by Martin Rose
Leaving the one on Jin’s vest ticking, surrounded by yet more grenades and munitions, to cook its way to detonation.
Todd hopped off the back of the truck with Jin’s pin in his hand.
Behind him, the horizon exploded.
*
I woke up with a monster in my face.
I grasped reflexively for the weapon that was no longer at my bedside. The creature flew up into the air, morning light filtering through the windows: the vulture squawked and flapped his massive wings with gusts of wind, sending black feathers into the air as he perched on the back of an old chair. He settled into place with his beak open, his tongue darting like a viper’s, agitated and annoyed. If I’d had my gun, I would have shot him and been able to stuff my pillows.
I sat up against the headboard. The adrenaline made my mouth bitter, my breath rancid. The bird must have crawled in during the early morning hours, which meant Elvedina still haunted the porch with the door open. I imagined her with dew clinging to her iron figure, her eyes like marbles. I reached for the pack of cigarettes and then put them down. Debated quitting again. This wasn’t like being dead when smoking didn’t matter; shit mattered now in ways they hadn’t before. The pill bottle from last night had rolled against the wall.
The vulture sunned himself lazily.
“Couldn’t bring me coffee or anything useful like that, eh?”
The cell phone beside the bed vibrated, lighting up like a strobe. My brain couldn’t catch up to my eyes. Time to be a functioning member of the twenty-first century, I decided, and lifted it into the air to punch the unlock button and cease its irritating chatter.
The vulture took flight. One second I held the cell phone in my sleep-numb fingers and in the next, it was gone—the vulture winging through the room and into the hall with the cell phone still ringing and blinking in the cage of his talons. Wing beats buffeted me. I held onto emptiness like a man trying to hail a cab while the vulture busily tapped it with his beak on the floor until the screen cracked and the ringing stopped. Plastic bits flew.
I nearly fell out of bed in a half-hearted attempt to stop the avian theft. The world turned hostile. The horizon, suddenly optional. I was sick and nauseated, like when Jamie and me used to raid our father’s liquor cabinet. My brain slammed against my skull in one endless ricochet.
“You look quite under the weather.”
I pirouetted to face the voice and discovered Lionel beyond the threshold in the hall, the fringes of his hair ruffled and uncombed, staring at me over the rim of his glasses, reflecting light within light. Pinning down his gaze became difficult, sickened me with speed. Was this Atroxipine withdrawal? His left hand trembled while he balanced a pen and a book in the other, each line in his face like the scar on the surface of a deeply rutted mountain.
“Had a shitty night’s sleep.”
“Come now, boy, I was just about to chase some coffee. I dare say, I know you’re an adult, but you look something like a lost child.”
Lionel crooked one paper-dry claw over my bare arm. Tensile strength flowed through him, as though the old man were made of rebar underneath his wrinkled skin and his flagging heart. He used me in place of his cane, and together we tottered down the long hall. The vulture squawked after me.
“Who is that?” Lionel asked, tremulous.
“Oh, uh, Fluffy.”
“I didn’t know you had a cat.”
“I didn’t, either. Let me get you a chair.”
The vulture followed us down the hall and took flight to make a home of my shoulder. Each time I shoved him away, he refused to leave, persistent, annoying, and morbid. I let him, unwilling to interrupt the conversation to school the recalcitrant bird, and most of all, because I felt sorry for him. Unwanted, unloved, ugly. He reminded me of myself, of all those years undead, and I didn’t have the heart to shove him out into the wilderness. Normal people had dogs and cats. But I could no longer make claim to their charmed ranks. Yet, wasn’t I fit for a companion? Did I not deserve company to allay my dark hours? And if this scavenger of the dead chose me, who was I to refuse him?
I pulled a chair out for Lionel. He sank into it and slid his paper and book onto the table. I threw the coffee pot in the sink to fill it. A rumpled coverlet and the unmade sofa bed gave mute testament to Lafferty’s midnight drunk and his warning: She’s a fuckin’ cleaner if ever there as one.
The night seemed a decade long in retrospect. How many dreams did I have between here and there? They numbered in the thousands I thought, pouring coffee grinds into the basket. I remembered Elvedina’s kiss to Megan—that inscrutable woman suddenly so intimate with my brother’s wife—and Lafferty’s face, earnest and worried. You look me in the eye and tell me it’s not possible she’s here to kill you, or even me, just for being here. Maybe even the old man, too.
I set the coffee and sat down across from Lionel. From where I took my seat, Elvedina’s starved shadow stretched taut like a wire across the floor from the porch. I kept her in my sight line, and halting, told Lionel about the prison guard who called last night, relating the strange incident of Gunther, the prisoner who assaulted Highsmith over dinner, who killed himself later that same night in solitary.
“Omens and portents,” Lionel muttered, drumming his fingers on the table in deep thought. “This does not bode well. Coincidences are never good.”
“You thinking that Highsmith put him down?”
“I think it’s a reasonable suspicion, but through a locked room?”
“Could have bribed a guard… You did.”
“Hmmm, yes. Maybe. We’ll have to look into it later when the facts are in and accounted for. If it wasn’t a bribe—if it wasn’t a guard aiding him—”
The unfinished thought took sinister form. What, exactly? What was Highsmith up to? How many suspicious deaths were occurring at the prison with every second we failed to prove Highsmith’s culpability and allowed him free reign to do as he pleased, kill as he pleased?
What of us? Which of us would be next in line if we vexed him?
I left it, but in the same way a splinter itches beneath the skin, knowing it would return with a welter of pus and poison besides.
“So, you knew my father.”
“Oh yes,” Lionel nodded. “We met each other a long time ago. We were young, it was the forties and we lost touch for a bit. Ran into each again over in Korea, later, Vietnam. We built our careers together, you might say. We had an overlap in political and military applications.”
“I can’t imagine my father young.”
I did not speak of the dream. I failed to mention the classified report. I hadn’t known my father to be friends with anybody. There were merely people he used, and people he kept close, and all the rest he kept as enemies. Now, I had a chance to get closer to Lionel, to get under his skin and see what mettle he was made of. Yet, in the diffuse light of the morning and the locusts warming up outside, the smell of coffee drifting in, I realized there was nothing to discover. Oh sure, the old man had stories to share by the dozen, no doubt.
But the evil spy with the hidden agenda I’d been looking to uncover wasn’t here. In front of me was a tired old man who was little more than a glorified warden. I’d thought he’d been up to no good, but what, exactly? Was I about to uncover his secret conspiracy to use the extra flyer miles on his AARP card or get his senior discount at the local diner?
This was a man at the end of his life. Look, how he trembled. His glassy eyes hidden behind the thick lenses. What could he see, if anything? I’d been able to turn the clock back on my own biology, but nothing would stop his relentless spin of entropy. One day, I would be in Lionel’s place—an old spook at the end of his life, wanting to get back down south to Columbia, to Guam, to forget about The World and the arthritis biting into my joints.
There was no conspiracy here.
The woman outside was a different story.
I became aware of Lionel, aware of his fragility and what an easy target
it made him for any would-be assassin. My sense of protectiveness came to the fore, shifting this confidante of my father into a different role. His failing sight, his trembling grip—could any of it measure to Elvedina’s steely composure, her well-muscled strength?
“Oh yes, he was something else, your father. Everyone knew it. He had quite a following of hangers-on. He had charisma, a deft politician, was your father. I know it’s hard to picture, seeing as how your mother married him so much younger. You were born, what—when he was forty? I wouldn’t expect you to know of him, the way he used to be. He’s much more serious now, but back then, ah, your father was very energetic. Would get up to all kinds of pranks. I understand you and he are not on the best of terms.”
“He burned bridges. Exiled my mother.”
Lionel inclined his head. The morning sun made his wrinkles seem as mighty river paths in a folded map. Monkish. He drew his chair closer to me so our elbows brushed. I froze, thinking he would take my hand in grandfatherly fashion, and then he relented at the last and was still.
“I will not lie to you, Vitus,” he said. “In my past, I did terrible things. I’ve seen things, all the things old men don’t talk about. And some of us, we grow more distant and hard with every passing year. Men like your father. Some of us—men like me—sometimes, standing witness to all that terror and heartbreak, it does something else to you. Makes you realize there’s nothing to be gained from all that pain. The pain opens you up on the inside, instead of closing you off. It’s what makes it hard for me, to see how much pain your father has inflicted on you, and know there’s nothing I can do to repair it. And indeed, I do not think you would want that from me, and I do not think there is anything that can be done for it.”
He reached into his suit pocket then, withdrew a ball in his hand, and set it down on the kitchen table with a tap! And I saw it was not a ball at all.
It was a World War II–style grenade. A ring of yellow around the top gave it a high explosive wartime designation. A fragmentation grenade like this had not been in production since the 1970s. My breath and heart stopped in tandem. The pin and the ring gleamed like razor wire in the light. It was older than I was.
It was the grenade from my dream.
“Bet there’s a story there,” I croaked, coughing to make my voice work right again, choking out my surprise.
“You know your father and I conducted special intelligence projects during Korea and Vietnam, didn’t you? You father must have told you about that.”
“No. He never talked about work much. You saw more of him than I did.”
“Well, that was how I ended up with this beauty,” Lionel said and tapped the grenade. I nearly choked again, wondering if the thing were still safe to handle after all those years. In theory, it should be, but munitions have a way of betraying you as they get older.
“What kind of work was it you and Todd did?”
“Most of what we did was observation. Todd was restless. Didn’t like being put behind a desk. He’d invent reasons to go out and explore the countryside. I told him, what are we supposed to do if we get caught?”
“With my father? Pray.”
Lionel ignored the deadpan. “Oh, nothing so dire. He just laughed and gave me a passport. Your father was very good that way. It was a Russian passport—during the day, I pretended to be Pyotr Ivanovich.”
I remembered the dream, the Russian uniforms young Todd and young Lionel wore as they sat together in the car.
“At night, when we found ourselves too far out and getting lost on unpaved roads, I unfolded the passport. Do you know, it was stained with old blood on the edge, just a sliver of rust. I wondered what had happened to Pyotr Ivanovich. It occurred to me much later that Todd had been what happened to Pyotr Ivanovich. He had a way of making things happen, turning miseries and tragedies to his advantage. Only later, when I had the time, when things were calm and he was far away, did I deduce how these things came to pass. In some ways, I am frightened of him.”
“Then there’s hope yet.”
“I don’t blame you for your antagonism toward you father. But I would never dare tell him. At the core of him, he was a deeply lonely man. That happens when your greatest talent in life is running headfirst into the maw of danger. The people you love tend to disappear off the edge of a cliff. And more often than not, it’s your fault. I sometimes wonder if he loved me as a friend if only because I survived longer than all of them. And am surviving still. Though what dubious accomplishment that may be, you may debate.”
I made a mental note to treat Lafferty better than my father had treated Lionel.
“During one of those projects—one of the unofficial ones in which Todd could not seem to sit still behind a desk for more than ten minutes at a time without bemoaning the torture of paperwork—we decided to chase down a figure who kept reappearing in our transmissions. We drove out and took on our Russian identities and Todd delighted in the roleplay. I noticed the small efforts he made, taking on the appearance of Pyotr Ivanovich’s comrade, Vlad Nicholavich. Combing his hair a certain way, smoking cigarettes with his opposite hand, as though he were becoming and assuming totally the personality of this made-up identity. And later, as with Pyotr Ivanovich, I realized it likely Vlad was no imaginary figure, but a soldier lost from his Soviet Empire, rotting in a ditch beside Pyotr Ivanovich in Korea. Todd was becoming Vlad and, even at night, when he arose, he kept the pretense, speaking Russian, affecting a heavy accent. I would have told him to stop but we were stopped by guards a time or two. His flawless performance allowed us to slip through the cracks. Chameleon like. Reptilian.
“I don’t even think the man we were tracking down mattered in the scheme of things. Todd liked to take on challenges merely to do them, to engage in high-risk activities for the satisfaction it brought him to beat the odds. We found a lady of the evening. He went to bed with her while I waited and disapproved. She led us to a middle man, and that man led us to an agent who had regular contact with Kim il-Sung. We were going off the map on this one. Todd said he wanted to talk to him, probe him discreetly, and I believed it. He had a natural, seductive charm. A rendezvous point was agreed to, and this man was going to meet us under the impression we were passing him sensitive information from the American side.
“Close enough. Though it is one thing to say it—another to experience the horror of realizing the house of cards is made of stones and about to topple over you. And we did not quite appreciate the trap. I think the principal problem lay with our target agent—he was a man very like Todd.
“Jin, his name was, though if that were his first or last, I cannot quite wrestle it from memory. In the end, your father planted the seeds of his own undoing. Jin and Todd had met before. So his Russian sham fell apart when they were close enough to stare each other in the face. Naturally, that did not go well. We scrambled and retreated. Jin could have satisfied himself with shooting us as we ran, but instead, he stripped us of our passports. We would not survive ten minutes without our cover, unless we wanted to lie low as fugitives in North Korea indefinitely.”
“And then…” I pantomimed pulling a pin with my teeth, throwing an imaginary grenade.
Lionel nodded.
“Sometimes, I don’t think that day really happened. I wouldn’t be sitting here, if not for your father.”
And that’s how he bought you, I thought, but did not say. That’s how he owns you. How he commands your loyalty.
Lionel took the grenade back in his trembling hands and pushed it back into his pocket where it disappeared with a slight bulge. Easy enough to overlook, when he walked with a distracting silver-headed cane to obscure the unusual cargo at his side.
“Once upon a time, your father cared about people. He’d do the impossible to save the lives of the people he cared about. And that’s why I carry the grenade with me. So I never forget that day, and how he saved my life.”
“It’s what he does to people he doesn’t care about that worries me, Lio
nel.”
“I won’t pretend that he’s a good man. But he’s been a good man to me. And you should think about times you don’t know about, that he might have been a good father to you, and you never know it.”
The coffee machine breathed a hiss of steam and I retrieved two clean cups from the drain board, snatched a bottle of generic pills for the headache, and counted out two. They buzzed the ancient memory of Atroxipine. Like cigarettes, I felt the seismic pull of that old addiction, the pills in the back of my jagged throat, blazing a pathway down into my bowels. I thought of Todd, of Lionel, of Jin. I thought that if Elvedina had planted the red folder in the hopes of shoving a wedge between me and Lionel—in a desperate attempt to prove that Lionel was untrustworthy, that he had been keeping secrets from me—well, it failed miserably. Clearly, I held his confidence. He’d handed me all the redacted information, and who knows, perhaps that dream had been nothing more than my subconscious, stitching together a reasonable turn of events from the available information.
Elvedina, I thought, you’ll have to try harder than that.
I palmed a dose out of my pocket and shoved two Atroxipine into my mouth, guilty and savage. Taste buds opened up to receive it, salivary glands working overtime. I poured coffee for Lionel as though everything were natural. At all costs, I decided, he could not know about my burgeoning addiction.
“Yeah, well, I’m sure he was a lot more fun back in the day.”
That’s right, my Id whispered, just like nothing happened, eh?
“He must have passed something on to you. It’s in your blood, this work. You’re a quick study. I imagine you’ll make quick work of Highsmith.”
I said nothing. I drank the coffee black.
“You don’t know yet, do you, how he’s killing them?”
I didn’t know how to tell him that if Highsmith was to be believed, the man himself was the murder weapon and I was looking for mind bullets.