Growing uneasy, trying not to admit she was uneasy, trying not to let the ride be spoiled or to resent a world which at any moment could make her feel unsafe, she briefly stepped off her pedals beneath the blinking light at Windsor and Olivia and glanced behind her. Two men on what appeared to be rented beach cruisers were approaching, half a block away, steadily closing the distance but with no great hurry.
She told herself to relax. Bicycles were benign, weren’t they? How likely was it that something horrible would arrive on a beach cruiser?
Then again, she was a young woman alone on a dark street next to a graveyard and it was not a risk-free world. As she once again pressed her pedals and made the left onto Olivia, she fumbled around in the purse in her basket, fishing for the lipstick-sized canister of pepper spray that she’d bought some months ago and never used and never really thought about till now.
She heard the two trailing bikes make the same turn behind her. She heard the suck of their tires on warm pavement as they quickened their pace. She wished she’d read the instructions that came with the spray.
Lifting herself from her bike seat, she braced her hands on the worn grips and rode faster. The mild air pressed against her, but now it was not caressing, it was thwarting her, resisting her flight. Her skin began to moisten and prickle at her hairline. Her bike was bouncing, her basket rattling, and it was hard to keep her sandaled feet steady on the pedals. She heard the strangers’ cruisers clattering closer.
Her vision grew choppy from the effort and the bouncing. Parked cars blurred at curbside. A crow flashed past as it swooped low toward its cemetery roost.
Then, in an instant of infuriating defeat, she saw through bleary eyes that the two men, one on either side of her, were pulling even, then just barely overtaking and converging, pinching off her escape before braking to a skid and a halt under a sickly pinkish streetlight just shy of the corner of Packer Street.
It was a clumsy and off-balance stop for all of them. They half stepped, half jumped from their pedals and stood there silently a moment, everybody struggling for breath, bike frames trembling between their thighs. Rita’s knees were shaky and a line of cooling sweat traced out her spine. The little canister was in her hand by then. She wagged it toward her pursuers and begged her voice to be firm. “Keep the fuck away from me. Just keep the fuck away.”
Bent over, hands on his legs as he labored for air, one of the men said, “Hold on a minute, Ms. Janneau. Don’t panic. We only want to talk to you.”
“Ms. Janneau? Ms. Janneau? How the hell you know my name?”
“We know everybody’s name,” wheezed the other man, who was pudgy and dough-faced and even more winded than the first one. “We’re the government.”
She didn’t believe him. Why should she? He started to move a hand toward a hip pocket. She didn’t like that. She brandished her spray and said, “Keep your hands out front. Don’t make me use this.”
The first man had recovered enough that he could stand up straight, though his chest was still heaving. Offhand, he didn’t look much like a killer or a rapist. He had stiff brown hair, clearly a toupee that had slid a few degrees off-center in the breeze, and was wearing a white polyester office shirt heavily splotched in the armpits. He said, “It’s okay, use it if you want. It’s a lipstick.”
She looked at the tube. It said Revlon. Shit. What was the point of making the pepper spray such a close match? What the hell did that accomplish? Was it supposed to be more ladylike? She held her ground but said nothing.
The two men shared a glance, then, smoothly, though not as in-synch as they’d seen it done in movies, they reached for their wallets and whipped out badges that gleamed dully in the wan, acidic light. The first guy said, “I’m Agent Ernie Johnson and this is Agent Ralph Godowski. IRS. Sorry if we scared you. Didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to?” said Rita. Her adrenaline was still pumping, and what had been naked fear just a moment before now stiffened into outrage. “Bullshit you didn’t. You don’t come riding up like that behind a woman if you don’t mean to scare her.”
“Okay,” said Godowski, who was now wiping his doughy face with a wrinkled handkerchief. “We did mean to scare you a little bit. But for your own good.”
“I’ll decide what’s for my own good, thank you.”
Johnson was straightening out his hair. It was odd to see an entire hair-do moving as a single unit across a scalp. “We know where you work, Ms. Janneau. We know who you work for and we know what your wages are.”
“Thanks for the heads-up. I’ll be sure to file a return next year.”
“Your employer,” said Godowski, “is a lifelong criminal and tax cheat.”
“Same could be said about yours,” she fired back.
“He’s done jail time for it,” the pudgy man went on. “You aware of that?”
“It’s none of your business what I’m aware of.”
“Maybe he’s learned his lesson. Maybe he’s reformed. But tax cheats tend to stay tax cheats. It gets to be a nasty habit. That’s why we do follow-up. For years and years sometimes.”
“Job security for you, I guess,” said Rita. “And maybe even a nice, expense-paid junket to Key West now and then. Good to know where my withholding’s going.”
Johnson said, “Maybe you should take this a little more seriously, Ms. Janneau.”
“Maybe you should stop calling me Ms. Janneau and maybe you should get out of my way so I can go home.”
“No one’s stopping you,” he said as he backed up his bicycle a few grudging inches to clear a path for her. “But before you go, I’d like to give you my card.”
“I don’t want your fucking card.”
“Take it, please. Just in case you ever feel like chatting. Just in case you ever come across any information that your government might appreciate.”
“I can’t imagine anything less likely.”
“We do pay bounties, you know,” Godowski said. “Pretty substantial sometimes. Especially compared to entry-level wages.”
Rita put a foot on her pedal. “Listen, guys, first of all I don’t know anything, and second of all I’m not a squealer, and third of all I think your way of doing business really stinks, so instead of scaring and bullying people on dark streets why don’t you just go back to your fucking cubicles and audit someone. You’ll feel better.”
Johnson stretched his neck and squared his shoulders. “We’re not Auditors, Ms. Janneau. We’re Field Investigators. And we’re pretty good at what we do.”
At that, Godowski narrowed down his eyes, hunched up his shoulders, and for some reason started speaking in a heavy Russian accent. “Vunce already ve have nailed Costanza. Behind bars ve have put him. Peerhaps you are not avare of this.”
Baffled, looking from one agent to the other, Rita said, “No, I was not aware of it. But I hope you got a big gold star. Now if you’ll excuse me…”
She lifted herself onto her seat and balanced on her pedals. Her purse was open in her basket and Johnson dropped his business card into it just as she was wobbling off. She thought of throwing it into the very first garbage can she came to, but she couldn’t bring herself to stop her bike again until she was safely inside the gate of the compound. The card soon settled into the bottom of her purse among an assorted litter of crinkled old receipts and grocery lists and the canister of pepper spray that looked exactly like a lipstick.
14
O n Stock Island, the distillery was dark and silent. The burners that heated the copper columns were idle and cool. The hissing pressure had been bled from the pipes and valves and faucets. The crew had all gone home or out to bars.
Alone in his gleaming, spotless lab, Mikel Shintar was still hard at work. The nighttime hours were the ones that suited him best; when he alone was immersed in light and everybody else was in the dark. The contrast pretty well summed up Shintar’s view of his place in the world. He was brighter, smarter, than anyone around him. And not just smarter, but bolde
r in his thinking, more ambitious in the sweep of his imagination.
Did anyone truly understand the audacity of what he was working on in that lab or the degree of ingenuity the job required? Certainly his barely literate partner Costanza didn’t, with his constant gruff refrain: It’s way beyond my pay grade. So why bother trying to explain? It was actually far better that he didn’t. Carlo thought they were out to produce a nice little recreational street drug, one that would become a mostly harmless fad and on which they’d hold a monopoly, and that would pay them back ten- or a hundred- or a thousand-fold for their investment in this money-hemorrhaging booze business. Fine. If that’s what Carlo thought, let him think it. By the time he, Shintar, had finished his part of the job—had perfected his epic molecule, his masterpiece—Costanza would be close enough to bankrupt that he’d have no choice but to stay on board and handle distribution.
First, though, the molecule had to be perfected.
The chemist had felt in recent days that he was getting tantalizingly close to having it, and the closer he got, the more excited he became to get there, and the more furious and frustrated he was that he wasn’t quite there yet, and could not be absolutely certain that he ever would be. This bracing but toxic combination of excitement and frustration had been depriving him of sleep and keeping him at work with his beakers and pipettes and diagrams and note pads until his eyes burned and his depleted body trembled because he’d forgotten to eat.
Part of what spurred him on—the part that wasn’t standard greed or a morbid craving to be infamous and loathed—was a paradox that had driven and mocked him for as long as he could remember: That chemistry, while on the one hand endlessly subtle, was on the other hand almost childishly simple.
It all came down to shapes. Basic geometry. Organic molecules were jigsaw puzzle pieces; that’s really all they were. They were smooth in certain places, jagged in others, rounded or angular, concave or convex or some of both. Like puzzle pieces, they fit together where their bumps and notches matched up; if they didn’t match, they didn’t interlock, and nothing happened. If they did match, well, that accounted for many seeming mysteries—how muscles moved, how food became energy, how blood held oxygen. More specific to Shintar’s line of research, it also explained how drugs worked. Drugs weren’t magic; they were shapes.
So, for example, why did morphine block pain? It wasn’t voodoo. Morphine blocked pain because its molecule had the same shape as certain endorphins produced naturally in the body. It could therefore lock on to certain proteins whose job it was to pass along pain messages; and, by locking on, it neutralized them. The pain was still there; the message never got through. End result: fake euphoria. Side effect: opioid crisis.
Or why did cocaine make people feel invincible? Again, geometry. Cocaine locked on to several different molecules whose job it was to regulate the brain’s feel-good juices like dopamine. With the regulator blocked, the dopamine level would keep building up, raising blood pressure, body temperature, alertness, confidence: the rush. Sadly, though, the brain would soon run out of dopamine, and then the desolating crash would come. How to fix the crash? More cocaine, of course.
Then there was meth, another interesting puzzle piece, whose special shape fooled the brain into releasing squirt after squirt of noradrenaline, a super-stimulant normally reserved for fight-or-flight emergencies or freakish acts of strength such as lifting up a car to free a pinned child. Amazing stuff, noradrenaline, but produced by the body in very limited supplies and at great cost to the metabolism, and not meant to be squandered on mere fun. Meth addicts tended to forget that even before they forgot everything else.
In any case, three drugs, three shapes, three distinct actions on the human nervous system. What if a gifted and driven chemist could craft—from readily available organic substances, such as those contained in ordinary and perfectly legal fermented sugar cane—a super-molecule, a sort of uber-drug, that would do the jobs of all of them? Imagine the market among the thrill-seeking and the desperate! Such a molecule would, of course, be highly addictive, at least three times more so than any single one of its components. But that wasn’t Mikel Shintar’s problem; if people were dumb enough to get themselves addicted, so be it. Shintar’s problem was simply one of determination and technique, of a painstaking mastery in the lab that might secure him a place in the pantheon of history’s hated geniuses. But geniuses nonetheless.
Eyes itching, hands a little bit unsteady, he got back to work amid the glaring, gleaming light that bounced off spotless surfaces of glass and tile and stainless steel. He felt that he was getting oh so close.
15
“P retty subdued this morning,” said Albin, as he and Rita, on opposite ends of the still blue swimming pool, were having their separate breakfasts. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, fine,” she said unconvincingly, her face half hidden behind her coffee mug. “Just didn’t sleep very well last night. Something kind of creepy happened when I was riding home. Couldn’t get it off my mind.”
He’d been jotting in his suicide book as usual. He moved it aside a couple inches. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.” She didn’t see the point of upsetting Albin by mentioning the IRS. “Just a couple guys hassling me.”
“Ah.” He took a piece of toast from his silver rack and evenly smeared it with bitter orange marmalade, the grown-up kind that was mostly peel. “Catcallers? Drunks?”
“No, just assholes.” She shrugged and ate some cereal. The pool pump switched on. The skimmers made a soft slurping sound and ripples started to spread in a scallop-shell pattern across the surface of the water. “Whatcha been writing about this morning?”
He dabbed his lips on a napkin. “Memory.”
“What kind of memory?”
“No, I mean memory itself. How it works. How it tricks us.”
“Tricks us?”
“Yes. How we imagine that we’re remembering, when what we’re really doing is telling ourselves a story about something that happened in the past.”
She sipped some coffee and thought that over. “But what we remember is the story, right?”
“That’s what we like to believe. But not necessarily. What if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the story we tell ourselves that then becomes what we think we remember?”
“That sounds kind of ass-backwards, Albin.”
“Does it? Maybe not if you really think about it. I mean, look, what sort of things do people tend to remember? Family, neighborhoods, love affairs. The things that have been most important, that have shaped us. That tell us who we are. That’s where it gets tricky.”
Rita was absently eating cereal. Her spoon ticked over a crack in the bowl. She said, “I’m not quite sure I’m getting this.”
Albin, usually so measured and stately in his movements, grew animated, almost twitchy. He swung his legs out from under his little breakfast table then primly tucked his robe around his knees. “I think what it comes down to is that remembering is not neutral. Remembering has an agenda, a motive. Maybe the motive is to make ourselves look good. Or find someone else to blame. Or justify things we did or didn’t do. Make ourselves the hero.”
“Or the victim,” she put in.
“Right. We can skew it lots of different ways. But the point is that memories have a bias, and the most important memories have the biggest bias of all, because we think about them most often, and every time we think about a certain version of events, it cuts a deeper groove in our minds, and it gets harder and harder is to separate the story we’ve been telling ourselves from the truth of what really happened.”
She sipped some lukewarm coffee. A green hummingbird half-disappeared inside the petals of a red hibiscus flower. Then it flew out backwards, turning as it backed, like a car easing out of a garage. Rita had seen this happen before but it had never really registered how odd it was to see a bird fly backwards. She said, “No offense, Albin, but this is getting a little deep for firs
t thing in the morning. Could you maybe give me a fr’instance?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, leaning forward to retrieve his teapot and pouring himself a splash of tea. “I’ve been thinking about my brother. More than I have in many years, what with you working for him, and his name coming up when Bert was over the other day. And it dawned on me that a lot of what I remember about him, about our relationship, or lack of a relationship—after all these years, maybe I just have a lot of it wrong.”
“But they’re your memories. How could they be wrong?”
“Oh, lots of ways. Look, we’re all spin-masters when it comes to our own past. So, for example, why did Carlo and I become estranged in the first place? My spin is that he couldn’t handle it that I was gay. But maybe that’s not fair. Maybe I couldn’t handle it that I was gay. I mean, coming out was hard back then. Bruising. Did my brother ever say anything hateful? I don’t think so. Maybe I was too ready to imagine slights and disapproval because I wasn’t yet comfortable in my own skin. Who can say for sure?”
“But there was also another side to it, right?” said Rita. “The small detail that your brother was a criminal.”
“Well, yeah, sure. But that’s not spin-free either. Criminal. Is there a more judgmental word in the English language? So I stuck that label on my brother, which made me feel very smug and justified about turning my back on him. But he wasn’t just a criminal. He was a criminal who was helping a lot of people, taking on a lot of responsibility. The exact same kind of responsibilities I was shirking. I preferred not to remember that part of it, of course. So I stuck with criminal and closed the door. Ah, well.”
He shrugged with his eyebrows and went back to his toast. But he didn’t eat any. He lifted the slice a few inches from the plate and then just seemed to be staring through it at the ripples in the pool.
After a long moment, Rita said, “Ya know what I think would be really good?”
Nacho Unleashed Page 9
