I must have drifted off with her after a while. Her butterfly kiss on my cheek woke me. I looked over her shoulder at the digital clock on the side table: 11:44. We’d been out for hours. “It’s not too late,” she said against my face. “For what?”
“To learn to play pool!” she said, a sweet stubbornness in her voice.
“You mean tonight?”
“Yes!”
“Gem, look. I—”
“You said you would.”
“And I will. But let’s … compromise, okay?”
“How?” she asked, propping herself on one elbow, watching me.
“I’ll take you, okay? But not in that outfit.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, little girl. You walk into a poolroom dressed like that, I’ll be in a half-dozen brawls before we get near a table.”
“Huh!” she snorted. But ruined the effect with a giggle.
“Come on. All you need to do is—”
“I will change my clothes,” she said, almost formally. “But it took a very long time to apply all this makeup. I will not remove it.”
“All right,” I said quietly, wondering if she knew what her crying had done to the paint job … if she’d glance at herself in a mirror before we left.
I grabbed a quick shower. Changed into chinos and a pullover. I was just about finished when Gem came into my room, wearing a pair of jeans and a hot pink sweatshirt. All that was left from her streetwalker’s outfit was the spike heels.
And all the makeup was gone.
She saw me looking at her fresh-scrubbed face. “You won’t forget, will you?”
“Forget what?”
“What I looked like … before?”
“I doubt I’ll ever forget it, girl.”
“You will remember, while we’re out together, yes?”
“I promise.”
The poolroom was nothing like the joints where I’d learned to play as a kid. The tables looked ultra-modern, with the short ends canted at a spaceship angle. The pockets were some kind of hard plastic, not mesh. The lighting was ceiling-recessed, without individual drop-down lamps for each table. No beads strung overhead—each table had little dials you could turn to mark the scoring. The felt covering each of the tabletops was all different colors—every one except green.
And not a single no gambling sign in sight.
Even the music was pitiful pop and sappy soul. I was thinking maybe Gem could have worn her outfit without any trouble, but I kept that thought to myself.
We got a plastic tray of balls, took an empty table against the wall. I showed Gem how to check a cue for straightness, how to examine the tip to make sure it was properly shaped. She was gravely attentive, not interrupting.
I demonstrated how to make a bridge, how to cradle the butt end of the cue lightly in her right hand, how to stroke.
Then I went through the fundamentals, concentrating on the relationship between the cue ball, the object ball, and the pocket.
Not once did she demonstrate any impatience.
I lined up a bunch of balls in a fan around the corner pocket and put the cue ball a couple of feet back, at the midpoint of the fan, and Gem started to practice.
Her first shot went in, but the cue ball followed right behind. I showed her how placing the tip of the cue slightly below center would stop the white ball at the point of contact. The first time she tried it herself, the ball hopped. I caught it on the fly, not surprised.
“Was that a good trick?” she asked, smiling.
“It’s a good trick if you can control it,” I told her.
“I think I can …” she said, and, before I could say anything, hopped the white ball right off the table again.
“Uh, that’s a pretty advanced move,” I said. “Maybe we should wait until you’ve had a few more games under your belt, okay?”
“Yes,” she said, narrowing her eyes in concentration.
It took maybe half an hour for Gem to get the concept of angles. She had a delicate touch with the cue stick, chalking up after each shot as I’d shown her, forming the bridge with her left hand carefully each time. Except for two guys on a nearby table who didn’t even pretend to play whenever Gem bent over and took a long time to line up a shot, we might as well have been alone.
Never once did Gem ask to play an actual game. She just went through each exercise I showed her, focusing hard.
“You are very patient,” she said, echoing my own thoughts.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it cannot be much fun for you, to watch me and not play yourself.”
“It’s a great pleasure to watch you.”
Her creamy beige cheeks took on a sprinkling of cinnamon. “You know what I meant,” she said.
“Sure. But I wasn’t kidding. You’re really learning. And it is a pleasure to watch.”
After a while, we played an actual game. I started her with straight pool. It’s the hardest version to play, because you have to call each shot, but it’s the best one for learning how things work on a table. I missed most of the shots I took, not pretending it wasn’t on purpose, setting up various opportunities so Gem could have a look at them.
I’d expected the lack of depth perception to affect my game, but it didn’t seem to—the balls went where I wanted them to go.
We didn’t keep score.
One of the men on the next table strolled over, said to me, “You interested in playing for a little something?”
“No thanks.”
“Come on. Your girlfriend can watch you in action, what do you say?”
“No thanks.”
“My buddy and I, we’ve been watching you. Looks like you really know the game. I figured, maybe I could learn something, you know?”
“No thanks.”
“Hey, man. Is that all you know how to say?”
I let the prison yard come into my eyes, told him, “I can say, ‘Step the fuck off,’ pal. You like that better?”
But he’d been raised so far away from prison yards that he didn’t get it. His hand whitened around the pool cue he was holding. “You got a problem?” he challenged.
His buddy rolled up, stood behind the first guy’s right shoulder.
I guessed the fancy tables and the middle-class music didn’t mean so much after all.
“No problem,” I assured the guy with the pool cue. “In fact, we were just leaving.”
When I said “we,” I glanced over at where Gem was to make sure she understood. She was gone. I had a flame-tongue flicker of fear, but then I spotted her—standing off to the side of the two men, feet spread, knees slightly bent. And a clenched fist at her hip.
“You want to take this outside?” the guy with the cue asked, his voice more confident than his hands.
I stepped in close to him, the red three-ball I’d snatched from the table when they’d first closed in cupped in my fist. “No,” I said softly. “And neither do you.”
It took him a couple of heartbeats, but he finally matched the music to the lyrics. “Punk!” he sneered … as he was turning his back to walk away.
“What style?” I asked Gem in the car on the way back to the hotel.
“I do not understand.”
“Martial arts. What style do you study?”
“Me? I am no martial artist. Why would you think so?”
“Back there. When you made a fist. You put your thumb on top of your clenched fingers, not bent over the side, the way people usually do.”
“It is better that way?” she asked, innocently.
“The way you do it? Sure. You can feel the difference in the muscles of your forearm. And you won’t break your thumb when you strike that way, too.”
“So!”
“Are you trying to tell me you make a fist that way naturally?”
“No. It is true, someone showed me how to do that. But that is all they showed me. It was a long time ago. I was just a small child. I always did as my elders instructed me.”<
br />
“Didn’t … whoever showed you, didn’t they show you any more?”
“It was only that one night,” Gem said, nothing in her voice. “The next day, she was gone.”
I let it go. Some locks shouldn’t be picked.
“You can never slam the window closed,” she said later, in bed.
“When you try, it only opens wider.”
I lay there, wondering if it would ever be any different.
“It only opened a little this time, isn’t that true?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, wondering how she knew.
“And then you tried to concentrate so hard on what you … what we were doing?”
“Yeah.”
“And that opened the window more, do you see?”
“Then how can I—?”
“This is something you cannot fight by fighting. By fighting, you invoke it.”
“Invoke it? It just popped—”
“No,” she whispered, as if telling me a deep secret. “You expect it. And your desire to battle it brings it forth.”
“What do I do, then? Surrender?”
“Not surrender. Accept. Sometimes the window will open. And sometimes it will not. You feel as if you cannot … lose yourself in … this,” she said, her hand cupping my testicles, thumbnail gently scraping under the root. “But you can. Not by trying. By not trying. Go to sleep, Burke. There are no windows in your sleep. It will only be your body then.”
“But if I’m asleep …?”
“I will not be,” Gem said, thumbnail resting against my root, sending a tiny tremor to where I thought was dead.
I was … maybe … afraid to ask Gem anything the next morning. Her eyes were shining, but I figured that was from the waffles with maple syrup, double-side of bacon and home fries, and the two chocolate malts she called breakfast.
She went out for a while. Came back with the Sunday paper. The Oregonian. Must be statewide, with a name like that, I figured.
We sat on the couch and read the paper quietly. By the time we finished, Gem was hungry again.
“You mind going over it one more time?” I asked her. “Tomorrow’s the meet, and …”
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ll page Byron. No point doing it in pieces.”
It took Byron less than an hour to show up. He greeted Gem almost formally, taking his cue from her. I wished I had his manners. Or maybe just his natural grace.
I drew a sketch of the plaza and the surrounding streets. Explained I’d be there first, and Gem should take whatever spot looked best to her. We couldn’t script it any closer than that—no telling what other actors would be on the stage.
“You’ve got the tricky part,” I told Byron.
“And I’ve got help,” he said.
“We can’t—”
“Not ‘we,’ partner. Me. I have a … friend. A very close friend. One that I can trust. All he knows is we’re going to do a box tail.”
“Does he know how to—?”
“Better than me,” Byron said, pride in his voice. “He’s a spook.”
CIA? Did they have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” like the Army? And did anyone actually believe that bullshit? I let it go. A man who could hide from his own employers could certainly handle his end of a box tail.
“They’re going to be edgy,” I warned them both.
“Then we shall be calm,” Gem replied.
“You’re going to have to improv,” I said to her. “It really doesn’t matter so much what you say. You’re only there to give information. Sent by a friend. A friend you never met—a friend of theirs, see? You’re just the messenger.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever you do, no matter what kind of opening they give you, don’t ask any questions. They’ll be looking for that.”
“I understand.”
“Something else is happening. Something besides me. These people disappeared a while ago. Put some very complicated systems in place, must have been planning it for a while. And they can’t be earning money legit; not in their professions, anyway. I saw their setup in Chicago. Expensive. Real expensive to maintain, the way they’re doing it. Heavy front, heavy cost. It’s a tightrope. We have to make them nervous enough to contact whoever set me up. But not panic them into running.”
“What good will that do?” Byron asked. “There’s a million ways for them to contact their principal, if that’s what this is. Phone, fax, e-mail, telegram, FedEx, UPS, carrier pigeon … you name it. No way we can put a trap on all that.”
“All this money, all this planning … Whoever wanted me dead isn’t someone they can just call on the phone. They’ve got other things going. So they’ll have cutouts in place.”
“So you figure … the Russians reach out, it takes a while for whoever it is to get back to them.”
“Yep.”
“And we’ll be waiting, right?”
“Watching.”
“For what?” Byron asked.
“Fear is a communicable disease,” I told them both. “Whatever makes them afraid, they’re going to run to the people who put them in the jackpot, looking for answers. But, see, whoever put them there, they’ll have to wonder, too. The wheels come off, you know the car’s going to crash … but you don’t know where it’s going to hit.”
“So you believe these … people, whoever they are, they will come to reassure the Russians?” Gem asked.
“Or to reassure themselves.”
“You think …?” Byron lifted an eyebrow.
“This was about murder, going in,” I reminded him.
“So if they come to cut their losses …”
I nodded. Saw Gem out of the corner of my eye, doing the same.
It was raining when we got up the next morning, but the sun made its move before noon, and pressed its advantage once it got the upper hand. By one o’clock, it was almost seventy degrees on the street.
I’d been in the plaza for a couple of hours, making sure I had the bench I wanted. Byron was in position somewhere on the side opposite where I was, aimed the right way to exit quickly. I couldn’t see the car he’d gotten for the job, but I knew it would be something bland. Maybe not as anonymous as his friend—the one whose name he hadn’t yet mentioned—but close.
Gem would be walking toward the meet from somewhere within a half-mile radius, taking her time, the red coat neatly folded into her backpack.
I wasn’t wearing a watch—it wouldn’t have worked with my ensemble: Basic American Homeless. Stretched out on one of the benches, newspapers for a mattress, all my belongings in a rusty shopping cart, a big garbage bag full of recyclable plastic bottles next to me—the sorry harvest I’d turn into cash when the twisted wiring inside my mush brain told me to.
The clock on a nearby building read 1:54. If the Russians had come early, they were masters of disguise.
Gem strolled into the plaza, found herself an empty bench at an angle to where I was stretched out. She took out her red coat and shrugged into it before she sat down. Then she pulled out a thick paperback with a white cover and purple lettering. I’d seen it in her room: The Thief, some heavy Russian novel. She put a notebook to her left and cracked the novel open on her lap. She looked like a college girl, settling down for a long haul on her assignment.
I watched her through slitted eyes under the brim of a once-green John Deere gimme cap. She never looked up from the book. Three skinheads entered the plaza and draped themselves on the sitting-steps, clearing out the section they occupied as if their very presence was a natural repellent. Jeans, stomping boots, white sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off. Too far for me to read the tattoos, but I figured it was the usual Nazi mulch. They looked everyplace but at Gem.
Not good.
A man approached Gem. He was medium-height, with pepper-and-salt hair. Impossible to tell his build under the black topcoat he wore. They exchanged some words, and he sat down on her right. I was so focused in on them that I didn’t pick
up the woman until she was only a few feet away. She plucked Gem’s notebook from the bench, handed it to her, and sat down in its place. Good technique—whenever Gem had to speak or listen to one of them, her back would be to the other.
I shifted my gaze to the skinheads. They were quiet, content to glare at anyone passing by, not talking among themselves.
The male Russian was talking and gesturing at the same time, intense. The female was still.
I couldn’t see Byron. Couldn’t tell if he’d scoped the skinheads.
Gem spread her hands in an “It beats me!” gesture. The Russian male pointed a finger at her face. She spread her hands again.
Suddenly, both Russians got up and walked away. Gem didn’t look in their direction, just opened her book again, eyes down.
The skinheads slowly got to their feet, spread out, and started for Gem, their boots scraping on the concrete.
She stood up quickly, dropping the book.
I yelled “Hey!” and staggered off the bench, cutting them off.
They whirled toward me. Kids. Seeing another homeless man, probably wishing they had their squeeze bottles of gasoline with them. Veterans of a hundred street-stompings of color-coded victims. They were lazy and confident—a pack of garbage-dump bears, their predatory skills lost to Welfare. The leader swept a brass-knuckled backhand at my face. I slipped it, snapped my wrist. The heavy bicycle chain I had up my sleeve popped out. I went with its momentum, whipping the links across his knees. He went down, screaming something. The guy next to him spun to face me, thumbing the blade on his knife open, shouting, “Get the lemon nigger!” to the one still standing.
I backed off, engaging, pulling him to me, away from Gem. He made a couple of underhanded swipes with the blade, but never got within three feet, nervous about the chain.
“Fuck!” I heard the third one shout, but I didn’t look over there. The guy with the knife did, turning his head just enough for me to get in with the chain. The knife clattered on the ground. The first one got to his feet, favoring one leg. I turned quickly. The guy who’d run over to Gem was sitting on the ground, holding his shoulder. The red coat was gone.
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