Gutshot Straight

by Lou Berney

  Dawn was just starting to crack over the eastern mountains when they arrived at UNLV, so they parked in the lot by the arena to kill some time. Gina fell asleep like that, boom, or pretended to. Shake stayed awake. He had been in Las Vegas now for less than twenty-four hours, out of stir for less than forty-eight. He started tallying up everything that had happened to him in that time period, then gave up halfway down the list. In prison you could go weeks, sometimes months, without the slightest bump in the routine, a kind of heavy sucking boredom that was more likely to permanently damage you than a sharpened toothbrush in the shower room or a shot of bad pruno.

  Shake acknowledged he had not been bored at any time during the past forty-eight hours; he could definitely say that.

  He told himself that going to Panama—if these foreskins were worth $5 million, if they really were foreskins—was the smart play. He needed some leverage if he was going to survive Alexandra and Dikran and Dick Moby; that, or he needed a lot of cash to outrun them.

  But it really wasn’t the smart play—partnering up with a woman who met almost every single conceivable requirement of a person you’d never in a million years want to partner up with.

  So why was he even considering this? Where had his newfound appetite for unhealthy risk come from? He wasn’t sure. Maybe something had snapped in him yesterday morning, back at the Apache Motor Inn, when he’d decided to whack Jasper with the phone book. Maybe at that instant the old Shake (who eluded hard decisions whenever possible and preferred to go with life’s gentle if unreliable flow), maybe that guy had died of shock and astonishment. Was even now lying dead on the floor of that motel room, a red rubber ball with teeth marks on the carpet next to his head.

  Gina wasn’t hard on the eyes, and the girl had a kind of sparkle he’d never encountered before, but Shake knew he’d deserve every bad thing that would happen to him if he went into this on the basis of sparkle.

  “You’re frowning,” Gina said. She was awake now, and watching him. It was a little after eight.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  They drove across campus and parked outside Wright Hall, an ultramodern tricolored building that looked more like the prison of the future than a college building. On the third floor, they found the office for Dr. Reginald Gorsch, Department of History.

  Dr. Gorsch was a long-faced, long-necked guy hunched over a laptop. When he looked up from his screen and saw Gina standing in the doorway, when he adjusted his glasses and still saw Gina standing in the doorway, he swallowed several times in quick succession. Shake watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down, up and down that long neck.

  “Hi, Doc,” Gina said brightly. “What’s shakin’?”

  Dr. Gorsch looked at her with yearning, then alarm.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, Doc,” Gina said, shutting the office door behind them. “I’m not here to get you in trouble.”

  Ha, Shake thought.

  IT TOOK A FEW MINUTES to convince Dr. Gorsch they were not there to rob, extort, or blackmail him. It took another few minutes to assure him they did not consider his twice-a-week strip-club habit a defect of character.

  “It’s only research, you see,” he explained urgently to Shake. “I’m thinking of writing a screenplay, and I just thought—”

  “Research is important,” Shake said.

  “It really is!” He fiddled with items on his desk and almost accidentally stapled his hand to a Vista for Dummies book.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Gina explained. “We’re doing some historical research and want to ask you some questions.”

  Dr. Gorsch brightened. “Tudor-Stuart England?”

  “Not exactly,” Shake said. They didn’t have time to beat around the bush, so he took a calculated risk and told the truth, or at least some of it: They had in their possession some potentially valuable religious relics and wanted to know just how potentially valuable they were.

  Gina held up the briefcase and did a little spokesmodel flourish with her hand.

  “Religious relics?” Dr. Gorsch’s long face fell. It took a while. “I’m sorry, that’s not at all my area of expertise. You’ll want to talk to someone with a background in medieval—”

  “But I want to talk to you, Doc,” Gina said. She put some extra-sexy English on her wink that made even Shake, at the edge of the blast radius, tingle a bit.

  Dr. Gorsch swallowed. “Well, I know a little about the market for religious relics,” he said. “There are collectors, I’ve heard. A very gray world. Not illegal, exactly, but the Catholic Church takes a dim view, as you might imagine. A few relics can be quite valuable, theoretically, but I doubt unless you’ve found the crown of thorns that—”

  “We have a hundred foreskins,” Gina said.

  Dr. Gorsch looked at her. She held up the briefcase again. Another spokesmodel flourish.

  “You have the hundred foreskins?” he said.

  “The?” Shake said.

  “You’ve heard of them?” “Oh, my,” Dr. Gorsch said. “Of course. They’re the holy grail of religious artifacts.”

  “Wouldn’t the Holy Grail be the holy grail of relics?” Shake asked.

  “Common misconception.” Dr. Gorsch, in his element now, went to one of his bookcases and started digging around. “A billionaire in London has that. Apparently the Vatican’s been trying to buy it back forever. Apparently the asking price is outrageous, the Laocoön or something like that.”

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about relics?” Gina said.

  Dr. Gorsch snorted. “I don’t.” He found the book he was looking for: a big, black, leather-bound Bible. “All this is just the most basic common knowledge.”

  Gina gave Shake a glance. “What did I tell you? Smart guy.”

  Dr. Gorsch flipped through the Bible. “Here it is. First Samuel, chapter eighteen. David wanted to marry King Saul’s daughter. Of course Saul would never let his daughter marry some peasant, a mere shepherd. So he told David he could marry his daughter if, and only if, David could prove his worth.”

  “How?” Gina asked.

  “He had to go forth, alone, and bring back to Saul the foreskins of one hundred Philistine warriors.”

  “Which, just guessing,” Shake said, “Saul knew the Philistines would not part with happily.”

  Dr. Gorsch nodded, then paused to absentmindedly finger his long neck like he was playing a guitar. “The Philistines, you know, have been treated quite unfairly by history. They were actually quite culturally advanced. In fact—”

  “Doc,” Gina said, “focus.”

  “Right. Yes. Well, of course it was a suicide mission. Saul knew that David had no chance of success whatsoever. But he did it, David did. He went out, killed a hundred Philistine warriors, and brought their foreskins back to Saul.”

  “What did Saul do?” Shake asked. “After asking David to wash his hands, I mean.”

  “He told David the foreskins were only a start. Now David had to go out and kill the giant Philistine Goliath, who’d been wreaking havoc on Saul’s army. Never in a million years, Saul was certain, would David survive that encounter. But if he did, if he killed Goliath, that suited Saul’s purposes, too. We all know what happened next, of course.”

  “I like his style,” Gina said.

  “David?” Dr. Gorsch asked.

  “Saul. He knew how to get behind the wheel of a bargain and drive it. Va-va-vroom.”

  Dr. Gorsch straightened his glasses and tapped away at his laptop.

  “Let’s see. Yes. The hundred foreskins. There’s a record of their provenance up through 1939, a defrocked Jesuit in Belgium. Then the war, of course, the Nazis, and everything after that is just rumor and hearsay and collectors searching fruitlessly.”

  “So do you have any idea what they’re worth?” Shake asked.

  Dr. Gorsch grinned suddenly. “This is the most fun I’ve had in months. You know in the old horror movies? When the grizzled old professor with the
dusty books explains how you can kill a werewolf only if you’re pure of heart?”

  “And have a gun with a big silver bullet.”

  “Ahem,” Gina said.

  “Right,” Dr. Gorsch said. He turned his attention back to his laptop. “What are they worth? Oh, my. Hard to say. I suppose, and I paraphrase my colleagues in the dismal science, they’re worth whatever a buyer will pay for them.”

  “Not five million bucks, though,” Shake said. “Right?”

  Dr. Gorsch fingered the frets of his long neck. “Possibly. According to this site, St. Agatha’s vertebrae sold for two million dollars a couple of years ago. Your foreskins would bring at least that, I’d think. Probably much more. They’re more unusual, and they’ve got to be at least eight, nine hundred years old.”

  Shake opened his mouth, but Gina beat him to it.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’m no college professor, but … David and Goliath? I’m pretty sure that was a lot longer than eight or nine hundred years ago.”

  Dr. Gorsch looked at her blankly. “Well, of course.”

  “But then—”

  “Your foreskins aren’t real,” Dr. Gorsch said. “Well, of course they’re real foreskins, but they’re not the actual ones David removed from the Philistines. Probably they’re from monks, or medieval peasants who were paid for their service or who thought they’d improve their odds on Judgment Day.”

  “They’re fakes?” Gina said.

  “Most religious relics are.” Dr. Gorsch chuckled. “You don’t think that billionaire in London has the actual Holy Grail, do you?”

  Shake had thought so, actually.

  “But—”

  “It has no effect on the value,” Dr. Gorsch said. “What matters is the rarity of the counterfeit, the age, the quality. The narrative behind it. You have to understand, these relics were venerated for centuries and centuries. In some cases they were created by men and women who later became saints. City-states went to war over purloined relics. They might be fake in the strictest sense, the motives behind them might have been venal at the time—you know, one trying to advance one’s prospects to become a cardinal—but eventually the counterfeits themselves became singularly unique religious artifacts of great historical significance. Sometimes the fakes are more valuable than the real relics, depending on the circumstances.”

  Shake took a second to wrap his head around all that. He would have suspected that Dr. Gorsch was fucking with them, except that Dr. Gorsch was clearly not the kind of guy who fucked with anyone. Still …

  “You’re fucking with us, aren’t you?”

  “What? No!”

  “Ahem, ahem, ahem,” Gina said. “Our foreskins?”

  “Very rare,” Dr. Gorsch said. “Very unique. The bones of saints were everywhere back then. Mark Twain, if you recall that amusing passage in Innocents Abroad, claims there were enough nails and pieces from the true cross in the cathedrals across Europe to build a small town. But your foreskins—there’s never been a record of anything else remotely like them. Whoever came up with the idea of faking such a relic, he had extraordinary imagination.”

  “Or extraordinary something,” Shake said.

  Dr. Gorsch jumped to another site on his laptop. Scanned the page. “Hmmm,” he said. “Apparently many scholars think the man behind the foreskins might have been the Coeur de Lion himself.”

  “The Lion Heart?” Gina asked.

  Shake turned to her. “You speak French?”

  “C’est en forgeant qu’on devient forgeron, sport.”

  “Richard the First,” Dr. Gorsch continued. “Yes. That’s why the foreskins would have been so valuable right from their creation.” He continued to tap away at his keyboard. Blue light from the screen flashed in the lenses of his glasses. “According to this—interesting—Dante himself might have owned the foreskins at one point. Machiavelli lost them in a card game to Pope Clement VII. They ended up eventually with Julius II, who traded them to France so they’d stay on the sidelines when he marched on Bologna. By the time Martin Luther came around, they were so famous, so beloved, he didn’t dare burn them with all the other relics.”

  “Okay,” Shake said, “I’m following. But five million? You’re sure?”

  “Well, no,” Dr. Gorsch said, “but I think that’s a fair ballpark figure.”

  “I like that ballpark,” Gina said. So did Shake, though he knew better than to get his hopes up yet. And, he reminded himself, if what was in that briefcase really was worth $5 million—Alexandra wouldn’t stop looking for it.

  Shake noticed that Dr. Gorsch was staring at the briefcase in Gina’s hand.

  “May I, do you think,” he said, “just for moment, perhaps … ?”

  Shake considered, then nodded to Gina. She popped the snaps and turned the briefcase toward Dr. Gorsch.

  Dr. Gorsch looked nonplussed. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  Shake leaned over to see for himself. The interior glass case—with the foreskins—was gone; the briefcase was empty.

  Shake turned to Gina. She stared down into the empty briefcase like she was about to laugh, to throw up, to burst into tears. Shake didn’t think anyone, not even someone with the advanced deceptive skills of Gina, could fake all three of those at once.

  “There’s no way!” Gina said. “Fuck! Fuck! I had it with me the whole time, I never once even—”

  She stopped. Shake waited. Gina closed her eyes.

  “I’m going to murder him,” she said, so softly that Shake could barely hear her.

  Chapter 24

  Gina tossed Shake the keys to the Town Car so he could drive. She was steaming, so mad at herself she could barely stand it. They hauled ass across town to the strip mall and parked a few doors down from Marvin Oates Fine Jewelry and Pawn. The shop was supposed to open at ten, but by eleven there was still no sign of life.

  “He’s gone,” Shake said.

  Gina remembered pushing open the exit door to smoke. She remembered thinking she saw something in the shadows, by the alley Dumpster. She’d had her back turned to Marvin Oates for like all of two flipping seconds.

  How could she be such a dipstick to let that creep steal her foreskins? Right from under her nose? She resolved to quit smoking at the earliest opportunity. Dangerous, stupid habit—see where it got you?

  She’d started smoking at age thirteen, because her other friends were too chicken to try it. Because she’d watched Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Because it was five minutes every evening, sitting out on the porch steps, when she and her mother had something in common.

  “You don’t think he’ll show up eventually?” she asked.

  “Would you?” Shake said.

  “I’d go to Panama.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” she said. “Maybe he left them inside, and he overslept, and he’s just running late this morning.”

  Gina shut up. She was out of straws to grasp at. “He’s not the brightest star in the sky,” she said.

  “What’s that make you?” Shake said. The way he was looking at her—the twinkle in his eye, a smile tugging one corner of his mouth—he was enjoying this way too much.

  “What’s that make you?” she fired back.

  “Fair point.”

  “How far ahead of us is he, do you think?”

  “Let’s find out,” Shake said.

  They drove a mile or so west and found an Internet café. Shake paid for half an hour on one of the computers, and Gina pulled up the flight schedules. A Continental nonstop had left Las Vegas at 7:00 A.M. It was due to arrive in Panama City, Panama, at 6:00 P.M.

  Gina pulled up more flights. Looked at her watch. Shitburgers.

  “The best we can do is a four-o’clock through Dallas that doesn’t get us in till tomorrow morning.”

  “Shitburgers?”

  “Did I say that out loud?”

  “I doubt he’ll be able to find Ziegler and make a deal by tomorrow mor
ning,” Shake said.

  “So you’re saying we still have a shot.”

  “I’m saying I don’t have any other options.”

  She nodded. Shake’s gray-eyed lady boss. He didn’t say anything for a second. Gina started to worry he was remembering he did have another option, which was to give her up to the Whale, or to his boss, and try to save his own butt.

  But then he said, “I’ll need a passport.”

  “I know someone you can go to,” she said. “How much money do you have?”

  “How much of my money do you have left?” he asked.

  “Sheesh. Ever heard of bygones? Letting them be?”

  “How much?”

  “Enough to cover a passport. It’ll be my treat.” She swept her hand magnanimously across the Internet café.

  “Generous,” he said. “But then how are we gonna pay for the plane tickets?”

  Oh. Gina hadn’t thought of that.

  “Well, we can—”

  “Forget it,” he said. “I found a couple of grand in a shoe.”

  “Your shoe? What?” She’d searched his shoes, back at Treasure Island yesterday morning.

  He was already heading toward the exit. “We’ll go dutch,” he said.

  Chapter 25

  The passport acquisition went off without a hitch, which in light of recent events Shake found a refreshing change of pace. The old guy Gina sent him in to see—while she slouched down in the front seat of the Town Car, the brim of her baseball cap pulled low—had a monster, state-of-the-art computer-scanner-printer rig in the basement of his smoke shop.

  “I’ve got to give you an old one,” the guy explained to Shake. “Issued in’ 05, but that still gives you a few years before it expires. The new ones they changed to, holographs and shit and embedded biometric microchips, those fuckers I got to contract out now, piecework, you know, and it’s a total pain in my ass. My profit on those fuckers don’t make it hardly worth the pain in my ass.”

  He scowled as he snapped Shake’s picture with a digital camera.

  “That’s the federal government,” Shake said, “always screwing it up for the workingman.”

  “You got that right,” the guy growled. Twenty minutes later, Shake walked out of the shop with a passport.