Dying Is My Business

by Nicholas Kaufmann

  Bennett leaned forward from the backseat until his face filled the rearview mirror. “Maybe you’ve got a lucky streak going, just like Sully did. But you gotta ask yourself, errand boy, when’s your luck going to run out? You can only cheat death for so long before it comes to collect.”

  I ignored him, turning the car onto Empire Boulevard. Normally a major thoroughfare jammed with traffic, it was deserted at this hour—3:21 a.m. by the clock on the dashboard. I was able to drive the length of the boulevard quickly, passing darkened storefront churches, closed beauty salons, and West Indian restaurants with their gates down. When I saw the gas station coming up, I slowed the car.

  The Shell station was a derelict from another decade, shuttered for going on twenty years. The pumps were dry, and the only things on the shelves inside the convenience mart were cobwebs and rat droppings. It was what was under the station that mattered. Back in the 1960s, the original owner had bought into the Red Scare so fully that he’d built a fallout shelter beneath it. It made the perfect base of operations for someone like Underwood who didn’t want to be found. I pulled up to the chain-link fence and got out of the car to unlock the gate. I glanced up at the sign that towered over me. The S had fallen off years ago, leaving the word HELL written across the sign’s faded yellow clamshell shape in enormous red letters. Underwood got a big kick out of that.

  I drove around the back of the station, locked the gate again behind us, and then opened the back door of the car. I grabbed Bennett’s shoulders and hefted him out.

  He squirmed out of my grasp. “Get your hands off me, you freak.” He took a deep breath and held his chin high. His attempt at dignity would have been a lot more impressive if we hadn’t been standing in an abandoned gas station parking lot. “Which way?”

  “This way,” I said. I guided Bennett around the back of the station to the storm doors at the base of the rear wall, keeping one hand on the plastic tie between his wrists in case he tried to run. Then I said, “I’m going to let go for a second. You’re not going to try anything, are you?”

  “What if I did?” he asked. “Would you kill me like Maddock?”

  Not like Maddock, I thought.

  I let go of the plastic tie and pulled open the storm doors. Below, cement steps descended into a murky darkness. I guided Bennett down the steps until we reached the dirt floor at the bottom. Before us was a metal door embedded in a cement wall. The old fallout sign was still bolted next to the door, three yellow triangles inside a black circle, faded and dented with age. I gave the special knock Underwood had taught me, then heard the sound of a bolt being pulled back. The door swung inward. A hulking shape stood in the doorway—Big Joe, one of Underwood’s enforcers. He was six foot five with shoulders that looked broad enough to scrape the walls of the narrow hallway behind him.

  Big Joe sized up Bennett, then turned to me with an all-too-familiar glare of hostility. “Took you long enough, T-Bag.” There’s a cliché about organized crime henchmen being men of few words. It’s a cliché for a reason. We’re not exactly eloquent. “Underwood was expectin’ your sorry ass half an hour ago.”

  “There were some complications,” I said.

  “Big surprise. There’s always complications with you.” Big Joe stepped aside to let us in, then closed and locked the door. “He’s waitin’ for you inside.”

  I escorted Bennett past Big Joe and into the hallway.

  Bennett snickered. “T-Bag? Really?”

  Annoyed, I kept my mouth shut and pushed him forward.

  “Do you even know what tea bag means?” Bennett pressed. “He must really hate you.”

  Hate wasn’t a strong enough word for the way Big Joe felt about me. He blamed me for the death of Ford, Underwood’s collector before me. Ford and Big Joe had been tight. If Big Joe thought he could get away with it, he would slit my throat as payback in a heartbeat. Not that I would stay dead, but he was the kind of guy who’d do it anyway just to blow off steam.

  A string of work lamps lit the hallway, clamped along the seams between the walls and ceiling. As we walked deeper, the constant hum of the portable generator grew more audible. Bennett shivered and hugged himself for warmth. Our breath clouded in front of us. For some reason, Underwood kept it freezing cold in the fallout shelter, using the generator to power several portable air-conditioning units set up throughout the space. Just one of his many peculiar eccentricities. The hallway emptied out into a large, cement-walled room that was lit by bright standing lamps and a ceiling fixture. The walls were stained with a brownish-yellow tinge from cigarette smoke. Dark circles from extinguished butts spotted the red and tan Oriental rug on the floor. There were two gray metal doors in the right wall and another door in the left. The black door. I averted my eyes from it. In the middle of the room, a wide table stood cluttered with empty pizza boxes, drained liquor bottles, and a couple of small crates of stolen goods. Directly under the table was a big steel lockbox containing a cache of handguns.

  Underwood’s second enforcer, a muscular, neckless bull of a man who went by the name Tomo, was sitting on a folding metal chair. He stood up as soon as he saw us enter. He straightened his shirt’s hem over the butt of the gun tucked into his pants.

  Underwood himself sat on a reclining easy chair on the far side of the table. He had his legs up and his arms folded behind his head like he was enjoying a lazy afternoon in his backyard. Dark black sunglasses masked his eyes. He was never without them, even inside or at night. When I first met him, I thought he might be blind. He wasn’t. He was just the kind of guy who always wore sunglasses because he thought it made him look intimidating, imposing. In the Brooklyn crime world, appearances were everything.

  “There he is, the man of the hour,” Underwood said, getting up and coming around the table. As he came closer, the smell of his cologne was overwhelming. Underwood practically bathed in Obsession for Men, another of his eccentricities, but of course no one dared tell him to dial it down. “Did our friend here give you any trouble, Trent?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle,” I replied.

  Underwood turned to Bennett. “So glad you could join us, Mr. Bennett. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Underwood,” Bennett spat.

  Underwood smiled a thin, closed-mouth grin. “Tomo, would you take our guest in back, please?”

  Tomo stepped forward. He grabbed Bennett by the arm and dragged him toward the black door.

  “You’re not going to get what you want, Underwood,” Bennett shouted. “I don’t care what you do to me.” Tomo opened the door and pulled Bennett inside. Before the door slammed shut again, I caught a glimpse of a single wooden chair in the middle of a bare room. The chair had straps across the armrests and on the two front legs. There was a drain in the cement floor beneath it. I felt cold all over.

  Underwood turned back to me and noticed the bullet hole in my shirt. “So it happened again,” he said. I nodded. “And it was just like before? You’re okay?”

  “I’m not dead yet,” I said, and handed him Bennett’s snub-nosed revolver.

  Underwood pocketed the gun. Then he laughed and tapped me lightly on the cheek with his open palm. The potent, musky scent of his cologne tickled my nose. “Good dog. See, what did I tell you? You’re a miracle, Trent. We’re going to do amazing things together, you and me. So do me a favor and lose the long face, okay?” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket, peeled off a few, and handed them to me. “Get some rest, you’ve earned it. Once I get what I need from Bennett, I’m going to have a big job for you. Your biggest yet. There’s a lot riding on this one, and I’ll need my best man on it. You’re my best man, aren’t you, Trent?”

  “Sure,” I said. I pocketed the money. The black door glared at me like the eye of the devil.

  Underwood made guns out of his fingers and pointed them at me. “I knew I could count on you. You’re my go-to guy!” He opened the black door and went inside, blocking my view of whatever was h
appening in there. When the door slammed shut again I was left standing alone in the room.

  I sighed and approached the first of the gray doors in the opposite wall, the one that led to my room. With no home of my own, Underwood had given me the room rent-free. At the start it had struck me as a generous act of friendship, but now, suddenly, I wondered if it was something else. If maybe he wanted me close so he could keep an eye on me, like a pet you don’t quite trust.

  From the corner of my eye I saw the second gray door swing silently open. I turned. Peeking out from behind the door was a woman. She had a thin face, big eyes so dark they almost looked black, and long, ragged black hair that fell in slender wisps across her features. She was Underwood’s wife, or girlfriend. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what the status of their relationship was. Underwood never talked about his personal life, only business. But she was never far from his side. She never spoke a word to me, or to anyone as far as I knew. In the year I’d been here I had yet to hear Underwood address her by name. Maybe she didn’t have one.

  She glared at me, her eyes narrowing. I hated when she did that, which was all the time. I got the feeling she was scared of me, or disgusted by me. Maybe both.

  She disappeared behind the door again, and I went into my room. The cement walls there were just as bare as in the main room, but unlike the main room there was no rug, just more cement that felt cold and hard against my feet when I took off my shoes. I’d never bothered to decorate the room in any way. It would have been like admitting this was where I would always live, that I’d never find my real home, and I refused to accept that.

  A twin-sized bed, rescued from a garbage dump, rested along one wall, its metal frame speckled with rust, the mattress moldy and stained. I sat down on the bed. I wondered what was happening to Bennett on the other side of the black door. I expected to hear the sounds of torture coming through the walls, the high-pitched whir of a drill or the meaty slap of fists hitting flesh. I expected to hear Bennett scream. I waited a long time, but the sounds never came.

  In a way, the silence was worse.

  Three

  I don’t sleep. I can’t, my body won’t let me. I learned pretty fast that it’s one of the side effects of not being able to die, like there’s some kind of battery inside me that won’t turn off. I feel tired sometimes, but never sleepy. That makes my downtime boring, frustrating, or both.

  But that night I had a special ritual to perform. One I didn’t enjoy but felt compelled to do.

  I lifted the mattress. On one side was a small tear in the fabric. I reached inside and pulled out the pen and sheet of paper hidden inside the stuffing. There was a list written on the paper, a list I’d been keeping—and adding to—for the past year. I kept it hidden in the mattress because I didn’t want anyone else seeing it. It felt sacred to me in ways I didn’t fully understand. No one else would understand it, either. I sat down on the bed and read over the list:

  1. Ford

  2. Wellington

  3. Braum

  4. Langan

  5. Francisco

  6. Perry

  7. Petrucha

  8. the boy

  Then I took the pen and added another name to it.

  9. Maddock

  All the lives I’d stolen, reduced to the equivalent of a shopping list. Writing down their names was a compulsion. It helped me remember them, and that seemed like the right thing to do. I could recite the list forward and backward by now, knew their names by heart, all except one. Number eight, “the boy.” The only one who didn’t belong. The others were killers, racketeers, and thieves, but not him. He hadn’t done anything to anyone. He hadn’t tried to kill me first the way the others had. The boy had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I thought of the crack house on Fourth Avenue again, and had to forcefully push it from my mind. The memory of the boy had been lurking in the back of my head like a ghost ever since. I didn’t want to think about it. One night off, that was all I wanted. A way to forget, even if only for a few hours.

  There was an old TV set in the corner of the room, rescued from the same garbage dump as my bed. It barely worked, and when it did its rabbit ears only picked up a single station, a local-access channel that showed old movies. I watched whenever I could. It was more than a pastime—it was my teacher. Everything I learned about the world that didn’t come from Underwood came from watching Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Lon Chaney Jr., and Boris Karloff.

  I turned it on and watched for a couple of hours, taking in all of Werewolf of London and part of The Maltese Falcon before I realized I was too distracted to pay attention. I kept thinking about the boy, and God-knows-what happening to Bennett behind the black door. I needed something stronger than the TV. I turned it off and pulled out the other item I’d hidden inside the mattress. It was a paperback book I’d found one rainy day on the stoop of a brownstone in Park Slope after running a collection for Underwood. Something about the sight of the book lying there, discarded, unwanted, and alone, pelted mercilessly by the rain, had filled me with an unexpected sadness. I pitied it, felt almost a kinship with it, so I stuffed it inside my coat to keep it safe from the storm, and brought it back with me.

  It seemed so small in my hands now, a fragile thing. Its rain-battered pages had dried, but they’d also become swollen and brittle from the moisture they’d absorbed. The cover art was a painting of a flat blue sea with a big white castle on the far shore. A ship with tall sails floated upon the waves. Standing on its deck was a woman in a white dress with long, flowing auburn hair. She held a sword in her hands. Above her, a winged horse and a flying lizard faced off. The title was printed along the top in a curled script: The Ragana’s Revenge by Elena De Voe. I opened the book carefully so the damaged pages wouldn’t tear.

  At the front was a detailed map of a land called Kallamathus, charting regions with names like the Cliffs of Treachery, the Forest of Dark Secrets, and the Sea of Miseries. I thought it was ridiculous and chuckled at the idea of New York City’s geography named in a similar, absurdly specific manner. The Street of Forgotten Trash Bags. The Avenue of Impossibly Expensive Restaurants. I turned the page to a foreword by the author explaining how the magical kingdom of Kallamathus was based on an alternate version of Eastern Europe, and in fact the word ragana was Lithuanian for witch. Then, finally, the story began, describing the adventures of a dirt-poor peasant girl named Armelle who lived in a realm of magic and strange creatures, and discovered her world was far more dangerous, yet far more richly rewarding, than she ever knew. At the back of the book was a lengthy glossary of invented words that I found myself consulting regularly as I read, just to figure out what the hell the characters were talking about, and who was who. It didn’t help that most of the characters had unpronounceable names comprised of strings of consonants broken by random apostrophes—all except for the heroine, Armelle, and the villain, the Ragana. Armelle befriended a magical, telepathic horse (or rather, a Q’horse, only the Q and the apostrophe were silent), fell in love with the pointy-eared elf prince Ch’aqrath, and discovered she wasn’t a peasant at all but an orphaned princess who was prophesied to save the kingdom from the Ragana.

  “There are worlds within worlds,” Ch’aqrath declared, petting the Q’horse’s soft, snowy mane. “The Ragana plans to tear this world asunder and reveal the true world that lies beneath its mask.”

  “And what world would that be?” Armelle queried bravely, though her full, rosy lips quivered with the foreboding fear that overcame her.

  Ch’aqrath set his handsome jaw, alerting her that what he was about to tell her was knowledge known only to Elfkind. “It is a world of wonders and terrors the likes of which you could never believe,” he replied. “Your kind is so fragile, my beautiful companion. Were they to behold the truth, they would surely fall into fits of madness.”

  I grunted, annoyed. Elena De Voe had gotten it wrong. You didn’t need a secret, hidden world to scare people. The real world was
awful enough. I continued reading, but by then the spell the story had cast over me was broken. As the Ragana unleashed an army of dragons upon the royal palace, I stopped, closed the book, and put it aside.

  Dragons, magic, worlds within worlds—it was all preposterous. There was no magic to protect you from the rich and powerful; if you didn’t learn to lie, cheat, and steal, you were ground down. There were no ancient prophecies that guided people toward their destiny; everyone just muddled along as best they could. There were no poor peasants who were secretly wealthy royalty; the poor stayed poor under the heels of the rich, and they always would. It was the way of the world. In this world, the real world, there were only cold cement walls and dangerous men who patted you on the cheek and smiled as they called you a dog.

  And there was death. Death was everywhere. It lurked in the barrels of the countless guns that had been pointed in my direction, and behind black doors in rooms with drains in their floors. Death was a constant, the only constant—and yet even death had rejected me. For reasons it refused to explain, death didn’t want me any more than the world of the living did.

  It brought me back to the same question I asked myself every day: Who was I? Like Armelle, did I have a family somewhere I didn’t know about? Parents, siblings, a wife and kids? If I did, then why was no one looking for me? I’d walked every inch of this city on jobs for Underwood and hadn’t seen a single missing-person flyer with my picture. Why had no one ever recognized me on the street, stopped me, called me by my real name?

  Maybe I was more like the Ragana, who rose fully formed from the Sea of Miseries, a self-contained force that existed only to bring evil and suffering. A freak, just like Bennett had called me.