EIGHT LIES (About the Truth): A collection of short stories

by Sean Chercover

  Bailey took the case, and gently closed the door.

  Up in the lounge, Bailey flipped the latches and opened the case. He withdrew a map that showed a section of Haiti’s north shore, from Labadee to the town of Cap Haitien. Beneath the map was a semiautomatic pistol. He lifted the pistol from the case, smelled it. Cordite. He put the recently fired pistol aside. There was money in the case. American money, about $30,000. Bailey fished around under the cash, found a passport. A US passport. He took it out of the case and opened it.

  His blood ran cold. Staring back at him was the standard passport photo of the man who called himself Diego. But the name on the passport was Tom Bailey.

  I leave nothing to chance. So the man who called himself Diego wasn’t done killing.

  Or thought he wasn’t. Bailey could take care of this threat without breaking a sweat. The man was asleep and Bailey had his gun. Easiest thing in the world, to walk downstairs and put a bullet in the man’s head with his own gun. End of threat. He could weigh down the body with an anchor and some line. Dump the body at sea, along with the gun. Done. Finished. Pretend it never happened.

  But then Bailey thought about it from the other man’s perspective. A change of identity would mean relocating. It was an expensive proposition. It would mean a significant sum of money waiting for him in his new destination. Had to. But there was nothing else in the case to say where.

  And that led Bailey on a new train of thought. Was this a crazy idea? A reckless bet? No, he decided. It was time to go legit—now—and this could set him on his new path. The man had an ego problem. He would play on that.

  This was a calculated risk.

  He would have to put the case back the way he found it—passport under the money, gun on top, and the map covering the gun. Then return the case to the people-hider with the man, and switch the ventilation back on.

  Sunrise was breaking over a calm sea when the man emerged from below. The case was in his left hand. The butt of the pistol peeked out from his waistband.

  “Good morning,” said Bailey. Cheerful.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “Almost home. We made it.” Bailey gestured out the windows, to a speck of land on the horizon.

  “That’s Long Island?”

  “Yup. I’ll have you back on dry land in an hour.”

  “You got an extra shirt I can have?”

  “No problem.” Bailey got a T-shirt from the stateroom in the starboard hull. When he returned, the man was pointing the gun at him. He tried to look surprised. “Take it easy, Diego,” he said. “If you don’t like the shirt, I’ll get you another one.”

  “That’s actually very funny,” the man said. He was no longer affecting an accent. He gestured with the barrel of his gun to the aft deck. “Outside.”

  Bailey put his hands up, even though the man hadn’t asked him to do so. He walked out to the aft deck, sat down hard on the portside bench, braced his hands on his knees and shook his head.

  “Diego, I delivered my end of the bargain. You don’t have to do this. It’s not the smart play.”

  “Actually, it is.” The man kept the pistol aimed at Bailey’s chest.

  “I’m an accessory, before and after the fact—you know I won’t talk.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Killing me is only going to raise questions. I turn up dead, it’ll only bring more heat. You’re making a stupid play, here. Really stupid.”

  The man smiled. A cruel smile. “But you’re not going to turn up dead. You’re just making a move.”

  Bailey shook his head like he didn’t understand, and leaned back with his hands planted on the bench behind him. “I don’t understand. Where am I moving?”

  “Grand Cayman. It’s lovely there.”

  “They’ve got private banking in Cayman.”

  The man’s smile broadened. “I know.”

  “Please, you really don’t have to do this.”

  “No, I really do have to do this.”

  “I’m telling you. Don’t be stupid.”

  The man pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  The man snorted derisively. “Clever,” he said. He dropped the pistol on the deck and reached behind his back and came up with a throwing knife as Bailey slid his hand under the bench cushion and came up with the preloaded spear gun he’d stashed there a couple hours earlier.

  Both men froze.

  “Mexican standoff,” said the man who called himself Diego.

  “Not really,” said Bailey. “You may be good, but no arm can match the velocity of this thing. You’ll lose.” He locked eyes with the man, but instructed his peripheral vision to watch for any twitch in the man’s knife-hand, poised to throw.

  “What do you propose?”

  “I’ll give you a choice. If you really think you can beat me, fire away. Or, you can take a swim.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll never make it to shore.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll tread water for a while, then you’ll get tired and drown. You could get lucky, a boat may come along and pick you up. But that’s unlikely. You have a choice to make. Either way, it’s a calculated risk.”

  The man thought for a second, nodded to himself.

  The knife hand moved forward. Bailey pulled the trigger. The blade clattered to the deck at Bailey’s feet.

  The man groped for the metal spear sticking out of his chest. He made a horrible gurgling sound, staggered backward. His arms flailed in the air as he toppled over the gunwale and into the Caribbean Sea.

  Bailey crossed over to where the man who called himself Diego had stood, picked up the gun, and tossed it overboard. He stuck his hand in his pocket, pulled out the bullets, and dropped them into the sea.

  Then he went inside and poured himself a long drink of rum.

  Cayman. That’s where he’d find the money. It would be waiting for him in a bank account in his own name. He plotted a course for Grand Cayman, and sipped his drink.

  A calculated risk. And it had paid off.

  I first moved to Chicago in the late 1980s to attend Columbia College. I lived in the South Loop, in an apartment directly behind the Pacific Garden Mission. Most nights I fell asleep to the sound of drunks fighting in the alley. Every morning I looked out my window and read: FOR THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH; BUT THE GIFT OF GOD IS ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD—Romans 6:23 painted large on the mission’s brick wall.

  It was an exciting time for the neighborhood, which was trying to gentrify, with decidedly mixed results. Full gentrification would come years later, after I’d moved away from Chicago. The apartment building I lived in is now an upscale student residence, the other Section 8 buildings in the neighborhood have all gone condo, and the Pacific Garden Mission is just a memory.

  The gentrification of Chicago is something I write about in the Ray Dudgeon novels, Big City Bad Blood and Trigger City. Ray takes a pretty dim view of it, while I’m willing to concede that Chicago is a much more livable city than it once was.

  “The Harrison Hotel” is a short piece I wrote upon returning to Chicago in late-2006. It has never been published. Its inclusion in this collection may seem odd, since it is not fiction…but given the way memory works, I wouldn’t swear that it is strictly fact, either.

  Anyway, I’ve decided to include it as a lagniappe, to go along with the Ray Dudgeon stories…

  BACK IN THE ’80s, the Harrison Hotel stood, dirty and defeated, between Michigan Avenue and Wabash, on the south side of the street from which it takes its name. The rates were cheap and there were always rooms available and the elevators were a gamble and the stairwells reeked of urine. Much of the Harrison’s business came by way of the government, which had been housing men in Joliet for fifteen or twenty years and now needed to put them somewhere else.

  Some of the men were young when they killed somebody, but now they were old and broken and had nowhere to g
o. So the government housed them at the Harrison Hotel until they could get back on their feet, which most of them never did. Instead they settled in, collected their welfare checks and slouched across the street to the Step-Hi Lounge to spend them.

  The Step-Hi Lounge stood on the northeast corner of Harrison and Wabash. It was always busy and smelled of stale beer and body odor and ammonia cleanser. It was dimly lit, which was for the best, and a jukebox in the back played songs from the early-’40s to the mid-’60s.

  The Step-Hi used to sell a bottle of beer for two dollars, and from four to seven you got a second bottle free. Then some local bureaucrat told them that it was illegal to give away beer for free so they changed the happy-hour deal to two bottles of beer for two dollars. And that seemed to satisfy the local bureaucrat.

  The broken old men at the Step-Hi came in quiet and conversation didn’t start until they got a couple of one-dollar beers down. Then there was talk, but never about their time inside. They talked instead about their lives before they went to prison, playing out the scenes of their younger days like the old songs playing on the jukebox. To listen you would think they’d had it made when they were younger men. They used to drive shiny new cars and wear fancy suits and go out with their best girls on Friday nights. There was always money for whatever they needed and they were young and smart and tough and good-looking.

  And then they went and killed somebody. It wasn’t their fault, of course. Whether it was over money or love or simple respect, Somebody always had it coming. Somebody ripped them off or stole their girl or wouldn’t back down in a bar and say sorry. It was as good as self-defense, the way they told it. But then they got some good-for-nuthin’ defense attorney who probably played poker with the prosecutor after church on Sundays.

  And that’s where the stories ended. The broken old men didn’t talk about their time inside. Those fifteen or twenty years never happened. The men who killed their girls instead of their rivals didn’t talk about the killing either, and only joined in on the good-time stories. Even then, they didn’t talk much.

  The stories would change with each telling; the cars got newer and the girls got sexier and the young men got smarter and tougher and better looking. But the stories were all they had and there was an unspoken agreement not to question the truth of them.

  When nighttime descended and the men got hungry, they would brave the cold and shuffle over to the Pacific Garden Mission, on State Street. Painted large on the side of the building was a warning, and a promise: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.—Romans 6:23.” It was hard to see at night, but there was no missing the red neon Jesus Saves cross that hung above the front door.

  Inside the Pacific Garden Mission the broken old men would be fed, but first they had to sit through a fire-and-brimstone sermon that lasted a full hour, sometimes two. And there was always the promise of salvation, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, but few men took him up on the offer. They just sat and pretended to listen and hoped the beer buzz would last longer than the sermon. Then they could eat their fill and go back to the Step-Hi and pick up a flask of whatever was cheapest and take it back to their shabby rooms at the Harrison Hotel.

  One night an old ex-con set himself on fire, smoking in bed. The general consensus at the Step-Hi was that any experienced drunk who smokes in bed probably means to die, because you never can tell when you’re going to pass out, once you lie down. One of the men, who had once set himself on fire smoking in bed but lived, said this wasn’t necessarily true. If you get drunk enough, he said, you might just forget. The oldest of the men said there are ways of meaning to do things without meaning to. It was, subconscious, like.

  This led to a lot of philosophizing among the broken men who talked never of the future and never of the wasted years in prison, but mostly of the distant past and sometimes of current events, like the ex-con who set himself on fire smoking in bed.

  It’s been over fifteen years since I lived in the Chicago. I recently returned, hoping to find my favorite city just as I left her. Bags unpacked, I braved the cold and walked into the wind, into the South Loop. I figured I’d stop at the Step-Hi Lounge to drink a few and offer the broken men a fresh pair of ears, like I used to.

  But the Step-Hi Lounge is gone. The northeast corner of Harrison and Wabash is a parking lot. And the Harrison Hotel is a Travelodge now. Clean and white and not an ex-con in sight.

  I’m sure the government has plenty of other places to put their broken men, but the South Loop is clearly off-limits.

  “For nothing is hidden, except to be revealed…”

  Mark 4: 22

  In 1983, Pope John Paul II officially abolished the Office of the Devil’s Advocate—the Vatican’s department responsible for investigating miracle claims. Only, he didn’t. The ODA continues its work, unofficially and in secret, to this very day…

  Prologue: New Orleans, Louisiana…

  THE DECEIVER HAD NOT YET arrived, but the multitudes preceded him, and Jackson Square was packed. A sea of clamorous believers stretched from the rocky bank of the Mississippi River all the way to the microphone stand set before the blazing white façade of Saint Louis Cathedral. A turbulent sea of believers, jostling and sweating under the oppressive midday sun.

  Some in the crowd carried placards.

  REPENT AND BE SAVED

  PREPARE FOR THE RAPTURE

  TRINITY SPEAKS FOR THE TRINITY

  Idiots.

  The man wondered if he would get a clean shot. It’s in God’s hands. He stepped back from the window and again checked the action of the well-oiled rifle that had been left here in this room for him. Clack-clack. Smooth.

  There were cops everywhere, of course. National Guard too. And media. News vans below and helicopters above. The timing had to be perfect. No one would see him at the window, so long as he was quick and careful. The lights inside the apartment were off, and the sheers—yellowed by years of sunlight and nicotine—were duct-taped to the wall against any wayward breeze. This too had been done for him in advance.

  He had set up a table with a sandbag rest, four feet back from the window. This far back from the sheers, he wouldn’t be seen from the street outside, yet with the scope, he could see right through them.

  The crowd outside roared to life. It was time. The man lifted the rifle from the bed, seated the magazine, and racked a round into the chamber. Clack-clack. He carried the rifle to the table, set it firmly on the sandbag. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve and put his eye to the scope.

  His target had arrived. About a dozen cops cleared a path to the small stage that had been set up in front of the cathedral, and the Deceiver followed in their wake, carrying his famous blue Bible from the television. He wore a shiny silk suit, which picked up the highlights in his wavy silver hair. His skin glowed with a deep salon tan. The tan contrasted with his brilliant smile. His teeth looked like dentures, or implants.

  Perfect, and perfectly fake.

  The Deceiver hopped up on the stage and waved to the cheering horde with both hands. He approached the microphones and signaled the multitudes into submission. The cheering subsided.

  All at once—divine providence?—the cops backed away, providing a clean shot.

  It’s in God’s hands.

  The Shepherd had said not to pull the trigger before one thirty. He checked his watch. 1: 34.

  The man mopped his brow with his sleeve one more time, put his eye to the scope, and carefully positioned the crosshairs, center-of-chest.

  Flicked off the safety.

  Put his finger on the trigger.

  “State of grace,” he said. He took a deep breath, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

  1: Lagos, Nigeria – four weeks earlier…

  DANIEL BYRNE DIDN’T NOTICE THE boy with the gun until they were standing face-to-face, six feet from each other in the quiet alley behind the fruit stand. Before he saw the gun, Daniel Byrne had been en
joying the best day of his trip.

  First day off in two weeks, seventh in the nine since he arrived in Africa. A day free of commitments or obligations or expectations. A day he didn’t have to live up to his rep as Golden Boy of the department. He spent the morning working on his tan, reading a novel on the beach, and swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, bathtub warm and salty soft. Back in his executive suite on the top floor of the Federal Palace Hotel, he showered, made the executive decision to give his face a day off from the razor, and dressed—light chinos, a plain black silk Tommy Bahama shirt, and deck shoes, no socks.

  Out on the balcony, Daniel stood with the salt air caressing his face and looked out over the white sand beach, the sparkling blue ocean beyond. He leaned forward until the balcony railing pressed against his waist, just above the pelvic bone. Then he leaned farther, keeping his hands free, bending over the railing, looking down at the concrete patio and swimming pool below.

  He started to get the tingle.

  He leaned even farther. There was a little give to the railing, but it was unlikely to give way completely. Unlikely, not impossible.

  The tingle grew into an adrenaline rush. Heart racing, Daniel imagined concrete screws shredding mortar, imagined the sudden jolt of the railing ripping free of its mooring. Imagined falling. Like the dream of falling that jerks you back from the edge of sleep.

  But the railing held.

  He straightened, blew out a breath, went back inside, and checked his e-mail one more time—all quiet at the office—and grabbed a taxi to Jankara Market.

  He wandered among stalls of corrugated steel and sun-bleached canvas, navigated around the beggars, dodged the occasional moped, stopping at the stalls of the artisans, thinking he might find a gift for his boss, who had a birthday coming up. Folk art was always a safe bet.

  In the stall of a juju man he found a stunning crucifix—the cross carved out of ebony, polished to a high gleam. But the corpus was real ivory, so he let it go.