by Joe Ide
“Well, I’ll be,” he said.
It was the same magnificent old building that was in Seb’s photograph, the one where he was wearing the oversize suit, except he was standing in the archway. Seb never said he went to Cambridge but there couldn’t be two buildings like that, and he said he’d seen one of his professors panhandling outside the Drummer Street bus station. Isaiah checked. The bus station was five minutes from the Cambridge campus.
A gauzy layer of clouds filtered the evening sun, a thoughtful pewter light cast over the yard. Lonely crickets chirped from their hiding places, the smell of fading leaves in the air. Isaiah sat on the stoop with Ruffin and shared an energy bar, the fingers of his mind carefully assembling the puzzle pieces.
Sarita is a sophomore, doing prelaw at Long Beach State. She’s interested in international law and goes to Cambridge on a foreign exchange program. There, she meets Seb, maybe in one of her classes, maybe socially. The timing was right. The lawns in both pictures had the same lush greenness, the same bare patch in the foreground. There was a garden off to the right, flowers blooming identically; a furrow in one photo, its twin in the other. Seb was probably infatuated, who wouldn’t be? So he asks her out. She rebuffs him, but he won’t take no for an answer. He’s an obsessive, after all; dogged in the face of reason. Sending Gahigi back to punish Laquez a second time. Taunting Gahigi repeatedly about smoking. Returning to Rwanda and searching every road into and out of Kigali to find the man who cut off his leg. His spotless booth at the bar needs cleaning again. He returns home to check the front door a second time. The tea set in a grid. Seb wants everything just so and he’ll keep coming at you until his life is just so.
Isaiah imagined a young, awkward Seb, transparent as glass, showing up as Sarita walked to the library or went to London on the train or had a Guinness at the pub with her friends. He saw Seb, fidgeting and smiling sheepishly. Hello, Sarita, you are looking quite beautiful this evening. Might I join you? Sarita trying not to cringe, her friends smirking and rolling their eyes. But Seb persists. Perhaps we might attend a lecture together. Get a bite to eat. A show, perhaps? Always gracious, she makes excuses. A study group or a test tomorrow or a dental appointment. Seb is not stupid, he gets the message, but what does an obsessive do when they’re thwarted? They get more obsessed. He calls her repeatedly, slips notes under her door, peeks in her windows. She changes her schedule, her routes, her hangouts, her friends intervene but he’s implacable. Frustrated, and no stranger to confrontation, he gets angry. He tells her he does not forgive and that frightens her. She decides she’s had enough and returns home early and meets Marcus.
Still at Cambridge, Seb remains obsessed with Sarita. She’s beautiful and intelligent, yes, but more than that, she’s optimism, hope, the doorway to a new life for the small African man who is taunted and ridiculed, limps around on one leg and wears thrift shop suits. Isaiah recognized himself in Seb. Vesting his future in a fantasy, planning his life around a pipe dream; a new destiny in one easy step.
Ever determined, Seb leaves school, comes to America and finds Sarita in Long Beach. He has nothing to offer her so he watches and waits. He discovers she’s with Marcus. A handyman. Laughable, really—but look at them! Fawning over each other like teenagers, it’s disgusting. But clearly they’re in love. Seb is crushed, his obsession swelling into hatred, but not toward his darling Sarita. Toward the interloper. Seb keeps an eye on the couple while his career transitions from tax preparer to criminal. He hopes they will break up but they don’t. Seb can’t stand it anymore. He has to see what kind of magic this handyman possesses, what alchemy has turned Sarita’s head. But how? Marcus is a handyman, so what if we hire him? The catalogue suggests a light gray bamboo flooring to go along with the white leather furniture, so yes, let’s do that. Marcus can replace the flooring. That should keep him around for a while. And what would anyone have seen if they’d hung around Marcus for a while? That he was warm and charming and good-humored; that he was patient and kind and honest. That he was a good man with a good heart. Everything Seb was not and would never be. What now? The answer was simple for someone who hacked off a man’s leg and turned it into a walking stick. Marcus had to die.
Marcus, for some unknown reason, needs money, and installing hardwood flooring isn’t going to cut it. He learns about the drop; maybe eavesdropping while Seb is on the phone with Frankie working out the details. Marcus intercepts Frankie and robs him, accidentally shooting him in the process. Then he takes the money to the storage locker, puts it in a fireproof box and hides the box in a carton marked TAX RECEIPTS ’07. He doesn’t know that Frankie saw the car and has identified him. He doesn’t know the Locos have put a hit out on him, and he doesn’t know that Seb and Gahigi are tracking him, learning his habits, the trails he takes. They discover that Marcus and his little brother play basketball every Saturday at McClarin Park. Good. They have a reliable location but how will they kill him? The method should be something that will not bring in the police. An accident, then, a hit-and-run. But Seb also realizes he must destroy Marcus in Sarita’s heart as well or she’ll mourn him forever, so while Marcus is busy on that deadly Saturday, Seb plants the drugs and money in the backpack. When the authorities find it they will assume Marcus was involved in drugs, and when Sarita finds out—and Seb would make sure she did—her image of Marcus will be wiped out right along with his physical body.
Marcus and Isaiah play two-on-two with Carlos and Corey while Seb and Gahigi wait in the Accord, parked across the street in front of Kayo’s. Seb smokes English Ovals, nonfiltered, the butts would have disintegrated before Isaiah could find them. When Isaiah met Seb in the Nyanza Bar, Gahigi was trying to quit smoking, but what was he smoking eight years ago? An educated guess? Marlboro, the most popular brand in the world. The Carta Blancas? A&J Liquor didn’t carry Tusker or any other African brands so they drank the Cartas instead. Seb didn’t seem the type to order a submarine sandwich so Gahigi did but only ate half, either because he was nervous or because his lank frame couldn’t hold any more.
Having followed the brothers to the park, Seb and Gahigi assumed they’d walk home the same way, crossing Anaheim at Baldwin. They drove around to get west of them, Seb at the wheel. He wanted to make sure it was done right, that there were no mistakes. He gets the car in position, sees Marcus coming off the curb and stomps on the gas, laughing as he slams into his rival, his fractured body flung in the air. Seb’s nemesis is gone, but an important part of the plan has failed. The police don’t find the heroin and money. Even worse, Sarita goes away to school and then she gets a job in San Francisco, while Seb has tied his enterprise to East Long Beach. Years pass. Time and distance cool his obsession, but he follows her on social media and learns she’s returned to LA.
The obsession reignites. Isaiah remembered the copies of People and Los Angeles Magazine in Seb’s office. Did Seb imagine himself and Sarita in those glossy pages, walking the red carpet and mingling with their glamorous friends? Seb is a wealthy man now. He can reintroduce himself into her life with style and class. He buys a new house and a new Jaguar. All he needs to do now is find an opening, a way to run into her.
So why did Marcus rob Frankie? Isaiah tried to remember what was happening back then. Marcus was agitated and short-tempered and there were all those intense phone calls out on the balcony and the mysterious college brochures left on the coffee table. Only Sarita could have caused such turmoil. Had she broken up with him? Did that account for his upset? Probably. She was going away to Stanford and entering a new phase of her life. She was going to meet new people and make new friends, none of whom would be handymen living in the hood. Marcus was losing the love of his life. He had to fight for her but how? What could he give her that would keep her in his arms? A future. He had to prove to her that he wouldn’t be a handyman forever; go back to school, be an architect or an engineer; show her he was changing and that he was a man worth hanging on to. Marcus collected college brochures but discovered that the tuit
ion would take money he didn’t have. He and Isaiah lived hand to mouth. So Marcus robbed Frankie, and he did it because he loved Sarita. The only force powerful enough to push him off the straight and narrow, the only reason great enough to rip away his character and leave him naked and in need. And then Seb killed him.
Isaiah’s hatred was a lesion pulsing and oozing pus. It was time for Seb’s punishment, but what should that be? Isaiah couldn’t kill him, and a beating was temporary. Destroy his business? No. That was numbers on a ledger. It had to be something deeper and more terrible, something to make him suffer until the day he died.
Seb sat in his booth at the Nyanza Bar, feeling nostalgic, smoking and drinking his tea. He wouldn’t be around much anymore. Drop in for meetings and such and that would be all. He’d decided where he would run into Sarita. On Fridays after work, she and a few of her colleagues met at the Ten Pound Bar in Beverly Hills, where the glassware was Lalique and the drink minimum was fifty dollars. Seb would stroll in, unassuming, see her, let their eyes meet, then tip his head slightly as if he was recalling her face, and then smile his most charming smile. Hello! How are you? It’s been a long time! Then they would talk, the problems of the past long forgotten. And what was she doing now? You’re an attorney? Of course, a mind like yours. What am I doing? I’m an investor, he’d say casually. Equities, real estate, precious metals, that sort of thing, her eyes taking in the six-thousand-dollar Anderson & Sheppard bespoke suit and the two-thousand-dollar Tom Ford oxfords and the eighteen-thousand-dollar Piaget Emperador rose-gold watch, bought on the black market for twelve-five. And then he’d suggest they go to dinner at Bouchon or Spago, and afterward, How about a nightcap? Well, my house is not far, perhaps we might go there. By then she would have seen that he’d changed, that he wasn’t an awkward college student anymore but a successful and charismatic businessman. Still, the decision would be hers. Seb thought it incongruous, even embarrassing, that a man who always looked for an advantage had given it away to a woman; that she should decide if he was desirable, worthy of love. He got up from the booth, his anxiety and excitement hardly contained. Tonight was the night when his yearning and coveting and frustration would come to an end. Tonight, his new life would begin.
Isaiah entered the bar. The African woman was wailing another lament. The bartender wasn’t there, but another soccer game was on TV. Seb was just getting up from a booth.
“Isaiah!” Seb said, his smile warm and mocking. “How are you? Did you come to insult me again?”
“Sarita,” Isaiah said.
Seb’s smile didn’t waver. “Sarita? I don’t believe I know anyone by that name.”
“I told her it was you. I told her you killed Marcus.” Seb went still, the smile held up by two thin threads at the corners of his mouth. “I told her how you did it,” Isaiah said. “How you hired Marcus to work at the house and how you planted the money and the heroin and how you waited at the park and ran him down like he was nothing. And I told her you were a criminal. That you laundered money for drug dealers and gangsters and that you bought a new house and a new car to impress her. I told her how you turned a man’s leg into a cane.”
“You should not have done that, Isaiah,” Seb said. He looked stricken.
“She doesn’t want to see you, talk to you, or read your fucking handwriting,” Isaiah said. “She hates you. And you know what she did when I told her you were planning to hook up? She laughed. I mean she cracked up! She said, Does that little reptile really think he has a chance with me? That I’d let him touch me? He could live in the Taj Mahal and drive a Rolls-Royce and I wouldn’t spend five minutes with him if he was the last man left on earth.”
“Do not say these things, Isaiah!” Seb seemed to lose his balance, stepping back, leaning more on his cane.
“What was that other thing, I can’t remember—oh yeah, she said at Cambridge you used to wear a suit that looked like you’d borrowed it from a grandfather. She said you thought you looked good in it. She used to laugh about it with her friends.” Isaiah paused to chuckle and sneer. “And she said you were always pestering her, harassing her, spying on her. She said you were a creep. That’s what she called you. A creep. Do you know you’re why she left Cambridge?” Seb didn’t answer. You could feel his fantasies crashing into reality like the Accord had crashed into Marcus. “You,” Isaiah said. “She went home because of you.”
Seb rapped his cane once on the floor and puffed out his chest. “I do not believe you!”
“Oh, really?” Isaiah said. “Well, did she say goodbye? Leave you a note? Leave you her address? Send you an email? Anything? No, she didn’t. She just got the hell out of there. You were such an asshole she didn’t just change schools, she had to leave the fucking country.”
“Stop! Don’t say anymore!” Seb demanded, pounding his cane on the floor like he was trying to kill a rat.
Isaiah grinned. “Did you know that’s how she met Marcus? If she hadn’t come home early that never would have happened. Funny, huh? How you fucked yourself over? And by the way, she already has a man in her life. An attorney. Good-looking, tall, almost like a model from a magazine. He makes you look like a fucking troll.”
“No!” Seb shouted, but he was wilting, curling into himself. “She would not do such a thing!”
Isaiah laughed. “She wouldn’t? Why? Because she was hoping you’d come back into her life? The reptile that chased her out of Europe? That annoying little freak that wouldn’t take no for an answer?”
Seb covered his face with the back of his forearm. “Please, no more.”
But Isaiah couldn’t, wouldn’t let up. “She said that you were vicious and ridiculous and you murdered someone that was a hundred times better than you’ll ever be. She said you were pathetic. She said you weren’t even a man.”
Seb’s lips were trembling like he was frostbitten, a gleaming film over his eyes. He screamed and swung the cane, Isaiah catching it, twisting it away, and jamming it lengthwise under Seb’s chin, pushing him into the wall and snarling into his face. “I want you to think about Sarita for the rest of your life. How you will never have her and that she’ll always remember you as the pitiful little creep in his grandfather’s suit.”
Gahigi came rushing out of the hallway, a gun in his hand. Isaiah let go of Seb, kept the cane, and turned to face Gahigi. Seb fell to the floor, coughing and gagging.
“Kill him, Gahigi!” Seb screamed. “Kill him now!”
Gahigi was too far away to strike with the cane and too wary to come closer. The sutures on his neck hadn’t healed. He touched them as if to remind himself that Isaiah had put them there. He looked at Isaiah, his weary, despondent eyes searching for something that wasn’t there anymore.
“What are you waiting for?” Seb screeched. “Kill him, Gahigi! Kill him!” Gahigi remained still while the bewilderment on Seb’s face turned into something that looked like sadness.
“I am not killing him, Seb,” Gahigi said. “I am done with killing. I am done with killing forever.” Gahigi ejected the clip and set the gun down on the bar. “I am going now, Seb. I am going home.”
Gahigi walked away, two inches of white sock flashing like lane reflectors down the long dark road of the bar. He went out the front door, sunlight exploding, snuffed out again as the door closed behind him.
“You will regret what you have done,” Seb said. He was breathing heavily, drool dripping from his chin.
“No, I won’t,” Isaiah said. “I’ll be sorry I didn’t kill you.”
“You are my enemy now.”
“And you’re mine.”
Isaiah broke the cane across his knee, the snap like a gunshot. He tossed the pieces at Seb, who raised his arm to shield his face, the pieces clattering onto the floor.
“One day, I will come for you, Isaiah,” Seb said. “One day very soon.”
“You do that, Seb.” Isaiah looked down at him; wretched and ruined, like rotten fruit, stepped on and smeared across the sidewalk. “And I won’t
be an innocent man crossing the street,” he said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
Chapter Sixteen
Ruffin, Sit
There are many forms of violence, and stripping away a man’s dignity is one of them; more punishing than a beating or taking his belongings or sometimes even death. Isaiah had done it once before, to the hit man. It hadn’t registered then, but this time it was so deliberate he had to think about it. He didn’t feel victorious or satisfied or unburdened. He felt empty. Like the hatred had scoured out his insides and left him fallow and dry.
The next few weeks went by in a hazy state of apathy. He had to force himself to work on his cases. Cherise’s brother, Jerome, coached a middle school football league. Isaiah got him to recruit Rayo, who instantly became a star defensive lineman, venting his aggression on the opposing teams. He sacked one quarterback so many times the kid walked off the field, telling his dad football was stupid and he wanted to play tennis. The science club, grateful to have Rayo off their backs, went searching for Miss Myra’s precious brooch. They systematically combed the area around her house and found it tossed in a hedge. Isaiah and Ruffin waited around the Shop ’n Save, and when Doris’s ex-husband, Mike, came out, they followed him home and cornered him in his garage; Isaiah and Ruffin standing there, dark silhouettes framed by the sunlight. The dog’s amber eyes glowing. He panted slow. Heh…heh…heh, Mike thinking he was going to be eaten alive.
“You’re going to leave Doris alone from now on, aren’t you?” Isaiah said.