“I just want to see him, say hi. I drove all this way.”
“Yeah, but the problem is, the man doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Roger said.
“Well,” Thorn said, “then he should see a psychiatrist.”
Roger smiled, said, “You’re the one should do that, showing your ass around here. I mean, either you’re crazy or your goddamn androgen’s pumping overtime.”
“Both,” Thorn said. He sat on the edge of the desk. “You want to buzz him or should I?”
Benny, in a charcoal suit, French blue shirt, red Oxford tie, was wearing a small dot of a bandage on his right earlobe. When Thorn came into the office, he’d seen it and taken a deep swallow of air.
Benny was saying, “Yeah, yeah, right, Thorn, I’ll give you a job. Soon as the next ice age comes, when the woolly mastodons are running down Biscayne Boulevard. When you can ice-skate to Bimini. Yeah, then come see me, we’ll find you a slot.”
“But Gaeton said the coast was clear. You’d forgiven me.”
“Gaeton Richards?” Benny said, lowering his eyes to the papers on his desk for a fraction of a second, bringing them back up. “Where is that asshole anyway? He hasn’t been around since last week.” Benny took a quick look at Thorn’s leather pouch.
Thorn said, “You didn’t know about the accident? I saw him just yesterday, brought him home from the hospital.”
Very slowly Benny brought his eyes to Thorn’s. Gave him a thorough exam. Thorn suffered through it for a moment or two, then turned away, continued his prowl of Benny’s office.
The wall across from his desk was covered with photos. Benny and J. Edgar Hoover. Benny and a crowd of men in tuxedoes, one of them Richard Nixon. Benny with a head of hair and Kissinger. And standing next to the Russian writer with the funny beard. Benny and some Arab sheikh. Thorn was looking at that one, standing with his back to Benny now, examining this black-and-white photo of Benny on a yacht, up in the pilothouse with an Arab in a white headdress. Benny yakked at the side of the sheikh’s face while the Arab concentrated on the direction they were headed.
“Hey, hot rod, you turn around, look at me,” Benny said, “tell me what accident that would be.”
Benny and a Miami TV star. Benny with a pencil-thin mustache, shaking hands with a former Florida senator. Thorn turned around.
“You ask me that, and it surprises me,” Thorn said. “Because Gaeton told me you knew all about it.”
Benny said it wasn’t Thorn’s goddamn business what Benny knew or didn’t know about. His eyes were charged now. He drew himself up out of his chair, put his hands flat on the desk, and leaned forward. A lot of amperage in his eyes.
Thorn said, “He spent a few days at Mariner’s Hospital before I even knew about it. You know him, how secretive he is about everything. He called me yesterday, I went down there. Jesus, I thought he was in a head-on, all the bandages, bruises. His face, shoulder. It looked bad, but he was up, moving around OK. Creaky, and his speech was slurred a little, but moving around.”
Benny said, “And he told you to come here, speak to me? Is that what you’re saying? Gaeton Richards did that?”
“Yeah, he did.” He kept his voice easy while his heart had hiccups. Thorn sat down in the bucket seat next to the desk. It looked like an ejection seat. Go ahead, he was thinking, let it rip.
Benny said, “And so what you’re saying to me is, you came up to Miami, see if I still desired your services? That’s the bullshit you’re spouting here?”
Thorn made an affirmative hum.
“You know what, Thorn?” Benny sat back down. “The business I’m in, I’ve met flakes and scutwads like you wouldn’t believe. But this is a goddamn first. A guy, one day he tries to drown me in my own hot tub. A week later he’s in my office talking bullshit to me like we were kissing cousins.” Benny turned halfway around, gazed out at the sleek skyline of Miami. “I’m a believer in hiring the handicapped. I got all kinds of half-wits and dimwits working for me. Making a decent wage, too, by God. But let me tell you something, I wouldn’t pay you a nickel to pick fleas off my ass.”
He had his white phone up then. Punched three numbers.
He said, “Key Largo. The number for Mariner’s Hospital.”
Then he punched that, watching Thorn intently with a lift of an eyebrow.
Benny asked for Gaeton Richards’s room. He waited, squinting at Thorn. Benny kept the phone at his ear, curled his hand underneath his desk. The office door lock clicked.
Benny’s eyes shifted down to his desktop, and he said, “When was that? Yesterday?”
As he listened, Benny rose, came around the desk, stretching the phone cord behind him, moving closer to Thorn. His gray suit was tailored to take twenty pounds off him. Halfway working.
“And he was in for how long? Yeah, OK. His doctor’s name was what? Oh, you can’t? Tell me, why is that?” Benny edged up closer to Thorn and let him see the look in Benny’s eyes, a cold light. He ran those eyes over Thorn’s face as he listened to the voice on the phone.
Benny said, “Well, then never mind, honey, I’ll find out myself. And hey, tell me one more thing, sweetheart, you having some serious blood flow problems between your legs, or what?” Benny listened to her answer, smiling. Thorn could hear her squawk. He’d have to apologize to Cynthia Sanderson. Doing Thorn a favor and having to take Benny’s abuse.
When he’d hung up, Benny brought his eyes slowly to Thorn’s and said, “You got my attention, hot rod. If that’s what you wanted, you got it.”
“I could put you into some good fish,” Thorn said. “I know where they are. I know a hole, I’ve taken snook, jewfish out of it. Next day another one swims in and takes its place.”
Benny shook his head, walked back to his desk, and clicked the door lock again.
“I already settled your fate, Thorn, or you might be ticking me off right now. My friendly advice to you, son, is to start lining yourself up some reliable pallbearers.” Not angry. Not anything. He sat down, leaned back in his chair and went off somewhere, thinking, or whatever he did in there.
Thorn said, “I’ll tell Gaeton you asked about him.”
“Yeah,” Benny said, his eyes drifting back to earth. “Do that. You do that.”
Thorn got off the elevator at the twelfth floor. A lawyer’s office. The receptionist was the Cuban woman in the green dress he’d ridden up with. She cupped her hand over the receiver and said, yes?
“I’m here to service your copier,” he said, jingling his pouch at her.
She scowled at him and told the person on the phone she’d call right back. She led Thorn down a hallway with a plush purple carpet to a stark room with five copiers. She waved her hand at the silent machines and said something in Spanish about the tainted ancestry of all copy machines.
“Do any of them work?” he said.
“Just the one,” she said. She patted it cautiously. “We call and call. It is a week now.”
Thorn said, “Well, you should’ve bought the XR four hundred series. You bought the bottom of the line. Pieces of shit like this are always broke.”
She said something else in Spanish. An anatomical absurdity.
When she left him, he flipped open the lid of the working machine and laid the snapshot he’d taken on the glass plate. It took him a minute of fiddling, but he got it spitting out copies in a while. He made fifty before the machine broke down.
Back in the receptionist’s lobby he said, “I have to get the rest of my tools now. I’ll be back, probably around the first of July.”
He posted a couple of the photocopies on the elevator walls. One over the inspection permit. He rode the elevator down to the parking garage.
There were two levels, hundreds of cars. It took him awhile, but there were only two brown Mercedes. One had Oregon plates, a Save the Whales sticker. The other one had to be one of Benny’s company cars.
Thorn slid some of the photocopies under the windshield wipers, rolled several up, and slid them int
o the door handles. He wedged them in the gas opening, in the tailpipe, punched a couple onto the antenna, more in the grille, around the hood. In ten minutes he’d used up all fifty.
The Xerox machine had reproduced the Polaroid fairly well. It showed Gaeton sitting at Thorn’s picnic table, the bay glittering behind him. A copy of yesterday’s Miami Herald opened on the table in front of him, with the headlines clearly visible, LARGEST AIR DISASTER IN FRENCH HISTORY. Shot from the side, the photo didn’t show his wounds. Or the ice cream bar that had frozen itself to his right cheek.
Before he left, Thorn slid the blade of Gaeton’s knife into each of Benny’s tires. Left them hissing with menace.
Darcy sat on a wooden bench in the bare white room. Cheers and applause echoed from out front in the fronton. At the oak table in the middle of the room Carlos Bengoechea was hunched over, reweaving a cesta with strands of dried reeds. They grew only in the Pyrenees, he had told her. Very strong, like the people there. He chewed on an unlit cigar, moving it from side to side, as he repaired the jai alai basket.
“You are mistaken if you believe every Basque is a terrorist,” he said. “These boys, they are athletes.”
“I know, Carlos,” Darcy said. “I didn’t say that.”
“I have enough trouble, equipment, wages, I don’t need trouble from Immigration. If I found out one of the boys had once been in ETA, had even painted a slogan on a wall, anything like that. I would send him back to Bilbao tomorrow.”
This was a necessary formality, Darcy knew that. The denial, cleansing his personal slate. But she was impatient. She’d driven three hours to Dania to see Carlos. It was after midnight.
Darcy had spent the afternoon lying on her bed, watching the paper shades flutter, going over her plan. She’d pictured every step, making it all neat. Then started over, neatening it even more. And now she was here. Her dead brother jammed into the cooler of an ice cream truck and she was at the Dania jai alai fronton.
Carlos Bengoechea must’ve been near seventy. Ten years earlier he’d been one of her father’s closest friends. It’d started as simply a story for the Guardian. Florida gambling, horses, dogs, bingo, jai alai. But her father had caught the fever. Gradually it became an addiction, three nights a week at the fronton, finally smuggling Gaeton and her along a few times. Sitting out there in a padded chair, looking at that smoky hall, they watched those young dark men run at the walls, run up the walls, catch that speeding goatskin ball, and sling it back at the high wall, all in one sweeping motion. The cheers, the curses, the graceful passion, the brute skill. Her father on fire beside her, watching it all.
Darcy said, “I didn’t know who else to ask, Carlos. Something like this, it’s out of my experience.”
“Your cousin with the IRA, she has murdered?”
“No,” Darcy said. She hesitated, considering how evil to make this cousin. “But she has committed crimes against property.”
“Yes, yes,” Carlos said. “And now she has had enough of the struggle and wants to live here.”
“That’s right.”
He snipped some reed ends, tucked them into the cross weave. He put aside his scissors and scooted his chair around to look directly at her. Carlos closed his eyes. The cheering out front rose, a smattering of boos. Stomping.
“You can buy bogus passports in Nassau, any nationality.” Carlos narrowed his eyes at her. “You can buy papers here in Miami, Fort Lauderdale. This is easy, forgeries.”
“She wants something better. She wants something first class, more than just a few papers, something that would stand up to close inspection. She can pay whatever is required.”
He shook his head, clicked his tongue. No, no, no.
He went back to braiding the narrow stalks into place. Bent over the cesta, focusing everything on it. She listened to the cheering, the announcer calling out the names of a new set of players.
This was all wrong. Carlos was just a simple businessman. When Darcy had thought of this, frantically running through her memory of people who could help with her plan, Carlos was the only one she had turned up. Now she realized he was simply a man like her father. Solid and honest. Let the police handle such things, he would say if she told him the truth.
She decided she would stay a minute or two longer, kiss him good-bye, go back to Miami. Maybe one of the reporters at WBEL would know the name of a quality document forger.
Finally he raised his head, looked sternly at her. He said, “Basques have known nothing but oppression. First Franco, now this socialist state. For a true Basque, it is not a question of joining ETA or not, but what work they will do.
“But sometimes, when a boy grows older, he changes, he wants no more of the struggle. Perhaps by then he has killed, he has bombed police barracks, murdered Guardia Civil, Franco generals. He was young, brave, but now he wants no more. But how does he begin over?”
She said, “A name. A phone number. Something like that would be all I need.”
Carlos held the cesta out, fit his hand into it. He moved it smoothly through the air.
“My boys are great athletes. You have seen them, Darcy, what they can do. Should they be punished forever because they once fought for the freedom of Euzkadi, their homeland?”
Darcy did not reply. She watched Carlos stare at the cesta as if trying to recall its purpose.
He drew the cesta off his hand slowly. Out front in the auditorium the announcer introduced more players. Carlos’s eyes, exhausted, moved to hers.
“Your father,” Carlos said, staring at her gravely, “he would approve of this?”
“I think he would,” she said. “Yes, definitely.”
“There is a man who lives in Homestead. He raises avocados,” Carlos said. “He uses the name Emilio Fernandez.”
Roger threw the last of the photocopies into the parking garage trash bin. He came back to the Mercedes. Benny was counting out bills to the tow truck man. Four new radials. Roger got in and started the car.
“What was that all about?” he said when Benny got in the back.
Benny sat there, looking at the parking garage wall.
When Roger started the car, Benny said, “You ever have to shoot anybody? Kill them?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking at Benny in the rearview mirror. “I killed a guy once, yeah. Missed a few, too.”
“You ever hear of anybody shot with the barrel pressing against their fucking head, they survived?”
Roger looked into the rearview mirror. He said, “In the newspaper, I read about a guy shot himself in the temple and it went through, didn’t kill him. He walked to the hospital, checked himself in.”
“Shit,” Benny said. “Don’t tell me something like that.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Don’t worry about it, Roger. It doesn’t involve you.”
Roger revved the car, looked at Benny thinking away back there. He said to the rearview mirror, “I seem to have a rapport with this Thorn guy. You want me to talk to him? See what’s eating him?”
“I took care of Thorn already. The boy’ll be back at the bottom of the food chain before he knows it.”
“How you mean?” Roger said. He put the car in gear, backed out.
Benny said nothing. Roger pulled the Mercedes out onto Biscayne Boulevard, cut into traffic.
Benny said, “The guy you read about, the one botched his suicide, he must’ve used a small-caliber something or other, just grazed himself, huh?”
“No,” Roger said. “I remember it. It was a thirty-eight or something big. Slug went right through, missed everything. Just tore hell out of his skull. The lesson was, you want to kill yourself, you got to use a twenty-two, so the slug gets in there, doesn’t come out, just Cuisinarts around, tears everything up.”
Benny staring out the window, said, “I never heard that.”
Roger pulled onto the ramp for the Dolphin Expressway. He said, “Makes you fucking wonder what it takes to kill somebody.”
�
��Yeah,” Benny said. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
23
On that Wednesday night the parking lot at the Bomb Bay Bar was full. And not pickups, not Keys cruisers with their peeling vinyl tops, broken-out windows. No, sir. Tonight it was new Mercedeses, Cadillacs, Lincolns. It looked as if the Republicans were having a fund raiser.
Ozzie saw Papa John standing out back of the bar, leaning on the fish-cleaning table, a bottle of whiskey sitting beside him. The man was staring out at the marina, out into the dark wind coming off the ocean.
Ozzie strummed a couple of chords as he approached, getting his fingers limber.
“Bonnie says you wanted me to sing,” said Ozzie.
John turned and said, “I got some people inside want to hear what you got.”
“This a trick?”
“Not on you it isn’t,” Papa John said. “You never mind what’s working here, you just stand up there and play your song the best you know how. But I want you to change the words around just a little bit first. You think you can do that?”
“What for?”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t understand, boy.”
“Try me.”
Papa John lifted the bottle by the throat and bubbled down some of the bourbon. He gasped, set it down on the table again, and put his arm around Ozzie’s shoulder, moving him up to the edge of the seawall.
“I’m selling out,” he said. “I found me somebody knows what my worn-out old ass is worth, and I’m handing it over to him.”
Ozzie was quiet, scrambling in his head to stay with this.
Papa John said, “I got a gentleman inside there, he’s the new generation of bandit. He’s what’s coming next, Ozzie, my man. I thought it was you and your kind, but it isn’t. It’s this guy and his computer and his German cars.”
Ozzie didn’t understand it yet, but he knew he didn’t like how it sounded.
“All the training I was giving you, showing you how the rip-offs worked, giving you a sense of history, working on your sorry-assed storytelling, well, shit. I was wrong, little buddy. I was just being softheaded, thinking I could find me a son this late in life, get a little last-minute immortality. No, sir, by God, I hate to admit it; but I seen the future, and it’s in there in the bar, burping and slapping rich men on the back. A guy wanting to be somebody he ain’t, and without a goddamn idea how to go about it.”
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