Nina had been under fire.
She had The Look.
That nose, though…easily fixed, but it had been smashed, almost flat, opened up just enough to breath through. It was obscene in a face as pretty as hers, but she wore it like a badge. And it was. There was a story there that would lay open her every secret.
And she’d never tell it, except, maybe, to someone who could find the chink in her eightfold armor, cross the drawbridge over the moat she’d dug around her soul.
Hmmm.
I like a challenge.
Customers came in. Regulars, a smattering of the usual wanderers or thrill seekers who came down this way. E Block drew a certain proportion of people who thought they had something to prove by coming into the bad part of town and making an appearance in Moby’s, so they could go back home or to school and brag about being in the bar that the Herald Review had said was the most dangerous bar in town. Truth was, we didn’t have much trouble in this place. I’d be lying if I said it was because of me, because for the most part, the clientele here was self-policing. There's a lot of business conducted in here, the kind of business that didn’t account for taxes and regulations. Those business men and women had their own ways of settling accounts and keeping the peace.
I just helped out in my own way.
An instrument of the peace.
Or of karma, as Lizzy would say.
I glanced involuntarily at my watch, the beat up G-Shock my old crew I put that memory away had given me…
Lizzy would come by my apartment tonight, after she got off. She’d be in there, waiting. Sometimes she came here, had a drink, sat like a gleaming icon alone at the bar, and the regulars made sure nobody came near her.
I never had to do anything that way.
I felt something, looked up.
And recognized the big man coming through the door.
Nina had shown me his picture.
Something I learned, a long, long time ago, was about presence. Some people have it, some people don’t. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with charisma, charm, any of that -- it’s a palpable force, a presence you can sense with your eyes closed, the feeling of someone’s energy, their life force, impinging on your own, a presence…
It can be good, it can be evil, but it is always there to some degree, and some have it far more than others.
This guy had it.
A big guy, and the whole package spelt trouble. There was something beneath the surface with this guy -- a hidden part of his presence that spelt out a whole different kind of trouble.
Evil, you could call it.
“How you doing tonight?” I said.
He stopped, became more obvious in his evaluation since I’d called him on it by speaking to him. “I am fine, thank you. May I come in?”
“Sure,” I said. “Everybody’s welcome. This is a peaceful place, we don’t have any trouble in here. You’re not looking for trouble, are you?”
He smiled, and I felt the part of me where my rage lived stirring. A cruel curling of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes.
I wanted to kill him right there.
And somehow, I knew, that some day I would have to.
Part of me wanted to just do it right there. Sometimes it happened like that -- you encountered someone, and a long line just rolled out in front of you, and you saw the inevitability of what was going to happen.
Why not just cut to the chase?
But life and fate were full of changes, and after all I’d been through, all I’d lived through, I’d learned that nothing was certain…the only certain thing was that everything could change.
Didn’t mean it would.
Just meant that it could.
“No,” Vladimir Darko said. “I don't look for trouble. Just a drink, maybe some talk. I am new here.”
“Slovenia?” I said. “Bosnia?”
I liked the stiffening in him when I said that.
He recovered quickly, though.
“Yes, I lived in Bosnia.”
“In the military there?”
“No,” he lied. Not well either. “My family sold cars. We were fortunate enough to leave before the fighting got too bad. You? You are military?”
“Hell no,” I said. “That shit scares me. I have enough trouble when the boss tells me to come to work. Who’d want somebody telling you what to do all the time?”
I didn’t fool him one bit.
“That is the truth,” he said. “My thinking, too. May I buy you a drink?”
“Maybe later,” I said, tipping up my Dark Lady. “I don’t drink on the job.”
His smile was a little flatter, and he moved more carefully than he might otherwise have when he went to the bar. He took a place by himself, stood beside the stool instead of sitting, where he could see me as well as the whole bar. I watched Thieu watching him, and the rigor of her posture told me that she got the same read. She looked over, caught my eye, and I nodded.
Yeah.
Shark in the water.
***
My attention was split all night. It was slow, but a tense night. Any one who has ever worked in a bar can tell you that there’s always a feeling, an ambience, to a place, and that ambience changes with the crowd. Some nights it’s happy and light; other nights dark and gloomy, just like a bad novel; sometimes edgy and violent. Those were the nights I actually had to work, and that encompassed everything from dragging an irate girlfriend off her date to convincing a couple of hitters from the Somali Boys to delay their job and take it elsewhere.
Vladimir Darko brought some of that with him.
It was like there was a ring around him that no one wanted to enter.
Some of the young guns, pumped up with gym weights and too much beer courage, gave him a look.
But that was all.
Survival mechanisms at work.
No woman went near him, not even the hardened street hookers who’d duck in for a drink or a cup of coffee to take the chill off.
After a few hours, while he sat and sipped a long series of beers, paid cash every time instead of running a tab so that he was always ready to leave, he got up and went to the corner where Deon had his “office,” the same table he sat at every night, where those in the know knew how to find him and what he offered.
I watched them with interest, too far away to hear what was being said.
Wasn’t much.
Vladimir stiffened at something Deon said, then turned, almost robotic, and marched toward the door, a grim drummer.
“Leaving already?” I said.
He shrugged. “Not so friendly a place.”
“Just takes people a while to warm up to a stranger. Stick around, I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Another time,” he said. He didn’t look at me. Something on his mind. He gave me his back and stalked away.
There was a palpable relief in the bar; a few of the regulars nodded at me, one gave me the thumbs up as though I’d had something to do with him leaving.
He’d be back, though.
I got up, stretched out the kink in my back, walked over to Deon’s corner.
“What did you say to him?” I said.
“It’s what I wouldn’t say, oke,” Deon said. His face was sour. “That man has no subtlety.”
I laughed.
“The pot calling the kettle black?”
Deon didn’t laugh.
“I think the Komorav’s are sniffing about, oke.”
That got my attention.
“Why do you say that?”
“Russian oke, screaming muscle, asking me about guns? No intro, no go between, just hey, how you doing, I’m interested in buying? No, oke. Komarov is coming round, having a look.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No need to, oke. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about and sent him on his way. He just wanted to see my face.”
That made sense to me.
But Nina Capushek, my new best friend,
she might be just the one to take that potential problem off the books for me.
***
Lizzy was wearing black tonight.
When I came in, she was standing at the window that looked out over the quiet street I lived on, second floor flat.
Still. Silent. Red hair falling across the black of her dress. Armani, simple and elegant and expensive.
She turned, framed there, black dress against the window, pale skin, so white…those deep blue eyes.
I just watched her. No words for it.
“Hi, Jimmy,” she said.
“Hey.”
“I like having your key. Does anyone else have it?”
“No. Only you.”
She smiled, one of the rare ones that reached her eyes. “Like the Himalayas, good men shine from afar.”
She always made me smile.
“What does that mean, Lizzy?”
“It’s from the Dhammapada. The sayings of Buddha.”
“I’m not a good man.”
She shrugged. “You are, whether you believe it or not. Your actions will always overcome your doubts.”
“Is that the Buddha?”
She moved away, stood a hand's breadth away from me, breathed my breath, her eyes luminous.
“The Buddha in me.”
I throbbed everywhere. The heat of her washed over me.
She turned her back and said, “Undo me.”
My hands trembled. I stilled them, touched her shoulders, unzipped the dress. She stepped out of it, turned, in heels and a thong, nothing else.
“How do you want me, Jimmy?”
“I want to look at you.”
She pirouetted in her heels, took two steps, turned back to me and swept her red hair over one shoulder, hands on her hips, a challenge.
“Look, then.”
I drank her.
We stood there for what seemed like a long time.
“The voluptuousness of looking,” she said.
“What is that?”
“Wallace Stevens. A poet.”
“That’s good. Voluptuousness. I like that word.”
Her belly rose, fell. The crease of muscle that fell from her rib cage to her pubis flexed.
“Sensual,” I said. “Rich, as though with flavor.”
“Yes.”
“Why do you come back to me, Lizzy?”
“Do you know what dharma means, Jimmy?”
“No.”
“It means work. As in life tasks. The things we are meant to do.”
“You’re meant to be with me? I don’t think so, Lizzy. You can do better.”
“I’m supposed to bring something out in you, Jimmy Wylde.”
I went to her, trailed my fingers across her flat belly, through the swoop and hollow of her hip where her waist fell away.
“What do you want to bring out of me?”
Arms around my neck then.
“What you’re afraid of. What needs healing in you.”
I froze then, for just a heartbeat, but she felt it. As she always did. She tightened her hands, wouldn’t let me pull away. Touched my face, trailed her fingers across my cheek.
Stepped back.
“How do you want me, Jimmy?”
“This is your work? This?”
She stood straight and still, hands crossed in front of her like a Botticelli, or an obedient school girl. “I define us one way. You define us another. What you will is what you will. I’m here. How do you want me?”
My heart beat in a way I wasn’t used to.
“In bed.”
She turned, a flow of muscle across her back and her ass and her long, long legs. Stepped out of her shoes. Walked barefoot across the floor and into my bedroom. The swish of sheets thrown back, the sound of skin in my bed.
“Come in here,” she called. “Come in to me, Jimmy.”
The siren’s song.
Interlude
Lizzy left a book in my apartment once. It was called Hands of Light, an illustrated text about energy healing, something she was into. There were pictures in there of what the author called the human energy field, the aura.
Though she never mentioned it, Lizzy knew I felt things about people, knew things about people -- in the same way she did.
She knew about the wall I kept up between us for that reason; the way I defined our relationship.
It was safer that way.
For her or for me, I didn’t know.
That was how I sensed the evil in someone like Vladimir Darko, how everyone sensed it -- it was palpable because it was real, something that couldn’t be seen, only felt.
And knowing that was real made me question myself, about the things Lizzy said about me, because I knew she could see, see in a way that others might not.
Walls, barriers, boundaries…
Lizzy brought me a print once -- a black and white print of a rock wall in New England some place, the wall crumbling in one spot, with a line from a Robert Frost poem: Good fences make good neighbors.
She said it was my life, a usual enigmatic Lizzy-ism.
But tonight, I felt something crumbling between us.
And I didn’t know if I wanted that wall to come down.
Chapter Thirteen
Deon wondered what it would be like to kill Vladimir Darko.
Darko was a big man, physically competent, but Deon sniffed the soldier on him, and could tell by the chilly air of the man that he had hurt, and he had killed, often.
Probably for pleasure as well as for work.
He signaled for his bill, and Thieu came to his table. “No tab?”
“Not tonight, my beauty. I want to have a clean slate. Never know what might happen, eh?”
“$32 dollars,” she said.
Deon peeled off a $50 from the roll he kept in his pocket. “For you, my beauty.”
“Thank you.”
“As always, you are welcome.”
He watched her walk away, her sharp hips accentuating the roundness of her ass. She was built like the Xhosa girl he had kept for a long time in a house on the edge of the Tembesa township. A beautiful girl, a quiet girl. She still lived there, though he’d given her the house and her freedom and enough money to start the tailor shop she wanted.
He shrugged off those memories.
Got to his feet, stood for a moment and made sure he knew where all his weapons were on his person. Went out to the parking lot, empty now except for Thieu’s Mustang and a few other cars, probably belonging to someone who’d wake up in a strange bed tomorrow morning. Got into his Cherokee, started it up, pulled out slowly onto E Street and turned left. Clocked in his rear view mirror the Town Car parked that pulled out slowly, then turned on it’s lights.
Deon grinned at himself in the mirror.
“Persistent, aren’t you, oke?” he whispered. “C’mon then, let’s see what you’ve got.”
He drove carefully, under the limit, rolled through a yellow light.
The Town Car followed right through.
“Ah, oke, that’s an oldie,” he said.
Deon made a right turn on 7th, went a block, turned right on C Street.
The Town Car followed him.
“No subtlety at all with this one,” Deon said.
Time to up the ante.
Deon turned again, left this time. Pulled into an empty lot, turned quickly around so that the Cherokee was facing out. The Town Car slowed to a stop in the street. There were no other cars out. Then the Town Car pulled away. Deon looked for the plate number. SARGANT 3. A custom plate.
Easy to find.
Deon waited a few minutes. Pulled the Cherokee out into the street, drove away.
Tonight he’d sleep at the shop, in the backroom he kept there.
There were hunters about.
Interlude
What do I remember about South Africa?
The bush, the veldt…long grass parting as unseen predators prowled in the dusk and dawn…the cries and growls in the dark�
�the thorny trees, the stars strewn across the night sky like diamonds tossed carelessly across black velvet…
…the cities, teeming…
…violence, unspeakable violence sometimes, as though every dark spirit in the universe had found a fleshy home in the criminal world there, in the bodies of things that called themselves men, eaten up with no hope, dying from AIDS, red glared eyes, fueled by amphetamine and alcohol, into attacks fueled by nothing more than boredom, quite often…
…killing…
Deon strode through that landscape like the Grim Reaper.
He still ran a security company in Johannesburg, a branch office in Durban, another in Cape Town, and he made two trips a year at least down there, where he geared up like just another shooter and went out trolling for gunfights…
…not hard in a place where 230 police officers were killed each month…
…not touching the numbers of murders and rapes, the highest number in the world…
…and Deon, he went there for fun.
It was his laboratory, his training ground, his proving ground.
But he always welcomed the opportunity to exercise his skills closer to his new home in Lake City.
Chapter Fourteen
“I have a feeling about the South African,” Vladimir said.
“So?” Irina said.
She looked back over her shoulder at him, one foot on the desk as she smoothed her stocking. It amused her how he wouldn’t look at her.
“People will not talk about him,” Vladimir said. “It is hard to develop information about him.”
“It is because you are new,” Sergey said. “Use my name.”
“I have. The National Guard sergeant, he’s not the one. Too out of shape, I would have recognized him. His operation depends on his low profile -- he’s a paperwork man. Not this kind of man.”
“What about the South African?”
“Nothing specific. Only a feeling. It does not seem right that he would go in there and take only the SAWs. He could have taken much more.”
“Not on a smash and grab,” Sergey said.
“Why do it like that unless he was only after the SAWs? Are they so hard to obtain?”
“Yes,” Irina said. “Very hard to obtain here in America. Easier overseas, and that’s where we got those. They were stolen in Iraq and shipped back to us in returning diplomat household goods. Brand new, in the wrap.”
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