“Thank you,” he told her gratefully, pulling his pleated trousers toward his crotch as he sat.
“Would you like some coffee?” Lux purred. “Some tea, perhaps?”
He made another grateful sound. Lux turned around and walked off. I made a grateful sound of my own.
“All right,” I asked him. “What’s the deal with Kingman?”
“You are . . . aware of who he is, then?”
“Brett Kingman, the movie twit, right?”
“Sir! Brett Kingman is one of the world’s highest-ranking martial artists, as well as a screen actor of the most . . . bankable magnitude.”
“As a martial artist, he’s mid-level on his best day. I know a half-dozen karateka who could kick his ass without breaking a sweat. And two of them are women.”
“Mr. Kingman—”
“—is also so purely stupid he needs a stand-in for dialogue.”
“I gather you’re not a fan,” he said dryly.
“Mr. Slate isn’t a fan of anything,” Lux said, coming back into the office with a small silver tray and a full tea service. It weighed about fifteen pounds. She carried it in one hand like it was a handkerchief.
“I’m a fan of money,” I volunteered.
They both looked at me about how you’d expect.
“Mr. Slate, I was referred to you by the studio. I have no idea why. If you are not interested in this matter, I would be more than happy to seek services elsewhere.”
“I don’t have to be interested to do the work,” I assured him. “Or to get paid, either.”
“So that means—?”
“Please explain your problem,” Lux told him gently, pouring the tea, doing her geisha act. The one that’s about as real as Lux is Japanese.
“It started with an anonymous note. . . .”
“Damn! That’s a new twist. The blackmailer didn’t sign his name, huh?”
“Mr. Slate. I am trying—”
“—my damn patience,” I told him. “Look, you’ve been here a half-hour and I don’t know anything more than when you walked in. You’re on the clock, pal. You want to keep spinning your wheels, that’s up to you.”
Lux gave him one of her “Forgive him—he’s an idiot!” looks. He smiled. Men smile at Lux all the time.
“Very well, I shall cut to the chase, as you people say. It seems Mr. Kingman had a . . . romantic liaison some years ago.”
“So?”
“So the other party was married.”
“That’s going to crimp his box office?”
“In the aforementioned marriage”—the Brit coughed delicately— “the other party was the husband.”
“If this is cutting to the chase, I’d hate to see you beat around the bush. So the chump’s gay—so what?”
“This isn’t a matter of reality, Mr. Slate. It’s one of public perception. If Mr. Kingman’s fans were to see him as . . .”
“Get out of town,” I said. “I’ve seen his movies. If this guy’s a sex symbol, so am I.”
Lux giggled. I wasn’t offended. I’m used to it.
“That is not the point,” he said stiffly. “This is not a matter of . . . sexuality. It is one of politics.”
“I don’t get . . . Wait a minute,” I said. “Kingman. Isn’t he the one who did that commercial for those loons? The one where he said gays could be ‘converted’ and all?”
“There were—”
“I remember now,” I told him. “Sure. He went on the talk shows, too. Told everyone how being gay was a choice, and they had made the wrong one. Huh! You’re right, pal. Once the public finds out that a gay-basher is a stone queen, that’ll about do it.”
“I hardly think—”
“That’s obvious. Look, let’s be real clear, okay? Paying blackmail is about as effective as putting an agoraphobic under house arrest. What you need is for it to stop, right?”
“Yes! That is precisely what is needed. And the studio said you were the one to—”
“Right. I remember. You told me that about ten minutes ago. How much is the payoff?”
“They want one hundred thousand dollars. In—”
“—used bills, nothing bigger than a fifty, no sequential serial numbers.”
“Yes. And they—”
“—‘re going to give you the negatives, right? Or is it video?”
“Neither. It’s some letters. And an audiotape.”
“Whatever. You want someone to make the exchange?”
“Yes.”
“And to make sure your boy isn’t bothered again?”
“Yes.”
“You have the payoff money?”
“I do,” he said, patting an oxblood leather briefcase next to his leg.
“And my fee?”
“Which is?”
“The usual. Two and a half times the bite. So, in this case, a quarter mil.”
“The studio will—”
“Sure.”
“It’s tonight. At the bus station. How will you—?”
“Me? Hey, I don’t do the drops, pal. In this outfit, I’m the brains. Lux over there, she’s the muscle.”
“This . . . young lady?” The Brit seemed shocked at the prospect.
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t look very . . .”
I nodded at Lux. She bowed slightly and put her hands together in a prayerful gesture. When she opened her hands, she was holding a fireball. She blew gently and the fireball shot across the room, splattering against the far wall. It blazed for a second, then went out, leaving an ugly black char mark.
“Want to see what she can do with a fingernail?” I asked the Brit.
He wasn’t saying anything.
“The studio knows how it works,” I told him. “Leave the briefcase here. There’s plenty of time for them to wire the payment into my account. The business department knows how to do it. I’m on the books as a stuntman. A special stuntman. Soon as the money lands, we’ll take care of the rest. You’ll have your tape and letters tomorrow. And you’ll never hear from the blackmailer again.”
“How can we be—?”
“Ask the studio if I’ve ever failed.”
He pushed the briefcase toward Lux, got up, and showed himself out.
Lux locked the door. Then she walked over and sat in my lap. “Do you think they’ll ever figure it out?” she asked me.
“Nah. We solved the first one, didn’t we? Eight years ago. You know Hollywood—they haven’t had an original idea since they moved west. The suits never imagined we’d be at both ends of the game. Ever since, we’re the studio’s first choice when they get a ‘situation.’ And, working for them like we do, funny how much we hear, huh?”
“It’s a good plan,” Lux said approvingly. “And they get exactly what they deserve.”
“Us too,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you I was the brains of this outfit?”
Lux chuckled. It felt real fine.
for r.
PIECEWORK
“How much you go for this?”
“A yard.”
“A yard? For a .357 Python? Man, this piece musta got a murder on it, be that cheap.”
“Gonna have another one on it before tomorrow.”
“Yeah? You really gonna do him?”
“Got to do him.”
“He didn’t actually call you out, man. It don’t have to be like this.”
“No? How it supposed to be?”
“It supposed to be Chill City, bro. You don’t see him, he don’t see you right?”
“I stay off the corner behind this, you can change my name to ‘Bitch.’”
“Man, I didn’t say stay off the corner. Got to corner, I’m with that. But you wasn’t gonna do him on the corner, right?”
“I was thinking about it.”
“Take him down in front of all them rats? Man, you motherfucking big-time crazy-stupid-dumb. Half those dudes got cases on them. They trade your sorry ass in on a deal with the Man, then where you be?�
��
“Everybody gonna know I did it anyways.”
“You mean everybody gonna say they know. True. And Five-Oh gonna come take you down, that true, too. So what? You ice up, don’t say nothing. Without the piece, they got nothing, okay? But you do him on the corner, it won’t go like that.”
“I don’t give a—”
“Man, what you come around me for, then? You know where I be. Same time, same place, every day. I be here to t.c.b. You know what I do—watch my man’s back, right? So why you tell me this, show me the piece and all, you don’t want my advice? I am trying to look out for you and all you do is give me attitude.”
“Look, I’m . . . Truth, brother: I wasn’t downing you. No way I do that. I know you been Upstate and all. I mean, you don’t get to be working right under an OG without knowing things. You got my apology.”
“All right! First thing is, you don’t gotta do it.”
“No, man. No disrespect. But he gotta die.”
“Over a ho, man?”
“You calling my—?”
“Yeah, brother. That is exactly right. I am calling her what she is. Matter of fact, you break it down, you want to blast the one who put you in the cross, you blast her, way I look at it.”
“She’s—”
“—like all the rest of ’em, bro. You gonna let her play you into the Death House?”
“Nobody’s playing me.”
“You wasn’t even there, man.”
“How you know that?”
“’Cause I was, bro. What she tell you? He grabbed her ass?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he did, man. ‘Course, she was waving it in front of him. And everybody else, too. Got half her cheeks hanging below those shorts. The way she was staging, he don’t grab him a little something, it’s like he a fucking homo.”
“He didn’t have no—”
“Oh, man, you making me tired. You was gonna . . . what? Marry the ho?”
“That’s my woman.”
“That’s everybody’s woman, fool. You not the first, you not gonna be the last. I tell you something else too, all right? She not only won’t be coming to visit you when you waiting trial, she gonna forget your pitiful ass soon as you get shipped Upstate. That is, if she don’t testify against you herself.”
“Why you saying this, man? Why you wanna hurt me?”
“I’m trying to keep you from hurting yourself, young brother. You gonna take a man’s life over something you don’t even know the truth of?”
“I don’t do nothing, I got no face.”
“You gonna do it, then? No matter what I say?”
“Got to do it.”
“Yeah, well, listen up, then. A piece like you got there, that’s a motherfucking cannon. You ever hear how much noise one of them makes? It’s not like no nine, like I carry. This one, you can make it quiet. You just screw this thing in the front. See, like I’m doing here? Then you can pop someone, it ain’t loud at all. That’s the way a pro would do it.”
“I ain’t no pro.”
“No. You ain’t.”
“Hold up! Okay. Okay, I see it. All right. I’m not gonna dust him. I let it slide, okay? Brother? Let me . . . Please!”
for Keith Gilyard
THE REAL WORLD
This all started over one of the silly kinds of things kids get into. The kind of things they’re supposed to settle themselves. Maybe it was because we’re both fathers, Hank and me.
That’s his name, Hank. I don’t really know much about him except that he lives a few blocks over. In a little tract house, just like we do. It’s a big development, the one we live in. Built right after the war, for returning GIs. That’s World War II, not the one I was in. The one I was in, they don’t really have a name for it, just the place where it happened.
What I mean is, people called it different things, depending on how they looked at it. Even the guys that was in it, they called it different things. Vietnam. The Nam. Overseas. It didn’t matter. All we knew, it wasn’t out here. The World, that’s what we used to call out here. We used to talk all the time about getting back to the World.
Nobody in the World ever called it that. Funny, huh? So I always thought it was a special name that only soldiers used.
Until I went to prison. In there, guys called it the World too. And they’d say it the same way—they couldn’t wait to get out in the World.
The stuff they talked about doing once they got out there, it was the same thing guys used to talk about doing overseas. I don’t mean the same same things. I mean, different guys had different . . . I don’t know, goals. So some guys overseas, they talked about getting back to the World, get a job, find a girl, get married, have kids . . . like that. And some talked about dealing drugs, or hijacking armored cars. Or raping women. It just depended. But it was the same thing, the Army and prison—people talked about what they were going to do when they got out. And the guys who stayed, they got called the same thing in both places—lifers.
Another way both places were the same—people got there for different reasons. In my platoon, there were guys who enlisted. Some because they wanted to be in the war. For America, they said. They didn’t keep saying that, not after a while. I mean, it got hard to tell after a while why you were there. The only thing you knew for sure is that you didn’t want to be. The guys who did want to be there—everybody stayed away from them.
Others, they thought it was a good opportunity. Learn a trade, maybe go to college when they got out. A few even thought it would be a career, like if their fathers were in already. Then there were guys like me. Guys who had to be there—either they got drafted or it was their only choice, you know what I mean.
So, because of that last thing, I never blamed the war for me going to prison. I mean, I was going to prison before the war—or before I went into it, anyway—and I got a break from the judge. Everybody was against the war then, it seemed like, so they was looking for guys to go. When the public defender I had told the judge I wanted to go, the judge looked real serious. Then he said I was a good kid, and that fight I’d been in—the one where the other guy got hurt so bad—well, those things happened in certain neighborhoods.
That was when I lived in the city. We didn’t call where we lived a neighborhood like the judge did, but we knew it had borders. The whole thing had started when those other guys crossed our border.
When I went in, I had a bad temper. A real bad temper. And I liked to drink, too. Liquor only gave me a worse temper. I knew that, but I still liked to drink. But even though there was a lot of dope in my . . . neighborhood, I never used it.
Not until I was over there.
I lost my temper in the Army. I don’t mean I got mad. I mean I lost all my bad temper. It disappeared. I stopped drinking too, after a while. This was all after I found out stuff about myself. After I got my MOS—Military Occupation Specialty. Which was Infantry, at first. Which really isn’t an MOS at all. I mean, it’s not like being a helicopter mechanic or a radioman—nothing you could use in the World.
So I stopped drinking and I didn’t use any more dope—which was only weed, anyway, not the other stuff.
That other stuff, it was good and bad both. Good because you stopped being afraid when you had to go out into the jungle. Which was most of the time, for us. That’s what Infantry did. The bad thing was that it made you stupid. Like you didn’t care if you got blown away or not. Or made you so paranoid you would just start blasting away every time a leaf moved. That could get you killed, too—we were supposed to be quiet.
One thing I learned over there, it was how to be quiet.
I got shot once. When I was still Infantry. It wasn’t much of a wound. Not a “million-dollar wound,” like they called it when you got shot bad enough to go back to the World, but not so bad that you was crippled or nothing. The best thing was to get shot bad enough to go back, and get Disability too. They give you that in percentages, like 10 percent disability or 30 percent or whatever.<
br />
My wound was in the leg. Not even from a bullet, from a mortar round they lobbed into where we was dug in. I didn’t get to go back to the World. They gave me a medal, a Purple Heart. Some guys had a whole bunch of them. Nobody cared, except the lieutenants and the lifers—they wanted them bad.
When I got back to the World, I just drifted around for a while. A lot of guys did that. I know, because I’d meet them in the same places I hung out in.
I went to prison for stealing. Robbing, actually. There’s a real difference. In the law, anyway. One is if you take something that’s not yours. The other is the same, but it’s when you take it from a person, not a place. Anyway, the public defender told the judge the same kind of story he did the first time. I don’t mean it was the same guy, the PD, only that he told the same story. But this time, instead of saying I was going to serve my country, he said I already had, see? The judge was one of those liberals. He had long hair and everything. He was probably against the war. Or he was in law school and didn’t have to go. Or something. I know he never went in, because I can tell. But now it’s like . . . fashionable to give a damn about Vietnam vets. So he made a big speech and gave me five years. Instead of the twenty-five he could have given me, that’s what the PD said. Like he’d done a real good job. The PD, not the judge.
I didn’t care so much. I thought prison would be like the Army. And the guards would be the VC. But it wasn’t like that. Mostly, the convicts fought each other. Usually over race, but it could be any stupid thing. It was like that in the Army too, but not so much. And almost never out in the field.
Except for lieutenants. Nobody liked them. You couldn’t fight them—that was straight to jail, worse even—but some guys, they’d toss a grenade right into a trench where one of the lieutenants would be dug in. Everybody would see it, but nobody would say anything.
In prison, most of the guards was white. And most of the convicts was black. Kind of like the Army too, except that, like I said, nobody thought the guards was lieutenants, if you understand what I’m saying.
There was a lot of murderers in there. They never called themselves that—they always called themselves killers. If they was ever in the Army, ever in the Infantry especially, they would know the difference.
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