by Joe Nelms
Stump instructed Brad to stay in the car under Brittany’s protection while he took a look around this perfectly secure home to placate his compulsive need to protect. Brittany couldn’t take the silence.
“Well, this is exciting, isn’t it?”
“The Mafia putting a price on my head?”
“Doing something for the American people. Something meaningful. Making a difference.”
Brad was not buying what she was selling.
“At least it’s probably a high price. That’s got to make you feel special.”
One of the many things Brad did not like about himself was his name. Brad Fingerman. He had never felt like a Fingerman anyway. It connoted a career spent as a substitute teacher. It was more likely to be the third from the last name in a footnote of a medical journal than topping a movie poster. It was not memorable for any of the reasons one would want a name to be remembered.
One sentence that was never heard in good company was, Oh, Fingerman? Of the Upper East Side Fingermans? No, Fingerman was more of a saddle on which bullies, hecklers, and jokesters rode various wordplays amusing to all but the owner of the name. Finger-me. Fingerfuck. Man finger. Oh, it was good times in middle school.
So yes, Brad had always wanted to change his name, but it was never really a viable option, much less a pressing necessity. Until now.
This was his opportunity to do something big. To really cross something off his “Stuff to Change about Myself” list. Part of the Witness Protection Program entry process was the selection of a new name. Brittany had mentioned it when she first offered up the program. When he remembered it on the way to the safe house, the thought quickly nestled itself in the forefront of Brad’s mind, and he begin trying various combinations out on an imaginary theater marquee.
Mike Blackstone. Jake Schwartzenstallone. Brock Granite. He would have to walk the fine line between action star and porn actor, but Brad was confident he could pull it off. It was like a whole world opening up to him.
That night, after Brittany had left and Stump had cleared the entire house, yet again, Brad lay in a strange new bed on the verge of sleep, vacillating between thinking thoughts like Holy God, what have I done? and dreaming up awesome new names that girls would totally go for.
The wedding ring he had slipped off during his contract negotiation with Brittany sat on the dresser next to his watch. He had pulled it out when he undressed but hadn’t quite figured out if he should throw it into the kitchen disposal and be done with it or have it melted down and recast as a keychain. He had decided to figure that out later.
Brad was exhausted.
The Fortunato Thing
“How many times do I have to tell you people, the low-fat raspberry vinaigrette is mine. I wrote my name on it and it is the height of inconsiderate behavior to use it without asking. That’s called theft. You know in Arabia, they would cut your hands off for that.”
As usual, the eyes of Malcolm Middleton’s fellow coworkers found something else to look at while he made his indignant speech. Everyone in the break room was by quiet default pleading innocent. Well, that was highly unlikely. Someone must have used the newly opened salad dressing without asking. It didn’t crawl out of the bottle on its own. This is exactly why he insisted on locking his door whenever he left his office. Even to go to the bathroom. You couldn’t trust anyone around there.
Malcolm shook it off and got ready for another day of the job he loved. Say what you will about his sticky-fingered coworkers and the disrespect they showed for his personal items, Malcolm wasn’t going anywhere.
“Middleton, I’m going to give you Fortunato.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? That’s it? This is a career-making decision. You’re going to be a legend around here after this. And you’re just . . . Okay?”
“If it’s so important, why give it to me?”
“Look, don’t turn this into a thing. It’s an important case and I want you to act professional. Keep things moving. Okay?”
“Okay, but you didn’t answer my question. Why me?”
The room was quiet as Malcolm’s boss considered the answer he would give to the one question he had really hoped Malcolm wouldn’t ask. He decided to be honest.
“You’re the only one who’s free.”
Malcolm Middleton was a federal judge. In theory, with his experience, he could have taken a high-paying job in a New York City law firm. Except that no one would have hired him. As a lawyer, he simply wasn’t aggressive enough. He was smart. He had a deep understanding of and profound respect for the law. But he was a thinker. An über-thinker. He enjoyed the process of thinking. Not the pushy type of questioning found in so many overly thoughtful people, but a pure and deep curiosity about absolutely everything. For Malcolm, examining both sides to the point of exhaustion before saying yay or nay was good sport regardless of whether it was a debate concerning the morality of the death penalty or a question of supersizing his fries. And it generally took him fucking forever to make a decision.
So it was a bit of a relief for both him and Malcolm Middleton Sr.’s entire law firm when his father landed him a job as a federal judge through his network of powerful and influential friends.
Sitting at the front of a courtroom, listening to shark lawyers pick every piece of meat off a legal bone was pure heaven for Malcolm. Their job was to think things over to the point of absurdity. His was to enjoy the process and decide the winner based on the overwrought facts.
For the last twenty-two years, Malcolm had made quite a name for himself as a judge. The judge who would entertain just about every fool motion your overpaid lawyer could dream up. Yes, Malcolm was very popular with that type.
So he had listened to the arguments from both sides of Frank Fortunato’s case on whether or not Frank should be allowed to leave jail before the trial. They ranged from logical (He’s a known gangster versus He’s a devoted family man with ties to the community) to the outright emotional (He killed a man in cold blood! versus It’s his birthday!). Malcolm considered them all.
While most bail hearings took no more than an hour all in, Frank’s took the better part of the day, thanks to Malcolm’s unrelenting curiosity. Where did Frank live? Does he have a passport? What kind of ties to the community are we talking about? Is there a party planned? Who’s invited?
In the end he decided that the reasons for keeping him in jail (one, he’s a suspected murderer with a record longer than one of those pythons they find every two years in a Queens bathroom, and two, there’s an eyewitness and surveillance footage) outweighed the reasons for setting a reasonable bail (one, his mother swears he’s a good boy, and two, he buys fireworks for the kids in the neighborhood on the Fourth of July). But barely.
The Secret Life of Stump
First came the power nap. As soon as Brad passed out for the night, Stump lay flat on his back in his bed and hauled ass to sleep. Because of his unorthodox sleeping pattern, it never took more than thirty seconds to start the sleep process, followed soon after by REM sleep. As long as he followed his polyphasic routine, he didn’t need more than two hours of sleep a day. That was the way da Vinci did it. That was the way Thomas Jefferson did it. That was the way he did it. Which gave him an extra six hours to accomplish all the things normal people complain they don’t have time for. He had been at it for three weeks now and so far it was serving him well.
When he woke up twenty minutes later, it was time for yoga. Stretching. Sweating. A little grunting. It usually lasted about a half hour. Then there was another half an hour of jumping rope followed by another hour of pushups, pull-ups, and crunches mixed with a collection of martial arts katas to keep his fighting skills razor sharp. He cooled down with some deep transcendental meditation, showered, shaved, and spent the rest of his free time catching up on his reading, cleaning the house, returning e-mails, and finishing his night/morning with a second twenty-minute power nap well before the rest of America, or in this case, Brad, rubbed the
sleep out of their eyes.
Brad finally got up and shuffled to the kitchen to see if coffee was one of the perks of the program. It was. He poured himself a cup and turned to find the door to the room filled with Stump, standing guard in the same position he had been in when Brad retired the night before. New suit, same position.
“Special Agent Marinakos will be here in half an hour.”
Brad X
Brittany sat with Brad to fill out some paperwork to submit to the department that fabricated identities. She started with his name.
“Fingerman. What is that, Irish?”
Brad’s mother was vaguely Italian and his father was a strain of German, with Fingerman being an Ellis Island clerk’s bastardization of a family name a century before. His parents had never thought to ask and all four grandparents were dead, so finding out the original name or its origins was no longer an option.
But, it didn’t really matter. If the truth were to be told, the Fingerman line of ancestry could have been classified as Ikea-American. A pressboard background of empty lineage stretching back several generations, his heritage had been rendered meaningless as his family had long ago assimilated into the prefab lifestyle of the United States. His parents weren’t Italian-American or German-American. They were American-Americans. No accents. No leftover traditions from the old country. No treasured heritage carefully preserved in rituals and holidays. They forged their life out of materials conceived in conference rooms and refined with target demo research, test results, and focus groups. Certainly they considered themselves individuals, but in fact their lives had been compilations of items selected from a finite pool of products offered to the American public by calculating conglomerates that had determined the lowest common denominator to the fifteenth degree. The Fingermans were generic. Arguably tasteful, but nothing special. Ikea-Americans. And Brad was their son.
“It’s German, Italian, English, French. You know, American.”
Brittany made a note on a form.
“All right. That gives us plenty of wiggle room. We like to give witnesses names that have some thread of reality to them. Like we’re not going to call an Asian guy Chang Baumgartner, that kind of thing.”
Jackpot. Maybe with a little quick thinking he could convince Brittany that somewhere along the line in his ancestry there was a Sven Ahssccikerr or an Andre Riflemann. Something that would make sense with a guy like him.
“Smart. You know, I was thinking about names last night and—”
“Brad, don’t even think about giving yourself your own butch new handle. It doesn’t work that way. We’ll assign one to you. And you’re going to keep your first name. If we change that it becomes too risky. You might not answer to the new one and people will start to wonder. It’s safer to stick with Brad.”
Brad’s brain rolled its eyes.
“Your last name will be generated randomly by Witness Protection Program software from a database of the most common American names.”
“Like Bronson or Damon?”
“Like Jones or Smith. The program will use an algorithm to determine, based on where we locate you, your ethnic background, and the local population, what the least obtrusive name is. It’s easier to do it this way so that all legal documents—birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, credit report, et cetera can be generated at one time. Poof! Instant new identity.”
Poof! Goodbye Brock Granite. Hello Brad Yawnberg.
They moved on to employment. In most cases, witnesses were kept in holding patterns during the trial and then released into the wild of their new lives once the trial was over. But Brad’s was not most cases. It was a humongous case in which many millions of dollars would be spent on lawyers by the defendant to, at the very least, tie the prosecution up with motions and tests and whatever else Frank Fortunato’s money could buy. Brittany explained Brad’s new situation.
“All right, here’s the deal. The trial could take months, if not years, and you probably don’t want to be sitting around waiting. So in the meantime we need to get you set up in your new life. What do you do for work right now?”
“I’m in advertising.”
Rather than go into the finer points of his current job, Brad walked her through his job history (minus the Chicken Shack and tequila shots) with very little embellishment.
Brittany took copious notes and slid them into Brad’s file for Stump to look over.
“Okay. Stump has a lot of friendly relationships with various companies around the country. He’ll see what he can dig up for you, take you wherever you need to go, and get you set up. I’ll check on you as the trial preparation proceeds.”
“Great.”
“Now, let’s go over exactly what you saw yesterday.”
Not great. Brad had been too busy figuring out his new marquee-worthy name to think up a decent story about what he had seen. “A pair of black shoes walked into the fuzzy periphery of my vision, shot Carmine, and then ran off . . . I think” would not have done the job. In fact, it would have probably left him high and dry in Jackson Heights without so much as cab fare. So he lied.
“Can we do it later? I’m really exhausted. You know, psychologically.”
Brittany nodded. She understood. The poor guy had been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours. Besides, she had him now. One day wouldn’t hurt anything.
“Sure. I’ll come back tomorrow morning and we can talk.”
As Brittany packed her files up, Brad noticed Stump standing quietly in a doorway watching them. How long had he been standing there and why the hell didn’t that guy ever say anything? This is the person he was supposed to trust his life to, and he couldn’t tell if Stump was sussing him out as a gutless coward or developing a severe man crush. It was disturbing. The safe bet was on Stump seeing right through his homina-homina-homina bullshit. Brad would have to watch his step around Stump, which would be every waking moment for who knew how long.
Like he didn’t have enough to worry about.
Brad spent the day trying to distract himself with History Channel reruns and spent the night pacing in his room while re-creating the murder scene in his mind. Inevitably, every replay ended up looking like some poorly shot assassination film. Every detail crystal clear until the moment of truth when the camera holder forgot their primary responsibility and let the lens drift away to some random scenery that had nothing to do with the action. And no matter how often he rewound the film, the same mistake occurred. But he kept rewinding anyway.
There was the amazing interview. The elevator. Carmine standing there. Carmine ignoring Brad. The scuff mark. That goddamned scuff mark. The sneeze. And then Carmine again. He rewound and tried to focus on a different detail. The song playing in the elevator. The color of the carpet. What frigging floor did we stop on for the murder? He tried to slow down the sneeze and go frame by frame. Nothing helped. Eventually, Brad fell asleep.
His intense mental re-creations had left a sour residue on Brad’s psyche and the reenactments bled into his dreams, serving up wall-to-wall nightmares of a very angry Frank Fortunato. Having never paid much attention to the papers and only seeing Frank live in person the one time while they were both in cuffs, Brad didn’t have a firm grip on the exact topography of Frank’s face. So his brain substituted his junior high school baseball coach’s face as a placeholder in the dreams. They were completely different men, but the impression was just as scary. In the morning, Brad stayed in bed for a good ten minutes trying to shake the feeling of impending doom and reminding himself to hit the cut-off man, you pansy.
Brad’s shower went a little long since he spent most of it trying to figure out what he was going to say to Brittany. Goddamn, he hated deadlines. The more he struggled to remember some relevant nugget of information, the angrier he got, first at himself for not being more aware of his surroundings, and then gradually his ire shifted toward Brittany. After all, he was the one who went through the traumatizing experience. Not her. Nobody was tryi
ng to hunt her down and turn her into a hilarious story told over fettuccini and gravy. She wasn’t even there.
She wasn’t even there.
Well, hello. It had taken a while, but it had finally occurred to Brad that he was the only person who (in theory) actually knew what had happened in that elevator. He had been so worried about getting it right, he had forgotten that there was no getting it wrong. Everyone already knew the beginning and the ending. All he had to do was fill in the middle.
With anything.
It didn’t matter what he told Brittany as long as it was something she could use to put Frank Fortunato behind bars. He couldn’t claim there were aliens or showgirls in the elevator, but perhaps some interesting dialogue and a heroic stance on his part wouldn’t be out of the question. He just had to lie.
You’re in advertising, man! Since when do you tell the truth?
This would be part of his reinvention. His chance to lay the foundation of his future self by creating some macho, confident, in-control character. Someone exactly unlike who he currently was. Perfect. He would give himself a fantastic backstory. Maybe he couldn’t choose his own name, but by God this instant mythology would give him a huge step up in his new life.
Like magic, Brad transformed from naked, wet, cowardly informant into naked, wet, and confident storyteller. This is what he did. Only instead of cornflakes he was selling murder. Five shots to the gut! Now with more fiber! If he could sell tampons and action figures, certainly he could figure out an interesting punch for the setup that was already written for him. All he had to do was finish the script. Couldn’t be that hard. He had been carrying his partners for years. Everyone knew the words were the easy part.