The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  He paid her entrance fee at the zoo and took her by the hand. She hated him and recalled how Esmerelda had taken the children to the zoo many years ago on their birthday, a disaster of an outing, Esmerelda unsuited to chaperone in her hugeness, the incident at the diner across the street that they cried about for weeks. Little kids had long memories, she thought, like wives and husbands.

  He took her to the monkey house. The primates sat on poles and branches, picking their teeth and sleeping. They were stocky animals, bordering on chubby, and their ridiculous hairless rumps made her feel uneasy. Marat spoke softly to her, pointing out a little guy in a tree hanging by one leg, waving at her, it looked like, when it pooped on the floor. Marat laughed and she laughed too, an unfamiliar feeling, laughter, her last laugh. She didn’t hate her grandson so much anymore. She realized she didn’t mind the monkey house smell either, no worse than a fisherman’s socks.

  They looked at flightless birds, foxes, a bear, otters. A herpetologist was giving a talk by the turtle garden and they stopped to listen, the woman serious and straining when she smiled. Though her delivery was muted, it could not hide the love that coated her recitations of genus and species, the specifics of the turtle lifecycles and details about rare breeds she’d tracked in the field; her sincere affection held Fanny rapt, unanchored, almost happy. She was focused on the herpetologist’s inert description of the Aldabra giant tortoise’s mating rituals when Marat touched her arm and they walked on.

  Marat didn’t say goodbye. He walked her to the edge of the open-air lion sanctuary and said he was going to go to the bathroom, did she need anything? Some popcorn or maybe a cotton candy? She said no, thank you, she would be fine, go on ahead, she’d wait right there. He left and she turned toward the animal prowling the perimeter, humped back the color of fire, two globes of translucent jade for eyes. A vital, baronial beast. The drop from the wall to the moat surrounding the lion’s habitat was about thirty feet, and she watched the lion pad back and forth along the edge of the protective waterway, an incorruptible sentry, soundless but for a quiet and terrible purr.

  This was the place. In the open air near the sea, alone, going with pure nature instead of manufactured solutions like sleeping pills or nooses or ovens. Briefly she wished for a rain shower, but when nothing materialized she took the shallow moat for good enough.

  She fell with her mouth open and sucking air. There was time to watch the lion react, hurtling toward her and widening its jaws, animal instinct in all its beauty. Shrieks from other visitors, the piss-stained air stale around her head. Why so long, Harold? she thought. Why so long? And then she kissed the shallow moat and drew a lungful of water, Marat’s love and the herpetologist’s love and the lion’s primal love melting into her at once, and finally she was returned to the sky.

  The cops pulled Murphy Ahn over for a broken taillight, but soon identified his driver’s license as a Chinatown knockoff, recorded the vodka spewing from his pores, found the Beretta under the driver’s seat, a half kilo of cocaine in the tire well. Fourteen years old, his very first arrest. About time, he thought as they threw him over the hood and clipped his hands behind his back. He needed a kick in the ass, a jump-start, a mental and physical challenge. If you weren’t rising you were stuck, he thought, and gambled his one phone call on Château Versailles.

  He knew he’d made a mistake when Allen answered. Problem was, Allen was usually high and forgot stuff, basics like the way to the bathroom and his middle name. Most nights he played board games against himself and listened to funk in the living room while the rest of the crew partied downstairs.

  “H’yo?”

  “Allen, it’s Murph.”

  “Downtown Murphy Brown. ’Sup! ’Sup!” A slap bass solo cranked over the line.

  “Cool, cool. Listen, I got pulled in by the cops an’ I need some help.”

  “The cops? Shit, what they get you for?”

  “Bunch of things. I only got five minutes.”

  “Yeah, man, got it.”

  “’S cool. Look, I need you to tell D that I’m down at Rudolph Youth Center.”

  “Hold on, lemme find a pen.” Murphy watched the guard at the end of the hall scratch his balls as Allen snorted into the phone, punctuating a horn-section vamp in the background.

  “What was that again? Dude somethin?”

  “Rudolph. R-U-D-O-L-P-H. Like the reindeer.”

  “Shit, this pen don’t work. Call back later.”

  “I can’t call back. Tell Big D.”

  “Tell him what, you’re at the North Pole?”

  “Nah, man, Rudolph.”

  The line cut out. “I get another call?” he asked the guard.

  “One call, five minutes.”

  “C’mon, I got hung up on. That don’t count.”

  The guard took a step toward him, observing his ragged hair, pustule-ridden face, yellow and red eyes like the Spanish flag, the bad-milk stink of small-time failure. “You suck my dick, you get another call.”

  “What the fuck?” Murphy reacted.

  “You heard me.”

  “What, like now?” Not that he was into that faggot-ass shit, but he was used to leading people on until they fucked up, and it felt like the right thing to say. He looked around and tried to look paranoid and desperate, like he might actually dish out a tax-free hummer. It wasn’t hard to fake it with all the coke still in him.

  The guard curled his lips into a thick pink rosebud.

  “Fuck, man,” Murphy acceded, “just lemme use the phone.”

  Big D’s cell went straight to voicemail. The clock on the wall said 12:37, prime party time.

  “Big D, yo, this Murph. I’m down at Rudolph Youth Center in DC an’ I need somebody to come down here soon as you can, get me out. Cool? Aight.”

  He put the phone down and took a long look at the guard. He was wide-waisted and black, with a rectangular Brillo-pad haircut and a sloped forehead like a pitcher’s mound. He moved leisurely, nothing in the world to worry about, his back tilted back five degrees and straight as a prairie road. His hands stuck deep in his olive pants pockets, slowly working his crotch.

  “Let’s go,” the guard said, and pulled open the door.

  They tooled down the green-tiled hall, Murphy in front, the guard a step behind him and playing an extended game of pocket pool. They walked past the infirmary and the mess and the shaded director’s office, and then the guard told him to stop. He picked a key from the chain tied to his belt loop and opened a door and told him to get in.

  Plastic trash cans on wheels filled the room, brooms and mops against the wall, jugs of bleach and boxes of garbage bags stacked on shelves. The guard came in after him and shut the door. Murphy squinted into the darkness and found the guard’s legs moving toward him. He traced the line of his pants, pin-pointed his utility belt, his pistol.

  “You done this before, boy?”

  Murphy wasn’t about to say shit to that.

  “Don’t use your damn teeth. The rest come natural.”

  He heard the run of a zipper, the clack of a belt. Fluids plunged in his throat. “Got some weed or somethin?” he asked. “Shit.”

  The guard laughed. “I got something that might help,” he said. There was a rustle and an unclipping sound and the top of Murphy’s head buzzed black. He fell to the ground and stayed there until a hand grabbed the back of his shirt and dragged him to his knees.

  The guard’s dick was out, celery-thin and curving toward him in the shape of a bass clef. “Don’t be afraid use your hands, your neck get tired. Get this right, I can gitcha all the phone calls you want.” The guard chuckled and pulled the boy by his hair into a musk of piss and baby powder. Murphy held in his breath as the guard craned back his head and stared at the ceiling, held it while his fingers danced and the ghosts of his hands unsnapped the holster and pulled out the gun. The guard’s hand came down too late; Murphy had the gun and fell back into the dark grappling with the safety. The guard kicked at him but he fel
t nothing and then the safety was off and the bullet was loaded and he told the guard that he was getting the fuck out of there now.

  They walked back down the hall with the formation flipped, the guard a step out in front, Murphy rolling along behind, the gun bulging in his pants. The guard led him through the mess to a room filled with canisters of cereal and oatmeal, where he opened a locked door with another key from his chain. They pushed out onto a loading dock, jumped down onto asphalt. The night was cold, and Murphy wished he had his sweatshirt from the car, fuck how was he gonna get the car back, all that coke, the gun? They walked across a parking lot that smelled of dead fish until the guard took out his keys and unclipped one.

  “That’s mine,” the guard said, pointing to an old Dodge sedan with a felt-covered roof that almost fooled Murphy for a convertible.

  “I need my car,” Murphy said.

  “Impounded,” he said. “Booted in a lot under the highway.”

  “How do I get it back?”

  “That’s hard. Gotta get releases, and they ain’t gonna give it back in the middle of the night to an underage delinquent busted outta jail, I’ll tell you that for free.”

  “Fuck.” Murphy pounded his knees and was halfway through spitting a consolation loogie through a steam grate when the guard threw the key at Murphy’s face and charged him. Murphy rolled, righted, and fired, basic police evasion. A poof of blood and sour smoke. The gunshot echoed off car hoods, converting Murphy’s legs into uncontrollable rubber stems. The bullet hit the guard in the head, creating a small slit in his cheek and a large wet hole in the back of his skull. A blood-letting vacuum silence, his body folding onto the ground. Murphy’s mind went to God, God this was wrong, God took away life, and now he had too. God would condemn him. God it was easy. A bubbly sound came from the guard’s chest, and Murphy leaned over and put his frenetic fingers against the guard’s neck until he realized how dumb that was, the guy was clearly dead, and besides he didn’t know shit about taking pulses or what to do afterward, just saw it on cop shows. He sat on the ground beside the guard, hands in his in his armpits, gun on his thigh, panic bludgeoning his innards. His eyes went flat, wan sorry worm-holes. Aircraft throttled noisily through the sky. He realized this translated into serious jail time, probably forever, the privilege of killing not worth it unless he managed to get away. Then he worked the guard’s wallet and ID out of his pocket, crawled around on the ground until he found the car key thrown at him, and got in the Dodge.

  He didn’t think about the parking lot gate until he was there. He waved the ID at the uniformed Chinese lady watching TV in a little hut, but she looked at him closely, then put on her glasses and waved for him to roll down the window. He complied, and then it was obvious this was not Henry O’Dwyer driving Henry O’Dwyer’s car, this was not Henry O’Dwyer waving Henry O’Dwyer’s identification card. When the woman reached for the phone Murphy shot her in the head. This time he was ready for the crackback and smell, the ease of murder, a bloody eraser scrub, and he crashed through the gate and onto the street like he’d done it a million times.

  He got rid of the car in Tenleytown and stole a dented Mercedes hardtop. He turned it to the classical music station and drove the speed limit on local roads until he got to Potomac and parked at the high school, his mind a big blank brick. The rest of the way he ran on foot, cutting through backyards and parks and baseball fields, darting across intersections. He was rocket-ship awake and happy for the exercise, time and space to let thoughts coagulate, burn off the excess jet fuel. He was aware of his guilt but registered no emotional anguish; no brutal images flickered through his head; his appetite was at full strength and his head was clear; overall he felt terrific. The guard was a kiddie rapist but still he was a human being, and the parking woman was just doing her crappy job, and he’d killed them both like that. Weird to realize he was such a cold motherfucker, but truth was all he felt was fear of getting caught and some jogging endorphins, not a drop of sorrow. The gun was crammed in his front pocket, weighing down his pants, so he had to hold up his jeans with his hand, but his legs burned cool and he ran fast.

  The lights at Château Versailles were all on. He rolled over the low stone wall around the property and greeted the snarling Dobermans with his wrists bared. The blood and sweat made them a little unhinged, a little more slobbery, and they swirled around his legs like a dust cloud as he trotted over the uncut grass and past the fish pond and around the tennis courts to the garage. All the cars were in but his, he counted, nobody heading to bail him out.

  Allen was sprawled on a sofa in the den, staring at a rack of Connect Four and bouncing his chin in time with a feisty ska guitar riff. “Seen Big D?” Murphy asked.

  Allen looked up from the game. “Yo man, how was Santa’s workshop? Shit, musta done something right. Put some color in your face. Don’t even look that whack for once.” He inserted a red chip into the Connect Four set and picked up a black one.

  “I need to talk to Big D.”

  The black chip fell in, cutting off a red three in a row. “You know where D’s at, man. Down in the lounge, entertaining!” Allen’s ruby eyes slipped from Murphy’s face. “That a gun? Lemme see.”

  But Murphy was already racing down the hallway lined with moose heads, through the cavernous kitchen where the late-night sous-chef spiced curly fries, past the movie room and the gym and behind the grand staircase to the small elevator beside the coat closet. So far as Murphy knew the lounge could be accessed only by a rickety metal cage the size of a phone booth, a controlled-access security measure that sometimes backed up lines ten minutes.

  He’d never been all the way down to the lounge before, though he’d heard stories about sex parties, boxing matches, week-long poker games, once a half hour concert by Mariah Carey. The elevator ticked as it dropped past the basement, the subbasement, the arsenal, the vault, the measuring room. It slowed, sped up, slowed, slowed, crunched to a stop. Murphy dragged aside the chain-link divider and found his path blocked by a thick armored wall.

  He examined the barricade. It was solid and unblemished with no visible hinges. Thumping against it produced no sound. A smudged screen glowed blue, a biometric scanner. He wiped his thumb against his T-shirt and realized his shirt was stained with grass and dirt and blood, he stank of excrement and entrails, he was all alone in this.

  He took the gun out and pointed it at the screen. He thumbed back the safety and heard a quiet snipping sound, a petite blond woman dressed in a genie costume pulling back the door.

  “Keep it in your pants, sheriff,” she said, taking his arm. She led him into a dark room set up like a nightclub, blistered with heat, deep mauve carpeting, cloying cigar smoke. “Old West rules in this town,” she said. “Check your guns at the door.” The pistol floated from his hand and he drifted into the scene.

  It took a minute for his eyes to adjust. Dim light flashed on a pair of bartenders mixing drinks behind a glass bar, their legs distorted and knobby through the beveled lens. White fire snapped in a marble hearth. Clustered around red velvet sofas on the far end of the room he spotted a horde of blond women covered in sequins—sequined headbands and veils, plunging sequined blouses and form-fitting sequin-laced sheer pants, haunches lined in sequined thong underwear peeking above their waistlines. They wore pink sequined slippers and sat twittering in the laps of men dressed in basketball uniforms and drinking straight from champagne bottles. Murphy knew some of the guys from the car wash—Eli the accountant, McKenzie the payroll manager, Mike in security—but most he’d never seen before, probably dudes from the office, the back-room cage where they kept the drugs. He was the only one from the line itself, where they scrubbed and hosed and vacuumed and sometimes, if the license plate numbers matched up, stuck a potting-soil bag packed with cocaine in the trunk.

  He went to the bar and ordered a double scotch neat. Every last woman was blond, he realized, including the Asian women, the black women, the Filipina women. “Wild, huh?” The bartender
slid over his drink. “D wanted blond harem night, so they gave him blond harem night. Cost a fortune in wigs.”

  Murphy nodded and downed his drink in ten seconds. “Another,” he said, then stood up and ambled toward a rowdy group in the corner by the fireplace. Men were shouting, pounding a table and knocking over drinks, their attending women looking on three feet behind, a cautious row of fake hair. He smelled the women as he got closer, their strata of designer lotions and body oils, and then he saw the masterpiece on the table, coke doughed into clay and used to construct a magnificent Arabian palace, minarets stippled with rimy granules and snot streaks, ornate sandblasted terraces, broad ramshackle swaths where the cocaine cement had been scraped loose and ingested, ringed by the men’s runny noses and runny eyes and runny minds. In the corner Big D sat with his arms crossed, eyes blocked by gold slitted sunglasses. He wore the black turtleneck he always wore, black jeans, black socks, black sneakers. He looked skinnier, his bones more fragile than usual inside his loose skin, his long brown hair scraggly and thin. Like a budget Johnny Depp, without all his teeth.

  “Murphy,” Big D rasped. “Come here.” He tapped the shoulder of the man sitting next to him, Deva the sourcing director, who plucked a cocaine palm tree from the palace grounds and left without speaking. Murphy claimed the open chair tentatively, nervous but deeply tired, an ache building around his brain. Across the table Martin the assistant manager crouched on top of his chair, his Afro headdress flopping over his languorous red-stained eyes.

  “ . . . so I says, kill ’em. Kill ’em! Cuz if that gets acceptable, standards start tumblin’ and people turn wild like tigers, see? An’ we got plenty a Dumpsters ain’t nobody look inside of, plenty a folks wantin’ to make the hit. Even little Frankenstein here, he beat like a pit bull, but look at dem eyes. Ferocious. We send kids out do the killin’, ain’t nobody git us.”