Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  “What?”

  “Not much. The changes weren’t earth-shattering. I see that now. In fact, they might’ve made it better. The point is, I realized my plays weren’t going to change the world. As a playwright my power, my talent, was very limited. But that experience taught me about power, that I wanted to have it. I want you to understand this, Chris.”

  “What good is power if you use it just like everybody else does?”

  His father looked frustrated. “The point is, you have it. Not someone else.”

  “It’s good in itself, is that it?”

  “What are you, Socrates?”

  “What are you, Attila the Hun? You’re a fucking TV producer. You don’t even run that little corner of the world—it runs you. The shit you crank out has your name on it, but it’s still shit.”

  “I ought to belt you.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. That’s my power sphere. Not that I’m particularly proud of it.”

  His father reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? I run that game, too. Do you know what happens to freelance tough guys in this world? You don’t think I can pick up a phone and hire as much muscle as I need?” He let go of his son’s hand and slumped back in his chair. “I’m trying to teach you what I know. I might not know the big answers to the big questions, Chris, but you live in the same world I do, and I don’t want to see you get hurt.” He picked up his glass, swirled the ice in his drink. “Let’s call a truce here, okay?”

  Ransom ran his finger around the edge of his glass and looked into the wood-grain pattern of the table. When he looked up he saw that his father, too, was running his finger around the edge of his glass.

  After a minute or so Ransom’s father asked if he wanted another drink.

  “None for me. Are you tired?”

  “I couldn’t sleep right now.”

  “How’s your suite?”

  “Probably very expensive.”

  “I was hoping it would be ridiculously expensive.” Ransom paused. “You want to go for a walk?”

  They took a cab to Okazaki. The moon was nearly full. They walked up the hill and then north on the ancient cobbles of the Tetsugaku no Michi, the Philosopher’s Path, which Buddhist sages had trodden hundreds of years ago, although father and son talked of things which had only parochial significance: friends, family and home.

  28

  When he arrived at the coffee shop, Otani said there had been a phone call for him—a very rude gaijin who refused to leave his name—quickly adding that most of Ransom’s friends were very polite. Setting a coffee in front of Ransom, he predicted the rain would start any day, then the phone rang. Otani picked it up. It’s for you, he said. It’s him.

  “Seen your girlfriend lately, samurai?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the chick you snaked from your cowboy friend—Marilyn.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Ransom said.

  “Right. That’s what you tell the cowboy. But, hey, I’ve seen you two lovebirds.”

  “What do you want, asshole?”

  “Whoa! The zombie awakes.”

  Ransom hung up the phone.

  Shortly after he had resumed his seat it rang again. He asked Otani not to answer. Otani stared nervously at the red phone as it continued to ring, and finally Ransom picked it up.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Same thing I’ve always wanted,” DeVito answered.

  “You want to fight?”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “Give me a reason.”

  “I’ll give you any number of reasons. First—your girlfriend. You don’t want to see anything happen to her, do you?”

  “You’re sick, DeVito.” Three uniformed schoolgirls entered the coffee shop, giggling, modestly covering their mouths.

  “I’ll write that remark down in my little black book. Meantime, I know where your girlfriend is. She suddenly picked up and moved yesterday, am I right?”

  Ransom didn’t say anything.

  “I keep tabs on these things. I can find her if she moves again, too. You know I can. Now, what I figure is that you guys had a little lovers’ quarrel and that’s why she decided on a change of address. You probably don’t even know where she is.”

  “What if I don’t care?”

  “So, I was right, was I? I bet you’d start to care all over again if you thought she might come to harm. You wouldn’t like that a bit, would you? Shit, you should be grateful to old Frank. I’m kind of a matchmaker here, reviving tender feelings for your old squeeze. Anyway, there’s one reason—the health and well-being of a loved one.”

  “What if I still don’t care?” Ransom said, uncertain if he was bluffing DeVito or himself.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we? If Marilyn doesn’t get you going, there’s always Ryder and his little family. They’re next. Maybe I had you wrong. I thought you were the sensitive type who cared about his friends.”

  “You’re not this fucking crazy, are you?”

  “The problem from the very start is that you haven’t taken me seriously. I’m a serious person, very serious.”

  Ransom felt a sickening dread, a feeling of having already lived this dream. He suddenly knew DeVito was serious, that he would keep coming after him through his friends, that he wasn’t going to go away. No reasonable strategy could answer this kind of fanaticism. Ransom wanted to bust the phone against the wall. He wanted to pound this bastard into oblivion, and for reasons that DeVito could never imagine.

  “You’re a disease, DeVito.”

  “Sticks and stones, Ransom. Are you going to fight me, or do we try plan B?”

  “I’ll fight you, you sick fuck.” The schoolgirls, who had taken a table, broke into fresh rounds of stifled laughter every time Ransom spoke.

  “Now you’re talking. You could’ve got this thing over a long time ago, but no. You thought you could ignore me. You thought I wasn’t a serious person. You tried to pretend that I didn’t exist. That’s what we’re talking about here—existence.”

  “You’re a real philosopher, DeVito, a fucking idiot savant.”

  “Let’s not get snotty. This isn’t the Harvard Club or whatever.”

  “When do we do this?” Ransom said.

  “When I say so. You made me wait, now you can wait. Be at Buffalo Rome tonight at midnight and I’ll give you your instructions.”

  He hung up. The dial tone was absorbed into the buzz of traffic from Kitaoji Street as Ransom laid the receiver back in its cradle. The bells on the door sounded as a young man entered, stopped and stared. Ransom instinctively wondered if he looked peculiar, but the man recovered his composure and took a seat, having seen nothing more than a gaijin, the everyday strange. Ransom saw that he was wearing cowboy boots. Are You Ready for Boots?

  Okay? Otani asked him.

  Ransom nodded, trying to remember if Marilyn had mentioned the name of her old hotel. But even if he could come up with it, she probably hadn’t left a forwarding number. For more than an hour he waited for her to call, time enough to realize that he didn’t even know how to use the phone book. He wanted to get her out of DeVito’s way, although he wasn’t convinced that this would solve the problem. Some things wouldn’t go away unless you faced them head-on.

  29

  Ransom met his father for lunch at the hotel. The senior Ransom, sitting at the bar with a Bloody Mary, appraised his son as he walked over to the bar. “You could have put on a decent pair of pants and a jacket.”

  Ransom let the remark pass.

  “Want a drink?”

  “No, thanks. Out of practice.”

  In the dining room they sat among Caucasians in bright colors and Japanese men in dark blue suits. “I hear the tempura chef is first-rate,” Victor Ransom said, putting the menu aside.

  After they had ordered, Ransom said, “You haven’t talked to Marilyn yet, have you?”


  “I called her hotel this morning and they said she’d moved out. I thought you’d know where she is.”

  “Promise me you won’t give her a hard time.”

  “I don’t even know if I’ll see her.”

  “I want you to make a point of giving her a hand.”

  “Did she spill the beans, or what?” Seeing every reason not to tell the truth, Ransom said, “I found her passport in her purse one day when I was getting her a cigarette. She didn’t have much choice but to tell me what was going on.”

  Ransom’s father nodded. “She’s a nice girl,” he said. “I was hoping you two would hit it off.” The waiter arrived with a tray of sashimi. “What are your plans, Chris?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come home.”

  “I’ll think about it. What about you?”

  “I have to be in Tokyo for a few days. Maybe you could come out and join me?”

  “Maybe.” Until now flight had not occurred to Ransom as an option, and for a moment he let himself pretend to consider it.

  “Are you feeling okay? You seem out of it.”

  “I’m fine,” Ransom said, as two trays of tempura arrived at the table, piled high with shrimp whose shells had been replaced with spiny crusts of batter.

  After lunch, they stood in the lobby and awkwardly traded information, Ransom’s father repeating his itinerary and Ransom giving him the phone numbers at the coffee shop and at Miles’s house. Finally, they shook hands.

  “Think hard about the long term,” his father said, clasping Ransom’s hand firmly.

  “I will,” Ransom answered.

  After lunch Ransom made a sweep of the major hotels, asking unsuccessfully after Marilyn. The city air was dense and smoggy. Late in the afternoon he took a bath, and from the bath he wandered into a nearby covered market, wondering why he felt so restless and finally realizing that what he was missing was karate, which had structured his life for the past two years. The market was a chaos of sensations and individual missions of procurement. He paused at a fish stand, where ocean creatures reclined on shaved ice: green shrimp, hoary oysters, a bonito with a woeful eye. At a fruit stand he admired a rack of perfect strawberries, then bought an apple. Women with babies on their backs and baskets under their arms shouted questions at the shopkeepers. Ransom admired the confidence with which they proceeded, and thought how good it would be to belong in this simple procession, to be the man for whom the broad-cheeked woman in the blue scarf was buying food, whom she would sleep with that night, moan for, quietly, so as not to wake the baby or the neighbors. He watched her point toward a sea bass and felt a surge of tender, erotic emotion. Looking up, she met his eyes and registered alarm at the interest of his gaze. She nervously completed her transaction and hurried away. Ransom observed her retreat and walked back toward his bike, which Udo had finally repaired, realizing along the way that, for the moment, he had nothing to do and no place to go.

  With a black eye and stitches in one cheek, Miles answered the door wearing an apron that said Prime Texas Ribs and pictured a ribcage across the chest. “Welcome to the Ryder nursery and grill.”

  “How are you?”

  “Great.”

  “Akiko?”

  “She’s good. She’s real good. So’s the kid. Of course, who wouldn’t be with a faceful of warm nipple? Those were the days. Did I tell you he weighed in at eight-and-a-half pounds? I freaked when they first told me it was three something, but then I realized they were talking kilos.”

  Ransom handed him a bottle of Australian champagne with a blue bow. “It was either this or Rumanian.”

  “Baby-san will never know the difference.”

  Ransom left his shoes among the collection of boots in the entryway and followed Ryder inside to the kitchen. “Does the kid have a name yet?”

  “We’re working on it.” Miles picked up a bowl in which three steaks were marinating. “Consider the short happy life of a Kobe beef cow. They feed you beer and massage you every day to keep the fat from bunching up.”

  “You haven’t named the young master?”

  “Well, Miles junior has a certain ring to it, but it just won’t play in old Nippon. It doesn’t seem fair to give the kid a name nobody could pronounce. Which raises the question, do we stay here for the rest of our lives, or what? This fatherhood number is no cinch. It makes you think.”

  “So you might repatriate?”

  “Thinking about it. You hear about Mojo Domo? They’ve got an offer to go to Chicago to work on some documentary about the blues. Hit the rice cooker, will you?”

  Ransom flipped the switch on the appliance while Miles broke apart a head of lettuce.

  “Akiko’s parents came to the hospital, all smiles. Big breakthrough in East–West relations.”

  Ransom heard the shuffling of slippers in the next room, and Akiko appeared in the doorway with the baby in her arms. Ransom approached carefully, feeling awkward and bulky in the presence of mother and child. Akiko smiled and looked down at the round face within the blankets; she bounced the bundle gently in her arms and the baby made a faint birdlike noise. Akiko turned her back to Ransom, allowing him to see the tiny face. For a moment the dark eyes seemed to focus on Ransom’s, registering this new presence, then were lost in a blur of light, shape and color.

  “Would you like to hold him?” Akiko asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not hard, Christopher.”

  Ransom put out his arms to take the baby. It was heavier than he expected, and from this new vantage point he could see the mist of auburn hair on the baby’s head and smell its milky breath. The skin of his hands looked incredibly worn and wrinkled beside the baby’s face. He gingerly returned him to Akiko, who said she would take him upstairs.

  “What do you think?” Miles said.

  “Good-looking kid,” Ransom said, uncertainly.

  “You liar. You think he looks like every other baby you’ve seen.”

  “I haven’t seen too many. What do you think?”

  “I think he’s a good-looking kid.”

  They went out to the garden, where Ryder filled a hibachi with wood chips. “Mesquite,” he said. “I shipped in twenty pounds.” He spit into the fish pond, and several orange-and-yellow carp came up to investigate.

  “I’ve never even heard you joke about going back before,” Ransom said.

  “Time for a change, maybe. Akiko’s always wanted to go to the States, and opening a business over there will be like falling off a log after what I had to go through to set up here. I’d have a nice piece of capital if I sold out my interests.” Ryder stirred the fire and put the grill in place. “I’m sorry about all that at the hospital the other day. You were right, what you said.”

  “I already forgot it.”

  “Say hi to Marilyn for me if you see her. Tell her my news.” His tone was casual, vaguely solicitous.

  “If I see her,” Ransom said. He had thought about telling Miles about DeVito’s phone call, and about who Marilyn really was, but he didn’t see what that would accomplish. He certainly didn’t want to disrupt this new family scene, nor would he allow DeVito to. For a couple of months he had kept Marilyn’s bogus dilemma a secret from Ryder and now there were better reasons for withholding the truth.

  The three of them ate supper together in the tatami room off the kitchen. Decorated with Remington reproductions and mounted steer horns, this was the room in which Ransom had slept during his first months in Japan. They listened to Hank Williams, Akiko frequently slipping upstairs to check on the baby while Miles and Ransom debated names. Ransom was distracted, but Miles didn’t seem to notice. At eleven o’clock Ransom said it was time he pushed off.

  “I think I’ll stop in at Buffalo Rome,” he added. “Any messages?

  “Tell my minions to salt the food and water the drinks.”

  “Business as usual?”

  “Right.”

  Ransom kissed Akiko, shook Ryder’s ha
nd, and said goodnight. As he was putting on his shoes in the entryway, Miles said, “Let me know when you’re ready for boots.”

  Ransom stopped by Marilyn’s club, where he learned that she was off for the next two nights. He wasn’t really sure what he would have said to her, anyway. Presumably she was safe enough unless he chose not to fight.

  At the bar Ransom ordered a beer and told the bartender he was expecting a call. A new narc had taken up the post near the door, the old one having blown his cover on DeVito. Mojo Domo was playing and he was glad for the music—blues falling down like hail, songs of exile from love, home, self—and relieved that for a moment he didn’t have to talk to anyone.

  Ten minutes after he arrived, the phone rang at the bar. The bartender told him he could take it in the back office. Ransom went back, closing the door behind him, and picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

  “Are you ready to deal?”

  “I’m ready.” Ransom held the receiver and stared at the map of Texas on the wall.

  “The stakes are higher now,” DeVito said. “You insisted on escalating hostilities.”

  “How did I do that?”

  “By turning up your nose. By pretending I wasn’t worthy of your attention. You could have gotten it over with a long—”

  “Spare me your attempts to reason, will you?” Ransom said, but DeVito wanted to finish his speech.

  “—a long time ago. But I had to convince you, which took a certain amount of time and effort on my part, Ransom. And you owe me for that. Which brings up the question of weapons.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Swords.”