The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “You serious, huh?” he gasped. “How much he paying you?”

  Murphy counted in his head. “Seven hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Seven!” The Octopus winced. “I guess I gotta double it. One point four. And you actually get the cash, dig? Unmarked bills, et cetera, repeat.” He rolled onto his side and coughed up brown phlegm, blood. “We cool?”

  One point four million dollars. A preposterous sum, more than enough to melt down and recast and bounce back fresh. Wasn’t like they’d miss him down at Château Versailles. It was a big country. “You gotta get me outta town, far away,” he slished, “California or something.”

  “Look, man, one point four’s some dough! Getcha a first-class bus ticket to the state of your dreams.” The Octopus leaned onto an elbow, firmed up his head in his fingers. “You gotta make a call.”

  Murphy walked over to the Octopus and pressed the pistol into his crusted hair. “Sneak me out to California. Professionally.”

  The Octopus wheezed. “Fuckzit, fine. Make the call, kiddo, time’s starting to drip-blip away. Speedy now, Gonzalez, kay?”

  “How do I know you’ll do it?”

  “My word’s straight shit now? Shoot me or pick up the phone, the deal’s the deal, no welshing, get on with it! Scout’s motherfucking honor.” The Octopus sank into the wine-colored puddle forming at his thighs. “Puh-lease?”

  Murphy dialed. A minute later a platoon of heavy boots pounded into the apartment. One of them connected with his forehead. He woke up in the same clothes, sprawled across the back row of a Greyhound bus. A highway scrolled past his window, slick with drizzle and dotted with orange construction barriers. He watched the rolling gray hills and the sifting gray air and the roaming gray cars, lazing through the day like lost clouds. He was anywhere and nowhere, gorgeous anonymity. After a while he felt something move in his jeans pocket.

  He discovered a cellphone, muted, the size of a dog bone. He opened it.

  “Yeah?”

  “Kiddo!” The Octopus was distant but peppy, clearly feeling better. “Got that bus ticket to the bank, didincha? Saved from shit by the one honest crook in all the land, believe dat. You are made, man. You’re a made man, man. Man!”

  “What?”

  “There’s a metal suitcase under yo seat. Combination’s one-seven-nine-three. A lovely year for Bordeaux I hear.”

  “Uh . . . yeah.”

  “Seventeen ninety-three, kid, bank it. Or findjaself a blowtorch. It can be done. But your welder might get greedy, know-Imsayin? Also, ticket stub in your ass pocket takes you straight on to Sac-town, Cali. Didn’t know where you wanted to go, L.A., San Dee-egg, Frisco, whatevadeva. So Sac-town’s your hub. Play it like you see it.”

  Murphy listened to the drone of the bus and wondered if anyone else could hear.

  “Thas it then! Bon vo-yage, fro-mage. What, you ain’t got nothin to say?”

  He gurgled: “Thanks.”

  “Thanks! Cranks!” The Octopus exhaled viciously. “Best thing coulda happened to you, skipping out on that faux French cesspool. Too nice, boy. Too nice. They’d eat you like sautéed snails, watch that S-car go. Later, skater.”

  Octavius Maximus was an adroit businessman, a clever linguist, a strangely honorable crook, Murphy thought, but he was miles off on this one. Murphy wasn’t tender like buttery pan-seared mollusks; he was short-tempered and ruthless with a long motherfucking memory. A bottomless motherfucking memory. A hard-ass non-snail short-tempered Baby Cop Killer with an endless motherfucking memory logging law-enforcement tactics from television and sound racketeering principles at the car wash.

  A fourteen-year-old kid with 1.4 million dollars underneath his seat riding to Sacramento on Thanksgiving Day.

  At the next rest stop, he took the metal suitcase into a handicapped stall and counted the banded packs of bills. A hundred bucks light, Murphy guessed for the bus ticket. He bought all the newspapers he could find and climbed back on the bus, looking for his picture in every section and even the ads but finding only the hand-painted mirror reflection, somebody handsome and mildly sexy, definitely not him.

  Four days later he debussed in San Francisco. Downtown was cool but not cold, the people dressed casual, a policeman walked right by him drinking beer on a bench. He watched bike messengers slap fight in a plaza, then went to a bakery and paid two dollars for the best chocolate-chip cookie of his life. Nobody asked any questions at the banks, just ushered him into a private room, counted his money twice, and gave him pamphlets about financial advisors. He found a small creaky bookstore and bought a stack of guides to stocks and real estate development, the clerk taking his hundreds without blinking, a separate drawer in his register full of them.

  That night he stayed up late reading and eating room service in a suite at the Fairmont. In the morning he’d buy new clothes and find a short-term rental, he decided, start scouting dumpy businesses to reinvent. He wanted to build a lasting place. He would leverage debt, hire a team of financial wunderkinds, and piggyback off profitable, no-lose trends. Thinking a focus on real estate, owning the earth and building it up into indestructible skyline empires. His 1.4 million dollars could do a lot better than interest, he knew this from Big D; it took some risk but not much. And his way it would all be double-insulated, audit-proof, invincible.

  At four he forced himself to bed. So tired he was seeing shapes, evolving phantom amoebas, he hadn’t done more than doze for days. He looped the silk sheet tight around his body and under his back, over his head, binding his legs and feet, locked into physical calm. Still his mind exploded in blissful trajectories, cranes constructing cities, colors blowing out black, and he rocked softly in his sarcophagus until he heard the morning paper drop at the door and decided he might as well get back at it.

  THERMIDORIAN REACTION

  The fall of the dictator so emboldened that large number of people who were determined to end [the Terror], that its continuance proved impossible.

  —HENRY PACKWOOD ADAMS,

  The French Revolution

  The Thermidorian Reaction, as the end of the Terror is called, left the National Convention free to resume its task of devising a permanent republican constitution for the country.

  —CARLTON J. H. HAYES,

  A Political and Social History of Modern Europe

  They put Fanny in the ground amid a full downpour, a ten-minute ceremony conducted in five by a Methodist priest for hire who mispronounced Fanny’s name. When he clamped shut his Bible, they threw flowers on the anchor-adorned gravestone and raced back to the office for a respectful few minutes of black coffee and drying off in the bathroom. They slipped into a taxi before the manager could give Esmerelda the bill and rode home in bumper-to-bumper traffic, an hour of painful proximity standing in for a funeral procession.

  Released from the cab confines, Esmerelda heaved her great wool bag to the floor and stomped enthusiastically to the kitchen for her first-ever Fanny-free meal in the house. Unfortunately she couldn’t find any cookies in the cupboard, and they appeared to be out of marshmallows, so she hit the fridge for a cheese sampler or a side of bacon. The door snapped to a halt after an inch, and after giving it six more increasingly vigorous yanks she looked down to discover a thick metal chain snaking through the refrigerator and freezer door handles, padlocked shut by a Kryptonite bike lock. “Kids!” she called. “We’re locked out of the fridge!”

  The twins filed into the room staring at the floor so they wouldn’t cry or laugh or sock a hole in the wall.

  “Repo man, I bet. Somebody better check out Fanny’s bills. I haven’t been able to give it the proper study.” She noticed the kids’ downcast eyes and clucked her tongue. “Somebody lose a contact?”

  “It’s not the repo man, Ma,” Robespierre said.

  “Hang on, there’s a hatchet in here somewhere.” She grabbed the knife block out from the counter and pulled out a pack of rusted steak knives, serrated bread slicers with the teeth sawed flat, a dull-as-a-t
humb sushi blade, a hybrid slice of metal that looked like a cross between a can opener and a barber’s straight razor. “Raw deal,” she mumbled. “Maybe we can do one of those urban bombs you make from the medicine cabinet. I know there’s matches in the bathroom, lighter fluid in the garage. Marat, why don’t you grab a few of your firecrackers?”

  “Can’t do it,” he said.

  “Come on, hup hup. Dinner bell’s ringin.”

  “You’re too big, Ma,” he shot back.

  “It’s a medical condition,” she clarified. “Metabolism and thyroid.”

  “You’re overweight,” Robespierre pressed.

  “So are most people! It’s like a national tradition!” She flung the knives at the fridge lock, watched them clatter to the ground.

  “Not this bad,” Robespierre said. “You have to lose it.”

  “I’m trying, I’m trying,” she sputtered. “Why are you picking on me, today of all days?”

  “We’re gonna do things differently,” Marat told her. “We’re starting a new way starting now.”

  “What’s wrong with the way we got?” They let a minute of quiet answer that one for her—melodramatic soap opera dialogue running upstairs, the stench of gin-soaked carpeting, the oxidizing Harold Van Twinkle portraits patching the dining room walls from floor to ceiling, the phone ringing and the answer machine picking up and Slippy Sanders whining about where the hell was she, they had a line out the door and an overheated photocopier, they needed reinforcements on the double, drop everything, run.

  “The contract’s done now,” Esmerelda went on. “All those rules are gone.”

  “The contract wasn’t the problem, Ma,” Robespierre said. “It was just another excuse. Point is, if you want to live past dessert, you’ve got to change.”

  “The real question is why you want me around that long,” Esmerelda snickered. “The real question is why I wasn’t invited on that trip to the zoo.”

  All they got from Marat was breathing, long scratchy draughts and endless exhalation, his chest bobbing like a squeezed bellows. He wiped a thumb beneath both eyes and stuck it in his ear. “We’re gonna help you get better, Ma,” he gasped, “if it kills us.”

  “Marat.” Robespierre guided his hand to his side and gave him a quick sideways hug. That face, Esmerelda thought, they had the same conniving, Jasper-cursed face.

  “Show’s over,” she blurted, “and I’m hungry. I’m ordering pizza. And buffalo wings. And a salad for the health nuts around here.” She clicked her teeth and smiled wide. “You’re welcome.”

  They parted as Esmerelda plodded to the phone.

  “The funeral feast is on its way,” she reported a minute later. “Forty-five minutes. I’m gonna slip out of my mortuary garb.”

  Marat and Robespierre sat at the kitchen table and went over Fanny’s finances while Esmerelda tramped over to the bedroom and wrestled with her clothes, starting off a soundtrack of wall-to-wall yelling and overturned furniture; tearing fabric and paintings crashing to the floor; leftover snack plates and milkshake glasses shattering grotesquely. They listened as Esmerelda’s epithets and hyena screams gave way to frustrated pillow tosses and whines for help, moving on to mumbling rambles and, eventually, quiet whimpering. They heard the doorbell ring, and Esmerelda’s soft moan, and the follow-up doorbell ring, unanswered. A few minutes later came the phone call, the answering machine pickup, the angry message. All was quiet for the hour required to finish their review of Esmerelda’s bills and receipts and update their plan for boosting household revenues, at which point Marat put away the files and set the table while Robespierre took a key from her shoe, opened the bike lock, and prepared a Caesar salad made of local organic vegetables and topped with fresh goat cheese and toasted sourdough cubes.

  “Dinnertime!” she called. “You want some, Ma?”

  A whinny like a sick horse came from her room.

  “Well, another new rule is only eating at the table. We’ll wait.”

  A half hour of crawling, complaining, and expletives brought Esmerelda into position. She was swaddled in the festive serape her father had picked up on a Baja fishing vacation thirty years ago, all she’d been able to dress herself in. “Water,” she rasped.

  “All you can drink,” Robespierre said, and went to fix her a tall glass at the tap. When she returned, the salad bowl was empty, the tablecloth was marred with lettuce and loose croutons, and her mother had a dab more color in her cheeks, overall appearing a smidge revived.

  “Now, let’s get something straight,” Esmerelda burped. “I work. I’m the mom. I make the money. I’m like a million years older than you. Which means I’m in charge, the boss, el presidente, the goddamn big cheese. Got it? My word’s the law, whereas you’re a couple of underage ambushing Indians. Now hand over the key to the fridge and I’ll rustle up a round of hot-fudge sundaes.”

  “You don’t get it, Ma!” Marat yelled. “Everything’s changing. Drastically. Your hot-fudge sundae days are over.”

  “We’re helping you,” Robespierre said. “So you can earn more money. And feel better. And live longer. So you can get ahead, and we can too.”

  “Money’s no concern,” Esmerelda said, “I just inherited a house. I feel great.”

  “Actually, the American Merchant Marine Veterans get the house once we move out or die,” Marat clarified. “Says so right here in the will. And Robespierre basically got the rest.”

  “Bull-monkey. Give me that.” She scooped up the stack of papers, flipped and scanned. “She was a crazy old loon, and mostly drunk. This won’t stand up for a second.”

  “Think of all your skills,” Robespierre said. “You’re smart. Fast. Ultraefficient. You keep that store afloat.”

  “You need a raise,” Marat concluded. “We need a raise.”

  “For your information, I ask for one just about every day. Slippy plays hardball, you know that.”

  “Then go get more somewhere else.”

  “I can’t do that. I can’t leave Slippy.”

  “Sure you can.”

  She shook her head. All the years of steady work when she was a Zoog-smoked soul-blitzed faker, no good to nobody, a huge boil on society’s shin. Slippy always spotting, with the steady hours and the paycheck and the health insurance, a fair retirement program, even good for short-distance emergency rides. “He’s done a lot for me, and for you guys too. You can’t even begin to know. One of the best friends I guess I’ve ever had.” One of her only friends, too, and the realization hit her square between the eyebrows, the emptiest moment in a day already overdone with lows.

  “Well, you can make him scared you might leave,” Robespierre said. “That way he’ll pay you more.”

  “We’ve got a plan,” Marat added. He went on to explain that they had mapped out a physical and financial regimen that integrated seamlessly with her hectic life, that she’d find various bits of her day slightly out of skew, but that was intentional, and with a little imagination and energy she’d figure it out in no time flat, burning calories galore and firming up her earning potential, setting the stage for a major payday and whole-life reinvention, which in turn would pay for space and college camp and semesters abroad in ritzy European capitals.

  “Whatever you say, Jenny Craig,” Esmerelda yawned. “I’m hitting the hay.” But without any help the undressing and bathing portion of her evening took a solid two hours, at which point she was far too pooped to dream of gulping down her typical bedtime serving of ice cream, much less trek to the kitchen to prepare the nightcap herself.

  She awoke to a room glowing in light, the sun halfway across the sky, three hours late for work. Incredibly her walker had vanished from its parking spot beside her double-king bed, which meant that digging out clean clothes from her steamer trunk required an inefficient if vociferous search peppered with no fewer than fifteen rest breaks. Actually changing into her fresh muumuu was another hour-long production, with the side effect of whipping her stomach into side-shaking contrac
tions. She limped over to the kitchen and applied tugs of increasing ferocity to the refrigerator door; when that failed to make headway, she wolfed down the assortment of apples and pears left on the counter and picked up the phone. “Slippy?”

  “Ezzie! How’s the vacation going?”

  “What vacation?”

  “Robespierre called this morning and explained everything. Don’t worry, I get it. Frankly, I don’t know why you’ve never taken a vacation day before. You must have a world of stress inside.”

  Slippy’s description brought it to life, the planet of wind and fire lodged in her abdomen that blocked every smile and drained flavor from food and tinted the world with grays and blacks. “Never mind that,” she said, sad as week-old gravy.

  “Well, allow me to give you some day-off pointers. Number one, don’t call the office. The rest mostly involve alcohol.”

  “Right. OK. Just making sure you got the message.”

  “Course I got the message. Your kids are more reliable than you are, and that’s saying something. Now hit the tiki bar and don’t bug me until tomorrow.”

  She threw the phone across the room and looked longingly at the refrigerator, her mother’s fridge, the stubby rounded-corners kind from the mid-1970s. Fanny had stocked it with fairly priced vegetables, bulk packages of meat, pitchers of homemade iced tea, bowls of fresh guacamole, usually a chocolate cake or two, a peeled box of baking soda in the back that she replaced faithfully every New Year’s Day. Fanny took care of the vacuuming, the dishes, clothes washing and dry cleaning, semimonthly dusting; she handled the personal valet services and Esmerelda’s morning wakeup call, bathing assistance and spa treatments, mortgage payments and property taxes and year after year of all the insurance bills imaginable. Three badly cooked but edible squares a day, with packaged cakes and cinnamon buns left out for midnight snacks. A universe of responsibility and diligent execution fueled by something close to love but vividly different. Pride. Filial piety. Guilt. The absence of a better thing to do. All of it and none of it and everything in between.