Arse and All
Charlie’s Last Adventure
By Kenn Brody
Broken Symmetry Publishing, May, 2016
Hey, look, I did all right as a petty smuggler. Dope, currency, papers, I carried for the middle guys. I stayed small, independent, under the radar. Never got caught, but sure, I had to dispose of a few loads. Sometimes the owners came after me, Most of the time they accepted the risk. After all, if they wanted guaranteed FedEx delivery they would have sent it FedEx. Smuggling is a risky business, and you have to accept that or quit.
When I wasn’t working I had a nice social life. Sandy, my ex-girl friend and bar buddy, is a stunt double for Carmen Diaz, and Aroyal, my current squeeze, is the Phillipina that graces the travel brochures for Philippines Airways. Me, I’m the genial male sidekick to two hell-raising women, with headquarters on South Beach. Any South Beach.
Too genial. That’s how I got into this mess. Do you know, I mean you DO know, just how hard it is to say NO when a pair of women like that gang up against you? Damn, they know all my weaknesses, and I have more than a few.
“CharLEE! You don’t want to sit around HERE! Let’s all go to the Mojambo. Come on!” That’s Sandy, your upfront, perky blonde bikini type.
“Puleeez, Lover, you really should meet Rosnikov. Wait ‘till you see his new house!” Aroyal, my petite longhaired beauty, you are a complete materialist. All you need to know about this Rosnikov is that he has bucks.
“So. And how do you know this guy, the size of his house and everything?” Aroyal just smiled and batted her eyes. Sandy stuck out her chin and said, “Huh! Come along and find out.”
We piled into my beach car, the old Jeep Wrangler, and drove out to the end of the peninsula. The estate on the end was Rosnikov’s. A wrought iron filigree over the open gate said “Mojambo” and a lot of fancy cars were parked around the circular driveway. The architect had to be an elf from the Magic Kingdom. Gaudy, cutesy and overdone all applied.
I wasn’t about to meet Rosnikov unprepared, so I buffered myself with four fingers of his excellent single-malt Scotch whiskey. Only then did I allow the girls to steer me over to a group of bearded men on the far side of a pool shaped like the letter “R”. One entire side of the pool was a glass wall to an aquarium. The shark looked too much at home in it.
A neat, short man all in white came up and took my extended hand. His hand was hard as cast iron and about as cold. He had a very toothy smile and gray hair.
“Horse!, with these two beauties it can’t be anyone else. Welcome to my little party. I see you found the bar.” I should mention that Horse is my professional nickname. I carried a lot of things. It’s OK with me so long as you don’t use it with my first name, “Charlie”. Also, by using it, he let me know what this was really about. I decided the whiskey was no longer on my menu right now and set it down, reluctantly.
“Let’s do a little business before we get happy.” He steered me to a grotto where faeries poured out a waterfall.
“Horse, you did a delivery for me a few times, but you didn’t know it. Papers. You lost the load. I let you go, once. So, I know where you live.” He gave me a hard look, right in my eye. “I want you do something bigger this time.” He waved his hands and waited.
“How big?” I was pretty sure that was the right answer.
He looked me in the eye. “Very big. Top rung. Priceless, but worth billions to me.”
The greedy little calculator in my head ran out of digits. I visualized train cars, shiploads of ... whatever. I had no idea how to do anything in that category. I said so.
“Don’t worry about the size of the load. We’ll fix you up. The stuff is bugs - bacteria.”
“I don’t do weapons of mass destruction. I don’t mind commercial stuff, but...”
“Its not that kind of bug. It’s a thing called an Archaean extremophile, one of the oldest life forms on Earth. This one is a tailored bug, an extreme extremophile. Made out of a bug that lives in the soil around oil wells. It eats mostly hydrocarbons, especially crude oil. It eats a few thousand times faster then the natural bug, that’s all. It multiplies very fast, too. You deliver the load to the Middle East.”
Wow. If it did what he said, a bug like that could turn a lot of crude into a lot of crud.
He didn’t wait for my answer, he could see it on my face. He grew a big smile, with lots of teeth grinning out of his beard. Then he said, “Do you like tattoos?”
I found the girls a little later and a lot tipsier. “Hey, little Miss Mischief, how did you find this guy and what do you know about him?”
“He owns the Beach Blanket Bar, Charlie. I was out of change and needed another Amaretto. He owns a lot of little businesses, but they say he’s really big in oil.” Sandy tossed her hair aside and took a sip of some kind of drink.
“Russian oil, I think,” said Aroyal.
Russian oil, indeed. The SECOND largest oil exporter in the world.
Aroyal slid closer and put her sleek head on my shoulder. That meant she knew I was into something big and she was worried. I kissed the top of her head. I knew I wasn’t exactly her image of husband material. She knew what I did for a living. It sounded romantic and exciting, like a modern version of the swashbuckling pirates of old. It wasn’t. It was hiding, worrying, keeping a low profile, hoping you get paid and not caught or killed or maimed. Nothing to build a relationship on.
Sandy was more of a risk taker, a real daredevil stunt double, too smart to love a guy like me. I think she took pity on Aroyal, Having your old lover hang out with your current squeeze was complicated. I had reason to think about the real relation between Sandy and Rosnikov. Why had she made this introduction?
South Beach Ink was a place where top tattoo artists came to put art on skin. After a lot of agonizing over dragons and eagles, I found a rather colorful peacock that Aroyal loved. “Peacocks are male displays,” she opined, against my objection that they were not masculine enough. The peacock’s round body and neck stretched the length of my right arm from my wrist to my shoulder. The feathers ran across my shoulder and bicep. The colors were magnificent. Allie, the artist, drew it out in ball pen first, made the changes and then followed with the tattoo gun. It took two days. He covered it with gauze and forbade me from doing anything wet or useful with that arm for a week. A week later, I uncovered it the way the Mayor of New York uncovered the Statue of Liberty when it was sent over from France and put on its base. The peacock was magnificent.