(2004) Citizen Vince

by Jess Walter

  “Curly Hair.” Charles sits up in his seat. “Is that your guy?”

  “That’s not Camden, no. Might be Benny.”

  “’Cause I know the other guy. Pete Giardano. He’s a shy, does some book.” Charles seems genuinely intrigued by this development, and Dupree wonders how long it’s been since Charles did real police work. The two men are on the street, only a few feet apart, talking and nodding. Finally, they shake hands and Pete Giardano climbs back into the cab. The curly-haired guy leans down and says something into the back window, then watches the cab drive off. As soon as Dupree sees that the guy is walking toward the building, he opens his car door and calls out: “Benny?”

  Benny DeVries turns, first curious about who is calling his name, then alarmed. He pretends to wave as he moves quickly toward the door of his building.

  Dupree angles across the street, holding up his badge. “Slow down, Benny. I’m a cop. I just have a couple of questions.”

  DeVries looks unsure, but he waits as Dupree steps onto the curb and shows his badge. “I’m Alan Dupree. From Spokane, Washington. I’m looking for a friend of yours. Vi—” He catches himself. “Marty Hagen.”

  “Marty?” DeVries smiles. “God, I haven’t seen Marty Hagen in…” He blows air out his mouth and looks up in the sky. “Jesus, I don’t remember exactly when. He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

  “Maybe,” Dupree says. “I understand you represented him?”

  “Yeah. Theft. A couple counts of fraud.”

  “He went into witness protection a few years ago?”

  “Yeah. Marty got in trouble, owed some money to some people.”

  Dupree hopes he remembered the name right. “To Pete Giardano?”

  DeVries laughs and looks in the direction the cab just went. “Pete? No. I’m Pete’s lawyer. We were having a meeting that turned into a bunch of drinks.” He laughs. “Look, I don’t know what happened to Marty after the feds took him away. He disappeared. You know they don’t even let those guys talk to their lawyers?”

  “I didn’t know that,” Dupree says.

  “Yeah. They’re just…gone.” He shrugs. “Look, if there’s nothing else…I’m exhausted.”

  “I talked to your sister.” Dupree sees the first bit of worry on the attorney’s face.

  “Has she heard from him?”

  “No,” Dupree says.

  Benny is relieved.

  “So what can you tell me about his case?”

  “Not a lot,” Benny says.

  “Maybe you can just tell me what I’ll find in the file Monday morning. Who he testified against.” Dupree smiles. “Where the bodies are buried.”

  “There aren’t any bodies. Nothing like that. Marty got busted on a credit-card scam. That’s all. He had to borrow some money from a made guy up in Queens to get out and the guy’s family wanted a bigger taste of the business. He took some risks trying to pay them off, got busted again, and it just got worse from there.”

  “He couldn’t repay the loan?” Dupree asks.

  Benny nods. “And the fellas were afraid he’d talk. The FBI heard some guys say they were gonna make him dead for it. So we took the deal—put him in witness protection if he’d testify. Old story. Happens all the time.”

  “They put him in witness protection over a credit-card scam?”

  “They were targeting this crew, hoping to get the guy above him to turn. And the guy above him. You know. Like dominoes,” Benny says. “It all fizzled out, ended with some plea bargains.”

  “And he had no history of violence?”

  “Marty? No. Marty’s a thief. He’s not a violent guy. Marty is—” Benny looks up at the streetlights smearing the night sky “—funny. He’s a bright guy. If he’d been born in some other neighborhood, with money, and opportunities…I don’t know…”

  “So, if he came back to New York, where would he go?”

  Benny stares off. “Marty? I don’t think he’d come back. But if he did, he could be anywhere—wandering around staring at the buildings, hanging out in bookstores…sitting on a pier with his feet in the water. Hell if I know.”

  “He have any other friends?”

  “I’m the only one. No others I know of.”

  “Girlfriends?”

  “Only one I knew was my sister.”

  They talk for a minute more and then Dupree thanks Benny DeVries and exacts the same worthless promise he got from Benny’s sister: “If you hear from Vince, you’ll call me, right?”

  “Sure,” Benny says, and takes the cop’s card without looking at it. Dupree starts back for the car, trying to add this up. Almost two in the morning.

  In the car, Charles is leaning on the wheel. “So?”

  “He’s seen him.”

  “He tell you that?”

  “No.” Dupree shrugs. “But he talked about him in present tense. Isn’t that weird? If you hadn’t seen someone in three years, would you talk about them in present tense?”

  “Right, right,” Charles says. He looks at DeVries’s building, and then back. “What the fuck is present tense?”

  WHEN DOES THE day turn? Clocks and calendars say midnight, but the man who lives his life by a clock is no better than a robot. Daylight? Letting the sun determine is only slightly less arbitrary. So what? Consciousness? Does the day begin when you rise out of bed into it? Is there a fixed moment when you pass from one to the other? Even awake, Vince has felt the turn from one day to the next; no rule says when it happens, you just know it when it does. If he had to peg it, he’d say closing—when the bars shut down. That’s generally when the day ends for Vince. Two o’clock in Spokane, three here in New York. That’s when Vince has most often felt himself moving from one day into the next, when the world changes and he feels delivered.

  Vince sits at the poker table, beneath a low ceiling of cigar and cigarette smoke, highball glasses sticking to the felt table. Ange, Carmine, and Beans look up from their cards, enthralled, waiting to hear more. Johnny seems uninterested, although it was he who dragged Vince back to the table after hearing the whole story—showing no reaction as Vince explained his debt, the witness protection program, and barely escaping from Ray Sticks. Now he listens patiently, like a jury, as the guys pepper Vince with questions.

  “So, then what?” Ange asks.

  “Well. The marshals sit you down at a table. And you talk about the places where you’ve lived or worked or traveled. Anyplace you might have friends or family. They cross out those cities and states and the states bordering those states. Then they take the places that are left and they look for a city big enough for you to blend into, big enough to have a federal office but not so big that you’ll fall in with whatever action might already be there.”

  Beans shakes his head. “So you don’t get any say in it?”

  “Not at first,” Vince says. “At first, you just wake up in this town and everything is different. Not just the buildings and the people, but everything: the language, the smells…The sky in this town where I live now—it’s huge. And it’s closer than it is here. Right here.” He reaches up, as if he could touch it. “Big and blue and white at the edges. No smoke or traffic. And trees! When you’re driving through, you got no idea it’s even a city because the houses are all built in the trees.”

  “No shit.” Carmine leans forward on the table, smiling. “Like it’s invisible?”

  “Sort of. And the people are funny…they live in this perfect place, but it’s all they know, so they all assume it’s gotta be better somewhere else.”

  “I heard there’s places in Montana where you catch fish out your front door.” The guys all look at Beans.

  “Well, there’s a river running through Spokane. It’s mostly filled with bottom-feeders. Suckers. Nobody bothers fishing in the river because it’s fast and has waterfalls and rapids, and anyway, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a lake up there. These cold mountain lakes are twenty, thirty miles long and so deep they still haven’t found the bottom in
some of them.”

  “No shit.”

  “The water comes from glaciers. There’s one in British Columbia, couple hours north, where you can see the ice at the top of the lake. There are rivers to the south where you can catch a hundred-year-old sturgeon, twenty feet long.”

  The guys shake their heads.

  “What about the women? There a lot of broads?”

  “Not a lot, but the ones there are…” Vince begins to describe Kelly and is surprised that it’s Beth who appears in his mind. “Nice,” he says quietly.

  Ange asks, “The government give you a lot of money?”

  “At first you get a little. But they retrain you and expect you to go out and earn it yourself straight. So I took baking courses.”

  Beans, Ange, and Carmine nod intently. Johnny works his drink and stares at Vince, noncommittal and flat.

  “I’d always wanted to open a restaurant,” Vince says. “So I got this job making donuts and figured I’d try something on my own later.”

  “Italian place? They got good Italian out there?”

  “No,” Vince says. “Macaroni and ketchup joints. But I don’t cook Italian anyway.”

  Ange shrugs. “I could give you some recipes.”

  Beans looks for room in his own overflowing ashtray for a butt, then flicks it into Carmine’s. “What else could you do? Could you be…I don’t know…a doctor?”

  Vince shrugs. “I doubt you could be a doctor, but maybe. I mean…theoretically, I guess, you could be anything that any other person could be. You get to start over.”

  “Hey.” Carmine lets out a sort of giggle. “You know what I’d be? Marine biologist. You ever see them guys swim alongside dolphins? That’s what I’d be. I’d move to Hawaii and swim alongside them dolphins all day.” He turns to Gotti. “They can communicate with each other, John.” He makes sharp clicking sounds.

  The other guys sip their drinks and seem to be imagining their new careers. Except John, who just stares. Not at Vince, just out into space.

  “You get to pick your own name?” Ange asks.

  “Sort of. They help you with that, too. They try to give you something you’ll remember. Like with me, Vince was my dad’s name.”

  “No shit.” Ange turns to John. “That’s nice, huh, John? He picked his fuckin’ father’s name. Ain’t that nice?”

  John drinks his whiskey.

  “You know what I’d pick?” asks Beans—short and bald, with a long scar from his eye to his lip. “Reginald Worthington Edenfield, the Third.”

  “It’s kind of overwhelming sometimes,” Vince says. “You get to start from scratch. No record. No debts. It’s like…being born.” He reaches in his wallet and, in a moment of shared excitement, produces his voter registration card. “I just got this.”

  Ange looks at the card and passes it to Carmine, who turns it over as if it’s written in French, then hands it to Beans, who passes it along to Johnny.

  John turns it over in his hand, wads it up, and flicks it off the table. “Big deal,” he says. “You and a hundred million other morons.”

  The guys are quiet.

  “So,” Vince says finally, “how did you find me?”

  The other guys look over at Gotti, who shrugs. “What makes you think you were lost?”

  Smoke. Quiet.

  “Come on.” Johnny Boy drains his whiskey and it’s like his head is on a cracked swivel, lolling right and left and then back. “Deal the fuckin’ cards.”

  Carmine deals to himself, Beans, Ange, and John. “And this is the first time you been back, Vince?”

  “Yeah.” Vince is glad they’re calling him by that name, hopeful that they’ll make the distinction between Vince the repentant baker and Marty the snitch. He watches the cards go out to the other players and wishes he were still in the game; he doesn’t like watching the cards go around and past him. Doesn’t like the symbolism of being out. “When I recognized Ray Sticks I knew I had to get out of town. I thought about running—even a few minutes ago, I thought about running. But I decided it was more important to face up to what I’d done. Pay my bills.”

  Beans shakes his head in wonder. “I been wondering where Sticks went. You had him on a job this whole time, boss?”

  John looks up but doesn’t answer.

  Beans turns back to Vince. “Boy, you must’ve shit your pants.”

  “A little.”

  “Still, it takes balls to come back here,” Ange says hopefully, glancing over at John, who doesn’t seem to hear. “Don’t it takes balls, John?”

  Vince has the feeling that Ange is serving as his default attorney in this, arguing his case in front of John.

  Vince looks from John to Ange and back. “Yesterday I went to see old Dom Coletti and made good with him.”

  Beans smiles. “No shit. Old Cold Blood? How’s he doin’? I heard he had an attack or something. Moved into a little apartment in Bay Ridge.”

  “Yeah,” Vince says. “A stroke. He doesn’t look good. I paid him what I could and made arrangements to pick up the rest. So at least I’m square with him.” He cuts a glance to Johnny, who doesn’t reveal anything. “I was hoping I could do that with you, Mr. Gotti. I was hoping I could square my debt.”

  Johnny takes a drink of his whiskey and looks up at Vince with eyes that register nothing but their own opaqueness.

  DETECTIVE CHARLES PULLS up to Dupree’s hotel, puts the car in park, and turns the key off. He says he’ll get Dupree the file on Marty Hagen in the morning and they can start going through the names. Charles yawns. “So, are you married, Seattle?”

  Dupree spins the ring on his finger. “Yeah. Couple of years.”

  “Kids?”

  “Not yet. My wife is getting her degree. After that we want to have a baby.”

  “Yeah? What’s she gonna be?”

  “A speech therapist.”

  “No shit.” Charles lifts his head, eyelids heavy. “So she’ll do…what…what is that?”

  “Speech therapy—therapy for people who have speech problems.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Dupree reaches for his door handle. “So you can help me get Hagen’s file tomorrow? ’Cause I don’t want to screw with the marshals service. It might take weeks.”

  “Oh yeah, fuckin’ feds. I’ll get you the file.”

  “I’ll take care of it from there. You don’t need to waste your Sunday with me.”

  “Aw, we come this far. I wanna see it to the end.”

  “It’s not necessary,” Dupree says.

  “I need the overtime.”

  “Put in for it. I’ll tell your lieutenant you were with me all weekend.”

  “Nah, I’ll save you a lot of time looking for the places you gotta go. And I might even know some of the guys, like Pete Giardano.” Charles reaches up to turn the key. “Besides, I leave you alone and you get killed, it’ll be my ass. So I’ll pick you up about noon. Okay?”

  “No,” Dupree says, as firmly as he can. “Thank you.”

  “What?” Charles looks over at him. He laughs. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” Then his face reddens and drains. “You don’t want my help?”

  “No.”

  Charles stares for a long time. Dupree wants to pull away, but he feels challenged, and he stares right back.

  “You know what I love about guys like you?” Charles asks finally. “You think you know all about the world. You think the job is a certain thing and your life is a certain thing and you can just go along, fuck-all blind. Well, you know what? One day, ten years from now, you’re gonna realize…it ain’t about who’s a nice fuckin’ guy or who deserves trouble. It’s about how there’s us—” He backhands the city. “And them.

  “And one night, when you’re walking down a dark shit-smellin’ hallway with junkies all around and you hear the click of a forty-five next to your fuckin’ ear, it’ll all be clear to you and you’ll realize that having those guys behind you is the only thing worthwhile in this world. That�
��s why they put us in the same uniform, why they give us the same shield. Because that comes first, Seattle! We’re brothers. Just like your real brothers. If your fuckin’ brother needed help, if he was sick, what would you do?”

  “Call my mom and ask why she didn’t tell me I had a brother.”

  “Fuck you, Seattle,” Charles says.

  Dupree opens his mouth to say something, but decides not to press his luck. He steps onto the hotel sidewalk in front of a line of cabs, their drivers leaning back and sleeping. Dupree thinks hard about what the big cop said (if your brother was sick) as he watches the unmarked police car pull away from the curb. He looks back at the cabs.

  JOHNNY LOOKS UP from his cards, as if he’s decided something. “Lift your shirt.”

  Vince lifts his shirt to his neck and spins.

  “Pants.”

  Vince waits a moment, then unbuckles his pants, and drops them to his ankles. The guys at the table make a point of not looking up—all except Johnny.

  Satisfied that Vince isn’t wired, Johnny asks: “So what will you do?”

  Vince is fixing his clothes. “I’m sorry?”

  “If…” He dips his chin forward and catches a belch just before it leaves his mouth. “If I cancel this contract, what will you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Vince is amazed that he hasn’t even thought that far, that he hasn’t considered what would happen beyond this point. He can tell by the look on Johnny’s face that the answer is important. As soon as Vince poses the question to himself, he knows the answer…and hopes it’s the right one. “I guess I’d go back to Spokane. I’d mail you the rest of the money and…I’d just live.”

  John stares, so Vince continues.

  “I rent a little house there. Got a job I like. And friends.” Again, he finds himself thinking of Beth. “I wouldn’t mind trying to make a go of it. You know, legitimate.”

  Johnny finishes his drink. He looks at his cards, then at Ange on his right. “What’s the bet?”

  “Five to you, John.”