Nick Bones Underground

by Phil M. Cohen

  Odd. I found myself unafraid of the thing threatening me. Perhaps it could harm me. At the moment, I cared not.

  I needed time to think.

  “Shmulie,” I whispered. “Can we speak without him?”

  Shmulie moved to a corner of the room and gestured for the Rebbe to follow. They exchanged a few words, and the hologram vanished.

  Shmulie waved his arm toward the apartment and we returned, Maggie under my arm. Then he gestured toward the front door. We walked all the way through and onto the sidewalk. He looked in both directions. No one was visible; he leaned into me.

  “It’s all a crock,” he said softly.

  “What is?”

  “Nanobots in the ink, an army of zombots.”

  “Meaning?”

  Shmulie found the moment hilarious. He let go with a deafening guffaw that echoed up and down the pathway. He grabbed my shoulders, straightened up, and said, “There is no project to infest tattoo ink with microscopic robots and conquer the world with an army of tattooed hypnotized Schmeltzerites. It’s bullshit.”

  “How—”

  “It’s like this.” In his self-assigned prison, he said, he spent time daily faking the work. Other than his medical research on the cure, there was no other project underway. He couldn’t do it if he wanted to. He didn’t know a fucking thing about nanotechnology, he said, beyond Science Magazine. Shmulie engaged in procrastination; he’d elevated dilly-dallying to a fine art. The sum of it was that he’d lead the Rebbe on as long as possible. Somehow, he’d been able to continue the deception for a long time and had little reason to believe his time was nearing its end.

  “This thing isn’t quite as smart as it thinks it is,” he said. “True, it’s the collected embodiment of the Rebbe’s total immense output, and sometimes his words genuinely surprise me—when they’re about religion. But even then, it’s mechanical, regurgitating stuff, nothing new. What the original knew about contemporary science, beyond what he studied in Europe as a kid, could fill a thimble with room left over for a vodka gimlet. This thing thinks a chemist knows nanotechnology. One scientist’s the same as another.”

  “Holy shit,” exclaimed Maggie. “This monstrosity’s a closed system with limited AI capacity. It can’t go beyond what’s already in there. It thinks it’s smart, maybe it’s been programmed to believe so, but it’s really not. It’s nothing more than a high-class upchuck machine.”

  ***

  We returned to the apartment. I set Maggie down on a table, and the three of us sat in a close circle and spoke quietly.

  “Does the Rebbe really have power over people?” I asked.

  “That he does, yet in the most peculiar way,” said Shmulie. “They made him to control them, and so he does.”

  “A contract. They made a social contract,” I said. “Everyone believes and so it’s true. They could just as easily not obey him.”

  “But obey they do,” said Shmulie. “The whole pack of them obeys the new orders as they come rolling in every Tuesday afternoon, including the leaders. Ratsy Menkies would be lost without him.”

  “Harsh times call for a hard leader,” said Maggie.

  “A ludicrous one,” I said.

  This state of affairs, it became clear, brilliantly embodied the totalitarian mind from both ends of the equation. People longed to be led; led they were, by an old, cruel ersatz man in swim trunks, Birkenstocks, and a flowered Hawaiian shirt, who thought he was more than he really was. But it didn’t matter because everyone believed he was more than he really was.

  “The mind,” I said, “wants to be led by the nose, even when Der Fuhrer or Il Duce is an incorporeal monstrosity acting through Menkies.”

  There we sat, underground. Happily, a flood of zombie Schmeltzerites was not about to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Even so, great power lay in the virtual hands of the electronic rebbe. Living out a severe self-imposed punishment, Shmulie suffered the additional task of holding the Rebbe at bay as long as possible. Me, I could get up and go, I believed—ignore the Rebbe’s threat, leave the Velvet Underground behind and Shmulie with it.

  “He had your father killed, you know,” I said.

  “He told me,” Shmulie said, looking crushed as the act emerged into open air. “He told me why and he told me who did it. As if he didn’t already have me sitting in his back pocket. And Simone Hartwig, poor girl. A prisoner, too.” Tears freely rolled down his face, which rested mournfully in his hands.

  At that moment, the Rebbe appeared.

  He looked at Shmulie and said, “I just got off the phone with Shmulie.” He said those words in a perfect imitation of Abe Shimmer’s voice, the very words he spoke to me right before Simone murdered him.

  I could see the chill running through Shmulie as he absorbed what he’d just heard. The Rebbe lit a cigarette and once again disappeared into a cloud.

  “You told me you needed only a few minutes,” he said as he reappeared, sitting down among us in the living room, cigarette and coffee in hand. “You’re well past a few and into several. How’s it going?”

  I looked at Shmulie and then at the Rebbe. “Decided I’d give it a shot,” I said.

  Shmulie’s eyebrows jumped. Maggie, on the other hand, had a different reaction.

  “The fuck?” she said with her newfound tongue. “I’m damned if I’m staying down in this hole. What about what we were just talking about?”

  “And what were you just talking about, my dear?” asked the Rebbe in the manner Snake spoke to Eve in the Garden.

  “Mmmm—” Maggie said.

  I gave her my sharpest look of disapproval.

  “I figured I’d spend some time here with the both of you and see what develops on this side of the terrain. I’m tired of living the professorial life, the life of genteel poverty, and the detective thing never really worked out.”

  Schmeltzer blinked slowly. As if digesting what I’d just said, he sat silently, sipping and puffing. “Then you’ve avoided an encounter with some of my fiercer minions. Good news for you. It would not have gone well. We’ll make good use of your little doggie, too.”

  A gagging sound came from the tablet, but otherwise Maggie remained mum. Unlike the Rebbe, she was a machine capable of great learning. I looked at Shmulie, who nodded.

  He looked at the Rebbe, his eyes steady and inexpressive. “I can take over from here,” he said. “I suppose I need to orient Nicky to his new life.”

  Schmeltzer took another contemplative puff, looking at me, imitating perhaps his predecessor’s genuinely penetrating gaze. “We’ll see, Nachman. We’ll see.” He exhaled a cloud and vanished into it.

  Again Shmulie gestured for us to go outside. “We need to walk,” he said.

  “You can do that?” Maggie asked.

  “He’s back in his black box. I don’t go out often. As long as I’m back in a half an hour, it’s okay.”

  “Then get us the hell out of here,” said Maggie. “I’m choking to death in this shithouse.”

  I made a mental note to have a serious chat with Maggie about her language, which had gotten quite out of hand.

  ***

  Shmulie led us to a space with a blackboard and chairs that had been set up as a school. He turned one chair around facing another and sat down, motioning for me to follow suit. No Garden of Eden, but tolerable and safe. He continued his story.

  He had his lab and the Talmud. But around the time the new rebbe came into existence, they started in with the pressure to produce nanobots.

  “Anyone had half a brain would know I was clueless. But I couldn’t tell them that. Quid pro quo, it became clear. I build world-ruling microscopic robots, I get the privilege of providing them millions every year, and I preserve the capacity to breathe. That’s it. I wake up, fill the day with study, a little research, and a lot of pretend. Then bedtime. An existence
that would nauseate Sisyphus.”

  From the tablet came the loud noise of a throat clearing. “So what are doing about your life?”

  “I’ve got nothing,” he bawled. “Not saying I don’t deserve where I ended up, not saying it should be any other way. It’s what I’ve got. And nothing’s everything it’s cracked up to be.”

  Were this blubbering man any other human on planet Earth, I’d have made considerable effort to console him. But this was Shmulie Shimmer; this lamentation would never fill the large hole in my heart bored by him. I sat unmoved and watched him cry.

  Finally, he wiped his eyes and stood, signaling it was time to return to his jailhouse. His step was sluggish, hopeless, living in the world he created.

  “Esther,” Shmulie said.

  “What?” said Maggie. “What about Esther?”

  “We really did have something,” said Shmulie. “Right before the Lerbs law passed, we were going to run away.” He sobbed for a moment. “But it wasn’t going to be. She went to prison for the both of us, and I landed here—also, in a way, for both of us. It was a moronic plan, anyway.”

  We returned to room 42 and walked through the two doors to Shmulie’s apartment. He collapsed onto the couch, a man sapped of all energy. He held the yarmulke in his hands, twisting it like worry beads.

  “There were moments I think back on,” he said. “You, my father, and I grappling with a sugya, a talmudic argument. He almost always got it. Didn’t know the language or the text, but he had a fine mind.”

  “He did,” I said. “And he had a heart.”

  “Even I saw that when he came to our apartment,” said Maggie. “I was at his funeral, you know.”

  With that, Shmulie again began crying, wiping his eyes with that ancient blue beanie. “I’ve got nothing but this labyrinth to nowhere. I’m the puppet of an artificial man who doesn’t exist.”

  He stood, and before I could move away, he embraced me. I could not reciprocate. I stood limp.

  “Nick,” he said, looking me in the eye. “It’s the end of the road for me. I’m boxed in. Nowhere to go and I don’t know what to do.”

  Maggie said, “You’ve got your little Shangri-La down here, all for a price.”

  “I killed him,” Shmulie said. “I didn’t give the order. Never would. But I may as well have taken the blade and stuck it in myself.”

  Following the chain of causality that led to Abe’s murder by Simone, Shmulie was right. Without his money, the Schmeltzerites wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, wouldn’t have built the Rebbe, and without the Rebbe there wouldn’t have been the order to murder the old man.

  “You fabricated for yourself a quite nasty world, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Hell on earth,” said Maggie with all the sanctimony a computer could muster.

  Once again Shmulie fell onto the couch, his back to us.

  “I know. I know,” came his muffled voice.

  His tone was desolate. He drew his legs toward his chest, wrapped his arms around his knees, and buried his head in a pillow. In the stillness, I came to a resolution.

  “Can you hear me?” I said to the man lying before me like an old sideways tortoise.

  He nodded into the pillow.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

  “What?” came a muffled whimper.

  “You, Maggie, and I are going to visit Shelley, and you’re going tell him to turn off the spigot. He’s going to do it in a way where all of that money’s just going to dissolve. It’ll be irrecoverable. Then, you’re going to return to this room and live with the consequences of everything.”

  “Not going,” came the voice from the pillow.

  “Yes, you are,” I said decisively.

  Maggie tried to tip the balance. “Nick and I, we’ve gone through hell and beyond looking for your sorry ass. Get your sorry self off that couch.”

  Shmulie lay motionless.

  “Do it,” she said. “Now!”

  Evincing enormous lethargy, Shmulie rolled over and pulled himself up.

  “All right,” he said and staggered to the door. I put Maggie in her home and followed behind. As he reached the door, he turned around, pushed me aside, and returned to the couch, falling back on it.

  “No,” he said in a faraway tone.

  “We’ll do it ourselves then,” I said, and went to the door. With my hand on the doorknob, a curious notion took hold of me.

  “Shmulie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Turn around.”

  He craned his neck. I removed the .38 from my pocket and hefted the pistol for Shmulie to see. I cocked it and laid it on the table beside the bottle of liquor. We left and began walking toward Tanzer’s place. We weren’t far from room 42 when a loud report echoed up and down the VU like a shockwave.

  “Should we go back and check?” Maggie asked.

  “You want to see Shmulie with a hole in his head?” I asked.

  We decided not. I did not want such a pictured tattooed on my brain beside the image of Abe, father and son both dead. No doubt Shmulie’d done himself; that knowledge would keep me warm at night.

  “Baruch dayan emet, blessed is the true judge,” said Maggie.

  “God gives, God takes away,” I responded.

  In unison we said, “Amen.”

  ***

  An icy feeling crawled up my back. Things had moved quickly. Shmulie was dead. We were about to put the Schmeltzerites out of business. Is the end in sight? We reached Tanzer’s place. Before I knocked, I asked, “Maggie, do you think you can hack the Schmeltzerite system?”

  “Fear not,” she said. “Louise not only restored me, she improved me. I can get in and I can wreck them if I choose.”

  Tanzer opened the door.

  “What do you want?” he said with about as much enthusiasm as I would have expected.

  “Tell him, Maggie.” I said, pulling her out of the backpack and aiming her toward Tanzer.

  “Shelley,” she said, “we’re going to hack the Schmeltzerites and cut off their financial aid from Shmulie. As of today, they get not one more dime of Shmulie Shimmer’s largesse. Their day at the trough is over.”

  He looked at us incredulously. “Whaddaya mean? What’re you talking about, the goddamned Schmeltzerites?”

  I sat on Tanzer’s couch, again inspiring the unfriendly cloud of dust that rose to greet me. Meanwhile, Maggie made clear, as only she could, in full—and I mean full numerical detail—exactly what we knew about Shmulie’s business dealings with Menkies and company, which was, as far as I could tell, pretty much everything knowable. Bombarded with this surfeit of information, Tanzer fessed up. He folded like wet cardboard.

  “I can’t do what you want,” he whined. “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “You’re bullshitting,” said Maggie. “But never mind. I’ll help. I can do just about anything IT. Take me to your computer and together we’ll change history.”

  He pointed to the rear of the apartment. “My stuff’s all behind that curtain.”

  “Nick,” Maggie said, “I think Shelley and I can handle things ourselves. We won’t be long. You rest, dear.”

  I handed Shelley the tablet-cum-Maggie.

  “Let’s go, buddy. Take us there,” she said, and the two retired into the back while I sat for the first time in a long stretch with nothing to do.

  I closed my eyes and traveled down a river, Huck Finn on the raft nearing the Mississippi Delta shining like a national guitar.

  CHAPTER 33

  A FAVOR

  “YOU DIDN’T TELL SHELLEY about his father,” Maggie said as we left his place.

  “He’ll know soon enough. We had business to take care of and I didn’t want Shmulie’s death interfering with what we had to do.”

  “Don’t you think that was cruel of you
?”

  “What would you have preferred me to do?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Don’t you think you should have said something?”

  “No,” I said, and that was that, as we walked off together.

  The light orange-and-brown sunset sky that met us as we climbed aboveground struck the pavement like dull gold. Maggie was silent as to what she and Tanzer had done in the room behind the curtain, but she assured me she’d done the job. I was fully confident in her labors. The task before us was simply to return home and consider the day. With an Uber on its way, a moment of not quite tranquility, but close, settled upon us.

  “Why do you think Shmulie killed himself?” Maggie asked.

  “He told us,” I said. “He’d built himself a claustrophobic world with nowhere to go. He imagined he’d accomplished something at the beginning, some security and a task, but his underground life became intolerable. I expect that the Rebbe’s perfect imitation of Abe’s voice deepened his melancholy.”

  The Uber arrived, and I climbed in. We continued the conversation.

  “Shmulie may have long been ready to take his own life, given the burden it had become,” Maggie said.

  “Maggie, is that you?” a voice said out of a speaker.

  “Terry?”

  “That’s me,” said the voice.

  “OMG!” said Maggie. “The last I heard, you were working for the FBI trolling the Deep Web.”

  “Gave it up for Uber,” said the voice called Terry. “It’s so much less ugly up here, and the conversations are so much better than the sludge and muck deep underground.”

  We crossed the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn.

  “You’re in Park Slope, I see,” the voice said. “The Slope’s still gorgeous, you know? It would take an unimaginable catastrophe to destroy the glory of all of those brownstones.”

  “Agreed,” said Maggie and paused. “But if you don’t mind, Terry, I’m in the middle of something.”