There were four of us in the sunglasses and the swimsuits on the lounges, the whole of the Last Chance Crew. Cassandra hadn’t made the trip, but Bert had come, ostensibly to fulfill our every whim, but also, I knew, to keep an eye on us all and report back to Mr. Maambong. Bert stood now in his red vest, behind a bar just inside the house’s open wall of windows. On the pool deck the umbrellas had been maneuvered to maintain perfect shade for Kief, whose skin was already the color of boiled lobster and whose eyes were even redder. There were fresh fruits and pastries on the side tables, platters of bacon and eggs on the dining table, but we were mainly working the drinks Bert had prepared, a little bit of orange juice and a lot of champagne, garnished with strawberry and mint.
“Have you guys noticed this shack is eerily similar to the Miami property?” said Riley.
“Mr. Maambong sure does love his stark white walls,” said Gordon.
“It’s not Mr. Maambong,” I said. “There’s someone above Mr. Maambong.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know his name. But get this: he’s called the Principal.”
“Reefer all night, spiked orange juice in the morning, and a principal in charge of discipline,” said Kief. “You were right, boss, when you said we were back in high school. I wonder what they give instead of detention.”
“My guess on that, little Kief, is that you don’t ever want to find out,” said Gordon. “What do we know about this Principal person?”
“Nothing really,” I said. “He’s Mr. Maambong’s boss. He likes modernist architecture with the personality of a cinder block. He prefers to stay unnamed and behind the scenes. He has a nice jet.”
“That nice jet belongs to a corporate thingery called Jungle Dog, LLC,” said Riley. “I checked the call number on the tail.”
“How could you do that?” said Kief. “No computers, no phones; that was the rule for this little jaunt.”
“Fuck the rule.”
“Keep it down or Bert will hear you.”
“Fuck Bert.”
“Poor guy sure could use it,” said Gordon.
“I just figured if I’m selling my soul, I ought to figure out who’s doing the buying,” said Riley. “That plane belongs to Jungle Dog, LLC. That house in Miami belongs to Jungle Dog, LLC.”
“I’m seeing a pattern,” said Kief.
“I’m having trouble getting into the Mexican real estate database, but I’d be surprised if this house isn’t owned by the same company.”
“What about the four of us?” said Gordon. “Are we owned by Jungle Dog, LLC?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “From our noses to our spleens.”
“Are we ever gonna talk about what we up and did in Memphis?” said Riley.
“No,” said Gordon. “No we are not.”
“Just take the money and pour ourselves another drink, is that it?”
“That’s it exactly, except we got Bert to do the pouring.”
“I didn’t sign on for stealing kidneys.”
“What did you sign on for?” said Kief.
“Money,” said Riley. “Flash. A life with a bit of strut and style.”
“And have you gotten paid?”
“I’ve gotten paid.”
“Then quit your bellyaching,” said Kief. “It beats the drive-through. Big Mac, large fries, supersize soda: the crap they push through those windows will kill you quicker than a missing kidney. And those suckers do it for minimum wage. We’re not that different when you strip it down to basics; we satisfy whims. We just do it for a better clientele, and get paid better to do it. It’s called capitalism.”
“Thank you for that lesson in Economics 101,” said Riley. “I suppose all I needed to assuage my girlish conscience was a man explaining the way the world works to me.”
“Obviously, yes. There’s a demand that’s not being met by the supply. Blame it on the government. If there was a marketplace for these things, we wouldn’t have a role, but due to America’s tendency to overregulate, there’s an inefficiency of which we, fortunately, can take advantage. We’re like the traders on Wall Street making fortunes by mining the little blips of inefficiency between oil prices in Bengali and Beijing. The only difference is that we don’t bring down entire economies.”
“Which makes us heroes.”
“Pretty much. You didn’t have so many scruples when you were stocking up your bank account for your trip to Bali.”
“That was just money.”
“Nice excuse. As the old gent at the dinner party said, ‘We’ve already determined what kind of woman you are, madame. Now we’re just haggling over the bill.’”
“Fuck you, Kief.”
“Don’t take it so personally,” said Gordon. “We’re all just hookers on that gravy train. You know, Maambong didn’t get hold of us at our peaks. Riley was just out of prison, Kief was out of work and under investigation, Phil lost his sales job, and I had nothing. Nothing. But then, there’s a reason the Hyena Squad doesn’t set up a table at Harvard.”
“I can just imagine Mr. Maambong standing between Google and KPMG at the work fair,” said Riley. “He’d have pictures of a pool and stark white houses.”
“And Cassandra’s breasts,” I said.
“They wanted us to be desperate,” said Gordon, “so we’d be willing to do anything, and that’s exactly what we were when he found us. What we still are. So let’s not kid ourselves. We can flap our wings and pretend that we’re anything other than last chancers with no real outs, but we are last chancers with no real outs.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Kief.
“Oh, I’ve been listening to you, my perma-fried friend. When you feel compelled to twist yourself in knots to defend what you did, when you’ve got no choice but to go all Ayn Rand on our asses, then you know what you are. You can rationalize it for a month of Sundays but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. You know exactly what you are.”
There was a moment of quiet before I broke the silence. “Ayn Rand?”
“Yo, yo, yo,” said Gordon over the laughter. “I almost graduated from Miami.”
“What about you, Kubiak?” said Riley. “What says the fearless leader?”
I sat up on the chaise and stared through my dark glasses at the sun high off to the left. I knew what I wanted to say, what I had the strange urge to finally spill with all the spite in my soul: all those things they said they felt, those guilts and regrets that gnashed their teeth and twisted their consciences, all of them were fictions imposed by those who wanted to keep us down and docile. When you get to the root of it, we don’t feel anything for anyone beyond what that anyone can do for us. Whatever anyone claims beyond that baseline is an excuse for failure. Cindy Lieu? All she had for me was a kidney. The rest of her, her supposed hopes and fears and loves and sadnesses, they didn’t register in the least. She was a problem to be solved and I solved it. End of story. That’s all life is. A problem to be solved. And that’s all they were, each of them, Riley and Kief and Gordon, as well as Cassandra, Bert, Mr. Maambong, even the damn Principal—problems to be solved. The urge to tell it all rose like bile in my throat.
How would that little truth go over?
I stood, tossed my glasses onto the chaise, and dived like a knife into the water. The cool kissed every inch of me with its calming touch as I swam to the far edge without a breath and rolled into a neat kick turn. When I returned to the near edge I pulled myself out of the pool and stood before the three of them, water pouring off me like it was in flight.
“You want to know what I think?” I said. “I think it’s time for the drugs and the whores.”
I woke up in one of the second-floor bedrooms with my mouth dry as dirt and pain oozing like slime through my head. White walls, white bedding, a multihued selection of women naked as blue jays. There was a leg slung over my hip, there was a breast in my face, there were two women twined together like the strands of a rope by my side. The marble tops of the side tables were litt
ered with glasses and ash, remnants of white powder lines, joints burned to the nub. A used condom dripped off a table edge like wax off a candle. Even with my nose seemingly scorched and stuffed with writhing worms, I could still catch the stink of sex and sweat and shit and smoke.
I sat up and looked around dazedly at the unholy mess and laughed.
As I went about extracting myself from the torsos and limbs, a hand reached out and pulled at my chest. “Bebé, quédate, por favor.” I took hold of the hand and scratched my balls with it before tossing it aside and rising from the bed. I made my way around the tipped bottles and the strappy heels to the bathroom, where I pissed like a fire hose before blowing my nose clear in the sink, one side at a time. Not just worms, bloodworms.
The great white tub beckoned, but I brushed my teeth and scratched my stomach and headed down the stairs instead, looking for something wet to drink.
On the main floor naked bodies were flung haphazardly on the carpets and atop the white upholstered furniture, as if knocked about by a giant bowling ball of sex and drugs. The rock and roll of the night before had been turned off, and a quiet reigned, except for the sleep scratching, the ratchety snores, the dreamy moans. The slumbering body of Gordon, with his arms flung wide and his sunglasses on, took up one couch. Riley was in a pile of legs and breasts on the carpet by the fireplace. A woman lay facedown on the dining table, the wood beneath her open mouth slicked with drool. Two naked women sat on stools in the kitchen, drinking orange juice.
I was about to join them and beg in my bad Spanish for some coffee when I saw the tall, thin woman. Her hair was white and loose and shiny, and unlike every other woman in the house, she was clothed. The wall of glass that separated the main house from the pool had been left open through the night and she stood at the pool’s edge, wearing black pants and a loose white silk shirt, her hip cocked in a youthful contrapposto, looking away from the debauchery and toward the sun rising over the Gulf of California.
I walked around the couch where Gordon was sprawled, pulled the pair of sunglasses off his face, and stepped through the open wall. With the sunglasses on, and nothing else, I stood beside the woman, who barely glanced at me before saying:
“Every time I see the sun rise, I think, Carpe diem.”
“I think about my per diem,” I said.
“Coffee?”
“Absolutely.”
The woman snapped her fingers and quick as that Bert showed up in full red-vest regalia. He never showed up that quickly for me. “Two double espressos,” said the woman. “Or would you like a cappuccino?”
“I’m not much for froth,” I said.
“Good. No milk, Bert. And get the man a robe.”
“Why?” I said.
She looked at me, looked down at me, looked at me again. Her face was sharp, angular, with deep creases about her eyes and mouth. It was the face of a woman who didn’t give enough of a damn about what you thought to have her face worked on. And there was something in the way her mouth protruded that let you know she was hungry and would always be hungry. “Feed me,” that mouth said, even before it spoke.
“No robe then, Bert, just the coffees.”
Bert bowed and backed away, and in the way he backed away it became clear this wasn’t just some Josephine in a silk shirt. This was the Josephine in a silk shirt.
“We were talking of evolution,” said the Principal.
“Were we?”
“Life is simple. You’re either evolving or devolving. The one thing you can’t do is stay the same. Darwin taught us that.”
“Pete Darwin? I played little league with Pete Darwin. He wasn’t very evolved at all.”
“I’ve heard good things about you, but I have my doubts. Lawyer, gold salesman, fixer, thief. You’re a skitterer. Like those spidery bugs that skim the surface of a pond.”
“It’s important to have role models,” I said.
“They skitter here and skitter there, but they don’t get anywhere.”
“They stay afloat.”
“And that’s a fine goal—for an accountant. The world is thick with floaters, but where do they end up? In the same pond, waiting for the frog to lap them up for breakfast. Look at the far edge of the pool.”
“This pool?”
“Yes, this pool.”
“It’s a nice pool.”
“A marvel of simple engineering, because it seems to go on forever. But its infinity is only an illusion. This pool is just as closed in as any other, just as much a prison. There’s only one way to get beyond the edge.”
“Climb out?”
“And then what? Skitter to the next? And then the next? I read a story about that once; it ended badly. When you get down to it, one pool is the same as the next. They’re just holes in the ground. Ahh, the coffees. Thank you, Bert.”
Bert shuffled silently forward with a tray on which sat two cups of espresso thick with butterscotch-colored crema and a small bowl of sugar cubes. The woman in the silk shirt took one of the cups and lifted two sugar cubes with the little silver tongs, dropped them in the espresso, swirled her coffee with a little silver spoon. She used the silver utensils like she had picked her teeth with silver toothpicks in her crib.
“Let’s sit,” she said, gesturing to an arrangement of white upholstered chairs under an arcade to the left. “I have a proposition for you.”
“If you’re going to proposition me, maybe I should get that robe after all.”
“Evolution,” she said. “We were talking of evolution.”
We were now beneath the arcade, leaning back in our chairs, looking down at the villas on the narrow flat of land beneath us and the wide gulf beyond. In two fingers she held a neat silver tube, the tip of which glowed red each time she inhaled from the oboe-like mouthpiece. As she exhaled, vapor wreathed her head in a mist smelling of jasmine and clove. I was wrapped in a white robe that matched the cushions on the chairs, like I was just another piece of her furniture.
“I started this whole operation with one used limousine bought on credit. This was right after I landed in Miami. Things had gone sour in New York and I needed a new start, so I dragged my daughter to Miami, bought a piece-of-crap limousine and a uniform, and went into business for myself. It wasn’t much, but I had plans. I thought I’d work long enough hours to buy a few more vehicles, hire some drivers, build a small fleet. That was the extent of my shallow little pool, and I was a bundle of nerves about it, waking every night in a sweat, worried about that loan. More coffee?”
“I’m fine.”
“How about a bite of the hair of the dog? There’s a Scotch that Bert keeps here just for me. Japanese distilled, only five hundred bottles ever made.”
“That sounds right.”
She snapped her fingers and a few moments later I had a Scotch on the rocks in my hand. The whiskey was brilliant enough to piss me off.
“Then my limo clients started asking for more than just a ride. ‘Where can you get a good plate of ropa vieja?’ they asked. ‘What’s the best nightclub in South Beach?’ ‘Could you hook me up with a couple doses of ecstasy and some of your lady friends to share them with?’ I realized there was a need out there that I could fill if I had the courage to be more than a limo driver. So I took the leap, went deeper into debt, hired a recent immigrant from Quezon City to man the car, and started a luxury concierge service.
“Whatever was desired, I could get it for a price. And once word got out among a certain . . . demimonde, shall we say, I had more business than I could handle. I was a one-stop shop for anyone coming into town: not just a limo but the best hotels, the best restaurants, the best shows, the purest drugs, the classiest whores, the darkest entertainments. By now I had four limos running, and the money, I have to tell you, the money was quite impressive. Still I had worries—an even bigger loan, cash flow issues—still I woke in the middle of the night riven with anxiety. It was like I had skittered from one pool to another, something bigger, warmer, with a waterfall and
an attached Jacuzzi, sure, but it was just another hole in the ground.
“Then one of my clients, a very well-connected financier, told me a story. His daughter was being stalked by an old boyfriend. The boyfriend had been abusive. The police were doing nothing. The man was fearful that something terrible would happen. He didn’t know what to do, he was lost. And in his helplessness I suddenly saw the possibility that I could be more than a mere concierge. I could be a problem solver, whatever the problem, whatever the solution. But I was worried that the doing would be beyond me. You see, I knew it would take a certain kind of person to play it out all the way. A certain kind of person with a certain kind of ruthlessness. I had never been that before, it was why I was forced to run from New York in the first place. Could I become that person now? Could I evolve?
“The answer came as I stood over that stalker with a baseball bat in my hands. Later, these kinds of jobs I would contract out—like your piece of work in the desert for Mr. Gilbert—but this I had to do myself. I had to see if I could be something new and ferocious, something utterly unlike what I had been. And that something new rose in me like the laughter that I barked out as I hit him and hit him again. The bat dripped blood and I hit him once more and I kept laughing. I wasn’t laughing at his pain—I’m no sadist—I was laughing at how easy it was to cross the line. That’s when I realized that nothing was impossible, that no pool could contain me. That’s when I realized that infinity was within me, because I myself had no limits.
A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion] Page 12
