While Drowning in the Desert

by Don Winslow

  “This is a standard shift,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know how to drive a standard shift.”

  “I shoot you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I shoot you,” he said. “Drive.”

  “Believe him,” Nathan said. “He really is that stupid.”

  “I really am.”

  You could hear the little guy thinking about what to do. It seemed like he thought for a long time.

  Then he said, “Drive or I shoot you.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. There was a horrible, metallic screeching noise. It was either the engine or the little guy’s voice as he screamed, “This is a 1965 Mustang! It’s very valuable!”

  “Not for long,” I said.

  I cranked the engine again and stepped on a pedal or something.

  “Nooooo!!!!” he screamed. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I drive.”

  It took awhile for Nathan to climb into the backseat and me to slide into the passenger seat and Sami—as I later learned and you already know was his preferred alias—to climb into the driver’s seat. Especially as Sami was trying to hold the gun on both of us while we were all doing what I would later come to refer to as the Lebanese Fire Drill.

  But I began to feel a little better as I realized that Sami was not exactly Clyde Barrow when it came to being a gunslinger.

  When we were all settled in, Sami said, “No funny business, okay?”

  I think career criminals should be banned from watching old movies, don’t you?

  “No funny business,” I said. “No monkey business either.”

  Then Sami seemed to be having difficulty figuring out how to shift, steer, and hold the gun in order to pull out of the rest stop. He simply didn’t have enough hands.

  “I’ll hold the gun,” I offered. “And if I try any funny business I promise I’ll shoot myself.”

  But Sami apparently decided that the better option would be to stick the gun between his legs and expose himself to both the chance of emasculation and comments of a Freudian nature. So this is what he did, and pretty soon we were roaring west on Interstate 15.

  For about a minute. Then he turned south onto a two-lane blacktop. The sign read, Cima—East Mojave National Scenic Area.

  And even I had figured out by that point that Nathan had a definite reason for running away from Palm Desert and not wanting to go back, and that this reason was connected to the small but well-armed man now driving us somewhere for some reason I did not know.

  Nathan turned in his seat to face me and said, “So Arthur says to the Irish kid, ‘This isn’t pastrami and…’”

  I leaned over to Sami and said, “Shoot me.”

  Chapter 13

  Sami didn’t shoot me.

  As we headed further south into the bleakest terrain I have ever seen (and I have been to Bayonne, New Jersey), he just kept trying to interrupt Nathan’s latest stream-of-semiconsciousness soliloquy with a persistent line of questioning.

  “Do you recognize me?” Sami asked.

  “So Arthur was laughing and—Sure I recognize you.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Who are you?” Nathan asked. “You’re the for-shit, fekokteh, no-goodnik who is kidnapping me, that’s who you are. So Arthur—”

  “I mean before that, okay?”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I kidnapped you, okay?” Sami asked. “Do you recognize me?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry, but I do not recognize you. I’m eighty-six years old, sometimes I don’t recognize me. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this old man?’ So, excuse me, I don’t recognize me sometimes, I’m supposed to recognize you?”

  Sami got an especially crafty look in his eye.

  “Okay,” he said. “So you don’t recognize me as your … neighbor, for example?”

  “And Arthur Minsky, who was a gentleman—What?”

  “So you don’t recognize me as your neighbor, for example?”

  “Excuse me,” Nathan said. “I live in a development that didn’t get developed. What neighbors? I got no neighbors. What I got is a burned-up smelly mess next door. So, are you my neighbor?”

  “No, no, no, no, no, okay?” Sami said. “That was just an example.”

  “Example of what?” Nathan shook a cigarette out of his pack and started to light it.

  “Of how you might recognize me,” Sami said. “Please don’t smoke.”

  Nathan took a drag of the cigarette and went into his usual coughing spasm. When he was finished he said, “I don’t recognize you.”

  “And,” Sami said happily, “I don’t recognize you.”

  “Must have been two other guys,” I said.

  Nobody laughed, so I said, “Having established that nobody recognizes anybody, why don’t we just turn around, you can drop us back at the rest stop, and we’ll all forget about the whole silly thing?”

  This sounded like a very good idea to me. Especially because Sami now turned off the blacktop onto a dirt road. I have learned from long experience watching movies, that when a guy kidnaps you and takes you for a ride on a dirt road in a vast desert, you can cue the vultures.

  And the smoke in the car was going to kill us all anyway.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what to think, okay? ” Sami said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  “To tell you what to think?” I asked.

  “Yes, okay?”

  Sami punched some numbers on his portable phone. Being the ace private eye that I am, I memorized the number so that if I lived, I could get the name of the guy he was talking to.

  “Hello, Heinz?” he said. There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll stop using your name on the phone, Heinz, okay? … Yes, I still have him. Someone else, too.… You don’t have to yell, Heinz.… Sorry, I forget.… Who else? Some younger guy, I don’t know. Says he is working for the old man.… What?…Okay.”

  Sami turned to me.“Are you an insurance investigator?”

  “No.”

  “He says he isn’t, Heinz, okay? … Okay, I’ll ask.”

  Sami turned to me again. “Do you know Craig Schaeffer?”

  “No.”

  “He doesn’t know him,” Sami told Heinz.

  “He says you’re lying,” Sami said to me.

  “Who does?” I asked.

  “He—” Sami said. “The person I’m talking with.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Sami got back on the phone. “He says he’s not lying, Heinz. … He’s lying when he says that? … Okay, I’ll ask.”

  “Are you a Jew?” Sami asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

  It was a truthful response, seeing as how I was, to quote Smollett, “a love-begotten babe” and could only answer to half my lineage.

  Nathan interrupted his soliloquy long enough to observe, “He’s too stupid to be a Jew.”

  “He’s not a Jew,” Sami said into the phone.

  “I’m a Jew,” Nathan said.

  “Heinz said that even if you were a Jew you’d lie about being one,” Sami said to me.

  “Okay,” I answered. “I’m a Jew.”

  Nathan moaned.

  “He is a Jew,” Sami said happily.

  “If he’s a Jew,” Nathan said, “I’m an Arab.”

  “I’m an Arab,” Sami said.

  “Of course,” groaned Nathan.

  “Good news, Heinz! The old man does not recognize me. I don’t have to take care of him!” Sami said into the phone. “What? Both of them?”

  Nathan said, “Of course. I get kidnapped by an Arab talking to a Nazi on the telephone.”

  “Both of them, Heinz?!”

  Both of them what? I wondered. This didn’t sound good.

  “Both of them what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about this, Heinz, okay?”

  “Both of them what?!”

 
“We had a girl at Minsky’s used to do an Arab routine,” Nathan observed. “Not that she was an actual Arab, which she wasn’t. She was a French Canadian. Name of Paulette something. Did a belly dance. Girl had a belly flat like a sheet of glass. Lovely girl. Used to go out with a fellow with a glass eye named Hannigan …”

  I could have made him happy and asked what the name of the other eye was, but I was too concerned about Sami’s conversation with Heinz. Sami’s complexion at that moment looked a lot more Scandinavian than Semitic. He was ashen and blubbering, “I don’t know about this, okay?” several times.

  “I don’t know about this, okay?”

  “Let me talk to him,” I suggested.

  He didn’t let me talk to him. He just said, “Yes, Heinz, I understand,” and hung up the phone.

  “What is it you understand, Sami?” I asked.

  “What I understand,” Sami said sadly, “is that I’m supposed to take care of you. Both of you, okay?”

  “And by ‘take care of,’” I said, “you mean …”

  He nodded.

  This time I went for the gun.

  Chapter 14

  Dear Diary,

  What a day!

  This afternoon I got on an airplane and flew to Palm Springs, California, to spend some time with Natty. I had forgotten what a sweet guy he really is! Natty may he old—and not exactly a firecracker, if you know what I mean—but he is a lot of laughs and at my age maybe the laughs are more important.

  So I flew to Palm Springs and took a taxicab to Natty’s condominium in Palm Desert.

  What a place! It sits out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert, and the first thing you see when you come through the gates is a waterfall! In fact, the whole complex—and how nice it’s going to be when they finish it!—is called Desert Waterfalls. Isn’t that cute? Where they get the water I don’t know, but then again they have a lot of fountains in Las Vegas so I guess these people just know how to do these things.

  I thought I’d surprise Natty, but guess what? Natty surprised me! He wasn’t home! Maybe he stayed in Las Vegas for a couple of more days. If I know my Natty, he probably got snuggled up with some chorus girl but I’m not jealous. Good thing he told me where the key was!

  Natty’s place is very nice, as you would expect from someone with Natty’s money. It sits right on the edge of a golf course and I wonder if Natty is worried about golf balls coming through his windows! He has a nice living room with a wonderful view of this golf course and the mountains on the other side. He has two bedrooms, so it will be “decent” for me to be there, as Natty says—as if at this age I’m worried about my reputation, but it is very sweet of Natty to be, don’t you think?

  All the furniture is white, which I think is very interesting, seeing as how my name is White. Maybe this was just meant to be.

  And diary, there’s even a piano!

  The place is very clean and neat, which you would not expect from a widower, so I think Natty must have someone come in.

  Natty’s condominium sits at the end of the street, so he doesn’t really have any neighbors. There is an unfinished condominium across the street and the only one that is next door to Natty must have burned down. You can still smell the fire smell!

  Oh, diary, I hope that Natty was sincere when he invited me to come and stay for a while and that it wasn’t just sweet talk. Natty Silver could always talk a girl right out of her bloomers (blush, blush). But I think he really wants me to be here. I hope he is pleasantly surprised when he comes home and finds me here.

  I was relieved to find out that even though Natty doesn’t have neighbors he does have a lot of friends! I don’t think that I was here more than half an hour—I barely had time to freshen up—when the visitors started to arrive!

  First there was a nice young couple, Mr. Schaeffer and Miss Done, who wanted to talk with Natty. It was so funny, Diary! The young man asked if “Mr. Silverstein” was home.

  I said, “You mean Natty?”

  “Natty?” he said.

  “Sure!” I said. “Natty Silver!”

  You should have seen the smile on this fellow’s face!

  “Nathan Silverstein is Natty Silver!?” he asked.

  “Sure!” I said.

  I thought he was going to start jumping up and down, because it turns out that he is a big fan of Natty’s. He started telling the young woman—who I guess had never heard of Natty (Where’s she from, Diary, Kansas? Ha-ha.)—all about Natty’s days in burlesque, and the old sketches, and lines from Natty’s stand-up routines. This Schaeffer fellow even knew all those stinko beach movies that Natty was in with the boy with the hair and that girl with the bosom. You know, the one that used to be a mouse.

  Well, the Schaeffer fellow was so excited that I took the liberty of inviting them in. (I hope Natty doesn’t mind.) The Schaeffer fellow looked all around the place. He was so thrilled to see some of the mementos that Natty has!

  “This is a picture of Natty with Phil Gold!” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said. Phil Gold was before my time.

  “They say that Silver and Gold’s ‘Who’s on First’ was even better than Abbott and Costello’s!” Schaeffer said.

  Wait until Natty hears this!

  “Don’t get him started on the subject of Lou Costello,” I said.

  Well, Schaeffer would have looked around all day but the girl—and she was perfectly nice and polite—had business on her mind because she asked, “When will Mr. Silverstein he back?”

  I said I didn’t know but that I hoped it would be soon.

  “Are you Mrs. Silverstein?” she asked.

  “No, honey,” I said. “There were at least three Mrs. Silversteins but I’m not one of them. I’m just a friend.”

  Then the boy seemed to realize that the girl wanted to conduct business because he started to talk in a deeper voice and said, “Will you have him telephone me the moment he gets back?”

  Diary, I think that there’s a spark between these two, if you know what I mean.

  He handed me his card. I got a little concerned when I saw it because it said, Craig Schaeffer, Attorney-at-Law. I was afraid that I had made a mistake letting them in because maybe it was one of Natty’s ex-wives trying to get more alimony.

  So I started to say, “Mr. Schaeffer, if you are some kind of shyster here to try to bleed Natty dry, you can just—”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “It’s nothing like that. Mr. Silver might have seen something.”

  “Well, I’ll ask him to call you.”

  “Thank you,” said Schaeffer, and I could tell he didn’t want to leave just yet.

  Miss Done asked me, “By the way, were you here on the night of May thirtieth?”

  “No, honey,” I said. “I was working in Las Vegas.”

  The girl turned red so I added, “I play piano.”

  I mean, Diary, I may have accepted a lovely parting gift from time to time, but I will not let anyone mistake me for a common hooker.

  So I sat down and started to play. I did “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “I’ve Never Been In Love Before” and “What’ll I Do” and they applauded and demanded an encore so I did “Adelaide’s Lament,” which they thought was very funny.

  Diary, I must have sung two dozen songs and Schaeffer made tea and we all sang and had tea and chatted and then I said, “Natty must have some booze somewhere in this place.” We found a fifth of Stoli and Schaeffer, made a pitcher of vodka martinis and we all sat out on the patio and had a nice cocktail.

  After a while, the girl Pamela sat at the piano and sang “Fairest Lord Jesus” and she and I had a good cry. Guess what, Diary! She’s a Methodist, too! From Nebraska, as it turns out. An old farm girl just like me!

  Anyway, they finally had to go—a little tipsy, I think; young people these days just can’t seem to hold their booze—and I was just about to see what was on television when the doorbell rang again.

  This was a big fellow, even taller
than Schaeffer and with muscles like a weight lifter. Short blond hair, blue eyes, chiseled jaw. Very handsome, if you go for that type.

  And the accent, Diary! He talked like one of those Germans in the old movies.

  “Izz Natan at hoom?” he asked.

  “No, he’s not,” I said. “May I ask who is calling on him?”

  He gave me what I’m sure he thought was a very charming smile.

  “Yaah,” he said. “I’m a frient of Natan’s. I was driving by and saw lights and chust taught I’t tropp in to zee how Natan is.”

  “Well, I’m sure he’ll be back soon,” I said.

  Then he smiled kind of funny, Diary. As if he knew something that I didn’t.

  “Zen I koom pack latuh,” he said. And left, just like that!

  After he left I sat down and tried to think of what Nathan could have seen that a lawyer would want to talk to him about.

  And where is Nathan, anyway? He certainly should be home by now.

  Anyway, Diary, as soon as I find out the answers to these questions you can be assured that you’ll be the first to know.

  Your confidante,

  Hope

  Chapter 15

  It was a stupid move.

  All the more so because I knew better. Even if I hadn’t known that this sort of maneuver only works in the movies, I should have realized that a 1965 Mustang doing 80 mph on a dirt road does not respond well to life-and-death struggles between the driver and a passenger.

  Anyway, I lunged between the seats and grabbed the pistol between Sami’s legs. Sami grabbed my wrist, squeezed his legs and pulled back. His eyes were bugging out because the gun barrel was now pointed right at his balls and he was trying to control the car—and doing a pretty good job of it until Nathan took his cigarette and poked him in the eye.

  “Ayyyiiiaaaaaa!” Sami screamed, and Nathan apparently admired the effect so much that he did it again.

  “Ayyyyiiaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

  So the next thing I knew the little car was doing 360s, Sami was screaming, Nathan was yelling, “How do you like that, you little Arab bastard?” and I was holding on to the gun handle in Sami’s crotch and praying that the car wouldn’t flip over and kill us all.