When the Nines Roll Over

by David Benioff

  “What happened next?” Leksi asked the old woman. He couldn’t remember if there had been an epilogue.

  The old woman stopped walking and looked skyward. A blackbird squawked on a pine branch above them. “Nobody knows. Some say the Devil swam under the ice and back to Hell. They say that every winter he returns, looking for Aminah, calling out her name.”

  The Devil really loved her, decided Leksi. He always rooted for the bad men in fairy tales and movies, not because he admired them but because they had no chance. The bad men were the true underdogs. They never won.

  Leksi and the old woman stood motionless, their breath curling about their heads like genies. Leksi heard growls and turned to see where they came from. In the shadow of a great boulder twenty meters away three dogs feasted on a deer’s still-steaming intestines. Each dog seemed to sense Leksi’s gaze at the same time; they lifted their heads and stared at him until he averted his eyes.

  Leksi looked uphill and realized they were no longer standing on a hill. Panicked, he searched for footprints, but there were none on the gully’s wet stones. How long had they walked in the stream? Where had they entered it? All the tall pine trees looked identical to him; they stretched on for as far as the eye could see. Nothing but trees and melting snow littered with broken twigs and pinecones. The dogs watched him and the blackbird squawked and Leksi knew he was lost. He strapped the rifle over his shoulder, pulled off a glove, and began fumbling in his parka’s pockets for his compass. The old woman turned to look at him and Leksi tried to remain as calm as possible. He pulled out the compass and peered at it. He determined true north and then closed his eyes. It didn’t matter. He had no idea in which direction the house lay. Knowing true north meant nothing.

  The old woman smiled at him when he opened his eyes. “It’s an old story. Of course,” she said, letting the shovel’s long handle fall onto the wet rocks, “some people say there is no Devil.”

  Leksi sat on the bank of the now bustling stream. If he could organize his thoughts, he believed, everything would be all right. Unless he organized his thoughts he would die here in the nighttime, the snow would drift over his body and only the dogs would know where to find him. He stared at his lap to rest his eyes from the glare. Feeling hot, he laid his rifle on the ground and shrugged out of his parka. The sun was heavy on his face and he could feel his pale cheeks beginning to burn. He listened to the countryside around him: the dogs snarling at the blackbirds; the blackbirds flapping their wings; the running water; the pine branches creaking. He sat in the snow and listened to the countryside around him.

  When he finally raised his head the old woman was gone, as he knew she would be. Her shovel was half-submerged in the stream, its handle wedged between two rocks, its metal blade glinting below water like the scale of a giant fish. The sun rose higher in the sky and the snow began to fall from the trees. Leksi stood, pulled on his parka, picked up his rifle, and started wading upstream, searching for the spot where his footprints ended.

  He hadn’t gone far when he heard a whistle. He crouched down, fumbling with the rifle, trying to get his gloved finger inside the trigger guard.

  “Relax, Leksi.” It was Nikolai, squatting by the trunk of a dead pine. The tree’s bare branches reached out for the blue sky. Nikolai tapped off the ash of the cigar he was smoking. He was in shirtsleeves, his rifle strapped over one shoulder.

  “You followed me,” said Leksi.

  The older soldier did not reply. He squinted into the distance beyond Leksi and Leksi followed his gaze, but there was nothing to be seen. A moment later a single gunshot echoed across the valley floor. Nikolai nodded, stood up, and stretched his arms above his head. He picked a bit of loose tobacco off his tongue and then tramped through the snow to the stream. Leksi, still in his crouch, watched him come closer.

  Nikolai pulled the shovel out of the water and held it up. “Come over here, my friend.”

  Leksi heard singing behind him. He turned to find Surkhov marching toward them, singing “Here Comes the Sun,” twirling a silver chain with a black cameo on its end.

  Nikolai smiled and held out the shovel. “Come here, Aleksandr. You have work to do.”

  ZOANTHROPY

  Whenever a lion was spotted prowling the avenues, the authorities contacted my father. He had a strange genius for tracking predators; he made a lifelong study of their habits; he never missed an open shot.

  There is a statue of him in Carl Schurz Park, a hulking bronze. He stands, rifle slung casually over his shoulder, one booted foot atop a dead lion’s haunches. A simple inscription is carved on the marble pedestal: MacGregor Bonner / Defender of the City. The statue’s proportions are too heroic—no Bonner ever had forearms like that—but the sculptor caught the precise angle of my father’s jawline, the flat bridge of his nose, the peacemaking eyes of a man who never missed an open shot.

  In the old days, the media cooperated with the authorities—nobody wanted to spark a panic by publishing news of big cats in the streets. That attitude is long gone, of course. Every photographer in the country remembers the New York Post’s famous shot of the dead lion sprawled across the double yellow lines on Twenty-third Street, eyes rolled white, blood leaking from his open jaws, surrounded by grinning policemen, below the banner headline: “Bagged!” My father was the triggerman; the grinning policemen were there to keep the crowds away.

  So it’s sacrilege to admit, but I always rooted for the cats’ escape. A treasonous confession, like a matador’s son pulling for the bull, and I don’t know what soured me on my father’s business. A reverence for exiled kings, I suppose, for the fallen mighty. I wanted the lions to have a chance. I wanted them to live.

  All good stories start on Monday, my father liked to say, a line he inherited from his father, a Glasgow-born minister who served as a chaplain for the British troops in North Africa and later moved to Rhodesia, where my father was born. For my grandfather, the only story worth reading was the holy one, King James Version. My father rejected the God of the book in favor of empirical truth. He never understood my obsession with fictions, the barbarians, starships, detectives, and cowboys that filled the shelves of my childhood room. He purged his mind of fantasy only to watch his lone child slip back into the muck.

  This story starts on Tuesday. I was twenty years old. On bad afternoons I sometimes found myself where I had not meant to go: lying on the dead grass in Bryant Park with a bottle of celery soda balanced on my chest; inside a Chinese herb store breathing exotic dust; riding the subway to the end of the line, Far Rockaway, and back. The bad days came like Churchill’s black dogs; they paced the corridor outside my bedroom, raking the carpet with their claws. The bad days chewed the corners. When my corners got too chewed for walking, I took a taxi to the Frick Museum, stood in front of Bellini’s Saint Francis, and waited for the right angles to return.

  On this bad Tuesday I stared at Saint Francis and Saint Francis stared into the sky, hands open by his side, head tilted back, lips parted, receiving the full favor of the Lord. Bellini shows the man at the moment of his stigmatization, the spots of blood sprouting from his palms. I don’t think I’m being vulgar or inaccurate when I say that the saint’s expression is orgasmic—the Rapture of divine penetration. The animals are waiting for him, the wild ass, the rabbit, the skinny-legged heron—they want to have a word with him, they see that Francis is in ecstasy and they’re concerned. From the animal perspective, I think, nothing that makes you bleed is a good thing. The rabbit, especially, watches the proceedings with extreme skepticism.

  After an hour things inside my brain sorted themselves out, the thoughts began to flow with relative order, my bladder swelled painfully. In the restroom, I locked myself in the toilet stall, did my business, closed the seat, and sat down for a smoke.

  The stall walls were covered with names and dates, a worldly graffiti: Rajiv from London, Thiago from São Paulo, Sikorsky from Brooklyn.

  Someone rapped on the door. “Occupied,” I said.<
br />
  “You’ll have to put out the cigarette, sir. No smoking in the museum.”

  I took a final long drag, stood, lifted the toilet seat, and flushed the butt. When I opened the stall door the guard was still standing there, a tired-looking kid about my age, batwing-eared, narrow-shouldered, his maroon blazer two sizes too large. He stared at me sadly, hands in his pockets.

  “You smoke Lucky Strikes,” he said. “I could smell them from the hallway. They used to be my brand.” He spoke with a forlorn air, as if the real meaning of his words were, You slept with Cindy. She used to be my girlfriend. “Hey,” he added, smiling, “the Saint Francis man.”

  I squinted at him and he nodded happily.

  “You’re the guy who always comes and stands by that Saint Francis painting. What’s the matter, you don’t like the other stuff?”

  “I like The Polish Rider.”

  I was spending too much time in this place. The Frick made for a cheap afternoon with my student discount—I had dropped out of NYU after a term but kept my ID. I hated the idea that people were watching me. Perhaps I had grown too dependent on Saint Francis. I walked over to the sink to wash my hands.

  “Me too, I like that one. Well, listen, sorry about busting you. It’s pretty high school. Detention! But I’ve only been working here a couple weeks and, you know.”

  He held the door open for me and I thanked him, exited the bathroom, drying my hands on the seat of my corduroys. The guard followed me, walking with a bowlegged strut as though he had six-guns strapped to his waist. “The thing about Lucky Strikes, they have this sweetness, this . . . I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “You’re not from New York, are you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where are you from?”

  He grinned, jangling the heavy key ring dangling from his belt. “Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. What, I have hay in my hair?” His Bethlehem had two syllables: beth-lem.

  We were in the garden courtyard now, a beautiful pillared room with an iron trelliswork skylight and a fountain in the center where stone frogs spitting water flanked a giant marble lily pad. I sat down on a bench and watched the frogs. The guard stood behind me, fiddling with his black tie. He seemed lonely. Or gay. Or both.

  “So you’re an artist?” I asked him. “You’re in school here?”

  “Nah. I don’t think I could look at paint after being in this place all day. Nope, not for me.”

  “Actor?”

  “Nope, nothing like that. It’s—”

  We both saw the lion at the same time, padding below the colonnade on the far side of the courtyard, yellow eyes glimmering in the shadows, claws click-clacking on the floor. He rubbed his side back and forth against a pillar before limping to the fountain. The lion looked unwell. His mane was tangled and matted down; an open red sore marred one shoulder; his ribs seemed ready to poke through his mangy fur. He stared at us for several seconds before dipping his muzzle to the water and drinking, huge pink tongue lapping up the frog spit. His tail swayed like a charmed cobra. After satisfying his thirst he looked at us again, and—I swear—winked. He left the same way he came.

  “Lion,” said the guard. What else could he say?

  Neither of us moved for a minute. We heard screams from the other rooms. People ran through the courtyard in every direction, hollering in foreign languages. A small girl in a dress printed with giant sunflowers stood alone beneath the colonnade, hands covering her ears, eyes clenched shut.

  They closed the museum for the remainder of the afternoon and all of us witnesses had to answer questions for hours—the police, the Park Service rangers, the television and newspaper reporters. I was interviewed on camera and then stood to the side, listening to the other accounts. A group of schoolchildren and chaperones from Buffalo had seen the lion walk out the museum’s front door, search the sky like a farmer hoping for rain clouds, and walk slowly east. A bicycle courier spotted the lion on Park Avenue and promptly pedaled into a sewer grate, flipping over the handlebars and smashing his head against the curb. He spoke to the reporters while a paramedic wrapped gauze bandages around his forehead. After Park Avenue the lion seemed to disappear. A special police unit had scoured the surrounding blocks and found nothing. New Yorkers were being advised to stay indoors until further notice, advice that nobody took.

  After all the interviews were over, the guard found me sitting on the bench by the frog fountain. “That was something,” he said. “I need a beer. You want to get a beer somewhere?”

  “I do,” I said. “I really do.”

  We went to the Madison Pub, a dark old speakeasy where the gold-lettered names of long-dead regulars scrolled down the walls. We didn’t say much during the first beer, didn’t even exchange names until the food came.

  “Louis Butchko,” I said, repeating the name to help me remember it. My father had taught me that trick.

  “Mm.” He was chewing on a well-done cheeseburger. “Most people call me Butchko.”

  “He winked at us. Did you notice that? The lion, he winked.”

  “Hm?”

  “I’m telling you, I saw him wink. He looked right at us and winked.”

  “Maybe. I didn’t see it. One thing’s for sure,” he said, licking his lips, “they didn’t mention lions when I applied for the job. Mostly they’re afraid of people touching the paintings.”

  “He winked.”

  “I thought maybe a lunatic splashing yellow paint on the Titians, something like that, but lions? I ought to get, what do they call it, danger pay? Hazard pay?”

  The bartender, an old Cypriot with dyed-black hair who had worked in the Pub since my father first took me there as a child, rubbed down the zinc bartop with a rag and a spray bottle. He whistled a tune that I could not place, a famous melody. It was maddening, the simple, evasive music.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked Butchko.

  “New York? Nine months. Down on Delancey.”

  “I like that neighborhood. You mind if I ask what you’re paying?”

  He took the pickle off his bun and offered it to me. It was a good pickle. “One-fifty.”

  “One-fifty? What does that mean?”

  “One hundred and fifty dollars. A month.”

  I stared at him, waiting for an explanation.

  “Come over and see the place sometime. I got a great deal. I met the superintendent and we worked it out. You know, New York is very expensive.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I didn’t really have the money to move here, but it’s one of the requirements. As a title holder.”

  “What title?” I examined his scrawny neck, his small white hands. “You’re not a boxer?”

  “Nope.” He smiled, bits of blackened beef on his lips, in his teeth. “Nothing like that.”

  “You’re going to make me guess? You’re Anastasia, daughter of the czar?”

  “It’s something I kind of have to keep a low profile about. No publicity.”

  I sighed and waited.

  “All right,” he said, “all right. But you can’t go around telling people. It’s part of the deal, I have to keep it undercover. I’m the Lover,” he said, beaming a little in spite of himself.

  “Okay,” I said. “Whose lover?”

  “No, the Lover. Capital L.”

  “Right,” I said, finishing my beer. The bartender, quartering limes, kept whistling his one song. “You’re a porn star.”

  “No,” he said, offended. “Nothing like that.” He looked around the shadowy barroom, making sure nobody was within hearing distance. “The Lover of the East Coast. I’m the Greatest Lover on the East Coast. Not counting Florida, they’re independent.”

  I smiled at him happily. The great thing about New York, no matter how insane you are, the next man over is bound to be twice as bad.

  “What is there,” I asked him, “a tournament?”

  “It’s not something you compete for,” said Butchko. “It’s more like the poet laureate. The
last guy, Gregory Santos, he lives up in the Bronx, near Mosholu Parkway. Really nice guy. He took me out for drinks when I got the title, told me how to handle certain situations. He said it would change my whole life. The pressure is—I mean, women have expectations now. It’s like being the New York Yankees.”

  I was pondering that for a while. The New York Yankees? No other customers remained in the bar, just the two of us and the bartender whistling. I imagined the Cypriot coming to work on the subway, head buried in the newspaper, while a small black-eyed girl sitting next to him whistled notes she heard at breakfast from her father’s razor-nicked lips, notes her father heard the night before as he stood in a crowded elevator and watched the lighted floor numbers count down.

  I concentrated on Butchko’s sallow face, the purple blooms below his eyes. Studying a face will keep things quiet for a while. I tried to imagine that this was the man millions of East Coast women fantasized about while doodling in the margins of crossword puzzles. I tried to imagine him mounting bliss-faced seducees from the northern tip of Maine to Georgia, whispering in their ears, making them go all epileptic, their skin stretched so tight over rioting nerves that one touch in the right place would send them ricocheting around the room like an unknotted balloon.

  I could picture the rapturous women because I had read about them in novels, had seen them in movies, but I had never held one in my arms. I had not touched a naked breast since the day my mother weaned me. The only contact I had with women was incidental: the brush of a supermarket clerk’s fingers as she handed me my change, or an old lady tapping my shoulder, asking me to move aside so she could step off the bus. Like my beloved Saint Francis, I was a virgin.