Maria Elena looked toward Kwan, barely visible in the backseat of the Toyota. She glanced back at Pami, talking with Grigor. She said to Frank, “Where are you all going?”
“To hell in a handbasket,” Frank said, and pulled the ruined tire off its rim.
‘That work will make your hands very dirty,” Maria Elena said.
“Yeah, I know that.”
“When you are finished,” she said, “come to my house.”
Ananayel
Now! my five triggers are together at last, and now all they have to do is find the path I have cleared for them, and the game is over.
I will miss them, Fm afraid, miss all of it, miss the Earth and the humans and even contesting my will against that fiend. The long doze of my life will be as comfortable in the future as it has always been, I know that, and the joy of doing His service will remain untarnished. But still, when I look back, from eons away, at this augenblick in my existence, this speck of time, this brief instant of vivid color and vivid emotion, I will remember it with fondness.
Susan Carrigan.
Well, yes. I have made a study of this problem, while my players have been ricocheting toward one another, and I have proved to my own satisfaction that Susan Carrigan is nothing special. There are millions of such young women scattered over the globe, unmarried as yet, doing small things with clean neat fingers, whether in banks like Susan, or in clothing mills, or in lawyer’s offices, or in computer assembly plants, and they are all the same.
That’s the point. Such minor differences as occur in the appearance of these young women is as momentous as, to a human, the differences between two collies. Such shadings and gradations of personality as they provide within their basic nature as wholehearted servants are of even less moment. There is nothing to distinguish one from the other.
The human males, of course, devote much of their lives to discovering the minutiae of whatever differences do exist in these young women, and make their lifetime choices on the basis of such highly emotional and transitory distinctions as they profess to find. But I am not a human male, though I have enjoyed playing at the part.
Susan Carrigan was the first of them I met, that’s all. Nothing more.
I may drop in to see her again, once or twice, while the plotters work out the planet’s destruction in the house in, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but that will mosdy be because I enjoy being Andy. Oh, well, I’ll miss it all, and her, too. I’ve said as much.
Regardless, it won’t be long now.
SYNTHESIS
X
Pami!
I found it, didn’t I? The center of the scheme, the very cockroach nest of that servile fog, the cluster of god’s dunces all in one place. And what a crew!
We have kept him under observation, that blanched tool, that truckling toady. My winged allies, my fellow spirits of the air, they have viewed him unseen as he has to’d-and-fro’d on his lickspitde rounds. And why has he now caused a minor traffic incident to occur to an automobile on a side road in New York State? A blown-out tire, not very artfully arranged; but he is not an artist, is he, that bumble-fingered marplot? No, no, but no; truth doesn’t need artistry, does it? (Thus the immemorial motto of the ham-handed.)
I had kept not far from Susan Carrigan, which is to say, I had been keeping not far from murderous boredom. But when the word came that heaven’s stooge had made this upstate incursion into the quotidian, I fled from her—gratefully—and observed the two in the disabled car. They could give me aesthetic pleasure on their own, of course—what fortitude, in the face of what sorrow! hah!—but what did he want with them? Then the second car arrived, and there was Pamil
Oh, HA HA HA! I’ve got them now! I can destroy them at any instant, any instant at all. And once I discover Susan Carrigan’s role in Armageddon, I shall destroy them. Not as lingeringly as they deserve, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my best. I’ll give them as much attention as I can spare.
But not yet. Susan Carrigan is somehow central, but is not present with this gallery of the agonized. Why not? What is her role? Until I understand her function, I will not understand that vaporous firefly's plot. I have to learn what he’s scheming before I can be sure the scheme has been as permanently doused and trampled as a cookfire in dry timber country.
I told you you could trust me. I told you I would save you.
31
Frank carried Grigor into the house, seating him in a soft armchair in the living room, where his view ranged from the TV set on the left to the picture window and Wilton Road on the right. Kwan made his own way into the house, and collapsed onto the sofa, breathing with his mouth open.
Maria Elena took Pami to the kitchen to help put together some sort of dinner for everybody, but Pami knew nothing about kitchens and preparing food; it was embarrassing for them both. So Pami soon left and went back to the living room.
By the time Frank returned from the ground-floor half-bath, where he’d been washing the tire-changing grime off his hands, Pami and Grigor were deep in medical conversation and Kwan seemed to be asleep, so he went off to the kitchen, where he found a beer in the refrigerator, then sat at the kitchen table and watched Maria Elena work.
He had about forty thousand left, out of the East St. Louis money; almost a third gone already, on nothing at all. But it was an easy way to live, not nervous, not hustling all the time, not just barely scraping along. Frank hadn’t broken into a house or a store for almost a month now, and he didn’t miss the experience a bit.
Mary Ann Kelleny’s advice came back to him: don’t do constant litde hits all the time, exposing yourself to risk over and over, but do it all at once, in one big major haul. The five-million-dollar hit. Well, fifty-seven grand wasn’t exactly five million, but it showed the principle was sound.
Sitting there at the kitchen table, watching Maria Elena at her domestic work, Frank felt as though he was at some sort of watershed moment of his life. Already he could see that this was the place to turn himself back into a loner; Maria Elena would be happy to take Pami and Kwan off his hands. She liked worrying about fucked-up sick people, you could see that. Then from here, alone, Frank could maybe drive on up to Boston, hole in somewhere, try to think about that five-million-dollar hit.
People pulled jobs like that in the movies all the time, right? So what did they do, what kind of thing? Break into Fort Knox. Steal The Love Boat and hold it for ransom. All these make-believe capers pulled by platoons of good buddies, as well-drilled as the Green Berets.
Is that what the five-mil hit is supposed to look like? Then forget it, because it isn’t realistic. Unless there’s five million dollars lying in a room somewhere that one man can get into and grab and get out again, there’s no such thing as the five-mil hit. No such thing.
So what was realistic? If a man got tired of exposing himself to the risks a hundred times a year for shit-poor returns, what could he do instead? Where was there even a fifty-seven-grand hit, three or four times a year? (Without any weak-hearted old man in it, please.) Money isn’t cash any more, not usually, it’s electronic impulses between banks, it’s charge cards and pieces of paper and phone calls.
Frank would leave all that stuff to another generation to figure out how to loot; what he needed was tangibles. Money, or for second best, jewelry. And the greater the concentration of money or jewelry into one place, the tighter the security.
Maria Elena broke into Frank’s thoughts when she put a bowl of carrots onto the table and said, “Excuse me. Would you do these carrots?”
Frank looked at them, overflowing the bowl, their long green fernlike tops still on, the carrots themselves large and thick and hairy. He had no idea what she wanted from him. “Do?”
She put a wooden chopping block on the table in front of him, with a small sharp knife and a scraper. “Cut the ends off each one,” she said, “and scrape the skin off.”
“Well, I’ll try it,” Frank said.
She was amused by him, but in a low-key way
, as though she hadn’t known she could be amused by anything. Moving back over toward the sink, she said, “Have you never had a wife to ask you to do these things?”
“Never,” Frank told her. “And in diners they pretty much do it themselves.”
“It is very easy to learn,” she assured him.
“I’ll give it a whack,” Frank said, and did just that, decapitating one of the carrots. The knife was good and sharp. He nicked off the narrow end of the carrot, feeling pretty much on top of this job, and then had a hell of a time getting the scraper to work. It kept turning around on him, rubbing along the hairy skin of the carrot without accomplishing anything. “Bugs Bunny eats it with the hair still on,” he pointed out, but she ignored him.
Once he got the hang of the scraper, Frank finished off the carrots with no trouble at all, and then Maria Elena gave him a bowl of potatoes to work the scraper magic on. “I gotta have another beer if it’s gonna go on like this,” he complained, and she brought him one.
Weird place to be. In the living room, Pami and Grigor had turned on the TV, and the sounds of music and voices came from there. The warm kitchen was beginning to smell very good. Frank sat at the table, sipping his beer and peeling the potatoes. The five-million-dollar hit, he thought. Where’s the five-million-dollar hit?
* * *
The dining room table seated twelve; plenty of room to spread out. They ate roast lamb and two kinds of sausage and boiled potatoes and three kinds of vegetables and a salad.
All except Kwan, that is. Since he couldn’t swallow any solid food, Maria Elena had made for him various drinks in the Cuisinart, giving him also a mixture of honey and warm water (known long ago as melicrate) to help soothe his throat between sips of the other liquids.
Since Kwan was sitting with the others, at their insistence, but couldn’t eat, Maria Elena gave him a pen and yellow pad and pushed him to let them all know who and what he was. His despair was such (he was trying to figure out how to die without interference from all these unlikely do-gooders) that she had to press a lot, but finally he gave in and wrote as few words as possible, sketching his brief history.
That’s how Frank learned he wasn’t a Jap after all, but was a Chinese named Li Kwan. And Grigor, who was reading Kwan’s notes aloud, suddenly recognized Kwan when Tiananmen Square was mentioned: “I saw your photo. With the, the...” Frustrated, Grigor held his cupped hand in front of his mouth.
“Bullhorn” Kwan wrote, and finished his biography, and went away to sit in the living room, where they couldn’t question him any more.
They did come in with him later on, but not to pester him. There was a general desire to watch the eleven o’clock news. Maria Elena closed the sliding drapes over the living room’s picture window and the possible eyes of neighbors, they all found places to sit, and the sound-bites of news started: litde digestible chunks of events. A chunk from Russia, a chunk from Washington, a chunk from Alaska, a chunk from Berlin.
The first chunk after the first commercial break was about the strike and demonstration at the Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Pickets and police surged in a confused scrum, and a yellow school bus with some difficulty made the turn and drove through the gate. Within its windows could be seen embarrassed-looking middle-aged men and women. Then the neutral, the lobotomized, the castrated off-camera voice told the viewers that the plant was being kept on active status by managers and supervisors, who kept a skeleton staff in the mostly automated plant twenty-four hours a day. The disputed research continued, safely. Dutchess and Columbia county citizens were assured that power outages would not occur.
“Outage,” Grigor said. “What a word that is.”
“They are very good, officials,” Maria Elena said, “at finding the words that put the people to sleep.”
“The people want to sleep,” Grigor said, and Kwan nodded emphatically at him.
“I don’t care about that stuff,” Frank said, unconsciously confirming Grigor’s point. “I just wanna make it through my life.”
Pami said, “So do I.”
Repeating what he’d said to Maria Elena the other day, Grigor nodded at the television set, which was now showing an anti-racist demonstration in Brooklyn at which four pickpockets had been arrested, and said, “I’d like to get into that plant, for just one day.”
Frank looked at him. “Why?”
“I’d play a joke,” Grigor answered, with the same cold smile as when he’d said the same thing to Maria Elena.
“Big deal,” Frank said, not really getting it. Nodding at the television set, as Grigor had, he said, “Easy to get in there, if that’s what you want.”
Grigor shook his head. “How could it be easy? They have such security. You saw it just now for yourself. Fences, and guards, and television monitors. And there must be other things as well.”
Frank grinned; they were on his subject now. “Grigor,” he said, “getting into places is what I do. That isn’t security there, that’s Swiss cheese.”
Maria Elena said, “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”
“There’s a dozen ways in,” Frank said. “You saw the school bus?”
They’d all seen the school bus.
“On day number one,” Frank explained, “you follow the school bus around. It’s picking up all those managers and whatever they are at their houses, bringing them in. You take the night shift, midnight or whenever, and you follow it around. Day number two, you go to the last house on the route and you wait. When the school bus comes by, you climb aboard, you show everybody your MAC-11s, you—”
Maria Elena said, “I’m sorry, your what?”
“It’s a gun,” Frank told her. “Not my kinda thing, I don’t use guns, but this is just a for-instance. So, for instance, you get on the bus, you show these guns, you say everybody just sit nice and quiet. You get to that plant there, the security guards wave you right through the gate. They protea your route into the place.” Frank grinned. “My kinda security,” he said. But then he shook his head and said to Grigor, “But what’s the point? You’re inside. You can play your joke, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But what’s in it for the rest of us? There’s nothing in there.” “Plutonium,” Grigor said.
“Yeah? What’ll a fence give me for that?”
“Nothing, I’m afraid.” Then Grigor smiled and said, “And I must admit, even with a gun in my hand, I doubt I’d be very intimidating to all the people on that school bus.”
“So there you are,” Frank said. “Now, you find me a jewelry store where you wanna do a joke, could be we’re in business.”
* * *
Exhaustion settled on Grigor and Pami and Kwan after the news. Grigor would sleep on the living room sofa, as originally planned, with Kwan on the living room floor on a pallet made of cushions from the armchairs. Pami would sleep upstairs on the sofa in the den/sewing room. Maria Elena would sleep in her own bed, and Frank in the next room in Jack’s bed.
But not yet. Neither Maria Elena nor Frank was tired yet; for different reasons, both felt keyed up, needed more time to unwind and relax. They went into the kitchen, closing the swing door, and did the cleanup together while Maria Elena told him about her background in Brazil, and he gave her a capsule summary of his own useless and repetitive life. He also gave her a more full account of the East St. Louis heist and the change it had made in his life. “Now I can’t let myself get caught. No more litde hits, litde risks, three to five inside and back out again. This time, I go in, I’m done for.”
“So you must reform,” she said, as a kind of joke. She wasn’t sure why she was taking his biography with such moral neutrality, but somehow it seemed to her that he was more a good man who did bad things than a bad man. He’d never, for instance, poisoned any children.
Frank was amazed at the things he was telling this woman, and finally said so: “I never shoot my mouth off like this. I don’t know what’s with me tonight, I just put my life in your hands and I don’t even know you. One phon
e call, and you could blow me away.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I dunno,” Frank said. ccWhy do people do any of the shitty things they do?”
They had finished the kitchen work and were just standing there, she with her arms folded and her back against the sink, he leaning slouched against the refrigerator. Maria Elena said, “I would not do anything to hurt you, Frank.”
He shrugged and grinned, in a joke’s-on-me way: “I guess I must believe that,” he said.
She unfolded her arms and spread them, saying, “You are the first person to talk to me in five years.”
His grin widened. “Longer than that for me. Listen, you want to dance?”
Surprised, she said, ccThere isn’t any music.”
“You don’t hear the music?”
She lifted her face, and at last returned his grin with her own rueful smile. “Now I do,” she said.
He stepped away from the refrigerator, and she came into his arms. He was a miserable dancer, and knew it, so he just led them in a litde slow-paced circular shuffle around the kitchen table. She felt heftier, more solid, than he’d guessed; but he liked that. She wasn’t a girl, she was a woman. Her hair smelled clean, her throat was soft and musky. Holding her, moving in that slow jailhouse shuffle, he cleared his throat, geared up his courage, suffered a couple of false starts, and finally murmured, “Could we uh, uh...”
“Yes, Frank,” she said, and patted his shoulder, and kissed the side of his neck.
32
In the morning, Kwan was weaker. He remained on the pallet on the living room floor, sitting up twice to force down small portions of purees Maria Elena had made for him. He was having trouble now even swallowing the melicrate (rhymes with consecrate, desecrate, execrate), and spent much of the day asleep.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 24
