A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  “Am I a cyborg?”

  “You are you.”

  “Am I dying of thirst?”

  “You are weak with thirst.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “That’s for you to decide.”

  “Then I drink the water,” I said. “If I don’t drink, I’ll be too weak to get out of there. I gamble that the black X doesn’t mean poison. If it does, either way I die, so I do what I have to do and take the chance.”

  “No need to explain, Mr. Kubiak,” said Mr. Maambong, with a smile that showed off a set of canine teeth longer than his incisors. “This isn’t a math test where you get credit for showing your work. How did you lose your position at Gold Dog International?”

  “Joey Mitts fired me.”

  “Why?”

  “For going off script.”

  “Why did you go off script?”

  “There were so many cautions and caveats in Joey’s script I couldn’t keep the customers on the line long enough to close, so I made modifications. The job was to close.”

  “Was your deviation from Joey’s script the only reason?”

  Ahh, the rub. I had learned over the years to tell people what truths they wanted to hear, which usually meant lying through my pearly teeth. It was a surprisingly effective strategy for dealing with clients and adversaries both, and I was damn good at it. You could say I was a natural born liar. But Mr. Maambong was neither a client nor an adversary, he was something other, and it was tricky determining what lies he wanted to hear. Adding to the difficulty, a man named Bert was sitting behind me, tracking my pulse rate, my heart rate, my perspiration rate, my blood pressure. With straps across my chest, a cuff on my arm, wires taped to my fingers, and a band tight around my skull, I felt like I was in some apocalyptic form of Japanese Jeopardy!

  “I also slept with the receptionist,” I said.

  “Shelly Levalle?”

  “You know her?”

  “Indeed we do, Mr. Kubiak. She has been with Mr. Mitts for decades. Her breasts were legendary in the halls of the Nevada Legislative Building. Well done.”

  “When I was hired, Joey told me she was off-limits.”

  “And yet you had relations with her anyway.”

  “If that’s what you would call it.”

  “What would you call it?”

  “Sunday afternoons?”

  “So tell us, Mr. Kubiak. These Sundays you had with Shelly Levalle that cost you your job. Were they worth it?”

  “Truth?”

  “That is all we are asking for.”

  “Well, you’ve seen her breasts.”

  We were in the dining room of the suite. There was a kitchen counter with a coffeemaker, there was a potted tree, there was one wide window, its slatted blinds partially open. Mr. Maambong had watched impassively as I was trussed like a turkey by Bert, a plump, sweaty man in white shirt and black tie. The straps and wires were linked to a box that was plugged into Bert’s laptop, the screen of which was tilted out of my vision.

  “Is all this necessary?” I had said as Bert placed his straps.

  “Oh yes indeed,” said Mr. Maambong. “It is crucial that we get truthful answers to our queries. We wouldn’t want you trying to bluff your way into our employ.”

  “I wouldn’t think of doing such a thing.”

  “Ah, Mr. Kubiak, if we didn’t already know you were lying just then, we’d be disappointed. Are we ready, Bert? Excellent. Now in these kinds of proceedings, it helps to get a baseline. Tell us something false.”

  “My name is Dick Triplett,” I said.

  “Now tell us something true.”

  “I’ll be the best employee you ever had.”

  Mr. Maambong turned his head toward Bert to get a sign. “Let us try this once more, and this time with feeling,” he said calmly. “Tell us a lie.”

  “I enjoy watching hockey on television.”

  “Good. Now where are you staying in Las Vegas?”

  “I’m at the Hard Rock.”

  “And before that, Mr. Kubiak, where were you staying?”

  I was about to blurt out some face-saving untruth, but I stopped and looked at those dark round glasses, so much like the eyes of a beetle and just as inscrutable. “I was at the Excalibur.”

  “You sound embarrassed.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Indeed.” Mr. Maambong glanced at Bert and a smile broke out on his face. “Finally we are getting somewhere.”

  After that the questions came fast as tennis balls from a machine, bizarre hypotheticals mixed with queries about my actual past, all while Bert validated the truth of my answers.

  “You are in a dark wood,” said Mr. Maambong. “It is a cold day. You have a handgun but no hunting license. You see a buck lying on the snow, alive but with a bullet hole in its belly and blood all around. Do you shoot it to put it out of its misery, shoot it for its antlers and meat, shoot it because you can, or walk on because you don’t have a hunting license and there are rangers in the woods?”

  “Am I weak with hunger?”

  “That’s not part of the question.”

  “But I admit to being a bit peckish so I don’t shoot it at all, instead I start carving it up for the meat. I don’t want the antlers. What would I do with a set of antlers? But I can eat the meat if I’m hungry. Maybe I’ll eat it raw, because I won’t want to set a fire with the rangers prowling around.”

  “What do you want, Mr. Kubiak, from this job?”

  “Money.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Sex. Maybe with that Cassandra.”

  “Mr. Kubiak, listen now. If you, by chance, get this position, you are not to have sex with Cassandra. Ever. She is off-limits to you. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tilted his chin toward Bert. “Good. That is one thing about which we need to be clear.”

  “It’s clear enough.”

  “Now we all want money and sex, to want such things is to be a breathing human being. Tell us what else you want.”

  I paused a moment to figure out the truth for myself. “I suppose I want to be somebody.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means when I walk through a crowd in the street I want them all to know exactly what I am.”

  “And what is that, Mr. Kubiak?”

  “Better than they are.”

  “You are on the beach in Maine. A lobsterman has pulled his traps from his boat and one of the creatures has escaped. It is scuttling toward the water, scuttling toward its freedom. The lobsterman doesn’t see. What do you do?”

  “I pick it up for dinner.”

  “It snaps at your finger with a claw. You can feel the bite in the bone. You drop the creature and howl as it continues toward the sea. What do you do then?”

  “I step on its head and then boil it red.”

  “Are you a good lawyer, Mr. Kubiak?”

  “I’m crackerjack,” I said.

  “Then how did you lose your position at the firm of Peel & Boggs in Sacramento?”

  “The economy tanked,” I said. “The firm contracted. I was let go in the contraction.”

  “Bert says you are telling the truth,” said Mr. Maambong, “which means you believe what you are telling us, but we all know that is not the whole truth.”

  “I’d go with Bert.”

  “What would Mr. Boggs tell us if we called him right now? Would he say it was the economy?”

  “Did you talk to Boggs?”

  “Do you think you walked in here by happenstance, Mr. Kubiak? Do you think we are concerned about your GPA in college as listed on your résumé? Do you have any idea what we do?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Exactly. Why were you let go by the firm of Peele & Boggs?”

  “Boggs and I had a falling-out,” I said.

  “Over what?”

  “Ask me about a frog on the highway or something. Would I swerve or run it over. I�
��d swerve to run it over.”

  “You had sex with Mr. Boggs’s wife,” said Mr. Maambong. “What is he, in his sixties?”

  “She was a trophy wife.”

  “And how did Mr. Boggs end up in the hospital with a broken jaw?”

  “He didn’t appreciate my brand of polish,” I said.

  Mr. Maambong smiled his canine smile and leaned forward. It was as if the beetle eyes of his sunglasses were peering deep inside me, beyond all the shields I had built around my darkest truths. And he was pleased with what he saw.

  “When did you first realize you were different from everyone else?” he said.

  “I’m not so different.”

  “What would Joey Mitts say? Or your Mr. Boggs? Should we get the numbers from Bert for that answer or are we going to stop kidding ourselves?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was seven,” I said. “It happened when my grandfather died. I wasn’t sad. I was supposed to be sad, and I pretended to cry. I rubbed my eyes, but it was an act. What I really wanted to do was watch TV.”

  “He was a nasty man, we suppose, not worth the tears.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “He was the sweetest. But I just wanted to watch cartoons. And I knew that was wrong. So I rubbed my eyes to fool my mother. I don’t know if it worked, but she gave me ice cream and put me in front of the TV because I was so sad. But I wasn’t sad. I had ice cream and cartoons. Why would I be sad?”

  “When was your first fistfight?” said Mr. Maambong.

  “The very next day. Barry Sonenfeld. He said something about my shoes.”

  “Something nasty?”

  “It didn’t matter.”

  “I think we have enough,” said Mr. Maambong. “Thank you, Bert. You can free Mr. Kubiak from your chains of truth. We are done here.”

  “If you knew all this about me from the first, why did you drag me down to Vegas? What the hell was the point?”

  5. Copper

  I won’t deny he got to me, Mr. Maambong, with those ridiculous animal questions and the beetle gaze of his dark glasses. I won’t deny that his test touched some nerve deep inside that jangled everything and sent me spinning. I won’t deny that when I left that suite the taste of copper was so strong in my mouth I couldn’t stop myself from spitting right onto the carpet of the corridor.

  I could still taste the copper as I sped out of Las Vegas on the same route I had taken just a few days before on my Grand Canyon jaunt, past Henderson and Boulder City, flying over the Colorado on the Hoover Dam bypass on the way to Kingman. I was still then blind to the root pattern of my life, but the flavor of a sucked-upon penny was as familiar to me as cheap rye had been to my father. My teeth tingled of copper when I was fired by Joey Mitts, when I decked Old Man Boggs, when I found myself cheating on my wife with some scag I found in a bar with soft hands and a preference for the rough. Copper was the taste of my condition, and somehow Mr. Maambong had tapped into the mother lode.

  But then he’d surprised me. “The point of the test, Mr. Kubiak, was to see if you measure up.”

  “You knew the answer before you started.”

  “Actually, no, we did not. But we’ve found that you measure up better than you might imagine.” He laughed at my expression, his laughter loud, dark. “Don’t look so surprised, Mr. Kubiak. You passed with flying colors. Have you ever been to Miami?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Then it will be a pleasant excursion. We are having a get-together at our house in Miami in a few days. It is by the sea, it is quite lovely.”

  “Does that mean I have the job?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So this is another interview?”

  “A competition, let’s say. There will be other candidates.”

  “How many?”

  “More than a few.”

  “It must be a hell of a job.”

  “It is that indeed, Mr. Kubiak. With quite the upside. We’ll have a hotel room waiting. Don’t be late.”

  As I headed south to Kingman, as I ripped east across the massive wastelands of Arizona and New Mexico, and then farther east into Texas, the desert landscape seemed less a metaphor for my life than something to be passed through with all possible speed. I had hopes that this long ride, this furious run toward my future, would strip the taste of copper from my mouth once and for all. Copper was the flavor of my failure; I was driving now toward success. This time I wasn’t going to allow anything, or anyone, to get in my way, which was why east of Amarillo I ditched Route 40 and headed southeast, through the center of Fort Worth and into the guts of Louisiana.

  I had one loose end to bind before Mr. Maambong got hold of it and started unraveling the dark truths of my past.

  Saint Gabriel is a bleak little oil town on the east bank of the Mississippi. I had been there twice before, so I had a sense of the ways and means of the place. Out of Baton Rouge I headed straight south and then took a left onto the small road that ran right through the belly of the town, such as it was, keeping my windows up to avoid that slicked oil smell from the refineries. I passed the bright-red shack of Big Jake’s Bar-B-Q without stopping. I’d pull in on my way out of the city for some of Big Jake’s famous pulled pork, but I knew enough not to fill my gut with dead pig before my appointment at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Something about the stink of the place could cause even the dead to rise.

  “Give me a kiss. That’s right. And another. Oh, you look so good, Phil, I could take you out back and eat you like fried chicken.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “I’m glad you came. Sit down, I need you to do some things for me.”

  “I’m just passing through.”

  “You’re working with them lawyers in California, right?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “The economy.”

  “Damn thing’s no good for no one no more. The whole country’s cracking up with poor. So what then are you doing with yourself?”

  “I’m between things.”

  “I know what that means. Nothing is what that means. But you’re still a lawyer, right? Because I need you to talk to Silverman for me and I think he’ll listen better to another lawyer. He’s not doing any damn thing. Tell him to start doing something.”

  “There’s not much he can do. You lost at trial, you lost your appeal, you were denied federal habeas corpus.”

  “I hear the ladies in here talk. Every one of them but me is getting a new hearing. There’s always something to be done. You tell that Silverman to get the hell off his ass. I’m getting old and ugly in here.”

  “Not ugly,” I said, meaning it.

  “Oh, you,” said my mother. “Give your moms another kiss.”

  My mother had been the low-rent belle of Belleville, New Jersey, when she birthed me. Those eyes so blue, those lips so red, the way she shook her thin hips in those short shorts. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to suckle at her breasts before she grew bored with the whole breast-feeding thing at three weeks and put me on the bottle. My strongest childhood memory of my mother is her squinting at me as she smoked a cigarette, as if I were as indecipherable as a Frenchman. I never knew what she was thinking and she felt the same about me. Whether I was crying because I had crapped my diaper, or crying because I was hungry, or reaching out my arms for a hug, it didn’t much matter; she couldn’t read me for the life of her.

  “For God sakes, Helen, his diaper is full of crap,” my father would say, coming home from his job with the Belleville Public Works Department to find me in a state.

  “I didn’t realize,” she’d say, sitting on the couch with a cigarette and a magazine.

  “Why the hell do you think he was crying?”

  “How should I know?” She’d flip the pages with the fingers holding her cigarette. “He’s a baby. That’s what they do.”

  This regular give-and-take
was relayed to me by my father long after my mother had left, in the nights when he was waxing nostalgic over his bottle of Old Overholt, shedding the occasional unapologetic tear. He would tell me he loved my mother with all his soul despite her failings, that she continued to be the love of his life even after she deserted him and her child and ran away with Jesse Duchamp, that he’d take her back in a heartbeat. She couldn’t help herself when it came to men like Jesse Duchamp, he told me, she was just built that way. And I suppose she was.

  “What’s with your eye?” I said.

  She reached up and pressed the bruise above her right cheek. “That reminds me. I also need you to get two thousand dollars to a man named Louis Boudin in Winn Parish. Can you do that for me, Phil?”

  “Two thousand dollars?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “To Louis Boudin. Write it down. Boudin, like the sausage.”

  “What sausage?”

  “He’s somewhere up there in Winn Parish, just ask around. His daughter’s in here with me and she’s country crazy. She pounded my face and told me if I don’t get her daddy the money, she’s going to slice my throat like a pig hanging from his hindquarters.”

  “Just out of the blue she hit you in the face?”

  “That girl’s got a knife hidden in the leg of her bed. She’ll slice me just like she said.”

  “Tell the guards.”

  “That’s not how it works in here.”

  “Have you been borrowing money again?”

  “How else you expect me to get my cigarettes and sodas? It’s not like you’re sending any hard currency. Your dad was good at posting money to my account but then he got the liver cancer and that was that, just when I needed him most. God, I loved that man.”