by Craig Nova
“Sorry about your trouble,” said the other one.
“Thank you,” I said.
I held the box in both hands, my eyes set on the churchyard, the gray stone and that ragged circle of people. My feet moved a little in that dusty, brown soil, and as I held the box, felt its weight, smelled the cheap cologne these two were wearing, I said, “You’re from Stas, aren’t you?”
The air seemed a little heavier, a little more ominous, and the sun, for a moment, seemed filled with ill will, as though while it gave life, it had occasions, too, when it was ready to do its worst.
“Can we talk for a minute, Frank?” said the first one.
“I asked you something,” I said.
“Listen,” said one. “You can call me Semyon. This is Timofei.”
“Sorry for your trouble,” said Timofei.
“Thanks,” I said.
Semyon, his skin rough in that gray light, put his hand on my arm, although he didn’t touch the box. At least he had enough sense not to do that.
“Get out of my way,” I said. “I’m busy.”
“We know that, Frank,” said Semyon.
“We understand,” said Timofei. “But you can imagine how important this is if we’d talk to you now.”
“About what?” I said.
“Well, that’s complicated,” said Timofei. He put his hand across his chin. The people in the churchyard glanced at us, not impatient, not anything, really, aside from the fact that they seemed to look like people just before a bomb goes off, or before someone yells fire. The men from the CIA glanced at the sky, the river, the hole in the ground.
“We want to remind you of that favor,” said Semyon.
“It was an important one,” said Timofei.
“Aurlon Miller? Remember?” said Semyon. “And so we may ask you for help. That’s all. One hand washes the other.”
“That’s what we have to say,” said Timofei.
He stood back.
“We’ll be in touch,” said Semyon.
“You know, maybe some friends of ours who are having legal trouble in Boston might need some help.”
“Listen to us,” said Timofei. He put his hand on the box, as though he was going to take it from me. I looked at him, in the eyes. He stared back.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare . . . Let go.”
Semyon smiled.
“Go on about your business,” said Timofei. “Pay your respects to the dead. They need it. We’ll talk to you some other time.”
“Let go,” I said.
I put the box on the ground and stepped toward Semyon, but he opened his hands, as though blessing me, and then stepped back. Timofei did, too.
“These guys causing trouble?” said Tim Marshall.
“No,” I said.
I made my way through those stones, the box in my hands, in that smoky air with the sun hanging there like a lemon on a gray sheet, the haze so thick it felt we were already in the underworld, where the mists of the dead hung with such infuriating vagueness: here was the atmosphere of eternity, but it wasn’t definite enough to get your hooks into. The path between the stones was covered with a little sandy gravel, and my shadow moved along it, a shade over the film of light that came through the gray mist.
The crowd turned toward me. Alexandra stood by the small hole in the ground and stared at me: I felt the caress of her glance, her steadfastness. I came through the gate. It was about thirty yards from the entrance to the churchyard to the hole in the ground, and as I approached it, a car door slammed behind me and then an engine started. The crowd seemed to open up, to pull back, and I carried the box in two hands, and as I went, I wanted to put it down and open it up to look in at the dust and the chips of bone to ask my father just what the hell I should do now.
I stood next to the hole. The box fit in perfectly. The grain of the box looked like the current in the surface of the river, and then I stood up, missing my father more than ever, although I’m sure if he had been here he would have only insisted on more delusion, on denial, on the notion that if we all just had another drink everything would be fine.
We all picked up a handful of dirt, my father’s old CIA pals sad and somehow exhausted, as though burying each other had come to the point of being as much part of the job as the work they had done fucking up governments in South America. They came up to the small hole and reached down, their hands shaking, as they picked up the dry dirt and dropped it in, letting it fall through their fingers like the flow of regret itself.
On the other side of the fence the car had been pulled into gear, and the engine faded away as the two men, one with an earring, drove along the river, the sound getting fainter and fainter, like a memory that one wanted to hang on to but that was nevertheless disappearing no matter how hard you tried. The car had burned a little oil and the mist of it, like a black cloud, hung in the air.
Finally, with that dirt on my hands, I went to the back of the crowd and waited for the rest of my father’s friends to be done, to stand there with a handful of dirt so as to say good-bye as it slipped through their fingers and onto that sad, lonely box.
Alexandra took my hand with a squeeze and said, “Well, that’s the worst of it.” Then she glanced at the car that had driven away. “Is that the trouble?”
The air was smoky blue, that odd fate-tinted color that you usually see in the fall, but which was nevertheless here in the spring. Not like fog, but more like a cataract in a blue eye, at once ominous and blind, and all the more ominous for being that way, as though fate didn’t care what it was going to do so long as the bang was loud enough. I often felt this when we hunted deer, or when I had hunted deer with my father, and in that Oo-Bang of a center-fire rifle, and when a deer had been shot through the chest and ran into the woods, it was more keen than I could say, but still there for all that. Once, at that moment, an old friend of my father’s had said, looking at the deer like this, Why, he’s heartshot. Dead and still running. Well, he’ll find out soon the way things are.
“Yeah,” I said. “Part of it.”
•••
In Cambridge, the next day, the usual assortment was out, street musicians in tie-dye shirts and torn blue jeans, the three-card monte boys, the guys with card tables covered with used paperbacks and fold-up umbrellas made in China, a guy with a portable amplifier plugged into an outlet of a head shop. The coffee I held in a paper cup was so hot I had to move it from one hand to the other. The Raver came through the clutter, his gray cape flowing behind him, somehow regal in its sway and flap, his eyes gray, too, his hair thinning a little, but it was obvious he accepted this as part of things. He nodded to the men with card tables, the musicians, stopped in front of the Burger King and knocked on the window, to say hello. The women, in the uniforms, looked a little sour. Then he turned to me.
He handed over a scrap of paper, a little dirty, as though he had used it to clean a windshield, which he did now and then and if the driver didn’t give him some money, he had another sponge filled with oil that he would swipe across. “Ying and Yang,” he called it. The Raver stood next to me and then he said, as he looked at a woman through the window of the Au Bon Pain, “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good. How’s the heart?”
[ CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ]
SO, A WEEK after the funeral, the dust, like a gray boa, trailed from Tim Marshall’s new Subaru on the dirt road to the gun club. The gun club is where Marshall liked to talk: no one around, the scent of gunpowder, which to him was like the aroma of fertilizer to a farmer. But even with the windows rolled up in the Audi, the grit still got in, and it made a little crunch between my teeth, and it probably got into the gun case, too, where I kept my grandfather’s L.C. Smith field-grade shotgun. Marshall had a custom-made trap gun, a pump that had started out as a Remington, but he had the trigger fixed so he could, as he said, just think about it going off, and bam! That’s the sec
ret, he said: you think more than shoot.
I stayed in that dust, and we pulled up to the gun club, which was nothing more than a wooden shed on one side, a cement house that held the machine to launch birds, and a dusty parking lot. Beyond the blockhouse, the landscape sparkled with broken birds and scrub that seemed as though it should grow in the Mojave or the Kalahari, on the edge of death but knowing that patience was its only hope. The Bulgarian who ran the club launched the birds. He usually wore a wife beater and said the blockhouse where the birds were launched reminded him of the apartments he had rented in Bulgaria. “Same smell,” he said. “Wet concrete.”
Marshall wore a pair of khaki pants, a blue work shirt, some boots with steel toes that a longshoreman would wear, as though to show that this was all unofficial. He had on his day-glo vest, with a pocket for shotgun shells, which hung with the weight of them. Just us here today. He took his shotgun out of the car, the port already open, so you could see no round was chambered, and then said, “Frank, we’ve got some trouble.”’
The Bulgarian said, with an accent that seemed sort of generic European spy, “You ready?”
“You ready?” Tim repeated to me.
I held my grandfather’s field-grade L.C. Smith shotgun.
“I mean for the birds. You aren’t going to be ready for this other thing.”
The Bulgarian went into the blockhouse.
“Pull,” said Tim.
A hard shot right away, a passing one to the right so you have to swing away or against the right hand. The clay pigeon flew in that line like a line drawing. The bird disappeared in a puff of smoke, like the flak my father had described to me. Tim pushed another green hull into the port.
“So, why are you curious about this guy out there in Braintree. Stanislav Ivakina, right?”
Of course he knew the name.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So,” said Tim. “What are we looking at here?”
“Domestic violence,” I said.
“Pull,” said Tim. Another bird, a hard shot, straight to the right, vanished in the flak-like smoke. He took another green shell and tossed it up and down, up and down. Then he put it back in the pouch and turned those blue eyes toward me. They were at once oddly fatigued and utterly blank.
“Frank,” he said. “I’ve been a cop for thirty years. And I’ve been lied to by guys who beat their wives to death with an iron, by wives who put d-CON in their husbands’ hamburgers, by kids who raped a ten-year-old girl, by men who put bodies into furnaces, by mobsters who dropped bodies out there in the Atlantic. And you know what, Frank? After all those years, you learn something.”
“Yes,” I said.
“So what do you learn?”
“If someone is lying to you,” I said.
He put the green hull into the shotgun and said, “Pull.” The bird disappeared in that pigeon-colored smoke.
“Now, you can tell me all kinds of things, Frank,” he said. “But if you think you can say you’re interested in this guy in Braintree because he’s pushed his girlfriend around and have me believe it, then you better remember who you’re talking to. So, let’s cut the bullshit, Frank. You know what I’m like? A sex therapist. I’ve seen it all. Every fucking thing you can imagine. So, don’t tell me any lies, Frank. It just pisses me off.”
The Bulgarian sat in the blockhouse, just glad to be under cover.
“Pull,” said Marshall.
Dead center: like magic, just a little smoke, which drifted away. The field looked like the back of a failed pottery factory in Rumania.
“It’s personal,” I said.
“Hmpf,” said Marshall. “That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”
My ears rang with the shot. The puffs drifted away and I thought of my father as he came in low, so they couldn’t hear him, those men around a general’s headquarters in the desert.
“I’m close to retirement, Frank. I’ve got a nice little place in New Hampshire where my wife likes to grow flowers. Snapdragons, delphinium, astilbe, hollyhocks. It’s nice to sit out there when the fireflies are in the flowers.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said.
“So, here’s your friend Stanislav. Guys like him don’t start out at the end of the spectrum. Chopping guys up and putting them in Glad bags to put out in the landfill. They sort of work up to it. But it happens fast. We haven’t got enough to indict this guy, but he’s on the move. Won’t be long. And, of course, we’re always a little behind. That’s the hard part. Keeping up to date.”
The Bulgarian said from the blockhouse, “Are you done?”
“Pull,” said Tim.
The bird disappeared in that puff of black smoke.
“You want me to pick this guy up and take him someplace and have a talk, you know? We can go up against him hard. Maybe in some room downstairs in a suburban precinct. I’m not saying like the bad old days with a phone book, but let me tell you, that was a piece of work. Around the kidneys. When they start pissing blood, why you’d be surprised how they want to talk. It’s not the blood. It’s the fear. So, even though I’m looking forward to those fireflies in the snapdragons, I’ll talk to this guy. You want me to do that?”
“No,” I said.
“What’s he got on you, Frank?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There you go again,” said Marshall.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m on my own.”
“That’s right. You’re on your own, then,” said Marshall. “You poor son of a bitch.”
“Do you have a daughter?” I said.
“Sure, I do, Frank. My little patty-cake,” he said.
“What would happen if she suddenly thought less of you? A lot less. Like some kind of scum?”
He put a green hull into the port, closed the action, and just stood there, the barrel over that gritty landscape, which was a perfect combination of dump and cheap graveyard.
“I’d do a kervork,” he said. “A first-class Dutch job. But I’d do it so my wife got the insurance. You want help with that?” He touched the barrel of his shotgun. It wasn’t too hot. “So it looks like an accident? So your wife gets the money?”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Pull,” said Marshall.
That flak- and pigeon-colored smoke appeared.
“After thirty years on the job, Frank, you realize what your job really is. It’s to see how things are connected, underneath, not where you can see it. Like poetry, see? Do you read Yeats?”
“Yes,” I said. “I read Euripides, too.”
“What does he have to say for himself?” said Marshall.
“Cleverness is not wisdom,” I said.
“Hmpf,” said Marshall. “Maybe.”
Another explosion like flack.
“So, we got something else. What do you make of this?” Marshall said. “A lot of people from out of town are ending up dead. Why would someone bring someone to Boston to get rid of them? Why not do it in Florida or Arizona or wherever these people came from? Just think of the money that’s being wasted on airfare and car rentals. It doesn’t add up.”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
“Pull,” he said. We stood in the aroma of burned gunpowder and that black flak.
This man, said Tim, sold stolen car parts in the South that he got from the Northeast, from Boston and Hartford, New York and Passaic, and he had come north for what was supposed to be a vacation and to do a little business. Firm up connections. Maybe he brought to Boston a list of what he needed: air bags, fuel injection, DVD players, parts for Audis and German cars and Volvos, which parts cost a fortune if you import them. The usual stuff, said Tim.
“You drive an Audi,” he said. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Parts expensive?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Like how much does a power steering pump cost?”
“$2,891.89,” I said.
“$2,891.89?�
� he said. “Hmpf. Handy the way you have that number.”
Tim looked over at me: not suspicious, not curious, just that lingering glance from a man who had been a cop for thirty years.
So this guy from Miami, said Tim, brought his wife along with him, a heavyset woman with bleached hair and a tan that looked more like a leather coat that had been left out in the sun too long, and his kids, too. They all wanted to go to the amusement parks in New England. They called it the Six Flags tour. They rented a car and went from one amusement park to the other. The guy from Miami sat in the parking lot and read the Daily Racing Form with a pint of scotch and a hot dog he got from the concession stand while the wife, even though she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, went with the two teenage boys on the roller coaster and the Gravity Defier. He waited in the parking lot of the aquarium in Boston, his Daily Racing Form spread out over the steering wheel, and someone came to the window and shot him. Didn’t open the door. Didn’t go over the body. Didn’t do anything like that at all. It took a while, but the police were able to arrest two men, each of whom had bad skin and who had a long list of minor and not-so-minor violations. Eastern Europeans. It was pretty obvious that they had done it, especially since one of them had been stupid enough to keep the gun that had been used.
“I’ve never seen anything like these guys,” said Tim. “Smug, you know, like they’ve got nothing to worry about. They said they had friends. What do you think?”
That same look: he had seen everything there was to see, and so it wasn’t curiosity, just a sort of running through the catalogue of possibilities. Sort of like dreaming with his eyes open.
Tim faced the rubble of that field.
The Bulgarian brought us two bottles of beer and one for himself and then sat on the overturned bucket and faced that landscape.
The Bulgarian picked up a handful of the dirt next to the bucket and let it sift through his fingers, just like the yellow loam of the graveyard where my father’s ashes were buried. I was left with the memory of those bloody feet in Poland, wrapped in rags, the blackness of the bore of the pistol that a German guard in a coat had put against my father’s cold head, those moldy papers that my father had left to disguise the fraud he had pulled off and for which he obviously wanted my forgiveness, and the memory of that funeral dirt as it slipped between my fingers. Now, when I needed to reach across that gulf between us, I was faced with silence. I picked up some dirt, too, and let it sift away. I was left with the smell of gunpowder, so much like flak, and the litter on the ground was like the cigarette wrappers and condoms in the pigeon shit that was the last thing Cal had touched before falling away, a skydiver in a business suit.