Planet Willie

by Josh Shoemake

  “Dear Lord, it’s Willie. Just wanted to let everybody up there know I’m in Acapulco, in case you didn’t already know. Been working the case with ol’ Ralph, who’s, uh, actually turned out to be a really great addition to the team. Please express that sentiment to Saint Chief Mahoney if you would. Ralph and I have split up for the moment to work different angles, which we figure’d be more efficient, but we’re getting to the bottom of this, and you know what they say about the bottom: from there it’s only up, and that means back to you and the clouds. Had a quick question about nuns, Lord: are their souls already guaranteed by the costume, or could I also potentially save a nun’s soul and bring back a big win for the department? No need to answer now, because of course I know you officially can’t. Just maybe send a sign if it’s your will? Thanks. Also, second question: have you ever done any cliff diving? Wouldn’t be surprised if you had. Absolutely breathtaking, Lord. Sort of like what I once thought angel life might be, if you know what I mean, not that I’m complaining about the lack of twists and flips and all that. Heck, old dudes like us would probably throw out our backs, wouldn’t we? Ha ha. Assuming we had backs up there, but uh, thankfully we don’t. In any case, Lord, all’s well in Acapulco. Your sun’s still working as it should, I’ll tell you that. So well that if you ever create another world, I’d consider addressing sunburn from the outset. Or maybe skin could evolve to protect itself, and please excuse me if that’s out of line. I’m not entirely recalling our revised policy on evolution at the moment. Heck, I’m just brainstorming here, so I’ll let you go. See you soon, Lord, and I’ll be sure to keep the eyes peeled for signs. Okay, then. Amen.”

  After opening our eyes, we stand for another song, and I take the opportunity to scoot along the aisle until I’m behind Lulu and her questionable soul. Then the priest pulls out his bible, and we all sit for the lesson. The nuns pull out their prayer books too, Lulu hunching down real devotedly over hers. Her blond hair’s strayed loose from her wimple again and picks up the candlelight from the altar such that it almost glows. I could reach out and touch it, and a fella can’t help but thinking that just as Fernanda wasn’t made for the art business, Lulu wasn’t made to be a nun. People make it so hard on themselves. There’s so much chaos out there, and people react by trying to be something, to stand for something, and while under the right circumstances I guess I find that admirable, too often you just end up building your own prison.

  Anyway, as I sit there meditating on Lulu’s stray hair, I become aware of a minor commotion among the orphans across the aisle, so I look over and see Cipriano and El Gordo sitting not more than twenty feet away. They’ve spotted me and want to make contact. I tip my hat, which seems to quiet them down a bit, and then it occurs to me that the Lord doesn’t like a hat-wearing man in his house, so I’m pleased to take this as a quick sign and go ahead and tip The Kid all the way off, making it as comfy as I can in my lap. In the meantime the priest’s started up some responsive reading. He’ll say something in Spanish, then the rest of us are supposed to say something back, following along in our prayer books. That’s when I notice that although Lulu’s still hunched over her book, she not quite as responsive as the rest. Not saying much of anything, to tell you the truth, so I slide over on the pew a bit to see if I can glimpse what’s occupying her. Lean forward a tad like I’m intending to get in some extra praying down on that knee bench. Edge forward just enough to discover that although she may have a prayer book open in her lap, inside that prayer book is another little open book that I’m pretty certain is not distributed by the Catholic church. She turns a page to a chart. Starting Hands, the chart says, and below that is a column of starting poker hands with percentages next to them. A pair of aces, a hundred percent, pair of threes, twenty percent, and so on. What I experience in that moment may be something like the joy imparted by the Holy Spirit. I mean never has church been so much fun. Makes you think Kafka could benefit from attending a little more regularly.

  Then the priest is busting into another little hymn, and at this point mister I am happy to sing. Singing from the gut, so to speak, which has admittedly done some expanding with all the Mexican food I’ve been eating. Not that I’m complaining when I hear that full bass sound. Reminds me a bit of Mister Luciano Pavarotti, the famous Italian opera tenor, and you can’t tell me Mister Pavarotti ever turned down a burrito special.

  Lulu takes a moment to realize we’ve moved on from the prayer book, but then she’s up too. Kyrie Eleison, the song goes, although I’m making up my own words, singing of diamonds and pure hearts and raising Lulu a Madonna. That gets the wayward nun’s attention real quick, and then what she’s doing is more like hyperventilating than hymns. When the service ends, she slips off down the aisle quick, but I’m as quick as she is and trap her near the entrance, where candles are lighted before an altar of painted angels. Lulu spins away from my hands, fluttering around like she’s trying to grow wings and fly right up into that painting, but sister, that’s not the way it works. Yes sir, the Lord and I are on the same wavelength for once, and I’m getting signs all over the place.

  “You’re no angel, Lulu,” I say.

  “Stop torturing me,” she says, turning to face me with tears in her eyes.

  “That’s not my intention,” I say, already regretting taking the hard line. “I just want the painting back.”

  “I don’t know where it is,” she gasps. “I just told Queso about it. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Except borrowing gambling money at twenty five percent interest,” I say, making a speculative little bet of my own.

  “Poker is a skill,” she says. “It’s not a game of chance.”

  “Burglary’s a skill too, sweetheart.”

  Her eyes overflow, and tears run down her cheeks. “I just wanted to help,” she says. “I just love these little orphans so much.” Now she’s outright weeping, and I’ve learned enough from her now that there’s not much point in prolonging the interview, so I leave her there mumbling about her dearly beloved orphans to walk back out into the plaza, where I’m treated to a beautiful Acapulco sunset.

  20

  When I go down for breakfast in the morning, reception has a message for me from somebody called Drita, which I vaguely recall may be another name for Twiggy. The message says that the Farsinellis have a meeting scheduled with Queso that evening, and that in the meantime she’s gone after Lulu. It also says that the police called in the night and are holding Kafka. Our Twiggy may be insane, but she’s turning out to be a pesky little investigator, so I decide to leave the real criminals to her for the morning so I can get over to the police station and see about releasing Kafka into the general population again.

  The jail’s not a big place and can’t have room for more than a few cells. I walk up to the front desk and tell Rodrigo, the officer on duty, that I’d like to bail out an amigo. He wants to know the name of this amigo, I tell him Kafka, which doesn’t appear to ring a bell. Then I tell him the amigo’s Albanian, and he tells me the Albanian’s not getting bail.

  “What are you holding him for?”

  “Public disturbance and an expired passport.”

  “Public disturbance?”

  “And an expired passport,” Rodrigo says, lighting a cigar so he can blow some smoke in my face, while down a corridor I hear what sounds like weeping.

  “Can I at least get back there and see him?”

  “No visitors,” he says. I can’t say I like Rodrigo’s attitude, and it may be at this point that I decide I’m not leaving without the kid.

  “Then can I see the Chief?” I say. “He happens to be a close personal friend.”

  “Chief is in the capital.”

  “Then let me introduce you to another close personal friend of mine, the one thousand peso bill. Looks like some kind of monk there on it. Not sure what his name is.”

  “Hidalgo,” the officer says, laughing a bit. “Why don’t both of you get out of here.”

  Desperate
situations call for desperate measures, and conveniently my life has been, or was, one long desperate measure, which prepares me in a sense for what comes next. Also conveniently, I discovered a talent for opera just yesterday, and it feels like time for an encore performance. I mean if you’ve got it, you’ve got it. So I step away from the desk to give myself a little room to work, run through the scales a couple of times for tuning and whatnot, then ease into it real soft-like. Just a little humming at first, getting the feel of the melody, so to speak. And then I bring it on in.

  “La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha….” Nice and easy, just easing myself into the tune.

  “La Cucaracha, La Cucaracha….” And though I’m not real sure of how it goes after this, I do feel that you want to get that cucaracha hopping around a bit, so I start getting it out there, cuca-cuca racha-racha-ing to the music. Catchy little tune. Sort of grabs you by the vocal chords. I mean this must be how Mister Pavarotti feels when he gets up there on stage in Carmen or La Traviata or one of your finer operas. And if there was ever an opera written about the lowly cockroach, you better believe I’m singing it, one hand on my belly like the stars on public television. Cucaracha! Let me tell you it does feel good, right up until the moment half the police force of Acapulco, and believe me that does include Rodrigo, swarms in like pesticide to squash me like a bug. Not sure what they’re throwing in there, but you can’t deny the effectiveness. A little something Mexican, perhaps, as truth be told it’s nothing like anything I’ve ever encountered north of the Rio Grande. Hell of a lot spicier, you could say. Does it hurt? It does. Does it bother me? To the contrary, officers, to the contrary. They say that when the nuclear Armageddon comes, the last creature walking the face of Planet Earth will be the lowly cucaracha.

  A while later I awake to find myself alone on the cement floor of a cell. My hands are still cuffed, and my right arm feels like an appendix – one of those organs we no longer need, I forget what they’re called. The suit’s taken a beating too, which I sure as hell don’t like, but it’s so dark in there that’s it’s difficult to assess the damage. I move around the cell a bit to see if I can find a cot or something a little more comfortable to stretch out on, but there’s nothing. I walk every inch of that cell, staring hard into the darkness and cursing even harder. After a while I hear a voice that sounds like it’s coming through the wall.

  “Willie?” it says. “Is that you?”

  Kafka, from the sound of it. I curse him a bit for getting me into this, he curses me right back for letting them take him away in the Mercedes.

  “They’re never going to let me out of here, Willie.”

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll figure out something.” I ask him about this passport of his, he tells me his visa had run out in America, but he had no intention of going back to Albania. Problem is, you can’t renew your passport without a proper visa, and then it just didn’t come up with all those Madonnas I was handing out to the border police. Then he says something that makes up for all the pains I suffered during my short-lived opera career. He’s been up to Queso’s, and Queso is one bad hombre.

  He was taken into the hills by the men in white suits, he tells me. A high fence ran around the property, and men with guns and more white suits watched the front gate. Kafka begged the driver of the Mercedes to give him a few days to pay off the debt, but the driver wasn’t talking. He parked the car in front of a white-columned mansion and led Kafka into an entry hall. Italianate, Kafka calls it. White marble everywhere.

  They took him into a sort of library with a lot of leather-bound books on the walls and also quite a few Renaissance paintings. Queso was there sitting in a leather armchair at a Louis Quatorze table painted gold.

  “Louis Quatorze?”

  “It’s a French style. I’m an artist, Willie. And believe me, I don’t like having to relive this.”

  “Alright. What did Queso look like?”

  He tells me he’s a big man with a bad toupee and a thin mustache. When Kafka came in, he was in a white robe, eating a bowl of strawberries and cream. He stuck out his chin at an adjacent armchair, down into which the white suits pushed Kafka.

  “Circumstances seem to have brought us into a business relationship, Mister Kis, he said. Something like that.”

  “Mister Kis?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Wish you’d told me sooner,” I say. “Seems like we should be using that more often in public. Kafka Kis. I like it.”

  But Kafka’s not liking anything at this point. He tells me Queso said that he would be happy to extend their business relationship for a week, after which time the relationship would be terminated. Kafka understood from this that what would be terminated was Kafka.

  “Don’t worry, kid. A week should give us enough time.”

  He bangs on the wall. “You have the money, Willie, right? So pay him off.”

  “Calm down, Kafka. Let’s be smart about this. That money may come in handy, so we better hold onto it for a few days.”

  “Please, Willie,” he says, his voice catching.

  “Then what happened?” I say.

  “He showed me the Madonna,” he sobs. “I think he was trying to impress me. It was laid out on the gold table beneath a piece of cloth. He hasn’t framed it yet. I guess Alberto just took the canvas and left the frame. That would make sense. Queso said it’s worth a million bucks.”

  “Well is it? Was it the original or one of yours?”

  “It looked original. Something in the colors. I don’t think I painted them like that.”

  “And he really loves art that much? He’ll have a hard time selling a stolen painting.”

  “He’s giving it to his daughter for her eighteenth birthday,” Kafka says. “There’s a big party tomorrow night. He throws one every year so people can come up and see how he lives in his mansion and gives his daughter million-dollar birthday presents. This man will kill me, Willie. As we were sitting there I could hear gunshots outside. That’s the way they’ll do me.”

  “They were shooting people?”

  “That’s what I thought. Really they were just getting ready for the party. Another guy in a white suit came in and whispered something to Queso, and Queso started screaming all these things in Spanish I didn’t understand. Finally he calmed down enough to tell me how he wants fireworks, but the fireworks people are incompetent. He had them all fired as I sat there, and they’ll never work in Acapulco again. Oh Willie, they were probably terminated.”

  “Then they brought you down here?”

  “Yeah, and there’s more. Alberto was in here last night. They had him in your cell. This morning they took him away, I don’t know where.”

  “This is working out even better than I expected,” I say.

  “We’re both in jail, Willie!” Which is a fair enough point, but what interests me more at the moment is how the mysterious Alberto got to Acapulco. Kafka confirms what we already knew about the Shore robbery. Fernanda hired him to go down to Texas, but of course Queso knew about the Madonna before calling Fernanda, which must have been Lulu’s idea. Fernanda could get to the painting easier than Queso could. He just sent a couple of his men to south Texas to wait, knowing Fernanda would send somebody sooner or later. When Alberto showed up, they kidnapped him. One of them took his car, and the other drove him down to Acapulco with the painting. Queso was furious when they got to the mansion. The Blancos weren’t supposed to take Alberto with the painting, but from what Kafka’s seen, the Blancos aren’t too bright. Now they’ve made up some drug charges and are keeping him out of sight until they can decide what to do with him.

  “What did he say about the cocaine in his car?”

  “Queso’s men must have planted it,” Kafka says. He’s silent for a while, then his voice comes softly through the wall again. “I wish I’d never left Albania.”

  “You don’t mean it, Kafka,” I say. “You can’t go back. Just take it from me, because that’s one thing I’ve learned: you
can’t go back. Like it or not, we can only go onwards and upwards.”

  21

  I’ve had better nights of sleep, even on cement floors. Let’s just put it that way. Maybe I doze occasionally, but the rest of the night I star in a little horror movie called The Revenge of the Cucarachas. Didn’t like what they heard me doing to their national anthem, apparently, and so they come out in full force to exact revenge on my bodily person. I don’t guess cockroaches bite, but by dawn and with practice it appears that a few of them are learning. I spend hours twitching, trying to keep the little critters guessing. Meanwhile I attempt to figure out how I’ll get past all of Queso’s white suits to the Madonna. And does Fernanda have any idea what she’s doing? By now the Farsinellis have had their date with Queso. I can assume the good professor confirmed its authenticity and that Bella drank too much, but did Fernanda make the date too, and is she crazy enough to have asked Queso to give it back? Then again, she doesn’t want the painting, she just wants money, and if she miraculously gets any for it, she’ll have Twiggy to deal with. Hours go by, until my brain’s so fried with thinking I’d be hard-pressed to remember my name.

  In the morning somebody switches on a light out in the hallway, and the cockroaches scatter. My lucky streak continues when Rodrigo’s replacement comes around to uncuff me. He gets me up on my feet, and I don’t know what hurts worse at this point, the brain or the body. It’s like that old philosopher’s debate – mind versus body. Well I’m both and not liking it much. The cop tells me they’re letting me go. I ask if that includes Kafka, he tells me I can stay if I want to. So I recuperate The Kid and call out for Kafka one last time. His voice is faint through the wall.