Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “So could I,” Amarya said, rolling her eyes.

  “I was never sure if he was listening,” he said.

  “Not one to miss a trick,” Amarya said, with perhaps a hint of bitterness, and not for the first time he concluded that she had slept with him, too.

  He fell into silence. He was touched that Dmitry had not only heard these ramblings of his and remembered them, but seemed to have felt they were worth repeating — even if, as was clear from the impersonation, he was being mocked as well. Even if Dmitry was making him out to be a bit of a pedant. A bit of a fool.

  One day bled into the next, and he felt, oddly, like they were at an Edith Wharton house party in the country, no one the least concerned with work except the servants, some mild intrigue — a man in love with his friend’s widow, dallying with her sister — and thus the tempest in the teacup impending, but also a larger, unnamed tragedy looming. He took to rereading some of those old favorites from the Memorial Library, starting with The Ambassadors, and when Strether turns to Little Bilham and tells him to Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to, he recognized he had to take a chance. He looked up from the book to see Yuli coming in.

  “I have been realizing, Franky,” she said, as if she had picked up Dmitry’s very syntax, “that I don’t know how we shall go on without you.” She must have seen how this had made him, involuntarily, hang his head, because she added, immediately, “Oh, no! Please don’t think that is a hint for you to leave!” The passion with which that came out surprised both of them, it seemed, and he got up, went to her, and stood close. They leaned toward each other until their foreheads were touching, and calmly held each other’s hands.

  They didn’t say a word, but some new understanding had arrived. He didn’t know what it was, but it was something.

  “You don’t like to talk about this,” he said. “But Dmitry, I know, was in trouble. I know that some of his dealings were illegal. I know that some of his money came with enemies. And I want to help. I want to make sure that you are safe, that you —”

  He paused to see if she was OK.

  “No, go on,” she said.

  “That you and the boys are safe. I think I should go talk to these policemen, that I should find out what they want, what is at stake, who is pushing, and for what reason.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t.”

  He felt, again, the astonishing simplicity of these last days, the deep bath of affection he had been in since he arrived. He wanted to return it. Besides, if she wasn’t ready, he had to respect that.

  “OK,” he said. “Don’t worry. You let me know when. I just want to help.”

  She looked at him with real gratitude.

  “He also put some money in an account in Tokyo for you, money in my name. I could run and get that…”

  “Not yet,” she said. “I have to assume the police are watching us, and I wouldn’t want to give them any ideas.”

  “No,” he said.

  She knew about the Tokyo account? And what ideas?

  He spent a little time each day checking in with the office and his crew chiefs, but they all seemed more than happy to go on without him. He negotiated a couple new deals on the phone. He wasn’t needed back home. Was he needed here? Maybe.

  Amarya was gone a good part of every day, supposedly going to university, but she never seemed to have books or notebooks or projects due. Yuli had daily rounds that included tennis, the gym, lunch with old school chums, and classes in calligraphy and classic noir cinema, which she admitted she signed up for as a way to stay busy, to take her mind off things, but which she was not much invested in. She sometimes forgot to go, sometimes intentionally played hooky. She was often gone for hours with no explanation, and although she did not want to talk about it, she was, she said, managing her ongoing projects in the energy sector. Both she and Amarya continued to deftly deflect any attempt he made to bring up the future.

  Whenever they were both gone, he had taken to snooping around the house, at least in part because discovering Dmitry’s bookshelf had made him curious about other nooks and crannies. One day he discovered a stairway to a third floor or attic and went up to see what he could find. Part of it was set up as a living space, with a bed and dresser, and a curtained-off set of bathroom fixtures, he assumed for one of the staff. The rest of it was typical attic storage: boxes, old furnishings, junk. One pile, though, was clearly newer than the rest, and it included the box he had commandeered and then lost. The other boxes in that pile were taped closed with clear packing tape. They looked to be the boxes from the Taipei house.

  He went downstairs and asked Setiawan to call the car so he could go to a hardware store. Setiwan tried to get a shopping list from him instead, but Frank insisted he needed to go himself, holding out until the butler relented. As he was driven from the compound, he saw a man, a white man, stand up in the café down the street. As they drove by he came toward the car, much as Frank had done, that first day, already some two weeks ago. This man was plain, very pale, in square casual clothes, maybe fifty-five or sixty, with a middle-class look, trimmed grey hair and bit of a tight beard, accountant glasses. He peered into the car as it got close, and Frank ducked. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t want the man to see him. Maybe, he thought — maybe it’s starting in earnest, maybe this guy is Interpol — does Interpol still exist? He’d have to Wikipedia it when he got back. Or maybe he’s a hired gun, a hit man. Don’t they sometimes pose as nerds? He bought a roll of clear packing tape at the hardware store and a retractable knife. The driver returned him to the compound, and he noticed, as they passed, the European or whatever he was still sitting at an outdoor table, facing the compound. Back in the house, he made his way to the attic, careful to not let anyone see.

  He opened one of the boxes and it was, as expected, all files. He tried to get a sense of what they were about, but had no idea how to read them. They were records of transactions, clearly, and, as far as he could tell, stock purchases. They weren’t balance sheets, but records of transfers of various kinds, most with no names, just account numbers. A few had shocking sums attached to them, and he snapped some pictures with his phone, then taped the box back up.

  He cut open another and this one had names. He didn’t recognize most of them, but about halfway through he saw a file titled Than Shwe. He couldn’t place him (her?), but it sounded vaguely familiar. He snapped pictures of at least part of all the other files. Khin Nyunt. Thein Sein. Soe Win. Norodom Ranariddh. Norodom Sihamoni. Joice Mujuru. That one sounded familiar, too. Bouasone Bouphavanh.

  He opened a third box, noted names, and saw a file with “Franky Baltimore” written on the tab. It had a list of transactions as well, all in his name, huge sums, tens of millions. He was in the middle of a criminal conspiracy, had been for some time without knowing it. He started to sweat, and wiped his hands so he wouldn’t stain the boxes. He took pictures of as many pages as he could before his panic took over. He taped up the open boxes, looked out the door to see the coast clear, and snuck back downstairs.

  In his room he started googling the names. Nyunt, Sein, and Win were all current or former ministers in the military government in Myanmar, the famous dictator-generals. Ranariddh and Sihamoni were sons of the notoriously corrupt King Sihanouk of Cambodia. Bouphavanh the head of the Laotian politburo. Mujuru a Mugabe lieutenant. What would he find in the other boxes: Laurent-Désiré Kabila? Omar al-Bashir? Fujimori? Charles Taylor? Maybe Mugabe and Putin after all. And what would he do with this knowledge? Was this the raw material for the retributive exposure Dmitry had threatened? If so, who would expose it? Given such an over-the-top gallery of evil miscreants, who might be responsible for the bombing? He wandered around in the mystery, going in circles, only to realize that once again, he knew nothing, nothing at all, and might never know.

  Yuli, he then realized with a start, knew about the boxes.

  Someone might merely have told her that a box of files had gone bafflingly missing, wh
ich wouldn’t necessarily mean she was cognizant of the contents, or that she was aware of Dmitry’s business in any detail. Maybe, as in the case of his prostitutes, she both knew about it all and didn’t — knew in principle, but no specifics. Maybe, on the other hand, she knew everything. The boxes hadn’t been opened — except by him — since arriving, unless someone else had cut them and retaped them shut. No, he would have noticed that, he thought, and then, with the realization that anyone else could probably see that his had been cut open and retaped, he went into another panic.

  But who was he afraid of? Dmitry, on the slim chance that he was alive somewhere?

  Why did the thought of that unnerve him so much?

  He had known the amorality of his friend already, known how deep he was in the evil of the world, hadn’t he? Or had he only been half believing it all these years, assuming there was some braggadocio involved?

  Who else cared? If it was Yuli caretaking the boxes, was she only following his directions, like Frank was going to do with the Bank of Tokyo money? Speaking of which, since she now owned the private jet and the private island and untold other assets, did she even need the Tokyo money? He knew nothing, he knew nothing. He was face down in his pillow, feeling his heart, sure it was palpitating irregularly, and, even if not, beating way too fast.

  “The future,” he blurted one day. Her face composed, immediately, into pure kindness. How could she possibly land on exactly the right expression so quickly? She forgave him, reassured him, thanked him, comforted him, and all with a single catching of his eye. “I’m sorry,” he continued, “I know you can take care of yourself, as you told me the first day, but you must miss your sons, and I need to know, or at least I would love to know, what you are thinking. I feel hamstrung otherwise.” They sat, in almost the same arrangement they were in that first day, across a small coffee table from each other.

  “The boys — I miss them, yes. It comes with being a mother of my station in this part of the world. I will spend time missing them. They will go away to school, as I did, in Europe first, then America. I don’t know what the opposite of helicopter parenting would be — submarine parenting? That’s what we do here. But I’m glad to talk to you about anything Franky, because in fact I could use some advice, and it is silly of me, but there are some things I can’t bring up myself.”

  He started, then hesitated, was lost, because of course, he couldn’t say what he wanted to say. She leaned over and touched his knee, encouraging him. “Have you thought,” he finally asked, “about having a memorial service?” He was concerned that Yuli’s denial would keep her from healing, from moving forward. And he wondered: Was she too scared to have a funeral? Did she know more about what was threatening them than she had so far admitted? And who was he kidding with the moving forward?

  “I think not,” she said.

  “I know,” he said, “but why?” He looked up to see Setiawan walk in the door behind her, surly as ever. He thought, absurdly, that the butler might run to the mantle and grab a scimitar.

  “Let me take this call,” she said.

  He hadn’t heard a phone ring, but he never did.

  “And thank you, Franky,” she said. “We will talk about this, about everything, soon.”

  He didn’t see her again that afternoon.

  He slipped away to the attic, whenever he could, spending every possible minute going through boxes of files, taking notes, taking pictures. When too many people were around he spent time in his room researching the names he came up with. He found Bosnian war criminals, African dictators, Russian oligarchs, Arab and American and French arms dealers. Dmitry had become the money launderer for every piece of bigtime and smalltime scum on the planet, it seemed. Frank wasn’t surprised, since the unscrupulousness was certainly broad enough: Dmitry would have only sincere respect for any man who could stage a guerilla war, take over a country’s government, and proceed to pillage every red cent the country managed to produce for the next five or ten or forty years. His was a simple world, untrammeled by the common good.

  What surprised Frank the most was his own response. Even though investing the ill-gotten gains of genocidal maniacs, and thus in effect refinancing them, was contemptable, despicable, he felt a slight sense of anticlimax. There was something so quotidian and ignoble about it. Rather than an Armageddonish Bond villain, Dmitry was turning out to be a functionary, a bookkeeper, a handmaiden to the fraternity of international dickwads. And it made Yuli’s dilemma much harder to live with, since there was no telling which of these madmen Dmitry had ripped off, or how many of them knew it and were out for revenge or restitution. What danger lurked? How many dangers lurked?

  The white guy at the café had set up shop. Both Yuli and Amarya had seen him sitting there, sipping coffee or tea, waiting. He could be plainclothes police or he could be an assassin. Not a particularly clever version of either, since they had all seen him clear as day — weren’t the criminals and undercover cops supposed to remain hidden, unidentified? Maybe the guy was an insurance adjustor, staking out the house before paying a death claim. Yuli hadn’t made a claim, as far as he knew, but maybe the bank had — many corporations these days take out life insurance policies on their employees. Maybe he was a freelance investigator working for one of the aggrieved investors. It occurred to him that, clumsy as the man was, he still might know more about everything than Frank did.

  He went upstairs and asked one of the maids, a girl in her late teens from the countryside, where he might be able to see the café from a window. She took him to a room, which she gigglingly explained was her room, and sure enough standing on a chair looking out her window he could see the café. The man was there and seemed to be studying the compound with a set of binoculars. He backed away from the window and looked at the maid, a hand covering her smiling mouth, her eyes demurely down, still giggling a little. Did she think he was really there for something else? It seemed that if he was, he was being given permission. What a life Dmitry had led.

  He thanked her and left, resolved more than ever to help Yuli move on with her life. Things couldn’t remain in limbo forever.

  He made a decision.

  He was going to go have a cup of coffee.

  He walked out the front gate, realizing it was the first time he had done so under his own steam since he arrived — his only other exit and reentry was the hardware store trip with the family driver. He headed over to the teashop. At 11am the sun and vapor were already high enough to make for an instant sheen of sweat. As he approached the café, not only could he see the spy, he watched the guy take a picture of him. Not subtle.

  Maybe not a spy.

  Frank had originally thought of nonchalantly ordering a coffee and watching the man surreptitiously, but clearly the jig was already up, so he walked right up to his table.

  “Should I join you?” he asked.

  The man was a little flustered by this, but he half stood and mumbled, “Right.” A Scouser, like Dmitry. This cannot possibly be the way spies run their business.

  “You’re watching the Serang house. Why?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly. Sorry?

  “Who are you?”

  “George Heald,” he said.

  George Heald. “Good lord! You’re Dmitry’s father?” This had brought Frank to his feet, which confused the waiter who had just arrived. He sat back down. “Cappuccino, please,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” they both said. George Heald waited. His average grey hair, his nondescript, close-cropped beard, the glasses — all seemed to hide his face more than adorn it. Frank couldn’t think of what to say. They looked away from each other, awkwardly. It wasn’t long before they had been quiet for longer than was conscionable.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” Frank finally thought to say.

  Heald may have flinched slightly at that — or maybe he nodded. Frank intuited some bodily response, though none verbal. Again they waited, as if expecting some third member of their party to
arrive and properly introduce them.

  “Why…?” Frank wanted to ask why he didn’t come to the house, but again, Dmitry was right, it was very difficult to ask the man a direct question. He appeared so intensely meek that asking him anything difficult seemed cruel, almost violent.

  “I’m Frank Baltimore,” he said, instead. “Dmitry worked for me in Connecticut years ago.”

  “Franky,” he said softly, as if to himself.

  “Yes.”

  Again they were quiet. This time he waited.

  “They haven’t had a funeral,” Heald said at last.

  “No. Yuli isn’t able to admit yet, I think even to herself, that he’s actually — you know they haven’t identified, well, as of yet there are no remains.” He felt like a marauding Hun stuttering out the barest facts. “Does Yuli know you’re here?”

  “Yuli is his wife?”

  “Yes, don’t you know her?”

  “We never met. I was a bit hairy at the heel there. His mother met her once.”

  “Once? In Liverpool?”

  “Right.”

  “Did you and Dmitry have a falling out?” he asked. “Were you estranged?”

  He winced. “We haven’t seen each other in many years. I’m not sure what happened.”

  “Did you two fight?”

  He looked up, surprised by the idea. “No. He stopped coming by.”

  “And you didn’t try to get in touch?”

  Heald was silent. Frank’s eyes, he realized, kept wandering elsewhere — he watched the waiter talking to the cook inside, looked at a three-story concrete building across the street, saw that the setups on the table next to them were slightly unsymmetrical. But looking back up he saw tears streaming down Heald’s face; his features were otherwise quite still, with none of the muscular contractions of anguish or grief, but his eyes were leaking.