“You think I’m a pompous ass,” the Aardvark says, and Jeannette Winderhoek is back in the office, in front of the telescope.
“No, no,” she says. “I would never say that.”
“Okay then,” he said, “how might we tap into and perhaps organize this emerging market?”
“Call Inu Kimura. And ask for the biggest loan of your life.”
The Aardvark waited until three in the morning, so that he’d catch Kimura after lunch. The phone line crackled with the interference of the atmosphere; the signal sparked up to a satellite that threw it over the horizon to Osaka, where Inu Kimura picked it up, his fingers sticky with the juice of a dozen peaches.
“I have to make a very large request of you,” the Aardvark said.
“Tell me the scale before we talk anymore,” Inu Kimura said.
The Aardvark told him.
“A very, very large amount of money,” Kimura said. “Why do you think that I have it?”
“Because you’re a god among animals, Inu Kimura,” the Aardvark said. “Because you control five major banks, and you and the president of Japan decide who the minister of finance is.”
“These are rumors,” Kimura said.
“I happen to believe that the rumors are true,” the Aardvark said, “and I know that you didn’t start them. Which means that your power is greater still.”
“You exaggerate, Mr. Aardvark. But I do have the money. What do you want to use it for?”
“Slavery.”
“That is illegal according to both Japanese and international law.”
“The words ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ have lost much of their importance here, Mr. Kimura. And you’re just giving me a loan. You can’t be held responsible for the things I do with it.”
“Which are?”
“Taking advantage of economies of scale, Mr. Kimura. Big farms and factories sit idle all across America, lacking only a compulsory labor force to be revived and compete in the world market. Obtaining these properties requires no more than capital.”
“Are there enough slaves?”
“Oh, yes. We just need the money to begin feeding them, buy equipment. Their indenture and the profits will sustain the operation once it’s running.”
“You are talking about startup costs only.”
“Precisely.”
“At the amount that you suggest.”
“Yes.”
For three seconds, the hiss of the phone line, a singsong elevator chime. Then: “My interest rate begins at five percent, held for the first six months, after which it will rise each month to be capped at eleven percent. I would not mind becoming more wealthy, but I do not want to make a slave out of you, either. Do we have a deal?”
Our peculiar institution is everywhere now. The slave markets are social events, with electricity, strings of Christmas lights, girls dressed in a hundred and five colors; bands made of junting guitars, spitting horns, skittering drums; carts with yellow umbrellas selling curried mutton and green beans, tamales with chiles; horses clapping their hooves against the ground, sweating in the heat while clowns on stilts with pump accordions let a flock of balloons escape into the sky. Jeannette Winderhoek is appalled. They should have gone through the proper procedures. They should have had the debates, covered the contingencies, resettled the uninhabited territory between individual and property rights. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of legal questions scream to be answered, and they’ll keep screaming for Jeannette Winderhoek until she strangles the law inside her and burns the corpse.
Through the spyglass, Jeannette Winderhoek watches the blunt shape of an armored car growling down Madison Avenue; a flash, black smoke, and the armored car is flipped on its back, wheels spinning. Six kids with submachine guns rush the vehicle; one of them shoots the back open, and ten thousand tropical birds fly out of it, funnel away from the car in a rising cone of red, green, and yellow feathers that disperses high over the city while the kids dispatch the driver, then argue about how to flip the car back over.
“I just want to say this one more time,” she says to the Aardvark. “The Slick Six aren’t a threat to you anymore. I don’t see any reason for this.”
“You know that my respect for you could not be greater,” the Aardvark says. “But my disagreement with you is fundamental.”
“The game they played with you, sir, was about the law and money. Both of those things are gone now. There’s nothing left they can hurt you with.”
“This is the precise place where I disagree with you, Miss Winderhoek. You think I ever gave a fuck about the money or the law? They come and they go. This is about reputation. I owned a bank, twelve holding companies; I bent the law to my designs, because of my reputation as a man of righteousness and perfect vengeance.”
“Well, having a good lawyer helped too, sir.”
“Touché, Miss Winderhoek. But the essential point remains. Those six individuals, and Marco in particular”—she sees that twinge again, the shard of glass in his spleen—“are blemishes on a record of twenty years. Because they are famous, and because they were too proud to keep their mouths shut, they must be punished. It is not enough that they have been scattered across the country like a cursed people. I thought it was, but then in sweeps Marco like a—a—”
Jeannette Winderhoek watches the shard turn, the Aardvark’s knees quiver with it.
“—a fucking superhero,” he says, “and takes Zeke with him, who knows far too much about what goes on around here now. They must be destroyed, and the word must spread of their destruction, before I rest.”
It must be the speeches in the parks, Jeannette Winderhoek thinks. She remembers him only a few years ago, all monosyllables, hand gestures, meaningful frowns. During Marco’s trial he said only twelve words: He and his friends stole from me, and they will all pay. She could afford to be afraid of him then.
“When is he supposed to get here?” she says.
“I’m already here,” the assassin says. He’s sitting in a yellow leather chair near the Aardvark’s desk, legs crossed, arms folded, his expression too blank to even be neutral. The plants around him shrink back, as if he is a place of no light, barren soil. She doesn’t know how he got into the room; there was no bell from the elevator, no creak from the stair door. But he’s been there for five minutes, and has been staring off into the middle distance, as though he’s in a room with a million people or none at all.
“Do you know where they might have gone?” the assassin says.
“I like this one,” the Aardvark says to Jeannette. “All practicality. See how businesslike he is?”
“He’s saying he doesn’t know,” Jeannette Winderhoek says.
The assassin tilts his head to the right, looks toward the ceiling. “I’ll find them,” he says.
“For how much?” the Aardvark says.
“We’ll discuss it when I return. Expenses can vary, and I foresee complications.”
“Of course. When do you start going after them?”
“I’m already gone,” the assassin says, and the yellow chair is empty again, the door to the stairwell closing; Jeannette Winderhoek never saw it open.
“Where did you find him?” she says.
“He’s one of Kimura’s. Four heads of state, he says, without anyone even knowing. Their constituents think they’re still in power.”
“Is he better than Marco?”
Before the Slick Six had Marco, they were nothing to the Aardvark; but Marco Oliveira, free agent, was his first call. His best man, the Aardvark said. In the rare times when the Aardvark reminisces, his brain revisits the first assignment he gave Marco, to convince two Algerian businessmen who were late in paying him for money laundering services to settle up. Give me five hours, Marco said, and three hours later, the Algerians were calling the Aardvark terrified, wiring him more than they owed—a premium, they said, if he’d just call off his man.
“What did you do to them?” the Aardvark said.
“What
you asked.”
He hung up the phone then and turned to Jeannette Winderhoek. I love that man already, he said, and Jeannette Winderhoek realized she’d never heard him say that word about anything, understood later why the trial hurt him so much—though in the courtroom, with the Slick Six parading before a judge he’d already paid for, he never stopped smiling.
“You don’t think there’s a conflict of interest?” she says.
“You suggested I mortgage my life away to this man, and over this you think there might be a conflict of interest?”
“This is more direct.”
“Kimura’s interest is in his interest, all eleven percent of it,” the Aardvark says. “Hideo was his disciple a lifetime ago. They haven’t spoken in years.”
“Does he know where Hideo is? Or what you did with him?”
“I don’t think he cares, Miss Winderhoek.”
Jeannette Winderhoek returns to the window, the spyglass. The car is already gone, and three of the Aardvark’s policemen are wandering around the blast site like blind pigeons. Sheimagines the boys joyriding the armored car through the old buildings at the edge of Brooklyn, getting it up on two wheels on the corners, sending bullets into the wall of a collapsed bank. We used to be those boys, she thinks; now we’re in our tower with our security and ammunition, our pronouncements and public hangings, letting them know how much we fear them every time a body drops through a trapdoor.
Marco and Zeke are in a 1963 Aston Martin DB4 convertible, sliding along the curves of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The October afternoon is aging into evening; orange sun throws sheets of light over the road; the trees rustle in the warm drafts from the valley, setting free the first leaves of fall. Raptors soar in the thermals. Now and again the rocks and trees give way to a small field of honeyed grass, a few sparse crops, a warping clapboard house, a wooden barn with a balding roof, its shingles on the ground around it; the sun flashes back from the windows as they pass, and then the woods return. They have the top down, and the music from the radio strains through the whipping wind; don’t the moon look good, mama, shining through the trees. Seven milk jugs full of gasoline roll in the footwell behind them on every curve. The assegai lies across the backseat, its blade yellow in the wavering light. Zeke is driving, his left arm hanging over the door, right hand gripping the wheel at twelve o’clock, and he can’t stop smiling. Driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway in a convertible: It’s another thing he swore he’d never do when he was an angry man in his early twenties, before he’d heard of the Slick Six and his speech was spiced with nevers. I will never eat an animal’s testicles. I will never date her. He knows now that saying he will never do something guarantees that he will do it within ten years; and each time his life shows him how foolish he has been, Zeke wishes for time to fold over on itself, cut him off from history, his finger moving away from the trigger as the elk stumbles and folds its knees, lists into the snow. His mouth to her ear as her neck arches, her hand on his thigh. Rising from freezing water amid shorebound ice floesin a bathing suit and cap, other swimmers hopping around him, voices pitched like girls in languages he doesn’t know, a twenty-two-foot bonfire encircled by towels warming on the beach. Driving down this road, in this car, with his friend.
Marco is asleep in the passenger seat, and the beat of the curves in the road brings him back to the prison ship. He is there in his cell, the door open to the block, and he can tell by the way the other inmates avert their eyes that it’s past the three-month mark, after the fight that established him as a man who did not fuck around. It was him versus two larger men; they had a sharpened scrap of metal and a shard of glass, he had his left arm in a sling from a fall during a storm. It ended with the metal growing out of one man’s throat and the glass driven into the other’s eye, and Marco wiping the blood off the soles of his shoes, annoyed that it had spotted the cuffs of his jumper. In his dream, he leaves the cell and looks down onto the block floor, where Maggot Boy Johnson is playing Ping-Pong with Abraham Lincoln and arguing about history. If you knew it would come out like this, Maggot Boy Johnson is saying, you wouldn’t have bothered to fight the Civil War, for the Union is no more. I was a man of my time, Lincoln is saying, and thank God for that. If I had seen into the future, I would have done nothing at all. It would have seemed so futile. We must live in the present if we are to make what we will of history. Maggot Boy Johnson pounds the ball over the net. That’s nine to two, Abe.
The sun sets, pulls its light off the land, and the wind snaps in coldly. Zeke closes the convertible roof, wakes up Marco when the rising window jostles his foot.
“Sorry,” Zeke says.
“Where are we?” Marco says.
“Virginia.”
“The Old Dominion.”
“They’re calling it the New Dominion now. I hear they’re planning to invade Maryland.”
“What about Washington?”
“Not enough left to invade, I guess.”
There are small fires in the woods just off the road, six people roasting a mammal, a child lazing a stick back and forth through the flames. A pickup truck on its side, the roof tattered with shotgun blasts. The hood hangs from its hinges; it is obvious even in passing that they attacked it just to pillage the engine.
“Did they steal the Bellows?” Marco says.
“The what?”
“The George Bellows from the National Art Gallery. The boxers.”
“I don’t know.”
“That seems like something you would have known.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Zeke says. “But information isn’t what it used to be. If we were going to start over, you know, build a racket, that’d be an interesting angle to look into. Everyone still wants to know what’s going on.”
“Dayneesha already does that,” Marco says.
“Really?”
“Yup. I saw it at Nerve’s before I came to get you. People from all over the country send her what’s going on around them, and she organizes it, sends it back out. You get paid if she uses what you send. Other people pay to read it.”
“That’s smart,” Zeke says.
“If you do say so yourself,” Marco says.
“I do.”
“I know.”
“You seem to know a lot these days, smart guy. So what’s your plan?” Zeke says.
“For getting us all together? If I tell you, it’ll ruin it,” Marco says.
“…”
“…”
“You don’t have a plan, do you,” Zeke says.
“Nope.”“I thought so.”
“…”
“It would help,” Zeke says, “if you had a job for us to do. Something big.”
“Well, I don’t.”
There is a strain in Marco’s voice, the push of a child’s whine. Zeke knows what Marco wants to say: I just need to get us all back together again. I need this or I’ll be in prison the rest of my life, the metal walls around me, the fields far away. I need this. He wants to say it, but Zeke knows he won’t, and doesn’t make him.
“You going to turn around now?” Marco says.
“No. We’re closer to Asheville than New York by now. Besides, something will come to you. Or maybe me. I like the general idea. And I owe you.”
“For the jailbreak? You would have done the same thing.”
“No I wouldn’t. In fact, I didn’t. And now that we’re talking about it, we should really, you know, talk about it. Because I’m sorry for what happened to you. We should have done more to stop it.”
“We didn’t have a choice. Somebody had to take the blame.”
“It didn’t have to be you. Or, at least, not just you. It could have been you and Hideo. Or you and Johanna—”
“—Look. Zeke. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You mean not now.”
“Not ever.”
“Because it’s in the past.”
“Yes.”
“But it still affects you, doesn’t it?” Zeke say
s.
“So you want to talk about it?”
“Not as such.”
“…”
“…”
“That’s why we always got along best,” Marco says.
“You think?”
“Yes. But I thought saying something about it would fuck it up.”
“Me too,” Zeke says.
“Did we just fuck it up?”
“I don’t think so.”
They roll toward North Carolina in the dark. And Maggot Boy Johnson, sitting in a bar in a basement on the burned edges of Chinatown, is assaulted by another vision. It repaints the room around him, erases the people, turns the bar into black smoke that soaks into the ceiling. He is in a room with a giant, coal-burning stove. Four German boys are huddled in the corner with bruises around their mouths. Two Italian boys are standing over them, speaking English spurred by accents from the slums of Rome.
“Where is the money?” one of the Italian boys says.
The Germans speak German to each other.
“Where is the money?” the boy says again.
It’s clear to Maggot Boy Johnson that the Germans have no idea what the Italian boy is saying, but their instincts are right. One of them reaches down his pants, digs out a roll of brown bills. The Italian boy takes it, unrolls the top bill. His nose wrinkles.
“This is German money, you yutz,” the Italian boy says.
“Your money doesn’t work here,” the other Italian boy says. “You’re in another country now. Nobody will take these bills.”
“We have the same problem,” Maggot Boy Johnson says. One of the German boys looks right at him.
“Mind your own business and stay in your own time,” he says, in a perfect imitation of his Midwestern descendants. Then the bar returns, Maggot Boy Johnson has a new stale beer in his hand, and the bartender is looking at him like he wants something. Maggot Boy Johnson gives him the leather belt he’s wearing. The bartender takes it, appraises it, giveshim three shoelaces. I need to learn Chinese if I’m going to get anywhere, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks.
At almost five in the morning, the Aston Martin drinks the last of its gas. Zeke feels the engine’s death cough as they’re cresting a hill, and he shifts into neutral; they glide down the slope and cross a rusted bridge in silence. Then Zeke pulls the car into the gravel on the shoulder, stops it, puts on the parking brake. He feels stupid watching his hand take the keys out of the ignition, another case of habit trumping reason. Like the people still trying to go to the bank after the dollar collapsed. They peered in the windows, punched the buttons of the automatic tellers. Still believing they could make things happen just by wanting them, still acting like Americans, though America was gone.
Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America Page 6