The gear looked a complex business of cables and components, and yet from the sofa, at least, shown only a few small, humorless lights, and no obvious controls.
“So how do you know the tall gentleman?” he asked from the kitchen.
“Who?”
“The Eddie Bauer lumberjack,” he said, and appeared presently with the Champagne. He replenished her glass, and with her free hand, she collected the drape of her hair, dressed it altogether over one shoulder, and with an uncomprehending lift of her brow, dismissed the question with a gentle shake of her head.
“It’s very spare. Is this really all your furniture?” she asked, proposing the question to a floor lamp of cantilever joints which set beside the sofa.
“I also have a bed. I’d be happy to show to you.”
“Probably that’s all the place will hold.”
“It’s all I require.”
“Your wife won’t be barging in on us?” She glanced at his hand with the question. “Or do you just use the ring to bait the ladies?”
Hussar stood center of the rug, arms folded, and sipped from his glass.
“Seriously—beautiful as it is, in its own stark way, is there a woman who would live like this . . . could, could live like this?”
He said nothing.
“Beads and colored pots; plants with dangly leaves; glasses with unnecessary writing . . . scarves over the doorknobs: women are messy.”
Hussar moved to top up the glasses from the bottle, and placed it beside her at the leg of the sofa.
“. . . something to fill in the empty spaces,” she continued.
“A man requires the space for his noise.”
“. . . accent chairs and do-dads: not just black leather and chrome—“
“Polished aluminum—“
“And . . . wood—” she said, rapping her knuckle on the frame beneath her thigh.
“Walnut.”
“Whatever . . . Does your wife live with you? I don’t think there’s a woman living here,” she said.
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t recall saying there was.”
“The ring.”
“Could it be you’re straying from your mandate?”
“Then where is she?”
He said nothing.
“Where’s the woman . . . !” she said pointing emphatically; and feeling suddenly inundated by the spuming tide of Champagne, she stopped, and she laughed. “ . . . who belongs to that ring?”
“May it please you—she is far from here,” he said, and lowered himself again, resuming a position, cross-legged center of the floor.
“You have any coke?” she asked with a rhetorical attention, and set distractedly into her purse.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time,” he said.
“Never mind, I have some.”
Hussar laughed. “Good for your grades?” he asked.
“Study aide,” she said, and fished a small, intricately arranged piece of folded white paper from her bag.
“Is that origami?” he asked
She held it toward the light and shrugged. “You have a bill?”
“I seem to recall you have several.”
“I ‘spose I do,” she said and smiled. “Hate to get them dirty.”
Hussar rose and returned to the stereo.
“Some other part of the country then?” she asked, recovering her earlier thought and rolling a small bill tightly against her thigh: an alabaster plane borne beneath the brief chase of hem.
“What’s that?”
“She’s in some other part of the country?”
“Further,” he said.
“Further? The woman who belongs to that ring?”
“The woman who belongs to the ring.”
“What’s further?”
He said nothing.
“Ah! That’s right,” she exclaimed. “We still haven’t cleared up the matter about where you’re from!”
“Originated? Or do you mean the location of a previous instance?” he asked. His wry smile looked to her like a gleeful suppression: an expressive indulgence clasped by its ends.
“What?”
“Do you know Eckernförde?”
“No.”
“That’s fine.”
“Do you mind if I set this up in the kitchen?” she asked.
“By all means,” he said.
“Do you have an edge?” she asked, as she walked carefully into the kitchen with the loosened paper and the tightly spun bill.
“Do you know Jarrett?” he called after her, but to no reply. He cued “Desert Sun,” and followed her into the kitchen with the Champagne and the first chords from the stereo.
She unfolded the elaborate paper on the counter, and with the blade of a credit card, parted out two lines amid the creases and terrain of the flattened sheet.
“How did you say you know the tall fellow?” he said, and rest the Champagne and glasses on the counter.
She gestured toward him with the straw. “You sure?”
“Thanks, I’m full.”
She took up the first line and pinched off the nostril with a snort. “I didn’t say that I did,” she said. “Although—he was good for this.” She motioned again with the straw and set it beside the paper.
“A gift?”
“A tip,” she said. “But it’s very unsexy, talking about other jobs.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know him.”
“No, I said that I didn’t say that. But I don’t. You’re not going to ruin my buzz with this stuff, are you?”
“I merely thought he looked familiar. How is it?”
“Seems clean. I’ll know in a minute, right?” She laughed. “I dunno, I’ve seen him maybe, like twice—danced for him twice. If he’s been around more than that, I don’t know about it. What, he owe you money or product or something?”
“He looked familiar.”
“Whatever,” she said, and retrieved her glass. “There’s nobody familiar as somebody who owes you.” She mouthed the Champagne and considered the stemware.
“First law of accounting? Your field of study?” he asked, and folded himself into a bend of the countertop.
“Everyone’s an accountant—it’s just some people are good with numbers. So where’s Eckenford then? Eckford?”
“Not where I’m from.”
“You’re a coy boy,” she said, and with great care drew another line from the low white drift set upon the paper. In a moment of unguided emptiness, Hussar’s thoughts settled upon the spot, upon the miniature pile, surrounded by its vast and empty moat where he envisioned the tiny mound instead, as a great plateau rising above a boundless angular plane; and were a microbial Moses in this moment to rush up the crags of this narcotic Sinai—he wondered as she erased the line with a greedy sniff and a coordinated nod of the straw—what might he receive?
She canted her head back and cleared her nostrils with an alternating pinch and a strong, dry sniff. Her eyes closed. She blinked heavily and then looked at him as though in reappraisal. “Is it bright in here? It feels bright in here. Didn’t you say you were going to show me your bed?”
8.
The room was the sound of fine sheets and stubble and the rough tread of his palm along the spline of her neck, the angle of her jaw, and every other feature where the touch was pleasing. He was patient and tender, and she was high, and cultivating an urgent delirium; and that he contradicted her practical assumptions was, by far, his greatest pleasure. Her back spasmed. And when it seized again he returned slowly to his side, and trailed his hand across her. Another followed, and then a tremor which ebbed in the wrinkle of her toes, and a slow flutter of her eyelids.
It was a deep half-li
ght to which their eyes had accustomed, and hers bathed in it and cast up at the ceiling as though its plaster works were cloud. “That’s cheating,” she said, and the bulb of sound flashed starkly for its contrast against the silence. “That’s not fair,” she said, and moved to face him. Hussar lay with an arm outstretched, and rubbed his knuckles against the cleave of his chin with the other. On his shoulder was a dark spot, which her eyes now strained to make out—a smudge of ink, a pattern, a shark or marlin or barracuda.
“What is that?” she asked. She brought her fingers to touch the mark where it shifted against the fibers of his shoulder.
“A momentary indiscretion.”
“What is it really?” she asked, tracing the features of the black, skate-like shape. He looked at her again, searched her, she thought, much as he had in the car—a look which seemed to see her, but to land beneath her surface.
“A sawfish,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
“It’s return postage,” he said.
She looked uncertain.
“It means, when they find your carcass floating in the Baltic, they’ll know who to call.”
She lifted her fingers and leaned in to look for this meaning, then withdrew her hand.
“That’s what it means?”
“It says . . . ‘suffer without complaint’,” he said and smiled. It uncurled broadly between them but shone with none of the charm of the club or the boyish mischief of downstairs, and she held an urge to press her eyes closed until it had passed. “In all toil, the Bible tells us, there is profit,” he said, “but in mere talk, only poverty. Let us be silent and profitable.”
For a time they were.
But when his phone chimed a text, he withdrew and snatched it from the bedside where he stood deliberating in the buzzing darkness, damp, and nude, and pale; and then with a quick gesture, stole into the brief gray light of the hall, leaving her the muted knock of the latch, the door’s tidal breath, cool and unseen and trembling the hairs against her brow.
Hussar moved to the laundry: padded along the hall to the stair and down, his soles across the turned lips; across the acrid chill of the foyer tile; through the glass-knobbed door, and down again. Unfinished concrete was livid beneath his feet. He thread his limbs into shirt and pants three days cold from the dryer. In the kitchen he fastened his clothes, and he examined the text, and considered the address it contained: it contained only an address. And with this done, he dropped the phone in his pocket, poured the remnant of Champagne into glasses, and tread again softly, up the stair and down the hall.
When he opened the door, she jerked with a start where she sat upon the bed in the light of the small lamp, and in the half-dress of his shirt. The closet on the far wall rest ajar where a mislaid strap from Hussar’s canvas duffle resisted the door, and as he set in the doorframe with the Champagne ticking lightly in the flutes, they both paused to observe the lighted screen of her phone, nuzzled beside her thigh—which presently extinguished.
“That’s a waste,” said Hussar as he offered her a glass.
“What’s a waste?” she asked, her beauty a lamentable and misspent inheritance.
“Warm champagne,” he said as he entered the room and drew the door behind him.
III.
“Use this,” said August. He removed the thread protector and handed the pistol to Edmund LeFrance. “You familiar?”
“I hold this end, right?” asked LeFrance when he received it.
“No.”
“What is it?” LeFrance asked, peering more closely in the dim of the cab.
“Sig, Mosquito, TB. This is the clip release, this is the slide release,” said August and showed LeFrance. “Your dance partner for the evening. Rack it.”
“I’m a big boy, August—you wanna shake it for me?”
“Rack it. Show me,” said August.
LeFrance showed him.
“The brass is clean, but don’t leave any,” August said, and passed the clip to LeFrance. “You’ve got ten, but I want nine back. You’ll want this,” he said, and turned over the suppressor. “Test the fit.”
LeFrance tested the fit, and watched August watching.
It was quarter to six on Christmas Eve, and August and Edmund LeFrance sat in the dissipating warmth, parked at a meter on Bonhomme, in a Cummins dually LeFrance called ‘the white whale,’ and without the least affection. LeFrance slipped his instruments into the deep pockets of his topcoat and drummed at the wheel. August worked a pinch of chew in his lip and kept a tired paper cup between his knees for spittle. The discharge was a small watery burp, and the sound of it against the ratted slope of the cup left LeFrance thinking each time of the dyspeptic purge of flu and that final brown-sour glottal of sputum before one leaves the bowl. His mouth watered and he ground his tongue on his teeth from time to time to clear it.
Beyond the breath-dewed windows flurries leapt into the air between a heavy sky and glistening pavements they never appeared to meet. 7912 Bonhomme lay along the opposite curb. Two bare wisps of tree rose from concealed planters, two cast iron street lamps shown against the pale façade, and the self-conscious script ran three sizes in Deco stainless about the door: The Guild Building.
“Swap me,” said August, who showed the expectant angles of his hand for meaning.
LeFrance soothed fingers along his bare Hippocratic verge of scalp and smiled at August. He drew a small chapbook from his coat and set himself to read.
“No, I mean it. Swap me out—trade me,” he repeated.
“Why would I do that, August?”
“You can’t use what you don’t have,” said August.
“I’m familiar,” said LeFrance.
“You set that thing off in there—its gonna leave a hole a block long—and fuck this whole thing in the ear. Gimme,” said August.
“You play cards, August? .22 for a .44 is a split—I should get two hands,” said LeFrance, as he drew the Redhawk from his coat and August slipped it beneath the zip of his flight jacket.
They’d been parked for a quarter hour. Kyle Lewis sat in a car near the end of the block at the stop. Phillip waited in the back; in the narrow lot he thumbed the ignition key and watched the exit for LeFrance. Kyle Lewis had covered the building for several hours in turns by foot and car, and now he rang through on August’s phone to report. LeFrance gazed across the street through the receding light, the yellow glare of the street lamps—their shifting halo of snow dancing like a static charge—and he listened to the attenuated notes of the voice of Kyle Lewis crackling into the porches of August’s ear. LeFrance thought then of the small AM radios of his youth—his father brought one with them to ballgames, into the high bleachers so as to hear what could only be seen—two thumb wheels, a collapsing aerial, a dial face, and a silver box the size of a Gideon’s. He surveyed the wall of alternately dark and half-lit windows—those few lazily trimmed in holiday lights: sad little portals pledging unrequited hope by the foot-candle—and into the growing stillness, which LeFrance had a notion was physical as a compelling breeze or high gravity, a sociobarometric pressure rising with the failing day, pressing people toward one another, toward brighter and more splendid lights, or leaving reluctant stragglers breathless beneath its unabated force.
“Phillip tells Kyle the janitor’s arrived and started work on one. Our man’s in his office on four, but we’re waiting out another loafer on the floor. Kyle says there’s another still—corner of the first floor,” said August, reaching across LeFrance to indicate an illuminated window, “but otherwise we’re lookin’ good. Just awhile more,” he said. August had just the taper of an accent, an occasional eliding slur that scored the flanges from consonant junctures and played contiguous words through a single extrusion: LeFrance thought it had a taste of Appalachian backwood to it—something the endive slaver of tobacco chew. LeFrance returned to the
chapbook held out against the wheel to read in the streetlight, but it was only a moment before August’s phone interrupted him again.
“Phillip says our loafer on four just split. That leaves the janitor and the orphan on one—that should be clear enough,” said August.
LeFrance slipped the book in his coat and leaned for the door handle.
August grasped him by the elbow: “Remember, behind the ear. Inside the hairline is best.”
IV.
“It is just like riding the bus,” had come the voice, soft and with the vague character of the vodka of which it smelled: a vinegary and granular solvent. “This is what I tell my daughter. She does not like the bumps. ‘It is just the same as uneven ground,’ this is what I tell her.”
The voice emerged from someplace very near to Foster’s ear, poured out of the gestational dim of the cabin, and from somewhere within the fibrous coherence of engine noise: the perpetual bass rumbling of thrust and drag friction and rotating mass; the whining soprano over-score of inducting turbofans, and the whistle of cabin overpressure venting with feathery reluctance into the shoulder of each window frame and through the fine breach of every hidden seam. It was the noise of common experience made bright-sharp and bowel-jostling by the ebbing chemistries of hangover.
It was a year and a month ago—last January, Beijing to Tel Aviv in coach—and he was thinking of the recent holiday: Christmas at his parents, and the nausea which marked him for the whole of the occasion; the pinion of pine logs and damp smoke, and the astringent of his wife’s perfume, alive in his nostrils at the thought—like an exhaust: corrupted to its mere aroma. She’d been committed to the pageant of normalcy. A fraud accomplished for the benefit of his parents, he assumed, he hoped. And there was New Year’s in D.C, too. A gesture he’d taken to as a chaser: buttressed by old friends; a cast joined at oxidized but habituated terminations; doubling down at the stations of their first missteps, and fastened to the city and trajectory of the occasion. Nevertheless, Foster had been keened up at the prospect—and diversion—of indulging old and infamous glories.
This memory was scentless, but its remembering seemed somewhere to prize a coagulated knot loose of its fitting. And it was through this renewed wound the milky-thin, dribbling, and bilious residue—not of Christmas or his wife—but of the two prior nights in Beijing, came.
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