Moonlight Rises

by Vincent Zandri

  “Albany’s small, all right. But not small enough for you to ever run into your father?”

  “Gee, Mr. Moonlight. It’s like I said. I’m not sure I would know my father if I were sitting next to him at the Miss Albany Diner. That’s why I’ve hired you.”

  Lola’s driving, listening, white knuckle-gripping the steering wheel like she’s trying to fly a plane that wants to crash.

  “OK,” I say, “I get it. You came to see me. We conversed about a nurse’s tits. What the hell else did we talk about?”

  Lola exhales angrily. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece. “Sorry Lo,” I whisper in her direction.

  “You were pretty out of it. It wasn’t much of a conversation, to be honest. I only stayed a couple of minutes.”

  “Did you give me something? A box?”

  He hesitates for a weighted beat.

  “You still there, Czech?”

  “Still here, yes siree. No, I don’t recall giving you anything. Not even a stick of gum. Not that you could chew it without choking, anyway. You were on your back, dead to the world.” He follows up with a chuckle. Guy’s responsible for me nearly buying the farm and he’s getting a big kick out of it. If he were in front of me now, I’d tip over his wheelchair. OK, maybe not.

  “You’re sure.”

  “I’m a nuclear engineer. I’m paid well, both for my precision and razor-sharp recall.”

  “Good enough. Oh, and Czech, do you actually work on the submarines themselves? Do they have any at the plant?”

  He laughs again. Guy’s just full of good humor today.

  “We work mostly on computer-simulated models. CAD programs. If you recall, the Knolls Atomic plant resides on the Mohawk River, so it’s possible we have a nuclear sub or two in our possession. But…” He lets the thread trail off.

  “But I’m not supposed to know about that, am I?”

  “Correcta-mundo!” he barks.

  Mr. Precision, revealing national security tidbits like that over his cell.

  “I’ll be in touch, Czech.”

  “I hope you find Daddy.”

  Daddy…

  I hang up.

  In the split-second before I hand the phone back to Lola, the screen that represents my call to Czech disappears. That’s when I catch a quick glimpse of her phone call log. The number she connected with last, just prior to the phone call I made to Czech. According to the readout, the number was pulled from her stored speed-dial list.

  It says, “My Father.”

  Chapter 7

  We ride in silence until we hit New Scotland Avenue. Me thinking about how Lola never mentioned her father, beyond once telling me that he died a long time ago. I might mention seeing the speed dial with the title “My Father” on it in big-ass letters, but like my interest in Some Young Guy, I choose to hold off. Maybe “My Father” is just a spiritual friend of hers, like a priest or a Rabbi. But then I’ve been led to believe that Lola doesn’t believe in God. And the way the listing is so coldly rendered.

  My Father…As if she were saying, My Cancer…

  Anyway, Lola has a life separate from mine—separate from ours, I should say. OK, whatever. That doesn’t change the fact that clearly something is up with my girlfriend, and I’m not about to confront her with it until I’m good and prepared, not half dead and bleeding out.

  But then quite suddenly, Lola’s own curiosity kills the cat. Or in this case, the inquiring clinical psychologist, and she finally speaks up.

  “What’s happening here, Richard? You were pronounced dead. Beaten to death by three men wearing masks. Those same men came for you again. They could have killed you on the spot. But they didn’t.”

  “That’s because they want something from me now. I’m dead, I can’t give it to them.” I press the blood-soaked towel tighter against my side. “They want whatever is inside a box. Only I don’t remember a box and I don’t remember a man named Peter Czech coming to my hospital room to see me. That’s why I needed to call him.”

  “Did this man actually come to see you?”

  “So he says.”

  “Did he give you anything?”

  “He claims he did not, and that he’s a man of precision, so he would certainly recall giving me a gift. Apparently, we had a conversation about my nurse.”

  She exhales again. Time to stop mentioning the nurse with the ample chest.

  “Your head,” Lola says, pulling a right onto a West Albany street congested with bungalows and townhouses on both sides, “it’s not right. You’ve suffered yet another concussion. That’s on top of the bullet in your brain. What you’re doing now, leaving the hospital like that…it’s suicidal.”

  Her message isn’t lost on me. Me, the suicide survivor. Me, the dead man come back to life. The head-case convinced I spotted my girlfriend kissing Some Young Guy. Or about to kiss him, anyway.

  “If you’re worried about me living out a death wish, you can breathe easy. I’m trying to survive, not die again.”

  She nods.

  “So, who’s Peter Czech?”

  “A client. New client. Came to me late last week. Said he pulled my name from out of the phone book.”

  “You believe that?” She shoots me a pair of squinty, disbelieving eyes.

  “Can happen. Lots of people still use the phone book instead of Google.”

  “You wouldn’t show up on Google. That’s how little private investigation work you get these days.”

  I proceed to tell her what I know about Czech.

  He’s a man who’s paralyzed from the waist down. A man of about thirty who crashed his car four years ago while driving back to Albany after a drunk night on the town in Saratoga Springs. Fell asleep at the wheel, drove across the median into the oncoming traffic. The pickup truck he collided with nearly split him in half when it hit his Buick four-door. The driver of the pickup bought the farm. But the only thing that kept Czech alive was his drunken state and the fact that his speed had been reduced to crawl. The booze kept him loose during the point of impact. Otherwise, he might have been a dead man.

  He phoned me five days ago, asked me if he could meet me at my bar after work that evening. I told him I wasn’t doing much PI work lately, but he asked me to hear him out. I didn’t argue.

  When he arrived, I was surprised to see him in a wheelchair. He’d sounded so assertive and confident over the phone. So tall and broad, you might say. But I hadn’t yet known anything about his history; about the accident. We took the table in the back after I told him that it’s reserved for me and for me alone, even though the place was pretty much empty. Empty, that is, except for Uncle Leo, the gray-haired Korean War vet who maintains a stool of honor at the far corner of the old wood bar.

  We gathered round my table, and he introduced himself as Peter Czech and held his hand out for me to shake. The hand was thin and crooked, like a twisted tree limb. I could tell there must have been a time when it didn’t work very well, and that it must have taken a hell of a lot of therapy to get it to work even a little bit right. As for his left hand, he kept that tucked up tight to his midsection, palm inverted awkwardly upwards.

  He was chewing an enormous wad of Juicy Fruit and he told me he was an employee of the Knolls Atomic Research Facility in Schenectady. A chief engineer who helped design propulsion systems for Uncle Sam’s nuclear submarine arsenal. His appearance fit the bill: brown slacks, white shirt, brown tie, plastic pencil holder stuffed into the left-hand pocket, black hair to match his eyes and slicked back with gel, trimmed mustache over a thin upper lip. He had a Blackberry mobile phone stuffed inside his jacket pocket, which he kept retrieving and replacing, like he was obsessed with it or the person who might be trying to contact him.

  For shits and giggles, I told him I didn’t think the US still maintained an active nuclear sub force now that the threat from the Russian Bear had given way to radical Islamist terrorists. But he shook his head with vehemence.


  “The nuclear submarine program is alive and deadly,” he assured me with some heat in his quick-speaking Juicy Fruit voice. “And so are the dozens of nuclear warheads it carries. Tridents, ICBMs, Minute Men…you name it. We get another 9/11, Mr. Moonlight, you can betcha one of my subs will delight in lighting up Iran. Or maybe Northern Pakistan. Take your pick.”

  “Call me Moonlight,” I told him, lighting what’s become a rare smoke for me these days. “So, what brings you around my bar?”

  Raising one of those crooked hands.

  “Mind if I have a drink?”

  I felt myself smiling. Ironically. Booze almost killed him once. Indirectly, I guess. In technical terms, the truck had nearly killed him. But his condition…the fact that he would never use his legs again was all about the booze.

  “Where’re my manners,” I said, standing up. “What’s your pleasure, Mr. Czech?”

  “Jack and Coke,” he said, that boyish smile on his face revealing fine, straight white teeth. Czech must have had good parents. Parents with enough cash to send him to orthodontists.

  I started toward the bar to mix his drink.

  “Oh, and hey, Mr. Moonlight,” he said over his shoulder while pulling out his Blackberry again. “Can you make it a big one?” He raised both crooked hands and made like he was measuring the size of something.

  “Sure thing,” I told him, and made him a drink inside a beer pint that had a worn Pabst Blue Ribbon logo pasted to it.

  I remembered the hands again, so I stuck a straw in it without asking him if he wanted a straw in it and brought it to him. When I sat back down, I took a hit off my still-lit smoke, set it back down in the metal ashtray and decided not to smoke any more of it.

  “Your story,” I said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’d like you to find my father,” he said matter-of-factly. I noticed that in the time I’d made his drink he’d ditched the Juicy Fruit, which suited me just fine. He took hold of his Jack and Coke with two trembling hands, greedily mouthed the straw, and sucked a major hit off it. By the time he came back up for air, the drink was a third gone.

  “You lost your dad?” I said.

  “I never knew him,” he explained, retrieving, observing, and quickly shoving the Blackberry back inside his jacket yet again. “I was removed from his custody at birth. You see, my mother gave me up for adoption. Both she and my dad were too young to take care of me. So the story goes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Harvey Rose. It’s possible he is, or was, an accountant in Albany. But there are many accountants in Albany and a couple of men named Harvey Rose who are most definitely not the one.” He spelled out the last name for me, which wasn’t necessary. I wrote it down on a bar napkin, stuffed it into my pocket.

  “What about your mom?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “You know that for sure?”

  “My mother confirmed it for me many years ago.” Smiling again. “My adoptive mom, that is. She told me my biological mother had died of cancer back when I was fifteen. She thought I should know, so that I didn’t harbor false hope of ever being reunited with her.”

  “Wow, your adoptive mom must have been all heart.”

  He laughed, took another hit off the drink, this time leaving it half empty. Or full, depending upon how you looked at it.

  “She was a good mom,” he said, smiling. “Just different. She was from Russia and so was my adoptive father. Muscovites. They’d escaped the Berlin Wall somehow in the late seventies and made it over to the land of the free and the home of the brave. They made a life for themselves here by going to school and educating themselves. By the time they adopted me over twenty-five years ago, my dad was employed at Knolls Atomic as a nuclear engineer. So, you could say, Mr. Moonlight, that I’m continuing the family tradition. My adoptive parents were hard workers and straightforward people. When there was something they wanted you to know, they just told you. No sugarcoating it. That’s the Russian way.”

  “Back to your biological father,” I said. “Why do you want to find him now?”

  For the first time, his smile faded. He sucked down the rest of his drink.

  “It’s personal, Mr. Moonlight,” he said, setting the empty glass back down with both, now steady, hands.

  “Pardon me,” I said, stamping out the still lit cig. “But there’s something we have to get straight. If you want to hire me, I need to know that you can trust me, and I can trust you.”

  “I understand,” he said with a grin.

  “Good. No lies or fibs or hiding important tidbits from me for whatever reason.”

  He stared intently at what was left of his drink. Not too much. I got the message. I got up, mixed him another one, weaker this time. I put a fresh straw in it and set it down in front of him. Then I sat back down.

  “As you might no doubt guess, my father will be getting on in years. I estimate him to be about seventy-six now, or thereabouts—”

  Raising my hands, I told him to hold it while I got up, grabbed some paper napkins from behind the bar, popped a new beer for Uncle Leo, and planted myself back in front of Czech.

  “Seventy-six,” I repeated under my breath.

  “I know he will die sooner than later, and I simply want to meet with him, make some kind of peace with him…his existence.”

  “You’ve never spoken with him?”

  He shook his head, sipped his new drink, slower this time.

  “Never. According to my adoptive parents, I only know that he lived in this area and worked as an accountant, first with the federal government. Department of Military Affairs, I believe. The same department that oversees my operation at Knolls. Then he went to work for himself.”

  “Both you and your father worked at Knolls, yet you’ve never run into him?”

  “Not that I know of. I’m not sure we’d know one another, Mr. Moonlight. But I do know that my father knew him, and perhaps that’s how the whole adoption issue began in the first place.”

  “And his name is really Harvey Rose?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Really, Mr. Moonlight, I just told you his name. You wrote it down on a napkin. I’m not making it up. That would be counter-productive. I’m an engineer after all.”

  He had a point. I did just write it down and he was an engineer. Silly me. “Why not just conduct your own search on the internet?”

  “I’ve already exhausted my computer search. The Harvey Roses I come up with are most definitely not him.”

  “How do you know?”

  He smiled, upper lip hidden under that thin mustache. “I just know.” Shaking his head. “My father is not listed on the internet.”

  Czech’s gut must have been speaking to him. I still wasn’t all that thrilled about the internet, myself, even if it had taken over everyone’s lives. “How can you be sure your dad still lives in the Albany area at all? How do you know he’s even alive?”

  “I can’t be,” he said. “In fact, I should tell you that there is yet one more Harvey Rose, who is listed as deceased by the Albany County Hall of Records. Died years ago. But I know in my gut that my father is alive.” Another Jack and Coke smile. “Must have something to do with the blood-is-thicker-than-water thing.”

  “Must be,” I said. “Had the dead Rose been an accountant?”

  “Information I got online didn’t say one way or another. He was just listed as a ‘local businessman.’” He made pretend quotation marks with the fingers on his right hand when he said, “local businessman.”

  “Any clue as to what he might look like? That is, assuming he’s alive and just a very private, unlisted, off-the-Google-radar human being.”

  Czech reached into his pocket, pulled out a small photograph and handed it to me.

  I stared down at an old, black-and-white image of a hospital room. There was no one lying in the bed, but the sheets and blankets were tossed about, as thoug
h whoever had been lying in there had either left the room or been dismissed somehow.

  A young woman and a man occupied the center of the shot. They were holding a newborn baby who was bundled up in white blankets. You couldn’t see his or her face, but I’m assuming the baby was Peter Czech.

  Standing to the left of the would-be father was a tall man, who was older than the couple. He had black hair, a receding hairline, and thick eyebrows—thicker than thick, and raised up on both ends, like they’d been pasted on that way. He was wearing a business suit, and he was devoid of a smile. In fact, the young couple wasn’t smiling either. They were looking at the camera rather apprehensively.

  That’s when it dawned on me that the mother who’d borne this child—the wife or girlfriend of devil-eyebrows—wasn’t in the picture. I looked again at that just-recently-vacated-looking bed. She hadn’t gone far, probably. Bathroom run? Or—could she be behind the camera?

  That seemed a stretch. I couldn’t imagine a mother giving away her child in the first place, but to record the transaction for posterity was mind boggling. Plus, she’d be in a hell of a lot of pain to play photographer. Must be the photographer was a nurse.

  Had the unseen mother and devil-eyebrowed father entered into some kind of contract or legal arrangement to have a baby for this Russian couple? I wanted to ask Czech about the possibility but decided not to. I didn’t want to hurt him, and what difference did it make how the baby came about, anyway? It wouldn’t affect his need to search for his maker. Not if he wanted to find his father badly enough, which he apparently did.

  I went to give him back his photograph.

  “You keep it,” he insisted. “You’re going to need it if you’re going to find him.”

  I stuffed the picture in the left chest pocket of my black leather jacket.

  “You live close by?”

  “Orchard Grove Road. North Albany. Been there for almost two years now.” Back to smiling cheerfully. “Hey, it’s my first house. I’m pretty proud of it.”