Criminal Carma

by Steven M. Thomas

  Keeping the plastic disks tight against his chest in his left hand, he reached out with his right to take the Kruger. As he grasped it, I saw that his arm was bleeding. Taking hold of his wrist, I turned his arm and saw several fresh cuts midway between his wrist and elbow. The cuts were surrounded by countless scars. The long-sleeve shirt in all weather.

  “Oh, Oz, what are you doing?” The periodic misery that underlay his cheerful demeanor hit me like a knee in the gut. I guess I should have known. People who are always smiling are usually sad.

  He pulled his hand free and hunched back over, holding gold in one hand, plastic in the other.

  “I’m sorry, Rob. I know I’m not supposed to do it. Please don’t tell anybody.”

  “But why are you doing it, Oz? Why would you want to cut yourself?”

  I had heard of schoolgirls who supposedly sliced their delicate skin for some kind of perverse satisfaction, but I had never understood it. It seemed like something made up by daytime talk-show hosts to elicit maudlin tears from emotionally congested housewives, not something that actually happened in real life. I knew all about addictions to things that make you feel good, at least temporarily, like alcohol and heroin and sex, but I couldn’t comprehend being addicted to pain.

  “I do it when I feel sad,” he said. “It makes me feel better. It hurts, and I think about that and forget about my mom and everything else.”

  “What else?”

  He leaned his head back and moaned. “All my problems. Baba Raba won’t give me my picture back, and I’m going to get kicked out of my room, and I’m never going to get out into the country. I’m all grown up and I’ve never even seen a cow. I am afraid I am going to be stuck down here forever and never see my mom or the country or anything.”

  I knelt down beside him and put my arm around his thin shoulders. He leaned his head against me and wept. He smelled sour. Tears dripped from his chin, jewels of blood from his elbow. I let him cry for a minute or so to get it out of his system, then squeezed his shoulder.

  “I am going to make sure you get out into the country, Oz,” I said. “Don’t worry about that anymore.”

  It had occurred to me how much I owed the kid. He was the one who had put me on the trail of the necklace in the first place, and the necklace was going to make me rich. Not rich like Howard Hughes or Christina Onassis or any of the other sick superrich for whom money was a painful poison, but rich like a guy in the fairy tale who steals the ogre’s treasure and exits the story whistling, bag slung over his shoulder, hat pushed back on his head, disappearing down a country lane.

  More than that, in the hollowness of late nighttime, I felt a kinship with him in his sorrow, as if he were my son or brother. He had lost his mother, who I was quite sure would never return. I had lost my daughter, whom I probably would never see again. Oz and I were sandwiched together in the darkness between two devastations.

  Reggie and I would be leaving Venice the next day. Or maybe the day after. I might try one more time. Before leaving, I would hook Ozone up with some kind of social-services agency and find him a place to stay, maybe some vocational training. Something better than sleeping in alleys.

  “Come on, stop crying,” I said. “Why don’t you come over and sleep on our couch tonight? We need to put some antiseptic on those cuts so they don’t get infected. What did you cut yourself with, anyway?”

  He reached under the sleeping bag and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. I took it from him and slipped it in my shirt pocket, then helped him up.

  “Bring your shirt and boots. We’ll wash your clothes tomorrow after you take a bath and get cleaned up.”

  Following Oz out of the dim room, I tripped on some of his junk, kicking a pile of magazines so that they splayed across the floor. One of them caught my eye. It was the copy of Riviera with Evelyn’s bejeweled picture that the boy had shown me on the boardwalk. I wondered if he had two copies or if he’d forgotten that Baba had returned it to him. I started to ask him as we walked back over to the flophouse, but thought better of it. I didn’t want to challenge another of his delusions, if that’s what it was. He was upset enough already.

  Though he should have been dead to the world, Budge must have heard us go into the downstairs bathroom. I was putting Bactine on Ozone’s arm when the former lineman’s bulk loomed in the doorway.

  “Don’t let him see!” Ozone said, turning away.

  But he had already seen.

  “Oh, motherfucker!” Budge said, turning away from us and smashing his fist into the wall, punching through the plaster and lath, something I’d never seen anyone do before.

  Any fool with a few drinks in him can put his fist through a piece of drywall without damaging his hand, unless he hits a stud. Most of my friends’ homes when I was growing up had a hole or two in the kitchen or living room drywall, testament to some memorable domestic disturbance, as when a drunken father objected to his wife’s shrill 2 a.m. accusations. But plaster and lath is more like concrete than half-inch drywall. My man Budge had a big punch.

  “Knock it off, Budge,” I said. “Look what you did to your hand.”

  He held his fist up in front of his face and looked at the blood seeping through the white plaster dust.

  “Who gives a shit?” he said.

  “Sharpnick will when she sees that hole in the wall.”

  “Why should she? They’re gonna tear it down anyway.”

  “Just behave yourself.”

  After Oz’s cuts were disinfected and bandaged, I sent him to the living room to lie down on the couch.

  “I’m sorry, Budge,” he said softly as he went down the hall. But Budge wouldn’t look at him.

  “Let me see your hand,” I said, pulling the big goof into the bathroom. He had gashed his knuckles badly, grinding old paint and plaster into them.

  “I told that little son of a bitch if he ever did that again, I was gonna kick his ass,” he said and hiccupped and began to cry.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Not you, too. Sit down on the toilet and let me see if I can do something with your hand so you don’t get gangrene.”

  When Budge was patched up and back in bed, I checked the other downstairs rooms. Candyman was snoring in his berth with an anonymous companion of sizable proportions. Pete’s room was empty, the hospital corners on his bunk undisturbed. I wondered what the ex-sailor was up to at two-thirty in the morning.

  Upstairs, Reggie’s room was empty, too. Probably gone to Chavi’s to celebrate the score with a blow job after stashing the rental car.

  I drifted off, thinking about the next day. The first thing I would do was take the necklace and coins to Fahid. Then we’d return the car and get the five-hundred-dollar deposit back. Then call someone about Oz. Then…

  I slipped over the edge of consciousness, dropping down into a deep, cool sleep.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “Wake up!”

  I heard the voice from my vague location far down in the depths of unconsciousness. As I breast-stroked toward the surface, it repeated itself.

  “Wake up!” It was cheerful.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw Namo leaning over me, grinning, showing the black gaps beside his top incisors. He had a snubnose chrome six-shooter in his hand. He was pointing it at me. My gun was in the glove compartment of the rental car, parked beneath some ragged palm tree on a side street somewhere in south Venice Beach. Namo’s little green eyes were sparkling with happiness. He was looking at me the way a sadistic kid looks at a cat he has just trapped, relishing what he will do to it.

  Judging by the light pouring in the window, it was midmorning, around nine or nine-thirty. I had been asleep for about six hours. Baba was sitting in the armchair by the window, his ample ass more than filling the space between the splayed arms. He was wearing the blue suit I had seen in his closet, dressed for an appraisal.

  “If you return the necklace now, without any difficulty, I give you my word that the police will not be involved and you wil
l not be harmed,” he said in his measured guru voice. Despite the sonorous tone, he looked scared. His face looked thinner than it had been, flesh worn away by worry in the hours since I had last seen him.

  “Necklace? What are you talking-”

  Namo jabbed the barrel of the gun in my face, striking my cheekbone with an explosive bolt of pain. Instinctively, I started to come up out of the bed but he cocked the hammer and I lay back down.

  “Stop it!” Baba said. “There is no need for that. Not yet. I believe Mr. Rivers will be reasonable when he knows the facts.”

  “How did you know where to find me?” I said, rubbing my cheek.

  “Our nautical friend put me wise.”

  “Pete?”

  “Yes,” Baba said. “He has been keeping me informed of your activities. When he told me last Saturday that you and your associate had been to the desert on some kind of criminal enterprise at the same time that a pair of thieves attempted to steal the necklace, I instructed him to keep what he might call ‘a weather eye’ on you.”

  “I’m in it with ‘em, you asshole!” Pete said, bouncing into the room through the hall door. “You think you are pretty fucking smart, but there’s a lot you don’t know. I’m the one that found-”

  “Be quiet,” Baba said, cutting Pete off. “Loose lips sink ships.”

  Pete clapped his mouth shut and Baba turned back to me. “I congratulate you on your skill and perseverance. You very nearly got the necklace in the desert, despite my precautions. But you also very nearly came to grief. It was bold of you to quickly regroup and steal it last night from that idiot lawyer’s office. Concentration of that order is a yogic virtue. But then I believe you have studied yoga, haven’t you?”

  “How do you know that?” I said, confused again by his insidious ability to pluck information from the atmosphere.

  “Our lovely little Mary mentioned it to me. You are acquainted with her, I believe? A slender young woman with blond hair and a fairy’s face? Street tough, but oh so tender underneath? Another prize you hoped to steal from me, perhaps?” Anger crawled up into his voice like a sewer worker emerging from a manhole.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Baba nodded heavily, as if my silence confirmed his statement. “We will come to her shortly,” he said. “At the moment, I am interested in the necklace. You must return it.”

  “I don’t know what kind of shit Pete has been feeding you, but I don’t have the slightest idea what you are talking about. What necklace?”

  “Bullshit, motherfucker,” Pete said, doing a perverse hornpipe of fury and glee. “I heard you and your prick of a partner planning a job before you went to the desert. When you came back you were tore up like a couple of sailors who tangled with a barroom full of Marines. When Baba told me someone fought Jimmy Z and tried to steal the diamonds, I knew it was you guys.”

  “How did you hear us?” I snapped.

  “Through that floor vent,” Pete said.

  His room was below mine.

  “How he heard is irrelevant,” Baba said. “He did hear, and when I mentioned the attempted robbery to him last Saturday, we put two and two together and he started watching you. He has been helping me with… certain tasks since last summer. He is always most willing to be of assistance if his efforts are recognized in a monetary fashion.” He smiled a mixed smile at Pete and then went on: “I was less confident than he that you were the culprits, but the possibility certainly existed.”

  That explained Baba’s laser-like interest in me on the beach on Saturday evening. I tried to think when and where Reggie and I had discussed the burglary and when Pete had been around. They couldn’t have known about the previous night’s plan ahead of time or they would have moved the necklace and tipped off the police.

  “So what are you saying? You think me and Reggie tried to steal a diamond necklace in Palm Springs last weekend and that we did steal it last night?”

  “I know you did,” Baba said. “And I have to have it back. I need it as collateral for equity in a real estate project I have in hand. My partners in that project are not the most spiritual of men. They have half a million dollars earnest money at stake, which they stand to lose if the deal falls through. The deadline is five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. If we aren’t fully collateralized before then, our option will expire and the project will collapse. My partners have informed me several times this week that if I don’t provide my share of the equity in time, there will be dire consequences.”

  His voice trembled a little. Despite his size and spiritual accomplishments, he was scared of the Italians.

  “They will certainly kill you if they find out your actions were responsible for scuttling the deal,” he went on. “That is an outcome I could, with regret, accept. But if they lose five hundred thousand dollars, they will also want to kill me, I think. As you might imagine, I am not so easily reconciled to that outcome. So I need the necklace back, and I need it back now. If you refuse to return it voluntarily, I will have to allow Namo and Pete to indulge their lower natures and use pain, and the fear of even greater pain, to compel you. Other people could be harmed as well.”

  “What makes you so sure that I stole the jewels?” I said. “Just because Pete suspects me hardly proves…”

  “I see everything-here,” Baba said, jabbing a blunt finger into his broad forehead. “And then of course there is this.” He held up the Krugerrand I had left out of the stash. “Some of these gold coins were stolen along with the jewels. This one was on the table beside your bed when we arrived this morning. That is conclusive, I think.”

  I had taken the coin back from Oz for safekeeping, but was so tired when I came upstairs I hadn’t bothered to put it away. It would give the cops enough for a search warrant and make it very hard to convince Baba that he was chanting up the wrong chimney.

  “I’ve had that for years,” I said and laughed. “Even if some Krugerrands were stolen last night, it doesn’t prove I had anything to do with it. There are millions of Krugers scattered around Los Angeles.”

  “Have it your own way, asshole,” Pete said, pulling a leather blackjack out of his back pocket and circling to my right so that he was on one side of the bed and Namo on the other. “I got a cut coming when this deal closes, and you ain’t jewing me out of it.”

  “Wait!” Baba said. “The less trouble we have here, the better. If you don’t value your own skin, perhaps you care more about the delicate epidermis of our mutual friend Mary. It would be a shame if her loveliness were to be marred.”

  “If you hurt that girl, I’ll kill you,” I said.

  Baba nodded and smiled as satisfied a smile as he was capable of with Discenza and his men waiting in the wings, tapping their Italian loafers.

  “It is as I suspected,” he said.

  “Where is she, you fat fucking hypocrite?”

  “Watch yer mouth,” Namo said.

  “She is locked up, safe and sound,” Baba said. “We had a disagreement yesterday evening when she declined to participate in the culmination of a ritual. Her refusal to submit led to an argument about the role of sexuality in spiritual development and human relationships. Your name came up in that argument in such a way as to make me believe that you two have formed a mutual attachment. Considering our suspicions of you, I thought that might make her a useful tool. In addition, I didn’t want her running to the authorities with any wild tales. So I locked her up. Are you going to force us to knock you out and take you to watch her be abused in order to secure your cooperation? Would you enjoy seeing Namo have his way with her? Or will you play it smart, as they say, and turn over the necklace?”

  When I didn’t answer, Baba continued, putting a powerfully persuasive note in his voice: “If you give me the necklace, I will give you the girl, only slightly the worse for wear. I will also let you keep the golden coins and any other booty you may have taken from Hildebrand. You and the girl can go your way, richer than you were, and I will go my way. Neither of us want
police involvement, and that will give us a comfortable level of what could be called mutually assured destruction. You don’t have to worry about me turning you in for burglary and safecracking, and I don’t have to worry about the two of you making any allegations about illegal activity at the ashram.”

  “All right,” I said, resignedly. “I guess you’ve got me over a barrel. I’ll give you the necklace, if you promise to let Mary go and let me keep the Krugerrands.”

  The loving smile, tinged with relief, widened beneath Baba’s big nose. “This is wise, Robert. I knew from our first meeting that you were an intelligent man.”

  “Be careful!” Pete said. “He’ll try and pull something.”

  “Not while we have the girl,” Baba said. “And the gun. Where is the necklace?”

  “I’ll get it,” I said, throwing back the covers.

  Namo raised the snubnose as I put my feet on the floor.

  “Tell this goon to step back so I can get out of bed.”

  “I am not sure that is a good idea,” Baba said. “Why don’t you just tell us where it is?”

  “It’s hidden under the house,” I said, standing up. “I’ll have to show you.”

  “Watch him, Namo,” Pete said.

  “I got him covered.”

  Baba shrugged. “Let him get dressed. There’s no time to waste. The necklace has to be at the appraiser’s by the close of business today in order for the bank to provide the funds by tomorrow evening.”

  The clothes I had worn the previous night were on the floor beside the bed. I stepped into my pants, put my shirt on and buttoned it up, then sat back down on the edge of the bed to put on my shoes.

  Namo was hovering over me in a threatening way while Pete stood guard at the bedroom door with his sap in case I tried to make a run for it. He wasn’t a big guy, but he was in good shape. It would be tough to get past him without taking a debilitating blow from the blackjack.

  When I stood up again, I patted my pants pockets. “One of you guys got a cigarette?” I asked.