by Tod Goldberg
I wanted to avoid that as much as possible, so I came around the counter and took his cord. It was too short to reach anything nearby, so I went upstairs and came back down with an extension cord and then plugged everything in.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You weren’t on the machine earlier,” I said.
“Days are better for me. I can sometimes go a full hour without the machine, but nights seem to be worse. Soon days will be worse, too, and then I’ll be dead. No odds on that one, I’m afraid.”
“What do you want with Brent?” I asked.
“His mind.” Big Lumpy clicked back to the Inter-Macron site and began going through each page. “His ideas? These foolish ones he came up with? This sham? This is terrible science, but it is brilliant propaganda. And surprisingly accurate to what I suspect is actually being worked on. That is a rare talent. To be a fool. To be a genius. And to be able to synthesize all of that into a believable package. Does he have any idea what he’s capable of?”
“He’s just a kid,” I said.
“So was I. I took down Las Vegas when I was his age.”
“Everyone does that now,” I said.
“But I was the first. He could do the same thing with just a slight bit of training. You say he goes to the University of Miami?”
“Yes.”
Big Lumpy tsk ed. “Talent like this should be at a real school.”
“I mentioned his father is crazy, right? Degenerate gambler, too.”
Big Lumpy waved all that away. “Michael,” he said, “are you happy with your life?”
“Sometimes.”
“I love my life, apart from the dying aspect, but that’s true of all humans. We have superpowers, you and I, Michael, and we’ve both used those powers for evil.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said.
“I am,” he said. “You could have joined some antiviolence movement, but you chose the armed forces and chose to go around the world shooting heads of state. I have no problem with that, I honestly do not, but without a sanction you’re a criminal, as you are now in the eyes of the law, I assure you. I can show you that file, too, if you like.”
“No, thanks,” I said. Big Lumpy had me confused now. I wasn’t sure what he wanted or if anything he said was worth listening to. But the strange thing was, despite my best instincts, I found myself liking him. He was smart-there was no question about that-but he was also conflicted and lost in his own identity, so I was intrigued by whatever it was he was about to propose. “So, what, you’re going to adopt Brent?”
“No,” he said. “But I could help him. Do you read, Michael? I mean other than books on counterinsurgency and the like?”
“I’ve been known to curl up with an operations manual for small submersibles.”
“I’m thinking Dickens. Great Expectations. ”
“I’m familiar with it,” I said. “I take it you don’t see yourself as Pip.”
“I don’t have much time left, Michael. Maybe I can do a little good. Maybe I can send Brent in a direction in life that would use his talents. Talents that have not been cultivated, as far as I can tell.”
“He did dupe Yuri Drubich,” I said.
“He could dupe our own government with this site,” he said.
“He’s not as impressive in real life,” I said. “He says
‘like’ a lot. And takes Ambien recreationally. And counts Sugar among his friends.”
“He doesn’t need friends,” Big Lumpy said. “He needs someone to lead him. Like you did. And like I did. Or he needs someone to at least provide him the path to a better life. I could be that person.”
“You didn’t sound like that kind of person this afternoon.”
“It was something you said, actually, if you must know. You called me a sideshow. At the time, it just made me angry. But then I got home, thought about torturing Sugar, but instead just polygraphed him for what I needed to know. And you know what, Michael? I felt… gratified.”
“So you had an epiphany,” I said. “You could change your mind tomorrow.”
“Do you want to know how long I have to live?”
“I’d say three months,” I said.
“Could be less, really. My number of epiphanies is limited. I’d like to spend my last days happy, if you can believe it. Maybe I’ll travel. Maybe I’ll buy a spot on a Russian spaceship. Or maybe I’ll just keep running numbers and sending my minions to beat the shit out of people until I take my very last breath. Before today, those seemed to be my best choices. But then I had this… epiphany, as you call it. I call it a moment of reckoning. A moment of understanding my place on this planet.”
This all sounded too good to be true. “I don’t believe that I can totally trust you,” I said.
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “You’d be foolish to.” There was another beeping sound, this time from Big Lumpy’s iPhone. “Do you have anything to eat? I have to eat something every hour or else my medication will make me sick. Isn’t that funny? My medication will make me sick.”
“It’s ironic,” I said.
I opened up my fridge and took out two yogurts, blueberry for me and strawberry for Big Lumpy. He regarded the yogurt like it was poison, then exhaled in resignation, asked me for a spoon and started eating. When he was finished, I offered him a glass of water or some orange juice, but he declined both. I didn’t bother offering him a beer.
“Big Lumpy,” I said. “You like that name?”
“Not particularly.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“I don’t have friends.”
“What about family?”
“My brother, Jeff, calls me Buddy,” he said, “but I hate that, too. But then I haven’t spoken to him in a decade. So he probably just calls me ‘asshole’ now.”
It was weird to think of someone like Big Lumpy having a brother. Or parents. People like him just seem to exist outside of the normal world sometimes. “Anyone ever call you Mark anymore?”
“No,” he said, “no one calls me Mark anymore. Not in a million years.”
I’ve never trusted adults with nicknames. If you want to hold on to some childish thing, make it that you look both ways before crossing or that you are slavishly dedicated to making others share. But letting yourself be called something like Big Lumpy suggests a larger emotional problem. Which it was clear Big Lumpy had. Here he was nevertheless, as raw and vulnerable as a newborn. I could step on his oxygen line and he’d be dead. Or I could just shoot him. Or break his neck. He’d come unarmed and alone into an enemy war zone.
He was acting like a person with nothing to lose, which I suppose was true.
“So, Mark,” I said, “tell me what you want to do.” Big Lumpy made a few clicks on his computer again. “Yuri Drubich, you recognize, is not a positive part of international relations. He deals with terrorists. As much as I don’t care for working for our government, that has more to do with pay rates and backstabbing than some jihad madness, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
“I can.”
“So you didn’t really blow up a preschool in Panama?”
“No,” I said.
“Good to know,” he said. “I’d like to represent your interests to Yuri. Tell him I’m the man behind the plan and that I have all of the actual information, but that it will cost him. What sounds like a good round number?”
“Four million?”
“That’s not a round number. Six has more curves.”
“So he pays. You give him the information and then when he finds out it’s bunk, what then?”
“You get him for purchasing government secrets with the intent of distribution to terrorists.”
“But this isn’t a government secret,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “But when I share Brent’s ideas with a few associates of mine in the NSA, it certainly will be. His broad ideas for transference are nothing short of profound. Just because they are theoretical doesn’t mean the
y aren’t inherently plausible.”
Or valuable. I wasn’t sure what angle Big Lumpy was working. Part of me wanted to believe that there was this new soft core of altruism inside the artist formerly known as Mark McGregor. And part of me knew that I was dealing with a man who played incredible odds in every part of his life. What was the bet here? And who got the payoff? At the worst, this was a suicide mission on Big Lumpy’s part. At the best, it was a path toward freedom for Brent, if indeed that was what Brent wanted. What nineteen-year-old knows what he wants, after all?
“And who gets the money?”
“I do,” he said. “And then I leave it to Brent, with a few provisos.”
“If I say no, what then?”
Big Lumpy spun his computer back toward me. On the screen was a satellite image of a house. I didn’t recognize it, so I pulled the image back until I began to see recognizable landmarks: the Stratosphere Casino, the Luxor Pyramid, the stretch of cars along the Las Vegas Strip. The house didn’t look familiar because I’d never actually been to Nate’s place in Las Vegas.
“Your brother Nate still owes me money, but I’ve taken that as a loss,” Big Lumpy said. “No use crossing state lines just for a few hundred dollars. Killing someone, that’s a reason to travel. Do you know what he used as his call-in code? Goldfinger007. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Hysterical.”
“I’m a reasonable man now, Michael,” Big Lumpy said. “And I’m a serious man. I trust that we have a partnership?”
“I can’t tell you what Brent will decide,” I said.
“You’re basically asking him to sit beside you and learn how to be an evil genius. Kids today, they have their own ambitions.”
“He’ll have choices. Good or bad genius is still genius. He can be good if he wants, too. You must know that eventually someone will come along to try to corrupt him, if he’s not dead before then.”
Big Lumpy had a very good point. A man like Yuri Drubich, even if he was arrested and imprisoned by the American government, would still be able to come at a person. He’d keep coming for as long as it took. It was a compelling argument.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “What about Sugar?”
“He’s an exceptionally annoying person.”
“I shot him once,” I said.
“You should have finished the job.” Big Lumpy got up from his seat and began to make his way to the front door, then realized he was still plugged in and waited for me to unhook him from the extension cord. He was an odd combination of extreme smarts and confounding helplessness. He was strong of mind but incredibly weak of body, so he was smart enough to threaten Nate’s life, smart enough to know that I was powerless to stop anything from happening to Nate three thousand miles away and blacklisted from conventional air travel, but too weak to do anything himself. Like take a breath, for instance. Or kill Nate.
It’s hard to kill someone once they’ve stopped being an object and started being a person, which is likely what Nate now was to Big Lumpy. But he wouldn’t be the one killing him. He’d just hire that out. If nothing else, I’d come to know that Big Lumpy was a man who covered all of his possible angles. I could muscle him if need be, but I wouldn’t outthink him.
I helped him to the door. When I opened it, his assistant was waiting on the landing with Sugar. Or someone who I presumed was Sugar. It was hard to be definitive since he had a canvas bag over his head and his torso was wrapped in what looked to be the plastic wrap commonly used by movers.
“He’s unhurt, at least physically,” Big Lumpy said.
“And there’s nothing there emotionally to tarnish, so I suspect he’s fine.”
“Nice of you to wrap him up for me,” I said. I watched as Big Lumpy was helped down the stairs by his manservant-I really needed to get one of those-and was struck by how difficult it was going to be to explain all of this to Sam and Fiona, when Big Lumpy stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back up at me.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“Trusting me. No one trusts me.”
“I’m not sure that I do. You did threaten to kill my brother after all.”
“It’s just part of the odds. You know that.”
“I suppose I do. I just don’t want to take a bad beat like Henry Grayson.”
“You won’t,” he said. “We’ll speak tomorrow and in a few days all of this will be over and I’ll be dead or dying and your friend Brent will have a new life. Isn’t that nice?”
Big Lumpy didn’t wait for my reply. He and his assistant walked through the courtyard and out into the street, climbed into the white Escalade and were gone. I pulled the canvas bag off of Sugar’s head and saw that they’d also duct-taped his mouth and stuffed his ears with cotton. That they hadn’t just cut out his tongue was probably only due to Big Lumpy’s new world-view. I ripped the duct tape off of Sugar’s mouth and he immediately began apologizing, making threats and essentially babbling incoherently, so I put the tape back over his mouth, but pulled the cotton out of his ears.
“Sugar,” I said, “I want you to listen to me. You ever tell anyone who I am, where I live or even the color of my eyes again, and I’ll kill you myself. We clear?”
Sugar nodded his head. It was about all he could do, since he was still wrapped in plastic.
“All right,” I said. “Come on in and I’ll make you some yogurt.”
11
The first kamikazes, the first fighters willing to commit suicide in order to defeat their opponents, are generally thought to have been the Jewish Sicarii and the Islamic Assassins. Unlike modern-day suicide bombers, the Sicarii and the Assassins weren’t required to die in order to do their jobs, but if that was what happened, so be it. Undertaking a suicide mission requires a different psychological makeup than merely putting yourself in a position where you might die as a result of your actions.
With someone like Big Lumpy, however, where his death was already foretold, taking a risk like presenting himself to Yuri Drubich in order to defraud him was an entirely different beast. He could die in the process, but maybe it would be a less painful way to go than via whatever was eating him from the inside out. No matter how this all played out, Big Lumpy was a dead man. And in the end, if he went for it, Brent’s father’s debts would be gone, he’d be able to get the help he needed, and Brent would have choices about how to use his talents. Or at least he’d have the financial security to make choices. I couldn’t imagine what Big Lumpy’s provisos would be, as he said, but they’d hardly be enforceable with violence after he was dead.
“What sort of person goes by Big Lumpy?” my mother asked.
It was the next morning and I’d just finished explaining to Brent (and a befuddled Sugar… and my chain-smoking mother) the deal Big Lumpy was offering him, right down to the potential for millions of dollars. We were sitting at the same kitchen table where I’d had eight thousand conversations with my own mother and father about how crime doesn’t pay. The same table where Fiona and Sam-who were on their way over to take Brent to school-and I had planned more than one enterprise that might normally be considered criminal if we weren’t such good law-abiding citizens… or, well, at least Sam and I were, in any case.
I hadn’t mentioned to my mother that Nate was being threatened in all of this, figuring that all things being equal, she really didn’t need to know that Nate was also into a psychopath-or a former psychopath, as it were-for some marginal sum of money. Parents really don’t need to know everything about their children.
“It’s a nickname,” I said. “Because of his huge brain.”
“What about you, Sugar?” my mother asked. “Why do people call you that?”
“I’m sweet, Mrs. Westen,” he said.
“Isn’t that nice,” she said. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Brent tells me you used to live under Michael’s place. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“It’s a small world,” he said.
/>
“So you’re the drug dealer, then, that he had to shoot?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You know. We all got checkered pasts, right, Mike?”
“You don’t have a checkered past,” I said. “You have a checkered present. You really do need to consider another line of work, Sugar. Eventually someone is going to have better aim and will get you in the head.”
“I was thinking maybe I’d go back to school. Hit up twelfth grade again at night school and then just bounce once I get my paper. You know, but I gotta get mine until then. I’m going to get up out of that game when I can, Mike, on the real. Soon as I get a new ride.”
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, “but I have no idea what you just said. Could you interpret into English for me, Michael?”
The thing about my mother was that she could be lost and adrift and then she could just seem to be lost and adrift. It was a good defense mechanism and a good way of putting people like Sugar in their place. She would have made a good preschool teacher or Cossack.
“He’s going to quit dealing drugs just as soon as he gets his high school diploma and a new car,” I said, “but not in that order, I suspect.”
“And do you also call yourself Sugar because you sell cocaine?” she asked.
“Allegedly,” he said.
My mother turned to Brent. “If you’re smart,” she said, “you’ll get him out of your life as soon as possible.”
Brent shrugged. If he could figure out a way to convey the word “like” by using a repetitive body action, he’d have the basis of his entire emotional range covered.
“Anyway,” I said to my mother, “Big Lumpy is a genius. Geniuses get to call themselves whatever they want. Though my understanding is that he doesn’t actually care for the name, if it makes you feel any better, Ma.”
“He might be all smart and stuff,” Sugar said, “but he’s mean.”
“He let you live,” I said. “He didn’t need to do that.”
“Whatever,” he said. “He wrapped me in plastic wrap like I was a sandwich or some shit. That’s messed up, yo.”
Through all of this Brent was strangely silent. “So,” I said, “what do you think, Brent?”
