He threw a savage backward elbow, then rose - not steadily, but close enough - and grabbed the man by his lanky hair. He jerked down and brought his knee up at the same time, breaking the man’s nose. Blood spread down the thug’s face as he fell on his ass.
The third fellow decided he had seen enough. “Fuck you and the Baron,” he said, then raced off into the darkness, leaving the big man resting with his hands on his knees, trying to steady his overwrought brain.
___
Fighting—was that a third vice? Because you might as well throw it in with the other two, he liked it just as much. And he was good at it, too. Part of that was due to his physical gifts (he was tall enough to have been a shooting guard in the NBA), but more so because he was never afraid of a fight. Not one bit. Nobody scared him. He wouldn’t have felt the jitters if he’d been in the ring with Ali. Well, he might have felt a little something at being in the presence of a childhood idol, but nothing like fear.
That was why he was disappointed when the third assailant fled without doing more than throwing a few ill-aimed kicks while the big man was beating the living snot out of the other two. Coward. But despite the anti-climactic ending of the fight, the big man realized he was actually feeling good about himself. If this was his drunken stupor talking, then it could go on talking. There were worse voices a man could listen to.
He found himself drifting toward the sound of music. He must really have lost hold of his senses, because where he had expected to find a park filled with trees and gardens, he now saw tents and torches. People were dancing by the light of a bonfire, and from somewhere he heard a deep grunt that sounded like a pig. There was drinking too, of course, but even the sight of this caused his stomach to churn.
One sign caught his eye: A hand with an open eye set in the middle. It looked like it had been painted hastily. The heel of the palm directly beneath the eye was divided by two semi-circular lines, making it appear almost like an ass. The big man might have found this humorous if he did not sense the eye was boring into him, rifling through his secrets.
“Step right up! Get your fortune told!” The man standing guard at the front of the tent swept the curtain open. “Just two rations, that’s all, and your future will be laid bare!”
There was something strange about this fellow (Was it the intensity of his wide eyes?), but the big man could not quite place it. His curiosity, which was now sitting in the driver’s seat of his motor functions, compelled him forward.
The man with the strange eyes, however, stopped him with a hand to his chest. Fortunately for him, the big man’s taste for violence had cooled.
“Rations?” the bouncer repeated. “If you can’t pay—” He stopped speaking. The big man would have thought it impossible, but the guy’s eyes actually widened further. He was gawking at the big man’s coat—more specifically, at the badge stitched there.
“Apologies,” the stranger murmured with a little bow. “Any servant of the Baron is welcome here. No cost.”
The big man did not like anyone calling him a servant, but he stepped into the tent anyway. Two candles were burning on a low table. A girl was sitting on the other side of the table with her hands in her lap. Something seemed strange about her eyes, too, but in a much different way from those of the man out front. Her face was youthful and clear, with the roundness that comes at that age. Her hair was blond at the roots, but darker where it fell, straight and untangled, down the back of the chair.
“Take a seat,” the girl said in a voice both timid and weary.
The big man did so.
“What is your name?” she asked.
He hesitated. Then, thoughtfully, “Call me Khan.”
Chapter 34
Khan, whose real name was Rashad el-Hashem, did not believe in fortune-telling. Not when he was sober, anyway. He believed in God, yes, as well as the presence of spiritual forces (call them angels and demons, if you will). But the ability of one person to predict the fortunes of others, while perhaps not impossible, struck him as one of the more manipulative ways to con people out of their money.
In short, he was a skeptic. But he had followed his curiosity into the tent, and curiosity was keeping him there. For now.
“What brought you here?” the girl asked.
“I want to hear my fortune,” he answered, speaking more gruffly than he had intended. He sensed she was frightened of him. Maybe that was the smell of booze—he was practically radioactive with it. But damn, if she was so scared why did she keep staring at him like that? He felt like she was looking straight through his ribs and past the wall of the tent behind him.
The girl nodded and let her eyes wander down to the table. She seemed to be composing herself, maybe thinking of what to say next. Whoever was running this con job (probably the creepy fellow outside) hadn’t trained her well.
“Shouldn’t you read my hands or something?” he suggested. A few more moments of this boredom and his attention would be wholly and truly gone. When he thought about where he would go, however, his mind drew a blank. Maybe that was the alcohol trying to think for him. He supposed he’d just go out and taste the night air, walk around the park, see what other sights this circus had to offer. The night had to tire itself out eventually, didn’t it?
Without answering, the girl reached across the table. Her fingernails poked his arms, then grabbed the wrists and began wandering to his hands. Her own hands were trembling. That was no surprise, however. People were often scared of him.
“You have rough hands,” she murmured. “But not a farmer’s hands. Are you a fighter?”
“Yes.”
“And far from home?”
Khan blinked. She could have been guessing, he reminded himself. Besides that, she would have made a statement if she’d been certain.
“Yes,” he answered.
“Why did you really come into this tent? What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.” His voice had lost its edge. He now sounded like a penitent soul at confession.
“Are you looking for someone?” the girl asked.
“Yes, and no. I know where she is - where they are - but I can’t go to them. It’s like I’m trapped between two impossible things.” This was about the best explanation his alcohol-fogged mind could produce just then. It would have to do.
“But you want to be with her? With them?”
“Yes.” Tears were rolling down his cheeks now. He did not feel ashamed for the tears, not in the presence of this child. He reserved all his shame for the choices he’d made.
The girl’s hands tightened on his fingers. “What is stopping you from going to them now?”
He thought about this and recalled the consequences that could be involved for returning with nothing to show for his efforts. It was like a dash of cold water in his face, and he withdrew his hands from the table.
“I can’t go back,” he said. “Not like this. It would be even worse for them. I made a choice to help an old friend, and now my family must suffer for it. I must suffer for it.” He paused. “But I deserve the suffering.”
He rose abruptly from his chair, striking his thigh against the table. “If my pain would do anything for them, I’d cut my own wrists open right now. I’d snap my bones like branches!” The very idea energized him. It might not solve any real problems, but wouldn’t he feel better? Maybe a little?
“If you do that,” the girl said in her soft voice, “then how will you be able to help them? Why don’t you sit down?”
Eventually he did sit down. He felt suddenly weary and wrung out. He was not sleepy, not just yet, but that would come in time. All he had to do was cheat the night a little more.
“I’m sorry all this has happened to you,” the girl whispered. “Do you want to tell me why you can’t go back?”
He did not, at first, want to say anything, certainly not about riding off in the darkness of that night or seeing his wife’s silhouette in the window. But what about the rest? Who cared w
hat this little girl heard?
And so he spoke, and were he sober he would have noticed a change come over her face, a widening of the eyes and slight parting of the lips. But he did not notice, and so the long night toiled on, filled by Khan’s slurred, halting voice and the scenes his words drew.
___
The man had been in there too long.
This thought came to Meatloaf as he was taking a piss outside the tent. He could still hear the murmur of the stranger’s voice as he spoke to the girl. Why was the girl so quiet? Maybe this was a bad idea. Giving out free fortunes wasn’t likely to get them anywhere in a hurry.
Meatloaf zipped up his trousers and sauntered back to his post. This was a sort of living hell, he thought, this standing around with a grin on your face, all but asking people if you could lick their boots. It was demeaning. They should have been licking his boots, not the other way around.
Sometimes, if he was not careful, these “should have beens” would lapse into a waking daydream. He would find himself seated on a dais like the kings of old, gazing at a line of supplicants stretching past the royal doors and out along the gutter. Maybe he would grow tired of hearing their pleas. Maybe he would go to his harem for diversion or feed a few criminals to his pet tiger.
The boy who had grown to manhood in a small apartment above his parents’ butchery shop had once relished the idea of following in his father’s footsteps. It had never occurred to him that no matter how skilled he was with the cleaver or the tenderizer, he lacked his father’s business acumen. Oh, well. Daddy’s business acumen could rot with him.
Only later, after the government had appropriated their supply of meats (for their own protection, of course), had Meatloaf begun to dream bigger. He was destined for better things than cutting meat and sneaking his thumb onto the edge of the scale.
Some day, he thought as he walked back to the front of the tent, people will fear me. Then we’ll see who’s laughing, won’t we? They would respect him—unlike Victor, who had broken his promise and abandoned Meatloaf at the first opportunity; unlike Jenny, who spent all her affection on a mangy dog instead of on the man who had saved her; unlike those soldiers at the checkpoint, who had treated Meatloaf like he was a piece of trash.
Some day they’ll all respect me, he thought.
The key was patience. He had hated his father since he was old enough to distinguish his fingers from his toes, and had he tried to settle the score in his teenage years? Oh, no! He had waited until he was thirty years old—thirty, could you believe it! Middle-aged, by God!
Strategic patience—he seemed to recall reading that in a newspaper once, a headline that had forced itself on him before he could reach the funny pages. A lesser man would play his hand at the first opportunity, but not him. No, if he could wait so long to get even with Good Old Dad, he could wait a little longer to get the respect he deserved.
Maybe it wouldn’t happen until he was forty. Maybe (Please, God, no) not until he was fifty. What an idea! But if that was the sacrifice he was required to make, so be it.
How did that phrase go? Oh, yes. Good things come to those who wait.
He was smiling to himself as he reached the tent. The fantasies would feed him for now—they were like a bag of potato chips he would pull out now and then when his stomach began to growl. His opportunity would come in time. He was already forgetting his humiliation at the hands of those soldiers and the bout of depression that had followed.
Strategic patience—yes, that was the key. All good things—
Meatloaf started, then pressed his ear to the tent. He could make out most of the words of the man with the badge on his shoulder, though it would have been easier if the man hadn’t been sloshed. He was telling a story that seemed to have something to do with two brothers and a cabin. But it was the name of one of the brothers that had captured Meatloaf’s attention.
Victor Gervasio, his old friend.
Chapter 35
The sky had rusted over, bubbling in patches and peeling like silicone paint.
Khan thought, This cannot possibly be the place.
But the right place it was, according to the folded note in his pocket. Nestle Lane. “The Place where Dreams Come True,” according to the welcoming sign at the front of the street, though Khan imagined it was more likely the place where dreams died.
The cul-de-sac terminated in a brood of houses with matching dormers and yards sectioned off by picket fences. It may have been a quaint little neighborhood once, before the weeds went to seed and the ivy swarmed across the chimneys. Khan could almost hear the echo of children’s laughter as they chased one another around the common, watched by parents who leaned on their fences, pausing their yard work to smile at one another and remember how it felt to be young.
This cannot possibly be the place, Khan thought again.
He turned at the swish of footsteps through the tall grass. He was leaning with one hand on the bark of an elm tree. The street was lined with elms. The morning was still dark enough that, if someone were in one of those cookie-cutter houses, he doubted they would be able to see him.
“The boys are restless.”
Khan met the speaker’s gaze briefly. Walker had a long, bony face with sunken eyes and stained teeth. He smelled like week-old piss. He wore a yellowed wife-beater t-shirt, jeans that hung just below his hips, and a leather aviator jacket with a fleece collar. Khan suspected the coat was intended to compensate for the rest of his appearance. It didn’t.
Khan returned his gaze to the houses, ignoring the comment because he did not think it merited a reply.
There was a metallic click as Walker struck his lighter, then held it to the Pall Mall creased between his teeth.
“You want him to see us?” Khan said sharply.
“Isn’t that the point?”
Khan gazed back down the street to where the other four men were waiting with the horses. He wished, not for the first time, that his request for soldiers had been honored. Not one of these men belonged outside a prison, Walker least of all.
“Heard a rumor you knew this guy,” Walker said, puckering his lips as he expelled a cloud of smoke not much denser than the fog of Khan’s own breath.
“What do you care?”
“Maybe you should tell the rest of us what you know.”
“There’s nothing to tell. We worked together—it was a long time ago. Haven’t heard from him in ages.”
Walker regarded him through narrowed eyes. “So you’re saying he was just someone you knew. No more than a name and a face.”
“That’s right.”
“So if things go sideways, you’ll be ready to put a bullet in him?”
Khan plucked the cigarette from Walker’s hand, dropped it among the weeds, and crushed it beneath the heel of his sand-colored boot. “Let’s make something clear. This isn’t an improv class. If you give him so much as a paper cut, we’re all dead men. Understand?”
Walker held his gaze. “No problem, boss. After all, you’re in charge.”
Khan nodded absently, glancing again toward the semi-circle of houses around the cul-de-sac, for that was where his mind was—searching, calculating, trying to identify which pieces on the board were in motion.
“Just so we’re clear,” Walker said, “if we go into that house and I find a shotgun aimed at my face, I’m not allowed to fire first. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“But I’m still allowed to duck out of the way?”
“If that man gets you in his sights,” Khan answered, “you’re already dead.”
___
Khan’s heart hammered in his chest as he walked down the middle of the street, his hands raised at his sides. In that small eternity before he reached the front door of the house, he wondered how different he might appear since the last time he had met this man. Would he even be recognized? If not, he doubted his old friend would give him much time to explain.
After leaving the least combat
-ready member of his group (who was not, in fact, Walker) with the horses, he gave the other four men specific instructions on where to position themselves in case a gunfight erupted. One was leaning against the back of a white CRV parked along the street, watching the house through the tinted windows. Two more were in the bushes to Khan’s right, while the fourth, Walker, had agreed to sneak into the trees looming behind the house in case the subject fled through the back.
Khan did not think anyone would be fleeing today, but they had to be ready.
He watched the windows as he approached the front steps. It was a two-story brick house with a mail slot beside the door, small, homey, the kind of place that would attract the neighborhood kids on Halloween. Khan could imagine a middle-aged writer settling here to write regional fiction, walking his dog in the afternoons and exchanging pleasantries with his neighbors along the way. Those same neighbors would describe him as a “local gem,” a real “hero of the community” whose art was just not understood by the rest of the country.
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