The Death of Israel Leventhal

by Boom Baumgartner

  Because he destroyed the bodies and did not get the information, Derek Long was sure to put a hit out on him. The man would naturally assume Israel stole the information and intended to blackmail him. The next step was to call Jaime LaFleur and tell her what happened.

  Taking out his cell phone, he dialed her number, but she did not pick up. Then he poured a glass of water from the sink, and went back to his bedroom. He set the glass next to the bed stand for Rose, and pulled out his laptop to send an encrypted email to Jaime, and thought what he needed to do next.

  First step, make sure Rose lives. Second step, disappear.

  *~*~*

  It took a month before Israel received a phone call from Jaime. He wasn't sure if it was because he had gone underground, or if it was because she didn't feel like dealing with the mess up that happened in Chicago yet.

  Or maybe she knew that someone had jumped him in Milwaukee, and he had only barely survived the encounter, solidifying in his mind that someone was after him for the botched job in Chicago.

  There was a good chance the person who sent the assassin to find him Milwaukee was Jaime LaFleur.

  When he picked up her call, she started without preamble. "You are hard to find."

  "I called you," Israel said, keeping his voice neutral. "Hell, I emailed you."

  "Yes, but then you switched phones. I know I hired you because you are good at disappearing, but you are a pain in the ass."

  Israel tensed up, unable to discern where Jaime was going. "Just get to the point," he said gruffly.

  "I chose you for the Long job, Leventhal," Jaime's southern accent was cold on the other line, "because you are responsible. You have accountability. You have a reputation."

  "I was ambushed," Israel told her flatly.

  "That's great." Jaime snorted. "I don't care. You've been attacked on the job before, and you got the info."

  "I'm not sure if it matters," Israel gingerly touched the corner of his lips. It was still tender from the attack. "I couldn't do it this time. I barely survived."

  "I don't care. What matters to me is that Derek Long contracted me to get a job done, and it didn't get done. To make things worse, you destroyed the bodies, so no one will ever get that information."

  Israel rubbed his free hand across his face. "I understand th—"

  "I don't think you do. As your fixer, your reputation is my reputation, so you are going to do what you are paid to do. As such, God has smiled on you this day. Derek Long has another job for you, and you are going to do it. You are going to get him the information, and then you are going to meet him face to face and apologize for fucking up so badly."

  Israel narrowed his eyes. There was nothing more dangerous than meeting a client without a fixer as an intermediary. "I don't meet clients—"

  "If you wish to remain in my network," Jaime cut him off, "you will."

  Israel went silent as he considered his options. He had been ambushed, and then someone tried to kill him. That someone could very well have been Derek . "Fine, what's the job?"

  Chapter Two

  All nights were dark. George Rose knew this. This night, however, seemed darker than most, and he assumed it was because they were in a cemetery.

  And because they were digging up a corpse. It went hand in hand, really.

  Night had only just fallen, but the humidity and heat of the day had yet to recede. Cicadas droned in the background, competing against the high pitch of the katydids. A short rainstorm had come through earlier that afternoon, leaving the old cemetery moist, and smelling of mold and moss.

  Next to George, Izzy shoveled dirt out of a growing pit with punctuated jerks.

  If Izzy felt like the night was dark, or if that was even something worth noting, he certainly wasn't saying anything to George about it. Instead, he just kept plugging away at the hard dirt, wiping sweat off his face every now and then, and leaving a brown smudge across his forehead.

  Izzy looked worse for wear, even in the pale moonlight. A bruise blossomed around the right corner of his mouth, and a blood vessel had burst in his left eye, making him look like a caricature of a clown in a horror film.

  "Be honest with me, mate," George said, stabbing his shovel into the dirt, and searching his pocket for cigarettes. "How many times have you done this sort of thing?"

  "What sort of thing?" asked Izzy, still digging.

  "You know, grave digging."

  "Well, Rose, we are gravediggers."

  "No, I mean actual grave digging."

  "With shovels, shielded lanterns, and a full moon?"

  "Well, I don't think the full moon is that necessary to the affair, but yeah. The digging-in-the-dirt-to-find-a-stiff sort of thing."

  Izzy stopped. "Does it matter?"

  "Consider it a matter of professional curiosity."

  "Then you can keep your curiosity to yourself because I'm not telling."

  George snorted. How typically Izzy. "I've got a great pub conversation starter. Who was your first?"

  "First what?"

  "Gravedigging. Like a real grave."

  "Why are you asking questions you know the answers to?" Izzy asked, and went back to digging.

  "Dug up me mum. That was me first." George lit the cigarette and took a long drag. Izzy narrowed his eyes at George, frowning at the smoke drifted around them.

  "Right, Rose. I believe that," Izzy drawled.

  "It's true. Just wanted to know if she ever loved me."

  Izzy snorted. "And did she?"

  "Would you say that's a professional curiosity?"

  "I'd say it's social nicety. While we are being paid to dig up a grave and you feel the need to talk, I guess I could participate in the conversation."

  George grinned around his cigarette, letting the smoke drift out from the corner of his lips. "Ah, Izzy, you are my best mate, you."

  Izzy said nothing for a while, his words replaced by the sound of metal slicing through dirt. "So, what did your mom say?"

  "Nothing, really." George shrugged. "Mostly that if I could talk to the dead, why didn't I tell her earlier? Then she could have drawn up an inventory of things to yell at me about rather than listing them off the top of her head. Then she told me not sell her Vashti Bunyan records... which she apparently thought was a higher priority than asking me how I was doing."

  Izzy laughed, a low chuckle that reverberated through George's bones, leaving a warm feeling behind. "How much of that is true?"

  "How much do you want to be?"

  A hollow noise penetrated the night air, and Izzy's shovel vibrated in his hands. "Ah, here it is."

  George flicked the cigarette on the growing pile of dirt above them.

  The two got down on their hands and knees and cleared the dirt off the top of the cold, laminated wood of the coffin, wet soil sticking in their fingernails as they pushed it aside.

  The dark mahogany of the casket gleamed in the moonlight beneath their feet as George searched for the split between the lower and upper half of the lid. Heaving his torso up to the ground above them, Izzy's legs dangled over the edge as he grabbed two trowels and tossed them down before dropping back into the grave.

  The two worked the top half of the coffin as if they were archeologists, which, in a way, George sort of thought they might be. Archeologists dug up people all the time, right? Sure, maybe they weren't only a few weeks dead, but the premise was still the same. They dug people up, and hoped to find some sort of information from the corpse. Izzy and George did the same.

  If he ever got business cards—a terrible idea in their line of work— he wondered how misleading it would be to put the words "archeologist" on it, rather than the more derogatory word that was used for he and his ilk; "gravedigger".

  They carved inches of space around the coffin, Izzy occasionally stopping and feeling around the edge for a handle or a lever. It was another twenty minutes before they were able to open the top half of the casket lid. A cloud passed over the moon, and George rolled his
eyes inwardly as the night darkened further. It was so foreboding, it was almost literary.

  Before opening the lid, Izzy pulled out a lavender handkerchief from his pocket, and held it to his nose. George felt around his pockets, and pulled out his own checkered one scented with sage. He grimaced, and braced himself for impact when Izzy finally opened the lid.

  If anything, he didn't prepare himself enough. Even with the sage, the putrid smell that came from the coffin nearly knocked him on his arse, but he gritted his teeth, pulled out a torch from his back pocket and shined it in.

  The smell may have been horrific, but the closed-eye face of the corpse inside looked somewhat human. Her blond hair was curved around her face, and her thin lips were still stained pink with lipstick which made them appear a bit larger than they actually were. The gases produced from her decomposition broke and cracked the makeup the funeral home had put on her, revealing blue grey skin beneath.

  "Ready?" Izzy asked, holding out his hand without turning his gaze from the face of the girl below.

  He took a deep breath, and grabbed Izzy's hand, slowly feeling the void form in between them as they reached far into the depths of nothingness, where life was but was not as well.

  There, in the void, was creation and destruction and no one felt or saw it quite the way George did. It was why he made good money.

  He shaped Izzy's presence in the void, changing his curling black hair to gold, making him taller, thickening his lean, wiry body, and lightening his skin color to match that of a man named Jared Long. The woman on the coffin below sank into white bed sheets as the dark of the night evaporated into a brightly lit, sterile hospital room.

  George always wondered what they looked like when he created in the void. He had seen other gravediggers in action, and they always looked like themselves as they stared at a cadaver. Their lips sometimes moved, but nothing more than that. But few could do what George did, and he wondered if he too looked ordinary as the cemetery melted into a hospital room, as Izzy became someone else.

  But he wasn't to know. No one with his skills had ever let him watch, and he could not blame them. It was just a trust issue, through and through. Gravedigging took a lot of concentration, and when talking to a corpse, it was very easy to get stabbed in the back. Or hit on the head, and left for dead in the rain on a cold November night.

  George had seen it happen. Menti Baladier was her name. She had small tits, large, lovely hips and a quirky, sardonic attitude that endeared itself to him. They fucked once. He thought it was at a motel. A rather seedy one, probably. Both of them got crabs, as he recalled. When she didn't deliver on a job, he went out to finish it and found her body next to a severed pinkie, supposedly from the corpse she was sent to interrogate. George, very prudently, reneged on the deal, and fled to Turkey, the very cold reminder of how dangerous his job was sinking deep into his stomach.

  "Amanda," said Izzy gently.

  "Why?" mumbled the corpse, her pink lips barely moving. Her eye fluttered open, tears building up in her yellow, gooey eyes.

  "Why what?"

  "I'm not dead?"

  "No." Izzy sat down next to her bed, and took her hand.

  Weakly, Amanda turned her head to look at Izzy. "You're not Derek…"

  "It's me. It's Jared."

  "But why?" A smile ghosted across her lips. "Does Derek know you're here?"

  Izzy shook his head. "He's on a business trip."

  "But he could still know you're here."

  "He doesn't. Besides, I'm your brother-in-law." Izzy lied so easily, and George loved watching him do it. "Why wouldn't I come to visit you?"

  "Derek suspects," she whispered.

  George grinned in the back of the room as he observed. Bingo.

  "I know," Izzy said. The whole reason they were there was because Derek suspected her affair with his twin brother.

  "But I don't understand…"

  "What?"

  "Why I'm here." Her hand in Izzy's was still, and she would not look at him.

  "Because you're going to beat this."

  Amanda took a sharp breath of air, and her eyes drifted toward the window. "You can't beat this kind of cancer."

  Izzy shook his head. "Don't say that."

  "I didn't beat it, though." She swallowed, and George stiffened.

  She knew.

  "What do you mean?" Israel asked, not breaking character.

  She laughed a hacking, gravelly laugh. "I knew you gravediggers might come."

  George and Izzy exchanged glances. Izzy knit his eyebrows in confusion.

  "Please don't talk about graves, honey," Izzy said, trying to keep the charade up. It was a Hail Mary, and he knew it just as well as George did.

  "You're going to try and keep this up? Really?"

  "You know about gravediggers?" asked George, stepping forward, ignoring Izzy's wide-eyed glare that clearly asked him what the hell he thought he was doing.

  "I didn't believe it at first when I was looking through Derek's records. But it's kind of hard not to now. He sent you, didn't he?"

  Izzy nodded.

  "Even when I'm dead, he can't trust me. Fair enough. So, did he send you to find out if the kid is his? Typical. I just fucking died, and all he cares about his goddamn dick."

  "I must say, Mrs. Long." George chuckled. "You are taking the news of your death rather well."

  "I was very aware it was coming." She closed her eyes, and looked eerily still for a moment. "So what if I don't tell you?"

  "We have ways that are a lot less gentle that will make you tell the truth." The coldness in Izzy's voice made George shudder, and he reveled in the terror of it, a smirk gracing his lips.

  "I know." Amanda narrowed her eyes. "You should hear the rumors people say about you gravediggers. That you rape corpses, and cut them up, and fuck'em all over again."

  Slowly, Amanda lifted her hand to her cheek. Her nails looked hideously long, and some of the flesh on her finger ripped off when it scraped against the stiff, white sheets.

  "I can feel," her voice came out in a small gasp.

  "But you can't die," Izzy informed her in a low voice. "You can see where our reputation comes from."

  Amanda continued to study her hand, frowning at her long fingernails.

  "Is the kid Derek's?" Izzy asked, his hand firmly grasping her other hand.

  Amanda pursed her lips. "He can do a paternity test."

  Izzy shook his head. "He can't."

  "It's harder with twins, but not impossible…" As she trailed off, her voice throbbed with sadness as she put the facts together. She was a smart woman, and George felt sorry that she had to die. "I see. Jared's dead so he can't do the test."

  Izzy nodded.

  "And Jared had the common sense to get cremated or some shit, so his brother would never know if he was the father. He protected us." Amanda closed her eyes and took a long, deep breath. "Derek is a jackass and a half. The reason I never left him was that I was afraid I'd end up here." Amanda laughed. It came out in sharp, hacking barks. "Ironic, right?"

  Izzy inclined his head, but said nothing. A dark shadow flitted across his eyes that George had never seen before.

  "You have to lie. The truth won't hurt you, but it will hurt my daughter."

  Izzy nodded in agreement. "True."

  "Do you remember how you died, love?" asked George.

  Izzy jerked his head, and glowered at George.

  "Of course I do." She smiled. "Brain tumor. They didn't catch it until I only had three months left. Didn't tell Derek, though."

  "You were poisoned first," George stated flatly.

  "I know." She paused. "I did it. Better that than the brain tumor. Better that than Derek."

  The cloud moved across the moon, and the dark little hole they found themselves in glowed around the edges with faint yellow light.

  "It's a tough life for a woman," she said finally.

  "Sometimes," whispered Izzy.

  "It was for me."
/>
  "It's over, so there is some solace in that." Izzy removed his hand from George's, and moved to straighten the collar on his shirt.

  Amanda's presence faded into the void, the walls of the hospital room melting into the dirt of the hole they stood in. "There is absolutely no solace in that," whispered the last vestiges of her soul. Her cloudy blue eyes rolled back into her skull, and her mouth went slack.

  George had done enough of these that he felt he shouldn't let them make him sad anymore, but Amanda Long did. He wondered what her corpse would whisper to him when he fell asleep.

  Neither Izzy nor George said anything as they let go of the void and recalibrated themselves to reality. The cicadas roared back into hearing as they both gazed at the body of Amanda Long.

  "Give me a lift will you?" Izzy asked quietly.

  Wordlessly, George laced his fingers, and heaved Izzy out of the hole.

  "You're too heavy, so I hope you know you're on your own," remarked Izzy, who turned around, and laid down flat on his stomach to reach his hand out toward George.

  "Don't be such an arsehole," George grumbled, handing Izzy the shovels. Then he dug his feet into the side of the dirt wall while he pulled himself up, feeling his biceps strain against his tweed jacket. He grunted as it pulled against an old wound from a bullet that tore through his muscle. Izzy stopped what he was doing and looked at George, his eyes roving over to his shoulder and then his face. He wore an expression that George couldn't categorize. Guilt, maybe?

  The two shoveled dirt into the grave in silence, the clouds traveling past the moon more and more rapidly as a cool night breeze kicked up. George, despite his job, never cared for cemeteries. Maybe it was because he didn't know how to control his gift very well when he was young, or maybe it was because he used to pass out anytime he went near one.

  Really there were all sorts of reasons, but George didn't really think he needed one. Did anyone really need a reason to be creeped out in a cemetery? He really thought not.

  "Where's your next job?" asked George.