From the red cloud John rushed toward him, the handle angled out from behind his ear, gore gushing from his nose, the little teeth swimming in blood. Paco had found the shape of the gun in the backpack, but realized he was holding the gun upside down. He pointed it anyway. He fired.
You may want to film this next part in slow motion.
Flame shot from the bag, and the slug punched John just below the navel. He was staggering forward, so the wound didn’t alter his course toward Paco. John’s hands were raised in claws, a wounded beast intent to take El Cabezador with him beyond the mortal veil of tears.
A two-by-four swept out from the red cloud and cracked John square in the temple. The fat man rolled midair, blood arcing from his nostrils into the sky, his eyes rolling up into his head. With a low moan, he thundered to earth onto his back a foot from Paco. Like a mortally wounded bear, John lay on his back—huffing, bloody, and immobile.
One of the illegals stepped from the red cloud of dust with the two-by-four. He looked down at John with a curled lip of defiance and disgust. The other illegals had also picked up lumber from the woodpile.
Paco had heard it said that there’s no more pissed-off person than a woman who has been done wrong, but he came to think otherwise as the illegals and their clubs finished off John, pounding him into the red earth long after Satan had taken his soul to its dubious reward.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
THE FORTUNE-TELLER HELENA WAS MAKING a liverwurst on rye in the pantry behind the séance room when she heard Abbie’s heft thumping down the stairs. “Lena!”
“In here.” Helena put the French’s back in the fridge and picked up the paper plate with the sandwich on it. Who had time for washing plates?
“Lena!”
“In here, Abs.” Helena took a bite of the sandwich over the sink and chewed thoughtfully. Wasn’t the same without Miracle Whip.
You have to appreciate the contrast between this and the knife fight, am I right? Blood spewing in slow motion through the air versus the importance of Miracle Whip. There is irony in this, and they will love it at Cannes.
Abbie huffed and puffed into the séance room. “Lena, you won’t believe it.”
Helena walked through the beaded curtain and stopped, still chewing, eyebrows raised without too much genuine anticipation.
“Lena, I know who he is!”
“Who he?”
“The man.”
“What man?”
“Last night.”
“Oh.”
“I was just watching The View, and at the break, there was one of them things where the news people tell you the headlines, you know, the way they do.”
“Mmm.”
“Anyways, they have this newsflash, and Purity Grant was in court this morning about that thing with the horse.”
“Horse who?”
Abbie was trying to catch her breath. “’Memmer when Purity Grant stole a horse and rode through Central Park with her top off?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Well, she was in court this morning about that, and when she was coming out, she fainted, and they took her to the hospital.”
“Is she OK?” Yes, Miracle Whip would have made a better sandwich.
“They don’t know.”
“Was it something she ate?”
“I dunno, Lena, but—”
“Because there’s been a lot of food poisoning lately. A lot. They talk about it on the news all the time.”
“I dunno what it was, I don’t know if they know. Anyways—”
“Could have been stress. That girl takes on a lot of stress.”
“Anyways, they show her ambulance arriving at the hospital—”
“You can get sick just being at a hospital. Germs.”
“—and they show a picture of her father.”
“I somehow feel sorry for that tramp. Rich people, they think they have it so good, but then you see this.”
Abbie groaned as she settled into a chair at the crystal ball. The chair groaned back. “Her father, Lena.”
“Hm?”
“That’s him.”
“Who him?”
“Aren’t you listening? Him him. From last night.”
Helena stopped chewing and swallowed. “That was Purity Grant’s father?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Lena. Robert Tyson Grant. He’s a gazillionaire. And his stepdaughter is Purity Grant, the one who’s in trouble all over the place.”
“You’re shitting me. Really?”
“Lena, would I run all the way down here like this in the middle of The View to tell you this if I was lying?”
“You sure?”
“Poztiv.”
Helena sank into her chair at the dark crystal ball. “You sure?”
“Poz-tiv.”
Helena shot a suspicious glance at her liverwurst sandwich and set the paper plate on the table. “He’s very rich.”
“Gazillionaire.”
“A gazillionaire with a curse. Who’s his girlfriend?”
“Whadda I know about a girlfriend? They didn’t mention anything about that. Purity Grant fainted, not the girlfriend. They got no reason to mention the girlfriend.”
The front door tinkled, and there was a rush of air. “Hello?”
Abbie and Helena stood and went to work, parting the beads out into the foyer where Dixie, in a smart turquoise pantsuit, stood anxiously.
Abbie clasped Helena’s hands. “Thank you so much, Helena, you are so gifted, and have helped me so much, how can I ever repay you for all you’ve done for me and my family?”
Helena dished up her long-suffering smile, the one that betrayed sacrifice as its own reward. “Go, and be happy.”
Abbie burst into tears of joy and pushed through the front door onto the street. Helena turned her eyes to Dixie, parting the curtain into the séance room. “Please, enter.”
They eased down on either side of the table, and Helena moved her sandwich under it. “You have come about Robert. You are worried about him.” Inasmuch as she came alone, Helena could only imagine Dixie wanted to know something about her boyfriend Robert Tyson Grant, who was probably acting strangely.
Dixie’s lips parted, her eyes alight with wonder. True, Dixie had aimed to find out about the ring from me later that evening, and also to soften my loyalties, find some wiggle room, perhaps get me to kill Purity for money instead. Some women know the incredible power they hold over men, and Dixie was certainly one of them. Yet it occurred to her that the more information she had the better. So she had returned to Helena.
“How did you know that, Helena?”
“I feel this thing.” The fortune-teller tapped her heart and squinted. “Is it that you want to know about his business? About Purity?”
“You do just know things, don’t you?”
With the tip of her toe, Helena activated a switch under the carpet, and eerie violin music began to play softly, the room getting slightly darker, and the crystal ball glowing almost imperceptibly.
“It is my gift, and my curse.” The palmist held a hand over the crystal ball, and it got brighter and blue, smoke swirling within. “To see, our minds must be one. Hold my hand and look deeply into the ball. Deeply!”
“I need to know more, Helena. Yes, about Robert. About Robert’s past.”
Sparkles appeared in the orb, the light inside flickering.
“Deeper! Look deeper!”
Dixie felt Helena’s grip tighten and saw her eyes roll up into her head, just the whites showing. Lips trembling, the palmist hissed, “The ring!”
Heart pounding, Dixie’s watery eyes gazed into the orb. “Yes, tell me about the ring!”
“The past is very distant, and holds many secrets. Secrets! They have lives, these secrets! Spirits! Something happened. Robert got the ring many years ago, under mysterious circumstances, I am trying to see … look deeper! Deeper!”
“I’m looking as deep as I can!”
�
��A thief! I see a thief!”
“Someone is going to steal the ring?”
“Deception!”
“What? Who is the thief? Who deceived who?”
“Look deeper, child! Deeper!” Helena was of course fishing for some sort of hint. “Robert will not tell you about the ring. He does not want you to know. He doesn’t want you to know because of the deception!” All very obvious, of course. He would have told her about the ring otherwise, and a deception can be almost anything.
“Helena, why is the ring so important? Why won’t he give it up?”
Ah ha, Helena thought—finally, a clue. Then she remembered something from the previous night. With her knees she started to vibrate the table.
“I see now!” the palmist gasped.
“What is it you see?” the girlfriend gasped.
“The man from Bolivia,” the palmist hissed.
“Bolivia?”
“La Paz!”
“Mexico.”
“Yes, of course, I see the man from Mexico!” the palmist whispered.
“Do you know … do you know why he is here?” the gazillionaire’s girlfriend whispered, afraid the palmist might know the man from Mexico was a hit man.
The music stopped.
The orb went black.
Helena jumped to her feet and pointed a trembling finger at Dixie.
“THIS MAN, HE HAS COME FOR THE RING!”
This time it was Dixie who nearly fainted. She gulped. “Should I give him the ring?”
“At your own peril if you do—and if you don’t!” Helena collapsed into her chair, fanning herself with the hem of her skirt. Well, that answer covered her bases, anyway.
“What do I do?”
The palmist tipped her face forward into her hands. “I have seen all that can be seen for now. I must rest.”
“But I must know.”
Helena lifted her face. “I can only do so much at once. Follow your heart. Cash or charge?”
Dixie fished out four twenties from her purse. “Is it eighty?”
Helena took the twenties. “Want me to call you a car service?”
“I can catch a cab.”
“Don’t be silly.” Helena pulled a cell phone from her skirt pocket and speed-dialed. “My nephew Tony works at a car service around the corner.”
Occasionally Tony also worked for Helena when she needed more information.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
CUT TO A SHOT LOOKING up at Grant International’s Sixth Avenue headquarters, a shining glass hive of commerce on Manhattan’s skyline. Floors thirty through forty were occupied with Grant Industries worker bees, and the business of making the honey was kept humming by spiral staircases linking each floor to the next. The king bee had not wanted the workers to be waiting around for elevators and degrading productivity. The directory for the floors included many divisions in support of the discount importer’s retail operations, such as administration, accounting, research, promotions, and distribution. Robert had kept the company insulated and independent by maintaining various departments in-house that many other large companies would have shopped out, like advertising and auditing. Robert’s guiding principle in business was to maintain a strong but simple centralized corporate identity. Translated, that meant “Don’t pay other folks overhead and profit for what we can do in-house.” Their customers and their success relied on clarity of message: value and variety. A recent media blitz by the marketing department relied solely on billboards and ten-second commercials in prime time that were black letters on white: Value. Variety. Grab-A-Lot. No contests or cross-promotions or product placements or scratch-offs or blimps or stadiums or celebrities.
A new department called Initiatives had recently launched Grant Industry’s own discount products. Buy-It Electronics contracted with an off-brand manufacturer of third-tier CD, DVD, iPhone, and iPod devices, in an attempt to absorb that company’s manufacturing and distribution. The other was a discount gourmet food concern and an obvious attempt to steal market share from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. Within each Grab-A-Lot store Grant Industries had begun installing a store-within-a-store called Trade Winds, which sold everything from deluxe sugar cubes to exotic and supposedly healthy snack chips to frozen meals.
I read all this in the exposés on the plane, and lots more, of course. That was Robert Tyson Grant’s company in a nutshell. I’m sure in the movie the audience could be shown various images of the company at work with the sound of typewriters and telephones in the background, snippets of conversation, interviews, business reports, what have you. Yes, I know nobody uses typewriters anymore, but I think they still use that sound effect in movies to make us think people are very busy at work, don’t they? Of course, like with the penguins at the cocktail party, you could intercut images of bees with Grant’s workers running to and fro with documents and charts, the hive in action. Yet the buzzing sounds may become annoying to a theater audience when mixed with the clacking of typewriters. That is up to you; I am just telling you what happened so you can make the movie in the best way. The point I am making is that the audience needs to understand Robert was actually a captain of industry and not just a millionaire with a conniving girlfriend with great tits, with a troublesome daughter also with great tits, and with the ring of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra on his finger. All of which were becoming a distraction in his day-to-day at Grant Industries. Which was why on this given day, while the hive was buzzing and typewriters clacking, or what have you, our king bee was alone in his office, standing before a window with a commanding view of midtown Manhattan.
The sky had grown cloudy, another late-day storm brewing, New Jersey dark and foreboding in the distance.
How?
Grant was mystified, to be sure, because he could not figure out how an assassin picked at random had any connection to his own past, much less the ring. Was the Hapsburg/Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra ring somehow common knowledge in Mexico? Surely this ring was an obscure relic, and only a few would know of it, much less know its power. Grant held up his hand, admiring the simplicity, weight, and color of the gold ring bearing the double cross of Caravaca.
One part of him wanted to give up the ring. Were he to do so, he might find that his success was his own invention. He might find that his admittance to Princeton was not a fluke or mistake. Was investing in Chinese imports a shrewd business move or a roll of the dice? Was his unusual business model the product of his genius or the by-product of destiny? Would it be Robert Tyson Grant’s armada of stores that sank the fleet of Walmart and Costco and Trader Joe’s? Or would kismet rot their hulls before his advancing navy arrived? Was he a brilliant businessman and magnate who would be mentioned for eons to come in the same breath as Kroc and Gates? Or as a footnote?
Yet there was another part of Robert Tyson Grant—the fearful little boy.
There was hardly a day that passed when he did not recall those days in the orphanage, the stormy night in the chapel with Pasqual, the days when the orphans had to comb their hair and stand in line for inspection by prospective parents. It is one thing to not be picked for kickball teams at recess, then quite another to have your prayers rewarded by stinging hopelessness as couple after couple walked down the line of boys and picked someone else to be their son. A dark spot formed on Robert Tyson Grant’s soul, a depraved yearning to finally be chosen. Which was why one afternoon Bobbie stole back to the dormitory and forced open Pasqual’s footlocker with a butter knife. Hidden inside, he found a small clay donkey, one that Pasqual had made in art class. Grant smashed it on the edge of the locker—from inside glowed the gold ring of Hernando Martinez de Salvaterra, the cross of Caravaca flickering in the late-day sun.
Earn Destiny.
Did it matter how the destiny was earned?
Could Pasqual still be alive? Grant had tracked him down for years—a Brooklyn truck mechanic—and was assured that he had been killed by loan sharks. Who else would know he had the ring or what it
was?
What if his current success—like finding parents to take him from the orphanage—did rely on the ring? Then his business model would result in bankruptcy. Buy-It Electronics would become an object of the Wall Street Journal’s derision and founder on the rocks of hubris. Trade Winds would be broadsided by a fusillade of foreign trade sanctions. Overleveraged and insolvent, the once strong and invincible Grant Industries armada would be sunk by the same hand of fate that floated it, the ships of BJ’s and Sam’s Club sailing triumphantly to port.
Where the mighty Grant’s Industries once sailed, only the flotsam of lawsuits and the jetsam of ridicule would remain, the miserable orphan Robert Tyson Grant adrift in a lifeboat of failure with a paddle of regret.
Earn Destiny.
Did it matter how the destiny was earned?
Grant seriously had to wonder: Was Purity a curse, one that came with the success the ring had brought? There were other business magnates who suffered bratty daughters that did not seem as afflicted. Yet for Grant, Purity’s evil was relentless, like he’d somehow earned this curse, as the palmist had suggested. Was this the price he had to pay for stealing the ring? For using it to build the Grab-A-Lot empire?
Relentless. Now there was this court scene Purity had pulled off, and it was all over the paper and the news. If he could just rid himself of her, of this curse …
Of course. How obvious. If he were to rid himself of the ring, he would rid himself of the curse that came with it, because Purity would be killed in exchange for the ring. Even if the result of relinquishing the ring was forfeiture of his continued success, was it worth such success at the price of Purity’s persistent hatred and media humiliation? Perhaps it was possible to circumvent failure if he ceased to seek success. What if he were to relinquish the ring to the Mexican, and Purity were to be disposed of? Could he sell Grant Industries to the Chinese and retire with his money? He could wrap up his life in the States, and then he and Dixie could move down to his retreat in Cabo San Lucas. Would a hurricane then come and wash his life away? He didn’t feel it should work that way.
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