Gym Rat & the Murder Club

by Lawrence Block

  In her softly golden kitchen, Madeleine is scribbling on her wall calendar. My mother used a similar calendar—you probably know the type, the size of a pizza-box with a square for each date. Last thing at night, my mother made me take her thick black pen and strike a cross through that day’s square. A reminder, she would say, that all things, however terrible, must pass.

  Now something causes Madeleine to look up from the calendar. She walks out of the kitchen. I test the handle and the back door pulls open an inch. I wonder if I have time to cross the floor and secrete myself around the side of her tall refrigerator. Then Madeleine walks back in to the kitchen. She’s talking over her shoulder. As I gently push the door closed, a man follows Madeleine into the room.

  Gregor.

  Gregor fetches himself a glass of water. He doesn’t have to ask where the glasses are kept. They are dating.

  Madeleine joins Gregor at the sink. She leans into him and he pulls her to the hollow of his chest. Neither of them speaks. Gregor strokes Madeleine’s hair, starting at her crown, following the curve of her back to the base of her spine. Their eyelids close. His hand comes to rest above the nape of her neck, supporting her head as if she were a newborn, the pair caught like a photograph in the soft glow of the kitchen.

  Gregor’s going nowhere. Tonight is not my night.

  As I step away from the door and into the dark, I wonder how it feels to be held.

  Next morning, I leave the house for my pre-breakfast walk and he’s there at the bus stop. I recognize the lean shape of the man before I can put a name to the fear that floods my veins.

  Gregor, on the corner of my block.

  With a cardboard coffee cup and a newspaper clamped under his armpit.

  What’s he doing here?

  I ransack my mental Gregor file. Didn’t he tell us about his rabbit-hutch room in the Bronx? And doesn’t he work in one of those post-jail rehab programs somewhere in darkest Queens, making the little plastic ties that hold saplings to stakes? No… there’s just no rational triangulation between Gregor’s world and mine. And yet, here he is.

  Worse, he’s seen me, raising one of his rope-like arms in greeting.

  “Morning, Henry,” he says as I draw alongside. “How about that! You live around here?”

  I can’t answer as my face has begun to melt. Luckily, Gregor is gazing down the street. “I’ve a bit of cash-in-hand work up in Yonkers,” he says. “Just changing buses. Come to think of it, I don’t know why I’m surprised to see you. Didn’t you mention that you lived in this neighborhood?”

  I did not. I most certainly did not!

  “How did you find last night?” says Gregor, still peering into the morning haze.

  I consider walking back the way I came. Walking up to the nearest door and ringing the bell. Walking out into oncoming traffic.

  “I find the sessions useful,” I say, working to keep my voice level. “It’s… um… a privilege, actually. To share and to hear from others.”

  Gregor nods his long, lean head. His eyes have a shine and a quickness that I never saw in the ill-lit back room of The Falling Star. “A privilege,” he says. “Indeed. Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course,” I say. “But won’t your bus be along?”

  “We don’t usually discuss club stuff out of club,” he says. “But what you shared last night… small town in Wyoming… been going round my head like a record on a turntable. See, I’m from a small town myself. Everyone in everyone else’s business. Bad enough to go through what you did without having the whole damn town press its face to the window.”

  “I… People were supportive, as I remember. I was very young.”

  “Well, that’s nice. Sounds like a nice town. Remind me, what’s it called?”

  I have to think. “Bear River,” I say.

  “Bear River! Small town name if ever I heard one. I bet the local rag lived off your story for a month. My thing was front page of the Mount Olive Herald a whole summer, ‘cause it beat the hell out of elks stuck in the orchard fence, or how they just replaced the big hand on the Town Hall clock. What do the good people of Bear River read over their morning eggs? I bet it has some overblown title, Like it’s wielding the sword of truth instead of reporting stoplight malfunctions and speeding tickets. Let me guess: Bear River Enquirer? Bear River Tribune?”

  My left leg—the traitor—starts to shake. “Oh,” I say. “My memory. I suppose I blocked a lot from that time.”

  “No doubt,” says Gregor, pinching his bottom lip. “Can I ask you something else?”

  “I should be getting on,” I say, wanting to run, fearing my damn leg might buckle.

  “Madeleine’s a peach, isn’t she?” says Gregor. “Don’t you think?”

  “I… I never thought of her that way.”

  “You didn’t?”

  A bus pulls in. The doors scrape open and a young Latino mother herds a clutch of chattering children down onto the street. Gregor makes no move to climb aboard.

  “Isn’t this you?” I say.

  “I’ll get the next one,” he says, holding my eye.

  The doors squeal. Before I realise what I’m doing, I’ve stepped onto the bus. Two panes of smudgy glass fold flat between Gregor and me.

  We’re moving. Gregor slides away from me. From the sidewalk, he raises a long arm and waves. I think the bastard even smiles.

  He knows.

  He knows, he knows, he knows.

  Nineteen blocks I stay on that bus, until the driver tells me I’m scaring the other passengers and have to leave. I run home with heavy slapping steps, my stomach twisted at the thought of Gregor at the library hunched over a computer terminal, scrolling through Bear River newspaper archives to confirm what he already knows.

  Henry’s a fraud. Henry lied. Henry isn’t one of us.

  I turn onto my street, lungs aflame, hands scratching in my pockets for my keys.

  Madeleine a peach—what did Gregor mean? What do you think he meant? Did he see me last night outside her kitchen door? If not, then what? In the back room of The Falling Star, did Madeleine notice me staring? Have they discussed me? Did Madeleine ask Gregor to threaten me?

  In the sanctuary of my dusky hallway, I suck stale air into my chest and stumble to the kitchen to run my wrists under cool water. There’s an alcove between the washing machine and the wall and I crawl inside, pulling the darkness around me like a shawl.

  Over. It’s all over.

  There, in the wall, I shiver, gripping my knees until, with time, the darkness sooths and a new thought slithers into my gut, curled and watchful like a snake.

  What if Gregor hasn’t yet told the others? What if he’s the only one who knows?

  If you were in my place, what would you do then?

  One half-mile south of the Williamsburg Bridge, I observe Gregor as he pulls at the door of a disused factory building. The windows are blackened and blown. Plastic signs warn against trespass.

  This odyssey began yesterday, five in the afternoon, as I nestled in the shadow of an alleyway in Queens, across the street from the dismal rehab workshop where Gregor toils to pay off the last instalments of his debt to society. From the workshop, I trailed Gregor to his box-room in the Bronx, via a slice-for-a-dollar pizza stand and a liquor store with reinforced glass at the booth. My fellow club member is hardly living the highlife.

  This morning, I arrived in time to see Gregor exit his apartment in overalls and heavy boots, clutching a plumber’s tool bag. I kept three people between us on the street and three cars between us on the subway as Gregor crossed the borough line into Brooklyn. We alighted at Marcy Avenue Station—happily he didn’t look back along the platform!—and it was all I could do to keep pace as he marched into the industrial graveyard that awaits sentencing beside the East River.

  I had started to question what business Gregor could possibly have in this wasteland when he stopped in the doorway of an abandoned factory. Can you imagine my delight? A forgotten buildin
g on a forgotten street. No human life in sight. I couldn’t have picked a better place myself.

  And imagine my thrill, right now, this moment, as I watch Gregor prize open the wooden door and step inside.

  I give Gregor three minutes before I cross the street. At the entrance to the building, my hand closes in my pocket around my new purchase: the handle of a straight razor, curved like a lazy smile. It’s a beauty. Press your thumb against the tail of the blade and four inches of sharp steel slides into view. I chose it for the handle—swirls of translucent marble—I tell you, it’s like looking at the ocean.

  In the dusty stairwell, I listen. Of course, I might not need the razor. A ten-story fall from an open window would be neater. But then, Gregor is easily my height and weight, with long arms and a good skeleton. And there’s his eight years in jail to consider, the man no doubt hardened by a regime of push-ups and sodomy. I’d be a fool to rely on my bare hands.

  Sounds above—the buzz of an electric drill. I take the stairs on the balls of my feet, careful of the cracks and crumbling stone. Above me, the drill grows louder.

  On the fifth floor the buzz greets my ears from the side rather than above. I approach a door, slightly ajar. Footsteps on creaking wood and Gregor is in the doorway, carrying a hefty battery-operated drill with a seven-inch bit.

  Okay, we wait for him to put the drill down. Then we can reveal what we brought along today.

  Gregor doesn’t seem surprised to see me. “I thought you might come,” he says.

  “You did?”

  “You can walk away,” he says. “Like you should have done yesterday after we spoke at the bus stop. This is your last chance, Henry. Your last chance to walk away.”

  My fingertips slide along the curved handle of the razor. “Let’s go inside,” I say.

  Gregor shrugs. He steps back into the room and I follow him.

  And there they are. All of them. The Murder Club.

  Ex-cop Jem, catalogue-perfect in a polo shirt and pressed chinos, rests his shoulder against the frame of a vast window with blown out glass. He’s scanning the street. Paula sits cross-legged on the dusty floor. She blinks when I enter the room. Saul—fat, puffy-eyed Saul—has found an ancient wooden chair on which to rest his bulk. Beside Saul, Madeleine stands with her hands behind her back, strands of hair skipping at her cheeks in the breeze from the broken windows.

  The door closes behind me. Gregor’s heels scrape against the wooden floor.

  “Please put the razor on the ground,” says Madeleine.

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “The one you bought last night at Holm Hardware,” says Jem. “You paid with a hundred and received thirteen dollars in change.”

  “You’ve been following me,” I say.

  “It’s in your right hip pocket,” says Saul. “Be a good boy and place it on the floor.”

  Something sharp and stiff presses into the base of my spine. Gregor is using the drill like the muzzle of a gun. My knees weaken at the idea of seven inches of steel burrowing into my kidney. I pull the razor from my pocket and place it on the ground.

  The Murder Club forms a circle around me.

  “From day one,” says Saul. “The way you told your story…”

  “You weren’t one of us,” says Jem. “I still have a cop’s nose for a lie.”

  “We couldn’t work out what you wanted,” says Madeleine. “Until you followed me home.”

  “Not once,” says Gregor behind my ear. “Three times.”

  “At first we were scared,” says Paula. “We thought about confronting you. Madeleine wanted to call the police.”

  “But then we got angry,” says Jem. “And the more we thought about it, the angrier we became.”

  “Until we decided not to call the police after all,” says Paula.

  They begin to move, circling me in their anger. My throat dries. The traitorous leg begins to tremble.

  “It wasn’t enough to have you removed,” says Madeleine. “We had to know you weren’t coming back.”

  “I… I’ll go away,” I say, through a mouthful of desert sand. “I’ll move to another city, forget I ever met you.”

  “You could never understand,” says Gregor, “how we rely on the club and on each other.”

  “Did you think we’d let you take Madeleine from us?” says Paula.

  “Or Gregor?” says Saul.

  I twist towards each new voice, blood pounding through my temples.

  “The club is everything,” says Jem.

  “Sometimes,” says Paula, “the first Tuesday of the month is all I have.”

  “We’ll do whatever it takes,” says Madeleine. “Whatever it takes to protect the club.”

  Jem raises a hand to bring the circle to a halt. The staircase is just beyond the open door, but Gregor blocks my path. He’s replaced his drill with a length of rope, which he winds into one fist then the other—a yard of slack in between. “That you would dare,” he says, eyes burning. “That you would have the nerve to try to destroy us.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” I say, my own voice barely audible over the rushing blood between my ears. “I’m not what you think.”

  “You’re an abomination,” says Madeleine through her tears. “Do you even know what you are?”

  “I just wanted to be part of you,” I hear myself say.

  “And now you will be,” says Paula, her voice soft. “Part of our club, forever.”

  “Look around,” says Gregor. “Tell me what you see.”

  I do it. I look at them, the Murder Club.

  What do I see?

  “I see a mother. A mother who shook her baby till its brain swelled to the size of a pineapple. I see a marksman who watched a colleague die because he couldn’t do his job. A fat drugged-up doctor whose negligence turned a woman’s stomach to rot. A truck driver who wasted five lives including his own, for a three-hundred-dollar load. I see a woman who goes to sleep every night beside the dead young man she exploded with her car. I see five people who killed. And I never even took a life. So who are you to judge me?”

  Fingers tighten around my biceps. Gregor pulls the rope taut between his fists. “I see five people determined to survive,” he says.

  Powerful hands force me to my knees, as if compelling me to pray. Madeleine is the last voice I hear.

  “We live with our ghosts,” she says. “Do you think one more will make a difference?”

  The End

  About the Authors

  Lawrence Block is one of the all-time great crime fiction writers of our time. He has won the Edgar, Anthony and Shamus more than once, and almost every conceivable crime writing award. Among his many best-selling novels, Eight Million Ways To Die and A Walk Among the Tombstones, have been made into feature films. He has been a two-time Master Class Instructor at Crime Fiction Academy.

  Matt Plass is a British writer based in Brooklyn, who has published short fiction with The Fiction Desk in England. He is currently writing a novel based on his short story.