Someone is banging on the bathroom door and Monty stands, walks over to the sink, and washes his hands. He stares at his face in the mirror. For all the good it did you, he thinks. Green eyes, high cheekbones, straight nose, perfect white teeth. Pretty white boy. Eyes, bones, nose, teeth. More banging on the door. And Monty knows what he has to do. ‘Fuck it,’ he whispers, and waves goodbye to the face in the mirror.
Thirteen
Uncle Blue carves open the middle of his steak with his wood-handled knife and examines the meat. The sirloin is overcooked, the center pink instead of red, and Uncle Blue beckons for his waiter with one finger. The waiter rushes over.
‘This is not rare. Please bring me another.’
‘Right away, I’m sorry about that. I wrote down rare.’
‘Fine. And another glass of wine.’
Uncle Blue’s companion is a deeply tanned man wearing a handsome blue suit, his white cuffs projecting an exact inch beyond his jacket’s sleeves, his fingernails buffed and neatly trimmed. A plate of grilled octopus sits before him.
‘Please,’ says Uncle Blue, ‘eat.’
‘You’d think when you own a place, they’d cook your steak right.’ The tanned man squeezes lemon over his octopus. ‘This looks good, though.’
‘I hope so, Mr Gedny. I taught the chef how to make it.’
‘Mm. Very nice. They give you a lot, too. Lots of octopuses. Octopi?’
Uncle Blue smiles. ‘Either way. The servings are not usually so large; we wouldn’t make a profit.’
‘But I’m eating with the boss.’ Gedny wipes his mouth clean with his napkin and looks out the window. ‘Look at that stuff come down. My car’s going to get buried.’
They sit in the private balcony of the restaurant. Whitewashed walls, clay tile floors, bright posters of the Parthenon at sunset and Santorini at dawn. The tables in the main room below – glass tops supported by miniature Doric columns – are empty and unclothed; diners stayed home tonight, not willing to drive or walk through a blizzard.
‘You met with Brogan this morning?’ asks Uncle Blue.
‘I did, yeah.’
‘How did he seem?’
Gedny reaches for his wine. ‘He’s not loving life right now, obviously, but I don’t know. He’s hard to read.’
‘I know he is. I don’t like that.’
‘Listen, one hundred percent certain, the kid didn’t flip. They would not be sending him to Otisville if he flipped.’
‘We’re talking about human behavior, Mr Gedny. Nothing is one hundred percent certain. Don’t assume they’re idiots. Don’t assume they wouldn’t try to trick us.’
‘That’s just it,’ says Gedny. ‘They’re not idiots. No way in hell the kid’s still walking around out here if he flipped. Second he goes he’s gone, right? Disappeared. He would not be walking into my office. You flip federal, you don’t end up in Otisville. No, he’s kept his mouth shut.’
‘So far.’
Gedny nods, his mouth full of octopus. ‘So far. I’m not too worried about him. He’s a good kid. He’s smart.’
‘What are they doing with his girlfriend?’
‘They made a lot of noise about charging her as an accessory, but nothing ever happened. She told them she didn’t know anything, and they didn’t believe her, and they didn’t care. She’s free of it.’
Uncle Blue watches the waiter climb the spiral staircase, several plates balanced on his arm.
‘Here’s your steak. The chef sends his apologies. He wanted you to try these tonight, the shrimp. He wants your opinion on the sauce.’
‘Fine, thank you.’
‘Anything else I can bring you gentlemen?’
‘Not right now. Thank you, Jeremy. Tell Victor I’ll speak with him later.’ The waiter nods and departs. Uncle Blue cuts open the steak and inspects the color.
‘Got it right this time?’ asks Gedny.
‘Perfect. You were saying?’
‘Brogan. He’s a good kid. He’ll be all right.’
‘He’s soft,’ says Uncle Blue, checking his watch. ‘He won’t last long in there.’
‘He’ll have to. Fed mandatory, that means one day off per month of good behavior. We’re talking eighty-four days over seven years. Your boy’s not coming out quick.’
‘No,’ says Uncle Blue.
‘You’re going to see him before he’s gone?’
‘Later tonight.’
‘A goodbye party, huh?’ Gedny nods. ‘Where, at VelVet? That’s a good time. I’ve heard about some of those parties.’
‘You won’t be there, Mr Gedny.’
‘I know, I’m just saying they sound like fun. What do I have to do to rate one of those VelVet specials? Aside from getting locked up for seven years.’
Uncle Blue chews his steak in silence for a moment and washes it down with red wine. ‘Win more trials.’
Gedny licks his lips. ‘Listen, they found six hundred and fifty g’s in your boy’s sofa cushion. They got every white junkie on the East Side saying Brogan’s the sell. Game over. What am I going to do? It’s U.S. Code; there’s nothing to argue. Who do I argue with, the fucking grid? Seventy-eight to ninety-seven months, automatic. Judge says eight-four, so eighty-four’s the number. I kept him out of stepback, kept him out in the world for a couple months extra. Other than that—;’
‘They kept him out of stepback. This worries me. When they convicted Maravai, they cuffed him in the courtroom and took him to the holding cell. Brogan gets to walk out the door. He’s free before sentencing and after sentencing he’s free until his report date. The Bureau of Prisons ordered him to report directly to the institution, correct? It seems very unusual to me.’
‘Not so unusual,’ says Gedny, pouring himself more wine. ‘It’s pretty common, actually, for nonviolent offenders. Maravai—;’
‘It makes me suspicious, Mr Gedny. It makes me think the DEA asked the judge for this time. It makes me think they are still trying to flip him. Every day he meets with a federal probation officer, yes? What do they discuss?’
The lawyer shrugs. ‘Nothing much. He’s clocking in. They just want to make sure he’s around. You know why Maravai got stepback? He’s a black kid with a record. Brogan’s never been charged with anything before. He’s a nice-looking white boy and the judge liked him; the judge liked his dad. His dad’s bar is his bail bond; that counts for a lot. I don’t think the DEA had anything to do with it.’
‘They know more than you think, Mr Gedny. They went straight to Brogan’s sofa. They knew exactly where it was. If Brogan’s telling the truth, he was touched.’
Gedny points at the ceiling and then his ear with his index finger. ‘We need to take a little walk after dinner. Get our galoshes on and take a little stroll.’
‘The restaurant is clean.’
Gedny forks a shrimp, carries it to his plate, cuts the tail off. ‘I’m sure it is. And I’m sure everyone thought the Ravenite was clean, too. But I’d still rather take a walk. It won’t be a long walk – your theory was right.’ Gedny takes a bite of the shrimp and raises his eyebrows. ‘That’s an excellent shrimp.’
Fourteen
By the time Slattery has shaken the snow from his long cashmere coat and hung it from a hook, a glass of whiskey sits waiting for him on the bar.
‘Hey, Jody,’ he says, cheerful at last. He feels this is an important moment in his life: for the first time a bartender has recognized him coming in the door and poured his drink without waiting for an order. If she got the drink right, he thinks, I’ll remember her in my will. God bless her soul, it’s Jameson’s.
‘I’ve got to make a phone call,’ says Jakob, shuffling off to the back room, slapping his wet Yankees cap against his hip.
‘It’s a big one tonight,’ says Jody, leaning into the bar, a practiced motion that introduces her cleavage to the conversation: Good evening. ‘The first big one of the year.’ Behind her the bottled liquor glimmers seductively below wooden shelves stocked with glass jars.
Each jar holds a dead bug: giant roaches, moths, stag beetles, and millipedes.
‘That’s a new one, isn’t it?’ Slattery asks, pointing.
Jody turns her head to look. Slattery takes advantage of the moment to stare at her breasts. They are good breasts. They make him happy.
‘Which, the banana spider? Yeah, Linda caught him when she was down in Florida. Looks like a tarantula, right? Hairy legs and all.’
‘It’s nice. She did a nice job.’
Jody faces front and smiles. ‘You’re making me nervous, admiring the bugs. That’s a bad sign, my friend.’
Jody gets called down to the end of the bar, and Slattery checks the door. Monty will hate this place; it’s not a Monty place at all. Most of the drinkers here are regulars, slow-speaking white men who come for the country music and pretty bartenders. A heavy black fly buzzes past Slattery’s face, and he slaps at it halfheartedly.
The Bug Bar was uncool for ages, became a hip dive for a few months after a famous divorce lawyer was shot in the bathroom, is now uncool again. Sawdust covers the linoleum floor. In the rear of the room a bearded man wearing a camouflage jacket practices trick shots on a pool table surfaced in red felt, the felt nicked and gouged and beerstained. A group of college kids plays cricket with their own silver-finned darts. A television above the bar shows highlights from the night’s basketball games. A fat-necked old man sits hunched over a blinking video poker game next to the bathroom door. Jerry Jeff Walker sings from the jukebox by the window:
It’s up against the wall, redneck mothers,
Mother, who has raised her son so well (so what! so what!),
He’s thirty-four and drinking in a honky-tonk,
Kicking hippies’ asses and raising hell.
Slattery sometimes wishes he were a redneck. He doesn’t know any rednecks: there’s Tex on the trading floor, who’s from Oklahoma, but Tex went to Harvard and Slattery is pretty sure that rules out Tex, even if he does chew plug tobacco and wear boot-cut Wranglers. The one-seventy-seven pounder on Slattery’s college wrestling team, Zeke something, was from deep-western Pennsylvania, the true backwoods. What was his last name? He wore a Cat Diesel Power cap and always said things like ‘Aw, come on now, Big Frank, you putting me on?’ Slattery hated being called Big Frank; he enjoyed slamming Zeke into the mat for the entire two hours of early morning practice. Zeke seemed to enjoy it even more; he wasn’t a very good wrestler but he had a disturbingly high tolerance for pain. Maybe Zeke was a redneck, but Slattery doesn’t want to be Zeke; he wants to be the redneck from the song, getting drunk in honky-tonks, kicking hippies’ asses, going home in his pickup truck alongside a couple of good ol’ girls with hyphenated first names. Rednecks have it made.
Jakob returns from the back room, Yankees cap brimmed low over his forehead. Slattery watches him walk directly in front of a dart player in mid-motion, oblivious to all danger. The dart player gestures to his friends and mimes hurling his dart at the back of Jakob’s head. Slattery feels the familiar constriction in his bowels, the feel of a fight about to happen. He wants to shake Jakob for being such a constant unwitting provocation, wants to punch the dart player in the mouth for threatening Jakob. He narrows his eyes at the dart player but the kid ignores him. Slattery wonders, for the thousandth time, how Jakob survives daily life in the city.
Jakob seats himself on the stool next to Slattery. ‘It’s unbelievable. My mother says, “You shouldn’t be out tonight. It’s the worst storm of the year.” And I say, “Mom, I’m actually twenty-six years old.”’
‘So why are you calling her in the first place?’ The fat fly has landed on the bar, and Slattery watches it rub its forelegs together, a tramp warming his palms above a garbage-can fire. He brings his fist down hard but the fly wings safely away.
‘You know my mom. She says she can’t fall asleep at night until I check in. You should hear these conversations. It’s incredible. She’ll say, “Did you get the thing from the thing yet?” And I’ll say, “Yeah, Mom, I got it two weeks ago.” You know? I mean, what is that? The thing from the thing? She doesn’t speak with real words, but I understand what she’s saying.’
Jody returns with a wink for Slattery. ‘This your little brother, Frank? He’s a cutie.’
‘Don’t waste your time on me,’ says Jakob. ‘I’m in the sixty-second percentile.’
Jody nods, pouring beer into frosted glasses. ‘But that’s probably because you don’t work on Wall Street. The scale is skewed toward the money thing.’
Jakob stares at her, then at Slattery. ‘Does everyone in the city know about this?’
‘Not everyone,’ says Jody, setting the glasses of beer in front of them. ‘Just everyone in here.’ She sticks her tongue out at Slattery and retreats to the far side of the bar, to the older men who sit down there, silently waiting for her return.
‘Great way to make friends,’ mutters Jakob, crossing his arms on the bar top and leaning forward to blow patterns in his beer’s foam.
Slattery concentrates on Jody, particularly on her ass, presented in cut-off denims, white threads snaking down her thighs. ‘What do you think of her?’
‘Of who? Of whom?’
‘Of Jody,’ says Slattery. ‘The bartender. It’s a blizzard outside and she’s wearing Daisy Dukes. You think she’s cute?’
Jakob squints at Jody, shrugs. ‘She’s pretty. She’s pretty, except her face—;’
‘She’s pretty except her face?’
‘Her face is kind of weird.’ The fly lands on Jakob’s ear and Jakob jerks sideways, nearly falling from his bar stool.
‘She’s pretty except her face is kind of weird?’
‘So, okay,’ says Jakob, righting himself on the stool. ‘She’s pretty.’ He removes his wet hat, bends the brim, traces the NY insignia with his fingertips. ‘It’s all subjective. One of the guys at school, this biology teacher, Terry – have you ever met Terry?’
‘No.’
‘I think maybe you did. At my birthday party last year. Anyway, he really likes this girl. In a sort of—;’
‘A girl,’ says Slattery. ‘What do you mean, a student?’
‘A student, yeah. A junior. What’s weird is, I mean this girl is sixteen. Maybe seventeen, I don’t know, but probably sixteen. But you have to see her. She’s not really pretty, but she’s – I don’t know, she’s got something.’
‘Uh-huh,’ says Slattery, watching the televised basketball players.
‘I told him – I told Terry he ought to just forget about it, put her out of his mind, but he’s thinking about the future, he’s thinking long-term. It’s a little scary, the way he talks about it. He’s like, “Five years from now, she’ll be almost out of college. And I’ll be thirty-one. Nothing wrong with that.”’
‘Miami won again,’ says Slattery. He turns to look at Jakob. ‘You haven’t fucked her yet, have you?’
Jakob’s eyes go wide. ‘See, if you listened you’d know I was talking about Terry. Terry’s the one—;’
‘Remember when Mr Green got caught blowing Eddie Arabian in the bathroom stall? That shocked me. I had no idea Green was gay.’
‘You understand it’s Terry we’re talking about, right?’ asks Jakob. ‘Not me?’
‘Why Eddie Arabian? Of all the guys in the school, Eddie Arabian? The kid always smelled like tuna fish. Hey, look who’s here.’
Naturelle stands behind them, a wet overcoat folded over her arms. She shimmers in her silver dress. Slattery knows this dress, he has memorized this dress, he has stood in the shower and cursed this dress, the way the fabric slides over her hips, the way it wrinkles at the belly when she sits down.
‘Francis Xavier Slattery.’ She kisses him on the cheek as he half rises from his stool. ‘Hey, Jakob,’ she says, kissing him too.
Slattery pulls a stool over for her and she sits between them, her knees brushing against theirs. ‘What are you guys up to?’ she asks.
‘Frank’s been—;’ begins Jakob.
The fly swoops past and Slattery takes a swing at it with his open palm, nearly cracking Naturelle in the jaw.
‘Easy, killer,’ she tells him, poking him in the gut.
‘Frank’s been checking out the bartender,’ says Jakob.