A Passing Curse (2011) (41 page)

Hamsun was at her side wheezing. He bent at the waist for a closer look. She smelled ripe dirt and Reese’s sweat. She smelled rotting moss.

Hamsun straightened and pronounced, “It looks like a gardener or a fisherman. It’s certainly no Indian and he hasn’t been dead more than, than - ”

“Twelve months,” Reese said. He reached into the coffin, searching the back pockets. The body rattled like an empty shell. He pulled out the wallet.

Hamsun was impatient. “Well, Who is it? Say something, young man.”

Reese slid the driver’s license back inside. “A guy who once disagreed with Ajax Rasmussen. A guy who figured out what Ajax was doing before we did.”

Rusty held the blood-stained lining.

“They buried him alive.”

Ajax adjusted the lens of the brass telescope, bringing the trio into focus. He watched them put the lid back on the coffin and load the small mound of dirt containing one female skeleton into a truck. He stepped away from the eyepiece, walked into his bedroom, and dressed slowly. He could barely see himself in the mirror and felt the first, deep pangs of Hunger. He pondered his next move. An hour for Reese to drop off Penelope and return to his hovel at the Palms. Give him a taste of things to come? Perhaps.

An hour later, Ajax was at Reese’s window, slipping with the shadows, pressing his palms flat on the glass. He floated, effortlessly now, around the apartment to the sliding glass door and opened it. Inside, the first sniff told him: empty. He haunted the apartment, searching, searching, curious really. But there was nothing of interest except for a slight hint of Homer, a feral quality to the scent. A goatish smell. Fear or insanity? He smiled. Then again, he could be sensing Reese. The policeman was probably still with her. Good. Why not? They were young. He certainly had no qualms with nature’s pull.

And then an unexplainable urge filled him, an inexplicable rage, and he suddenly wanted a showdown. He wanted to show her who was the best man.

Should he hide in the closet and wait for the arm to hang the jacket? No. Reese was young, he might spend the entire night with her. The Hunger prodded him. Moved him. He heard the footsteps above, the springs of the couch compressing. He could almost hear the whiskey hitting the glass. Perfect. The perfect red cape to wave in the bull’s face.

Ten minutes before midnight, Rupert Amos put the basket of yarn next to his whiskey glass. He was slowing down. Now only a fifth a day, down from his usual quart. He’d laughed when the doctor told him that his liver looked like a waffle, but the VA doctor had not smiled. The asshole should have laughed when he told someone he was dying.

It was funny that after years of possible death by fire and gravity, he would die of a bad liver. He was not afraid, but he was curious. Would he see it coming? Or would it sneak up in his sleep? It did not matter. He would welcome it. He was tired of living, especially now that he was dying.

He could, he decided, beat the game. Well, he could control the timing. Shove the .45 against his head and see how many times he could pull the trigger. No, he’d rather go down fighting. But then, the prospect of lingering in a hospital bed, fighting for his last breath, fighting for his last minute while the nurses changed him and fed him with a spoon and laughed behind his back, was not encouraging.

Maybe he’d finish the sweater. Maybe he wouldn’t. He had been knitting for a year now and had one sleeve done. He wasn’t very good at knitting.

The shrink, another damned doctor, had suggested the knitting to keep his hands busy and keep the dreams of fire and spreading concussion rings at arm’s length.

He would probably feel a lot better if he could get his hands on a few doctors.

Ten minutes after midnight the knocking stirred him. He rolled off the couch and opened the door. At first glance he thought it was Death come to pay him a visit before realizing it was only Ajax, which could easily be the same thing.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Ajax Rasmussen asked, his voice murky, as if speaking through a mask.

“Sure.” Rupert stood back, letting the door swing wide. “If you’ve got guts enough to show up here after dark, I can let you in.” He brought the .45 Colt from behind his back, letting it hang at his side in full view.

“You’d shoot me?” Ajax asked sincerely.

“I don’t aim on getting killed.”

“Killing? But this is merely a casual visit, old friend,” Ajax said. He was impeccably thin, wearing black. His eyes were a little jumpy, but Rupert saw no weapons. “I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by. I saw your light and merely wanted to say that though we’ve had trouble in the past there are no hard feelings.”

“Come in then, friend.” Rupert backed up to the couch. He had nothing to lose by killing Ajax, his speech to Reese Tarrant about honor and being a gentleman now seemed hilarious. Anyway, he’d be doing the town a favor. Was it kosher to kill a man you’d just invited into your home? The least he could do was offer him a drink. It did not seem unusual that Ajax had appeared tonight. Out of the blue, so to speak. But still a lot had been going on around town and none of it good. Rupert sensed a larger plan at work.

He nodded to the bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey on the table with glasses next to a bottle each of Ballantine’s and Beefeaters gin. The Beefeaters had been a present from a tenant, long gone, who’d skipped out on the last month’s rent. He’d never cracked the top and trusted no one who drank gin.

“Help yourself,” Rupert said. He liked it better this way, better than killing Ajax at a distance with the Lahti. He’d never killed up close. Never face to face. His heart felt lighter thinking about it.

“I can’t stay long,” Rasmussen said.

“Don’t worry about that,” Rupert said. He was now positive Rasmussen had come to kill him. He wasn’t sure why, unless it was because he’d refused to sell him the Palms, or maybe Ajax knew about the Lahti and was taking preemptive action. He smiled at the thought. Ajax turning his own strategy on him. “Have a drink,” he said as warmly as he could. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Ajax judiciously selected a tumbler, picked up the gin without hesitation, unscrewed the top, and half-filled the glass, holding the tumbler up to the light. “It’s clean,” Rupert said and cocked the hammer with his thumb, a solid click.

Ajax took no notice of being a five-pound trigger pull from eternity. He tossed the tumbler down cleanly, in that elegant way he had, and said, “I appreciate your hospitality.”

“It’s the way I was brought up,” Rupert said. “Good manners and getting to the point.”

“Precisely,” Ajax said. “Besides being bored and wanting to mend fences, I have no reason for being here. There is no point.” Ajax eyed the gun. “Are you planning to shoot me?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

Ajax raised his eyebrows. “How long?”

“Since I first laid eyes you.” Rupert brought the pistol in line with the billionaire’s throat. He squeezed the trigger. He brought the pistol down after the blast and recoil but amazingly Ajax had moved to the side, unhurt. Before he could fire again, Ajax stepped in, slapped the pistol to the floor, and shoved him onto the couch.

He fell, sprawling, trying to gather himself, thinking of the man he had once been, seeing just as quickly the portrait of himself and taking the stern look of his own long ago face as a sign of approval. He felt relieved. He was doing the right thing.

He jumped for the pistol and was almost to it when he saw the knife’s shadow falling, falling from far away, Ajax moving incredibly fast as the first blow staggered him.

28

She woke at seven.

Reese was snoring slightly, and when she touched his nose he opened his eyes. She hadn’t realized how blue his eyes were and in this light he almost looked pretty.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Nothing. I’m happy. I’m a morning person.” She wasn’t happy, but she was not going to think about Thomkins, the body they’d found, the shredded coffin lining. The upside down cross. She was not going to think about Ajax or the rest of it.

He kissed her and smiled. He looked like he didn’t have a care in the world. They could have been somewhere nice on a honeymoon. “You know what I like in the morning?” he asked.

“Hot coffee and grease?”

“Before that.”

“Gee, Reese, you’re a man, so let me take a wild guess,” she said and laughed to herself. She reached under the covers. She smiled and moved on top of him.

Vladimir patiently stood in front of the nurse’s station, a ten foot square counter under florescent lights that gave off a bluish hue. The two nurses were chatting happily to each other in that blissful way the bourgeoisie assume, rolling their comfortable chairs from one pile of paperwork to the other. Vladimir guessed the paperwork was simply a blind for them to look busy while others, the real workers, toiled.

He cleared his throat, but they ignored him. They wouldn’t have guessed he’d once been a doctor in Vladivostok before revanchist schemes had brought him down, that he had once ordered the doing of things, and spent languorous hours busy over paperwork. He had once been a very important doctor and would have shaped up these two. He would have left them trembling.

He was lucky, though. He was lucky to be here and not rotting in some Siberian hellhole. He had not been stealing supplies as accused. He’d escaped, one step ahead of the KGB, on a trawler bound for Tokyo Bay. He’d stashed money in a Tokyo-Swiss bank, a numbered account. Not much, emergency funds, but enough to escape the dreaded KGB.

He’d come to America, but when he’d applied for status as a doctor, a professional with a so-called “green card”, fleeing the Soviet anarchy, they’d told him that political asylum was no longer applicable. Russia was changed. Russia was democratic. Yes, and half the taxis in Moscow still had a picture of Stalin adorning the backseat. Did you see pictures of Hitler in Berlin taxis?

And when the U.S. authorities had checked with Vladivostok, they’d been told that Vladimir Piotkin had never been a doctor, but only a lowly janitor with bourgeois aspirations. The schemers had a long arm. His hopes of renewing his medical credentials had been dashed. Even the AMA would not listen, writing him off as some crackpot with a bad accent.

But he was tenacious. He would learn good English. He would save his money. He would go to night school and become a nurse, possibly a physician’s assistant. It meant becoming the lackey of these capitalists and their meaningless positivism, but it meant survival. It meant a car, a house, and a bit of respect in this consumer state.

The nurses finally noticed him, and when he told them his purpose, one grudgingly handed over the key to the storeroom. “We’re missing three cases of toilet paper, Vlad. You know anything about it?”

“Yeah, Vladdie,” the other one teased. “You haven’t been stocking up, have you?”

He wanted desperately to denounce their bourgeois dictums, but now was not the time. He must move slowly and meekly. He had plans. “I am not aware of any discrepancies in the stock. I do not control the coming and going. I do not control the key.”

He tried to say this with a smile, but he knew he sounded officious, this language, and he nodded politely before leaving, but they still laughed at him as if he were a perfect fool and their laughter followed him down the hall. A fool on a fool’s errand.

The supply room was large, at least thirty feet long, and overflowing with materiel. There were boxes and boxes of disposable diapers, disposable syringes, disposable bed pans. Bottles upon bottles of alcohol and cleaning soap and latex gloves. Vladimir sniffed and shook his head. Everything was disposable in this new world. He ran his hand along the boxes. This much equipment would have lasted years in his former hospital. The doctors and nurses would have cried, would have celebrated to have seen so many latex gloves that the wasteful Americans snapped on and off into a trash can with joy and excess. In Vladivostok a pair of gloves would be resterilized and used for weeks, the holes patched with the silver tape. Such waste.

He found the shelf for restraints. Apparently, one of the patients, an old man, had been acting up all night and into this morning. The nurse who’d told him she needed extra straps had seemed afraid, claiming that the old man had broken all of the other straps, but he’d put it off as American emotionalism. He picked up a cardboard box containing ten four-foot straps with Velcro buckles. The extra-heavy duty ones. That should keep the old man in bed. He shook his head in wonder as he removed two straps from the box and slung them over his shoulder. In Vladivostok they’d used the trouser belts left by former patients.

When Vladimir opened the door to Mr. Edwards’ room, he noticed the nurse sitting stupidly on the floor in a pool of blood. In shocked consciousness, he remembered her name was Becky, a mean, complacent thug of the establishment. He then noticed she was sitting a few inches off the floor, supported by the rolling mechanism for the I.V. stand. He turned his head. The bed was empty. Stuck to the side of the bed he noticed a strip of white tape sprouting gray hairs.

With staccato movements he went to her, wondering how she had entangled herself and saw, with some shock, the top of the I.V. stand protruding from the soft tissue next to her collar bone. He knelt and brushed the hair from her eyes. He nodded to himself still in shock. She was very dead. But how? He stood up, staring at the apparition in front of him, slowly realizing that the nurse had somehow climbed on top of the apparatus, inserted the end of the pole into her-my God-and sat down, using her weight and gravity to push the pole through her.

Vladimir saw another body, another nurse, sitting in the corner, eyes open, smiling at him, blood from her eyes and nose dried black on her face. He began shaking uncontrollably and backing out of the room to call for help when he felt the large hand on his shoulder. He was turning to tell the person to get help, for-God’s-sake, there had been an accident, when the hand spun him with great strength. He felt the straps that had been on his shoulder wrapping around his neck. He looked deeply into the sad eyes of an old man whose hands were quickly tightening the straps, the rest of his face purposeful but offset by very slack and brown teeth. He heard the false teeth clacking and snapping and then realized he could no longer breathe.