Mine All Mine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Awful Truth

  The Life

  Make That Four

  Heaven, or: Last April at the Frick

  New Punch Line

  The J-Mart Employee of the Year Pleads His Case

  Reminder

  Auto-Nav

  Our Greatest Hit Hits Again, or: Who Is the Rat Burglar?

  I’m the Mang?

  Me vs. the Goldfish

  Size Matters

  Life of Crime

  I High-Beam the Dream

  What the Covet Girl Tells Me

  How Memory Harvesting Can Save Your Life

  The Sound of Our Future Together

  Bullet by Bullet

  The Effects of Drinking and Dosing

  A Bra Tells the Truth

  Gun Therapy

  WWPD: What Would Pinkerton Do?

  The Nakamura Job

  The Treachery of Images

  Herk to the Rescue

  The Truth About Herkimer

  The Polecat

  Do I or Don’t I?

  The World I Know Nothing About

  Kong’s Price

  Bathroom Talk

  Good Start

  Reunited

  Baconmouth

  Teamwork

  A Picture of Loveliness

  The Forty-fifth Murder

  The Unreachable

  Ambiguity

  Exit

  Sacrifice

  Otto Starks, Supernova

  Snitching

  Clean Getaway

  Acknowledgements

  PRAISE FOR GOODBYE LEMON

  “A family drama that makes Oedipus look like The Brady Bunch...evocative and emotionally true. High Fidelity and Less Than Zero fans will devour it as quickly as a three-minute pop song.” —USA Today

  “Heartrending . . . A droll delight.” —Harper’s Bazaar

  “Smart and vicious and cutting.” —New York Post

  “Davies does an excellent job of showing how childhood events can become distorted through time and memory.” —Elle

  “A story that soars on the same jet stream of inspired wordplay and literary tics that made The Frog King a dazzling read. Bitter, smart, and soaked in dark humor, Jack and his narrative harbor enormous heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  PRAISE FOR THE FROG KING

  “Probably the funniest young-guy-in-New-York novel since Bright Lights, Big City.” —Bret Easton Ellis

  “The literary invention, metaphorical pizzazz, and sheer cleverness of the prose and wordplay in The Frog King is astonishing.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Truly hilarious and so much more—totally original and yet classic, romantic, and real. With his first book, Davies has become one of my all-time favorite authors. And since I can’t kiss Harry—hard to believe he’s just a character in a book—I’ll kiss the book instead.”

  —Jennifer Belle

  “In his sly, slippery way, Davies picks apart language and puts it back together, offering us a tell-all exposé of the publishing industry.... Davies’s story is as touching and hilarious as Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, as heartfelt and ironic as Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. [And] unlike Eggers, Davies delivers right to the last page.” —The Baltimore Sun

  “One of the more appealing literary narrators to surface recently . . . Davies has created a clever tale that delivers moments of simple beauty.” —Chicago Tribune

  “A frisky coming-of-age novel sure to have reviewers reaching for Bright Lights, Big City analogies and High Fidelity comparisons.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Adam Davies has a delicious command of the English language. He coins so many phrases in The Frog King he should probably start his own currency.... Kiss this frog. You won’t be sorry.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Wildly funny and original, Adam Davies perfectly recalls the crazy days of being young and daring and clueless about love and life and work. The Frog King is a captivating joy ride from the very first page.” —Laura Zigman

  “Strewn with idiosyncratic perspectives and eccentric characters... alternately evokes lively laughter and anchoring sympathy.”

  —BlackBook

  “Davies’s subtle observations about life and strategic lack of romanticism make for an impressive and thought-provoking work . . . a fun and memorable read.” —Booklist

  “This is indeed a love story, a genuinely modern tale of good intentions and bad manners, and though Harry may not be much of a charmer, his roller-coaster story is charm itself.” —Newsday

  “The Frog King takes the coming-of-age-of-a-young-writer-living-and-self-destructing-in-New-York genre to its highest level. It’s so funny, timely, and smart that the fact that it’s really a love story sneaks up on you, till it’s too late and you’re really sucked into the tragicomic romance. Broken hearts, lives in ruins, and a little bit of redemption—what’s not to love?” —Newcity Chicago

  ALSO BY ADAM DAVIES

  THE FROG KING

  GOODBYE LEMON

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over or does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2008 by Adam Davies

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  RIVERHEAD is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The RIVERHEAD logo is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Davies, Adam.

  Mine all mine / Adam Davies.—1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3347-8

  1. Police, Private—Fiction. 2. Women college teachers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.A953M56 2008

  813’.6 —dc22

  2008001000

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Esther

  Those two fatal Words, Mine and Thine.

  —Miguel
de Cervantes

  The Awful Truth

  I am now going to tell you a secret. I am going to come clean. How can you ask someone to marry you if you’re living the big lie? You can’t, not if you’re one of the good guys. Not if your last shot at happiness after years of sitting alone in darkened rooms, waiting for a bullet, depends on telling—it’s a hard word—the truth. So tonight before I pop the question I am going to tell Charlie everything, but I am going to rehearse it on you just this once, before the real confession, to see how terrible it sounds. Here it goes. The dirt on Otto Starks. The life strife. The biohazard. The awful, unavoidable truth of it is:

  “I am not a talent scout for the New York Mets.”

  Through perforated bulletproof glass the Guere-Wobe K’plua mask stares back at me with an ancient, implacable intelligence. It is made of wood, cloth, raffia, and has cowrie shells for eyes. Its conical headpiece made out of ivory and bone makes it look a little garden gnomey but it also has something really soulful going on. Understanding and omniscient. These African K’plua masks are protectors and judges. Their enormously oversized heads, dominated by glistening, all-pupil eyes, are supposed to keep spiritual watch over their families. But they also maintain karmic scorecards and decide who is permitted entrance to the promised land.

  It’s a good avatar to practice on.1

  I will get so written up if I am caught violating proximity, so I peep around the corner to make sure Herkimer isn’t passing by on an Evac Recess. Herk is the closest thing I have to a best friend. He’s a new hire at Janus, just six months, but I feel like I’ve known him forever, and although he would never report me, I’d hate to put him in an awkward position. But so far, so good: no sign of anyone. I double-check to make sure no one’s installed any audio on this thing, then lean in as close as I can without tripping the prox-alert cloud and spill the rest of it into the K’plua’s enormous turtle-shell ears.

  Those three weeks in February? I was not in Dubuque taping a high school phenom’s big twelve-to-six breaker. Last Christmas, when I bolted the house at one in the afternoon and didn’t come back until after New Year’s? I was not called away to perform a battery of psych evals on a former NFL quarterback looking to make the jump to the mound. Spring break? I was in Yokohama, all right, but I was not calculating the big league potential of undersized Japanese singlers. In fact, I have not once scrutinized college kids at batting practice or analyzed the barehanded fielding of awkward grounders on the torn-up lots of the Dominican Republic. I have never had a legit follow. I don’t know how to determine a fringe, average, or definite prospect. I don’t know any of it. Talent scout for the Mets just came out of my mouth that spring day I met Charlie. I’m glad it did, though. It has made everything plausible. Why would anyone doubt that I was out trolling all time zones on behalf of the Mets? It accounts for the irregular hours, the time away. Plus it affords a certain black-ops secrecy. I always tell her that contractually I am not allowed to talk about what I do on scouting trips. Just the way it is. Sorry, Charlie.

  But this story is just my cover, my headliner, my Clark Kent.

  I down a couple of quick cyanide tabs—I know, I know: I’m working on it—and brace myself for what I say next.

  “I am a pulse.”

  The Life

  As soon as I utter that word I gasp and reflexively hold my breath. At ninety it tickles. At one-eighty it pinches. After four minutes2 my lungs go taut and my eyes feel stretched out like an overtuned guitar string and I have to let it go. Coast still clear. No sign of Herk. Schermer and his asshole friends aren’t doing rounds. I can still hear the dieseling groan of the roof-top AC unit four floors away and if I concentrate I can hear one of the stoolies riffling the pages of his girlie magazine. He’s got the radio on low but I can make out a staticky ad for that new Covet perfume.3 I even detect the electricity crackling in the walls. All normal sounds. No one has heard me.

  So I screw up the guts and say it again. Out loud.

  “I am a pulse.”

  I am sure Charlie won’t have heard about pulses. Most law-abiding people haven’t. Being an art historian, she may have heard another term for us floating around. There are a million names, and you hear them all on the job. Pulse, body, mack, Johnny, pinker, voice, vox, squealer, Jagger, spoiler, eyeball, sitter, squatter, asstimer, watcher, fido, spook, caspar. Different names for the same thing. If you are a national government who wants to hang on to your military secrets, if you are a plutocrat with an extensive personal collection of bronze Shang-dynasty water-buffalo-themed kuangs, if you are a multinational corporation who wants to keep what is yours yours, then you need to put a pulse in the room—a human guard with a finger on the button when the high-tech talent disables your safeguards and penetrates your compound. To say that we are elite security guards doesn’t quite cover it. We are the reason why the Crown Jewels still belong to Great Britain and why warheads haven’t shown up in Iran. We are also the reason why every crime story you’ve ever seen or read is either hilarious or just plain stupid.

  Herk and I have a few favorites:

  Mission: Impossible. It’s cool, all right, when Tom Cruise and his badass crew infiltrate the government complex as firemen on a call. But when they crawl through the air shafts and Tom gets lowered on a trapeze from the ceiling vent so as not to set off the sensors in the floor and then sets about “hacking into the system” it’s hard not to snicker. Do you think that if the US government is going to pay millions of dollars on a custom system of thermosensitive receivers, pressure-sensing floor plates, and multiple retinal-scanning hydraulic-sealing door locks, they are not going to hire a pulse? I’m not kidding—one mediocre pulse in that room with his finger on the button and Tom Cruise and his Supercuts hairdo are history.

  This film also gets major demerits for the use of the air shaft. I mean: the air shaft. The air shaft, people. Is Brian De Palma in third grade?

  Entrapment. Don’t get me wrong, Sean Connery is a classy bad guy, and Catherine Zeta-Jones is an elegant and fascinating thief with smooth moves, but you know the big scene with the lasers around which Z-J does her sexy thief yoga? If you were the retention strategist on that one, would you honestly make the laser pattern just irregular enough for a swimsuit model to cha-cha around? Or would you simply make an impenetrable network of evenly placed lasers at six-inch intervals? Is that such a toughie?

  Once again, a single pulse in a chair and Z-J is doing downward dogs on Rikers.

  Ocean’s Eleven. I feel bad about debunking this one. The movie is so much fun. And suspenseful. There’s nothing more terrifying to a pulse than thieves making off with a MacGuffin and taunting the client while they do it. However, in the case of Clooney and Pitt et al., it is also ridiculous. Naturally they do a slick job of bypassing the safeguards and getting into the vault. But then they “loop the tape”—again, here I must suppress a guffaw—and engineer a clever way out dressed as SWAT guys. Smart, but—can you feel it coming?—even if they blew the power to the entire state of Nevada they would have been snagged by a pulse in the vault armed with a child’s bicycle bell.

  Brrring brrring! You’re busted.

  While I’m at it, let me dispel some other security myths. The first thing is air shafts. Let’s just get this one out of the way. No facility on earth that is serious about MacGuffin containment has air shafts big enough to crawl through. They have a series of smaller ones, vulnerable to nothing larger than a specially trained ball python,4 so unless you’re pulsing a really crappy site (such as the one I’m at tonight) you don’t have to sweat the air shaft.

  Trained dogs cannot be bypassed by throwing steaks at them. Some guy did this to my late, beloved Pinkerton and he got an assful of teeth.5

  You can’t fool a pulse by showing up dressed in the same uni and pretending to be a last-minute replacement for a colleague who called in sick. It’s just ridiculous. There’s a strict protocol for call-ins and every pulse at Janus knows each other. We aren’t interchangeable. Th
e second we see an unfamiliar face on-site it’s button time.

  It’s hard to cudgel someone and not kill them or cause serious brain damage.

  Only stoolies do predictable, thief-friendly rounds. Pulses don’t break sight line with their MacGuffin unless they’re on a rare Evac Recess, in which case they get covered by a floater. When necessary to do a round—or if you’re overstaffed on a particular gig—you bob and weave, and you never follow a sked.

  And I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this so publicly, but: it’s never the green wire. It just isn’t. Maybe it’s the red, maybe it’s the black, maybe it’s the yellow. It could very easily be the chartreuse wire with magnolia piping and purple doilyesque filigree, but it’s never green. Every time some bluethumb tries to cut the green wire to bypass the system it ends up in one quick arrest.

  I know. You’re thinking: why should I believe this guy when he has received two Desuetude Warnings in the last eight weeks? Why should I listen to someone who has been downgraded from solo to partner to backup? Why should I put any faith whatsoever in the opinion of a pulse who has set a Janus record for permeability with three hits in the last nine months? Why should it matter to me that old Otto has screwed up so royally that this job, this lousy job pulsing third-class, six-figure tribal artifacts, represents his last chance to improve his standing at Janus and save himself from being sent back out to the colonies?

  You should listen because I am an exemplary cautionary tale. I used to be the man. Just look at who I used to be only one year ago, when Pinkerton was still alive, before I became a punch line, before I started finding rattraps in my locker, before the goddamn Rat Burglar—

  The cowrie shells and sacrificial pigment stare at me in a menacing way. There’s no fooling a K’plua. You might only be worth mid-six, fella, but you’re sharp. You know I’m stalling, don’t you? All right, all right, all right already. The hard part is over. I’ve said what I had to say about being a pulse. Now down to business.

  I pull the ring out of my pocket and get down on one knee.6 A false alarm would pretty much guarantee demotion, but when I propose I’m going to be nervous7 so I need to simulate that as closely as possible if I am going to get it right. So I risk it. I lean in so close to the glass that my breath fogs it up and I can see the proximity cloud glowing red.