by E. Z. Rinsky
He holds the glass case up to the light of the chandelier to inspect the vanilla cake that was baked this morning. Courtney glued it to the base of the box then carefully painted it with green-tinted frosting and egg whites to make it look ancient and brittle.
“Nearly,” Courtney says. “Imagine. The other pieces were eaten by Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau . . .”
“Mmm,” Orange grumbles. “Next time bring me something I can eat.” He hands the case off to a Chinese girl who can’t be much bigger than Sadie. She carries it over to a bookcase and deposits it between some other antique curiosities, where it will surely remain untouched for years. Then she returns to his side, cuts a cigar for him, sticks it between his teeth, and lights it for him. She kisses him on the cheek, and as she retreats to the minibar to fetch us some drinks, Orange winks at us. I bite my tongue and force a smile. Beside me on the shiny black love seat, Courtney does a remarkable job of swallowing his disdain.
The waitress returns with a tray bearing three tumblers filled with ice and a bottle of fifteen-year scotch. Pours one for Orange first, then sets up a folding table in front of Courtney and pours one for each of us. She avoids our gaze the whole time—probably instructed to just stare at the floor. I grind my teeth and think about my Magnum sitting up at the front desk.
“Could I actually,” Courtney says to the waitress, “get an ice water?”
She nods obediently, still staring at the floor. I doubt her English extends beyond drink orders and sex commands.
I greedily suck on the smoky scotch, and it goes straight to my head. I must be badly dehydrated.
“I first heard of the tape maybe four years ago. There was a guy who showed up at the front desk out there,” Orange says, puffing on his cigar. “He was short, midforties. Prematurely grey. Bushy lumberjack beard. He had awful dark circles beneath his eyes—every time I saw him he looked the same, like he’d just chugged three energy drinks and was going to vomit. I could tell he was a first-timer.”
“First-timer?” I ask.
“Never paid for a girl before.” Orange puts a fat finger to his lips. “They’re easy to spot. They’ve usually been agonizing over the decision for weeks. They feel like they’re crossing some threshold from which they can never return. The truth is much more benign, really. My father gave me my first girl when I was fourteen. Birthday present. Nothing changed.”
Courtney rolls his eyes. Orange pretends not to notice.
“So this client, I arranged for him to liaise with a cute little girl I found in K-town. Don’t worry, Courtney. She was nineteen. Usually first-timers are nervous, come in under a minute. But she told me later that he was the complete opposite: lay down naked on the bed and just stared at the ceiling for an hour. Took her twenty minutes just to get him—ahem—primed. Then she rode him for a half hour, and let me tell you, this girl knows what she’s doing—but nothing. The guy lays there like a corpse. Never comes.”
Orange continues, swirling his tumbler, sucking pensively on his cigar, like he’s waxing philosophic.
“Okay. That’s weird, but I’ve heard weirder. But then, first thing in the morning, he’s back again. I had to call a girl and wake her up to come in. He started showing up here every day. Sometimes twice a day. Hemorrhaging money, but he didn’t seem to care. Each time I saw him he looked a little thinner—not quite like you, Courtney, but still. It was clear that he was emptying his life savings. The only request he made was that it be a different girl every time, which started getting tricky. Had to make calls to some friends to get some fresh meat in here just for him. Had to charge him more, but he didn’t blink. And every time I talked to the girls after, they told me the exact same thing: He just lay there, never said a word. Never came. After an hour, he zipped up and left. Then he’d be back, maybe that afternoon. He’d spend hours here sometimes waiting for another girl to show up. Would sit down right where you’re sitting there. Never said a word, except asking to make sure he was getting a different girl. Once I accidentally gave him a girl he’d had before, maybe a month before. He took one look at her and said, ‘No. I want someone new.’ And that was it.”
Courtney looks sick to his stomach. I go bottoms up on the scotch to hide my grimace. The waitress immediately materializes to give me a refill. She hands Courtney an ice water with lime and smiles an empty smile that makes my heart quiver.
“So.” I take a deep breath. “How long did this go on?”
“About seven or eight weeks, I think.”
“Then what?” I ask. Courtney is fiddling anxiously with a few long hairs that hang off his chin like a billy goat.
“I ran out of girls. Couldn’t find a single new one in this whole fucking city. I called every contact I had, nobody had anyone new. I told him this, and he just stood up and left. Simple as that. Oh—I forgot. He never wore protection. Not once.”
I grind my teeth. “That seems ill advised, so to speak.”
Orange looks hurt. “My girls are clean. I take care of them.”
I can feel Courtney struggling to suppress a retort. I put my hand on his boney knee and squeeze: cool it.
“Alright,” I say. “So what does this have to do with the tape?”
“Wait for it, Frankie.”
Orange signals for a refill, and when the waitress approaches he wraps a mammoth arm around her and pulls her in close for a slobbery kiss. Then he spanks her, and she runs off. I wonder if Orange has ever had sex with a woman he doesn’t own.
“So when I tell him this, he just stands up and walks out of my gym. I didn’t see him again for about a month, when he showed up here at four in the morning, clawing at that glass door, moaning. It’s just me and my guy Gussy—all the girls were asleep. We let him in, and he practically collapses on the floor. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or just miserable. Never seen anyone in a state like that. Screaming, moaning incoherently. I just stared at Gussy—neither of us knew what to do with this sack of shit. I mean that—he was a fucking sack of shit. Like, he was empty. A sack of skin with nothing inside. Then he stops sobbing and looks up at Gussy and goes, ‘Kill me. Shoot me in the head.’ ”
Orange pauses and stares at his drink.
“You know, I’ve seen some very nasty things down here, but I’ve never seen anything like this. Never seen a person so far gone.”
“So you shot him?” Courtney asks, deadpan.
Orange looks appalled. “Of course not. I dragged him in here, sat him across from me at the poker table, and asked him to tell me what’s going on.”
“How kind. You’re like a philanthropist.”
Orange laughs deeply.
“Watch it, you fucking guido,” he growls. Then polishes off his second drink. “I can’t claim it was totally magnanimous. Don’t forget, he’d been one hell of a customer. He’d dropped fifteen grand here in two months. Since he’d left I’d gotten some more girls in. Figured maybe . . .”
“Jesus,” Courtney whispers. I tighten my grip on his kneecap. I’m not exactly charmed by Orange’s attitude toward women either—but just gotta keep it bottled up until we’re out of here.
“So he calms down a little bit. Finally looks at me with these empty eyes. I say, ‘Why do you want me to kill you?’ and he replies, ‘I know what’s coming. I heard it on a tape.’ ”
I raise an eyebrow. Courtney clears his throat; his curiosity just overtook his disgust.
“What else did he say?” Courtney asks.
“He kept repeating himself, that he’d heard what’s coming. And that he heard it on a tape. I asked him what tape, you know. This guy was hardly even with me, you could see it in his face. He was here, sitting here, but his head was somewhere else, somewhere far away.”
Orange reaches toward the red carpet, and his massive hand finds a hidden drawer in his lounge. He removes a bag of what appears to be choco
late-covered macadamia nuts, pops a few in his cavernous mouth. Doesn’t offer us any.
“I ask him how he knew the tape was telling the truth, kind of indulging him, you know. And he freaks out a little, almost screams at me, ‘I heard it. I saw it.’ ”
Orange chews another couple of nuts.
“Kept repeating that. That he knows what’s coming, that he heard it, saw it. Finally he says one other thing. He says, ‘It’s the same backwards as forwards.’ I ask, ‘What, the tape?’ and he nods really hard. I can tell I’m sort of losing him. He’s losing the ability to really even convey himself through speech. He’s stuttering, and when he can get words out, they’re slurred. A few things he says are just plain gibberish. Then he shoots up out of the chair and starts motioning like this.” Orange pantomimes writing. “He wants a pen. So I get one, a pen and paper, and hand it to him. And he starts writing. It’s like crazy person writing.”
“What did he write?” Courtney asks.
Orange hesitates. “We’re in business, right? We have a deal? I get one listen, right?”
We both nod vigorously. Orange sits up slightly and licks his lips.
“Don’t cross me on this,” he says.
“You have our word,” I say, unsure how much I believe myself. Courtney nods in enthusiastic affirmation.
Orange’s nostrils flare. “Follow me.”
He grunts and sits up. Takes a moment to collect himself, then catches his breath, heaves himself to his feet, and motions for us to follow him. He leads us past the bar, past the poker tables. We follow him through a curtained doorway, brushing past a different girl heading back out with a few drinks on a tray. Orange gives her a halfhearted smack on the ass as she passes. We follow him up a narrow staircase; if he was any fatter, he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze his way up. As it stands, his pink bathrobe scrapes against the whitewashed walls.
At the top is a locked door, which he opens with a combination, and then we’re in what must be his office. Not particularly spacious, set up like a CEO’s might be: polished mahogany desk, potted plants, more artwork. Packed wall to wall with glass display cases containing assorted trinkets. Notably missing are windows (since we’re underground) and any pictures on the desk. No family photos. I’m surprised he doesn’t keep portraits of his favorite whores.
Courtney and I sit down in two armchairs on the customer side of the desk while Orange digs through his desk drawers until he finds a key ring. He waddles to a lone green file cabinet in the corner of the room. Unlocks the bottom drawer—exposing us to a voluminous, bathrobe-garbed backside—then returns to his seat holding a single laminated page, which he puts down in front of us.
“Did you show this to Greta?” I ask.
Orange shakes his head. “I haven’t shown this to anyone until now. If I’d known she was after the tape, I wouldn’t have let her in the front door.”
He wets his thick lips.
“I’d long since given up hope of finding the tape. More or less assumed it didn’t exist. But now you two come in here and tell me someone else is after it . . . She must have heard that I was looking for it years ago and wanted to check if I had it in my collection.” Orange shakes his head. “And she was desperate . . . feverish. It wasn’t just money she offered, you know. She told me if she found what she was looking for . . .”
“What?” I ask.
“She said if she found what she needed in my archives I would ‘have’ her. You know. Fuck her.”
Courtney gives me a sidelong look, like she said that to you, too, didn’t she? I try to hide my burning face from Court. Feel like an idiot for assuming I was the first to receive that particular term in our agreement. Should make me want it less. But it doesn’t.
“But she didn’t tell you what she was looking for? And then left empty-handed?”
Orange nods his head.
“I just gave her your number, talked you up to get her out of here. She was making my skin crawl. I appreciated the offer, of course, but . . .” I can’t tell if Orange is blushing or if his blubbery face is still glowing from the shvitz.
He’s definitely never had consensual sex in his life.
Orange bites his lip and pushes the laminated paper over to us. We stare at it. It is crazy person writing. The central text is surrounded by squiggles that are half letters, half something else. And the words in the center of the page, though clear, are written dysgraphically, in square box letters. No curves. Only straight lines; his o is a square. It’s also rife with misspellings. First is a single word near the top of the page:
Sexes
Then, beneath it, what looks like some kind of confession:
Orange,
Same plaid backwrds. Evry Second. I saw wat happns. Thatz why we did it. Beulah twelve. Im twelve.
Live not on Evil
Then he seems to completely lose it, degenerating into nonsense:
Evlewt mi evlewtha . . .
His letters become unreadable until the end. Signed:
Egnaro
I click my tongue. Guy was nuts. Like Silas. Probably not worth reading too much into this.
“What happened after he wrote this?” I ask Orange.
“He ran out in a panic. Like a madman. We watched him on the cameras. He raced from here, faster than I’ve ever seen anyone move. I tried to hunt him down. Asked everyone I knew if they’d ever heard of an ‘Egnaro.’ Nothing.”
“Sounds Hispanic,” I muse.
Courtney is still staring intently at the laminated page.
“But if Greta is paying you to find it, she must know something I don’t. It must really exist,” Orange says, squinting at the paper in concentration, forehead wrinkled like a salted snail. He clearly doesn’t know anything about the tape’s connection to Savannah’s murder or that Greta is her sister. “So what do we know?” Orange squeezes his fat cheeks. “Obviously the tape is intimately connected to the Beulah Twelve . . .”
“What’s the Beu—” I start, but Courtney suddenly grabs my thigh and digs his nails in deep, so deep that I almost squeak.
“Obviously,” replies Courtney, cool as a Frappuccino. Great liar. A million times better than me. I’ve seen mannequins with more tells than Courtney. But my lips must have squirmed, because Orange looks up and inspects us, correctly ascertaining that we’re holding out on him.
“What else did Greta tell you?” he asks.
Courtney taps my thigh with his index finger. We’re both thinking the same thing: Tread very carefully. Give him enough info that he believes we’re on his team, but not so much that he could hire his own team to track it down before us . . . If it’s real.
“Greta believes the tape contains the dying words of a young woman who was murdered,” I say. And now feed back to Orange what he already knows to be true. “In which she reveals the nature of the afterlife.”
“And of course she knew of the Beulah Twelve connection,” lies Courtney. “Though obviously didn’t have access to the same level of detail as you.”
Orange’s black eyes are glowing. I’m involuntary reminded of the look on Sadie’s face after her first bite of ice cream the other day but am instantly sickened by the comparison.
“A girl’s dying words,” he says, “telling you about the world to come. Imagine if it exists! A tape that tells us what happens after we die! Is there a more fantastic treasure anywhere on earth?” Orange’s breathing approaches shvitz levels. His eyes alight with wonder—he can’t wait to get his grubby hands on the thing.
“Why?” I say. Orange and Courtney turn to stare at me. “I mean, seriously. So what? Say this thing exists, and it really—somehow—tells you about what happens after you die. What’s gonna change? You’re going to start going to church on Sundays?”
The look Orange gives me in response sends chills shooting down my spine. For jus
t a fleeting moment, I think I’m privy to decades of aggregate, deeply suppressed suffering. Countless hours spent in this subterranean prison he’s built for himself. Self-loathing the likes of which I can hardly fathom. Burying himself among his ever-growing hoards, like a pharaoh already in his sarcophagus, just waiting to move on.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you can’t relate,” Orange says quietly. “I can’t speak for others, but for me to know that there’s another life, one without this, this . . .” Orange glances down to his pink-clad girth, shaking his head as if still in disbelief of his physical form. “This burden . . .” He lowers his voice to a strained whisper. “My friends, if this is what Egnaro and Greta think it is, it’s worth much more than whatever she’s paying you. Its value is beyond material wealth. To hear this tape . . . to know what no man has known before, to be privy to the secrets of the universe, to perhaps understand God himself . . .”
Hot breath pours from Orange’s nostrils. I’m thinking the guy knows that at best he’s wasting his life, at worst he’s hurt a lot of people. In his mind, here’s a chance for redemption. All his sins can be offset by this groundbreaking metaphysical discovery.
There’s no way he listens just once then hands it back to us.
“So there’s two questions,” Orange says. “Where is it? And what does it say, exactly? How could any audio recording prove such a—”
Courtney suddenly slams a thin hand onto the desktop. “Julius. You’re an idiot.”
Orange raises an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”
“His name isn’t Egnaro. Egnaro is just Orange spelled backwards.”
Orange furrows his eyebrows in concern and snatches the sheet back, as if to confirm this.
“Palindromes,” Courtney says softly.
“Palindromes?” Orange asks, still staring at the signature.
“Words or phrases that are the same forwards as backwards. Sexes is a palindrome. And then see, he started writing this message to you, telling you about the tape. Then ‘Live not on evil’ is itself a little palindrome. Then he tried to finish the letter by just writing it backwards, but must have kinda lost it.”
