Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  Gamlin hailed a cab—a red and gold Nissan, furrowed with a crease at the corner—and swept back to the airport trying to puzzle out where else Kashkin was likely to be: why after all would Kashkin abort the meet at the basilica—a change of venue he requested—if the purpose was to draw out a tail in the first place? But Kashkin would know it was a quick turn, know that Gamlin couldn’t wait: what Gamlin thought was certain though, was that Kashkin would have waved off the meet if he’d intended to cancel. The original plan was all that remained then: after forty minutes of stalled buses and an ass-numbing and meandering tedium, he was put down at the airport once again and worrying over the closing knot of time remaining for security, customs, the long shuffle for the gate—when he thought of the hotel, Kashkin’s hotel, and his initial instruction for Kashkin to hold there: it was the last final option, and it was the very perishing moment in which to rule it out.

  Signs for the hotel were few and poorly laid, and Gamlin found the Hilton as a squat and square three story arcade buried deep into the cavity of the terminal. Gamlin rang up Kashkin again as he took one of a pair of elevators to the hotel on the third floor, and with the phone to his ear and a hearty wave to a distracted clerk, he strode past the chaise in the reception hall and past the counter. He slipped past the hotel bar with a view of planes on the taxiway—looking closely for Kashkin as he passed—and down a narrow and unremarkable corridor of numbered rooms, and when he’d come round a bend to 315 he knocked lightly at the door. He knocked again to no answer. He tried Kashkin’s number again. As before, there was no answer, but as he listened closely near the door Gamlin thought he could hear a phone trembling against a surface within. When he tried again, there was the same crisp palpitating drub. He’d just put his phone away and was staring along the hall after what to do when a housekeeper came slowly up the hall pushing a trolley larded with spray bottles and towels and tissue rolls. She was young and small and leaned into the handle as though she were driving a weighted sled.

  “Mi teléfono: mi llave de la puerta: la tarjeta de la puerta . . .” Gamlin blurted at her suddenly. He waved to the door and the slot for the key card and patted down his pockets helplessly. “I’ve left my phone and my keycard in the room—I’m in a great hurry, and I have to take a call—can you help me?” he said. The housekeeper paused and looked at him with the drooped, jowly, expressionless appearance of someone roused from a slumber. “Mi teléfono: mi llave de la puerta: la tarjeta de la puerta,” said Gamlin, repeating the Spanish and charades routine, patting his pockets and pointing emphatically toward the narrow slot for the keycard. The housekeeper shook her head uncertainly, explaining in Spanish, what Gamlin assumed to be a business about the front desk and the appropriate steps of a process; all the while producing a long gesture he guessed was intended to set him on his path.

  “No hablo español,” he interrupted. “I have an urgent call, and I’ve locked my phone in the room with my keycard. I can’t get in. My phone and my key are inside—can you help me?” She began again with the gesture and a bit of instruction Gamlin imagined she had stored at the detent of a play button. But Gamlin foiled her prerecorded direction: he touched her hand lightly where it clutched the cart handle: “Muy importante,” he said, and clasped his hands together as though in earnest prayer: “Please?”

  Inside Kashkin’s room the curtains were partially drawn over tinted windows. The room looked down into the arcade, beneath its translucent latticework ceiling, and on to its elevators, escalators, and into its drab white corners. The television was on with the volume down, and beyond it on a small desk lay the phone Gamlin had heard rattling from outside. Gamlin snatched it up and waved it at the housekeeper in gratitude, opened it as if to make a call, and then returned to heartily shake her hand: “Gracias! Gracias! Gracias!” he exclaimed before closing the door on her.

  Gamlin quickly surveyed the room; the television remote lay on the bed. The bed sheets were disordered from use. Two shirts and two pair of pants and one jacket hung in the closet. An overnight bag lay on the floor beside the bed; its shirts and socks and underwear were in disarray. Three minibar bottles of Smirnoff and a Johnny Walker set on the nightstand along with a small, unfinished glass and the keycard in a paper sleeve. And from this perspective Gamlin noticed the uneaten club sandwich on the credenza. When he examined it, the fries and ketchup were untouched and the lettuce and mayonnaise looked passably fresh, and Kashkin’s wallet lay on the floor nearby. Gamlin noticed it with the toe of his shoe, and when he saw this a great weight of resignation passed over him and he drew several tissues from a box at hand and with them turned the handle of the closed bathroom door with a reluctant care.

  Beyond the door the bathroom was lined in a tawny cultured stone; a toilet, a shower, and from its abbreviated tub jut a pair of scuffed brown wingtips; and when Gamlin drew back the curtain he saw they belonged to a man in a disheveled blue suit, whom he knew at once to be Kashkin. A white pillowcase was pulled tightly over his head and pierced through behind the right ear by what looked to have been a small caliber round. The cloth perspired a thick crimson stain the scent of a meat counter. The nail on one hand had lifted from the quick and the back of both hands bore light bruising and were cool as tap water. Gamlin turned through his pockets, but found nothing.

  The predominant odor was of unlaundered clothes, but Gamlin knew that would not last. He switched on the exhaust fan, closed the door, and dialed the front desk from the bedside phone. “Yes,” he said when a voice came on the line, “what time is checkout? . . . One?” The Luminor shone quarter after twelve. “I’ve had an unexpected travel delay,” he said, “and I’ll be needing to extend my stay . . . Two days,” he said. There was a pause. There were fingers playing at a keyboard. “Yes, 315,” he said. “No, I’ve no interest in changing rooms . . . No, no interest . . . Mate? . . . Mate? . . . No interest . . . I will not be changing rooms . . . A sentimental attachment, what do you care? . . . I don’t need the discount, just the room . . . Fine . . . Do that . . . Do that, then; I’m sure they’d prefer it. This one has a bad view in any case . . . A bad view . . . I said—never mind . . . Yes . . . Two days,” he said. “What noise? The television? . . . The television? . . . When? . . . When was that? . . . Who says? . . . Who said it? . . . Well,” he said, “I’ll be quiet as sheep from here in.”

  Gamlin smashed the phone in the cradle and picked it up to do it again, but rest it gently instead. For a moment he sat and rubbed his brow, then wiped down the handset with tissue. He checked through Kashkin’s bag, collected his phone and wallet, hung the ‘No Molestar’ sign on the door handle, and left for the terminal.

  VI.

  Some ten days ago I left Paris, quite ill and tired, and journeyed into a great northerly plain whose breadth and stillness and sky are to make me well again. But I came into a long spell of rain that today for the first time shows signs of clearing a little over the restlessly wind-blown land; and I am using this moment of brightness to greet you, dear sir.

  His eyes cast over the words again, though this time he leaned his focus forward upon them. But there was no help in it: the words, any words it seemed, would not adhere. Absently, reflexively, he began again, as though his eyes would take up the unmediated substance of their own. But as before, his gaze merely rolled across them, tonguing at their corners.

  The address was a pale brick four-family apartment house at the western curb of Nebraska. The windows of the first floor gaped stupid, toothless, and empty onto the street. The entry were a pair of green doors set beneath an arched threshold and shaded over by a sycamore clutching lifeless and noisy leaves, stabbed in the dirt between the curbstone and where the sidewalk panels lifted from the soil. An air conditioner yawned from an upstairs ledge with the limp turn of cigarette ash; there was a flagstone crown, an eroded dentil relief, and a spare, unlikely inlay of decorative white tiles which must once have promised cheer. Upstairs, the floorboards were worn and un
finished, the plaster bowed and cracked, and the air was heavy with the memory of cooking oil.

  It had been ten to nine, morning of March 15th, when Edmund LeFrance made the stairhead, followed closely by August, and Phillip, and Kyle Lewis. They’d milled through the rooms. They’d taken up loose positions, and wherever they tread they disturbed decayed sediment which rose about their ankles, and which LeFrance lamented for spoiling the finish on his shoes and coat and freshly laundered pants.

  After the New Year August had been away, and had returned with a fractured cheek, a separated ear, and a harrowing, which even today were still in evidence. The cheek had mended to a discolored scuff, but the ear was taped and—Lefrance guessed from the way he pressed it from time to time with his hand—still live with discomfort. LeFrance put it to tobacco—or perhaps it was the harrow that staved the completeness of healing. August had been irritable since the matter at the office in Clayton—for which his travel was thought to be a tidying of affairs—and today, as Lefrance understood it, was the final: the settlement of accounts. Despite this, though, August seemed quiet, and LeFrance thought, pensive beyond his nature; and so as the wait had drug on, it was without protest or comment that LeFrance had received the small envelope from him. A small, manila, padded mailer—sealed and folded: “I’ll be calling for it when he comes—but hold it for me till then,” he’d said. August drifted back toward the kitchen where Kyle Lewis carved an apple with a knife, the discarded core in the pocket of his Carhartt’s; LeFrance traded the envelope into his topcoat for a sleeve of Drum and rolling papers; and Phillip peered uneasily through the front windows.

  LeFrance had been setting the tobacco and wet the seam when Phillip called out. “He in a Mercedes?” Phillip had said.

  August had come up: “No, why?”

  “There’s a black one next block up. It’s running—I can see exhaust,” said Phillip.

  LeFrance lit his cigarette and joined them at the window.

  “No,” August had said. “Suburban, I expect.”

  “Maybe he’s a no-show,” Phillip had said, and they’d all turned from the window.

  LeFrance had broken off for the toilet out of boredom: “I’ve got a piss to mark the occasion,” he’d said. August had seemed uptight about the prospect and barked his disapproval down the hall after him, but it was an exchange LeFrance had already forgotten.

  “Cautious man leads a long life, LeFrance!” August had shouted when LeFrance wedged the door closed. It was frustrated and disproportionate, and LeFrance had flipped up the seat, and released his zipper, and stared down through the onion burn of cigarette smoke into the dry bowl lined in a hard-pack masonry of sewage: “That Socrates?” he’d said, half to himself.

  The salmon tile looked to have been spackled in places with shit. The lens of a pull chain light above the sink was a shade of silverfish. LeFrance extracted the cigarette with unused fingers, and by force of habit, derived a wet belch from the sink tap before squeezing it closed again. He’d rubbed his hands in vigorous turns against his pant legs, and then against his coat as a finishing cloth, before drawing the thin, careworn chapbook from his pocket—Letters To A Young Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke—and setting himself down on the ledge of the tub.

  And now, fanning the pages with his thumb, he read from where the book lay open at the hinge of a relaxed and familiar crease:

  Some ten days ago I left Paris, quite ill and tired, and journeyed into a great northerly plain whose breadth and stillness and sky are to make me well again. But I came into a long spell of rain that today for the first time shows signs of clearing a little over the restlessly wind-blown land; and I am using this moment of brightness to greet you, dear sir.

  LeFrance broke off and smoked. He began again. He glanced through the window. He gazed at his dusty shoes. He turned the cigarette between his fingers. He began again. But when he began, it wasn’t his wandering attention, but a sharp thump from the kitchen that cut him off: the building leapt with a smart kick; there was a sparkle of separating glass; and the lash of a muffled and ferrous-snared report clung softly in his ear.

  He rest the book on his knee, and he listened. He leaned into it, listened with an elbow on his thigh, cocked his head as though tuning a frequency, turned an ear toward the fractured floor tile, smoked, pricked at the smooth-perfect silence from the adjacent kitchen, heard murmurs from the front room, and then the voice of Phillip called out: “Kyle? Kyle?” LeFrance heard three or four footfalls—August said, “Wait.” Immediately there was another thump: again the building shivered, calving window glazing fell, and then the sound of a great weight—two-hundred-some pounds of knees and elbows striking unchecked against the hardwood. LeFrance lurched at the impact. He slipped the book quickly into his coat, toss the nip of cigarette into the sink and began to stand, when the corner of the window frame above the toilet turned inside out with wood pulp, the porcelain sink exploded; a brick of it struck LeFrance in the chest and put him on his back in the tub. From just above the tub, then, the wall burst into brick cinders and plaster stones, and a round exited just left of the spigot and the instep of his shoe, and he was dappled with light and wood lathe and ash, and his ears rung with the cast-iron knell of the bathtub. The building leapt with another strike. Somewhere debris clattered the floor. The rent-wire snap flicked the air. There was another pause like a shallow breath, and the building shuddered again, again-again-again-again.

  LeFrance lay still. The impacts rang together heel-toe as adjoining syllables, the brittle snap played for a moment and evaporated, and the clap of recoiling silence heaved closed over him. He held his breath to hear. He drew the Redhawk on the door. Thirteen inches of stainless jigged at the end of his outstretched arms. But there was nothing: nothing but his open-mouthed rasp, the flickering sights, the nap of masonry grit in his mouth and nose, and the pulse thundering in his neck and in his hands.

  He spared a hand to check the speed loaders in his pockets; his book; the envelope. He climbed from the tub and cringed at the noise of his shoes and falling masonry. He listened at the door and could hear the apartment’s asthmatic respiration: the ventilated wheeze of its openings—but no more. He sighted through a low exit hole. He set onto his hands and knees in the sharp gravel debris, and knelt to peer under the door. Nothing. Motionless.

  LeFrance knocked the hammer back and stepped out. To his left, in the kitchen, were the Carhartt’s of Kyle Lewis, limp and still, one boot inexplicably cast off. To his right, in the next room, a clot of hair adhered to the wall, an impact cratered the plaster, and the damp shoulder girdle of Phillip’s heavy sweater lay before a greasy pool of gelatin onto which gypsum had settled with the look of powdered sugar. In the front room, clods of brick were tumbled everywhere, six ragged holes perforated the exterior wall, and August lay near the corner beneath the front windows. His face was a weeping bruise and his flight jacket seemed to bleed copiously from no place in particular. LeFrance felt his palm go humid on the pistol, felt the hood of his vision began to shade at the corners, and he felt the rising acid-blanch of panic; and he ran. He ran for the stair. He stumbled down on his heels and his thighs. He slammed into the door. He threw it wide, and trailing a coma of fine dust, he leapt the stoop and fled for his truck.

  VII.

  It was a queer thing, thought Charles Foster. He had been paddling a long-limbed backstroke when he’d stopped to think of it—and now he lay in the thought: floated between the buoy markers of the lane, the water lapping at his ears, and stare up into the steel rafters where every kick and stroke and turn seemed to catch and tangle against the welds and angles of the trusses: August was renegotiating, Foster decided. For weeks he’d thought otherwise. He’d been desperate to get back the drive—had been steeping in his own anxious dread from the first realization of his error. But when he’d heard from August the work was done—Mexico was a success—he’d suddenly cultivated a new and unexpected urge: a par
anoia. Almost despite himself, he’d told August to wait: August would quarantine—make sure between the debacle in Clayton, and his exploits in Mexico, he hadn’t contracted anything unwanted. Attention. Attention that might otherwise be catching. So he’d waved off the exchange a few weeks. But, those few weeks later in February—and this was the queer thing which had arrested Foster’s limbs with a curious doubt—rather than arrange to meet at the Grand Basin, where they’d met before, and soon; Foster received a text from August arranging the meet a further month out, and set it in a vacant apartment in the leprous armpit of South Saint Louis—Foster had driven by to see. He could also see sense in it, however disquieting a sense it was. It was the sense of someone worried they’d been made—rolling out a time and location isolated and unlikely. And this was the sense Foster held to it, until now. But it was also a caution beyond what of August he’d seen: a caution too far, Foster thought. This was the alternative which had freshly occurred to him: the extended date could be intended to whet his appetite for the drive, inflict him with real hunger; and the desolate location, a context for renegotiation—a safe and quiet place to sweat him for more. Foster didn’t relish either as a possibility, but he knew it must be one, and just now he’d settled with a visceral certainty on the latter. And in any case it had worked, particularly since Foster had lost touch with Jeffrey Sachs—unwitting and seemingly vanished author of the work—and had suffered these last weeks in an impatient and nervously self-medicated stupor. Reconciled, he began to kick again at the pool, turned an arm back in stroke, noted the depth markers crawling past—clinging at the tissue of the waterline; and wondered what was a better insurance against this likelihood: that he should bring nothing, or that he should bring more?