Diane decided that a fresh start meant distance, and relocated from Portland to Seattle. She also stopped calling herself Diane Long and became Diane Burroughs again. Returning to her old name was bureaucratically entangling, but every time she had to visit an office, fill out a form, mail something, or have a document notarized, she felt spurred by catharsis. The niggling paperwork—writing out her personal details ad nauseam—contributed to her purge. So did the other details of returning to her life as an unattached person. Diane bought a two-door car and, after a bit of investigation, chose a Seattle suburb called Kirkland—boutique shops and handsome lake vistas—where she signed a lease at The Palms. Favoring the view from Apartment 226 of the terrace full of chaises longues and of the pool and “cabaña”—a covered area for outdoor entertaining featuring a refrigerator and sink—she ordered furniture, shopped for kitchenware, and bought a stereo and a high-end television. Becoming single again swallowed a good part of June, but by July, Diane could do what she wanted, which was to sit by the pool, read, and drink Evian water. It was while she was in this bank-account-depleting mode that she heard from her half-brother the constable, who said he’d tracked her down via her car registration. “That’s lovely,” she said, “and good of you, John.” But it turned out his call was not just social. He’d called to say that Mum was in hospital. Besides her shot liver, a lot of things were ominous; the worst of it was that she no longer took food. She was incoherent, yet one thing was clear: Mum wanted to see Diane before she died. Diane said she’d look at the price of a plane ticket, but before she could, John called again, in the middle of the night, to report via a crackling, distant connection that Mum had “passed on at about ten a.m., without much trouble.”
Diane bought the ticket in the morning. John met her in the arrivals hall at Heathrow and, after offering a stiff embrace, hoisted her “trunk” onto his shoulder and carried it to his Lada like a sack of flour. He was a giant with awful walrus mustaches, ungainly and deferential. Whereas once he’d been an agile rugby prop, now he was flabby, short of breath, and slow. He used hair cream. His face was red, his lips cracked, his eyes beady. He had the broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks often telling among alcoholics. In his car, where he loomed against the roof and overfilled his seat with girth, he told Diane that she looked “quite fit for her age.” It was a wonder he didn’t break the stick shift off, so puny did it look beneath his hand.
Even before leaving the airport’s ring road, Diane was reminded that everything in England was smaller, closer, denser, more compact, and darkened by time. It was raining in August, at three in the afternoon. The rush of traffic, though pell-mell, felt cooperative. Diane recognized the blight between Epping and Stansted, and, beyond Great Dunmow, the unruly hedgerows. The countryside here looked like a rubbish heap, and was too close to London for its own good. There was the ancient pall of successive devastations, applied by nature and man both, that she recognized from girlhood but, in that era of her life, had had no name for. Nevertheless, Diane found herself feeling fond of England. She preferred it, with its dowdy pubs, chimney pots, and mansard roofs, to America’s shoddy newness. England’s industrial trim and tackle, even its wreckage, was properly bleak, whereas like clutter in the American Northwest corner struck Diane as the fresh detritus of a colonial outpost. But less than half her attention was available to these observations, because the constable, en route, was a fraternal chatterbox, full of information about Mum’s demise, and thorough in his rundown of his three grown children’s exploits. Coming into Great Hockwold he warned, “You won’t recognize it now,” which turned out to be true. The Tesco she’d frequently shoplifted from was brighter, much refurbished. There were plenty of new roundabouts, and pedestrians-only in the town center. A bulging mosque astride the bypass was visible from High Street, and—the constable’s tone bespoke a point of view on this—there were three Indian takeaways in walking distance of each other. At a traffic light Diane saw, next to her, a cluttered taxi dashboard starring what the constable said was Ganesha, the Lord of Success, and Rekha, a Bollywood star. The old mine works had been turned into a tourist attraction. So had Tate’s, now called the Pasty Shoppe. They lurched along the lanes past sodden house fronts before pulling up at what the constable, in a stab at wit, called his “domicile.” To offset its impoverishment, he’d planted decorative fuchsias, and these, obviously, had been assiduously watered. Still, they had a beleaguered look. By the front door sat a pair of rusting chairs.
Diane was installed in a damp, cheerless bedroom on the ground floor. The house smelled like cooking oil and laundry-soap flakes. The constable, it emerged, was a diabetic whose wife, Jenny, kept a pan of fudge for low moments. Diane, before skulking off to sleep away her jet lag, decided that Jenny’s doting was cruel. She carved her fudge with a furrowed intensity and stood over the constable to watch him eat it with one hand turned against her hip, as if administering cod-liver oil.
Club showed the next day, looking pop-eyed and goitery. As a kid he’d been brawny, jaundiced, and tough, but now, at thirty-seven, he looked beat up and unkempt. He was snaggle-toothed, and chain-smoked nervously, and spoke around his hand-rolled cigarettes. He wore a peacoat and a beret. Like his older brother, Club had a mustache, although his was closely trimmed to parallel his upper lip, and an alcoholic’s spidery network of blood vessels in his cheeks. There the resemblance ended. Club was compact, with a wrestler’s build, a low center of gravity, and a chimpanzee’s gait. He was overgrateful for the constable’s offer of a military-surplus cot set up in a storage pantry, and, having claimed it with his duffel, sat in the front room in his stocking feet with a cup of heavily sugared tea on his lap and the telly on in front of him. Soon he was asking John and Diane to remember Mum pegging a port bottle at Tom Clark, and—demonstrating—how she’d blown smoke rings at the telly. Later, at the table, over bread and soup, he remarked that Diane had a classy wardrobe. As for his own clothes, they smelled like the Fens.
At Mum’s funeral, a friend named Harriett Rivers gave a synopsis of Mum’s life and hailed her strong points—cheeky, quick with a joke, knew her mind and spoke it, friend to stray cats. Diane, at the open casket, thought it appropriate that the undertaker had presented Mum as a wizened tart, or a Gilbert and Sullivan old-lady-of-the-night. She looked as if she ought to be wearing ruffled bloomers and sitting in the lap of a sot with meager cash. Sure, it was darkly funny, but it was also sad, if not quite as sad as the rotund constable sniffling, red-faced, into his cravat when Mum’s remains were interred in the fourth vertical row of a mausoleum. Afterward, Jenny, to honor Mum, served pie, and the constable laid out photos on a sideboard, where he also displayed a half-dozen pieces of Mum’s crochet work and some letters from when Mum had been a land girl during the war. Before supper he gave a gin toast, teary-eyed. “So many pissed on Mum,” he said, “but, give her credit, she pissed right back. Gave ’em what for. Put ’em in their place. That was her speciality. From the school of hard knocks. Came up in a sheep barn but always stood tall. Say what you want, all the rows she caused, and the talk in town, Mum was a fighter. Harriett knows what I’m meaning to say, because Harriett saw it, and thank you, Harriett, for being here with us so late and for giving us your eulogy at the funeral. I thought it was spot-on. You had her in your sights. And here’s to Sweetie for your whortleberry pie, and to you, Club, and to Diane, you both come all this way. Blessings all around, then, and bottoms up! To Mum!”
Diane, who was drinking gin, said, “To Mum, then,” and after Club’s toast—“To Mum, the old fighter!”—she offered: “Rest in peace, Mum, and no more misdeeds.” Harriett Rivers, whose gravelly voice betrayed her many years of Golden Virginia roll-ups, said, “No more misdeeds? Your old mum?” And once more, they all went bottoms up.
Diane and Club pursued a post-funeral mission to finish off a fifth of Gilbey’s while sitting in the constable’s rusty chairs a few feet from night traffic. Memories, memories. The shifty dealer they’d bought puff from with the lame, chained dog just past Park Crescent, and playing football with those slobbery and foul-mouthed Carricks on the supposedly offlimits cricket pitch in winter, and the blind boy on Trelawney Road whose eyes scared the shite out of you because they rolled back so far in his head, and baked potatoes on Bonfire Night. The more they talked like this, the more treacly they got. Still, Club held his drink well—as juiced as she was, she could see that about him. Reeling in bed afterward, she regretted bashing Jim Long in front of Club, and rued her version of her current circumstances—well-heeled divorcee, living large and on a spree, was how she’d besottedly painted things for him.
Diane flew back to Kirkland feeling cash-depleted and chastised. The constable, at least half a dozen times, had dropped his jowly head in her presence and opined, “Oh, if she could have seen you at the end, it would have brought a ray of happiness in,” and “She asked after you any number of times. She had her regrets, you know, and wanted to make things right with you, in my opinion, but it’s a fair trip from America, she knew that. Too bad when someone’s on their last legs, eh?” Diane smoldered in her coach seat now. She chewed her fingernails. The important thing was to put it all behind her. Her mother was dead, and the constable, for all intents and purposes, was noise wafting away in the Gulf Stream. Who was he to insinuate or accuse? A constable on foot patrol, portly and huffing. A dunderhead with an awful mustache too often dipped in ale froth.
Redelivered to The Palms, Diane took to the pool deck in the French-cut bikini Jim had bought her in Puerto Vallarta. It was a Saturday, and The Palms’ tenants were out in numbers. Some brought radios, so there was music, not played too loudly, and some discreetly broke the rule about glassware and, while Diane kept track, got tipsy. The whole scene was sexy in an American way—the chicks, mostly, glistened with health, and the dudes, mostly, had weight-room muscles. Diane could see that many of them were restless, as if they believed there was something better to do elsewhere. They were like nice state-university kids on spring break, but a little older, and they left Diane feeling so self-conscious that on Saturday evening she went shopping for less European-looking swim apparel that would let her sit around the pool without disturbing people. She found a red two-piece that Lynn Long—Jim’s sister, who’d married a PGA golfer—might have worn in her era as a hot chick attending U of O, kind of a Miss Teen USA look. Then she went into a club called the Pelican because she felt like it, and, besides, there was nothing to stop her, including the bouncer, who nodded not at her but at her boobs.
The singer onstage was called Sir Charles, and with his long fingers and huge Afro, his over-the-top bellbottoms and half-opened shirt, he called to mind Sly Stone. Diane took a seat at the end of a long bar where the servers, costumed in black tank-tops, black flares, black aprons, and sensible shoes, came to yell at the bartenders, pick up orders, and keep track of tabs. Underneath, these girls looked a lot like the bimbos at The Palms, with their careful hairdos and sunny complexions. The bartenders, all three, looked like soap-opera bachelors, two with the air of marriage material, the third with a slightly more sensual demeanor, as if he moonlighted as a gigolo. From him, she ordered a mai tai.
A good corner, because she blended into the commerce there, and could watch without self-consciousness the loud behavior apparently natural to the Pelican, and also watch the dancers, most of whom were terrible, so that Diane thought of opening a dance studio, Diane’s, where couples would learn to salsa and tango and where singles could pursue each other. Maybe during the day her space could be sublet to Al-Anon and Weight Watchers for meetings; at other times it could accommodate a support group she’d run, fee-based, for divorced women seeking to get back on their feet but having a time of it. Maybe Sir Charles needed an agent, or the bartender needed a pimp, or she could set herself up as a quasi-legitimate masseuse, or get good at investing. Diane, sipping from her mai tai, tried to think of ways not to work and still cash in, like people at the top who, instead of working, intercepted funds.
In the midst of such thoughts, she was assailed by a guy, tall, neat, but not good-looking, whose come-on was to yell, over Sir Charles’s “Let’s Stay Together,” “I know you probably think I’m hitting on you.” Diane answered, “Mind reader.”
“I’m actually just checking,” the guy said, without smiling, “to see if you want to score some blow.”
“I don’t do blow.”
“Want to get started?”
“I want you to get out of here.”
“What if I give it to you?”
“You’re giving away blow.”
“Yep,” said the guy. “Like free-sample sausage in the grocery aisle. Same strategy. Customer grooming.”
Diane put her elbow on the bar and her chin in her hand. The coke dealer did, too. He had closely cropped gelled hair and a broad, Gallic nose; he wore his polo shirt buttoned to the throat, tight chinos, and a wedding band. He looked law-abiding, if a little greasy—like many of Candy Dark’s clients. “Free blow,” said Diane.
“I never turn down samples.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is … Bill. I mean Mike. Why did I say Bill? My name is Michael Bill, I mean Bill Michaels. But just call me Bill. Or Mike. What’s your name?”
“Funny,” said Diane. “My name’s Bill, too.”
“Great,” said the coke dealer. “What are you drinking?”
“I’m drinking a Mike,” said Diane.
The coke dealer’s wedding band was alongside one nostril, and the green face of his sizable watch, with its articulating silver band, now glowed in the relative darkness of the Pelican. He looked hangdog, impatient, big-elbowed, and uncoordinated, and hulked like a basketball player. “Great,” he said. “Mike. Whatever. Bill. But maybe, since you’re nursing that mai tai, I ought to come back later.”
“Why?”
“Take your time. Nurse away. I’ll come back. We’ll do the blow.”
Diane, from behind, was crowded by one of the all-American servers, who put a hand on her shoulder and yelled, over Sir Charles, “Hey, Mike!” Mike returned a peace sign, and Diane said, “I thought this was like free-sample sausage, Bill. So why would you and me be doing blow?”
“Fine,” he said, checking his watch. “You do the blow, I’ll watch.”
Diane unzipped her handbag for a matchbox. “Take that,” she said. “Put in your blow. I’ll be here for a while.”
“You never did blow before?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Good play,” said Mike. “Be seeing ya.” But ten minutes later, he brought the coke.
On Sunday, Diane wore the less noticeable bathing suit and made an effort to talk to people. There were two girls in chaises ten yards away with whom she chatted about Mexico, tanning salons, England, and carbs. One, Kelly, pointed out a guy who had good pecs. The other, Teddie, assured her that guys loved British accents. They compared suntan lotions. Diane said she was in 226 and that the girls should come around when they wanted, for margaritas. Kelly responded to this with a too-many-margaritas anecdote. Teddie, who had a Cosmo in her lap, said people called her Ted. Next they talked about the Princess of Wales, who, said Kelly, wasn’t good-looking. She couldn’t understand the big deal, the hype, which maybe Diane, being English, could explain. Surprisingly, Ted was well versed in the nuances of royal intrigue, and spoke authoritatively, at some length, on the Duchess of York, who, she said, was weird-looking. Diane agreed. There ensued a dialogue on standards of beauty. Ted was not an admirer of teased hair and provided the example of Olivia Newton-John, “after she went spandex, in Grease.” That was a weird look. Another was leg warmers. They checked out a guy with great shoulders who, said Ted, was a jerk, not that she meant to be judgmental. Diane made sure to mention 226 again, where the door was open a lot.
In the pool, she asked the guy with great shoulders if a drifting air mattress was his. It wasn’t, but that didn’t stop him from suggesting that it was probably okay if she used it, or from pointing out that she had an accent. Later, Diane asked three hot-tubbers if she could turn on the jets. It was fine with them, so a guy got out and turned the jets on, and Diane, with the small of her back against one, added a few words to a conversation about chlorine, what it did to your hair and skin, and a few words, too, on hot water and muscle pain. This led to inquiries on London hotels, and on the Princess of Wales, who was in the news that week for attending Live Aid.
Some book talk happened in the late afternoon, because a guy asked Diane what she was reading. She showed him the cover of An Indecent Obsession, by Colleen McCullough. He hadn’t read it, but he’d seen The Thorn Birds and had opinions about the actors. Diane celebrated Bryan Brown’s sheep-shearing muscles, and in response, the guy celebrated Rachel Ward in partial undress. Partial undress, he said, was better than full undress. Why? Because of suggestion. Next he asked Diane what An Indecent Obsession was about. She said, “A war nurse,” and then he gave her the title of his book—Gorky Park—and a plot summary of the first hundred pages. Somewhere along the way he must have recognized that he was boring, because he suddenly interrupted himself to say, “Enough on my book. You must be British.” As if that helped.
By five, there were a dozen people to say hi to in the future, including girls who’d been told to drop by 226 any time they wanted, and guys she felt confident she’d intrigued. On Monday, there were only a few people around the pool, but she managed, again, to strike up conversations, or at least to make contact, nod or say hello, and on Tuesday, she passed a good part of the day sunbathing, and making small talk, with a girl named Emily who worked as an accounts-receivable clerk for a contractors’ supply company. Emily had a Peter Pan hairdo and gawky legs, and wore the sort of bathing suit women generally started wearing only after they’d had children, with a built-in skirt and a bow at the back. She seemed listless, and entered the water tentatively, clinging to her mottled shoulders. Diane wanted to cheer up Emily, so around noon they repaired to 226 for cheese and crackers, and made rum-and-Cokes in large paper cups, with ice, and then a second round of rum-and-Cokes to carry back to the pool. There, Emily confessed that she was taking a mental-health day, wanted to change jobs, wasn’t comfortable in Kirkland, missed Spokane, and felt depressed.
Tuesday evening, there was a cabaña party that spilled out onto the terrace of chaises longues. Diane, in a shift and sandals, was introduced to a friend of Kelly’s and Ted’s named Shane, and accepted his offer of a gin-and-tonic in a plastic cup, but not his offer of a hot dog or a hamburger. “You’re going meatless,” observed Shane, who, muscular, with a cyclist’s thighs, stood forthrightly with his hands on his hips. “Hey, I know this guy from London. He’s—”
“Uh,” said Kelly, “I think Diane’s probably sick of people mentioning England all the time, just because she has an English accent. Even though she’s really nice about it.”
“She’s super-nice about it,” confirmed Ted.
She was, in fact, so diligently nice, that her reputation for niceness ascended. People at The Palms said hi to her, nodded, smiled, waved at her through her open door, chatted with her in the parking lot, greeted her in halls, spoke with her in elevators, flirted, commiserated, invited her to parties, even—in the case of Emily—sought her out for wisdom, which she dispensed with care. Then, one night, at a cabaña social, a girl she’d met beside the pool asked Diane if she knew where to score blow. “I do,” said Diane. “How much?”
“Just a rail or something. Or even a couple bumps.”
“Sure,” said Diane. “Let’s go up.”
Victim One rounded up a friend—Victim Two—and they followed Diane to 226, where they drank rum-and-Cokes, listened to Santana, and watched television with the sound off while Diane, taking her lead from “Mike,” set them up with her sample blow, free of charge.
The following Saturday, she tracked down Mike at the Pelican. Onstage this time, instead of Sir Charles, was Street Life—eight guys, three with theatrical horns, one with timbales, a cowbell, and congas, and a lead singer who went shirtless but wore an open vest, so that the crawling veins in his arms, not to mention his knotty chest, could function to advantage. Street Life wasn’t just brassy but loud, and that let Diane sit close to Mike, the better that he might understand what she was telling him, and, as she spoke within inches of his big pink-hued ear, the better for him to feel her warm breath and note her Obsession from Calvin Klein. “Yes,” she lied. “I did do the blow. It wasn’t what I expected.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t get super off on it,” she said, in Americanese, but he showed no sign of grasping her humor. “You didn’t get super off on it,” he replied.
“Ten-four. You read me.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t get off,” yelled Mike. “How can I help you with that?”
Diane put a hundred-dollar bill on the table. Then she picked up Mike’s left hand—the wedding-band hand—set it over the bill, patted his fingers, moved away from him about two feet, took a sip from her mai tai, crossed her legs, and watched the Street Life guy make love to his mike stand while covering “You’re Still a Young Man.”
Mike drummed his fingers on the bill. He was holding back a smile, she saw, as if he knew what was going on. “Obviously,” she thought, “he knows what I’m doing,” which was a thought she’d had about dozens of johns when she was younger but no less sure of herself. And what she’d learned in that era was that knowing what was going on didn’t stop a whole category of men from being stupid. Diane suspected that Mike was in this category. “If you’re a narc, you have to tell me,” he said, as he moved closer in the name of being heard, to which Diane replied, an inch from his ear, “I’m not a narc, don’t worry, Mike,” and kissed him, in a friendly way, on the temple.
“You know what?” Mike asked, after kissing her back, in the same friendly way, but on the lips. “Just about every chick I sell to thinks I trade blow for throws. That’s pretty cool, I guess, but I’m in business.”
“Perfect,” said Diane. “Did you notice I put money on the table?”
“Yeah,” said Mike. “That won’t get you much.”
“Three grams.”
“Another four hundred if you want three grams.”
“So, like, a hundred sixty-five a gram.”
“About.”
“What about ten?”
“That’s fifteen hundred.”
“What about twenty?”
“That’s twenty-five hundred.”
Diane took twenty-three more hundreds from her wallet. “Give me twenty grams,” she told him.
A dangerous game, but she liked dangerous games. Buying ten or twenty grams at a pop from Mike, turning it around as tenths at The Palms, giving away freebies to get people started, friends of friends coming around, maybe some of them untrustworthy, which made it important to scope people out and to pay attention to who crashed her parties. Like who, anyway, were those three quarterbackish guys, laughing, between bumps, about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ nose-candy troubles while drinking Coronas and playing with her remote? Could that be the sort of farce narcs put on? She checked on them later and heard a lot of doltish laughter that sounded reassuring. These three were too coke-centric to be narcs. Then she would check on someone else.
The upside was money; the downside was anxiety. Whores got short sentences, but dealers didn’t, not in Ronald Reagan’s administration. Diane didn’t like looking over her shoulder or anticipating a knock on her door, so she made a deal with herself: get out as soon as possible. Pursuing that end, she studied investment at the Kirkland Public Library—Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and books called Investing for Beginners and How To: The Stock Market. For the most part, it was stultifying reading; intercepting funds, it turned out, was a job. On the other hand, it didn’t involve sweat or danger. The hardest part was picking up the phone and putting down a bet with Charles Schwab.
Emily came by 226 one Friday in an unbecoming halter top that called attention to her caved-in posture. Diane poured wine, put on the Pointer Sisters, and went to work as Dear Abby. Emily had a new job—she worked in Accounts Receivable at a company called Aldus, although she couldn’t explain what Aldus made or did, other than to say, “We do PageMaker,” and, “PageMaker’s software for computers.” Basically, she wasn’t going out, except to run two miles after work. “And why is that?” asked Diane.
“Because nobody asks me.” Emily sipped her wine. “You probably think I’m pretty out of it.”
“No,” said Diane, “I don’t think you’re out of it. But I do think you’re lacking—don’t take this the wrong way—confidence. Is it all right with you if I say that?”
Emily leaned forward. One of her boobs—inside the dumb halter top with its infantile polka dots—was bigger than the other. “Keep going,” she said. “I want to hear this.”
“I don’t mean to sound derogatory. Perhaps ‘confidence’ isn’t the word. Maybe it’s something else—presence, you know. More subtle than confidence. God,” added Diane, “you mustn’t listen to me.”
“I’m just so out of it and dull. It’s depressing.”
“Well, keep running,” urged Diane, “said the out-of-shape advocate for aerobic fitness.”
“Running brings me up for like an hour, that’s it. Otherwise, I just feel so down.”
Diane the Coke Dealer knew this was her cue, but in the case of Emily the Pathetic Drip she just couldn’t be like the Reefer Madness guy who hands out free joints to kids. She felt auntish about this pigeon-toed loser. “Emily,” she said, “come on, now, cheer up.” This got Emily to smile, wanly. “Top totty, you are. What you might call a babe.” She said “a babe” in hyperbolic frat-boy. “Shall we go out on the pull, you and I? Find a handsome stud to chat you up?”
At ten, they visited the Pelican on this mission, Emily wearing too much blush and drinking too many piña coladas before claiming to have a “migrainy headache” while Just for Kicks was tuning up. So be it. You couldn’t actually change the world. So that was the right moment for a rail of gratis coke, hoovered bravely in a powder-room stall, and afterward it was fun to see Emily, that long-stemmed shrinking violet, out on the dance floor with her arms overhead, trying hard to look sultry and orgasmic and, in her own stupid way, succeeding. This new Emily, horny and on coke, eventually left Diane missing the old one. She took a cab home, where she sprawled on the couch watching Top of the Pops. In the morning, the television was still on.
An adequate life: nothing more. Here she was, the resident coke dealer to kids holding down their first real jobs. She was full of people, but vulnerable to nostalgia. It was embarrassing, for example, to be Diane Burroughs in front of Diane Burroughs when Gilbert O’Sullivan sang “Alone Again (Naturally)” and got her all mired and choked up. And yet the Irishman’s smarmy ballad did drive her to tears. “To think that only yesterday, / I was cheerful, bright and gay”—that pulled Diane into a wallow. The same thing happened when she opened a letter from the constable, densely written in a shaky hand, mentioning bunions on top of his diabetes. Pathetic John, poor dear old John. But, then, Diane had other moods, too, wherein she wanted to fire back, BUGGER OFF, YOU BORE.
Mornings were better. Always looking for hot stocks, Diane spent a lot of hours at the library, researching the market anxiously, and fretting over pulling this or that trigger with a call to Schwab. Sometimes she made the call, but mostly she watched while the Dow passed 1800 and accelerated coke sales. Diane joined a gym called Serious Fitness where muscular Shane, the cabaña-party king, was an assistant manager, and where Kelly and Ted worked out. Tightly packed with large exercise machines, loud with music, and lined with mirrors, Serious Fitness was for the most part tense, humorless, and male, but its lobby included a smoothie bar and tables where Diane, freshly showered, could cultivate customers, and where she found herself, before long, filling orders for buyers more dubious than her usual suspects: a guy who was in and out of bouncer jobs, a guy hamstrung by a restraining order, a guy on probation following a nightclub assault, a guy who was fencing stolen everything and wanted to trade coke for jewelry and state-of-the-art stereo equipment. Diane stayed cash-only, though, and since she had plenty of it now, it was sort of hard to get off this wheel, especially when its momentum made her so flush she felt nervous hiding her money beneath her mattress and was forced, by paranoia, to get a safety-deposit box. There her cash sat in neat, banded stacks, just as it had in Sullivan’s Gulch, looking all the harder to resist.
It was in the middle of this period of soaring coke trade that Club called. It was 11 p.m. and he was at a telephone booth in downtown Seattle, saying, “Guess what, I’m in your neck of the woods. Fancy a pint, luv?”
She met him at the J&M Cafe, which had a pressed-tin ceiling and a mahogany bar. What had attracted Club to the J&M, though, was the price of its “Yankee excuse for lager”; when she showed up, he had a pitcher in front of him and was drinking, alone, with his back to a wall and one hand in the pocket of his peacoat. Dangling a cigarette from his lips, he explained himself: he’d been at sea but was unemployed just now on account of a hankering for a lark, and he’d been bouncing a little on saved-up funds from San Diego to Whitefish via bus rides and hitching. Now he’d come this way to look her up, if for no other reason than that Diane was family. “Maybe it’s just the booze talking,” he said, “but I’m looking back on things right now.” Which was good, because Diane was looking back, too.
She took Club in out of curiosity, and for his entertainment value, and because remembering her childhood had become, for her, an increasingly common sentimental pastime. Club was a penny-pincher but not a soaker or gouger, and regularly ate tinned clams for supper, with pilot bread and ale. “Problem with the States,” he said, “can’t get a decent pint,” which to him meant a can of Boddingtons. Diane found some Boddingtons in a specialty store, and they took a goodly supply to The Palms’ Building B laundry center, stuffed in their loads, and played single-deck canasta. As their roiling clothes slapped the innards of the machines, they both got started down the road toward arseholed and jointly disparaged their recently deceased mother, who’d boxed Club’s ears so frequently he’d finally left—that was the reason Club gave for fleeing at fourteen, that and the urge to join a skiffle band. And he had skiffled a bit, in London, at first, but not a penny to show for it, though later in London he’d learned to do stick-’n’-poke ink, which paid a few bob, and then he showed Diane the Celtic dragon on his shoulder—well drawn, in flames, and intricately pigmented—he’d had done at sixteen. He’d next been to sea, he said, and had his papers.
They were sixteen months apart and, off and on, had lived in the same house, so they could remember finding nothing in the kitchen, and sitting on the stove with the oven on for warmth and a blanket nailed across the doorframe while listening to the Light Programme, the mention of which now set off a blistering bout of recall—Journey into Space, The Goon Show, Riders of the Range, Pick of the Pops, “the frigging Cliff Adams Singers,” “frigging Jimmy Clitheroe,” “frigging Mr. Higginbottom,” “frigging Alfie Hall.” They’d both liked heaps of white sugar taken straight, and Marmite and margarine on toast, and pilfering tea biscuits, and shoplifting, and gin when they could get it, and puff except that puff was frigging dear, and frigging Tommy Steele and the Steelmen. But then Club, with no warning, had decamped for London.
Club pressed to know where Diane’s money came from, and she told him she was a dealer. “Did you apply for citizenship as a dealer, then?” Club asked. “Are they short on dealers in the States here, luv?” So she had to explain what a green card was, and that by marrying Jim, and staying with him for three years, she’d earned the right to be naturalized and could even vote now, if she wanted to—though thus far she hadn’t taken any interest—and was required to pay taxes on anything that didn’t fly under the radar, which didn’t matter, because everything she made flew under the radar. Club steered her back to his subject: dealing. Club knew his way, a little, around dealing, because in Liverpool he’d been a rock addict—after, he said, he’d weaned himself off skag. “Show me a Liverpudlian,” he said, “and I’ll show you a dealer.” He’d even dealt himself for a while, but it was bloody dangerous, he said, because of the IRA. “You’re shitting me,” said Diane. “Come off it, Club.”
Club only dragged that much harder on his fag. “No messin’,” he said, as if hurt. “Heard of The Cleaners? Prop up the Merseyside mafia and all that? Me, I was dodging The Cleaners, you know. Pinched, I was. I did a runner.”
He stayed on in Diane’s second bedroom, drinking Boddingtons and talking like this, and sitting by the pool looking pale and strung out—at first—then painfully red. Diane saw that he was damaging her good reputation, and that The Palms’ in-crowd treated him with kid gloves, but what did they know, and what could they know, other than the weirdness in A Clockwork Orange? Or what they read about football hooligans? For them, England didn’t exist.
One night, she took Club to the Pelican for tap ale. He swallowed a lot without needing the loo—“one of me strong points,” as he put it. She laughed at this and confessed to Club that beer never stopped for long in her, that she had a weak bladder, “like Mum had.” “We all have our weak points, don’t we?” Club answered. “Yours is running off to the bog.” Then he celebrated his onion rings, but not Night Groove (“shite band of pimps”), sat at the bar bumming fags from people, and tried chatting up a trio of girls having nothing to do with him, except as a British basket case, threatening at first, but then comic. With his nifty elocutions and stream of cute jokes, Club made a valuable fool of himself for the benefit of people who felt smarter than he was. Coke King Mike was especially condescending, and didn’t try to hide his amusement at Club as the avatar of English daft. But Club, after all his pints, was not remotely in his cups, and spoke to Mike in Mockney for Diane’s sole amusement, sounding like Eliza Doolittle’s da. “Wot,” he said, “ ’ere’s to ya, Mike. Cheers. That’s me boy. Gawd, look at them bristols.”
There was some trouble later, in the back, by a pool table, where a footballish-looking guy made the inebriated error of calling Club, rather loudly, Popeye, and got dropped with a hard flush right.
So Club came in handy. Say you wanted to sell eight thousand dollars’ worth of blow to someone you didn’t know; you could bring Club along, since he looked unpredictable—a dodgy Brit who might be off his rocker. Diane brought him. He liked his role—played it as a prickly, agitated, shiv-concealing ex-con—and got a sap out of a pawnshop case, and started carrying it inside his coat, along with pepper spray. Diane had to preface her transactions now with, “This is my brother, don’t worry about him,” but she could see people worrying anyway. Which was good.
Club, decked out in military-surplus fatigues, a stained, ribbed tank, and combat boots, started throwing dumbbells around at Serious Fitness, partly because he had time on his hands, but also, he said, “to back up my evil stare, Di, at crunch time.” Club made some gym friends, other lowlifes and losers, two-bit bodybuilders who endorsed, while they worked out, amino acids and protein powders. There were televisions mounted in each corner of the weight room, usually playing MTV videos, and Club and his mates, between sets, gave commentary—thumbs up for Aerosmith’s “Dude (Looks like a Lady)” and for fucking Madonna in “Who’s That Girl?,” thumbs down for fucking Run-D.M.C. and the fucking-all lame Steve Winwood. Nevertheless, Club exercised judgment in mixed company and, at least at The Palms, was generally a gentleman whose sense of decorum had an element of the maudlin only if, like Diane, you were looking for it. At home he was impeccably, even rigorously, not a problem, and if somebody like Emily came to the apartment, he had the good sense to sidle out. He’d say two or three polite, safe things, then rise, take his jacket off a hook, and declare that he was “off on a peregrination”—he applied class deference and reassuring syntax so that no one would be scared to show up. The gormless Emily didn’t seem to mind him, though, except for his fags. She treated him as if he wasn’t a mongoloid, and he started hanging around when she called—for popcorn and Hearts—and going out to the railing to blow his smoke rings over the swimming pool so Emily wouldn’t cough.
Since Club’s visa was post-deadline, he couldn’t work legally. What he could do was stand around on Western Avenue near Bell Street with a lot of other charity cases and wait for a contractor to pull over in search of shovel labor. This way he met some on-parole roofers and got a bit of a paid stint doing the vilest work they had, and then he met a mason who needed a hod carrier on a major job, someone willing to break his back for shite. Club was the ticket. He told Diane he’d done like jobs in Manchester, not just the two thousand bricks a day but brewing tea for the layers. The Yanks didn’t want tea, he added; here what they wanted was to snort all his blow, one or two bumps at a time.
But that was fine. Club just developed his own two-bit customers. He was like a kid about it—that is, he brought his tens and twenties to Diane, except what he held back for menthols, ale, and big plastic sacks of black licorice. Then, one day, he came home empty-handed and ripped off, but only to get what he called “his tools,” which now included a Colt .45.
She took him with her to a hand-off at The Aegean, an innocent-enough-looking café with potted hothouse plants, a fat owner in a short-sleeved shirt, posters of Mykonos and the Parthenon, and at the register a display case of homemade baklava. They were meeting two communitycollege kids who looked like steroid users—friends of friends at Serious Fitness—and who, when Diane and Club arrived, were eating big meals at a table for two. “Babe, you brought a dude,” one observed. “Not cool.” Club dragged two chairs over and sat in his backward. He shook hands with the bodybuilders, who called themselves Lance and CJ, then cleared his throat, scratched his Adam’s apple, and looked around the room as if he worked for Scotland Yard. Club was so good that “Lance” stopped eating and said, “What’s up? You nervous?”
“Yeah,” said Club. “I get a bit nervous. Apologies for that, mate. Nerves.”
Diane said, “Club’s sort of fucked up, I guess you could say, from some shit times he had in the Falklands.”
The bodybuilders were interested in the Falklands, it turned out, so they talked about the Falklands for a while. By a stroke of good fortune, Club was an expert. He bullshitted with ease; he talked about the Gurkhas; he extolled the prowess of the Argentines. There was five minutes of mano a mano combat talk, followed by a slice of baklava for Diane and, for Club, two consecutive Winstons. Finally, and abruptly, Lance said, “This is pretty simple, babe. Put it this way. We know where you live. We know your name.”
“Oh, come on,” said Diane. “There’s no problem between us.” She picked up her gym bag and put it on the table. “So you know where I live,” she said, “but let’s just sit here, finish our coffee, and talk like friends, because we are friends, right?” She said this looking directly at Club, as if he were a dog about to be unleashed. “Am I right, mate? Friends, now? Caleb? Are we friends?”
Club scratched his neck and nodded, eyes averted. “Hmmm,” Diane said. “You guys should show the cash, then. Product’s on the table, so it’s time to show the cash. You show me the cash, then take my product to the gents’, do what you want in there, you know, test it, then I take the cash and make my count in the ladies’ while my brother and you boys hang out.”
The steroidal-looking guys began nodding at each other. “Cash,” Club said. “On the table.”
“Fuck you,” said Lance, scooping up Diane’s gym bag. “Wait here. I’ll test this in the can.”
“Whoa,” said Club. “You skipped a step, mate.” Casually, he unzipped his sheepskin bomber jacket and showed both bodybuilders the grip of his pistol. “Either of you lads drink Colt .45?” he asked. “It’d be my pleasure to order you a round.”
“In a restaurant?” asked Lance. “Come on, dude.”
“Try me,” said Club. “Now get your mitts off that bag.”
After that, it was as Diane had said. There was no more trouble from the college kids. Back from the loo—where first she’d urgently emptied her bladder, then made a speedy count of the bills—Diane told them, “You and the blow can go now, all right? And no hard feelings, because we don’t have any. No worries, right? Just run along. My mate will be picking up the tab.”
When they were gone, Club said, “Round of canasta in the laundro, then, mate?”
“Colt .45, I like that,” Diane answered.
Club laughed. “Man’s best friend,” he said. “Levels the turf. Classic Yankee game-changer, the tried-and-true boom-stick. Speaks to the natives every time.” He slid the bag of cash toward Diane. Winking, he said, “Same mum, different das, but still, you know, birds of a feather, luv. Peas in a pod and all of that.”
At The Palms that night they drank celebratory Boddingtons, listened to used albums Club had come across, sang along to “Apeman” and “Lola,” and finally, like a married couple, ate popcorn while watching Letterman.
“Domesticated, that’s me,” said Club. “Tamed. Fat. A jolly couch potato.”
“Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight if it’s not too dear,” said Diane.
“And sell ’em blow,” said Club. “Now pass the popcorn.”
She gave him five hundred dollars, which he used to buy a touring bike with a melted wiring harness. Club fixed that via what he described to her as “triage” and made a hobby out of fair-weather rides.
On-the-go Emily went to work for Microsoft, which, as she put it to Diane, was kind of like Aldus but with fifteen hundred people. Now she was excited about Frisbee golf with colleagues, and dating “a very sweet guy” named Gray, who’d introduced her to recreational racewalking. Her company stock had doubled in the few months she’d had it; Emily was buying a new wardrobe.
Microsoft sent Emily to a conference in Atlanta—paid for everything, for the first time in her life—and she manipulated her flights to straddle a weekend so she could meet an old college friend in Nashville. At home again in her apartment at The Palms, showing Diane photos of clubs on Bourbon Street, Emily said she’d sort of cheated on Gray by “stumbling” with a cute guy to his hotel room, though she’d stopped short of “going all the way.” Diane said maybe they should test her fidelity with drinks at the Pelican, but Emily preferred Ginger’s because of its martini list. As soon as they sat down on a sofa at Ginger’s, Emily pointed out a guy “worth probably about twenty million right now.” She knew other people, too, at Ginger’s, who were in the middle of getting rich.
The martini list was humorless, overwrought, and precious. You could have one made with cocoa-flavored vodka, or garnished with anchovy, but whatever you asked for, it came to the table as if under a spotlight, and in a cocktail glass with a mouth so wide it could have been a nut bowl. Diane and Emily had two martinis each while trying not to spill, and Emily made clothing comments: she predicted that people would look back on parachute pants with, “What were they thinking?,” and she thought Guess jeans were tacky. Diane asked, point-blank, about sex with Gray, and learned that he and Emily weren’t doing it yet, because Emily didn’t want “to go all the way unless it’s exactly the right guy.”
Emily wondered if Diane wanted to meet people, and Diane said, “Why wouldn’t I want to meet millionaires?” Then they accompanied their martinis to the bar so they could hang out with two of Emily’s colleagues—girls who were nice but not interested in Diane, not even in her English accent. They were sharing a plate of hummus and pita, next to which sat travel brochures. Marnie’s strong teeth were like what’s-her-name, on the news, who was sort of a Kennedy but married to Arnold Schwarzenegger—New England, whole-milk, good schools. Whitney wore Laura Ashley with white socks and Keds and was obviously smart in a quiet way, but she and Marnie both looked soused, as if they’d stopped at Ginger’s after work and hadn’t moved from their bar stools for hours. They worked together in Human Relations, and the year before they’d gone to Belize for snorkeling, nightclubs, and trips to Mayan temples. Whitney described a reef, a rain forest, the resort they’d stayed at, a trail through a jungle, a well-prepared red-snapper fillet, and a trip to Guatemala by water taxi. Marnie let her, adding nods, then said Grand Cayman had been “a major dud. Tiki bars and calypso. Sort of a theme park. There’s no there there,” she explained. “Where is it?”
Twenty minutes of this. Then, yes, they did want to buy some coke, so as to have it on hand for a party they were planning. Another friend was getting married, and they were in charge of some girls-only festivities at which coke would be a definite plus.
The next day, Diane bought a little black dress, in order to be arresting at Ginger’s. Since it was better not to look too slutty, she added a cashmere sweater and loafer pumps. She fit in after that, but her metamorphosis wasn’t complete until she went all the way and had her hair pixie-cut. With kohl-like mascara around the eyes just to bring things down a little, she quickly attracted some tentative come-ons and some furtive but motivated coke customers. In other words, Ginger’s was worth frequenting. Diane couldn’t take Club there, because Club was too coarse, but that didn’t matter, because sales to the tech sector were innocent and safe, lucrative with no hint of danger. Order a martini, chat, close the deal, and go your separate ways with nothing threatening or sinister. The profit margins were better, too. And the buyers, for the most part, were guys who understood discretion. In the main they were pensive and understated techie riche, with bad wardrobes and terrible haircuts, who wanted blow, Diane knew, as a social invigorator—as an expensive Saturday-night confidence builder that would make them feel like cocks-of-the-walk when in fact they were mouse-clicking nerds. These guys, as a rule, conducted themselves as if Diane was off limits, as if the dealer was a dealer, not a date. Though her vanity was wounded by that, she didn’t blame herself, because beyond-reproach computer geeks were not a good measure of desirability; on the other hand, she had to wonder a little, given that she was on the way to forty. In this frame of mind, on a Saturday, at Ginger’s, she engaged a blueblood with a cleft chin who, on entering the bar, made no effort to conceal from Diane his interest in her boobs. He just looked right at them while passing by, and then he looked Diane in the eye, as if they were communing over the possibility of a stand-up snog in the loo.
They hung out, with their martinis, at a high table for two. His name was Ron Dominick, and he worked “as a consultant to the software industry.” He wore a white shirt and jacket, black jeans, sharp shoes, and an amused expression. She gave him a reading, then activated her accent—the Pride and Prejudice approach—before revealing that she was divorced and lived alone, not far away, in Kirkland. Ron confessed to being married, but there were no kids, and his marriage was “sort of on the skids.” He liked glam rock and seemed rather hopeful that Diane’s British derivation might yield some insight into glam rock’s roots. Beneath his all-American smile he was a dedicated and even relentless ironist, which Diane found wearying. Nevertheless, she carried on without flagging, because coke had come into the conversation early. He said, “As I understand it from those in the know, you deal.”
“Not really. But I’m nice to my friends.”
Ron put his business card on the table. “Check me out,” he said, and pushed it toward her. “Am I cool or what?” he added. “Listen to me.”
“Okay.”
“Just okay? Am I that unfunny?” When she nodded her assent he added, “So the dude you divorced—left his socks on the floor? Toilet seat up?”
“I didn’t want kids. And there was nothing to talk about.”
“That sounds generic.”
“Well. So it is.”
“Was he mediocre in bed?”
“We hit it off there.”
“Is that a throw-down?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Now I’m intimidated,” Ron said. “What have I gotten myself into?”
She didn’t tell him. Instead, three nights later, when he’d checked out as not a narc, she gave him a sample in Ginger’s parking lot, where he stood beside his Alfa Romeo with his jacket hanging on his index finger, one hip cocked disco fashion, two parodic gold chains around his neck—a strapping guy with attitude and wit—saying, “What if I take, like, twenty grams?”
“That’s five grand.”
“I’ll give you three.”
“You sound like a dealer.”
“Not really. But I’m nice to my friends,” said Ron.
“Are you a dealer?”
“My hook-up bailed.”
Diane said, “I can’t sell for three. Find someone else at that price.”
“What about four?”
“I can’t do that, either.”
“What about getting a room with me, then?”
“That’s very cute,” said Diane.
He lunged, grabbed her by the waist, and kissed her. Diane wished he hadn’t gone overboard with the Old Spice, because the cloves made her gag. It was an asphyxiation she associated with more than one less-than-entirely-triumphant night as Candy Dark. It was the smell of choking on unlovable men, powerful narcissists, and insistent strangers. And now this Ron was taking his turn, smelling, underneath his cheap cologne, like gym clothes. She hated him intensely. Transactional sex had sometimes been rank with the exudates of desperate men, and sometimes clinical and antiseptic, but, however it was, it paid by definition, whereas this was point-blank pillage. “Okay,” she said, when Ron unlocked his lips. “Let’s get a room, then.”
Ron was a reliable high-stakes buyer, and since his own clientele was so well-to-do, he could afford to pay more before markup. He liked room service, and he liked Diane with her black dress wrinkled and her mascara running. He liked to talk about his customers, but not by name—guys he knew from Willamette University, guys at an athletic club, guys, he said, who ran companies. Ron’s attitude toward Diane, when not needy, was collegial—two dealers in the sack, trading insider insights—and it was good for his ego, in this arena, to feel that he had the upper hand. “I have a serious launderer,” he told her. “Guy’s great. Not somebody you mess with. Connected, backed up. Basically, I bank with him—dirty money in, clean money out. Used to be I smurfed, but you do that enough you get paranoid. You smurf?”
“Smurf?”
She let him drone on about it, about a shell company with a bulletproof balance sheet that his launderer used, banking in the Caymans, money-counting machines—whatever he needed to drone on about. Sometimes he was so relaxed and unprotected that he engaged her in the intimate emotions of his marriage as if she were his therapist or counselor. His wife, a cosmetician, was petulant, he complained, and moody in the extreme, and pouted when they argued, and liked to have her car detailed more often than was necessary. She was in the habit of telling him how he felt instead of listening to him when he told her how he felt. She was impulsive, impetuous, and hyper-susceptible, she couldn’t relax, she was anxious about her work and about people at work, and liked to talk about people at work he didn’t know and therefore didn’t care about. “I know I’m not being fair,” he said. “There’s two sides to everything, and I’m sure she sees it differently.” Diane let him confide in her and kept her comments private, because Ron bought a lot of coke, and why not make life easier by dispensing with the penny-ante sales and living off a middleman’s—or middlewoman’s—markup? In the margin lay considerable free time.
Then, one night, postcoitally and casually, Ron announced that it was time to repair his marriage. He and his wife were getting counseling now, very good counseling that Ron believed in, so he’d decided that, in good faith, he had to stop seeing Diane, except, he hoped, as a business associate, if she knew what he meant. She did, of course—money was money, she told him. So they stopped sleeping together, and she sold him his coke across a table at Ginger’s, in quick exchanges that were, Ron’s smile said, strictly about cash. “Wanker,” Diane thought. Couldn’t he have missed the sex a little more? Was she really that dispensable?
She told Club about the execrable Ron Dominick: his blather about his money launderer and his wife, his white shirts, jackets, and black jeans. Club chewed licorice with the news on, barefoot, a can of Boddingtons and the TV Guide beside him, a package of Winstons rolled up in his sleeve. “We ought to take a stab at the bastard,” he said. “Take him for everything he’s worth.”
“Yes, let’s,” Diane answered.
Club took a pull from his Boddingtons, wiped at his week’s worth of beard with his wrist, and said, “I don’t mean hypothetical. And you ought to think twice before you say yes. Diddlin’ the wrong bastard got me run out of Liverpool.”
“Kirkland isn’t Liverpool. And this guy’s a fool.”
“Good, then,” said Club. “Let’s nail his arse.”
They cemented the deal over copious Boddingtons, and, in between Diane’s trips to the loo, ate licorice, conspired, and watched television. Eventually, Club said he wanted to sleep on it. In the morning, she found him in his tank top and fatigues, lacing up for a go at pumping iron, because pumping iron was “conducive to strategizing.” She went along for a bout with a stationary bike, where she alternated between dreaming up con ideas and contemplating Club, who wore headphones and had a Walkman in his pocket. Later, they convened in the lobby, near the smoothie bar, where Club, with a shower towel draped around his neck, drank a Pepsi, downed two granola bars, and looked around, furtively, to see who was listening. “Okay, how about this?” he said, dropping his voice. “Next time you see this bloke, tell him you’re getting out of the business and won’t be dealing anymore. Pretend you’re sorry and that. You buy him a drink or whatever, act like you feel bad, then tell him since you’re getting out you could set him up direct to your supplier, but for a finder’s fee. Twenty percent, I’d say. You get him to agree he’s buying, let’s pick a number, twenty grand, then you tell him you want four off the top. He’ll argue, and that’s fine, just take what it takes to keep him in without looking like you’re willing to take just anything, because if you’re too easy that’s a signal to a target.”
“This guy does big deals,” Diane answered. “Twenty grand would be easy for him. He’s good for fifty, I reckon.”
Club put a little crimp in his Pepsi can. “Fuck it, then, let’s double that,” he said. “You tell him you’re going to discuss it with your supplier, and then you get back to him with a hundred grand; you tell him your guy doesn’t do small change, isn’t interested in small beer. What have you been charging this wanker?”
“A lot,” Diane said. “Two fifty a gram.”
“This time give him a break,” said Club. “Let’s say a hundred seventy-five a gram. He ought to go for that deal.”
Diane was impressed. Maybe, she thought, Club wasn’t bullshitting about the Merseyside mafia. Sure, he looked skuzzy, pop-eyed, and erratic, but inside, Club was a clear-eyed manipulator. “Club,” she said, “how am I getting that much blow? We’ll need to put up seventy grand.”
“How much do we have?”
“Something like fifty.”
“What about your stocks?”
“Twenty. Thereabouts.”
Club put a hand to his face like The Thinker. “Hmmm,” he said. “Cutting it a bit fine. What do you think about backing down our numbers?”
“Tell me the rest,” Diane said.
Club looked around again. “So this is what’s up,” he said. “You tell this wanker your supplier wants his payout in twenty packets, fifty fresh hundreds in each, each held with one large metal paper clip, the twenty packets in a gym bag, and you tell him to call you when he’s got it ready, and not to forget your cut. In fact, you should act like that’s your big concern, make a row about your cut. Then,” said Club, “once he tells you he’s got the cash, wait twenty-four hours minimum. Then you ring him up and tell him your supplier’s ready to meet. Tell him to stay by his phone and that you’ll call him eleven a.m. tomorrow. Something like that. You call him back, and you give him an hour. You tell him to come right here, this table. This table, Diane, right here, this table. You call him from the pay phone right here.”
Diane was smiling now. “Club,” she said. “I didn’t know you were such a criminal.”
“Another life,” answered Club. “Just dredging up the old tried-and-tested Club. Finding him proper American employment.”
Diane laughed. “So we get Ron here,” she said. “Ron ‘the Wanker’ Dominick, with his loaded gym bag.”
“We get him here with his gym bag, correct. We sit at this table, right here, this table, and you introduce me as your supplier, Club. Just call me Club, tell him I’m your brother, everything aboveboard, nothing to hide. Then leave things to me. Bloke might be armed, might bring muscle, the muscle could be announced or that poof over there.” Club aimed his chin at a guy reading a newspaper. “Poof like that walks in, takes a seat, acts innocent, reads the news, really he’s your target’s—what would you call it?—henchman. Accomplice.”
“Right.”
“So we have to assume he’s a genius, this Ron. Possibly a genius who’s nervous and packing—good American word, ‘packing.’ High stakes and all that. Game’s on. No bullshit.” Club dropped his Pepsi can onto its side. “People get topped over money, Diane, and I don’t want it to be you or me.”
“No.”
“But in case, I’m bringing the Colt, you know. For a breakdown in the proceedings.”
“We’ll hope for no breakdown,” Diane said.
Club tugged the wrinkles out of his shirt, leaned toward her, and dipped his head. “Tell me something,” he said. “In the ladies’ changing room, they have a cubicle for a toilet, right? With a lock on the door? Am I right or what? Because this place, you can see, was built on the cheap. Savings everywhere—shoddy plasterboard. Another thing they do is get the plumbing back to back. Saves on pipe runs. Now, in the gents’ changing room we have a cubicle, too, and in there we have a floor vent, the louvered type, for forced-air heat, which I prized up, and, sure enough, it’s a split end-run, with the other side, I’m thinking, feeding heat to the ladies’ side. But this we need to verify, important point. Linchpin point. So let’s both of us, right now, take a trip to the toilet. Lock yourself in, prize the vent cover off, and we’ll chat through the duct—you get my drift?”
They verified. When Diane pried the vent out, she heard Club say, “Good. Now here comes my hand.” Then she saw his fingers, wiggling, in the vent, followed by a vigorous thumbs-up, and she reached in and touched his coarse thumb tip. “Bingo,” said Club, through the vent, happily. “This guy’s fucked.”
Once again—back at 226—they cracked a festive series of Boddingtons. Diane, giddy now, digested the details. Club knew a hod carrier who had “at-a-glance C-notes,” counterfeits that were cheap to come by because of weak borders, blurry seals, and unaligned serial numbers. They’d never pass close inspection, but they were good enough for exchanges with unsuspecting parties. “So what we do is,” said Club, “we put a good note on top, the rest bad, twenty packets set up like that, two thousand worth of good, the rest bad—ninety-eight thousand. I pass his all-good bills through the vent to you, you pass our mostly bad ones back to me, simple as that.”
“I don’t know,” said Diane. “Ron’ll notice and retrace his steps. And when he gets in the loo there a second time, he’s probably going to notice the vent. And then he’s on to us.”
“Drink up,” said Club. “We’re smarter than he is. We’ll make up a block you can wedge in the breach, luv. If he wants to stick his hand in, he won’t find it goes anywhere.”
“He’ll still be coming after us, Club.”
“Drink to Mr. Colt, then. Cuz when jolly Ron shows, I’ll be on the business end. Sending him off to see his launderer about his frigging fucked bills or whatever his problem is.”
The next day, he brought a gift for Diane. “I picked up this sweet little snubnose,” he said. “Thirty-eight special. Fits in your purse. Case you need some protection, luv, that I’m not around to give.”
Club chose a Saturday, because, he said, on Saturday there’d be people at Serious Fitness. As called for by his plan, he rode his touring bike to the showdown. Diane, in her street clothes, looked freshly post-workout, with her hair still wet as if from the shower, though actually she’d just wet it in the bathroom. It was noon, the gym was busy, the girl at the smoothie bar turned the pages of a magazine, a couple at a far table watched MTV, some guys nearby were doing nothing, just sitting. Diane had a comb and brush on the table, and on the floor beside her sat her gym bag and her purse. Inside the gym bag was a sheet-metal duct plug Club had rigged up, and twenty packets of paper-clipped counterfeit hundreds, each with an authentic bill showing. In the purse was the .38 special Diane had only the barest idea how to shoot. Club had a plastic grocery bag in his lap with its looped handles knotted, which made him look tacky, but draped across his seat back was a new overcoat with his Colt in one of its pockets.
Ron showed up. Sure enough, he brought muscle, a slabbish sort whose efficient body language bespoke the martial arts. “This is my buddy, my buddy Jason,” Ron said, “and he’s totally cool and mellow.”
Jason wore a belted black leather jacket and an expression that announced, “I could kick your ass if I wanted to.” “Greetings,” he said, then sat, and, with hooded eyes, evaluated the girl at the smoothie bar while covering his mouth with the web between his thumb and forefinger. Diane guessed he was probably in for a free gram or something equally paltry.
Club said, “I hope you found the place all right.”
“We found it,” said Ron. “Yep. That’s right. It was exactly where Diane said it would be. Hey, Diane,” he went on. “Introduce us.”
“He’s my half-brother,” said Diane. “His name’s Caleb.”
Club looked thoroughly inane in his getup. How serious could someone be in nylon shorts, an Axl Rose T-shirt, and plastic fisherman’s sandals? He said, quietly, “I have two-point-three-three ounces in my bag here, Ron. That’s sixty-six grams. What do you have?”
“As requested,” Ron replied. “Thank you.”
“Is it clean cash? Did you go to a good launderer?”
“My guy’s cool,” answered Ron.
Club scratched the inside of his thigh, pinched his nose, and pulled at the inflamed-looking bags beneath his eyes. “Here’s what I’m going to propose,” he said. “You and me take a trip to the locker room. Jason can come along if he wants. In the locker room there’s a toilet, locked door. Scale in there. All the time you need. I hand you my bag, you go in, lock the door, weigh, test, make sure things check out. I wait outside. Me and Jason wait together, if that’s what you want. Then you come out, you hand me your bag, I go in and count, while you wait outside, or while you and Jason wait. I—”
“No,” said Ron. “We should stay eye to eye. We should go in the can together, you and me, I do my thing, you do yours, we come out and go our separate ways.”
Club shook his head. “Tight quarters,” he said. “We’re keeping it public. No knife in the back, mate. Okay?”
Ron did the same thing Jason was doing—propped an elbow on the table and covered his mouth. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“Come on, now,” said Club. “I don’t know you from Adam. You don’t want to make a buy, that’s fine. Sorry to have troubled you coming out here, but there’s a way I need to do things, every time. Safety first,” he added.
“As long as it’s not the rip-off way.”
“How am I going to rip you off? You’re out there with the stash while I’m in there with the cash. And I don’t have a Jason,” Club pointed out.
“Come on,” said Ron. “I mean, like you say, we don’t know each other and—”
“Okay,” said Club, “Let’s call the thing off.”
“No,” said Ron. “We don’t have to do that.”
“I’m serious,” said Club. “No worries. We’ll call it off.”
Ron ran both hands, a quick groom, through his hair. He sat back and sighed. He nodded at Jason. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s go for it.”
Diane now took up her comb and said, “Good. Because I still want my cut.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Ron. “That’s separate.”
“I’ll worry until I’ve got it, big boy.”
“You’ll get it.”
“So you say.”
“Let’s move,” said Club.
When he stood, he looked like a workingman on Spanish holiday—red-faced, decked out for sun, pale British legs on display. Jason, Diane saw, was holding back laughter, but Ron looked a little disoriented. They left for the locker room, and, surreptitiously, Diane scanned the Serious Fitness lobby. The girl at the front desk was folding towels, the girl at the smoothie bar was watching television, a girl and guy at a far table were talking, a guy checked in and went to the locker room, the girl at the front desk fielded a phone call, a guy came bursting out of the weight room and, wad of keys in hand, left. Diane didn’t think anyone was secretly Ron’s “accomplice,” but, just in case, she stuck with the plan, which called for her to open her purse, search for and then draw out a tube of lipstick, collect her comb and brush, pick up her bags, and head for the women’s locker room.
Someone in the locker room was lacing up running shoes, but other than that, the place was empty. Diane went immediately to the private toilet, locked herself in, peed, assessed her face in the mirror, applied the lipstick, and combed her hair. Then she knelt, opened her gym bag, and pried up the vent cover. After a while, there was Club’s hand, giving her a bolstering, confident thumbs-up, followed by comically wiggling fingers. She touched them to let him know she was there, and then she fed in the packets of fake bills. When they were gone, Ron’s good bills appeared in Club’s hand, and she put those inside her emptied gym bag. There was a final, salutatory thumbs-up from Club, which she answered with a concluding squeeze of his thumb tip before stuffing the sheet-metal plug into the duct and pressing the vent cover back into place. Then she gathered up her things, looked in the mirror again, and returned to the table in the lobby. She set the gym bag next to her foot and took a paperback book from her purse.
Club had it worked out to the last detail. He came from the locker room with the coke bag in his hand, put it on the chair seat in front of him, and slipped into his overcoat. Now he looked, quite hilariously, like a flasher, but he also looked angry, strained at the neck. “Fuck it,” he said to Ron. “I’m outa here.”
“I still don’t get it,” Ron said. “What’s your problem?”
“I’m out of here,” said Club. “Keep your counterfeits. In fact, shove them up your arse.”
He shrugged more deeply into his coat, picked up the coke bag, left Ron’s money bag on the table, whirled on his heels, and burst out the door.
Ron looked perplexed. He turned to Jason and said “Huh?,” and then he turned, with a furrowed forehead, toward Diane. “Jesus,” he said. “What just happened?”
“Apparently, he didn’t like your cash,” Diane answered. “I think you might have fucked up.”
“Me?” said Ron. “I fucked up?” He hit himself in the chest with an open palm. “Diane,” he said, “thanks for nothing.”
After that, she let him insult Club all he wanted. That was his business. That was his call. Ron’s anxious and worried voice—it was something she’d have to put up with for a few minutes. She apologized to him—“Club’s cranky,” she offered. “He gets paranoid for no reason. Maybe we can set up another try, Ron, after I get him calmed down.”
“Are you kidding?” said Ron. “I wouldn’t do business with him again ever. Not after bullshit like this.”
“Have it your way, then,” said Diane.
She left. She thought it would be best to go straight to her bank and deposit the hundred grand in her box, but, unfortunately, it was Saturday. Never mind that, though, it was time to celebrate, not only the money but also the blow, which she could turn around for another hundred. Club had figured out a way to take her seventy thousand and almost triple it, just like that. Why was he living like such a lowlife?
When she came through the door of 226, there was Club on the couch with his Boddingtons. He’d changed into jeans and battered athletic shoes; the bag of coke was on the coffee table in front of him. “Trouble?” he said.
“None.”
“Then victory is ours.”
“Payback,” Diane answered. “He deserved it.”
She put the cash on the table beside the coke bag. Club poured Diane a Boddingtons eagerly. They clinked their glasses and drank to themselves. Club made a fist, he stamped the floor, he raised his hand in the Black Power salute and then gave God a thumbs-up. “That’s why Britannia rules the waves,” he exclaimed. “That’s why the sun never sets on the British Empire. That’s mad dogs and Englishmen,” he said. “We took that fucking arsehole to the cleaners. We ate him for fucking lunch. We wiped the floor with him. We rimmed that poof.” Club raised his ale glass one more time. “What a stupid fuck,” he added.
Diane said, “We’re rich!”
“Made, we’re fucking made, we’re made, we got it made. It’s just like they say—land of opportunity. Person pulls himself up by his bootstraps. With freedom for all—let’s drink to that!”
They kept drinking Boddingtons. And now it was pleasurable to revisit the con, and especially to cover its more precarious moments, when things might have crashed but for their stiff English upper lips. They did this until Diane had to pee, at which point Club said, “Off to the loo, then,” and picked up the TV remote.
“Be right back.”
“Okay, luv. See you in a jif.”
But when she came back to the living room, Club, the coke, and the money were all gone, and by the time she got out to the parking lot, running, his touring bike was gone as well.