“Anytime. It’s always you or her that empties the machines, guy. So it’s axiomatic that you’re stealing from the government. I just wanted you to know that I know and that I could let the Austrians know. Just so you know how much of a box you are in.”
“Thanks,” I said. “We were discussing a deal. To get me out of the box.”
“Yes, we were. But it’s important to understand what a terrific, inescapable box it is so that you can appreciate the deal. Otherwise, you might not, guy.”
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Sure, guy, what can I do for you?”
“Don’t call me guy, guy.”
The grin snapped off. But he decided to be pleasant. “Sure, gu.… Of course. But what should I call you? You didn’t want me to call you Tony. And I don’t want to call you Rick, because I know you’re not Rick. You understand what I mean, guy?”
“Call me Tony,” I said.
“Nah, the heck with it,” he said, “I’ll call you Rick. It would confuse everything if I start calling you Tony. Until we get back to the States, of course. I mean here. Here they all know you as Rick, and if all of a sudden you became Tony, it would be very strange.”
“Are we going back to the States, Chip?”
“My real name is Chester. Call me Chip. I like Chip a lot better.”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll call you Chip.”
“That’s great. We’re going to get along just fine.”
“What’s this about going back to the States, Chip?”
“Oh, I assumed you wanted to. I mean isn’t that what all expats want? Go home and have all the things they miss? Burgers and fries and apple pie? Macy’s, the Mets, CBS, and Monday Night Football? Gosh, America’s full of great things. Bargains. Have you been shopping here? Do you know what I paid for a banana? I paid eleven schillings for a banana. That’s a buck a banana. And jeans. Hey, I don’t know about you, but when I want to relax, when I want to kick back and just be one of the guys, I like to have my pair of Levi 501s on. Back home I can go to Jack’s House of Discount and get me a pair of Levi 501s for twenty-one ninety-five. A pair of jeans over here is seventy-nine ninety-five, eighty-nine ninety-five, ninety-nine ninety-five. Gosh, you must miss the US of A.”
“Gosh, Chip, I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
“Wow, if I’d been away from home as long as you, by golly, I would.”
“I like to ski, Chip.”
“See that? Even skiing is better in the US of A. I mean we have more snow in New Jersey than you guys do here in Austria.” He laughed. He thought it was funny.
“Yeah, it’s been a bad year.”
“If you like skiing, America’s got the East—Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, even New York. Why, they had two Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Two of them. Then there’s the Rocky Mountains, right from Idaho down through Wyoming to Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona. Then there’s the Sierras. You can ski in California. In California you can ski in the morning and drive to the coast and surf in the afternoon. Or you could go up to Canada, which is practically some more United States.”
“What do you want, Chip?”
“And they don’t go around killing people in avalanches. No-sir-ee-bob. Not in the US of A.”
“What’s the deal, Chip?”
“We were speaking of avalanches.”
“We were?”
“Sure, we were. And you’re messed up with this thing with Hiroshi Tanaka.”
“What thing with Hiroshi Tanaka?”
“Oh, heck,” he said. “Here I thought we were together on this. Here I thought we were going to make a deal. Here I thought we were going to help each other. Darn it.”
“Do me a favor, Chip. No, two favors.”
“I don’t know that I want to, Rick. Now that you don’t want to cooperate.”
“Oh, these are favors you’ll want to do.”
“I will?”
“Fuckin’ A,” I said. “First, stop using baby words. Darn and heck. It makes you sound like an asshole. Enough of that shit. Then you can tell me what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“If I want to express myself without recourse to foul language …”
“Then don’t say darn and heck. It makes me think you’re a Mormon.”
“What’s wrong with being a Mormon?”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a Mormon.”
“I hope not,” he said, “because I am a Mormon.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “I know that. I understand that. I accept it. But I will have you know that Mormons are very nice people. We believe in honesty and hard work and integrity. If a Mormon gives you his word you can be pretty darn sure that his word is better than a New York bond!”
“Do you ever get the feeling that you’re talking to someone who is having a different conversation than you are? Does this happen to you a lot?”
“So I don’t use filthy language,” he said, and something far away was happening behind those gray eyes. He had the body of someone who does his Nautilus or calisthenics with dedication and regularity—to be fit, not to bulk up—and those toned-up muscles gave a slightly too emphatic push to his gestures. “It’s a pledge I took. That doesn’t mean I’m not one of the guys. That doesn’t mean I don’t sit back for a couple of brewskis now and again. I’m a little defensive about being a Mormon. You can understand why.”
“Chip, it’s been nice knowing you,” I said. “When you decide you want to tell me about this deal, you call my lawyer.”
“Rick,” he said, “sit the fuck down and listen.”
“That’s better,” I said.
“Did that sound right?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” I said.
“Good. But be straight with me.”
“Gosh, I’ll do my best,” I said.
“What’s your involvement with Hiroshi Tanaka?”
“None,” I said.
“Oh, darn,” he said. Truly upset.
“There you go again, with the baby words.”
“Rick, I’m not effing around. I will go to the Austrian tax authorities and point them at your little laundry. I will start extradition. You can run but you can’t hide. Not with the girl and a new baby.”
“Don’t forget my mother,” I said. “My mother just arrived.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I guessed that you followed her to me,” I said.
“No. Not at all.”
“Don’t tell me you came all the way from Washington …?”
“Yes, Washington.”
“… all the way from Washington just looking for me.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep denying that you’re involved with Tanaka. It makes it all very difficult.”
“You know, I’m getting sick of telling this story, but I’ll tell it again. There was a girl killed in that avalanche. She had a mother. Her mother met me, by accident, in the Laundromat and …”
“Sooner or later, everyone comes to Rick’s,” Chip said. He giggled. “At least everyone who’s dirty.”
“… she wanted to know more about her daughter’s life and death here. I agreed, under pressure from my wife, to find out what I could.”
“That’s what you say,” Chip said. “But I saw you going to Tanaka’s apartment right after he died. Then you go skiing with Hans Lantz, who tries to kill you. Why would Hans Lantz try to kill you? If you’re not involved with Hiroshi Tanaka.”
“How do you know he tried to kill me? What do you know about Hans Lantz? What the fuck is going on here?”
Chip pointed to himself. “I’m the investigator.” He pointed at me. “You’re the criminal.” And back at himself. “I hold the cards. I ask the questions.”
“You’re a Mormon. I’m an Italian New Yorker. You couldn’t figure your way out of a paper bag if someone bent it double. If you want me to play, you better talk to me.”
“I’m the one that has you in a box.
”
“Who the fuck cares? That’s the point, you know. Who the fuck cares? I disappeared once. I can do it again. It took you six years to find me, and I wasn’t hiding. I got money in the bank and you don’t know which bank and the account is numbered and you don’t know the number and I have cash in my pocket and I can be out of here in a New York second.”
“What about your cute new baby?”
“What about her?”
“You wouldn’t leave her.”
“You don’t know that. She wouldn’t be the first girl I’ve left. Maybe I’ll take her with me. Maybe I’ll send for her later. But you, you give a shit. You care. You got some kind of point system back in your office. ‘Hey, Chipper closed two more cases than Harold this week. Chipper gets two gold stars. That makes him officer of the month. Oh, hooray for Chipper.’ I know what feds are like. I know what bureaucrats are like. I even have a pretty fair idea of what a Mormon is. And they don’t drink beer. They don’t even drink coffee.”
“That story about the girl’s mother—is that true?”
“I swear by the bones of Joseph Smith,” I said. Smith invented Mormonism.
He nodded reverently. Maybe he was a Mormon. “About the beer,” he said. “A guy’s got to fit in with the guys a little bit. Otherwise they think you’re a Holy Joe.”
“I won’t tell the elders,” I said.
“What do you know about Hiroshi Tanaka?” he said.
“I don’t know shit about Hiroshi Tanaka except that he was an okay skier, had lots of money, claimed that he was descended from samurai, and liked young pussy.”
“That’s almost more than we know,” he said. “You may still be the man I need.”
“Who’s we?” I asked. “You’re not IRS.”
“I am if I want to be,” he said.
“What’s the deal?” I said.
“Tanaka had something. I was after Tanaka and he had some material that was important to us.”
“What did he have, Chip?”
“This other guy—this other Japanese that’s been hanging around Tanaka’s apartment—maybe he’s got it. If he’s got it, could you get it from him?”
“You got warrants or something? Are the gendarmes or the Polizei working with you?”
“They’re financial records,” he said.
“A book?” I said. “A big book?”
“Why? Did you find a big book?”
“No, I didn’t find anything—I haven’t been looking.”
“It could be a big book, but we don’t think it’s a big book. It’s computerized stuff. It’ll be in a computer format. If it were the printout—you know, hard copy—it would be a big book. But it wouldn’t be a printout. It would be on a disc.”
“Floppies? Regular five-and-a-half-inch floppy discs?”
“No. Not those.”
“Those new little ones—what are they?—three-and-a-quarter-inch, like for a laptop?”
“Not those,” Chip said. “Probably an optical disc.”
“An optical disc?”
“It looks a lot like a CD. The other possibility is that it might be on tape.”
“On tape? Like a cassette of the Stones to put in my Walkman?”
“No. Big tape. For a main-frame computer. Like one-inch videotape.”
“These are pretty heavy-duty records.”
“They’re very complicated,” Chip said.
“Whose financial records are these?”
“What do you mean, whose financial records are these?”
“Well, I mean are they the records of the Medellin cartel? Are they records of all the cocaine traffic between Colombia and Miami? Are they the Sicilian Mafia? The new memoirs of David Stockman?”
“These are really important records,” Chip said.
“If I don’t know what they are, how am I going to recognize them?”
“You wouldn’t understand them anyway. They’re all in code.”
“Coded financial records?”
“If you find them,” he said, “I can clear your problems with the IRS.”
“Everything?”
“Just about. Do you know where the records are?”
“They claim I underpaid by forty-six thousand dollars. Do you know what the interest and penalties on forty-six thousand dollars is? Accumulating and compounding for six years? I owe over a quarter million dollars.”
“Is it a mistake?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Then I’m sure we can clear it up.”
“The twenty-two counts of tax evasion? You know I really reported everything I earned.”
“I think that can be arranged. One hand washes the other.” He demonstrated. “How soon can you find the records?”
“Soon, Chip, soon. You know what I’m really worried about, Chip? The obstruction-of-justice charges.”
“We can clear that,” he said. “If you get the records.”
“All four hundred sixty-six counts?”
“Yes. You solve my problem, I’ll solve yours.”
I told Marie Laure and my mother what Chip Sheen had said. They were very pleased.
That meant they didn’t get it.
My mother nodded sagely. “There is always a deal,” she said in a tone of parental vindication. “There is always an arrangement.”
It was a tone of voice that is one of nature’s primary ways of driving human children from the warmth and safety of familial shelter into the cold cruel world to become adults. “What are you,” I said, “a consigliore in a Godfather novel? Was it you who taught Mario Puzo il via siciliano?”
“It will be good to go to America,” Marie said. “It will make Anna Geneviève very ’appy. She wants to visit her grand-mère in Brooklyn and New York City where ’er mother and father first became lovers.”
“Anna Geneviève couldn’t care less at this point,” I said.
“What do you say, ma chérie,” Marie cooed to Anna, “do you want to go to Manhattan?” The baby made a sort of noise. I admit that. “Anna Geneviève understands everything,” Marie Laure said. Human beings have a powerful anthropomorphic urge. No one and no thing, from equipment to infants, is safe from the need to impose feelings, ideas, and ideals that are just like ours. A car won’t start and it’s sullen. A cat rests—people see smug self-satisfaction. A dog cocks its head—it’s the face of puzzlement. Our daughter was born with the knack of looking like she possessed enlightenment. I took her and I looked into her blue eyes. She looked back and I fell right into the anthropomorphic delusion.
“You’re right,” I said. “She looks like she knows everything.” I would have preferred to debate with her directly, but Marie Laure was her official spokesman. It’s nice to debate gender roles and try to demolish them like they do in America, but they seem to be more deeply rooted and less superficial than we all had supposed. That’s what the babies tell us. “We have to look at this so-called deal,” I said to her mother. “We have to ask some questions.”
“Where do you want your daughter to grow up?” Marie Laure said. “Should she grow up in ’iding? Or in a good place? That is the important question.”
“I would like it if she grew up somewhere near me,” my mother said. “If you want to take my feelings into account.”
“Okay, Mother, you were right,” I said. “It was worth talking to this guy. If only because it means we have a chance to deal with things in a measured and rational way.” As far as I was concerned my conversation with Chip Sheen had only changed things a matter of degree. Our sojourn in Austria and my incarnation as Richard Cochrane, lapsed Roman Catholic priest of County Clare, Irish Republic, was over. The reality was that I only had two options—run now or play for time and run a little later. Time to get a decent price for the Laundromat. Then we would disappear. There are lots of Alps—Swiss, French, Italian, Yugoslavian, German. Even Lichtenstein has Alps. There are lots of borders and lots of crossings. There are names and passports for sale. The reasons that I’d kep
t this identity and the papers that went with it lay somewhere between laziness and if-it-isn’t-broken-don’t-fix-it. If it looked like Europe was too small to hide in, what with two generations of women to take with me, possibly three, there was Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Argentina. I’d been dying to ski Portillo and Las Leñas. There was Sapporo in Japan. Maybe it was about time that someone started to ski Nepal and Tibet.
But the women had been talking in my absence. They were united, mother and mother. They had cast me in a snowball Western movie—a frostbitten John Wayne riding out to clear my name so’s my family could stand tall. Confronting the league of mothers directly would just harden their position. I know something of women. They would dig in, it would become the long and bloody business of trench warfare. It was best that they be led, gently, to discovering the truth by themselves. “Don’t you even want to know the details?” I said.
“I ’ave faith in you,” Marie Laure said. “You can do this. That is all I need to know.”
“What does he want you to find?” my mother asked.
“That’s a good question,” I said. “There are better ones, but that’s a good one to start with. Chip Sheen was after Hiroshi Tanaka, who died in an avalanche. That avalanche might have been deliberately set. The man who led him into that avalanche more or less admitted that to me, then tried to kill me, then he died. His death certainly looks like suicide but I wouldn’t bet the laundry on it. Plus there’s a girl who’s dead. Let’s not entirely forget Wendy Tavetian, because Ms. Tavetian set off some powerful feelings in people and maybe has more to do with this than we know. Anyway, Tanaka died before Chip Sheen could get to him.” Anna Geneviève looked bored. I put her face down, one hand under her belly. When I did that she stretched herself out straight, arms and legs extended. I swooped her through the air—a game called Flying Baby. My mother looked nervous. As if I would drop Anna Geneviève. I put her on my arm, on the football carry, and just rocked her.
“Now Sheen is looking for something that belonged to Tanaka,” I said. “He is very reluctant to tell me what. When I ask him if he has warrants or is working with the gendarmes, then he doesn’t answer that question and says he’s looking for ‘financial records.’ Whatever the contents are, the dingus itself is either computer tape or an optical disc. Which looks like a CD but is used for computers. Next question.”
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 11