“How are we going to get it cleaned up? Where do we begin?”
“Just get your ass down here.” Maloney sounds a bit more upbeat than he did the evening before. Thomas opens two cans of cat food and pours water in the creature’s bowl. He calls Annie first, then Peter. They’re taciturn and nervous, and he can’t decide whether they’re happy to have an extra day off or not. He shoves some clothes in a duffel bag. Then he finds a shirt in Patricia’s drawer, two pairs of panties, a blue dress, tights. He searches for her toothbrush, but it’s not there. She must have taken it with her. She must have taken it with her. He holds his breath and catches sight of his own face in the mirror above the sink. A pale and rigid mask. He tosses two army-green sleeping bags into a black sack and also takes the trash when he goes downstairs, dumping it into the container before heading toward the station. The heat’s always more intense than he imagines it’ll be. He can’t help but glance around for Patricia. But she must have already left for work. Or is she skipping? Maybe she’s even left town? Maybe she’s really left him. His pants stick to his balls. In the train he sits across from a girl with coarse hair the color of curry. She’s covered with tiny freckles and has a butterfly tattooed on her ankle. When she turns one arm so that it rests on her thigh with her palm facing upward, he sees there’s also a tattoo on the inside of her forearm. The devil likes to play, it reads. The girl dozes with a fixed smile on her lips; she’s got a slight overbite, and Thomas can’t take his eyes off her. She seems transparent, as if she were made of glass. One could lift her up and throw her against the doors of the train, and she would splinter into a thousand pieces. Like a casket made of glass, he thinks, like in Snow White. She opens her eyes and stares at him. A drowsy, sea-green look. Then her head glides back against the wall, her eyes sailing away. Thomas feels a column of anxiety rising in him. What if Patricia moved out. What if she’s already moved out. What if she’s found someone else.
Maloney’s standing outside the store eating fried onion rings from a brown paper cone. The store looks like something found in a war zone, with the rough-hewn boards they’d hammered in place the day before.
“How do we even get in?” Thomas asks, short of breath. He sets his duffel and his sleeping bags down on the sidewalk. Maloney pulls a crowbar from a plastic bag. “With this,” he says, handing it to Thomas. “I’ll let you play thief.” Maloney steps aside with his onion rings.
There’s a certain pleasure in yanking off the planks. In that moment right before the nails slip free, the thrust in his biceps and hands feels good. Sweat dribbles down his skin. He licks salt from his upper lip. The planks give one by one, and with a loud crack each falls onto the heap. When he’s done they enter the store, crunching on glass shards. “Fuck,” Thomas mutters. It’s as if they’re seeing the mess for the first time. As if they’ve repressed what happened yesterday. Everything’s ripped from the shelves and trampled on. The glass case is open, the keys are missing, each and every one of its twenty-six small windowpanes have been smashed in the same manner. For a moment the two men simply stand, staring. Thomas traces his index finger along the carving on the countertop. Someone had stood here with a knife in his hand. Someone left this message. “Look,” Maloney says, pointing at the mountain of silk paper. “And there,” Thomas says, nodding in the direction of the expensive gold leaf lumped in a huge ball on the floor, which looks more like a curvy, gilt-metal sculpture cast in the light from the doorway. Maloney chucks his greasy cone onto the floor angrily and walks into the hallway. A terrible wall of heat slams into them when they open the door to the office. The plastic binders with all the balance sheets lie stacked like a colorful mountain. The lamp has been yanked from the wall, the computer screen destroyed. It looks as though someone shattered it with a hammer. Two wounded chairs with broken legs that jut pathetically this way and that. The air is thick, almost sticky, and the dust billows like a swarm of bees as they step inside the office. Thomas falls despondently into the boss’s chair. Maloney tries to turn on the fan, but it doesn’t work. The cord has been slashed. Instead he opens a window, but the window sticks. Thomas experiences it in slow-motion: Maloney’s hand coaxing the hasps and jostling the window until, finally, it slips free with a plop. Maloney sinks onto the edge of the desk and swings his head back and forth, back and forth. “Oh, God,” he moans. “What’re we going to do?”
“The basement,” Thomas mumbles, his voice thick. He’s already out in the hallway. But the storage room is intact. No one has been in here. Everything’s neatly and tidily stacked on the shelves. The large, rectangular room is cool and comfortable. Maloney sits determinedly on the floor, extends his legs, and rests the back of his head against the smooth wall. “Let’s think,” he says, his eyes closed.
Thomas lies down on the cold cement floor, and during the next twenty minutes, when they’re about to doze off, neither say a word. Thomas doesn’t even think of Patricia now, and after this silent, refreshing pause they get to work. Thomas balances two boxes filled with black trash bags up from the basement. They begin in the store. Sweeping everything into enormous piles and shoving it into the sacks. Under some crushed pink pencils with small pony-erasers, on the tips of which have been added lilac-colored manes, Thomas finds the key to the display case. Three hours later they’ve cleared it all up, and it’s evident that nothing has been stolen. Everything has been destroyed. Only a few metal pencil sharpeners and four boxes of ballpoint pens are undamaged. As is the display case with the expensive fountain pens. The vandals must not have seen those. They set the trash bags on the street. They sweat and moan. Maloney gets sodas. Thomas fills out the paperwork for the insurance company. They put on music and turn the volume all the way up, and for a moment the atmosphere is almost like when they’d just purchased the store and were fixing it up: bristling with hope for the future—it was energizing and very exhausting. Maloney repairs the ruined lamps and the fan. He fetches the tall ladder in the basement and straightens the chandelier. It really glows when they turn it on. It’s as though it brightens the entire situation. The chandelier is their mascot and they love and admire it as though it were a goddess. They consider it a figurehead, like on the prow of a ship, proof of their success with Lindström & Maloney, and have done so since that late evening when they found it heaped on a pile of garbage in front of a mansion in one of the well-to-do neighborhoods in the northwestern part of the city. A weak yellow light shone on the first floor of the otherwise darkened house. They imagined the mansion was occupied by a brittle old widow. They imagined her husband had just passed away. This was soon after they’d concocted the name Maloney. Because Maloney’s real name wasn’t Maloney. He took the name when they finished their studies. Thomas studied architecture, half-heartedly and restlessly, and dropped out after two years even though he’d gotten a scholarship. Then he began taking classes at the business school and met Maloney. They managed to stay in school for a year and a half, but they quit mid-semester. They had outlandish dreams. A chain. A long string of pearls, of beautiful, unforgettable stores like pins on a map stretching across the entire continent, the entire world. A simple concept: Lindström & Maloney. And it would be much more than just office supplies, paper—much, much more than that. The name that Maloney’s religious parents had given him out there in their oh so pretty white wooden house in the sticks, so many years ago now (Tim Stürtz, nickname Timmy), was too trivial, and they agreed that they needed something more mystical: a name that was deep as a well. It was Thomas who came up with it (both the well metaphor and the new name) after they’d been drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and joints for several hours on the twin bed in his room, scribbling down all the names they could think of in a notepad. Suddenly it came to him: “Maloney!! You’re Maloney! Yes, you are! Don’t you see it? Lindström & Maloney! It sounds—like a threatening dream, you hear it?! It sounds like something you can’t resist. Noir . . .”
“Noir?”
“Yes! Secrets. Rainy weather. Darkness
. A well, Maloney, a deep well!” Thomas sucked hard on the last of the joint. At first Maloney looked down at the mattress, then he turned toward the window and stared into the far distance, and at last he leaped to his feet and shouted, “Jesus Christ, you’re right! We’ll use Maloney. MALONEY!” And it was as if the name was created just for him. Even when Thomas thinks about their friendship before that afternoon—when they sat bent over the notepad, each nibbling on a pencil, on the bed in the dying, weak light of the day, in the messy room, high as kites while the upstairs neighbor argued with his wife and the radiator dripped—he thinks of him as Maloney. He no longer believes the pairing of their names has anything noir about it, but Maloney fits Maloney perfectly.
The office isn’t missing anything, either. But all their financial documents were riffled through, and some bank statements from the last two quarters were ripped out and thrown on the floor. Thomas gathers the loose papers, tries to smooth them, return them to the folders. It’s clear that someone wanted to check their deposits. He doesn’t say anything about it to Maloney. He carries the smashed monitor to the street and sets it down next to the trash bags. The sun’s high in the sky, and people hustle past, lightly dressed and full of purpose. The stench of the trash bin on the corner wafts toward him. He lights a cigarette and sits down amid the glass shards on the stoop. He hasn’t told Patricia about the break-in. Now he sees it as an opportunity to connect with her. He texts her, and to his surprise she replies at once: “What?? Why didn’t you say anything??” “We’re cleaning up now, all’s well.” She doesn’t respond. “I love you,” he writes, feeling for a moment like a traitor. The feeling passes. Maloney buys shawarmas with pickled chilies and sits beside Thomas. The sunlight blinds them; it flickers through the leaves of the chestnut tree; it sparkles off the shiny hoods of cars and women’s hair as they bike past in their colored skirts, their scarves fluttering, shoulders bare. Maloney whistles at a long-legged brunette. She flips him the bird. They laugh. They finish eating. They sit shoulder to shoulder, and Thomas feels the heat from Maloney’s big body. We’re sitting shoulder to shoulder like brothers, he thinks, and the heat sweeps through him, as if the temperature in his blood has been turned up. Then he stands up and grabs a broom. While he sweeps up the shards, the glazier and his assistant arrive in a dented, yellow van. The glass panels are lashed to the side of the van, in a wooden frame. “And you’re certain you don’t want thermal windows?”
“Never,” Thomas says.
“Burglary-proof panes?”
“No thanks. If sunlight doesn’t spill onto the floor, it’s pointless.”
The glazier smiles. “People usually don’t care about things like that. But I’m not gonna complain. It’s good business for me.” They work quickly and efficiently. They remove old slivers, nails, putty, and wood strips. They clean the rabbet notches, sanding and puttying. Carefully, the glazier measures the door pane and cuts the glass on the floor of the van. He arranges the new window in the frame, and the assistant hands him the nails and a small hammer with a square head. Maloney tries to seem interested. “What’s that called?” “A glazier’s hammer,” the glazier mumbles with a couple of nails in his mouth. Suppressing laughter, Maloney looks at Thomas. “Makes sense. A glazier’s hammer . . .” With a sure hand, the glazier putties a perfect slanting edge around the pane. The assistant keeps an eye on even the tiniest movements, scrutinizing the technique. Then they turn to the store’s windows. The assistant’s already waiting at the van with suction cups, which they use to carefully transfer the large piece of glass over to the window frame and position it in the rabbet. Then they begin tapping the molding firmly in place along the edge. “There!” The glazier backs onto the street and admires his work. “You can paint the molding right away, but don’t go touching the puttied surfaces until they’ve dried properly. Give it a few weeks. And you said something about a cabinet?” The glazier, a small, stooped man wearing a brown smock, is in the habit of rubbing his chin often, and has a cluster of stiff gray hairs poking from his pointy ears. He shuffles into the store, measures the cabinet panes and, mumbling to himself, jots the numbers into his notebook. The assistant stands off to the side, his hands thrust deep into his pockets. His ratty overalls are a washed-out blue. They converse about the break-in. Both the glazier and the assistant think it’s odd that the perpetrators didn’t take anything with them. “It doesn’t pay off then, does it? I mean . . . going through all that trouble for nothing,” the assistant says, blushing in the same moment the words exit his mouth. He’s just a big boy. “Crime never pays, Samir,” the glazier says sharply. “No. But it wasn’t even theft . . . you know. That’s exactly what . . . it isn’t . . .” The glazier just looks at Samir. And Samir lowers his head. The four of them return outside to the sunlight. Maloney says, “It must’ve taken a helluva a long time to smash everything so consistently. Who would do that, and why?” Thomas feels his stomach squeezing into a hard knot. A sudden, bottomless fear. The glazier and Samir shake their heads, and the glazier fastens his gaze on a point far in the distance. “Meaningless,” he mutters. “And that it happened here, in such a nice neighborhood . . .” He falls silent. Samir packs the tools. Soon they drive off in the dented van. Thomas saves the receipt for the insurance company. They admire the new glass partitions and decide that the cleaning job is much too great for Eva to do, even if she brings her attractive niece with her. Thomas calls a company and orders what they call a “post break-in clean up.” They can come as early as Monday morning. Which means Annie and Peter can arrive a little later and help put all the products in the storeroom back on the shelves. Maloney surveys the depressingly empty store. “I can’t wait to see customers in here,” he says. “But I’m not placing any orders now. Not until first thing Monday.”
“You want to go over and get a drink?”
“Can’t. Have to go somewhere. But Monday. Maybe we should invite Annie and Peter to a company dinner? Call it a kind of perk? Because they’re our ‘faithful employees’?”
Thomas smiles. “We could do that.”
“See you soon,” Maloney says, clucking his tongue. He does a few dance steps, laughing, his back to Thomas, before switching over to his standard heavy gait.
Thomas saunters through the city with his duffel slung over his shoulder. He’s got plenty of time; the car rental agency is close to the store. He buys an iced coffee and an almond croissant and suddenly feels in really great spirits. She’ll definitely come. She answered his text. She responded to me, and that’s an opening. The weather is bewitchingly wonderful. The humidity is dropping, there’s a light breeze, bright colors everywhere; even the gray stone projects look better today. People have begun putting plants out on balconies. He walks along wondering whether they can swim in the lake up at Kristin and Helena’s. If the weather holds, they can. Maybe he should buy something for the twins. He texts Alice; she’s on her way there. Maybe they’ll have a good time. If Jenny doesn’t make any scenes, and if Patricia comes along. If they can make the effort to show that everything’s fine with their relationship. Is it fine? Fundamentally fine. He has no clue. But the thought of her leaving him makes him so weak, like his entire being is seeping out of him. When he stops to smoke on a bench beneath a tall acacia tree, the real estate agent calls and says “accepted.” “Fantastic!” Thomas catches himself shouting. The agent’s in his car and can meet him at a nearby square in fifteen minutes. Thomas waits beside a copper statue, coated with verdigris, and white with dove shit, depicting a young man with a raised sword.
Then the agent arrives and Thomas says, “And she knows that I’m paying in cash?”
“Yes. But you’ll have to take it as is,” the agent says. “She doesn’t want any trouble.”
“What does she mean by that?”
“Good question. I told her that we’ll test for dry-rot and mold. The electrical wires will also need to be examined. She agreed, but very reluctantly. You won’t end up with a moldy building or a fire haza
rd. I know a guy who can look at it over the weekend.”
“Thank you. That’s very thoughtful. And you’re sure that I’ll get a valid deed?” The real estate agent nods, tugging at his tie. Thomas thanks him again. They agree to meet the following Wednesday, when the money will change hands. “And the deed will be under-signed,” the agent says. The seller will be present. “2:00 P.M. at the location.” He shakes Thomas’s hand. Thomas sits at the statue’s feet and smiles. It’s perfect. Right now, just after the business was defiled, Lindström & Maloney gets back on its feet again with a new branch. That’ll teach them, the bastards. How’s that for rehabilitation. That’s how you do it. Thomas trembles inwardly with joy. He can’t stop smiling. Alice will have a job and an apprenticeship, a future, and it’ll also help secure him in his own retirement (he imagines); the money will be removed from the microwave, will be passed on, and his father will be eliminated forever. The old dream of owning a chain (albeit a very small one) will become a reality. All in one fell swoop. And he can get the papers right away, despite the sale being under the table. The seller has, presumably, a few skeletons of her own in a closet. It’s perfect.
When he turns the corner of the street where the car rental agency is located, he literally bumps into Frank. Simply smacks his chest into his shoulder. Frank with his slicked-back hair and smarmy smile. The smell of aftershave mixed with cigarette smoke, his sweet, nauseating breath.
Thomas feels a dull thump on his back. “What are you doing in this part of town? We haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“No.” A short pause. And then it just comes barreling out of him. “But maybe you’ve seen my store?”
Frank looks at him, baffled.
“There was a break-in. I couldn’t help but think of you and Fatso. Did you stop by with baseball bats?”
Frank opens his eyes wide, then clucks tolerantly. “Baseball bats?! That’s priceless. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. Ha! Why would we attack you with baseball bats?! Two old rats like us! If we wanted something from you, don’t you think we could easily figure out how to contact you by normal means? You’re Jacques’s son.” Frank looks at Thomas with restrained disgust, his eyes squinting in his angular face. “Though it’s hard to believe.” He takes a deep breath and lowers his voice to a mild pitch. “I’m really sorry to hear what happened. But listen: We don’t want to harm you. I believe I made that clear after the funeral. All we want is to be left alone to mind our own business. We don’t want to get mixed up in anything.”
Rock, Paper, Scissors Page 17
