Just then the door swung inward and Billy Bones appeared in his three-piece suit, smelling vaguely of mothballs. He stared blankly at the three men standing in the hallway.
“Billy!” Conrad said loud enough for his counterpart to hear. “What took you so long?”
“I was applying my cologne. Now let’s go find the target —”
“Tut-tut,” Conrad moved to place his blind hand over Billy’s mouth. He fumbled a little and poked Billy in the eye but nonetheless managed to stop his associate from talking. “Beware of prying ears,” he motioned in what he assumed was Abraham’s direction.
Billy gazed up at Abraham as though he was seeing him for the first time. He took a good long look, tilted his neck to either side to examine the tall man and then stepped back.
“You sure got a strange head on you,” he said.
Abraham, already flustered by Conrad, could only mutter his response. “I’m just as God made me, sir.”
“Ah yes,” Conrad said. “The maker truly did break the mold on that fine day.”
Alfred reached in and shut Bones’ door. Conrad twirled his cane. And Billy trudged down the hall ahead of the pack. They made it thirty feet before Abraham finally noticed the metal briefcase in Alfred’s hand. He called out.
“I’ll find out what you’re up to! Whatever it is, I assure you — you won’t get away with it!”
His voice faded as they rounded the corner. The three elderly assassins, carrying a case loaded with ammunition, were off to find Henrik Nordmark.
thirteen
Henrik realized he could never truly be a saint. He tried chivalry long ago and found it to be an abstract notion that was nearly impossible to accomplish in reality. He knew he would never do great things that made people speak of him with admiration. But watching that young man get thrown out of the office building made Henrik realize you don’t have to be good to be distinct or unique. An equal effect can be achieved by being bad. Henrik walked to the local shopping mall intent on becoming a public menace. It was easy, he decided. He would simply mimic the actions he found most deplorable in others. One could much more readily inspire hatred than love. Some day, he reasoned, he might grow out of aberrance. But for now, it was the first step along a diving board into a pool of eccentricity.
Once inside the shopping mall, Henrik proceeded to walk through the stores and haphazardly rearrange the clothes folded on the shelves. He would pick up an article — a T-shirt or a cardigan, a pair of pleated pants or a lady’s full bodice — it didn’t really matter what it was — and he would crumble it in his hands and unfold its sleeves, then place it back indiscriminately on the shelf. With each piece of clothing, Henrik imagined himself to be more and more wicked, a certifiable brute in this world. He furnished a demonic cackle, far too quiet for anyone to hear, but loud enough to underscore the depravity of his actions.
To Henrik’s immense dismay, the store staff didn’t seem to notice. He’d anticipated at least one of them would grow furiously angry and throw him out of the store on his heels. But none of them seemed to care. In one store, a young man wearing women’s jeans and a pink headband even followed along behind Henrik, dutifully cleaning up his mess and making small talk with him.
Henrik would have to up the ante.
He found the most crowded hallway in the mall and set about walking slowly and taking up as much space as he possibly could. This will do the trick, he thought. Many a time while walking down a busy city sidewalk, Henrik had found himself victim to the incredible scourge of slow, overweight women meandering along at a breathtakingly unhurried dawdle, their leisurely attitude and seeming obliviousness to the traffic jam behind them causing a rage to form deep within Henrik to where it manifested in a tightness in his chest. They always traveled in flocks, these women. Henrik had no such flock, but still, he set about eliciting an angry response from the shoppers in the mall. He waddled four times slower than normal, stretched out his arms and stumbled absently in people’s way when they attempted to pass him. To Henrik’s horror, his actions had little effect. No one seemed to notice him in the least. He was only one man after all and the shoppers could pass him easily on either side. Henrik increased his efforts and slowed down to a skulking crawl. He was almost standing still now. This made it even easier for the shoppers to garner passage along the crowded corridor. Henrik heaved a great sigh. This process, he realized, necessitated their being at minimum two meandering loafs. He could never achieve this alone.
Dismayed, Henrik headed to the food court in a last-ditch attempt to be hated by all.
Once inside the food court, he sat down in a crowded area next to the New York Fries and took off his shoe, followed by his sock, which he waved in the air dramatically for all to see. He then produced a pair of nail clippers from his pocket and began clipping his toenails one by one. He started with the second toe. It had a jagged, thick nail stricken with cavernous yellow craters and sharp edges on either side. It would need two attacks with the clippers at minimum, perhaps as many as six. Henrik dug in hard. Clip! A piece of nail shot straight from his toe and landed several feet away next to a family of four. They didn’t even look up from their soup. Undaunted, Henrik dug in again and chopped away at the toenail as though he was felling a great redwood in the forest. Clip! Clip! Clip!
Randomly, outrageously, pieces of toughened keratin flew from the end of his animal digit. With a devilish smile, Henrik dug into his middle toe and proceeded to obliterate its nail as well. He looked up from his work to discover the entire food court was oblivious to his actions. How could this not bother them? It would be driving Henrik crazy! He was already angry, but now grew even further incensed at the fact that he was outraged and they were not. Henrik returned to his undertaking with even more purpose. He chopped away at the other toenails before he reached his Everest — the big toe. His anger fled as he thought about all the quantifiable adjectives people in the food court might use to describe him when pieces of the big nail went flying; words like deplorable, heinous, unhygienic. True, in a perfect world he would rather be described in positive terms, with admirable, respectable and sanitary as the adjectives of the day. But this was not a perfect world. This was a prison in which Henrik had lived far too long in the solitary confinement of dreary dullness. He attacked his big toe in stages, chopping away first at the thick, difficult yellow sector on the left. Once free of this section, the rest of the toenail surrendered. But Henrik would show no mercy. He hacked away without remorse, caught pieces of nail in the air and threw them across the room. One fragment landed in the TacoTime salad of a woman sitting directly across from him.
Eureka! Henrik exclaimed inwardly. This poor victimized woman would finally notice his appalling behavior. She would be forced to stand up in the crowd and scream at him. She would arouse the attention of the others and classify Henrik as an outright scoundrel.
But the woman didn’t notice the nail land in her salad. She continued eating, chatting all the while with her friend about Marc Anthony and how one day Jennifer Lopez would rip his heart out through his ass. Henrik watched in stupefied wonder as the woman ate every last bit of her salad. Together the two women stood up and walked away, leaving their trays on the table. Henrik hobbled over on one shoe and looked in the salad bowl. The woman had scraped it clean. There was no trace of the toenail. It could mean only one thing — Henrik’s nail was at the bottom of that woman’s stomach, swirling around with the Diet Coke and the taco meat.
Henrik felt himself about to vomit. He struggled to pull on his shoe and as he finished tying his laces, Henrik bent over and held his chest, determined not to deposit the contents of his stomach into the lady’s salad bowl.
Just then, an arrow sailed straight over his head and struck a poor Dunkin’ Donuts employee right in the chest. Henrik didn’t even see it happen. Quickly a crowd rushed to the man’s aid. This is a tragedy! they cried — although not nearly as great a tragedy as one might think. Only one week prior, the injured man h
ad cheated on his wife with the teenage girl selling hot dogs at Orange Julius. He propositioned the hot dog girl outside a storage closet in the back hallway and then hammered away at her ruthlessly in the same closet, exited the moment he orgasmed and never spoke to her again. Until this moment his actions had gone unpunished.
That he was not entirely innocent would have been of small comfort to the three old men hiding behind the coffee kiosk across the way.
“Did we get him?” Conrad whispered to Billy Bones.
Billy was busy tucking the crossbow back in the briefcase.
“What?!” he yelled.
“I asked did we get him?” Conrad said louder.
“No!” yelled Billy Bones. “We shot some other guy instead!”
“Keep quiet, you damned fool,” Conrad swatted Billy Bones across the face with his glove. But Billy would not keep quiet. His senility was increasing exponentially by the hour. He yelled at Conrad, “Don’t be mad at me! Alfred’s the one who shot him!”
Faces in the crowd turned away from the ailing man and began searching for the source of the arrow. Their eyes focused on the area where the three elderly assassins were now ducking behind the coffee kiosk.
“I think we should take our leave,” Alfred said inaudibly.
“What?!” Billy Bones yelled again.
“I think we should take our leave.” Alfred slammed his fist on the kiosk in outrage that no one was listening to him.
Conrad stood up. “Now, Bones!” he screamed. “Now!”
Billy Bones stood up as well and looked down at the wheelchair the elderly assassins had brought with them. Unsure what to do, he stared back at his blind associate, his mind occupied by puppies and rainbows, the lifelong quest for fine bourbon and long-legged women in scanty attire. Conrad swung his cane wildly in the direction of Billy’s leg, missed the shin bone entirely and caught him right on the ankle. The sudden stab of pain shot Billy out of his senile musings. He collapsed in a heap in the wheelchair.
“Step aside,” Conrad said to the growing crowd. “This man requires immediate medical attention.”
Alfred looked down to discover Billy Bones wasn’t entirely acting. He’d already fallen asleep in the chair. Alfred grabbed the handles and started pushing. Conrad took his arm and they fled — well, rather they slowly shuffled — through the crowd with Alfred steering, Conrad swinging his cane to clear a path and Billy Bones snoring as though he’d fallen asleep in front of his black and white television.
Henrik stood in the middle of all of this, completely baffled. He couldn’t quite see the man in the cape and his two associates make a bungling — though surprisingly successful — exit past Banana Republic and off into the distance. And he wasn’t really sure what happened to the man lying on the ground. There were two crowds, one watching the elderly men make their escape and another huddled around the severely wounded Dunkin’ Donuts employee, and neither of them were congregated for Henrik.
Henrik frowned a sad frown and left the food court.
In the aftermath, no witnesses had any idea what had happened. They hadn’t noticed anyone in the food court acting strangely. Even Conrad’s cape was a detail that slipped the minds of those interviewed. The only witness who could positively identify the assassins was the teenage girl from the hot dog stand at Orange Julius. But she didn’t say a word. She couldn’t speak. She was too busy trying to wipe the smile off her face.
fourteen
Discouraged that after all his hard work, he remained entirely unnoticed, Henrik wandered over to a convenience store, bought an orange Shasta and a package of gummy bears and sat down on the curb to lament his fate by consuming as much sugar in as short a time span as possible. He wolfed down the gummy bears and choked back the soda. In the midst of his sugar high, Henrik watched the cars go by and wondered what to do next.
As the sugar wore off, Henrik reached into his pocket and found the toll-free number for Jacksonville’s Religious Crusade. He’d written it down the other night and kept it with him in case of emergency. Henrik headed to the nearest pay phone and dialed the number.
There was a long pause before a woman with a southern accent answered.
“Hello, this is Betty Sue. Would you like to donate to Jacksonville’s Religious Crusade?”
Henrik was deeply disappointed not to hear Parminder’s voice.
“I’m looking for the woman I spoke to the other night,” he said.
“Well, I can help you now, sir. How much would you like to donate? Do you have your credit card ready?”
“I think I’d really rather talk to the same woman from the other night,” Henrik said.
“Please hold,” the woman said and then placed Henrik on hold before he could say Parminder’s name. A Muzak version of the theme song from Who’s the Boss? sounded over the line. Henrik waited through two verses and half a chorus before the signal abruptly cut dead. Undeterred, he immediately dialed again.
“Hello, this is Betty Sue. Would you like to donate to Jacksonville’s Religious Crusade?”
“Hi Betty Sue, this is Henrik Nordmark. We just spoke. You were going to look for the woman I was speaking to the other night.”
Betty Sue exhaled an audible groan.
“Sir, there are dozens of service representatives in our office. Do you know the name of the representative you spoke with?”
Henrik racked his brain for the alias Parminder had used. “It began with an M . . . Mary, I think.”
“One moment please.”
Henrik waited through a painful version of the Leave It to Beaver theme song, hoping the line wouldn’t go dead again, before the music suddenly cut short and a second voice came on the line.
“Hello, this is Mary Jo. Would you like to donate to Jacksonville’s Religious Crusade?”
Henrik was elated. “Is this Parminder?”
“I’m sorry sir, but there’s no one here by that name.”
“It’s me, Henrik,” he said. “We talked just the other night about Nanak and the Janamsakhis.”
“Henrik, it’s good to hear from you again!” Parminder’s Indian accent returned in full force. “How are you? Have you found what makes you unique?”
“No. It’s actually proven much more challenging than I anticipated.”
“That’s too bad.”
Henrik leaned against the phone. He’d initially intended to ask her about the dinosaurs and how the millions of years they spent roaming the planet fit into Nanak’s big plan for humankind. Henrik quickly forgot about that and became overjoyed at the idea of some random small talk. “How are things over there in India?”
“I went to see the monthly baby drop today,” Parminder said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a tradition in India. We all crowd around a big temple. The elders take newborn babies and drop them from the top of the temple.”
“Do they land on the ground?!”
“Very rarely,” she said. “Some men at the bottom hold a small sheet really tight so the babies bounce when they land. Then another man catches them in midair and hands them back to their mother. The tradition is supposed to promote strength in the child.”
Henrik looked down at the ground. He could hardly believe that through the layers of cement and dirt, through the thick rock and past the Earth’s molten core, there were people on the other side of the world who actually did this.
“How far do the babies fall?”
“About fifty feet or so.”
“Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”
“Yes,” Parminder said. “Very much so.”
“Has a baby ever missed the sheet and landed on the ground?”
“Once or twice.”
“Were they hurt?”
“Quite severely,” Parminder said. “But at least my family has health insurance in case one of our babies gets injured and needs medical attention.”
“Does the Jacksonville Religious Crusade pay your health insurance?”
&n
bsp; “No. But because I’m a Sikh, I can buy my own.”
Henrik was confused. “Because you’re a Sikh?”
“Yes,” she said. “Muslims, at least the really devout ones, can’t buy health insurance because the Qur’an forbids gambling and Sharia law has deemed that buying insurance of any kind is a form of gambling.”
Henrik thought back to when he was almost hit by the car. “I have health insurance. If I was maimed in some kind of accident and needed to be kept alive on a ventilator, my insurance carrier would pay for it.”
“Would you really want to be kept alive on a ventilator?”
Henrik paused. What was the difference, he wondered, between his everyday life and being kept alive by a machine with tubes coming out of every orifice in his body? True, the able-bodied Henrik got up every day and went to work. And there were some joys in life — he liked to read the morning paper and look at the pretty girls as he walked down the street. In addition to the sugar he just ingested into his system, Henrik also enjoyed the occasional nearly ripe plum. But was this it? Was this everything that life held for him? The monotonous waking and eating and sleeping and waking? There had to be more to life than this. There just had to be.
“I want to be unique,” he said. “I want to be an enema.”
“Don’t you mean an enigma?”
“What’s the difference?”
“From my understanding, an enigma is a person who is something of a mystery. An enema is when they insert liquid into your bum to treat constipation.”
“Do I have to choose between the two?”
“Henrik, my friend,” Parminder said. “You can be anything you want to be. You can be as interesting and unique as you choose. You just have to find your own path.”
“But that’s my problem. I don’t know which path I should take. I tried being a public menace and it turned out horribly. What should I do next?”
“You must not fall headlong into hopeless misery. Instead of beginning your quest with evil, perhaps you might start with virtue. Did you know that the gods favor those who are kind to the elderly?”
The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel Page 9
