by J. D. Brink
“It certainly is,” Felix tells him, going into his overworked miracle worker routine. “And, I assure you, Mr. Waters, it was no easy find. I had to call in two favors, and I don’t have many left. But...” He sidesteps and rolls his veiny hand like Vanna White: “Here it is. You’re a very lucky man.”
“Fantastic.” Waters passes the wine to his companion and slaps his palms together. “Can we take a look?”
“Of course.”
A switchblade appears in the Cat’s hand, the blade pops out. Our host’s eyes widen. I take the knife on cue, spin the painting, and slice an X into the white butcher paper. The boss and I unwrap it, then spin it back around for review.
It was only because of the simplicity of this piece that I let Felix talk me into painting it for him. The canvas is consumed by the subject: a traffic signal with its caution light on. The impression is of a hazy, perhaps rainy evening. The background is black, dry brushed with charcoal grey and brown. The ochre color of the signal itself is subdued and heavy with shadows. Its red and green bulbs are the darkest areas, black hell pits, while the cautionary bulb shines with a full range of yellows, carefully blurred together, a white highlight just left of center. Seeing it again, I’m even a bit impressed with myself. In the bottom right corner is Stanley’s signature in red, which I practiced for an hour with pencil, pen, and brush, just like Felix taught me.
This painting is a masterwork of bullshit.
Waters eats it up. “Fantastic,” he says, beaming. He takes it gently away from me and sends the girl to fetch our payment. She returns from the next room with a black leather briefcase, like this is some bad spy movie, maybe his next hit. I make a quick estimate of the contents and nod to Felix. We all shake hands and take our leave.
It isn’t until we’re pulling back onto the street that I realize where I knew him from.
“Robbie Watersworth,” I whisper sharply.
Rummy looks over.
Virgil, Indiana. Hayes High School. In my senior year, a new freshman—a lanky, red-headed kid named Robbie Watersworth—moved up from somewhere in Georgia. Robbie the overly eager, clumsy kid whose feet were too big for his straw-like legs, who spoke with such a thick southern accent that he had to say things twice to be understood. Robbie Watersworth who tried with such vigor to make the spring musical but was laughed off the stage by teachers’ pets who already had parts reserved. Robbie who got his nose bloodied in senior hall for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember walking him to the bath room and sending the vice principal down the wrong track while Robbie stuffed toilet paper into his nostrils.
Of course, this was half a lifetime ago. Four or five identities back for me.
Felix and Rummy get a big kick out of my Robbie Watersworth story. They’re laughing all the way back across the Marshman Bridge.
“No shit?” Rummy asks. “Robert Waters is really Opie Taylor? No shit?”
“No shit.”
The big man slaps the steering wheel twice. “Oh, Eddie’s going to love this one.”
The car dodges effortlessly around a red Buick, then cuts back in front of it.
“So he bought it, huh?”
“Damn right he did,” Felix says. “That jerk-off wouldn’t know Stanley from fucking Stan Lee. He went from Redneck, Georgia, to Bumfuck, Indiana, to Hollywood, California. We could sell him a paint-by-number and tell him it’s a fucking Van Gogh, he’d buy it.”
Rummy’s eye-bushes crowd over his eyes and he shoots me a suspicious look. “Indiana, huh? What town did you say?”
I smile, him trying to pry another clue from my past. “I didn’t.”
Felix scoffs behind me, mumbling, “Secret fucking identity.”
“Jack of spades,” I say, turning back to the open window.
That’s my card. I have a person assigned to most of the face cards, people from my past. It’s like a tarot deck in reverse. As I’m placing cards in a hand of solitaire, a ghost will crop up in my game. It’s the past coming back to haunt me. Or to warn me about the future.
Four
Edgar and that caterpillar on his lip grinning down on me from above: this is what wakes me the next day.
I have to start locking that door.
After prodding me off my couch, Edgar plops down at the kitchen table. Laid out is last night’s hand of solitaire, which he’s happy to finish for me.
Sluggish with a hangover, I shit, shave, and shower, and we head out.
Though my stomach is in no shape for it, we stop at Whitey’s Diner for breakfast. Edgar inhales pancakes, eggs, and sausage while relaying the highlights of his evening as a wedding crasher. “They really shouldn’t put that info in the newspaper,” he says. He regales me with his dramatic account: how he proposed a toast, took over for the DJ while the guy was in the john, and then, for a finale, banged the groom’s wallflower cousin behind the banquet hall. Great pride and detail go into the play-by-play, until the waitress comes by and asks him to stop.
At ten o’clock we pull into the parking lot of the Caterina Playing Card factory, carried by Edgar’s royal chariot, a rust and orange ‘74 Gremlin. The factory’s on the north side of the industrial ghetto, housed within brick and glass that dates back to the twenties. The estate is a castle of criminal tradition. Felix’s father, Old Man Caterina, started the factory a long time ago, thinking the gambling industry in California would make him rich, but it was Prohibition that did that. He converted his humble building into a bathtub gin distillery, making a modest fortune on the era’s greatest commodity and quite a few criminal connections in the process. When the bottom fell out and alcohol was legal again, Old Man Caterina was content to retire early and raise his family on the money under his mattress, right up until it nearly ran out. Then World War Two happened and he was back in the playing card business; it seemed soldiers in foxholes and sailors at sea needed something to pass the time and take their minds off of dying.
Felix took over in the late fifties and still makes a good living, both legitimately and illegitimately. Today, he’s a black market entrepreneur. I consider us soft criminals, rather than hard ones.
We go in the side door. The presses roar, running sheets of paperboard inked with royalty, all exposing their hearts, weapons, and wealth, then getting sliced, diced, and hot-waxed.
Such is life.
The boys in grey, as we call them, are hard at it, circled around in grey coveralls, smoking cigarettes and shooting the shit. These are the legitimate employees of the factory (if not legitimate citizens of this country), and they all nod their heads or raise their chins as we go by. We give our good mornings and head straight into Felix’s office.
Rummy’s in his corner seat, a rusted-out swivelly number, with nothing visible behind his newspaper but his big mitts, curly hair, and bushy brows. Those eyebrows that could snag sparrows from the air. He starts up when we come in, then settles back when he sees it’s just us.
Felix barks into his office phone. Sounds like it’s a convenience mart rep. I once saw a pack of Caterina playing cards at a gas station, hanging between a shelf of 10w-30 and a row of bubblegum-flavored condoms. It seemed an appropriate place to have the cat-faced king winking at customers.
The boss motions for us to sit.
Felix the Cat actually looks younger in the daytime. At night, in the shadows, you get the impression that he’s an old man. Especially when he’s quiet. But plainly seeing his vigor and viciousness in the light of day… I wouldn’t want to be on his bad side. Lucky he likes me. He’s built more like a bulldog than a feline. And don’t let the bifocals fool you: I could see him jumping on a man twice his size and biting his face off. Edgar calls him Archie Bunker with a tan, but I don’t think the description fits. Felix hair is a stonier grey, his nose wide and flat, but I’ll give him the grumpy attitude—that fits. Though in his pin-striped suit, he’s too well dressed to be sitting in the bare, drywall office of some smalltime factory. His wardrobe beats that of most funeral direct
ors.
“Stupid prick bastard,” Felix groans as he slaps the phone back into its cradle. Then he switches to me without missing a beat: “Nice eyes, Jack. Allergies?”
“No. Long night.”
“No shit. Been a lot of those lately, hasn’t there?”
“Yeah,” I admit.
“That’s what I thought.”
He’s in a mood today. The other night, selling that painting to Opie Taylor, he was happy-go-lucky. An art collector on an errand. But the Cat’s back to work today.
Felix licks his lips and shuffles some papers around. “I got something for you guys. A little trip.” He finds a big yellow envelope beneath some loose papers, gestures at Edgar with it. “That vacation I mentioned.”
“Hookers and gambling,” Edgar says, leaning back with his thick, hairy hands laced behind his head. “Sluts and slots.”
“The details must have come through,” I say, catching the packet tossed at me. I shake out its contents into my other hand: photocopies, handwritten notes on a yellow legal pad, a set of paper-clipped plane tickets, a heavy white envelope full of cash.
“Saipan,” Felix explains, “is one of those little green rocks we got in World War Two. It’s technically a U.S. territory, so you don’t need passports. I already booked you two rooms, one on Saipan and one on Tinian, the next island over. The hotel on Tinian has a casino, and that’s where you’ll meet my associate out of Hong Kong, Ms. Ming.”
I notice the name among the scrawl on the legal pad. The photocopies are from Chinese art books.
“Ming has eight tiles, about the size of our playing cards,” he forms a rectangle with his fingers, “which she’s going to trade you for this.” He lifts a San Francisco ‘49ers duffle bag from behind his desk. A box has been forced inside, stretching the seams. “You carry this on the plane with you. It’s a DeFaux.”
“A DeWhat?” Edgar asks.
Felix spells out the name in an angry tone.
Rummy snorts behind his newspaper.
“So it’s a Frenchman?” Eddie asks.
“French-Canadian,” I say, correcting the clown next to me. It’s a point of pride for me to know the artists we trade in, be they sculptors, painters, or pornographers. “A bronze, then?”
Felix nods and passes the bag to Edgar.
“Carry on DeFrog. Got it. I sent the girls off yesterday,” Eddie says, “overnight express. They should be at the hotel before we are.”
“Good thinking.”
The girls obviously couldn’t go on the plane with us, but the post office rarely checks to see if packages contain what you say they do. The sculpture, on the other hand, is the item of value here, so we keep it close. And there’s no way an airport security goon is going to assume it’s a stolen work of art. For all they know, I made this one myself, too.
I give the rest of the paperwork a quick once-over and close up the envelope.
“Is that enough for you, Jack?” Felix asks, referring to the information.
“Yeah. I’ll take it from here.” It’d be plenty for most delivery boy thugs, but I like to be thorough. Felix knows I’m likely to do my own research from here.
That tingle of professional pride has already returned, lighting up the darkened corners of my brain. It helps me remember what attracted me to this life in the first place.
And then, as if he knows what I’m thinking, Felix asks Edgar and Rummy to wait outside. Then he starts in on me: “So talk to me, Jack.”
I play dumb, like a teenager caught smoking. What cigarettes? Never worked on my mom, isn’t working here.
“You’ve been drunk for the better part of two weeks.” He sticks a finger in my face. “And don’t give me any bullshit.”
Shrugging, I answer, “I told you before, Felix, I’ve got a shelf life. I don’t know why. Eventually everything goes stale and it’s time to move on.”
“You telling me my work is boring you, Jack? My shit ain’t enough to keep your goddamn attention no more?”
“No, no, it’s not like that.” I struggle for an explanation, but don’t even have one for myself, much less for him. “I just... I don’t know.”
“The rolling stone?” His tone says that he doesn’t get it, doesn’t like it, doesn’t approve.
“Something like that.”
“You think you’re the goddamn dark stranger? The High Plains Drifter? Clint Fucking Eastwood?” His voice gets louder, more intimidating as he goes. “Aren’t you getting a little too old for that shit, Jack?”
He’s right, of course. I am too old for that shit.
Felix whips off his glasses and drops back in his leather chair. His hard expression softens. “You piss me off, boy.”
I want to say, I’m thirty-six, too old to be a ‘boy,’ but of course I know better.
“But if you need anything,” he says, jabbing his thick finger at me repeatedly, “you will let me know. Right?”
For a smuggler, fence, and general hood, Felix Caterina makes quite the fatherly figure.
“I will,” I promise, and stand to leave.
“You know that piece of shit I had here before you could have drank himself to death, I wouldn’t have said a word. Hell, I’d have bought him a bottle. But good help’s hard to find, Jack. You’re too good to turn wino and disappear.”
I feign a shameful nod, curse the name Petey Jackson as is customary, thank the Cat for hiring me in Jackson’s stead, and finally escape the awkward lecture.
Five
I spend the rest of the afternoon doing my research. I’m probably the only hood in California with a library card.
First, our destination. Saipan, I find out, is the chief island of Micronesia, the chain of islands just north of Guam. In their history they’ve been claimed by Spain, Germany, and Japan, and later captured by the U.S. Marine Corps. Their past is as sordid and colorful as mine. Tinian was then the site from which our bombers delivered Fat Man and Little Boy, bringing an unholy end to World War Two. I could dwell on the ominous doom in that, but choose not to.
Both islands thrive on tourism these days, so Edgar and I should be just two more sightseers in the crowd.
The photocopies in Felix’s packet describe the tiles we’re to pick up, and I look into the books they were Xeroxed from, as well as a few related texts.
The tiles are like large dominos, or thick playing cards, with lines carved into them. Each one shows a combination of three horizontal lines, either solid all the way across or broken in the middle. Their simplicity defies all the mysticism and mystery around them.
There are no photographs in these books, just drawings, and the textures vary from metallic highlights to cross-hatched stone to parallel wood grain. Of course, there are no photographs because these items may not even exist. I hope Felix isn’t trading a real sculpture for an ancient wives’ tale. Then again, he must already have a buyer lined up or he wouldn’t be taking the chance. And he’s got me to verify things for him.
Assuming, that is, I even know what I’m looking for. Most books agree that there are two sets of eight, not just one, though none agree on what they’re made of. One text, written by an ambitious treasure hunter, says there’s one set of silver and one of gold. Another claims they’re ivory and jade. More humble philosophers think they’re made from wood or sandstone. All myths and hearsay, all making my job that much harder.
And the myths go deep. I read about the Chinese zodiac and wonder how goats, pigs, and rats got to be so highly regarded. I learn that there are four mystical animals revered above all others: the dragon, the tortoise, the phoenix, and the ch’i-lin, whatever that is—looks like a horse with a dragon head. In the Asian tradition, there are five elements, rather than four: earth, fire, water, wood, and metal. I find a book entitled 100 Chinese Gods, but I don’t have that kind of time. Nor the patience. My skepticism keeps me from getting too involved in all this lore. I just imagine Marvin pouring milk into a straw disk of a hat on some bamboo stage a thousand years ago,
or my mentor Karl, or even myself. As far as I’m concerned, all this Chinese mysticism is as valuable as the lucky lottery numbers in a fortune cookie.
Concrete history holds more interest for me, though for these relics there are various and contradictive versions. Differing authors have them as carved by a sage, a prince, or a poor peasant carpenter. Another account has them appearing out of a river on the back of a horse. Generations of wise men and ruling courts used them for divinations. And apparently those traditions have survived the millennia. More recently, if the author of Treasures of the Ancient East is to be believed, powerful modern governments have also gone to great lengths to find these things. He claims the Japanese Empire had special army units assigned to find them when they invaded China in the 1930s. In fact, that may have been when the two sets were split up and sent in opposite directions. Another story has them stashed in a Tibetan monastery until 1949, when the Communists took over China. They were smuggled out just before Tibet fell under Communist persecution, or so the book says.
I’m beginning to see the value of these items, at least to the right buyer. I just hope this set Ming has is made of gold rather than sandstone. It’s an interesting case, I admit.
Might make a good final assignment here.
Six
By evening I’m in Chinatown, my usual hangout. The Chinese neighborhood is as big as any other in Rails End, thanks to the tragic history of its founding. And after a long day as a library goon, I’m in the mood for history…
Rails End sprang into being from the corpse of the Marshman and O’Keefe Railroad Company. Russell Marshman was the financial brains of the venture with roots planted in St. Louis. Miles O’Keefe was the driving force that got line laid down from Missouri to California, leaving bastard children, bar tabs, and dead bodies along the way. Despite all that, or maybe because of it, he became a bit of a folk hero. He was known in every cow town and mining camp on the frontier. A champion arm wrestler, unyielding drinker, and a hell of a ladies’ man. Crowds gathered in Wild West saloons just to drink beside him.