by Giles Blunt
He flicked off the television. In the sudden quiet a distant siren threaded its way through the night. Someone in one of the other trailers was playing a banjo. All his life Max had taught him to never reveal what it was they did for a living, no matter who asked. “Discretion,” he had told him a hundred times, a plump finger to his lips. “The world depends upon it, boy.”
Owen had long lived in the expectation of one day facing an accuser. It just never occurred to him that it would be anyone he liked so much. Sabrina was right beside him on the couch, and he had to restrain himself from putting his arms around her. He found he wanted her to know everything about him.
“I’m not a violent person,” he finally said. “Neither is Max.”
“A man is in the hospital, Owen.”
“He attacked us. We didn’t hurt anybody, and then just as we’re leaving he comes leaping out of nowhere.” It sounded so lame, he felt his face begin to burn.
“Lucky for you,” Sabrina said, “it looks like he’s going to survive. They’re searching for the bald Australian who shot him. And you say Max is not violent?”
“He isn’t. He’s just … losing it. We never carry anything but blanks. This time, unfortunately, he forgot to replace the real bullets that came with his new gun. And he’s having these weird nightmares. He won’t admit he’s screwing up, and I can’t get him to quit.”
“Can’t you take him to see a doctor, have some tests? Maybe a specialist?”
“Max hates doctors. They always tell him to lose weight. And he would never see a shrink, are you kidding?”
A television went on in the trailer next door. The Tonight Show theme blared for a moment before it was turned down.
“Don’t let on to Max that you know about Tucson,” Owen said. “I don’t know what he’d do. Anyway, obviously it’s kind of dangerous hanging out with us at the moment.”
“Why? You’d tell the cops I was in on your jobs?”
“They might assume you are-aiding and abetting and all that. Actually, we’ve got worse things to worry about right now.”
Sabrina raised her eyebrows, and Owen found it impossible to keep anything back. He told her about the Subtractors, and about Pookie and Roscoe.
“I heard of the Subtractors,” Sabrina said. “My dad used to live in terror of those guys. I always assumed it was an exaggeration, a legend of some kind.”
“Well, maybe it is. All I know is our friends are missing, so where are they?”
Later, when he was in bed, Owen wondered if he had said too much. Not that he was worried about Sabrina telling anyone. But a more gallant sort of person would have remained silent.
He felt his bunk rise up a little and go back down. Then up again, and back down. He leaned over the side.
Sabrina was looking up at him. “You want to come down here and visit for a while?” She nudged his bunk again with her feet.
“Uh, yes,” Owen said, “but …”
“So why don’t you?”
“You told me you were a lesbian.”
“I did? Then I guess you must be my kind of girl.”
Owen climbed down and she lifted up the covers to let him in. It took some manoeuvring to get comfortable in the narrow bed.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you,” Owen said after the first tentative kiss, “but I’m actually not all that experienced at this.”
“Really,” Sabrina said. “And you think I am?”
“Well, you are a couple of years older. I assumed, you know …”
“That I’d been around the block? A few miles on the old speedometer?”
Owen laughed. “Not like that.”
She crooked a hand around the back of his neck. “I’m not a nympho, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re the fourth, to be exact.”
Owen thought about that for a moment. “I guess you want to know how many for me too, huh?”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “I have a strict Don’t Ask policy.”
“It’s twenty-seven,” Owen said. “Or maybe twenty-eight.”
She sat up as if she’d been hoisted by a pulley. “Jesus, Owen, are you serious? What’s the male word for slut? You’re only eighteen, and you’ve slept with twenty-eight people? That’s disgusting.”
“Sorry,” Owen said. “I didn’t expect you to believe me-I’m just getting you back for telling me you were a lesbian.”
“So it wasn’t twenty-eight?”
“No. If I tell you how many, will you lie back down?”
“How many?”
“It’s only been two.”
“Really?”
She lay back down and he held her close-there wasn’t much choice in the narrow bunk. They twined themselves together, and he felt the heat of her skin down to his toes, the heat of her breath on his neck. He was now aroused as hell, but also feeling tender in an unfamiliar way, and in no hurry; he wanted this to last. He kissed her cheek, and it felt like the softest, warmest thing he had ever touched.
“Two,” he said. “Pretty pathetic, huh?”
“You think I’d be more impressed with ten? That a high number would make you more manly?”
“Seems like it’s supposed to.”
“Being more manly is not something you have to worry about, Owen.”
She kissed him, reaching under the covers, and soon he wasn’t worrying about anything at all.
Afterwards, when they had lain in silence for a while, Owen sighed and said, “That was amazing. Astounding. That was really, really-I don’t have words for it. I feel-I don’t know whether to shout or cry.”
“I know what you mean. Well, maybe I don’t,” Sabrina said, her voice in that silky region between a whisper and full speech. “Why don’t you tell me?
“You mean aside from the fact that you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever met?”
“Oh, come on. I bet you say that to both the girls.”
Owen laughed. “It just feels so good that you actually know who I am. I mean, you know the truth about me-about me and Max-what we are, what we do. And you still-well, I mean you seem to, at least-like me. Nobody’s ever really known me before. No girls. No guys. Nobody except Max.”
Sabrina touched his lips with a finger. He took hold of her hand and they lay side by side for a long time, talking quietly, sharing their memories of growing up in households where the money came from crime.
“The thing is,” Sabrina said, “living with a criminal-or being one-is like living on the Titanic. You just know it isn’t going to end well.”
FIFTEEN
Stu Quaig was staring into the mirror on the open closet door, checking out his hair for the forty-seventh time, it seemed like, pinching and prodding it into artful little peaks. Clem had to admit the colour looked good, some kind of mustard yellow highlights he’d had added to relieve the monotony of brown.
“Did I tell you how much I hate my haircut?”
Clem picked up the May issue of Handyman and thumbed through it. “Why, no, Stu, you didn’t. Please go ahead.”
“I hate my haircut.”
“There, you feel better now?”
“I told her a quarter inch, no more.” Stu held up thumb and forefinger to show him what a quarter inch looked like. “And she says sure. Starts off fine, cutting the back, the top, I don’t see anything wrong. Then she gets to the front, I’m seeing two-inch hunks of hair falling into my lap.”
“You should of stopped her.”
“It was too goddamn late to stop her. What am I going to tell her, put it back? Reattach it? Hey, Ming, you think you could graft that back to my head so I don’t go out of here totally fucking bald?”
“I hope your dissatisfaction was reflected in the tip,” Clem said, flipping pages.
“Tips are how they make their living. I’m not gonna cut off her income over it.”
“I’d have given her nothing. Asians don’t feel pain like we do.”
“She holds up a mirror to the back of my head
, where there used to be hair, and says, ‘What do you think?’ and I say, ‘I think you cut it too short.’ And she says, oh, she had to do this and that to make it sit right. I expect to come out looking like Jude Law, instead I’m sitting here with a head full of nubs.”
“So why go to Sassoon?” Clem said. “You spend like eighty bucks or something and you’re coming back in tears.”
“Because they’re the best, that’s why. They have a training program. It takes time to become a Sassoon stylist.”
Clem tossed his magazine onto the floor. “I been going to the same barber for twenty years. Mikos. Eight bucks, I get a great haircut and Mikos is happy with a two-buck tip.”
“Yeah, but your hair looks like shit.”
“It suits me.”
“Let me tell you,” Stu said as he shut the closet door. “A total makeover would not be wasted on you, Clem. You could stand a little improvement in the presentation-of-self department.”
“At least I don’t got a head full of nubs.”
There was a sound of rattling chain from the bathroom. “You ever try Hairlines?”
“The dog is speaking again,” Clem said. “Shut up in there, Rover!”
“Hairlines. Small chain out of New York. You get the best of both worlds. Trained stylist, but they don’t charge you Sassoon prices. I’ve been going there for years.”
Stu stepped back into the bathroom for a second, looking down at Roscoe. “You got good hair,” he said. “What do they charge?”
“Twenty plus tax and tip. And the girls are major cute.”
“Twenty bucks, huh? Maybe I’ll check ’em out. Place nice?”
“Sure. You know, lots of black. Lots of mirrors. Music’s too loud for my taste, but I got sensitive hearing.”
Stu left the bathroom and Roscoe climbed out of the tub. He put the toilet seat down again and sat. It seemed like a year he’d been chained to the bathroom sink in this motel. According to the soap, it was a Motel 6. He had to sleep in the bathtub, and every time one of these bastards took a dump, he had to be in the damn bathroom inhaling it. At least the one called Stu had the decency to pull the shower curtain shut.
He looked at his bare feet, the two gauze bandages where his baby toes used to be.
“Hey,” Roscoe called out, “he claimed to have shot forty-four men with his Colt Thunderer before he himself was shot in the back following a barroom altercation in 1895.”
“Who the fuck knows?” the one called Clem said. “Theodore fucking Roosevelt.”
“Was it Billy the Kid?” Stu said.
“John Wesley Hardin. Known as the Fastest Gun in the West. There were several songs about him, none of them true, however. Bob Dylan, you have to wonder if he did any research whatsoever.”
“You really get a bang out of this trivia shit, don’t you?” Clem said.
“It passes the time.”
There was a long pause after that. Just the sound of the television as someone flipped channels, and magazine pages turning.
“So, you got any more questions for us?” Clem said.
“Yeah, how about you unlock this chain and let me out of here.”
“No,” they said.
The theatre department at the University of El Paso was planning a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and Max took the opportunity to provide them with several high-quality wigs. It was not a huge sale, but it was excellent cover, and the university itself was quite entertaining, having been built for some reason in the manner of a Tibetan lamasery.
After that, he drove over to the hospice affiliated with Thomason General, where John-Paul Bertrand, alias the Pontiff, alias Sabrina’s father, was dying on the third floor. Sabrina and Owen were sightseeing. Even at his age Max found it difficult to believe someone so young and pretty could be so heartless.
The Pontiff lay in bed in a wash of sunlight, a shrivelled, shrunken thing. His previous address had been the Huntsville state prison, and usually inmates put on weight from the lack of activity combined with a steady diet of television and candy bars. Either that or they inflate themselves into rippling muscle-men by relentlessly pumping iron. But the shape under the sheets was scarcely more substantial than a child’s.
His face was turned away from the window, the mouth slightly open. A comb-over was plastered to his skull, and a hundred hairpieces appeared in Max’s mind as improvements. One bony hand was splayed on his chest, no watch, no jewellery. The stalky neck, the bony hand, the hollowed cheeks-the Pontiff was Coventry after the Blitz.
Max sat down beside the bed, the small chair creaking under his weight.
The eyes fluttered open. Bombed-out eyes.
“Magnus Maxwell at your service.”
“How long you been here?”
“Mere moments, squire. Moments.”
“Sorry. All I do is sleep all the time. Well, doze. I never actually sleep. Sleep …” He let the word dangle, as if it were the name of an old friend fallen in battle.
“I brought you something.” Max propped the stuffed angel he had found in the hospital gift shop on the nightstand.
“To see me on my way. Thanks, Carl. That’s kind.”
“Max, old son. There are a million Maxwells in the universe, and no doubt one of them is Carl. I, however, am Magnus-known to all and sundry as Max. You asked me to look in on Sabrina, remember? I’m happy to tell you she is very bonny. Socking away the gold, planning to go back to school.”
“Sabrina.” The Pontiff coughed weakly, but even that small strain made his eyes water. “She’ll be glad to see the last of me.”
“Not a bit of it. She was so happy to hear they let you out,” Max said. “Finally saw the error of their ways.”
“Department of Corrections is not equipped for …” The bony hand gestured at the curtains, the television, the pale blue walls.
Max touched the IV unit. “Stoli?”
“No.” John-Paul looked at the saline drip and grimaced. “We’ve had a parting of the ways, vodka and me.”
Where was the Pontiff? Where was the sly thief? The party animal? The robust friend yelling jokes and insults, slapping you on the back? Who was this thing, this carcass that had taken his place?
Max pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya from his sample case, and two glasses. “It’s time the two of you made up,” he said, proffering a shot.
The Pontiff made no move to take it. “Only good thing about all this,” he said, in the dry remnant of his old voice, “you lose your taste for alcohol. Stuff never did me any good.”
“Rubbish,” Max said. “I’ve seen you hold forth in bistro and tavern, in song and rhyme and just about any form that would suit one of the world’s natural born master thieves.” He leaned forward confidentially. “You remember the party after the Chemical Bank job? You rented the house in Seaview? What a time we had then, hey?”
“Stupid.”
“It was worth it just to see Bobo Valentine dressed up as Wonder Woman.”
“It was all stupid.”
“Ach, man, don’t tell me you have regrets! Regrets aren’t for the likes of us.”
“What’s your name again? Sorry, between the chemo and the radiation …”
“You remember me-Magnus Maxwell. Old Max. The one and only.”
“Let me tell you, Max, you and me, we’re a dime a dozen. Not even a dime. A thief is nothing but a parasite.”
“But I only prey on parasites, your grace. That makes me a metasite, a net contributor to the economy.”
“Call it anything you want, pal. A thief’s a thief.” The Pontiff was taken by a series of feeble coughs. With the bruise-coloured circles under his eyes, the sunken cheeks and papery skin, he was a wisp of life, as if there would soon be nothing left of him but the tiny rasp of a voice, and when that was gone, nothing at all.
He took a drink of water-a slow process, even with Max’s assistance with glass and straw-then he continued.
“I took things that didn’t belong to me-out of greed
and selfishness and laziness. Couldn’t be bothered to get a real job, do something positive in this world. I got more respect for the guy mops this floor. I got more respect for the guy fixes the toilet. Those people are adding something, and they don’t do it for big bucks and they don’t do it out of some cockamamie philosophy and they don’t think the entire world should pay them to do nothing.”
“You were a tower of strength,” Max said, “a leader of men.”
“An asshole leading assholes. It’s not like I was running a research team. My advice to you is get out while the getting’s good.”
Max decided to change tactics. “Sabrina’s hoping to visit soon.”
The Pontiff closed his eyes and shook his head. “Girl hates me.”
“Not possible, my liege. Nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. I told her I’d be visiting you and she said, ‘Tell him I’ll be there, soon as I can.’ Absolute monster of a boss, Luigi. Wouldn’t give her even two days off.”
“Sa-bri-na.” The Pontiff’s thin rasp separated the three syllables as if they were unrelated, as if they didn’t add up to a word, let alone a person.
“The very girl,” Max said. “I remember you requisitioning a bicycle for her first Communion.”
“Uh-huh. You see any family here?”
“Well, hmm, time and distance do sometimes beggar the sweetest intents.”
“No, my friend, no one’s coming. My family got sick of me a long time ago. All those years, I never cared what it meant to Paula, my line of work. She never knew if she’d be seeing me from one day to the next, one year to the next. Finally got sick of my lies and evasions. I don’t blame her. It just wore her down, and she offed herself. Sabrina’s never gonna forgive me for that. Why should she? So spare me your bullshit, old man.”
Max tried again. “Listen, Ponti. Why don’t you come on a road trip with me and my boy? We’re travelling cross-country in a luxurious vehicle.”
“I don’t want to die in a vehicle.”
“Your holiness, allow me the honour-”
“Your holiness. What is that?”
“Don’t you remember? You were known as the Pontiff, being named John-Paul-and also owing to a certain infallibility.”