by Brian Hodge
He took a job on Vaca Key at some Hemingwayesque hole-in-the-wall bar, slinging long-neck beers and shucking oysters and renting out half a duplex trailer to call home. There had been romance, too, on a limited basis. Both women from Miami, one a stockbroker, the other a civics teacher, both lured by beach bum mythos in America’s final eastern frontier. But even the Keys were eroding, and he no longer had the heart for these games, single or not. One-night stands and week-long standoffs; libidinous hit-and-runs, volcanic in their passion, then terminal in escape velocity once the lava had cooled.
Six weeks had been enough. To let Mendoza and the drug called skullflush poison his life any longer would have been, in some ways, allowing them to win, in absentia.
He called April. Told her where to find him, if interested. Neutral ground, far from questions and curious glances from passersby. She came. Vaca Key became no-man’s-land, where they could reevaluate away from the scrutiny and morbid fascination of the ghoul contingent.
Here they found, at long last, common ground. Peace. Resolution. And most importantly, forgiveness.
When he shaved the beard and returned to Tampa, nearly two months after leaving, he found a truth he’d suspected all along. Time heals … and the media have short attention spans. The interim had brought new calamities. Fresher blood was in vogue.
He had earned the luxury of solitude. They both had.
He loved his life, loved his wife, and would trade them for nothing. But always, there were the memories … of adrenaline and headlong plunges into terrifying catastrophe, of hard-won triumph.
So why look back on those worst of days, and realize he had never felt any more alive?
Chapter 4
Sanction
Eel and his driver picked the guy up on Decatur, just outside the Central Grocery. In this aspect, at least, Evan Erskine lived a life of predictable routine. Here nearly every afternoon to grab a muffuletta for his lunch, at about the same hour the Brits sat down for high tea. If the law ever decided to move on the man, and knew his habits, here would be the place. Evan Erskine, felled by an addiction to New Orleans’s official sandwich.
When Evan opened the door and slid onto the Cadillac’s backseat, a blast of August vintage New Orleans preceded him like a hot fist. Toasty, humid. The kind of air that brought cities to standstills during midday hours, left people too weak and empty for anything but drinking and fornicating, or surly enough to commit impulsive murders.
“Mr. Fletcher,” Evan said, and nodded amiably to Eel.
“Move,” Eel said to his driver. “Royal Street. You know where.”
The car rolled, no longer blocking the single lane. They hooked around the next corner, up Dumaine, along streets built for another era, long dead. Narrow streets that once resounded with the clopping of iron-shod horses and the rolling of buggy wheels. Traffic, both wheeled and pedestrian, was light at this time of day. Mostly tourists who didn’t know any better, stalking the French Quarter to wrest their money’s worth out of vacation time. Watch them fry, watch them sweat. Watch their pale legs shuffle along in misery while they hunted for bargains they could brag about back home. They might as well have had signs stenciled on their backs, PLEASE VICTIMIZE ME.
Fun to watch, in that same silly brainless way as squirrels in a park.
Evan Erskine unwrapped his gargantuan sandwich. Italian culture meets Creole, muffulettas ran ten inches in diameter, stuffed with olive salad and meats and cheeses. Thick as a family Bible, the sandwich had been sliced into quarters, and Evan held one out. “Want one?”
“I’ll pass.” The sight alone made Eel’s stomach curdle, let alone the smell.
“Don’t know what you’re missing. This is food for the soul.” Evan attacked the first quarter, eyes shut in ecstasy.
Evan Erskine was one of those thoroughly American oddities who, with the mere addition of a thick dark mustache and dime-sized patch of beard beneath his lower lip, suddenly resembled a mad PLO bomb thrower. Advantageous, Eel supposed, if the man ever found himself spotted by a witness. Five minutes with scissors and a razor, and he could become someone else entirely.
The sandwich quarter was gone just after they hit Royal, and deli paper crackled as Evan rewrapped the remainder to stow until later. Eel’s driver, Lewis, cruised until they passed Conti, then eased to the curb while leaving the car idling. Eel pointed across the street to a storefront down several doors along the French Quarter’s most upscale shopping district.
“LJ Jewelers?” Evan said. “You want me to hit them?”
Eel nodded once. “Is there any problem with that?”
“Nah. None.”
LJ Jewelers had been family owned and operated here in the Quarter for better than forty years, founded by a World War II Treblinka survivor named Jablonski. There was no truth to popular local rumor that the initials really stood for Looziana Jewboy, but some legends died hard, while others refused to turn toes-up at all.
It was more than two thousand square feet of ground-level floor space, one of hundreds of French Quarter businesses tucked securely in the bottom of some old building that had been standing for nearly two centuries. Spanish wrought iron scrolled up the balconies on the higher floors. Sometimes, when Eel caught a long look at such buildings, an entire block’s worth, he was struck by the way life had stratified into layers. Street level mercantile, then residential or something else entirely different behind the balconies. Sometimes the rooftops contributed a third.
“What’s my end in this?” Evan asked.
“Fifty thousand.”
“Fifty G flat fee? For this place?” Erskine blew a short rude raspberry. “That’s chump change working for hire. I decide on my own I want to go in there, I could take in two bozos and do a three-minute smash-and-grab in the display cases alone, and come out of there with two-and-a-half, three million in merch.” Evan shook his head. “For fifty grand, this isn’t in my best interests. I’m the best in this city. Fifty’s an insult.”
Eel sighed, grabbed his Panama hat from the seat beside him, fanned his face. Very calm, collected. A reasonable, negotiable man. He turned his ice-blue eyes on Evan Erskine and did not blink.
“If I had wanted the best,” Eel said softly, “right now you’d still be back on Decatur, stuffing your face with that oily sandwich.”
Erskine’s face grew as red as stoked coals.
“You’re in the top ten, I’ll give you that. Maybe top five. That’s good, that’s plenty good enough, there’s no shame in it.” Smiling, then, thin and bloodless, and he reached out to trace a cool fingertip along Erskine’s temple. Evan wanted to pull away, how obvious that was, just as obvious that he dared not.
“Your skull has a lovely shape beneath there,” Eel whispered. “What a fine candleholder it would make.” He pulled his finger back, then steepled his hands beneath his chin. “I like you just fine, Evan. But don’t fuck with me. And don’t waste my time. Do we have an understanding?”
Erskine swallowed thickly, ever so slowly nodded.
“Do you want to make some quick money, guaranteed, with no risk whatsoever?”
Another nod.
Eel relaxed, settling back into his seat. “Then we have just achieved a meeting of the minds.” Fingertips drumming, he stared beyond Evan to the storefront. Watching corners and goers, shoppers and gawkers, so sad, so many of them, so lost. “Just so there are no hard feelings, I’ll go fifty-five thousand for you. Call it a gift of appeasement. And it comes with the guarantee that if something goes wrong and you get caught the night you pull this, you won’t see more than an hour of jail time. You make your one phone call to me, I’ll take care of it from there. Two or three more calls, and your arrest report will disappear. Unless you were to do something brainless like resist arrest, but I know you don’t like guns, so I’m not worried about that.”
“There must be something special inside. What is it you want out of there?”
“As far as jewelry goes, I don’t care what you br
ing me. As much or as little as you feel like. Whatever you have time for.”
Evan frowned, deep confusion. Uncertainty scrawled all over his face. “This doesn’t make sense to me.”
So Eel laid out the particulars. Precisely what he would be going in after under the cover of night and disconnected alarm wires. The particulars were brief. And simple.
And decidedly off kilter.
“Are you serious?” Evan dissolved into nervous laughter. “That’s what this is all about? Man, there’s gotta be at least a dozen sources where you could get pellets like that. And wouldn’t cost you anywhere near one percent what you’re paying me.”
“Don’t worry about it. There’s more to it, and don’t worry about that either. Just hold up your end. Are we clear?”
Evan sat back a moment, rubbing a hand back and forth across his wryly grinning mouth. Perplexity personified. “Just who the hell’s money is this? Nathan’s not financing this, is he? I know Nathan Forrest, this is not the way he works.”
Eel twirled the Panama atop one rigid index finger, then snapped his hand shut on the brim. “I’d think fifty-five grand is more than enough for you to keep the questions to a minimum. You’re working on a need-to-know basis.”
Evan scowled a moment, then huffed down into his seat. Paper crinkling as he fingered the rest of the sandwich.
“One more thing,” Eel said.
“I figured.”
“There’ll be a fall guy.”
This one perked him up. This thing just kept unfolding like an origami sculpture.
“And for that reason,” Eel went on, “we can’t have you doing too professional a job in there. You’ll have to make it look like somebody very stupid went in and got very lucky to make it away at all.” He glanced at his Rolex, then peered out the tinted windows of the Caddy, along Royal, toward Canal. “Here he comes now. Right on time.”
Erskine looked around, scanning sidewalks left and right. Lots of sweaty tourists and cameras; right away he could dismiss their ilk. Which still left a dozen from which to choose in the immediate area.
“Which one?”
“About thirty yards ahead, coming this way. In the brown shirt.”
Erskine craned his neck forward, watching, watching. The guy eventually shuffled out from the overhanging shadows of a balcony and into raw daylight. Evan gaped.
“Him?” Evan tossed up his hands in dismay. “This guy looks like he doesn’t even have the brains God gave a cinder block.”
An accurate assessment, perhaps even charitable. The fall guy was a black man, probably young, but weighed down by several extra years in sheer haggardness. He walked with a stagger hinting at chronic alcoholism, and looked to have dressed in the dark, all thumbs. Mouth hanging slack, eyes roving with the glaze of someone peering into realms open to his eyes only. A single dead leaf clung stubbornly in his hair. The sorriest humanity Evan had seen in a long time.
Dorcilus Fonterelle had definitely seen better days.
“Sure glad I can’t smell this poor bastard,” Evan muttered.
Out on Royal, it appeared others were not so lucky. Natives and tourists alike gave this shambling wreck wide berth.
Eel and Evan watched him stop before LJ Jewelers and gaze at the door in apparent dazed concentration.
Eel, shutting his eyes, That’s right … in there. Little more than a mental flex of will. A nudge to a mind whose thought patterns had been all but scoured away into faded impressions. Then replaced with simple grooves of daily repetition.
Fonterelle shoved past the door and disappeared into the jewelry store. Twenty seconds later got his ass hustled right back onto the sidewalk by a uniformed rent-a-cop who’d been through this routine enough to have it down cold.
Fonterelle lurched slowly around on the sidewalk, blinking moistly at the afternoon sun. Looking like some puppy abandoned far beyond the point where even instinct would carry him homeward. His jaw worked mutely with frozen words.
And as he always did when watching Dorcilus Fonterelle from afar, Eel marveled at this creature of his own making. The sight never failed to inspire awe. How did it feel to Dorcilus? Did he feel pain the same as before? Did he hear Eel within his head as he would hear with his ears?
Academic, and moot, though no less fascinating. There was no getting into Fonterelle’s head any deeper than was necessary to stir things up, and the exchange was a one-way avenue. But Eel had wondered things such as this for the better part of a decade, and the answers were no more forthcoming now than they were then. When he had been hunsi, a lowly initiate, clay in the hands of capricious gods.
But if he were to never learn, never possess any greater understanding than he did now … that would be failure of the most heinous kind.
“When do you want me to do it?” Evan asked, and Eel had to ask him to repeat. Daydreaming. That wasn’t good, not now.
“Anytime next week. I’ll leave you to decide what looks best. That’s more your area than mine.”
“Good enough.” For several more seconds Erskine watched as the shabby human scarecrow turned around and scuffed along the sidewalk, back in the direction from which he’d come. One more hopeless piece of street trash that couldn’t be swept up.
“Probably I don’t need to know this either,” Erskine said. “But what the hell happened to him?”
Eel pursed his lips while staring into his lap. Fanned himself again with the Panama, then glanced up with a soft, soft smile. Eyes merry and, at the same time, hard as agates.
“You wouldn’t believe it even if I told you.”
Chapter 5
Reaping the Wind
The Magnolia Blossom account was by far the biggest thing to drop into Justin’s lap since arriving at Segal/Goldberg more than ten months ago. He’d needed a job, and been woefully unfamiliar with the local market. April had flexed a few contacts, finagled him interviews with various creative directors she’d had occasion to work with on her freelance basis. Fine. He wasn’t proud, just broke and unemployed. He had done enough solid work back in St. Louis to feel reasonably confident about his portfolio.
And not one, but two job offers had materialized. The one from Segal/Goldberg edged out the other by virtue of benefits, winner by a nose.
Ten months of work since then, gradually increasing in importance. He still had to prove himself. Nevertheless, ten months was solid, fast track. With Mullavey Foods he was once again playing in the majors, and it felt overdue.
After the mid-July meeting in New Orleans, and his unexpected displacement of Todd Whitley as senior copywriter on the Magnolia Blossom Coffee Bag account, Justin fired the afterburners. Hard work, long hours. The deadline of ads in the can for an early September debut was a pressure cooker, with no room for screw-ups.
He rented Gone With the Wind and spent a lost weekend, four viewings in two days, until April jokingly threatened to pack a bag and move back in with her parents in St. Pete until this was over. Howard Hughes began this way, she warned. Sit around and watch the same movie for forty-eight hours? It could only get worse; curly twelve-inch fingernails couldn’t be far behind.
Justin watched in shorts and a tank top, sun tea in reach, a legal pad at hand for the jotting of any and every scene that might be purloined for salesmanship. Toss a coffee bag into the equation and see how the scene might play differently. Only one idea he scrapped at the outset. Prissy the pubescent maid was a comic highlight, helium voice and all, and her confession of knowing nothing about birthing babies classic, but Justin foresaw only trouble here. A supposedly racially enlightened America did not need a resurrected Prissy screeching, “Lawzy Miss Scarlett … I don’t know nothin’ ’bout perkin’ coffee!”
At the office, he winnowed wheat from chaff, came up with a roster of nine possible scenarios for the TV spots. He fleshed out thirty-second scripts, worked with Nan to storyboard them. Fax wires between Tampa and New Orleans got daily workouts, and the four weakest spots fell by attrition to leave the best.
At the same time, the production department geared up to find a suitable replicant for Scarlett O’Hara, hers the most crucial casting. The talent seekers put out a national casting call among agents for anyone resembling Vivien Leigh circa 1939.
The winner was finally discovered in New York. Legitimate stage actress, off off Broadway. While she was being groomed for the part, locations were scouted for filming. A director and technical crew were hired out of Orlando, as of late becoming Hollywood East. A commercial music whiz in Nashville was hired to score what amounted to a ripoff of Gone With the Wind’s instantly identifiable “Tara’s Theme,” that orchestral swell of grandeur and antebellum Southern romanticism. Finished tracks were out within seventy-two hours, just the composer and a programmer and a studio engineer. Digital technology eliminated the need for an orchestra. Synthesizers and samplers performed as requested, and belonged to no union.
The wheels of progress rolled, inevitable as a steamroller, twice as heavy-handed. All because of a quick free-association in hope of saving a meeting gone to hell. Had Justin not looked at USA Today several days prior, these past weeks would surely have played out entirely different. Now he couldn’t have turned it all around had he tried.
The night before filming commenced in Virginia, Justin trekked out in a humid rain and rented Gone With the Wind once more. Plugged it in while the loft gusted with cooling breezes and April sensed the shift in his mood. Ajax, in a rare display of platonic affection, curled into his lap while he watched the movie for the fifth time in a month.
And here he was, a vulture, picking scraps of flesh from a perfectly preserved body. His micro-versions and interpretations seemed less an homage tonight than a sacrilege.
