The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  “I told you not to get up, Ron.”

  Richardson’s eyes were jumping around in their sockets. He couldn’t talk, but he made some sputtering noises. I let go of his throat and sat back down. “As I was saying, it’s important that you not be late. Not even five minutes. If you’re late, well, I’ll have to do business with the asshole who takes your place.”

  “Business!” Richardson blurted. “This is what you call doing business?”

  “A man who makes his living the way you do is in no position to put too fine a distinction on things.”

  “I can’t...”

  “Don’t even start with that.” I said, holding up my hand to stop his excuses. “I know how much money you make in a year. What you’re going to pay me is little more than an inconvenience. A psychological inconvenience, at that. I know you hate giving anything to anyone if you can’t take back twice as much. I know you’re going to do everything you can to avoid paying.”

  “What the fuck do you expect?”

  “I expect you to resist. And then I expect you to pay.”

  We looked at each other for a couple of minutes.

  “You ever watch ‘Star Trek’?” I asked.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!”

  “Answer the question, Ron. Were you a ‘Star Trek’ fan?”

  “I wasn’t a fucking Trekkie, if that’s what you mean. But, yeah, I watched it.”

  “Do you recall what the Borg used to say to their victims?”

  Richardson thought for a few seconds. “Resistance is futile.”

  “Very good. Resistance is futile. That’s where you’re at, Ron. Don’t be stupid. You’re not Captain Picard. Make your monthly deposits and learn to live with it.”

  “I can’t fucking believe this. You expect me to give you a hundred and twenty grand a year for nothing?”

  “Ten thousand a month, by midnight, Pacific time, the last day of every month. Beginning this month, by the way. Since today is the twenty-ninth, your first deposit is due day after tomorrow.”

  Richardson wasn’t used to being coerced by someone who wasn’t backed by an organization more powerful than his own. And even when he didn’t hold all the cards, he always occupied a bargaining position that would guarantee him a return on any compromises he might find it expedient to make. So I was fairly certain he wouldn’t make the first payment. He’d want to test me, confident that he could counter any threat I was capable of presenting. That was fine. I could deal with that when the time came. For the moment, there was still the matter of Arnaud. I had told myself I was going to play it by ear, and apparently some part of me had come to a decision about what that meant.

  “Now, the other little favor you’re going to do for me.”

  “There’s more?” Richardson asked calmly, as if I had already exceeded his ability to process audacity.

  “About a year ago, a cop named Dean Arnaud was killed in a motel in Vacaville. Executed. Do you know anything about that?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said, with enough conviction that I thought he might actually be telling the truth.

  “Be that as it may, I want a name. If not the name of the guy who pulled the trigger, then someone involved.”

  “Jesus Christ, man! I don’t know who the fuck killed him. I told you, I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You’re a resourceful guy. Not all that smart, but you know how to collect favors. Maybe you’ll have to throw some money around. Whatever. I don’t care how you do it, just get me a name by Friday.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Friday, Ron. There’s a lot of cold, deep water out there.”

  I was done, for the time being. When Richardson turned to look at the river, I went up the bank and back into the night.

  •

  There were some riverfront condominiums a mile or so down the Garden Highway. About halfway there, I called Karla and told her to pick me up in front of the condos. She pulled into the parking lot a few minutes after I got there, coming to a stop with the passenger door at my fingertips.

  “Everything go okay?” Karla asked.

  “Well enough, I think.”

  “Where to?”

  “Back to the university footbridge.”

  “Should I go back the way we came?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  Karla put the car in gear and exited the parking lot toward town.

  “Did you find something to do while you were waiting?” I asked.

  “I went to that restaurant you mentioned. Had a Denver omelette and read my book.”

  “Sounds yummy. What are you reading?”

  She glanced briefly my way, as if questioning my motivation for asking.

  “I’m just curious,” I said.

  “I thought curiosity was the scourge of the soul?”

  “Only if you have one.”

  She laughed. “A Frozen Woman. It’s a novel by Annie Ernaux.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah. I like the way she writes. Very sparse. No gushing emotions, no irony. She just tells you what it was like. Her life. Growing up in a small town in France. How it was both beautiful and stifling. How she loved and hated it. She makes you understand what she had to go through.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “Also, I guess I kind of fell in love with her photo on the back.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

  Karla slapped the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. “Fuck! I can’t believe I said that!”

  “Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I did the same thing once, became interested in an author after seeing his photo on the back of one of his books. I ended up reading everything he wrote. Walter Abish. He wears an eye patch.”

  When we were nearing the footbridge, I told Karla to pull over and park for a minute. When she stopped and turned off the engine, I unzipped my fanny pack and removed an envelope.

  “What’s this?” she asked, when I handed it to her.

  “Sixteen thousand dollars. Normally, I’d pay you on the last day of the month. But it’s the twenty-ninth, and I won’t be needing you again this month, so I’m paying you tonight, for the full month. Five thousand base salary, five hundred as a bonus for picking up the car from Tony’s, and another five hundred for tonight. That’s six thousand. Is that agreeable?”

  Karla looked incredulous. “You’re not shitting me, are you?”

  “The other ten thousand,” I said, “is for future expenses. Don’t waste it, but don’t hesitate to use it if the need arises. Carry some with you. A thousand or two. That’s important. Don’t come to work with empty pockets. When that runs down, let me know so I can give you some more. Also, if I were you, I wouldn’t put it in the bank. At least not in one lump sum. The banks are required to report deposits over ten thousand dollars.”

  “Right,” she said, thumbing through the bills, “taxes.”

  “I’m not positive yet, but I’ll probably need you to drive me somewhere Wednesday evening. I’ll call you on Wednesday and let you know, one way or the other.”

  I opened the door and started to get out, pausing when Karla said my name.

  “Yes?” I asked, leaning down and looking in the door.

  “You don’t live under the footbridge, do you?”

  “I’ll talk to you on Wednesday. Good night, Karla.”

  “Good night, Shake,” she said, after I had closed the door.

  Chapter 6

  My tolerance for human company diminished over the decades as I gradually adjusted to a life of solitude. This was partly out of necessity and partly because I simply lost interest in people. There were exceptions, of course, but they were few and far between. Even when I did cross paths with someone who sparked my interest, interaction with humans always required a level of detachment that tended to preclude all but the most superficial relations. For one thing, I knew for certain that whatever novelty or enrichment a human might
offer, it would soon fade. People quickly betray their limitations. And when you add to that the difference in human and vampire life spans, people came to seem like fleeting diversions. Like pet goldfish, they were colorful, but it was never very long before they went belly up.

  I suppose my attitude was a little cold-blooded, but a certain amount of misanthropy went with the territory. It was impractical to be too sensitive about one’s food. The relationship of eater and eaten imposed the need to maintain a clear, categorical distance. Paradoxically, the need to function in human society required the opposite; the cultivation of pragmatic social skills. These two conditions worked against each other, with a vengeance. My century-long path to a workable solution had been thorny, unpredictable, and not without moments of comedy.

  After Calvin and I climbed out of the rubble in 1908, there was a decade or so during which the novelty and the inherent excitement of my new life served as a counterweight to a host of less appealing conditions, including my newly acquired and growing aversion for human company. It was a time of exhilarating exploration of my vampire powers. I reveled nightly in my senses, time and again astonished at what I was capable of. By moonlight, I could read the dial of a watch on the wrist of a man standing thirty paces away. I could hear the heartbeats of every man, woman and child in a crowded room. And if I chose to, I could isolate a given rhythm and identify the heart’s owner. I had the nose of a bloodhound, and could track like one. The world of scent became a redolent olfactory kaleidoscope.

  Initially, I might add, this kaleidoscope was not all roses. Wild animals are not offended by “bad” odors, because they haven’t been socialized to distinguish good odors from bad. Odors are just odors. If a dog sniffs something caustic or acidic, it will reflexively pull away, but not because of any idea associated with the smell. A dog has no problem with bad breath, stinking feet, farts, or any other special effects of the human body. A vampire’s reactions, on the other hand, are vestigially human, at least until he has had time to unlearn them. Before that happens, crowds of humans can leave a newly turned vampire gasping with incredulity.

  But as impressive as my vampire powers were, they were not really supernatural. I could not, for instance, outrun a bullet. A vampire is subject to physical laws—inertia, gravity, and so on—just like other creatures. I could run about forty-five miles per hour, tops. Which is to say I could, if the need arose, chase down an ostrich. This is considerably faster than the fastest human, but it is still the running speed of a two-legged animal. As for stamina, if I had to, I could maintain thirty miles per hour for a couple of hours. And I could jog along at twenty all day. Or rather, all night.

  Naturally enough, adjusting to my heightened powers brought its little problems. It took me quite a while, for instance, to get used to my own strength. For a long time, I inadvertently broke things. I had to relearn how much effort to invest in common tasks, like lifting objects that were no longer heavy. I would open a door and find the knob snapped off in my hand. I broke so many shoelaces I stopped untying my shoes when I took them off.

  I also had to make some radical adjustments in how I dealt with people. Even the most formidable were no longer threatening. The difference in strength made it ludicrous for a human to offer physical resistance. Nor was it just a matter of strength. My reflexes were unmatched by any animal I’d ever encountered. But again, this didn’t mean I could dodge bullets. I may have been able to anticipate a bullet’s trajectory. I could see that someone was pulling the trigger of a gun pointed in my direction, and in the time it took the finger to squeeze, I could probably move out of the way. But this ability was dependent on my seeing the gun being fired. A bullet in the back, though it wasn’t likely to kill me, would definitely spoil my mood.

  Even after a hundred years, I’m still occasionally surprised to discover some previously unsuspected talent. But these tend to be small surprises. For the most part, I know what I can and can’t do. What I can’t do is tolerate sunlight. It is genuinely unpleasant. I can survive maybe twenty seconds of direct exposure. Maybe. I have never been inclined to test that particular limitation. Discovering my strengths was usually more entertaining that bumping up against my weaknesses. And often enough, discovering what I could do forced me to deal with the consequences when my curiosity, my enthusiasm, or my boredom got the better of my judgment. These failures of judgment often began as small things, seemingly trivial when first committed. Then the consequences would start to snowball and it would soon be obvious that I had once again gone too far.

  A good example comes to mind. I was in a small town near Atlanta, Georgia. It was in 1919, I think. I was strolling one evening among the crowd at a county fair. In one of the booths, a “strongman” was challenging all comers to arm wrestling matches for twenty-five cents, and doing pretty well for himself. He was a big guy, rather obese, but with a lot of muscle under the fat. I watched him easily defeat a well built young man, taking a lot of pleasure in laughing at him afterwards and taunting the other male bystanders to show their wives and girlfriends what they were made of. It was just part of his act. He would ridicule his audience, trying to shame them into paying a quarter to prove themselves.

  It was stupid and pointless of me to make a spectacle of myself in front of all those witnesses. It would have been okay if I’d lost the match. People would have understood that I’d just wanted to try. But they could not understand my winning. I’m five feet ten inches tall and weigh about one hundred fifty pounds. I was several inches shorter than my opponent and about half his weight. His upper arms were thicker than my thighs. Of course, the size difference was irrelevant. No matter how strong the guy was, he had the strength of a human. The match was legitimate only as a contest between two men. With my vampire strength there was no contest.

  Looking back, I can only assume I was bored out of my mind. I stepped forward and slapped a quarter onto the tabletop. The strongman got a good laugh when he saw me, and of course the crowd was equally amused. Rather than side with an obvious loser, most of bystanders immediately switched allegiance, calling out for the strongman to break me like a twig, and other charming encouragements.

  We squared off across the table. At the signal to begin, we both held our arms in place without applying any pressure. He looked at me, smiling, waiting for me to press. I looked at him, not smiling, waiting for him to do the same. We stayed that way for maybe thirty seconds before he began to slowly add pressure, as if he were conducting an experiment to determine exactly how much I could resist. I matched the gradual increase, just enough to keep my arm vertical. At a certain point, when it became clear to him that what was happening wasn’t possible, he gave it everything he had, straining until his lips began to quiver and the veins bulged out of his neck and face.

  The crowd had gone dead silent. Not betraying the least effort, I winked at the strongman, then perfunctorily forced his arm down and pinned the back of his hand firmly against the table, then stood up and walked away from the murmuring crowd. I continued to stroll aimlessly through the fairgrounds until my mistake became undeniable. Once again, I had drawn too much attention to myself. People were watching me, pointing me out to others. It was only to be expected. They were there for entertainment, novelty, a temporary respite from the monotony of their lives. By failing to keep my distance, by failing to remain detached from human affairs, I had played right into something potentially dangerous. I left the fair, and the next night I left Atlanta.

  At that time, my dilemma was still working its way forward in my mind. My relationship to humans was neither simple nor natural. People may have been my primary source of nourishment, but they were not toys. They were neither passive nor harmless. In fact, they could be pretty nasty. All my new vampire powers were exhilarating, but they could also get me into trouble if I didn’t learn to control them.

  Chapter 7

  A large sum of cash has its own gravitational field. It pulls violence into its orbit. Violence itself didn’t bother me. B
ut the more volatile a situation is, the more unpredictable it becomes. I was never injured during one of my little drug-money heists, but the possibility of gunplay was always present and luck could have worked against me.

  That was all back in the days when I needed money. I often put a lot of work into the process of acquiring it, something that I needed as much as I needed the cash. Planning my thefts gave me something to do, a way to occupy my time. But over the years, having appropriated and invested several million dollars, I found myself less and less entertained by the whole process.

  That’s where people like Richardson came in. The more I lost interest in the process of acquiring wealth, the more I liked the idea of someone just giving it to me and saving me the trouble. Or most of the trouble, anyway. The thing about people with money, the more they have, the more they invest in keeping it, and the easier it is to shield themselves against those who would like to take it away from them. The rules attached to wealth are a kind of game, and one of the rules is that the richer you are, the more immunity you enjoy when you break the rules. Which is to say, the more freedom you have to make up the rules as you go along.

  In Richardson’s case, I was fairly certain he wouldn’t willingly play by my rules. He’d do what came naturally to him. He’d beef up his personal security and the next time I showed up, he would try to take me out of the game. People like him, accustomed to the prerogatives of wealth and power, always have to have their little fists pried open. But that was all right. I was good at applying leverage.

  I checked my Cayman Islands account early Wednesday morning. As expected, no deposit had been made. That evening, I gave Karla a call and told her to pick me up at the footbridge at 1:00 a.m. I didn’t want anyone near Richardson’s place to see me, so I had Karla drop me off in the condominium parking lot where she’d picked me up the previous Sunday. From there, I made my way to Richardson’s on foot.