by Hank Moody
“Hallo!” says the old man. He speaks with a heavy accent, German I think. “You are him? You are older than I ask for.”
“Uh, I think I might have the wrong house.” “Take it easy, Hans,” says Danny, who appears behind him wearing, I’m thankful to see, a much more modest bathing suit. “Go back to the sauna. I’ll let you know when the entertainment arrives.”
Hans frowns and disappears into the back of the house, but not quickly enough for me to save my eyes from confirming that, yes, his swimsuit is a thong. “Fucking Germans,” Danny says. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve got to do to keep them happy. Thanks for coming all the way out here. Normally I’d make Rick do it, but dickweed has the week off. You want a drink or a bump? I’ve got the Bolivian.”
I point over my shoulder. “The cab’s waiting for me.”
“Right, right, right, right,” says Danny. He disappears into the back of the house, returning a moment later with three thousand dollars in cash.
The rest of the week is a blur. My imaginary smokers are inhaling like chimneys as I scramble to put together ten extra bags for Danny. There’s a return trip to the agency to pick up my passport. A guilty phone call to my mother, although her mood brightens considerably when I hint at a female presence in my life.
By Friday afternoon, just a few hours before my flight to Korea, I’ve managed to pull together the package for Danny. I load my jacket with more than two pounds of weed and take the train downtown. When I reach Danny’s building, the security guard is away from the desk. Smirking, I sign myself in as “Mr. Green” and board the elevator.
When the doors open again, I’m looking at two policemen.
Every instinct I have tells me to run. But the simple geometry of the elevator box dictates otherwise. Besides, they’re looking right at me.
“It’s okay,” one of them says. “It ain’t a bomb or nothing.”
I plaster on what I hope is a convincing smile. My rapidly escalating body temperature feels like it might ignite the two pounds of marijuana in my jacket, whose unmistakable aroma, I’m certain, is wafting up through my collar. I am definitely going to jail.
I’m not really conscious of walking down the hallway, but suddenly I’m in front of Rick’s desk. I haven’t evaded the storm but sailed right into its epicenter: Danny’s office is awash with blue uniforms.
In contrast to my own internal horror show, Rick looks relaxed, maybe even wide-eyed, like we’re watching actors film an episode of a TV cop show. He’s about to say something else when Danny gets escorted from his office, a sober man in a gray suit attached to each arm.
Danny looks through me as if I’m not there, a gesture I quickly find myself grateful for. “Mark my words, Ricky,” he says to his assistant. “I’m going to fuck you.”
“You might want to save some of the romance for your cellmate,” Rick replies.
Danny cackles. “What cellmate? You think I’m going to wind up in prison? Worstcase scenario is a country club vacation, you dumb, ignorant fuck-face.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” says another sober-suited man, defined by his posture and attitude as the Man in Charge. He holds Danny’s vaporizer in his hand. “I’ve already identified at least three Class A narcotics in that cabinet of yours back there. Your white collar’s gonna look a lot dirtier to the judge. Hope you got a good lawyer, Danny.” The Man in Charge turns to one of the uniforms. “Clear off one of these desks, willya? Lay out the drugs and the paraphernalia. The Post will want a picture.” Then he turns to me. “Who the hell are you?”
There are a lot of ways to answer the question, and none of them seem good. “You know this guy?” he asks Danny.
“I don’t know anything,” Danny says defiantly. “From here on out you’re talking to lawyers.” He mimes the act of zipping his mouth and throwing away the key.
“Get him out of here,” says the Man in Charge, sniffing the air. “Mother Mary and Joseph. The whole floor smells like grass.” He returns to Danny’s office, leaving me face-to-face with Rick.
“I don’t think Danny’s going to be able to take your meeting,” Rick says. “Let me walk you to the elevator.”
Rick is bursting to share. “Those Germans he kept meeting?” he says as soon as we’re out of earshot of the police. “Fronting money from Iran. Fucking communists.”
I resist the urge to tell him Iran’s a theocracy. “Crazy,” I say instead.
“Whatever. Hey, I know you were his drug dealer, but as far as I’m concerned, the drugs were incidental. Live and let live, right? Fucking weed. Who smokes fucking weed anymore? Now if you could score me some blow….”
I glance at the various law enforcers still milling about the office, mercifully oblivious to our conversation. “I don’t …”
“Don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. Whatever. Play it your way. Happy New Year.”
“See you around, Rick,” I say, managing to wedge myself into the elevator.
“He got what was coming to him!”
“Nobody gets what’s coming to them,” I say as the doors slide shut. “And what they do get they probably didn’t deserve,” I add, aloud, to no one.
I fast-walk for maybe a dozen blocks, looking nervously over my shoulder, but I don’t think I’m being followed. I hail a cab.
“Kennedy,” I say, climbing in. It’s already almost six o’clock, two hours until my meeting with Mr. Yi. “How long do you think it will take?”
The cabbie, a burly guy with an unpronounceable name, examines me with glazed eyes. “Depends on traffic,” he says, nearly slamming into a parked car. He spits a series of what must be profanities in a foreign language, something Eastern European.
Are you okay?” I ask.
He grunts. “Double shift.”
“Just get us there in one piece.”
“You don’t like, you find other cab,” he says, turning around to face me.
“Can you keep your eyes on the—” Too late. I hear a sickening screech as the cab scrapes against a parked car. The cabbie throws the wheel in the other direction, overcompensating enough to slam into a town car in the next lane. I’m thrown forward, then sideways as the cabbie pulls the wheel the other way, sending the car into a spin. We bounce off two more cars before coming to a stop, facing oncoming traffic. Several more cars collide around us.
We sit for a minute in silence. “I’m going to find that other cab now,” I tell him, hopping out of the backseat and sprinting to the safety of the sidewalk. Traffic on First Avenue has come to a complete halt.
“The fare!” he screams after me, climbing out of the cab with what looks like a police baton. I flip him the bird and scramble over the hood of the dented town car. I sprint two long blocks to the next uptown avenue and stop another cab.
“Kennedy,” repeats my new driver, a turbaned Pakistani who at least doesn’t seem dangerously fatigued. “Do you want we take the tunnel or the bridge?”
“Which is faster?”
He shrugs. “That is not for me to decide.”
“Which is usually faster?”
“Sometimes the bridge, sometimes the tunnel.”
“Okay, the tunnel.”
“I think maybe the bridge is faster.”
“Fine,” I say. “The bridge.”
The taxi pulls up to JFK’s International Terminal ten minutes past my appointed meeting time with Mr. Yi. “We should have taken the tunnel,” says the cabbie. “You never know, you know what I’m saying, man?”
“How much?”
“Forty-two dollars.” I toss three twenty-dollar bills at the cabbie. “You don’t have change?” When I shake my head no, he sighs. He makes a show of fumbling through his pockets. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”
“Well played,” I tell him. I leap out of the cab, leaving him a nearly 50 percent tip.
“God bless you!” he yells.
As promised, the punctual Mr. Yi is nowhere to be found. “Fuuuuuck!” I scre
am at no one in particular.
“Watch the language,” warns a passing transit cop.
By the time I’ve paged Mr. Yi over the public-address system and called the courier agency—both misses—the flight is less than an hour away. I slump to the floor near the ticket counter. You’ll see her again in a couple of weeks, I say to myself. I rest my head in my hands.
“Are you okay?” asks a woman from behind the ticket counter. She’s Korean, approaching middle age, dressed in the uniform of the airline I’m supposed to be flying.
“My mother is dying,” I say, surprising myself.
Suddenly, we’re both crying. “And you missed your flight?” she asks, holding out a tissue box.
“I was supposed to meet the guy with my tickets here, but my cab got into an accident and I was late.” I accept a tissue and dab my eyes. My conscious brain is no longer in control of my speech. “She’s in the hospital in Seoul …,” I hear myself saying. I’ll spare you the rest of the performance; suffice to say that it’s desperate, shameless, and in the end, effective.
“There is one thing I can do for you,” she says. “The flight is not full. I could sell you a seat.”
“I don’t have much money.”
“I can charge you bereavement fare, because of your mother. Can you afford three hundred and fifty dollars?” I nod that I can—I still have nearly a thousand dollars left over from my aborted deal with Danny. After checking my passport, she scribbles a series of numbers and letters onto my ticket. “When do you want to come back?”
“Monday morning?”
“So little time!” she says, pausing to look at me. I nod gravely with puppy-dog eyes. She begins to cry again. “There’s one last thing,” she adds, tears streaking down her cheeks. “I can only get you a ticket in first class.”
A minute later I’m sprinting through the airport like O. J. Simpson in that Hertz commercial, arriving at the gate just before it closes. I show my ticket to a stewardess, who ushers me to a large leather chair that would have been too big to fit in my apartment.
“Cocktail?” she asks.
And then we’re taking off. We’re in the air for nearly an hour before an old lady sitting next to me offers me a huge smile. “Don’t you just love these international trips?” she says. “So exciting. Even the air on the plane smells different. It re-minds me of my garden.”
I take a whiff of the air. It suddenly dawns on me that what she’s smelling is the two pounds of marijuana I’m still carrying on my person. I excuse myself for the bathroom, where I flush two thousand dollars’ worth of drugs down the toilet.
15
“WHERE IS YOUR LUGGAGE?” ASKS THE Korean customs official with a cherub’s face.
“No luggage,” I reply, causing the cherub to raise an eye-brow. “I’m only here for the weekend. To see my girlfriend.”
“Ah, girlfriend,” he says, stamping my passport. “She must be good girlfriend for all this travel.”
“She’s the best.” I look up at the clock behind him, which places the local time at three P.M.
The cherub returns my passport and nods at the soldier who stands between me and the exit. “Soldier” isn’t the right word to describe a kid with greasy hair and a soft layer of stubble and who, despite the ominous-looking machine gun hanging from his neck, reminds me of a teddy bear. He smiles and gestures at me with the gun, indicating that it’s okay to pass. South Korea may be the most adorable country on Earth.
Unlike New York, Seoul’s subway runs right into the airport, making it an obvious choice for a budget traveler like yours truly—I only have a few hundred dollars left to my name, and it is going to have to last given the abrupt end to my relationship with Danny Carr. So I’m disappointed to discover, studying the map on the wall, that none of the stops are labeled “the Four Seasons,” K.’s hotel and the only point of reference I’ve bothered to bring along. One more thing to re-member the next time I make a mad dash across the world to evade the police and spend the weekend with a lady.
I exit the terminal to a sunless afternoon that feels ten degrees colder than what I’ve left behind. Rain is inevitable. Luckily, the taxi stand is where I expect it to be, just outside baggage claim, and a black-suited man escorts me into the back of a waiting car. Ahead looms a skyline, white, shiny, and clean, like a miniature Manhattan by way of The Jetsons.
About forty minutes later, we pull into a semicircular driveway in front of the Four Seasons. The driver points to the meter, which has just broken 11,000.
I rub my eyes to make sure I’m reading the meter correctly. I hold up the portrait of Andrew Jackson. “Hothyel,” says the cabbie. I’m saved when a smartly uniformed valet opens my door for me. “Welcome to the Four Seasons,” he says in perfect English. “The concierge will be happy to help you exchange your American currency for our Korean won. I will ask your driver to shut off the meter while he waits. You should know that in Korea it is not customary to tip the driver.”
The doors to the hotel part like curtains, exposing an international casting call for beauty and wealth. As I scan the lobby for the concierge, I find Ray. He’s sitting on a couch, looking completely at home, his attention focused on a dark-haired woman. He doesn’t look up as I cross the room to the front desk.
An agreeably efficient concierge magically transforms $100 American into a princely 70,000 won. I’m on my way back to pay the cabbie when Ray intercepts me by the door.
“There he is!” he yells, capturing me in a bear hug. “Man, do we have to talk!”
I disentangle myself and place a hand on his shoulder. “Good to see you, too. Just let me go settle my tab.”
Outside, the cabbie accepts the exact fare on the meter with the same smile he’s worn the entire trip. I slip a 5,000-note to the helpful valet—the extra zeros have me rolling like Donald Trump. I reenter the hotel, this time with a strut in my step.
Ray is waiting for me, his arm around the dark-haired woman. I decide that thirty-two perfections might have been an understatement, wondering if “skin like mocha ice cream” and “the legs of a Rockette” had been among them. “You must be Devi,” I say, extending my hand. She hands me hers as if she wants me to kiss it, which I do. “First time I’ve ever kissed a goddess.”
Devi flashes a perfect smile and surprises me with an elegant British accent. “In my country, it is considered to be good luck.”
“This is very good news,” I reply. “I hope to get lucky.”
“You Americans are such bad boys,” she says, not disapprovingly. “Ray and I were just about to have a cocktail at the bar. Will you join us?”
“I’d love to, except I’m only here until Monday and I’d really like to see the lady I came here for.”
Devi cocks her head, puzzled. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”
“No, Monday.”
“But today is Sunday.”
“What happened to the international date line?” I ask Ray.
Ray looks at me sheepishly. “Only works on the way home. Turns out you actually lose a day getting here. My bad. Listen, buddy—”
“Wait a minute…. I’ve only got, what, eighteen hours here? Now I really have to find K.”
Ray nods and looks like he’s going to say more, but Devi interrupts him. “K.? She’s in our suite,” she says. The change to her smile is fractional, but transforms its message from benevolence into something more mysterious. I can see why she probably made an effective goddess.
“Suite,” I say, shaking off her spell. “I like the sound of that. What’s the room number?”
“Surely you’re not going to interrupt them.”
“Them? What them?”
“Oh, it was quite magical,” Devi says, now gushing like a teenager. “Her boyfriend surprised her. He lined the hallway with rose petals….”
“Her boyfriend? K. doesn’t have a … Nate is here?”
Ray shrugs. “I’ve been trying to tell you since you walked in.”
“Nate is
here. In fucking Korea? Lining the hallway with rose petals?”
“He was outside her room when she arrived,” Devi continues, either divinely indifferent or just oblivious to my mortal suffering. “With his guitar. He has the voice of an angel. And the necklace …”
“There was a necklace?” I turn again to Ray. He looks back at me with a sympathetic cringe, as if he’d just seen me get kicked in the nuts.
“Diamonds,” says Devi.
“Diamonds? As in plural?” My head is starting to spin. I feel like I might vomit.
“From Tiffany’s,” she chirps. “With the blue bag and everything!”
“Where are they now?” One look at Devi, and I can tell I sound as angry as I feel.
“In our suite,” she replies, uncertainty creeping into her voice for the first time.
“The room number?” I ask, sounding even angrier. Devi’s eyes flit nervously toward Ray. Threat assessment.
“You don’t want to do that,” Ray says, presenting a reassuring hand to my shoulder. I slap it away.
“What. Fucking. Room.”
“I’m afraid I’ve said too much already,” says Devi, clearly frightened by the look in my eyes. I focus on the small handbag she’s now clutching to her chest. Pissed off enough to take on a goddess, I grab the purse out of her hands.
Devi shrieks. Ray looks caught between hugging me and socking me in the jaw. I root quickly through the bag, my hand emerging with her room key.
“Room 24021,” I read aloud off the plastic tag. Replacing the key, I hand the bag back to her and storm toward the elevator. Or as close to it as I can, before a sumo wrestler stuffed into a security guard’s uniform holds out an arm to block my way and asks to see my room key.
I pat my jacket as if looking for the key. The sumo has clearly seen this one before. “Guests only,” he says.
“Have it your way.” I walk back to the front desk. “I would like a room,” I tell the clerk.
“So sorry,” she says kindly. “All booked up.”
“Any room.”
“I’m so sorry. Perhaps I can recommend another hotel?”
“Listen,” I say. “I have traveled almost seven thousand miles to see one of your guests.”