by James Sallis
“Let’s run it down. Storyboard it. First you have this guy in NoLa. Dunaway. No doubt about what he’s in it for, you say.”
“Right.”
“But you don’t know why.”
“Again.”
“Different music, different lighting, late night with rain maybe, this Beil character turns up. Has a guardian angel or two sicced on you. And tries his best to press-gang you onto his ship. To fight for the common good, common bad, whatever. Next, a couple more get dropped in, these troopers that Beil’s men were shadowing. The guy at the mall, too? No idea where they hang hats. Makes for a thick soup, my friend. Any others in the cooker?”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“Only if you live long enough.”
Manny took another sip. Driver could hear the producer talking there at the other end, wondered whether Manny was ignoring him or managing to carry on both conversations.
“Do the dots connect? Could be all random. Separate storms. And in the long run what does it matter? The question’s always the same: What do you do? How do you act? Hold on, I’m going out to the patio.”
Moments later, against a faint backdrop of traffic sounds, Driver heard “And are you acting?”
Driver said nothing.
“Because from here it starts to look like you’re hanging back. You remember when we first talked about this? I asked what it was you wanted.”
“Yes.”
“Same thing then. If you don’t want to carry through, you can go away again. Be missing.”
Manny waited, then said: “Grand ideas is what we’re taught. That mankind moves forward by grand ideas. You get older, you understand that nations aren’t formed or wars fought for grand ideas, they happen because people don’t want things to change.”
The thwack-thwack of a helicopter came over the line. Sounded like a weed cutter one yard over.
“Think about it. I gotta go in and make nice for the money man, do the greasy smile and all-there’s your creativity. Maybe we’ll discuss how in the last twenty years the top one percent of Americans saw their share of the nation’s wealth double while their tax burden shrank by a third. Or not. Talk to you soon.”
At the time, both of them believed that.
The treatment Manny sketched out that day for the producer as barometric Scotch fell to the knothole and well below, riffing and spinning the story from whole cloth as he spoke, was about a man who drove, that was all he did, and about how he came to his end early one morning in a Tijuana bar. A hero for our time, the last frontiersman, Manny said. He almost said “a man exempt” but thought that would confuse things. And while the producer wrote him a check on the spot, the movie, like so many others, never got made.
Years later, blurry-eyed and clang-headed one intolerably bright morning, Manny found his draft of the script, which he’d long forgotten. By early afternoon he had a revision. By midnight he had it with his agent at APA.
“It is good to see you again. You’ve given what I said due consideration?”
Radically unlike the last time, the restaurant was at capacity, tables moved in close together to accommodate. Driver thought of New York, how you couldn’t get up without jostling the neighbor’s table. Back here, of course, there was space.
“A single malt, perhaps? An espresso? Are you hungry?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Nothing. Yet you are here.”
Beil looked toward the doors and immediately a server appeared. “Would you bring a small antipasto plate please, Mauro? And a glass of my Pinot Noir?”
The antipasto appeared within moments, as though lurking in the wings awaiting its turn onstage. Perhaps, but Driver found it hard to think of Beil as being that predictable. A separate server brought the wine. Crystal glass, silver tray, linen napkin.
“I came for a name.”
“I see.” Beil chewed at an olive, swallowed. “An agreement is in place?”
“For the moment.”
“Ah. Then we have what politicians, ever wary of pinning themselves too close to the rose, might call a binding resolution.” He sipped wine. “Surely you have a name by now.”
“I know who’s sitting across the board. Not the other players.”
“The one you know is not only out of the picture-”
“For the moment.”
“-he is also of no interest to me. To anyone, actually.” Beil selected a divot of salami, then a chunk of ancient parmesan that looked like yellow stone. “You’re certain you’ll not have a drink?”
Driver nodded.
“Those you seek are wolves. Wolves do not wish to be found, they are themselves the hunters, slipping between trees, out of eyesight, close to the ground. They survive, they thrive, on their cunning.” Beil bit off half an olive, peering into the hollow that was left. “They have been at their trade for hundreds of years. This way of life, it is in their blood, their bones.”
“Their amygdyla.”
Beil looked at him oddly. “Yes.”
“And if I were looking for the big wolf, where would I go?”
“That wolf’s name is Benjamin Capel. And you would go to a restaurant much like this one, though with appointments more…not of the gilt-statue-and-red-flocked-wallpaper variety, but close enough in spirit?”
Beil pushed an elegant business card across the table. Engraved, burnished silver characters, only the name, telephone number, and web address. Harlow’s.
“This would be a good time for you to go calling, as it happens.”
Driver stood.
“You might choose to make entry via the kitchen. A small, wiry man with a nose like a white potato and jet-black hair will be eating there. He’s the gate you have to go through. Please do as little damage as possible?”
Driver looked back.
“The restaurant is half mine.”
Two nights before they ripped out his throat, Benny Capel had talked to his wife about all the things he’d never do again.
She’d made a fine risotta with Parma ham and Parmesan, served it with a salad of mixed greens, apples, and walnuts. Afterwards they sat around out on the patio with a bottle of wine talking. Still hot, but with a breeze now and then, and a bright near-full moon. An owl sat in the pecan tree at the edge of the lawn. They could hear faint music from the neighbor’s house beyond that and across the alley, light classical, soft jazz, something like that.
Nothing to eat after noon tomorrow, and all kinds of things to swallow. Cleaning out the pipes.
A pair of coyotes started up the drive, saw them, and turned back into the street.
“I’ll never sing,” he said.
“You never did.”
“And I’ll never be able to shout when I get angry.”
“You don’t get angry. Not so anyone can see.”
“I’ll never spend hours on the phone talking to friends, never talk back to the television, hum along with the radio. Never whisper in your ear. And I’ll never laugh.”
Janis just looked at him then and said, “I’ll be your laughter.”
They didn’t laugh much anymore, either of them, but he remembered her saying that, and how she looked when she said it, and how he felt.
He’d never forget that.
The discussion in the kitchen had run about two minutes. Even out here, you could smell burned flesh. Nonetheless, Capel kept looking that way.
“Your man’s in the walk-in freezer,” Driver said. “Cooling off.”
A waiter stepped up to a table with two plates of food only to realize that his diners had jumped ship. Customers were quick-stepping away from others. Three over, by the wall, Driver watched a man turn in his chair and pull back his sport coat. Carrying, no doubt.
“This is personal,” Driver said. “I’m not armed.” The man nodded.
Capel looked up. He was older than expected, late sixties, early seventies, wearing a robin’s-egg-blue shirt, darker blue tie, and black suit shot with silver pinstripes that m
atched his hair. He held both hands out to show they were empty, then reached for a small cylinder on the table by his plate. That was silver too. Held it to his throat. The voice that came out was surprisingly warm and inflected. “You would be the driver.”
Driver didn’t respond.
“Did you come to kill me?”
Again, Driver said nothing.
“And with your bare hands.” Capel looked around. “But of course there are knives, aren’t there? Dangerous objects everywhere.” He pointed. “And that man’s gun. A Glock-the new favorite of the feds. My wife says they keep investigating me only because it allows them to eat well.”
“Maybe we should talk outside. Before all your customers leave.”
Capel came to his feet easily, a man who kept himself in shape. He plucked a breadstick from the tumbler filled with them. Electrolarynx in one hand, breadstick in the other. “To defend myself.”
They walked outside, where two cars, a gleaming black BMW and a kickass old Buick, were pulling away. The restaurant sat on a dogleg off major streets, so there was little traffic. Up toward Goldwater a restaurant’s outside patio was choked with young people, misters going full-out. From here, it sounded like flocks of birds. And it looked as though the birds were washing down, drink after drink, food that hadn’t happened yet.
“You, this thing with you, that’s business too, you know,” Capel said.
“Look at it a certain way, everything’s business. The simplest conversation becomes an economic exchange.”
“Yes. Both sides want something.” Capel took the cylinder away for a moment, as though on a microphone and clearing his throat. “True, too, that generally the desired ends are not so transparent. You want your life, and me out of it. As of but minutes ago, I would like the same.”
A black Escalade eased along the street and into the lot. A tall, thin man, pale with feathery white hair, climbed out.
“They’ll have called, from inside.” Capel’s hand lifted, made a slight push at the air. The man leaned back against the van, watching.
“It’s no easy thing,” Capel said, “but I can call this off. I have the weight to do that. But it won’t be over.”
“I understand.”
“I’m sure you do. Neither, then, are our negotiations.”
“No.”
“You’re an unpopular man. Memorable-but remarkably unpopular. You have no friends, for instance, in Brooklyn. Around Henry Street, say, where old women sit on the stoops in their aprons and men play dominoes on cardtables by the curb.”
Capel looked past him. “These would be yours.” Driver turned. A gray Chevrolet sedan coming in slow. Two heads. “The PPD, subtle as ever. Completely anonymous in their unmarked car.”
The driver’s door opened and a man got out who looked like an accountant. Room for half of another neck in his shirt collar, bad tie, wayward elbows and knees.
Billie’s father got out on the other side.
“What you described, how things were getting handled, it had to come back to Bennie. No one else locally has the machinery, the people in place. Figured I’d swing by, talk to him about it. The two of us go back some years.”
“When you were a cop.”
“Before that.”
Bill’s companion was Nate Sanderson, who Bill said had done time in the FBI, then in the DA’s office, before settling in with the department, and had now gone too lazy to move again. Not to mention the excellent pay and job security, of course.
“You found out what you needed?” Sanderson asked.
“Hell if I know.” It was turning into one of those situations, Driver thought, where every answer you get confuses you more. To Bill he said, “Aren’t you missing Andy Griffith back at the home?”
“I’ll catch up next time.”
“What, you escaped?”
“Man walks in, flashes a badge, they’re not likely to ask a lot of questions. One reason I needed Nate here.”
“The other?”
“He works organized crime. Squeezing the rag. Knows where to find Bennie this time of day.”
They were in a cavernous, mostly empty restaurant off Missouri. The handpainted sign out front read only Chicken Ribs, with a primitive cartoon of a fox licking its lips. Those would be some mighty small ribs, Bill had said. He and Sanderson were eating slices of pie that looked to be about 80 percent meringue. Driver had coffee. He watched as a light-skinned man passed on the sidewalk wearing a t-shirt with We Are All Illegal Aliens in bold capitals front and back.
“I can’t seem to find a straight line anywhere in this,” Driver said.
Bill glanced out the window to see what he was watching. “Nature’s never been big on straight lines.”
“Or people,” Sanderson said.
Driver had assumed that once he had the handle, once he made his way to Capel, everything would tumble right back onto the guy in New Orleans, Dunaway. But it didn’t. The road curved, and you couldn’t see around the bend. Capel didn’t know Dunaway from hot mustard. Word came down, he said, “from one of the motherships,” and when Driver asked where the ship was harbored, he said Brooklyn.
Dunaway was from Brooklyn. Old connections? Or just work for hire?
Bill shook his head. “Conceivably they’d lend their guys, but they don’t hire out.”
“Calling in old markers, then?”
“Or favors. Borrow your tool for the day? Could be.”
Came in as a simple take-down, Capel had said. But then when he passed word up the line, he was told the situation had changed, he was to keep his men out there.
“What changed?” Sanderson said.
They sat quietly. Finally Bill spoke. “They have history with our friend here.”
Both looked at Driver. He nodded.
“A long time back. A man named Nino, big up that way. And his right-hand man.” Bernie Rose.
“You killed them?”
“Yes.”
“These guys don’t have short memories.” Bill peered out the window. An elderly man who looked like a weathered piece of rope had pulled his bicycle into the crosswalk, slammed down the kickstand, and walked away. He stood on the corner watching as one car, trying to avoid running into it, slewed into another.
“People will do anything to make their mark,” Sanderson said.
“Maybe just to prove to themselves that they’re alive.” Bill looked back. “But Bennie told you he sent word up the line. Never mind how the job came about. Source, Channels. Bennie sent word, it means that as far as he knew the job was done.”
“But it wasn’t. I walked away.”
“Right.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Sanderson said.
“Not the kind of sense you’ve been trying to make,” Bill said to Driver. “You can’t find a straight line because there isn’t one. There’s more than one and they don’t meet. They’re parallel.”
Cruising away cross-city, Camelback in his rearview mirror, Driver saw a billboard, one of those horrendous new digital ones that changed every few minutes. Jesus Died For Your Sins, it said, above a stylized figure that could be rabbi, priest, or big-hair preacher, hand raised in supplication. That went away to be supplanted by the close-up of a man who had the look of running-for-office about him. Probably born with the look, but he’d worked on it some. Wide face, sincere eyes, hair perfectly parted. Don’t Make A Move Till You Talk To Us, the legend read. Sims and Barrow, Attorneys at Law.
Driver laughed.
Shannon would have loved it.
Minutes ago, he was thinking about Bernie Rose. Now Shannon. Thinking about how almost everyone he knew was gone.
About Elsa.
That smile she got when he said or did something really dumb. Her voice beside him in the night. The drowned-dog look of her hair as she stepped out of the shower and the way she looked that last day, propped against the wall of the empty cafe, blood pumping from her chest.
The cell phone rang. Driver flipped it ope
n.
Felix. “You know someone named Blanche?”
“No.” Driver pulled up at a light behind an ancient van whose rear doors were covered with stickers. They’d been there so long that none of them were legible. Shapes and blurred patches of color. “Yes.”
Blanche’s shoulders lying across the bathroom door’s threshhold, the pool of blood lapping toward him. Not much of her head left in there.
And he was back at the Motel 6 not far from here, standing again at the window thinking it had to be Blanche, no other way that Chevy was down there in the parking lot.
Then the shotgun blast.
Blanche and her accent, saying she was from New Orleans, sounding like Bensonhurst.
There it was: Brooklyn again.
“Blanche Davis,” Felix said.
“Not the name she was using.”
“Lady had a casual way with names. Blanche Dunlop, Carol Saint-Mars, Betty Ann Proulx. Pretty much a moving target, too. Dallas, St. Louis, Portland, Jersey City. Scams, hard hustles. Coupla hinky marriages in there. She got around.”
“And what, her name just popped up?”
“Not quite. Doyle had to kind of stick his finger in there and pull. You know.” Felix was quiet for a moment. “There’s more.”
“Okay.”
“Your man Dunaway?”
Driver waited.
“He’s in town.”
“Where?”
“About four feet away from me. Want to come say hello?”
Driver had gone less than a mile before traffic slowed almost to a halt as one of Phoenix’s epic dust storms rolled in. You felt it at the base of your throat, behind your eyelids, could barely make out the car in front of you, or road’s edge and the banks beyond. Dust burrowed in like guilt or regret, you couldn’t get away from it, couldn’t get rid of it. And Driver couldn’t get rid of thoughts of Bernie Rose. He sat in the landlocked car thinking about that last time, how Bernie had asked if he thought we choose our lives and he’d said no, what it felt like was, they’re forever seeping up under us.
