Those little girls come to Derrick easy. He empties his mind and lets their faces flow into him, driven through the vacuum by the thin electric pulse of the pacemaker, to his sap and pliers. He works first on Anderson’s right hand and then his face. Works hard. And Anderson says nothing. Or almost nothing. He’s just a man, after all, he can’t control the grunts and moans, the occasional yelp.
And then, when Derrick stops for his next hit of cocaine, his hands slick and beaten bruised, Anderson slurs the same question he’d asked earlier, “What time is it?” He’s holding his hand in his lap, a basket of splintered bone and torn flesh.
Derrick has removed his watch and laid it on the cot. He picks it up and squints at it. “It’s a little after twelve,” he says, though he has trouble believing that it can really be that early.
Anderson’s face looks like it had the skin peeled off it and the flesh underneath beaten with the claw end of a hammer. His chest starts to throb, like he’s choking, and there’s a hoarse, locomotive grunting coming from somewhere in the ruin of his face, that Derrick finally realizes is a laugh.
Then he says one word to Derrick. Just one word. A name.
Derrick abominates corruption like he abominates mediocrity. Even the whores that he can’t help visiting, he pays for out of his policeman’s salary. And if he ever had any doubts about the extent of Cirillo’s corruption, the size of his Georgian home in Mount Auburn takes care of them. Derrick bypasses the front door and slips down the bushes and around the house. He finds the back door, and, as expected, it’s been crow-barred. Derrick gives the door a gentle shove and slides inside.
It’s in the living room he finds Cirillo’s wife. She was a wiry woman in her fifties, good looking enough. Now she’s sprawled akimbo across the couch with her robe hanging open and her head all but split in half by point-blank gunshots. Derrick lines up in front of her, making a guess as to where the shooter would have stood, and looks to his right. There, brass glinting against the wall, three empty casings. Derrick pockets them and moves into the front hallway, then up the stairs.
Lou’s in the master bedroom, holding Derrick’s 1911 between her knees. She’s curled up in a reading chair by the window, her lips pulled back from her teeth. Derrick feels that hollow spot in his chest swell when he sees the gap between her front teeth. He resists a hard urge to take her face in his hands and kiss it. “Put the gun down,” he says.
“I’m shot,” she rasps. “There ain’t nothing you can do to scare me, pig.”
Derrick spots blood leaking out of a hole over the top of her left breast. “He got you in the tit?”
She bites her lip against the pain, her chin trembles.
“Well, drop that fucking gun before I put a hole in your other one,” he says.
She lets the gun fall on the floor. Then she puts her hand on the bullet hole and takes it away, as if she can’t quite believe that its real, being shot. She winces, blood stringing between her fingers and shirt.
Derrick picks up the gun. He drops the magazine, checks it, and slams it back in his pistol. Then he eyes her wound. “Keep pressure on it,” he says. “If you bleed everywhere, you ain’t gonna leave me no choice but to shoot you.” He looks around the room. “Where is he?”
She juts her chin at the bed. Then her eyeballs flicker up in her head.
Cirillo is wearing nothing but a white T-shirt, his cock red and half erect under the purplish swell of his stomach. He’s holding a full-size Colt .45 1911 of his own, standard issue in World War II as well as Vietnam. Lou only shot him once, but it was a good one, right through the nose. Derrick estimates the angle and finds the brass casing from her round. It looks like Cirillo returned fire in a death reflex, his gun almost dead sideways in his hand. Derrick finds the casing in the bedding.
Without the brass casings the forensic officers won’t be able to match the pistols’ firing pins to the rounds fired. Derrick takes Cirillo’s gun out of his hand, field strips it, extracts the barrel, then does the same to his own gun. Then he trades barrels, reassembles them, and puts Cirillo’s gun back in his hand. If forensics can match the rifling of the barrel to the bullets, they’ll now all come from the gun in Cirillo’s hand.
He looks the crime scene over. It’s a murder-suicide now. There’ll be the missing casings, sure, and there’ll be plenty more problems as the police go through the scene. But murder-suicide will be the easiest explanation, and the rest’ll be chalked up to inexperienced investigators. After the riot, neither the district attorney nor the chief of police are going to hurt themselves trying to find out who killed the dumb sonofabitch.
Lou’s passed out in the chair. Derrick grabs her up and slings her over his shoulder. She shudders, mumbles. He carries her out as gently as he can.
When she comes awake, she tries to move her arms first, and then her head. But she can’t. Her black eyes go wild like a captured bat, fluttering around the room. Then they land on Derrick. “Oh, Jesus,” she tries to say, but she chokes on the blood overflowing in her mouth. “What are you going to do to me?”
“You doped me,” Derrick says, trying not to hide in the shadows left by the kerosene lantern he’s hung on a nail in the wall. He’s got her tied to a kitchen table, deep in one of Over-The-Rhine’s Victorian ruins. “You conned me and you doped me.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she says, “It hurts.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Derrick says. “But first I want to tell you what you did. You can just nod along.”
Her eyes roll back in her head and her lips drain of blood, and Derrick thinks for a second that she might lose consciousness, but she returns, nodding.
“Down in niggertown, Cirillo’s like the white devil, ain’t he? He rousts you, abuses you, beats you. Steals all your dope and takes his kickbacks in money and nigger pussy.”
She nods.
“You and the vet, Everette Anderson, you figured you’d get rid of him?”
She nods.
“You set me up for the suspension. That was one of your people? You knew Cirillo hated my guts, so you gave him an excuse to discipline me. To give me a motive.”
She nods.
“And while you were doping me so you could steal my gun, Everette Anderson was organizing that riot. Then him and a couple of your Fanon-toting niggers drove me to riot central. You figured even if I survived, I’d be out of my head when I finally surfaced. And by that time the police would already have my gun.”
She nods.
“It’s so cockamamie it just might’ve worked,” Derrick says. “The only place you fucked up was in thinking any little nigger riot could kill me. I’ve worked real war. There is no war here.”
She spits blood at him, but she doesn’t have the force. It falls back on her face, splattering all over her cheeks and mouth. “It’s war to us” she says.
Derrick pulls out his pliers and a knife. Then he finds his syringe. It’s taken more time and money than he should have spent to come up with that loaded syringe.
She blinks in pain.
“I can’t leave my bullet in you,” he says. And he sees himself in the curvature of her iris. Black and hoary and somehow pitiful in the greatcoat, like a small and terrified boy playing at war. He holds up the syringe. “This is for the pain,” he says stupidly.
And he has no idea how she gets her hand free. Nor where she’d hidden the little .25 pocket pistol. But she thrusts it right into his stomach and pulls the trigger until the slide jams against his flesh.
Derrick has no way of telling how long its been when he wakes into the complete blackness of the boarded up room, the camping lantern long extinguished. Nor how long he sits against the wall, listening to the creaking of the building around him, the skittering of animal feet. He coughs blood into his fist and then makes the mistake of reaching down to the horrorshow at his lower abdomen.
And then he’s gone again.
When Derrick returned from Vietnam there were days he would lay on his bed in the cabin sunu
p to sundown, drinking bourbon and watching shadows slide down the walls. His father could understand the trauma of war, even seemed hopeful of it, but Derrick allowed of no trauma. He lay on his bed because there was nothing for which to move, and he drank bourbon because he liked to.
Which lasted exactly two weeks. Until a dinner of pork chops, which his father had cooked in an iron skillet, wearing one of his gray department store suits with a dish towel draped over his shoulder, where he said to Derrick, “You are not the first young man to return from war.”
Derrick was barefoot in jeans and a tattered undershirt, hacking a pork chop into chunks and swallowing them whole. He grinned up at his father without answering.
His father’s mustache raised, and then dropped. And then raised again. “This,” he said, and stood and reached for a volume on the shelf.
A younger Derrick probably would have removed one of the many guns on the walls and shot the old man in the face. But it turned out that war had changed Derrick some. So, when he quit laughing, he walked back into his bedroom and packed his few things into a duffel bag.
This time, Derrick makes himself move. He drags himself half upright and lights the lantern. Then he stands like that for a while, hunched over, until he can work up the strength to unscrew the can of gasoline he’d brought with him and kick it over.
He makes it out into the street before the whole building catches afire, but he makes it no further than the street before the billowing smoke opens a hollow around him and swallows him whole.
And then he dreams. He dreams of Lou, of the gap in her teeth, of her voice speaking gently to him from above. He dreams that he’s chasing her through the narrow alleys of Over-The-Rhine, chasing her to retrieve his bullet, which he knows she’ll always carry inside her. But he also knows in his dream, just as he will know later in waking life, that he’ll never catch her.
He dreams for what seems like days, and probably is. He dreams right up until he wakes up in the hospital bed, howling.
Berlin: Two Days in June
Rick Dakan
“But Rosa Luxemburg would meet with Karl Liebknecht right here. In the apartment upstairs. This was a café then,” the old man insisted to me. I didn’t doubt him, but I also didn’t know what he was talking about.
“That’s really interesting,” I said, showing him my phone’s screen again. “Our app allows you to customize your ads to suit both new and existing customers. Coupons. Twitter notifications. Special events. Anything you want.”
He looked down at the phone, confusion on his face. He was in his sixties, gray and wiry with a full head of silver hair and thick, black-rimmed bifocals. “I used to have some letters,” he said, looking up from my phone to me. “They were my father’s, but I haven’t seen them since the nineties. I think my daughter might know where they are. Maybe my niece?”
“With our free trial week, you can explore all your options for both bringing in new customers and integrating your mobile, online, and brick-and-mortar advertising streams,” I went on, sticking to the script. I thought this old guy and his antique store full of genuine and replica East German artifacts was a lost cause. Antiques and mobile phone-based augmented reality sales tools probably didn’t mix.
“My neighbor, Siebert over across the street, he told me I needed historical documentation to be included in this phone thing,” the man said, still looking confused. “Are you saying that’s not the case?”
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head and smiling. “Of course not. All you need to do is sign up. We just need a bank account number, which we won’t charge for a month, and you can get started right away.”
He leaned over, peering close at my phone, lifting his glasses and putting the screen to within just centimeters of his left eye. “This is not the Berlin City History Layer?” he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about. “This is ThriftyCityBerlin. com,” I said for the third time since I’d walked through the door ten minutes earlier. “Part of the worldwide ThriftyCity tourist app network. We’re the world’s fastest growing location-based couponing system, with thirty-seven cities worldwide and more added every month.” I spun out the spiel slowly, concentrating on my German pronunciation, not trusting that he understood everything through my American accent.
He pursed his lips and wrinkled his nose, staring at me. Then he frowned and shook his head and I knew I’d lost. Damn. I was already seventeen minutes and two sales behind schedule and it wasn’t even noon. “No, no, this isn’t the one I want my store in. I need to be listed with Berlin City History. If I find that letter, I can e-mail a picture of it to you. That will be proof enough of our historical importance, yes?”
It took me seven more precious minutes to explain to him that I couldn’t help him, that I had nothing to do with Berlin City History, whatever that was, and to leave him my card. I stepped back out the front door and into the warm summer light of Frankfurter Tor. The late morning traffic in the roundabout provided a dull roar as background music to my frustrated mood. I pulled up the Sales Tracking app on my phone and checked out of the antique store, punching the “No Sale” button with an angry tap.
My next sales call was three hundred meters away, down Karl Marx Allee, on the left. I shuffled forward, bringing up the phone’s Marketplace app and speaking slowly into the microphone, “Berlin City History Layer,” taking care to pronounce the German as precisely as possible. Like the antique store owner, I used the English word “layer” The app came up first on the list, its icon a stereotypical image of the Brandenburg Gate superimposed over a German flag. It cost 3 euros, but it was a company phone and I figured I could justify the expense (as I would definitely have to do) as opposition research. It was a big one, over a gig, and I slipped the phone into my shirt’s breast pocket while it downloaded.
Karl Marx Allee was maybe the widest street I’d ever been on, certainly the widest in Berlin. Lined on both sides with massive, vaguely art-deco style buildings, it had been built as the showcase for East Germany’s greatness, a boulevard to rival the Champs Elysees. Having been to Paris, this didn’t come close, but it had a certain grandeur to it. Did it look this way when my dad had been in Berlin? Dad had left when he was only three years old, so he’d never shared any real memories of life in Berlin sixty years ago. And oma had died before I was born, just a few years after mom and dad moved from Heidelberg to St. Louis, but I bet she’d walked this street at some point in her life, back when these hulking examples of model modernity had been the pride of East Germany.
I was within ten meters of my destination, an ice cream shop which, judging from all the shiny new plastic, definitely hadn’t been here in oma’s day when my phone started vibrating against my nipple, a quick double-pulse that signified a text message. Only one person that could be. I pulled out the phone to look at my the message from my boss.
Ned: No sale again.
His text was in English, which made sense since he was in Philadelphia and, apparently, up very early. Ned was a very hands-on manager, surprisingly so given half his work force was on the other side of the Atlantic, spread out across a dozen different countries.
“Nope, wants to be on a competing service,” I dictated back to him.
Ned: Wants to be? Already is??
“Wants to be. Berlin City History Layer. I’m downloading it now.”
Ned: Googling it now.
Ned: Okay, this is history guide stuff. Not sales. Not coupons.
Ned: How did you not close this?
I took a breath. I didn’t need this hectoring right now. “I’ll hit him back tomorrow.”
Ned: You have a full day tomorrow.
Ned: Check your schedule.
I knew I had a full day tomorrow, and I knew Ned knew I knew. He’d only tell me to check it if something had changed. I pulled up the Sales Control app and, lo and behold, my schedule had gotten even fuller. There were five new sales calls added to the twenty I already knew about. “Fuck you, Ned,” I s
aid to Karl Marx Allee, but not to my phone.
To the phone I said the only thing I could say, “Okay, got it.” Ned didn’t reply. He’d made his point. His many points. The same points as always—he was watching, I was behind. Sell, sell, sell.
The history app had finished loading, so I launched it, which brought up a dense block of German text constituting the software’s End User License Agreement. My spoken German, honed by summers spent with mom and her family in the South, was decent, but reading was still a chore. I always took care to make sure my Sales Targets here didn’t see me sounding out the bigger words, something I didn’t need Ned to tell me was unprofessional and a sales-killer. I touched accept, got another block of Germanic legalese and hit accept again. One more time and I was done, or so I thought. Then the damn thing started importing “Personalized User Experience Data,” and I couldn’t stand around waiting for it.
I let it do its thing in the background while I brought up Thrifty City Berlin, and the sample layer I’d put together for Marx Eis, the Communist-kitsch ice cream parlor with flavors named after Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, and Engels. I didn’t know a thing about Engels, except that his flavor was mint chocolate, but I’d mocked up a two-for-one coupon in his name. I went in, all smiles and “guten morgens” and came out thirty-one minutes later with a successful close. The young Danish couple who owned the place loved the idea.
My phone emitted a two-tone ping I’d never heard before. Not a congratulatory text from Ned of course, that didn’t happen. It was the Berlin City History app telling me it was finally ready for action. I held it up and watched the screen as it transformed the sunshine-drenched modern Karl Marx Allee into a black-and-white, sixty-year-old Stalin Allee, complete with a parade of Soviet Tanks down the middle of the street. It was the best Augmented Reality layer I’d ever seen. I slowly turned in place, scanning all up and down the broad boulevard. They’d modeled every building, and I was surprised to see how much was the same. Trees and signs and kiosks were different of course, but the imposing architecture remained, looking more imposing in black and white.
Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! Page 25