Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (30 page)

“And just where is this country of yours?”

“
Ecuador.”

“Well, you in
New York now, honey, and I’m a bitch from the Bronx.  Talk to me like that again and I’m gonna Bruce Lee yo ass.”

“But I know you would like to sit on my face.”

“Why?  Yo nose bigger’n yo dick?”

This cracked up a couple of teenage girls leaving the store.  Mr. Ecuador’s face darkened.  He didn’t seem to appreciate the joke.

Head down, Jack crowded close behind Loretta as she entered the store. 

She said, “Told you I was in a bad mood.”

“That you did, that you did.  Five minutes, Loretta, okay?”

“I hear you.”

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Mr. Ecuador pick up his gym bag and follow them inside.

Jack paused as Loretta veered off toward one of the cosmetic aisles.  He watched to see if Ecuador was going to hassle her, but he kept on going, heading toward the rear.

Duane Reade drugstores are a staple of New York life.  The city has hundreds of them.  Only the hoity-toitiest Upper East Siders hadn’t visited one.  Their most consistent feature was their lack of consistency.  No two were the same size or laid out alike.  Okay, they all kept the cosmetics near the front, but after that it became anyone’s guess where something might be hiding.  Jack could see the method to that madness: The more time people had to spend looking for what they had come for, the greater their chances of picking up things they hadn’t.

This one seemed fairly empty and Jack assigned himself the task of finding the ice cream to speed their departure.  He set off through the aisles and quickly became disoriented.  The overall space was L-shaped, but instead of running in parallel paths to the rear, the aisles zigged and zagged.  Whoever laid out this place was either a devotee of chaos theory or a crop circle designer. 

He was wandering among the six-foot-high shelves and passing the hemorrhoid treatments when he heard a harsh voice behind him.

“Keep movin, yo.  Alla way to the back.”

Jack looked and saw a big, steroidal black guy in a red tank top.  The overhead fluorescents gleamed off his shaven scalp.  He had a fat scar running through his left eyebrow, glassy eyes, and held a snub-nose .38 caliber revolver – the classic Saturday night special. 

Jack kept his cool and held his ground.  “What’s up?”

The guy raised the gun, holding it sideways like in movies, the way no one who knew squat about pistols would be caught dead holding one.

“Ay yo, get yo ass in gear fore I bust one in yo face.”

Jack waited a couple more seconds to see if the guy would move closer and put the pistol within reach.  But he didn’t.

Not good.  On the way to the rear, the big question was whether this was personal or not.  When he saw the gaggle of frightened-looking people – the white-coated ones obviously pharmacists – kneeling before the rear counter with their hands behind their necks, he figured it wasn’t.

A relief… sort of.

He spotted Mr. Ecuador standing over them with a gleaming nickel-plated .357 revolver.

Robbery.

The black guy pushed him from behind. 

“Assume the position, asshole.”

You can watch Jack take these guys apart in
Quick Fixes – Tales of Repairman Jack

April

Co
nspiracies

(illo by reader Xiao Yu)

(includes “Home Repairs”)

Rasalom and Jack meet for the first time, though Rasalom doesn’t know Jack is the Heir, and Jack has no idea of Rasalom’s true nature.  But Maurico suspects that Jack is more than he seems…

Wow, did I have fun with this one.  Maybe too much fun.  Because I decided upon completing it that I would commit to writing the series.

Here’s where I solidified the pattern of giving Jack both a mundane problem and a weird problem to fix in each novel.  The mundane fix involves a wife-beating hubby.  For that I borrowed a Repairman Jack short story called “Home Repairs” and incorporated it into the story.

For the weird fix, I involved him in a UFO/conspiracy convention on Manhattan’s West Side.  I even went to a similar convention in Laughlin, NV, to research it.   It seems this woman who is in charge of SESOUP (The Society for the Exposure of Secret Organizations and Unacknowledged Phenomena.) has disappeared.  You can imagine what a group of conspiracy theorists thinks about that.

I feared I might have put too much humor in
Conspiracies
, but readers didn’t think so.

Here follows one of their favorite exchanges as Jack and Abe discuss life and death and conspiracies.

CONSPIRACIES

(sample)

“So why should you call them nuts?” Abe said.  ”We are surrounded by conspiracies.”

Jack had swung by the Isher Sports Shop to say hello to Abe Grossman, a graying Humpty Dumpty of a man in his late fifties with a forehead that went on almost forever, and Jack’s oldest friend in the city.  In the world.  They sat in their usual positions: Jack leaning on the customer side of the scarred wooden counter, Abe perched on his stool behind it, and around them, a gallimaufry of sporting goods tossed carelessly onto sagging shelves lining narrow aisles or hung from ceiling hooks, all in perpetual, undusted disarray.  A Sports Authority outlet designed and maintained by Oscar Madison.  One of the reasons Jack liked coming here was that it made his apartment look neat and roomy.

“You know the root of the word?” Abe said.  “Conspire: it means to breathe together.  The world is rife with all sorts of people and institutions breathing together.  Just take a look–”  He broke off and cocked his head toward the pale blue parakeet perched on his stained left shoulder.  “What’s that, Parabellum?  No, we can’t do that.  Jack is a friend.” 

Parabellum tilted his beak toward Abe’s ear and looked as if he were whispering into it. 

“Well, most of the time he is,” Abe said, then straightened his head and looked at Jack.  “See?  Conspiracies everywhere.  Just now, right in front of you, Parabellum tried to engage me in a conspiracy against you for not bringing him a snack.  I should be worried if I were you.”

Usually Jack brought something edible, but he’d neglected to this time. 

“You mean I can’t drop in without bringing an offering?” Jack said.  “This was a spur of the moment thing.”

Abe looked offended.  “For me –
feh!
– I shouldn’t care.  It’s for Parabellum.  He gets hungry this time of the day.”

Jack pointed to the Technicolor droppings that festooned the shoulders of Abe’s half-sleeve white shirt.  “Looks like Parabellum’s had plenty to eat already.  You sure he doesn’t have colitis or something?”

“He’s a fine healthy bird.  It’s just that he gets upset by strangers – and by so-called friends who don’t bring him an afternoon snack.”
Jack glanced pointedly at Abe’s bulging shirt front.  “I’ve seen where the bird’s snacks usually end up.” 

“If you’re going to start on my weight again, you should save your breath.”

“Wasn’t going to say a word.”

But he wanted to.  Jack was getting worried about Abe.  An overweight, sedentary, Type-A personality, he was a heart attack waiting to happen.  Jack couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to Abe.  He loved this man.  The decades that separated their birthdays hadn’t kept them from becoming the closest of friends.  Abe was the only human being besides Gia Jack could talk to – really talk to.  Together they had solved the world’s problems many times over.  He could not imagine day-to-day life without Abe Grossman. 

So Jack had cut back on the goodies he traditionally brought whenever he stopped by, or now if he did bring something, he’d sworn it would be low cal or low fat – preferably both.

“Anyway, I should be worried about weight?  If I want to lose some, I can do it anytime.  When I’m ready, I’ll go to Egypt and eat from street carts for two weeks.  You’ll see.  Dysentery does wonders for the waistline.  Richard Simmons should be so effective.”

“Im-Ho-Tep’s revenge, ay?” Jack said, keeping it light.  He didn’t want to be a complete pain in the ass.  “When do you leave?”

“I have a call in to my travel agent now.  I’m not sure when she’ll get back to me.  Maybe next year.  But what about you?  Why are you so careful with your foods?  A guy in your line of work should worry about cholesterol?”

“I’m an optimist.”

“You’re too healthy is what’s wrong with you.  If you don’t get shot or stabbed or clubbed to death by one of the many people you’ve royally pissed off in your life, what can you die from?”

“I’m doing research.  I’ll find something interesting, I hope.”

“Nothing you’ll die of!  And how will that look on your death certificate?  ‘Cause of death:
Nothing
.’  Won’t you feel foolish?  Such an embarrassment.  It will have to be a closed-coffin service to hide your red face.  And really, how could I come to your funeral knowing you died of nothing?”

“Maybe I’ll just die of shame.” 

“At least it’s something.  But before you pass on, let me tell you a little something about conspiracies.”

“Figured you have something to say on the subject.”

“Indeed I do.  Remember that global economic holocaust I used to warn you about?”

For years Abe had gone on and on about the impending collapse of the global economy.  He still maintained a mountain retreat upstate, stocked with gold coins and freeze-dried food.

“The one that didn’t happen?”

“The reason it didn’t happen is that they didn’t want it to happen.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“The cabal of international bankers that manipulates the global currency markets, of course.”

“Of course.” 

Here we go, Jack thought.  This ought to be good.

“’Of course,’ he says,” Abe said, speaking to Parabellum.  “Skepticalman Jack thinks his old friend is
meshugge
.”  He turned back to Jack.  “Remember when the Asian and Russian markets went into free fall a while back?”

“Vaguely.”

“’Vaguely,’ he says.”

“You know I don’t follow the markets.”  Since he didn’t own stocks, Jack pretty much ignored Wall Street. 

“Then I’ll refresh your memory.  Not so long ago the bottoms fell out of all the Asian markets.  Less than a year later, the same thing in Russia, making rubles good only for toilet paper.  People were losing their shirts
and
their pants, banks and brokerage houses were failing, Asian brokers were hanging themselves or jumping out windows.  Do you think that just
happened
?  No.  It was planned, it was orchestrated, and certain people made money that should be measured in cosmological terms.”

“What people?”

“The members of the cabal.  They’re drawn from the old royal families and international banking families of Europe along with descendants of our own robber barons.  Most of their influence is concentrated in the West, and they were probably miffed at being left out of all the emerging economies booming in Asia.  So they invited themselves in.  They manipulated Asian currencies, inflated the markets, then pulled the plug.”

Jack had to ask: “How does that help them?”

“Simple: They sell short before the crash.  When prices have bottomed out – and they know when that is because they and their buddies are pulling the strings – they cover their short positions.  But that’s only half of the equation.  They don’t stop there.  They use their stupendous short profits to buy up damaged properties and companies at fire sale prices.”

“So now they’ve got a piece of the action.”

“And no small piece.  After the crash, enormous amounts of Thai and Indonesian stock and property were bought up at five cents on the dollar by shadow corporations.  And since the lion’s share of profits from those upstart countries will now be flowing into the cabal’s coffers, those economies will be allowed to improve.”