A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  Now I’ll do the fight, or what I remember of it.

  I have this memory of Gava coming along the pathway, all the while looking over his shoulder as if he couldn’t believe I hadn’t turned up; as if I might still turn up. Keeping my shoulder low, I slammed into him from his blind side (from the way he angled his head it may have been his deaf side, too). I heard the wind explode out of him along with a yowl of rage. I saw him sprawled on his back in the bluish green desert sand groping for the pistol in a shoulder holster when I kicked him hard in the groin and, dropping to my knees, brought my shoulder up into his chin. I thought I felt his jaw splinter under the impact. In my rage to draw blood, I am sorry to say I lost it—I lost whatever control I had on the caveman anger not far below the surface of all of us, I lost my dignity, I lost my memory of who I was trying to be since I’d stopped being who I was. I reared back and tried to hack the side of my hand down on the side of his neck but Gava was too young and too fast and too strong. Howling with pain, he rolled away from me and brought a knee up into my thigh and managed a karate chop to my upper left arm that sent a current of pain shooting down to my wrist, leaving it numb. He was scrambling to his knees breathing hard and prying his pistol out of its holster when I heel-stomped him in the back of one of his knees and kicked the pistol out into the desert and backed off to one side in the hope of socking him when he came off the ground. But he never came off the ground—he rolled and came up in a crouch groping for something taped to his ankle, which is when I remembered the sweet little two-shot derringer. I saw it in his fist but I have no memory of hearing it go off. He must have pulled the trigger because I felt the wasp-sting of the bullet grazing my neck—and I had this crazy thought, now I had another wound for Friday to lick. Before Gava could get off a second shot, I hit him with one of the combat moves I’d learned the hard way—I’d been on the receiving end of it in the back alley of a souk in Peshawar. I plunged in low and hard, crunching into his rib cage with my head. The brittle sound of ribs cracking reverberated through the bluish green emptiness of the night. With my arm that still had feeling below the wrist I bunched my fingers into a fist and swung up where I thought his jaw ought to be, and nearly broke my wrist when my knuckles connected with something rock hard. I heard Gava trying to vomit. With the wind and the fight knocked out of him he melted into the desert floor, groaning in agony. I kicked him hard in his good ear to be sure he wasn’t faking.

  He was not faking.

  I have a dim memory of looking for his pistol and not finding it, of retrieving the derringer from the pathway, of tying Gava’s feet in a makeshift sling using the sleeves of my khaki jacket and dragging him back down the pathway, feet first, to the hotel. I wrestled him onto the porch and into the hotel and propped him against what had once been the check-in counter, then secured his wrists behind his back with a coil of telephone wire I’d spotted under the staircase. I folded back his legs and lashed his ankles to his wrists for good measure, put the night-vision goggles and the derringer on the check-in counter and went outside to the barrel filled with rainwater and splashed some on my face and wasp-wound. Then I soaked both my hands in the barrel up to the elbows for a long moment. When I pulled my hands free I noticed the fourth finger of my right hand hanging limply from its joint—the tendon had been busted when I slugged Gava in the jaw. I jury-rigged a splint with a sliver of wood from the porch railing and wrapped my handkerchief around the splint and the finger and splashed more water on my face and neck. I felt a certain after-shock calmness returning. My breathing wasn’t normal but it was going in the right direction. I shook myself the way a dog does when it comes in from the rain. First light was starting to smudge the horizon in the east when I heard a muffled cry of terror and then the sound of gagging coming from the lobby. I went inside to discover Ornella Neppi kneeling over the Wrestler, her skirt whipped back, her bare knees clamped against his ears, the derringer clutched in her small fist and jammed into Gava’s mouth. With her free hand she pulled a blonde wig from that silver astronaut knapsack of hers and set it askew on her head.

  And to my everlasting regret the missing pieces of the awful puzzle fell into place.

  Friday was the blonde bombshell girlfriend that Gava took back to his condo and beat up while he was making love to her.

  “Now do you recognize me?” Ornella asked Gava in an ugly whisper.

  Gagging on the barrel of the derringer in his mouth, he managed a terrorized nod.

  I found my voice. “Don’t do that,” I called softly.

  “He hurt me,” Friday sobbed. “He hurt me so much there is no me, there’s only the hurt.”

  “I’ve seen the welts—I never swallowed the story of a car accident.” I took a step in her direction. “Killing him won’t solve your problem,” I said.

  She never so much as glanced at me. “Killing him will make him vanish from my dreams,” she said in a dead voice. “Killing him will make me better.” And she angled the barrel so that it was pointing toward the endless expanse of universe over our heads and she pulled the trigger. Gava’s skull exploded, splattering brain matter on everything within a fifteen-meter stain radius.

  I thought I’d seen it all but here was something I hadn’t seen—me sinking back on my haunches wiping someone’s brains off my face with my sleeve, me suddenly suffocating under the dead weight of the endless expanse of universe over my head, me trying to remember who I’d been after I’d escaped from my first stain radius back in the Hindu Kush Mountains.

  Twenty-seven

  You didn’t have to be Philip Marlowe to understand I was in a jam. With a corpse instead of a prisoner on my hands, the situation was delicate, to say the least. I could almost hear the prosecutor summing up to the jury:

  Fact: Ornella Neppi engaged the accused, Lemuel Gunn, a former CIA agent who was expelled from the Agency for reasons too secret to spell out in open court, an occasional private detective working out of a mobile home in Hatch, New Mexico, a reject from society, to track down Emilio Gava so she wouldn’t be out the $125,000 she posted as bond.

  Fact: Somewhere along the way this same Lemuel Gunn became Ornella Neppi’s lover.

  Fact: He noticed the welts on her rib cage and discovered that Emilio Gava had brutalized her during a six-month liaison.

  Fact: In a jealous rage, he lured Gava to an abandoned hotel, overpowered him, breaking several of his ribs and his jaw in the process, and then cold-bloodedly jammed a derringer into the mouth of the bound victim and fired a bullet into his brain.

  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is commonly called first-degree homicide.

  I don’t know how much time passed before Friday joined me on the hotel porch. I was sitting with my back to the wall squinting into the sun rising over the Kelso dunes. Without a word, she settled down next to me, her shoulder touching mine. “I didn’t intend to—”

  “You should have stayed in the Toyota like I—”

  “I heard a shot, I thought he might have killed you—”

  We were talking past each other, not to each other.

  “We need to notify the authorities—”

  “—wrap the body in the tarpaulin and bury it in the desert. Nobody will be the wiser—”

  I shook my head. “Listen up, Friday, we have to take our chances with the police.”

  She turned on me and I couldn’t miss noticing that her face and hair were speckled with Gava’s brains and blood. “Can’t you see, Lemuel, I won’t have a chance. If I’d killed him when he was abusing me, a jury would have been sympathetic. But this will look like premeditated murder. Look, there never was a girlfriend named Jennifer Leffler with a deed to a condo. I was the girlfriend. I put up bail without collateral because he was my lover, because he swore he would beat the charge and we would go away together. When I realized he was going to jump bail and run out on both the $125,000 bond and me, something in me snapped. When I asked you to find him, I didn’t give a damn about the $125,000. I wanted you to find him
so the Corsican in me could kill him.”

  “You need to tell your story to a judge,” I said softly. I found myself talking to her the way you talk to a child coming off a tantrum. “I’ll find you a good lawyer. You need to show the jury the welts. You need to convince them—”

  “You told me you were eager to share my pain,” Friday said. She pulled her dress off one shoulder, exposing the ugly welts on her rib cage. “You be the judge and jury, Lemuel. You try the case. If you find me guilty, I swear to you we’ll call the police. If you find me innocent—if you decide it was justifiable homicide—we’ll bury the body and get on with our lives.”

  Thinking it would calm her if I heard her out, thinking we could still call the police when she’d finished, I accepted the challenge. On the porch of the abandoned Kelso hotel, with the rising sun burning the chill off the desert, I listened.

  Shrugging her shoulder back into the dress, she noticed the nick in my neck. She spit on the hem of her dress and used the moistened fabric to wipe the blood from my wound. “I met Emilio Gava one night at a block party in Albuquerque,” she said, her voice hauntingly soft, her eyes tightly shut as if keeping them shut would stem a tide of tears. “He was lean and good-looking and a smooth talker and a good listener. I’d never known anyone like him before. He was uneducated and coarse and rough but he didn’t play intellectual games, he didn’t beat around the bush, he came right out and told me he wanted to have sex with me. So you said it yourself, Lemuel. You said we are different lovers with different people. You said it was completely mysterious and completely magical—how one person can transform you into an eager and ardent lover and another can barely get you to perform adequately. Was it my fault if Emilio transformed me into an eager and ardent lover? To put it crudely, he turned me on. At first the lovemaking was gentle, but gradually he began to explore the violent side of the sex act.”

  The violent side of the sex act! I almost choked on the words. I muttered, “Lady, we’re not talking about the same act.”

  “Oh, yes we are, dearest Lemuel. You really were born into the wrong century. You’re out of sync with this one. You see it from a man’s point of view—you see sex as a coupling, like two cars in a train attaching themselves to each other with a gentle crunch. Women see it as a penetration, an invasion, an assault with or without battery, which leaves scars, some of which are visible, most of which are concealed. Can’t you understand, Lemuel? At different points in our lives we are different people. These points can be days apart, even hours, it doesn’t matter. Women love differently than men. We spend our lives trying to figure out what it means to be female. For the six months that we were together, Emilio imposed his definition on me. To the Emilios of this world, to be female is to be at the service of men, the receptacle in which they deposit their seed when they get the urge.”

  Pushing herself to her feet, Ornella went to the barrel of rainwater and, wetting the hem of her skirt, began to wipe the blood off of her face and arms and chest and hair. After a while she walked over to what was left of the porch railing and stared out into the waves of heat beginning to rise off the desert floor. I realized she was still talking so I got up to stand next to her. She was saying something about having been a battered child. She was describing what it was like to have lived a lifetime of pain. The words and phrases emerged in a single tone of voice, as if dredging up the past had numbed her vocal cords. “Every time my father beat me I took it for granted that I’d done something wrong,” she was saying. “I couldn’t figure out what but I took it for granted I deserved the beating. The punishment made me feel as if I had expiated the sin, whatever it was; that I was Daddy’s little girl again. Oh, how he would cuddle me and fondle me after each beating. Over time the pain of the beating was transformed into pleasure, and the line between the two blurred. I became addicted to this pain-pleasure syndrome. Emilio picked up where my father, long since dead, left off; the brutal sex with Emilio was a continuation of this pattern.” She turned to look at me. I could have sworn the seaweed green in her eyes had faded to what I took to be mourning gray. Blinking back unshed tears, she said, “He beat me and fucked me and cuddled me. And the addict I was then kept coming back for more.”

  When she finally ran out of words, I wandered off into the desert to sort through my emotions. A tepid breeze stirred paper cups and cellophane wrappers that had been tossed from passing cars over the years. Overhead, two kingfishers, with the distinctive white collar around their necks, circled looking for lizards. I watched them for a long time. I watched the slowly bloating contrails of a jet heading in the direction of the Pacific. The sound of the jet engines reached my ears well after the plane had passed, which meant it was flying faster than the speed of sound; which meant the sound, racing after the plane, would catch up with it on a Los Angeles runway. There is something about flying faster than the sound your engines produce, something about the infinity of space that birds and planes inhabit, that reduces life and love and homicide to puny details in the history of the universe. Gunn, the philosopher king spouting his half-baked theory of relativity. I remembered the first time I’d set eyes on Friday, with her nipple pointing straight at me through the flimsy fabric of her dress. She’d looked as if she were hanging on by her fingertips but I couldn’t figure out to what. Now I knew. She was hanging on to sanity. She’d been mauled, physically and mentally. The instinct that pushed her to kill Emilio was as old as the human race, as old as the first man who mastered walking on his hind legs so that he could use the front ones to grip a club. If you’re mauled, you maul back.

  Add to this the fact that Emilio Gava a.k.a. Silvio Restivo, the Wrestler with a penchant for brutal sex, had blood on his hands; he had set up Salvatore Baldini for the sniper. Add to this the fact that the Delta-Foxtrot people who had murdered three females and blown out the brains of the especially tall mujahid on the Hindu Kush had never been charged with a crime.

  Back at the porch I found Ornella where I’d left her, staring from the half-broken railing into the desert. “What have you decided?” she whispered.

  “I’ve decided killing Gava was justifiable homicide. I’ve decided no jury would find you guilty of killing a killer. I’ve decided to bury his body in the dunes. I’ve decided we need to quit this stain radius in the hope that we can get on with our lives and our loves.”

  She opened her eyes and the tears spilled from them. “Lemuel, Lemuel,” she sobbed as she came into my arms.

  The rest was a matter of work in the final inch. I retrieved a length of white plastic stashed under the staircase and folded Gava’s corpse into it. I brought the Toyota down from the wadi and, with Friday’s help, loaded the body into the back of the car. I found Gava’s handgun in the sand off the pathway. I wiped the prints off it and off the derringer and buried both in a rabbit hole on the side of a dune a good mile into the Mojave. Then I drove deep into a tangle of wadis and, using the folding army shovel, dug a grave in the sand. I dragged the plastic into the hole and covered it with sand and big flat stones. I figured the wadi would be filled with water after the summer rains. With any luck the body would never be found—Gava would just be a hoodlum who had gone missing from the witness protection program; gone missing from the face of the earth.

  Ornella, meanwhile, had soaked her dress in the barrel of rainwater and used it to wipe most of the stains off the walls and the check-in counter. To the naked eye the lobby of the Kelso Depot hotel looked long abandoned. It would have taken a forensic expert to identify the smudges on the walls as human blood. Friday had rinsed her dress and put it on sopping wet and was standing in the sun trying to dry it when I came back from the wadis. We caught our respective breaths, I took a last look around. Friday smiled a thin smile. “Thank you for being here, Lemuel,” she said. “Thank you for being.” I wasn’t sure how you said thank you for a thank you so I just nodded. We climbed into the Toyota and headed back toward Nipton to collect my belongings.

  Which is when I discovered t
he note pinned to the door of the Clara Bow room. I somehow knew it spelled trouble.

  Trouble it was. Call this number urgently, somebody had scrawled on the back of an envelope. I recognized the phone number—it was France-Marie’s, my French Canadian accountant in Las Cruces.

  I used the pay phone in the general store. France-Marie came on the line. “Kubra called,” she said. “She sounded kind of funny. She said you should call her at a Nevada number. What’s she doing in Nevada, Lemuel? I thought she was supposed to be at her junior college in California. I asked her if it could wait until you got back to Hatch. She said no. She said it couldn’t wait. The way she said it made it sound almost like she needed help, and quick.”

  I dialed the number in Nevada. A man answered. “That you, Gunn? You took your sweet time calling. Here, wait a sec—”

  Kubra came on the line. “It’s me, Gunn.”

  “You okay, Kubra?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s wrong, little lady?”

  “Plenty’s wrong,” she said. I could hear the strain in her voice, as if she were fighting off a persuasive terror. “I thought you’d sent them to get me, that’s what they said when—” She didn’t finish the sentence. I heard her cry out in pain.

  A man comes on the line. “Listen up, dickhead,” he growled, “you are holding one of ours, we are holding one of yours. Like we suppose you will be interested in an exchange.”

  Ornella was at my elbow. “Who is it?” she whispered.

  I snarled into the phone, “If anything happens to my kid—” I took a deep breath. “Okay, sure, let’s trade.” My thoughts were racing ahead of the words forming on my lips. “There’s a small-sized problem. We had a fight. Your man can’t walk so well.”