by Robert White
“My father used to quote Shakespeare,” I said. “‘As flies are to wanton boys we are to the gods. They kill us for their sport.’” Pippin had asked me that, too. Odd.
“Maybe we weren’t the best Catholics. David and I were making a good life, we had Brandi to think of, our careers. The money was good. It makes you...”
She paused. I waited for her to find the words for it, whatever it was.
“It makes you forget,” she said finally, happy with the choice. “It’s like being awake and asleep at the same time. But time passes, you grow older. Unfortunately, not always wiser.”
She gave me another quick smile but it wasn’t like the practiced one; it was more a throwback to one she might have used before her professional career taught her to hide emotion, lower her voice to a man’s pitch.
“I know something about forgetting,” I said. “My wife, that is, my ex-wife, said I was very good at it.”
“My husband reads the bible. Maybe it’s overcompensation for what he has to do on his job, but he’s a very good, kind man. He gave me this for you. Read it later, please.”
She handed me a slip of paper and turned around and started walking back. I watched her for a while and then I cut across a field behind Burger King to the rear of my motel.
The semis passed close enough to give me the acrid whiff of heated diesel fuel. The meadow was full of Queen-Ann’s-Lace and Monarchs delaying their trip to Mexico for the abundance of flowers. The newspaper said honey bees were all dying of a hive disorder; the monarch butterflies were being killed off by pollution.
Most of the poplars that survived the state’s periodic road widening efforts were stunted from the blunt force of sleety winter winds banging into them. They weren’t as striking to the eye as the firs and spruce that made a phalanx at the edges of the snow fences but there were many kinds in one section. Someone a long time ago must have loved that tree. I saw some blacks near a balsam, a few gray and, for this northern climate, the rare Lombardy. Near it a small stand of swamp cottonwoods and some silver and yellow poplars grew wild.
Maybe I was mistaken from the distance, but it looked to me as if that old farmer, whoever he was, had planted a single Balm-of-Gilead in their midst. Before I had gone ten feet, my Salvation Army shoes were soaked. My pant legs were sodden and dusted with pollen. I had an urge to make a bouquet of the painted trillium. The white clusters beside the ditches at the bottom of the ravine were all in bloom: Lizard’s Tail, Canada Mayflower, and False Solomon’s Seal. I always liked weeds.
Up in my room I thought about Alicia. The old man’s ghost, however, was nodding in approval at me because I had beaten the polygraph.
I opened the folded paper and read:
Then the young man answered, ‘I have heard, Brother Azarias, that this maid hath been given to seven men, who all died in the marriage chamber.’ Because that she had been married to seven husbands, whom Asmodeus the evil spirit had killed before they had lain with her.
– Book of Tobit
I had gone through a phase of religious reading during one of my seasons on the Great Lakes as a deckhand, but the passage mystified me. Brandi was the maid and Calderone clearly usurped the demon’s role, but was I Brother Azarias or Raphael in disguise? The only thing I ever had in common with an archangel was the fact that I was sent on missions by a much stronger force, far greater in power than mine and downright malevolent when disobeyed.
#31
I found a slip of paper under my door when I got back. The handwriting was feminine with childish whorls and loops, although the message wasn’t. It was written in pencil, unsigned, on the back of a packing slip sent to the motel:
Your brother for the money
There was also a telephone message from Rick saying I should thank Augie for talking him out of filing criminal charges against me. He cursed me out, but that was being stoned with popcorn. The Big Crapshooter Who Rules the Board must have found it amusing to extricate me from one dangerous enterprise while dipping me headfirst into another. I didn’t understand Marija’s note – who else? – because my brother should have been in New York City by nightfall yesterday. Was Pippin fishing with me as bait?
I sat down on the bed and rubbed my temples and tried to think. I wanted another tête-à-tête with Randall Calderone about as much as I wanted a hot lead enema. My shoulder burned where Marija’s teeth marks had raised the flesh into an oozing circular welt. Nothing dirtier than a human mouth, and I made a mental note to get a tetanus before it turned septic.
I had enough money stashed in my sneakers to put all this behind me. I could leave scot-free, get on a Greyhound, pick a new spot on the map. I had gone soft during those nine years of marriage and lost my edge. The trouble was, much as I hated to admit it, I liked being another Northtown drone, an ordinary, tax-paying nobody.
But every time I told myself Carlos was long gone, that infallible dread in the pit of my stomach told me the opposite. The whole premise he wouldn’t run for cover was so stupid and incredible – and that’s what made it believable.
It was time for me to stop playing the tethered goat waiting to get eaten by the wolf. I left a message for Pippin and asked him to call me back.
Five minutes later, he called. I picked up on the first ring and put a husky dip in my voice. “Agent Pippin, you’re like a lot of intelligent people I’ve met in my travels. You’re intensely stupid.”
“Whoa, slow down, Trichaud. What are you talking about?”
“You won’t catch Calderone by watching me twenty-four, seven,” I said.
“Who says I’m watching you?”
“If I flipped this curtain, would I see the one guy in the Blazer, and the other one who followed us this morning, the one in the tan Datsun behind Burger King? I noticed a home decorating van in the lot. I suppose that’s you.”
“What do you want, Trichaud?”
“You’re not thinking like him and if you’re going to find him, you have to try to do that.”
“And you know how to do that?”
“He thinks in capital letters.”
“Explain.”
“I received a note this morning.”
“God damn it, I’m coming up.”
#32
“It’s open,” I said.
He came in as dapper and nattily dressed as ever despite being on a stakeout. I wondered how much luggage he traveled with.
“Was Alicia your idea?”
“What do you think, Jack?”
“Was she wired?”
He looked at me and shrugged. “She wouldn’t allow it,” he said. “I don’t know what evil spell you’ve cast on that woman-”
“Did you get anything? I mean from a guy with a long-range mic or anything?”
“You mean anything I can use in court? You already know the answer to that one. That’s why you stood in the middle of that overpass, isn’t it? Our guy in Burger King was zeroed on your mug but he said the traffic noise was deafening.”
“So how did Marija get under my door with all your surveillance?”
“She didn’t. You have any idea how many neo-Nazi organizations are holed up in this raggedy-assed state?”
“Calderone is Aryan Brotherhood,” I said. “I thought their ideology went into their tattoos and the rest was extortion and being a silent partner in running prisons for the US government.”
“They might not be big on reading Nietzsche during long winter nights but they work with anybody, and they’re not just prisons,” Pippin said. “Get to the point, Jack.”
“Read this,” I said and handed him the note.
Pippin eyeballed my room. “Could have been a maid whose old man is locked up and somebody put the arm on him so he calls her and tells her to pick up the note at point A and slip it under your door.”
“So he just looked into his little black book and found a name who owned a deserted farm house?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Jack.”
“But
that’s how he got the guns,” I said.
“DEA’s looking into it. They’re tracing them now.”
“You don’t know much, do you, Pippin?”
“We’ll check the motel surveillance tape, OK? The cameras don’t pan so we don’t see far from the elevators. You think some greasy-looking biker with a swastika on his forehead is going to come walking right up to your door?”
“Let me help you,” I said.
“I don’t work with criminals, I put them in jail.”
He slammed the door and took the note with him. He never asked me what it meant. I was the one underestimating him.
#33
I called Stevie’s cab company but didn’t ask for her. When a car with the same livery showed up outside the lobby and gave a triple honk I walked nonchalantly to it and smiled for all the CCTV lenses. My heart was racing and my esophagus burned from acid reflux. I awoke from a nap that had left me feeling sticky and tense. Alicia’s words still haunted me.
I threw the bag in and asked him, “Is Stevie working now?”
“Naw,” he said. “Stupid bitch came into some money and got her ass all wasted. Didn’t show up for her shift two days straight. They canned her.”
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Said she found it in a dumpster, haw,” he snorted. “Can you believe that shit? The fat dyke. So where we goin’, buddy?”
I told the driver to take me into town but to take the first exit from the interstate north where I had him wait for me in front of the DYI. I threw my purchases inside and climbed in.
He drove fast without my prompting. Beside us the Northtown River flowed along in swirls before it flattened out into the brown chemical murk that eddied back and forth between the mouth of the lake and the docks of the marinas. My bespectacled driver happily informed me he was addicted to internet pornography and had married a Filipina mail-order bride from one of his web sites.
I had a gut-churning fear that, at the end of all this, no matter what I did to avoid it, I was going to confront a really vicious dog guarding the mouth of hell. Calderone didn’t have three heads, but he used the two he had with a violence and fearlessness I had witnessed too often.
The cabbie let me off in front of the house. Sarah and her new beau were standing on the porch with grocery bags in their hands; she fiddled one-handedly with the key. As I approached the steps, she turned around to see me. The words she formed were like an exaggeration of an opera singer’s pear-shaped notes: Oh shit.
“Jack, I don’t want any trouble,” she said.
“Hello, Sarah,” I said.
I pressed the small device into her hand while her boyfriend concentrated on the bag in my other hand as if I were about to pull an Uzi out of it. She looked at me intensely but didn’t betray me. I saw her close her hand around it.
I said, “I need a few tools from the garage, Sarah.”
“There’s a new lock on it,” she said.
“Not a problem,” I said and drew a crowbar out of the bag.
“Let him in with the key, hon,” she said.
Then she muttered something under her breath about my timing and something else I didn’t catch, but I inferred she wanted him to keep an eye on me. In less than two weeks, I had gone from total obscurity to being one of the most watched men in Northeastern Ohio. The Greeks were fond of irony but I was eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
As soon as she was inside the house, I said, “My name’s Jack,” and proffered my hand. He came down the steps, an owner’s shuffle that matched the sneer on his face.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I walked behind him up the driveway. An effort had been made to clean up some of the damage to the flower gardens.
He undid the lock and stepped aside. “Take what you need and get out.”
I walked in and smelled that familiar odor of death. I went to the rain barrel with the tool handles jutting out like giant toothpicks from a black mouth. I reached in and pulled out the duffel bag. It felt like the right weight.
“I saw your punching bag in the basement,” he said.
“Keep it,” I said. “I’m first among equals when it comes to hitting a bag that didn’t hit back.”
“Next time you come around here without my permission, I’ll show you something that does hit back,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ll be sure to ask permission.”
He wasn’t even a tiny blip on my screen so it was something of a surprise to realize he loathed me enough to want to pick a fight with me. My mind was keyed to an airbus named Calderone; Sarah’s new man was one of those balsa-wood gliders I used to buy with a quarter. Sarah was standing out front waiting for me.
Before I walked away, I thought I saw a look of concern on her face. “You look terrible, Jack,” she said. I kept walking down the sidewalk, a pair of heavy bags looped over each shoulder.
I walked down to the beach and found a payphone near the concession stand the vandals hadn’t wrecked yet. Since they all had cell phones anyway, that kind of mischief lost some of its appeal. Their preferred means of annoying the bourgeoisie escalated to garage thefts, spray painting houses, and tipping over memorials to fallen soldiers.
I dialed the number Stevie gave me, and waited while it went through a dozen rings. No answer. I hung up.
The jungle gym for the little kids was deserted. The wooden walkway extending from the tawny brick concession stand to the shoreline was empty of people. Far off near the shore on the private side, I saw a man walking a pair of German shepherds. The city workers hadn’t gotten round to rolling up the beach for the winter season. It was too soon after Labor Day, and the water would still be around seventy degrees.
I had a crazy urge to run down the boardwalk and dive headfirst into the breakers. Let the waves roll me around and toss me wherever they wanted.
I dialed the number again and this time I heard her scratchy smoker’s voice ask, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” I said.
“Like, who the fuck’s you?”
“The guy that owes you a lot of money,” I said. “The same one that wants to give you more money for a few days of driving.”
“Where youse at, Jack?”
I told her. She said she’d meet me in twenty minutes. I told her the name of a fish restaurant near the beach where Sarah always ordered the yellow perch.
“Give me a half hour,” I said. “There’s something I have to do first.”
After secreting the bag back into its tidy fissure in the breakwall, I walked back up the hill, sweating hard now, and my shoulder bloody and raw from the constant rubbing. If they were ringing the phone off the hook back at the motel, it could work against Carlos – if they even had him. I had the money and they had Carlos, and I had only just one card to play and nothing to bluff with. I had paid up before and they would reason I’d pay up again. People like me always paid up.
#34
Marija’s phone message on my motel phone was two parts saccharine, one part menace. It chilled me to recollect her back at the farmhouse when Tanya was breathing her last. The woman’s heart for duplicity would have served her well in the social salons of Louis XIV.
I screened it the way those guys in the van would. Except for linking me to a man implicated in a recent bank robbery, and blood-related to another for the same, and both of them wanted for questioning in the kidnapping-murder of a Youngstown businessman, I was banking on Pippin not taking that tape to a grand jury and getting an indictment on me. The subtext of her message was clear – same booth, Oak Room, same time as before, when they had run me through my drunken paces. She ended it with a sultry “Ciao!” that made me want to smash her nose into her lovely face with a ball-peen hammer.
The first job was to evade my watchers and for that I would need Stevie’s help. I had paid her and then given her the remainder of my money for a week’s hire.
She was happy to have it in the bundles of small denominations I laid in her lap
. She held it to her nose. “Wowie, kazowie, homo pocus, motherfucker. Didja pull this out some old man’s ass crack?”
“His swimming pool, actually,” I said. She dropped me at the motel.
“It stinks but sure tastes good,” she said and lapped her silver tongue stud against a wad of the dirty bills.
“Don’t get high tonight, Stevie. I’m going to need you,” I said.
“Don’t you worry about me, man. You keep doing me right, I’ll do you right.”
After we synced watches, she drove off squealing tires. I had a brief pang of conscience for not telling her very much this time either. She was unaware of the danger of being in too close proximity to me. I was turning into my father: anybody who stooped for a blood-stained dollar deserved whatever happened. If she followed my instructions for picking me up at the spot tonight and was half as good as her brag about her driving skills, I might make the meeting without my escorts.
I paced the floor of my room. In truth, Calderone frightened me; the grotesque image of heads dumped out of a sack and lined up on a bar was the work of a man who had no boundaries and knew no fear. If they had an acoustical mic on the window pane, they’d pick up the pay-per-view sounds of soft porn and not the shuffling of my feet wearing a path in the carpet, too nerve-shot to sleep.
I splashed some water on my face and dressed in dark clothes beneath cargo pants and a white shirt. Pippin’s men wouldn’t need night-vision goggles to keep me in view. I practically glowed in the dark. I had a cheap pair of deck shoes with some good tread that would keep me from slip-sliding all the way down the grassy slope into a ravine at the bottom of the interstate exit.
I checked the time and left my room. I took the steps down instead of the elevator and walked out into the far back lot. I kept my hands in my pockets and slowed my pace to a walk like someone out for a stroll. A light rain was falling but it was a warm night. The cars that passed by looked bled of color in the misty glare of the orange sodium lights leading from the junction. Cars pulled ahead north and south, with a few turning off to the B & P station or one of the six fast-food places squatting in garish colors lining the exchange like grizzlies hooking steelhead.