Catch and Release Paperback

by Lawrence Block

  They didn’t talk much on the way back to the city, either. Bellerman tried a couple of times, but gave it up when Kramer failed to respond. Kramer closed his eyes, replaying a hole in his mind, and the next thing he knew they had reached his house.

  “I know it was a rough day for you,” Bellerman said. “What can I say? Welcome to the real world, Kramer. You can get that putter repaired, you know.”

  Kramer didn’t say anything.

  “There are craftsmen who fit old clubs with new wooden shafts. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it. Look, you played real golf today. This was the genuine article. Next time it’ll come a lot easier.”

  Next time?

  “And before you know it you’ll be hooked. You’ll see.” A hand on Kramer’s shoulder. “I’ll let you be, buddy. Lemme pop the trunk and you can get your clubs. Grab a shower, get yourself some rest. We’ll do this again.”

  * * *

  That was Saturday.

  Sunday he stayed in and watched sports on TV. There was golf on one channel, tennis on another. Ordinarily he much preferred watching golf, but this day, understandably enough, it got on his nerves. He kept switching back and forth between the two channels, and was grateful when they were both done and he could watch Sixty Minutes instead.

  Monday he went to the gym, warmed up on the elliptical trainer, then put in his time on the treadmill. There were runners, some of them men as old as he, some of them older, who entered the New York Road Runners races in Central Park, trying to beat others in their age group, trying to improve their times from one race to the next, trying to up their mileage and complete a marathon. That was fine for them, and he could applaud their efforts, but no one would fault a man who ran just for exercise, no one would argue that he wasn’t doing it right if he never took it outside of the gym.

  Tuesday he went to the batting cage and took his cuts. He hit some balls well and missed some of them entirely, but he wasn’t so invested in results as to lose his temper with himself or his equipment. He never had the impulse to slam his bat against an unyielding metal post, or smash it over his knee. And he never for a moment saw his activity as a second-rate and laughable substitute for joining a team and playing baseball in the park.

  Wednesday he went to the gun club, Thursday to the gym again, this time to lift weights. And Friday found him at the driving range at Chelsea Piers.

  He hadn’t yet replaced his Big Bertha. It would be easy enough to do, one Big Bertha was essentially indistinguishable from the next, but he hadn’t yet had the heart for it. He hit his drives with his 2-wood, as he’d done on the course, hit a dozen balls with it, then continued to work his way through his bag of clubs and through two buckets of balls.

  It wasn’t the same.

  Memories of the previous Saturday kept getting in the way. “The wonderful thing about golf,” Bellerman had assured him, “is the way memory improves it. You remember the good shots and forget the bad. I suppose that’s one of the things that keeps us coming back.”

  Wrong, dead wrong. He’d already forgotten the handful of good shots he’d managed to achieve, while the awful ones crowded his memory and got in the way of his practice today. He couldn’t take a club from his bag without recalling just how horribly he’d topped or sliced or shanked a shot with it. His mashie, which he’d hit solidly on Twelve, only to send the ball thirty yards past the damned green. His 3-iron, which he’d used from the rough, visualizing a perfect shot to the green between a pair of towering trees. And of course the ball had struck one tree dead center, rebounding so that it left him further from the hole than he’d started, but with the same shot through the trees. Second time around, he’d hit the other tree...

  “Want to go out tomorrow?”

  Bellerman, damn him. He drew a breath, forced himself to be civil. “No,” he said. “Thanks, but I can’t make it tomorrow.”

  “You should, you know. Kid gets thrown from a horse, best thing he can do is get right back on him.”

  And get thrown again?

  “You obviously love the game, Kramer. Otherwise you wouldn’t be over here after a day like the one you had Saturday. But don’t try to make this take the place of the real thing. You’ve had a taste of golf and you want to keep at it, you know? Say, did you find somebody to put a new shaft on that putter?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you will. Are you sure you can’t make it tomorrow? Well then, maybe next week.”

  * * *

  The weekend passed. Monday he ran on the treadmill, and afterward he went online and ordered a new Big Bertha driver. Tuesday he had a good session at the batting cage, and that afternoon he took his putter to an elderly German gentleman somewhere on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, who repaired old golf clubs and fishing rods in his basement workshop. The price was high, more than he’d originally paid for the club, but it was worth it and more if it could erase the evidence of his bad temper.

  Wednesday he went to the gun club. He fired the deer rifle and the .22 at his usual targets, then took a break and sipped a cup of coffee. The weight machines tomorrow, he thought, and then the driving range on Friday, and Bellerman would show up, dammit, and what was he going to do about that, anyway?

  The real world. There were, he supposed, fellow members of the gun club who hunted. Had country places in Jersey or Pennsylvania, say, and tried to get a buck in deer season, or a brace of pheasant at the appropriate time. But the majority of members, he was sure, just came to practice marksmanship. They didn’t think of their activity as a pale substitute for the real thing, and neither did anybody else.

  He went back to practice with the magnum, selected his usual paper target. Then something made him switch to a target he’d seen used by other members—law enforcement personnel, for the most part. The target was a male silhouette, gun in hand.

  It was strange at first. He’d always aimed at a bull’s-eye target, and now he was aiming at a human outline. It too had a series of concentric circles, centered upon the figure’s heart, so you could see just how close you came. And it wasn’t a person at all, it was just a piece of paper, but it still took a little getting used to.

  And an odd thing happened. Welcome to the real world, said a voice in his head, and it was recognizable, that voice. It was Bellerman’s voice, and he steadied the big handgun and squeezed off a shot, and the gun bucked satisfyingly in his hand, and the bullet found its mark in the silhouette.

  He kept hearing Bellerman’s voice in his head, and the two-dimensional generic silhouette began assuming three-dimensional form in his mind, and the face began wearing Bellerman’s features.

  He spent a longer time than usual at the range, and his hand and forearm ached by the time he was done. The real world, he thought. The real world indeed.

  He returned the rifle and the target pistol to his locker. No one noticed that he walked out with the magnum tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and the remainder of a box of shells in his pocket.

  Would Bellerman show up again at the driving range Friday?

  Perhaps not. Perhaps the man would have gotten the message by then and would leave him alone, having done what he could to ruin Kramer’s life.

  But somehow Kramer doubted it. Bellerman was no quitter. He’d be there again, with the same abrasive drawl, the same smile that was never far from a sneer. The same invitation to a round of Saturday golf, which this time Kramer would accept.

  Only this time there’d be something new in his bag. And, on one of the more remote holes at Bellerman’s club, Kramer would bring out not his brassie or his mashie or his niblick, not his sand wedge, not his (and God’s) 1-iron, but a .357 magnum revolver, cleaned and loaded and ready.

  Welcome to the real world, Bellerman!

  WHO KNOWS WHERE IT GOES

  When the waitress brought him his coffee, Colliard managed a nod and a smile. He added milk but no sugar, stirred, looked out the window at the entrance to the four-story commercial building across the street.
He didn’t really want the coffee, he’d had enough coffee today, and this cup wouldn’t make him any more alert than he already was. Its only discernible effect would come hours from now, when he’d want to sleep and it wouldn’t let him.

  Of course that might be difficult anyway.

  Maybe he should have ordered decaf. He never did, he never even thought of it until he already had a cup of regular coffee in front of him. He’d never been able to see the point of decaf. Why drink the stuff at all if not for the caffeine? It never tasted as good as you hoped it would. Sometimes, if it was particularly good coffee, the smell was wonderful. But then you took a sip, and all you got was disappointment. And caffeine.

  He picked up the spoon, stirred the coffee some more, put the spoon down. And left the cup in its saucer. It wasn’t as though he had to drink it. He’d had to order it, so that he could have this table by the window, but now that she’d brought it to him he could sit here until closing time. It wasn’t as though they needed the table for another customer. The diner was mostly empty, and would likely remain that way, like every place else in town. Like every other town in the country.

  Hard times. Sometimes it was tough not to take it personally, to see the entire break in the economy as having been aimed specifically at him. When he got that way he forced himself to take a good look around. And it was pretty easy to see that it wasn’t just him. Everywhere he looked, businesses were failing and men and women were out of work. Corporations, absolute household names that had been around as long as he could remember, were going out of business. Banks were imploding. Retailers, from the big box chains to the hardware store on the corner, were turning off the lights and locking the doors. As an economy move, someone had quipped, the light at the end of the tunnel had been turned off.

  A matter of months ago Colliard had been sitting on top of the world, and the perch was all the sweeter for the time and effort it had taken him to get there. He’d sweated it out to get the union card—an MBA from a top university. He’d lived off his savings and hit the books hard, and the degree got him his first corporate job. He worked hard, and when the headhunters came calling, he was ready to move up. He earned the promotions, he got the cash and prizes, and he bought the right house and married the right woman. He earned big bucks and lived within his income, and when the chance came along to start his own company, he jumped at it.

  And made it work. And figured he had it made.

  * * *

  “Warm that up for you?”

  It was the waitress, coffee pot in hand. He smiled, shook his head. “I’ve had too much coffee already,” he said. “But thanks.”

  “Something to eat?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You sit there as long as you like. That way people look in the window, they see we’re still open. You know Sacco’s? On the next block?”

  He didn’t know the neighborhood at all, but the question didn’t seem to require an answer.

  “Thirty years they been there,” she said. “Good times and bad. Friend of mine’s worked there twelve years herself, and Friday afternoon the owner called them all together and told them it was the last day. Just like that. Twelve years, thirty years just like that. How can a business just disappear, here one day and gone the next?”

  He said, “‘Who knows where it goes when it’s gone.’” She looked at him, and he told her it was a line from a song. She said she’d like to hear the rest of the song, and he said that was the only line he remembered.

  “Well, it’s a good one,” she said, “‘Who knows where it goes when it’s gone.’ Not me, that’s for sure.”

  * * *

  “I’d see your name in the papers,” Sully had said earlier. “Morton H. Colliard. What’s the H stand for?”

  They’d met two days before in a diner not too different from the one he was in now, but a hundred miles away. They sat with cups of coffee in a rear booth. They knew Sully there, knew to bring him his coffee and then leave him alone.

  “Henry.”

  “Never knew about the H, never mind the four letters after it. Just Mort Colliard, and I couldn’t have said if it was Morton or Mortimer. Or just Mort. Means death in French, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t speak French.”

  “Didn’t you have to learn it in school? Got my own hands full with English. Morton Henry Colliard. Gave me a turn the first time I saw it, and I can’t say I ever got entirely used to it. Of course it was a good thing, a sign you were getting places, and I was happy for you.”

  Was he? Sully had cool grey eyes, hard to read. Colliard had learned to take what Sully said at face value, because trying to get any deeper was a waste of time.

  “But all the years I knew you,” Sully said, “the whole point was keeping your name out of the papers. So it was hard to get used to, that you were in the papers, and glad to be there. Was it a kick for you? Did you clip the stories, keep a scrapbook?”

  “Not my style.”

  “No, I don’t guess it would be. But people change, don’t they?”

  Did they?

  “Saw the wedding announcement. Fine-looking woman. Never expected you to marry, though I can’t say why not. Any kids yet?”

  “One on the way.”

  “Boy or girl? Or don’t you know?”

  “We figured we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “People need a little suspense in their lives, don’t they? You care much one way or the other, boy or girl?”

  “Just so it’s a healthy baby.”

  Sully nodded his approval, and Colliard wondered at the lie he’d just told. The baby, due in four months, was a boy, and why had he kept that from Sully?

  “I’ll tell you,” Sully said. “I swear I couldn’t believe it when I picked up the phone and there you were on the other end of it. Never thought I’d hear your voice again, not in this world.”

  What should he say to that? He couldn’t think of anything.

  “Not that we parted on bad terms, but we parted, didn’t we? You moved on to a different life, and you couldn’t do that without leaving the old life behind. Be like a film I saw, young fellow from South-Central L.A., he’s in a gang, Bloods or Crips, can’t remember which. You see the film?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he’s bright, you know? Good in school. Studies hard, applies himself. And there’s this teacher who believes in him, and she fixes it so he gets a scholarship to this Ivy League college. Couldn’t tell you which one. And he goes there, and it’s culture shock, you know? He’s this street kid and his roommate is this typical preppy—you can see where this is going, can’t you?”

  Like he cared.

  “He adjusts to campus life. And then he goes home because his mother is dying, and he gets sucked into the gang life again, because once you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way.”

  Wasn’t it Bloods and Crips a minute ago? Oh, right, the song. He took a moment to hear it in his mind, and when he tuned in again Sully was telling him how the kid died in the streets after all.

  “He could get away, see, but he couldn’t stay away. Of course, all it was is a film. Didn’t even claim it was based on a true story, which wouldn’t make it true even if it did. Someone made it up, just to prove that a man can’t get away from his true self. But what’s a man’s true self, can you tell me that?”

  “All these questions,” he said.

  “Had your own company, didn’t you?”

  “Until it went bust.”

  “Well, this economy. No shame going broke in times like these. But you must have socked away a few bucks in the good years.”

  “At first it all went back into the business.”

  “How it’s done, isn’t it? And then?”

  “Then it went into investments. There was this hedge fund, promised twelve percent on your money, good years and bad.”

  “That’s not bad, twelve percent.”

  “That’s what I thought. It�
�s what everybody thought.”

  “This hedge fund, the player’s the one who got his name in the papers a lot lately?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “And you got hurt pretty bad.” It wasn’t a question, and didn’t require an answer. “You must have a nice home, though.”

  “If I can keep it away from the bank.”

  “They looking to foreclose?”

  “Not tomorrow,” he said, “and not the day after tomorrow.”

  “But the day after that? And you don’t want to forget there’s a baby on the way.”

  “No.”

  “The jobs in your new field—”

  “The market’s dried up. There’s nothing out there for me.”

  Sully nodded. “Be different when the economy turns around, I suppose.”

  “I suppose.”

  “And you could wait it out, but that’s not so easy since that hedge fund went south. That about sum it up?”

  It was all he could do to nod.

  Sully’s fingers drummed the tabletop. “I have some investments myself,” he said. “Different establishments where I’m what you’d call a silent partner. A man owes you money and can’t pay, so he takes you in as a partner. You know how it works.”

  “Sure.”

  “Most of them, business is off. A lunch counter, a corner deli, you wouldn’t think they’d be affected, would you? People still have to eat. Are they going to stop buying their newspaper in the morning, having a latte in the middle of the afternoon? They still have to have their beer and their cigarettes, don’t they? Yet business is off all across the board.”

  “Hard times.”

  “And yet,” Sully said, “the core business, my core business, remains untouched. I’m recession-proof, you might say.”

  “That’s good.”

  “So there’s work for you, my friend. If you really want it. If you think you can still do it.”