Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  There was a massive billboard taking up the entire length and height of the main hall’s northern wall. After the election results had come in and the billboard had been taken down, he’d had it moved here. Felix Eberhardt for Illinois State Governor. He’s got heart! Yeah, that’d been the campaign slogan. No fucking wonder he didn’t clinch it. Well, some things had come to light about his past, some skeletons the competition managed to shake loose, and that handful of indiscretions the voting public evidently had some difficulty looking past. Illinois might be tough, but it was still the Midwest.

  Then a little farther down, not nearly as eye-catching as a billboard inside a house, a framed photograph of him when he was around Melanie’s age, the day he’d been made partner at Rogers & Rogers & Rogers, which would see Eberhardt tacked onto the end for six months, until that tiny legal snafu of his that involved a near-insignificant – microscopic, really – assault with a deadly weapon charge.

  A complete misunderstanding, you see, but the DA’s office held a different perspective and even went so far as trying to angle it into attempted second-degree murder but, luckily, the judge didn’t take the bait. Deciding the saying about a man who represents himself has a fool for a client didn’t apply to him because he had a law degree, Felix tried his best to explain what had happened, but at the end of the day still got handed ten years without possibility. He ended up only serving a nickel down in Joliet. Good behavior. The best behavior, in fact. Yes, sir. He politely declined each time the Aryan Brotherhood invited him to join their ranks, even as they became increasingly insistent about the issue, he did not make any toilet wine, and he did not subject a single fellow prisoner to uninvited carnal union.

  Joliet. What a hellhole. The same hellhole into which they’d flung the men who’d killed his mother, a painful event which had carried Felix through law school and passing the bar with flying goddamn colors, only to find himself getting flung in there too. What a kick in the nards. And another kick in the nards was to find out that those three men were already dead before he got there, one expiring from stomach cancer only four days before Felix got handed his peel. So, gone was the opportunity to break from his choirboy-like conduct and use Joliet’s intimate confines as a setting to exact some revenge. He just had to sit there. Read. Jerk off. Walk the yard. Press license plates. Repeat. Prison wasn’t as fun as the end credits of The Blues Brothers made it out to be.

  He learned very quickly that while the joint will chew up a guy who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else, it will spare you if you apply that quickfire think-meat of yours toward making others laugh. His bunkmate taught him that. He was a guy who, on the outside, had been all about making people laugh. But, sadly, John had let his hobby of strangling boys and stuffing them under his house get in the way and his career as a clown-for-rent got cut short. They kept in contact with each other long after Felix got released, and a few times John was even kind enough to send along some of his artwork. Felix still had the paintings proudly displayed in one of the guest bedrooms. With John up there with the angels now, the portraits of himself gussied up in full clowny regalia would probably do well at auction, but Felix would never. They were gifts, from a dear friend.

  While nobody in their right mind would consider it a good time in prison, he could say – strictly in retrospect – that it hadn’t been so bad. For some, going to prison really could mess up a guy. A lot of them came out kind of whacky or churchy as fuck or even more violent than when they’d gone in, but Felix emerged with a laser focus about what his future should – and would – look like. Sure, there was that minor misstep thinking he might be the next JFK, but it turned out he should’ve been setting his sights on becoming someone more like Hoffa, the anti-Kennedy. Not lowering his sights, mind you, just adjusting them a little, a lateral shift, a personal rebranding. Felix was good with people; that was the important thing he had to remember. He could talk them into shit, talk them down from doing some shit that might not serve his interests, make them think some shit was their idea when it was really his all along.

  Unlike John and a lot of those guys he’d met in the clink, Felix had neither killed anybody nor paid to have anybody killed. Then. All that came later. While those he’d arranged to be made dead now numbered in the thousands, since he’d been out he’d only personally hands-on done four people in his life. To this day, he could tell you each of their full names, the names of their wives and kids if they’d had any, where each of them lived, probably rattle off their phone numbers too. He used to visit their graves but then gas prices took an uptick that one summer and that pretty much broke that habit right then and there.

  He wasn’t proud of what he’d done, but he’d learned a lot in prison. How to end someone’s life in a time-efficient way and how to make money in your spare time doing it as well. Like a lot of cons, he couldn’t secure gainful employment to save his life when he first got out. He was a week away from living in an alley. His saving grace came in the form of a phone number scribbled on a scrap of paper he’d brought out with him the day of his release – If you find yourself hard up for lettuce, give them a call. What started out as something the kids nowadays would refer to as a side hustle over time became his main source of income and then, a few decades down the road, he’d become the biggest game in the country, managing a stable of two dozen fixers offering service to every state in the union, even way the fuck out there in Hawaii. But here in a few weeks with the turn of the new year, all that’d be over. Kaput. Sayonara. Goodnight, Irene. New thrills await. Nonetheless, the house was thick with nostalgia tonight. Oh, the life you’ve led, you bent old rascal you.

  He really wasn’t listening, but the person whom Felix had on the line was talking a blue streak. They were doing like a surprising number of them do, trying to cram what they were asking to have done to another living human being through the justification filter.

  Terms like principle of the thing and moral obligation got heavy rotation, unsurprisingly. Explaining themselves, saying how this isn’t an easy thing to ask for, saying how they’re not approaching this lightly, so on and so forth. In essence, please don’t think I’m a monster because right now I am trying very hard to not think of myself as one.

  Felix just went, ‘Mm-hmm,’ when appropriate or gave a soft ‘Absolutely,’ or a ‘I totally get it,’ in order to provide the best bedside manner he could to his client. They just had to walk themselves through this part, but sometimes hand-holding proved necessary.

  “You can rest assured my associates and I will follow your wishes to a T,” Felix was saying as he came to a stop in front of his bust of Nero in the library. He spoke to the highly unattractive marble mug as if the man who fiddled while Rome burned was Felix’s conversation partner. “If that’s what you want to have happen, then that’s exactly what will happen. You want my associate to make a seven-day visit then that’s what we’ll do, nary a minute less.”

  The person whom he had on the line talked for a while, more demurring and rationalizing. And then, an awkward question.

  “No, I don’t feel particularly torn up about things having to come to this and I don’t think you should either. Mr. Knudsen only did a couple jobs for me, whereas with you he was pretty much your go-to guy. You trusted him and he broke that trust. Now, that bed he’s made for himself, we’ll see to it that he sleeps in it. Tuck him in, so to speak. Snug as a bug.”

  Felix listened for a spell.

  “That’s true, that is a good point, but we can’t make a habit of letting bygones be bygones. Where will that get us? Eye for an eye might leave the whole world blind but letting jackassery slide every fucking day isn’t likely to improve things either. Revenge may sound like a harsh word, but I only think it’s because of that hard V it’s got. In my own personal opinion, I feel that revenge is not only healthy but perfectly natural.” Felix left the Nero bust to go over to his Steinway. He rapped out a little ditty on the ivories and sung i
nto his phone, “Chimps do it. Crows do it. Even inspired lions do it. Let’s do it. Let’s exact revenge.”

  That got a laugh out of the client, albeit a short-lived and sputtering still-half-worried kind of laugh that was quickly followed with another goddamn question, the worrywart.

  “One of my best people sent me an email earlier tonight, in fact, confirming that she will be the one going to spend a week with Mr. Knudsen.”

  And the client had yet another question.

  “Well, without boring you to death with the details, Mr. Knudsen will disappear like his mama done never pushed him out. Which, while we’re on the topic of corpses, I should probably ask you: will you be requiring any proof of purchase on this?”

  The client spoke.

  “What I mean by proof of purchase is,” Felix said, “will you be requiring a photo of a job well done? We can even do a quick video if you like. Maybe a finger or two that we – no pun intended – hand-deliver to a location of your choosing? Maybe one of his peepers, his sniffer, his nuts, a couple teeth? It’s not all that uncommon for people to ask for their tongue since lies are frequently the reason a visit has been requested in the first place. So, if you want their tongue, we can definitely work that in, no sweat.”

  The client was vehement in their response.

  “Okay, all right, no need for name-calling, a simple no would’ve sufficed. No proof of purchase. Understood. Will this be the only visit you’ll be wanting us to make?”

  The client asked a question.

  “Because, as things are, I’m going to be closing up shop soon. So, if you want us to visit somebody in addition to Mr. Knudsen, I’d suggest putting that request in now because I don’t know if this time next month we’ll still be accepting them.”

  This scared the client.

  “We’ll still do this one, of course, of course, and it’s not anything to worry about, it’s just time, you know? I’m no spring chicken and a good number of my dependable doers are getting up there in the years as well. Everyone’s retiring happy. But I appreciate your concern.”

  The client spoke for a while. Felix listened patiently. A smile slowly curled on his gray, emaciated face.

  “Sounds like a plan,” Felix said. “I’ll shoot over a text when it’s finished.” He paused. “Yes, good doing business with you as well and in the future, I agree, we will learn to vet our underlings with a bit more of a careful eye, absolutely.” A pause. “Goodnight to you as well.”

  Felix never wrote anything down. He kept all his records in the filing cabinets found between the pink folds of his brain, a place where – for now at least – the police could not use a warrant to invade. But he did repeat in his mind what he’d need to know about this job, that the mark’s name was Chaz Knudsen, who, for the next little while, was alive and well in Minneapolis.

  The special request was to heap upon Mr. Knudsen seven days of blinding agony and then, on the dawn of day seven, relieve him of his protracted misery. Of course, if Felix were to tack on his own special request, the client would never know. It’s not like they were going to be there breathing down Brenda’s neck making sure she did a good job, they didn’t want anything at all to do with this beyond shelling out the fifty-eight grand for it to happen.

  On bare feet, he slapped past the mountain of furniture he’d stacked into a pile to block the house’s front doors. He peeked out the window and saw, to his relief, that there was no other vehicle than his own out there – his Escalade, parked in the fountain. It needed a bath anyway.

  Every mirror lay in pieces. Either he’d done it or one of his guests. The majority of the lightbulbs too. He passed through a puddle of broken glass, felt the stings on the bottoms of his bare feet, but kept on, adding other red footprints to the trail going back and forth through the same broken glass, other times he’d forgotten it was there. It’s only skin.

  He cupped a hand over the phone and called out the name of wife number four before remembering she’d hit the bricks months ago. Alas.

  The echo of his voice came back to him, then the quick patter of someone upstairs running around. Felix tracked them from below, picturing one of his guests – he didn’t know anyone was still in the house besides himself – running around like a chicken with its head cut off. What a nuisance. He’d have to go up there later and shoot them, put them down. Everyone has a limit when it comes to mondo. Some end up establishing it for themselves the hard way.

  From the contacts on his phone, Felix selected friend five and as he waited for them to pick up, went into the kitchen, passing the island overflowing with red Solo cups, a sink heaped with dirty glasses, most of which had a dark brown crust resting at the bottom and a few bearing a smudged red lip-print on the rim. He’d let the house staff go recently. Instead of them always buzzing around the house, eavesdropping and going through his things, he had flies buzzing around the house instead. He’d thought about naming them, but like the cleaning staff they all looked too much alike to remember which was which.

  Small, yellow wriggling life in the sink, each hungry for the red stuff clotting the crystal, feasting on the congealing material from which they’d been laid to hatch. Industrious little things. They say don’t shit where you eat but Felix ever heard anybody say anything about never eating the filth in which your mother planted your egg. It’s hard to look down on opportunists, regardless of their genus. They’re just trying to make it through the day like everybody else.

  Felix tugged open the fridge when Friend Five picked up, but he was too preoccupied bottom-upping a Mason jar to say anything. He listened to Friend Five say his name and continued ignoring them as he ran his tongue around the jar’s threaded glass lip, thankful for the final dregs but also harboring a mounting anxiety that this was it, the last of the stores. The sink overflowing with glasses and the island carpeted with red Solo cups and the idiot running around in circles upstairs spoke to how his friends had drank him out of house and home. His thanks for being generous. The man out in the study with the back of his head looking like a stomped watermelon spoke to how the bacchanal had abruptly been brought to an end, but Felix couldn’t remember if he’d done that or somebody else. Greedy fucks, either way. New rule. No more entourages, no more hangers-on, no more sycophants and wannabes. He was eager to secure his line on mondo and promptly pull a Greta Garbo on the world. Catch you in the funny papers, pricks.

  Friend Five tried again to get Felix’s attention, shouting his name, saying, “I can hear you…doing whatever hell you’re doing.”

  Felix gave up on the last laps of the sticky red inside the jar and pitched it across the kitchen to explode against the wall, only seeing the shards go flying in the moonlight pouring in through the French doors, like a miniature Big Bang had opened briefly up right here in Illinois.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Friend Five asked what Felix had called them about and if he knew how late it was.

  “I’m aware,” Felix said, even though he wasn’t. Like the mirrors, he’d decided the clocks all had to die as well. “I didn’t expect you to pick up. I was planning on just leaving you a voicemail.”

  Friend Five, pissy, asked if Felix would prefer it if they hung up on him, let him call again, and this time they just wouldn’t pick up.

  “Nah, that’s all right, it might be better for you to hear good news direct instead of by voicemail. Yes, you heard me right, I said good news for once. Shocker, I know.”

  As Friend Five asked Felix to please go on, Felix picked up one of the Solo cups and used his fingernail to scrape up some brittle brown flakes from its bottom and used the edge of his teeth to get them out from under the nail, savoring them, for what negligible charge the flakes had to them still, which was minimal.

  Lately, it’d become never enough. He used to only indulge on special occasions, a buddy of his bringing out his bottle of private reserve. Then that friend ha
d to go and get himself whacked, leaving Felix with a developing hankering for the stuff and no contacts that could help him get more. So, he started asking around and eventually secured some suppliers of his own he could call on. Like slinging dope on the playground, though, they let the stuff get its hooks in him good and deep before jacking up the price. Fast-forward, some people met untimely ends and then, last year, it was thrust upon Felix that if he didn’t want to go back to how he used to be before he’d gotten so big into mondo and now only knew himself as being consistently on it, which he preferred, he’d have to secure his own supply flow. Break ground on his own vineyard, so to speak. Start stomping those grapes with his own feet. So to speak.

  The arranging fixes game was pretty much over with anyway. Requests were still coming in, that hadn’t changed, but Felix, from experience, had developed a sense for when a bubble under something was about to go pop. Contract killing was so last year. The new trend was going to be all about self-annihilation and providing others with their own self-annihilation. He’d saved a bundle on things like food and electricity, that’s for sure. As he thought of it, he’d evolved past a need for such base needs. Being on mondo full-time is like going caveman without turning stupid. You’re like this primal motherfucker, one giant open nerve that’s on fire and electrified simultaneously. You can see sounds, speak in song, hear in color, catch errant particles of antimatter on your tongue like snowflakes, Fucking Alive with a big-ass capital F and a big-ass capital A. And the dreams. Goodness gracious. Better than a night out at the pictures.

  They keep saying on the news how there’s only fifty harvests left before the crops wither out for good. The weather is getting nastier with us every year. The viruses that scared us all shitless will come back but really mean it this time. The great give-up is what it’ll all be about, in due time. Burn the flotation devices and take an ax to the lifeboats. We’ll go down with the ship, high as kites, blissfully oblivious to the budding oblivion.