Powder Burn

by Blake Banner

  Blanka giggled and grabbed hold of Marcus. “Oh, my Marcus is the same.”

  They kissed and I looked at Matt. “So, not since Saturday 30th, huh? I’ve been to his apartment, but the landlady hasn’t seen him there for a week. I don’t know, it seems like a week ago, he just vanished.”

  Marcus disengaged himself from his girl and said, “Maybe talk to the guys, yuh?”

  “Zack, Bran…?”

  Blanka said, “Yeah, they always hangin’ together, like, all the time. You know? They are so crazy they probably just went to Vegas or somesink like this.”

  “Yuh, it could be.” Marcus nodded. “On Saturday, they had money. They was talking about some job. It was paying good. Maybe they went for a road trip. Route 66 or some shit.”

  Matt was frowning at me. “Why don’t you call him, mate?”

  “First thing I did. His cell is switched off. Say…” I made a face that was apologetic. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but truth is, I am kind a worried. Have you any way I could contact Zack, Bran…?”

  They exchanged glances and Matt nodded a few times. “Yeah, sure, mate. Marcus, have you got…?”

  Marcus pulled his cell from his pocket and Blanka followed suit. I opened my address book.

  Blanka spoke first. “OK, Zack: 74, 127th Street, just opposite the choir school. You know where is it?” I nodded and she gave me his cell number. “Is real close to Charlie. They mostly all live right close to each other.”

  Marcus said, “Bran is, like, almost Zack’s neighbor. He’s on the same street, but on the other side of Madison Avenue, number twenty three, on the ground floor.”

  “The first floor.”

  “OK, the first floor, yuh. His cell number…”

  He gave me the number while Blanka scrolled through her address book again. “Hans and Hattie. They were not so close. They are staying with, like, this amazink family in the Bronx, right on the river. Uh… 208, Betts Avenue. Big garden right down to the water. Fuckin’ amazing place. And so sweet people, they are just, like, in their own family. So far out.”

  I asked if they were hungry. They said they were and I told Matt to give us three burgers and three more beers. Blanka and Marcus wanted vegan burgers. I asked Matt if the season was open yet on vegans. He laughed, but they didn’t get it.

  While they were preparing the food, I said, “So, the crazies, huh? What’s with those guys?” I shook my head, like I knew exactly what was with those guys.

  Matt leaned on the counter. “Last week? I told Bran to recite the fifty-two states of the U.S.A. in alphabetical order? Straight off, no sweat. Didn’t even try. I told him to start at ‘I’ and go backward. No problem. I made up, on the spot, an alpha-numeric code with twenty-one digits. He looked at it for ten seconds and recited it perfectly. But an hour and ten shots later, I asked him again, and he still remembered the fuckin’ thing, to perfection. The guy is, like, you know! I mean, that is, like, his superpower.”

  Suddenly, I had an uncomfortable feeling in my mind. It was like a hungry leopard had just come in and flopped down in the corner, watching us. I smiled and took a chance. “Each one of them has his thing. Charlie: I don’t know how that guy gets by with so little sleep. Where the hell does he get his energy from?”

  Blanka took the bait. “Yuh! Right? He’ll be here drinking till three or four in the mornink, then he is up at seven to go for runink.”

  I nodded. “Efficiency incarnate.”

  Blanka punched my arm. “But what about Zack?”

  I’d been wondering the same thing and was hoping she’d tell me. I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “Tell me about it! What’s your Zack story?”

  “He is, like, fucking savant, man! We was playing a game, you remember, Matt? I hat the calculator, and I told him, eighty-three, multiplied by forty-two, divided by eight point seven. I just made it up, like, on the spot. And fuckin’ hell, man. He was as quick as the calculator, and he was right to six positions! I was so freaked I wrote it down. And he says, ‘Ah! That is just arithmetic. Mathematics is more interesting,’ and he tries to explain Hawking’s equation to me, you know? Where time goes backward? I told him, ‘Fuckin’ hell, man! No way!’”

  I laughed. “That guy! A genius!”

  Matt was looking at the floor. “The one who gets me? I would never interfere in a relationship, right? That is sacred to me, but man, if she is ever single!”

  “Hattie?”

  He nodded. “The… empathy! I mean, she can just look at you, and she knows what you’re feeling, man! She reads people like she can just see inside their fuckin’ souls! And she fuckin’ cares! That’s what blows my fuckin’ mind. She’s, like, I don’t know, enlightened or something.”

  Marcus shrugged. “Yuh, I know you are into her, but isn’t she just the perfect partner for Hans? He does the same think but with the environment!” He leaned forward at me with wide eyes. “I am not kidding you, man. It is weird! Like Sherlock Holmes. He can, like, just come into a room and say, ‘Oh, that guy just broke up with his vife, she has gone to Orlando…” The other two started laughing and nodding. Marcus went on, suppressing his own laughter. “This woman just got pregnant from a guy who is not her husband, he was Swedish and has a limp. That guy over there works in the accounts department of a lumber company and he plays the violin…”

  Our burgers arrived and we ate them while they exchanged astounding stories about The Crazies and their brilliant exploits. I finished my lunch and asked for the bill, and while Matt was at the till I said, “Who was that beautiful chick who sometimes hangs out with them? What was her name…? Real cute, Latina, black hair, very feminine…”

  Blanka nodded. “Yuh, yuh, a little older, but Charlie is pretty sweet on her, and sometimes I sink it is a little bit mutual. You know, Marcus, don’t pretend. He thinks I am jealous!” Marcus was shrugging so she turned to Matt. “Who was that girl? You liked her, too, very beautiful, Hispanic…”

  He came back with my bill, smiling. “Lucia. A little old. She must be, what? Thirty? No offense, mate, not that thirty is old, but, you know... Anyway, she was hot as mustard. Gorgeous.”

  I nodded. “Lucia! Olga Lucia. I remember now.” I put my money down and stood. “OK, guys, thanks for everything. Maybe I’ll come back and we’ll do some shots one night.”

  I left them reminiscing and drinking into the afternoon and made my way back toward Amsterdam. I was still haunted by the uncomfortable feeling that I was sharing a confined space with a lethal, hungry animal. If the whole thing hadn’t made much sense that morning, now it was insane and made no sense at all. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, the fact that all five of them seemed to be prodigies of some sort made me feel… I sighed, stared up at the sky as I walked, and tried to identify the feeling. All I could think of was the leopard in the corner, watching me. It was somehow menacing.

  Menacing... but it was more than that, because it was something unseen, unknown, and not understood. Something that made no sense. How the hell did Charlie come to stumble on this group of savants in the middle of New York? Were they college students? And what was with the international club? Marcus and Blanka from the Czech Republic, Matt from New Zealand, Charlie from Mexico, Zack from Taiwan, Bran from Australia, Hans from Germany and Hattie from the U.K. And each one a genius of some sort.

  I wondered about Olga Lucia. Obviously she was Latina, ethnically, but her accent said she was born and bred in California. But then, was she part of the group, or an ‘outsider’?

  And in any case, how could her nationality have any relevance to anything? It was absurd. The whole thing was absurd. But it went on: why had she lied to me about meeting Charlie at the bar? And what was a university lecturer doing hanging out with kids at the Mezcal? Holding on to her youth? At thirty something that seemed absurd, especially looking the way she did.

  I sighed and thrust my hands deep in my pockets. In any case, what defined this group was not their age, it was their extraordinary minds. Was that what d
rew her to the group?

  I chewed my lip and shook my head to myself. Even if it was, how did all of this add up to a text message telling me ‘they’ were trying to kill him? Who was ‘they’? Were his genius friends trying to eliminate him? How did it all tie in with his disappearance a week ago?

  I arrived at Amsterdam Avenue, pulled my key from my pocket and climbed into my car. Then I sat for ten minutes drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, watching the slow dirge of traffic.

  He disappeared a week ago, but he had sent me the text less than forty-eight hours ago. So he didn’t disappear because he was dead, or because he had been abducted and murdered by a cabal of evil geniuses. Logic dictated he disappeared because he’d gone on the run. So if he had gone on the run, why the hell did he give me his address, knowing full well I would not find him there? You didn’t need to be a genius or a savant to work that one out. Clearly, there was something in the apartment I would find, and he wanted me to find.

  I fired up the Zombie, slipped silently into the stream of traffic and headed south, toward my apartment. I needed a shower and a change of clothes, and I needed a search warrant for Charlie’s apartment. You’d think it would be impossible for a civilian to get a search warrant, but you’d be wrong. All you have to do is download one as a PDF from the relevant government site. Then you need an illegible judge’s signature, an official-looking stamp and a person stupid enough to believe it’s all real. Faced with an authoritative manner and a convincing badge, most people are that stupid. It’s called obedience to authority. They are trained in it, right from kindergarten.

  FOUR

  Two hours later I stood in front of a dilapidated brownstone on 127th Street and wondered if I had the right place. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d expect a mathematical genius to live. The windows in the basement were caked with grime. In the front yard there was an old cooker, and a fridge next to it, each with its own expanding areas of rust and mold. There were bags of trash, too, stacked against the wall, with holes in them where animals had started pulling out the contents.

  The first floor bow window showed signs of habitation: there was a brown blanket nailed over the window that had been hoisted with pieces of string to let the light in, and inside I could make out posters on the walls. There was nothing original about them: Van Gogh’s sunflowers and a couple of pre-Raphaelites. I climbed the steps and pressed the bell. I didn’t hear ringing inside, so I hammered on the door. Nothing happened again, so I hammered some more until I heard feet thumping down stairs, and after a moment the door opened.

  The person looking up at me might have been Frankenstein’s monster’s baby brother, or sister, it wasn’t clear; but whoever it was seemed to be held together with pins and bits of chain, and there were several bits of face that looked like they might drop off at any moment, especially around the ears. I tried to smile but only managed to look worried. “Is Zack in?”

  His voice gave him away as a boy. He frowned and said, “Zack?”

  I nodded. “Taiwanese guy. He lives here.”

  “I know who he is. He lives here.”

  I wasn’t sure for a moment what to answer to that. In the end I settled on, “So, is he in?”

  “You, like, family or a friend or something?”

  I figured as I seemed to have stepped through the looking glass, I may as well be the mad hatter, and said, “Yeah, I’m his uncle. You going to tell me if he’s in, or do I have to get on my knees and beg?”

  He hesitated a moment, then stepped back. “You want to come in?”

  “Thanks…”

  He led me through a spacious, but dilapidated hall to a big living room with a dirty, brown carpet and lots of flaking paint and broken stucco. There was furniture that looked as if it had been rescued from dumpsters around Harlem, or donated by charities that weren’t very charitable.

  And there were people. There was something tragic about them. They looked like infirm caricatures of themselves. Not one of them weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. Not one of them had a tan. Not one of them looked like they’d had any kind of healthy motivation in the last ten years. They all looked at me with something that might once have been curiosity, but had forgotten how to be.

  A couple of them stood and said they were going to their rooms, and hurried away like pale, frightened smoke. Three remained: a blonde girl in jeans and a red leather jacket, sitting cross-legged in the corner of a broken sofa, rolling a joint; a guy in black whose arms and legs were roughly the same size, who had a steel pin through his nose and eyes empty of all feeling; and a third guy, with long hair and dirty jeans, who was lying on the floor, curled up in the corner, asleep. The Baby Frankenstein said, “This is Zack’s uncle. He’s looking for Zack.”

  The girl in the red jacket stopped rolling and looked at me, then she looked at Baby Frankie. After that she turned back to her joint and started to lick it.

  Baby Frankie said, “I’m Orlando. You want to sit down?”

  There was a chair next to me, so I nodded and said, “Sure, Orlando. Thanks. How about Zack, is he here?”

  The kid in black looked at Orlando and said, “I could make some green tea.”

  They nodded at each other and he left on hurrying, unsteady legs and bare white feet. Orlando said, “That’s Pete. We have a kitchen. Everything works. That’s Tracy. She has a job.”

  Tracy smiled at me. It wasn’t a nice smile. Orlando crossed the room and sat carefully on the other end of the sofa, placing his hands in his lap as he did so. I said, “I appreciate the trouble you’re taking, Orlando. It’s very kind of you, but do you think, maybe, you could tell me where Zack is?”

  His eyes seemed to shift, first this way, then that, like he was watching a slow-moving butterfly drifting around the room. They settled eventually on the kitchen door, like he thought maybe Pete should come back with the green tea before he answered my question. But it was Tracy who spoke, with a slightly malevolent smile.

  “Zack is dead,” she said. “How come you didn’t know that, if you’re his uncle?”

  I stared at her, then looked at Orlando. He was watching me, with his hands still primly on his lap. “He’s dead? How? When did he die?”

  He frowned, sighed and looked sleepy.

  Tracy said, “It was a car. He went out to do something and a car hit him. Went right over him. Didn’t stop. Didn’t come back.” She pulled a green, disposable lighter from her bag and lit up. She inhaled deep, held the smoke down for a long time, then let it out and handed the joint to Orlando.

  I heard the kitchen door open and Pete came out with a teapot and four mugs hanging from his fingers. He said, “It’s filtered water, and organic tea. We only use organic tea.”

  I ignored him and kept kept my eyes on Tracy. “How long ago was this?”

  She stared out the window, squinting slightly at the sunlight. “Oh, man, time…” She grinned at me, like we were sharing a joke. “I have trouble with time. A few days?”

  Pete was kneeling on the floor, pouring the tea. “It was a week ago yesterday, Sunday. I know because I cleaned the fridge Sunday.” They all looked at each other and started laughing. Orlando’s face went red and he had to lean back on the sofa and cover his face. Pete was making a high-pitched squeaking noise. He brought me my tea, trying not to spill it.

  I put it on the floor and smiled at Tracy. “Something funny about the fridge?”

  She didn’t answer straight away. Pete carried her mug laboriously across the floor for her. She accepted the joint back from Orlando and took a drag. “Pete cleaned the fridge. It was his job that day. He took eight hours and it was like, immaculate. Man, it was so clean, but…”

  They all started laughing again. Orlando went into the fetal position on the sofa.

  “He only cleaned one shelf. But man, that shelf was…”

  I gave them a while to recover and examined the mug and smelled the tea. The mug was spotless and I couldn’t detect any cannabis in the tea.
I sipped.

  The laughter subsided.

  “Did they catch the guy? The driver?”

  Pete shook his head. “I don’t think so. But they wouldn’t tell us, anyway. We’re a squat. That suited Zack because his visa had expired.”

  “How long had Zack been living here?”

  He carefully poured a third mug and handed it with great care to Orlando. As he did it, he said, “Christmas. It was Christmas. Because I remember we were all talking about how unfair it was, his landlord had kicked him out at Christmas. And his family back in China didn’t want to know.”

  I frowned. “China or Taiwan?”

  He giggled. “There’s a difference?”

  I sighed.

  He glanced at me, took the joint from Orlando and took a deep drag. As he let the smoke out, he said, “I guess we don’t really care where people are from, do we, Tracy? It’s just, like, you’re here, you know? It’s like, ‘now’?”

  He made little inverted commas with his fingers and I nodded like I agreed and what he’d said made sense. “Right, so, did he have a job or anything?”

  They frowned at each other, trying to remember, but it was difficult. Tracy said, “Yeah, but it was kind of part time, or something. It wasn’t, like, every day. They’d call him and he’d go, and then, like… come back?”

  It was like wading uphill through treacle with a mentally retarded sloth tied to each ankle. I said, “How about his stuff? Is that all in his room?”