by Craig Nova
“How?” I said.
“Aurlon is wanted here and there. Theft in Florida, rape in Orlando, some other things. Yana told me.” “Ukrainians. Jesus,” said Aurlon.
“So, I used the rape charge in Florida. And some other things. I told him I’d call Orlando, some other places where people would like to talk to him. And he knows I don’t lie.”
“She doesn’t lie,” said Aurlon.
“So I told him he better meet me here,” said Pauline.
“And if you were gone,” I said to Aurlon. “Why, then Stas could try to get me to help him with a case, right?”
“Make your move,” said Aurlon. “Five hundred, right?”
I set up two castles, one behind the other, power right down the middle of the board.
“That was the idea,” said Aurlon. “Yeah, we almost had you. That’s what I call stakes.”
He countered, brought out a knight.
“So, five hundred?” he said.
“But you’d have to stay gone,” I said. “For this to work.”
“Check,” said Aurlon. “Just two moves.”
“But you’d have to stay gone,” I repeated. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be so cooperative.”
“Make your move,” said Aurlon.
I moved a bishop.
“You’re such an innocent, Frank,” said Aurlon. “I’d only have to be gone long enough for you to help Stas and his friends once. Just once. Then they’d have you. I could come back and they’d have the goods. How would you explain helping them? They’d have you good and proper. Check.”
One move. Mate.
“That’s five hundred you owe me,” said Aurlon.
That institutional smell seemed to grow in intensity. The scent of exhaust from Route 2 came into the room.
“I could make a list,” I said. “Of the things I could charge you with. Conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to blackmail, and, you know, some other matters that would be pretty easy to hatch up . . . ”
“That’s five hundred dollars . . . ,” he said. “But look, you don’t want me. You want Stas. He’s the bad character here, right?”
I knocked my king over. Pauline put her hand in her dress to adjust a strap.
“If it hadn’t been for her, I’d never have come here. But when she makes promises, you got to watch yourself . . . ”
The drawer of the desk opened with a squeak, and the heavy motel paper (as though good stationery would make the stink and desperation of this place go away) made a little rumble as I pushed it across the table. I put three hundred dollars on the table, too. And a pen.
“Write Pia a letter. Tell her you are sorry that you disappeared. You just had to go. A rambling man, right?”
“And you’ll get the other two hundred from the ATM?”
“Start writing,” I said.
The ATM was in a glass booth with an oily film of handprints on the sides, and these obscured the parking lot and the highway. The machine made an ominous clicking, and then the twenties came out. Heavy, new, and as crisp as if they had just been ironed. Then I went back to the room.
He held out the blank paper. Not a word.
“See, we’ve got to work this out delicate like,” Aurlon said. “We’ve got to solve some problems here. You’re a smart guy. So the first problem is Pauline.”
“I just wanted you to know I could help, if I wanted,” Pauline said. “And then, you know, say I don’t help you. I let Aurlon slip away into the shadows. It might be fun to watch a scandal with you at the center and for you to know that I could have stopped it. You see what ‘bitter’ means?”
“I’m getting the idea,” I said.
The building shook as another truck came down that grade outside.
“But say I go see Stas,” I said. “I tell him I’ve seen you. I guess he’d have you at the bottom of the harbor in about twenty minutes.”
“That’s a risk,” said Aurlon. “But I don’t think he’s there yet. I think he’d help me get away.”
“That’s a pretty thin reed,” I said. “That thought.”
“It’s a risk,” said Aurlon. “I have to say that.”
“So what are we going to do?” I said.
“Give me the two hundred,” said Aurlon.
I passed it over.
“Now I could write to Pia and say I had to leave town because you hired a thug to come after me,” said Aurlon. “She kept after me, you know, to tell her if anyone threatened me. A cop, she thought. But cops, thugs, it all sort of runs together sometimes.”
“Don’t you see, Frank,” said Pauline. “It all depends on me. If I want to help, we’ll feed Stas to the wolves. We’ll get Aurlon here to testify against him. And, you know, we’ll work out a deal where we forget those charges in Florida.”
“It could be done,” I said.
“Just listen to him,” said Pauline.
“Sounds good to me,” said Aurlon. “So?”
Pauline closed her eyes. Then she said to Aurlon. “All right. Get the fuck out of here. I’ll let you know what I decide.”
Aurlon stood up, put two hundred dollars in one shoe, two hundred in the other. A hundred in his pocket.
“I could just grab you right now,” I said.
“You haven’t got a legal right to do that. You’d have to get a warrant. Or you’d have to call a cop. And I’d be willing to bet that Pauline would help me get out the door. So, just forget it. And what would it look like anyway, if it comes out that you were trying to grab some guy who was blackmailing you? Where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is Boston, remember? Its lifeblood is scandal.”
“Get out of here,” said Pauline.
“Too bad, Frank,” said Aurlon. “We almost had you. And we might yet, if this one”—he pointed at Pauline—“helps out.”
He went out the door. The trucks went by on the highway and then a cop car shrieked. Outside the maid pushed her cart along the concrete, the wheels squeaking. Pauline undid the first button on her dress. She turned back the sheets on the bed.
I took her hand.
“You didn’t believe me,” she said. “All you had to do was ask for my help.”
We sat at the end of the bed. Pauline undid another button. The familiar scent of powder rose from her chest. The sheets smelled not clean so much as disinfected.
“I think we should just sit here,” I said.
“Don’t you want to thank me,” she said. She touched the turned-back sheets.
“I think we should just sit here,” I said.
“I’ve been waiting a long time, Frank,” she said. She undid anther button.
“You smell wonderful,” I said.
“For old time’s sake, Frank.”
She took my hand and put it inside her dress.
“Let’s just sit here,” I said.
“And then?” she said.
I shook my head.
“We’ve got something else to talk about,” I said.
“I guess we do,” she said. “Just to prove to you that I’m not so dumb. Aurlon is in real danger now.”
“Un-huh,” I said.
“If I let Stas know he was around and that you knew about it, I guess Aurlon would have a half-life of about twenty minutes. Then it’s out in the harbor for him . . . I could do it on general principles. He doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about.”
“But you wouldn’t say anything, would you?”
“I don’t know, Frank,” she said. She took my hand and put it inside her blouse. “Are you sure?”
“It would just make us sad.”
“Maybe that’s not the way I’d feel about it,” she said.
We sat there, our faces close together as though we were about to kiss.
I reached into my pocket and took out the velvet case with the gold at the edge where it opened. Pauline kept her eyes on mine. I put it into her hands, and when she opened it, she sat on the edge of the bed, the case in her lap, the diamonds there like a coll
ection of stars that had been reduced and strung together: blue sparkle, red sparkle, hard, white flash. She let them dangle from her palm, as years ago when they hung like a small, dead snake, and then she ran the diamonds across her lips, across her neck, in her hair.
She stood.
In the bathroom, the strand in her hand, she opened the toilet seat. She looked at me and let them slip, one at a time, the color of them the same as the water, which was bright with the overhead light, the reflection of the mirror, and something else, a kind of brightness that came from Pauline’s own trembling, as though her feelings had their own energy, their own sidereal radiation. The diamonds disappeared, one at a time.
She put her hand on the lever, then she turned to me.
“I didn’t want the diamonds,” she said. “I wanted to know that you cared enough to get them.”
She pushed the lever. The water came with a rush, a sort of diminished roar.
We sat in that motel. The trucks went by and their long trail of exhaust leaked into the room. After a while she stood up, put on her shoes, and said, “Well, Frank, didn’t I keep my promise? Couldn’t I make you feel so good? Just so good?”
She leaned forward. I kissed her on the neck.
“Yes,” I said. “You did.”
She hesitated in that motel scent.
“The address,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Aurlon’s address,” I said. “I’ll probably need it.”
“No, Frank,” she said. “No.”
On the motel’s little pad I wrote Tim Marshall’s numbers, landline and cell, and told her she should call him with the address.
She held the small, cheap slip of paper in her hand, the thing trembling with her regret and fury, and then she put it in the pocket of her blouse.
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
“Thanks for the diamonds,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
Then she went out the door.
I sat on the end of the bed again as the trucks rumbled, and I was left with the memory of the light on Pauline’s skin, those rows of jockey shorts, one clothespin holding the end of two of them, and as they dried, and as Pauline whispered from the shadows, Louis Armstrong played, “Hello, Dolly, how nice to have you back where you belong . . . ” How could I have known, years ago, that I would end up in a motel on Route 2, humming that song and thinking of revenge: the gears and pulleys, the flywheels and pushrods, of time in action?
I opened my cell phone and called Tim Marshall. When he picked up he said, “Frank Mackinnon. You remember that dumb Bulgarian at the gun club? You know what he did?”
“He did a Dutch job on himself,” I said.
“How did you know?” said Tim. “Did someone in the office tell you?”
“Just a guess,” I said.
[ CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN ]
THE WEDDING WAS on Sunday. A week away. When I called Alexandra, she said the caterer had started to bring tables and tablecloths, chairs and silverware, and members of the band had been around to see about the power, and so we were going to have to hire an auxiliary, but quiet, generator.
At home, I got out a suit bag and put in a morning coat and striped trousers, a new suit for the rehearsal dinner, shirts, ties, studs, shoes, shined for the occasion, and then some rough clothes for the other job.
Robert answered his phone.
“Are you ready?” I said.
“Sure, Frank,” he said. “I’m ready.”
The scotch was warm and soothing, and I went along the shelf, where I stopped at Marcus Aurelius.
The Mannlicher felt light in my hands: just the weight to carry it all day, as I had years ago when I had hunted deer with my father and when he had used it to hunt deer with his father, who had used it to hunt alone, before his sons were old enough. Now, I removed the bolt, cleaned the barrel with a push rod and a brush, and then changed the attachment so I could run a rag, soaked in Hoppe’s 9. Then I wiped the barrel and receiver, put the bolt back in, slipped the rifle into its canvas case. The box of 6.5 mm ammunition went in, too. Then I put it in the car, with the rest of my things.
On the way out of town the prison guards looked down from those lofty gray walls, and yet, while the place was as stern and unforgiving as ever, the prison had another quality. It seemed amazed by the possibility of surprise, which places like this didn’t take into account. After all, this place seemed to say, everything is decided.
The road up from the Delaware was one that I had taken with my father and one that he had taken with his father: just a dirt road with fieldstone walls on both sides, the construction of a ruin, just stones piled up with a geometric precision, as though people were sacrificed here as in ancient civilizations. Gray stones, covered with green and white lichen, and behind the walls red and white oak stood along with stands of spruce and pine, the green seeming oddly hopeful in spite of everything. It was a dry September, and the Audi left a trail of dust, which even in the air showed a bit of sparkling pyrite, bits of gold. A deer, its white tail flagging, ran alongside of us for a while.
“What if we can’t find it?” said Robert.
“I don’t know,” I said. “My father should have shot the thing when he had the chance.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He left the job to me,” I said. “He loved to get someone else to do something he didn’t want to do.”
“But why didn’t he want to?” said Robert.
“It’s hard to say,” I said.
We turned toward the farmhouse and went along the road, which was lined with pines, big ones that two men couldn’t reach around. Then we came up to the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to the farm, square prisms of stone my grandfather had put up and which now looked like some marker of an ancient grade.
•••
The tent appeared achingly white on the brownish grass of September. The sides were rolled up, and long tables with tablecloths had been arranged with white folding chairs. Soon the silver and napkins and glasses would be laid out, too, with a sort of mathematical precision. Back in the woods, just out of sight, the auxiliary generator, set up for the opium-smoking musicians, made a slight throbbing, as of an anxious heart, and in front of it a technician, in a tie-dye tee shirt that probably came from Harvard Square, waved to someone out of sight. The generator stopped. Everything was working.
Robert and I stood in that cloud of dust.
“I sure hope the heat breaks by Sunday,” said Robert.
The woman from the Girls Club, Buddy Hollyette, drove up to the farmhouse, too, in her ancient Willys, double-clutching as she came up the drive, and then she came out and stood in the heat, her shape shimmering there, and said, “I could accept a promise from you that you would get rid of the thing, the mangy creature, but I did that with your father.”
“I know,” I said.
“And what did it get me?” she said. Her glasses had a layer of dust, and she took them off, wiped them with a Girls Club handkerchief, and put them back on. Then she leaned closer.
“If I let you go ahead with this,” she said—she gestured to the tent, the generator, and toward something else, too, the general air in the field and the house that seemed somehow essentially nuptial, which, of course, she was naturally suspicious of—“you’d do the same damn thing. Why is it that men turn into their fathers? Just like clockwork. So, here’s the way things are. Get rid of that monster. If you don’t, this isn’t going to fly. I’ve talked to my lawyer. But then you’re a lawyer, too.”
She said this as though announcing a nationality, as though I was a Bulgarian.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Then it’s just between us,” she said. “Your word and mine. How’s that?”
Robert stepped up.
“Fine,” he said.
“Who’s this?” said Buddy Hollyette.
“The groom,” I said.
> “Great,” she said. “A groom.”
“What did you say,” said Robert. He stiffened. “Do you have something to say to me?”
“You heard me, Frank,” she said.
She got back into her Willys, cranked the engine, and drove out, leaving a cloud of dust. With the grit in my mouth, I wanted to say, Listen, I’m not my father. Not by a long shot. My father would have let the air out of your tires and then put a hornets’ nest in your spare. He would have found a way to make you profoundly uncomfortable in some intimate way. He was full of tricks, and not all benign. That’s what a spook is. He would have gotten two thugs to throw you through a window because you were causing trouble. He would have found a way to appear blameless, a victim, innocent, generous, and abused. When he was through with you, you’d be begging for mercy from a jail cell where you would be sitting for having been charged with perversions you haven’t even heard of. Maybe you’d end up with a lobotomy. All the dead Yale men knew some tricks, right out of Skull and Bones. And you know, as well as I do, that they are gone forever.
We went out the drive and up the road to the stone house, which, at least, was clear. The trees on the sides were slowly forming a bower, but you could see beyond those stone walls an understory of mountain laurel and shadbushes. Then we went over that stone in the middle of the road, came around a turn, and pulled up on the brown grass where Alexandra’s car was parked.
She came into the heat of the afternoon, her clipboard to keep track of details in one hand, the other touching the sweat on her forehead.
“So, you poor mutt,” she said. “You’re going to do it. Isn’t that the deal?”
I gave her a kiss on the cheek. The Mannlicher was in its case, and when I reached in we all listened to the zipper as I opened it up. The Mannlicher slipped out of the case. Then I pushed the brass hulls into the open port, the magazine being circular and taking one shell and then turning to take another. Five plus one in the chamber. I closed the bolt and put the safety on, a little tab that stood straight up.
“Did you see the generator?” said Alexandra. She kept her eyes on the rifle. “Those opium-smoking musicians are happy as can be.”
It was late afternoon.
“Yes,” said Robert.
