A Billion Ways to Die

by Chris Knopf

  At the piano the general was improvising around a Duke Ellington classic. Quite artfully. The driver left me standing there to wait out the performance. I spent the time looking out the giant windows at the sailboats sliding across the blue water and the row of South Beach hotels rising like a citadel above the opposite shore.

  He reached a logical break point in the song and turned to me.

  “Do you play?” he asked, in English.

  “Not a note.”

  “The piano kept me alive when I first got here from Cuba. I stay in practice, just in case.”

  “Seems prudent.”

  He wore a collarless black linen shirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulders, white linen pants tied at the waist and bare feet. His two-day growth of beard was silvery white, matching his hair. He stood up and pointed to a pair of love seats, the only seating in the room. We sat across from each other, the general with his feet tucked up beneath him in a modified Lotus position, mine firmly on the ground.

  “Do you have a back-up plan?” he asked. “Should your career buying and selling information turn sour?”

  “I crewed on a sailboat for a couple days recently. That could work.”

  “My brother and I paddled here in a canoe. Destroyed any desire to be out on the open water.”

  “Does he work with you?”

  “He’s dead. The result of working with me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Me, too. Most of what I do is perfectly legal, depending on how you read the law. Unfortunately, every country seems to have a different interpretation. Applied according to the interests of the moment.”

  “I need to locate a Latino mercenary who was part of a specific operation on a specific date and time. I don’t know if it was legal.”

  “That’s what you want to learn?”

  “No. That’s important, to some degree, but I need more basic information.”

  “Such as?” he asked.

  “Who the mercenary was working for.”

  “To what end?”

  “That’s a private matter,” I said.

  He put his fingertips together in a prayerful gesture, gazing off to the side, as if to better hear his internal dialogue. Though physically robust—slender and clear-eyed—he looked weary, as if warding off an irresistible lassitude.

  “Of course,” he said. “Tell me what you know of this Latino mercenary, and I’ll see what I can learn.”

  I described our capture and interrogation, including as much detail as I could remember, not knowing which particular would be the most useful in his search. I left out the substance of my conversations with Alberta and her colleague, which he surely noticed, but had the good form to ignore.

  He listened carefully to the end, nodding along to show he was following the narrative. When I was finished, he sat back in the love seat, even more languidly composed.

  “This is not difficult,” he said, “though you leave me curious. Not only about your tormentors, but about you. Why don’t I know who you are?”

  “I can’t answer that,” I said. “But I can tell you, honoring my privacy will make me an ideal customer.”

  He nodded, not necessarily in response to my comment.

  “Do you know what I miss the most?” he asked me, after a long pause.

  “About what?”

  “The loss of innocence. What becomes of us after so many years of experience.”

  “Trust,” I said. “You regret the assumption of betrayal.”

  He nodded again, this time directly to me.

  “Yes, Señor Rana. Precisely put.”

  “Regrettable, but necessary,” I said, “when engaged in pursuits other than piano playing and Caribbean cruising.”

  “How do I communicate?” he asked.

  I asked if I could take something out of my shirt pocket. He said yes.

  “My phone number,” I said, putting a slip of paper next to me on the love seat. “It’s good for a week. Then we’ll have to make other arrangements.”

  “Your e-mail?”

  “Already shut down.”

  “Of course.”

  We both stood up and he reached out his hand.

  “Keep your phone within reach,” he said.

  A door opened and the driver came into the room. I shook the general’s hand and turned to leave. He called to me before I cleared the door.

  “Señor Rana,” he said. “You didn’t ask what happened to my brother.”

  “I didn’t think it polite.”

  “I killed him,” he said. “For betraying my trust.”

  I shrugged, turned on my heel and followed the muscular gait of the driver through the house and out to his SUV where we once again rode in silence through the sultry streets of Miami.

  CHAPTER 7

  I was on the phone with Natsumi after an evasive zigzag trip back to our hotel, so I barely noticed the slim shape in a long summer raincoat and black Mary Janes fall in behind me. In the elevator, I saw it was a woman with straight brown hair nearly covering her face, much of which was also obscured by a Toronto Blue Jays hat. On her back was a lightweight leather backpack. She pushed my floor number then leaned up against the rear wall. I signed off with Natsumi before leaving the elevator.

  The woman followed me. I walked past our room to the end of the hall, then turned to walk back, almost running into the woman who was following close behind. She stood back to let me pass, then fell in behind again. I ignored our room a second time and returned to the bank of elevators.

  The woman waited with me at the elevators. She had her hands in her pockets and rocked back and forth, letting her toes lift off the floor. She rode the elevator with me to the lobby. I got out and went into the small bar that served the hotel and a restaurant that opened out onto the sidewalk. I sat down at the bar and she sat next to me, pulling off the backpack and setting it on her lap.

  When the bartender approached, I said, “I’ll have whatever she’s having,” nodding my head toward the young woman.

  “Give me a hurricane,” she said. “With bitters.”

  I balked at that and ordered a beer. The woman turned on her stool and faced me, her arms wrapped around her backpack.

  “I expected more in the adventurous department, Spanky,” she said.

  “Strider?” I asked.

  “You found me, sort of. So I found you. Like, for real.”

  “Crap.”

  “It’s not that hard anymore. You should know that.”

  “I suppose I should.”

  “I guessed at the visual ID. I had two false hits, if that makes you feel any better.”

  The hurricane looked too big for her hands—fragile and white, with chipped fingernails and nicotine stains. She held up the glass and drank a third of it through the straw.

  “I’ve been up for almost two days,” she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her raincoat. “So it’s not, like, automatic, but the tools are getting so fast. It’s the banks. They got billions to spend on this shit and you just can’t keep up.”

  “You’re probably not going to tell me how you did it.”

  She shook her head.

  “It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Everything changes too fast. As soon as you think you’re an expert, an hour later you’ll be wrong.”

  I didn’t want to think that. It was too frightening, too apocalyptic. I said as much.

  “You’re fucked,” she said. “I’m fucked, too. We’re all fucked. Get used to it. It’s the ineluctable modality of the calculable. Warps folded into warps. Syncopated algorithms. I’m only sitting here because they haven’t gotten around to killing me yet.” She finished off the drink and set it down gently on the bar. “Wow, I better eat something. If you’re still buying.”

  While she ordered a meal and another hurricane, I texted Natsumi that I was delayed, not to worry, but to stay away from the hotel bar and keep the phone handy.

  “Girlfriend? Boyfriend? Wife?” St
rider asked me, glancing down at my phone.

  “Spiritual adviser.”

  She took off her raincoat and dropped it at her feet. Underneath was a white T-shirt with the words “Starship Hijacker” in a bold, blocky font written across her surprisingly prominent breasts.

  “It’s my favorite,” she said, following my eyes. “My lucky traveling shirt.”

  She looked down and pulled out the fabric, as if trying to read the familiar words. I caught a whiff of body odor.

  “Should I forget about getting my backdoor?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “I didn’t say that. I just didn’t want you to think extortion works on me. And I wanted to meet you. You’re so fucking polite. I’m not surprised you’re bald. It’s a compensation thing.”

  Her shoulders were narrow, but her posture almost unnaturally erect as she used both hands to consume her cheeseburger. I was relieved to see her dab her face frequently with the cloth napkin, staying ahead of errant globs of catsup and relish juice.

  “Do you actually think people want to kill you?” I asked.

  She nodded and pulled her hair back away from her face, trying to keep the thin strands from brushing against her burger.

  “Oh, yeah. What’s the worst they can do to me for data theft? A few years in jail? Banishment from the Internet? I’ve got a photographic memory. I could just do this,” she made a writing motion in the air, “to unlock the vaults of half the banks in the world.”

  “You implied you were losing the hacker arms race.”

  She frowned into her drink and shook her little balled fists.

  “Don’t get all debatey on me, Spanky. You know what I mean.”

  “I do. Sorry.”

  “The thing is, there’s no such thing as money anymore. It’s all data. Bits and bytes. It only becomes what we used to think of as money when you have a chunk of cash in your hand. There are physicists who think nothing is real unless it’s observed. It’s like that with money. It doesn’t exist until you hit the ATM machine. Not even then, if you want to talk gold standard and all that currency crap. But you get the idea.”

  “I do.”

  “So, if you fuck around with their data, you’re essentially running your hands through their money, like Scrooge McDuck in his vault swimming around in dollar bills. They can’t let that happen. And they can’t stop addicts like me forever, so the only way to deal with us is to purge the gene pool. Makes me want to have a baby. Almost.”

  I watched her finish her meal, including a giant order of french fries. Throughout, she worried at her backpack, occasionally adjusting where she supported it on her thighs.

  “I still hope you’re wrong,” I added.

  “Rationalization and denial are excellent survival mechanisms,” she said. “Until they get you killed. But then you don’t care, right?”

  “Your loved ones care.”

  “I’m done with that crap since my parents died. Except for my cat, and he’d love anyone who fed him.”

  “Sorry.”

  She rolled her eyes like an annoyed teenager.

  “Oh Christ, that wasn’t a pity play. Not interested in the lovey-dovey thing. Don’t like all that genital entanglement. It’s not an abuse thing, no matter what the shrinks tell you. Why am I telling you all this? You’re not a shrink are you?”

  “No, but people like to tell me things.”

  “I’ll bet they do.”

  “I only steal when I have to,” I said. “And never for money.”

  “And junkies do heroin to get those cool needle marks.”

  She opened her backpack and pulled out a slip of yellow paper covered with a pencil scrawl of alphanumeric code. She handed it to me.

  “I hate it when people try to take from me something I’d gladly give away if they’d just ask,” she said. “But here it is anyway. Just don’t threaten me again. I want to like you.”

  When I went to take the paper, she gripped my hand, kneading it like a piece of dough. Then she used her other hand to pat around my face, like you’d do with wet modeling clay.

  “Real is still real,” she said, before zipping up the backpack, sliding off the bar stool, slipping on her raincoat, and disappearing out the door, her back straight, her feet in a slight shuffle, the backpack nearly dragging on the floor.

  I called Natsumi.

  “It’s you,” she said, answering the phone.

  “It is. Real is still real,” I said.

  THE GENERAL called me the next day and told me to meet him at the lifeguard stand on the beach at the north end of Ocean Drive. He told me to come in a bathing suit and nothing else.

  “No reason for modesty,” he said. “I already know what your prick looks like.”

  When I told Natsumi the plan, she offered to come along and try to get his photo.

  “He’ll have spotters posted all around the beach. They might see you.”

  “I’m feeling superfluous,” she said.

  “I need to know you’re safe.”

  “You’re more cautious since they grabbed us off the boat.”

  “I am?”

  “You once told me inaction was the most dangerous thing we could do.”

  “Why did I say that?”

  “If I leave now, I’ll be an hour ahead. Time to get comfy and see if I can spot the spotters.”

  She changed into a bathing suit over which she slipped a beach dress in a loud floral pattern. She put the SLR camera with the longest lens in the bottom of a canvas beach bag. I stayed silent as I watched her leave the hotel room.

  I used the intervening time on the computer, cruising around nearly aimlessly as if that would help me feel less anxious. It didn’t.

  I left the room and walked north from our hotel through the tan haze of sand-blown Miami Beach. It was a warm wind, with a threat of rain, the tropical kind that came and went like the sweep of a broom, cleaning the air. When I reached the assigned beach, I stripped down to my bathing suit and left the little pile of clothes under a palm tree. I resisted the impulse to seek out Natsumi as I walked across the beach, instead fixing my eyes on the big purple, green and yellow lifeguard stand.

  When I got there, the general was sitting nearby in a beach chair. His body was lean and ropy, a greying mat of hair almost concealing a scar across his right breast. He pointed to an identical beach chair to his left. I sat down.

  “I understand the attraction of sitting by the ocean,” he said. “The primordial pull. I just don’t get doing it all day. The time investment.”

  “Agreed,” I said, brushing sand off my lower legs.

  “It’s good to have common ground between business partners,” he said.

  “I appreciate your help.”

  He took a smartphone from his lap and tapped around on the screen.

  “I appreciate the twenty thousand,” he said. “You won’t mind if I move it to a safer place?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I can do this while sunning myself on the beach,” he said, working the phone’s screen. “Most think such things commonplace. Me, I still have the wonder of un joven Cubano.”

  “A young brain is good for survival.”

  “Agreed on that as well.”

  “So, any luck with my mercenario?”

  He squinted at the phone for another moment, then nodded and put it back on his lap.

  “Si. It happens I know the man well. Someone I have respect for. We were able to speak with candor, which saved a lot of time, effort and money. So much I’m almost embarrassed taking your twenty thousand. Almost.”

  He rummaged around in a beach bag and came up with a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote down the name and handed it to me.

  “Rolando Mosqueda,” I read out loud.

  “I asked him point blank about the operation you described. He just laughed.”

  “Laughed?”

  “I don’t know why. I gave him your e-mail address and left it up to him if he wants to contact
you. No guarantees there.”

  “What if he doesn’t? How can I get word to him?”

  “Not my problem, Señor Rana. You asked about a certain Latino mercenary on a certain operation, I give you this name. Be thankful I give this much.”

  “There’re probably a lot of Rolando Mosquedas in the world,” I said.

  “At least one’s a soldier of fortune. That should narrow the field.” Two young women wearing suits in tenuous conformance with South Beach decency standards walked by us on the way back from the ocean, their eyes cast furtively toward the rambling guard stand. “On the other hand,” he said, taking up a prior conversational thread.

  “How about an address,” I said.

  When he looked over at me I saw my face reflected in his oversized sunglasses. Then, another shape flashed across. I turned and saw Norberto unfolding another beach chair. He sat down next to me so I was sandwiched between the two men.

  “Hola,” he said to me as he reached in a woven beach bag. He pulled out a can of beer. “Too early for you?”

  “No thanks,” I said, as did the general.

  Norberto shrugged and dove back into the bag, this time pulling out a towel. He pulled a piece of it away to show me the tip of a silencer. He grinned, and I grinned back.

  “Just in case we run into any beach banditos,” he said.

  I turned my head back to the general, who was gazing out at the sea.

  “I need more than just a name. I can’t afford the research time,” I said, honestly.

  “What’s the hurry, young man?” said the general. “With your whole life ahead of you?”

  “This wasn’t the deal.”

  “You must be unaware of the organizational chart,” said the general. He put one hand above the other. “I’m here, you’re there. Your responsibility is to thank me for such high quality information for such a reasonable price. My job is to go back to my piano and away from all this primordial pulling. You can keep the chair,” he added, as both he and Norberto stood up to leave.

  “Did you check your investment account?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “Have you checked your investment account, the one at the bank? First off, I wouldn’t trust a banker with my investments; secondly, you have way too much in growth stocks and too little in solid, dividend-yielding blue chips. So I rebalanced everything. You don’t have to thank me.”