by Robert Ward
It also made him broke.
By the end of one solid year of wild drinking and poker playing, Bob and Meredith’s life savings had dwindled down to sub-nothing. All their retirement plans, which had once included Ambrose Bierce-like dreams of moving to Mexico and buying a cottage in San Miguel de Allende, or homesteading in economical and left-friendly Costa Rica, were now washed up.
Poverty at this precarious age was a bitter pill to swallow. Meredith wept at night, tossed and turned in bed. She railed and screamed at him until she was all screamed out. Then one day three years ago she’d moved out. Out and in with Bob’s old friend and current nemesis, the pop shrink star Dr. Rudy Runyon.
Now she lived in luxury in Rudy’s 1920s mansion in Roland Park, played tennis every day at the Roland Park Country Club, and confined her trips downtown to occasional stop-ins at the shelter on South Broadway, where Bob worked a couple days a week, and where Rudy made yearly public appearances to keep up his image as the champion of the homeless.
Bob let himself into his little row house, took off his coat, and flopped on the faded yellow couch. He reached for the vodka bottle on the sideboard and poured himself a stiff drink.
God, the agony of it, getting old with the same depressing patients.
He took a sip and reminded himself not to go down that dark path. Don’t hate your patients. No, no, that was no good at all. After all, he did try to help them, didn’t he? He worked his butt off trying to get the manicurist Ethel Roop to keep her ballooning weight down. But every time they seemed to be making some headway, she’d relapse. The last time had been just a few days after Christmas. She’d gone on an eggnog-and-cinnamon roll binge and gained fifteen more pounds. Christ, she’d be better off taking some kind of new designer diet pill than talking to him. A pill he couldn’t prescribe because he wasn’t a psychiatrist. And what about Perry Swann, the masturbating bus driver? Hadn’t he worked forever to get him to see that his problems were related to his unfinished business with his mother, who’d sexually molested him when he was three years old? But what good had this startling insight done? Two weeks ago Perry had jerked off in front of a woman just outside the Greyhound bus terminal and been busted for public lewdness. Which meant suspension from his job, a trial, and probably a cancellation of his health insurance, and that meant bye-bye Bobby Wells. Another patient down the tubes and how the hell would he find a new one to replace him?
Of course, there were his elderly patients at Church Home Hospital and St. Mary’s shelter, but those were welfare recipients for which he received a small stipend from the Department of Welfare.
No, what he needed were some more paying patients.
Christ, face it, the only interesting (and solvent) patient he had nowadays was the haunted and paranoid art dealer, Emile Bardan, who usually sat through the fifty-minute hour terrified by fears that Bob hadn’t been able to help him with at all. And what if Emile decided Bob was useless? What then?
Bob couldn’t bear thinking about it.
He’d done it, all right. Royally fucked up his life.
What he needed, he thought, as he headed upstairs to his Ambien and blessed oblivion, was a miracle. That was it. Some way to see things anew. Life looked at through a new pair of glasses, a vision that would spring him into action.
But what in God’s name that vision might be, the good shrink Bob Wells didn’t have a clue.
CHAPTER THREE
On the surface, at least, Emile Bardan seemed a brilliant and successful guy. He owned a lot of real estate, ran a new art gallery that dealt in antiquities a few blocks away on South Broadway, and lived in a smartly refurbished end-of-the-row nineteenth-century redbrick row house in nearby Canton. He was thin and handsome, in his thirties, obviously well-educated, and Bob gathered from his offhand comments that he did quite well with the ladies.
But for all of that, Bardan was a terrified man. He was obsessed by the recurrent feeling that his enemy and rival, a Brit named Colin Edwards, was going to steal one of his prized acquisitions, the mask of Utu. Indeed, the fear so overwhelmed him that Emile was no longer sure if he was in his right mind.
“Perhaps,” he told Bob, “I’m just paranoid, but maybe … maybe it’s really going to happen. That’s what’s driving me nuts. I just don’t know.”
As a hungover Bob made breakfast the next morning, he remembered what Emile had told him about the mask.
“It’s a mask of the Sumerian sun god,” Emile explained, sitting cross-legged and nervously wringing a monogrammed linen handkerchief in his hands.
He picked up a large art book he’d brought with him and brought it over to Bob, who looked down at a color photo of the mask.
Bob knew very little about art, but one glance at the strange and terrifying green mask made him shudder. Utu’s eyes were almond shaped, the mouth was oversized, with nightmarishly thick red lips, and his ears were pointed. Golden streaks slashed the sun god’s green cheeks, and his forehead was adorned with three huge red rubies. Utu was hardly sunny; rather, he radiated a fierce malevolence.
“He’s very … intimidating,” Bob said.
“Yes, he is,” Emile said. “The Sumerians didn’t have cozy gods. And if you think the picture is hellish, well, you should see the real thing sometime. It’s very powerful. It had to be because our boy here was not only the sun, the giver of life, but you can see from his fierceness, he was something else, too …”
“He looks angry,” Bob said, realizing at once that it was a lame and obvious statement.
“That’s right,” Bardan said. “Old Utu was also the avenger of the dead. The god of justice and vengeance.”
“Right,” Bob said. “Well, I can definitely see why you value the piece.”
Bob handed the book back to Emile Bardan and sat back down in his seat.
“Where the hell was I?” Emile said, looking down at the floor.
“You were talking about Colin Edwards,” Bob said.
“Yes,” Emile Bardan said. His voice was pitched higher when he spoke about Edwards, and he gritted his teeth.
“We’ve known each other all our adult lives. I met him in Cambridge years ago, when we were both students. We ended up in the business and we often bid against each other at auctions. I usually won, and Colin has hated me ever since. He’s a rich, smooth bastard and something else, too: a thief. He’s been involved in any number of art thefts, but he’s very slick. Never been caught.”
Bob felt hopeful for the first time. This was the most Emile had ever told him. Now the trick was to keep him talking.
“I’m not sure I understand, how he’s related to the mask?”
“He wanted it badly, but I outbid him for it and he’s been toying with me ever since.”
“Toying?” Bob said. “How do you mean?”
Emile flashed his big brown eyes.
“You’ll think I’m paranoid.”
“Try me.”
Another long silence. Bob waited, trying hard not to let Emile feel his own desperation. Finally, the trim little man spoke.
“Okay. For example, he sends people around to my town house to watch me. And I get phone calls all the time. Even in the middle of the night. He doesn’t say a word. Then hangs up. He’s seriously fucking with me.”
“The thing I don’t understand is,” Bob said, “if he wants to steal the mask, why would he put you on guard like that?”
“Because that’s how he is,” Bardan said, “It’s personal with him. It’s not enough for him to simply steal the mask and sell it. He’s got to break me down in the process.”
“Sounds sadistic.”
“Totally,” Emile said. “The most sadistic bastard you’d ever want to meet.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, Emile began to weep. Bob waited for him to use the Kleenex box, which was sitting on the little end table by his chair.
“Have you called the police, Emile?”
“Of course. But you know what they say. ‘Sorry, we can’t do a thing u
ntil a crime is actually committed.’ Meanwhile, I can’t sleep, can’t think. Colin’s watching me, waiting for me to slip up, and then he’ll grab the mask.”
“I take it you have it well guarded,” Bob said. “Locked in a safe.”
“Of course,” Emile Bardan said. “But this war of nerves, it’s really getting to me. I think what I really need is some sleeping pills. When I can’t sleep I get nuts. And I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake. Think you can write me a prescription?”
Bob bit his lower lip and felt a twinge of anxiety. Since he wasn’t an MD he couldn’t write prescriptions, but instead had to refer his patients to a psychiatrist who could give them the pills they invariably wanted. The problem was once they’d met a Dr. Feelgood, many of them jumped ship. Why spend their lives talking to Bob when the pills changed their mood in a matter of hours?
“I could refer you to someone,” Bob said. “But let’s try to work on this without medication. You don’t want to add addiction to your other problems.”
Emile Bardan only shrugged and picked at his pink socks.
“I know what you think,” he said.
“What’s that?” Bob said.
“You think I’m making the whole thing up.”
“Not at all,” Bob said. “But now that you mention it, are you sure he’s really got people watching you?”
“Of course,” Emile said. “They were on my roof the other night.”
“Edwards and his men? You saw them?”
Emile shut his eyes and massaged his temples with his thumb and forefingers.
“Heard them,” Bardan said. “I got my pistol and headed up the fire escape. By the time I got up there, the helicopter was already in the sky.”
“And you’re sure this … helicopter had taken off from your roof?”
Bardan’s thin and elegant face squeezed into a frown.
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t believe me. I’m telling you, the guy is after me. He’s driving me crazy.”
Bardan’s eyes were wide with terror and it took Bob a full fifteen minutes to calm him down. At the session’s end, they’d agreed to meet twice a week for the next few months, during which Emile Bardan’s stories had become even wilder. He was sure his phones were tapped, he was certain Edwards had hidden cameras in his living room and office. He lived in fear that one day when he went to check on the mask, it would be gone and there would be nothing he could do.
In the beginning Bob had believed him, but as the stories grew more elaborate he began to wonder how much of it could possibly be true. Perhaps all of it was a mere projection, some kind of neurotic persecution fantasy that caused Emile to fixate and obsess on Colin Edwards.
Bob wasn’t sure where the truth actually lay, but his instinct told him that there was something else going on in Bardan’s heart, some terrible secret that perhaps made him feel that he deserved to have the mask stolen from him. Sometimes, when Bardan talked about Edwards stealing it, there was almost relief in his voice, as though he wished Edwards would steal it so the whole torturous ordeal could finally be over with.
Emile Bardan seemed to be suffering from some terrible guilt, a guilt that could only be expiated by losing the mask. But whenever Bob tried to broach the subject, Emile would get uncommunicative, cross and recross his thin legs, and stare moodily down at Bob’s frayed Indian rug.
They had reached an impasse, not unusual in therapy, of course, but before Bob could work through it, Emile announced he had to go to London for a time to check on some possible acquisitions for his gallery.
Bob asked him what he would do about the mask when he was gone. Emile frowned and said he’d hired two guards.
“Expensive guards,” he said, as he left the room that day. “The kind that will shoot to kill, if necessary.”
“Let’s hope it never comes to that,” Bob said, using his best optimistic voice.
“I’ll see you when I get back,” Emile said.
As Emile left that day, Bob smiled and wished him a good trip, but the truth was he hated to wait for two whole weeks. Given the tenuous nature of their relationship, two weeks could set them back two months, maybe longer. God, what rotten luck. He finally gets an interesting paying patient and the guy leaves. Maybe forever.
Meanwhile, what was he supposed to do about his overdue credit card bills, his late mortgage payment? Bill collectors were starting to hassle him. At first they were polite, but after a few calls they had threatened to come pay him a visit. He had to think, come up with something. What he needed, he found himself saying as he climbed into bed at night, was inspiration. In the old days, in his youth, inspiration could come from anywhere. He’d be walking down the street and he’d see two people talking, maybe they’d just be waiting for a bus, but the way they were huddled together would make him think of one of his patients, and he’d suddenly know what that patient’s problems were all about. Because his antennae were out, because he was fully alive.
That was what it was all about, he thought. Becoming alive again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Dressed in his old Hopkins sweatshirt and his father’s watch cap, Bob ran through Patterson Park. Sometimes, he thought, as he moved his legs in long, loping strides, sometimes when he was a kid, running would give him ideas, too.
Now he jogged by the dilapidated Chinese pagoda, which had been there ever since he was a child. He remembered when the People’s Republic of China had sent it to Baltimore. There had been a ribbon cutting, pictures in the paper and on television. But now the pagoda was rotting, and on late-night jogs he’d once seen a dozen rats running out of it. Kids used it for sex, and junkies to shoot drugs.
Like everything else in his life, Bob thought, the pagoda was past its prime.
Bob ran harder and watched the steam come from his mouth. He could still run. He wasn’t a hopeless case, yet. He just needed to work harder. Find a reason to keep moving. Hey, he’d be okay. Of course he would. It was just a matter of time, wasn’t it? Something would happen. And boom, he’d be on top again.
Running, like this, with the endorphins flowing, he could nearly believe it.
But even the run had its perilous side.
At least once a week, an unmarked beige Crown Victoria would pull up beside him, somewhere near Linwood Avenue or at the east end of Baltimore Street.
Inside, Homicide Detective Bud Garrett would be sitting behind the wheel. Garrett’s eyes sagged down to his lips, and he’d lost most of his once-thick brown hair. He sported a lame comb-over, three or four lost strands that looked like broken feelers on an insect. Beside him in the passenger seat was his fat, brutal partner, Ed Geiger. Geiger had a gut, and a big, untrimmed mustache. When Bob looked at him he always thought of Hitler.
The Crown Vic was there again today.
“Hey, hey, look at the jock,” Geiger said.
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “Dr. Bobby’s gonna get himself on Survivor.”
They both brayed at that one. Bob said nothing but kept running as the police car kept pace. As he tried to cross the street at Linwood, the two detectives pulled in front of him, blocking his path.
“What the fuck?” Bob said.
“Oooh, you shouldn’t curse,” Garrett said, getting out of the car.
“What the hell do you guys want?” Bob said.
“You got any drugs on you?” Geiger said. “I think you better let us look and see.”
“Yeah,” Garrett said. “Assume the position, Bob.”
“This is bullshit,” Bob said. But he didn’t resist. He wasn’t in the mood for a beating today. He spread his legs and leaned on the roof of the car, as Geiger roughly patted him down.
“Nothing here today,” Geiger said as he finished. “The hero is clean.”
“Save anybody from mental illness today, Bob?” Garrett said.
“No,” Bob said. “But I did teach a class in how to avoid police harassment.”
“Whoaaaa,” Geiger said. “Score one for Dr. Bo
bby.”
Bob gave them a quick little smile like they weren’t getting to him and, suddenly, had a mental image of himself punching Garrett’s nose in a street demonstration thirty years ago. Yeah, those were the days … the whole hood out fighting city hall, and Garrett trying to shove Bob off the street with his baton. Bob had surprised him with a short left hook, right in the snout.
A glorious, terrific shot …
An impulsive shot that had earned him fame in the hood, and the enmity of the cops for the rest of his life.
