The Coincidence Makers

by Yoav Blum

  An invisible wave of excitement swept through the crowd.

  Alberto got up from the table and approached Miguel. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Miguel turned toward him. “Oh!” he cried. “Teddy bear is here! How are you, teddy bear?”

  “I think,” Alberto said, “you should get out of here and go sit somewhere else, to calm down.”

  Miguel looked at him with a sneer. “That’s what you think?”

  “Yes,” Alberto said. “You’re damaging the library’s property. Get out.”

  “Me? The library’s property?” Miguel feigned innocence. “You mean this?” He jumped on the pile, trampling the books.

  “Yes,” Alberto said, still quietly. “Get out of here now.”

  “And who exactly is going to make me leave? You, teddy bear?”

  Thirty pupils and one librarian were filled with hidden joy when Alberto said, “Yes. If necessary, I will.” A pimpled boy sitting to the side raised his eyes toward the ceiling and silently murmured, “Thank you.”

  Miguel got off the pile and leaned his arms against the shelves next to him.

  “You,” he said with the serenity of drunkards, “might look big and strong, but you’re a bullshitter and an idiot, with balls the size of peas. Maybe you should run outside before someone gets hurt.”

  “I don’t want to resort to violence. . . .” Alberto started to say.

  “Of course not,” Miguel said with a crooked smile. “That’s what I’m here for.” He reached his hand into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. The knife made a clicking sound when Miguel opened it and flashed it at Alberto, as if he were an expert fencer. “Come on, teddy bear,” he said.

  “I’m telling you for the last time,” Alberto said. “Don’t make trouble. Get out.”

  The spring that held Miguel popped open. “Come on, you freaking mutant!” he screamed. “Come defend your precious books!” He banged his fist on the bookshelf next to him.

  That was enough.

  At first, a soft screeching sound was heard. And then another. The bookshelf collapsed with a thunderous noise.

  After a second of silence, the bookshelf opposite Miguel also collapsed, burying the future gang leader under a pile of books six feet high.

  Alberto went back to his place at the table. The pimply boy sitting to the side felt a certain urge to cry, but overcame it.

  It was only when Alberto was older that he surfaced on the radar of really dangerous people. He had just received his first paycheck as a waiter in a neighborhood restaurant and decided to go to the bank to deposit it. When he approached the teller and placed the check in front of her, a masked man burst into the bank, brandishing a pistol.

  “Everyone on the floor!” he shouted. “Everyone on the floor, now!” The other customers—two older women, one teenage girl with pink hair, and a gaunt young man with a haunted look—threw themselves onto the floor in panic, screaming the familiar screams they saw in the movies.

  The robber continued to act according to protocol, yelling, “Shut up, I said shut up, dammit.” He waved his pistol at the two tellers who sat behind the counter and intended to shout at them to raise their hands immediately, but then he saw that someone was still standing.

  Alberto looked at him gravely.

  “Why are you getting yourself into this?” he asked quietly.

  “Get down on the floor!” the robber screamed. “I’ll blow your brains out so that even your mother won’t recognize you!”

  “You can still stop all this,” Alberto said to him, gesturing with his hand around him. “Bank robbery carries a very long prison term. You can still get out of here before you cause damage. You can return to normal life. No one here knows who you are.”

  “Down! On the floor! Now!” the robber screamed, his eyes bulging under the itchy stocking on his head. “Don’t try to be a hero and don’t try to be a psychologist!”

  “You won’t shoot me,” Alberto said. “You’re not a murderer, right?”

  “I am! I am!” He lifted his pistol and aimed it straight at Alberto’s head.

  “Give me the gun,” Alberto said. “Let’s put an end to this.”

  “You stupid idiotic son of a thousand bitches!” the robber yelled. He had already shot five people in the head without batting an eyelash. One more head didn’t pose a big problem for him. “We’ll indeed put an end to this now! We’ll finish this!” he said, and he pulled the trigger.

  The policeman who later collected testimony from Alberto and the rest of the people at the bank said that it was a very rare type of technical malfunction.

  “The back end of the pistol simply exploded,” the policeman explained. “The bullet got stuck somehow and wasn’t propelled forward. Consequently, the back end absorbed all of the energy of the bullet’s explosion, and the thrust inside the pistol was trapped within such a small area that everything flew backward.”

  “Very interesting,” Alberto said.

  “Yes,” the policeman said. “I’ve never seen such a thing happen. I’m familiar with this only in theory. But apparently this guy didn’t have much luck.” And he looked at the robber, who no longer needed a stocking to cover his face. No one could identify him now.

  Two months later, two serious men in cheap suits knocked on the door of Alberto and his mother’s home.

  “Alberto Brown?” one of them asked.

  “Yes,” said Alberto Brown, dressed in pajamas.

  “Come with us, please,” the second one said.

  “Where?” Alberto asked.

  “Don Ricardo wants to speak with you,” the first one said.

  Alberto though for a moment and asked, “And who is Don Ricardo?”

  The two seemed a bit perplexed. They weren’t accustomed to speaking with people who were unfamiliar with Don Ricardo.

  “Um,” one of them said.

  “Don Ricardo is someone you don’t want to refuse to visit when you’re summoned,” the second one said, quite pleased with himself.

  “I’m a bit busy,” Alberto said.

  “Nevertheless,” the second one said.

  “Wait a moment,” Alberto said and closed the door.

  The two stunned men waited behind the door and heard Alberto call to his mother, “Mother, do you know who Don Ricardo is?” They couldn’t see the mother’s eyes widening in fear, but they could hear hushed talk on the other side of the door. And just when the more impatient of the two men decided he had waited long enough and that the time had come to kick in the door and take this idiot Alberto by force, the door opened and Alberto stood at the entrance, dressed this time.

  “Couldn’t you have just said, ‘from the Mafia?’ ” he asked.

  The two henchmen looked at each other. You’re not supposed to speak in such explicit terms, they thought to themselves. “Mafia” was a word used by the police, screenwriters, and bartenders who tell tall tales. We “do business.”

  “Okay. Let’s go,” Alberto said. “But only because my mother says I have to.”

  Don Ricardo sat at the end of the table. Alberto sat facing him at the opposite end of the table, some twelve feet away.

  “Thank you for joining us,” Don Ricardo said.

  “It was made clear to me that saying ‘no’ wasn’t an option,” Alberto said, shrugging his shoulders.

  “Saying ‘no’ is always an option,” Don Ricardo said. “But the repercussions are such that people usually don’t.”

  “I think some sort of mistake was made here,” Alberto said.

  “Mistake is a very general term,” Don Ricardo said. “Can you elaborate?”

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” Alberto said.

  “Really?”

  “I have no connection to your affairs.”

  “So why did you come?”

  “My mother told me to.”

  “Ah, respect for parents. That’s very important.”

  “Definitely.”

  “My son, Johnny
, was very conscientious about respecting parents.”

  “Aha.”

  “He would always kiss my hand, he wouldn’t use foul language around me, he wouldn’t bring home young ladies whom he knew I couldn’t tolerate. There was a lot of respect there.”

  “You must be very proud of him.”

  Don Ricardo flicked his hand, as if shooing away a defiant fly or trying to clean the air from a cloud of meaningless words. “He was an idiot who only knew how to use force to obtain things. No elegance, no creativity. He always got into trouble. I bailed him out of so many predicaments that at some stage, I stopped counting. Drugs, solicitation of prostitution, robbery attempts. One time, he robbed a liquor store and then went to eat at a McDonald’s and left a pistol with fingerprints, just like that, on the table next to some leftover fries. A complete idiot. ‘Why don’t you just put bars on your window and be done with it?’ I asked him. And still, he was my son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Though this also might not be completely accurate. I assumed he was my son, despite the stupidity in his genes.”

  “But you still loved him, of course.”

  “Of course, certainly. A certain type of love, at least. It broke my heart when he was killed.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. How did it happen?”

  “The jerk tried to rob a bank. He actually chose the bank well this time, but there was some smart aleck who tried to stop him and in the end he somehow shot himself.”

  It took some time, but Don Ricardo’s cold gaze ultimately traveled across the long table until it reached Alberto and made the situation clear to him.

  “According to what I understood,” Alberto said, “it was a very rare malfunction.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Don Ricardo said. “But still, you know, I can’t help thinking that if that smart-ass idiot who tried to be a hero wasn’t there . . .”

  “I’m truly sorry about the death of your son,” Alberto said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “But I have no connection to what happened.”

  “Not from my point of view.”

  Alberto squirmed uncomfortably in his chair.

  Don Ricardo remained motionless.

  “From this point of view—mine,” Don Ricardo said, “you are responsible for the death of my son.”

  “I . . .”

  “This makes me quite sad. I really don’t like to involve people from outside of my business.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “But you’ll surely understand me when I say that I cannot ignore what happened,” Don Ricardo said. He scratched his gray temple.

  “What do you intend to do?”

  “To you? Nothing, my friend. Nothing. But in my worldview, you took a son from me, so I take your mother.”

  Alberto felt his heart starting to pound.

  “I . . .”

  “My two colleagues are now at your mother’s home. If I don’t call them during the next ten minutes, then we’ll be even. It’s as simple as that.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Like life,” Don Ricardo said, pursing his lips, as if pondering something profound. And then he added: “But maybe we can find another type of deal to resolve the matter.”

  “What type of deal?”

  “I have a friend. A good friend. Such a good friend that he became a good enemy. You know, when a person reaches my position, when he accumulates power, he cannot avoid a situation in which there are some people in the world, with no less power than he himself has, who counteract him. It’s like yin and yang, black and white, Hansel and Gretel. You could call them colleagues and you could call them enemies. In any case, they are strong people. Strong enough so that we can dine together, on the one hand, and fight each other, on the other. It’s not personal; that’s the way this business works. Have you ever heard of Don Gustavo?”

  “Never.”

  “Okay, that happens. In any case, Don Gustavo has always been one of the only people to block the expansion of my business. Not that I lack anything in life. Life is good, I admit. Business is also good. But it could always be better. You know, it’s human nature. We always want more—no, we always need more. This is part of what drives us. We want to touch the stars, tickle the sky. We aim for infinity, though we’ll never reach it. Perfectionism, perhaps. The human spirit aims for it. For infinity, my friend. I, for example, want very much to see Don Gustavo dead. It would be very beneficial for me.”

  “Beneficial?”

  “Beneficial, yes. It would enable me to do all sorts of things that are currently difficult for me to do—things related to boundaries and commitments. If I want to expand my business, I need Don Gustavo to move to ‘dead’ status. But, you understand, I cannot allow myself to kill him. It’s too dangerous. A matter of honor and handshakes. If somehow his death is linked to me, a world war will erupt. It will also be very unpleasant. Dishonorable. You don’t do such things.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. Because this is exactly where you enter the picture. Someone who isn’t connected to the family in any way. We can arrange poetic justice here. Johnny was a robber and you killed him, and now you’ll be a robber and will kill Don Gustavo. You’ll break into his home and kill him. You’ll make it look like a regular robbery that got botched. You can also take whatever you want from there. I’ll provide you with a diagram of the house, of course. I even have one or two entry codes, and the location of the guard posts. It’ll really be a piece of cake. And if by chance you’re caught—and, of course, we all hope very much that doesn’t happen—no one will be able to connect you to me. And, in exchange, I’ll go out of the room and will instruct my people not to cause any tragic accident to befall your mother. Don Gustavo in exchange for my Johnny.”

  Alberto raised his right eyebrow in a movement he knew how to do since he was a baby. “You want me to murder for you,” he said quietly.

  “That’s a very barbaric way to describe it, but it’s quite precise,” Don Ricardo concurred.

  “And if I don’t agree—you’ll kill my mother.”

  “You catch on well.”

  “Do I have an alternative?”

  “Certainly. As I said, ‘no’ is always an option. The consequences are what we don’t want. Right?”

  Alberto thought a bit and said: “Right.”

  Don Ricardo insisted that the job take place that very night.

  Don Gustavo’s house would be nearly empty tonight, he said, and this presented a unique opportunity. Don Ricardo wanted to be done with this entire affair immediately. Alberto would later discover that impatience is a trait shared by many people who want someone else to die. He was given an hour to review the diagrams of the building, and two hours later, he was en route to Gustavo’s house. Before he left, Don Ricardo gave him a stocking. It matched the one Johnny had worn on the day of the robbery. He said. “Is that poetic justice or what?”

  Alberto was silent, wondering whether refraining from responding to a rhetorical question would be held against him.

  “It’s been laundered, of course,” Don Ricardo said.

  And thus it happened that at 2:00 a.m. that night, Alberto Brown found himself standing in the bedroom of the head of one of the biggest crime families in the country, a stocking over his head and a pistol in his hand—a pistol that had once belonged to the son of the head of another crime family. In front of him, an old, pale man was lying on the bed, breathing heavily. And Alberto was supposed to kill him.

  It was clear what he was supposed to do now. Noise.

  Enough noise to wake the old man in front of him, to make him sit up in his bed, perhaps scream something so that someone could hear that a robbery was taking place. It was important that it be clear to everyone that this was a robbery. And then Alberto must shoot him.

  He took a long look at the old man lying in the bed and felt like he was choking. He didn’t want to do this.

  Alberto reached out his hand
and picked up a vase that stood on a dresser at the edge of the room. With his other hand, he aimed the pistol at the Don.

  He was about to smash the vase on the floor, but just then he heard a sound from the direction of the bed. As he turned his head, he saw the Don moving. The man gurgled a bit, then emitted a number of strange sounds. Another gurgle and his hands contorted, his mouth gaped open, and Alberto heard the Don take one heavy breath.

  Then there was silence.

  Alberto listened intently but didn’t hear a thing. He returned the vase to its place and approached the bed slowly. He bent over and moved his ear close to the old man’s face, then moved it closer and a little closer, before realizing that the old man was really not breathing.

  He stood up and thought a bit. He reached out and touched the Don’s hand. There was no reaction. He placed his fingers on the man’s wrist and looked for a pulse. Then he placed his fingers on the man’s neck. He shook him and shook him a bit more.

  And then he left.

  Don Ricardo was very impressed. He was very happy.

  “How did you do it?” He grabbed his head, shaking it in disbelief. “Everyone is certain that he died from a stroke in his sleep. It’s amazing. This is the cleanest killing I’ve ever seen.”

  Alberto quietly asked whether he was allowed to go.

  “You don’t understand?” Don Ricardo told him. “You’re a treasure! A treasure! You’re such a rare natural talent. It’s amazing.”

  “I think we’re even now, Don Ricardo.”

  “Of course! Of course!” Don Ricardo said.

  “Then I want to go.”

  “Yes, yes.” Don Ricardo sighed. “What a waste. You could be great, do you know that? I mean really great. The greatest. Killers like you can become very rich.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “What a waste.”

  “I’m going now,” Alberto said and left.

  Two weeks later, two men appeared at the door of Alberto’s home. This time, Don Ricardo told him he had a real business proposition to discuss. Alberto said he wasn’t interested.

  Don Ricardo said that the job wasn’t for him but for a friend.