Windward Passage

by Jim Nisbet

  Red sighed.

  “So,” Vassily said. “What do you propose?”

  “I want to cut her in. If she knows what’s up or can figure it out, and she’s in on the action, her mind will clear, if she’s got any sense, and it won’t get any messier than it already has. I could hang around, drink with her, ask her all about her brother and sneak a peak at the letters he’s been sending her for twenty years, talk about her boyfriends, and maybe even become one of them myself; but it’s not going to help us find what we’re looking for if she doesn’t know what it is. If she has no idea what we’re talking about she’s not about to find it, or even to look for it, and meanwhile she’s merely mourning her brother. An opportunity, combined with the threat of death, might sharpen her mind.” Red took up his steak knife. “But I’m willing to bet you on something.”

  Now Vassily sighed. “How melodramatic.” Clearly he was disconsolate. “But,” he said, “what’s that?”

  Red touched the point of the knife to a crust of bread. “Charley left Rum Cay with your package in his keel. Arnauld told you that much, and it’s true.”

  Vassily’s lower lip spilled up and over his upper one, which had the effect of adding a layer to the cascade of his chins. “He told us that much,” Vassily agreed. “Considering the … position … he was in, we believed him.”

  Red’s own jaw hardened. “You killed a man for nothing,” he said quietly.

  Vassily touched his breast. “I wasn’t even there.” After a moment: “We generally try to kill them for a reason,” he added with a vague smile. “It’s true.”

  “You talk like a kid who’s delivered a newspaper to the wrong house.”

  “Quaint simile.” Vassily passed a hand over his face. “It’s quaint to think that one or two lives mean anything at all. Is this a conch thing,” he asked, as if exasperated, “or are you just stupid?”

  “The latter,” Red assured him. “I thought I was in this for the money. Then I thought I could help a friend. Kill two birds with one stone. Well, the birds got killed all right. It wasn’t about the money. It was about the friend. The kind of friend you don’t know anything about. Or, come to consider it,” he reflected bitterly, “maybe you do. All the same, it’s my mistake.”

  “Who? This Arnauld? A bum who scrapes boat hulls only to eat?”

  “Well, yes, there was Arnauld. But I was talking about Charley.”

  Vassily waved his napkin. “Another bum. What the hell did your Charley ever do besides wander around on his boat? But I’ll tell you something.” Vassily dropped the napkin onto the table. “If this deal went the way you think it did, this guy Charley is not your friend.”

  “He was, though,” Red said stubbornly. “Charley was my friend.”

  “I thought you were smarter than this, Mr. Means.”

  “I thought you were smarter than this, too, Vassily.”

  “I hire the likes of you to do a job, and you think I’m smart?”

  “You got a point.”

  “I have another point. Turn that sister of Charley’s or we’re all going to learn a lesson about how cheap life is.” He refilled his glass and toasted Red. “Even in America.” He sipped a loud sip. “Maybe then, that stone will stop with just the two birds.” He took another, smaller sip. “Instead of five.”

  “Me, the sister,” Red counted, “and you?”

  The steaks arrived. The two customers watched glumly as two waiters arranged glasses, plates, silver. When his two colleagues had departed, the original waiter arrived to top off both wine glasses. Setting the nearly empty bottle aside, he flanked the existing wine glasses with two fresh ones and presented a new bottle for Vassily’s inspection. The Russian glanced at it and grunted. The waiter proceeded to draw the cork. Vassily declined to taste. So did Red. The waiter placed the bottle on the table so that both diners could see the label. “Anything else, gentlemen?”

  Vassily sighed loudly. Red said it was all fine. “Enjoy your dinner,” the waiter said. He set the two-hundred-dollar cork on a little saucer and went away.

  Vassily contemplated his meal. The thirty-four ounce steak draped over its plate like an overcoat over a footstool. “What is this?” Vassily said after a moment.

  “Carrots,” Red told him.

  “No. This.”

  “Okra.”

  Vassily blinked.

  “Americans are crazy,” he finally said. “I’ll give you a month.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  OFFICERS PROTONE AND FEW, A STUDY IN CONTRAST. BUT THEIR PINCER was mighty, they had produced a high rate of evidentiary proceedings. If the District Attorney’s office ever got its act together, they might even generate a high rate of conviction, too.

  Take Laval, for instance. When Protone was a beat cop, Laval was one of his pet projects. Laval’s end-all desire was junk, of course, but anything else would do: Seconal, Toluene, cough syrup; Vicodin, Oxycontin, Oxycodone; Percocet, Darvocet, Demoral; Morphine, Laudanum, Paregoric; Mandrax and so forth, ad nauseum.

  Alcohol, Laval never touched.

  Laval’s specialty was the quickie car break-in, the smash-and-grab. He walked a grid in Hayes Valley, west of the Symphony, the Opera, the Ballet. In the vicinity were many tony restaurants and bars. City Hall was just across Van Ness from the various edifices of culture, too, but those people went home about the time the culture vultures were showing up—although there was some overlap; so, once in a while, Laval would nick a city employee for a laptop or a briefcase. But usually it was people from out of town looking to cop a parking spot for cheap or for free prior to spending an hour and a half in a $250 seat at the opera or symphony. For cheap, that is, until they had to buy a new window along with a new computer, or a designer purse, or an in-dash stereo, or twenty CDs, or whatever else it is that people are naive enough to leave in their cars in Laval’s territory.

  Metastasize naive to stupid, and voilà, you have Laval’s way of looking at it: people leave stuff in their car, they’re stupid, they deserve to get ripped off. Cops look at it the same way, Laval would argue, and he should know, he talks to them all the time. He was no punk who busted a window on some stiff’s car just because the stiff hadn’t left him a little something on the back seat or in the glove compartment. Laval would never take a chance on breaking into a car without having a pretty good idea there was something to grab and run with. When the whole operation took thirty seconds, that was a good job. Conversely, when the whole job was too juicy not to take three or god forbid four minutes, well, there was an element of resentment there, as in like, man, how can you do this to me? You think I can just pick and choose from among all this shit, and in the dark? The fuck you think I am? Superman and shit? See in the dark and shit? So, once in a while, he’d take a shit in the back seat, or set the dashboard on fire, just to even the score.

  But sometimes … Once, he spotted the job from the other end of the block. White hybrid, out of town license plate holder—Merced or Modesto or Fresno or Chico or some such fucking place, UCSB decal in the back window with JUST MARRIED soaped over it. He stalked nearer. He bore down. Sure enough, the entire back seat was heaped with wedding presents.

  Still in their wrappers, pink, white, baby blue, some tie-dye, with cards on them. And, courtesy of Laval’s beard du jour, a homeless guy collecting bottles, he was pushing a shopping cart that night. Freight forward? No problem! And what a haul. Blender, iPod, copper cookware, microwave oven, four-slot toaster, X-box, matched set of cutlery, briefcase full of sex toys …

  It might be three days before he would have to go back to work.

  Laval made no bones about his approach. He stalked the ‘hood like a zombie on a mission, which he was. Every four hours, rain or shine, holiday or hump day, full moon, sixty knot wind, gay pride parade, whatever, Laval was on duty. No matter that he’d jonesed on the floor of a jail cell times beyond ordinality, a most unpleasant experience, guaranteed to cure all but the hardcore, the equation was simple: fifteen, twenty years max, an
d he’d be unclaimed on a slab, done. Retired, after a manner of speaking. Laval stalked the ‘hood like a soldier on a twenty-mile hike with Sarge right at his ear calling him a roundheeled pussy, a limp-dick failure, a stretch-elastic pantywaist—not that Laval had served. One look at the abscesses inside either of his elbows, between any pair of toes, on the back of either hand, all up and down his calves, the odd, desperate puncture about the carotid artery in his neck, exempted Laval immediately as already a lifer in a different kind of army.

  Tonight he carried a bicycle lock and wore a little purple backpack. He walked against traffic on a given side of the street, on the principle that any do-gooding driver seeing him bust out a window couldn’t pursue him without doing a drastic U-turn and making a scene to the extent that Laval would be long gone before the citizen got his or her wheels straightened out, sure, but the real principle was that walking against the parking vector maximized his view of front and back seats.

  Being a masochist of the primordial fluid, Laval entertained certain fantasies, and in this he had certain archetypes in common with his victims. For example: who hasn’t dreamed of embedding a hand grenade inside their car radio, its pin rigged to a loop of wire captured to some part of the underdash infrastructure, such that yanking the radio without taking a certain precaution pulled the pin on the grenade which, preset to explode after four-and-a-half minutes, would blow Laval’s backpack right through his thorax?

  But only when he was sufficiently high could Laval entertain any fantasy at all. Which on a good day amounted to about four fifteen-minute time periods, in between which he was all business, work work work, add it up it’s a life. Balance of his time, Laval was of one mind, one course through life, restive as a shark. So focused was he that he seemed to possess a sixth sense as to whether or not some wily suburbanite had stashed the removable face of his fancy CD player under the passenger seat, so as to outfox the Lavals of the city’s night.

  Merchandise to hand, Laval made it on over to an apartment in the projects, one of the few with a door direct to the street, wherein the mummy of the original lessee lay shrunken and desiccated in a wheelchair reeking of terminal decomposition, while her grand nephew dealt in stolen pawnables.

  Additional foetidities, lit only by a television, included mildew, scorched ham hocks, dry rot, burnt spoons, stale vomit, instant-coffee urine, cat piss on polyester carpet and drapes, decayed breakfast cereal, burnt cheese, rotted masonry, and pillow mites, among other things.

  Never more than ten bucks per item. Two items, twenty bucks, unless the Flake—that was the guy’s handle—could smell Laval’s need as especially pressing. Then, “Fifteen, baby,” the Flake would say, and without touching the merchandise he would add something along the lines of, “You ripped them wires pretty bad.”

  “Come on, man,” would whine Laval, “it’s my birthday.”

  And the Flake’s great aunt, in the wheelchair with one leg lost to diabetes and the establishment waiting for her to come back so they could get the other one, interested only in cigarettes, Spam, and cola, would squawk like a parrot. Or, every once in a while, just to throw Laval off his feed, she would screech like a macaw.

  “Don’t upset Nana,” the Flake, inscrutable behind tinted lenses and oblivious to the brazenness of this filial presumption, would warn Laval. “And, say, Laval?”

  Laval, disgruntled: “What?”

  “Quit scratchin’.”

  When he had been a beat cop, Protone having made a special project out of Laval, busted him fourteen times. Fourteen. Count them. Laval never did more than ninety days, and most times they’d turn him loose because the jail was too crowded, because Laval would get a public defender who would plead and win no contest, because Laval would promise to go to rehab or Narcotics Anonymous or maybe even career redirection, get some computer skills, start fresh, commute to a tall building downtown—whatever he had to say to get himself back on the street before the monkey incisors started working him over for real.

  Protone had been in court for every one of Laval’s appearances. He’d testified every time, too, at first. But eventually the public defender would see him coming and advise Laval to plead nolo contendere. Finally a judge who’d gotten tired of seeing Laval in her court gave him a ninety day stretch—the first in Laval’s then nine-year career.

  Laval’s personal best? One Christmas Eve Protone had busted him, booked him, and thrown him in the clink by nine o’clock. By midnight, however, Laval had been sprung on his own recognizance by the necessity for additional jail space precipitated by the mass arrest of rioting Santas outside a karaoke bar in the Castro. While this manipulation spared Laval the spectacle of several adjacent cells full of inebriated Santa Clauses chorusing on “Christmas in Jail,” it did not spare a brand new Range Rover from the ministrations of Laval. Forsaking the D-shaped bike lock, confiscated by Protone as evidence, Laval fell back on an old stand-by, the ninja kick. The porcine Range Rover’s passenger window is pretty high off the ground, however, and Laval’s various kicks twice indented the passenger door panel before he managed to land one on the window, dead center at that, and fall right back on his ass, narrowly missing the occupational hazard of shredding his left leg and perhaps the femoral artery, a death sentence even for one so bloodless as Laval. But a titanium iBook was the result, along with a cellphone and its charger, and Laval beat feet down Linden Alley pursued by the useless klaxon of the Range Rover.

  “Damn, pretty good,” Flake told him. “Twenty-five bucks.”

  “Awk,” screeched Nana, who was still alive at that point.

  So that Laval was fucked up enough to have wandered into traffic on Van Ness, get busted for public intoxication and obstructing traffic, and land back in the can by 2:30 in the a.m. of Christmas morning. Making for a solid two and one half hours of liberty between incarcerations. A record, maybe. Maybe not. There’s a lot of competition for these kinds of achievements.

  Protone, as he lay on a piece of cardboard next to a shopping cart on Ivy Street, an alley whose eastern end terminates across Franklin from the back of Louise Davies Symphony Hall, had figured it out. The calculation was a simple one. All one had to do was take Laval’s age when his rap sheet started, 14, and subtract it from his age when last he’d been collared. Laval looks 57 but don’t be fooled, 37 is the correct answer. Multiply that figure by the number of nights per year Laval reasonably could be expected to be servicing his habit, 365—cut him some slack for Leap Years, and you come up with 8,395. Let’s cut society some slack and back out the average amount of time Laval spends scoreless or in one lockup or another, say thirty days per year—that ninety-day ticket was a serious anomaly, and Laval really browbeat his public defender about it. So that’s 335 working days per year times 37 - 14 = 23 years equals 7,705 working days. And, go ahead, back out the ninety-day ticket: 7,615 working days. Fog rattled the leaves overhead. Protone shifted his cold ass over the layer of cardboard flattened under it and raised the collar on the quilted hickory shirt.

  The cheapest removable-face stereo you can buy, legitimately, runs about $175 plus tax and installation. Let’s say $225. The cheapest you can replace one of those wing windows in a gracefully aging pickup truck, if you can find it in a junkyard, is about $150, plus maybe $50 for installation if the frame isn’t damaged. That’s $200. Window plus stereo, you’re talking $425. We’ll leave out the laptop computers, musical instruments, baby pictures, sterling silver dinner service for eight, stacks of CDs, rhinestone dog collars, walking sticks, boxes and boxes of tools (not so much any more, however, as Protone had noted, on account there are no blue collar residents left in San Francisco), binoculars, cameras, bracelets, rolls of quarters and on and on and on. Stick to the basic statistical unit of window plus stereo, round down to four hundred dollars so some liberal sociologist can’t say you’re exaggerating, and get a career take of three million and forty-six thousand dollars. Round it down to three million. Why not?

  One fucking junky.
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br />   But hey. You want to get really pissed? After taxes Protone takes home $35,272.57 a year if he pulls no overtime which will never happen but that’s beside the point. Divide that into Laval’s lifetime take, and how long before Protone achieves parity? Eighty-six years and a little over four months. Round down: Eighty-six years of this shit.

  But now a shadow entered the western end of the 400 block. There was a tree up there with two vehicles parked beneath it. Ivy is a narrow oneway street, heading west, with parking on just the north side. The shadow moved east, with little pretense of doing nothing other than hesitating over each window on the sidewalk side of each parked vehicle. Then came a protracted section of driveways and end-out parking—culs de sac not worth the risk. The shadow stalked on.

  And here the motherfucker is, Protone said to himself.

  Protone had a flat little unregistered snub-nose .32 automatic in an ankle holster tucked into the thick athletic sock that billowed up out of his left sneaker. He had a snub-nosed .38 Police Positive, one of his service weapons, nosed into the small of his back under his belt. While Laval would never offer resistance sufficient to quell with a bullet, one could always hope. And one could always kill the bastard anyway. A homicide detective busted back to beat cop is a pretty frustrated guy. It is however a mark of a professional to face temptation, even go armed against it, and not succumb. If only Laval knew how close he had come, over the years. But Laval knew little. He had a belief system, a structure of denial, a way of getting by that brooked no compromise, no systemic augmentation other than confinement or death.

  Since his divorce, rather than go home, Protone had renewed Laval as his special project. He hadn’t told anybody—not even Laval. He’d quietly gotten a colleague at Parkside Station to assign him the extra duty. He told him he needed the overtime for alimony, and how much of a lie could that be? It wasn’t a lie at all. Meanwhile the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Association had besieged its supervisor, the cops, the city, the mayor, and anybody else they could think of, with letters and petitions and phone calls and emails and en masse appearances. For, indeed, Laval wasn’t the only smash-and-grab guy working Hayes Valley. In this neighborhood the light of every dawn twinkled among shards of safety glass. People were pissed. So the old friend gave Protone the assignment happily. Staking out a single dark block, disguised as a homeless person, night after night, was an assignment few cared to undertake. It was cold and unsanitary, it was generally fruitless, and it could be dangerous.