Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “Talk to me,” Frank said. The guitarist kept playing and started to sing. It might have been ‘All Along the Watchtower.’ It might have been in Japanese, but maybe English.

  “It’s amazing you’re still alive,” Irish said.

  “I try not to take it for granted.”

  “Seems to me you do.”

  He spent some time thinking about that: a threat? His second death threat in as many days? Hm. It slowed him to a stop. The Irish guy walked over to him and he heard a metallic whoosh and click and looked down to see a large, gleaming switchblade pointed at his belly. The guy leaned next to his ear and said:

  “Go pick up your fucking boat and get out of here. Go home. Go anywhere. But go the fuck away.”

  With that he walked past him and left Frank staring at the place the knife had been. The old beatnik kept playing — now it sounded like some other Dylan song. He finally looked up, still trying to process what he had just heard, to see the bartender watching him — he could see now the woman on the shirt was ripping her own face off with her right hand, elbow raised. None of the other patrons looked at him. He made his way back into the ramshackle street, where there was no trace of the Irish guy. The old man’s sour voice and tinny guitar leaked into the street and then stopped. A door closed. The green “Orange” sign blinked once and went out.

  Frank made his way back to the hotel. The Irish sociopath: he had put that picture of the sailboat in the safe-deposit box — how else would he know about it? Bumping into him was no accident — he’d been following Frank and accidentally got caught when he turned around. Was he doing this alone? Monitoring Frank’s every move? Had he been the one emptying the bank accounts? He had all the same information Frank had, since he’d been in the box. Who else was part of this? Setiawan? Why? The beer wasn’t helping him think clearly. The knife had briefly scared him straight, but now he was feeling woozy again.

  Was Irish executing some prearranged errands for Dmitry? Is he the guy in charge of the exposure and everything else? He, Prabam, the Men in Black, Amarya, and everyone else said the same thing: Frank had no idea what he was up against, and they didn’t want him to know more than he did. Why go home? And if go home, then why the ticket to Tokyo? And why the boat? Didn’t that say stay?

  If Irish had access to the safe-deposit box, why leave all that money for Frank, why not take some of it for himself? Maybe he had, maybe there had been stacks of cash. Maybe he emptied the other envelopes of their bankbooks and passwords when he dropped the boat picture off, and that they had even larger sums. If he was stealing Dmitry’s money, no wonder he wanted Frank to go away. And what about the knife? If he wanted to knife him, why didn’t he? He wanted to scare him away, not kill him.

  Had the Irish guy set the bomb at Credit Lyonnais? He had wanted to fight Dmitry that night — did he kill him? And if so, had he kidnapped Yuli? That would explain how she could leave him after a night like the one they had, and why her note was unfinished. Then again, maybe the Irish guy was doing Yuli’s bidding, maybe she was trying to protect Frank, and give him what she could — the boat, some cash — and keep him safe: the bad guys were afoot, and Frank needed to get out of town. The only way Irish could know Frank had been snooping around is if Yuli had told him, so that must be it, he decided: she must be trying to protect him. Irish was his shadow bodyguard.

  He somehow found his way back to the Sunroute, and in his room he looked through his bag and found the cards of the two Taiwanese detectives. He didn’t want the sour sidekick, he wanted the moonfaced guy in charge, but since he didn’t know which card went with which guy, he just flipped a coin. He didn’t know what to say, either, what he wanted to say, or what he ought to say. He would just have to wing it. It was earlier in Taipei, but already way after office hours. He’d leave a voicemail.

  A man answered right away, which was surprising, and in Chinese, which was not.

  “Is this the detective investigating the Credit Lyonnais bombing?” Frank barged ahead in English.

  “Yes,” the man answered in English.

  “This is Frank Baltimore.”

  “Yes.” Apparently he got the sour one.

  “I don’t really know how to begin.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “In Tokyo.”

  “Japan.”

  “Yes.” Is there another one?

  “Good.”

  “Good?” What did that mean?

  “Sir.”

  This was getting nowhere. “I have reason to believe crimes have been committed,” Frank said, wondering if he was still drunk. “I want to report a crime.” Crime?

  “In Tokyo?”

  “No, well, yes — I know who did it.”

  “Please, I tell you, sir,” his voice got quieter. “There is warrant for you in Taipei. Accessory after fact. Money laundering after bombing of Credit Lyonnais building.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Franky Bal’more. With warrant we arrest you at airport.” Frank sat trying to figure this out. He was a wanted man. How incongruous.

  “At airport, Taipei,” he repeated, as if he, too, had limited English.

  “Yes, Taiwan only. Stay away Taiwan.”

  So he couldn’t go to Taipei. OK. Did he care?

  “It was another Credit Lyonnais banker, the Irish one,” he said into the phone. “He is alive. He is here, in Tokyo. He did it.”

  There was silence on the other end. When the detective spoke, it was low and ominous.

  “Franky Bal’more not safe.”

  He tried to understand this as a warning, but it didn’t work. It was a threat.

  His mind was too slow, but it gradually dawned on him that the police themselves were somehow involved. He had just accused the Irish guy of blowing up the building, and the cop agreed and then threatened Frank. Silence. The cop could stand a lot of dead time on the phone.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he heard himself finally ask, still with some nagging need to understand more.

  “Mr. Dmitry Heald have many friends in police,” he said, almost whispering. “I am friend.”

  “Have…” Was he just not using the right tense?

  “Thank you for information, Mr. George,” he said, suddenly loud, for somebody else’s benefit, and hung up.

  The hotel room felt doubly claustrophobic. Warrant for his arrest. Money laundering. He felt like a puppet. Every second he sat in the room it seemed smaller. The walls were closing in. He was having trouble breathing.

  None of it made sense. Had the cop agreed to the idea that the psycho-killer Irish punk was the bomber? Or was Frank just over-interpreting his silence? Had this cop been paid off by the Irish runt? Why, then, had the cop and his colleague come to Jakarta? Maybe one got paid off and the other hadn’t. Maybe he got paid off after the trip. But why and by who? What did it have to do with Dmitry’s many friends in the department? Maybe they’re right. Maybe he should get out of there. Let the crooks kill someone else.

  Then he got it. Like he was slowly making his way through a mathematical proof, he put it together. Not only did the Quentin Compson passport make it possible for him to fly to Taipei and pick up his Scorpio 72, somebody had known that it would. And wanted him to go back to Taipei not as Frank Baltimore — and make a mess of things — but as Quentin, wanted him to buy his boat and sail away. Whoever arranged for the extra passport knew that he would need it, and wanted no part of Franky Bal’more, known associate. And of course Quentin Compson couldn’t go to the police or the embassy — how good was that passport, anyway? The hotel room was now torturously small.

  “Fuck it,” he said out loud. He stood up, packed his bag, checked out, walked across the block, and checked into the Park Hyatt with his Quentin Compson passport. He was a freaking millionaire after all. He was shown to his overlarge room, cracked a beer from the mini-bar — bad value — and flipped open his laptop, thinking everyone was corrupt. Everyone. Among his new emails was one from a woman he had
dated a month or so earlier. It seemed like a different life, but seeing her name gave him a little shot of warmth. He opened it. The subject line was “thinking about what happened between us.” She wrote:

  Dear Frank,

  I realized that I just wouldn’t feel right about it all unless I said, at least in an email: fuck you.

  OK. Sweet.

  He shut his email, pulled up Google. Typed in “Tokyo, escort service.” He was drunk and depressed and surly and lonely. And rich. The Miss Platinum escort service charged 200,000 yen before tip. $2,000. He had a pocket full of cash. He browsed the available women. He picked one. He picked up the phone. She would arrive, he was told, within thirty minutes. They insisted on a credit card, and he rifled through his pockets, found the debit card for the account in Cyprus, and read off the sixteen numbers, the expiration date, the three-number code on the back. He put the phone down and grabbed another beer.

  An incoming email popped up. It was from you-lee22@gmail.com. He opened it. It had only two words:

  Come back.

  You-lee22. Yuli. That answered the question whether he really wanted the call girl. It also, at least for now, answered the question of what he was going to do with his life.

  He hit reply and typed: I’m on the next flight.

  He checked back out of the hotel fifteen minutes and $1,121 later — $40 for the two beers — and went to the airport. He called the escort service from the car and canceled. They would keep a 50 percent service charge. Sure. What did he care? He got to the airport and was on a redeye to Jakarta within the hour.

  When he arrived in the morning, Yuli’s driver was waiting for him in the entrance hall, apparently not fired after all. On the ride from the airport the glass between the front and back seats was closed, leaving Frank free to imagine his reunion with Yuli in a hundred different ways — all of them a little fraught, none of them quite right. Had something happened to bring her back so soon? Did it have anything to do with the Taiwanese cop? Or the Irish guy in Tokyo?

  Maybe she loved him. Maybe she needed him. Could he stand to entertain the thought? No, no he couldn’t. Not just for the obvious reason, that if he got crushed again, he’d have to tie an iron to his foot and jump in a river. Something was gravely wrong with the whole picture, something so not right that love could not possibly be at the center of it.

  Still, despite all such nauseating conjecture, when the driver dropped him inside the gate, he trotted up the path, anxiety replaced by anticipation, surprised to realize — and then surprised that he was surprised — that he was ecstatic at the idea of seeing her again.

  The front door, as usual, opened just before he reached it. He smiled: he was even going to be happy to see Setiawan again.

  But it wasn’t Setiawan at all, of course.

  It was Dmitry.

  Of course it was Dmitry.

  PART FIVE

  2013

  “I should really like to say, Hey, no, you look like you’ve seen a ghost! but I have a feeling, Franky, you mightn’t be in the mood to find that particularly amusing.”

  “You’re alive.” As if he could continue deluding himself, as if he had ever really thought Dmitry was dead. All of a sudden he realized that everyone could see it — he hadn’t even pretended to mourn his friend’s passing. He hadn’t tried to find out who had killed him. Why would he? Dmitry was alive.

  “You sound so disappointed.” His trademark goofy grin looked more like a smirk than ever.

  Frank didn’t know where to start. “Robert Mugabe?” he blurted out. “You dedicated your life to helping Robert Mugabe?”

  “Ah, so that is what is bothering you?” Smirk. They remained standing in the foyer.

  No, it wasn’t the main thing bothering him, not by a long shot. “It doesn’t bother you?” he asked anyway. He wanted to cry. Instead, he continued down the wrong path, like Dmitry skydiving, unable to turn. “Don’t you ever think about the fact that you’re helping the worst men in the world stay in power, and get more powerful?”

  “OK, I’ll pretend for the moment this is what you are upset about, Franky. Do you think I should have refused and let Citibank manage Mugabe’s money, on the off chance they would get a worse return, thus weakening, by half a percentage point, his hold over the Zimbabwean people? That is a silly way to understand the world.”

  Frank wondered: did he care about Dmitry’s crimes at all? Why was he talking about them?

  “And I must say before we go any further, that your brand of resentment, this peasant hatred you have for the rich, it really clouds your judgment about everything, since the rich are like you and me — in fact they are identical. You are, even before my largesse, among the top one percent of wage earners on the planet, and, exactly like me, you make your own quite comfortable living off people even richer than you. Having a home recording studio, when you aren’t a musician, Franky, is a rich person’s sport.”

  Did Frank tell him about the actor? He couldn’t remember. Dmitry was alive. Frank’s world was dead.

  “Cat got your tongue? I suppose not believing myself that I was dead, I have a hard time realizing that you really bought it — I had an idea you’d seen through all this. In fact, you did, didn’t you, right? Ah, here is Setiawan finally.”

  Setiawan came in with a tray of Bloody Marys, handed one to Dmitry and one to Frank.

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” Frank said.

  “Mine’s virgin. Yours has a little kick to it. I thought you might want it. And a nice bookend, right? You had Bloody Marys your first morning here, if I’m not mistaken.” He walked into the parlor and sat. Frank’s knees being weak, he followed suit. His glance went to the scimitars.

  “I don’t know where to begin,” he said. And he didn’t.

  “Well, let’s get rid of one source of your apprehension: my days as handmaiden to the rich are over, and yours, too, if you want — we neither of us need to do that anymore, do we? And I am interested to see how my little accidental experiment will work, Franky — will you turn over all those ill-gotten gains to a charity, or the SEC? Or will you do what normal people do with money, use it, enjoy it. I am predicting a solid ten percent goes to charity and that you develop a very good and highly ethical rationale for why you will keep the rest. Then, upon finding yourself a rich person without any plausible deniability, you will have no choice but to hate yourself.”

  He laughed at this and Frank didn’t. Instead he drank half his Bloody Mary in a long draught.

  “But since I digress,” he went on, “allow me to digress further. You have it all wrong about Mugabe and the others. I never worked for those men. People make this mistake all the time, and obviously the error has almost always been in my favor — people think their broker is their friend, a person who wants to provide a service to them, one who cares about their financial wellbeing. But that couldn’t be more specious. Your broker is not your friend. Your broker is never your friend. Your broker is, in effect, your opponent. You want to invest your money, make money with your money. Your broker wants to use your money, too, your capital, in order to make money for himself, and he keeps you on the hook by releasing dribs and drabs — one of those great phrases, eh, Franky? As far as I can tell of unknown origin — by doling out minor parcels of the profit, just enough to keep the capital pump primed. The singular goal, for the broker, is to make money for himself, period. The client is no more or less than a pack animal in the caravan, carrying his or her load of capital across the financial desert, and only a stupid caravanner doesn’t feed his camels. Mugabe, the rest of them — they are my camels. I don’t help them; they help me. I use them.”

  Frank looked at him. Dmitry was calm, and preoccupied, as if unhurriedly trying to remember where he put down his keys. The keys to his Bombardier Global Express.

  “And don’t you have to admit, Franky, that, having pulled some fifteen billion dollars out of the system, I have inadvertently joined your crusade to change human nature, your redist
ributive revolution? I have, in fact, not grown the money supply of the bad, bad people who run the world, I’ve shrunk it. I have made the world a better place by extracting money from their pockets and putting it in mine own.”

  He will be leaving here to join her on his island, Frank thought. In his jet. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t follow them. And what would he possibly follow them for? He had lost the ability to think. He was an open mouth, an outstretched palm, a beggar’s bowl.

  “Fifteen billion dollars?”

  “More, actually, and yes, quite astounding, isn’t it? I always wanted to amass a trillion pounds, Franky, ever since I was a wee lad — that’s impossible, as we know, but I have now, at least, made over a trillion yen! If my wealth were not so damnably well hidden, I would end up just ahead of Carl Ichan on the Forbes list. But really, Franky, my crimes? How can it be a crime to give money to those men and it also be a crime to take it from them? You have always allowed an unconscionable level of contradiction in your moral philosophy.”

  Frank knew if he stayed silent, Dmitry would just go on, and besides, his tongue didn’t seem to be working.

  “I would add, Franky, that the parade of people waiting to help these men manage their money is long and deep, anyone could do it. But stealing fifteen billion dollars from them? Not many people, Franky, could do that, only thirty or forty of us in the world. It takes quite a clever man to do that.”

  Frank was sprawled on the same couch where Amarya had first kissed him, the same couch where he sat with Yuli evening after evening, in his brief days of bliss. He downed his Bloody Mary and Setiawan immediately refilled his glass.

  “Yes, it takes quite a clever man to blow up a building,” Frank said, his mouth having taken over the argument without any brain involved. “As a business maneuver! A clever man to walk around with the blood of hundreds of innocent people on their hands.”