Born Slippy

by Tom Lutz

  “’S’fur,” Frank said, trying to say it was for her.

  “Cat really does have your tongue now! But yes, Franky, you have let me down. You could have left my gifts in the safe-deposit box. You could have thrown them in my face. You could have said at any moment, or even now, that you would not take such blood money, such a bribe to buy your silence and absence. But you didn’t. It confirms to a T my assumptions about human nature, but it saddens me a little that you didn’t, after all, prove to be the last upright man you so would like to think of yourself as, and as I, I’m sorry to admit, was counting on myself — your rectitude was the final frontier for my cynicism. Now there’s no one left for me to look up to. I feel it as a loss. My guess is you will too. Is that what I wanted? Perhaps…”

  He stood up, rolled his shoulder once more. Frank could no longer even move his eyes in their sockets.

  “Oh, and one more thing. The money in those accounts? I thought that putting some money in your name would somehow repay you for the land yacht fiasco — pushing that thing down the hill was awfully callous of me, I’ll admit, exposing you to charges of insurance fraud and negligent homicide and all that, and I did feel bad about it at the time. So the accounts were penance. But the first of it came in before I had perfected the art of laundering, and it is traceable — in fact traceable to a Chechen pipeline deal, a deal Credit Lyonnais financed and that went belly up. Once you came over and started mucking things up, it occurred to me that I had a way to insure your silence.”

  Yuli was gone forever.

  “For a while I despaired of you ever doing it, and so had to bring Frick and Frack, as you say, in to goad you — which still didn’t do it! —forcing me to stage the kidnapping of my own dear wife in order to get you to finally do me the favor of physically, in person, posing for the security cameras at Bank of China and Bank of Japan as both yourself and Quentin Compson. Moving money into new accounts — thus cementing your ownership — and your criminal impersonations of fictional characters put you in the bull’s eye instead of me. Your gallantry, running off to claim the money for your exquisite Yuli, makes you, forever, the most exposed unindicted co-conspirator — unindicted only because as of yet there are no indictments.

  “I reclaimed the majority of the money, as you saw — it came to a tidy half-billion or so — all except that fifty-two and half million you so ingeniously transferred into new accounts — brilliant, that, and welcome to it. I am sorry in advance if any of this catches up with you, Franky, but I assume knowing how things stand will help you to lay low” — it was the least funny use of his gangster voice ever — “and help you keep your trap shut.”

  He paused as if he had lost interest and started to leave the room. Then he turned and stopped.

  “Listen, Franky. If any further misplaced gallantry prompts you to come after me, you will lose that fifty million, because I will expose it, inform the IRS and tax services, you will be a target of various government agents and much worse people, and you will go to jail or die or both. So let’s call it even, yes?”

  He was halfway out of the room.

  “I must say, it does seem, especially given that you slept with my wife, a fitting risk to saddle you with.”

  But you wanted me to sleep with her, he tried to say. “Buchewwannamseepher.”

  Dmitry walked out of Frank’s range of vision. Since Frank couldn’t turn his head, he couldn’t tell what he was doing.

  “Ah, Franky,” he said from somewhere behind the chair. “What do any of us really want?”

  He walked back into Frank’s line of sight in the foyer, looked around the room as if seeing whether he had forgotten anything, grabbed a black attaché case from the hall table, and handed the cash he had counted out earlier to Setiawan, who had, once again, thaumaturgically appeared.

  Dmitry said something in Bahasa, and Setiawan came over and moved Frank’s head so he could see the door. The puppet master setting up his own exit.

  Dmitry’s driver, Prabam, opened the door from outside and Dmitry turned to face Frank one last time.

  “Do not try to contact me or Yuli again,” he said, “will you, old man?” And then, with a last smirk, he was gone. The lights went out.

  2017

  And so.

  Frank had christened the Scorpio 72 God Sees Everything — pretentious, maybe, but The Big Sleep was worse, and too morbid. As the cyclone season approached, worse and worse it seemed to him with every climate-changing year, he liked to pull into Rangoon, where the dry dock and refitting charges were quite good value, and where people kept his ship seaworthy. He took a covered skiff up the mighty Irrawaddy, a couple days’ journey, and wandered among the pyramidal temples strewn across the plains of Bagan.

  An inn there, all but empty in the rainy season save an occasional throng of Chinese businessmen, passes for a luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere. He found a local woman to cook for him — the hotel restaurant was horrid — but sometimes he would go down to the patio and order a lemonade and listen to a man play the saung, a Burmese harp, his daughter adding some finger cymbals and singing in that high East-Asiatic whine, which he first found grating but then came to feel expresses the basic human plaint.

  Once a week a marionette show featured the classic characters of Burmese commedia del arte. The marionettes he found uncanny, the way the slightest waggle of fingers by the manipulator resulted in full body movements of the puppet, the way she could make them dance, give them emotions, have them do convincing double-takes, experience moments of ecstasy. And there was no end to the complexity — on one puppet each eyebrow could be raised independently. The manipulator — a woman very young to be so accomplished — worked from behind a waist-high curtain, and at times her hands and arms were a flurry of activity, throwing strings one way and another, moving six or more control bars at once, roaming behind the curtain to move multiple puppets back and forth across the stage, faster when she made the horses gallop. At times like that she always smiled. Some of it had become rote, but at the edge of her game she was pleased by her own skill, her own dexterity, her power.

  It always made him miss his work, this non-sailing time, made him wonder what he was doing. Out among the islands, he pulled whatever strings the sea let him, and exulted in his new prowess as a sailor. Was that what Dmitry was after in all his double- and triple-dealing — the thrill of skill, the feeling of mastery, the exercise of capacity? Maybe. But maybe that was giving him too much credit.

  He had, he knew, given him too much credit. He chalked some of it up to youth: youth loves a narcissist, which is why young people love rock stars and movie stars — everyone dreams that maybe, somehow, they will learn the narcissist’s secret, learn how to be both fully self-contained and the center of attention, the secret of how to not care about anyone or anything other than one’s own pleasure and profit. As we get older, he decided, we see narcissists for what they are — they are the death of love, the death of beauty, the diminishment of the world around them. Narcissists smell of possibility to the young, they smell of death to the old. They suck up all the possibility in the room. They leave us with nothing.

  Except, in this case, fifty million bucks. Once the typhoons had done their worst, he’d drift down the 150 miles to Rangoon on the still-rain-swollen river, collect the spruced-up God Sees, and wander off to wherever his whim might take him. Last year he went all the way to Papua New Guinea. This year, he decided, he’s going to Bangladesh. He’s never been there. Perhaps he’ll hug the coast all the way around and down the subcontinent to Sri Lanka.

  People told him it was crazy to sail these seas, what with all the pirates, but so far, so good. He had everything he needed, and kept his passports, a hard drive, and some significant cash in a waterproof safe that he could chuck overboard and find with a SCUBA tank and a GPS device. And he opened safe-deposit boxes in a dozen cities with some wads of cash and all the bits of paper and ID he would need to get set up again if he lost everything. Needless to sa
y, there’s more money than he will ever need. He sold the Nichols Canyon house, sold the company to a group of his employees at a bargain-basement price. They were happy, he was happy. He would have had enough for a nice life even without Dmitry’s money. He gave around 60 percent of it all to charities of various kinds — mostly environmental, anonymously — and kept the rest in bonds, metals, and money markets, with a certain percentage in the hands of younger versions of Dmitry, the next generation of thieves, the whole pile tooling along at six or seven percent. He gave away 60 percent of that million and a half, too, and still spent a fraction of what was left. He’d leave some tidy millions for Lulu and Kennedy, for Isa and her kids, and for a half dozen nonprofits, when he was gone. With no mortgage, no car, no taxes, no debt, and no reason to save, he could afford to be an extravagant gift-giver, a magnificent tipper. He was never sure if it was because of the guilt or the loneliness. Or — and this was without question part of it — the vanity.

  The ship was everything he dreamed she would be. Incredibly seaworthy, luxuriously comfortable. He went ahead and bought a new one, because why not? In it was everything that was his except his investments and safe-deposit boxes. It was preposterous how aphrodisiacal the ship was for Western women, and his rich Americanness had the same impact on everyone else. He was always happy to meet people, the women often more interesting to talk to than the men, while most couples avoided the weird single guy. If the women started to act interested, he told them right away he was still, four years later, too brokenhearted to play, and he was. He had come to see that every romance in his life, from the big loves with Tracy, Isa, and Yuli to his briefest encounters, had all been fueled by a bathetic and finally exploitive desire to validate himself, to feed some need for an approval he was unwilling to give himself. His love was a burden he gave to people who didn’t, and shouldn’t, want to carry it. Celibacy was a way to stop the endless death and rebirth of his own self-regard.

  He told himself, sometimes, that he should relent, that a dalliance or two would help keep the purity of his love for Yuli alive. He told himself all sorts of things. He even wondered if, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, nobody with a 72-foot ketch needed to be justified — or that nobody who has given $30 million to help save the earth from the Anthropocene needed to be justified. That is, maybe whatever recognition, or justification, or approval he sought in sex and romance had been obviated by this pile of good luck fallen in his lap, and he was now ready to just be a decent companion to someone.

  Still, he knew he would never marry. He would never fall again. He could no longer pretend, or be party to pretense. Nor could he use any of Dmitry’s loathsome excuses. He helped people pay their rent, but not in exchange for sex. He knew this was only a tiny step toward a morally defensible life, one less rife with contradiction than his life had always been, but it was a step.

  He quit drinking, and he sometimes wondered if he hadn’t made these decisions, if he had chosen, instead, to lose himself in alcohol, or in the pleasures of the flesh, or if he had returned to LA and turned into some version of Phil Spector, snorting coke and picking up girls on the Strip, he might have shuffled off the deck already. He also sometimes wondered if the events that led him to Yuli, and then away from her forever, and the solitary life he had chosen since, had so molded him to himself that he was not entirely in his right mind anymore. Who could know? There was nobody close enough to register it.

  He thought about Yuli often, and about Dmitry too. Once in a while he emerged from some deep memory and — hence the worrying about his right mind — felt that she had been right there with him. He snapped to from these waking dreams surprised to find himself on a boat, a thousand miles from anywhere she might be.

  He sent Lulu and Kennedy each a check for a house down-payment, and they were both grateful, but also, he could tell, a little embarrassed. They didn’t think of him often, and were abashed at his interest in them. So he kept what he hoped was the right distance. He called on their birthdays, and let them know he had their backs if they ever needed anything. Isa, Margie and Paul, the journalist, Catskills, Trog, the Healds, Tracy, Amarya — he had no idea. They were either dead or they were alive. He had no reason not to assume the latter. He hadn’t seen them in the flesh, or anyone else from his past, for that matter, since that last noir nightmare at the Serang family compound.

  When he had come to from the drugged drink that day in Jakarta, having slipped out of the chair onto the floor, the house was empty. His suitcase stood at the front door. He took a shower, put on fresh clothes, and walked through the miniature rainforest and away from the empty house. For the first time there was no driver, and no guard at the front gate. He walked over to the café, rolling his suitcase with him. He sat down at a table with Dmitry’s father and mother, a new guy, and the Men in Black.

  “So we meet again, Hollywood,” the short one said.

  “I’ll have a cappuccino,” Frank said to the waiter.

  “Who is he?” the new man, also a Brit, asked the rest without looking at him.

  “Who are you?” Frank asked in return. He looked like Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy.

  “Sam Bert,” he said. “Dmitry’s uncle. Come to straighten this out and take everyone home.”

  “The Ambassadors,” Frank said. Maybe the drug hadn’t worn off yet. Sam looked at him funny. “It’s a novel — they send someone to save the son, then someone to save that person, then —”

  But Sam had stopped listening and was back to watching the compound. He was the kind of guy who, if he didn’t understand what you were saying, immediately decided you were not worth listening to.

  “You leaving, Baltimore?” the tall man in black said.

  “You’re Franky?” asked Dmitry’s mother, swinging around.

  “Yes, Franky Baltimore,” said Dmitry’s father.

  “Gotten pretty chummy with the infidel, have you?” Bert said, with a sour face.

  “Yes and no,” Frank said. He noticed, at a table across the patio, the same Indonesian man pretending not to listen that had been there the day he met the father. He looked even more like a cop.

  “Who’s the shadow?” he asked the Men in Black. They looked over at him and shrugged. Could they be that incompetent? Dmitry’s father, mother, and uncle all continued to gaze straight ahead at the front gate of the compound. He thought about whether or not to tell them that the show was over, that the family was gone, everyone was gone, it was all gone gone gone. But he didn’t. He didn’t see the upside.

  “Can you call a taxi for me?” he said to the waiter when he brought the cappuccino.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can’t leave yet,” Dmitry’s mother said. “Trog is on his way over.”

  “Trog? Why on Earth?”

  “He’s also had experience with Muslims,” Dmitry’s father said, while the new man nodded in agreement. “This won’t be giving the donkey strawberries, I warrant.”

  Dmitry’s mother shook her head at that line. She looked directly at Frank. She seemed sane enough. “I originally thought Trog might help me get George to give up this madness and come home,” she said, her eyes wandering back to the front gate. “But now I’m thinking maybe he’s right. Trog may be just the man. He dealt with some desperate characters in North Africa. Maybe he can help.”

  “Help do what?” Frank asked. It came out more flummoxed than he intended, but it didn’t matter. None of them seemed to hear him, deep in their vigil. What could they possibly expect to happen? What could anyone have possibly expected to happen?

  “I seen both cars went out,” said Bert. “They leave you all alone?”

  “You could say that,” he said.

  A cab arrived, and he assumed it was his. He put down a bill for his coffee, finished throwing the searing tar down his throat, and stood up. But it wasn’t his cab, it was Trog’s. Looking more than ever like Tolstoy’s pissed-off brother, he got out, and the driver put his duffel on the walk.

 
; “Somebody pay this guy,” he said, all gravel. “I’ve got no local currency.” No hello. No howdy do.

  Bert handed the cabbie his fare.

  “I thought you were on the inside,” Trog said to Frank. “What a fucking flight that was. I’m a million years old.”

  “No,” Frank said. “I’m not on the inside. I never was.”

  Everyone looked at him. He motioned to the cabbie and pointed to his bag. The driver stuck it in the trunk, and Frank told the waiter he could cancel the other cab.

  “Where are you going?” Trog asked. “I just got here!” The Indonesian man leaned over to hear what he might say.

  “I have no idea. Why are you here?”

  “Cathy said George and Henrietta needed sense talked into them. This is craziness. What do they think they’re doing?”

  Well, that was a good question. “You tell me. Working out their grief? Defending civilization? You should send them home. Dmitry is alive and long gone. The whole family. Gone.” He couldn’t get himself to say her name.

  He followed their eyes. “That the family manse?” he asked, motioning to the entrance.

  “Yes, but they’ve all left,” Frank said. “Like I said. For good. Go home. Dmitry staged the whole thing. These clowns work for him,” he said, nodding to the Men in Black. With their sunglasses on it was unclear whether they reacted.