A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

“You could be arrested for puppet slaughter,” I told Ornella.

  “There was a time in my life when I couldn’t hurt a fly,” she murmured. “I’ve moved on,” she added in a negatively charged afterthought. She smiled the barefoot contessa smile, the one despairingly devoid of joy that I first spotted when she turned up at the Once in a Blue Moon.

  She shut the lid on the straw hamper, imprisoning the puppets—I was relieved they could breathe through the straw—and invited me for coffee and doughnuts in the club’s coffeehouse. A song with a drumbeat drowning out the words was coming from a jukebox. A dozen or so local adolescents—white boys with crew cuts, Pueblo Indians with dreadlocks, girls with ears and/or nostrils pierced—sat on benches around a long table nursing Diet Cokes, which Friday said was, for reasons unbeknownst to her, the only kind of Coke they served here. Ornella and I found a table in the corner the furthest from the jukebox.

  “What brings you up to Taos?” she asked.

  “You,” I said. I blew on my coffee to cool it off (by the time I got around to drinking it, it was cold) as I filled her in on what I’d learned about her bail jumper, Emilio Gava. “Silvio Restivo ring any bells?” I inquired when I’d set out the main points.

  She shook her head. I thought I could read puzzlement in her eyes. Yul Brynner would have read it the same way.

  “I have some leads to track down in Nevada,” I said. “One of them will hopefully take us to Gava’s doorstep. All the photographs—at the Las Cruces Star, in the police morgue—have disappeared. You saw Gava in court, you posted bail on him. You’re the only one I know who knows what he looks like. I need you to come with me to identify him.”

  She flashed that smile of hers that I was coming to dislike because I didn’t know her well enough to know what was behind it. “Of course I’ll come with you,” she said almost eagerly.

  Her puppeteer friends took care of the straw hamper. I led Friday to the Studebaker. Passing in front of it, she spotted the scratch on the fender. “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

  “I hit a diamond,” I said.

  If the answer struck her as curious, she didn’t let on. “Beautiful car,” she said as she settled into the passenger seat.

  “Vintage fifties,” I said. “Only thing newfangled are the seat belts. Still has the original radio. If you turn it on all you get is Nat King Cole or Bo Diddley.”

  She almost but not quite laughed. “I don’t even know who Bo Diddley is.”

  “That’s what’s called a generation gap,” I said. “Chances are you never saw the Ed Sullivan show where Bo Diddley made his national debut.”

  “I don’t know who Ed Sullivan is either.”

  I mimicked moving closer to her in a wheelchair. “Can you talk louder?” I said. “I have a hearing aid but I can’t remember where I put it.”

  “Hey, you’re not that much older than me.”

  “In my body, maybe fifteen years. In my head, more like twice that.”

  Working our way down the interstate to the Albuquerque airport neither of us made small talk, but unlike my recent experience with France-Marie the silence never became strained. I parked the Studebaker in the long-term lot as near as I could to the cashier’s booth. We took separate rooms in a respectable motel near the terminal. Early morning flights coming in so low they scraped tar off the roof woke us. We checked in for the first plane going in the right direction, a midmorning flight to Flagstaff. Our baggage was carry on—I had my small canvas overnight bag, Friday had her bulky silver astronaut knapsack slung casually over one bare shoulder. She was wearing faded red basketball sneakers without socks, loose-fitting jeans, and that butter-colored sleeveless blouse she’d had on when she came round the mobile home park looking to hire a private investigator. The sleeves of an off-white cardigan tied around her waist hid the sliver of midriff between the blouse and the jeans. The plane had been overbooked. Four people I took for college students and a spry older woman volunteered to leave in exchange for free tickets on a later flight. Friday wasn’t even seated next to me—she was on the aisle, across the aisle, three rows up. At the risk of being taken for a spine fetishist, I have to report that I stared at her vertebrae the several times she leaned forward to retrieve something from her knapsack.

  I rented an air-conditioned four-wheel-drive Toyota from the Avis people at the Flagstaff airport, ticked the box on the contract to get full insurance, and set out heading west on U.S. 40. We shared a sub at a lunch counter outside of Kingman, then branched off onto Route 68 and crossed the Colorado River above Laughlin, a town booming with flashy casinos and fancy hotels and fleshy roadside billboards advertising same. Seems as if everything for sale these days is being marketed by half-naked ladies. We topped off the gas tank outside of Laughlin, used the facilities, stretched our legs in a picnic area behind the gas station, then set out for Nipton, crossing into California and arriving just after seven. I’d been to Nipton once before—it was when I was towing Once in a Blue Moon from Los Angeles to Hatch—so I pretty much knew what I was getting into. In a previous incarnation it’d been a stagecoach stop between Flagstaff and the coast. Nowadays it consisted of a dozen mobile homes and an equal number of dilapidated buildings, an old-fashioned general store with a potbellied stove inside and a gasoline pump that was “temporarily out of order” outside, and a pleasant enough adobe hotel with four bedrooms and one bathroom in the hallway. Giant hundred-fifty-car Union Pacific freight trains passed a stone’s throw from the hotel’s porch, rattling the windows, setting the building to trembling on its foundations.

  We parked the Toyota under the overhang at the rear of the hotel. A tired cowboy engrossed in a comic book was holding fort behind the check-in counter. He had neglected to take off his Stetson indoors, probably because he felt naked without it. A plastic name tag attached to the flap of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt identified him as Clarence. I had to clear my throat twice to get him to look up from the comic book. He didn’t appear to appreciate the interruption. I told Clarence I’d called ahead from the Avis desk in Flagstaff. He moistened a thumb on a postage-stamp sponge and rifled through the pages of a large reservation book until he came to this week’s page. He ran a finger down the list, scratching at the names with a fingernail bitten to the quick.

  “Only got us four rooms,” he remarked.

  “That’s why I reserved,” I said.

  “How’re we spelling Gun?”

  My sidekick answered for me. “With two n’s,” Friday said.

  “I don’t got nobody named Gunn on my list. I got a reservation for a Gun with one n.”

  “That’s almost certainly me,” I said.

  He looked up, a frown of disapproval on his face. “Did you go and spell out your name on the phone?”

  I said I couldn’t remember.

  “Well, then, it’s sure not our fault if’n it’s spelled bad.”

  “I didn’t say it was your fault. What about the two rooms?”

  “Only one listed on the reservation.” Clarence looked up again with something resembling a lecherous glint in his eye. “Only one still available.”

  I could see Clarence sizing up the pretty creature standing next to me. She’d put on the cardigan but hadn’t bothered buttoning it. I wondered whether he could make out her very spare ribs. I wondered if he was calculating the age difference between her and me.

  I looked at Ornella in confusion. “I promise you I asked for—”

  “We’ll take it,” Friday told the night clerk.

  “You’ll take it?” he asked, looking at me.

  “The lady said we’d take it so we’ll take it.”

  I signed the register “Mr. and Mrs. Gun from Hatch.” I figured the reservation was in the name of Gun and I didn’t want to confound the already confounded cowboy by registering under another name.

  Which is how Ornella and I found ourselves sharing a tiny bedroom with a plaque on the door identifying it as the Clara Bow room. Seems as if the legenda
ry silent-screen actress had lived here during the Roaring Twenties when she was building her Shangri-la in the Mojave Desert.

  The situation was awkward, to say the least. I can only suppose my desire for Friday was written on my face. Clarence out at the desk certainly spotted it, judging from the way he licked his chapped lips as he slid the room key across the counter. Trouble is I have scruples. The last thing I wanted to do was impose myself on a woman. If something was going to happen in the Clara Bow room, in the Clara Bow double bed, Ornella would have to make the first move.

  Which, I am happy to say, is what she did.

  Here’s what happened. We had supper in the general store. An obliging Chicana named Vesustiana whipped up some hash browns and turkey burgers for us on her two-burner stove. “Where’bouts?” she asked as dished them out right from the frying pan.

  “She wants to know where we’re from,” Ornella explained when she saw the blank look on my face. “We’re from Hatch,” she told Vesustiana.

  “What brings you to Nipton?” she asked.

  “We’re newlyweds,” Friday said with a straight face. “This is our wedding night. For our honeymoon, we’re going to explore the Mojave.”

  “Well, neither of you look like virgins, so I reckon it’ll work out real fine. Wedding nights can be bad news for late bloomers who don’t have a lot of experience with sexual copulation. Since you’re celebrating, coffee’s on the house.”

  Back in the Clara Bow cubbyhole, I asked Ornella why she’d said what she’d said.

  She was looking at herself in the small wall mirror with seashells glued to the frame. Suddenly she crossed her arms and took hold of the hem of her shirt and pulled it up and over her head. The sight of her vertebrae left me short of breath.

  I could see she was monitoring my reaction in the mirror. “I figured we could beat around the bush, Lemuel. We could laugh nervously at each other’s jokes. When I admitted I didn’t have the foggiest idea who Clara Bow was, you’d explain at great length. You’d be so edgy you wouldn’t economize on words. The subtext of what you said, the message between the lines would be the difference in our ages.”

  Ornella walked across the narrow room to the window that gave onto the railroad tracks and, beyond that, the Mojave Desert and pulled down the shade. She turned to face me. “How old are you, Lemuel?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “I’m thirty-three. You were smack on when you figured there were fifteen years between us.”

  She settled cross-legged onto the bed, her spine against the footboard. “There’s a Corsican saying my grandfather passed on to me—something about a woman needing to be half her lover’s age plus seven if the relationship had a hope in hell of working out. I think the Corsicans got it from the Arabs. So by my Corsican grandfather’s rule of thumb, Lemuel, dear, you’re much too young for me.”

  She smiled that patented smile of hers, only this time I thought I detected the faintest suggestion of joy in it. Maybe I was coloring her smile with my own crayons. Maybe I was wishful thinking. Maybe I needed to stop thinking. Her nipples were erect. My luck, both of them were pointing straight at me. This wasn’t the moment to play the killjoy.

  Without going into details, I can honestly say that I rose to the occasion. At one point I became convinced she was running a fever—until it hit me that the heat coming off her body had another explanation. Her skin was the temperature of the earth I once touched above Dacht-i-Navar, a still active volcano southwest of Kabul in Afghanistan. When I said this out loud, I was rewarded with a ripple of musical laughter, something I couldn’t remember hearing from her before. Fact is I could feel myself falling for Friday in a big way—I could feel myself trying to hold myself back and not succeeding. I could see she’d been hurt and hurt badly. The pain was in the smile. The pain was in the back of her eyes. The pain was in the alert, guarded way she had of accepting a lover into her arms. A nasty little voice in the lobe of my brain that houses my early warning system told me hurt people sometimes became addicted to pain—in themselves, in others.

  I tuned out the nasty little voice.

  In the early hours of the morning one of those endless Union Pacific freight trains rumbled past the hotel. The rattling of the windows, the quaking of the floorboards must have startled Friday because she melted back into my arms as if she were seeking sanctuary. After a long while she whispered in my ear, “You make me hope there is hope.”

  “Hope is what’s left when you pan for gold and come up with pebbles washed smooth in the riverbed.”

  “Are you always such a wet blanket?”

  “I try to keep things in perspective. We can begin to talk about hope when we spend the night in the same bed without making love.”

  When the freight train’s caboose had gone past, the deafening soundlessness of the desert engulfed us. “So I didn’t think you’d be a good lover,” she said suddenly, her breath warm and moist on my ear. “You took me by surprise.”

  I pushed her away gently and sat up. “Listen up, Friday. There’s no such thing as a good lover or a bad lover. We’re different lovers with different people. It’s one of the mysteries of life—how one female can turn you into an eager and ardent lover and another can barely get a rise out of you. Go figure.”

  She sat up alongside me. “Question of chemistry,” she said.

  “Question of alchemy,” I said.

  “Panning pebbles in a riverbed and turning them into gold?”

  I had to laugh. “That’s as good a definition of alchemy as any.”

  She padded over to the window and raised the shade and came back to the bed. The Clara Bow room was turning shades of gray. The seashells on the small mirror glistened with first light. “Our first sunrise,” Friday said. She kissed the shrapnel scar on my right shoulder, then, startled, looked at me. “Where’d you get this?” she whispered.

  “Roadside bomb filled with ammonium nitrate—what you call fertilizer—exploded under our Humvee during my first tour in Afghanistan back in 2001. The driver was killed instantly. He was a nineteen-year-old hillbilly who drove me nuts blasting ‘Grown Men Don’t Cry’ on a jury-rigged Blaupunkt. The Afghan officer riding shotgun had both his legs blown off and died of gangrene two days later. I was catnapping in the back so I lucked out—only caught a splinter of shrapnel in the shoulder. Never did find out if the bomb was set by Pashtuns trying to kill Tajiks or Tajiks trying to kill Pashtuns or either, or trying to kill Americans.”

  Friday pressed her lips to the wound inflicted in the hospital immediately after I was born. And I heard a murmur drift up to me. “We’ve been lovers for only a third of a day, Lemuel, dear. I’m already sharing your pain.”

  We made love again. It was one of those drowsily slow, exquisitely sumptuous couplings that only happen in the morning when you’re still not a hundred percent awake, when you mistake reality for a dream.

  With sunlight flooding the room, I could make out the spume white swell of her breasts and purple welts on one or two of her very spare ribs. She noticed me noticing. “Car accident,” she explained. “I was driving my uncle’s old Chevy—skidded off the road into a drainage ditch. Seat belt probably saved my hide but left its mark on my rib cage.” She smiled sheepishly. “Last thing I expected was to sleep with you so I didn’t think you’d ever set eyes on my rib cage.”

  “I’m tickled pink to wake up to your rib cage,” I said. “I’m eager to share your pain.”

  Later on, stuffing ourselves with home-baked raisin muffins in the general store—amazing the appetite you can work up at what Vesustiana called “sexual copulation”—we returned to the business at hand. I retrieved the Sony Walkman from my gear and hit PLAY so we could listen again to the anonymous phone call that sent Detective Awlson off to the Blue Grass to arrest Gava. “Awright, I have not got all night. What do you say we put this show on the road, huh?” We sat there staring at the cassette as if it could provide an image of the speaker if you listened hard enough.

&
nbsp; “What can you tell about him from his voice?” she asked.

  “He’s cocksure of himself, for starters. He knows where the conversation is going because he’s steering it. He’s shrewd smart as opposed to educated smart. He’s probably a poker player who memorized the odds against drawing to an inside straight. He’s not someone I’d invite into my Once in a Blue Moon to drink a cold Mexican Modelo. He’s not someone I’d tangle with if I could avoid it.”

  “All that just from his voice?”

  “All that and more. I’ve come across mugs who buy cocaine before.”

  “I’ll bet you have.”

  Back in the Clara Bow room, Friday suddenly came up with the idea of exchanging tokens to mark the beginning of the beginning. “I told you I was superstitious, remember?” she said. “Here’s the thing: We’re starting out on a journey together. I need to have something personal of yours, you need to have something personal of mine to make sure we get where we’re going in one piece.”

  I studied her eyes. She was dead serious. I didn’t know if the journey in question was the search for her bail jumper or had something to do with what happened in Clara Bow’s double bed the night before. Shrugging, figuring I had nothing to lose, I gave her the small piece of shrapnel the Afghan male nurse had pried from my shoulder and I’d used as a fob on my Once in a Blue Moon key chain. She gave me the silver St. Christopher medallion she wore around her neck whenever she was on the road. Turns out her grandfather had given it to her at the airport after her first summer in Corsica. I attached the medal to my key chain. St. Christopher, of course, is the patron saint of voyagers. I wasn’t one to put much store in saints but what the heck, it didn’t hurt to bet on several horses in any given race.

  Seventeen

  I’ll do Afghanistan now.

  I’d been posted to the Company’s compound in Kabul, which was Langley’s bright idea of R and R after two months in the Pakistani-Afghan badlands. I’d been named acting deputy station chief, which sounds real important until you discover there were eight deputy station chiefs, each one with a bailiwick to preside over. As the station was thick with desk wallahs and thin on officers who’d spent serious time outside the Green Zone, I presided over field operations, which consisted, during my tour in Kabul, of forays into the maze of various medinas in search of Taliban and Hezb-e Islami operatives. Sometimes I’d tag along with the raiders to interrogate suspects myself—I understood enough pidgin Pashto to know when the government translator was leaving out juicy details. Other times I camped in the compound’s command bunker to coordinate operations from a distance. I’d sit on a wooden swivel chair, nursing a cold beer, my eyes on the bank of plasma screens showing, among other things, a Wall Street ticker tape, an old episode of Seinfeld, and the live feed from minicameras attached to the helmets of soldiers breaking down doors in a medina. I was presiding over one such foray that had reached the operational stage when my station chief—I’ll refer to him as Jack for the purposes of this narrative, since the real names of Company employees, mine included, are considered a state secret—suggested I ought to tailgate the Delta-Foxtrot team setting off at midnight to raid a remote village in the rugged ridges of the Hindu Kush in the hope of capturing the especially tall mujahid who’d taught English to Osama bin Laden. (We had the mujahid’s photograph on file, it’d been taken from a drone, we calculated his height from the time of day and the length of his shadow.) “If you’re on scene, you can begin interrogatin’ him from the get-go while he’s still disoriented,” Jack said. “If you elicit real-time information on the whereabouts of our friend Osama, radio it on in. I’ll have another team geared up and airborne in minutes.”