The naked slaves sat on broken furniture or on bags and boxes of money piled against the walls of the shed. They were just high enough to function but not so far gone they’d start emitting speed riffs without punctuation and shouting laundry lists of their inner dream experiences and hopes and secret details of intergalactic conspiracies. They stared at the creature of their salvation, Emperor Jerry, and appeared to be listening intently as he organized them into a count crew.
Haig, the skinny speeder who’d driven up in the Saab, was put in charge. Patient Jerry Kelly took him a half-dozen times through the procedure before he mastered it. How to supervise the slaves as they took bundles of bills and removed any elastic bands and paperclips; loading the feeder of the currency sorter, then removing the sorted bills from the sort pockets, stacking them by denomination, and re-feeding them for counting. After noting the total in each bundle, Haig’s chore was to copy the number off the display onto a yellow sticky note, stick it to the top of each bundle, then put it through the compressor, flattening and banding it. Haig thought the whole concept of technology was cool. Naked Aurora watched. She’d been warned by Chyna Lily of the carnivorous dangers of Jerry Kelly and was deeply attracted to him. She’d learned in life that the most ruthless could deliver the most. In Jerry Kelly’s shadow Chyna Lily was just a mark in a muumuu.
Through the open door, Jerry Kelly could see Gary sitting in the porch, eying the shotgun leaning on the steps. The ground around the shed was strewn with heaps of slaves’ clothing.
Jerry Kelly slapped his hands together. “Okay, team. Everybody got Chyna’s vitamins pumping, doing their good works? Enough chocolate bars? We’re ready to work here, folks. When we’re done, Chy’s got treats for all. Chyna’s a good woman, eh? Like the mom we always wanted.”
He was bursting with bonhomie, enjoying the concentration camp aspect of the shed, the naked malnourished frames, the big eyes eager to please. “It looks like a lot of work, sports, but really, it really isn’t. Let’s give it a shot, okay?” He stood with his hands on his hips, looking from face to face. “One last thing. Pay attention now.” He reached behind himself and picked up an axe. He hefted it like a baseball batter and gave a wide sad smile. “Any of you fuckers steal a single fuckin’ nickel, try to put a five dollar bill up your ass, I’m going after it with this. So don’t fuck around, don’t get fancy. You want to get creative, find a new vein.” Lumberjack Jerry put the axe back behind him and smacked his hands together. “Okay, let’s get at it. Love your work; work your love.”
Admiringly, Aurora said: “Heavy.”
Marko Markowitz, mindful of the ramifications of a lack of fuel to the engine, took the little plane lower. Far ahead he recognized the curves and bays of his lake. From the air his cottage compound looked like all the others, happy safe places for recreation and relaxation. He took the plane lower still and listened with growing unhappiness as the engine began stuttering its hunger. He came in low over a sailboat, the almost recognizable folks aboard waving at first, then pointing up at the hesitant motor music of his distress. The boathouse became visible, then the finger of his dock. There was no hopefulness in the engine’s sounds, which went from stutters to coughing. The sounds of silence between the noises seemed to be getting longer.
Naked Marko on the bottom of the lake, he thought, trying to focus through his weed-cured brain. Naked Marko a long leisurely lunch for the tiny crayfish he sometimes found inside the bass he caught in the evenings. Naked Marko the thing of jokes and snickers, his eyes and genitals munched by all species of little things that lost their innocence and weren’t so cute when they had at you in the dark deep when no one was watching.
He amazed himself. His eyes and his hands found the common purpose of survival. It was as if they knew the little chewing things at the bottom of the lake would go for the blanched fingertips and the gawking eyes first.
At the last second, as his ears recognized the absolute silence of the engine, water surface and plane met with a smoothness that astounded him. If he’d been straight, he believed, he could never have made such a kiss-down. The little plane rode forward on leftover thrust and stopped, bobbing on the gentle waves. He sat until he was certain he’d actually stopped.
He unlatched the wing door, stepped onto the strut, and slipped into the water. His cottage looked to be a quarter mile away, maybe a little less. A point of land stuck into the water off to the left and was much closer than the compound. It would be hard going between the point and the cottage but he decided he’d be safer reaching the first land available, even if it meant a stroll through rough brush. He struck out gently, deciding the swim would become the first step in a disciplined regimen of health and fitness, if not to a buff and sculpted Marko, then certainly something a little more presentable when squiring Julia Gurr about the town. His strokes were powerful and rhythmic and it seemed he reached the point in very little time. Trudging heavily out of the water he decided that maybe he was in pretty good shape after all and he adjourned the idea of workouts. The brush and branches worked him over as he made his way in the direction of his compound. He was careful to avoid stepping in poison ivy, although he had no idea what it looked like.
There were cottage clothes in the boathouse and he carefully pulled on a pair of zany shorts and a faded T-shirt from Jamaica. He climbed into a twelve-foot aluminum boat, untied it from the dock ring, and fired up the engine. Running out to the floatplane he appreciated nature. He tied off the plane and motored back to the dock.
The crayfish were little friends once again.
Showered and shaved, Marko Markowitz used a strong astringent to paint the rips and bites on his body. He wandered naked through the sunlight flooding into his white apartment in Stonetown until the stinging faded. His chest and shoulders ached; he’d picked up a combo sun and windburn across his balding scalp and back. He dressed but clothing irritated his skin. He found a billowing white shirt and eased it on, untucked.
A cellular phone began emitting a steady beep and it took him a minute to sort through the dozen units set up in chargers on the dining table. He didn’t recognize the number on the display and answered cautiously. “Yeah?”
Julia Gurr sounded as bright and happy as the day. “Marko, we’re working.”
“Both of you? Ah, good. Good.”
She told him Bobby Preston wanted him to send someone to a dumpster behind her building, although she didn’t say she lived there. “He’s left a bunch of cardboard boxes and stuff there. There’s a stencil, some spray paint, some packing tape. You have to get someone to paint the stencils on the boxes, each side.”
“Do we know what the variation is?”
“Nope. We have to get together, you and me. How about Holts, under the Tower Mall?”
She gave him an hour to make the fifteen-minute drive to meet her. She knew he had to make the requisite number of circles, to change vehicles, to dash through hotel lobbies with their crowds and escalators. He’d check reflections in store windows like a spy, stop to tie his shoelace, double back or stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk. He’d dive into and out of taxis like a comic book character. Following Marko, she knew, would require a battalion of badges with the patience of rocks. Cops were notoriously linear thinkers and Marko’s antics could be both high comedy and effective. He’d learned from Jerry Kelly, a master of the dodge.
She was glad of the wait. She was exhausted. She’d been taking telephone instructions from Bobby Preston and running around town. He had dictated slowly over the blind phone: go to a printing house and buy a stencil that read: “For Export Only — This Side Up.” Then to a corrugated paper box firm and buy a gross of cardboard cartons, C flute weight, one-by-two-by-two-foot dimensions, and inserts for reinforcement. Then to a stationery store for packing tape. Then to go to a paint shop to buy a gallon of fast-dry red paint and a roller. Leave it all someplace and have Marko send someone to pick it up.
It looked like a land transfer. Cardboard boxes would burst and split if they had to be tossed from a plane. The stenciling indicated Preston was working something through a Customs contact, maybe on the span bridge. Maybe in a transport truck, mixed in with electronics. Cardboard boxes, if he used the river, even C flutes, would fall apart if they got soaked. She didn’t know the variation, but she knew it would be a good one. And it wasn’t the river.
She jumped when Marko Markowitz dropped into the chair across from her in Holts Cafe. He was glazed with a light sweat. He looked like a cloud in a ballooning white shirt, untucked and smelling of astringent, with red slashes showing on the fabric on his chest and shoulders. He held up his hand. “Don’t fucking ask. You wouldn’t believe me.”
She gave him a pretty smile. “Can I call you Omar?”
He gazed at her and noticed immediately a difference, a change that retrofitted his heart. She looked happy and in control and there were no shadows of Spicetown running across her face, wrinkling confusion into her brow, tugging the edges of her mouth down. He wondered if it was the Presto effect, this change, if Presto had a variation for her heart.
“How’s Bobby? What’s the scene? He working his mojo for the greater good?”
“That’s why we’re here. He’s getting ready to move and he’s moving through me. He said you’ve got too much heat, there’s too much at stake.”
“Ten ems plus. Fucking right.”
“He means Zoe, Marko. He doesn’t care about the money. He’s worried about Zoe. Don’t you worry about her?”
“Jools, there’s no way anything’s going to happen to her.” He didn’t bother with the pretence he hadn’t got her grabbed up. “My word. I’d as soon hang upside down on a meathook in front of that fucking midget, Pavo, than let anything happen to her.”
“Why’d you take her, then?” She looked at him sadly.
“What’s done is done. I didn’t want to do it, but Bobby, well, he was just being the fucking Presto. The clean crook, the sporting bandit, the scarlet fucking pumpernickel or something. Saint Presto. It isn’t like that, Jools, and you of all people know it. He’s left people for dead, accident or no. He’s no fucking better than me. Or Jerry.” He felt bad for her future. She’d grieve the loss of Presto. But he’d be there for her and Zoe. “Anyway, Zoe’s safe, no matter what. That’s what’s important. Bobby works a variation, great, she comes home. He fucks it up, okay, them’s the breaks and she still comes home. It was just a shot; turned out it worked. It was a tight timeline, I couldn’t wait.”
“When we get her back, Marko, you should know Bobby and I’re going to take another shot. Get normal. This thing was a wakeup call. We’ve fucked up our lives. Now we fucked up Zoe’s.”
Marko already knew, but he’d had a faint hope that Jerry Kelly was just being an asshole. Hearing it confirmed angered him. “What the fuck?”
“You put us back together, Marko.” She put her hand on his. “You made us need each other. That’s a good thing.”
Marko pulled his hand back. “Cocksucker. Cock-fucking-sucker. What is it with that fucker? Ah, Jesus. Oh, that fucking guy.”
“Marko. C’mon, straighten up. We’ll work it through, you’ll get past it. We have to focus on doing the work, right? Bringing Zoe back.”
But Marko was focusing on Preston in the weeds with his head inside out. He was thinking that he should have been more creative and specific in his instructions to Jerry Kelly, that maybe Jerry should’ve been sent with a hundred bucks to the woodworking section of a hardware store to loosen his creative juices.
There’ll be time, he told himself, when frogs are feasting on Preston’s fucking eyes. He was going to have his day. Remain calm. The Colombian midget dough first, then Preston, then her and him and Zoe. “Fuck it.”
“Okay. The way he wants to work it is like this. He’s calling and giving me instructions. So far we did the boxes and stuff. I assume your guy picked ’em up and figured out how the stencil works. If Bobby has instructions for you he’s going to give them to me and I’m going to give them to you.”
“That’s it? Sounds okay to me.”
“One little thing though, Marko. When he calls he can’t hear me once I answer. Once I say Hello, once I’ve made the first sound of the first word, he’ll disable the hearing portion of his phone. He talks, I listen. I can talk, but he can’t hear.”
“What’s that all about? He can’t hear you? That’s fucked.”
“It’s smart, if you think about it. No one can threaten him, no one can manipulate him, get him to make stupid or dangerous moves. He gets a leaving alone until he sets up the variation. He’s going do it for you, but once it’s over there, he’s done. He’s going to want Zoe there, do a hand-to-hand. If he doesn’t see her there, he’s going to assume you’ve double-crossed him, or Jerry has, and that she’s dead. He’s going to set the money on fire.”
“What if I need to reach him? Something comes up?”
“He said if everybody does everything right, then everything’ll come out just fine. He said he isn’t interested in hearing Zoe scream over the phone because the psycho there’s got a blowtorch working. ‘Do this, do that, come here, go there. Take a dope shipment over while you’re at it.’”
“He’s taking a chance, a big fucking chance, Jools. You gotta talk him out of this shit.”
“Wish I could, Marko, but I can’t talk to him. No one can.”
Marko sat and stared at the tabletop, evaluating the ramifications of Presto’s plan. He appreciated the creativity, the removal of Presto himself from threat or enticement. It gave him total control. But at some point crazy Jerry and the Presto would have to be at the same place at the same time. “Okay. If that’s how he wants it. I’m going to want Jerry at the exchange in case Presto is setting up some scheme. What’s with the boxes? It looks like, what, over land?”
“I guess. I don’t know. If it was water, he wouldn’t use cardboard boxes, wouldn’t need the stencil. If it was a plane, he’d use reinforced knapsacks. Maybe he’s got someone at a border point. Maybe a trucker. Stack ’em in behind something else. I don’t know. Anyway, once the dough’s here in town I’m going to have to start picking it up for boiling. I’ll only have a day to do what I can, Presto says, so I’ll be living in the cartoon for a while. You gotta find a place where I can get at it.”
“I’ll have to have some guys with you, make sure you don’t fall into bad company or something.”
“I’ll call and tell you what I need, you separate it from the main stash. When I take it around you can have a guy or two, no problem, but when I go inside someplace to do the boiling, they wait outside. I mean it, Marko. These are my people. I don’t want Jerry going in later and slapping people around and generally going ape.”
He nodded. “Okay, we’ll work it out when the stuff’s here. What’s the Presto need from me, right now?”
“Just the money in the city, someplace, ready for me to boil it. Then we follow his instructions.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’re sorting and counting now. I’ll get it down here, find a place. But no matter how much you boil there’s gonna be a huge fucking stack of it. Tell him he better be prepared.”
She made a small smile and a shrug.