Payback

by Sam Stewart

  “Giving a Bring Your Own Uzi party.”

  “Yeah. I mean, bring it, then leave it. I can see Jackie as a gunrunner but he’s no fuckin commando. Gets your clothes all sweaty.”

  “Mr. Vanity.”

  “True. He do admire his own ass.” Mack grabbed the towel again and deftly, one-handed, unfurled it in the sink. “So you want to try Paris? We could split,” he said flatly. “I could go to the whorehouse and you could go to Vienna.”

  “Or you could go to Argentina and I could go to the cops.”

  “That’s a notion,” Mack said.

  They were silent for a time.

  “Caracas,” Mack said. “Is that in Argentina?”

  “No. Venezuela.”

  “So what’s in Argentina?”

  “Hitler,” Mitchell said. “Evita. Buenos Aires.”

  “Then forget it,” Mack said. “I had something more temperate in mind anyway.—Anyway, I’d like to be the cockroach on the wall when you’re impressing all the cops. You got what?”

  Mitchell turned.

  “Oh hey. Forget me, man. I’m doing a road company of Evita.—What else you got?”

  “Well …” Mitchell looked at him. “I guess I got a phoned-in anonymous tip.”

  “They’re gonna love it,” Mack said. “No shit. They’re gonna mobilize NATO over that. No kidding.”

  Mitchell laughed.

  There was nothing but the slosh-sounds of washing for a while.

  “Besides—you don’t even know what country Jackie’s in. What continent.”

  “No, he’s in Europe,” Mitchell said. “Within six hundred miles.”

  “You know that.”

  “Yeah. I know the range of that chopper. And he’s not about to switch to a commercial airliner. Not with an Uzi.—Okay?”

  “Okay, that’s a start,” Mack said.

  26

  Cy went to see his lawyer, Roger Parfrey, in his downtown office.

  The company was so old and had been there for so long that the neighborhood had gone down and come up again half a dozen times. It was a company so old that one of its first clients had been Eagle-Lion Studios. Old-line but hip. Show biz but Wasp. Roger, for instance, was a guy in a conservative Brooks Brothers flannel, had the thin blond hair and the thin blond lips and the cold blue eyes and could talk about stock debentures on the one hand and where to get a good line of coke on the other. Old-line but hip.

  Roger, in a double-breasted gray flannel suit and a turkey-red tie, in a wood-paneled office with the Old English hunting prints lined around the wall, saying, “So—that’s the story?”

  Cy said, “I swear it on my mother, it’s the truth.”

  Roger scratched his chin and said, “The boy who cried truth.—All right,” he said. “Go on. What’s your question?”

  “My question,” Cy said, “is I’m sitting with a quarter-million dollars in my head and should I put it in my hand. That’s my question, Roger. I’ve got a quarter-million profit. That’s if I move now. Three o’clock tomorrow comes and all bets are off. I’ve got expired options. Zip. Nada.” Cy looked at Roger who was just sitting there; bland. “All right,” Roger said.

  “All right?”

  “What’s your question?”

  “My question,” Cy said, “is what the hell should I be doing? What am I getting into here? What kind of position am I in?”

  “Oh.” Roger nodded now. He swiveled in his chair and built a steeple with his fingers. “Well …” he said agreeably, “let me put it this way. To begin with, you’ve got the rock and the hard place. Then, on either end, you’ve got the pillar and the post. Up above you’ve got the devil, down below you’ve got the creek.—Am I making myself clear?”

  “Can we open a window?” Cy said.

  “They don’t open. Why don’t you take your jacket off?”

  “No. Never mind. That’s not the problem,” Cy said.

  Roger shrugged his shoulders. “Let me give you the bottom lines. If you’re caught, and if they can’t prove you knew about the murders, you’re looking at approximately five years in jail and a fine of, say, conservatively, two hundred thousand. I don’t want to imply you’ll break even here either. That’s in addition to returning all your profits to Tate Pharmaceuticals. If you want to know the exact technical name for all that, it’s felonious violation of the Securities Law. Making a bet against your own company is a no-no. Keeping the profits is a no-no. Using offshore banks. Using inside information, and forgetting for a second what kind of information, is a plain fucking felony.” Roger took a breath. “Is what you’re getting into.” He swiveled in his chair. “If your involvement’s any deeper …”

  “Like I told you—”

  “Oh Cy. Doesn’t matter what you’ve told me, it matters what they’ve got. You have to notice,” Roger said, “that I’m not questioning your story. I’m your lawyer, not your priest. I’m also ostensibly an officer of the court. I’m supposed to advise you about the law and not tell you how to break it. I can warn you, however. I can warn you, if you actually profit from the options, you are A—increasing the chance that you’ll be caught, and B—increasing the depths of liability. I hope that answer is sufficient to the day.”

  Cy didn’t move. He looked at the picture of the guy in the jodhpurs and the little red jacket leaning forward on the horse. There were hounds in the picture but there wasn’t any fox. Maybe, he was figuring, the fox got away. He swiveled back to Roger. “So you’re telling me to pass. Just skip it. Is that it?”

  Roger shook his head. “I’m not telling you to do anything, Cy. It’s your decision. I’m saying where you are is an explosive situation. The money’s like a fuse that’s gonna tie you to a large bomb.” Roger spread his hands. “Maybe you’ll get away with it. Who knows?”

  “People do,” Cy said.

  “Absolutely.” Roger nodded. “On the other hand you have to understand if you’re indicted on this particular securities fraud, you’ll have a tough time proving that you’re innocent of murder. And in that case you’d better make your will out, Cy, because the legal fees’ll kill you.” Roger leaned back.

  Cy looked over at the hunters on the wall. His eyes tracked the series till it got to the credenza where the fox was at bay.

  ***

  Ortega broke up.

  Ortega had been looking at the telephone transcript—chair tipped back, crepe-soled Hush Puppies planted on the desk.

  His partner looked up at him and said, “What’s funny?”

  And Ortega said, “Life.”

  Death wasn’t funny but life, Ortega saw it, was a vaudeville routine. It could offer you a number like Tammy and Jimmy and their air-conditioned dog. It could offer you red-wigged burglars in the Watergate. Or Oliver North putting contraband money in a top-secret Zurich-based numbered account and he fucks up the number.

  Well … that was life.

  It could offer you a character like Carol Tate’s brother, the Cleveland dentist, a guy who’d be talking on the phone to his mistress, he’d complain she hadn’t flossed. He’d say, “You have to work at relationships and gums.” He’d tell her how “the tartar buildup in your mouth is a perfect example of your attitude to life.” Then there was the line that was typed underneath it:

  (Girl starts to cry.)

  Ortega could picture the typist transcribing it (Girl starts to cry.) and then reaching for his coffee. There was coffee on the page. Then the phone call from Burt.

  (Puts her on hold.) “Burt? Thank God. I want to tell you I’ve been grinding my molars over this.”

  And then Burt says, “I asked him for the story of the tip.”

  “You mean Cy,” says the dentist—his ladyfriend disconsolately slobbering on hold. And then Burt tells the story. Ending with, “he pissed in a ficus plant and left.”

  Taken in context, Ortega had to think, it wasn’t any sillier than the rest of it. The rest of life.

  He opened his pen again and doodled on a pad. He was doodlin
g a tooth. Then he drew a half-moon smile around the tooth. Then he called the Naturalite Task Force in New York and asked if they’d check about a Slovo Abdajanian, a Ned Ted Fred Ed Jed with a penthouse, a dick named Schneider, and a cooker named Sandy, Andy or Sam.

  27

  The girl in her twenties with the long ironed hair and the tight white sweater and the bright purple mini and the white vinyl boots led them over to a table. She asked what they wanted to drink and Mitchell said a whisky and Mack said a whisky but he’d settle for a Coke. He watched her walk away—ass like a metronome, clicking out the rhythm of “American Music” as it blasted from the box. Narrowing his eyes, he said, “Christ. I don’t know. I thought we already did that girl, didn’t we?”

  “We did, yeah. Things come around again.”

  “Oh.”

  Another mini came bopping from the bar and Mack tipped his chair back and followed her with his eyes. Mack, like a rerun of 1969: hair to his collar, face down to bone, squint-lines around the eyes but the eyes were still the same, still flat and ironic, still narrowed in a general suspicion of everything, especially himself. He yawned.

  “Are we keeping you awake?” Mitchell said.

  “Little man’s tuckered out.”

  “Big day.”

  “Big fuckup.—You realize, of course, I could’ve had him if I hadn’t had to clobber you to the ground.”

  “And I apologize.”

  “Fat lot of good it does. Shit.”

  There was laughter from the bar. Rusty, behind it, doing numbers with the crowd.

  Mitchell looked away. “You gonna brood about it?”

  “No, I was just thinking, that’s all. Problem is, I didn’t have anything to think. I mean aside from the phone book—the Who’s Who in Decadence that’s sitting in my boot—what the hell we got going?”

  “Well … I suppose we’ve got you,” Mitchell said. “You know him.”

  “Not much. Not recently, at least. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. He got out in … eighty-six. Next thing I heard of him, he calls me in New York. Last month.”

  “Like that,” Mitchell said. “Out of the blue.”

  “So I thought. He says, Hey man, you’re out. Takes me to a steak joint and hits me with a lot of crap. How gorgeously he’s doing. Sings me a chorus of ‘A Wandering Chemist, I.’ A thing—as he describes it—of impeccable threads and unimaginable snatches. Beyond that, he tells me how he’s living in Vienna, how big Eva’s tits are, blah blah blah, and then he hits me with the deal.”

  “Did he give you any details?”

  “No. I cut him off. Then I walked around and got my own brilliant scheme and went charging to California.” Mack shook his head again in mock dumb-wonder as the waitress dealt the drinks. She said, “Who’s getting what?” He said, “I’m getting hornier and he … I don’t like to talk about it, but he’s getting an incredibly gamey-looking sore.” He winked at her maniacally and grinned. “What’ll it be?”

  The girl looked past him as she handed him the Coke. She asked if they wanted to eat and Mitchell said, no, they were expecting someone else.

  “We gonna eat her?” Mack said.

  “Watch it—okay?”

  “Ah.” Mack grinned. “So it’s that way, is it? Well, don’t worry. I don’t birddog a buddy. Besides, I got Barbie here’s in heat for me—right?”

  The girl shot a look again and fled across the floor.

  “Say one thing for you, you’re a charmer,” Mitchell said.

  “There’s some of us that have it, some don’t,” Mack grinned. He lit a cigarette and fell silent for a time. Mitchell sipped his Scotch, turning at a loud burst of laughter from the bar. On the lit-up jukebox, Springsteen was launching on his usual complaint: Born.…

  Mack took out the Cartier phone book and opened it to A. “Let us pray, my children.” He turned another page. “A, my name is Donald and my last name is Acker and I live.… Lookit this. Guy lives in Malibu in the summer, Klosters in the winter, Park Avenue, Kensington, Paris …”

  “I guess Brother Jackie gets around.”

  “Brother Jackie gets by,” Mack said, “with a little help from his fiends. But seriously, folks.” He tossed the book on the table. “I’m shot. Out of business.”

  “Pretty funny,” Mitchell said. “You think you’re out of business. What do you think he does to me?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m serious. What do you think he does? He doesn’t get the bread. Does he kill? Does he quit?”

  “You want to check the crystal ball?”

  “I want to talk about his character.”

  “He had one,” Mack said, “but he traded it for shoes. Hey listen. I don’t know. You want to talk character? He’s too fuckin dumb. I mean for the whole thing. He’s not reckless enough on the one hand or … strategic enough on the other.”

  Mitchell pulled his Scotch. “To’ve thought of it, you mean.”

  “He said he did.”

  “But.”

  Mack shrugged. “I don’t know. It always bothered me, is all.”

  “He could’ve changed,” Mitchell said.

  Mack took his time. “He’s a one-trick dog. Hey listen—you know the way he worked his way through college? He’d go into the school lab, he’d make angel dust and speed.”

  “This is Princeton?”

  “Why not? What’s the matter?” Mack said. “You think the Ivy League’s clean? Grow up. He used to call it the I.V. League. I mean, shit. There he was. Little Jackie Lessandro from the tarpits of the Bronx. In the playground for incipient heads of corporations. No. He found a market. Believe me.”

  “And you still think he’s stupid,” Mitchell said.

  “Like the dog,” Mack said. “A performer but he doesn’t originate, right? You ever meet a dog that said, hey man, I’d really like to jump through a hoop?”

  “Okay,” Mitchell said. “He didn’t think of it himself.”

  “Right,” Mack said. “He had a couple of roommates. So one of ’em thinks of it. Same guy handles all the business and the sales and the other guy handles the investment of the profits. According to Jackie, they wandered out of Princeton with a tidy little chunk.”

  “Not to mention a higher education,” Mitchell said.

  “And connections. They were wired into huge beds of Ivy. Jackie winds up as itinerant chemist to the Dow Jones Industrials, but Jackie doesn’t climb, he doesn’t rise. The other guys rise. One of ’em—the thinker—makes his first twenty million by the time he’s twenty-five. He’s into everything when it’s hot. He’s into software, hardware, underwear, name it. Guy buys a laboratory, Jackie gets a lab. Like the old days at Princeton, he gets himself a neat little covered operation.” Mack shook his head.

  Mitchell didn’t move for a while, didn’t speak. Because he knew before he knew. Because it bwanged into place. But he was frightened of it too because what if he was wrong. He said quietly, “I guess he must’ve said the guy’s name.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “You want to think about it?”

  “Why?” Mack waited. “Oh Christ,” he said. “You’re thinking of a partnership—right?”

  “The old one.”

  “Yeah. Okay,” Mack said.

  Mitchell squinted at the bar. “And let’s say the partnership’s expecting a windfall. Two.”

  “What’s the other one?”

  “Stock market. Friday. But the question is … what do you suppose they’d want to do?”

  “Be together,” Mack said.

  “Celebrate. Chortle.”

  “Keep their eyes on each other.”

  “On an island,” Mitchell said.

  “I don’t know about an island.” Mack looked at him. “It sounds like you know about an island.”

  “How about an island you could fly to in a chopper?”

  “How about you just fucking spill it?” Mack said.

  Mitchell took a breath. He waited, then plunged. “Litt
le boy out of Princeton. Made his first twenty million by the time he’s twenty-five except he blew it out his nose. He had a lab in Long Island, had his head between his thighs, and he thinks I stole his product.”

  “Oh,” Mack said. He grinned. “That’s a tidy little package there, huh?”

  “Labeled Billy McAllister.”

  Mitchell grabbed the book and went rifling through the M’s.

  Mack stared at him. “So?”

  Mitchell nodded yes, and looked up at Joanna who was standing at the table, her eyes going zig-zag-zig between the two of them.

  Mitchell said, “I think I’ll introduce you in the car.”

  “Where’re we going?” Joanna said.

  “To Spain,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  MOUSETRAP

  28

  Billy McAllister sat on his terrace and looked over at the sea. It sparkled in the moon. It looked, from above, like an overturned sky with a scattering of bright unbelievable stars. It was so fucking boring he could actually scream.

  He screamed, “Hey Rocky!” and waited. Nothing. He lit a cigar and went into the house. A clock ticked in the white living room, the dark windows looking over on the woods. He crossed to the bar and then caught his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror. Girls used to tell him he looked like Jagger. He didn’t, even then, but he’d acted like Jagger. He used to have a kind of a lean mean strut, a kind of sympathy for the devil. A man of wealth and taste. He poured himself a good stiff vodka on the rocks and swallowed another lude.

  Rocky came in. The Moving Mountain. That’s what they’d called him when he’d wrestled in the ring. The Moving Mountain. Billy’d acquired him as a pet rock.

  Rocky said, “Boss?”

  “I just wondered where you were.”

  “In the kitchen,” Rocky said. “Before. Now I’m in the living room.”

  “Oh,” Billy said. Rocky’d taken one too many in the head. “Where’s Hector? He go to meet the chopper like I said?”

  Rocky nodded.

  “That’s good.” Billy looked at the clock again and settled on the couch. He couldn’t think of anything to say to the mountain but he had to have a presence, a body in the room, so he said, “Sit down.… Consuela in the kitchen?”