by Robert White
“It’s good to have a hobby. Now if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got some birds to watch.”
My back was turned, but I felt him breathing behind me. In truth, I wasn’t trying to get his goat. I just wanted him gone to think. Alicia Fox-Whitcomb was bank manager of the Fifth Third and the woman we terrorized until she cooperated and got us into the bank vault. But Ms. Fox-Whitcomb’s refusal to identify me back at the station wasn’t a gift I could take advantage of forever – not with Calderone waiting for my call in a couple hours. I never doubted for a second he had more cunning than to get himself caught stumbling around lost in the woods or boosting a car. My brother might have done the planning, but he was nothing more than a pilot fish to this shark.
My father in his delusional ‘Soviet phase’ as a CIA spy used to quote Russian proverbs. One came to mind: The groundhog knows many things. But the fox knows one thing.
#2
The phone rang at twenty-five to noon.
“Jack, are you going to be out of there?”
“I want to see you, Sarah.” My not-quite-yet-divorced ex.
“Don’t be stupid, Jack. We’re past that now.”
“I’m not past it, Sarah. I don’t want to be past it,” I said.
There was a long pause. “It’s too late,” she said. “It’s over, Jack.”
God Almighty, I was hearing soap opera dialogue in what was the collapsing building of my life; before I knew it, this came out of my mouth: “I can change things,” I said.
Both expected and lame. “No, you can’t. I haven’t got the rest of my life to wait even if I thought that was the truth. You’ve been half there for years.”
“I had to work, didn’t I?”
“I’m talking about another kind of thereness,” she said.
Now we were shifting into TV shrink speech. “Is that why you cheated? Did I just imagine your new stud on his shiny motorcycle?”
“It’s not going to get us anywhere if we start making recriminations about who did what to whom,” she said. I knew that tone well.
“Why is it that when people are caught rutting in the mud like pigs, the language suddenly elevates to fine words like ‘recriminations’ and ‘whom’?”
“I want to know if you’re going to be out of the house by tomorrow afternoon. I have some contractors and painters coming over at one o’clock.”
“Goodbye, Sarah.”
#3
I needed a shower and a shave. I was just turning the corner of the stairs when the phone rang again.
“Sarah, I don’t have time for this right now-”
“Who’s Sarah?” Marija asked.
Her laugh was a jolt of adrenalin straight into my stomach. An image of her sent the blood rushing south like one of those Californian mud slides. Here I was moping over one woman and two seconds later lusting for a different one. The first time I saw Marija Ercegovic she said she was on vacation in America. She laughed at my pronunciation of her name.
I thought from her accented English she was Hungarian. I even had a flashback to one of the old man’s lessons in a goofy version of Magyar at that other kitchen table. She was from Dubrovnic on the Adriatic coast. She had a large family there, she said. My father’s dog-eared Atlas popped into my head. Carlos and I had fought over it so often that its spine was cracked and frayed. We used to hide it from each other. Ancient and badly outdated, at least a dozen East European and Central Asian countries weren’t called by their right names. My father insisted we learn their vital statistics, culture, demographics, and important historical dates. Carlos soaked up information like a blotter and could recite principal imports and exports, GNPs, and other kinds of trivia back at my father whereas I stumbled through these recitations. My father used to shake his head in dismay. He had the field agent’s contempt for desk jockeys. It took me years to unlearn some of it, but by then I had acquired a way to compartmentalize much of the tangle of lies my old man created.
She had looked pretty with some makeup on and her hair combed back neatly. When she stood up from the bench near the hot dog stand, I realized she was much taller than Sarah. She wore a frilly demibra beneath her white blouse that exposed an ample wedge of breast flesh. Blushing like a teen, just coming from a landscaping job, I found myself giving her a tourist’s thumbnail sketch of Northtown. She was vacationing on the Strip with a friend, she said. Her striking looks and flawless body were spoiled by one thing, however, and that was the pig she cavorted with, betrayed me with, and with whom she played me for a sucker.
“Marija,” I said into the phone. “I thought you had gone back home.”
“I got an extension of my visa. I’ve been in Cleveland every day over this, for one thing or another, but they finally gave me permission to stay another six months.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“You sound strange.”
“I’m... I’m peachy,” I said.
“What is that, peachy?” She asked in a little-girl’s whispery voice she probably learned from American soap operas.
“I don’t think I could explain to you what’s happened since... since that day,” I said.
“Then explain it to me over a drink. I’ll be in Rita’s in twenty-five minutes.”
She hung up on me. Phones don’t have toggle buttons nowadays, but I could have hit one with my erection. Unlike my wife, I had not committed adultery. But in my mind I had cheated on her with this strange, exotic, and dangerous woman who had suddenly appeared in my life.
Here was my problem of the moment: I had no wheels and five bags of money at the bottom of a dirty swimming pool forty miles away. Jefferson-on-the-Lake might as well be on the moon. If I had known Sarah’s boyfriend’s number at that moment, I might have been desperate enough to ask to borrow our car.
Instead I called up my former boss’s number and got his son-in-law.
“Rickie,” I said.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Jack,” I said.
“What do you want, Trichaud?” He didn’t sound pleased to be hearing from me.
“Rick, do you recall that landscaping job on Tanglewood three weeks back – the Japanese honeysuckle?”
“What of it?” His voice deepened a notch and revealed his antennae were on full alert.
“I need a favor, Rick.”
“Shit, what kind of favor?”
“I need to borrow one of the trucks for a small errand. Shouldn’t take me more than a couple hours,” I said.
“No fucking way, Trichaud. I’m not letting you have-”
“Now, Rick, Rickie, lad. Is Tinker home? Put her on, please. Maybe your wife might be interested in hearing the more salient details of that particular landscaping job. Especially the part about where I’m outside baking in the sun for four hours while you, Rickster, old trout, you were inside riding the customer.”
“Fuck you, you can’t prove it,” he said.
“I don’t have to prove it, dummy. You’ll have to prove your innocence to Tinker and her father. You know how many times I’ve heard Augie say he’d break the neck of any man-”
“What do you want?”
“I just told you, asshole. I need to borrow a ride for a couple hours. I’ll have it right back. Tell Augie it’s going on a job somewhere.”
“I’ll leave the key in it. Take the Ford. And, fuck me, if you put one scratch-”
Any conversation after that was a waste of my breath. Just as the old man had insisted all those years ago in my and Carlos’ youth in the old section of Montreal: everybody’s got a weakness. I thought of Marija’s phone call and hated the fact he was always right.
#4
I took a cab over to Augie’s and got off a block from the house. Rick had even parked the F-150 in the street for me. I was one of the few unemployed in the middle of the day. I’d lost track of the number of lines I was stepping across.
The daytime crowds on the Strip were dwindling down. There were no teenagers hanging out at the arcad
es on Little Minnesota. I hit the power button and turned it to channel three. I heard a crackle. I said one word and shut it off.
Rita’s was dark and almost empty; the air inside had a heavy, fuggy smell of fermented beer that a kitchen match could ignite. She was sitting in a booth close to the bar. The bartender was a different guy from the owner. He was about thirty-five and wore a trimmed van Dyke. His arms were muscular but bare of tattoos. A couple sat at a booth far from the bar and a solitary drinker sat hunched on his stool at the end of the bar concentrating hard on his beer can.
“Sit down, Jack.”
“Where’s Calderone?”
Marija thought about it for a while and discarded the lie she was formulating. It was a small enough compliment to my intelligence, I suppose.
“Randall’s not far from here,” she said. I hated the fact she called him by his Christian name, this oversized, tattooed biker lout with his Aryan Brotherhood connections.
“How’s my brother doing?”
“That depends on you, Jack, now doesn’t it?”
It was hard to see her features well even though she was close to me. Her lipstick was a shade of red so deep it made her whole face glow. She was beautiful and she was poison from the first day we met.
“What do you want?”
She laughed and her teeth were exposed to the gum line. She was a beauty in bad lighting too. “Isn’t it obvious?” she said.
“Was I a part of it from the beginning or did my brother suggest me to Randall?”
“Does any of that matter now?”
“I suppose not.”
“Good. Then let’s talk about what we need to talk about.”
“OK,” I said. “You called me, remember?”
She took a sip of her beer. I watched her throat muscles work. “European beer is so much better,” she said. I said something banal about Canadian beer.
“Simple enough,” she said brightly. “The money for your brother.”
I nodded my head slowly. I expected it yet I was hoping there would be other things that could be brought in as leverage before that. Randall had to be champing at the bit.
“Does he know?”
“Not yet but he’s getting more agitated. Randall’s not going back to jail and he’s not going to hang around this dump of a town forever. Not with all these cops running around.”
That seemed an odd thing to say, what with me being a cop magnet at the moment, but I let it go.
“We need to deal,” she said, trying to sound tough. “Or he’s gone and your brother will be found in some dumpster. He’ll be in pieces.”
“So for the time being, my brother’s ignorant, is that what you’re saying? He’s just walking around with the Sword of Damocles over his head wherever you three are camping out.”
“What sword?”
“It’s, it’s... Never mind. What else are we talking about?”
“What do you mean?”
Her features were close enough so that I could watch her mouth twist up into a look of annoyance.
“My brother and I came out of the same womb,” I said after a pause. “That’s all we have in common. If you think I’m going to hand you nine hundred thousand dollars for sentimental reasons, you can tell Randall to kiss my ass with his tongue out.”
“Do you know what he’ll do to him?”
“If he’s smarter than he looks, he’ll cut his losses and run. He’ll get as far away from my brother as he can get. I’d offer you the same advice if I thought you’d take it.”
“That’s not going to happen, Jack. You’ll get pieces of your brother in the mail before that happens.”
“I’m leaving now, Marija.”
The anger that looked about to boil over disappeared and she dropped her shoulders a little. Her face assumed its normal prettiness.
“You need to understand something. Randall Calderone has friends. He knows people. Some of them are in prison and some of them are free – walking around, sitting in a bar having a beer like me. He just has to make a phone call and your life will be... changed. You don’t want to spend all your life looking over your shoulder.”
“I can handle it,” I said. “Having money makes it easy.”
“Look, we’ll let you keep some of the money. That’s only fair. You were in for a third, you can have a third.”
“What if I want more?”
“We can negotiate,” she said. “I can go under the table and suck you off right now. Would you like me to do that, Jack?”
I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, but I didn’t say anything.
“Besides,” she said, “I don’t believe what you said about your brother.”
“Why is that?”
“He never stops talking about the two of you. You’re all he thinks about. You and him, starting over. He’s driving Randall crazy.”
“That’s a pretty short drive.”
“You make stupid jokes but you won’t find anything funny for much longer.”
“I don’t find anything funny now, Marija. I was living a normal, happy life a week ago before your thug boyfriend decided I needed to spice it up with a felony bank robbery and kidnapping that will guarantee I never see a sunset before they wheel me out at ninety-three.”
“You can walk away from this with plenty of money and you can have your brother and your nice house all to yourselves and raise chickens.”
“My house isn’t so nice anymore,” I said.
“We thought you needed a little push,” she said.
“So all that fornication on the couch in my basement was purely for my benefit?”
“Jack,” she said, and leaned across the bar toward me; her breasts expanded into the table’s edge but didn’t flatten much. I caught her smiling at me. She opened her denim jacket so I could read her tee-shirt: My Eyes Are Up Here. She would be the kind of girl to ask a guy how to shoot pool while rubbing her backside into his crotch. One painted nail raked the back of my wrist hard enough to leave a white scratch line.
“You know,” I said, “I’ll sound like every older woman you’ve ever known who tried to warn you about men. If you’re lucky, you’ll come to some day in a hospital or an alley. Randall’s not the marrying kind, Marija.”
“Let me worry about me,” she said. “Let’s say I like the relationship the way it is at the moment. Do you like a little pain with sex, Jack?”
“I don’t know what sex is anymore. I’m not sure if my leg goes here or her leg goes there. I need one of those how-to books for beginners.”
“Mmm, I’d love to show you how to again. Why don’t we go back to my cabin? You know where it is, right? You’ve been there before.”
“I know where it is,” I said.
“Shy boy, you’re blushing! Did you like what you saw, hmmm?” Her hand reached under the table and caressed me.
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on the split, Marija?”
“Yes, give me your hand. You can have that split right now. It’s already wet.”
I pulled my hand free.
“Want to lick it? I can feel how hard you are. Come on, let’s go back to my cabin and fuck like rabbits.”
Her hand roamed again seeking my crotch. I picked it off delicately like removing a foraging tarantula.
“OK,” she said. “You had your chance. If I leave here, you’ll never see your brother alive.”
“I’ll make the swap,” I said. “But not here and not today.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Close by,” I said. “It’s close.”
“Now’s as good a time as any, Jack. Let’s do this and go our separate ways. I don’t think I can hold Randall off much longer,” she said. “You don’t know.”
“That would be a bad idea,” I said and leaned back against the frayed and dank-smelling naugahyde of the booth.
“Why is it a bad idea, Jack?” She could swing her moods like a metronome on a Steinway between a soft purl and a harsh alto.
“Bec
ause the bartender is an undercover agent. I’ve had two more following me since I left town. One’s a big tall black FBI guy from Youngstown. He’d have followed me in here, but I guess he didn’t want to stick out in his Armani suit.”
Her eyes tightened and locked onto mine; the frown lines disfigured the beauty of that face. She whipped her head around. The bartender was talking to the solo drunk.
“How do you know that?”
“Ask my brother,” I said. “We were taught surveillance by one of the best.”
#5
I drove back with my escorts well behind me because there wasn’t any traffic on Lake Road to hide behind. Instead of taking the road by the lake all the way to Walnut as usual, I hit the fork where it tees off a state route that leads through some undeveloped acreage and connects to the I90. The road is bad and narrow. The big Ford engine gave me all the power I needed to disappear down it. I hit the first gulley at eighty-two and left the road surface at the top of the hill.
The next gully was trickier because it veered slightly to right and came up fast. I slowed to 75 but even that wasn’t enough to keep my wheels from going airborne. The right front tire struck gravel and I knew I was in trouble. I was patient and didn’t ease off the gas pedal until I felt the back and front tires hold their own against the spin-out. Little by little, I wrestled it back and reclaimed the road. It was a straight shot to the first caution light on West 19th and then a short, sharp turn down Cemetery. I’d had a driver’s license in Michigan forfeited when I first discovered the joy of speeding.
I stopped before Cemetery ran out where four houses were all crammed together into opposite sides of the street. I reversed it into a vacant lot overgrown with crab grass and rabbitfoot clover near a transformer unit enclosed by a small cyclone fence.
They were better than I thought. The first Crown Victoria went sailing past just five minutes later. Pippin wasn’t either of the two drivers I glimpsed.
