by Jim Nisbet
Certainly not your longest acquaintance and best friend from technical college, the sharpest manager you’d thought you ever met, and good-looking, too—although what that latter qualification had to do with the equation, he’d long since forgotten. Why, after all, expect her to watch your back, when she’s obviously been exclusively preoccupied for a long time with watching her own?
Phillip sighed heavily, and his entire frame sagged. He’d been harboring a lot of tension for a lot of time, and he knew it, even as he denied it. Though he’d seen this confrontation coming for a while, he’d refused to allow himself to believe its subject. Marci Marci Marci. Sold out, copped out, and with a little help from the fiancé, whom Phillip had always pegged as venal, dishonest, corruptible, clutching for the main chance—mere emotional or maybe human entanglements from the past be damned.
“I’m sorry, Phillip,” Marci suddenly said.
He almost didn’t hear it. “Sorry?” he repeated.
Marci said nothing.
“Are you going to pay that invoice?” he asked.
“I’ll … see what I can do.”
“It’s not my fault it was bullshit work,” Phillip reminded her. “Work tasked to me specifically to force me to quit.” He took a beat. “Right?”
“You’ve no call to take that attitude,” Marci said quickly. “It’s not like we haven’t already paid you—how much?”
“Well over three hundred thou,” Phillip said immediately.
“Not bad for one year,” she suggested.
“One year of my life,” he agreed. “One year without even the time to pick up my dry-cleaning. Though I was looking at it as an investment.”
“Well,” she said, “what did you do with the money?” Phillip pursed his lips. Less rent on his crummy apartment, and the occasional fleeting and very modest night out, like this one, he still had most of it. “That’s none of your business, Marci. Not to mention, it’s beside the point.”
“What point?”
“You’re shafting me. You know it, I know it, all the aforementioned shitheads know it and—what I consider worse?”
“What do you consider worse, Phillip?” Marci said, suddenly coming on with the acid tone. “Darfur? Bangladesh?”
“What’s worse,” Phillip said, declining to take the bait, “is that if I knew it I suppressed it, and if I suppressed it it’s because I trusted you and your shitbird husband-to-be.”
“Let’s leave Billy out of this.”
“Leave Bill out this? Gladly. Only it’s not possible. Or—hey, maybe it is possible. One thing would make it possible. One thing.”
“What thing is that?”
He was testing her attention span. He could hear the strain. She was probably already browsing the latest posts to her bridal registry. The conversation was almost over. All he had to do was quit and they could hang up and everybody could get on to the next multiplicity of tasks.
“That thing would be this: that you set me up for this from the beginning. You recruited me into the start-up, there was a promise of equity, it was a promise that you never intended to fulfill. True or false? If true, well, sure: I’ll gladly leave Bill out of it.”
“What are you saying, Phillip?” There was nothing but ice in her voice now, arctic ice, many feet deep.
“I’m saying … I’m saying …” Phillip stared at the inch of Sangiovese that remained in the second glass, which was actually his third glass. It would have been nice to throw it across the room. A mere gesture, but nice. Ditto, it would have perhaps been satisfying to turn over the table. It may even have been conciliatory to duke it out with the staff. But there was no percentage there. No equity … They just ran a modest little cucina Italiana, and they ran it well. The food was good. The wine was reasonably priced. It wasn’t their fault that Phillip was in bed with the wrong people in some other business in some other location. No. That was Phillip’s fault, and Phillip’s fault only. Phillip had only the one person to blame, himself to blame, and it was a lesson that perhaps most people who had managed to achieve the ripe old age of twenty-six had already learned but had somehow eluded him.
Until tonight.
“I quit,” Phillip told his phone.
“Submit that in writing,” Marci said quickly. “Word the document as a respectful resignation, along with a quit-claim, and send me the pdf. Include with it a copy of your final invoice marked net five and say as much. I’ll see that you’re paid in full within sixty days, and we’ll give you our highest recommendation.”
Before Phillip could point out that net five means five business days, not thirty or sixty, she rang off.
He rested his phone hand on the red and white checked table cloth. The phone was hot and so was his right ear. Both were hotter than his meal.
He stared at the nearly full bowl of pasta puttanesca in front of him.
He tugged the red and white checked napkin away from his shirt collar, dabbed his lips pro forma, and laid it neatly atop his salad fork.
One year, he was thinking, if he was thinking anything at all. But he’d known Marci since Computer Club in high school, which made ten years, or thirty-eight percent of his life, and that seemed a treachery no amount of cognition could rectify.
An odd noise from the phone let Phillip know that its battery was low.
Phillip drew his attention to the phone. On its screen various widgets blinked, spun, floated, came and went. Of the five of them Phillip had written single-handedly, Corazonics controlled three.
Let it die.
He dropped the phone in his breast pocket.
After paying the bill, Phillip wandered north on Kearny to the intersection at Columbus. There, at Café Niebaum-Coppola, he sat still long enough to purchase and consume a shot of Haitian rum with an espresso. But the place was too brightly lit, and the movie posters and the crowd they attracted did nothing for him. He crossed Kearny and then Washington and stepped into Mr. Bings, where he ordered a rum and coke. Before long he abandoned the drink and a ten-dollar bill on the bar because the European football game on the big screen only aggregated to the perceived sumtotal of meaninglessness. From there he drifted up the block to Vesuvio, where he lingered over another rum and coke long enough to watch a chess game. But it turned out the two players were recreating a game Samuel Beckett designed to be played in the madhouse toward the end of Murphy, which Phillip only divined because one of the players was calling out the moves from a copy of the novel. In the first half of the game, the pieces tentatively advance toward one another. In the second half, they retreat. What’s the point?
He wandered up the avenue. He crossed Broadway, took a left on Vallejo, a right on Powell. At the far end of the block, where Powell comes back to Columbus, he hit an ATM for two hundred dollars, around which he folded the dwindling remains of the previous two hundred dollars, inserting the resulting sheaf of bills into the right front pocket of his jeans, beneath the skirt of the tweed jacket he’d bought at Barney’s, in New York, the year they’d won the battle of the robots. It was the only tweed jacket he owned, and it had leather patches on its elbows.
A block away, at Gino & Carlo, on Green Street, Phillip switched to margaritas. Miles Davis was on the jukebox. The bar was crowded, convivial, boisterous. Phillip almost felt at home. He ordered a second margarita. It tasted good, it made him feel better, it made no difference that the room was spinning. A solid year of stress began to shed down his shoulders like rain off a dog, therefrom to flood across the barroom floor and dissipate through the cracks into who knew how deep a karmic basement, not like rats leaving a sinking ship, he smiled to think, but like parasites deserting a host they’d bled dry. This feels great, Phillip said to himself. He even repeated it out loud, apropos of nothing, to a guy sitting next to him. You got that right, said the guy to Phillip, barely audible though other people’s yelling, and they touched glasses.
Not long after that Phillip had the idea of going down to Enrico’s, where he hadn’t been in a long
time, because they served food there very late, and he had a vague idea it was good food and, after that misfired Italian meal, he found himself hungry enough to try again. For sure he remembered the custom mix of local olives served in oil from the Napa Valley with fresh-baked bread he could order there, not to mention a good glass of wine, and, muttering an adios to his stool mate, Phillip sallied into the night.
Across Green Street, two men lounged in the doorway of a darkened store specializing in used vinyl, used stereo equipment, and used musical instruments.
“Here he comes,” one said to the other.
EIGHT
An hour and a half later the mark came out of the Chat Noir on the south side of Broadway, directly across the street from Enrico’s. He faced east, paused, faced west, paused, then exhaled loudly.
The sidewalk was teeming, the neon was screaming.
Whoooee, Phillip Wong was thinking. I may be six foot three, but those two Rusty Nails got me nailed to a tree.
The rhyme caught his fancy, and he began to repeat it under his breath. Six foot three, nailed to a tree. Six foot three …
Klinger, moving east, went port-to-port with the mark, nudging the left shoulder with his own left shoulder. “Oh, excuse me, buddy,” Klinger said, turning to his right. The mark, who had been turned maybe forty-five degrees, barely noticed. “No problem,” he said, just as Frankie Geeze went starboard to starboard with him.
“Oh, hey, hey, watch where you’re goin’,” Frankie said cheerfully. He took a step forward as he spoke, then turned a quarter turn back. “You okay, fella?”
Phillip Wong turned to his right and, being as he was about fifteen minutes from taking a nap in the gutter, straightened up, smoothed the front of his jacket and, marshaling all the dignity he had left, had a look at both of his fellow pedestrians and said, “I’m just fine, thank you. Dandy all ‘round. No problem. No problem. Six foot three.” He cleared his throat. “Always a silver lining,” he said thoughtfully. The prospect of eight or ten hours’ sleep, uninterrupted by cache overflows and rude phone calls, looked pretty good to him.
“Glad to hear it.”
“Me, too, fella,” Klinger said, moving east. “Have a swell night.”
“Say,” Frankie Geeze said, as Phillip Wong turned to his left to watch Klinger fade toward the intersection at Kearny, “can you tell me where the Ferry Building is?”
Phillip Wong turned back to his right. “The Ferry Building?” He frowned. “The Ferry Building …”
“That’s okay,” Frankie told him. “I’ll find the mother-fucker. You—.”
Phillip pointed west, toward the Broadway Tunnel, then lifted his hand, still pointing, over Frankie’s head, and swung it back down Broadway until it was pointed east. Then, turning with the hand, he pointed more or less southeast. “Down to the bottom of Broadway, across the Embarcadero, take a right. You’ll be on the water. Right away, you come to Pier 7. Can’t miss it. It’s a so-called fishing pier, though there’s no more fish, and it’s all lit up. Like me.” Phillip chuckled. He converted the more or less horizontal pointing finger into the vertical one of pedagogy. “North of the Ferry Building,” he informed Frankie, who listened patiently, “the piers are all odd-numbered. South of the Ferry Building …” Phillip’s voice trailed off.
“They’re even,” Frankie helpfully supplied.
“That’s it,” Phillip said, staggering a little. “Too late for more ferries, though,” he lamented.
“That’s okay,” Frankie said. “I’m supposed to meet a chick in a bar down there. How far is that?” Frankie shot a pinstriped cuff and had a look at a nice watch whose face lay on the inside of his wrist. “Damn.”
Phillip screwed up his face. “That’s gotta be half a mile.” He pulled forward the left lapel of his British tweed jacket with his left hand and reached for the inside pocket with his right. “I could ask my phone—.”
“Not to worry, pal,” Frankie said mildly, touching the mark’s wrist. “I got half an hour.”
“Oh,” Philip said, dropping the lapel. “You’ll make the date. Easy.”
“Yeah,” Frankie told him. “Time to enjoy the full moon.”
Phillip turned east again. There, not a hand’s breadth above Berkeley, hung a huge moon, full and very orange.
“It must have just risen,” Phillip marveled. “Wow.”
“If it’s setting over there,” Frankie suggested, “we’re in a world of shit.”
For the second time in less than a minute, Phillip managed a chuckle.
“Gotta go,” Frankie told him, and he went.
Phillip, watching the moon, nodded distantly.
Two-thirds of the Broadway block beyond Kearny, Frankie passed Klinger, who was ambling along with his hands in his pockets, and took a right at Montgomery. A couple of minutes later, just below the entrance to the parking lot at Verdi Place, Klinger caught up with him. “So?”
Frankie showed a thickness of freshly laundered twenties, folded once across the middle.
“A horizontal jeans pocket, and under the hem of a jacket too,” Klinger marveled. “A clean piece of work.”
“I was afraid I’d lost my touch inna joint,” Frankie said simply.
“No way,” Klinger assured him. “If I had a GED certificate, I’d sign it over to ya.”
“But to tell you the truth,” Frankie continued modestly, “that guy gave me so much time I coulda took his shorts off him. He never woulda noticed the difference.” Frankie opened the folded bills and slid the thickness of the stack between thumb and forefinger. “Take,” he said, giving, and “Count,” he added, without bothering to do so himself.
Despite the dim light Klinger counted five twenties, a ten, four ones, and said as much. “One fourteen.”
“Fifty-fifty.” Frankie slipped his half of the take into the breast pocket of his jacket and patted it. Then he patted the breast pocket into which Klinger had deposited his own cut. “Thanks. And now we part ways.”
Klinger frowned. “That enough for you?”
“Sure.” Frankie smiled. “Who needs to eat?”
The roar crescendoed into a howl more to be expected from a man desperate to wake from a bad dream than from a mere victim whose pocket has been picked. Before either felon could react, Phillip plowed into them from behind, launching Frankie headlong down the steepness of Montgomery. As Phillip ricocheted into Klinger, he tackled him at the waist.
Klinger, though a slacker when it came to physical altercation, did what he thought he had to do, which was bring both fists, one clasped inside the other, down onto the back of Phillip’s neck. To little discernible effect. On the contrary, having hurtled down the hill, aided and accelerated by gravity, Phillip’s forward momentum, though shared with Frankie, pinballed the two of them across the breadth of the sidewalk.
A peculiarity of this sidewalk is that it forms the eastern border of a two-level parking garage. The top level is accessed from Broadway. Access to the lower floor, ten feet below the upper, is made via Verdi Place, off Montgomery Street.
The upper deck, of poured pre-stressed concrete, being more or less flush with the elevation of Broadway, flies south over the Verdi entrance until it’s a full story and a half higher than Montgomery Street. The upper deck is supported by a fourteen-inch grade beam. Between the apex of this beam, where it meets the pavement of Verdi, and the end of the parking lot, perhaps five car-widths south, a long, right-angle triangle opens up. Its upper leg is level, and it extends from the apex at Verdi to the northernmost exterior wall of the next building south. This wall forms a right angle with the upper car deck, and descends about eight feet to the incline of the Montgomery sidewalk. This sidewalk, if you walk back up the hill, north, forms the hypotenuse of the right triangle, tapering through the angle back to the foundation of the Verdi pavement.
This entire triangle is open. Once upon a time, perhaps, there had been fencing over this cavity, or pigeon netting, or a handrail. But no longer.
It was through this opening that Phillip Wong’s forward moment carried Klinger, despite Klinger’s frantic, if momentary, resistance. But, in fact, if Klinger had been able to foresee the end result, he might have resisted not at all. Precipitated backward, Klinger also twisted and fell to his right, down the hill, and, as he was shot almost horizontally through the aperture, like a perfectly cued eight ball, not so much as grazing above or below, the upper deck’s grade beam peeled Phillip Wong off Klinger’s hip as if he were a spud and his aggressor its epidermis, fracturing the skull of the victim—for Phillip Wong remains the victim in this, does he not?—though not killing him outright, and depriving him of his consciousness.
Klinger, for his part, fell several feet onto the hood of a brand new Jaguar XKR, indenting the cobalt blue sheet metal considerably, rolled half over and fell again, to the concrete between cars. The former impact sent a formidable boom reverberating among the parked vehicles, whose echoes eclipsed the grunt evinced by the latter.
This isn’t working out, Klinger said to himself, as he rolled over onto his back, but you got to get up anyway. He clawed at the Jaguar tire in the darkness. You got to get up! How come this car’s alarm didn’t go off? Get up …
Squinting in the dark, he heard a groan.
“Frankie,” he whispered.
Klinger pulled himself up by the Jaguar’s bumper, then by its eponymous hood ornament. The lower ledge of the opening was too high for him to see over. He moved south along the angle of the sidewalk until he could see over it. There, across the sidewalk and face down in a treebox, he could discern the crumbled outline of his erstwhile partner, Frankie Geeze.
Frankie looked a lot like a pile of laundry.
Klinger stuck his head out, over the hypotenuse of the sidewalk, and looked up the hill. There he discerned another pile of laundry, and from it the groan repeated.
Though this was North Beach, the street was dark and there seemed to be nobody around. “Frankie,” Klinger hissed. He got one foot onto the front bumper of a Jeep Cherokee and levered a third of himself through the angled opening. “Frankie!”