The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “Don’t get used to the sentimental stuff,” Jason said. “I can be a hard boss. There’s a way to do things, and we’ll show you how, and you’ll do it exactly that way. I’ll need to teach you a lot, and you’ll need to listen a lot. A lot more than you’ve ever demonstrated the capacity for, to be quite frank. Sound like you can handle that? Once you get a couple days’ sleep and shave off your blisters?”

  There were other reasons for Jason’s relenting, one of them being a mistaken belief that Whit’s recent near-death experiences—that night, and at the hands of the Lincoln City cops—would have purged him of his rage at the banks, at the cops and the judge who’d put their father away, at anyone who wielded an ounce more power than he did. But Jason would soon learn that Whit’s rage was not something that could be beaten out of him. Or even killed out of him.

  “Can the next endeavor be Third National of Lincoln City?” Whit asked.

  “No, it cannot.”

  “Why not?” Already Whit was demonstrating a reluctance to follow orders.

  “For one, it’s local, and we’d have cops on our tail anytime we came back to town.”

  “That problem seems to have presented itself anyway.”

  “And, second of all, it’s too personal.”

  “What’s wrong with personal? What’s wrong with really goddamn wanting to rob that bank?”

  What’s wrong, indeed? For here they were, months and many crimes later, driving north to find Marriner and cobble together what they could of the broken bricks and crumbling mortar that had once constituted their gang. With a newly unified group, they would plan one last endeavor. And this time, since they were believed to be dead, since the police could not possibly be on the alert for them, they were setting their sights on that familiar, formerly untouchable foe.

  The bank that Whit believed killed their old man was going to be robbed by the dead Firefly Brothers.

  VIII.

  The goggles no longer chafed at the skin above Darcy’s ears. She wondered if that meant they had slackened with time or if her skin had toughened to the pressure. Her eyelids, however, did not react so agreeably: they itched as though the cloth stuffed inside the goggles were infested with mites.

  “I really would like to scratch at my eyes, please,” she said again.

  “No dice. And if you ask again I’ll scratch them myself with sandpaper.”

  She had heard a number of voices, her invisible guards in this mystery room, and had privately assigned them names. She recognized this voice as belonging to The Particularly Mean One.

  Darcy had finished her breakfast, bitter coffee and toast that should have been rescued from its hell thirty seconds earlier. This was the second full day, meaning the third since they’d taken her.

  They had driven her through the city and then on a highway for possibly an hour. Then they had brought her into a house where their footsteps echoed too loudly in her ears. She had been given a hard chair to sit on and was told not to touch her goggles, that someone would always be beside her, watching. It was true; even when she heard voices in another room, there was still breathing nearby. Someone had eventually brought her a cheese sandwich, and guided her to the bathroom. She was given some degree of privacy in those moments but was always told to “be quick about it,” and warned that they would be able to tell from her hair if she dared to adjust the goggles.

  Then it was back into a car for a longer drive. She guessed it was night, when they would be less conspicuous escorting a hostage. Time was unknowable for her—the goggles were not only stuffed with dark cloth but also, she suspected, painted black. By the time the car stopped, she would have believed it was eleven P.M. or four in the morning, would have believed they were in a Chicago suburb or in Oklahoma or Saskatchewan.

  Darcy felt half drunk and queasy, her head pounded by the dueling drummers of fear and confusion. Jason was alive, but she had been kidnapped, and these men believed him to be dead. She had been given a glimpse of a long, lonely, desolate life, then rescued from it for approximately ten glorious minutes before being confined to darkness of a more tangible sort. Memories of the day she’d met Jason kept flashing through her mind in cruel contrast to this very different abduction; the men’s voices were hushed, full of aggression and alarm, lacking Jason’s sunny chivalry. She told herself that the telegram from Jason changed everything, that his being out there somewhere rendered this episode a mere inconvenience, but she didn’t entirely believe that.

  Her mood darkened as time passed. Based on the way the voices ricocheted off the walls, she knew only that she was in a small, mostly unfurnished room. She was seated for hours each day in a wooden chair, her ankles tied to its legs, her calves and buttocks deadened into numbness. She never would have imagined the sheer torture that came simply from being unable to cross her legs or twitch her feet. At night—she knew it from the different calls of the birds, and the humming crickets, and the cool breeze from some half-open window—her feet were untied and she was guided to an upholstered chaise that they brought in from another room. Her legs again were fastened, as well as her arms, and she was given a thin sheet. They assured her that she was being watched as she lay, which did not make sleep come any easier.

  When you first close your eyes, the screen before them seems to glimmer and glow, the vanishing colors leaving an aura of their past selves, like light from a dying star. But as time passes and your eyes stay shut a brute darkness takes hold. Darcy saw the blackest black she could have imagined, a permanent winter.

  This was her world now. The seclusion and deprivation made her too conscious of the rope on her ankles, of the goggles on her eyelids, of her swollen legs. By day her right arm was free, thank God, and she scratched obsessively at her other arm and side. She chided the men for submitting her to this infestation of mosquitoes—couldn’t you at least put me in a room with a screen on the window?—but they insisted there were no bugs, that the itching was imaginary.

  And so, today. She heard a plane overhead. It occurred to her that she had heard one such plane each day. She asked what time it was.

  “About noon.”

  This was a different voice, not The Particularly Mean One but the one she thought of as The Lovable Thug. He had a deep and slow voice, and from the way he spoke to her she could tell that he felt uncomfortable with the way they were treating a lady. The others were tight-lipped and borderline abusive, but she could work on this one.

  “I suppose that means my peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich is on the way.”

  What bothered her was that she hadn’t noticed The Particularly Mean One leave and The Lovable Thug enter. Were they really that quiet? Had she fallen asleep? Or was her mind allowing different scenes to blur together, forcing one character to become another, like an amateur play with too few actors for so many roles, the slain Mercutio rising to play Paris and die again?

  “You don’t like peanut butter and jelly?”

  She had insulted him. “I love it. I deeply admire the interplay of complex flavors. Sometimes I serve it for dinner.”

  “You’re joshing me now.”

  “Well, a girl needs to have some fun. Regardless of the situation.”

  “That’s the right attitude to have, miss. Just keep your spirits up and this’ll be over soon.”

  “Does that mean things are progressing?”

  “I think so.”

  “They don’t tell you much, do they?”

  “I know enough.” Again he seemed insulted, and she smiled.

  The first night, they had handed her a pen and a pad of paper and dictated a message to her father. She didn’t remember what it said, and she hadn’t the faintest idea how legible it wound up being. But the basic message was that they had her and she was safe but these men “meant business” (she remembered that phrase, the cliché almost comical) and that her father should do whatever they asked.

  “I’m not e
xactly close to my old man,” she had dared to interject.

  “Well, you’d better hope this brings you closer to him, dearie.” A voice disguised by a rasp, which she thereafter identified as The Threatening One. “Or it’ll spell big trouble for you.”

  She paused, the pen rigid between her fingers. “And how exactly do you spell big trouble? It starts with a B, right?”

  “Hilarious.” The man had continued with his dictation.

  “How much are you asking him for?” she inquired when they’d finished.

  “Enough questions, dearie.”

  “Don’t I deserve to know what I’m worth to him? Or to you?”

  “You’re worth nothing to me. You need to understand that.” She knew there were others in the room, but this man, the ringleader of her invisible circus, seemed to enjoy employing the first-person singular. “But, like I said, you’d better hope you’re worth a lot to your old man.”

  “All right, but my advice is to ask him for cold hard cash, and no cars.” She knew she sounded flippant; it was an act, of course, but if she could convince herself maybe her nerves would calm down. “His cars are designed to fall apart after four years. Insider information.”

  “Thanks for the tip. Any other wisdom you’d like to impart?”

  “Wisdom, no, but a criticism: I think it’s rotten that you stole my idea.”

  Indeed, this had been her plan for embezzling money from her crooked old man. The Firefly Brothers would kidnap her, demand a steep ransom, and, after they received it, she and Jason would disappear together. She would eventually write her father a letter explaining that she was all right, that the nameless crooks had released her and she had decided that it would be best for her and her father to go their separate ways. She had never been able to persuade Jason to act on this plan—too complicated, he always said—but now these strangers had the audacity to do so. It was as if they had stolen not only her physical person but also something from inside her.

  Darcy sighed as she sat, on the third day, in the room with The Lovable Thug. She liked him. He had apologized whenever he swore in her presence—gallantly but unnecessarily, as she herself had cursed a number of times in his without reciprocating. He had even procured some aspirin and water when she confessed to being hungover that first night. He sounded to be in his early thirties, uneducated, likely an ex-convict.

  “I assume by this point my father has agreed to your request? Payment and delivery are being arranged?”

  “Don’t worry about all that,” he said, not unkindly. “We’re on top of it.”

  “So what’s your name, anyway?”

  “Can’t tell you our names, miss.”

  “Well, I can’t very well go on calling you you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then how do I tell you apart from the others?”

  He thought about this. “I don’t think you’re supposed to.”

  “At least make up a name.”

  “Can’t do that, either.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Boss told us that if we made up any names we might accidentally reveal some part of our identity’r something.”

  “Very well, I’ll make up a name for you. I’ll call you Rufus.”

  “Why Rufus?”

  “Would you prefer something else?”

  “I told you, I’m not allowed to ma—”

  “And do you always follow orders, Rufus?”

  “When it’ll result in a big paycheck, you better believe I follow orders.”

  “How big of a paycheck?”

  “Let’s see …. Split seven ways, it should bring me about thirty or so. Minus the laundering fees. Bastards bleed it out of you, pardon my cuss.”

  So there were seven of them. “That really is an awful lot of money. I should be flattered.”

  But what she felt was worried. Two hundred thousand dollars? Jasper Windham was hardly Henry Ford, even in the best of times. And, from what she had surmised, Windham Automotive had not glimpsed such times in a long while. As the rest of the industry consolidated in Detroit, her old man had stubbornly held out in Chicago, clinging to the gangland connections that kept his workers from causing trouble. But such connections carried their own price, and Windham Automotive was slipping behind the pack. Greed was blinding Darcy’s kidnappers to a certain unfortunate truth: there was no way her father could pay two hundred thousand.

  She opened her mouth but realized, as the first syllable made its mad escape, that telling them this would be a mistake. So she ended the sentence before it began.

  Hoping to distract herself from this new fear, she started over. “Tell me about yourself, Rufus. Something interesting.”

  “Can’t do that, miss.”

  “Very well, tell me something about yourself that no one else knows.”

  “Why do you think that’s any different?”

  “The reason your boss doesn’t want you to tell me your name or your vital statistics, presumably, is because that way I could later give the information to the authorities, who would use it to discover your identity, correct? If you told me you were a former longshoreman from Baltimore, for example, and they have a list somewhere of underworld characters who in their youth packed crates out of Baltimore, you’d be finished. But if you tell me something about yourself that no one knows but you, then it can’t be connected to you. You see?”

  He seemed to puzzle over this, wanting to trust her but frightened of the snares she had surely hidden somewhere.

  She sighed. “Oh, just make something up.”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll tell ya something no one else knows. Once I robbed a dead man.”

  “Now, this sounds good.”

  “It was in Chicago. I didn’t even know about the crash until a while after it happened, ’cause it’s not like I owned stocks’r nothing. But when I got to Chicago I started hearing more and more people talking about it, worrying about it, comparing what all they’d lost. It was weird to hear that, all these people who’d had so much more’n me, and now they’re all panicked that they don’t have quite as much more’n me than they used to. I started hearing how people were jumping out of windows. Stockbrokers or people who had all their money tied up in things they didn’t even own, and now they couldn’t pay back what they’d never had in the first place, and they owed more’n they could get their heads around. Talk about real crooks—and now they couldn’t handle it, so out the windows they went. You heard the stories. My God, it was—”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the stories, Rufus.” She was angry now, but it was her fault for getting him started. She could stop him, but then he might hear the pain in her voice.

  “Well, I’d just been bumming around that day, checking in on some old friends, you know, back in town and hoping to find a lead on work or something, anything. I’d been inside the Loop most of the day and now I’m on Wacker Drive, maybe about four o’clock. It was early autumn, I think, one of those days that was colder’n you thought it’d be. But the sun was out and I remember the shadows, how long they are when you’re surrounded by the downtown buildings like that. And, just as I’m thinking that, I look up.

  “I see this guy—and it’s not like it took me a second to figure it out, it’s not like him being in midair confused my mind’r anything like that. I knew exactly what it was, right away. I’d always figured they’d fall limp, you know, as if they were dead already. Resigned to it. But this guy, his legs were cycling, like he was hoping to ride away, and his arms were flailing. Like maybe he’d actually thought he could fly and was only now realizing his mistake.”

  Darcy was thinking of her mother. It had been five years ago, before death by skyscraper was considered a business decision. Emotional problems, her father had tried to explain to her. Hysteria, then depression. Surely you, too, had noticed. But Jasper Windham had not known of the letter his wife had posted to their daughter only moments before opening that window. She had written to Darcy about her father’s a
ffairs, cataloguing his various sins and even naming some of his conquests. She had failed to produce a male heir, had suffered all those miscarriages after the birth of their daughter, and couldn’t take his blame or hostility any longer. She had written Darcy the letter and posted it from her husband’s tenth-story office while he was away in some strumpet’s bed. And then she had transformed herself into a bird, and then an anvil, and then a corpse.

  “At first it looked like there were two of him,” Rufus said, “because his shadow was right there next to him, flat against the building. But then when he got low enough other buildings were blocking the sun and his shadow vanished. I remember that. Like, suddenly at that moment, he was fully alone. For half a second. Then he landed on the sidewalk.”

  She had visualized it before, of course. But never had someone explained it to her.

  “There were ladies screaming, and some cars and buses swerved into the wrong lane. I ran over and there were about four other people standing near him, but not too near. He was flat on his stomach, with his right arm underneath him so you couldn’t see it. His left arm was out and it was sporting an awful nice watch, and I remember it was still ticking. That’s a heckuva watch. Nice suit, too—navy with pinstripes—and shoes with brand-new heels, I saw, ’cause they were facing up. He didn’t have a hat, but it might have landed somewhere else.”

  “Lovely.” Her mother had been beautiful. Several portraits in the Windham manor reminded visitors of this fact, at least for a few months, until Jasper abruptly had them removed. That strategic redecorating, occurring hours before some soirée he was throwing, had precipitated the first of what he considered his daughter’s “scenes.” Accusations were thrown, then a glass. Inflamed by her drinking, the scenes continued. They were the only times her father seemed to notice her. So he sent her to the sanatorium, as the mother’s emotional problems clearly had been passed on to the daughter. Emotional problems—Yes, Father, the problem is that I have emotions. Treatments were forcefully administered; solutions were injected; stern judgments were issued. For months. By the time the doctors conceded that Darcy was sane enough to be released, her father had remarried. Darcy was sent to boarding school, staying over for the summers, straight through to graduation. By the time she returned to Chicago, she had two adorable half brothers whom she never wanted to see again.