by Otto Penzler
Lyle huffed a laugh, and Parker watched Juan carefully. He didn’t seem to be playing along.
Lyle said, “Keep an eye on the lawyer while I open the front door.” To Parker, he said, “Give me those keys.”
Parker handed them over and he watched Lyle fight the blizzard on his way up the porch steps. The wind was ferocious and Lyle kept one hand clamped down on his hat. A gust nearly drove him off the porch. If anything, it was snowing even harder.
“Books,” Juan said under his breath. “He tricked me.”
The massive double front doors to the Angler home filled a gabled stone archway and were eight feet high and studded with iron bolt heads. Angler had a passion for security, and Parker remembered noting the thickness of the open door when he’d visited. They were over two inches thick. He watched Lyle brush snow away from the keyhole and fumble with the key ring with gloved fingers.
“Books are not treasure,” Juan said.
Parker sensed an opening. “No, they’re not. You’ll have to somehow find rich collectors who will overlook the fact that they’ve been stolen. Lyle doesn’t realize each one of those books has an ex libre mark.”
When Juan looked over, puzzled, Parker said, “It’s a stamp of ownership. Fritz didn’t collect so he could sell the books. He collected because he loved them. They’ll be harder than hell to sell on the open market. Book collectors are a small world.”
Juan cursed.
Parker said, “It’s just like his crazy story about the antelope and the Hindenburg. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“He’s crazy.”
“I’m afraid so,” Parker said. “And he sucked you into this.”
“I didn’t kill your dog.”
“What?”
“I didn’t kill it. I shot by his head and he yelped. I couldn’t shoot an old dog like that. I like dogs if they don’t want to bite me.”
“Thank you, Juan.” Parker hoped the storm wasn’t as violent in town and that Champ would find a place to get out of it.
They both watched Lyle try to get the door open. The side of his coat was already covered with snow.
“A man could die just being outside in a storm like this,” Parker said. Then he took a long breath and held it.
“Lyle, he’s crazy,” Juan said. “He wants to fix his family. He don’t know how to move on.”
“Well said. There’s no reason why you should be in trouble for Lyle’s craziness,” Parker said.
“Mister, I know what you’re doing.”
“But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
Juan said nothing.
“My wife …” Parker said. “We’re having some problems. I need to talk to her and set things right. I can’t imagine never talking to her again. For Christ’s Sake, my last words to her were, ‘Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’”
Juan snorted.
“Please …”
“He wants you to help him,” Juan said, chinning toward the windshield. Beyond it, Lyle was gesticulating at them on the porch.
“We can just back away,” Parker said. “We can go home.”
“You mean just leave him here?”
“Yes,” Parker said. “I’ll never breathe a word about this to anyone. I swear it.”
Juan seemed to be thinking about it. On the porch, Lyle was getting angrier and more frantic. Horizontal snow and wind made his coat sleeves and pant legs flap. A gust whipped his hat off, and Lyle flailed in the air for it but it was gone.
“Go,” Juan said.
“But I thought …”
“Go now,” he said, showing the pistol.
Parker was stunned by the fury of the storm. Snow stung his face and he tried to duck his head beneath his upraised arm to shield it. The wind was so cold it felt hot on his exposed bare skin.
“Help me get this goddamned door open!” Lyle yelled. “I can’t get the key to work.” He handed Parker the keys.
“I don’t know which one it is any more than you do,” Parker yelled back.
“Just fucking try it, counselor!” Lyle said, jabbing at him with the Colt.
Parker leaned into the door much as Lyle had. He wanted to block the wind with his back so he could see the lock and the keys and have room to work. He tried several keys and none of them turned. Only one seemed to fit well. He went back to it. He could barely feel his fingers and feet.
He realized Lyle was shouting again.
“Juan! Juan! What the hell are you doing?”
Parker glanced up. Lyle was on the steps, his back to him, shouting and waving his arms at the pickup and trailer that vanished into the snow. Faint pink tail lights blinked out.
At that moment, Parker pulled up on the iron door handle with his left hand while he turned the key with his right. The ancient lock gave way.
Parker slammed his shoulder into the door and stepped inside the dark house and pushed the door shut behind him and rammed the bolt home.
Lyle cursed at him and screamed for Parker to open the door.
Instead, Parker stepped aside with his back against the cold stone interior wall as Lyle emptied his .45 Colt at the door, making eight dime-sized holes in the wood that streamed thin beams of white light to the slate-rock floor.
He hugged himself and shivered and condensation clouds from his breath haloed his head.
Parker roamed through Angler’s library, hugging himself in an attempt to keep warm and to keep his blood flowing. There were no lights and the phone had been shut off months before. Muted light filtered through gaps in the thick curtains. Outside, the blizzard howled and threw itself against the old home but couldn’t get in any more than Lyle could get in. Snow covered the single window in the library except for one palm-sized opening, and Parker used it to look around outside for Lyle or Lyle’s body but he couldn’t see either. It had been twenty minutes since he’d locked Lyle out.
At one point he thought he heard a cry, but when he stopped pacing and listened all he could hear was the wind thundering against the windows.
He started a fire in the fireplace using old books as kindling and had fed it with broken furniture and a few decorative logs he’d found in the great room downstairs. Orange light from the flames danced on the spines of the old books.
He wanted a fire to end all fires that would not only warm him but also act as his shield against the storm and the coming darkness outside.
After midnight Parker ran out of wood and he kept the fire going with Angler’s books. Mainly the German language volumes. The storm outside seemed to have eased a bit.
As he reached up on the shelves for more fuel, his fingers avoided touching the copies of Mein Kampf. The act of actually touching the books terrified Parker in a way he couldn’t explain.
Then he reasoned that if books were to be burned, Mein Kampf should be one of them. As he tossed the volumes into the flames, a loose square of paper fluttered out of the pages onto the floor.
Parker bent over to retrieve it to flick it into the fire when he realized it was an old photograph. The image in the firelight made him gasp.
Parker ran down the stairs in the dark to the front door and threw back the bolt. The force of the wind opened both the doors inward and he squinted against the snow and tried to see into the black and white maelstrom.
“Lyle!” he shouted to no effect. “Lyle!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The story is fiction but the photograph is not.
In 1936, in one of the odder episodes of the modern American West, Wyoming rancher and noted photographer Charles Belden did indeed catch pronghorn antelope fawns on his ranch and deliver them to zoos across the nation in his Ryan monoplane, including a delivery to the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey, bound for the Berlin Zoo.
The photograph appears courtesy of the Charles Belden Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
I can find no information on the fate of the pronghorn antel
ope. They would have arrived shortly after the conclusion of Adolf Hitler’s ’36 Olympics.
—CJB, 2011
III
The Book of Virtue
Ken Bruen
MY OLD MAN:
Tough.
Cruel.
Merciless.
And that was on the weekends when he was happy. If a psycho could do happy.
His cop buddies said,
“Frank, Frank is just intense.”
Right.
Other kids go,
“My dad took me to the Yankees.”
Mine, he took out my teeth.
With intensity.
The horrors of peace. He bought the farm when I was seventeen. My mom, she took off for Boise, Idaho.
Hell of another sort.
They buried my father in the American flag. No argument, he was a patriot.
I played
“Another one bites the dust.”
He’d have hated Queen to be the band.
His inheritance?
A book.
Rich, huh?
My father died horribly. A slow, lingering, eat-your-guts-in-pieces cancer. His buddies admired my constant vigil.
Yeah.
I wanted to ensure he didn’t have one of those miraculous recoveries. His last hour, we had an Irish priest who anointed him, said,
“He will soon be with God.”
The devil, maybe. With any luck.
He was lucid in his last moments. Looked at me with total fear.
I asked,
“Are you afraid?”
He nodded, his eyes welling up. I leaned close, whispered,
“Good, and, you know, it will get worse.”
A flash of anger in those dead brown eyes, and I asked,
“What are you going to do, huh? Who you going to call, you freaking bully?”
The death rattle was loud and chilling. The doctor rushed in, held his hand, said,
“I am so sorry.”
I managed to keep my smirk in check. He was buried in a cheap box, to accessorize his cheap soul. A week after, I was given his estate.
The single book.
Mind you, it was a beautiful volume, bound in soft leather, gold leaf trim. Heavy, too.
And well thumbed.
I was puzzled. My old man, his reading extended to the sports page in The Daily News.
But a book?
WTF?
On the cover, in faded gold was,
Virtue.
Like he’d know any damn thing about that.
Flicked through it
???
In his spidery handwriting, it was jammed with notes. The first page had this:
“You cannot open a book without learning something.”
… Confucius.
I put the book down.
“Was he trying to educate himself?”
The schmuck.
My cell shrilled.
Brady, my boss. He muttered,
“Sorry about your old man.”
Yeah. Yada, yada.
Did the sympathy jig for all of two minutes. Then,
“Grief in the club last night.”
The outrider here being
“The hell where you?”
And, unsaid,
“So your old man bought the farm. You’re supposed to ensure the club runs smooth.”
The Khe San, in midtown.
Home to:
Wise guys
Cops
Strippers
Low lifes
Skels
Power trippers
Politicians.
All R and R-ing in a place of uneasy truce.
My job: to maintain smooth and easy vibe. I didn’t ask if they checked their weapons at the door but did try to keep a rack on the rampant egos. I had an assistant—in truth a Mack 5 would have been the biz—but, lacking that, I had—
Cici.
A weapon of a whole deadly calibre.
Brady was a Nam wanna-be, like Bruce in his heyday, a dubious tradition begun by John Wayne with the loathsome Green Berets. Rattle on enough about a lost war and it gave the impression you were there. Sure to be shooting, Brady played “Born in the USA” like his own personal anthem. That he was from the Ukraine seemed neither here nor deceptive there.
I ran the club, and well.
Was taught by the best, my best friend, Scotty, but more of that later.
Had learned to walk the taut line between chaos and safety that growing up with a bully equips you to do. When your mother takes a walk early, you lose any semblance of trust. My old man, second generation Mick, was as sentimental as only a fledging psychopath can be. His MO was simple:
Beat the living shit out of your child, play the suck-heart songs:
“Danny Boy”
“Galway Bay”
“Molly Malone”
Sink a bottle of Jay.
Weep buckets for your own miserable self.
What they term the “Constellation of Disadvantage.”
Booze, mental illness, violence.
But books?
Never.
So what the hell was this beautifully bound edition about? I opened another page at random.
Got
“A book must be an ice axe
To break
The seas
Frozen inside our soul.”
I was rattled.
If he could quote that, and, Jesus wept, have applied it to his own self, where the fook did that leave my dark finished portrait of him?’
Resolved to run it by Cici.
She was
Brady’s babe, in every sense.
Twenty five years of age with the experience of fifty, and all of them dirty.
And ruthless.
Concealed behind a stunning face, she had that rarity, green eyes, and a mouth designed by a Playboy deity.
She was a simple girl at heart, really.
All she wanted really was a shitload of cash.
And, like, before the spring.
Her beauty was of that unique stop-you-dead variety.
Worse, she knew it.
Used it.
Sure, I was banging her. If you live a cliché, then that’s the most lame of all. But, see, I could talk to her, I think. And,
Get this:
She read.
Our club catered to the young punks, reared on the movies Casino and Wise Guys.
They spoke a mangled Joe Peschi, convoluted by snatches of Travis Bickle.
Books? Nope.
They didn’t know from kindle to National Enquirer. But Cici, she’d have a book running alongside her vegetarian Slurpee. Her latest was titled, Ethics of the Urban Sister.
I shit thee not.
So, she seemed to know stuff. Couple that with an old soul glint in her amazing eyes and you had, what?
Sensuality with knowledge.
Late February, New York was colder than my old man’s eyes.
An hour before the club opened, we were having the usual hassle:
Chef on the piss
Waitresses on the whinge
And a mega tab from an old guy in one of The Families who no one had the cojones to ask,
“Yo, fook head, you want to like, settle your freaking bill?”
Translate
Me.
As in having to ass kiss and somehow get some major green from the dangerous bastard.
Cici was down with the young guns’ lingo,
Was explaining to me the essence of
“Too school for cool.”
And the extreme irrationality of adding NOT to a statement. Like
“I’m happy.”
Dramatic pause,
Then,
“Not.”
Fook on a bike.
But the word that annoyed me beyond coherent belief was the universal reply to seemingly any situation.
Like
“Your wife was killed.”
“… W
hatever!”
Or, even good news:
“You won the State Lottery.”
They go
“…Whatever.”
Drives me ape shit.
My old man was dead five months then. Okay, five months and change.
So, I counted. You betcha. Joy can be measured.
Cici had, in a drunken moment, told me that Brady kept a mountain of coke, and a ton of cash, in his apartment. She was laying down the seed of a plan.
Scotty had been dead three months.
We cherished the hour before Brady showed. Cici had taken my music faves on board. We had a ritual down. She’d ask,
“Caf Corretto?”
Basically the Italian version of a pick me up. Caffeine with Jameson.
The tunes: U2, with “Bad.”
The Edge proving he was indeed the owner of the driving guitar.
Lorena McKennet, with “Raglan Road.”
Vintage regret. The Irish legacy.
The Clash, with “London Calling.”
Because they rock, always.
Gretchen Peters’ “Bus to San Cloud.”
Pining in beauty.
We were midway along when the door whipped open and Brady blasted in. Heavy-set, muscle and fat in contention. A squashed-in face with eyes that never heard of humor.
His opener:
“Turn off that shit.”
Meant we’d have
“Born in the USA.”
Ad nauseum.
And add ferocity.
His crudity always managed to reach new depths of offense.
Like,
“Bitch, the office. I need servicing.”
Cute, huh?
Scotty.
My best and, in truth, only friend.
The ubiquitous them, whoever the fook they be, say,
“The difference between one friend and none is infinite.”
Scotty was the manager of Khe Shan before me. I was taken on as his assistant. I’d been fiercely pressured by my father to follow his footsteps—heavy, brutal, as they were and join the NYPD.
Yeah, right, like hell.
I went to business college at night. Learned that school teaches you one thing: Greed rocks.
I wanted to rock.
I had a job during the day stocking shelves. And,
Get this:
Carrying customers’ bags to their cars. All I ever, Christ ever, needed to know about humiliation, being almost literally invisible.