Marked Man

by William Lashner

  “He pretty much admitted that he was Teddy Pravitz and that he knew your sister. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.”

  “But whatever he did, he’s not racked with guilt, is he?”

  “No, not at all, though he doesn’t seem the racked-with-guilt type of guy. But he also doesn’t seem like someone who has been murdering his old pals to keep his secrets.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong about him,” she said.

  “I doubt it.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Swim.”

  I glanced at her and couldn’t help but glance again and then to stare. Monica Adair was born to wear the little two-piece nothing Lou had given her. There was something American about her body, healthy, abundant, maybe too much of a good thing, but then what’s a little excess among friends?

  “I don’t think it’s right accepting his hospitality,” said Monica. “It makes me feel dirty.”

  “He seems to have a story he wants to tell. I figure we should accept his hospitality to the fullest, put him at ease, and let him tell it.”

  “So this whole lounge-by-the-pool thing is part of our strategy?”

  “Of course it is, Monica. Do you think I’m enjoying this?”

  Just then Lou appeared, a sweating glass with an umbrella standing tall on his tray. “I bring your colada,” he said. “Made it fresh, right out of can.”

  “I’ll be sitting there, Lou,” I said, pointing to a lounge chair in the shade of a canopy. “And could you put these things over there, too?” I unbelted my robe, slipped it off, and handed it to him, along with the script.

  “Why not? Lou has nothing better to do than to serve you foot and mouth?”

  “Thank you so much. Can you bring one of these concoctions for my friend? And, Lou, keep them coming.”

  Lou huffed. I smiled broadly at Monica. She put her hand up as if blinded by the white of my smile. Or was it the white of my sun-starved skin?

  “I didn’t know you were German,” she said, taking in the little Speedo that Lou had given me to wear. “I’ve worn G-strings with more material than that.”

  “It’s all Lou had in stock.”

  “Teddy Purcell’s hand-me-downs.”

  “When you put it that way, yuck.”

  “And with the color of the water, I wouldn’t go in that pool if you paid me. It’s like colonies of mutated life-forms are swimming in there. I expect the blob to crawl out of it at any moment.”

  “Where is Steve McQueen when you need him?” I said as I peered into the water. I couldn’t see the bottom of the pool. Instead of diving, I lowered myself carefully until I was sitting on the edge, my legs dangling in the murk.

  While I was sitting there, a young girl came out of the house, climbed onto the diving board, and leaped into the water like a graceful slip of light. She swam the length with perfect form. When she got to the end, she effortlessly lifted herself out of the pool. Clean enough for her, it was clean enough for me. I lowered myself in, keeping my head above the water as I paddled around. The water was cool and silky, more like lake water than the usual chlorinated pool.

  When I pulled myself out, I walked over to my lounge chair in the shade of the canopy and toweled myself off with the robe. The white toweling took on a strange green tint. I sat down, drank a deep draft from the piña colada, and then lay back with a strange sense of contentment. Just yesterday I was in an old Philly row house, stuck with a dead man. Today I was poolside in the mountain retreat of a big-time Hollywood producer. That the two places were related, I had no doubt, but still I savored the pleasure of the juxtaposition. And then something caught my eye. It was the young girl who had been swimming in the pool. She was standing again on the diving board, her back straight, arms outstretched.

  She wore a bikini, blue with yellow flowers that matched her yellow hair. Long legs, high breasts, just a smattering of acne across her prominent cheekbones. There was a radiance to her, a youthful exuberance, and yet you could see in her the woman she would soon become. For an instant I wondered if maybe she was the missing Chantal, but then I did the calculation. Chantal would have been in her mid-thirties, this girl was all of fourteen. Still, she frolicked in the afternoon sun as if the pool and patio were her own backyard. Maybe they were. Maybe she was Theodore Purcell’s daughter.

  I watched her perform a graceful jackknife into the water and thought about what I might end up doing to her comfortable life, and then I stopped thinking and took another long sip of my drink. For lack of something better to do, I opened the script.

  Fade in.

  It wasn’t very good, you could tell it right off, with its hackneyed title and too-cute dialogue that went nowhere, and it wasn’t long before I started fading out.

  “Who is Chantal?”

  I woke with a start when I heard the voice. It was the young girl, standing right next to my lounge chair, looking down at me. “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Chantal. The name on your tattoo. Is she your mother? That’s the kind of tattoo that usually has ‘Mom’ on it.”

  “It’s not my mother,” I said. “It’s just the name of a girl. I’m Victor.”

  “I’m Bryce. Is she Chantal?” she said, pointing to Monica, who was asleep in the sun beside me. In the heat, and with a few of Lou’s piña coladas between us, the jet lag had taken us both down.

  “No, her name’s Monica. She’s just a friend. We’re working together.”

  “Do you make movies, too?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Then why is there a script open on your stomach?”

  “Oh, this?” I sat up, put the script to the side. “Mr. Purcell gave it to me to read.”

  “Uncle Theodore always has a new script he needs you to read. They’re all”—and here she roughed up her voice in an imitation—“brilliant, genius. Take a look and tell me what you think.”

  “So he’s your uncle?”

  “Friend uncle, not uncle uncle. I like your tattoo. The colors are still bright, and you don’t see too many hearts except on old men.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  “Your friend Monica has a nice flower on her ankle. And I like the dove on her shoulder. I wanted to get a tattoo of a fish on my back, but my mom wouldn’t let me. She said I was too young.”

  “Well, Bryce, I think that’s very sensible. A tattoo is easy to get and easy to regret.”

  “But it was a nice fish, blue with yellow stripes. I saw it when I went scuba diving in Cabo San Lucas with Uncle Theodore.”

  “Is your mother here?”

  “She’s working inside,” said Bryce. “Her name’s Lena. She’s Uncle Theodore’s secretary. She’s worked for him from before I was born. Do you regret your tattoo?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “I won’t regret mine, it was a pretty fish.” She smiled at me brightly before spinning away and heading toward the hot tub. I watched as she turned on the jets and slipped into the bubbling water. She tossed back her head in the water as if the jets were giving her a deep-muscle massage.

  “Who was that?” said Monica, groggily lifting herself onto her elbows and opening her eyes.

  “That was Bryce,” I said.

  “Who’s Bryce?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s something about her that worries me.”

  “How’s the script?”

  “Awful.”

  “Too bad. I have an idea for a movie.”

  “Why shouldn’t you? Everyone else does.”

  “It’s about a girl who goes missing.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “And she reappears decades later. But here’s the thing: She’s the same age as when she disappeared. And she wears white robes, and she glows.”

  “And then she saves the world.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. So why did she go missing?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Aliens, mayb
e, but good aliens, not bad aliens.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Or maybe there was, like, a saint involved.”

  “Or a clown.”

  Just then I spied Theodore Purcell charging out of his house, followed by the nastily servile Reggie and just-plain-servile Lou. Theodore Purcell was chomping on his cigar, obviously upset, when he glanced at us, stopped for a moment, and then said something out of the side of his mouth. Lou nodded and hustled our way as Theodore shucked off his robe. He sported a Speedo of his own, stretched beneath a round, sagging belly. Purcell handed his robe to Reggie as he climbed into the tub with Bryce. I could hear Theodore Purcell’s guttural mumble followed by a squeal of laughter from the girl.

  “You like quail?” said Lou, who had now appeared behind my chair.

  “That’s not very politically correct of you, Lou.”

  “I mean bird. Roasted. With pine nuts and pineapple.”

  “Sounds delicious.”

  “I make special for you and pretty lady friend, you stay for dinner.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “What you think, I run restaurant?”

  “Will Mr. Purcell be there?”

  “Oh, yes, just three of you. He say he want private dinner. Everyone gone. Staff go home. Just Lou to cook and clean like slave.”

  “I suppose he has a story to tell.”

  “Either that or he want to have hot hot sex with you.”

  I looked over at Theodore Purcell in the hot tub. “Let’s hope it’s a story.”

  “So you stay?”

  In the hot tub, in a quiet moment, Theodore Purcell patted young Bryce on the neck. Bryce edged toward his touch. Reggie looked away.

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

  54

  “What did you think of the script, kid?” said Theodore Purcell.

  “Not much,” I said as I cut into my quail. “It didn’t grab me.”

  He tilted his head as if I had insulted his mother.

  “It reminded me of the way I used to run in Little League,” I said. “A lot of up-and-down without much forward movement.”

  “How would you fix it, then, smart guy?”

  “I’d hire a writer and tell him to start on page one.”

  Theodore Purcell stared at me for a moment with a deep anger brewing in his eyes, and then, suddenly, he broke into laughter, loud and guttural. We were in a large room, big enough to hold a king’s banquet, but completely empty except for the small round table by the window where we were sitting. There was crisp linen on the table, the china was fine, and the cutlery was silver, but the table shuddered with each stroke of the knife, as if it were about to collapse under the weight of everything upon it.

  Still, our skin was nicely crisped, the quail was gently roasted. Lou, in his tuxedo, was filling and refilling our wineglasses with something very old and very white. Quite charming, actually, with hints of peach and oak. No white zinfandel for Theodore Purcell. It was all so lovely it was almost possible to forget why we were there, which might have been the point of the whole exercise.

  “Think you could make it in this town, kid?” Purcell said when his laughter subsided. “Think you could have a run at the producer’s table?”

  “What’s so hard? Read a little Nietzsche, steal a little art, screw over your pals. Nothing to it.”

  “Give it a try, punk, and see where you come out. L.A. can be a tough town if you’re from out of town. Even though everyone’s from out of town. I spent years trying to get my foot in the door. Was it hard? You bet. I was like you, kid. I didn’t have Harvard, I didn’t have a rich daddy. All I had was the eye of a hunter. And the determination to pay the price.”

  “And what price was that?”

  “To bet my life in the hope of becoming something new and better. You want to hear how it happened?”

  “We want to hear about Chantal,” said Monica.

  “Oh, she’s part of it, all right. The best part. So listen up and take notes, kid. You might even have a chance yourself.”

  “I WAS TENDING bar in Del Rey. Tending bar was what I did till I found my way into the business. Why did I want into the business? The same reason everyone else wants in. You want to live high and fat in L.A., you got to be in the flicks. But it wasn’t happening, and I was getting too damn good at mixing drinks.

  “So one night I get to talking to one of the regular drunks, and he tells me he’s a writer. He wrote a book. The book came out and it tanked and so now he drinks. Old story. I ask for a copy, I give it a read. I know right away why it never flew, it was empty at the core. Still, there was a hook in the premise. We come to an agreement. I wipe out his tab for the rights to the thing. Suddenly, just like that, I’m a producer.

  “I set up meetings at every studio in town. I got a property, so suddenly the bigwigs are willing to sit with me. I go in, I pitch the thing, and no one bites. Doesn’t earn me a penny, but it’s an education. I’ll be back, sure I will, as soon as another book comes walking into my bar.

  “And then it does. Not a writer this time, but a dame with nice legs and her mascara running. I ask her what’s wrong. She says nothing’s wrong, she’s just been reading. Must be a hell of a book, I say. ‘It touched my soul,’ she says. I ask her to tell me about it, and she does. All night. Hell, she’s got me crying the way she’s telling it. Next morning, without even reading the thing, I call the author. The son of a bitch has an agent, which means it won’t be the price of a bar tab. And the agent, he tells me all I need is fifty thou.

  “The book’s name? You bet it was. Tony in Love.

  “The opportunity I had been waiting for. And I knew how to pitch it, I knew who to pitch it to, but only if I could buy it first. In this town you control either the money or the property. Anything else, you get it up the ass. I wasn’t going in without the property. It was like a poker game that I knew I could win, but with a fifty-thousand-dollar buy-in.

  “Hopeless, except I had an idea to get the dough as old as the town itself. I was going to find a woman, older, rich, ready to fall in love and pay my way. Happens every day in the big city. But one thing I knew, she wasn’t going to step in that stinking bar in Del Rey.

  “And then I caught a break. One of the studio guys was from Philly, a Main Line guy, but he took a shine to me because I was city. Invited me to one of his parties at the house. Lots of stars, studio honchos, a hippie band playing. And there I spotted her. She fit my profile perfectly. A woman, older, visiting from Philadelphia, with her hair up and the best clothes and a twitchy mouth that let me know she was looking for something herself, looking for me.

  “I took out two cigarettes, put them both in my mouth. She took out a lighter. I cupped her hand as the fire reached the tips. I gave her a cigarette, she gave me the lighter. As simple as that.

  “She wanted to educate me, and I was willing to learn. We both were full of a desire that had nothing to do with each other. Was it more than mercenary? Truth is, she tasted like ashes in my mouth. But I tasted worse in my time, and you got to eat your vegetables before you get dessert. One night, on the beach, I took that twitch right off of her lips, and after, as we stared up at the stars, I told her I loved her. It’s Hollywood, kid, a factory of dreams, and I was giving her the grandest one of all. And when she bought it, I told her what I needed. She said she didn’t have the money, which was like a blow to the gut. But she had an idea. Out of left field. A heist. Why a heist? I asked, and she told me she had her reasons. But it would work, she said, and the money would be beyond my richest dreams.

  “That night, with the stars in my eyes and the taste of ashes filling my mouth, with my hope distant and my future dimming by the minute, I thought it through. The risks were huge, but playing safe hadn’t gotten me anywhere.

  “During one of my pitch meetings, a studio VP had given me a book. It was his thing, to give it as a gift. He thought it made him seem literary and hip. That’s right. Nietzsche. By the end of the
year, the VP was back in Waukegan, but the book stayed with me, along with its most important lesson: that we could will ourselves to power. ‘Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.’ And I wanted to believe it. On one side of the abyss was Teddy Pravitz, a bartender from the streets of Philadelphia sinking slowly into his failure. On the other side was a stranger I could only dimly glimpse: Theodore Purcell, a man with a name I had invented to use in the business, the great man I always wanted to be. The question was whether I was strong enough to make the leap and become something new.

  “What about you, kid? Do you think you have the balls for it?”

  IT WAS AN impressive experience, listening to Theodore Purcell justify the choices in his life. He relished the opportunity to tell it to someone who knew where he came from and what he did to get where now he sat. He wasn’t apologetic, he was proud and confrontational. As he told us about how he contacted Hugo, brought in the rest of his old gang, how he orchestrated everything, he could barely keep the self-satisfied half smirk off his face. He leaned forward at the table as he talked. Each sentence was like a fighter’s jab, quick and bloody. This is what I did, this is how I became a big-time mogul. Who the hell are you to judge what I made of my life?

  “You must have put on some show in that bar,” I said, “convincing Charlie and Joey and Ralphie Meat to go along with your crazy plan.”

  “I convinced them with what convinced me. Nietzsche. I pitched it like I was pitching a flick, and they put it in development right there in that bar. Setting up that operation was like setting up a movie. Working out the three-act plot, with its subtle character arcs, the big action scene, the getaway and payoff, picking the cast, getting everything ready for the shoot. Even with all the success I’ve had, it was the greatest achievement of my life. I took the risk, made the leap, watched it all work out. And it did work out, like a dream, kid. You ever do something so perfect it changed everything?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It ain’t easy, trust me.”

  “How did you guys get someone in the building?”