“Then much shorter on the sides and back, if you please,” he said. “For all I care, you may leave the rest as it is.”
The woman, Lauren, despite her contemptuous glances, had begun to work into the scalp with her fingers and comb—the sensation as always, made Hussar drowsy—before her curiosity had the better of her. “Was there a misunderstanding, perhaps?” she hazarded. “Perhaps a . . . miscommunication?”
Hussar felt amused by her proposal, and pulled away from the scissors to look at her. “Does she speak the King’s English?” he asked.
“What?” she said. “Yes. I mean . . . yes.”
He turned back to the mirror. “Well then, I hardly expect there was a misunderstanding.”
“What, if I may ask, did you say to her?”
“You may,” said Hussar, “but frankly it’s interrupted my haircut once already. As it is,” he said, extracting his arm from the smock, and lifting his cuff to bare the watch face, “in thirty-two minutes, I’ve an appointment eight minutes away. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather keep things simple.”
In fact, what he’d said had been simple. The woman with the dark bob and the tattoos, called Kim, had been dividing her energies unequally between cutting his hair and chatting him up. She was cute in that indiscernible past tense one presumes of girls defiled beneath an indiscretion of ink and piercings. And she’d prattled on interminably:
Where was he from? She didn’t care for an answer. She was from Hazelwood. Did he have children? Was he in a relationship? The questions were merely preludes for her own response. She’d just moved in with her boyfriend of a year. How did he feel about apartments? They were constricting, she thought, and was happy to have rented a small house. What about pets? Did he like pets? She loved pets—dogs most of all: at which point she launched headlong into a detailed accounting of how her Labrador, Titus, had worked himself free of the house just last night. The final scene involved the boyfriend’s heroics, snatching after the trailing leash, hurtling fences after the dog, circling the property, the neighbor’s yards, and a near four block radius before the emboldened Titus ultimately secured his escape; and concluded with a quavering moment of sympathetic offertory into which Hussar was expected to tithe. What he thought, dryly, was: the lot of you are idiots of the first order. But what he said—and with no special intention, was, “The only thing more foolish than a man chasing a dog is a man chasing a woman.”
At which, the woman, Kim, had straightened, and seized. She raised and lowered her tools, pinched her eyes, turned away, and finally, back into mirror, where, Hussar could see her eyes glistening mist. She dropped the comb into the Barbicide, clapped her shears on the counter, and after five minutes of blow dryers and the receptionist lavishing supernatural enthusiasm into the telephone, Lauren, her fabric bolt of a dress, and her disparaging eyeglasses, had emerged in her place; and from Hussar’s reply forward, failed to utter another word. When she’d finished, she dusted his neck with a brush, straightened his collar, removed the cape, and pivoted the chair to the side.
“They’ll ring you up at the counter,” she said.
“I can see we’re on a roll,” said Hussar.
He collected his linen suit jacket, slipped it on at the counter and corrected the lapels as the receptionist worked the checkout.
“Would you like to schedule your next appointment, sir?” she asked.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“Total’s thirty-five. Would you like to add anything, sir?” she asked.
“I think it would be lost in the moment.”
“I’m sorry?”
“No,” he said.
Outside, his breath emerged in fuming vaporous snorts, his hair had grown suddenly stiff and chill, and he navigated the sidewalk crowded everywhere with university students in their daily migration, downed and fleeced and flannelled, on their harried and self-certain way; each a point on a graph of convergences: resources versus academics, versus substances, versus time. All of them, Hussar mused, ingredients committing to a dish whose recipe they cannot fathom.
The portal of a narrow footpath between buildings opened onto a cluttered parking lot, where Hussar found the car still with the warmth of an hour ago, and bulwark against the air which had begun to sting in his nostrils and bite through the middling weight of his suit. With a few moments of running, the cabin was balmy and he’d wheeled west up Delmar, past the ornate octagon of the City Hall, beneath the gaze of the lion’s gate, along the boulevard’s great, leafless sycamores, and eventually left, through the wrought iron gate at Purdue, and following the leftward split at Creveling, to a stop before the second house on the right. He waited there with the V8 burbling idly for a further eight minutes and fifty-five seconds, by the hands of his watch, before the realtor drew up behind in her lipstick-red Mercedes Geländewagen.
“You’re certainly of a piece,” he said, stepping from the car and into the gritted street. The woman approached, prancing vehemently across the noisy pea-stones in a silk jacket printed with golden ropes, and a brimmed hat, scarf, and suede boots, each the identical saccharin red of the truck. “I nearly missed you,” he said.
“Mr. Degen! Oh, what a pleasure to finally meet you! I’m Patricia, of course. Did I say that right—Degen? Is that right?” she asked, advancing toward Hussar with her arm thrust out rigidly as though to gore him with it.
“That’s fine,” he said, and received her hand, small, cool, and frail as an iced herring, but studded everywhere with jeweled adornments. At the touch, Hussar wondered if she could imagine the whimsy with which those improbably ornate digits might be rendered a snapped and opulent gristle. The butterfly whose grace is the spider’s incredulity, he thought.
“Oh, lovely—what a lovely car you have. Very pretty,” she said.
“The one woman with whom I always agree,” said Hussar.
“And white after Labor Day, aren’t you the daring one! Come!” she said, and led him up the front walk toward the door.
“Is it white?” he asked, briefly considering where his cuff met his glove. “And what happens on Labor Day?”
At the heavy, oaken front door, the realtor was engrossed in a procedure for opening the lockbox shackled about the handle. Stooped and muttering, Hussar suspected her of struggling to recall an incantation.
“Why Labor Day? What happens on Labor Day?” he repeated.
“Why what?” she asked, adjusting her hat brim. “Oh, well, we put up our summer whites of course . . . Oh, you’re being coy,” she said, spinning the key in the tumbler, and throwing the door open upon a dim tiled foyer.
“And why do we do that: put our whites up?”
“Well . . . I don’t know, I suppose. It’s just what . . . it’s a . . . a convention . . . etiquette. It’s just what civilized . . .” she said. But when she straightened into the full wick of his attention, she lost the fiber of her thought.
“I’m sure it is,” he said. “I sometimes forget the world began in 1776. Americans have such quaint superstitions . . . and a mysterious preoccupation with color.”
The home was rough-hewn brick and leaded glass, over-leaved with a deliberation of slate tiles, and trimmed the lichen green of mature copper fittings. It stood off from the street behind a lawn of crisp winter grasses, and beneath the stone archway and the shadeless overcast. The realtor rooted abruptly through her purse for her next words, and Hussar watched closely to see what she’d find.
“You’ve an arrow for every occasion, Mr. Degen,” she said, finding at last what she sought in the red leather clutch, and closed it with a snap.
“Bravo,” he said, and stepped past her into the foyer. “I try to stay well armed.”
She smiled: a brief, curled smudge the precise color of her boots, and clutch, and car. “As I mentioned,” she cleared her throat, “as I mentioned—I believe I mentioned when we spok
e before—this is four beds, four baths,” she said, laying the door gently closed. “A two-car garage as you requested; in-ground pool—though I can’t attest to the condition . . .”
“What does it say in the seller’s disclosure?”
“About the pool? Let me see.” She produced a fold of papers from a deep coat pocket. “Oh, here, this is a copy of the listing,” she said, and presented a single sheet from the bunch into the vacant foyer. But Hussar had passed into the living room and she followed. “Yes, and of course, the living room meets the dimensions you provided.”
“It’s larger, in fact,” he said, removing his gloves and pacing off the long wall, his head bowed in concentration.
“Is that a problem?” she asked.
“No.” He paused in the corner to take note of the paces, and then pivoted to mark-off the shorter adjoining wall.
“You must have large furnishings?”
“No,” he said, “I have particular furnishings.”
She moved to the fireplace and rest her hat on the mantle. The fireplace was simple but substantial unadorned stone, and fitted with a worked hardwood cap. An array of faceted windows stared into a brittle, gray hedge, and an anemic light shown the polished floorboards and the cherry stain woodwork of the barrel vaulted ceiling. Hussar had an impression of the light as an overpressure from the outdoors, and that the rooms were simply inflated by it.
“A little over thirty-four hundred square feet . . . Should be plenty of space if you have a lot of furniture,” she offered to Hussar, who was walking off an additional series of measurements.
“I don’t.”
“It must be your wife,” she said when she’d noticed his platinum band.
Hussar slipped his hands reflexively into his pockets and turned from his measurements to face her. “She won’t be joining me,” he said.
“She must have quite a bit. My husband—bless him: he claims I’ve never seen a Rococo I didn’t—”
“She won’t be joining me,” he said, and rest his gaze upon her. “The garage?”
“. . . is through the kitchen.”
“And the beds?”
“Upstairs.”
He strode from the room, across the foyer and through the kitchen portal, hands fastened behind his back. She followed. The room was white, practical, and recently clean, with fittings survived twenty years beyond their fashion.
“It could use a bit of updating,” she said through the door into the garage, through which Hussar flashed occasionally turning in the unswept grit.
“It’s a two-car,” she said.
“It’s narrower than I’d hoped. Both remotes for the automatic door?” he asked and appeared in the doorframe.
“They should be here,” she said and started for the kitchen drawers, but Hussar had already begun to search them to a chorus of unladen casters. He shook his head, turned back to close the door into the garage, and checked it for play.
“Seems sturdy,” she volunteered.
“Like a vault door.”
She followed him upstairs where he fixed on the closets and doors and window latches. “There’s just the one stair?” he called out from the master en suite.
“Yes, just the one,” she said. In the bath he peered into the yard and a bitter draft through a small open window. And she fell back from the cold into the comparative warmth of the bedroom.
“Do we know the neighbors?”
“What do you do, Mr. Degen?” she called into the bath.
“Real estate,” he said to the rattle of the closing window. “Real estate,” he repeated as he emerged. “We’re a modest firm, but we have interests in a diversified portfolio of real estate investments. Historically commercial, increasingly residential as well.”
“Is it a U.S. firm?”
“By location or concern?”
“I’m not . . . I don’t . . .” she attempted with a dubious shake of her head.
“Certainly,” he said.
“What . . . Which is that?”
“You won’t have heard of it. Wire transfer or bank draft?” he said, and turned for the door.
“Yes, yes . . . You’ll forgive me, Mr. Degen—your accent, please tell me—I’m struggling to place it,” she said, as he descended the stair.
“I’m a Swiss of course,” he called from the foyer: “You will always know us by our impartiality.”
3.
Hussar rose late into the morning, and with the grim reluctance of one acquainted with the night. The week was warm out of season and the furnace had been still for days. He bathed thirty minutes to the sound of running water, of which twenty were motionless: his thoughts suspended in the air of the stall, thick and moist as a bodily enclosure. They collected where the airborne spray beaded and released along the tile—veins of condensate born and spent in a singular pulse, slick, and humid, and sudden.
The door to the bath was fastened. The outer bedroom door as well—sealed against the limitless possibilities of an empty house. On the counter beside the sink rest a canvas duffle, which he kept near at hand bathing or sleeping. The exact contents of the bag varied based on location and circumstance, but were presently one pair of shoes; two pair of socks; two pair underwear; two undershirts; two long-sleeve shirts; one jacket; two pair of pants; one pair compact field glasses; one utility tool; gauze wrap, tape, and sterile wipes; two vials of morphine and syringe; two curved forceps, a tweezer, and nail trimmers; ½ circle surgical needle and suture thread; two virgin passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards; a ring with five safety deposit keys; twenty-thousand American dollars in two sealed plastic bags; one blacked Fällkniven F1 survival knife; two H&K USP Tactical pistols chambered in .45 ACP; eight prepared fifteen round magazines; one hundred round box of Winchester 230 grain cartridges; one suppressor with left-hand thread; and one concealable shoulder rig.
When he’d finished, he dried, ordered his hair loosely with his fingers, and brushed his teeth. From the mattress on the carpet he dressed in jeans and shirt, rest the canvas bag in their place, removed the black knife from it, and padded in bare feet down the stair and into the kitchen, where he roused the dormant espresso machine. It was an affair in heavy stainless and commercial hafting, and was the exclusive addition to the otherwise dated kitchen appliances.
The movers arrived the week prior, threaded the storage container up the drive, and in some forty minutes of luxuriant motion, deposited the balance of Hussar’s earthly effects and departed: a king mattress; an Eames sofa; a large pale rug Hussar deployed exclusively in rooms which were sonically bright; the pair of enormous piano black Bowers and Wilkins 800 speakers, the three-hundred-fifty pound Mark Levinson No. 33 amplifiers and source gear—each requiring cautious uncrating and meticulous placement; the four six-foot, double-wide, combination-locked ATA flight cases rolled on their casters and stowed beneath a vast fabric drop in the unused garage stall; and the espresso machine which just now issued the anticipated tick of status light.
These objects, barring necessity for change or the intervention of irresistible forces, represented the entire material sphere of his portable world. And sipping a stout Americano from one hand, and tossing the unsheathed knife, blade over handle in the other, Hussar ignited the components for the stereo—which like the espresso machine, required a warming—and paced the living room restlessly.
He let them warm an hour before he disturbed them again, in which time he crafted and dispatched another coffee and stalked the living room observing the dark-amber lights of electronics he’d not seen in some time, and flipped the knife round in the air, handle to handle; only the once lodging it in the floor beside his naked instep, summarily withdrawing it and continuing as before. It was common to go for extended intervals without seeing his things. The flight cases, in part or whole, were rarely far from hand; but for his nonessential gear—the e
quipment of human indulgence—many months may pass without it.
From a small window adjacent the fireplace a groggy wasp licked at the glass. When the stereo had warmed to his satisfaction, he played three versions of Charlie Hayden’s “Silence” from digital files, and marveled at the wasp, acicular and unseasonable and precocious. It flung itself in venomous turns against the glass or the screen, a trap of inestimable boundaries it could neither penetrate nor perceive. Nowhere could Hussar make out a point for entry—the screen was whole and taught—and he wondered how it could so ingeniously enter, and with what prompt stupidity forget the ingenuity?
He retired from the window to the sofa to continue his listening, and sheathed the knife for the welfare of the cushions. From an extruded aluminum remote he advanced the volume, until the floorboards trembled with Hayden’s base, and his eyes watered from the pleading horns. And as he swabbed them with his palm, he realized the wasp’s trap was unsurprising: after all, determination is often comprehension’s orphan.
4.
At the gym off the parkway, Hussar sat in a small office blanched by fluorescent tubes, into which a consultant entered with the brisk noise of quick-dry fabrics. He arrayed freshly-drafted papers before Hussar on a desk of wood grain plastic. The contract was a thin ream of paper vellum—a measured ploy for concealing its size while retaining a binding formality, Hussar observed—and in a script so fine he imagined it might be presented with a jewelers loupe; and when the consultant placed it reverentially upon the table which bore nothing but the loose impression of previous signatures, Hussar laughed out loud at the sight of it. “You’re quite sure you haven’t forgotten anything?” he asked.
The consultant, whose badge was emblazoned with the singular declarative—Roger—was a man in his middle-twenties, lightly pimpled, unskilled with a razor, slightly plump, and unaccountably earnest. At the sound of Hussar’s laughter, his eyes, pink and watery, rolled to the sidelong assumption of a spooked horse, and he reared from the desk to the length of his arms and his clangorous red sleeves. “It’s the standard,” he said. “It’s the standard,” he repeated, with the cajoling note of a question. “You’d find it anywhere in the industry—you can be sure.”
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