I indicated my complete agreement with that idea, then I sat back down on the sofa. A little closer this time. She calmed down as her tsunami of tears passed.
“Why’d you come to Chicago? Did Jeremy actually want to see his sad excuses for a father?” she asked.
“No, the dad was just on the way.”
“On the way to what?”
“Probably nothing good, considering all the people who have been killed so far. Which brings me to a few follow-up questions about your brother. I understand he had an interesting record collection, which apparently included some Nazi storm trooper tunes. Guess he skipped over that whole grunge music craze and went right to the Horst Wessel song.”
No answer. Her mouth was still hanging open from my disclosure about the dead folks.
“Your charming ex-husband, who I hope was at least good in bed because he doesn’t appear good for much else, filled me in on Robbie’s hobbies and his sparkling personality. I’m also interesting in knowing more about Herman.”
“None of this has anything to do with…”
“All of it has something to do with this,” I interrupted. Fuck gentlemanly manners, I was tired of her bullshit, she was evading more than a Republican talking about race relations. “Ask your son what we’ve been through. The more I know, the more I have a chance of actually surviving this. So you need to lower the walls and let me in.”
Did that sound too sexual? She swallowed most of the Jack in her glass.
“I’m so exhausted, I haven’t had one good night’s sleep since Jeremy left.”
“And you’re not going to have another one until you tell me what I need to know.”
She looked away. “I don’t know who to trust.”
“You can be more specific. You don’t know if you can trust me. Ask your boy. I think he’ll tell you that you can.”
“I don’t want to bother him. He’s finally getting some time with his father.”
“And Wanda,” I added as I got up to refill her glass and mine.
“Who’s Wanda?”
“Well, I’d say she’s old enough to be your ex-husband’s mother, but I’m not sure she’s young enough to even make that cut.”
“He’s with an old woman?”
“She’s pleased with her orgasms, he’s pleased with her money. Sound familiar?”
“You’re a little cruel.”
“Sorry. I’m a little on edge.”
“I did think I loved him, you know. You were married young, weren’t you? Didn’t you think you loved her?”
“I wasn’t totally convinced.”
I handed her back her glass and sat down even closer to her as she finally noticed her lavish surroundings.
“Speaking of money, what did this place cost?”
“Forty-five bucks through Trivago.com. Now. Your brother.”
“Sounds like you already know everything.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking you.”
She took a too-big sip from her glass. She was already worn out and I doubted if she had had anything to eat, so I knew, sooner rather than later, the booze would hit her hard. But I also knew I needed her to get past her inhibitions and tell me the fucking truth about her brother.
A delicate balance. I was a little cruel.
She sat quietly a moment, then finally nodded. “Okay. Okay. What the hell, let’s get this over with.”
She told me everything. At least it sounded like everything.
Robert Davidson, her younger brother, was a shy and sensitive kid with an artistic bent. General Davidson, on those few days he was home, didn’t like that. Military purity. He had his wife, who always followed orders even when she knew they would lead to disaster, ship the kid out to military school after he finished sixth grade.
That’s when the trouble began. Robert came home for the holidays and summers a different kid. Something had broken, and what was constructed in its place wasn’t pretty. That’s when he started collecting Nazi memorabilia from rogue online sellers and begging sister Angela not to tell General Dad. That’s when his eyes grew cold, that’s when he stopped smiling, that’s when he became obsessed with weaponry of all kinds.
At first, the General was pleased with the turn in Robert’s personality, but then he began to sense just how far a turn it was. The General wanted his son to follow in his oversized footsteps at West Point, but Robert had other plans. He didn’t like all the pomp and circumstance involved with the officers’ training, nor was he particularly interested in rules and regulations. He was interested in becoming Special Ops, training for the Army Rangers and participating in whatever cool and brutal clandestine missions he could.
Like the kid, he wanted to dominate. I didn’t like to think about the duplication of that pattern.
All Angela knew about Herman was that he was a higher level Ranger whose spell Robert fell under. Hence all the jokes about Robert being his “girlfriend.” No one had any idea about Robert’s sexuality, if it mattered. He was gone most of the time and he never mentioned a woman – or a man in that context, for that matter. There was no question, however, that Herman was his BFF – and also that nobody in the Davidson family liked Herman, especially the General, who sensed that Herman was feeding Robert’s darkest impulses and causing him to drift farther and farther away from the family. Angela wasn’t sure what her father thought Robert was up to – he kept all of that to himself. But at some point, about two years before Robert’s death, the father-son relationship was severed forever. She hadn’t heard from her brother since then.
So what was she worried about?
Quite simply, she was worried about everything she didn’t know, an affliction I also suffered from. She had seen the growing madness in Robert’s eyes and she knew whatever he was doing overseas wasn’t going to make for a pretty bedtime story. She was relieved when the reporting on his death finally vanished from the airwaves without any unseemly dirt attached. But her heart was broken and so was her father’s, because they both remembered the four-year-old boy who loved Cookies N’ Cream ice cream, Inspector Gadget cartoons, and Hot Wheels.
As she told me all this, she let slip a few pertinent facts about herself. Even though she was the first child by a couple of years, the General had pretty much ignored her because she wasn’t a boy and her mother had followed suit. She did everything right as a child to try and win their attention, if not their love, and it never really worked out. That’s why she did the absolute wrong thing and married A.J., more of a disaster for her obviously than her parents. But she was happy she got Jeremy out of the deal, even though she worried about him too. She could see her brother in him...
And with that, she started to droop. I had to act fast and ask the biggest question I needed answered before I lost her for good.
“What do you know about Andrew Wright and your father?”
She looked at me with such squinty eyes that I felt that I had physically become out of focus.
“Andy?”
Andy. The nickname made him seem so…cuddly.
She somehow bolted up off the couch and onto her feet.
“I have to go…”
“Where exactly?” I asked as I got up. “Tell me about Andy.”
“Can’t…”
She turned and fell into my arms.
“I’m a little loopy.”
She looked into my eyes. Oh shit. She kissed me. And I let her. It went on for a little bit.
I’m not the best-looking guy in the world, but I wasn’t the worst either. I knew there was something happening between us, but I kept telling myself I was nowhere in her league, that I was imagining things.
But apparently I wasn’t. In the D.C. restaurant, I guess she was serious about me being in her wheelhouse. Normally she’d have an open invitation to mine, but this wasn’t the time or the place – I was already more involved than I should be with the Davidson clan. Plus, I was also in too deep with Jules, who I’m sure, if she were here and realized I had
just now gotten to her name in my internal deliberations, would be slapping me so much harder than Angela had that my head would fly off my neck and into a nearby wall.
Which would save her the trouble of strangling me with my own intestines.
When the kiss was over, Angela looked up at me and asked, “I shouldn’t like you, should I?”
She felt good in my arms, but no.
“Let me put you in the bed, Angela.”
I walked her towards the bedroom.
“What are we going to do there?” she wondered aloud.
“Not that. I already have a girl.”
“A singer that doesn’t sing, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s about to change.”
“Is she pretty?”
“She’ll do.”
I gently guided her to a landing position on the bed.
“Am I pretty?” she asked, half-out.
“Too pretty for me. And maybe too young. I’m going to be sixty in a year and a half, you know.”
“So will I…in eighteen...”
Her eyes were already closing. I took off her heels and put some covers over her. She was already gone. She had to have been most of the way there when she kissed me.
It was after two. I found a spare goose down pillow and a blanket in the closet and headed over to the sectional couch for what wouldn’t be a very restful sleep. For one thing, there was this pesky erection I was lugging around with me. I could make that go away, but what I couldn’t stop was the sadness I felt for the lonely woman sleeping by herself in my bed.
I was getting way too involved with this family. Maybe because I hadn’t had one of my own in too long a time.
Family Time
“Does Andrew Wright have a limp? Right leg?”
Angela was still in the bedroom and I assumed she was still asleep. Meanwhile, Howard had taken it upon himself to give me a call from his new burner to make sure I hadn’t gotten into any more trouble. He was oddly cheerful.
“I don’t know, but I’ll check it out,“ answered the new, suddenly-helpful Howard. “I also looked into Montana. You said all those SUVs had plates from there? Well, Dark Sky’s corporate headquarters is here in D.C. But they have a training facility in Montana named Black Sun…”
“…in Montana.”
“A couple hours north of Missoula.”
“We used to track a lot of crazies up in that area, didn’t we?”
“Still do.”
“Black Sun,” I wondered. “What’s that all about?”
“Don’t know.”
Pause.
“So nobody’s come after you to try and come after me?”
“Very, very quiet.”
“Thanks for not saying ‘Too quiet.”
“You’re welcome. So – you’re going to Milwaukee tomorrow?”
“That’s the plan. You going to talk me out of it?”
“Not yet.”
How did our talks get so congenial? We wrapped things up and got off the phone.
My Waffle Spa bathrobe and I couldn’t do much until Angela woke up, so I checked out the vintage record player. I had been reading about how all the cool kids loved vinyl these days - me, I just remember the giant scratch that fucked up Come Together every time I played Side 1 of Abbey Road, rendering an already-incoherent song off-the-charts nonsensical. I really couldn’t fathom what the hipsters were thinking going back to this stone-age technology. Maybe they should give hand-crank phones another whirl while they were at it.
I went through the albums and found one lone Sinatra, one of his last on Capitol, Nice ‘N’ Easy – it was towards the end of his magnificent run with arranger Nelson Riddle and featured mostly remakes of old ballads from the Columbia days, but it still went down okay, even though Frank’s voice had lost most of its syrup by then. I put it on and the title track, the only original song, started playing its gentle intro. I started thinking that might make a good song for Jules when she got her pipes back in shape. Which sent a huge wave of guilt crashing over my insides.
I grabbed my special Howard-sent phone and dialed. And of course, I woke her up. It was Sunday and it was before noon.
“Haah?” she said sleepily. Did I mention she wasn’t a morning person?
“It’s me.”
A beat.
“David…Mal…Mil...Melfinger?”
“Close enough.”
“You’re going to give me a heart attack…where the fuck are you? Let me guess…you can’t fucking tell me.”
She wasn’t awake enough to really build up a good head of angry steam. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen until this call was over because, God knows, I had provided her with enough coal to fire up that particular furnace.
“No, I can’t. But I just wanted to let you know I was okay…”
“Wonderful. By the way, did you want to know if I was fucking okay? Because I’m fucking not. Because my fucking boyfriend is God knows where doing God knows what. Jesus, Max.”
“When I can tell you more, I will. I don’t know who’s listening to what.”
“Well, here’s a question that should be safe. Have you had any more romantic dinners lately?
That’s when Angela decided to come out of the bedroom in the suite’s other provided Waffle Spa Bathrobe and say, in loud clear tones so I could hear her across the room, “I’m going to take a bath!”
I quickly nodded to Angela that she could do anything she wanted, but I was kidding myself if Jules wasn’t going to notice that line of dialogue being shouted at me in a female voice.
“A BATH? Who, pray tell, is taking a GODDAM FUCKING BATH? MUST BE A DIRTY WHORE WHO NEEDS TO GET CLEANED UP!”
“Jules, c’mon, it’s not…”
Call disconnected.
I’d have to fix the damage another day, I couldn’t tell her enough to calm her down, if that was even a possibility. Besides, I had a new distraction to attend to. There was someone else now banging on the hotel room door. Which was just what I didn’t need, another surprise visitor.
I got up and went over to the door, where I again peered through the peephole.
Huh.
I opened the door and PMA hurried in. He looked as mad as Jules sounded.
“I’m done. Done with him.”
Muttering to himself, he walked in a crazed circle around me as I shut the door. Then he stopped and noticed the room.
“Holy shit - how much did this place cost?”
“What happened with your dad?”
Suddenly in a good mood, he heard Sinatra and looked over at the record player.
“Vinyl? Cool!”
I thought about offering the counter-argument involving my old Abbey Road album, but let it go. “What happened with your dad?” I asked again.
The kid got angry again. He sat down like a bowling ball falling into foam and laid his head against the back of the couch. After a moment, he told me how yesterday, after I had left, his dad had screamed about all the CIA atrocities committed over the last five decades and how they had basically fucked up the life of everybody in the world. A.J. had a point - the only lives he fucked up were the ones in the immediate area. Anyway, A.J. then made him watch every CIA conspiracy video on the internet and accused the kid of being a tool of the military-industrial complex like his grandfather.
Wanda finally told A.J. to leave Jeremy alone and just spend some quality time with him. But the kid had had it. He went to the guest room after dinner and stayed there. When he woke up in the morning, A.J. was still pissed off. He told the kid that he was his only son and no son of his was going to be a stooge of an imperialist, fascist and several other ists government. The kid ran out of the house and took a cab over here with the few dollars he had left in his wallet.
“Sorry about all that,” I finally said.
“What the fuck,” he answered. “You were with the CIA. You don’t seem like such a bad guy.”
I frowned. “I was glad to get out, Jeremy. To tell you the tru
th, I was glad to get out. My dad was CIA. He was in at the very beginning, he got into the OSS during World War II. Worked under ‘Wild’ Bill Donovan. I was raised to be an Agency man, so I became one, and I couldn’t have been more of a fucking idiot. When you build your life based on somebody else’s idea of what it should be, sooner or later it all goes wrong. In my experience anyway.”
“So you’re telling me I’m a fucking idiot.”
“I’m not. I’m just telling you what happened with me, okay?”
He took a deep breath and let it go for the moment, as Sinatra asked the musical question, How Deep is the Ocean?
“Can we get some breakfast? Wanda served some vegetarian crap last night and I’m starving.”
I sat down on the couch near the hotel phone. “Yeah, I’ll order some up. But you should go ask your mom what she wants.”
He gave me a weird look. “My mom?”
Oh. He didn’t know.
I told him about what happened. The mad was back with a vengeance.
“That douchebag called her? He told her where we were?”
He got up and marched over to the bedroom door and opened it.
“Kid, wait, she’s…”
He went inside and a moment later, there was a surprised lady scream. Then there were some words, some very intense words from which I got the mood, but not the substance. The kid came out again after a couple of minutes.
“She just wants some granola and yogurt, with a coffee.”
“I just want you to know nothing happened between me and your mom.”
His only response to that was, “She wants skim milk for the coffee if they have it.”
A half hour or so later, after Angela was done bathing and I was done showering and shaving, we were all dressed and sitting around the lovely round dining table in the elevated portion of the room, enjoying a wonderfully expensive breakfast. Actually, it was more of a tennis match than a meal, as I sat with Angela and PMA on either side of me. They were facing each other across the table, lobbing quick strokes back and forth as they argued in the style of the old Monty Python Argument Clinic sketch.
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 14
