Larry had a face about the deal, and I had to almost squeeze his nuts in McDonald’s to find out what was bothering him.
‘Sorry, Vince … I hope you don’t think I’m being mean or anything, but that van comes from your cut, yeah?’
The van cost 9,000 bucks. I was kind of hoping to sell the idea to Larry that it was sort of a company car, but I knew by the look of him that he had every dollar of his share counted and measured against his own stuff.
‘For sure, Larry. I bought it out of my cut.’
Some of the strain left his face. Something else, though, lurked in the craggy lines of his forehead.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to spend so much dough … the cops will be looking out for that sort of thing, yeah?’
He was right. My silence told him. But I’d really wanted the van.
He said, ‘Maybe we should split the …’.
‘Are you saying you don’t trust me, Larry?’
‘I’m not saying that, Vince. No way.’
‘Cos that would hurt me here,’ I said, patting my chest.
‘Just that it’d be good to feel it in my hand, yeah. You know what I’m saying?’
‘Sure.’
He stood and said, ‘They’ll be looking for two fellas.’
‘I know that … don’t you think I know that?’
‘I got nothing to show for what we did. You have the van.’
‘What do you want?’
‘A new cellphone for starters. Some clothes. What I got on me is what I been wearing since we left lock-up.’
Six weeks back.
‘So, Larry, we book into the Red Caboose and we split the loot, is that all right with you? I go my way and you go yours?’
‘For a while, yeah … till the heat is off. Right?’
I didn’t answer because I wanted him to worry about my silence.
He went on, ‘And maybe we can think of doing something else. I … I’m not too happy about hitting off little old ladies all of the time.’
‘You’re right, we need a different plan … if we stick to the same scam, the cops will sting us for sure. But maybe we should keep our options open. In case we see a rich old dame looking for trouble. I mean it’s not as if we hurt them or anything, is it?’
‘We could spring a heart attack on them.’
‘If so … well, it means it was waiting on them anyhow. We can’t look at it like that, Larry.’ He nodded, but he wasn’t fully in tune with the plan.
The Red Caboose Motel is made up of maybe thirty to forty converted railway carriages from the old defunct lines – they have names on their sides like Pennsylvania West; North Line; Alaska Coy; New Jersey Express; Caledonian and the like. There’s a reception room, with off it a long dining car and a museum with a model railway and gifts, some of which made me remember my kids and how they used to beg me for things – I tried to get them whatever they wanted when I had money, because I knew they were going to have do without more often than not. I forced my thoughts off the ex and the happy times we had in the North Line sleeper. Linda’s half Polish. She’s got little time left on her clock because of a diseased heart. I try not to let that bother me, but it isn’t always possible.
That evening, we were having dinner in the dining car when Larry said, ‘You sure you don’t mind separate rooms?’
‘No problem, Larry. We’re grown men and need our own space.’
An hour ago we’d split the money in my carriage, right down to the last cent. All the time I was counting he had his eye tooth on his truculent lip. I swear he didn’t goddamn blink once as I counted. He stuffed his share into a red backpack and smiled broadly. ‘Happy days,’ he’d said in a singsong voice.
We ordered quarter cheeseburgers and fries, and two beers apiece. The car was empty because it was pushing to closing time, and it was out of season for family visits.
After he slugged on his beer, he said, ‘I think I’ll clear out first thing in the morning, Vince. I can’t wait around here, it’s too quiet, too creepy.’
‘Do you want a ride into town?’
‘No, I’ll be fine. I’ll get a cab and a bus from there.’
‘Where are you headed to?’
‘I have a sister in New Jersey. She’ll be glad to see me, I reckon.’
‘This is egg-eating Susie, right?’
He looked at me in surprise at my having remembered. Susie had a dietary condition. She ate boiled eggs for breakfast, dinner, and tea. In the joint, Larry used to talk about how she used to talk with her mouth full of egg, making his stomach sick.
‘She’s off the eggs,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘You bet. Too many people got to steering their asses well away from her.’
We concentrated on our food as we’d run out of things to say to each other. Besides, he ate with his mouth open – it must run in the family – which wasn’t a pretty sight, and I didn’t want to look at the mixing process. Normally, I could keep a conversation going among a crowd of deaf and dumb, but I had begun to dislike Larry: he had a major trust issue with me. And he didn’t have reason – which is a strange thing to say, given our game, our form – but I’d never turned him over, not once. Not even when tempted.
He looked to the side, out the window at the camper van. He said I should move it into the shade of the willow trees behind the purple house, so the sun wouldn’t spoil the interior. Clouds were crossing its windscreen.
‘Can I?’ he said, ‘I need to get that bag of treats out of it anyway.’
Larry had a sweet tooth.
‘Sure,’ I said, handing him the keys.
When I got up in the morning, he had already checked out – I hadn’t been late in rising. I sat out on the veranda enjoying a smoke and a black coffee, watching two Amish men drawing a horse cart along the tobacco crops and loading it. The horse was big and strong and blinkered. The mist hadn’t cleared from the rolling land, and the sky was the sort of blue you could look at forever. I thought that sticking with the plan to stay here for a couple of days had been a cool idea; I was in no hurry to go anywhere. And anywhere I wanted to go was going to see me eating into the stash – I knew deep down that I was going to hit the track sooner or later, and maybe the horses would run like they had cyber fuel in them, but some wouldn’t have much speed in their legs and fire in their hearts – but this time if the nags failed me I wouldn’t be living rough and hitting the soup kitchens. I had my camper, and in it a bed, mini-fridge, a TV … the works. I was well set up if the four legs disappointed. In my head I had it sown that because I was so well set up for failure, there was no chance of it happening.
I didn’t see it coming, but Larry caught me one all right. The fuck. He’d kept a spare key to the camper. I noticed its absence from the spot where I’d parked it the previous evening. All that was left were faint tyre prints along the earth, and a Snickers wrapper he must have eaten for an early breakfast.
He knew I couldn’t go to the cops, and probably counted on my not coming after him. I wished him bad luck, and consoled myself that I could still afford to buy another van. Also, I couldn’t stay at the Red Caboose for as long as I’d hoped – Larry couldn’t be trusted now, and if he was picked up by the cops, he’d rat me out to them for a deal on his jail term.
When I went to check out, the woman handed me a letter, saying that my friend, Mr Coady, had left it for me. Coady was Larry’s chosen alias, mine was Michaels.
Outside on the steps, while waiting for an Amish horse buggy to collect me, I read what Larry had to say for himself. He wrote sorry a few times in as many sentences.
‘Vince, sorry pal. But I guess this was coming for one of us. I’m gonna flog your bus as soon as possible, so no point in you looking for me or it
… sorry, it’s nothing personal. Hope you won’t stay mad at me too long. Sorry and all. Larry.’
I tore the letter, binned the scraps, and wished again all the worst for that sorry fuck.
In spite of feeling low, I enjoyed the buggy ride along narrow country roads to town. It was one of those things you do that deep down you know you won’t be doing again, and maybe that’s why it was such a grand journey of three miles.
Any so, I lifted my spirits and bought a red camper for $6,000 from the same guy. I had wheels and money. Hopes, plans, and a feel good feeling began to wash all over me. I drove for hours, and finally pulled over to a rest area alongside the edge of a forest after the eyelids began to grow heavy. There were trucks parked, and some larger vans than mine. It was late, and after I’d emptied myself in the convenience block, I drew the curtains in the camper and turned on the TV. Watching TV and slowly sinking a beer helps me to fall asleep. I think some programmes are made specially for that very purpose – that was an old joke of Larry’s.
Next thing I see Larry’s face in a photo on the news, and right off I’m awake. It was like a sword had been unsheathed in my stomach and thrust upwards. He was dead, his body lying on a sidewalk with a grey blanket over it. I upped the volume, my eyes wide, mind pleading for it not to be true.
The news guy said that police suspect that the killing was in revenge for the mugging of an old woman, the mother of mafia don Gio Marso. Many officials are questioning the police role, and their lagging behind the criminal fraternity in this investigation. Damn cameras, damn everyone who ratted on us. Poor, sorry Larry.
I rushed my gear into a travel bag, locked the camper and hurled the keys into the trees. Next, I started to hitch a lift, and I’ve been doing that on and off since – leaving the good old States for Canada a month ago, on the first anniversary of Larry’s murder. I’m working as a short-order cook in a shitty roadhouse. I don’t do crime stuff any more. I’m just living in wait for the bullet. There’s nothing can persuade me that it ain’t coming. If something doesn’t get better, it ….
That Time in Kurdistan
That time in Kurdistan, the snow came falling in relentless thick flakes for days, and blanketed everywhere so deep they couldn’t go on patrol, and had to stay put in their commandeered hotel. The Iraqi guards stomped their feet on the frozen roof, and others tried to keep warm around a brazier next to a dingy-looking armoured personnel carrier in the grounds. The UN people had nothing much to do beyond sit in their rooms, drink their fill, reminisce, hatch miseries and attend the daily evening conference. Sometimes there were power outages, and Mackay’s first touch with absent electricity brought him close to his mother’s worst experience. He woke in the middle of the night – he always slept with the light on – and it was pitch black. He thought he was blind; he was wildly disorientated. He groped for his J-torch, not finding it quickly enough – blindness played with him. Terrorised. Wide eyes saw nothing but coffin darkness, then the weakish shine from his torch. It had taken him an age to recover, for his heartbeat to slow down, for the cold terror to leave his spine.
In the closet that the hotel became for the UN observers, Mackay noticed changes emerging among the different nationalities that made up their group. For instance, he noticed that the two Norwegians and the two Canadian officers had, since being snowed in, become friendlier towards each other, that the Senegalese, Zambian and Indonesian officers had bonded together too, as had the civilian Austrian field officer and the two Danish officers, who weren’t really military men at all but dairy farmers and part-time reservists. The Irish military police stood apart. We’re not part of any clique, Mackay thought, and he gathered that this was partly because they were police, but mostly because they were Irish and non-commissioned officers. The Poles, including the Commanding Officer, weren’t part of any clique either, because they were communists and Poland belonged to the Warsaw Pact, while the Canadians and Norwegians were in NATO. They’d put themselves at a remove, and the others kept them there. As for the Iraqi liaison officers … they were convinced that every westerner was a potential spy, and in addition to overseeing the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran, they were on a fact-finding mission – like a nosey person eyeing up the contents of his neighbour’s house, taking inventory.
Mackay was a lone MP; his two colleagues had made it down south to Baghdad before the heavy snows arrived. He didn’t miss them; they were older guys and sometimes drank too much, and the early starts and long-distance patrols to the front line and mountain posts didn’t agree with them – last month, Fergus’s jeep had gone over an anti-personnel mine that’d made ribbony chunks of the tyre along with his nerves, which weren’t the best before the incident. Afterwards, he had gone quiet and sullen in himself. Only when sufficiently lubricated did he open up, and in this breaking of his silence he started to worry Mackay and Bull Nose, especially Bull Nose, with his fears about what might happen next, that the landmine was a premonition of sorts. Bull Nose’s mother was psychic, and he spent a lot of time on the phone to her trying to persuade her to see into his future, but she said she couldn’t tell him anything because the spirits wouldn’t allow her to use her gift for herself and close family. So, according to Bull Nose, she knew stuff about him but refused to say. He got Fergus to ring her, and she told him to avoid heights and depths, which Mackay thought was ‘pure shite’, but which the lads believed made for perfect sense: heights had to do with the narrow mountain trails that had sheer drops to rivers and canyons – so far down that those looking at the jeep crash wouldn’t hear the splash and splinter of impact – and the depths had to do with the trenches and hidden minefields. They said it was still okay to fly out to Cyprus on holiday – she didn’t mean they were to avoid that sort of height. Mackay marvelled at the way people could work a slant.
Mackay was delighted inside and outwardly envious of the lads, as it wouldn’t do to look happy to be waving them off. It was okay for them to be bubbling – they were getting out of Sulaymaniyah, away from the arduous long-range patrols, the hikes by mule to the ridge tops, the weaving between trenches where hundreds of men had been killed, the flattened villages whose occupants had been poisoned with gas, the long, lonely evenings playing cards, singing ballads, listening to the sentries suffering death by freezing on the roof above their rooms, listening to bullshit stories they had told each other for the umpteenth time, some taking on a new slant. The money was good though. God bless the Iraqi dinar, but give them USD anytime – it’s the world’s currency. Money can keep a man sane.
He was a sergeant, and they a pair of corporals who had no hope of attaining his rank; he was younger than them by about ten years, but his rank meant nothing here among the three of them – they were all the same. Bull Nose said so when he stated that they had to look out for each other up here – equal except when it came to taking responsibility for things. They handed him their leave requests to process, their payment queries, their reports to proofread, and often rewrite, and suchlike – for the moments of their particular need he became their sergeant. They suffered from ‘Kurdistan belly’ and blamed the food. As far as he was concerned they had been downing too much ‘Frieda’ beer, an Iraqi beverage in a brown bottle with a seabed of sediment, but he said nothing, because saying nothing probably staved off an outbreak of discord and disenchantment. The milieu was almost that of a prison, its bars made of snowflakes, in which inconsequential issues were put under a magnifying glass and developed into matters of significant importance. Men often searched for slights where none existed, but often, somehow, they managed to produce a miracle and find one, maybe several, and these infected the atmosphere, created bad blood, and for some reason, even long after things had seemingly being patched up between people, that bad blood returned every now and then to stain the air.
On his way to see Mrankowski, who had summoned him, he wondered what the Polish CO wanted. They hadn’t spoken very much to each
other in their time here. His room was on the second floor. Mrankowski was built like a down and out sumo wrestler. He had lips that were shaped as though he were about to kiss. He hadn’t endeared himself to the other officers when he gave an order that they were not, under any circumstances, to take photographs or use a video camera, and a day after this edict he himself was out and about like Cecil DeMille, filming away to his heart’s eye – it was the rumblings at the daily conference. On the last occasion Mrankowski spoke with him, it was to say that he did not want the military police to beat up his UNMOs. Do the MPs hammer their officers in Poland? Mackay had thought. He said, ‘Yes, Sir, of course we won’t.’ Later on he wondered if Bull Nose had thumped the Senegalese officer, Toure, for clicking his fingers at him to bring a typewriter from one office to another. Bull Nose could turn fiery in an instant. During a power cut, one of the many they experienced, the officer had got a bang to his nose that left it bleeding and swollen. It figured, of course, but there was no proof. No eyewitnesses. Toure didn’t click his fingers any more.
He knocked on the bedroom door, and was told to enter. Inside, the CO was sitting in a black leather chair too small for him, behind a desk. There was a large Polish flag on the wall behind him, flanked by two smaller ones. He preferred to work in his spare bedroom and not in an office on the top floor, which the Austrian field officer, Thom, had furnished for him. He didn’t like, Mackay supposed, to be surrounded by NATO officers.
‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ he said.
The officer had on his light grey uniform. There was a red flash with two white eagles on his upper arm. An inch of fat hung over his shirt collar.
‘It is nearly Christmas,’ he said.
Mackay nodded in agreement. It was. ‘So?’
‘And I want to have a party … it is good for the spirit, for this sector. I want you to organise this with Thom.’
Deadly Confederacies Page 19