by Iain Levison
In the next room, which Elias clearly used as a study, there was a computer, a desk and papers scattered everywhere. On top of a pile of bills was a manuscript, perhaps sixty pages, entitled Was Hitler Right? An Analysis of Personal Records From the Second World War. Was Hitler Right? What the fuck was this? This was the type of shit the Aryan Brotherhood fuckers would read in the joint, only there’d be bigger print and more pictures.
Then he noticed the words “by Elias White.” So Elias was a Nazi. He didn’t seem like a Nazi – all the Nazis Dixon had known had shaved heads, muscles and tattoos – but you could never tell. What the hell was a college professor doing writing shit like this? Dixon pulled up the office chair next to the computer, sat down, and began to read the great works of Professor Elias White.
6
“Look at those,” Denise said, pointing out an area full of rhododendrons in full bloom. Since they had arrived in Tiburn a half hour ago, Denise had found herself smitten with the place, with its quaint New England charm and small-town atmosphere. Agent Kohl, as she had expected, couldn’t give a shit.
“Yeah, they’re nice,” Agent Kohl said, his voice flat and his eyes trained on a young woman leaving the Tiburn Post Office across the street. “Why don’t we pull over and ask someone where this travel agency is?”
Agent Kohl, despite his charm and good looks and fine résumé, was a flatliner when it came to personality. During the six-hour drive from New York City to Tiburn, Denise had tried any number of times to start a conversation she might care about. Every attempt fell flat. They did discuss, in great depth, the poor condition of I-278 (they REALLY should fix this road!), the astonishing number of toll booths in Connecticut (are the I-95 tolls the only source of revenue in this state?!) and the greatest conversational topic of them all, the weather (I think it might rain . . . Why do you say that?). Denise’s one enjoyment from the ride was derived from the fact that she had worn a really short skirt, just to torment him, and had caught him looking at her legs at least three times in Rhode Island alone.
The one time Agent Kohl had started a conversation which had some promise was just after they crossed over into Connecticut, when he turned to her after twenty minutes of silence and said, “Lupo . . . is that an Italian name?”
“Yeah. My dad was from South Philly.”
“What does it mean?”
“Wolf.”
“So your name is Denise Wolf.”
“No . . . it’s Denise Lupo.”
Five more minutes of silence, and Denise said, “Is Kohl German?”
“Yeah.”
“What does it mean?” Denise asked, even though six years of high-school German had already given her the answer.
“I don’t know,” Agent Kohl said.
Denise knew he was lying. Who, at some point, hadn’t become interested in the origins of their own last name? “I think it means cabbage,” she said.
Agent Kohl said nothing. “Kohl, as in coleslaw,” she continued, rubbing it in, knowing that a last name meaning “wolf” was cool and a last name meaning “cabbage” wasn’t. “Kohl-slau. Slavic cabbage. That’s where it comes from.”
“Oh,” said Agent Kohl.
Twenty more minutes of silence.
Denise was aware, as she looked at Tiburn’s beautiful town square, that she was having one of her life’s seminal moments. She was staring at the rhododendrons and the people and enjoying the simplicity of the moment. An elderly man was walking his dog and yanking its collar as it tried to piss on the Civil-War-era artillery piece in the middle of the square. A mother was reading a paper on a bench while her two kindergarten-age twin sons appeared to be strangling each other a few feet away. Feeling a warm glow, she looked across the street, where she noticed a sign saying “Tiburn Travel” on one of the shops down the block.
“Do you already know where this travel agency is?” asked Agent Kohl, almost sarcastically.
Denise pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “Don’t you think this is a beautiful town?” she asked.
“Yes, it’s very nice. But it’s almost five o’clock, and we should find this place so we can talk to the travel agent who made the police report,” Kohl said, as if patiently explaining something to a child.
Denise wished she were with Dick Yancey instead of this annoying kid. Dick Yancey would just want to go and find a bar and get shitfaced and deal with business tomorrow. That would be fun. Of course, Carver would never let her and Yancey go on a field investigation together. The only way she could even get out of the office was to take Wonder Boy along, and now she was paying the price. The seminal moment continued.
The seminal moment was Denise’s realization that she was going to quit her job. This twerp in the passenger seat wasn’t exactly the final straw – the final straw had been the last transfer application getting rejected – but he was the catalyst. Why couldn’t he take five minutes out of his life and look at rhododendrons in full bloom and just appreciate the fact that he was out of NYC for a day? Fuck the FBI, and fuck Wonder Boy and his great résumé and his bright future.
“The travel agency is over there,” she said, letting weariness and misery show in her voice. She got out of the car, locked and slammed the door and started crossing the street. She heard Kohl getting out of the car behind her.
“How do you know your way around this place?” she heard him calling after her.
“Attention to detail,” she called back over her shoulder. “Something you need to learn.”
When Elias came home from work, he knew the second he walked in the door that Dixon had been up from the basement. Years of living alone in his own space had developed in him the unconscious expectation that none of his possessions would ever be moved by anyone except himself. He stood in the entrance hall for a few seconds and tried to determine exactly what it was that didn’t seem right. The desk, the coat rack, the umbrella stand, all where they normally were. Why the impression of another presence in the house?
The mail.
The mail had been dropped through the door slot the usual way, but one letter had separated from the rest of them and was at an angle to the pile. It was as if someone had gone through the mail and tried to make it look like they hadn’t. Someone. Whoever could that be? Elias picked the bundle of letters up off the floor and noticed immediately that the separated letter had a German postmark. It was from Ann.
He tossed his briefcase on a kitchen chair and got a bottle of wine from the cupboard, opened it, and sat down at the table. He looked at the letter, felt the thickness, turned it over in his hand. A white envelope. Normally an expressive woman, Ann would have picked a colored envelope for happy news. And it was thin and light. Whatever Ann had to say didn’t take long. Elias already knew what was in it. He had known for a long time, but it actually being here changed everything.
He put the unopened letter in the middle of the table and went through the rest of the mail: his auto insurance bill, an offer for a free oil change at a new garage in town, a flyer from a local dry cleaner. He threw it all in the middle of the table with Ann’s letter and poured himself a glass of wine.
Where was Melissa Covington when you needed her? She hadn’t been heard from since last Friday, the day of Dixon’s arrival, which was just as well. With a wounded bank robber in his basement, Elias was not enthusiastic about the idea of entertaining. But the girl had no idea Dixon was there. Had she just decided to end it? Had she found someone better? Her lacrosse coach, maybe? What made him, an up-and-coming young college professor, so easy to abandon? He looked at Ann’s letter, and paranoid thoughts began to dart through his mind. Had Melissa come over, and Dixon had gotten rid of her? Or maybe she and Dixon . . . No, he couldn’t, not in his condition. Elias was seized by the sudden desire to drive down to West Tiburn High and see if she was still at lacrosse practice.
He heard the stairs creak. Not the basement stairs, but the stairs leading to the second floor. As the rhythmic thump of a descent bega
n, Elias became furious that Dixon had wandered around his house. What the hell was he doing up there? Hadn’t the agreement been that he would stay in the basement?
Dixon walked into the kitchen, and Elias was further aggravated to notice that he was wearing one of his hand-knit sweaters. Without blood pouring from his side and dirt all over him, he looked surprisingly collegiate.
“What were you doing upstairs?” Elias asked, trying not to sound annoyed. Best not to pick a fight with a man capable of, and well-versed in, violence.
“I was reading.” While Elias watched, Dixon began rooting through his cupboards until he found a glass. He sat down at the kitchen table, pointed to the wine bottle, and said, “You mind?”
Elias was surprised by the display of manners. He imagined, if Dixon had wanted some wine, he would have just taken it. Elias shrugged. “Help yourself.”
Dixon poured himself a few gulps into the glass, which was in fact an old rocks glass Elias hadn’t used in years.
“I can get you a wine glass,” Elias offered.
Dixon took a long pull of the wine like he was an athlete drinking water after a sprint. “What’s the difference?”
“It breathes better,” Elias said.
“I don’t mean what’s the difference. I mean who gives a fuck. I just want to catch a buzz.” He finished his glass and refilled it.
“It’s not good for you, seeing as how you’ve lost so much blood. The nurse said you should reload on fluids. Wine’s a diuretic. Plus, you’re taking painkillers.”
Dixon took a smaller pull this time, exhaled mightily, then put the glass on the table. “Damn,” he said. “I haven’t been drunk in nine fucking years.”
“Why not?”
Dixon laughed. “Why do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it. Where are there a lot of people who don’t get drunk?”
Elias shrugged. “I don’t know. A Muslim country?”
Dixon laughed again, this one cut short by a pain from the side. “I’ve been in jail, dipshit. Falstaff Medium Security Correctional Facility. Fourteen years for armed robbery, they let me out in nine.” Dixon smiled. “Good behavior.”
Elias didn’t know what to say. “I didn’t know that. I mean, I knew you’d robbed banks, but I never knew you’d been caught.”
“Everybody gets caught.”
“Why do you do it, then?”
Dixon poured himself another glass, emptying the bottle. Elias felt that Dixon had been asked this question many times before, and he was sizing him up, trying to best determine which of his many answers was most appropriate for a strait-laced college professor.
“Why do I rob banks? Hell, that’s not a question. The question is, why doesn’t everyone else? What’s the matter with fuckers like you that all the bank robbery is left up to people like me? Why don’t you guys ever help out?”
Apparently it was the attempt-at-comedy answer. Elias would rather have heard one of the others. “Us guys?”
“You know, middle-class so-called normal people. Why don’t y’all try it, once a lifetime. It’s not hard.”
Elias didn’t feel Dixon was taking the conversation seriously, and attempted to end it. “You can’t just go around robbing banks. Soon, there wouldn’t be any banks,” he said.
“Why would that be a problem?” Dixon eyed him across the table, and Elias had the feeling he needed to be careful, that this sociopath was about to get passionate. Best just to agree with everything he said. Oh, wow, yes, I never thought of it before, a bank robbery attempt should be a rite of passage for all young men.
“It would be chaos, the wild west,” he said patiently.
“What do you know about banks?”
Elias shrugged. “I have an account.”
Dixon pulled a stack of crisp hundreds out of his pocket, peeled off the top bill, and handed it to Elias.
“Look at that bill.”
Elias looked at it. “Yeah? It’s a fresh one hundred dollar bill.”
“Where did it come from?” Dixon’s eyes were alive with passion now, and Elias was watching his answers.
Elias studied the bill for a moment, looking for an indication of the mint, like there were on coins. He didn’t see one. “The mint?”
“There are four mints, did you know that? Philadelphia, San Francisco, Denver and one in New York. Which one is that from?”
“I don’t know.”
Dixon took the bill back, held it up, and pointed to two signatures. “These two signatures. One’s from the Secretary of the Treasury, one’s from the Treasurer of the United States. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know. What?”
Dixon pointed to several small letters printed at various points on the bill. “What does this F mean? What does this mean here, this F23? Here it says FW. What does that mean?”
Elias shrugged.
“What does this mean here, Federal Reserve Note? How is that different from a US note? What does this Federal Reserve symbol mean? What is the Federal Reserve, and what does it do?” Dixon was looking feverish with excitement, and Elias was getting worried, fearing an outburst.
“What’s your point?” he asked cautiously, trying to make the question sound as non-confrontational as possible.
“My point is, nobody knows. Nobody ever wonders about any of this shit. I got this from a bank. It’s fresh, it’s new. Where did the bank get it?”
“From the mint, I would imagine.”
“Why did the mint give them money?”
“The mint didn’t give them money. They bought it.”
“With what? Money? What would be the point of that?”
Elias furrowed his brow, trying not to look confused, which would fire Dixon up even more.
But Dixon sensed Elias’s confusion and rapped his knuckles on the table with excitement. “That’s right. Nobody knows. Nobody knows where money comes from or how it gets here. Nobody really knows a goddamned thing about the most important thing in their lives, money. Nobody ever wonders about it, either. The only thing anyone knows about money is that they don’t got enough. The rest of it, they just assume.” Dixon spat out the word with disgust.
“They assume everything is fair, man. They assume the people in charge of shit know what they’re doing, and care, and aren’t just a bunch of greedy cocksuckers stealing all our shit. They assume nobody would put a guy in jail unless he’d done something wrong. But look, every fucking day there’s some new DNA evidence getting some guy off, some guy who has rotted away for ten years on death row waiting for the injection, and bam, it turns out he didn’t do it. And you know why he was there? Cause he didn’t have any of this.” Dixon held up the hundred. “That’s the fucking crime, man.”
Dixon took a deep breath and finished his wine, then continued in a softer voice. “Look, here’s how it is, man. They assume the banks and the government do everything fair, but fuck, nobody knows. And me, I think there’s something that ain’t right going on. If the government can just print money and sell it to the banks, why is the government in debt to the banks? Can you explain that? Why does a group that prints and sells money, like you say, owe hundreds of billions of dollars to the groups that buy it? Ya ever wonder about that?
“Why are sixty million people in debt to the banks? Why do farmers in Texas keep losing their farms to the banks? This is the richest country in the world, right? So why do millions of people owe the banks more money than they’re ever gonna earn? And nobody knows a fucking thing about where money comes from, or how it gets here, and why the banks have so much of it and nobody else has any.”
Elias said nothing.
“Ain’t nothing fair,” Dixon said. “Y’all think it is, but it ain’t.” He sighed, got up from the table, rooted around in the pantry and found another bottle of wine. He picked up Elias’s wine tool from the counter, looked at it as if it was an artifact from another culture, then handed both the tool and the bottle to Elias
. “You do it. I can’t figure this fucking thing out.”
Elias opened another bottle of wine.
“And that,” said Dixon, holding his glass up for a refill, “is why I rob banks.”
Denise Lupo drove slowly down the street, checking the house numbers against the address she had copied down from the travel agent. Angelique Davenport, 166 Bay Lane.
“This is it,” said Agent Kohl, as if Denise couldn’t have found the address herself, as if she were unaware that even-numbered houses were on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. What a relief to have him here. Without his helpful and frequent comments, Denise would probably just drive up and down the street, bewildered by all the numbers and houses. She parked outside a neat but small split-level on the peaceful street, taking care not to get in the way of the street hockey game that a group of junior high school kids were playing a few yards from the car.
Kohl opened the door as if to get out, and Denise grabbed his arm. “Wait a second,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“Get yourself prepared. Have your weapon handy. There’s a good possibility Dixon is in this house.”
She thought she saw alarm flash across Kohl’s face for a second, then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, as if he’d already thought of that. “I’m ready.”
“OK, let’s go.” They walked up the garden path, and Denise took in the pleasant suburban scene. She needed a life more like this and less like the one she had. She was tired of her one-bedroom apartment on West 45th Street, wanted to see trees, have a garden. She liked the noise of children playing in the street. At thirty-six, she was starting to realize that she really wasn’t the hardened city girl, the role she had been playing for the last twelve years. They came to the door, and Denise motioned for him to knock as she stood off to one side.