THUGLIT Issue Twelve

by Marks, Leon

  It didn't seem real. Even when she passed the note, I was thinking that it wasn't the real note, that it was a fake, a deposit slip or something. Only when I saw the teller's eyes go wide did I realize that I had waited too long. I had let it happen. And now there was no turning back.

  There is a definitive line between fantasy and reality, and Madison had just crossed it, something I truly believed she would never do. We were criminals now, bank robbers. For real. I could barely wrap my head around it. I felt a surge of adrenaline course through my veins, felt my knees go weak. A thousand thoughts ran jumbled through my mind.

  Then I snapped out of it. Now wasn't the time to think, it was the time to act. I had a job to do. Taking a deep breath, I felt my confidence return, and it was at that moment I realized that, on some level, I had wanted Madison to go through with it. I wanted to rob a bank with her, to share the thrill of doing something that bold and daring and reckless.

  I watched as the teller complied with the stick up note, sliding stacks of bills under the window into Madison's hands. Madison picked up the cash and dropped it into her shopping bag, cool as ice. She headed towards the exit.

  I saw the teller hit a button, saw her turn and say something to the teller next to her.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Madison had made it to the exit, and so far the plan was working as designed. As expected, two security guards were now hustling to the door. I shuffled like an old man into their path, and one of them nearly knocked me down. From behind me I heard a woman scream. I had no idea why.

  Until I saw the gun.

  It wasn't the security guard's gun. It was in the hand of a man, a bystander.

  "I'm a police officer!" the man shouted as he ran to the door and pointed the gun towards Madison, who was climbing into the cab.

  Everything was happening in slow motion. The man with the gun had assumed a firing stance. It appeared as though he was going to shoot Madison in the back. I couldn't let that happen. "No!" I screamed as I lunged at him, reaching out and knocking his gun hand away.

  A shot rang out.

  A security guard fell.

  My ears were ringing. Blue smoke hung in the air. There was blood on the floor. People were screaming.

  It was all over.

  The case didn't go to trial. There was no point. No lawyer, no matter how expensive, could have saved us from the mess we were in. In addition to bank robbery, we'd been hit with a murder charge. Despite neither of us being armed, a man was killed during the commission of a felony, and Madison and I were on the hook for it.

  The federal prosecutor had wanted the death penalty. We plea-bargained it down to life in prison.

  Lucky us, right?

  We're serving out our sentences at a pair of federal penitentiaries, me at Allenwood in Pennsylvania, Madison at Hazelton in West Virginia. The prisons are only about 250 miles apart, but it may as well be a million miles.

  I still love Madison. I love her more than anything in this world. And I don't blame her for what happened. Sure, it was her idea. But I had enabled her to see it through. I was supposed to have been the failsafe, the lifeline, but I had failed to act. I got caught up in the romance of it, and let it happen. And now an innocent man was dead, and there was nothing either one of us could do or say that would bring him back.

  The news media had a field day with the story: a young, successful power couple named Bonnie and Clyde attempting to rob a bank with tragic results. They'll probably make a movie about it someday. But I wouldn't want to see it. Because that movie, the real one, plays in my head over and over again, day after day, whether I want it to or not.

  Prison is pretty much what you'd expect. It's harsh at times, but mostly just boring. I have a lot of time to think—nothing but time, in fact—and I often think back to that dinner date at Le Bernardin.

  "La puissance du destin," Madison had said.

  The power of fate.

  She believed that we were destined to be the opposite of Bonnie and Clyde. But what we both failed to realize was that, in a way, we already were. As successful business people, we were putting money into banks, legally, not taking it out illegally. Maybe if I had seen that then, I could have made the argument and squashed this thing right then and there. But I didn't see it then. I see it now. But now's too late.

  The case haunts me of course. As I lie on my cot staring at the ceiling, day after day, night after night, I dwell on various aspects of the robbery and its aftermath. I thought the death of the security guard would be the thing that haunts me the most, but oddly, it's not. What haunts me the most are the masks. Madison and I had walked around the city disguised as an old married couple, wearing those masks. And we had every intention of growing old together in real life, of becoming those doting old lovebirds that we pretended to be. But now, not only will we not grow old together, we'll never see one another again. And that, more than anything, torments me no end.

  It's funny, because if you think about it, that too fulfills the destiny Madison had envisioned. Our namesakes had gone out in a blaze of glory, dying together in a hail of bullets. But Madison and I, we didn't die together. No. We're doing life in prison, isolated and alone, separated, forever apart.

  The opposite of Bonnie and Clyde.

  Grenoble

  by Edward Hagelstein

  Ruben Caro had no fixed abode. For three years he'd lived in an RV that he was ready to admit cost more than any sane retirement planner would recommend. Tall and narrow, it reminded him of a toaster. On the other hand, everything he owned fit inside.

  Ruben tended to chase cooler weather. The first summer he worked his way from Maine across to Vancouver, then wintered in the southwest. The next season he reversed course and parked a few weeks in Nova Scotia before hopscotching down the East Coast in the fall.

  He stayed at campgrounds and sometimes overnighted in Walmart lots, parks or rest stops. He sought out bookstores and the occasional restaurant when he was near a town, but mainly cooked his own food in the RV, read his books, and didn't seek out company. He avoided most places where students, especially girls, tended to gather.

  Ruben was fifty-four, bereft, and sought no other life, for the time being.

  Snow was creeping down the mountains when he checked his e-mail on a Monday morning in Ruidoso, New Mexico. His wife, Carole, wanted him to call her cell, any time of day. His scalp tingled when he saw her name. They hadn't talked in person since he departed France.

  He'd been in the campground for a week and was preparing to pull out and head south. He was leaning toward a slow easterly descent to Cudjoe Key with a two-day detour to Sanibel, where a former boss divided his time between eighteen holes and subjecting middle-schoolers to abridged, cantankerous tours of the shell museum. There were a few states between him and Florida, so it could take a month. He thought to stop in Oxford, Mississippi for a week. Austin and Marfa before that. Maybe New Orleans.

  Carole used to say that wherever Ruben was, that's who he was. In Paris he was Gallic. In Buenos Aires, Argentine. In America he fit in, although not of a particular region or state. Other than some Asian and African countries, people would often take him for a local and ask for directions in the native language. He was frequently able to reply in kind, even if in a rudimentary fashion.

  Ruben had come back to the U.S. post-retirement, after they lost first Anne, then their marriage. It was simple for him here. He'd never worked in his native country, didn't have to try and become someone else. Didn't have the gut-gnawing sensation of waiting to be exposed. Didn't have to fear the inadvertent flash of eyes on his in the street, or conversely, the studied refusal to meet his gaze. Overly alert faces or sudden jostles no longer sent him into high alert. It wasn't home any longer, but was comforting. He had no adult history here. He roamed anonymously at will.

  Three years earlier he'd walked out of the Paris apartment for good on the afternoon Carole finished a bottle of Bordeaux, one of many that year, and told him
she hadn't been looking forward to Anne's teenage years in any case. After the trouble Carole had given her mother she could only assume Anne would have been the same. Ruben didn't care whether or not she was trying to shock him into acceptance of what was apparent to everyone else. Carole had already absorbed the loss in a way he could not. Anne had been buried under the ice and snow for five months.

  He finished breakfast, packed the RV for travel and was on Highway 70 heading toward Roswell before he called. The apartment on Rue Vaneau had belonged to Carol's late father, a Francophile since spending much of the 1950s there expending his G.I. Bill. The apartment was the one extravagant purchase her father had allowed himself in nearly forty years of teaching literature at NYU. Carole had spent summers in the city with her father and considered it home now.

  A vivid morning in New Mexico, it was evening in Paris. The sky would be gloaming into night, and lights would be flowing on through the city. At times he missed the grubby tight spaces and bustle of a city. Other times he was able to enjoy wherever he happened to be. Like now, gliding between the dusty foothills and distant, greener mountains with Telemann on the satellite radio.

  Carole's voice had a hollow quality over the phone. He heard her heels clacking on the floor of an empty room. A decade earlier she'd opened an agency that specialized in renting apartments to Americans and the British. The voices of a couple lilted in the background as she excused herself and allo'ed into the phone.

  "It's me."

  "Ruben…" Emotion was in his name. Emotion he hadn't heard in the last year they lived together.

  "Is it Anne?" Her name was difficult to say aloud.

  "Yes."

  "Have they found her?"

  He'd expected it during the summers, not this time of year. Two others had been uncovered during the first thaw.

  "No."

  He waited.

  "Something came in the mail." She was trying to keep control with her clients in hearing range.

  "Paperwork?" Not a death certificate. No.

  "Not that. Something of hers."

  His breath stopped until he let it out. He had to concentrate to keep the RV in its lane.

  "Something she had with her? On her?"

  "Yes. Can you come?"

  He gazed out onto the sparse earthen beauty surrounding him for a moment. "I'll text you when I book a flight."

  Anne had been skiing Chamechaude with a friend from school and her family on a weekend. The girls apparently diverted from the trail and skied into the path of an avalanche triggered from above. The slope was thought safe, and Anne's friend had an Arva beacon.

  Neither girl was found, and the signal was lost. It was surmised they were swept into a deep crevice and the beacon was damaged. Two older boys skiing several hundred feet below the girls were enveloped and their bodies were found in the spring. It was guessed that the girls had followed the boys off the piste. They were both sixteen years old.

  Ruben entered through DeGaulle holding the only passport he had now—his own. With graying perpetual four-day stubble, in a dark tieless suit, he was mistaken in Europe for a bar owner or under-appreciated architect with few commissions. In retirement mode in the U.S. he was not usually noticed. He slumped in a cab in the morning traffic. His father-in-law's name was still posted at the door. Carole buzzed him in.

  The apartment was bright and fresh-looking. It lifted some of the blear from his mind. She'd had the kitchen redone and the other rooms painted. The windows overlooking Rue Vaneau were cracked open and admitted the subdued mid-morning street clatter he always found relaxing.

  Carole looked better herself. She seemed more French now. Slim, well-dressed, urbane. The situation couldn't be helping, but she didn't show it. He saw no evidence of drinking. No empty glasses, no wine bottles, even for cooking.

  They didn't touch each other.

  A package sat on the dining table, flaps open, contents exposed. Inside was a ski boot that he stared at for a moment. White and aqua in a distinctive pattern. He recognized it as the same model that Anne had been wearing.

  "The police examined it?"

  "They couldn't get any fingerprints."

  He picked it up. The boot had been used, but didn't appear to have been sitting under the ice or snow for any amount of time.

  "We don't even know if it was hers," Carole said. "Do we?"

  He folded the lids of the box down. "What did they get from the postage mark?"

  "They narrowed it down as being mailed from a certain La Poste in Grenoble."

  "Grenoble?"

  He'd spent a month there after the avalanche trying to organize a search for the Anne and the others. The worst month of his life. If there was one city associated with pain, Grenoble was it for him.

  Carole was looking at him. He was conscious of her blue eyes and expensively cut hair.

  "Did they give you the address?"

  "I have it written down. What's the point of the whole thing Ruben? What could someone want?"

  "I don't know."

  "Is it because of your job?"

  "Stranger things have happened. Do you have that paper?"

  Carole went into the kitchen and emerged with a sheet of notebook paper. La Poste Grenoble, Av. Jean Perrot. She watched him fold it and slip it into a pocket. She didn't object.

  The box was addressed to Carole with black marker in shaky script.

  "The police had a quick handwriting analysis done. I don't understand it all, but the upshot was that the writer appears to have been educated in both the U.S. and France at different times."

  "Did they give you anything in writing?"

  "No. It was fairly informal since there's no real crime."

  Ruben was impressed, but slightly skeptical without seeing a report. Still, it was something to go on. "No note in the package?"

  "Nothing."

  He gazed around the apartment that had been his home and now was not. "Can I use a spare set of keys? I'll be back later."

  The hardware store two buildings down that his friend Patrice had presided over for twenty years now still had chipped plum paint on the façade and the familiar display window packed with aging electronics and fading hand-written signs.

  A muffled bonjour drifted out from behind a crowded counter in response to the doorbell. Ruben stood at the front of the store and whistled the first ten ominous notes of Finlandia Opus 26.

  After a delay, something fell to the floor as a body attempted to brush quickly past a display of rubber door stoppers. Patrice came bursting to the front of the store, his arms held open, a wide genuine smile on his face. He might have been forty, or sixty. He wore a chambray shirt with a pocket protector and khaki pants. His eyes were the liveliest part of a jowly face.

  "My friend," he grabbed Ruben in a bear hug. "Close to four years and you have the nerve to come in here and try to stump me by eviscerating Sibelius? You are batshit crazy."

  "That's not right?" Ruben said innocently.

  Patrice licked his lips and whistled a version infinitely better than Ruben's, using appropriately dark facial expressions until they both cracked up.

  "You've got me there," Ruben said. "Mine was weak."

  Patrice hustled him to the back of the store and brought out a battered wooden stool for his guest behind the counter. He poured black coffee in mugs for them both and pulled up another stool for himself.

  "I did receive your kind postcard last year however and now have remembrance of the Alamo."

  "It's an institution."

  "When did you arrive?"

  "Two hours ago."

  "How long do you stay?"

  "That I don't know. Probably not long." Ruben gazed around the store that hadn't changed since the first time he'd stepped inside fifteen years earlier. "How's business?"

  "Sales are down," Ruben said with an expression approximating a pout. "Carole does not come in to buy things she does not need simply for the company, like you did."

  "You could ope
n an annex in her apartment," Ruben said. "There's still a closet full of unopened gadgets up there."

  Patrice pursed his lips as he noted how Ruben referred to the apartment as exclusively Carole's. He had been the one person Ruben felt he could talk to about Anne in the months after the avalanche.

  He told now about the package Carole had received. Patrice was truly pained. "The poor woman. There is twisted, and there is twisted, my friend," he said. "How would someone know what your daughter wore if this boot is not hers?"

  "There were photos in the papers taken that day that the other girl's family released."

  "What will you do when you locate this fiend?"

  "I was thinking of lighting a bag of dog shit on his front step and ringing the bell."

  Patrice looked at Ruben. He had always sensed that his joking gentle friend was familiar with unspoken violence.

  "He will be lucky if that's all you do."

  "Does your uncle still live in Grenoble?"

  "Unfortunately, for my uncle Max, he died two years ago. Fortunately for me he left me his apartment. I go down there some weekends now. It is yours for as long as you need it."

  "Do you still have your car?"

  "It also is yours," Patrice said, instinctively understanding Ruben might want a clean apartment and transportation that couldn't be traced directly back to him, if things turned ugly.

  It wasn't faultless, but close enough for Ruben. He nodded his thanks.

  "This is perfect," Patrice said. "You take the car. I will come down by rail on Friday and bring the car back on Sunday if you do not need it any longer." He clapped his hands happily, as if pretending they were arranging a vacation rental. "How does that sound?"

  "It sounds perfect," Ruben said. "Are there still pay phones around here?"

  Ruben climbed to the fourth floor, two flights above Carole's. He stood next to the stairs for a moment and listened to the midday quiet. He opened a pocketknife he just bought from Patrice, who tried to push away the Euros Ruben had placed on the counter. Crouched by the circular staircase, he eased the blade under the edge of a wood panel surrounding the gap under the stairs and pried until it came loose. He reached in and felt under the fifth riser from the bottom until he found a lump attached with masking tape. He pulled at the tape until the entire package ripped loose, and came out with a tightly wrapped plastic freezer bag. He opened the bag and removed a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm pistol.