Good to Be God

by Tibor Fischer

  GOOD TO BE GOD

  you from the pulpit. But the road back from shirt-lifting is a tough one.

  “Tyndale, man, you don’t understand. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Yes, I do understand. But consider this question. If you had a major, billion-dollar criminal organization would you make it easy or difficult for recruits to join? Easy or difficult?”

  “Couldn’t you, like, kill him instead?” suggests Gamay. This is how it starts. I can understand that Gamay is not eager to simulate sex with a ripe, unappealing African missionary, but I’m still a little shocked; although I have to confess there is a part of me that’s receptive to the idea, if I could be sure Gamay could carry out the disposal without repercussions.

  “You’re thinking like an amateur,” I reproach. “Why are you fussing? Your face won’t be in the shots.”

  “But, Tyndale, I don’t want to do this.”

  My phone rings.

  “Why, hallo, Muscat, how are you?” I answer with exaggerated warmth. Gamay is now making frantic whatever-you-want gestures. “No, I haven’t seen him. I haven’t seen Gamay for a long time.”

  I’ve always enjoyed photography. A black man in a cheap pink bra is a great composition. Naturally, the only thing worse than sinning, is sinning ridiculously. I enjoy the session, working in bottles of rum, white powder, a teddy bear and anything I can think of to heighten the turpitude and humiliation. I order Gamay to drive the still-blurry Liberius to Daytona, and dump him there with some printouts of the pictures. Florida is a big place. I’m confident Liberius will get the message.

  “When am I getting some money for this shit?” Gamay moans.

  “When I am going to get some disfrooting?”

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  “Easy or difficult?” I remind him.

  That evening Muscat phones me again. “I haven’t seen Gamay for a while. I don’t want to say anything bad about him.

  I don’t want to say anything too clear, Tyndale, that might be misleading, but I caught him looking at a website for the DEA.

  He could be ratting us out.”

  G

  One of my neighbours who used to be a spy told me how to get information. You go to the nearest bar. Or restaurant. Whether you’re targeting an office or a military base, there is always one relaxery where everyone gathers. Usually the nearest. There are a lot of things people don’t need, but everyone needs a drink, everyone needs to eat.

  You never approach anyone. You get them to approach you.

  You need a prop. According to my neighbour a small child or a dog is ideal for attracting people. “An infant-in-arms is the best tool a spy can have,” he said. Failing that some object that has visual weight, a guitar or a chess set, something that invites comment. I hang around outside the crematorium a few lunchtimes and I finally spot a group of three heading off to a kebab joint.

  I enter five minutes later, carrying the most bizarre item I could find at Dishonest Dave’s, a stuffed gharial, an Indian crocodile that has a snout so preposterously thin that it looks like a pipe.

  It’s a small one that fits comfortably under my arm.

  The waitress refuses to acknowledge my gharial, and I order a classic shish. The three cremcrew are close by, unchatty in the way when you’re having lunch with the colleagues you work with all day and with whom you’ve had lunch every day 178

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  for the last month. Sideways, they take in the gharial, but say nothing.

  “Is that thing real?” The gharial is working, but not in the right direction.

  Some retiree with too much time on his hands interrogates me about the gharial. I outline something about its habitat and the problems the species is facing. I don’t want to give away too much, because I want to save some gharial chat for the cremcrew and also because I don’t know much about the gharial. Without any invitation the old guy sits down next to me and natters about the python epidemic in the Everglades, former pets on the run. “Those suckers are loving it in there. They’re bigger than the alligators. They’re eating up all the alligators.” He rambles on for ten minutes without any encouragement from me.

  I can see the cremcrew are finishing up. Patience, I think. No, too late for patience. “Could you pass me the ketchup?” I ask, pretending my bottle’s caked.

  It’s enough. “You ain’t going to eat your pet, are you?”

  We chat. They’re not in any rush to get back to work. Two of them leave. Man Three with a big beard is extremely relaxed about getting back to work. I explain I’m a salesman, laugh about fixing my expenses. “If I didn’t have that extra on the side, I just wouldn’t make it. Honesty just doesn’t pay.”

  “It’s hard to get by,” he says. A skinny Chinese guy comes in proffering DVDs. My target frowns. “I know that guy isn’t getting rich, but it’s wrong.” I explain I’m new to the city, and does he know where I can score some dope.

  He ices up and leaves immediately. A law-abiding man. It’s reassuring to learn they still exist. But it doesn’t help me.

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  G

  Dave calls me and says the Brazilian will meet us this evening.

  I have nothing to do tomorrow so I agree to meet since I know we’ll end up burning the night right down.

  We meet at an elegant bar, in a shitty area of North-Western Avenue. The waitress gives a squeal of pleasure as she recognizes Dave.

  “You were right. You were right. How did you do that? Will you do it for my friend Amy?”

  She returns with another waitress. Dave holds her hand, looks in her eyes and says “Jacques Higelin. Insane Clown Posse.

  Graham Central Station.” The waitresses jump up and down in excitement.

  We’re joined by eurotrashy Eric, who works for his father’s property-development business. Dave explains to Eric that vodou is nonsense. An hour later Dave is explaining to Avi and Macca, two stoners who work in a music store, that vodou is not to be trifled with, and that he once smoked so much dope he ate three light bulbs in a balsamic-vinegar dressing.

  The bar looks more like a bar with Dave sitting in it. He should actually be paid for drinking in a bar. He’s a true night-rider. He rides the night, and at the end of it, it’s the night that’s exhausted, not him. He just climbs off and looks for something else to do.

  “The Brazilian’s not coming, is he?” I remark after four hours.

  “Shall we review the facts? He’s a lying, cheating butcher: a lying cheating butcher several extended families would like to kill. He is what you requested: a corrupt, unscrupulous, unfeeling, money-grabbing scalpel fiend. So it may be that he 180

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  is a man who does not feel bound by his word to attend this evening.”

  We have more drinks.

  “So what do you want to do now?” asks Dave.

  “It’s about time to go home.”

  “To do what? Sit alone in your room?”

  “A few hours’ sleep a night never hurt anyone.”

  “What’s your pecker up to these days?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You need to get laid. No, you need to get married. Once you’re married, you can get laid as much as you want. A wedding ring is the ultimate babe magnet. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, but as soon as you get married they fall from the sky. But I won’t misbehave. I did that a lot.” He stares at a waitress. “And I’m certainly not going to misbehave with her – too skinny.” A fuller waitress crosses our vision. “Now her – I could misbehave with her. But I won’t. I did that a lot.”

  Undeniably, it’s a tribute to the growth of our intimacy that Dave stands up and lowers his trousers to reveal his left buttock, which has odd word-shaped welts on it: PIC.

  “Pic?”

  “Pig. I thought I had the perfect system because I was sleeping with two girls called Stacey. No blurting out the wrong name, or if I did no one would mind. I’m asleep
when I dream this incredible pain. I must have levitated three feet off the bed. I’ve got to hand it to Stacey. No clichéd stuff like ripping up my best suit or sugar in my gas tank. It couldn’t have been easy to get a brand made, to heat it up till it’s red hot.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. That was unfair. I mean they had their fun. They could have told me where I slipped up.”

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  I want to go home. Dave persuades me to go to a charity event at a golf club. “It’s for kids,” he says handing me a flyer with a picture of a baby with kidney problems. Even I can’t say no to seriously ill kids. You just can’t. I realize it’s going to be an all-nighter and that I seem incapable of learning from experience.

  You swear you won’t make the same mistake again, but you do.

  Outside, there’s another homeless guy guarding a boombox.

  The voice is saying: “We have to choose. We have been put here to choose. You must choose the right path. You must avoid the wrong path.” The homeless guy is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Avoid the Wrong Path”. It makes me angry. Who the hell would choose the wrong path? No one, apart from a few headcases maybe, would choose the wrong path. If a path were clearly marked “the wrong path” who would choose it?

  The problems with paths is that they are rarely marked, and certainly never clearly, reliably marked.

  “The Fixico Sisters have helped many to find the right path and saved many from the wrong path,” the voice continues.

  “Who are the Fixico Sisters?” asks Dave.

  “Never heard of them.”

  “They must be new to town. They sound like some mean competition.”

  At the charity function, I wonder why it is, when you go out drinking, you go to different places to do exactly the same thing.

  A waitress comes up to Dave and gives him a big hug. “You were so right,” she says.

  “Too skinny, too skinny,” comments Dave, as we settle into a corner; this is the main purpose of waitresses and barmaids it seems, not just to serve beverages and repasts, but to provide debate for the male clientele, as to whether they’d like to mount them or not, and why. Dave produces his mill and starts grinding 182

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  out the white powder. I can’t believe he’s doing this in public. “Is that a good idea?”

  “I know we don’t go back that far, but do you think I’m stupid?” This is one of the least question-like of questions.

  “No, but…”

  “Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “Well…” I indicate the mill.

  “I’ll let you into a secret. It’s aspirin. I get bad migraines sometimes and I find it works best this way.”

  “Ah.”

  “I may be dishonest, but what I’m dishonest about is being dishonest.”

  “And the stolen stuff?”

  “A lot of the stuff in my shop’s stolen. But I didn’t steal it.

  It’s stuff recovered by the police, and when they can’t trace the owners it gets auctioned off. I know quite a few criminals, it’s true, but I also know quite a few museum curators. I do business with some criminals, that’s true, but anyone who does business is doing business with some criminals. I pay my taxes and at the end of the night, I go home to my wife. You’re disappointed in me, aren’t you?”

  “Ah.”

  “It may well be that out of the two of us, you are the more dishonest.”

  We drink and observe the charity. Why do we do it? Is it to feel better about ourselves, in the way we drink fruit juice after a debauch? Is it to appear better to others? I look at the revellers and suspect that in a few hours they’ll be back to normal: shafting colleagues and customers, failing friends and relatives. And what about the charity? What happens to the money if you really want to spend it charitably? How do you find seriously ill kids? Do you 183

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  advertise? How do you decide whether one kid is more seriously ill than another? If I could change this world, I would.

  “You know what we really want, life-wise?” Dave asks.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Fun you can have easy. You can have fun easily with one of the friendly waitresses of Miami. That you can get anywhere.

  What we want is… nagging.”

  “Nagging?”

  “Nagging. Yes, you can have too much nagging, like you can have too much rum. When your wife goes on about why haven’t you fixed the tap or why haven’t you thrown out your favourite red shirt, even though it’s full of holes. But imagine this: you go out on a three-day bender, you spend all the money and you come home and your wife just says, ‘Never mind, dear. You must have had a good time.’ Imagine how terrible that would be. Nagging is where home is.”

  Dave then drags me to an illegal drinking club. “You should see this place. It’s an illegal drinking club.”

  “I’ve been to an illegal drinking club before.”

  “Not this one.”

  I give up. The only difference I’ve ever noticed between legal and illegal drinking establishments is that the illegal ones are much, much worse. You go for the illegality. The decor is Albanian bunker and the other customers are very fat, depressed old men who don’t speak English. Much later I detect some daylight pushing through the shutters over the one window.

  What I think is dawn is in fact noon.

  We leave and Dave insists on buying me lunch. I have a cramp in my neck and I have to hold my head at an odd angle which makes me want to be out of the public gaze. There is a restaurant opposite.

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  “It’s a shithole,” I protest.

  “Shitholes are good,” says Dave, skirting two junkies to enter the Miami Restaurant.

  I was amused to discover that the quintessential Cuban restaurant in Miami is called Versailles, as opposed to the names you’d think more likely such as Habana, the Well-Lynched Comandante or the Old Country.

  One of my neighbours, a chef, told me that the first restaurant in Paris was called the Tavern of London. In London the clubs and restaurants tend to be called Paris this, Bombay that, something Cairo or any word from the Spanish, French or Arabic languages. For some reason, any establishment in London calling itself London, or in Paris calling itself Paris or in Miami calling itself Miami is best avoided.

  If nothing else calling yourself the Miami Restaurant is just so lazy. It’s a Vietnamese restaurant. I’ve had some good meals in Vietnamese restaurants, but I’ve never had good service or a trace of a smile. The unhappy history of the country, or the unhappy history of those running the restaurants may have something to do with it, but I’ve always had the sense that the staff were figuring out whether they could get away with killing me.

  To my surprise, the soup we order is quite good, and its spicy tang invigorates me.

  “You know what my secret is?” asks Dave.

  “Which secret is this?”

  “To keep the marriage hot, hot, hot.”

  “So what’s the secret?”

  “Hypnosis.”

  “Hypnosis?”

  “Every two weeks or so I have a session.” This is rather sweet.

  “I went to see this hypnotist to help me give up smoking. It 185

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  worked like a charm. I was forty a day, and then, wham. No more. So one day it occurred to me, it might work, you know, dick-wise too.”

  Does it work because it works or because he wants it to? Does it matter? On the street, I see one of the junkies getting ready to inject herself between her toes. Having grown up in a big city, I’ve seen plenty of junkies, but not like these. The junkies here aren’t dirty, degraded, they’re no longer human.

  We ask for the bill and discover neither of us has enough cash left. The old woman is very reluctant to take Dave’s credit card.

  “Is this really your card?” she says comi
ng back.

  Dave reaches into his pocket for his ID.

  “Is this your name really?” she says. I see the card is in the name of Soleil D. Magny. I suppose Dave has to have a real name.

  “My father liked the idea of an unusual name.”

  “What does the D stand for?” she asks.

  “Dave.”

  “This is so weird,” says the old woman. “We have a man upstairs with the same name.”

  “Can’t be.”

  “We rent out room upstairs. Man has same name as you.

  Same middle name too. Looks like you.”

  “You don’t meet many Magnys let alone Soleil D.s,” says Dave. “You’re not clintoning us?”

  “So strange. Come upstairs and meet him.”

  This is very odd. We are the only customers. Even without the junkie signpost, this is obviously not a good neighbourhood.

  I don’t like the old woman. She doesn’t seem like a friendly person who wants to engineer introductions.

  She leads us into the back and goes up a narrow staircase.

  There’s a bad, hard-to-determine smell. Dave falls back, and as 186

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  the old woman shouts “Where are you?” Dave coughs loud and long, to cover the sound of him racking his gun which he sticks in the back of his trousers. I’m very unhappy about this. Dave looks scared, and when people who are tougher than you are scared, it’s really time to be scared. Infuriatingly, he’s also excited.

  “You know the stories, don’t you?” he whispers.

  “Stories?”

  “Stories about meeting yourself.”

  “No. They all end badly, do they?”

  “Very badly.”

  I only follow him because I don’t want to be left behind on my own. We move into a dark, narrow corridor where the carpet has been rotting for years.

  “Down there,” says the old woman, indicating a weathered door, backing off in a very backing-off manner. All my alarm bells are ringing and I’m faint. If anyone fires a gun in this corridor, it’s going to hit someone.

  Dave composes himself for a moment. Then knocks with a force between polite and firm on the door. We wait. The floorboards creak underneath us. No sounds of stirring come from the room. Dave turns.