by Iain Levison
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Dave.”
She nodded at him, careful to keep from being too friendly, and wondered if she should just say, “I’m leaving,” and pay her tab and be gone. But Dave seemed like a friendly type, not excitable or weird in any way, and she wanted one last drink, and Denise decided he might turn out to be good company. “I’m De . . . Deborah,” she said.
He offered his hand and she shook it, a big and powerful hand with thick, rough fingers. He had some dirt on him, but not much, and she figured that he was a construction worker, probably drywall, and most likely a supervisor. It was a game she liked to play, guessing people’s jobs from a quick glance. “What do you do for a living, Dave?”
“I’m a supervisor for McCauley Builders,” he said. He pointed sheepishly at his dirty sleeves. “Sorry about this. Me and the guys came here straight from the job. We just finished a project at the Merrimack Development. Hey, Paul!” Dave waved to the bartender and held up two fingers. “What are you drinking, Deborah?”
“Vodka tonic. Thank you.” There was little choice but to stay now.
“What line of work are you in, Deborah?”
OK, that was annoying. Ending everything he said with a mention of her name sounded a little car-salesman-like, as if he was trying to prove he could remember something for more than ten seconds. Especially as it wasn’t even her name.
“I’m applying for a teaching position here at Tiburn College, Dave.”
“Oh yeah? What field are you in?” He sounded genuinely interested, surprising her. She had figured she would get in three or four words about herself, then listen to the story of his life for the rest of the evening.
She started to have some guilt feelings about making up an entire alter ego, wondering how bad it would have been had she told the truth. You could never tell people you were an FBI agent, though, it was always the same shit. They were either way too impressed (wow! . . . the FBI, that’s so cool!) or wanted to discuss exactly what had happened at Waco or Ruby Ridge, as if Denise’s own errors of judgment were responsible for those episodes. Her Italian friends back in New York just laughed, and taunted her about taking ten years to convict John Gotti. So it was best just to be an unemployed professor looking for a job, she decided. “History,” she said, remembering her visit to the history department.
Two of Dave’s friends came over, both of them drunker and louder than Dave, but equally friendly. “Introduce us to your lady friend, dude,” one said. He was a tall, thin, unshaven man with tattoos on both arms, and more dirt on him. Not a supervisor, Denise figured. Another guy behind him was young, barely twenty, and seemed to admire the tattooed one, looked to him for behavioral cues.
Dave made the introductions. The tattooed man took her hand and pronounced “Deborah” eloquently, and gave a slight bow, as if meeting royalty. She smiled. The younger guy, amused by his antics, shook her hand sheepishly and stepped back behind him, like a kid hiding behind his mother’s legs.
“Dude,” the tattooed guy said to Dave. “We’re going to step outside and smoke.”
“You guys go ahead,” said Dave, turning back to Denise.
“You can smoke in here,” said Denise, knowing exactly what they were talking about. She giggled, and the tattooed guy came around Dave and made a motion toward the door with his head, inviting her.
“Sure,” she said.
Dave looked surprised. “Wow,” he said. “You’re a history teacher, and you get high? What about all those young, impressionable minds?”
“Where do you think I get the pot?” she laughed. She was having fun with her alter ego now, the bad history teacher who bought pot from her students, though she didn’t think, after all the vodka tonics, she was up to inventing much more. Of course the truth, the bad FBI agent who stole pot, was even worse, so she figured she was really coming pretty close to telling the truth. Truth, lies, whatever. She’d be back in New York, bored to death again, in a couple of days. “Have fun while you can,” she said aloud, though she had only meant to think it.
“Amen to that,” said the tattooed guy.
She followed them outside. They opened up the door on a pickup truck and let Denise sit in the passenger seat, legs out on the running board, and the tattooed guy handed her the packed bowl and a lighter. Dave pulled a six pack out of the back, and the four of them chatted for at least an hour, the bowl getting repacked time and again. They found her fake life story endlessly entertaining, and as the pot took hold of her, she found herself increasingly adept at telling tall tales. Mostly, she figured, they just liked meeting a stranger. Finally, giddy from all the vodka, beer, pot and attention, she announced it was time to go.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” Dave offered hopefully.
“No, thanks, I’m only right there.” She pointed at the motel down the street.
“Nah, let me give you a ride.”
“No, really, I can walk.” Barely.
“She don’t want your ass, man,” the tattooed guy said to Dave, and he and the kid burst into peals of laughter. Dave just looked disappointed.
“Well, good night then,” he said, sounding sad. For a brief moment, Denise thought about inviting him back. He had a nice way about him, was a good-looking guy. Nice hands. She liked hands. And she giggled as she thought of the look on Kohl’s face in the morning when he saw a guy leaving her room . . . That would be worth it.
“Good night. Thanks guys,” she said quickly and turned to go. She wandered off down the wide, quiet road, suddenly realizing how drunk and high she was. She could hear them talking about her; they were unaware of how well their voices carried in the cool, still, night air, or not caring. One of them began singing ‘Hot for Teacher’. She giggled again, and nearly stumbled. As she made it back to her room, closing the motel room door behind her and tossing herself down onto the rickety springs of the aging bed, still in her clothes, she realized that for the first time in several months, she had actually had some fun.
When Elias got home, there was another letter from Ann. Again, plain white envelope. He groaned, but decided it was time to read them both. He opened the one from earlier in the week first.
Dear Elias, I think we both know that we’ve been growing apart lately . . .
Yeah, no shit. Maybe because you moved to another country, could that have anything to do with it?
. . . and I want you to know that I will always care for you . . .
What was that, a consolation prize? The notion of Eternal Love, just as long as you’re not around? Christ, even her Dear John letters were copied from some kind of a formula. Elias imagined that she had been to a bookstore and found a text in the self-help section with a title such as Unloading Your Boyfriend Gracefully. Get to the point. You got picked up in a bar by some Aryan asshole and you’ve decided to go with him now because he is more inclined to impress your friends at parties. He skimmed down the letter.
I met someone . . . Peter . . . Peter . . . Peter and I have decided to move in together . . .
He skimmed further. Peter this, Peter that. Elias remembered he and Ann had gone out for drinks with a young, good-looking German doctoral student who had been in charge of the exchange students’ orientation program, and seemed to recall that this fellow’s name had been Peter. He wondered when, exactly, this plan had been hatched. Perhaps Ann had been thinking of unloading him and taking on Peter when Elias had gotten up to go to the bathroom. Even her first letter back from Germany had been breezy and distant, focusing more on neutral topics like schoolwork and the weather than any actual connection they had ever had between them. Elias guessed she had driven straight back from the airport where she had watched his plane fly off to America, and gone out for drinks with Peter that very night, both of them relieved at last to be rid of him.
Elias tossed it into the middle of the kitchen table, opened a bottle of Spanish Merlot, and picked up Letter Two. Was this a change of heart? Had Peter dumped her? Why a second Dear John so quickly on top
of the first?
This one started off nicely enough, with a plea for understanding, but then followed up with a request for Elias to mail her two books that she had stored in his attic. These were a dense six-hundred-page volume about the rise of the Hapsburgs, and a sixty-dollar coffee table book of Helmut Newton’s nudes. A check for postage would be mailed immediately, if Elias asked for it, as well as the actual packing materials. The entire bottom third of the page was devoted to the exact location of the two books, in either the box marked “Books” or the one marked “Books and CDs”. The letter ended with the suggestion, “If you could please try the one marked ‘Books’ first.”
Love, Ann.
Love.
Elias had to laugh. Finally, it was over. Their façade of a relationship had mercifully closed itself out, not with the bang of a screaming match but with the whimper of a bitch begging for some expensive books she was too cheap to replace. Why these two books? He understood the need for the Hapsburg book, because she was working on a doctoral thesis on that very subject. But the Helmut Newton book? Was she really so pretentious that her new German apartment urgently needed the works of Helmut Newton displayed prominently on her coffee table? Well, yes, she was. Elias had always known that.
Elias went upstairs. He pulled down the retractable attic steps and looked up into the dusty, cramped and cobwebbed room, the stale smell of airlessness and mould overwhelming him as his head crossed the threshold. It was warmer up here, too, by at least ten degrees; the heat Elias was paying good money for was mostly trapped up in the rafters. He needed to talk to someone about insulation. He shined a flashlight around the room and saw some of Ann’s boxes, and pulled them towards him. BOOKS. That was the one he was supposed to try first. He tossed the box down the attic steps, where it landed on the floor with a thunk violent enough to shake the whole house.
Elias carried the box downstairs to the kitchen, where he cut the tape with a knife. Though he and Ann had never lived together, he had permitted her to use his attic for storage while she was away, and he always figured that the extended connection they shared through his control of her things would serve to continue the relationship. Apparently, Ann was of the opinion that banging a German doctoral student didn’t change anything with regard to the original storage agreement. It was this naiveté that Elias had found refreshing when he first met her, and which he now found laughable.
The Hapsburg book was on top. Elias took it out and looked at it, gently turning the pages of the old text, running his fingers over the gold embossed title, and he enjoyed the warm, rich smell of the leather binding. He tossed the book on the table. Against the edge of the box, stacked differently from the others because of its size, he found the Helmut Newton book, and he pulled it out. As he did so, a few papers fell out from between the pages and landed on the floor.
Well, lookee here. That must have been why she wanted the book, not for the marvelous photography but for the documents she had stored in it. One of the pieces of paper was her birth certificate. Another was her college diploma. Anne Phillips, Tiburn College, Class of 1998. Now, why would you be asking for your birth certificate when you lived in Germany? Had somebody lost their passport? Hee hee hee. He ripped the diploma and the birth certificate into pieces, then picked up the knife and stabbed the Hapsburg book. The knife went in far enough to stand up on its own. He stepped back to admire his handiwork, and then noticed Dixon in the basement doorway, looking at him.
“Dude, what are you doing?”
Elias said nothing. Dixon came out of the doorway, into the kitchen, and looked at the book with the knife wound.
“This is an expensive book,” he said. He pulled the knife out and looked at it. “It was a minute ago, anyway.”
“You want to read it?”
Dixon flipped through the pages. It was over 600 pages long and the print was tiny. “Doesn’t look like my kind of thing.” He picked up the photography book and opened that, and saw black-and-white nudes of some European models. “This, on the other hand . . .”
“Take it. It’s yours.”
Dixon took his eyes off the models for a second. “Why you want to get rid of this? It’s a nice book.”
“Just have it. Take it with you.” Elias turned around and found his bottle of Merlot left open on the kitchen counter. He refilled his glass. “Want some?”
Dixon nodded. “Sure, why not.” He flipped through some more pages, then noticed the torn papers all over the kitchen table. “What’re these? Hey, this is someone’s birth certificate.”
Elias handed Dixon a glass of wine.
“You know,” Dixon said, taking the wine with a nod of gratitude, a habit which impressed Elias – he had noticed that his basement felon, when he wanted to, had excellent manners – “I’m on the run from the law. I really can’t be carrying around a ten-pound book full of pictures of naked chicks.”
“Bet it would stop a bullet next time you get in a shootout.” Elias laughed, enjoying his own wit.
Dixon ignored him, turned the book over in his hands, and then noticed the price on the inside cover. “Jesus, sixty bucks for this? Why didn’t you just buy a Penthouse?”
“That’s Ahhhhhhht,” said Elias, hoping his drawn-out syllable was a good impression of Ann at her most pretentious. Like when she would come home and start talking about various incidents in German history she had learned about, going out of her way to introduce certain historical characters whose names required specific pronunciations which she had practiced to perfection. He remembered how she had impressed that German dickhead Peter with her pronunciation of certain German words, and how she had given Elias a victorious little nod. There had been disagreements about that back in Tiburn. Elias would always wince when she started with her breathy ‘ch’ sound, which Elias just pronounced like a ‘k’. Kristallnacht, she would purr, as opposed to Elias’s “Crystal Knocked”. Provincial little Tiburn just hadn’t appreciated her.
“Hey,” Dixon said, as if the idea had just suddenly occurred to him, though he had clearly been thinking about it for minutes. “I need a favor.”
Elias paled. “What?”
Dixon let a moment pass, acted like he was still looking at the pictures of the nude models. He’d give Elias a chance to relax. Or to imagine the worst. Then when Dixon asked the favor, and it wasn’t as bad as Elias had thought, there would be relief. Either way, it was the kind of thing said best after a pause.
“What? What? What?” snapped Elias. “What could you possibly want now? You want me to drive a getaway car for you when you knock over the post office? You gonna ask me to kill the FBI people? What?”
Dixon stared at him, a slight smile forming, still half-looking at the models. “Yeah, the getaway thing. That’s what I was gonna ask you.”
Elias sipped his wine and said, “Fuck you.” Dixon laughed, because it was the type of thing which he should have said while swigging from a bottle, rather than while daintily sipping. This guy cracked him up. It seemed sometimes as if his daintiness was grafted on, and the graft hadn’t taken well, and some core part of him was trying to reject it.
“I’m going to give you some money. I want you to spend it in a bar.”
Elias looked at him quizzically. “And then what?”
“Then bring me the change.”
“And?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it? Spend money in a bar then bring you the change?”
“Yeah. I’m heading off soon. A few days. I’m going to need a lot of twenties. All I have is hundreds and they draw attention. I want you to do it in a bar because bar money comes from everywhere. Goes everywhere. If they track the bills, which I doubt they will, that’ll stop the trail.”
“All right.”
Dixon pulled two hundred dollar bills out of his pocket. “I’ll need one twenty back. So I’m giving you eighty. Go have fun.”
Elias nodded. “Thanks.”
Dixon finished his wine with a gulp. “I�
��ll let you get back to stabbing books.”
9
Denise was lying on her bed in the motel room, looking at the ceiling, wondering if staying two extra days in Tiburn to relax had been a big mistake. For the last few days, when she was here with Kohl, she had been imagining all the beauty she would appreciate if only she could get rid of him, and have some time to herself. But now he was gone, having dropped her off at the car rental place that morning, and all she wanted to do was lie in her motel room and stare at the ceiling. It wasn’t as much fun without Kohl to avoid.
Maybe it was the crippling hangover, she decided. Maybe tomorrow she would be filled with energy again, and would go exploring the parks and shops and restaurants of Tiburn with the enthusiasm she had imagined. But tomorrow was Sunday. What if everything was closed? And she had to be back in New York by Monday morning, so she would have to check out tomorrow morning. She groaned, and put her hand over her eyes, as even the light of the dim hotel bulb was causing her head to throb anew.
Her cellphone, lying on the pillow next to her, rang, and she groaned again.
“Hello?” she croaked.
“Is this Agent Lupo, with the FBI?” A man’s voice.
Oh fuck. A business call. On a Saturday morning. She sat up stiffly and ran her hand through her hair, trying to adopt a professional posture which might make her sound more professional on the phone. “Yes, this is Agent Lupo.” She saw herself in the mirror, a bedraggled hung-over mess.
“Hi. This is Elias . . . Elias White.” There was a pause while the caller waited for the impact of his name to sink in, during which Denise tried to remember why the name sounded so familiar. “The history professor you spoke to yesterday,” he added helpfully.
“Oh, yes, yes, Mr White. Hi.” The horny professor who she had thought had been hiding something. And whose mother had been killed in LA.
“Doctor.” He corrected quickly. “Hi. I wanted to know if you’d decided to stay in Tiburn for the weekend, or if you had headed back . . .”
