by Lou Berney
It was incredibly difficult to think clearly in this suffocatingly hot, cramped office, with three people glaring at him and yelling in Spanish. Ted understood now, in a way he never had before, how the contestants on The Amazing Race would sometimes make what he, Ted (at home on his comfortable couch in his comfortable house, a glass of iced tea in his hand), would consider somewhat questionable decisions. Like walking thirty blocks to the Hermitage instead of taking a cab—when they were in a race, after all.
“PayPal!” Ted said in desperation, and pointed at the computer.
All the Spanish yelling stopped. The restaurant manager nodded. “PayPal,” he said, giving Ted what might pass for a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Bueno.”
Ted sat down at the computer, wiped his sweaty palms on the legs of his trousers, and thanked God he remembered his password. He e-mailed eighty-four dollars from his account to an e-mail address the restaurant manager wrote down on the back of an envelope. Then he logged off, cleared cookies and history to be safe, and exited Explorer.
The waiter and Nerlides had wandered off. The manager pulled up a chair, and together he and Ted waited for the transaction to process. When the eighty-four dollars showed up in the manager’s account, fifteen minutes later, he clapped Ted on the shoulder again.
“Vámonos,” he said.
Ted stepped outside the restaurant and took several deep breaths of night air that wasn’t cool, exactly, but at least immeasurably fresher than what he’d been breathing in the restaurant office.
A cab waited at the curb. Ted remembered, just in time, that he didn’t have the money to pay for it.
He started walking. The hotel wasn’t too far, only a few miles away, he calculated. He’d always had a decent sense of direction, and it felt good to be moving. He tried to think what could have happened to his wallet. He assured himself, without really believing it, that this would be a funny story he could tell people someday.
He noticed that the neighborhood had begun to change. Less light and music now, fewer restaurants and clubs. Actually, there were no longer any restaurants and clubs at all. Just run-down gray apartment buildings and, from the alleys, the sour smell of garbage.
Ted walked faster. He stepped around a hole in the sidewalk that someone had tried to fix by stuffing a red plastic Coca-Cola crate into it, but the hole was bigger than the crate. Up ahead, on the other side of the street, three young guys sat on the hood of a parked car, passing a joint back and forth and drinking cans of beer. When they noticed Ted, they slid off the hood of the car, hitched up their pants, and strolled across the street. They timed their stroll so they reached the next corner just before he did.
“Hola,” Ted said, in what he hoped was a gruffly nonchalant way. He tried to edge around the guys, but they edged with him.
The tallest young guy said something to Ted in Spanish.
“No habla español,” Ted explained. He edged some more. So did the young guys. The shortest young guy offered Ted the joint, and Ted saw that the middle young guy had a knife.
Ted remembered then, a sharp click of revelation—the very attractive woman from the plane, the surprising round of hugs at the baggage carousel, the way she’d squeezed his bicep, the way her other hand had brushed across his—
“Give us your wallet,” the young guy with the knife said, in perfect English.
Chapter 31
When they got back to the room, a little after midnight, Shake asked Gina which bed she wanted. He wanted the one by the window, but he tried to be a gentleman whenever possible.
“Just shut up,” Gina said. She got behind him, and he felt her put a shoulder to his back. She guided him to the big leather chair. “Sit.”
He sat. She turned the radio on and fooled with it until she found some bass-heavy hip-pop thing with a girl singer spelling out the words she’d just sung. Shake probably wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it a hundred times. But he liked it; he liked the way Gina, in that sea-green dress, her back to him, let the beat start moving her.
The beat moved her over to him. She faced him, still moving, smiling a little, and flicked one of the dress straps off her shoulder.
“Whatcha doin’ there, sport?” he asked.
She turned around, flicked the other dress strap off, peeked at him over her shoulder with a look that was at once both playfully wholesome and the playfully complete opposite of wholesome, whatever that was. The whole time Gina kept moving to the beat, swimming along with it.
“I lied,” she said. “Sometimes I do like giving lap dances, when it’s for fun.”
“And profit.”
She didn’t answer. She slid up against him, then back down. Shake breathed her in. Her lips, those lips, almost brushed his when she slid back up. Almost, but not quite.
It took every ounce of willpower he had, seriously, to put his hands on her shoulders.
“You’re not supposed to touch, mister, but I suppose we can make an exception.”
He moved her gently away from him. Arm’s length.
“We’re gonna keep this professional,” he said.
“Why?”
Good question.
She kept moving to the beat, moving beneath his hands. Which wasn’t making things easier.
“Which bed do you want?” he asked.
She stopped moving to the beat and looked at him. She wasn’t surprised, exactly. Maybe disappointed by his resistance. Maybe pleased. Shake couldn’t be sure.
“You don’t trust me, do you?” she said.
“I don’t really trust anyone.”
“I can’t really be trusted,” she said.
“A perfect match.”
She went and turned the radio off and plopped down cross-legged on the bed by the window.
“Shake?” She tugged her dress straps back up, one, then the other.
“Gina?”
“I’m not sure I trust me, and I am me, you know?”
He thought he knew what she was trying to tell him, and he appreciated it.
“I know what I’m getting into,” he said. “No warranty, expressed or implied.”
She blew a strand of hair out of her face. For one second, Shake came alarmingly close to standing up, walking across the room, and kissing her.
Instead he said, “We need to get busy tomorrow morning. If we’re gonna find those foreskins, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”
She laughed. “I seriously doubt it.”
“What’s your brilliant plan? There are probably a hundred hotels in Panama City your boy Marvin might be holed up in. We have no idea what name he registered under, and we can’t just—”
He stopped. She was waiting very politely, hands folded in her lap, for him to finish.
“You’re saying he’s that dumb? He’d use his own name?”
“I’m saying,” she said.
Shake grabbed the phone book from the desk.
“I thought you said there were probably a hundred hotels in Panama City.” She eyed him dubiously. “You’re gonna call every single one?”
Shake smiled and flipped the phone book open.
“I’m not that dumb,” he said.
Chapter 32
Why in the fracking world, Marvin Oates wondered, if you had hundreds of millions of dollars, would you choose to relocate to this steaming, sweltering, filthy, probably malaria-ridden swamp of a country? Where the street numbers made no logical sense whatsoever and the street names seemed to change every time you crossed an intersection? Marvin had ditched his rental car after about ten minutes. But even the cabdrivers had no idea where anything was. The last cabbie—who lived here, in Panama City!—had asked if he could borrow Marvin’s map. Which was a piece-of-shit map to start with.
Hadn’t Roland Ziegler, that millionaire dipshit, hadn’t he ever seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Hadn’t he heard of, oh, say, New Zealand? That’s where Marvin would go if he had a couple of hundred million bucks and was on the run from the feds. Or somewhere
at least like Tunisia, maybe, where the heat was dry, where it didn’t seem like every step you took you were being cooked from the inside out, like fracking dim sum.
Marvin slogged back down the block he had just slogged up. Number 276 was next to Number 214, which made perfect sense. He slapped at what felt like a mosquito on his forearm. On the plane down, he’d read a history of the Panama Canal. It said there were two kinds of mosquitoes. The kind that carried malaria was the one kind, and the kind that carried yellow fever was the other.
Great.
This morning before leaving the hotel, Marvin had doused himself with crop-duster quantities of DEET, but the humidity had the sweat running off him in rivers, the DEET running with it.
The guy at the hotel had asked Marvin, when he checked in, if he wanted to sign up for a day tour to the rain forest, to see the sloths.
Jesus fracking Christ.
There was actually a third kind of mosquito, too, he remembered, the one that carried dengue fever.
Marvin scowled. Things had started out so well. He’d been brilliant, if he did say so himself, when the blond chickie showed up with that briefcase of hers. Marvin had played it cool, stayed cool, gave nothing away. And the foreskin nab itself—that had been a masterwork of decisiveness and crafty improvisation.
Ziegler, though, the potential buyer, had been harder to find than Marvin had expected. Marvin had been slogging around this hot, hellish swamp of a city for two days now and hadn’t turned up a single lead.
He slogged an extra block in what he knew for certain was the wrong direction, but he didn’t have any other bright ideas, and the place he was looking for was the last one on his list for the day. And hey, of course, sure enough, there it was, the shop, in exactly a spot where it shouldn’t have been.
Marvin pushed through the door. A bell tinked once. He sucked in a big blast of could-have-been-colder A/C and glanced around. Polished wood floor, spotless glass cases, oh-so-tasteful framed art.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. You couldn’t compare an absurdly pretentious place like this to Marvin’s establishment back in Vegas, which was for the serious collector of antiquities. This place, clearly, peddled overpriced, dime-a-dozen crap to dilettantes, rich tourists, and local Botox-swollen trophy wives.
Even the clear, whiskey-colored light filtering in through the big windows felt expensive.
A girl with jangling bracelets jangled over to him, smiled, said something in Spanish.
“I want to talk to your boss,” Marvin told her. He looked around for a chair. His feet felt like they’d been battered and fried. Like they were made of soft cheese that had been battered and fried.
“Of course,” the girl said. She jangled away.
A couple of minutes later, the boss came out. He looked like he was trying to look like Clark Gable—black hair slicked back, skinny black mustache, a dark suit he probably thought was in just the most perfect understated taste. The cuff links probably cost even more than the suit.
“Marvin Oates, Las Vegas,” Marvin snapped. He said it like he expected the guy to know who he was. He didn’t really expect him to, but in his experience it was tactically smart to put your opponent immediately on the defensive.
“Ah! Of course,” the guy said, with such genuine feeling that it threw Marvin for a second. Maybe the guy had heard of him. It wasn’t out of the question, after all. It wasn’t like, in the world of serious collectors, Marvin was some nobody. What with the Internet and all. “Such a pleasure, Señor Oates. My name is Antonio Cornejo. At your service.”
“Fancy digs,” Marvin said in a collegial way. “Overhead must butt-fuck you to death.”
“I’m sorry?” Cornhole said. Apparently his English wasn’t as good as he thought it was. “In what way may I be of assistance, Señor Oates?”
“I’m looking for this collector guy, heavy into religious relics, Roland Ziegler.”
The jangly shopgirl and the only other customer in the place, a bent old man browsing the cases, both glanced up when they heard the name.
“Roland Ziegler?” Cornhole mused. “Hmmm. I’m afraid I’m not familiar with someone of this name.”
“C’mon,” Marvin said. “Millionaire collector, world-famous fugitive, hiding out in Panama the last three years, you’re saying you’ve never heard of him?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“You’re afraid not.”
Cornhole pondered. “Have you, Señor Oates, tried the telephone book?”
“Of course I have,” Marvin said, insulted. He stood there, stumped. He wished there had been a chair to sit in. It was almost five o’clock, and he was starving.
“Forget it,” he said finally, and stomped out of the shop. He slammed the door open so hard on his way out that the bell tinked twice.
DINNER DID NOT IMPROVE MARVIN’S MOOD. He added up all the money he’d blown already on this stupid, misbegotten trip. Airfare, rental car, hotel, cabs, meals. Factor in the revenue dripping away minute by minute with his shop shut down, and Marvin wondered if he should wish he’d never come across those foreskins in the first place.
But that was dumb-ass. Those foreskins were worth millions. He just needed to be smart about this. Smart and patient. He needed a nice cold soak in the tub and a good night’s sleep.
He slogged back to his pit of a hotel and slogged up the stairs—the elevator was out of order, of course. By the time he got to the third floor, it looked like he’d already taken a bath.
He took a hit off his inhaler and unlocked the door to his room. The housekeeper had drawn the blinds, for no apparent reason, and the room was dark. He slogged across and yanked open the blinds. Late-afternoon sunlight poured in, and that’s when Marvin saw her, sitting in the chair by the bathroom. Smiling at him.
“Frack.” He sighed.
Chapter 33
Remember me?” Gina said.
Marvin whirled to flee, but Shake had figured on that and positioned himself by the door. He stepped in front of Marvin, grabbed him, marveled for a second at the buggiest bug eyes he’d ever seen, spun Marvin back around.
Marvin looked at Gina. “Listen, I don’t have your—” He stopped himself. Took a hit off his inhaler. “What do—What are you doing here?”
“You think,” Gina asked Shake, “I should have gone with ‘So we meet again’?”
Shake thought “Remember me?” had been fine, not too forced. He told her so.
“Listen,” Marvin said.
“Don’t have my what, Marvin?” Gina said. “Finish your sentence and you can have dessert.”
“Those foreskins aren’t yours!” Marvin said, transitioning smoothly from fake bug-eyed innocence to genuine bug-eyed petulance.
“They sure aren’t yours.”
“You had no idea what they were worth. You wouldn’t know a Philistine from a philharmonic.”
Gina looked at Shake.
“One was an ancient tribe in the Holy Land, more culturally advanced than most people realize,” Shake said. “The other one’s an orchestra of some sort.”
“See,” Gina told Marvin. “I knew that.”
“You can’t make me give them to you.”
“Yes,” Gina explained kindly, “I can. My boy here, Shake, just got out of the joint for beating a guy to death with his bare hands. Isn’t that right, Shake?”
Shake shrugged modestly. “I used a sock filled with gravel part of the time.”
Marvin took a nervous look at Shake and deflated. “How did you find me?”
“You left a trail, you big slug,” Gina said. “Tip for next time? Use a fake name.”
“You called all the hotels in Panama City?”
“We called the rental-car places at the airport,” Shake said. “All seven of them.”
“Remember when the nice lady at Avis asked you where you were staying while in Panama City?” Gina explained.
“Oh.”
“Where are they?” Shake said.
“I don’t ha
ve them here,” Marvin said. “You think I’m a total moron?”
Shake and Gina considered.
“The bed,” Gina said.
Shake lifted the dust ruffle with his foot and peered underneath. Then he reached down and pulled out a big padded envelope.
“Frack.”
Shake opened the padded envelope and slid out the slender glass case. He examined the rows of foreskins. It was hard to believe they were worth $5 million. It worked out to fifty grand per. He wondered what, back in the day, each monk or peasant had been paid for his contribution. What the procedure had been like. All at once, like an assembly line, one guy with a knife? Shake winced. He was glad he’d been born at a period in American history when the circumcision of infants was routine, no matter what your religion, so you were too young to ever remember it happening.
“We’re in business,” he told Gina.
He started to open the glass case to get a better look.
“Don’t open it!” Gina and Marvin hollered at him.
“Roger that,” Shake said. He eased the glass case with the foreskins back into the padded envelope. He slipped the padded envelope into a leather day pack they’d bought and brought along for just this eventuality.
“I want a finder’s fee,” Marvin was saying. “Ten percent. I demand a finder’s fee.”
“Count on it,” Gina said. She followed Shake out the door. Halfway down the stairs, Shake could still hear Marvin kicking the walls of his room.
Chapter 34
They covered three of the shops on their list in an hour. Shake was surprised there was such a big market for antiques. Or rather, as he’d been corrected by the owner of one such shop, a haughty middle-aged woman with the profile and manner of a Roman emperor, “antiquities.”
