Devil's Dance

by Daniel Depp

  ‘Is this something you expect to lose sleep over?’

  He considered Spandau for a while.

  ‘You don’t like this, do you?’ Araz asked him. ‘I mean, it’s like a moral thing for you, isn’t it?’

  ‘I do what has to be done. Most of the time I don’t much like it.’

  ‘Atom says we don’t have souls. I don’t know one way or another. I don’t like violence unless there’s no other way. It’s not a moral thing, that’s all shit. But most of the time it’s unnecessary, just stupid and bad business. Atom doesn’t see this. He’s seriously fucked up. That part of him is missing.’

  ‘That’s why you need to be there instead of him.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Araz. ‘That’s your key, that’s where you come into all this. It’s a crusade. You’re trying to address the fucking moral balance of the universe.’

  Araz laughed. Spandau let him laugh. Then said,

  ‘Make the call.’

  SIXTY-ONE

  It worked just the way Spandau said it would work.

  Araz didn’t have to pretend to be frightened when he spoke to Atom. The quivering voice was legitimate. Araz was apologetic but scared. Wanted to come home but was afraid to after everything Atom had said. Atom suggested he come to the office, they could talk there. No, said Araz, he couldn’t do that. It had to be someplace public. They finally agreed on that. And someplace not far away.

  Now it was evening and Araz sat in a Starbucks on Santa Monica. Sat there framed in the window, for all the world to see, as public as it gets, looking like an Edward Hopper painting to the hundred cars that passed every minute.

  Waiting.

  SIXTY-TWO

  ‘He looks like an Edward Hopper painting, don’t you think?’ said Locatelli.

  They were in a French restaurant a few doors down and across the street, but from their table they could still see Araz sitting in the cafe.

  ‘You’re giving art-history lessons now?’ said Spandau. ‘While you’re in such an informative mood, you might try telling me why I’m here. This wasn’t part of the deal.’

  ‘Think of this as my moment of triumph,’ said Locatelli. ‘I wanted you to share this with me. You can help me gloat. This man has been a pain in my ass for years.’ Locatelli surveyed the menu. ‘Try the Daube Provençal. They put the orange peel in it. It’s the only fucking place in town that gets it right.’

  ‘You eat here a lot, do you?’

  ‘I own it,’ said Locatelli. ‘You want something made right, you just buy the factory. Otherwise it’s market-driven economics and the law of entropy. You leave things alone and they naturally turn to shit. The Medici knew this.’

  ‘It doesn’t bother you, what’s about to happen?’

  ‘You mean am I like Uncle Atom? A fucking monster? You know better than that. I’ve got a wife I love, sons, a daughter. I believe in God but I also believe you’re supposed to take care of your own. I let this man live and how many people do you think are going to die? The world will sleep better and you know it. And not that I don’t trust you, but it would be truly amiss of me to let you out of my sight at this point.’

  Spandau stared out the window at the cafe.

  ‘You might want to be a little less obvious,’ Locatelli said. ‘You look like you’re waiting for a bus. Relax. There won’t be any great drama. Atom can’t do anything to him there and Araz isn’t going to leave with him. The whole thing is just to get the crazy bastard into the open. My guys will grab Atom on the way back to his car, and as far as you’re concerned he decided to retire to Bali. End of story. I’m telling you, try the daube.’

  Locatelli looked out the window.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The trout has arrived. You see that guy over in the doorway, the big ugly one, out of sight? That’s Omar and somewhere on his person there is a large knife. You see what I told you? Atom was supposed to show up alone. Does this tell you anything? The bastard is cheating already. Not that anybody thought he wouldn’t. Atom smells a rat. Araz is dumb enough to actually leave with him and Omar would slice him like a loaf of mortadella.’

  SIXTY-THREE

  Uncle Atom stepped into the cafe. Or rather he stopped in the doorway, paused, like he was stepping into a dentist’s office. He looked around distastefully. Then he put his foot over the threshold and walked slowly toward Araz.

  ‘I hate these places,’ said Atom, sitting down. ‘It’s everything that’s wrong with this country. Artificial light, artificial coffee, artificial people. Just look at them. Let’s get this done quickly. What do you want?’

  ‘I want to come home?’

  ‘So who’s stopping you?’

  ‘I admit I fucked up.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘The bastard got away again and then there’s all that money I owe to you and you said a lot of stuff that made me very nervous before I went up north.’

  ‘There’s got to be discipline,’ said Atom. ‘You are my blood, but you’ve got to learn, there’s got to be discipline. You are my right hand, I need you, but you can’t be weak. It’s my place to teach you. That’s the way it is. You think I’m too hard but the world is hard.’

  ‘You said some things.’

  ‘You got a thick head,’ said Atom. ‘Sometimes you just got to knock things into a thick head. That’s all I was trying to do. This is stupid. Come home. We’ll go sit in the office, drink real coffee, talk.’

  A homeless guy came into the cafe. Tall black man, dreadlocks, a torn army jacket that looked like it had been rolled in seven kinds of grease. Atom looked at him with something that could only be described as hatred.

  ‘I need some sort of guarantee,’ said Araz.

  ‘You want a guarantee,’ said Atom, ‘then take a look at that living piece of shit. You don’t come home, you end up like that. Where you going to go, hah? What will you do? You walk out on your family, you abandon them, this is what happens. This is what the world does to you.’

  There was some altercation about the bathroom. The homeless guy wanted to use it and the young prick behind the counter didn’t want to let him, said it was for paying customers only. The homeless guy dug around in several dozen pockets, produced some change, slapped it on the counter.

  ‘What do you want to buy?’ said the kid. ‘This isn’t enough for anything.’

  ‘For god’s sake,’ said one of the customers, a young woman. ‘Be human. Let the guy use the bathroom.’

  The kid shrugged.

  ‘Flush, will you,’ said the kid.

  The homeless guy trundled toward the rear of the cafe.

  ‘Come home,’ said Uncle Atom. ‘You don’t want to be like this. You don’t want to let the world do this to you.’

  They could smell the homeless man as he passed them. Years of piss and sweat. Atom made a sour face.

  ‘I need to think,’ said Araz. ‘I need some time.’

  Just before the bathroom door the homeless man stopped and turned around. Araz looked up and saw the gun. He watched the man shoot Uncle Atom in the head first and as the gun turned to him Araz’s last thought was not really a thought at all but a vast weariness that the world should actually be like this.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  There were four shots in all, two pairs, like a simple poker hand. Pop pop, pop pop. They heard them but it was, as Locatelli had said, nothing dramatic. It was really the screams that got their attention. Spandau looked out the window like everybody else. You couldn’t see either Araz or Atom now, they were hidden behind large connecting spiders of cracked glass and crimson stains that inched their way toward the floor. Spandau stood up, like there was something he could do.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Locatelli firmly, ‘unless you want to spend the next fifteen years in jail.’

  Omar had moved from his spot in the doorway, ran to the entrance of the cafe, but saw what had happened and melted back out into the crowd that was gathering. You could see him on his cell phone, calling god knows who.

&
nbsp; ‘You son of a bitch,’ Spandau said.

  ‘There was no other way,’ said Locatelli.

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, everything we planned, what was supposed to happen …’

  ‘There was no other way,’ Locatelli repeated. ‘You wanted everything to be done offstage and I’m sorry about that, I truly am, but this is as much you as it is me and frankly I resented the idea of you walking away all smug and able to lie to yourself. You want to know if I’m a monster and no, this is how it feels, Texas, we get to share this one. And like I say, it’s not that I don’t trust you but I needed an insurance policy. Otherwise I have to be afraid of you and I just can’t have that, Texas, I just can’t. It was this or the other thing. Your guts may hurt for a while but once again you get to stay alive.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Stop saying that,’ said Locatelli. ‘Somewhere in that reptile core of your brain you knew damned well what had to happen. Why the hell would I want to remove one dangerous man and then replace him with another? Araz takes over and in six months you think he’s not going to be as big a pain in the ass for me as Atom ever was? He was too smart for his own good. Unfortunately his luck was shit. That gay friend of his was already talking. How do you think I found out?’

  ‘You think you’ve killed the whole operation? I thought the point was to have someone in there you could deal with? Now it’s just wide open, somebody else steps in and you’ve got no control. What the hell is the sense in that?’

  ‘Use your imagination, Texas. It’s like the royal fucking family. There’s a chain of succession.’

  ‘What are you talking about? There’s nobody left. There’s just …’

  It was a moment before he got it. It was too funny.

  ‘Tavit’s not the brightest crayon in the box, but with a little help he’ll do. In fact he’s exactly what we need. If Araz could waltz him around like a pony, imagine what I can do. It’s brilliant.’

  Spandau stood up, threw his napkin onto the table.

  ‘Sit down, Texas. Have something to eat. Some wine. We’ll get a little drunk.’

  ‘No matter what you tell yourself,’ Spandau said, ‘you’re no better than he was. Maybe you’re worse. He was crazy. You’re just fucking pure evil.’

  ‘You just crossed the line and you’re scared,’ said Locatelli. ‘You just helped murder two men and nobody’s giving you the option to pretend you didn’t know. Welcome to my world. Maybe it will take you a while to deal with it but you will and no matter what happens things are going to look different from now on. Everything is shades of gray, Texas. How long was Walter trying to tell you that?’

  ‘One of these days,’ said Spandau, ‘I’m going to kill you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Locatelli, ‘but I doubt it. If it truly worried me you’d be dead before you stepped out that door. You’ve finally lost your innocence, Texas, and there is a brave new world out there for you and we are going to be of much use to each other. You can count on it.’

  Spandau left the table and stepped out into the street. It was like a circus now. The sirens, the gathered patrol cars, the pressing crowd, the craned necks. Everybody loves a circus. An officer with a bullhorn warned people to stand away from the yellow cordon that was being unwound. Spandau turned and through the restaurant window watched Locatelli giving his order to the waiter. Every now and then in his life, holding Dee or Anna, Spandau felt he had touched something holy, something radiantly good that gave his life some kind of meaning, that made it possible to go on. Maybe he couldn’t tell you what God looked like, it’s true. But for the first time in his life he could now describe, in intimate detail, the face of the Devil.

  Spandau’s phone vibrated. He looked at it. A text message. From Anna.

  Come home, it said. Come home.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  They sat around Dee’s kitchen table, drinking coffee. Dee said,

  ‘So he’s not coming home.’

  ‘We didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him,’ Pookie said. ‘Like I say, the other two showed up and he took off. You can’t blame him.’

  ‘You don’t know where he went? You don’t know where I could contact him?’

  ‘That’s the last we saw of him. He’s very clever, Dee, he got away from all of us.’

  ‘But he’s safe now, you say? You’re sure of it?’

  ‘The guy he owes the money to is dead. There’s nobody looking for him now,’ said Spandau.

  ‘What about the money?’

  ‘The slate is clean. The guy he owes it to can’t try and collect on it anymore.’

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t get him back,’ said Pookie. ‘We did what we could.’

  ‘It’s worked out well enough,’ Dee said. ‘I mean, when he hears, he’ll come back. Or at least he’ll call and I can tell him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Pookie. ‘He’ll hear about it and when he calls you tell him it’s okay about the money now, he can come home.’

  ‘He’s still out there somewhere,’ said Dee, ‘gambling away what little we have left.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dee, there’s nothing to be done about it,’ said Spandau. ‘He can come home now. You can at least start all over. Maybe get him into therapy again.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Dee. ‘All I could think about was the money he owed, and now that’s resolved it doesn’t feel as if we’re any farther along. There was something about the whole situation that never seemed quite real in the first place. What do I do now?’

  ‘Be patient,’ said Spandau. ‘Wait. He’ll call soon. Then he’ll be home. You’ll have him back.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dee.

  ‘We didn’t do much of anything,’ said Spandau. ‘Uncle Atom had the good fortune to get himself killed. It worked itself out.’

  ‘I know you’re lying,’ said Dee. ‘And I know you well enough not to ask too hard. I suppose it was always like that, wasn’t it? You trying to protect me and me making sure I didn’t ask too hard in case you actually told me the truth. You protected me then and you’re protecting me now. I don’t think I ever saw that so clearly before.’

  ‘Would it have made a difference?’ Spandau asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think maybe it would have.’

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Pookie.

  ‘When he comes back, maybe you’d like to meet him. All this and it just dawned on me you’ve never actually crossed paths.’

  ‘No,’ said Spandau. ‘It’s probably best left just the way it is.’

  She put her arms around Spandau, leaned into him, kissed him gently on the cheek. Whispered to him, so soft and close that only he could hear, ‘Maybe another life.’

  He nodded.

  Let go of her.

  Went out.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘Well,’ said Pookie once they were outside, ‘that was some fancy lying.’

  ‘What is there to tell her,’ he said. ‘You want to explain about what he was doing in Crystal Ellerbee’s house? Or how the sonofabitch probably helped kill three people? There’s just no way to explain all that and she’s right, she doesn’t really want to know. And I don’t want her to. Maybe he loves her. I don’t know. Maybe everything will work out all right for them. That’s not my problem. I’m just not going to hurt her anymore. She’s wrong. You only get the one life and it’s too goddamned short as it is.’

  He walked with Pookie to her car.

  ‘When are you coming back to work?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t know that I am.’

  ‘You’ve got to make up your mind, David. You can’t sit on the fence forever. You’ve got to either grab it or let it go. Like it or not, it’s yours now. You have to decide.’

  ‘I’ll be in on Monday,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the weekend to think about it and, anyway, there’s something I need to do.’

  Pookie nodded. She hugged him. He hugged her back.
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  ‘God,’ she said, ‘you are so dumb.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Pam Mayhew, Anna’s younger sister, was in the kitchen making a pot of coffee when Spandau came in. Pam and Anna were Texans by birth, and came from a ranch family that, like Spandau’s, considered coffee as a sacramental liquid and the basic fuel of everyday life. Sand in your grub might be forgivable, but screwing up the java could get you injured.

  Pam didn’t say hello, just glanced at him when he came in and went back to the coffee. She was a smaller, younger version of her sister. Blonde, well built, and spirited, she was a knockout in her own right. But Anna had something else, that inexplicable other thing, that her sister lacked. Pam was pretty and sexy as hell, but Anna possessed a quality that drew people to her, made her unforgettable to complete strangers for reasons even they couldn’t describe. It had always been this way, and if Pam envied her she never let it show. She was a smart woman and Spandau felt she simply understood the burden of it, having watched all the pain the mixed blessing had caused her sister.

  ‘She’s out by the pool,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Are you mad at me too?’

  ‘None of my business,’ she said. ‘But damned right I am.’

  ‘Is there a specific reason or just on general principles?’

  ‘I’m just giving you fair warning if you’re fixing to hurt her, which it seems to me you are about to do.’ Like Anna, when she was angry the otherwise subdued Texas twang kicked up a few notches. ‘I will hunt you down and kill you where you sleep. You want coffee?’

  Anna was stretched out on a lounge reading a script when he came out carrying the mug of coffee.

  ‘When I said come home, I sort of thought it might be the same evening.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I waited. You really shouldn’t make a girl beg. She won’t thank you for it.’

  ‘Is it too late?’ he asked her.