by A. E. Roman
“I guess one serving was enough,” said Nicky.
“Some folks fill up easy,” I said.
“Who’s up for seconds?” said Nicky, stepping back and demonstrating a perfect roundhouse kick.
None of the TSP guards came forward for the Nicky Brown buffet.
Lieblich looked at Nicky and nodded and calmly walked out of the auditorium without a word.
That’s when I heard screeching tires and turned to the window behind me and spotted Doyle pushing Mara Gupta and Hari Lachan roughly into a Lincoln Town Car. They took off in a hurry.
It didn’t add up. Taking Max was a block to keep me busy. But for what? Why?
We took off.
“I just got a call from Joy,” I said, walking fast. “Somebody has Max.”
“The kid?” Nicky growled. I knew that growl.
I felt it, too, rage like a rip from my gut to my throat.
“What’s going down?” asked Nicky as we walked.
“I put it together like this,” I said. “With Hari the new president, Joey’s no longer a danger to Mara and Hari’s will to power even if Gabby is found and Joey returns. The fight for power between Hari and Mara was a fake, just like Hari’s injury. It made for a good show and high emotion and the final ‘miracle’ of Hari walking and Mara embracing him makes for deep love and forgiveness between all factions of TSP. Mara and Hari must have been planning this move as soon as Joey was cut out of the picture.”
So was it Mara and Hari all along? Did they have their goons silence Esther Sanchez and her secrets?
“But why now?” asked Nicky. “Why prematurely launch this plan? Give it to me, brother.”
I stopped. “Jeez,” I said.
“Undoubtedly,” said Nicky and nodded.
“Go pay these people in Manhattan a visit,” I said, jotting down some names for him as I walked. “Then hit Queens. Tell them that a child named Max is missing. Ask them to tell you everything they know. Ask real nice.”
“What if they don’t cooperate?”
“Get Nicky Brown on their asses,” I said.
THIRTY-THREE
I followed the dark Lincoln Town Car in my Charger, playing Tupac’s “Me Against the World.” I knew exactly where they were going as soon as the highway sign overhead read MONTAGUE. I thought back to the scuffling I heard up at Utopia Farms, the sound of Wagner, then the crashing noise, then the scuffle.
I sped ahead, past them, to Utopia Farms. I knew that in order to find Max (before we had to call in the boys in blue) I would have to go hard and fast. I didn’t have forty-eight hours. I gave myself twenty-four. Beyond that I’d have to pass the ball. And God forbid if you fumble, Santana.
As I approached the dirt road leading to Utopia Farms, I stopped the Charger, got out, gingerly closed the car door, and waded through the humid air.
I jumped a fence, tripped in the dark over a tree stump, regained my balance, and walked through a thick mess of bramble and forest, and down a curvy, steep dirt-and-gravel hill, and jimmied open a basement door. I walked blind through the bowels of the enormous lodge, not knowing where I was headed, moving forward, searching for Max or anyone who could lead me to her, looking into rooms behind endless white doors.
The first room I saw looked like an air-conditioned laboratory and was full of bottles of pills; the second room was a small, abandoned private zoo. Then I entered a small private theater with a projector and an enormous library of movies. The next room was a trophy and billiard room, then came a gym with fancy exercise equipment and a swimming pool, then finally a small bowling alley. A bowling alley. This is some basement, I thought as I walked through another door that led into a bright white hall and a honeycomb of . . . more white doors!
“Hey!”
I turned and almost soiled my Fruit Of The Looms when I saw the giant called Lieblich bulging like an enormous muscle in his red TSP blazer.
“Hey?” I said, smiling, extending my hand for a friendly shake. “Howdy, Lieblich. I’m here with Zena and Chase Gupta. I think I took a wrong turn?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lieblich. “Nobody’s allowed down here.”
“Oh,” I said, dropping both my hands to my side. “I’m sorry.”
“You’ll have to come with me.”
Lieblich started going for his walkie-talkie. Luckily, they did not equip Lieblich with a gun or a Taser or I’d probably be a dead or a shockingly quiet Chico. I moved toward Lieblich quickly, both hands still at my side, saying, “You know what?”
A quick jab, another, a throat punch, a snap to the groin, and then two sudden uppercuts to the jaw and a right to the temple and the machine called Lieblich went surprisingly flat as a board and off to see the Wizard. Nobody, except perhaps Lieblich, was more surprised than I was. I stepped over the mountain and moved quickly along the corridor, opening more doors, doors leading to storage closets and empty guest bedrooms and sparkling white bathrooms and empty lecture halls and meditation rooms, until I hit a target. Father Ravi.
I found Father Ravi, dressed in a simple white robe, barefoot in a large, austere room with a table, a chair, a few books, and a bed.
Father Ravi was sitting at the table, with a spiral notebook, a glass of water, and a tape recorder. He looked emaciated, his skin wrinkled and drooping, his long hair gray and dull. In other words, he looked like an old man, an ordinary old man.
He greeted me with a smile so innocent and sincere and warm, I almost cried out, Santa?
He signaled for me to enter and pointed at the spiral notebook. It was marked Wrestling with The Superman II.
Father Ravi stood up and he pulled me close and hugged me. I could feel his strength, and behind that, what felt like genuine love.
“Max,” I said. “A little girl. Little black girl. Have you seen her?”
Father Ravi smiled wide like a child. “Walk with me, Arjuna,” he said.
Arjuna was Father Ravi’s dead nephew, Edgar Gupta’s son.
I nodded and we began to stroll along the room in circles.
“Arjuna?”
“Yes?”
“I feel strange as of late.”
“What’s wrong?” I said, hoping to get some information, anything that pointed one way or another.
“Can I ask you a personal question, Arjuna?”
I nodded.
“Are you dead?”
“Yes,” I said. “Your nephew Arjuna is dead.”
“Am I dead?”
“No,” I said.
“We’re all going to die,” he said. “No rush.” He looked out, past me at the white soundproofed wall, as if looking through a tall window at the marvelous landscape of Utopia Farms lit up by an army of night lights and said, “It’s so beautiful.”
“Yes,” I said, looking at that spot on the wall. “It’s beautiful. Where is Max? Do you know Max?”
He looked back at me and said, “When you change your trousers from a dirty pair to a clean pair, do you fear the clean trousers?”
“Only if they’re plaid,” I said. “Do you know Max?”
“Do not fear death. Death is merely the changing from dirty trousers to clean. Do not fear the plaid, Arjuna.”
“I’ll try not to,” I said. “No promises. Have you seen a little girl? A little black girl?”
I thought maybe he wasn’t all gone, a fake like Giovanni and Hari, until he stopped and looked at me, wide-eyed and trembling, and said, “I saw the skeletons, Arjuna. Many skeletons. Humiliated, ridiculed, photographed, taped, recorded, controlled. There are no great ones, Arjuna. There are only sheep and killers. The sheep worship the killers. I have seen the skeletons. They are weak and decaying. They are us. Man does not want to be free. Did you know that?”
“No. I—”
“Your father Edgar thinks you are a fool, Arjuna. You don’t know, but he really thinks that. Because you are a poet, sensitive to something he doesn’t understand. A poet. Ah, how could Edgar really understand. I remember your first poem,
Arjuna: ‘When Everything Was God.’ ”
Father Ravi stopped, then said, “Good,” correcting himself. “ ‘When Everything Was Good.’ You dedicated that poem to me. Do you remember, Arjuna?”
“I remember,” I said. “Have you seen her, Father?”
“Of course!” Father Ravi said. “Your poem was brilliant. What are you working on now?”
“Something about Mara,” I said. “Tell me about Mara. Has she been here to see you? Is she keeping you here? Does she visit you? Have you seen her with a little girl?”
Father Ravi frowned.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Talk to Arjuna.”
I felt like crap, trying to trick a sick old man who couldn’t tell the difference between me, his dead nephew, or a house plant. But those are the breaks.
“Arjuna,” Father Ravi said. “I was wrong. You don’t have to go to war to be The Superman. Devote yourself to your own path with no thoughts of war. You are not dead, Arjuna. You are home, Arjuna. Love and do your work. Whatever it is. Stop making excuses. Start today.”
“I will,” I said. “But I need Max. I need Max to finish my work.”
“I was wrong about your mother. I was wrong about my daughters. I was wrong to tell you that you should go to that war and become The Superman.”
The old man began to cry and said, “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong,” over and over.
Father Ravi handed me the spiral notebook marked Wrestling with The Superman II he had been working on. “Forgive me?” he said.
I flipped through the notebook and encountered a blizzard of question marks, semicolons, parentheses, exclamation points, and periods that swept across the pages; it made me dizzy. There was one word at the end of hundreds of pages of punctuation marks, and nothing more, that read:
SHUTTLECOCKS
“Yeah,” I said. “I forgive you.” The old man sat on his bed. I walked over and placed my hand on his shoulder. He held my hand and said, “Thank you, Arjuna. Thank you.”
Then his eyes glazed and he chanted. Until his voice faded into a whisper and then total silence.
Then the door slammed open, and Doyle rushed in.
I turned away from Father Ravi and took Doyle out with a run-of-the-mill karate chop when he rushed at me again. To the right side of the room he went, slamming into the table and then the floor.
This spiritual stuff ain’t easy, I thought as Lieblich (sporting two black eyes) and two more guards, muscles bursting the seams of their red blazers, rushed in at me like bulls at a Spanish run. I remembered that I had told Nicky to try to find Max in Manhattan. Why the hell does he pick and choose when to listen to me, I thought as I hit Lieblich the bull as hard as I could on the snout, and his nose spurted blood. The other bulls looked bewildered and stopped short. Someone (thank God) entered and yelled, “Stop!”
They stopped, turned aside, not more relieved than I was, and I saw her . . . an Asian Indian woman, older than Zena and Chase, a bit older than Mara, with the same bronze skin, shapely and tall and dark, with a long nose, a thick heart-shaped mouth, no makeup, and coal-black hair. She was wearing a red sari and brown sandals. Her hair was cropped, like a black crown of soft coal. Her long nose and dark lashes and thick eyebrows and round brown eyes were all dipped in cinnamon. And she glowed with a peaceful energy that made night look that much darker. When she smiled, the glow around her was radioactive.
I recognized her from the wedding photo that Pablo Sanchez had given me.
Gabby. Gabby Gupta.
“Are you okay?” Gabby Gupta asked.
“I think I pulled a groin muscle,” I said, limping toward her. “Other than that, I’m peachy. Where have you been?”
“In Vermont,” said Gabby Gupta. “In the hills. I had no idea what was going on here. Where is Joey?”
“Nice of you to start caring,” I said. “But you’re a little late, don’t you think? Everybody’s been looking for you.”
“You must lose yourself to be found.”
Because Gabby Gupta, like her father, seemed so sincere, I bit my tongue.
“Your sisters actually never knew where you were,” I said. “But Mara found out that you had returned and she and Hari decided to make their grab for power before Joey came strolling back. Hari was never crippled in that so-called car accident outside TSP. The whole thing was a con brewed up by Mara and Hari after Father Ravi got sick. I had it checked out. Hari had a little accident, a sprain that maybe required a month of rest. Mara and Hari never came to an understanding, they always had one, they were on each other’s side from the get-go.”
“Mara and Hari’s behavior since I ran away has been horrible,” she said gently. “I apologize for that. But my sisters and I will try to make things right again. The board will hold another emergency meeting in the morning. We will deal with Mara and Hari internally. The importance of what my father, despite his shortcomings, was trying to do at TSP for an entire generation, for their morals, views, standards, and health, teaching them that they can do anything, is still invaluable.”
Bigger sister Gabby Gupta was back. Mara Gupta’s last-minute power grab had failed. TSP was closing ranks. TSP was trying to save itself.
“I hope,” Gabby continued in a soothing tone, “if nothing else, that your short time dealing with TSP has been enlightening in some way.”
“Oh,” I said, hearing the crack of a thunderbolt outside. “It has been.”
“None of this was their fault, really,” she said. “They actually didn’t know where I was, as you say. I told no one. Perhaps, I’m the one to blame.”
“We’ll start assigning fault in a minute,” I said. “Where’s my kid?”
Before she could answer I got the call.
THIRTY-FOUR
Midnight. I was on the Staten Island Ferry, smoking, a lead weight in my belly, and the mystical sea below. A humid wind was blowing and the sun had dropped down behind the Statue of Liberty. The water was black as the night as the ferry cut through the Hudson waters toward Staten Island. I was sitting on a stiff bench, looking out across the water at Ellis Island where the immigrants landed, a dream deferred for so many, limitations paid for in blood and suffering, again and again and almost lost, again and again, as he approached.
“Hello, pal,” I said.
“What’re you doing here, Chico?” he asked as he plopped down beside me, wide-eyed.
“Enjoying the ride,” I said. “You?”
“I’m confused,” he said and blinked.
“Let me unconfuse you,” I said. “They’re not coming.”
“What’s going on, Chico?”
“Gabby turned up alive,” I said. “She had run away and was hiding out with an old high school girlfriend in the green hills of Barnet, Vermont, meditating. No TV, no phones, no news about what was happening with Joey or TSP. You know what I think?”
“What?”
“Yayo and then Elvis found Esther dead. Yayo removed the knife from Esther’s back, just like he said. Then he panicked, just like he said. Realized what he had done, just like he said. A drug addict’s prints were all over the murder weapon. Yayo got out of there and took the knife and his prints with him, just like he said. Then Elvis stumbled in like a dope and you know the rest.”
“Okay.” He nodded, confused.
I continued. “With Gabby Gupta back, Joey was back, too, it was over, so Esther’s killer kidnapped my kid Max to get me to back off Joey until they could get what they wanted from him, to buy time.”
“What is this all about?” he said. “Why are you here, Chico?”
I turned my head and was surprised to see Pedro walking toward us, fists clenched like mallets and feet slamming the earth like pile drivers, and Pablo looked at me as if for help and said, “What’s happening, Chico?”
Dammit!
Pedro must’ve followed me from Utopia Farms without me knowing.
“Somebody’s taken my kid,” I said. “Somebody wants to play rough. They’ve come
to the right place. Can I search you, Pablo?”
“What?”
Pedro came sauntering down the aisle.
“Are you serious?” Pablo said, and then looked at Pedro, as if pleading his case. “I didn’t do it!”
“You can tell that bedtime story to the cops, Pablo,” I said. “I’m not sleepy.”
Pedro grabbed and shook him by the lapels.
“I didn’t do it! You gotta believe me!” Pablo turned and looked at me.
I said it again, “Can I search you, Pablo?”
“Please, Chico,” said Pablo. “What is this?”
“Cabrón!” Pedro shook Pablo violently. He threw up Pablo’s shirt and pulled a knife marked Michael Jordan Steak House (Zena’s missing knife) and a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket.
I bent over and picked up the knife and the latex gloves.
Pablo shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“You were hoping that this knife would tie your mother’s murder back to Zena. Find a scapegoat. That’s what you were hoping the night you left your apartment after killing your mother and dropping Joey’s card. Before Yayo and Elvis mucked up your plan. You were going to try and use this knife on Joey tonight. Isn’t that why you lifted this knife from Zena’s car that day you supposedly just went to see Chase at Utopia Farms? Isn’t that why you invited Joey and Zena to meet you here on the Staten Island Ferry? The same spot where Joey and Zena used to go to be alone. You knew that. A lover’s quarrel on the ferry. She stabs him, he goes overboard, maybe she goes over, too. Nice.”
Pablo just kept shaking his head. “None of this was supposed to happen.”
“All this for a comic book, Pablo,” I said.
“TSP still helps a lot of people,” cried Pablo.
“Joey’s first Superman comic book,” I said. “That’s what you were after all along.”
“People feel alone,” said Pablo. “They come to TSP. They always find someone there who will care for them.”
Pedro grabbed Pablo and shook him like a rattle, “I should throw you into the ocean, cabrón!”
“She was going to turn me in. My own mother,” said Pablo.
“Joey came to you, Pablo, not knowing that you were in Mara Gupta’s pocket.”