Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “I want to make you forget everything you’ve ever known,” he said at one point, kneeling over her and grazing his fingers lightly up and down her stomach, “I want to make you remember everything you have ever forgotten.” She jumped up, threw her arms around his neck, kissed his mouth hard, and then said, into his neck in a whisper, “That is the loveliest, most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.” And that, in turn, felt like the most lovely and beautiful thing anyone had ever said to him. They were on the mountain. They were in the clouds.

  “Promise me,” she whispered to him, again straight in his ear, “that you will always feel that — that whatever happens, you will accept who I am, and know that this is real.”

  He promised. Of course he promised.

  He woke up in the early morning light and had the aching sensation of being the luckiest man alive. Yuli was stretched across the bed, wrapped in wisps of white sheet, and as his eyes watered again in appreciation, she took on an actual halo. He leaned in, kissed her neck.

  “I suppose I should slip out.”

  “Don’t,” she said, and reached for him. He luxuriated in her arms for a while.

  “The servants? Amarya?”

  “Trying to keep things from the servants, you’ll learn, is impossible and usually causes more trouble than not. Amarya said from the first she was planning to enjoy you until you finally ‘grew some balls’ — her words — and got up the courage to come and get me.” That set off a flurry of kissing.

  “You certainly are an openminded group,” he said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she answered, and they went another round. He hadn’t had a fifth orgasm since he was in his twenties. This one knocked him out and when he woke up again she was already up and dressed, taking a last look at herself in the bathroom mirror. He hopped up, came and stood behind her. She looked at him in the mirror in a way he couldn’t read, then turned and kicked the bathroom door closed, threw her head against his chest and wept.

  “What is it, baby?” he said, and wondered if that idiom was too far off. She didn’t answer at first. “The boys?”

  She nodded.

  “I miss them,” she said, calmly.

  “Dmitry?” He was being masochistic, but also gallant.

  “All of them.”

  “Come back to bed. Let me hold you.”

  “No,” she said, but not coldly, wiping her eyes dry and turning to face the mirror again. “I have to run a few errands. Go back to sleep. I’ll see you at lunch.” She walked out, closing the door behind her. He made his way back to the lazy bed and stretched and indulged himself, replaying image after blissful image of the night. Eventually he pulled himself up, put on yesterday’s clothes, and headed to the attic. Only two boxes to go, and even if he wasn’t going to learn anything new, he figured he should finish the job.

  He got up the stairs, pulled on the light and looked at a patch of bare floor. The boxes were gone.

  All of them.

  As he headed down the stairs, Amarya was headed up.

  “Don’t speak to me,” she said, blowing past him with a ‘talk to the hand’ arm in the air.

  Christ. Downstairs he heard commotion. Setiawan was speaking heatedly to two men straight out of Men in Black, sunglasses and everything, two white guys, one tall and skinny, one short and skinny. Setiawan was asking them to leave. Frank came down the stairs and asked, as he got close, what the problem was. It was the first time Setiawan seemed happy to see him.

  “We’re looking for Dmitry Heald,” the shorter one said.

  OK, Frank thought, here we go.

  “As I’m sure Mr. Setiawan informed you,” he said, “Mr. Heald is recently deceased.”

  “He did not tell us that,” the tall one said. “And we’re not so sure.”

  Frank turned to Setiawan. “How did they get in?”

  “They seem to have come through the gate when Miss Amarya came home,” he said.

  “So they are trespassing.”

  “Don’t get cute,” the shorter one said.

  “Cute? Where are you from?”

  “East coast,” he said.

  “Me too,” Frank said, “long time ago.”

  “What are you doing here, then?” the tall one asked.

  “Helping my friend’s widow manage after the tragic and horrible death of her young husband. And I’m helping in part by keeping people like you out of her face. Please leave or I will call the police.”

  “Dude, we are the police,” the tall one said.

  These guys gave him the creeps — he couldn’t figure out if they were inept or stupid, but either way that made them dangerous. And who did they work for?

  “The police do not call people dude,” Frank said, with more confidence than he felt, and started walking out the front door.

  “I don’t know how deep you are in this, Hollywood,” the shorter one said, starting to follow him out. “But you don’t want to be deep.”

  “Hollywood,” he said, noncommittal, heading down the walkway toward the front gate, hoping they would follow. “So you know who I am.” This was not good.

  They were torn, it seemed, not wanting to leave the house, looking over their shoulders, but unwilling to lose Frank as he walked toward the street. They finally chose to follow.

  “Yeah, yeah, we know who you are. We also know Dmitry Heald took a lot of money that didn’t belong to him. Things are going to get rough all around if he don’t give it back.”

  “Wow, a threat,” Frank said, pretending nonchalance. His vague plan was to get them out in the street and then run back into the compound. He didn’t like the image of himself running in fear — the whole ploy was more Bugs Bunny than badass — but, what else could he do?

  “That’s right,” said the tall one, catching up to Frank and falling in step, dropping his sunglasses an inch so Frank could see his eyes, grey and scary. “And you’re right, we’re not the police. You wish we were the police. We are not the police so we don’t have to play square. The only reason they flew us in is because the local guys apparently didn’t know how to be rough enough.”

  “And listen, pal,” said the short one, “we can give you a significant finder’s fee if you help us recover these funds.”

  “So you guys do ‘good not-a-cop, bad not-a-cop,’” he said. “Swell.” A little surprised that his fake insouciance was sounding almost natural, he noticed that talking that way made him feel much calmer, more in control. “But too bad for you. I told you: he’s dead.”

  “Money don’t die, Hollywood,” the shorter one said. “It’s alive and well in an account or two or ten. Let us know where, and you get to keep a big chunk of it, like a rebate.”

  By then he had them on the street.

  “So who do you guys work for?” Frank asked, the heat already making them sweat.

  “Don’t be a chump,” said the short one. It was if he learned to speak from watching James Cagney movies.

  “How do people stand this heat?” the tall one asked. He was starting to drip.

  “You learn to go careful,” Frank said. “Walk slow, take it easy. Take off your jacket and tie for starters. Don’t wear black.” He wasn’t sure they could manage without their costumes, and neither made a move to take off their jackets. “Listen, maybe I can help you, maybe you can help me. But not if I don’t know who you are. I’ve been trying to figure this all out, too.”

  “You have?” said the tall one. “How have you been doing that?” Down the street, he could see Dmitry’s father, taking pictures of him and Smith and Jones. A white woman stood next to him, also looking their way. The Indonesian from the other day was again reading his paper.

  “Is that your competition?” Frank asked, pointing with his chin. They both turned to look at the café.

  “No, that’s Dmitry Heald’s father,” the tall one said.

  “That’s Heald’s mother next to him,” the short one offered. So she was here now, too? “The father sure hates t
he Muslims, don’t he?” Frank must have looked surprised, because he added, “We know you’ve talked to him. We’ve been around for a couple days. This is the first time we got past the guard and that damn butler.”

  “Damn butler,” muttered the tall one.

  “Look, kid,” said the short one. Frank was maybe five years older than him. “Let’s say we work for a detective agency, and let’s say we’re on spec, as it were, for the various stakeholders involved, people you don’t want to know.”

  What the fuck was he doing, talking to these men? Were they as hapless as they seemed?

  “Alright,” Frank said. “I can tell you this. The wife knows nothing.”

  “Hard to believe, Hollywood.”

  Every time they called him that he felt a little spike of terror.

  “Yeah,” the tall one said. “She was in the business too. She worked for the firm.”

  “Yes,” Frank said, although it hadn’t occurred to him in this way. “But only briefly, and years ago. She was just a kid, really.” Did he sound as transparent as he felt?

  “Looks all growed-up to me,” the short one said.

  That made Frank boil. Anger, it seemed, was what he needed to have a proper self-protective response. He turned around and went back through the gate, fast but not running, into the compound.

  “Don’t let them back in,” he said to the guard over his shoulder, more for their benefit than the guard’s, since he didn’t speak a word of English.

  “Think about it!” the tall one called to him from the street. Then he heard the little one say, quietly, to his colleague, “The idiot has no idea. He’s a dead man.”

  When he got back inside Setiawan was waiting.

  “I think it best you have a word with the man at the gate, and make sure something like that doesn’t happen again.” Dead man, he thought.

  Setiawan winced a little. “I believe I know my duties, sir.”

  “I wish I knew,” Frank said, shaky with adrenaline, thinking the guy had no right to get huffy, “what they all were.”

  “And yet I will always appreciate, sir, any advice you have to offer,” he said in his High Snideness mode, putting Frank in his place but managing to keep all the resentment below the surface — what a pro. The most unimpeachable “fuck you” he’d ever heard.

  “They say they work for powerful, scary people,” he said. “But who knows.” He was talking to himself.

  “Very well, sir.” After a perfunctory bow Setiawan headed out to the front gate. Frank ran to Setiawan’s office and rifled his drawers. After long ticks of the clock finding nothing, he chanced on a key ring hanging in plain sight on the doorjamb. He grabbed it, ran up the stairs, found a key that unlocked one of the two doors that were always locked, assumed it was the master key, and sure enough it unlocked the other. He ran back down, without looking in the rooms, hoping to get the keys back before Setiawan returned. He heard the front door open as he reached the office. He jammed the keys back on their nail, jumped in the kitchen and opened a large refrigerator.

  “Can I get you something, Mr. Franky?” Setiawan was suspicious, no question, and Frank worried he was red in the face. He was breathing hard.

  “I guess I was a little shaken by that encounter,” he said. “I wanted a gin and tonic.”

  “Allow me, sir,” he said, still pissy. “Where can I bring it to you?”

  “The library, thanks.” he said. “But perhaps a whiskey sour, instead.” That would take longer.

  “As you will, sir.”

  He walked out of the kitchen, and ran up the stairs. The first room was a man’s bedroom, maybe Setiawan’s. He checked the closet. The boxes weren’t there. He pushed the button on the inside knob to lock it as he left and crossed the hall.

  He opened the door to the other room. Bingo. The boxes were stacked against the wall inside.

  But that was the least of it. The room was lined with monitor screens, a much more elaborate security station than the one in the guard hut out front, maybe twenty screens in all, some big ones monitoring a dozen cameras each. As he scanned them, four more or less in the center of the wall caught his eye. It took him a while to process what it was, but once he did it was clear: four different cameras focused, from four different angles, on the bed he had slept in, and did everything else in, last night.

  He didn’t have time to think about it, because he saw, on another screen, Setiawan coming up the stairs. He slipped out of the room, pulled the door closed quietly, and ran across the hall toward his room, realizing too late that he had left the door unlocked. He got almost to the end of the hall and did a U-turn to be on the right trajectory by the time he met Setiawan, as if he was coming back from some errand in his own room. Everything looked normal, he hoped, except for the fact that he was breathing too hard again, flushed, and altogether looked severely seasick.

  “Your whiskey sour is in the library, sir.”

  “Thank you, Setiawan,” he said, hoping he had left the mixings for a couple more.

  As he walked down the stairs, that marvelous stone-clad, sweeping, movie-set stairway, he held his hands in front of him. Each finger seemed to jump at a different speed.

  “The thing that astounds me, Franky,” Dmitry had said to him, it seemed like a lifetime ago, as they sat in that Hooters in Santa Monica eating a pile of fried food and drinking beer, the night before they went to visit Dwayne, “is that we have an entire economy that is fundamentally based on the notion of risk, and yet people are terrible, terrible at assessing risk. Even me, although I’m better at it than almost anyone.” Dmitry had researched the area bars to locate one carrying a closed circuit Ultimate Fighting championship bout, and this was it. He was already working out with his fight club then, studying and sparring, although he had only competed a few times. For some reason, this fight was, in his fan world, an extremely important one. Frank was sure that before long he’d hear why.

  The Hooters waitresses were distracting — they are hired to be distracting — and so was the crowd, Ultimate Fighting aficionados full of confused testosterone. Frank was keyed up. Dmitry was his usual relaxed self.

  “It is impossible to say who will win this fight,” he said. The two fighters were in the ring, and it looked like a real mismatch to Frank. One, named Hughes, was built like a Bowflex ad, muscles everywhere, tight as a drum, with a soccer hooligan’s lunatic intensity. The other was B. J. Penn, who Dmitry adored. Penn was a baby-faced, skinny-looking guy with no discernible muscle tone at all. Dmitry had explained that he was coming out of a two-year retirement, and it looked as if he had skipped the gym that whole time. “B. J. Penn, Franky, is perhaps the best fighter in the history of the game. He received a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu after studying only three years — it usually takes ten — and four years after that he won the UFC championship. The championship bout was with this same guy, Hughes, who was the reigning champion, and B. J. won it in four minutes. Then — and this is the most astonishing thing, Franky — during the title ceremony, the minute they handed him the championship belt, he held up his hand to quiet the crowd and announced he was retiring from the sport! He said all his goals had been met and handed the belt over to Hughes, who thus immediately became World Champion again. B. J. won the belt, gave it back, and simply walked away. Later he said it was all too easy and pointless and he was going spend his life meditating instead.”

  Dmitry thought this not just astonishing but glorious; Frank couldn’t quite follow the storyline, nor could he understand why, if Dmitry agreed with B. J. Penn that it was all pointless, he seemed so invested in the sport to begin with. As the two fighters came forward to bump fists, the crowd on TV cheered, the crowd in the Hooters went berserk, and the referee started the fight.

  The match was fascinating in part because Penn’s limbs looked like they were made of rubber. He could slink and slide his arms and legs in and out of Hughes’s grasp like they were four independent-minded snakes, all with preternatural calm, expression
less. The oddly archetypical pair — very Tortoise and Hare, David and Goliath, Grasshopper and Ant — were not just equipped with different fighting styles, they embodied two fundamental, eternal principles: Hughes, the insistent, muscled striver against the slithery wraith Penn, yin vs. yang, the fierce angry dog up against an almost supercilious cat, idly sharpening its claws. For much of the fight Hughes seemed to be battling a phantom, Penn slipping through his fingers and disappearing from holds, Hughes’s punches and kicks seeming to pass through him with no effect. And the fact that Hughes had been disgraced twice by Penn, first by losing the title and then by having it handed back to him as worthless, all in one day, made the fight seem more like Hughes’s own internal psychodrama than a real bout, as if he was, indeed, punching a ghost.

  Eventually, though, Penn got trapped in some position that allowed Hughes to bring down his forearm from over his own head, and ram it, full force, into Penn’s face, over and over again. It was a horrific, bone-crushing thing to watch, on the order of a baby seal massacre. Penn never showed an ounce of desperation. He kept trying to maneuver out of range, moving more slowly with every shocking, soul-destroying crack to the face. An American boxing match would have been called twenty blows earlier. Penn’s head was starting to wobble with each new strike, and his eyes were beginning to dim. At long last the referee called a halt.

  “I am very disappointed, Franky,” Dmitry said, pointing their empty beer pitcher out to the waitress. “The real finesse of the sport resides in the jiu-jitsu elements, and it is always disheartening when the striker wins. Plus, the story isn’t as good.” The fight, the fried food, the beer, the pimply repression of the fans, the waitresses working the marks like so many hot-pantsed, buxom carnies: all of it gave Frank vertigo.

  “This was a very hard fight to handicap — the risks were equally distributed and incommensurable. That always makes calculation impossible, in finance or in sport — there, there, Franky, he’ll be all right, buck up, it’s just a few wallops to the kisser — try to focus. The real wild card, for handicappers, as always, was personal. Would the most magnificent act of humiliation in the history of sport make Hughes a better fighter, his eternal, shameful fountain of anger fed by that mortification, or would it make him a worse one, impetuous and lacking calculation?”