Siege 13

by Tamas Dobozy

  “Stan the Stall Man!” I cried.

  “Stanley Holden,” Constable Eckart continued. “Name his ‘marketable skills.’ In order.”

  “In order!” I couldn’t help but protest. “I’ve made so many of those,” I indicated the envelope, “how am I supposed to remember them in order?”

  “Just name them then,” Constable Eckart snarled.

  I looked at my hands, flat on the table, thinking of how Stan had been caught with another special-needs student, Horace Threadgill, their pants down around their ankles, fondling each other in a bathroom stall. “Milking cows,” I finally said. “Polishing microphones.” I stared at my hands thinking of how it went, the joke that never got old, every time Stan walked by us in the school hallways. “Putting those little stickers on bananas.”

  Constable Eckart got up and slapped me in the face, so hard I had to grab the table to keep from falling off the chair. Then he left the room.

  My mother didn’t believe it for a second, but she didn’t protest either. She came down with my father, the two of them sitting in another glass room across the hall as Constable Eckart went through my confession, shaking his head, every so often glaring across at me, even pounding his fist on the desk once and pointing at my parents and yelling something that made the two of them nod in shame. Afterwards they gathered me without a word, and out we walked into the parking lot, the car, home, the two of them leaving me to go put on pyjamas, brush my teeth, get into bed, to lie in the dark hoping my mother would come in and admit she knew what I’d done, stroke my hair, tell me to sleep. But I knew I didn’t deserve it, that in being able to answer Constable Eckart’s questions I was as guilty as if I’d made the cards in the first place.

  There was no trial. Maybe Constable Eckart figured it was a waste of money, or realized he could punish me without bothering a judge, which is exactly what he did, forcing me to wear orange coveralls while I mowed lawns, cleaned bathrooms, and helped load the bus at the local Hollyoak Centre, a halfway house for “special-needs people,” as I was henceforth to call them.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that Sebastian found out about the ’tard cards and was waiting for me every day to get off work. Luckily, there were a hundred exits from the centre—out around the pond, through the woods in back, over the fence by the dumpsters—so it was easy enough to ask one of the residents, Bernie Aldridge, to go and check where the “mean-looking guy” was waiting. What I didn’t count on was that Sebastian would eventually figure out this tactic and give Bernie a quick history lesson on ’tard cards, why I had to wear an orange jumpsuit, and the importance of loyalty to your own people.

  So one day he was waiting for me on the other side of the fence around the dumpsters, grabbing my hair the moment I landed, jerking me to my knees and holding me there. I remember staring at the broken glass on the asphalt, worried (of all things) that it would tear my pants and my mother would never let me hear the end of it, with Sebastian’s voice hissing in my ear. Meanwhile, in the background, Bernie was laughing and clapping his hands.

  “You know what John does after you little fuckers chase him home?” I tried to shake my head, but it was impossible with the grip Sebastian had on my hair, and anyhow I doubted he was interested in my answer. “He locks himself into a closet. And you know what I have to do?” The hiss had suddenly become a shout, and Sebastian shook my head like a bag of marbles. “I have to sit there and listen to him sing. It takes forever! And when he’s done I have to clap, and only then, when I’ve clapped enough, does he unlock the closet and let me take him out.” I could see it, Sebastian carefully creaking open the door, a wedge of light falling on John kneeling in the dark, tears streaming down his face, still murmuring a song to himself, almost totally inert as his brother carefully embraces and helps him out.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, tears coming to my eyes, though I’m not sure if I was crying because I was really sorry or just afraid for my life.

  But Sebastian never got a chance to judge.

  He let go of my hair. I looked up. Aces had him in a headlock. They struggled along the asphalt, shoes scraping back and forth, Aces howling that I was innocent, and Sebastian that he was going to kill both of us, and then Aces screamed at me to run, aided by Bernie, who was just screaming period. It seemed like good advice.

  I never found out who won the fight. When Aces got home he looked like he’d been hit by a garbage truck, wincing with every step, tape on his nose, one side of his face puffy and green. When I saw Sebastian again, at the grocery store with his mother, he looked just as bad. We almost smacked into each other rounding an aisle, but before I could hide Sebastian stared right through me as if I didn’t exist. It was the last I heard from him, though there was plenty from others, ex-friends of my parents, people at church—averting their eyes, smiling tightly, whispering as we passed—as if everyone in town was convinced I’d taken the blame for Aces, and so it was also my job, and my family’s, to take the shame.

  As for Aces, he left it alone—no commiseration, no thank you. But he did give me the assassin cards when he left. That was in 1987, the year I graduated from high school, the two of us standing on the pier below the Seahouse Resort, where the school held the party, both of us drinking from a bottle Aces had bought, walking through the liquor store as if at seventeen he owned the place, plunking the money on the counter and staring at the clerk just daring her to ID him. We were watching the sun come up, already hungover, listening to the splash of waves and clang of rigging in the morning breeze. He reached into his jacket and brought out a plastic bag. “For you,” he said. “A graduation present.” He was staring into the distance, clenching his jaw, as if giving them away pained him. I was surprised to see the photographs inside, having forgotten them, and was about to ask Aces why, at seventeen, he was still hanging onto these, but then thought better of it for the usual reasons.

  I showed the photographs to my father a year later, after we heard that Aces had one night, without consulting his parents, packed a suitcase, left behind a business card, and walked out the door. The card said, “Aces, 604 485 9380,” and nothing else, in shiny black font on a matte black background, so indistinct you had to tilt the card back and forth to catch the light and make out the numbers. “My nephew has finally gone nutso,” my father said, picking through the photographs, “if he wasn’t nuts already.” He held up one of them. “This is Endre Huszár, my great-uncle. And this is Elke Papp, my grandmother.” He turned over the photograph. “As far as I know,” he said, “she never killed anybody by ‘pyrotechnical blowgun,’ whatever that is.” He handed them back. “Your cousin’s going to end up in a padded room or at the bottom of a pit.”

  I kept the photos. Whenever we tried calling the number Aces had left—the area code was for Texada Island, British Columbia—we received only a long silence, followed by the short beep for leaving a message. Sometimes, after I left one, Aces would call me back to talk about the “harvests” he was doing in the mountains. He sounded tired, and when I asked what they were harvesting—as if I didn’t know—he said it was “a cash crop,” and that much of his day was spent “trimming, weighing, curing,” and then he’d go into a long tirade about how much he hated mould, specifically Aspergillus, though he was not a big fan of Clostridium botulinum, Penicillium, or Stachybotrys either. Finally, he asked if I still had the cards, whether I was taking care of them, and if I’d shown them to anyone (this last question was asked with such hopefulness the sound of it stayed with me for years). I said they were on the top shelf of my closet. Then, maybe because he was so far away, I told him what my father had said about the assassins all being family. Aces just laughed. “I’ve been doing some research here on my days off,” he said. “They have a little archive in Powell River. One day my dumb-ass uncle is going to have to wake up.”

  Following that telephone call I took the photographs down and stared at them until everything turned white at the edges of my vision, but they still did
n’t become real. I looked at them everywhere that summer—on lunch breaks at the mill where I had a student job as a broke hustler; in my girlfriend, Mary’s, bed, the two of us smoking and lifting them to the light; even in the Westview Bar, which was the only place I could get into under age, on Saturdays at the weekly jam, drinking clam eyes with friends and passing them around and laughing, feeling the whole time as if I was betraying Aces (though of course I was doing exactly what he wanted). By the end of summer the pictures weren’t in good shape, but everyone had seen them, and for a long time afterwards friends would mention them when I came home to visit, almost as if the assassins were real, or they’d transformed them, in the way we sometimes do with memory, into people who’d once lived and breathed.

  That fall I left for university in Victoria, and Aces moved from Texada to Los Angeles, sending another card, exactly the same as the last one but with a different phone number, to his parents and me in the mail. I forgot all about the pictures.

  Forgot about them for years. I did a BA in Victoria, an MA in Montreal, then moved to Hungary for two years, so that by the time 2009 rolled around Aces and I hadn’t spoken or written to each other for almost a decade. What finally recalled the pictures to me was accidentally coming upon the book Hungarian Assassins, 1900–2000 in the Art Gallery of Ontario bookstore, and opening it to find the photographs my father had identified as Elke Papp and Endre Huszár, but who’d had other names—the names they were given in the book—in Aces’ childhood fantasies. Hungarian Assassins presented the photographs recto and verso, so I could see the statistics Aces had carefully typed on the back of each photo. There was no mention anywhere in the book of words like “imagined,” “made up,” “delusional,” never mind “simulation,” “forgery,” or “bogus.” There were only paragraphs about composition, lighting, film stock, the anonymous photographer’s “contemporaries,” and straightforward thematic analyses.

  I bought a copy and took it home to Kitchener and spent the next few days tracking down the author, an “independent scholar” by the name of Christine Banks, whom I finally got in touch with by email through her publisher, asking where she’d gotten the pictures from, and why she hadn’t addressed their authenticity. She replied within days: “Thank you for admiring my work [I hadn’t said I admired it]. It’s always heartening to hear from fans [I hadn’t said I was a fan]. As to your questions, I thought long and hard about the issue of ‘authenticity,’ but it just seemed so twentieth-century to me, you know? What’s real, what’s fake—I mean, who cares? It’s art. As for the photographs, they were collected from archives throughout the United States, most of them in the little towns where the assassins went into hiding, took aliases, or lay low for a while before disappearing. I’ve appended a list to this email. Might I ask what your interest is?”

  I never responded.

  Instead, I called my mother and asked what she’d done with the bag of photos when she’d renovated my old room. “I still have them,” she said. “They’re with your other stuff in the basement. Do you want me to send them to you?” I told her I did, but before that I wanted my father to go through the pictures—all the pictures—and identify which ones were relations and which were friends or acquaintances or strangers.

  My mother called back the next day, and from the exasperation in her voice I could tell she’d had a fight with my father. They’d sat up until midnight going through the pictures and arguing about who was who. “They’re definitely our relatives,” she said, “but your father’s got it wrong when it comes to names and faces.” I could see their argument as she described it: “That isn’t your aunt Elke—that’s Aces’ cousin by marriage. I met her once in 2002 when they came to Canada. What’s her name?” My mother stared at the picture. “I remember—Cili Vashegyi! Apparently, she killed someone once,” she said. Aces’ mother had told her about it, something to do with a first marriage, an abusive husband, a scratch from a poisoned hairpin, never proven in court. My mother turned the picture around. “Here it is: Poisoning 1 (53).”

  My father took the picture from her hand. “That’s Elke Papp,” he said.

  My mother fanned out the photographs on the table. “This is Elke Papp. Didn’t she supposedly spit gasoline on a Russian soldier in 1956 and set him on fire?”

  “Shit,” my father replied. “I forgot about that. Actually, she spit it through a pipe . . . out the window so she wouldn’t be shot by snipers. But it’s such a bullshit story, I didn’t even believe it when I was a kid.” He laughed. “Family apocrypha.”

  “I met your grandmother,” she said. “She was definitely capable of burning someone alive!”

  I listened to her recount their conversation, a different argument for each photograph. “Just send them to me,” I sighed.

  Meanwhile, Aces mailed me his third black card, with a telephone number in Toronto. From what Annabella told my mother, he’d lived in the States for a number of years, “travelling here and there,” which she gathered from the libraries in Wyoming and Montana and New Mexico that kept calling her to ask if she knew someone by the name of “Imre Ászok” who owed thousands of dollars in overdue fines for books such as The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismai’lis Against the Islamic World; Secret Societies of the Middle Ages: The Assassins, The Templars & the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia; Conversations With an Assassin: Reflections on Modern Society, and many others, to which Annabella replied saying Aces was an adult and she had no intention of covering his fines.

  In the previous year Aces had been kicked out of the States, and had brought a woman with him, Anna Kovács, who was “masquerading” as his wife. That’s what my mother said: “I don’t think she’s his real wife. They didn’t get married in a church or anything. I think Aces just helped her to become a Canadian citizen.”

  “Maybe he loves her,” I replied.

  Aces had been in love before, with at least one girl I could remember, Katie Smith. She was the daughter of Leo Smith, one of the top managers at the pulp and paper mill. For some reason, Leo had liked Aces, hiring him on the university student program the summer before I worked there, even though Aces had dropped out of high school. Leo and Aces would go target shooting in the gravel pits up the north shore logging roads, Aces trying hard not to speak the script running through his brain—how each of the wine bottles, beer cans, and cardboard boxes were actually assassination targets. “Good one,” Leo would shout, looking through the binoculars and clapping Aces on the back. Meanwhile, Aces was thinking, “That’s one less crazy communist dictator for the world to worry about.”

  But Leo’s daughter, Katie, was more exposed to Aces’ craziness. Aces would show up hanging headfirst from the roof and gazing into her second-floor bedroom until she turned and caught sight of him and screamed. He’d take her out in his car and veer off into the alley that ran under the east-side power lines, racing along, trying to show her he was adept at executing a “Rockford” manoeuvre at high speeds. He’d take her to a dance at the Mercury Ballroom and look around as if he could see in the dark and ask if there was any guy there who’d ever looked at her funny, or made crude remarks, or treated her badly. “Tell me his name,” he’d say. “Tell me all their names.”

  I wasn’t there that night in the ballroom, but I could see her answer, gazing at Aces cruelly in the dim light, the smell of spilled beer and rye and Coke, the scrape of chairs as drunken kids fell to the floor, the blare of canned music. “Sure,” she said. “Lance Banks over there.” She pointed him out. “Ryan Olsen.” She pointed again. “He called me a cunt once,” she said, noting how it made Aces hop from his chair. “Then there’s Alex Johnston, by the beer counter. He told me I could suck his dick any time I liked.” She peered around some more. “Oh, yeah, Bruce Norris over there. Another dickhead. And George Hazelton, Jerry Alsop, Judson Astor. This one time, they wanted to do a four-way. Can you imagine that? It’d be like a porno.”

  I went to visit Aces in the hospital a few d
ays after he’d regained consciousness. The first three fights had gone well, but they’d worn him down, and it was on the sixth one, when Jerry Alsop was kicking him repeatedly in the head, that Aces realized, with a tinge of disappointment, that he probably wasn’t going to get a chance to take on Judson Astor. “But more than that,” Aces told me through the stitching on his lips, “I was sad because I knew this was Katie’s way of breaking up with me.” I had to look away from Aces then, turning my face to the window, afraid I’d see him cry. “I’ve got to find some way to get her back,” he whispered.

  He was serious. He loved her. It took me two anxious days to figure out what to do, knowing I had only as long as they kept Aces in the hospital. The next day, when my mother stepped out, I went into her jewellery, stuff that seemed famous to me from the stories that surrounded it—which aristocratic branch of the family had worn these rings, how this necklace was recovered from a collapsed apartment in the war, why the emeralds in this pair of earrings were traded for a wedding dress—until I found exactly the thing.

  I tracked Katie down that night, waiting in the parking lot for her to close up the clothing store where she worked, watching as she turned the “open” sign to “closed,” pulled in the rack of sale items from the sidewalk, cleared the till, turned out the lights, turned on the alarm, then lowered the grille, at which point I got out of the car and walked over.

  “What do you want?” she said, glaring at me. It was the exact opposite reception I got whenever I went inside the store, where my mother had been buying me clothes for years—stuff to wear to St. Joseph’s for mass, to concerts and better restaurants—and where Katie always remembered everyone’s names, plus an anecdote or two, to make them feel welcome, though she always walked past you without saying so much as hello when you ran into her anywhere else.