and said, “My brother’s coming over this evening.”
“Here?”
“Here. Bert set it up.”
“Ah. So that’s what all the deep thinking is about. About your brother, as usual.”
“I’m a nervous wreck,” he confessed.
“Even though time’s a fraud and everything’s already happened anyway?”
“That’s theory. This is practice. Look, it’s not reasonable. But the suspense has my stomach in a knot.”
“Deep breaths, Albin,” she advised.
“I haven’t seen him in almost forty years. Longer than you’ve been alive. What do you say to someone after all that time? Do we hug? Will there be blame? Tears? Laughing? Will we even recognize each other right away? Will we like each other? Maybe that’s what scares me so much. Even leaving out the brother part. Maybe I’m afraid we’ll just be two old men meeting for a chat with nothing to say and we just won’t like each other. What a letdown. I’d be crushed.”
Rita hadn’t planned to get up from her chair, but she found herself rising and walking around the neutral territory of the pool to Albin’s tidy table. Funny, she thought, that she’d never done that before; all those mornings that they’d had breakfast together but separately, he in his manner, she in hers, never crossing the boundary of the swimming pool. Now she stepped right over and put her arms around his shoulders. He tightened for an instant in surprise, then relaxed into the embrace. “It’ll be all right,” she whispered in his ear.
He petted her wrist by way of thanks. “It’ll be the way it has to be.”
So here we finally are again, back at that seemingly ordinary day where the story started and that gave rise to my heroics. As you may recall, it began as just your basic beach day. Hot sand on top, cool sand underneath. Hissing wavelets, a symphony of smells, volleyballs and footballs arcing up against the sky; all that kind of stuff. The only thing that made it different from most beach days is that Master and me already had an engagement set up for the evening.
For most people, I gather, this would not be so unusual. Most people seem to have fairly busy evening schedules. They have dinner plans with friends. Or they’re going to a show. Or they have some business obligation. Whatever. The point is, they tend to have a lot of items on their calendar. Master, not so much. Which is understandable. If you’re ninety-something, have no job, have out-lived most of your friends and enemies, and live alone except for a chihuahua, how much is there really to do? So it makes sense that when Master does have something on his docket, it takes on an amplified importance and he gets all wrapped up in it.
This is exactly what happened in the case of setting up the meeting between Albin and Carlo. In his favorite role of go-between, he must’ve made half a dozen phone calls dealing with details. You’d have thought he was arranging a summit between world leaders. Where should the sit-down be—a public place or at Albin’s home? Daytime or evening? How much time should they figure on for Carlo’s drive down from Miami? Clearly, there should be drinks, but what about snacks? Canapes? Crudites? Pigs in blankets? Would it help if Master sort of emceed things? Would it be better if he scrammed? I mean, he was trying to plan it out down to the nth degree. The funny part was that, in the actual event, Carlo pulled off a surprise that Master had never even imagined, and nothing went remotely like it had been figured to go. But we’ll get to that.
Anyway, the afternoon is wearing on and I can tell that Master’s getting antsy. I know the symptoms by now. He drums his yellowish fingers against the aluminum arms of his beach chair. He turns his head from side to side, but he’s not really looking at anything, not really focusing. When he picks me up to pet me, the petting is mostly a tic. Don’t get me wrong, I feel and appreciate the affection behind it, but I am a bit of an expert in the nuances of petting, and this particular kind of petting is what he does when he’s preoccupied with something else.
My guess is that he’s already starting to worry about being late to Albin’s, even though the big occasion is still five hours off. Then again, it takes him so incredibly freaking long to get ready to go out. There’s the slow and perilous steps into and out of the shower. The stiff and lengthy process of drying off, first one foot then the other lifted onto the toilet seat to get between his toes. Twenty minutes goes to shaving; God forbid he nicks himself, he burns another ten standing there naked with paper on his chin. Hair takes a while; he’s vain about his hair. Then comes an eternity of staring at his closet with its astonishing array of shirts. Sometimes, after an hour or so, he seems to have picked one out, maybe even touched its sleeve, then he changes his mind, takes a half-step back, and stares some more. True, there are dozens to choose from, but the part that puzzles me is that he always looks like he’s expecting to find one he hasn’t seen before. Most of those shirts he’s had for half a century. How would a new one just slip in?
Anyway, I can tell he’s starting to worry about the time, so of course I start to worry, too. That’s what dogs do, after all, catch their owners’ moods. By the time we get back to the condo, both of us are getting pretty jumpy.
30
“S o here it comes,” said Anthony. “The last batch.”
“Last batch?” said Rita, above the rushing hum of liquid being pumped from holding tanks into the copper stills.
“The end of the cane juice we have on hand. And I don’t imagine Carlo will be investing in any more. Why would he? So we can put it into fancy bottles and give it away for free at the tasting room?”
It was getting late, close to six o’clock. The few guys who still worked on the distilling crew had all gone home. Anthony and Rita stood side by side in their leather aprons and green rubber boots. There wasn’t much to do just then except listen to the splash and gurgle of the columns being filled. He said, “This is going to take most of the night. Don’t feel that you have to stay.”
“I want to stay. Want to be a part of it. If that’s okay.”
“Yeah, it’s okay.” His Adam’s apple shuttled up and down. His hair stuck out on the sides and his hazel eyes looked weary. After a time, he went on. “You know, on the way into work today, I stopped at three, four liquor stores. Market research.” He gave a self-deprecating little laugh. “Some people do that before they start a business. I didn’t. Why? Because what difference would it make? I already knew what kind of rum I wanted to produce. Classic. Pure. My own way. The world would find it somehow. Now that we’re going down the tubes, I finally open up and do some looking around. What’s everybody selling? Flavored rums. Are they good? Are they bad? Honestly, I don’t even know. I’ve been too much of a snob to try them. Who knows, maybe they’re terrific.”
Rita nodded toward the copper still and said, “Well, you’ve got one last batch to play with.”
He shook his head, shrugged mainly with his eyebrows. “And zero flavorings to add.”
“But the crazy chemist. You said he made some.”
“Forget about the crazy chemist, Rita.”
“You finally got my name right.”
“Better late than never. But forget about the chemist. That partnership is over. Everyone’s pissed off. No one’s sharing anything with anyone.”
“But if he already made them—”
“Please, it isn’t gonna happen and you’re just making me feel worse.”
“Sorry.”
They stood there without speaking for a while, shifting their weight from foot to foot, boots squeaking against the cement floor. The column started to heat up. They both watched the thermometer. Anthony said, “What’s the boiling point of ethyl alcohol?”
“One-seventy-three point one.”
“You are good. You are very good.”
She accept
ed the compliment silently.
Very softly, talking down a bit into his chin, he said, “So, um, would it be okay if we held hands till we hit the number?”
“But Rocco, I don’t feel good. I don’t wanna go.”
“Come on, Max, it’s just a driving job. Pick up Carlo, bring him to Key West. All it is, it’s sittin’ in the car.”
“I don’t wanna sit. I wanna lie down. I got a belly ache.”
“Want some Tums? I got some Tums somewhere.”
“Nah, it’s a different kinda belly ache. Little bit nauseous like.” Bad fibber that he was, he overplayed the moment, touching different parts of his abdomen and wincing now and then.
Rocco fell for it. His face showed an almost motherly concern as he leaned over and placed his enormous hand flat against his lover’s forehead. “Don’t think you got a fever.”
“Nah. No fever. Just a belly ache.”
“Okay, stay home then, baby boy. Rest. Want I make ya some Wheatena or somethin’ before I go?”
“No, Rock. No thanks. I’ll be fine. Give Carlo my apologies.”
He lay there on the sofa trying to look sick. Once or twice he groaned. Rocco changed into a fresh shirt, gathered up his phone and wallet and the keys to Carlo’s Mercedes, kissed him goodbye, and headed out.
Max waited a couple minutes, making sure his boyfriend wasn’t coming back for some forgotten item. Then he tossed aside the light blanket under which he’d been faking, and sprang up to check the time and the progress of the dusk. Six-thirty. Streaky pink in the west. He figured if he stalled for an hour, hour and a half, the timing should be pretty perfect; the main question was whether his excitement would let him stall. He’d been waiting days for an opportunity like this: Rocco off a nighttime errand, the car all loaded up with crowbars and sledges and chisels and at his sole disposal. It was his big chance to commit a burglary and prevent a homicide, his chance to save three lives. He wanted to get it all exactly right. He threw some cold water on his face, paced the grounds around the little condo, and told himself to bide his time.
Pressure, thought Mikel Shintar.
Or maybe he said it aloud. He really wasn’t sure. In recent days the line had blurred for him between thinking hard and talking to himself. And what difference did it make? He saw no one. He didn’t leave the lab. Who cared if he was mumbling? He hadn’t slept. Probably he’d dozed, but on no schedule set by the clock or even by the progression of sun and moonlight filtering weakly through the single frosted window. Inside his sanctum, it was always pitiless, unchanging noon, hard glints spiking into his red-rimmed eyes.
Pressure changes everything, he said or thought. Boiling points. Permeability. Stability of bonds. Everything! Of course it does. Why the hell didn’t I think of that before?
He was leaning on chapped elbows above the notebook that was spread open on a work table in front of him. The handwriting of recent entries had grown more crabbed and manic, but the diagrams were as precise as ever, the obsessive hexagons bunched or branching, dangling or tangled. He stared at his latest drawing. It snaked across three pages and he believed it was almost the perfect recipe for his wonder drug. Almost. Not quite. There was one last stubborn bond that needed rearranging. One last atom between him, a fortune, and the notoriety he missed so much.
Pressure! he said or thought. Enough pressure just might crack that sucker open!
He slapped the table and went clomping around the lab in his flip-flops, the panels of his smelly lab coat flapping carelessly open, revealing now and then a swath of wan but hairy thigh or a flash of pink and disused genitals. From a steel shelf, he grabbed a glass beaker half-filled with the green and viscous liquid that was his most recent attempt at the elixir; it looked like lime Jello before it sets, and it sloshed a little as he raised it with a hand made tremulous by exhaustion. Slowly, carefully, his tongue curled around the corner of his mouth in concentration, he poured the liquid into a metal canister equipped with a stout rubber gasket and a top that bolted down.
He closed the apparatus, locked it tight, and started pumping in nitrogen. The pressure went to five atmospheres, ten, fifty, a hundred.
The sealed and supercharged container sat there on the counter, innocent, mysterious, as menacing and full of promise as an unexploded bomb. Shintar stared at it and rubbed the stubble on his chin; the stubble was an unpleasant mixture of blond and white, the colors smeared as in a failed fried egg. When he very gradually opened the safety valve, it hissed like a nest full of cobras.
He poured the liquid back into the beaker. Its color had changed from lime green to amber. Magic! the scientist said or thought, reliving the giddy thrill of his first basement chemistry set. Fucking magic!
But the color change alone was kid stuff. What was that newly created amber fluid made of? There were two ways to find out. The proper way was to run a spectrograph analysis. But that would take a while. Or he could taste it and see what happened. That was unscientific, dangerous, and probably crazy. He grabbed a fine pipette, extracted the tiniest possible quantity from the beaker, and put it underneath his tongue.
The first thing he noticed was a not unpleasant sting, a feeling like that of ozone in the nostrils after lightning. Or after a quick snort of cocaine.
The second thing he felt was not exactly numbness. More like a serene and inviolable distance between himself and any sort of pain or worry. A listless euphoria. Like that of heroin.
Then the listlessness was gone, replaced by a crackling energy that sparked in all his sinews and put a corona of silver light at the edges of his vision. Like meth.
He stood there for some moments with his eyes closed, savoring, appraising, deciding. Then he put down the pipette, came forth with a sharp, loud Yes! that rebounded off the tiled walls, and jogged an awkward, lurching victory lap around the lab. He’d done it. After all these months, all the setbacks, all the effort wasted in trying to keep his small-time, small-thinking partner happy, he’d succeeded. He’d made his drug.
By the time he made it back to where the beaker stood, he wanted more of it. A lot more, right away.
He didn’t let himself have it, of course. He was strong. Addiction was for weak people. He looked at the beaker. He touched the pipette. He saw a tiny teardrop of amber liquid trembling on the end of it. He teased himself, dared temptation, fought it off. Then he broke into his condescending little smile even though there was no one there to condescend to. He went back to his notebook and redrew his final and triumphant diagram.
31
S o we’re due at Albin’s at nine o’clock, and after all of Master’s worrying about arriving late, of course we get there early. This happens pretty regularly—us arriving early to a gathering, I mean—and it’s the same deal every time: The host is nervous and, since we’re the first to show up, we’re supposed to calm him down. The problem is that nervousness tends to be contagious, so while Master is trying to get the host to mellow out, he himself is getting fretful and, it must be said, a little anal, and right away you have two people instead of one worrying about whether the candy dishes are properly placed and if the wineglasses have splotches from the dishwasher and whether the hand towels in the bathroom are fresh, even though people’s hands are already clean before they dry them on the towels, so what’s the big deal? I sometimes wonder, since everybody seems to get so stressed out about having other people to their house, why they do it at all. Why not just meet at a bar and save the aggravation?
Anyway, Albin is extremely jumpy this evening. He’s bouncing around the living room, plumping pillows on settees, changing the angle of his Chinese screens that already looked pretty perfect to me, moving his Balinese gongs an inch or two then putting them back where they were. Refolding a napkin, he says, “You know, it’s funny, you live in a place for thirty years, you make it just the way you like it, then you try seeing it through someone else’s eyes, and suddenly it just doesn’t seem qui
te there.”
Master is putting a doily under a bowl of nuts on an end table. He takes the opportunity to grab a Brazil and slip me a cashew. Nice and salty. “Come on, Albin, relax. Place looks great.”
Chin in hand, frowning, Albin says, “Maybe it’s just too fussy. Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it just looks too much like an old queen lives here.”
“Well, an old queen does live here. Don’t tell me you’re gonna get touchy about it at this stage a game.”
“I just want Carlo to like the place. I want him to feel comfortable.”
“He’s coming to see you, Albin. He’s not gonna give a rat’s ass about the furniture.”
“You don’t like the furniture?”
“I love the fuckin’ furniture, okay? I’m just sayin’—”
“I know, I know. I guess I know. But still…after all this time he’s still my older brother. That just never changes. Maybe it’s crazy. I mean, we’re grown men. In fact, let’s face it, we’re old men—”
“No shit.”
“But I guess I still need him to approve. I guess I still need to feel that. I’ve been waiting a lot of years to feel it.”
Albin shrugs, mainly with his eyebrows, and stands there very still and quiet for a moment, looking somehow boyish and uncertain even with his silver hair, so I go over and sort of rub against his ankle. It’s one of those times when you wish you could do more for somebody you like, but you know deep down that there’s only so much you can do, it’s not like just being a pal suddenly fixes all this stuff that goes back years and years and has nothing to do with you. On the other hand, doing a little something is better than doing nothing at all, so I rub against his ankle.
Master tries to help as well. He says, “I got an idea, Albin. What say we open up the bar?”
The last batch of rum was just shy of the boil.
Nacho Unleashed Page 17