Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  Like a Marine officer, he said, “Who do you work for?”

  “You know! I—”

  “I called the Freer. They’ve never heard of you.”

  “What?”

  “They never heard of your ‘foundation’ either.”

  “I was there today! I’m getting groceries during lunch!”

  Wes shook his head.

  “Jeannie,” she said, “the switchboard lady—she’s a ditz! An officious ditz! You don’t ask her exactly right, she doesn’t tell you! She’s a slot machine, a crazy—”

  “The archivist said you didn’t work for him.”

  “I don’t! I’m on a fellowship and I’ve barely met—Did you talk to him?” When Wes didn’t answer, her face lit up. “You didn’t! If you would have—”

  “You’re good, aren’t you?”

  “Good?” She shook her head. “I love you!”

  “Was that your idea? Or were you just supposed to fuck me?”

  Beth covered her mouth; her eyes glistened and he heard her gag.

  “You went through my stuff when I was asleep,” he said.

  “I … You asshole! I went through your stuff!? What were you … What are you looking for? Is this … sick, kinky, crazy … What did you expect? What do you want?”

  “Who’s paying you? How much? Civil service? Contract? Off the books? Or did you get jammed up in Thailand or Germany or New Jersey and they bailed you out and you’re working it off?”

  “Jesus!” She backed away from this bruised stranger. The fire in his deep-set black eyes flushed her face. “You … I thought … And I was worried about whether you’d run, whether you’d find somebody else or fuck somebody else or I’d drive you crazy …”

  She shook her head. “Is that it? You’re crazy? Some sick Marine fuck who gets his kicks, control …”

  “Damn you!” she yelled, and ran at him, slapping him, hitting his chest, his face, his arms, as he grabbed her shoulders and pushed her away and she staggered back toward the door.

  “Going to beat me?” she said. “Rape me? Wasn’t it good enough when I wanted you?”

  A coolness flowed through Wes, a pain, doubt, and he reached for her. “Beth …”

  She backed away. Closer to the door.

  “What’s my crime?” she said. “That pictures lie and I want to remember the truth in my heart, not what some camera traps? That trinkets get lost or stolen by a Baghdad window crawler or burn up and then it’s worse than never having them? That my mom and sisters have been too busy to write me? What about my dad, huh? He’s never written. Oh, that’s a real sin! Let’s beat the shit out of Beth. What did I do, scare you? Is that it? Love equals risk equals fear equals destroy?”

  “I don’t want to destroy you!” said Wes. “You …”

  “Me?” She shook her head. “No, you: who are you?”

  “What happened …,” he started to say as her eyes darted from side to side, seeking safety, seeking certainty.

  Saw the gun.

  Wes knew that she saw the gun, but he was rooted to the spot.

  Slowly, she took a step. Reached out—plenty of time, Wes had plenty of time, but his feet were locked to the earth, his legs couldn’t move, his arms too heavy as she reached out and picked up the gun.

  Slid it from its holster.

  “Is this it?” she whispered. “Is this what you do?”

  She looked at him, her eyes wide. She held the gun toward him—held it awkwardly. The bore pointed into the kitchen. She took a step toward Wes.

  “Is this for me?” she whispered.

  Nothing; he tried and he could say nothing.

  She was close. Close enough for him to grab the gun. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Is this what it’s all about?” she said. “This is for me? From you?”

  The gun turned in her hand.

  “Like this?” she said, and she held it by the barrel, its bore staring back at her. “Is this how it’s supposed to be?

  “Here?” she said, and slowly brought the barrel of the gun up until the bore where the bullets came out kissed the forehead below her widow’s peak.

  “This way?” she asked. “Is this what you meant when you said you loved me?

  “Here?” She held the gun bore in front of her lips, so close her breath fogged the black metal Wes had polished.

  “Here?” She pressed the gun bore to her heart, then lowered her arm, the steel trailing down her chest, her stomach.

  “Here?” She pushed the gun bore against her vulva.

  When she moved again, he thought eternity had passed. She pressed the gun into his grip.

  “Then do it,” she whispered, tears running down her cheeks. She turned and slowly walked to the door.

  Stopped. Without looking back, she said, “You were right. This isn’t my life.”

  Then she was gone, the door clicking behind her.

  When he could move, he went back to his apartment.

  The gray car was still parked out front.

  He’d left his suitcase in his car. There’d be tickets on it by now: too long in the loading zone. He changed into jeans, sneakers. Packed clothes and toiletries into a duffel bag that he could carry in the same hand as the briefcase of money and documents. The holstered gun was clipped on his belt, covered by a black windbreaker. He took a last look around this apartment.

  Someone else lived there.

  Wes went to the roof.

  He stayed low, out of sight of the street. His stash of duplicate documents looked secure. The surveillance team would figure out he’d left this way. Perhaps some they would find his stash. Maybe Greco’s people. Friendlies. Maybe. He crawled and climbed over the block of town-house roofs, dropped to an alley garage, then lowered himself to the pavement. And walked away.

  There was nowhere left to go but forward.

  Private investigator Jack Berns wore a silk bathrobe over his undershirt and jockey shorts when he opened his front door to Wes’s repeated knocks.

  “I ain’t home,” said Berns, swinging the door shut.

  Wes slammed his shoulder into Berns’s door and sent the private eye stumbing backward into his house.

  “Sure you are,” said Wes. “You been up all night, too?”

  “You are fucking gone, Marine!” yelled Berns, pulling his robe closed. “You’re history!”

  Wes grabbed a fistful of bathrobe, pulled him close.

  “I’m your history,” he hissed at the smaller man.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “You work for me—remember?”

  “Are you an idiot? Don’t you know?”

  “Tell me,” said Wes, keeping his grip on the bathrobe.

  “There’s a burn notice out on you,” said the private eye. “All your spook friends, they’ll get it today!”

  “But you know now,” said Wes. “How’s that?”

  “I, uh …”

  “Who called you?” When no answer came, Wes slammed the smaller man against the wall. “Who called you?”

  “Noah,” blurted the detective, “last night, after you … After the FBI tweaked him. Damage control, you know?”

  “I know a lot,” said Wes. He pushed the man deeper into the house. Berns glanced at a table. An alarm, thought Wes, or a gun. But he knew Berns would try neither. “Down to your office.”

  “I told you—”

  “I told you,” said Wes.

  Downstairs, the bathrobed man stood in his law-book lined study, trembling. Wes slowly circled round him.

  “Noah called you,” said Wes. “But you’ve been calling him, haven’t you? All along. Everything I hired you to do, you reported to him.”

  “What’s the big deal, huh?” said Berns, trying to keep his eyes on the crazed Marine who’d probably killed someone the day before. “He’s your boss, he’s—”

  Wes’s push almost knocked him over.

  “I told you not to!” yelled Wes. />
  Berns regained his balance. Watched the madman circling him like a shark.

  “Look,” said Berns, “a guy’s gotta do business.”

  “So you played me for Noah.” The idea came slowly, grew as he walked around Berns’s wary eyes: “Who else?”

  “What?” Berns licked his lips.

  “Who else did you sell me to? Sell whatever it was you knew I had, knew I was doing?”

  “What do you—”

  And Wes hit him, knocked him to the thick carpet.

  Berns pushed himself along the floor until his back was against his desk. He wiped blood from his lip.

  “You’re through!” Berns spat through the blood. “Done! You’re—”

  Wes kicked him in the chest.

  Wheezing, gasping for breath, Berns feebly batted at the arms that pulled him off the floor, bent him back across his desk.

  “Who else!” bellowed Wes. “There’s three people dead so far. You want to be number four? Who else?”

  “I know ’eople all over,” sputtered Berns. “People inside, people outside, people you can’t even imagine. People who can get to you. Count your days, Major. Count your time.”

  “Not my job,” said Wes. “But you … your job: you got the assignment from Noah to be my legman—and to spy on me for him. But that wasn’t enough: you shopped around, found somebody else who cared. Or maybe they heard Agency gossip about us, came to you with a proposition. That doesn’t matter. But who?”

  “Fuck you. Goody flag boy like you won’t kill me and you can’t hurt me enough.”

  For a moment, Berns was wrong and they both felt that. But only for a moment. Wes jerked him off the desk and threw him against a book shelf.

  “Denton and Noah are going to love it when I tell them you sold them out, too,” said Wes.

  “They’re big boys, they knew me. I’m too valuable to lose and too slippery to squeeze. Besides, after your messing around, all they care about is putting the lid on. Loudmouth like me, they won’t jerk my chain.”

  “What else have you done?” said Wes.

  “Count your blessings, Major.” Berns straightened his robe. “You might not die. Whatever this is, you fucked it up all to hell, but if Noah keeps it quiet, you might stay out of jail. Might even get to keep your uniform. If you keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told. If I don’t decide to fuck with you.”

  … whatever this is …

  “You don’t know,” said Wes. “You don’t know what this is all about.”

  Berns shrugged. “If you’ve got some ideas, know something … I’m the kind of guy who knows how to wheel and deal your way out of trouble.”

  “No,” said Wes, “all we got left is simple business.”

  “We’re through.”

  “You’ve been on Nick Kelley,” said Wes. “How close?”

  Berns wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. Shook his head no.

  “You’re right,” said Wes, closing the distance between them. “I won’t kill you. It’s my weak heart. But I’ve got a strong stomach. I’ve already lost more than just a few qualms about how I’ll get where I’m going and what that’ll cost a slime like you. I’ll buy that you won’t tell me everything. But you’re a businessman. You’ll sell me what you can to buy what you want. What you can buy is a lot less pain.”

  When Berns laughed, Wes hit him in the stomach. It took the private eye a full minute to regain his ability to talk:

  “Close ’nough, know he’s pokin’ round. He doesn’t have nothing. Couldn’t.”

  “Then you’ll leave him alone?”

  Berns looked up. “Not my show, is it?”

  “Come on,” said Wes. “You got one more card to play.”

  Wes sat Berns at the desk, pushed the phone toward him.

  “Your source in the phone company,” said Wes. “I want all of Nick Kelley’s long-distance calls since we last checked.”

  “Can’t. This time ’month, he won’t dare pop up the—”

  Wes grabbed the private eye’s left hand; broke his little finger. Berns threw up. Made the call. After he’d cajoled the source into risking a computer search, Wes took the phone and pushed him away. Wes listened: he was on hold.

  A man’s voice came back on, dictated a series of calls Wes wrote down: from Nick Kelley’s office, calls to Nebraska.

  When he was finished whispering the list into the phone, the source said, “Do you know what a risk I took? If—”

  “Don’t hang up!” said Wes. The man on the other end of the line froze at the sound of a stranger’s voice. “I’m a federal law enforcement officer and you’re in violation of privacy and telecommunications laws. That’s between us, but you talk to Jack Berns again, you give him any of this data, I’ll send you to jail.”

  “How … Who …”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Wes. “You’re burned.”

  He hung up the phone.

  “Do you know what that cost me?” cried Berns.

  “One finger,” said Wes. “So far.”

  He searched the house, took voice diaphragms out of all the telephones. He called a taxi from the private eye’s car phone, then broke that phone and took the engine’s distributor cap. When the taxi came, Wes left the private eye tied to his couch with his bathrobe belt, swearing and staring at his swollen hand.

  All flights to Nebraska were booked or had left for the day by the time Wes got to National Airport. Under a false name, he caught a flight to Nashville, where in the morning he could make a connection to Lincoln. He checked his gun and cash in his duffel bag, gambled that his wouldn’t be one of the bags airport security randomly x-rayed.

  The sky slipped past the window of his plane.

  STOLEN CAR

  Jud took the wrong road in the dark. He cruised past Gary, Indiana’s hulking steel mills and the dark sheen of petrochemical lakes before he realized his error. He exited the interstate, parked on the crumbling asphalt of an abandoned gas station. Under the front seat of the car he’d stolen was a screwdriver and a torn map.

  Outside the car, he urinated in the predawn shadows. He found a rusted gas can in the weeds, used the screwdriver to chop the hose from the dead gas pump. Most of the nearby homes were still dark. He switched license plates with a parked car and used the chopped hose and rusty can to siphon fuel.

  Back on the road, he found U.S. 80 West. Gas fumes and bile filled his mouth. Chicago’s whiskey cut the taste. He had to stay sober enough to drive, drunk enough to keep going.

  The cities of Illinois rolled past his car. Joliet, with its gray prison walls. La Salle. Annawan. Truckstops with cherry pie, coffee. Towns where no one would answer his knock at a lonely house. The door would be unlocked, there’d be fifty-one dollars in a desk drawer, a toothbrush still in its plastic case. A Dodge without a locked gas cap. Whiskey in a cupboard, beer and leftover roast beef in the refrigerator.

  Keep going, he told himself. You can do it. You can do anything. You can face anyone. You can make it.

  Laos and SOG, Iran, Watergate, Chile, Miami: they were nothing compared to this interstate humming beneath the tires of his stolen car. Only twice before had Jud so desperately needed to believe in his own righteous invulnerability:

  Once was the last time he saw his father.

  The second time was when he seduced America.

  Phantom operas flowed around him like fog as he tried to keep the car on the road.

  You’ve done this before, Nora had said. Worked in restaurants, I mean.

  In 1964, when he was sixteen in Chula Mesa, perpetually one step ahead of the sheriff’s cruisers and truant officers, Jud worked as a busboy at a seedy Italian restaurant, supplementing his cash from anger burglaries with money he could account for.

  It was October, a cool night for southern California, a Tuesday. Jud remembered every day that mattered. It was on a Wednesday that his kindergarten teacher made him stand in the corner so long that he wet his jeans. It was on a Thursda
y that he killed his first man, a VC sentry, slit his throat, black blood in the moonless night. The last time he’d seen his father was an October Tuesday, 1964.

  A slow night for Enzio’s Italian Palace. Jud practiced being invisible as he cleared tables and loaded dirty dishes into a gray rubber tub.

  “Hey, you!” said a woman’s nasal voice behind him.

  She was more than twice his age, red lipstick, dyed hair sprayed into a brass swirl, a fake silk dress that was tight across her chest and tighter still across her hips. She wore high heels and waved a lit cigarette as she spoke.

  “Yeah,” she said as Jud turned around, “I know you.”

  “I don’t think so, ma’am.” Part of Jud feared she’d seen him in some illegal escapade and the police were just a dime drop away; part of him feared/hoped she wanted him for the big mystery.

  “What’s your name, kid,” she said.

  “Jud.”

  She rolled her eyes to the plastic chandelier.

  “Jud Stuart.”

  She blinked; grinned. “No shit. Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

  “I’m Myra.” She winked, led Jud to the raised platform against the back wall. Jud watched her girdled hips as she said, “There was something about your hair, the way you walked.”

  Up the three steps to the balcony where someone sat at the table beyond her and she turned, said, “Jud, meet Andy.”

  There he was: eyes wide, mouth open, hands trembling around a tumbler of iced vodka.

  “Stuart and Stuart,” said Myra. “Father and son.”

  Jud’s stomach fell away. A freight train roared through his head. He was clammy all over, cold and flushed.

  “Aren’t you two going to say anything?” chimed Myra.

  “So, ah,” he said, and it was that voice, “you’re Jud.”

  “No, dummy,” joked Myra, “he’s your other kid.”

  Andrew Stuart gulped his vodka. His hands trembled. He glared at Myra as she circled around the teenager in a busboy’s white fatigues. She sat behind the drink she’d left.

  “I always find pennies,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “No matter where they roll. Thought you should remember that, Andy. Thought it’d be nice for the two of you to say hi.”

  Smoke rose from the table. She filled her lungs four times in the silence.