When Monty was twenty-two he almost helped murder the movie star Billy Marr. Monty had met Kostya a month before, at a dinner in one of Uncle Blue’s restaurants in Brighton Beach. ‘From now on,’ Uncle Blue had said, wiping his beard with a red cloth napkin, ‘you two work together.’ He never explained why he thought such a partnership was a good idea or how they should divide their labors. Monty had disliked Kostya at first, irritated by the big man’s constant clowning and bragging, the way he would get drunk and sing Bruce Springsteen songs on the street or kneel down in front of harried waitresses and recite Russian poetry from memory. But Kostya had called Monty ‘friend’ the first night they met; he ignored Monty’s surliness; he won Monty over with his certainty that they were meant to be comrades. Monty knew the Ukrainian was dangerous – at the Turkish baths one evening he had seen the ragged scar crossing Kostya’s belly, and Kostya was the only man he knew who actually slept with an automatic beneath his pillow – but he needed a dangerous man on his side. Monty alone was too much of a target. There were hundreds of sugar bandits in New York, men who made their money robbing dealers. Dealers were sweet targets because they carried wads of cash and never called the police when they were rolled. With Kostya, Monty had a bodyguard, someone whose very presence was intimidating.
They had gone to meet Billy Marr at his apartment in Chelsea. Monty slouched against the hallway wall, watching Kostya bang on the door and press the bell and mutter low oaths. After five minutes of this, a girl Monty guessed to be eighteen finally let them inside the place, a sprawling loft with bare concrete floors and ceilings twenty feet high. She wore a black silk robe, embroidered on the back with a Chinese dragon, and a green towel turbaned around her head. She led them into a sitting area and walked away without a word. All the furniture was white. A triptych of female nudes, painted in silver, hung above the fireplace. Three skinny young men slouched on a sofa, their forty-ounce bottles of beer cradled in their laps. They looked at Monty and Kostya for a moment and then returned their gaze to the television screen, to videotaped footage of air disasters: two propeller planes colliding above a runway; a fighter jet slamming into the prow of an aircraft carrier; a man whose parachute failed to open, falling, falling, falling. The camera watched him from the ground: the man started off a speck in the sky and grew larger and larger until, in the second before impact, his open mouth was clear and focused. He hit the desert floor so hard he bounced.
‘Ouch,’ said Kostya. ‘You guys know where Billy Marr is?’
‘Who are you?’ said one of the skinnies, not looking up from the television.
‘He called us,’ said Monty. ‘We’re Uncle Blue’s friends.’
The girl in the black robe had reappeared, peeling a tangerine. The turban was gone. Her ash-blond hair was cut short. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘the sugar man.’
‘Cool,’ said the talking skinny, sitting up. ‘Billy’s not here, man. We’ll hold on to it for him.’
Monty ignored him and spoke to the girl. ‘Uncle said talk to Billy. You know when he’s coming back?’
‘He’s out all night,’ she said, dropping the tangerine peels on the floor and halving the fruit. ‘How much is it? Gianni, you guys have any cash?’
The three young men made a half-hearted show of digging through their pockets.
‘Twelve thousand dollars,’ said Monty. The three young men quit digging.
The girl shrugged, the movement causing the open V of the robe’s lapels to flare farther apart. Monty caught a glimpse of white breast. He looked back to her bored blue eyes. He wanted the girl to offer him some tangerine but she never did.
‘Why don’t you just leave it here for him,’ she said. ‘He’s good for it. It’s Billy Marr.’
Kostya laughed. ‘Not possible.’
She spat a seed and began walking away. ‘You want to wait a few minutes, I can make some calls. He’s one place or the other.’
They ended up waiting an hour, taking the sofa when Gianni and his friends retreated to another room. Kostya put his arm around Monty’s shoulders and spoke quietly into the younger man’s ear. ‘Very stupid, what you did.’
Monty could smell the mint of mouthwash on Kostya’s breath and, below the mint, garlic. ‘What did I do?’
‘We don’t know these people from hole in the wall and you tell them, “Twelve thousand dollars.” You tell them, “We’re friends with Uncle.” You never see them before and you tell them our business. Very stupid. Don’t fuck me, okay, you hear? You know I have two strikes on me. Don’t fuck me. I won’t spend my life folding prison laundry.’
They watched a hang glider slam into a cliff in Mexico, a helicopter plunge into a river, a military cargo jet’s front tire burst on landing, sending the plane skidding on its nose into a hangar.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Kostya. ‘Who watches these things?’
At last the girl reemerged, wearing black nylon warm-ups and basketball shoes.
‘He just called, he’s at the Pierre. You guys have a car? I’ll give you the room number.’
‘We have car,’ said Kostya, standing. ‘Let’s meet Mister Movie Star.’
When they got to Billy Marr’s room on the fourth floor of the Pierre Hotel they found the door propped open with a room service cart. An uncracked lobster sat on a bed of seaweed, one dead antenna plunged into a bowl of congealed melted butter.
‘Poor fuck,’ said Kostya. ‘Boiled for nothing.’
They pushed the cart into the hallway and closed the door behind them. The room was dark. Billy Marr stood by the window, smoking a cigarette, watching headlights stream down Fifth Avenue. He wore a white T-shirt and black jeans. He was Monty’s age, slender and fine-featured, famous for a smile that made women stupid with desire. But in the dark he was nondescript, a lean shadow. He turned and beckoned his guests closer.
‘You guys are from here?’
‘New York?’ asked Monty.
Billy Marr laughed. ‘I figured you weren’t from the Pierre Hotel.’
‘I am from Ukraine,’ said Kostya. ‘My friend, he is from New York.’
‘Where’s the Dakota?’ the actor asked, gesturing toward the window.
Monty pointed at the row of buildings on the far side of Central Park’s dark sprawl. ‘One of those. I don’t know which.’
‘That’s where John Lennon lived with Yoko Ono. That’s where he was shot. I want to take my girlfriend there tomorrow. John Lennon was God.’
Half-assed God, thought Monty, getting himself shot on his own block.
‘Listen, brothers,’ said Billy Marr, ‘I’m ready to sack out. Ten hours ago I was drunk in London.’
‘We’re ready when you are,’ said Kostya, smiling, his false front teeth unnaturally white.
Billy Marr stared at them for a moment and then laughed. ‘Oh right, money. My brain’s in England still.’ He slipped his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a check.
Now it was Kostya’s turn to laugh. ‘We don’t take checks, Mr Marr.’
‘You’re kidding me.’ The actor frowned. ‘I always pay my guy in LA with checks.’
Kostya shrugged. ‘Not for us, please.’
‘You think I can’t cover this? I wipe my ass with twelve-thousand-dollar checks.’
‘We take American Express,’ said Monty.
‘Really?’
‘No, not really. We’ve been fucking around for three hours, looking for you. What is this?’
‘Calm down,’ said Kostya, resting a heavy hand on Monty’s shoulder.
‘You know who I am?’ asked the actor, squinting at Monty. ‘You know who you’re talking to? I’m Billy Marr.’
‘I’m Montgomery Brogan.’
‘Yeah, great. Listen,’ the actor said to Kostya. ‘The money is not an issue. If there’s a problem here, maybe there is, maybe it’s a trust thing, but money is not the issue.’
‘The issue,’ said Kostya, ‘is money.’
Billy Marr exhaled noisily, then jabbed his index fi
nger into Monty’s chest. ‘Let me show you something, brother. Come over here.’
Kostya let go of Monty’s shoulder and the three men walked over to a side door joining the suite’s living room and bedroom. ‘Don’t make any noise,’ said the actor, pushing the door open.
The television was on, blue-lighting a four-post bed: white sheets, chintz duvet, sleeping woman on her side. Billy Marr tiptoed over to her and studied her face. He slowly, slowly, pulled the sheet down the length of her body, exposing her in her naked sleep.
She was very beautiful, the bones of her face delicate in the lamplight. Her rib cage rose and fell with her breathing. Monty felt he should not be looking but he looked anyway: he studied her thighs, where they creased at her pelvis; her breasts, half covered by one arm; her mouth, lips slightly parted as if she were trying to speak in whatever dream now occupied her mind. Billy Marr smiled at Monty and Kostya. Monty turned around and left the bedroom.
Kostya followed a minute later, shaking his head. He huddled with Monty in the living room, whispering, ‘She looks like my cousin Zoya. I have shown you pictures, yes? The first girl I love, Zoya. She lose her arm in bad accident, very terrible, at factory. But still she is beautiful. One arm, but beautiful.’
‘That’s Cassie Whitelaw.’
‘Who?’
‘Cassie Whitelaw. She’s on TV. You never seen her before? St James Infirmary?’
‘“St James Infirmary,” Louis Armstrong?’
‘No, it’s a TV show. She’s a nurse; she’s in love with one of the doctors.’
‘Hey,’ said Billy Marr, closing the bedroom door softly behind him. ‘You see what’s waiting for me, brothers?’
‘Your girlfriend?’ asked Kostya.
‘Twelve thousand dollars means nothing to me,’ said Billy Marr. ‘You comprehend what I’m saying?’
‘No,’ said Kostya. ‘Not yet.’
‘I’m saying, don’t go away with my sugar. We both have something the other guy wants. Am I wrong?’
Kostya frowned and stared at the closed suite door. ‘She is whore? She is beautiful, yes, but for twelve thousand dollars nobody is so beautiful.’
‘No,’ said the actor. ‘I’ll give you the money tomorrow. This is by way of a down payment. She’s a friend of mine. I tell her you’re my old buddies; she’ll help you out. She’s not a whore, she’s a fucking actress. She likes to party. All right? We have a deal?’
Monty spat on the floor. ‘You’re a punk,’ he said, ‘pimping Cassie Whitelaw’s ass.’
‘Are you insane? Do you know who the fuck you’re talking to?’
‘You’re a punk and you’ve got no money and your movies suck.’
Billy Marr started walking toward Monty, fists clenched. Monty waited and the actor stopped suddenly and laughed. ‘This is retarded. You’re nothing, man. You’re a penny-ante sugar man with some Russian goon for a bodyguard.’
‘Ukrainian,’ said Kostya.
‘Tomorrow morning I fly to LA and a limousine picks me up at the airport. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be sitting poolside at my house sipping champagne in the sun, and you’ll be standing on a corner selling junk to teenagers. That’s your life. You’re gone. The next time you see me, I’ll be in a movie you’re watching in jail. Some three-hundred-pound nigger will be cumming up your ass and you’ll see my face on the television and I’ll be smiling, motherfucker, I’ll be laughing.’
‘Not if I shoot you tonight,’ said Kostya.
Billy Marr looked at the big man’s face and blinked. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘All right, hey. Let’s call this a bad date, okay? This has all been a real bad blind date, and now we know better we won’t do it again. Right?’
‘My friend likes to shoot bad dates,’ said Monty. ‘That’s the custom in the Ukraine.’
Billy Marr said nothing for a moment. One of Kostya’s hands was inside his coat pocket, and the actor watched the hand, shaking his head. ‘I’m going to bed. Okay? I’m going to bed, I’m going to sleep, and tomorrow none of us will remember this. Okay?’ He pushed open the suite door and slipped through it, closing it and locking it behind him.
When Kostya and Monty left the room, Kostya grabbed the boiled lobster from the cart. He tried to shove it in his overcoat pocket but it didn’t fit so he carried it while they rode down the elevator, while they strolled through the lobby, while they waited for the valet to bring their car.
‘Hello, how are you?’ asked Kostya, shaking hands with the lobster’s claw. ‘Yes, yes, this movie star fuck you tonight, I know. He fuck us too. But the woman, she was beautiful. If you had seen this woman, ah, maybe you die a little happy.’
The valet pulled up with Monty’s Corvette and Monty gave him a ten-dollar tip.
A year later Billy Marr drove over Cassie Whitelaw, crushing both her legs, after she tried to take the car keys from him following an eighteen-hour bender. He served six months in consequence, two of those months in a rehabilitation center in Northern California with hot tubs and a sand volleyball court.
Ten
The walk sign flashes and Slattery steps into the crosswalk. Jakob grabs his elbow. A jacked-up four-by-four careens around the corner at high speed, leaving a wake of bass-heavy radio music and an afterimage of happy faces, the driver and his laughing passengers.
‘Saved your life,’ says Jakob, smiling. He is very pleased that he was the one who spied the oncoming car, that he was the one with the quick reactions, defying all expectations. But Slattery shows no gratitude; he stares furiously after the speeding truck.
‘Did you see that? They were laughing at us! Little fucks almost kill us, and then they laugh at us!’
‘Jerks,’ says Jakob. ‘Teenagers.’ He wonders if they were his students, a gang of juniors dissatisfied with their grades. Maybe Mary D’Annunzio paid them off.
‘Those little punks.’ Slattery still stands by the curb, looking west through the falling snow toward where the truck disappeared. ‘Real tough guys behind two tons of steel.’
Ten minutes later, seated at the window table of a Chinese restaurant, Slattery is still talking about it. ‘You get these kids who can’t even write their own name, who were born in the eighties, for fuck’s sake, and it’s just like, Sure, here you go, here’s a license for you to drive a big truck whenever you want, go for it, have fun, don’t worry about that white stuff, that’s just snow, go as fast as you want. You know? And if they just stayed out on the Island or in Jersey or wherever, fine, great, let them splatter themselves out there. But do they have to come into the city and risk my life?’
Jakob looks out the window. A woman battles her umbrella, trying to straighten the collapsed frame as snow collects in her red tangles of hair. He watches her struggle and falls in love with her. Jakob is forever falling in love with women he sees through windows, their unsmiling air of determination, grimly tramping to wherever they’re going. Which is never to me, he thinks mournfully, and then rolls his eyes at his own self-pity. He pours tea for Slattery and himself.
The waiter comes over to take their order, scowl at their selections, and grab their menus without saying a word. Jakob imagines the waiter as the great poet of his generation, forced to flee China for supporting dissident causes, forced to make a living serving food without spice to men without talent.
Slattery gestures with his chin toward the window. ‘It’s really coming down.’
‘They said we might get a foot,’ mumbles Jakob. He tries to divine the future in the swirling leaves at the bottom of his teacup. What will happen to Monty? Where is he now, out in the snow or warm inside, and what is he thinking, and is he afraid? He must be afraid, except Jakob cannot imagine Monty scared, cannot picture a look of fear on Monty’s face. It’s not courage, exactly – something is missing. Sometimes Jakob wonders if Monty believes in the reality of other people, the danger of other people.
Slattery watches his own spectral reflection in the window, a balding ghost in the falling snow. He looks at Jakob, at the crown
of his fully haired head. What a waste, thinks Slattery.
‘So I did the calculations the other day and you’re in the sixty-second percentile.’
Jakob looks up. ‘The what?’
‘The sixty-second percentile. All the bachelors in New York, all the straight bachelors, we’re competing for the women, right? It’s like high school seniors competing for spots in the good colleges.’
Jakob opens his mouth to speak, closes it, opens it again. ‘And I’m in the sixty-second percentile.’
‘Right.’
‘In other words, I’m better than sixty-two percent of the New York bachelors.’
‘You’re rated higher than them, right.’
‘But worse than – what, thirty-eight percent?’
‘Thirty-seven. There’s no hundredth percentile.’
The waiter arrives with a tray of aluminum-covered dishes. He arrays the dishes on the table and removes the covers: a sad pile of steaming greens on Jakob’s side, heaps of glistening meats on Slattery’s.
Jakob snaps apart his pair of wooden chopsticks. ‘How did you come up with sixty-two?’
‘That’s your rating. There’s a whole way of figuring it.’
‘Oh, there’s a whole way of figuring it. Well, that sounds fair. As long as there’s a whole way of figuring it. And what are you? What’s your rating?’
‘Ninety-ninth percentile,’ says Slattery, picking up a dumpling with his fingers and dipping it in a puddle of soy sauce on his plate.
‘Ha. So, okay, hold on a second. Who came up with these ratings?’
‘I did.’
‘Oh, I see. You came up with the ratings. And you get a ninety-nine. That’s very interesting. And what are they based on? What’s the science behind this—’
‘Don’t get all annoyed,’ says Slattery, through a mouthful of ground pork and scallions. ‘It’s a system. It’s not saying you’re a bad person.’
‘Just a bad bachelor.’
‘No. A better-than-average bachelor.’ Slattery blows steam into his cupped hands. ‘Hot. You ordered all these vegetables and you’re not eating any.’
The 25th Hour Page 8
