by Tom Lutz
“A whip-smart, whirlwind novel of noir and adventure, humor and horror, cynicism and romance. Lutz’s sterling prose and love of literature light up this unique page-turner about the friendship between a man who would be good and the amoral, magnetic narcissist who comes to dominate his life story.” — Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay
“An instant, finely wrought story of friendship, ingenuity, and blithe evil. Lutz has the seven deadly sins nailed and rethought for our 2020 world. You’ve got to dig this book!” — James Ellroy, author of L.A. Confidential
“What a pleasure, to sink under the comedic spell of Tom Lutz’s debut novel! The perfect book for a dreary day — a gleeful, twisty tale of an unlikely friendship. I’d put it on the shelf between Tom Robbins and Martin Amis, if a place can be cleared there.” — Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral
“A highly literary and always engaging twenty-first-century noir. Born Slippy confronts contemporary questions about the relativity of evil that no one can dodge.”— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
“A smart and propulsive wild ride from the genteel mansions of Hartford, Connecticut to the more louche corners of Asia. Lutz’s debut is a technicolor noir, a smart, literary and literate thriller — like the love child of Elmore Leonard and Graeme Greene. Original and deft and not to be missed.” — Ivy Pochoda, author of Wonder Valley and Visitation Street
“The kind of novel a globetrotting Graham Greene might have written had he lived to trot around our contempo, gone-to-hell globe — now divided into neo-imperialist sociopathic zillionaires, and the rest of us. Born Slippy is smart, dark, funny and, best of all, what used to be called a real page-turner. You’ll love this book.” — Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, I, Fatty, and Old Guy Dad
Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11Shepperton House
89-93 Shepperton Road
London
N1 3DF
United Kingdom
www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2020
1
Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Tom Lutz 2020
Tom Lutz asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Cover design: Johnny Bull
ISBN: 9781912248643
Ebook ISBN: 9781912248650
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd
To Laurie Winer, firecracker
Contents
2013
PART ONE
2000
2002
2004
2006
2007
2000
2012
2000
PART TWO
2013
2000
PART THREE
2013
PART FOUR
2013
PART FIVE
2013
2017
Repeater Books
2013
The blast was felt for blocks. The concussion, the shattering glass, the rip of steel, the roar of falling concrete. The thick, evil odor lasted for days as crews dug through the rubble and gathered debris-encrusted body parts. Passers-by choked on the dust. Frank, when he first saw the images online, felt like he had been there, like the explosion was memory, not a photograph.
He had seen the building, the Credit Lyonnais branch in Taipei, only once, months before, during a brief, very distracted visit to see Dmitry, who was the head of their office there, or head of the region. It had been his first time in Asia. They had stopped in front of the building on Frank’s way out of town, that was all.
But when the Taipei Times website came up on his normal breakfast internet rounds, he immediately recognized the “before” picture. He felt shredded, felt the guilt of all survivors, obsessed with the cruel idea that he could have prevented it.
Which was ridiculous, he knew.
Only Dmitry could have.
Something had caught up with him, Frank thought later that day — Dmitry’s voracious rapacity had finally met its match. He didn’t know how, or who, but he knew its karmic inevitability. Al Jazeera turned up some shaky video the next day, accompanied by the idea that radical Islamists were responsible, which Frank thought unlikely — Dmitry had, by his own account, made many enemies, lots of them much closer to home. The video showed smoke blowing out of what had once been ten or twelve gleaming stories, now not much more than a maw, spewing black and noxious billows.
Did he see it coming? Like sharks and chum, like the Three Stooges with a ladder, like falling in love where you shouldn’t — Frank knew as well as anyone how stories start and how they end. This fiery mess, or something like it, was bound to happen. He had been expecting it for years.
He blamed himself, if not for everything, then for not doing better. After all, he was the one who pretended to be Dmitry’s conscience. He was the one not paying attention, the one who had forsaken his duty, the one who had reneged on the implicit bargain he had made those many years earlier, without telling anyone, without telling Dmitry — without even telling himself. He was supposed to fix Dmitry. But he didn’t. He was inconstant.
He was, after all, the one who fell in love with Dmitry’s wife. He’d set some kind of bomb, too.
Frank Baltimore had first met Dmitry Heald on a building site in the Connecticut hills a dozen years earlier, when the eighteen-year-old Dmitry had come to America — in his Liverpudlian accent it sounded like Ameriker — trailing whatever dusty innocence he might still have had, looking for a little work, wanting to earn some quick money and then wander around for the rest of the summer doing a low-rent grand tour, reeling through the Big Lonesome West, as he always called it. Then he’d fly back to England for university: Leeds or Reading, Frank could never remember which, and didn’t know what the names meant, where they were on the status hierarchy — Ivy League-ish? Loserville? Frank had never gone to college. He had tried once, failed, quit. He had a chip on his shoulder about it, he knew.
He was a kid himself back then, having just turned twenty-six. Like many people approaching thirty, he was haunted by a sense that time was short, that he might remain an irredeemable failure into the flaky, moldy decrepitude that lurked around the bend. The house he was building was his big break, his move up from what he had always called a remodeling business, even though he had been nothing but a glorified handyman. This new house, nestled in the woods at the advancing edge of Hartford’s northwestern insurance-executive suburbs, had been his move into actual contractorland. He never made billions, like Dmitry did, but in the end he did all right. And, he said to himself, looking at the mayhem on his computer screen, he did it without killing or maiming anyone, either.
PART ONE
2000
The house in Connecticut was on a deep flag-shaped lot — the driveway being the pole — running out a forested ridge. A month before Dmitry showed up, the plot had nothing on it but a thick weave of new-growth birch, fir, hemlock, ash, and pine; Frank chain-sawed a dirt-rut drive,
thrilled that the client agreed to leave the rest of the woodland untouched — a lot of people in the neighborhood made monstrous, wasteful lawns, but this guy had at least some ecological restraint.
He subcontracted a backhoe driver and concrete guy. They worked fast, and over the next ten days the foundation was set and — with the help of Jillian Gustafson, a large humorless carpenter — an immense, 60’x30’ rectangular deck appeared, a foot-deep platform of perfect braced joists and sublime subfloor you could drive a missile launcher across, with a single hole for the basement stairs. All neat and clean, square and level, it capped the foundation, bolted and pristine, ready for the rest of the framing. The day they finished, as Jillian was packing up her tools at 5pm sharp, like always, Frank said something about it being a thing of beauty.
“Thing of beauty?” Jillian asked, uninterested. Nine times out of ten, you say something is beautiful, people will agree with you, just to be sociable, Frank thought — especially women, who aren’t, as a tribe, afraid of talking aesthetics like men are. But Jillian avoided standard feminine behavior like she was achieving some political milestone each time. She was good and professional, steady, and knew things — how to use a transom, for instance, thank god, because he didn’t — and more than that, he found something about her tough-guy pose reassuring. He’d never been any good at male bluster, at the backslapping sports talk, and working with her made him more comfortable in his own skin. He liked that she called him by his last name, like guys do. It had always seemed affected to him when he did it in the past, but somehow she made it OK. He called her Gustafson and felt solid.
“Yeah, I call it beautiful, I do,” Frank said, into her doleful stare, volume trailing off, his enthusiasm waning. She stood there, giving him nothing.
And then, almost inaudible, maybe slightly peevish, he added, “Beautiful.”
It wasn’t Jillian alone, he knew that. He had yet to meet anyone who shared his love of framing, those squared-up house bones, their artistic perfection.
“Listen, Baltimore,” she said. “Can you write me a check tonight?”
She was from the Midwest and looked it, like a minor Willa Cather character, all muscle and mild disapproval. She was a better craftsman than Frank, and she was taller and broader too — a big tough carpenter who was religious about her union-mandated breaks.
“You sure you can’t stay on?” he asked. “Even for another week?” She had told him when she started that she could only work for a few weeks, that she was on her way to the Greek islands with her girlfriend. “Please?” The economy was good, and Frank was having real trouble finding carpenters. He had lived all his life in the Massachusetts hill country, and a few years earlier people there would have jumped at a job like this. But now nobody was hard-up enough to come down. The economy was booming, everyone had work, and the fact that Frank was from out of town didn’t help. Paul — his partner in the project — was useless; he was new to the area too, and the sole working-class person he knew was Frank. Frank had found Jillian through the lumberyard and checked with them every day for a replacement. No luck yet.
“Can’t do it,” she said.
Frank looked up and noticed a kid walking down the lane, lumbering out of the woods like a sated bear, at a pace he would soon learn to hate, with a goofy grin and a few red zits on his very white English face, his dark hair in its permanent dishevelment.
“Hey,” he said. He was 6’1” or so, maybe 6’2” given the slight slouch.
“Hey?” Frank asked.
“That’s right, isn’t it?” he said, sounding like John Lennon, still grinning. “That’s how you say it here. Hey, and then you chuck your chin like this, right?” He pointed toward Frank with his chin a couple times, and then once at Jillian. “Hey,” he added to her.
“Hey,” she said back, without looking. She walked over to her truck, threw her toolbelt behind the driver’s seat.
Frank knew who the kid had to be — Dmitry, the son of friends of friends. His parents had each written Frank a letter filled with polite harrumphing, pleading to give him a job. Thinking about them reminded Frank that nobody likes begging.
“My check, Baltimore?” Jillian said, coming back.
“I can up your hourly, you know,” Frank said, reaching into his truck to get his books. “Time and half if you give me another week to find someone.”
“We’ve been over this. No.”
Jeez, Gustafson, Frank thought, you could sound some slight note of empathy, it wouldn’t kill you, a tiny smidgen of regret that you’re leaving me in a jam. Nothing. He leaned over the table saw — it doubled as a desk — and opened his checkbook.
“Been over this.” Dmitry said. “I like that.”
They both looked at him.
“Looks like my timing is perfect,” he said, pulling out a box of Marlboro reds and lighting one up.
“You’re Dmitry, right?” Frank asked, though who else could he be?
“Hey, yeah, no, really,” Dmitry said. “That’s another Americanism.”
He was smiling at Jillian. She was frowning at him. Frank’s friends in the hills of Western Massachusetts, Dmitry’s quasi-relatives, had suggested he would be a good worker, but his parents had been less convincing, and something seemed off about the kid. He was doughy and heavy-lidded, and maybe sinister, watching Jillian like he was a bloated mosquito just landed on her sleeping arm.
Frank copied the amounts for pay and taxes from her last check stub. He didn’t have to calculate her hours. Jillian worked, hell or high water, a straight forty.
Still grinning, Dmitry asked her, tipping his head sideways toward Frank: “So what’s he like to work for, between us?”
She made a point of looking away into the woods. “Fine,” she said, and found an itch to scratch on her shoulder.
“Well I must say, you aren’t much of a talker, but you are a great strong woman, aren’t you?” he said to her, but she ignored him, not about to be baited.
“Baltimore?” she said. He finished recording her check, ripped it out, and handed it to her.
“Really strong,” Dmitry said. “Want to Indian wrestle some time? You know, the one with the legs?” She turned and gave him a casual, well-worn glare.
“Thanks,” she said to Frank, walking away. “Good luck,” she added, maybe in reference to Dmitry. She got in her truck, and before she pulled out, she rolled down the window and said, “Hope you make your boat.” He had told her about his dream — building a sailboat and sailing around the globe — but she had never before given any indication she had heard him. It was nice of her to say. She rolled her window back up and drove off. She didn’t look back.
Trog had come to see him about hiring Dmitry, a week before it was time to head to Connecticut to start Paul’s house. Frank had been working in musty Turner’s Falls, a town that was exactly what would happen if you built a movie set of the perfect New England hill town, with a picturesque river running through it, and then let the paint peel off, the metal rust, and half the wood rot. Lately, though, newcomers were arriving, sprucing up some of the churches, refurbishing a rundown factory building for retail shops, getting the old water wheels running again. Frank was building an old-fashioned well-house for some newly arrived weekenders, a miniature, rough-board Currier & Ives thing with a cute wooden bucket they could hang a plant in. Cheesy, Frank thought, city folk getting rural with a fake well-house — the pail was nonfunctional. But the money was good, and he was working alone, his preference. He was sucking on a soggy sandwich and finishing Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw when Trog pulled up in his ancient VW bug.
Frank’s college-educated friends had told him James’s prose was too difficult, and at first it was, but once he realized how it was put together, he could relax and enjoy it. He was just figuring out that The Turn of the Screw was not about the governess; it was about the cook. There were no ghosts, no corruption. The cook wanted to drive the governess mad, because the governess had her eyes set on t
he man whose niece and nephew she was supposedly protecting. The governess was a spectacular failure — the cook won — and the nephew ended up dead. The irony was not lost on him that Trog was asking him to do something for his nephew.
“How’s it going?” Frank asked without inflection as Trog grunted his way out of the VW. Trog was round-faced and round-bodied, bald on top with long stringy side hair, a wild grey beard, and an oversized, misshapen potato of a nose. He looked like a cross between an angry, gone-to-seed David Crosby and a nineteenth-century Polish syndicalist bomber.
“Struggling,” he said, as he always did, looking for a prompt to rage against his legion of tormentors. When Frank said nothing, he moved on. “You have any coffee?”
“No, just what’s left in my cup.”
“Huh,” Trog said, in his customary put-upon grumble, handing Frank two envelopes. “My nephew Dmitry — you know, this kid I told you about? — well, his parents sent a couple letters for you.”
Both letters were already open.
“You read them.”
“Yeah, nothing interesting, really.”
They were addressed to Frank, c/o Trog and Catherine.
“Federal offence, you know.” Why people put up with him, the bilious old goat, Frank didn’t know. He was opinionated, grumpy, irritable, and full of conspiracy theories. But it was a small town. You put up with each other. And with time, you grew fond, or if not fond, familiar.
Trog eyed the thermos like he knew Frank was lying about the coffee, one eyebrow hiked up, stroking his anarchist’s beard. Frank looked at the letters.
Dear Mr. Baltimore:
Dreadfully sorry to intrude, but since his gallant Uncle Trog and intrepid Aunt Cathy had suggested the remote possibility, I dare write this excessively presumptuous impudent missive, which you are well within your rights to consider all mouth and no trousers, or, as we used to say in the Midlands when I was a kid, “all my eye and Peggy Martin.” I wouldn’t blame you if you found my parental ramblings as daft as a brush — nonetheless, I do hope you won’t [something crossed out] find it amiss to give some consideration to affording my Dmitry some small role, any kind of noddy work at all, in your operation.
