Mine All Mine Page 4

  But it’s not as bad as the feeling I get when I am confronted, as usual, with the brochure of my sailboat taped, like a centerfold, to the back of my locker.

  Early in our relationship, maybe a month after that day at the Frick, Charlie told me about her secret fantasy of sailingaway to someplace where no one would find her. She was having trouble getting tenure; no one was interested in her research;16 she was living in a miserable little studio in Ozone Park that she was too embarrassed ever to let me see. She wanted out. She wanted a new future, one that was wide open, one without conniving colleagues and the years of grad school debt that were heaped upon her. So powerful was her longing that she had even tried to teach herself how to sail. She couldn’t afford lessons, she told me, and she knew that probably she would never even be able to charter a boat, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to learn, and so she had spent months and months reading books and renting how-to videos from the library. She knew, in principle, how to jibe and tack and navigate without instruments. Eventually she included me in these drills, and we began quizzing each other on terminology and etiquette, technology and vexillology, you name it.

  Some couples play House. We play Boat.

  In the pulsing business there is an old industry dream called the clean getaway: you work long enough to get the big gigs and then after a few years of heavy commissions you call it quits before you suffer anything irreversible.

  And one night, while struggling with a timber hitch, it occurred to me that what Charlie wants is her own kind of clean getaway.

  I had never envisioned getting away on a boat, but then again I had never imagined being loved by anybody. The next day I coaxed from her the exact type of boat she wanted, called up the manufacturer, and emptied my life’s savings on a deposit for a slick fifty-five-footer, a Najad, built to order, trimmed in handcrafted, unstained African mahogany, and loaded with all the oceangoing tech you need to leave everything behind and sail away with the woman you love.

  After the celebrity of the Frankie Nickels conviction and my triumph at Salt Lake City I was supposed to earn enough in six months to pay for the whole thing, but then the Rat Burglar rolled me the first time on the Angkor Wat job. I didn’t get that commission, obviously, and a month later, on the same day I got passed over for my next assignment, Najad called to say they needed a payment for the next phase of construction, so I took out a hefty home equity loan on my apartment. I remember confiding fearlessly in my journal that it would be no problem. One bad mark on an otherwise unblemished record at Janus. I’ll just take out this loan and pay it back just as soon as I get my next gig. Only on my next gig (a priceless, 4,400-year-old statute of King Entemena, Sumerian ruler of Lagash) the room I was being paid to keep unempty was emptied forthwith by you-know-who.

  A few months later I got a call from Najad indicating they needed another installment. I didn’t have it. The only thing I could think about was what had happened to some other veteran pulses. Two years ago a guy at Janus was injected with a refined dose of cyclosarin, a nasty G-series nerve agent; unfortunately, he lived for two days. Another guy got hit with some kind of synthetic hemotoxin that was roughly four times more virulent than that of a Russel’s viper; within forty-five minutes he had basically blistered, clotted, and hemorrhaged to death.17 Jimmy the Hat is always scalping some pulse somewhere. I didn’t want to wait for any of that. So I took out the maximum allowable cash advances on my credit cards. The rates were exorbitant, but I figured, what the hay, I’ll just pay them back on the next gig.

  I never imagined it would happen again. But it did, and rapidly. The third time in under a year. (A little cluster of alabaster vases of the goddess Inanna: yawn.)

  That didn’t look so great on the old résumé.

  That didn’t have Charles Saatchi calling me up at home.

  The credit card bills kept coming. As did notices from the bank. Najad informed me that if I defaulted on payments my contract would be nullified and they would sell the boat to someone else. I had visions of my future sailing away without me.

  What could I do?

  I called Deke—the only moneyman I knew. Deke, who doesn’t have an office but always seems to be on the corner when you want him. And when you don’t. Deke, who doesn’t bother hiring muscle because he likes collecting debts himself, using pliers in a way that I don’t want to talk about. Deke, who would no doubt be displeased in the extreme to discover that I am not a talent scout for the Mets but am in fact a top-notch pulse and have personally accounted for the arrest and incarceration of at least five clients with outstanding debts.

  Deke: either my best chance or my worst chance, but certainly my only chance.

  The next day Deke gave me the money. I gave the money to Najad. And now the boat is mine. Well, Deke retains the title until I pay him off, so I can’t luxuriate in the thrill of ownership just yet. For the time being the Clean Getaway is stuck up on stilts in a boatyard.

  But soon, I keep telling myself. Soon.

  When I was the accolade-laden Otto Starks of a year ago none of this would have been a problem. After a few big-time gigs I would have just paid Deke off and sailed away, badabing bada-boom. But now that I’m on lousy mid-six jobs with crappy commissions, it’s complicated. I still owe Deke a harrowing amount of money. The commission from the K’plua job wasn’t going to come anywhere close to getting even, of course, but it would have been a good-faith gesture. And the successful pulsing of that job could have gotten me the gigs I need to get even with him and make sure I don’t end up on the wrong end of his pliers.

  Now I don’t know what will happen.

  Grimly, tenderly, as if reading a last letter from someone I had loved and lost, I untape the Najad brochure from the back of my locker, fold it up, and put it in my pocket. If security is going to clear out my locker today, I’m going to make sure I have this with me. At least I’ll have a souvenir.

  “Where have you been, young man? Your mother and I have checked every shitter in the tri-state area. We’ve been worried sick.”

  The voice has the sound of heavy machinery dieseling underground: Herk. He holds up a camera and there is a flash like sheet lightning as he snaps my pic. He is always spending his commissions on tech gadgets and I’ve grown accustomed to him snapping, beeping, and flashing at me all the time. Most of the time I hardly notice it, but he’s been going nuts with this camera for the last two weeks and it’s beginning to get to me. The last thing I want is the cleaning out of my locker recorded for posterity.

  “Oh God,” I say, surprised at the surprise that everyone’s been able to sneak up on me lately. “Has everyone on earth heard about it?”

  “No, no. Not everyone,” Herk assures me. He makes contemplative, arithmetical gestures with his fingers, as if the numbers are too high to calculate without aid. “Drop the nine, carry the one...”

  “All right, all right,” I say. “Funny.”

  “What are you looking at so hard in there? Nudies of Queen Latifah?”

  Herk is big. Really big. His big mouth often gets him into fights, and he often gets out of them by standing up. That’s the size of his size. I mean, he has loom. One time at the Snug Bar some guy tried to start something with him. Standing up and blotting out the light from the bulb overhead didn’t discourage him, so when the guy started pushing Herk, he enclosed the guy’s hand in his. Gripping a beer bottle, the guy’s hand inside Herk’s was so small it looked like a child’s grasping a sippie cup. “You’re about to make a very bad mistake,” Herk said, smiling. “Why don’t you just go on home?” But the guy wouldn’t be discouraged. He unwisely cocked his other arm and started launching a punch that never got off the runway. Herk, still smiling, just squeezed and: smash. He shattered the bottle by crushing the guy’s hand over it. Beer and shards of broken glass went everywhere, but primarily into the fleshy parts of the guy’s palm.

  If Herk ever gets tired of pulsing, I always tell him, he’d make great muscle.

  Anyway, p
robably because of his own impractically enormous body Herkimer only admires larger ladies. Tall is good, sure—he has pics of Gabrielle Reece all over his locker—but big and tall both? Now you’re talking. His number one is Queen Latifah. He has an ongoing crush on Mrs. Hulk Hogan. Ditto postmenopausal Elizabeth Taylor. It’s part of the regulations that Charlie cannot ever meet Herkimer, but I have shown Herk a million pictures of her, and he thinks her build—all cheekbones and slenderness and whippetlike muscle—is laughable. “Pretty cute,” he said, “for a splinter with tits and hair.”

  “Yeah,” I say now, unwilling to tell even Herk about the sailboat. “Sort of.”

  I pop a couple of tabs of dendrotoxin, just for the nerves. Herk sees it but doesn’t say anything. Like everyone else, he thinks my method is weird, but he’s not one to talk. He’s a devotee of some kind of Taoism that I’ve never heard of. He thinks that saliva is the “Golden Elixir” of life and that by swallowing it a thousand times a day it will increase his resistances. He engages in “testicle breathing” and thinks that body hairs are antennae that receive signals from the universe around them. “Gotta lubricate the receptors,” he’ll say as he consumes his lunchtime avocados and Spam. “Don’t laugh. It’s follicle food, son. Why do you think your hair pricks up when there’s trouble? What do you think goose bumps are, man? They’re God’s Distant Early Warning system.”

  He also is very touchy about undressing in the locker room in front of other people. Even in the hottest weather he won’t take his shirt off or roll up his sleeves. He says it disrupts the purity of the signal or something. Personally I think he’s nuts—give me a consistently applied regimen of toxin desensitization any day—but I’m grateful that he doesn’t make fun of my method.

  “If it makes you feel any better, your ass isn’t the only big newsmaker today. There’s a big new job up for grabs.”

  “Oh yeah?” I try to sound interested.

  “Dream job. A fucking grounder. This Japanese guy, Nakamura, wants to ice it for a week for some Stateside buyer. Eight figs.”

  “A one-week hold?” I say, perking up despite the fact that in twenty minutes I probably won’t work here anymore anyway. “For eight? You sure?”

  “It’s a two-man job. Solo plus a floater. I know you’re not cleared for a solo, but a floater on a one-week job for eight? You know what the commission on that would be?”

  In my head I do the math. The cut, even for a floater, is good. Really good. Enough to get Deke to keep his pliers in his pocket.

  “Otto?” Herk says, snapping his fingers. “You following this?”

  “What?”

  “I know today was number four for you. I know it’s grim. But it’s just a stretch of bad luck, man. It can’t keep up. You’re the best pulse here. Everyone knows it.”

  “With the worst record.”

  “Well, who’s got the biggest-profile gigs? You. That makes you the favorite target, right? No wonder you’re getting hit.”

  “I haven’t had top-shelf gigs for six months. The K’plua was mid-six. Tops.”

  “You’re missing the point. Comps for this Nakamura job are tomorrow. You always take the top score. Take top score again and they have got to give you at least the floater, right?”

  “So what if they do, though? I’m sure the Rat Burglar would just get me again. What’s the point?”

  “Cheer up, numbskull. You want the Rat Burglar to make a move on you. That’s how you’re going to get your career back.”

  “How? With cunning reverse psychology?”

  “Just pulsing to term isn’t going to get you back your career, Otto.”

  “Who says I want my career back?”

  “Oh no. Oh Jesus. Please—please, for the love of Sally Struthers—do not tell me you’re still thinking about a clean getaway. How many times do your mother and I have to have this talk? No Santa Claus. No Tooth Fairy. No Fraggle Rock. And no fucking clean getaway.”

  I don’t say anything. He knows I want out of the business— we’ve had this argument many times, and many times he’s made his views clear on the subject of the viability of the clean getaway—but I’ve never told him about the sailboat. If he knew I had gambled money on it—all my life’s savings, in fact, plus money I don’t technically have—he would freak. And it’s no fun being near a man Herk’s size who is freaking.

  “Look,” he says in a makepeace voice, “at least in the short term you need your job, right? You’re not going to get reinstated to solo just by pulsing one job to term. You’re not going to get a fucking whiff of solo because you go one-and-four instead of oh-and-five. Is Herk right? Hell yes, Herk’s right. You need to do something dramatic. You need to put an M-80 up Janus’s ass.”

  “And what is said M-80?”

  “The Rat Burglar, naturally. You need to take down the Rat Burglar.”

  Even though I’m the butt of this joke, I can’t help laughing at it.

  “Sure. Why not? I’ll put that on my list. Laundry, milk, return movies, and, oh, yeah, bring down the most successful talent on earth. Right. Oh, but just one thing—how the hell am I supposed to find the Rat Burglar when Interpol hasn’t, when MI-5 hasn’t, when the FSB, DST, SISDE, FBI, CIA, and various mobsters haven’t?”

  “You’ve got an advantage they don’t have. You know where he is going to be.”

  “Oh yeah? Where’s that, smart guy?”

  “The same place you are.”

  I think about this for a second. It’s true. I’ve never thought about the Rat Burglar’s affection for me as a tactical advantage.

  “So I’ll probably see the Rat Burglar if I ever get a gig again. Then what?”

  Herk makes a gun gesture with his hand, fires it.

  “Oh no,” I say. “I’m not shooting anybody. You know how I feel about guns.”

  “Just one pop—”

  “No. I don’t want to pop anybody, Herk. I don’t want to off anybody. I don’t want to cap anybody. Got it?”

  “But it’s self-defense.”

  “He’s never actually tried to kill me, quote unquote. All the juice he’s used has been nonlethal.”

  “What’s the difference? He’s killing your livelihood. What do you think happens to burned-out pulses? You think you can find a lot of good jobs out there for people who can sit on their ass for seventy-two hours without sleeping? Really. Where will you go from here? A nice comfy stool somewhere? Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t want to shoot anyone. I don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

  Herkimer again makes a gun gesture and squeezes a finger to illustrate how easy it is.

  “It won’t make a difference anyway if Po-Mo fires me today.”

  “Well, right. If that happens. Sure. Or if your balls shrivel into Raisinettes.”

  “Is this your idea of a pep talk?”

  This time my senses don’t let me down. I hear Po-Mo’s assistant coming a mile away to fetch me. Before he exhales I know what words his breath will make and before his facial muscles flex I can see the satisfied smirk.

  The J-Mart Employee of the Year Pleads His Case

  My boss, Everett Polizzi-Molanphy—Po-Mo—sits in his chair, with his back to me, staring out the trompe l’oeil window while steepling his fingers archvillainously. For a long time he sits like this, as if there were a view to admire. He’s trying to make me sweat, and it’s working.

  “Do you know why I hired you, Starks?” he says, without turning around, as if I am too unpleasant for viewing. “Do you know why I brought you in from the colonies?”

  “My aggregates at the combine?”

  “Your interview. Remember what you said?”

  Of course I remember. I told Po-Mo about the burglar who killed my family. I also told him about what happened in the Chaffee Planetarium when I was thirteen.

  I was on my fourth foster family, the Zlolnierzes, Poles who didn’t like the Germanic name Otto and insisted on calling me Potap, and if I didn’t respond when they addres
sed me I got it with a plastic bag of drainage gravel. Back then, I told Po-Mo, the only thing I wanted—besides the lives of Mom and Dad and Tobias back—was to be left alone. Preferably in the dark. Preferably in silence. I went to movies, but two hours later I had nowhere to go. I went to the woods at the reservoir, but there were kids from school. Finally I discovered the Chaffee Planetarium. There were no janitors, no ushers. No one cared if you stayed for eight consecutive shows. Almost no one else ever went there. It was dark. It was quiet. It was solitary. It was perfect.

  One day two other people showed up, a guy in overalls and a little girl, who I at first thought was his daughter. The guy had taken steps to assure discretion; they were sitting on the far side of the planetarium, he had scared the girl into silence— the whole time she didn’t utter a syllable; she didn’t move one muscle in self-defense—and he even laid his jacket over their laps. He almost got away with it.

  But he hadn’t counted on someone with my audiometry.

  Over the susurrus of the air-conditioning I heard the metallic creak of a zipper disjoining, tooth by tooth, in the darkness. I heard a tiny, frightened inhalation of breath and I knew, instinctively, even at fourteen, what was going on. I was too scared to confront the guy myself but I could see them, and I knew they couldn’t see me, so I tiptoed to the doorway and, with my heartbeat roaring in my ears and sweat cabling down my back, I flicked on the light and yelled at the top of my lungs. The guy sprinted to the door, past me, knocking me down, frantically working his fly. Security got him at the revolving door. In no more than thirty seconds the whole thing was over.

  That was it: my first bust.

  The girl’s name was...well, I shouldn’t say. But his name was Eugene L. Sikes, and he was her uncle. It had been going on for six months, since the day of her ninth birthday. But it wasn’t going to happen anymore. Not after I heard it. Not after I flooded the room with light.