The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  So what did the government do? They outlawed flamboyant clothes. Whenever in public view, merchants were required to dress in very plain garments. What did the merchants do? They complied, of course. They had money, but the Shogun had swords. However, being the clever men they were, they complied only with the letter of the law. They turned their garments inside out, so the sumptuous fabrics became the inner linings. Whenever they needed to display their privileged status, they could simply open their garments and strut like peacocks.

  Levko’s voice brought me back from Japan. “Why are you interested in cop’s murder?” he asked.

  I could have fed him a line, making up something plausible. Or I could have told him it wasn’t any of his concern. But there was something genuinely affable about this big Ukrainian. I found myself taking a simpler tack. “I didn’t know the guy or his niece. Never met them. My interest is through Arnaud’s wife.”

  “We’re you having affair?”

  “Nothing that banal. My relationship with Francine Arnaud was brief and somewhat adventitious to all of this.”

  “Adventitious?”

  “Coincidental.”

  “So why all the trouble?”

  “Considering our agreement, Levko, it’s probably better if we don’t go into that.”

  “OK,“ he said, shrugging. “But seems like big hassle.”

  “Is this a big hassle for you?” I asked.

  “Not so much. I like driving. But my girlfriend is suspicious. She is jealous type. She wants to know everywhere I go.”

  “I take it you made something up?”

  “I told her I was going to pick up stuff I bought on eBay,” he said, smiling, obviously pleased by the cleverness of his subterfuge.

  “She didn’t want to come?”

  “No. I told her it was Teddy Roosevelt stuff.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt?”

  “Yes. Teddy is my favorite president. I am collector. But girlfriend thinks it is stupid waste of money.”

  There were probably stranger hobbies for a Ukrainian immigrant, but nothing came immediately to mind. “Roosevelt isn’t your girlfriend’s favorite president?” I asked.

  He looked at me like it was a perfectly reasonable question. “Girlfriend is American,” he said, as if that were a sufficient explanation.

  “I see,” I said. “She’s not interested in history.”

  “She is smart woman. But Ukrainian farmer has better education.”

  We took the Sly Park exit off 50, crossed the highway and went north, winding along Canyon Edge Road, then turned on Boyce Canyon Road. A mile or so further, approaching a sharp bend, Levko pulled off the pavement and stopped.

  “You can see Pines Guy’s house from here.”

  He opened his door and got out. I followed him across the road to a vantage point. From where we stood, the land fell off abruptly about two hundred feet down to the bottom of a ravine. I could hear water gurgling in a small creek at the bottom. Beyond the creek, the bank rose steeply for thirty feet or so, then angled to a gentler slope as it climbed the far side of the ravine.

  “He lives there,” Levko said, pointing to some lights about a quarter mile away, visible through the trees.

  There was enough moonlight to make out the shadowed contours of a large, two story house. It looked like there were also two detached structures. One was probably a garage. The other, some kind of shed, was larger and farther away from the house.

  “The lights are all outside,” I said. “The house looks dark.”

  “House is always dark when I come. But I think Pines Guy is home. You can’t see house from where driveway meets road. You have to go up driveway. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want Pines Guy to see me and tell Yavorsky.”

  I had no problem with that. There was no reason for me to get Levko in trouble with his boss. “When you brought the girls here,” I asked, “did you see anyone else around the house?”

  “Never. Only Pines Guy.”

  “Did you go inside?”

  “No. Pines Guy came out to my car and took girls. One time I asked him if I could use bathroom. He said bears shit in woods.”

  It would have been nice to get a closer look at the house, but I’d made a deal with Levko. “Let’s drive a little further. I want to see where his driveway meets the road.”

  We walked back to the car. About a half mile further, Levko pointed out an unmarked, narrow, dirt drive, partially overgrown with weeds. It would be easy to miss if you didn’t know where it was.

  The drive back to Sacramento was uneventful. I learned a little more than I really wanted to know about Teddy Roosevelt. I also learned something interesting about Richardson. According to Levko, Yavorsky and Richardson had known each other for a long time. Not friends, exactly, but their business connections went back several years. Richardson was going to be disappointed to hear that his December payment would be doubled.

  Chapter 20

  The following Wednesday evening I went to the university library. I’ve always liked libraries. In the age of the Internet, their solid inefficiency has a distinctive charm. I like to stroll casually through the library stacks, slide an interesting title off the shelf and thumb leisurely through its pages. That’s what I was doing Wednesday evening. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just pausing at whatever caught my eye. I found a fascinating photo collection of wildly extravagant marine life. The quality of the photographs was exceptional. Looking at these bizarre creatures, I was amazed at what evolution could do with living tissue. I also found an interesting work on the early Mamluk slave soldiers of Baghdad. They were almost as bizarre as the sea creatures.

  I left the library a few minutes before eleven. The evening was cool and overcast, the ground wet from a light sprinkle. The clouds seemed to be moving much faster than the light breeze circulating between campus buildings. It was one of those nights when the weather was peaceful on the ground, but turbulent at higher altitude. The breeze picked up a little as I moved out of the protection of the buildings, but not much. I followed the bike path to the footbridge crossing the American River and started across. A solitary man was standing at the rail near the center of the bridge, staring into the darkness below. He was wearing a long wool overcoat that looked expensive, but old and a little tattered. Faded sweat pants emerged from below the coat, billowing shapelessly around the elastic at his ankles. A tattered pair of Top-Siders served for shoes, and on his head he was wearing a Lahinch, one of those small-brimmed, fabric hats popular among bird-watcher types and Asian tourists.

  As I approached, he looked my way, a bit longer than a glance, long enough to do the sort of quick assessment a man might make when being approached by a stranger at night. Whatever the assessment told him, it didn’t seem to cause concern. He turned back to the river and his private thoughts. I expected him to ignore me as I passed and was surprised when he spoke.

  “Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river.”

  I stopped. “Borges, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “A Borges fan,” he said, turning toward me, smiling.

  “I am, though I like his fiction more than his poetry.”

  “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “I suppose most people do.” He scrutinized me for a moment. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look like a lit professor.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Indeed,” he said, then raised and spread his arms, clearly amused by the state of his attire. “I, on the other hand, might very well pass for an aging academic. I’m obviously too muddleheaded to dress myself properly.”

  I’ve always found something admirable in the ability to laugh at oneself. “As far as I know,” I said, “this bridge doesn’t have a dress code.”

  He produced a short, laugh-like spurt that sounded like he’d hiccuped in the middle of a cough.

  “Are you an aging academic?” I asked.

  “Exactly half right,” he announced cheer
fully. “I’m aging, even as we speak.”

  I stepped up to the guardrail beside him. “I trust the aging process is running at the normal speed? I’m not going to have to watch you decompose, am I?”

  He laughed heartily. “One can only hope. But I’ll tell you what, if I should stop talking and start to smell suspicious, you have my permission to drop me off the bridge.”

  It was my turn to laugh.

  He offered me his hand. “My name’s Steven.”

  “Shake,” I said, taking his hand, my name causing the usual confusion. “My name is Shake,” I clarified.

  “That’s a very cold paw you have there, Shake. Are you all right?”

  “Quite all right, thanks,” I said, remembering I would be needing some fresh blood before too long. “It’s just poor circulation. It runs in the family.”

  We stood silently for a minute or two, both leaning against the guardrail, gazing into the darkness below the bridge.

  “It’s different at night,” he said, breaking the silence. “In the daylight the river looks so inviting, but at night it’s the opposite, forbidding.”

  “You find it inviting in daylight?”

  "I do. I've always been attracted to bodies of water. Not the ocean, so much. It’s too big and too spooky. But creeks, rivers, lakes, if they’re clean, of course. I always have a powerful urge to dive in."

  “I prefer a drier environment,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not like I’m good for much in the water. I can swim, if we’re generous in defining what that means. There’s nothing very elegant about it. It’s more like a desperately awkward refusal to drown.”

  I could imagine what that awkward thrashing might look like, and the image struck me as one generally applicable to humans, in or out of water; an awkward refusal to succumb to the inevitable.

  “Do you often walk at night?” he asked.

  “I find the night more congenial. I seem to be nocturnal by nature.”

  “I suppose the night must have its charms for me, too. I certainly spend a lot of time wandering around in the dark.”

  “Literally or figuratively?” I asked.

  “A bit of both,” he said, somewhat pensively.

  A young man and woman were crossing the bridge on bicycles. Students, judging from their conversation. They were arguing about whether or not to buy an essay off the Internet. Steven and I stood quietly as they passed.

  “Are you religious?” he asked, then sensing my aversion to the question, added, “Me neither,” and brushed the air with his hand, as if swatting at an insect.

  “People who aren’t religious,” I said, “don’t generally spring that question on complete strangers.”

  “No, I suppose not.” he agreed. “I’m not sure why I asked you that. I was just thinking about my mother when you happened by. She was a real Bible-pounder. A Southern Baptist. Ignorant and a bit violent, and since she couldn’t actually quote the Bible, her Bible-pounding tended to take the form of pounding with the Bible. I can remember more than once being clobbered upside the head with her large-print King James.”

  I laughed again. “Like in the movies, when the suspect is getting the good cop/bad cop treatment, and the bad cop comes up behind him and clocks him with a phone book.”

  “Exactly. Same methodology, except she was both cops.”

  “So contact with the Bible dislodged your faith?”

  “An appropriately comical way to describe it.”

  “And now? What? Are you having second thoughts?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that,” he assured me. “The idea of God gets more implausible the older I get.”

  “Like the tooth fairy,” I suggested, wondering where this was leading. “If I were you, I wouldn’t expect to be patted on the back for my powers of discrimination.”

  Steven slapped the metal guardrail with the palm of his hand. The ringing reverberated along the length of the bridge. “You’re a quick study, Shake,” he said, chuckling to himself. “But our accomplishments should be measured by the ruler of our abilities, don’t you think?”

  “Fair enough,” I granted.

  “And anyway,” he said, “don’t you think there’s a difference between believing in the tooth fairy and believing in God?”

  “It does seem to be easier for people to let go of the tooth fairy.”

  Steven rubbed his chin, the way he might have stroked his goatee if he’d had one. “It’s hard, isn’t it, to talk about religion?”

  “People generally just want you to agree with them,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose they do. In a way, maybe that’s what the whole smoke and mirror show is about. Getting people to agree.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But there’s an awful lot of disagreement between all these people trying to agree.”

  “Maybe that’s the game. You win by getting the other guy to agree with you. After all, that’s what everyone wants more of, isn’t it?”

  “Power, you mean?”

  “Or as I prefer to call it, authority. We all want authority. We don’t necessarily want to be global dictators, but we do want to have authority over whatever circumscribed domain happens to be under our sway. That domain may have grand dimensions, or be as small as the desk we sit behind five days a week in some dreary office. We may have the authority to influence millions, or we may be reduced to hounding our spouse into some exhausted state of acquiescence. We may have authority over entire nations, or our sovereignty may be limited to the arrangement of knickknacks on the mantel.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and people are usually willing to throttle one another over the placement of their knickknacks.”

  “Just like my mother,” he said.

  “Why do think that was so important to her?”

  “She was afraid, I suppose. I don’t think the religion itself meant that much to her. She didn’t try to understand it, or make sense of it. The world was a scary place for her, and she needed to believe something would protect her. Or at least give her some solace. That’s why she needed the people around her to agree with her, so she could feel like her beliefs gave her some degree of control. And that’s why she got violent when I didn’t agree.”

  “So pounding you with the Bible was how she arranged the knickknacks on her mantel? That was her way of expressing her authority?”

  “That’s basically it, I think. She wasn’t very bright. Religion was the only way for her to have authority over anyone else. God is just so convenient.”

  “Convenient?” I asked.

  “For many people, I think, God is the easiest way to acquire authority. Think about it. God allows you to possess the truth, and your authority can’t be challenged by anyone, no matter how smart, powerful, educated, successful or rich they may be. Your authority is backed by a supreme being, so you can pretty much believe whatever you want. As a friend of mine once put it, an authority doesn’t have to be an authority to be an authority.”

  “Come again?”

  “Someone in a position of authority doesn’t have to be a true authority. They don’t actually have to know what they’re talking about, in order to play the role of an authority, and to enjoy the privileges and influence that role gives them. Priests are a perfect example. They just have to play the part convincingly. The dimmest fundamentalists can defy the greatest scientific minds in the world. Why? Because God is the ultimate tool for establishing false authority.”

  “So what you’re saying is that religious belief is really just a way for people to impose their will on one another?”

  “Well,” he said, waving his hand back and forth in a give-or-take gesture, “you know, it’s never as simple as you’d like it to be. But, basically, yes. I don’t think people really need to believe in God as much as they need to be right. They need to believe in themselves. So they become authorities on God. Then they can arrange their knickknacks just the way they want them, and to hell with anyone who says they’re out of order.”

  �
��It sounds like you’ve got your knickknacks in order,” I said.

  Steven lapsed into a thoughtful silence, then broke the silence with a chuckle. “I talk a lot sometimes,” he said, sighing, “but in the end it doesn’t add up to much.”

  “What would you like it to add up to?” I asked.

  "Yes,” he said, without hesitation.

  I wasn’t sure if he’d understood my question. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Yes,” he repeated. “I’d like it to add up to ‘yes.’”

  “I don’t mean to be obtuse,” I said, unable to follow his train of thought.

  “All my life,” he said, “I've been saying ‘no’ to things; to very nearly everything. But at the same time, always searching for something to say ‘yes’ to."

  "I gather you haven’t found it?"

  "Well, I'm not sure, really. I tend to make the mistake of thinking I know what I’m looking for. And in a way, I do. But in a way, I don't. Not really.”

  “So the things you find don’t meet your expectations?” I asked.

  “Usually not. But that doesn't necessarily mean I’m disappointed. Sometimes the things we find are much more important than the things we’re looking for."

  “True enough,” I said, knowing from experience that the things we find are sometimes unthinkable beforehand. “What might it be like, this thing you want to say ‘yes’ to?”

  “Well, now, how can I put this? Let’s say there is something I would like to experience before I die. It's not easy to describe, but maybe you'll know what I mean. I'm sixty-two years old, and one thing I've noticed about my life is that I've nearly always been wrong about the things that really matter. At any point in my life, looking back at an earlier time, I’d see that I was pretty consistently wrong. I’d make corrections in my thinking. But when I’d look back from some later time, I’d see that those corrections were also wrong. At sixty-two, I look back and see a life of misdeeds based on dubious judgments and half-baked ideas. I’m a bit like a wind-up toy that keeps falling over, pointlessly jerking its limbs while its spring runs down.”

  “In other words, you’re a human being,” I suggested.