Payback (25 page)

Well … that was life.

It could offer you a character like Carol Tate's brother, the Cleveland dentist, a guy who'd be talking on the phone to his mistress, he'd complain she hadn't flossed. He'd say, “You have to work at relationships and gums.” He'd tell her how “the tartar buildup in your mouth is a perfect example of your attitude to life.” Then there was the line that was typed underneath it:

(Girl starts to cry.)

Ortega could picture the typist transcribing it
(Girl starts to cry.)
and then reaching for his coffee. There was coffee on the page. Then the phone call from Burt.

(Puts her on hold.)
“Burt? Thank God. I want to tell you I've been grinding my molars over this.”

And then Burt says, “I asked him for the story of the tip.”

“You mean Cy,” says the dentist—his ladyfriend disconsolately slobbering on hold. And then Burt tells the story. Ending with, “he pissed in a ficus plant and left.”

Taken in context, Ortega had to think, it wasn't any sillier than the rest of it. The rest of life.

He opened his pen again and doodled on a pad. He was doodling a tooth. Then he drew a half-moon smile around the tooth. Then he called the Naturalite Task Force in New York and asked if they'd check about a Slovo Abdajanian, a Ned Ted Fred Ed Jed with a penthouse, a dick named Schneider, and a cooker named Sandy, Andy or Sam.

27

The girl in her twenties with the long ironed hair and the tight white sweater and the bright purple mini and the white vinyl boots led them over to a table. She asked what they wanted to drink and Mitchell said a whisky and Mack said a whisky but he'd settle for a Coke. He watched her walk away—ass like a metronome, clicking out the rhythm of “American Music” as it blasted from the box. Narrowing his eyes, he said, “Christ. I don't know. I thought we already did that girl, didn't we?”

“
We
did, yeah. Things come around again.”

“Oh.”

Another mini came bopping from the bar and Mack tipped his chair back and followed her with his eyes. Mack, like a rerun of 1969: hair to his collar, face down to bone, squint-lines around the eyes but the eyes were still the same, still flat and ironic, still narrowed in a general suspicion of everything, especially himself. He yawned.

“Are we keeping you awake?” Mitchell said.

“Little man's tuckered out.”

“Big day.”

“Big fuckup.—You realize, of course, I could've
had
him if I hadn't had to clobber you to the ground.”

“And I apologize.”

“Fat lot of good it does. Shit.”

There was laughter from the bar. Rusty, behind it, doing numbers with the crowd.

Mitchell looked away. “You gonna brood about it?”

“No, I was just thinking, that's all. Problem is, I didn't have anything to think. I mean aside from the phone book—the Who's Who in Decadence that's sitting in my boot—what the hell we got going?”

“Well … I suppose we've got you,” Mitchell said. “You know him.”

“Not much. Not recently, at least. I hadn't seen him in a couple of years. He got out in … eighty-six. Next thing I heard of him, he calls me in New York. Last month.”

“Like that,” Mitchell said. “Out of the blue.”

“So I thought. He says, Hey man, you're out. Takes me to a steak joint and hits me with a lot of crap. How gorgeously he's doing. Sings me a chorus of ‘A Wandering Chemist, I.' A thing—as he describes it—of impeccable threads and unimaginable snatches. Beyond that, he tells me how he's living in Vienna, how big Eva's tits are, blah blah blah, and then he hits me with the deal.”

“Did he give you any details?”

“No. I cut him off. Then I walked around and got my own brilliant scheme and went charging to California.” Mack shook his head again in mock dumb-wonder as the waitress dealt the drinks. She said, “Who's getting what?” He said, “
I'm
getting hornier and
he …
I don't like to talk about it, but he's getting an incredibly gamey-looking sore.” He winked at her maniacally and grinned. “What'll it be?”

The girl looked past him as she handed him the Coke. She asked if they wanted to eat and Mitchell said, no, they were expecting someone else.

“We gonna eat her?” Mack said.

“Watch it—okay?”

“Ah.” Mack grinned. “So it's that way, is it? Well, don't worry. I don't birddog a buddy. Besides, I got Barbie here's in heat for me—right?”

The girl shot a look again and fled across the floor.

“Say one thing for you, you're a charmer,” Mitchell said.

“There's some of us that have it, some don't,” Mack grinned. He lit a cigarette and fell silent for a time. Mitchell sipped his Scotch, turning at a loud burst of laughter from the bar. On the lit-up jukebox, Springsteen was launching on his usual complaint:
Born
.…

Mack took out the Cartier phone book and opened it to
A
. “Let us pray, my children.” He turned another page. “A, my name is Donald and my last name is Acker and I live.… Lookit this. Guy lives in Malibu in the summer, Klosters in the winter, Park Avenue, Kensington, Paris …”

“I guess Brother Jackie gets around.”

“Brother Jackie gets
by
,” Mack said, “with a little help from his fiends. But seriously, folks.” He tossed the book on the table. “I'm shot. Out of business.”

“Pretty funny,” Mitchell said. “You think
you're
out of business. What do you think he does to me?”

“Okay.”

“I'm serious. What do you think he does? He doesn't get the bread. Does he kill? Does he quit?”

“You want to check the crystal ball?”

“I want to talk about his character.”

“He had one,” Mack said, “but he traded it for shoes. Hey listen. I don't know. You want to talk character? He's too fuckin dumb. I mean for the whole thing. He's not reckless enough on the one hand or … strategic enough on the other.”

Mitchell pulled his Scotch. “To've thought of it, you mean.”

“He
said
he did.”

“But.”

Mack shrugged. “I don't know. It always bothered me, is all.”

“He could've changed,” Mitchell said.

Mack took his time. “He's a one-trick dog. Hey listen—you know the way he worked his way through college? He'd go into the school lab, he'd make angel dust and speed.”

“This is Princeton?”

“Why not? What's the matter?” Mack said. “You think the Ivy League's clean? Grow up. He used to call it the I.V. League. I mean, shit. There he was. Little Jackie Lessandro from the tarpits of the Bronx. In the playground for incipient
heads
of corporations. No. He found a market. Believe me.”

“And you still think he's stupid,” Mitchell said.

“Like the dog,” Mack said. “A performer but he doesn't originate, right? You ever meet a dog that said, hey man, I'd really like to jump through a hoop?”

“Okay,” Mitchell said. “He didn't think of it himself.”

“Right,” Mack said. “He had a couple of roommates. So one of 'em thinks of it. Same guy handles all the business and the sales and the other guy handles the investment of the profits. According to Jackie, they wandered out of Princeton with a tidy little chunk.”

“Not to mention a higher education,” Mitchell said.

“And connections. They were wired into huge beds of Ivy. Jackie winds up as itinerant chemist to the Dow Jones Industrials, but Jackie doesn't climb, he doesn't rise. The other guys rise. One of 'em—the thinker—makes his first twenty million by the time he's twenty-five. He's into everything when it's hot. He's into software, hardware, underwear, name it. Guy buys a laboratory, Jackie gets a lab. Like the old days at Princeton, he gets himself a neat little covered operation.” Mack shook his head.

Mitchell didn't move for a while, didn't speak. Because he knew before he knew. Because it bwanged into place. But he was frightened of it too because what if he was wrong. He said quietly, “I guess he must've said the guy's name.”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“You want to think about it?”

“Why?” Mack waited. “Oh Christ,” he said. “You're thinking of a partnership—right?”

“The old one.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Mack said.

Mitchell squinted at the bar. “And let's say the partnership's expecting a windfall. Two.”

“What's the other one?”

“Stock market. Friday. But the question is … what do you suppose they'd want to do?”

“Be together,” Mack said.

“Celebrate. Chortle.”

“Keep their eyes on each other.”

“On an island,” Mitchell said.

“I don't know about an island.” Mack looked at him. “It sounds like you know about an island.”

“How about an island you could fly to in a chopper?”

“How about you just fucking spill it?” Mack said.

Mitchell took a breath. He waited, then plunged. “Little boy out of Princeton. Made his first twenty million by the time he's twenty-five except he blew it out his nose. He had a lab in Long Island, had his head between his thighs, and he thinks I stole his product.”

“Oh,” Mack said. He grinned. “That's a tidy little package there, huh?”

“Labeled Billy McAllister.”

Mitchell grabbed the book and went rifling through the M's.

Mack stared at him. “So?”

Mitchell nodded yes, and looked up at Joanna who was standing at the table, her eyes going zig-zag-zig between the two of them.

Mitchell said, “I think I'll introduce you in the car.”

“Where're we going?” Joanna said.

“To Spain,” he said.

“Oh.”

MOUSETRAP

28

Billy McAllister sat on his terrace and looked over at the sea. It sparkled in the moon. It looked, from above, like an overturned sky with a scattering of bright unbelievable stars. It was so fucking boring he could actually scream.

He screamed, “Hey Rocky!” and waited. Nothing. He lit a cigar and went into the house. A clock ticked in the white living room, the dark windows looking over on the woods. He crossed to the bar and then caught his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror. Girls used to tell him he looked like Jagger. He didn't, even then, but he'd acted like Jagger. He used to have a kind of a lean mean strut, a kind of sympathy for the devil. A man of wealth and taste. He poured himself a good stiff vodka on the rocks and swallowed another lude.

Rocky came in. The Moving Mountain. That's what they'd called him when he'd wrestled in the ring. The Moving Mountain. Billy'd acquired him as a pet rock.

Rocky said, “Boss?”

“I just wondered where you were.”

“In the kitchen,” Rocky said. “Before. Now I'm in the living room.”

“Oh,” Billy said. Rocky'd taken one too many in the head. “Where's Hector? He go to meet the chopper like I said?”

Rocky nodded.

“That's good.” Billy looked at the clock again and settled on the couch. He couldn't think of anything to say to the mountain but he had to have a presence, a body in the room, so he said, “Sit down.… Consuela in the kitchen?”

Rocky nodded, sitting down in his bright yellow sweater on the red leather chair. He looked like a fire. Or a large pustular wound, Billy thought.

“What's she cooking?”

“Paella.”

“Paella,” Billy said. Wanting to scream again, wanting to smash his glass through the window and his fist through the wall. “Paella,” he repeated. “And Hector's on his way now?”

“Yeah,” Rocky said.

“Why don't you turn on the tube or something, huh?”

Rocky went over now and turned on the tube. Rocky could sit and watch the Spanish cartoons. International language. Zap. Boom. And Billy could relax. Through the magic of modern pharmacology. Instant. He could feel it already, his engine gearing down. A little more vodka and a little more time and he'd balance on the point. He could lie on the couch and be amused, not troubled or maniacally depressed, or bothered by the dullness of defective companions. Of exile. Boredom. Paella. Spain …
Spain
, Billy thought, his anger sending bile out to kick against the lude because, Jesus, he hated it. And not only Spain. What he hated with an edge was being out of the action; the days full of nothing on your mind but your mind. Still … you could hammer that idleness to purpose. There were precedents for that: Napoleon at Elba, Vesco in Costa Rica, Marcos in Maui—he could even include the Ayatollah in Paris, Nixon at the Annenbergs, quick—who else?

“Who else?” he said to Rocky.

“Who else who?”

“Never mind,” Billy said.

He listened now, hearing the rough sound of car tires crackling on the gravel. No one snuck up on a man who had gravel. A man who had gravel, not to mention an electrified twenty-foot gate, was a man who had an edge.

Only now he had a problem: When the doorbell rang should he answer it himself?—did he want to treat Jackie as an equal and a peer?—or do a little joke, send Rocky: “I'll see if the mahster is at home”? Decisions, decisions, decisions, Billy thought. Still, he admitted, he was hot to see the Uzi. Fuckin kike machine gun. Billy'd once captioned it
Revenge of the Nerds
. Israelis say “never again,” they really mean it:
Bladadadadat
. After the Uzi, he wanted a Kalashnikov—Russian—but the instrument favored by the Arabs.
Bladadadadat
. Billy'd be ready for a Seven-Day War.

It was coming, Billy thought. Fuck-all. Armageddon.

He listened, with his eyes half-closed, to the door. BING! He could feel the vibrations through his feet.

Rocky said, “Boss?”