by Norman Green
“There’s no way anybody’s building another nuclear plant in this country,” Harman said.
“Maybe not,” Georgie said. “But just because we’re a bunch of science-phobic, PC, brain-dead weenies, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world is, too. And given the choice between nuclear and selling your soul for oil, I think a lot of people would reconsider their opinions. Anyhow, for our purposes, none of that matters. Even if we never sold a single one of our mythical batteries in this country, the market worldwide would be enormous. XRC wouldn’t have to ever produce another thing, all they’d have to do is license the technology and count their money. They’d be like Eskimo Pie. They could get rich selling the name and the wrappers.”
“All right,” Harman said. “So the pitch is, XRC came up with this new battery, but what? They’re sitting on it?”
“Well, not exactly. We’re saying that they still have to commit some serious development money to bring this to market, and they don’t have it. They’d be gambling whatever equity they’ve got left in the company that this would work, and the ossified management team doesn’t realize what they have, so they aren’t moving on it. So we come along, we take over, chop them up, sell the pieces, and keep their breakthrough for ourselves. Once the smoke clears, anyone holding a stake would be disgustingly wealthy.”
“Wow,” Harman said. “Makes me sorry to know that this is all phony.”
“Doesn’t it? Funny thing is, it’s gonna happen, you wait and see.”
Marisa woke up a couple of hours later. She lay where she was for a while, feeling drained, listening to the murmur of voices from the first floor. She thought about what she’d felt earlier and wondered if it meant anything. You hardly know him, she thought. Why are you so concerned about what he thinks, anyhow? Besides, he’s never given you any indication. Not after that first night. Not after Brooklyn. What makes you think he cares about you at all?
Get over yourself.
She got up, stretched the kinks out of her back. She checked her messages on her cell phone. There were three, none of them from Prior. It was too early for him to call, anyhow. She shut her phone back off and wandered down the stairs.
“One more time,” she heard Tommy say. “Start with the question about mutual funds.”
“Okay,” George said. “Look, dude, you can’t play poker with scared money.” She could picture the sneer on his face, just from his tone of voice. He sounded like a completely different person from the guy she’d met yesterday. “I’m about making money, okay? I’m not about minimizing risk, I’m not about giving you three percent over the S&P or any of that shit. I ain’t running a mutual fund here, fucking mutual-fund managers, they all buy and sell the same two hundred stocks anyhow. You could train a chimpanzee to do it. Look, if you are uncomfortable with risk, do us both a favor. Take your money, go buy an index fund, and get it over with. You can watch the Dow with all the rest of the tourists, okay, you can cry when it goes down and jerk off when it goes up, and in the long run, you’ll probably do all right.
“I’m gonna tell you one fucking time what I do, so listen up. I get four or five great ideas in an average year. You get on the boat with me, here’s what you get to do: you get to sit in the boat with your mouth shut while we row ashore in the dark. We attack the village while everyone is still asleep, we kill the men, we rape the women, we take whatever we want, then we get back in the boat and we row away. You get it? But you have to be clear on one thing, this only works about three times out of four. The fourth time, King Arthur is waiting in the weeds and he kicks our ass. We take some casualties, and we run away licking our wounds. That’s the chance you take.
“Here’s what you do not get to do: you do not get to give me suggestions. You do not get to register your opinion. You do not get to ask for status reports, you do not get to call me on the fucking phone or otherwise render yourself a pain in my ass. I run your money for you, and you go do whatever the fuck it is that made you the money in the first place, and both of us will get richer.
“Comprendo?”
“Yeah,” she heard her father say. “That little thing at the end, like you think he’s got an IQ of about sixty, that’s perfect.”
Marisa walked past the kitchen without looking at them, out into the vaulted front entryway. Her footsteps echoed in the empty space. This is a cold house, she told herself. I’ll be glad when we don’t have to come here anymore…. She kicked her shoes off and walked barefoot into one of the rooms off the entryway at the front of the house. Formal dining room, she thought. More wasted space, a museum for someone’s furniture. She passed out of that room and into another one. Library, she thought, looking at the built-in bookcases. Or an office. Or a place to display your Hummels…There was a bathroom off the library, and an empty bedroom beyond it. This must be like the guest wing, she thought. Who would want to live in a house like this anyway? Isn’t life already lonely enough? You’d need radar or something, just to know where the other person was. She went into the bathroom, sat down, and looked out the window. She could hear voices again, but these ones weren’t coming from the kitchen. One voice was soft, the other louder, and with a Brooklyn lilt. On the wall in front of her was a small metal door marked LAUNDRY. She cracked it open and the voices became more distinct. They’re in the basement, she thought, and the washing machine is down there, too. You must throw your dirty stuff down this chute. That’s why I can hear them. She glanced at the bathroom door, then got up and locked it before returning to kneel in front of the little door.
“I know you think these guys are your friends.” It was Harman’s voice. Somehow she knew that, this one time, he would not be smiling.
“Where you going with this, man?” Tuco said.
“Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m just saying, you seem like a nice kid, and I’d hate to see you make the same mistakes I did when I was your age.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“This kind of thing is great in the planning stages,” Harman answered him. “Everybody’s on the same page, everybody’s deciding how they’re going to spend the money they haven’t made yet. Millions, right? Then the job goes down, and even if everything falls exactly the way you’ve got it figured, which never happens, and even if everybody walks away clean, which doesn’t happen either, you still have to survive the split. You have to hope nobody gets too hungry and takes you out so they can have yours.”
“I ain’t worried about that,” Tuco said. “Not with these guys.”
“All right, fine,” Harman said. “Assuming you’re right, and I’m not convinced you are. It’s all good, right? Wrong. It isn’t over yet, my friend, especially if the job has a big payoff, because all it takes is one jerk to go get toasted in a bar and start running his mouth about how smart he is. I can tell you what comes next, because I lived through it. Somebody in the bar goes to the cops and rats out the genius, someone always does, and then the cops pick up the genius. And they sit the guy down in a small room, and they say, ‘We got you, asshole, we got you, you’re in the box for the next twenty years unless you start singing. You give us the other guys, and we’ll let you walk out of here a free man.’ So maybe your guy will think about it for a while, but put yourself in that chair. Twenty years can be half your life, man, what are you, twenty? So you’d be a used-up middle-aged con when you got out, and your head would be all screwed up from all that time in the animal farm, you’d be lucky if you could find a job bagging groceries.”
“That what happened to you?”
“Almost. I went inside twice. Both times, it was one of my friends put me there. All I’m saying is, if you get out of this with a few bucks, get away from this garbage and go back to school.”
“I hate school,” Tuco said.
“I did, too. You know what I’d give for the chance to go back and do it again? I’m not saying you have go to Harvard, okay? But you really ought to check out some kind of technical school, engineering or something like that, because you
’ve got a great pair of hands. I’ve never seen anybody pick up anything so quick, you’re almost as good as I am with those locks, and you’ve been at it less than half a day. The real crime here is if you don’t start using the brain that’s attached to those hands.”
There was silence then. Marisa shifted to a more comfortable position.
“Well, if this is all true,” Tuco finally said, “then why are you here?”
“Truth? I shouldn’t be. Chalk it up to a weakness of character. As it is, I am definitely not going to do anything on this one that I can even get indicted for. I mean, technically, impersonation is probably against the law, but nobody’s going to bother with that. Conspiracy, maybe, but that’s a mother to prove. Cops and D.A.s are like everybody else, dude, they’re lazy. Unless you piss them off too much, they like to take the guy who’s easy, they’ll grab whoever has blood dripping off his fingers, and they’ll close the case and walk away happy. But the thing is, you stay in this racket too long, sooner or later your luck runs out. I just think you ought to think about your other options while you still got ’em.”
Tuco’s voice came back quiet. “I don’t know if school would work. I’m dyslexic. I never learned shit in school.”
“That’s not as rare as you think,” Harman said. “I know an architect up in Toronto who is dyslexic, can’t read worth beans. He claims that most dyslexics are above average, and I haven’t seen anything out of you to make me doubt it. There’s a way to get this done, Tuco.”
Tuco’s voice was still quiet. “So are you gonna quit again, when this is all over?”
Harman was silent for a moment. “Here’s the lie: I already quit, I don’t need the money, I’m only consulting here.”
“So what’s the truth?”
Harman let ten seconds go by before answering, and when he did, Marisa could hardly hear him. “The truth is, I stayed too long at the party. I can’t help myself anymore. There’s nothing else left for me now.”
“All right,” Tuco said. “I know I ought to be doing something else, but I’m not.”
“I can ask my buddy, up in Toronto, you know, how he got past it. I’m sure the dude would talk to you, at the very least.”
“Okay. But can we get back to this job? Because I already told Stoney I’d do it.”
“Sure. But will you talk to this guy? He’s a good guy, I’m sure he’d be happy to help you out.”
“Yeah,” Tuco said. “Okay.”
“All right. I’ll set it up, then. You’ll talk to him, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I will.”
“Good. Okay, back to business. We need to talk about the dogs.”
“Dogs?”
“Yeah. Guard dogs. They can smell you a mile off, and they’re usually smarter than the uniform hanging on to the other end of the leash, believe it or not. The thing is, dogs love McDonald’s.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. Quarter Pounders with Cheese, babe. You lace them with a little sleeping powder, chuck them over the fence, you’re in. The dog knows the sleeping powder is there, too, but he can’t resist…”
Marisa got up and pushed the metal door closed. It made a loud click when it latched. She got up on her feet and headed back upstairs.
Her phone rang. She took it out and looked at the screen, recognized Prior’s number. She looked around, then opened the phone and took the call. “Hello?”
“Oh, it’s really you,” he said. “Today must be my lucky day, I get to hear the real girl and not just her recorded voice. God, this makes me so happy.” He sounded genuinely pleased.
“I shouldn’t talk to you,” she said. “Why did you have that gorilla come after me in the parking lot the other night? How is that supposed to make me feel?”
“I apologize for that, honestly, Dwayne was completely out of line. He totally misunderstood my instructions to him. He was supposed to ask you, in the nicest way possible, if you’d deign to have a conversation with me, nothing more. Honey, I can’t be more sorry about that than I am. I hope you’ll allow me to demonstrate—”
“I don’t know why you keep him around,” Marisa said. “He’s an animal. If my friend hadn’t been there…”
“Nothing would have happened,” Prior said firmly. “I promise you on my mother’s grave. I’d have reprimanded Dwayne, which I did in any case, for stepping over the line. And I would have done my best to make it up to you. Will you consider—”
“I have to go,” Marisa said.
“Oh, no, no, not yet,” Prior said. “Please. Just a minute longer. I would love to meet with you, just so we could talk face-to-face. You wouldn’t believe how much I miss being around you. We could meet anywhere you like, really. Somewhere public, if that reassures you. Honestly, I just want to see you.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She kept firmly in mind what she wanted her voice to make her sound like: spoiled, easy, clueless. “I’m so busy lately.”
“So who was that boy you were with? The one who slapped Dwayne around? He must be very tough. You wouldn’t believe how angry Dwayne is about that. Is he your boyfriend?”
“Really,” Marisa said, “I have to go now. Good-bye.” She snapped the phone closed, cutting him off in midsentence.
She was sitting out on the back porch swing when he came out to tell her they would be leaving soon. “Hello, Jack,” she said. “Tell me. Is that your real name?”
“Ah, well,” he said, his “please like me” look fixed firmly in place. “What’s a name, anyhow? Something your parents chose to call you, or something you choose to call yourself. Doesn’t mean much.”
“I guess that means no,” she said. “What did your parents choose to call you?”
He glanced back over his shoulder before he answered, as though someone might be lurking there to overhear him. “Between you and me?”
“Sure.”
“I was born Nathan Moore,” he said.
She nodded her head. “I can see that. It fits you much better than Jack Harman.”
“Jack Harman is much better for business,” he said. “All-American, isn’t it? Blue eyes, apple pie, golly and gee whiz, pardon me, ma’am, you dropped your wallet.” His smile went wider.
“Ah, I see. You think the name makes people trust you.”
“Well, not by itself, but it reinforces the image. Think about it: your father could be the most upright man in the world, right, but when Joe Average looks at him, what does he see? A big, dark, brooding guy smoking a cigarette, usually with his fists clenched. He’s memorable, and he’s intimidating. I’m shooting for the other end of the spectrum.”
My father is twice the man you are, she thought. “You want to be the lead salesman in an infomercial.”
He nodded. “Exactly. ‘You can trust me. And you should buy these pots and pans.’”
“So you used to be a burglar,” she said. “And now you’re not?”
He shrugged. “I used to be a lot of things. The difficulty is that it’s hard to change into something new after the paint has already dried. Sometimes I think I’m born to this kind of life, and no matter how hard I’m trying to be something else, it’s almost as if I’m wearing another man’s clothes, and when I take them off, nothing is really different.”
She looked at his face, trying hard to ignore that manufactured look, trying to hold on to the image of the man she’d overheard talking to Eddie. She swallowed, gathering her courage. “Is it that hard? Can Eddie change, if he wants to, or is he stuck, too?”
“Eddie? Oh, you mean Tuco.” He looked at her then, and something in his eyes told her he had just figured out the purpose of the conversation. “You like him? He seems to be a good kid. Smart as hell, too, despite, ahh, some of what he carries around. And he’s lucky. No record, yet, no juvie arrests, he’s clean, but he’s standing right on the brink. Every time he rolls the dice, he comes a little closer to crossing over for good.” Harman reached out and took her hand in both of his. “I’m not sure I can help hi
m,” he said, his face suddenly earnest, “but maybe you can. If Tuco wants to be different, he’s going have to do some hard things. And I’m not saying you could change him, or anything like that. But some people have a way of giving a guy a reason to want to be better than what he’s been. Maybe you could give him reason enough to do the hard thing, and not the easy one.”
It was a daunting prospect. I don’t know if I can do that, she wanted to say, I just want to go home to my bedroom…. But it struck her then that she had turned that page the moment she’d stepped on the stage at the Jupiter. It was a terrifying thought, and she held her breath. Don’t you cry, she told herself, don’t you dare cry, not here, not now, not in front of this guy.
“I’m working on something for Tuco,” Harman said. “It would probably involve him coming up to Toronto. I’ve been wondering how hard I should push him. I wasn’t really sure he would put himself through it. But maybe you and I together, if we manipulated him carefully…” He was grinning. “Maybe we could shove him in the right direction.”
Marisa pulled her hand out of his and resumed breathing. Even when the guy is trying to do something good, he’s so creepy. “Is that where you live?” she asked him. “Toronto?”
He hesitated a half second before answering. “Yes.”
“When are you going home?”
“Couple more days.”
This is stupid, she thought, you can’t trust this guy….
“You better give me your number,” she told him, and she reached for her phone. “I think I’m gonna need your help on this.” They were still punching the buttons on their respective cell phones when Stoney opened the back door and stuck his head out. “Yo,” he said. “Time to go. Chop-chop.”
“Did Prior call you today?”
Marisa sat in the passenger seat of her father’s Lexus and stared out the window. Are you using Eddie, she wanted to ask him, what are you going to have him doing, is he going to be okay? She didn’t, though, and she knew it was because she was afraid of the answers. “Yes,” she said.
