The Deadly Kiss-Off

by Paul Di Filippo

  I got the address and directions on my phone. “Okay. Where should I pick you up for the ride to the airport?”

  “Back at the condo. I’ll Uber.”

  As I headed to where I had parked, Stan called out, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “That, my friend, is all I intend to do!”

  ***

  Even outside, I could catch the delicious scents of frying seafood. The restaurant turned out not to be a sleazy dive at all, but rather a good, solid proletarian hole-in-the-wall. The maritime decor—nets, glass floats, plaster swordfish, a poster of fancy sailor knots—had probably been moderately stylish around 1982.

  Rosa Luckman occupied a gingham-covered table in the farthest corner, her back to the wall and facing the door. When she saw me come in, it was as if someone had punched her in the gut. She actually got halfway up to leave, but I managed to cross the small room and beckon her wordlessly to sit back down, which she did.

  I sat across from her and didn’t say anything for a minute or so as she stifled her tears and blew her nose. Meanwhile, I was trying to form my chaotic thoughts into some kind of careful, caring, sensible words. The woman’s reality had hit me upside the head for the first time. I had been in her company only two times before—three if you counted the night I saw her clothes strewn across the condo floor and deduced her presence behind the closed bedroom door. This meeting was the first time Rosa Luckman as a unique, autonomous individual had become the entire focus of my attention, the whole reason for my being with her.

  At first, I just tried to internalize her essence, to put myself in her shoes.

  She wore a green knit dress with a high cowl neck against the autumn chill. At first glance, it appeared modest—until I noticed how it outlined every curve of her small-bosomed, well-toned body—a physique well above average for the age hinted at in her patrician features. Beneath this unremarkable surface roiled the hidden passions of a woman who, long ago, had started up a love affair with her sixteen-year-old student and then, decades later, taken up with the man he had become—both times at the risk of losing everything she had. But I hoped also to encounter her practical side, her genuine commitment to Luckman.

  “Rosa, I’m sorry.” That seemed the least terrible way to begin.

  She had regained some measure of composure and acceptance, although the eyes showed her continuing hurt. “Why should you be sorry?” she said. “You’re not the one who came back into my life with a lot of crazy talk and wild promises and hot sex.”

  “I know Stan somewhat,” I replied. “We’ve been through a lot. And I think that whatever he said, he really meant at the time. But changing circumstances have a way of undoing things despite all our best intentions. His woman’s coming back today. I have to leave soon to meet her at the airport.”

  “She must really be something. Because I am not exactly chopped liver.”

  I was gratified to hear her upholding her own worth. “No, I can see that, for sure. And yeah, Sandralene is a force of nature. And your husband—does he understand how lucky he is?”

  Reminding her of her sacred marriage vows and all that guff did not seem a bad idea, and her reluctant sigh proved me right.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Ron practically worships me. He’s told me many, many times how he couldn’t live without me, how I made his life over, from drab to wonderful. But you know, sometimes that much worship gets hard to bear. It even gets old and cloying. Sometimes you want—well, you want a hell-bound train, and damn the safety and common sense and consequences.”

  “Well, you sure picked the right travel agent for that trip.”

  She gave a gravelly laugh. “Yeah, didn’t I? If only Stan had managed to graduate, I’m sure his yearbook picture would have read, ‘Voted most likely to fuck with your head.’ I knew it had to end sooner or later, even if I did allow myself a moment now and then to imagine he’d chuck everything and we’d run off together. But that’s not in the cards, I can see.”

  I reached over to touch her hand, and she grabbed mine and squeezed before letting go.

  “Rosa, I hate to intrude practicality into this talk, but I have to know if you can keep it together whenever you and Stan come face-to-face again. We have a lot invested in this venture with your husband, and I’m sure you want it to succeed—for his sake if not necessarily for ours.”

  “Oh, of course. I’m an adult. I know how to lie and put up a good false front. Don’t worry about any of that. I want my share of those millions as much as you or Ron do.”

  I got to my feet. “I hope I might salvage some of your good feelings toward Stan. He’s not the worst.”

  Rosa stood and held my gaze with a passionate intensity I had seldom before seen.

  “I will love that fucking sexy bastard as long as I live.”

  37

  I was thinking I might just abandon my whole complicated life and get a job as a taxi driver specializing in the airport run. I had journeyed to and from this destination so often lately, I should have installed a meter in the Lexus. I practically knew the guys manning the booths at the short-term parking lot by name.

  But such delusional dreams of escape and obscurity could not survive long under the pressures of what lay ahead for me. I knew that tomorrow’s presentation was the make-or-break moment for our scam. Sure, if we failed to wow Derian Crespo and Pete Smalley, we could always start over with new clients, assuming Chantal and Les could roust some up for us. But if we failed to win over these first two—who might, I suddenly realized, spread bad news about us in the aftermath of a botch—then we weren’t likely to lure in any others. Yes, I could adjust my pitch after any failure, but only by making relatively minor refinements. I had put everything I had into this presentation, and the product was what it was, and could not be glitzed up any further. So if we didn’t get a bite tomorrow, we were probably staring disaster in the face. Not only would there be no life-changing riches for us, but Stan and I would be on the carpet again in front of Vin Santo, trying to arrange some kind of repayment plan for his loans that might conceivably end short of the year 2069 or else terminate with our ignominious deaths, whichever came first.

  But while all these worries were running through my head, no such trepidations appeared to preoccupy my passenger. Stan was too excited at the return of his luscious supersize squeeze to be bothered with mere business matters. Not for the first time, I envied his ability both to focus on what mattered and to ignore the rest.

  When I picked him up at our condo, he had simply said, “How’d it go?”

  “It went okay. You are one lucky son of a bitch, you know. Not only because it looks like you got away clean with this breakup, but also because a woman like Rosa ever loved you in the first place.”

  Stan seemed genuinely chagrined, at least in some small measure. “I know, I know. What can I say? I never claimed to be some paragon of virtue. Thanks for handling it. I owe you one.”

  “Don’t think I won’t collect someday.”

  Now, as I merged onto the airport access road, this recent crisis was evidently all forgotten, disposed of, not to be dwelt upon. His was an attitude I wished I could cultivate.

  “You think Sandy’ll dig this perfume, Glen?”

  Stan had brought along the bottle of fake Hermès perfume intended for her. “Sure, if she likes smelling the way some Chinese deputy factory manager figured Hermès ought to smell.”

  “Now you’re just trying to piss me off. Besides, this stuff doesn’t come from China. Gunther told me it’s from India.”

  “Oh, well, then, it’s sure to do the trick. It’s the next best thing to building her the Taj Mahal.”

  Out of the car, Stan practically galloped into the reception area, even though Sandy’s flight from Caboverde wasn’t scheduled to arrive for another forty minutes. He had to have a drink at the schmaltzy franchised saloon to s
teady himself. Then, finally, Sandralene was coming through the exit, her face lit up with anticipation and joy.

  Stan swept her up off the floor. With her right foot dangling a few inches above the carpet, she wrapped her mighty left leg halfway around his waist. They mashed their faces together with the force of particles colliding at CERN. I expected the sprinkler system to go off and the airport security guards to converge. Images from a college course on mythology swarmed unbidden into my mind’s eye. The occasion demanded mythic associations: women turned into trees or waterfalls, men into stags, giant swans thrusting between parted thighs.

  The clinch ended, and I got some of the fallout. Being hugged by Sandralene Parmalee was like being crushed in the embrace of the Greek earth goddess herself.

  “Glen! It’s so good to be back and see you again!”

  But then she did something strange. She put me at arm’s length and looked at me soberly, as if she had just encountered me on the wrong side of the ICU door.

  “You’re okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay. Except for being a little keyed up about tomorrow.”

  She said nothing further, and Stan, putting his arm around her waist, said, “Let’s get home.”

  Stan opened the rear door of the Lexus for Sandralene, then made as if to join her in the back seat.

  “Oh, come on, you’re not going to have me play chauffeur!”

  “Just make like Kato and drive.”

  By the time I pulled into the condo parking lot, you could have bottled the pheromone fog in the car and sold it as a Viagra substitute. It was evident that whatever of the Rosa Luckman infidelity Sandralene might have been privy to had proved insufficient to crack the foundations of the Hasso-Parmalee entente.

  Inside the apartment, I resigned myself to a long stint in the relatively cloistered confines of the laundry room.

  * * *

  The next morning, Stan and I mustered at the breakfast table before the clock showed 8:00 a.m. Sandy stayed abed. Stan was still in a pair of garishly striped pajamas. I had already shaved, showered, and donned my best suit.

  “Let’s hustle,” I said. “Smalley and Crespo expect us to meet them at the factory at ten. Chantal and Les are escorting them. Do you think I should call Luckman? Nah, what am I thinking? He probably didn’t even sleep last night, he’s so excited. And anyhow, Caleb will make sure he gets there.”

  Stan rubbed his face, then downed about eight ounces of black coffee. “All right, all right,” he groaned. “Let a guy get his head together first.” And off he shambled like a lazy teenage woolly mammoth.

  While Stan was in the shower and I was trying to divert myself with the Weather Channel, Sandralene emerged. Barefoot, clad in black leggings and an oversize sweatshirt featuring the logo of our local minor-league team, the Bandits, she looked preoccupied, even worried.

  “You didn’t hear from Nellie this morning yet?”

  “No—not in about a day, in fact,” I said, clicking off the TV. But I know she’s really busy. Why?”

  “When I was leaving, she promised me she would call you.”

  “Any special reason?”

  Sandy sat down beside me on the couch. “Glen, I thought Nellie should tell you, which is why I haven’t said anything yet. But it doesn’t look like she’s going to keep her promise to me, so I have to let you know. It’s the only right thing to do.”

  I had no inkling of what Sandy was about to say, only that it probably wasn’t good. “Let me know what?”

  “Nellie is having an affair. That’s why I came home early. I didn’t like being part of it anymore. It made me feel sad and cheap and anxious, and unfair to you, so I left.”

  I tried to laugh it off. “An affair? Sure, with her importing company. I am kind of jealous of all the time she spends on it.”

  Resting her hand on my wrist, Sandy said, “No, Glen, it’s more than that. She’s screwing this guy there. Onésimo Dambara. You know him.”

  Now my brain was whirling like one of those playground roundabouts, the steel platters with rails that kids spin up to dizzying rates by sheer muscle power. And just like a kid who tries to stop or slow the disc’s momentum, I could feel my mental muscles stretching as I tried to bring my chaotic thoughts to some steady state. Onésimo Dambara? Who the hell …

  And then memory supplied a face and job title to go with the name.

  Nellie was two-timing me with the manager of a third world pudding factory?

  38

  Sandralene did not respond to my disbelief with any words. She just nodded, continuing to look sad and serious as I staggered under the weight of this shocking news.

  Part of me refused to believe that Nellie would stray from the implicitly monogamous relationship we had established since we first got together during the Nancarrow caper. But another, more pragmatic part knew that such an event could happen all too plausibly. Nellie was no plaster saint. She had needs, as I well knew, and was alone in a distant country—a place that, moreover, also provided familiar cultural touchstones that would have disarmed her traveler’s wariness. And even when she had been home recently, I had been too immersed in this Luckman scam to lavish on her all the attention she needed and deserved. Mentally I cataloged all the times her enthusiastic stories about goings-on with Tartaruga Verde Importing had elicited from me only a grunt or a nod or a few blasé words of encouragement. I hadn’t even gone with her to the bank to offer support when she was applying for her line of credit! What a jerk I had been!

  And yet, even this damning list of lover’s slights seemed insufficient to propel her into someone else’s arms. There had to be something else at the root of this astonishing development.

  I regarded Sandy’s gorgeous worried face, framed by the cascade of undulant black hair, with a probing look that must have hit home somehow, because she averted her eyes from mine.

  “Sandy, what happened over there to make Nellie take up with this Dambara guy?”

  “I don’t know, exactly …”

  “C’mon, just tell me.”

  Sandy started to sniffle. “It’s all my fault, Glen! I let her know what you and Stan are actually up to!”

  To figure out what Sandy’s confession meant, I had to play back all the lies I had told everyone recently.

  “Nellie still thought Stan and I were working at a car transport job? And you told her what we were really up to?”

  “It just came out. I thought she already knew!” she wailed, and then the tears began in earnest.

  Nellie had never been part of the criminal milieu the way Stan, Sandy, and I were. An innocent kid from Nowheresville, with a respectable, conventional family, she had been just an unwitting pawn in the whole Nancarrow takedown. And in fact, when she discovered the true extent of our duplicity, she had deliberately but unthinkingly collapsed the whole structure around our ears in a near-fatal disaster. Afterward, it took many apologies, promises, and mea culpas for me to win back her trust. And I seemed to recall that somewhere in that outpouring of appeasement and self-abasement, I may have let slip a pledge to hew to the straight and narrow for the rest of my days.

  And so, naturally, upon learning the awful and insulting truth that I had been lying to her for weeks, and that the reason for those lies was that Stan and I had embarked on another dicey voyage down the shoal-ridden coast of Scamolia, she had sought out comfort and consolation where she could find it. That I would have told her everything once we were filthy rich was not something she could know, and thus could not have come into play as exculpatory evidence of my loving good intentions.

  I could just see her sorrowfully unburdening herself over drinks to that opportunistic cocksman Onésimo Dambara—a sympathetic fellow Caboverdean, handsome in his rough-hewn way but older even than I! She had confided in him strictly in the spirit of blowing off steam after work, and he, of course, twisted the occas
ion to his own loathsome horndog purposes. And then Nellie, in her stubborn and perhaps overly bighearted, simpatico way, would have maintained the relationship, not wanting to rudely cut Dambara off, and maybe even with a subliminal desire to repay me for my lies.

  Sandy continued to sniffle, using the sleeve of Stan’s sweatshirt as a handkerchief.

  “Couldn’t you have snapped her out of it, made her see how I was just doing what I thought best for everyone? You know I was only trying to spare her from worry and keep her from screwing the deal somehow with an excess of morals and such.”

  “I know all that, Glen. And I tried; I really did! But she was really angry and wouldn’t listen!”

  At this point, Stan emerged from the bathroom, clad in just a towel snugged around his waist.

  “Hey, why are you making my woman cry?”

  “Oh, put a sock in it,” I said. “She’s making herself cry.”

  I explained the whole deal, Stan nodding sagely as I talked.

  “So that’s why my poor baby sounded so freaky on the phone. She just can’t stand to see anybody hurting. What a special gal she is!”

  Stan walked over and planted a kiss atop Sandy’s head. She turned her face upward to receive another on the lips. Having mollified Sandy, my partner turned his attention back to me. “Oh, well, you are truly boned now. Sorry, bro. Sometimes, things just shake out that way.”

  I stood up decisively, full of resolve. I was already up in the skies and halfway to Praia, Santiago, Cape Verde, mentally rehearsing my soothing speeches. “I have to go to her and make this right.”

  “What, now? On the day of the demo?”

  I sat down again, my resolve temporarily shoved onto a stone-cold back burner. “Oh, shit no, of course not. But as soon as possible. Whatever happens today, good or bad, you are going to have to take over the reins, Stan, even if only for a little while. That’s the favor you said you owed me, and I’m calling it in now.”