Them Hustlers

by Jeffrey Manber

  All welcome! It said in bright yellow text. Bienvenue!

  Rachel paid the check half thinking how she should have gotten Phil to pay. But her mind lingered on the poster. Bienvenue--that was the name of the voodoo woman that so worried Gregory. Some sort of historic feud between the two families played out using voodoo. Herb had introduced her to the son of his first customer. What a strange bunch. More like the stuff of movies than Washington politics. Gigi Bienvenue. Rachel snorted. What a pretentious name--a little girl from an old movie about love. She sounded more like Phil's new flame...Lucie Welcomme.

  Rachel jumped out of the booth and bolted for the door while simultaneously firing off a call to Gregory.

  "You know the real name of the Bienvenue gal?" Was all she said.

  Gregory realized it was Rachel, the reporter who had become the third part of the triangle watching over Phil. "Yeah I know."

  "It's not Gigi, that's for sure."

  "No, no" agreed Gregory. It's been awhile, but I'm pretty sure it was Lucie. She changed her name maybe 10 years ago."

  "Bienvenue" was French for ""Welcome." How dumb she had been. Right in front of her nose. That meant that Lucie Welcomme was none other than Gigi Bienvenue. That meant Phil's hot new Babe de Jour was...doing what? Waiting, watching. Waiting for this moment. Gregory had explained how the Tuckers and especially the Bienvenue family were people who lived for revenge.

  Phil was right now headed either to the Talbott Inn for a drink with Violet or straight back to Gigi and whatever trap she may be planning. Rachel laid out the situation to Gregory who immediately put Rachel on hold and called Herb. Herb had just arrived at the restaurant, some 15 minutes late, and Lucie was not there.

  "Get out of there. Get out of there now." Screamed Gregory. Probably she had never intended to come to lunch. It must be a set up to get Herb out of his shop for some reason. That meant today could well be the day when Tucker would extract his revenge. This was the way of voodoo. "Come here, get everyone here now."

  Gregory got back on the phone with Rachel. "Come on over, it's too dangerous for all of you right now. Let's all get together to find Phil."

  Rachel ran out of the Post Pub. The jaded reporter didn't believe in the voodoo stuff. She didn't believe in fortune telling, in tarot cards, in astrology, in palm reading, in numerology or in horoscopes, but she ran to Gregory's office on 7th Street faster than she had run in twenty years.

  But Herb didn't listen to the lawyer. After finishing the call he raced north up Route 2, everything spinning wildly in his head. All this time he had been tricked by Lucie. Tricked! That meant she was moving in on Phil. He had to find Phil and get him to the protection of Gregory. Lucie Welcomme/Bienvenue had to be stopped.

  * * *

  Where was Phil? When Rachel arrived at the offices of McLeod, Young and Flowers, they called over to the Talbott Inn, but no one matching Phil's description was at the bar. Gregory called to Phil's home. No one answered. Unknown was whether he had gone to meet the new woman or for another romp with Lucie?

  Herb was late. He should have arrived in the office a good hour before. His cell phone went unanswered and so too the phone at the shop. They tried his home number but neither Tamay nor Herb answered. Gregory worked the phones like a pro; like a reporter. She told him and they both laughed at the compliment. But Rachel felt the nervousness. With each unanswered call all the stories she associated with Phil took on a different meaning. His dalliance with Tanya and her check kiting; his falling for Lucie, the stories of the nighttime escapades of the Louisiana politicians, at this moment it was all rolling into one frightening ball of connected dots of data.

  Like Phil was always preaching. All the dots in your life had to connect. Well, they were now connecting and the picture was pretty ugly.

  Phil had been in danger for months. Herb had known this. So too Gregory. Never again would she underestimate the seriousness of the Washington game.

  Gregory's cell phone lit up. It was Herb.

  "Where the hell are you?" Gregory shouted. "Rachel and I have been looking everywhere for you and Phil. How far are you from my office?"

  But it was not Herb on the line. It was his wife Tamay. She was calling using Herb's cell phone from the Annapolis hospital. Herb had been in a freak auto accident. With a deer. The Saab had hit a deer going 70 miles an hour on Route 2, Tamay reported bravely. The collusion caused Herb to violently fly through the windshield. He was rushed directly into emergency surgery to stop the internal bleeding. But the doctors had nothing encouraging to say. All this was delivered unemotionally and accurately by Tamay, like the good trooper she had always been for Herb McDermott.

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter 29

  Tucked away just over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on Kent Island is a hidden spot known only by the locals. The small patch of coarse sand is separated by a bank of trees from the road, and remains for most of the year unseen by those racing past to ocean resorts like Rehoboth or Ocean City. From here, the view onto the Chesapeake stretches forever. A perfect location to say goodbye to a good friend.

  A police escort, arranged by Big B, allowed the procession of thirty cars to pull out of town as one group. At the bridge the far right lane had been set aside by the Maryland State Police for the cars to assemble until everyone had paid the toll.

  Herb would have thought that much ado about nothing.

  There had been little debate about having his ashes return to the sea. That was just the right thing to do. Tamay had briefly thought of releasing them in the Black Sea off of Istanbul, where they had met. There was a beach an hour from the city that when Herb was on leave they would walk at sunrise and watch the dolphins and dream of their future together. It had at first seemed the right idea. They had been young. She had been able to walk. They had shared so many possibilities, just like a deck of tarot cards before the first card is revealed. But in all ways Istanbul felt so far away. Herb had grown to love Annapolis and anyway, she wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. In the months since the accident the idea that his ashes would be out in the Bay grew comfortably on her. She could go herself in the motorized wheelchair and sit by the mouth of the Annapolis harbor, just like he had done every morning, and know that part of the Bay, the water, the birds, the fish, had some of Herb McDermott.

  Herb would have thought that pretty funny but it’s what Tamay had decided on.

  About a dozen or so of the cars in the procession were filled with Herb's grieving clients. Mostly women, some had taken his departure harder than Tamay. A whole bunch was from the local charities Herb and Tamay had for years supported in and around Annapolis. The rest were fortune tellers, clairvoyants, palm readers and psychics from Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond and two from New York, paying their respects to one of the best of the tarot readers.

  The Davis family arrived first at the location from where Herb's ashes would be released into the bay. By now they were inseparable friends for Phil. For the two weeks that Herb had clung to life, Gregory and his mother had stayed in the hospital night and day, giving Herb the ancient potions and shooing away any evil forces.

  Tamay had no idea if their actions were helpful for her husband, though the emergency room doctors had given Herb only a few hours to survive after his mangled body was flown to the hospital. For whatever reason, he struggled on gamely for two weeks.

  Two extra weeks to sit by his bedside waiting for those miraculous moments when Herb regained consciousness. It was not two weeks for Tamay in the normal sense of the passing of time. It was the last stage of their life together, no longer or shorter than their courtship, their marriage, their journey from one end of the world to the other, the years at the Tarot Tales and finally, their time together in the hospital. But this time she had left without him.

  Phil knew precisely the extra time that Herb stayed here on earth because of the involvement of the Davis family: it was 13 days, three hours and 5 minutes. A divine duration.

  It was Phil who urge
d the service be held on the equinox of March 21st. An appropriate gesture for a tarot reader who studied the stars--but Tamay had wondered aloud as to why Phil was so insistent the ceremony had to be on this date.

  "Look, March 21st is 321, you with me?" Phil quizzed to Gregory and Tamay in his upbeat salesman style, "so divide 321 by 24 hours in a day and you get 13.375. 13 days, 3 hours and 7.5 minutes. That is almost exactly the length of time that Herb stayed with us. That's why it’s gotta be on March 21st. It connects everything up just right."

  As often when it came to numbers and patterns, Phil was onto something.

  Phil had survived that horrible Monday in December only because of the gypsy fortune teller from Old Town. After leaving Rachel in the Post Pub, he had elected to return to the Talbott Inn for a drink with Violet.

  Gregory was convinced that had Phil driven home to a waiting Lucie Welcomme, now known to be Gigi Bienvenue, he would have suffered a horrific fate like Herb. Gregory also believed that Herb had died a hero, seeking to protect his friend Phil.

  Phil spoke of what happened to him differently. "I went with Violet on a hunch. That's all. It was just a feeling I was having."

  He had also fallen seriously in love. With a woman stingy on giving it up. With a woman who admitted her desire for an American passport. But one who strove like Phil to connect to that inner world just beyond our grasp.

  For those two weeks they had together visited Herb in the hospital every day. And sat with Tamay and Gregory. They held Herb's hand, prayed, chanted when Gregory chanted. Talked to Herb about life when his eyes were open. Not once during that time had Violet allowed Phil to sleep with her. And not once had he objected.

  Phil had left the Post Pub that fateful afternoon in December intent on returning to Lucie for a fun evening. No reason to take a chance with some foreign woman when Lucie was waiting in his bedroom. But as he started the car it clicked inside for him to wonder where Violet was from--and her last name. So that was the hunch that made him drive to the Talbott Inn on 19th Street and double park in front, leaving the parking lights blinking. He just needed to know the answers right at that moment.

  Once inside he found Violet sitting in the most desired couch in the Inn's inner lobby, the old tattered couch with the low back, right in front of the wood burning fireplace.

  "I have to go back to Annapolis," he began.

  Violet was not impressed. "You've come to say you are going? That's a line you think will win me over?"

  But Phil was connecting the dots. He didn't know what was happening exactly, but he knew what he had to do right now. Here. "You're from Poland, am I right?"

  "No, smart man. You are not right." She slid to her left on the couch to face him. "You are wrong by thousands of kilometers, but since you don't even know what a kilometer is, don't worry. Be happy. Wrong country."

  "Be nice."

  "Invite me for dinner and I'll be nicer."

  "Violet, I don't even know your last name."

  "You need my last name to eat with me? And what about my middle name? Is that required for sleeping with me?"

  Connecting the dots. Stay the course. "I'd like to know where you are from, when you were born, and your last name."

  Violet took a sip of tonic water. This was, she thought, a simple man struggling with some sort of complex problem.

  Unlike Phil, Violet had long ago given up wondering where people were from or what sign they were born under or to what name they answered. Five years out of Moldova she was still in Germany, working as a cook in a small cafe near the university in Bremen. Two years later she was in Birmingham, England. Closer to what she didn't know. But she knew she was on her way somewhere and with luck all would turn out fine in the end with a good man and her own family. It wasn't Germany or England. It wasn't Moldova. It wasn't a location but some part of herself that she had known all her childhood was missing. Unlike many, Violet had not fled Moldova because the conditions were bad. The bad conditions had allowed her to flee. There is a difference.

  In Birmingham she had met a wholesaler for health books who fell in love with her. The one way love affair took her to New York. From there she left for Washington because a rich man living in the city loved Eastern European culture and thought all Moldavians were gypsies and all gypsies romantic. And then through Herb, the wonderful fortune teller, she had met Phil. And she felt intuitively this could be--should be-- the end of her wandering. But she was also a realist. So she waited to learn how this chapter would unfold.

  In Violet's mind Phil had earned the answer to his questions, so straightforward to an American and so complex for her. "My name," she revealed proudly as she stood from the sofa, "is Violet Vladimirescu. Daughter of Madalina and Ivan Vladimirescu. I was born in Balti, Moldova on September 9th, 1972. I studied architecture at university. I speak Moldovan, Romanian, German and English." She thought more. "I have no tattoos.” She thought still harder. "None on my skin, only those invisible, you know?" Phil understood perfectly. "I miss my mother and my dim witted brother. I want to raise a family of at least two kids. I know you would like my country." A twinkle in her eye. "The girls are very pretty. And you will not sleep with me tonight because of your reputation. Now, will you eat dinner with me?" Her hands rested defiant on her nicely shaped hips, her back to the crackling fireplace.

  As foretold by the Old Town fortune teller.

  A woman with the initials V.V. Not Russian, but Moldavian.

  Phil went for dinner with Violet and by doing so tipped the story into a far happier chapter than a revengeful Tommy Tucker or Tanya Lyn Owens wanted and far better than could be expected, given the ways of the political game.

  ~ ~ ~

  Chapter 30

  While struggling in the hospital Herb had managed to let it be known to Tamay that he wanted "The Man in Black," to be played at his service. That was his only request. So, after three speeches and Tamay's short statement of thanks to everyone present, Johnny Cash's deep plaintive voice boomed out from the speakers inside one of the cars, singing of the “poor and beaten down,” and the hopeless among us on the “hungry side of town.”

  Here was something new for Phil. Sure he had known of Herb's devotion to Johnny Cash and country singers like George Jones and Merle Haggard. And yeah, Herb had more days than not been dressed in his all-Cash outfit, as he called it. That meant the old black jeans with the faded black cowboy shirt. Phil had dismissed the whole country music bit as a whimsical part of the fortune teller. But listening to the lyrics, Phil wondered whether Herb's adoration of Johnny Cash was part of something far deeper. For one thing, Phil hadn't understood the extant of Herb's involvement with local charities. A huge man from the Annapolis food bank had spoken in praise of Herb and Tamay. So too a homeless shelter director. So too the director from a support organization for retired Merchant Marines.

  Phil realized he should have asked more about Herb's life over their breakfasts, instead of always talking about his own problems. But Herb loved his stories, that's for damn sure. "At my age I gotta live vicariously through you," Herb had chortled, as Phil relayed the previous week's escapades involving the latest women.

  Tamay was now being helped right to the edge of the shore. The motorized wheelchair didn't work well on the grassy sand. This was the moment Phil had dreaded. He hadn't participated in the ceremony, not being one to speak before a group unless it was to close a deal. And his deal with Herb had been closed long before. Knowing what was about to happen, Phil closed his eyes, not wanting to watch Tamay throw what remained of Herb McDermott into the Bay. It's not how he wanted to remember the man who had rescued his life in so many ways.

  His thoughts were instead on the second of three times he had communicated with Herb in the hospital room. Herb had woken up while Phil was telling Tamay about his future plans with Violet. The dying man held up two fingers. Tamay was the first to figure out what he was trying to communicate. He couldn't speak--there were all sorts of tubes running down his thro
at and oxygen in his nose. But Tamay realized her husband was referring to how many kids Phil and Violet would have: two.

  Two kids. Just like Violet had said at the Talbott Inn. Phil opened his eyes. Violet was a dash of color against the steel-gray backdrop of the Bay. She felt his glance and took his hand, thinking he was feeling sad. The first lie of sorts for the relationship, but it was a tiny one. Of no consequence.

  A month ago they had slept together for the first time. Phil hadn't slept with another woman since Herb's accident. Imagine that. After hours of discussion since that first night together, Phil had yesterday moved into Violet's small apartment in Eastport, about ten minutes from downtown Annapolis. It was the start of their life together. Two kids, the first boy would be named Herb....wait a second....today was the spring equinox, March 21st.....

  That meant a child conceived this very night would be...almost...a Hanukkah baby. Imagine that. For Violet it would be a Christmas baby. They had talked about raising kids with two religions. Three religions Violet had said with a straight face: Jewish, Catholic and American. That was fine with Phil - a better chance for the kids to get ahead, right? Two religions gotta be better than one. And a kid born during the holidays would be lucky his whole life! Lucky… Lucky…Lucky!

  Now Phil understood. Herb had lived exactly long enough to send Phil and Violet this gift for their first child. Sure, it made sense.

  The dots were connected tight on this one. And the picture was looking good.

  ~ ~ ~

  Afterwards

  The snapping of the invisible chain that linked Tommy Tucker and his power base to the other Washington insiders took place without fuss or fanfare. No one in Washington really cared about Tucker as a person, only as an occupier in front or behind in the struggle to climb as high as possible up the pyramid of power.