Hashimoto Blues

by Sarah Dupeyron

  Hashimoto

  Blues

  Sarah Dupeyron

  Copyright © 2011 Sarah Dupeyron

  Cover photo and author photo Copyright © 2012 Bruno Dupeyron

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1477476253

  ISBN-13: 978-1477476253

  To Bruno.

  Thank you for giving me

  the time to work on this.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Writing a novel is a big task. A lot of people helped me get it right. I’d like to thank everyone who read an early copy and gave me suggestions and advice. I listened to all of you. Michael Garrett edited an initial version and not only helped me see what was wrong but helped me understand why. I especially want to thank Kathleen Arnini – you had some awesome ideas and weren’t afraid to let me know when I got too cheesy. Mom and Dad, you encouraged me and told me I was great, even when I wasn’t. Last, but not least, I’d like to thank my husband, Bruno. Without you, I wouldn’t have embarked on this journey.

  1.

  Why did I say yes? I stood in the barn, alternately looking at the ruins of my house and the box with its gruesome contents in my hand. In the two short weeks since Max asked me to “play a Game,” life had taken a sharp left turn to Shitsville. If I’d listened to my own instincts, if I’d just told him no, that simple two-letter answer, we could’ve been sitting on the porch having a beer and a smoke instead of pissing ourselves in the barn.

  An unseasonably warm breeze blew across the yard, carrying the scent of wood smoke and scattering the autumn leaves in a red and gold rustle to the corners of the property. The sky overhead looked like rain with angry gray clouds rolling across the land and obscuring the mountains.

  In part, I agreed to this suicidal mission because we were running out of money. Max hadn’t pulled one of his criminal schemes, what he liked to playfully refer to as “a Game,” in months. I ran minor jobs over the border, smuggling small amounts of drugs and other valuables between the US and Canada in my ultralight airplane, making just enough to get by. It was steady work in good weather, but the beastly Vermont winter would temporarily put a stop to any of my jobs. The snow and ice made it too dangerous to fly, and incoming storms could be unpredictable. Plus, with the temperatures dipping well below freezing, it would be way too cold in my unheated cockpit.

  I looked at Max, my partner in crime, my partner in life, my partner in everything. He visibly bore the marks of our disaster. Bandaged and bruised, he hardly resembled the handsome Canadian I had lived with for the past sixteen months. His easy-going smile was replaced with a deep creasing frown, and his large, muscular frame held a tight posture of fear and disillusion.

  “Do you understand what this means?” I asked, holding the box up. It had been mailed to our farmhouse, specifically to Max, via UPS. The plain brown wrappings that covered the outside like a Christmas gift lay crumpled on the floor with our address neatly typed on the front. There was no return address, not that we needed one to know who had sent it.

  Max stared at the house and tugged at the front of his hair, twisting the brown strands around his fingers in a display of nervous tension. He had been avoiding the box but his blood-shot eye, such a beautiful shade of sea glass green, slid sideways to peek at it from under a swollen lid. He nodded slowly. “Ellie, he’s going to kill me. He won’t stop until I’m dead.”

  “Or we disappear.” I wasn’t about to give up and let Hashimoto kill either of us. “We need to leave. Now.”

  I took one last peek inside the box. As horrible as it was, I couldn’t stop looking. The eyeball nestled in white cotton padding at the bottom stared back at me, the muddy brown iris making eye contact, bloody nerve endings trailing behind it like a tail. My hand shook, causing the gelatinous sphere to quake and tremble as if it had a life of its own. I slid the box top back in place and set it on the ground.

  Again, I thought, why did I say yes? Then, I answered myself with another question. When did I ever say no?

  2.

  No one ever intends to be a criminal when they grow up. If a five-year-old kid is asked what he wants to be, he’ll probably say a fireman or a doctor. I wanted to be an engineer and build robots. I didn’t know I wanted to be a criminal until I met Frank.

  I can be incredibly smart, genius level kind of shit. I can calculate large formulas in my head, fix almost any mechanical problem, and understand complex theories. I remember everyone I meet and everything I read. The problem is my intelligence is over shadowed by the fact that I’m a huge dumb-ass.

  Albert Einstein said, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.” I had no common sense and never knew the limits to anything.

  After high school, I left my small town and headed north on a Vermont Transit bus for Montreal, the big city. I had $27.48 in my pocket, a backpack full of books, my toothbrush, a change of underwear, and high hopes of finding the quickest way out of my old life.

  It didn’t occur to me that once I got to Montreal, I wouldn’t be able to find a job. I was an American in Canada with no work visa, and I barely spoke French in a francophone city. My money ran out quickly and I didn’t have enough to get back to the States.

  After wandering around the city for several hours, I found a quiet park bench under the shade of a huge maple. The park was deserted except for an older man standing on the opposite end of the green, his back to me. I saw him stuff a wad of bills in the pocket of his suit coat. I thought if I could just slip my hand in there and snag a few, it would get me a bus ticket back.

  I casually walked across the park, outwardly appearing like I was there for a stroll to enjoy the early summer sunshine. Inside, my heart pounded and my stomach twisted in knots.

  As I approached him, I reached out my hand and my fingers brushed the money. His hand darted out with lightening speed as his fingers wrapped around my wrist, catching me in mid-act.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Your money was about to fall out,” I said. “I was just pushing it back in.”

  “Oh yeah?” He narrowed his sharp blue eyes at me. I felt like they were looking through me, reading everything about me. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

  He bent down to my level, still holding my wrist, and whispered, “Works better in a crowd.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I just stared at him, waiting to see if he’d kill me and dump my lifeless body in some dark alley. Instead, he took my hand in his own and gave it a firm shake. “I’m Frank. Nice to me you, . . .?”

  “Eleanor.” I regretted it immediately. I didn’t want to tell him my real name. I looked across the street and saw a sign hanging above the doorway of a bar. A fox holding a mug of beer, a large grin plastered on his pointy red face, smiled out to the street, inviting thirsty customers in for a drink.

  “Fox,” I announced. “Eleanor Fox.”

  Frank’s eyes had followed my line of sight, and he said with a smirk, “Miss Fox.”

  “Ellie,” I corrected him. Miss Fox was too formal, and I didn’t want to be called Eleanor. No one called me that unless I was in trouble.

  “Okay, Ellie. Could you do me a favor? I want you to stand over there, and if you see any cops, take this red bandana out of your pocket and shake it out, then pretend to blow your nose.” He pulled a red bandana out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “Is it clean?” I was afraid he might have actually used it to blow his nose.

  He laughed. “Yes, it’s clean. Now, if you do this for me, I’ll pay you $100.”

  I agreed and took my place at the lookout spot. About twenty minutes went by without seeing a single police officer when Frank waved me over. “Here’s your money, kid.”

 
“Thanks!” I took the five twenties he gave me and shoved them in my pocket, proud to have earned them.

  “You want to go to that bar over there and tell me how you ended up here?” he asked, pointing to my namesake. “I’m buying. You old enough to go in there?”

  “Yeah, I’m old enough. I’m eighteen.”

  We each ordered a beer and I told Frank my story. When I was done, he offered to bring me back to the States.

  I sat in the front seat and held my bag tight to my chest. Every few minutes, I looked over at Frank as he hummed along with the radio. He didn’t seem to mind my presence and continued to watch the road as he drove.

  When we approached the border, there was a long line of cars waiting for the next customs agent. Although it was a man-made boundary drawn between the two countries, the landscape did make a quick change from the flat farmlands of southern Quebec to the rolling peaks of the Green Mountains. Here, the road widened, allowing several customs booths to check cars going both ways.

  “Give me your passport card,” Frank said. “The agent’s going to ask for it.”

  He held his hand out, waiting. I didn’t want him to see my real identity, but, seeing as I didn’t have a lot of choice, I took my card out and handed it to him. To his credit, he didn’t look at it, but slipped it under his own.

  “We’ll have to get you a new one of these,” he said. “I’ve got a friend who can make you a good one.” Frank obviously understood. He rolled down the window and smiled at the customs agent.

  “Good afternoon, sir.” He handed him our identification.

  “Where are you coming from?” the agent asked.

  “Montreal. I picked up my sister’s kid. Her first year at college.” He let the story roll out easily. “McGill,” he finished with a touch of pride.

  The agent bent to look in at me. “What do you study up there?”

  “Chemistry and molecular biology,” I answered and gave him my best smile. “I’m particularly interested in how cells communicate through the use of chemical compounds.” I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, but it sounded good. I’ve read enough about all kinds of different subjects to be able to pull something out of my hat and bullshit a believable answer.

  “Wow. Impressive,” he said and stood to get a better look at our identification cards.

  Frank looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. “Yes, very impressive,” he whispered. He recognized my skill at lying even though my earlier attempt with him wasn’t quite as smooth.

  The agent handed the IDs back to Frank and patted the roof of the car.

  “You have a nice day,” he said and waved us past.

  Frank drove the car through the gate into the United States.

  “I can see you’re pretty good at that,” he said, handing back the plastic card with my old life stamped across it.

  “At what?”

  “Lying. Making up stories on the spot. Not only are you good at coming up with something, you look just right, too. With that cute little pixie face and those big brown puppy dog eyes, you must have people eating out of the palm of your hand.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” A little embarrassed by his praise, I blushed and pushed a stray curl of dark brown hair behind my ear.

  I knew I was good though. My above average looks gave me a trusting appearance that pulled people off their guard. People always thought I was a well-behaved, model young woman. Looks are deceiving, right?

  Frank lived in Burlington, VT where he owned several properties he used in an elaborate money laundering scheme he had set up with his lawyer. He put me up in a vacant apartment in one of his tenements, two floors above his own place. At first, I thought he would expect some kind of payment, rent money at least, or, in the worst case, sexual favors. Frank wasn’t a bad looking guy. In fact, he’d been handsome when he was young, but he was at least three times my age, and I didn’t want to have sex with him. But, I figured I owed him big time. He never asked. He never made any advances on me at all. As for the apartment, he didn’t charge me either.

  The building in which we lived was in a noisy neighborhood of large Victorian homes that had been converted to apartments housing mostly college students. The once elegant homes were now run down and shabby, owing their poor condition to tenants who didn’t care about the properties they rented. I lived on the third floor, up two flights of creaky stairs, in a spacious apartment with sunny windows overlooking the street below. Frank’s apartment was on the first floor across the hall from an office he used for legitimate reasons as a landlord as well as more felonious ones.

  Frank belonged to a network of criminals who helped each other out on jobs. It wasn’t organized enough to be a gang or a mafia, just a network of petty thieves who knew they could count on each other when various areas of expertise were needed. For example, he called Roger when he needed a good forgery (passport, driver’s license, any kind of documentation) or Angeline when he needed weapons. Frank seemed to be a leader of this group, the guy everyone went to see to get organized. He kept meticulous records in his filing cabinet of all his jobs. The funny thing about his records was that no one but Frank could ever read them as he wrote them in his own code that wouldn’t have made sense to even the best cryptographer. Frank himself had no use for them as he memorized everything anyway.

  Frank quickly realized that my intelligence was beyond what one would usually find in a street urchin and that I could learn to do almost anything. He taught me how to correctly pick pockets with such a light touch and delicate subtlety that even the best crook would never suspect he had been robbed until he tried to pay for his beer at the bar. He also taught me other criminal activities, like hot-wiring cars and cracking locks without a key.

  One of the most important things he taught me, though, had nothing to do with illegal activities. It was to be polite. If I said please and thank you and called people sir or ma’am, they weren’t as likely to be suspicious of me. Often I could lift their wallet, and they would never think back on the nice girl sitting next to them at the counter in the diner. They would think of the rude punk who bumped into them at the grocery store and told them to fuck off instead of saying he was sorry. Polite behavior got me a long way.

  I didn’t want a traditional life, a job, a routine. I bored too easily. Frank wanted to mold me into the perfect criminal. That was a role I was more than willing to take. Frank taught me a little of everything. I was a real jack-of-all-trades, but I wasn’t an expert in anything. Everyone had a specialty. I needed to find mine.

  3.

  For my twentieth birthday, Frank told me he had a surprise for me. We had known each other for over a year and had grown to like and trust each other.

  He drove me about an hour outside of Burlington to an old farmhouse. Built in 1789, it sat on top of a hill with breathtaking views of the forested Green Mountains all around. There were no neighbors; the only other building visible was a red barn about 100 feet from the house. Behind the barn, a long flat field stretched out like a lazy dog on a summer day. The place appeared to be uninhabited, although well kept.

  “This is one of my properties,” Frank explained. He walked over to the large double doors of the barn and opened them one at a time. I followed him in.

  He pointed to a small red contraption in the corner of the barn.

  “That’s yours. Happy birthday!”

  I was shocked into silence and stood with my mouth gaping open like a carp.

  “Don’t you like it?” he asked, his brow pinching together, as if he were worried that I’d be offended by the gift or that I’d have no interest in the thing.

  “I love it!” I turned, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and ran to inspect my new toy.

  It was an old ultralight airplane. An exposed two-cylinder Rotax 582 engine mounted on top of the red canvass wings ran the wooden propeller. Below the wings, a tiny cockpit sat perched on a triangle of wheels. Spider webs hung in all the corners, and dust covered the surfaces, but it
was beautiful.

  “Papy Volant,” I read the white letters written in script across the side. “Flying Grampa?”

  Frank shrugged and grinned. “You could change that if you wanted. I bought it off an old guy years ago whose grandchildren had painted it on there. I never bothered to change it.”

  “No, it’s funny.” Now instead of referring to the pilot, the name referred to the plane itself. I clapped my hands together. “This is cool. Thank you, Frank!”

  I peeked inside the cockpit. It was small. Very small. It had two seats raised a few inches above the floor so the occupants’ legs stretched out in front. There was no cargo area. It could be used for small shipments only, easy for me to manage alone if I had to. We never dealt in large cargo anyway.

  “You can fly one of these things without radioing into a control tower, you can land in a field, you can get from one place to another quickly, and you can cross international borders in a remote area without being seen.” He ticked off the benefits, the last of which was highly illegal. Not that we were ever concerned with that. In comparison to other countries, the U.S. had almost no regulations concerning ultralight aircraft. A license wasn’t even required, although they did limit the size and weight as well as defining an ultralight as having only one seat. This plane, with its two seats and larger fuel tank, was in itself illegal, but considering how I employed it, FAA regulations were the least of my worries.

  “This is a tool, Ellie. I’ll teach you how to use it, and you can make a couple of bucks flying various commodities across the border.”

  He knew I’d be the perfect pilot. I could make calculations in my head, I could remember points and landmarks, and I could navigate like a pro.

  I had found my specialty; I was going to be a smuggler.

  Over the next few weeks, Frank and I spent a lot of time at the farmhouse fixing up the plane and preparing it for flight after years of disuse. He taught me the physics behind aviation and how to repair any damages to the plane. We took the engine off and tore it down, completely rebuilding it. I understood the mechanics and loved the idea of knowing how everything fit together. We installed solar lights in the side field. It was long and fairly flat, the perfect landing strip.