When we asked Jorgensen to take care of Blaise’s problem, of course the first thing Jorgensen thought was that we were putting a hit on Ashleigh. “About damned time,” Jorgensen said. He took his sunglasses from the pocket of his pea-coat and put them on. Jorgensen said, “Address.” Then he smiled. No, we said, this time it’s not an ex. It’s Blaise. Jorgensen stopped smiling. “Look,” he said, “Blaise isn’t my best buddy in the world, but he’s a buddy. I drink vodka with him right here in this bar. I have no problem with bitch exes, or with their new lover-boys, but I draw a line. No one I drink with is a potential target.”
We were relieved to hear this, and I bought a round for everyone, and we drank together, us and Jorgensen.
We took turns telling Jorgensen what we knew of the Blaise situation. I said, “Blaise bleaches the toilet after every piss and every turd, a gallon of bleach for every pint of piss.” Shapiro told of the Incident of the Eyeball, Polizzi recounted the 98th Street Occurrence. Glenn explained the Castlemont High Bleachers Improper Laughter Event.
Jorgensen shook his head. “Bleach?” Jorgensen said.
“Every time.”
Jorgensen said, “Something must be done.”
Jorgensen told us that he’d do it right. He told us that first he’d cover the necessary intelligence, find out everything he could about the target. He led us outside to his F-150 and opened his tool boxes. They were filled with all kinds of stuff, boxes of ammo, pistols, disassembled automatic weapons, Tommy-gun shotgun cartridges to make streetsweepers with, plastic explosives and detonators we’d seen him fart around with every Fourth of July, sticks of dynamite. He pulled a cammie combat vest from the top of the pile and put it on. He checked it—pistols strapped to the inside, knives in a dozen pockets, metal Chinese stars that looked like they could mow down telephone poles, grenades.
“Knee pads,” he said. “For CQB, Close Quarters Battle. A Super Lite bullet proof vest. Classified—you tell, you die.”
He looked at us. We nodded.
“First-aid kit for self-surgery, claymores, frag-grenades, Blackhawk assault vest, 40 millimeter grenade launcher. A Surefire flash light with visible laser-sight mechanism—hey, put the red dot on what you want to kill, maim, or destroy. Pop goes the weasel!”
“But Jorgensen,” I said. “We just want you to take care of him, not take care of him.”
Jorgensen jerked his head toward me. He stared. His eyes twitched. “You,” he said. He looked at all of us. “You, my friends, are sending me on a mission. Do you understand.”
I said, “We understand, but.”
“But nothing,” Jorgensen said. “You are sending me on a mission. On a mission a man must be prepared. If you shits understood this basic principle of survival, if Blaise understood this most elementary aspect of the nature of the way things work, he wouldn’t need me,” Jorgensen said. “And neither would you.”
We looked at the ground.
“Any more dumb-ass comments?” Jorgensen said. “No? Good. Now,” he said. “Multiban-inter/intra team radio specific for spec-ops coms known as the AN/PRC-148, alternatively as the ‘lash’ which is the unit mounted around the neck and larynx throat-operated mike, the MSHR encrypted coms unit. I can whisper and my team will hear me like the voice of God. Flotation flak jacket configured as a raid vest with D-rings mag-pouches and accessory pouches strategically located. An LBV, Load Bearing Vest, will carry from 125 to 200 pounds of equipment. I carry one whole hell of a lot of shit.”
He tossed a grenade to Shapiro. “Don’t drop that flash-banger,” Jorgensen said. He looked at Shapiro serious behind those sunglasses of his. He lifted a box and opened it and it was filled with electronic equipment. “Wiretaps,” he said, “to discern the nature of his communications and the possible effects of hostile incoming, namely, The Ex.”
He lifted another box and opened it. “Night vision,” he said, patting the goggles with love. “An AN/PVS-7 and the new AN/PVS-21 see-through NVG, strobe light. If the target leaves under cover of darkness, tracking him will be as easy as trailing a semi in the desert.”
From the same box he pulled a mini radar looking thing. “Ears,” he said. “His mutterings will be known.”
He looked at Shapiro. “I’m counting on you to translate that college boy bullshit. I’ll provide tapes, you transcribe them, and then they must be destroyed. Audio recordings, unlike video impressions, are illegal unless proper consent is secured. That’s the law.”
It wasn’t quite what we wanted of Jorgensen. All we really wanted was for Jorgensen to stop Blaise from destroying himself, scare the living shit out of him enough to make him stop acting stupid over a cunt and her deviously conceived progeny, because though we’d all been down, and were sure to go down again, we’d not seen anyone down as far as Blaise without rubbing himself out, shooting himself or gutting himself or drinking himself to death or just plain losing the will to live and letting his heart stop beating. Fucking alto, amigo. No mas, adios.
We just wanted Jorgensen to slap some sense into the boy. Sure, Blaise was kind of weird, fucked up in ways we didn’t really understand, way out there because of all his college and books and big goddamn words, but Blaise was one of us, and any time one of us went down, in a way we all did, we all dropped yet another rung down into the shitpile of life, and although none of us ever entertained any hopes of climbing any higher out of the shitpile, none of us for damn fuck’s sake wanted to go any lower. We were all way too close to the bottom, and we knew it. Lose Blaise, and the next thing you know you can’t even afford Olympia beer. Lose Blaise, like we’d already lost Mike, Duke, P.J., George, Andrew, Joey Corollo, Clyde Lee, Bill Ware, Antonio—shit, lose Blaise, and it would take a lot of beers to get over it.
Blaise wasn’t even bad off. He still had some money coming in from his jingles, Blaise. He’d been to college. He was nowhere near the bottom. He scrubbed toilets not because he had to, but because he wanted to, for fuck’s sake.
We didn’t see or hear from either Blaise or Jorgensen for about two weeks, but one day, Jorgensen walked into Dick’s with scrolls of paper tucked beneath his arms. He was wearing his sunglasses and his combat vest. He looked bigger than usual. Really big. His chest looked like a 55 gallon oil drum, full.
“Non-regulars,” he said. “Out,” he said. “Now.”
Jorgensen looked at the new guy. The new guy left. I finished his Scotch. It was some of that expensive shit Louie keeps only for show.
Jorgensen said, “Clear the bar.” What, we said. “Clear. A clean bar is necessary.” And we took our beers and drinks and cleared the way. He set the scrolls on the bar and began unrolling them, grabbing cocktail glasses to hold the paper down. We sidled up to the bar to see what was the what.
Blueprints, is what. Schematics. Detailed studies of all Blaise’s comings and goings, of every movement he’d made in the past two weeks. Arrows, dotted lines, stick figures, special symbols, skulls and crossbones, Spy-v-Spy little black bombs sparkling and ready to explode, color-coded indexed dated timed and stamped, notary-public. He’d coded a legend at the bottom of each scroll as if each were an atlas. “The life of Blaise,” Jorgensen said.
We drank.
“Blaise is a consistent person,” Jorgensen said. “Every day he does the same things at the same times in the same ways. As far as targets go, he gives any professional a hard dick. O-four hundred hours, Blaise leans out of bed, left hand on the floor followed by left foot and then right hand and foot, resulting in a four-point position resembling either a baby or a soldier, depending on one’s perspective and personal opinion. Soldier, in my opinion.” He gave us that look of his. He said, “Soldier.”
There was a reverence in Jorgensen’s voice I’d not before heard. It was as if he were way too commiserate with psycho Blaise. Jorgensen understood something about Blaise that we didn’t, and I could tell the rest
of the guys felt as funny about it as I did. Somehow I felt really small, like some fucking dwarf that didn’t understand the world of great men.
“Purification,” Jorgensen said. “He crawls to the toilet, vomits, then pours a gallon of Clorox bleach into the toilet and scrubs with his hands, wiping the random splatters with bleach soaked toilet tissue, Charmin. After clearing of the stomach, emptying of the intestines and bladder, followed by Clorox and toilet tissue spot check. Sweat, the color and texture of cooled bacon grease, oozes slowly from temples, brow, neck, armpits, and groin.”
“Jorgensen,” I said.
“O-four thirteen, to the kitchen, clad in boxer shorts, plain white and uncannily sanitary. Open freezer. Withdraw Absolut vodka bottle, 1.75 liter, four gulps, Adam’s apple clicking once per gulp. Cap rescrewed, bottle reinstalled.”
“Jorgensen,” I said. “We don’t need all the details.”
He gave me another one of those looks of his.
I think I might have sighed or something like that, an outsuck of breath or a shoulder-slump of desperation or resignation. “Jorgensen.”
He, though, he, Jorgensen, he gave me a look like no one’s ever given me before or since, a look not of disappointment or sadness, no, a look of some kind of shock or disappointment or incomprehension. It was as if I’d said something or done something utterly unutterable, something so wrong that no human being, and certainly no one at Dick’s Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge would ever say, something so bad that somehow Jorgensen’s faith, his belief in humanity, had been shaken, had been rended and ripped and torn and shredded and stomped upon. It was as if I’d told Owen Jorgensen that his work didn’t matter, and there’s nothing worse you can tell a man who’s having a beer at Dick’s.
He told Louie to bring him a glass of bottled water.
“Not a beer?” Louie said.
“A soldier,” he said, “a man,” he said, “does not compromise his clarity,” Jorgensen said.
“What?”
“Water,” Jorgensen said.
“Water,” Shapiro said.
Jorgensen cut Shapiro a look.
“What?” Shapiro said. “What? What? What.”
Jorgensen bowed his head as if in prayer, then slowly raised it. He looked creepy, like someone truly serious. His head looked fucking huge. He took off his cap. He’d shaved it. His skull looked like someone had pounded it with a ball-peen hammer. You could see dents and craters. Fucked up, that head of his.
“You boys have called on me,” Jorgensen said. “And do you know why? Why is this. Why is because I know the difference between that which is clear and that which is not, and these two things can be predetermined by he who nourishes clarity.” Jorg looked at me. “You taught me this, T-Bird. When we were kids. Know the other,” Jorgensen said. “Know yourself, and victory will not be at risk. Know the ground, know the conditions of nature. The victory will be utter—if we know the face of the enemy. If you intend to win the war, it is proper to continue fighting. If loss is imminent, it is prudent to quit. If you do not know—well gentlemen, if you don’t know, you’re fucked.”
Jorgensen took a sip of water. “I never fight,” Jorgensen said, “if I don’t know. In order to know, one must gather, one must ingest, one must become details.”
He looked around the room. “Details,” he said. “Details, gentlemen. If you’d paid heed to details, you wouldn’t be here with the likes of me. Fuckup motherfuckers.”
Someone bought Jorgensen a drink.
Jorgensen pushed the drink aside and took another sip of his water. “To continue,” he said. “The target then returns to his bedroom, attires himself in unfashionable straight-legged jeans, Puritan label—Wal-Mart—and denim button-up shirt. Florsheim wing-tips, black. Returns to refrigerator, four more generous gulps of Absolut vodka. He then makes phone calls. It is these phone calls that pose the most interesting question concerning the target and his behavior.”
Jorgensen reached into his ruck-sack and pulled out a small plastic box. Inside were a dozen cassette tapes, each labeled. He handed the tapes to Shapiro. “A transcript, accompanied by a translation of his psycho-babble. By seventeen hundred hours. Return the tapes to me so that I can destroy them with acid.”
Jorgensen looked at us hard. “The case of Blaise is perhaps more serious and sinister than any of us had suspected. This is not merely a matter of Clorox.”
“He’s that fucked up?”
“You gentlemen remember the Chavez girls?”
We remembered. They were two of the sexiest girls in Oakland. They were legendary. When one of them came into the Mohawk station, everybody fought for the chance to fill her tank, to, as we’d say, give them the hose. Their cars always left with the air pressure exactly on target, the oil, water, transmission oil, brake fluid, and windshield wipers checked. We’d be readjusting our dicks for an hour after one of them came in. About six months before the case of Blaise someone had killed both of them, raped them, chopped their heads off, and, according to Eddie Martino the cop, each of them had something jammed up between their legs. Martino wouldn’t tell us what it was. “Pretty nasty is what it was,” he said.
“Blaise may be the killer,” Jorgensen said.
We laughed and tipped one.
“His phone calls,” Jorgensen said, “are to the coroner, the police, the morgue, the cemetery, the Chavez parents, and the girls’ friends. In that order, every day. He wants all the details, and he’s writing them down, copiously and with method. The tapes will tell.”
Jorgensen directed us to his scrolls, and he told us the rest, indicating Blaise’s movements with his finger moving along carefully drawn and color-coded lines on the schematic. Every day Blaise would leave his apartment and walk to Ashleigh’s house across town, a seven mile trek, and he’d just sit on the curb across the street staring, sometimes crying when he caught a glimpse of his kid. Then he’d pull a little notebook out of his pocket and retrace the steps of the Chavez girls’ last day alive, starting at their parents’ house, going to their boyfriends’ houses, on to Castlemont High, from class to class and Blaise would walk the halls—he’d convinced the guards that he was on the school board—and then to the Mac’s Lounge where they’d had lunch together, back to school, to the football field where they’d had cheerleader practice.
Jorgensen paused. He knitted his brow and said, “Here the target deviates from the Chavez girls’ last day. He drives to Medeiros Liquors and purchases a 1.75 liter bottle of Absolut vodka, opens the bottle, takes four gulps, caps the bottle and places it in the trunk of his car. He then resumes the day of the girls—to their boyfriends’ houses, each in turn, as the target could not be in two places at once.”
At nightfall, Blaise would sit in front of the house until the time when they’d gone on their dates, Lucy and her boy to Skyline Boulevard to make out with a view of Oakland and San Francisco spreading out like a miracle and looking beautiful instead of ugly, Maria and her boy to the San Leandro Marina, the Oakland dumps where I ended up living to one side, San Mateo across the water of the bay, the Tony Lema landfill golf course behind them, the smell of methane rising like a fog as they fucked in the car. And Blaise went to each place, squatted and with his chin cupped in his hands, and he stared and he cried. The Chavez girls met up at midnight in Berkeley to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and after the show they went to the bathroom and that was the last time anybody saw them, except, evidently, the guy who chopped their heads off and shoved something really nasty up their twats. Every night Blaise would go to the theater, and the nights The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn’t playing, he’d watch whatever was, then go into the ladies’ restroom at the exact time the Chavez girls would have.
We shook our heads. We drank.
“The ladies’ restroom excursions are not the fucked up part, nor are they the most incriminating,” Jor
gensen said. “What’s fucked up is this. After the target emerges from the ladies’ room, he gets into his car and drives to Mountain View Cemetery, locates the graves of the Chavez girls—section one hundred sixty-six, row forty-five, lot thirteen, Lucy, and fourteen, Maria—and he lies down, alternately, for one hour sixteen to one hour twenty-two minutes, on their graves. After which he returns home and drinks most of the bottle of Absolut purchased during the day, leaving enough to drink in the morning, the ritual of which I have conveyed.”
“Fuck,” someone said.
“Yes,” Jorgensen said. “Fuck.”
“The fuck,” someone said.
“The fuck,” Jorgensen agreed.
“What the fuck,” someone said.
“I’m not the only professional on this case,” Jorgensen said. “The FBI and the local authorities are both very interested. Very interested indeed. Do you know how difficult it is to tap a wire that is already tapped? Do you know? Do you? No,” Jorgensen said. “No you don’t.”
“Fuck,” someone said.
“The target has an alibi. The night of the Chavez double murder, he was in the hospital with his wife, who had a bullet lodged in her anus. However, the anus alibi may be a cover for the crime. At least that is the suspicion of the law enforcement agencies interested in the case. They suspect.”
Jorgensen pointed to his maps, took a pencil from one of his vest pockets, and drew an X over Blaise’s apartment. “The target must be silenced,” Jorgensen said. “He may be silenced through removal, relocation, or means more sure.” Jorgensen said, “In any event, the target must be silenced. Promptly, and permanently. For the sake of the neighborhood. For the sake of Blaise the Suffering Soldier.”
He slammed his water back like it was a shot of Beam. “This briefing has concluded,” he said.
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