Gun, with Occasional Music

by Jonathan Lethem

  They took it literally, bless their hearts.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PARKING METER OUTSIDE THE WHITE WALNUT REST Home played me a couple of bars of Hawaiian bottleneck guitar when I dropped in the quarter, but I didn't stick around to hear out the tune. It had been a long drive up into the hills and my head didn't feel so good. My bloodstream wouldn't quit asking and I was running out of ways of saying no. Cold turkey was a merry-go-round I couldn't get off, and instead of a wooden horse I was riding a porcupine.

  I went inside. The place was nice and quiet, all rosewood antiques and bunches of flowers. I found the office. The woman at the desk seemed frightened by my presence, but I don't know whether it was my red eyes and pasty complexion or the fact of who I was asking to see. Both, probably.

  They had him in a dayroom, a pretty one, with windows on three sides and a collection of wicker furniture for putting glasses of lemonade on. He was watching television, or maybe I should say they had him facing the television, because when I moved around his wheelchair and stood in his line of sight, he didn't notice, though his eyes were open. Except for the deadness in what had once been exceptionally lively eyes, he looked pretty much the same. His beard was unkempt, but he still had a full head of hair. I waved the attendant out of the room and sat down in one of the armchairs.

  We sat like that for a while, me watching motes of dust float through the sunlight, him supposedly watching the television. The only sound was the rasp of his breathing. Then 1 reached over and turned off the picture.

  "Phoneblum," I said.

  He murmured like he was asleep.

  I got out of my chair and took the collar of his robe in my hands. His eyes brightened considerably. "Wake up," I said. He put his big clubby hands over mine and pushed me away.

  I watched as he blinked away his stupor. His forehead wrinkled like a question mark as he looked me over.

  "You're an inquisitor," he said. The voice rolled out of him like secondhand thunder, acquired cheap. It was a voice from the past, and I was impressed at the way he could still summon it up.

  "That's right," I said.

  "Very good." He curled a finger and rubbed at his nose with the knuckle. "Do questions make you uncomfortable? I prefer to relax the conventional strictures."

  He was running on empty, but the old routines died hard. I had to tip my hat to him. It was a bluff, but his junk was better than most guys' fastballs. In another setting, minus the television and the wheelchair and the layer of dust, I might have bought it, might have believed he was still in the saddle. But the bright hard intelligence behind his eyes was missing. He didn't know who he was talking to.

  "Questions are my bread and butter," I said.

  He didn't remember the answer. He just nodded and said: "Good. What can I do for you?"

  "I want to ask you about Celeste," I said.

  I watched him chew it over. He obviously knew the name. It seemed to lull him back a step towards dreamland.

  "You remember Celeste?" I said.

  "Why, yes," he answered. He wasn't looking at me anymore. "I remember Celeste. Of course."

  "I've been working on her murder," I said.

  His eyes shot back to mine. "That's a long time ago," he said.

  "Couple of days, to me. I've still got her blood on my shoes."

  I said it casually, but I could see it was having an effect. His forehead lifted.

  "Yes," he said softly. "So do I."

  "You killed her," I suggested.

  "I don't remember," he said. "I killed a lot of people."

  "You loved hen"

  He clouded up. I waited.

  "I don't remember," he concluded. His face fell slack.

  "Try harder," I said. "This one was special. You loved her and you killed her." I took hold of his robe again.

  His eyes cleared and his jaw set. "I suppose I did," he said. "The two sometimes go together." He smiled through his beard. "Women are already split in two from the floor halfway up, you know. I just finished the job."

  , That did it. I'd been arguing with myself, but now he was making it easy. I let go of his robe and stepped back and took Barry's gun out of my coat pocket. It played the creepy violin music as it came into my hand. I opened up the safety and leveled the muzzle at Phoneblum's big chest. He made a good target.

  I watched him struggle to focus on the gun. He had to cross his eyes to do it. His fingers tightened a little on the arms of his wheelchair, but his face showed no fear.

  "Are you going to kill me?" he asked.

  "I might," I said. I wanted to. I didn't know what was stopping me.

  He squinted into my eyes. "Do I know you, sir?"

  There was a long, rough minute while I tried to get myself to squeeze the trigger. The motes of dust in the air seemed to slow down and hover, glowing, in the space between the end of the gun and the beginning of Phoneblum's giant chest. Eventually I saw that it wasn't going to happen. I closed the safety and put the gun away.

  "No," I said, disgusted. "There was a mix-up. I've got the wrong guy."

  Phoneblum didn't say anything. He didn't even look relieved. I reached down and turned the television back on, straightened my coat, and went out into the hallway.

  I passed through the lobby but I didn't sign my name in the guest register. I wasn't in the mood. I went out to the car and sat. It had enough fuel in it for one more trip, but I wasn't sure I did. I thought about the little packet of make I'd thrown into the woods, and I thought about the makery. The vending machines didn't seem so bad from this distance. I tried to tell myself the job was finished, that it was okay to let it go. I tried hard, and I got as far as starting the engine and pointing the car down the hill to the makery. But it wouldn't take. The job wasn't finished. I screwed the wheels around and drove across the ridge to the Fickle Muse.

  I was early. I had to park in the lot and watch the sun set and wait for them to open the place. The sky looked like a bruise. When the guy showed up, I went inside and ordered a drink on the chance it might fool my nerves for half an hour. Beyond that I didn't care. I didn't recognize the bartender, but I didn't have to. The face had changed but the type hadn't.

  He brought me the drink. "First customer of the night," he said, as if it meant something.

  "Guess so," I said back.

  When I got my change, I went to the corner and used the pay phone, then I finished my drink at the bar and went back out to the lot to wait. It didn't take long. The kangaroo looked like he was alone, but I couldn't tell for sure. He wasn't riding a scooter anymore.

  He got out of his car behind a gun. I wasn't surprised, and I didn't care. He wouldn't kill me until he found out what I knew and what I wanted. I just had to draw it out. He walked across the lot and came up to the window of my car.

  "Get in," I said.

  He sat down beside me and put the gun hand across his lap. It was more than a little reminiscent of the first time we talked, in the lot of the Bayview Motel. I knew now that he was a neophyte gunsel that night, making a pilgrimage to the scene of his first killing. Running into me must have been his worst nightmare come true. But all I had to do was look to know that the kangaroo had come a long way since then. There wasn't any great physical change—he might have been a little thicker around the collar, or a little yellower around the teeth—but he was different. I could read it in his eyes.

  "Metcalf—," he started.

  "Don't talk," I said. "I know how it'll come out. You're the big man now, and you know how to sweet-talk. It's your job. You'll tell me the past is the past, that it isn't worth it anymore. You'll tell me idealism went out of style while I was away. You'll mix your threats and your enticements into a nice little cocktail and pour it down my ear. I know all about it. You're Phoneblum now."

  He curled his black lips in a practiced smile. It wasn't part of his former repertoire, and I took it as confirmation of my guesses. "Me Phoneblum?" he said. "I guess that's about right."

  "I've got t
his conversation memorized in advance," I said. "You feel me out about my price tag, about what it'll take to get me to disappear. I tell you I don't buy. You remind me you didn't have to come and hear me out, you could have sent over a carload of your boys instead."

  "That's good," he said. "I like that."

  "Okay," I said. "I said your part. You tell me mine."

  He thought it over. "You tell me you've got dirt on me that counts," he said. "I listen patiently, and break it to you slowly that you and your information are six years dead." He paused. "See, you're a funny kind of ghost, Metcalf. You can't hurt me, but I can hurt you, bad. You're insubstantial one way, the wrong way."

  "That's pretty good too," I said. "Except you got it all wrong."

  "Wrong how?"

  "It's more like this," I said. "I tell you it was a big mistake putting me in the freezer. The events of Six years ago are yesterday to me."

  I watched his hand tighten around the gun again. I didn't care. He was mine now. He'd think twice about a messy murder in the parking lot of his club, and he wasn't going to get a chance to think twice.

  "I tell you that you just made the biggest fucking mistake of your life not sending those boys," I went on. "And then I break your face."

  He brought the gun up, but I brought it back down again, hard, and pinned it in his lap. I butted his nose with the top of my head, and he panicked and tried to stand up. The rental car wasn't big enough. I used my weight to mash him back into the seat, and pried with both hands on his trigger finger. He didn't want it to go off in his lap, so he let go, and the gun clattered down between his legs and tail to the floor of the car.

  He hit me in the jaw, but his heart wasn't in it. He probably hadn't been in a fistfight since our last waltz six years back, whereas my only problem was that my hands still hurt from breaking them on his jaw two nights ago. His main weapon had always been his big legs and feet, but those were wedged under the dash. It was my show. When my hands wouldn't ball up anymore, I picked up his gun and hit him across the mouth with it a couple of times. Then I rolled down the window and tossed it out onto the gravel.

  I tried to talk, but there was too much blood in my mouth. I guess he'd landed a couple of good ones. I cleared it out with my finger. Joey didn't look so hot either. His head was flopped back over the seat as if his neck didn't work. But when I started talking, I could see him listen.

  "There's a reason Phoneblum was frantic for an heir," I said. "There's always got to be someone in his role, just like there's always-got to be someone like me."

  I wiped more blood from my mouth, then took out Barry's gun. It played me the Danger Theme, but for once that seemed appropriate. "Don't think this is for the Stanhunt murder," I said. "You were suckered into pulling the trigger. I took that into account."

  Joey's eyes were big with fear. He understood every word.

  "This is because you picked up the reins," I said. "It's for the girls upstairs in the back room of the Fickle Muse. It's for the six years of wrecked lives I couldn't do anything about because of the freezer. It's for things only you know you did, things you did because you let yourself step into the fat man's shoes."

  "Metcalf," said Joey. "For God's sake."

  "I had Phoneblum in the same spot this afternoon," I said, ignoring him. "But I was years too late. With you I'm right on schedule. Besides, I wanted to kill somebody who remembered who I was."

  I squeezed the trigger. The first shot spread his face out across the top of the seat, but his legs kept moving. I had a lot of respect for those legs. I emptied the clip into his middle, and one of the bullets found his spinal column and put an end to it. Then I got his keys and left him there, and took his car for a drive. It handled a lot better than the rental job.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NEXT MORNING I WAS SITTING IN JOEY'S CAR IN FRONT of the Office. I felt okay. I'd spent most of the night in the hills, looking at the moon, working the kinks out of my fingers, and apparently I'd dried out in the interval. My system was clean. I rolled down the window of the car, leaned back in the seat, and listened to the noise the new day made. I didn't mind waiting. For some reason everything looked good to me all of a sudden. I even found myself admiring the buildings they'd thrown up while I was away.

  After about half an hour Angwine came out blinking into the sunlight, fingering his new card and trying to get his bearings. I didn't feel too bad for him. He was no more out of place here than he'd been six years ago. But I hunkered down in my seat as he passed. I didn't have anything to say to him when it came down to it. I just wanted to have a look.

  Then I locked up Joey's car and went inside. I found an inquisitor and handed him my card and Barry's gun, which played the Danger Theme one more time. I'd come to like it, almost.

  "My name is Conrad Metcalf," I said. "You're probably looking for me."

  Now that I'd been cut loose, so to speak, the freeze wasn't much of a punishment. I was like a hobo tossing bricks through shop windows to get a place to sleep for the night. If I didn't like where I woke up next time, I'd get myself in trouble again, until I found a place where I fit in or they stopped offering me the free ride. In the meantime maybe I'd run across Kornfeld and deliver that punch in the stomach I was carrying around.

  When I was in the holding area getting ready for the freezer, one of the inquisitors got friendly, the way they tend to do at that stage, and offered me a line of some make he was sniffing.

  "Forgettol?" I said.

  He shook his head no, indulging my question. "My personal blend," he said. "Give it a try."

  So the makers still worked, in-house. It figured. I took the straw from him. It meant waking up with the monkey on my back, but hell, it was my monkey.

  It was that rarity, an easy decision.