Sick Like That

by Norman Green

  And the guy stood right across the street from that alley . . .

  She remembered Sal’s warning.

  No way, she told herself, no way a guy that looks like an Irish folksinger is gonna be a hitman . . .

  Pass it by, Al told herself, keep walking, forget Fascati’s for now, go get your dinner someplace else and be disappointed, Fascati’s has been there for a long time, odds are decent it’ll still be there when this is all over.

  Whatever the hell it is that’s going on here . . .

  She stayed on the far side of Henry and walked on. A block and a half away she stopped and looked back, imagining she could smell the dough and the garlic and all the rest of it. She could see the rear window of the tiny fifth-floor apartment she had lived in. The light was on. Her rent was paid through the end of the month, but the landlady was a sharp-eyed, flinty old crow, she would probably know that Al was gone, and she would, no doubt, already have begun the business of finding a new tenant. Could be her, in there . . .

  Still, that guy parked out front was no cab driver.

  Al kept walking.

  Her stomach growled.

  “What do I call you?” Sarah said. “What do you like better, Jake or Jacob or Austin or John or Mr. Smits or what?” She was trying to be funny, trying to lighten the mood, but it didn’t seem to work. The two of them had left the gallery, they were walking up the side street, away from the noise and lights of Woodstock’s main drag. He walked next to her, a brooding figure, taller than her, and thinner, shoulders hunched, hands shoved into the pockets of his oversized black wool jacket, collar turned up. It seemed to Sarah that Jake had to make a conscious effort to remember she was there, and to modulate his gait to match her much shorter strides.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and he seemed to withdraw deeper into the folds of his jacket. He swallowed. “I don’t know.” He glanced down at her. “Maybe I haven’t found the right name yet. Hard to know what’s real anymore, and what isn’t.”

  Sarah reached out and touched his elbow. He started away from her as though he’d been jolted by house current. He stopped, and so did she. “I’m real,” she told him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Yeah. You look real enough.” He squeezed his elbows tight against his body, as though if he compressed himself hard enough he’d be able to disappear.

  She held out her hand. “Walk with me, Jake.” She smiled her most innocent smile at him. “How about if I call you Jake?”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  Sarah sensed that he didn’t know whether or not to take her hand, or maybe how, even. He was too tall, she couldn’t put her hand around his shoulders so she settled for patting him on the small of the back, turning him to walk next to her again.

  “Izzy used to call me Jake,” he said. “My brother. I remember my real mother calling me Jay-Jay, but I hated that.”

  “What do the people in Woodstock call you?”

  “Mr. Smits.” He glanced at her again, then looked away. “I guess, you know, I guess I keep them too far away from me to call me anything else.” He stopped again and she turned to face him. “What are you going to tell Clytemnestra?”

  Sarah stared at him, eyebrows raised.

  His lips twitched, the beginnings of a smile, maybe the first sign that he might have a sense of humor. “Clytemnestra,” he said. “My stepmother.”

  “I don’t know yet,” she said. “Tell me about her.”

  He scowled, knit his black furry eyebrows together. Sarah had a moment of fear, being, after all, a long way from home, in the middle of nowhere, and in the company of a strange guy. She trusted her intuition, though, and the moment passed. She was pretty sure she was okay with Jake.

  “You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” he told her.

  “Try me,” she said.

  He started walking again, the gravel along the verge of the road crunching beneath his boots. He shook his head. “Evil,” he said. “That’s the first word that comes to mind. I don’t know how else to say it. She’s evil. She feeds on other people’s miseries. She feeds on despair. And if that isn’t enough, I’m pretty sure she killed my father.”

  “I thought he died in a car accident,” she said. “No one ever really nailed down what happened. And then his partner, Tipton, he’s missing and presumed dead. Some of the cops thought you had something to do with all of it,” Sarah told him. “You and your brother.”

  “Hah.” It was a percussive sound, a small detonation of something, anger, maybe, or bitterness. “I know. Unbelievable.” He looked away from her, off into the darkening afternoon. “We were kids, for God’s sake. She controlled us completely. Anyone could have seen it. Anyone who was thinking straight.”

  “How could she control you? You guys weren’t exactly babies.”

  “Twelve or whatever,” he told her. “But you have to understand. Right after they got married, her and my father, she pulled us out of school so she could homeschool us herself. Agatha West, the great clinical psychologist, needed to have absolute control over all the men in her life. So she took us out of school and she isolated us, even from each other sometimes. It was like . . .” He scratched his head. “It was like being raised inside a locked room. You got out once in a while, if you were good. She had the last word over everything, what we read, what we ate, what we watched on television, everything.”

  Sarah thought of Frank Junior and the video games that he loved. Their cartoonish violence and gore repelled her, but she had not been able to bring herself to take them away from him. “Why?”

  “Her great theory.” He looked down at her and attempted a smile, but it didn’t come off. “To her, you and I, right now, walking up this road, we are not people. Not as I understand the word. We are not individual humans. We are simply biological phenomena, more intelligent than orangs, of course, but still, simply the products of our respective brain structures and our conditioning. We may consider ourselves free moral agents, you and I, but really, that, uh, that exalted status is reserved for a very select few who’ve demonstrated the mental acuity and the intellectual courage to break through to a higher plane. But for that statistically insignificant minority, the human race is comprised of breeders. Evolution and our environment have equipped us to eat, to procreate, to labor in service of society, and to die. Mastery or servitude, that is the only important choice any of us will ever make. You have no free will, you have no soul. There is no spiritual dimension to man, not outside of his imagination. We are . . . .” His voice trailed away.

  “Ants?” Sarah said, after a moment.

  “Perfect!” Jake said. “Exactly!” He wanted to laugh, she could sense it, but his face was a mask of revulsion. “You must have read my mother’s work.”

  “No,” she told him. “I guess evolution and my environment didn’t program me to give a fuck about any of that.”

  He did laugh then.

  She looked around, took stock of where they were. From the Woodstock side, it looked like the crest of a small hill. The town lay behind them, a cluster of buildings clinging to the fringes of the main road, petering out into forest in all directions. In the other direction, the road they were on ran down a long steep slope and disappeared into the woods.

  “So, Sarah Waters,” he said. “What do I do now? I really like this place. I sort of like J. Austin Smits, too, he’s not a bad sculptor, he’s starting to do some okay work. I would hate to lose everything again.”

  “She’s dying,” Sarah told him. “She has ovarian cancer. She’s not going to get better. She sort of gave me the impression that it was your father’s memory she longed for, and she wanted to leave her estate to someone connected to him. You’re the only family he has left.”

  “Of course,” he said. “And Santa Claus is real. His workshop, contrary to popular belief, is not at the North Pole, it’s actually right around the corner from here.” He looked down at her. “How can I persuade you to go back and forget all about me?”

  Sh
e shook her head. “Doesn’t work that way, Jake. If I found you, the next guy could do it, too. And there’s some money involved here, too. Might be a lot of money.”

  “You can’t spend the money if you’re dead. I have to run.”

  “No you don’t,” she said. “Let’s go back down, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we’ll talk about it.”

  “You all right?” Alessandra sounded tense.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Sarah told her. “I found Jake West. He’s pretty spooked. He thinks—”

  Al interrupted her. “Anybody following you?”

  “No. Why? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I went up past the building where I used to live, there was this guy hanging around. He didn’t look right. Are you sure that no one followed you? Do you think you’d notice?”

  “Well, nobody followed me up the Thruway because I stayed behind this truck most of the way and everybody passed us like we were walking. What did this guy look like?”

  “Where are you now? Are you safe? You’re not out on the street, are you? Take a look around. Look for someone hanging out, pretending to look in store windows or whatever. Jesus, I never should have let you go up there alone. And check the parked cars, look for a guy sitting behind the wheel of a parked car . . .”

  “Al, honey, relax. I’m inside Jake’s studio. We went out for a walk earlier and nobody followed us, I’m sure of it, there’s no place to hide out here. This guy by your old building, what did he look like?”

  “Oh, man.” Sarah listened to Al exhaling in relief. “God. I didn’t wanna call in case the phone ringing would have drawn attention to you or something. I was picturing you, you know, knocked in the head or whatever, I was trying to figure out what to tell your kid, you know, ‘Frankie, I’m sorry about your mom, I shouldn’t have let her go, but I did it anyway,’ Jesus. Are you positive there’s nobody showing any unhealthy interest in you? Or your mother’s car?”

  “Al, I promise, nobody followed me. You’re getting all neurotic and shit. Will you tell me what this guy looked like?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Phew. Just let me catch my breath. I was thinking I got to dig through your desk to see if you left West’s address here someplace, and I don’t even know what your mother’s car looks like . . .”

  “The guy,” Sarah reminded her.

  “Okay. Okay. He was, ah, a white guy, tall, red-faced, white hair. A little on the porky side. Probably in his sixties.”

  “Oh, wait. An old, fat white guy? Was he wearing a red suit?”

  “Oh shut up.”

  “With black boots? Carrying a big sack?”

  “I swear to God, Sarah, I am going to smack you so hard . . .”

  They both dissolved in laughter. Sarah sensed Al’s tensions draining away. “You were really sweating this, weren’t you? I’m touched.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t because I like you or nothing, but for real, Sarah, in this business things can go south in a big hurry. One minute everything’s cool, you think you got all your shit covered, the next minute it’s going bad, everything spins out of control. And I know that guy was looking for me, no matter what he looked like. I know it. So just you listen to me and be careful. Okay?”

  “Scout’s honor. The old white guy, you make him for a cop?”

  “No. Not really. And process servers are usually young guys working in pairs, you know, one to serve you and one for the witness. No, it was weird, Sarah, I couldn’t figure it. Anyhow, what were you going to tell me about Jake?”

  “You know what? It’s a long story. How about I tell you tomorrow? You coming into the office?”

  “Yeah, late morning. I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay, but let me ask you something. Why do you get so wigged out when I get off on my own? I’m a big girl.”

  There was no reply for a few seconds. “We’ll sit down and talk about it someday. You leaving now to come home?”

  Sarah turned, looked over her shoulder at Jake West, who was in the little office in the back corner of the gallery. “Not just yet,” she said, dropping her voice. “I think I’m gonna hang out here a little while.”

  Thirteen

  Paratronix was located on the second floor of a grubby three-story building on Manhattan’s Avenue B, just south of Fourteenth Street, over a liquor store. Once upon a time the crumbling edifice would have been called a tenement, a firetrap, and a blight on the neighborhood, now it was a charming pre-war walk-up in need of some TLC. Al climbed one flight of stairs, walked through the front door of Paratronix, and was greeted by the sight of a man’s shoulders and head on a large-screen monitor, he was a fat middle-aged white guy with a red face and he was shouting. A guy with short, pointy, sandy blond hair and a couple days’ worth of beard on his face sat at a computer station and peered at a second monitor, his hands poised over a keyboard. He had a Bluetooth headset on. He glanced once at Alessandra, held up a finger, then went back to what he was doing. After a second he touched a button on a teleconference console and while the fat white guy looked like he was still shouting, Al couldn’t hear him anymore. The guy glanced at Al again. “If a tree falls in the forest,” he said, his voice rueful, and then he was gone again, lost in what he was doing. “George,” he said to the headset. “Why do you guys keep doing this? No. No. Look at your screen. Look at your . . . Wait, I’ll highlight it. What does that tell you? Well, it tells me that you’ve got compatibility issues again. George, come on, you can’t just throw another driver in there, it’ll corrupt . . . This is not like adding a printer onto your home network, George . . .”

  Al walked over to the window and looked down at Avenue B. Beneath her, a tall, fierce-looking dark-skinned man with scars on his face and wearing African garb walked up toward Fourteenth. In one arm he carried a bundle roughly the size and shape of a human infant, and in the other a bright yellow SpongeBob SquarePants diaper bag. You see? Al told herself. Goes to show you, there’s a wrench for every nut . . . On the other side of the avenue, two guys emerged from a Greek bakery. They were drinking coffee out of blue and white paper cups, those same ones that every Greek diner and coffee joint seems to use. Al turned, caught the attention of the guy with the headset, pantomimed tipping a cup, pointed at him with eyebrows raised. He nodded energetically, mouthed the word “black” at her.

  He was still at it when she got back. She went over, left the coffee next to him, returned to the window to watch the world go past, but after a while she turned to watch the proprietor of Paratronix. He looked vaguely European, was not in bad shape, had intense eyes, thin face, looked like some sort of mad, hyperkinetic Polish soccer player. He might have been a few years older than her. His hands flew over his keyboard in a manic dance made all the more remarkable because he was not a touch typist. You could never call his style hunt-and-peck, though, it seemed to be a system of his own design, involving two or three fingers on each hand. This is him, Al thought, this is his favored form of communication. His default mode, because he seemed much less proficient in spoken English. He left most of his sentences unfinished and included a lot of grunts.

  “Okay, okay, you’re good,” he spoke into the headset. “It’s rebooting . . . You see it? Okay, good.” He reached over and suddenly the fat white guy regained his voice. “Corgi,” the white guy said, exasperated, “what the hell happened? What did—”

  “You’re good now, Mr. Ellis,” he said.

  “Yeah, but what the fuck—”

  “You really want to know? One of your vendors downloaded a driver and it corrupted—”

  “No, you’re right,” the white guy said. “I’m good. Thanks.”

  A minute or two later he was unlinked. “Hey,” he said, looking at Al. “Thanks for coffee. I really need it, after that. I love it when they screw up their shit and then yell at me about it. What can I do for you?”

  Al walked over to him. “Robbie Corgin? I’m Alessandra Martillo. I got a problem and I’m told you’re the man.�
�

  “Depends,” he said. “I mean, some problems I might be your guy, some others, maybe not. How can I help?”

  Al took out her phone and pulled up the images she’d taken at Palermo Imports. She handed it to Corgin, and he was immediately more comfortable.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, that’s interesting. Like a bar code or something.” He looked up at her. “Can I upload, uh, well, yeah, stupid, that’s why she brought it . . . Never mind me.” A few minutes later Al had her phone back and the bar code image was displayed on the large screen recently vacated by the fat white guy. “Check that out,” Robbie said. “Cool. Never seen anything like that. Wonder what the hell it is.”

  “Do you think you can break it?” Al asked him.

  “What?” It was almost as though he was surprised to see her there, like she had suddenly materialized out of the air. “Break it? No. I don’t know. Maybe. Take too long, anyway.”

  She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “Oh. Really? Then how do I—”

  “Post it,” he said. “Post it. A sign is not a sign if nobody can read it. No useful function. And look, obviously it’s there for a reason. Someone has to know what it is. Is it okay? If I post it, I mean.”

  “Why not?” she said. “But just because someone can read it, why should they tell you?”

  He stared at her, aghast. “You’re kidding. Right? Are you messing with me?”

  “No,” she said, a bit confused.

  “Oh boy.” He reached out for her hand, stopped just short of actually touching her. “Um, sorry, you said your name, before—”

  “Alessandra Martillo.”

  “Okay, Al, ahh, Aless—”

  “Al is fine,” she told him.

  “Good,” he said emphatically, obviously glad to be relieved of so many superfluous syllables. “Al. Come on.” He waved vaguely at the workstation behind him. “The Web. What’s it do?”