Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  “Can we go off the record?”

  “Sure, pal,” he said before closing his pad. “Off the record.”

  “You told me once you wanted to get it right, so I’m telling you, off the record, that this is all the purest of bullshit. Jessica Barnes and I might have shared a drink at the Franklin, but after that it’s a lie, all of it. And if I find out who is spreading this goddamn lie, I’m going to wring his stinking neck. And if you do the spreading, the chicken neck I’ll be wringing will be yours. They say when the head pops off and falls to the ground, the chicken keeps running around in circles while the blood spurts. Capiche?”

  “So you’re denying it.”

  “On the record now?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He opened his notebook. “On the record.”

  “No comment.”

  He stared at me and then closed his notebook again.

  “I’ve spent enough time on your front page,” I said. “I know how the headline will read if I start responding to all these lies: BAGMAN DENIES STEALING FOOTWEAR OFF CORPSE OF SHOELESS JOAN. So I’m not going to give you a denial, I’m not going to give you anything you can run with other than the off-the-record knowledge that it’s all bullshit.”

  “Fair enough,” said Sloane. “Are you sure you don’t have anything else you want to give to me off the record?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Pity,” he said, stuffing his memo pad in his jacket and standing. “If you could give me something splashy to put on the front page, anything at all, I could take the heat off of you. And Victor, trust me when I say you could use the cooling off.”

  As he walked away, I turned my attention back to the empty glasses and butt-strewn ashtray and tried to gauge my exact position. It was as if the ashtray were a giant rock, the empty glasses were hard places, and I was caught in between. The game was trying to figure out how to keep the whole thing going long enough to collect a few more paydays before I got ground to dust.

  “Oh, by the way, Victor,” said Sloane, who had stopped his egress to get in one last shot. “Just so you know, the police found the murder weapon.”

  “Good,” I said, without surprise and without looking up at him. “They’ll do their tests and know I had nothing to do with it.”

  “They did their tests,” said Sloane. “It was a hammer, and the bloody handle is lousy with your prints.”

  My chin rose suddenly as if jerked by a rein. Sloane was staring at me with a sly smile on his ugly face.

  “Any comment now?” he said.

  “Fuck off.”

  “The funny thing is,” he said, “you finally gave me something to print.”

  And then I was left alone at the table, stewing in a toxic mix of fear and anger and disgust as I tried to figure how my fingerprints could have ended up on the bloody goddamn hammer. After enough stewing and figuring, I reached into my bag, took out my prepaid phone registered to Jack Herbert, and sent a text to Duddleman:

  NEED TO TALK, IMMEDIATELY!

  I had just pressed “send” when someone approached. I tossed the phone into my bag as if I had been caught at something, looked up, and saw him standing there, tall and imperious, Aubrey the barman, with his circular tray.

  Those sons of bitches, once again they had stuck me with the check.

  CHAPTER 32

  TEXTUS INTERRUPTUS

  When you’re up against it, and the ground beneath your feet is avalanching away, sometimes the only thing to do is dance.

  I raise her bare leg and nibble at the arch of her foot, nuzzle the hollow behind her knee, leave a trail of kisses down the inside of her soft white thigh. She tastes of soured candy corn and kaleidoscopes.

  I wasn’t sure I liked Ossana DeMathis—there was something distant and dark in her manner, something defiant, even if it was unclear what she was defiant about, and she had treated me like a British manservant in her brother’s hotel suite, and that had pissed off the raw American in me—but I sure did like dancing with her, horizontal and naked as a mole rat. When she showed up at my apartment in a long diaphanous skirt, with spiky heels and a hesitant twitch of her painted lips, as she apologized for her sharp words, I didn’t hesitate. Having sex with Ossana, I felt like a serf drinking the nectar from some royal fruit banned from the common folk; it was sweet, yes, with just the right amount of electric tang, but, even better, it was ecstatically forbidden. She was connected and aristocratic and haughty, she was a delicious prize of this political world that I had fallen into, and, famished for success as I had been, I couldn’t get enough of her.

  I suck the diamond hanging from the lobe of her ear, hard and cold, just like she, and then run my tongue down from her neck, circling each nipple, where I can’t help but linger, and then down into the soft pillow of her belly, and then down again. She tastes of fire, she smells of pure wanting, my wanting. I bury myself in her, and her legs rise this time on their own, as if on a string, and her thighs press against my skull so that I can hear the pulsing of my own blood.

  I was following JFK’s lead, asking not what my country could do for me, but whom I could do for my county. The “whom” was Ossana, red-haired Ossana, pale-skinned Ossana, green-eyed, thin-legged, and small-wristed Ossana, with nipples like soft red berries that released their juice to tongue and tooth, Ossana, yes, Ossana, that Ossana, cold, aloof, and all-too-willing Ossana.

  I pull myself forward, kiss her hard, feel her fighting not to respond even as I can feel the tremble of her jaw.

  This was how she liked it, Ossana, hard and active from above, Ossana, even as she lay passive beneath. Again, at the start, she had taken the lead and raised the pitch, but in the middle she took off my hat and tossed it aside and then became lost to herself, Ossana.

  I remain propped above her pale, thin body with my arms outstretched, kissing her lightly, massaging her still mouth with my lips and tongue and teeth as I dip with the relentless rhythm of a bassist, feeling the vibration of her body as if my desire were a string within her plucked over and again.

  That hat depersonalized me. With it I was just a political tool, a sharp shard of her brother’s power. She could respond to power, make cruel love to power, even if it was power twice removed. But without the hat I was someone real and distinct and for some sad reason that drove her to the vanishing point. What I had learned of Ossana was that in the middle of sex with someone real, she dissolved into the moment and became less than herself. Sex for her was like a drug or a long skein of drinks, a place to hide. And when I asked if she was okay, she languidly placed her arms around my neck, and when I asked if she wanted me to stop, she pulled me close and breathed her soft exhortations in my ear.

  I turn her over, approach her from the side like a wrestler, lift her with one hand as I sweep her legs beneath her with the other. Like this I can only see the shapes of her, the arched torso, the thin arms reaching forward, the thin wrist turned, the slivers of neck beneath the brilliant swirl of copper, the line of her calf. She is all the more alluring in parts. We are equal now, both symbols to each other, and I rise above her, working hard, sweating hard, working it hard, as if with her laid out like that before me I can somehow screw myself tighter and ever tighter into consequence.

  And the buzzing I hear has to be the buzzing of my blood, the buzzing of my desire, as regular as the pounding pulse in my brain. On and off, on and off like a . . .

  Oh, crap.

  “I have to get that,” I said.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No.”

  “You’re taunting me now.”

  “I will if that’s what you want,” I said. “But I have to answer this.”

  It wasn’t my regular phone; my regular phone was an emissary from the regular world, a place of struggle and travail, which I could happily exile far beyond the fertile walls of this moment. But the other phone, the Jack Herber
t phone, was a lifeline I couldn’t ignore. I left the bed with a grunt and made my way to the bag. I glanced back to see the expression on Ossana’s face. She was no longer a bunch of disparate parts, she was a whole and she was appalled, as if in the middle of sex I had pulled out a corned beef sandwich.

  At least it wasn’t a complete loss.

  I grabbed the phone and found the text.

  YOU WONT BELVE WHT I FOUND!! UNION TRANSFER, 2ND FLR TIL MIDNIGHT.

  It was already after eleven. I sent Duddleman a quick reply and dropped the phone back into my bag. When I returned to the bed, Ossana was on her back, the pale lovely length of her covered with a sheet. I sat beside her and leaned down to kiss her. She turned her head and so I kissed her neck.

  “I have to go.”

  “I feel like I should be insulted.”

  “This is business. Your business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I can’t tell you, but I have to go. You wouldn’t want me to slack when it comes to your brother.”

  “No, I wouldn’t want that.”

  In the bathroom I slipped off my condom and showered the sex off my skin. As she watched languidly from my bed, I dressed quickly, putting on a suit.

  “Will you be here when I come back?” I said into the mirror as I tied tight a narrow black tie.

  “Do you want me to be?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “There are terrible things I still intend to do to you.”

  That twitch of her lips. “Don’t be full of empty threats, Victor.”

  Before leaving the apartment I put on my coat and my hat. Then I stopped in the kitchen, opened a drawer, and pulled out the envelope Jessica Barnes had given me. My next lead for the intrepid Amanda Duddleman.

  CHAPTER 33

  UNION TRANSFER

  Union Transfer is a rock club on Spring Garden that I knew of but till then had successfully avoided. Crowded all-night venues for obscure rock bands, where I could skulk in the back and feel out of place as hipsters hopped and twirled before the stage and shouted out the lyrics to songs I had never heard before, were no longer my kind of place. They were fine in the late nights of my early adulthood, but my life took on a different cast once I embarked on the downward trajectory of my failed career. Now I preferred quieter places with cleaner undertones of desperation that better matched my mood.

  Yet here I was, making my way through the crowd loitering at the door, fresh young folk with cigarettes and beers, far cooler than I had ever been, who looked to have just rolled off their couches and into the night. It might not have been my type of place, but it surely was Duddleman’s, and I liked that she had asked to meet me there. It meant she was getting back to herself.

  The crowd made way as if for a leper as I walked up to the ticket window.

  “One,” I said.

  The woman inside, all tattoos and piercings, with bright, pretty lips, didn’t bat an eye at my suit and tie and trilby. “Fifteen dollars.”

  “Who’s playing?”

  “Why?”

  “I just want to know.”

  She looked at me as if she had heard it before, heard it all stinking night. I gave her the money and examined the ticket. I guess with The Who and The Guess Who already taken, WHY? was the only band name left.

  Just inside the door was an anteroom where T-shirts and ice cream and CDs were being sold, and then beyond that was the main space, large and open and steampunk in design, with lights darting here and there, the room dark, bouncing, mobbed, loud, chaotic.

  The band of the night was onstage, the lead singer mixing rap and song over the heavy bass line. The young and the earnest were pressed to the front as the singer exhorted and the crowd shouted back and the lead guitarist tore it up. I walked into the least crowded area in the room, just in front of the soundboard. Behind me was a rise leading to a bar area with scattered tables. Above me a metal balcony ringed the room, every inch of rail leaned on by patrons looking coolly down at the stage. In the rear, behind the balcony, was a set of bleachers upon which a gang of carousers stood and shouted. I spun around as I searched. I didn’t spot Duddleman, but she was there, somewhere.

  Within the pressing, hypnotic four-four beat, I made my way to a stairwell on the far side of the room. I had to maneuver past stoned dancers, around couples making out, through a horde that barely shifted to let me through, as the singer shouted out his mystifying lyrics, and the music throbbed, and the ceiling lights spun.

  Just as I reached the stairs, I saw someone watching me, his eyes uneasily trained on mine.

  He was thin, with a sparse beard, wearing a loose flannel shirt, just another weaselly face in the weaselly crowd, but this face stared at me as if I was somehow familiar to him.

  And then he backed away before turning and disappearing into the waves of sound and the writhing mob.

  It didn’t come to me just then, or as I climbed the stairs, but when I reached the second level, I took a moment to grab a spot on the balcony rail and look down, hoping to catch sight of the man again. And I did. I caught the check of his shirt as he pushed his way hurriedly toward a doorway by the stage. He stopped for a moment and looked behind, as if he were being chased, as if he were being chased by me. And suddenly I placed him.

  The skinny wretch I had caught rifling my apartment, standing among the wreckage, holding onto my bag as I came out of my bedroom, before some other wretch knocked me into next week. One of the bastards who had placed my prints on the bloody hammer and then buried the hammer in my drawer.

  I leaned forward and looked close and saw him grab at another man whose back was turned. He said something to the man and then they both turned and looked up at the second floor, not at me, and not at the bleachers, but at someplace behind the bleachers, as if something back there was of more concern to them than the likes of Victor Carl. They rushed off, escaping out of the room, but not before I recognized the second man, too, the son of a bitch. I recognized him right off, and as soon as I did, I grew scared, very scared, and not just for myself.

  I tore away from the rail and fought my way through a bobbing throng to the back of the second level, behind the bleachers. It was an empty space dimly lit and filled only with the shrieking guitar, and the solid wall of bass, and the singer shouting words like nonsense all in time to the beat, the steady, steady beat.

  Each second that passed drove the desperation until it nearly clogged my throat. I shouted for her, but my shouts were lost in the darkness, lost in the music, and with every beat I became ever more certain as to what had happened, and what I would find, hoping all the while I was wrong, so wrong.

  And then I saw the shape of a leg, just peeking out behind a table in a far corner of the space, one long thin leg, stockinged in black, with no shoe.

  CHAPTER 34

  REDHEAD

  When I returned to my apartment in the early morning hours, everything was different, everything was cleaner.

  My hate, for instance, was no longer diffuse and general, but hard and glowing, sharp as a scythe. And my purpose was now as directed as a missile; suddenly I had answers to Timothy’s three questions, answers as cold and hard as my hate. And my profile, too, was cleaner, for I no longer wore the hat, that ludicrous gray trilby that made me look like a lothario pol from the fifties. I had tossed it into a garbage can outside the rock club, letting it nestle amidst the empty bottles, half-chewed sandwiches, and vomit, where it belonged.

  Well, not everything was cleaner. My apartment itself was utterly trashed. I had straightened it from its earlier ransacking, put the crap back in the proper crap drawers, stitched up what daggered couch cushions could be saved, turning bad side down so that the scars were hidden, and replaced those that couldn’t be sewed. It had almost seemed good as new, but not anymore. All the drawers again were pulled open and emptied, all the cushions again were slashed, the
floor again was strewn with my crap.

  And in the middle of this unholy mess, curled on a chair and wearing nothing but one of my starched white shirts, the shirt open just enough to uncover the ruby point of a single breast, was Ossana, her lips ripe and swollen, her hair a red swarm, her long legs bare and pale and pulled up beneath her, her green eyes so heavily ringed with mascara they appeared bruised.

  I looked around at the ruin of my apartment, so precise a representation of the ruin of my political dreams, and kept my expression matter-of-fact, as if finding my apartment in such a state were no more remarkable than finding a fat man at McDonald’s. Everything was now on the table. Good.

  “Looking for something?” I said.

  “A cigarette. I was desperate. I remembered too late that you don’t smoke. What took you so long?”

  “An unexpected tragedy. There’s been a murder.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said without an ounce of sorrow. “Anyone I know?”

  “Just a reporter.”

  “In that case.”

  I walked over to the easy chair where she sat, leaned over, reached down and cupped her breast with my hand, put my jaw on the top of her head, smelled her scent, warm and rich with still an undertone of sex. “Have you been in touch with your friend Colin Frost? How’s his rehab going?”

  “Quite well, from what I hear,” she said. “He should be out soon.”

  “Won’t that be a party.”

  “Why are you bringing up Colin? Are you worried he’ll take your job once he’s out?”

  “Which job is that, working for your brother or working on you?”

  She shrugged my chin from her head and pulled my hand away. “Don’t be crude.”

  “I thought that’s the way you liked it.” I took a handful of her hair and brought my mouth close to hers. “Hard and crude and impersonal.”

  Her lips twitched into a cruel smile. “I do like it better when I can’t see your face.”