CHAPTER 20

“You used to be afraid you were going to die,” Speed told Mrs. Vazquez. “Now that the chemo worked? You’re scared you might live.”

“Whaddaya talking about? I ain’t scared to live.” Her voice was a deep mannish rumble, deformed by sixty years of Chesterfields.

“You’re worried your savings won’t last. Isn’t that what you said? So you’re more worried about your money than your life.”

“You twist my words.”

It was true, of course. Speed twisted words into pretzels all the time. This time he was trying to wedge his way into Mrs. Vazquez’s savings. The fact that he might be the only person on earth that she trusted made his campaign particularly reprehensible. He ought to advise her to dine at elaborate restaurants, take luxury cruises, buy gifts for her grandkids and do whatever else might help her enjoy the time and money she had left. She was dogged by emphysema, an enlarged heart, diabetes, and breast cancer. A stiff breeze could kill her, tangling her estate in courtroom knots and making any payment to Speed a distant prospect. And there was a further complication: She was a fucking deadbeat. As soon as she’d received the cancer diagnosis she stiffed everybody, even her own sister. Mrs. Vazquez was a case study disproving the concept of ultimate justice. In a world this complex, good and evil couldn’t possibly settle at a precise median on the scale of life. Karma was contrived by dreamers.

His coworkers seemed to believe they were on the side of the angels just because they didn’t shout at their schmoes. But their overriding mission was dollar extraction, just as it was at any collection agency. He didn’t need to be told that his occupation and beliefs appeared incompatible, but on occasion acquaintances told him anyway, usually after some drinks. Sure, he’d prefer to work in behalf of a kinder, gentler mission. Building a solar energy station, maybe, or collecting vegetable oil for recycling. But Mrs. Vazquez was his reality.

“People, they all live to ninety these days,” she said. “I got to make my money last. What? Now I’m supposed to pay this crooked furniture store? The fabric, it’s fading already.”

“You know, if you don’t tell the truth—”

“Who’s not telling the truth?”

“Mrs. Vazquez. If you don’t tell the truth, I’ll have to turn your account over to someone who maybe doesn’t understand you the way I do. Is that what you want?”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“I wouldn’t want to. You’re a good person, Mrs. Vazquez. You know what’s right. All we’re talking here is $3,100. If you don’t pay it, well, I hate to say this, but eventually it will be deducted from your estate. Your kids will pay it, and that’s not right.”

“The furniture people, they said no credit no problem.”

“But they didn’t say if you don’t pay there’s no problem.”

Silence. Silence was good at this juncture.

“Okay, let’s start eating this elephant.”

“Huh?”

“Figure of speech. You don’t eat an elephant in one sitting. You do it a little at a time . . . They taste good, you know, elephants.”

“Go on,” she said.

“Once you go elephant, you never go back. You haven’t heard that?”

“You always make fun.”

“Only with people I like, Mrs. Vazquez. Just send it in, okay? Then we can talk about pleasanter things.”

“Once I pay we won’t talk at all.”

These words didn’t just pop into her head. She must be expressing a long-standing fear. He knew what he had to say next.

“What are you saying? Of course we’ll talk.”

“You’d call me anyway?”

“We’re pals, right?”

“I gotta go out Tuesday,” she said finally. “Maybe I can buy a money order.”

“You still have our invoice, right? You didn’t lose it?”

“How much it says? I can’t find my glasses.”

“The payment’s for $286. You’ll send it in?”

“You gonna pray for me?”

“Oh Christ, pray to who?”

“You’ll pray for me? Promise?”

Nietzsche said there’s no such thing as moral order in the universe, that we must create our own.

“Okay.”

“Okay you’ll pray for me?”

“Okay I’ll pray for you, goddammit.”

She chuckled. “That’s no way to promise.”

Funny how you can bend your moral code just a little at a time and wake up one morning to find yourself playing footsie with Beelzebub. And now there was news that Roland Sussman, one of the last of the good guys, was just another schmo. A super schmo, really. Mrs. Vazquez would never fall into such an obvious sucker trap. And where was Sussman while his gal pal was looting his assets? In a Buddhist commune learning all about karma.

SPEED RECALLED very little of his storied exchange with the control tower in Ramstein on what turned out to be his last air force mission. He remembered a previous mission more clearly. Angry spirits swirled around the plane, but he knew he mustn’t talk about them. They were none too pleased that Logan was clipping his nails in the cockpit. Multitasking, he called it. Logan was pleased no one was shooting at him and relieved that they were already on their way back, above the reach of weather or enemy malice, making them curiously godlike. They’d brought munitions and PX items into Al Asad in Iraq, dumped it off, and picked up the boxed-up cargo of corpses destined for Dover with a fourteen-hour stopover in Ramstein. Speed was particularly rancorous because he felt relieved along with Logan. Logan was a true believer who’d become even further enamored of Operation Iraqi Freedom after an intelligence officer laid it all out in a one-hour class he took back at Lackland.

“What was the guy’s name?” Speed asked him.

“I don’t remember.”

Click. Another nail fragment fell to the briefing book cover. Logan’s eyebrows were set on pronounced, hairy Neanderthal ridges and the eyes beneath were sunk so deep into his skull they were barely visible. It was an inhuman face and disturbing, no doubt, even to the mother who bore him. The guy could act in a Planet of the Apes sequel without cosmetic assistance. Speed couldn’t stop stealing glances at his implausible face, as though maybe next time it wouldn’t look so peculiar.

“Okay, what was his rank?”

“The intelligence officer? Major, I think. I know I told you that.”

“Some insignificant desk jockey who was such a fuckup they assigned him to lay out their bullshit propaganda to your little group of cargo jockeys or whoever the fuck else was there.”

“They were all officers. Including a couple bird colonels. And he was a major. I’m almost certain.”

“So this pissant who you’re pretty sure was a major tells you something he’s been told by somebody whose job or identity you don’t know and now it’s an unassailable truth, is that right? And now I can’t even question the conclusion of this anonymous possible major.”

“This stuff gets sent down from the top. Even you know that. How come you need to know his rank anyway? You’re just pissed off you got called back. You don’t know shit.”

“I know we’re taking a load of bodies back to Dover. They left young and healthy and they’re coming back in dead pieces.”

“If we’d listened to guys like you we’d a lost World War Two.”

“You think so? Because right after World War Two we listened to guys like your major or whatever he was, and we recruited Nazis to work for us against the Russians.”

“We don’t have all the facts on that.”

“Fucken right we don’t. If they let us have the facts we wouldn’t be flying this cargo back to Dover.”

“Shut up already with all your Bolshevik bullshit. And you’re not the only guy who reads stuff, you know. We’re not all idiots.”

“Ask the guys back there who the idiots are.”

“Show some respect.”

“Sending them out to be killed for nothing, I guess that shows respect.”

“If it’s as bad as you say, how come you can talk this kind of shit? Why don’t they have you shot or something?”

“If you reported me, I’d be in some kind of trouble.”

“You calling me a snitch?”

Speed thought awhile and answered no. Logan was an asshole, but he was an asshole with character.

“You know why you can talk that shit? Because you live in a free country, you dumb bastard.”

“Bullshit,” said Speed. He was all out of shrewd retorts.

“Just watch your charts, okay?” Now there was just the sound of the engines and the aircraft slicing through six hundred knots of air resistance. Finally Logan added, “Nobody forced you to take that ROTC money.”

“I was a dumb kid. If I had any brains I wouldn’t be stuck in this fucking hearse with you, would I?”

“Cheer up. Three more hours and you can get wasted in K-town.”

Match point. They both knew it. Speed needed a drink. That’s what it came down to. The swirling spirits laughed.

On the next trip he sneaked a bottle into his ditty bag, and thereafter it became routine, like brushing his teeth. But he got careless, and after the dust-up with the control tower somebody—but probably not Logan—squealed about the bottle, and he was drummed out with a general discharge. A little stain most people wouldn’t notice, but the discharge conditions lacked the word “honorable.”

WHEN SPEED clicked off on the call to Mrs. Vazquez he noticed Liz, looking concerned, motioning to him from her desk. Covering her mouthpiece, she told him, “Listen in on line six.” He pressed the button and heard a young man’s voice:

“I’ve seen how it works. Soon as I leave they’ll change the lock. I tried, but I had to sell off my cameras. One by one. Borrowed all I could, sold all I could, called everybody I could think of, people I hardly know even. It was awful, but I did.” Liz sat mute, and after a while, he said, “Got my back-pack here and everything, but I can’t . . . Anything I don’t take, it’s gone. You know, I’m a regular person. Really, I am. Where do I go? A park? But I have to go. There’s nothing here to eat.”

Liz told him her real name and said, “I’ll bring you something to eat.”

“Thanks, but today’s the day. Maybe . . . maybe I’ll see you down the road.” The line went dead.

Speed lumbered over to Liz’s desk. “Call him back,” he said. But the call went straight to message. It was the schmo’s voice in the message but sounding businesslike and a tad jovial, as business voices should: “Sorry no one could take your call. We’re either in the lab or out on a shoot. Please leave a detailed—” He sounded just as he’d described himself, like a regular person.

“Shit,” Speed said. He wanted to soothe Liz, place a chubby palm on her back, but he was a walrus and he knew it. It was only natural that she’d sought comfort from Bento instead. Speed had been inside their apartment, a sunny two-bedroom near the office. Phil cosigned the lease, they told him. They made sure everyone knew about the separate bedrooms, but sometimes Speed suspected it was all a show, that they shared carnal nights. Something he tried not to think about.