Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Have you asked Granddad?’

  ‘Yes. I spoke to him last night. Well, emailed. There’s no phone signal there.’

  ‘Where is he now? Where on earth?’

  Her father smiled, and this time it looked genuine. It made Hannah realize what a long time it had been since she’d seen that kind of smile on his face.

  ‘Washington State,’ he said, as if this meant the far side of the moon. ‘God knows why. But where he’s staying sounds pretty cool. I think you’ll like it. And he says he’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

  From the moment Dad first mentioned the idea, Hannah had wanted to go. She loved her dad’s dad, and the prospect of getting out of Santa Cruz for a while, doing something – anything – other than plodding through her mundane existence, felt desperately attractive. She’d held back from leaping at it because she knew she shouldn’t seem as if she wanted to get away from her father. That also meant she had to say what she said next. ‘But I’ll miss you.’

  As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how true they were. How badly true.

  Her dad’s lips clamped together, the way they sometimes did when he was mad. His eyes didn’t look mad, though. Not at all.

  ‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said. ‘But we can Skype, and email, and it’s not so long. And when you get back, things will be better here. I promise.’

  ‘OK,’ Hannah said. ‘Can I watch some Netflix now?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, wrong-footed.

  ‘Yay.’

  She jumped up and ran to the den and switched on the big TV. As she was waiting for her show to load she glanced back into the living room and saw that her father was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, shoulders bowed and head lowered. She could not see his face or eyes.

  His shoulders seemed to shake, for a moment, and then shake again. Presumably he was laughing at something.

  Chapter 4

  The driver pulled over to the side of Ali Baba Avenue and turned to look at the guy in the back of his cab.

  ‘You sure this is where you want to be?’

  The old man had been silent throughout the long journey into Dade County from South Beach, successfully resisting Domingo’s attempts to involve him in conversation. Domingo was good at conversation, too. His game was tight. He didn’t mind listening either, a much rarer gift, and so he could usually get customers to chat with him, and he did this out of a simple desire to tell people things and to hear stuff about where they’d come from and where they were going, not just because it meant a bigger tip, though that was always welcome.

  This customer, though … he wasn’t buying it. Anything Domingo said, he’d said nothing back, remaining relentlessly and noisily silent. He was currently looking out of the window at the twilight, his big, pale hands resting on the knees of his suit. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This looks perfect.’

  Domingo laughed briefly. ‘Right. You want to get mugged or score some dope that’s gonna put you straight in ER, that may be true. This could be Heaven on earth right here.’

  The passenger held out a few bank notes to signal their business was concluded. Domingo was not to be so easily dismissed, however.

  ‘The hell you want to come to Opa Locka for, anyway? Some dumbass website say there’s authentic down-home cooking? They lied, brother. The only specialty they got around here is rat boiled in meth. You want food, I can take you places, good places, back where the locals don’t eat each other.’

  The old man opened his door. Domingo tried one last time. ‘Look. At least take my card, OK? How the hell else you going to get back? Don’t you be flagging down no cab here, even if you see one, which you won’t. For real. They’ll take you round the corner and rob your ass. If you’re lucky.’

  The man got out and walked off down a street that looked as though it had recently withstood a minor hurricane and hadn’t been remotely picturesque before that. Domingo thought about going after him, but this was, bottom line, not a neighbourhood where he wanted to linger any longer than necessary.

  So he drove away.

  The old man spent an hour strolling the streets as the light faded. He saw low storage buildings of indeterminate purpose, fortified with barbed wire. He passed squat one-storey dwellings interspersed with clumps of stunted palm trees, houses set apart from each other not for the luxury of space but as though the inhabitants didn’t trust their neighbours enough to live in closer proximity. There were no sidewalks, so he walked down the middle of the streets, which were pitted and patched and ragged at the edges and sprouting grass in many places: the kind of broken roads you’d expect to see down the dusty end of country towns that had been dying for decades. It was stiflingly humid.

  He encountered few people. Every now and then a child would run past, but never stop. A woman stared at him from the stoop of her small, battered house, as if wondering what kind of fool he might be. A couple of times he observed men loitering outside corner grocery stores, their eyes following him. He passed slowly, in case it would be one of these who’d show him where he needed to go. None moved, however. They seemed winded, listless, as though they couldn’t summon up the energy to rob a frail-looking old man who was evidently a long way from base.

  But eventually he hesitated.

  He felt something.

  He turned in a slow circle, sniffed the air, and then set off up the next cross street. The houses were even farther apart here, and few showed a light. It felt … right.

  When he saw the abandoned warehouse down the end, looming in dark isolation, he knew for sure that it was.

  They looked up as he entered.

  It was a large, empty space, the heart of the disused building. A fire built of fallen palm leaves and broken furniture burned in the centre.

  Five men stood around it. Three white, one black, one half-Latino, none of them kids, all in their late twenties or thirties, but dressed in hoodies and ragged jeans all the same. Each looked as though it would be their pleasure to hurt you quite badly. There were a lot of candles, a hundred or more, spread over the floor and flickering in cavities in the walls.

  One of the men, the tallest of the white guys, laughed. ‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Holy crap, are you lost.’

  The old man kept walking until he was within ten feet of the fire. He put his hands together as if in prayer, and looked at each of the men in turn.

  ‘No,’ he said in a calm and thoughtful voice. ‘I believe this is precisely where I need to be.’ He pulled out his wallet and threw it on the floor closest to the man who’d spoken. ‘Let’s get that part over with. I’d hate us to get distracted by mere theft.’

  The tall guy frowned.

  One of the others picked up the wallet. He leafed through it with a professional eye, and whistled. ‘Six hundred,’ he said to the tall guy, evidently the leader. ‘And change. We going to kill him now?’

  The tall guy said nothing. His real name was Robert. That’s what his mother had called him, anyhow. She was dead and had been for a long time, along with his father and two sisters, and these days most people called him Nash instead. He’d been alive for nearly forty years – a long story by local criminal standards – and during that period had done many things. It’d be hard to come up with something he hadn’t done, in fact. Suffice it to say there were women, and men, and children, who woke in the night with his face in their minds as they lay sweating with the terrible memories they had acquired at his hands. Nash had stolen and beaten, and he had killed, via the media of gun and knife and bare hands and the sale of drugs cut with everything from toilet cleaner and chalk to concrete dust idly swept up off the street.

  Bottom line: Nash was a very bad man, and in the last six months he’d started to explore whole new realms and means and levels of being not-good.

  He was, however, also not-dumb. The way the old guy was presenting said you didn’t simply kill him. Not yet. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Tell me about the candles.’

  The
other three guys glanced at each other. ‘We’re Satanists,’ one said proudly, the guy who’d rifled through the wallet, and still clutched it in his hand.

  ‘Shut up,’ Nash said.

  The old man seemed intrigued. ‘Is that so?’

  The guy holding the wallet didn’t want to stop talking. ‘You don’t believe us?’

  ‘You say you are, you are.’

  ‘You’d better bel—’

  Nash turned to the wallet guy, his eyes hard. The other man went silent. He froze, his mouth open in mid-word. It looked as though he was trying to close it but could not. Eventually, after a great deal of effort, he managed to. Sweat had broken out on his forehead and his hands were trembling.

  The old man watched all this with interest.

  The trembling man retreated into the shadows. The others followed suit, leaving only Nash standing opposite the old man.

  ‘Going to ask you one last time,’ Nash told him. ‘What do you want?’

  The old man shrugged in a friendly way. ‘I’m curious. I have a fondness for ruins, the abandoned, the lost. I was walking, and saw this place. I decided I’d take a look. I was assuming it would be empty or that I’d find a few homeless or addicts sprawled over the floor. Instead …’ He gestured around. ‘Candles. They look well enough. But you don’t seem the Martha Stewart Living type. So I’m curious.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Merely what I appear to be. But who are you, Robert? What are you these days?’

  Nash stared at him. ‘How you know that name?’

  ‘It’s just a game of mine. Whenever I don’t know someone’s name, I call them Robert, that’s all. So tell me. Was what he said true? Are you gentlemen really Satanists?’

  Nash elected to tell the truth, not because he considered the practice to be important or valuable, but because it was time to let the weird old dude know exactly what – and who – he was dealing with.

  He lifted his right hand, raising it to chest height. His eyes on the other man’s, he coughed, once.

  A small glow puffed into life in his palm, at first very dim, but quickly growing into a little ball of bright orange fire, about the size of a golf ball.

  The old man watched the flame. ‘Huh,’ he said, as if impressed.

  ‘Right,’ Nash said, closing his hand and lowering it back to his side. ‘That answer your question?’

  ‘I suppose it does.’

  ‘Good. Got any more, or are you going to leave? Or I guess you could stay, and we could beat up on you for a while. For practice. That could work.’

  ‘How’d you do it? The fire.’

  ‘It’s a gift.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From him. The Dark One. For doing his work.’

  ‘How? What kind of thing?’

  ‘We pray to him,’ Nash said. ‘Every day. And we make sacrifice.’

  The old man nodded as if someone was explaining an important change in the terms and conditions of his health insurance. ‘What kind? Animals? People?’

  ‘No.’ Nash laughed scornfully. ‘That’s retro bullshit. You do the wrong thing with the right intent, you don’t need that Dennis Wheatley crap.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘We break, we burn. We spoil.’

  ‘You say “we”?’

  The other men watched from the background, silent, as if knowing this conversation was out of their league.

  ‘Me, mainly. These guys … they got a ways to go.’

  ‘So show me something. The kind of thing you do.’

  Nash hesitated. On the one hand the situation was kind of whack. He didn’t have a clue who this guy was. Could be a cop for all he knew. But if so, he couldn’t have anything on Nash or he’d have come with back-up and guns – even assuming Miami PD kept detectives on the payroll after they got so old they looked like they should have their feet up on a porch, waiting for the grandkids to come visit so they could go to Disneyworld and waste enough money to feed an Opa Locka family for a month.

  The other thing was that Nash did want to show someone, someone other than the hangers-on lurking in the shadows. He’d shown those guys what to do, countless times, but none of them was making progress. They couldn’t get it to click, and that failure was holding him back. Nash understood that it wasn’t enough to walk this road by yourself. You got status from how many you dragged along with you. It was a gift you had to keep on giving. Day after day. Night after night.

  He put his hand in his jeans and pulled out a small cardboard container, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. He held it up.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Nash opened it. The interior had been padded with cotton wool. Lying in the centre was a tiny box. He removed this and held it up for the old man to see.

  The man leaned forwards and squinted, seeing an intensely shiny black surface over most of the box, apart from the lid. There, someone had spent a great deal of time painting a detailed winter scene: pine trees and snow and a horse-drawn sleigh with two people on it, wrapped in old-fashioned coats and furry hats. It was so precise that it looked as if it must have been painted with a brush of a single hair, white and green with highlights of intense red and purple and dots of gold, all the more striking for the blackness of the box. It was extraordinarily shiny, too, as if coated with many coats of colourless varnish. In its detail and lustre it reminded the old man of something else, a far larger box he had once commissioned to be built.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Old guy who lives a couple blocks from here,’ Nash said, putting the tiny box carefully down on the floor. ‘I heard him talking in the store. His wife’s dying of cancer. Her mother was from Russia. The one thing she brought with her from the old country was a box like this. A lacquer box, they call it. It got stolen when this guy’s wife was a kid, but she’s remembered it all these years. Like it stood for her mom, or some shit. So this guy, he knows his wife’s dying, and he’s got cash salted away she doesn’t know about. He’s been saving all these years for the right time, putting a buck away here, fifty cents there. He figures this is the right time. So I overhear him telling all this to the guy behind the counter – who doesn’t give a crap, I mean he really could not care less – telling him that he’s blown this money, seven hundred fifty dollars, on buying one of these on the internet. Spent weeks tracking down a box like the one he’s heard his wife describe all these years. It’s her birthday in a week. He’s going to give it to her then. Or … he was. Until I paid a visit to their house, last Sunday morning when they were at church.’

  ‘You stole it. Nice.’

  Nash smiled. ‘Right. But that’s not it.’

  He raised his right foot and paused, closing his eyes as if in supplication, and then brought the heel of his boot down on the lacquer box, smashing it to pieces.

  He was quiet for maybe ten seconds, relishing the moment. Then he opened his eyes.

  ‘That’s what he likes.’

  The old man was motionless, as if listening for something. After a few moments he shook his head. ‘I got nothing,’ he said. He seemed irritated, and something else. Disconcerted, perhaps.

  Nash was confused too, having anticipated a very different reaction. ‘What?’

  The old man stood there, lips pursed, furrow-browed. Up until this point he’d seemed relaxed, as if their discussion had been quite interesting but no big deal. He didn’t look that way now. He looked unhappy, and thoughtful. He looked serious.

  ‘What’s up, dude?’

  The old man glanced at Nash as though his mind was already on other things. ‘What’s up? I’ll tell you what is up. I like your style, but there’s a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’

  ‘A big one. I don’t know who you’ve been sacrificing to, my friend, but he is not the Devil.’

  ‘Oh yeah? How do you know he’s not?’

  ‘Because I am,’ the old man said.

  He turned to the man in the shadows who was still hold
ing his wallet, held up a hand, and clicked his fingers.

  The man exploded.

  There was utter silence. None of the men standing there, sprayed though they were with blood and brains and internal organs, said a word or made a sound or moved a muscle. It was so very quiet that it seemed possible they might even have stopped breathing, until they all blinked, in unison.

  ‘Don’t try that at home,’ the old man said, bending down to pick up his wallet from where it had landed conveniently by his feet. ‘Otherwise, keep up the bad work.’

  He walked out into the night, purposefully, a man who’d determined that it was finally time to get down to business.

  Chapter 5

  The flight was OK except that a woman from the airline kept coming to check on Hannah, talking to her like she was five years old. At first, Hannah had been glad. She was a little nervous at the prospect of the journey, never having flown by herself (though also excited, as it would be the most compelling proof yet that she was, in fact, extremely grown up). Her dad was there to see her off, of course, but he still had not shaved and his voice was quiet and he was blinking an awful lot. He hugged her tightly when it was time for her to get on the plane and stood watching her walk down the corridor until she had to turn the corner and couldn’t see him any more. A kind-looking old lady with long grey hair told her not to worry, she’d see him again soon. Hannah didn’t think it was any of the lady’s business, but said thank you anyway.

  She didn’t like to think of her dad driving back over the hill to their house and walking into the silence all by himself. So she did not, and read her book instead.

  The flight passed, as they all do, eventually.

  The first person she saw when she walked out of arrivals in Seattle was Granddad, standing with his hands in his corduroy trousers, chubby and pink-faced and irrevocably bald. His face lit up when he saw her, and she ran over and buried her face in his sizable stomach.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, putting his arms around her, smelling as always of peppermint. ‘Everything will be OK.’