Zero’s Zen Moving Company is on Beach Avenue in Somerville, a thin side street in a commercial zone with auto body shops, warehouses, and scrap-metal yards whose footprint keeps shrinking as MIT, Tufts, and Harvard keep buying up property nobody else can afford. There’s an industrial laundry at the northern end of Beach that perpetually kicks out massive clouds of steam that smell like a dog’s peed-on blanket and when the wind blows just right, cotton-thick shrouds drift about the warehouse bricks, transforming the narrow avenue into a spooky film set replete with beggar extras—homeless men and women rattling their scrap-metal-laden shopping carts into and out of the mist.
The Zen Moving Company garage door is rolled open, the parking bays empty—a good sign—meaning all of Zero’s pirate crews are on the job and out of trouble, at least for the time being. Along the southern wall, Erector Set shelves are stocked with enormous pallets of flattened Zen-logoed cardboard boxes, giant containers filled with straps, bands, blankets, and tools. Portable metal storage bins form the wall directly across, stacked and secured until the owners request delivery to their new digs. Or not. Sometimes people just stop paying the storage fees, choosing a clean break over their old possessions, and are never heard from again.
Sam Budoff still had his bin with Zero, marked with his name, the roll-top door sporting a fist-size padlock like all the others. Zero provides the locks. The renter receives the only key. They lose it—and they tend to lose it—Zero charges them an exorbitant fee to clip the lock though he employs a half-dozen guys who could pick the thing in their sleep.
There’s a weight bench set up in the large room that leads to the back stairs up to Zero’s office, reject couches, chairs, and love seats horseshoed around it as if watching someone lift heavy objects after working all day lifting heavy objects were somehow spectator-worthy. Maybe it is, considering the bar’s stacked with enough iron to suggest the last person who’d been lifting was either Zero, Sid, or King Kong.
Make no mistake, raw strength in the moving business is crucial, but the sought-after skills are endurance and the patience to manage the stress of the people relocating, having the insight to gauge where the customer is emotionally during this major transition—good times or bad. Nobody moves for nothing; it’s just too much trouble.
Zero is particularly adept at this, another poker skill spun into positive action, though he rarely jumps in on moves anymore. Same goes for Sid, though most of his time these days is devoted to looking after my father and coordinating the other men who rotate in and out of my dad’s rented Brookline home, providing him with the twenty-four-hour care and supervision he now requires, his Alzheimer’s long ago obliterating his circadian rhythms and rendering sleep mostly obsolete.
Sid is gentle and infinitely patient with my dad, probably on account of his own experiences with a father who suffered from dementia, though it wasn’t diagnosed as such thirty years ago.
“It was a race between booze and a fucked-up brain,” Sid once confided in me. “And the booze lost. He would have done us all a favor if he’d chugalugged Drano instead.”
I remove seventy-five pounds of iron from each side of the bar and lie flat on the bench. I can still smell the diesel exhaust hovering just under the ceiling thirty feet above me, but it doesn’t seem to bother the pigeon that hops along one of the steel beams and swells with a cooing chuckle as it sees what I’m up to.
“Fuck you, you’re a pigeon,” I say, take a deep breath, and grunt into the lift. Maybe somewhere in China a bee pollinates a flower, which triggers an earthquake in Bolivia, but the bar doesn’t budge, it only laughs at me. At least until I realize it’s Jhochelle laughing.
“Zesty, what a pleasant surprise and a happy coincidence. I was about to call you.” Jhochelle is Zero’s Israeli wife and mother of my nephew, Eli, who must be napping in his crib upstairs in Zero’s office. Prior to her pregnancy, Jhochelle was dark and lean, retaining the body honed in the mandatory two years of service in the Israeli Defense Forces. She looks no different now, a little more than a year into motherhood, except around the eyes, which are the same color as my father’s, ocean-bottom black and impenetrable, now stamped with the tired half-moon imprint of every new parent’s.
“Do you think you could lift this?” I ask her.
“Why on earth would I try?”
“I dunno, to impress yourself?”
“I could use a little of that,” Jhochelle admits. “There’s nothing quite like having a child to make you question your self-worth. Or sanity, for that matter.”
“The kid didn’t come with instructions? What kind of baby factory did you get him from?”
“Considering his lineage, a shady one.”
I grunt into the lift once more. This time the bar vibrates. Progress.
“Anyhow, I don’t rely on brute strength, you know that.”
It’s true. Jhochelle, in addition to being a general badass, was trained as a sniper and could assemble an Uzi with her eyes closed. But barring firearms, she’s also one of those women who prides herself on the well-placed knee or chop to the larynx, moves I’ve seen deftly employed in crowded bars on men with grabby hands.
“Come.” Jhochelle leads the way upstairs and I follow into Zero’s cluttered office, where feng shui must have crawled up and died. Aside from the tidy crib with a mini Calder mobile suspended above it, the office is populated by a dizzying array of rejected knickknacks, cast-off furniture, and incomprehensibly bad original art.
“What’s with this crap?” I sidestep a pair of rust-streaked oxygen tanks and a palette-size rack of caged lighting, like the type you’d see illuminating a ballpark. Over the tanks, on a bicycle hook screwed into the ceiling, hangs a bulky yellow suit that looks more hazmat than diving, the helmet, nearly box-shaped with a large plexiglass shield riveted along the seams and attached by a bungee cord, giving the appearance of someone who’s nodded off standing up.
“Those?” Jhochelle dismisses the mess with a backward wave of her hand. “They’ve been there for weeks. I keep waiting for Zero to add a captain’s wheel, some plastic lobsters, and fishing nets to complete the scene.”
“Who’d the boys move, Jacques Cousteau?”
“Possibly.” Jhochelle peeks in on Eli, who’s asleep, before seating herself behind my brother’s desk. “So.”
“Is it safe, keeping the tanks in the office? They look pretty rusted out.”
“I’ll have Zero or one of the guys move them if you’re concerned.”
“What kind of suit is that? Not warm-weather, it looks—”
“Zesty, enough about the gear already. I haven’t seen you in months. What’s prompted this visit?”
“You go first,” I say. “I need a favor but you said you were about to call me.”
“Yes. Perfect. So it’ll be a trade, then.”
Only I’m uncomfortable with Eli in the room and keep the stained paper bag with Charlie’s gun in my pack. “Is there somewhere you can put Eli for a minute?”
“Why?”
I tell her.
“Really?” Jhochelle’s eyes widen.
“It’s not loaded,” I add hastily. “Don’t ask me where I got it but I need to put it in the safe, at least temporarily.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Jhochelle reads something in my reaction and then adds, “Allow me to clarify. I literally can’t do that. I don’t have the combination.”
“Since when?”
“Since Zero changed it last week.”
“Why?”
“Why did he change it or why doesn’t he give me the combination?”
“Both.” Though I know better to expect transparency in regards to my brother’s relationship with his mercurial wife. My relationships with women have never lasted long enough to confirm this, but I’ve long held the view that the daily lives of every married couple are governed by a communicative series of hieroglyphics rendered in smoke signals, forever changing in the breeze. In simpler terms: Who the fuck really knows what goes through the minds of two people who’ve conjoined their lives to such a degree that they’ve created another human being?
“It’s not a matter of trust, Zesty, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the alternative, if you ask me, is actually worse.”
“Which is what?”
“Obviously there’s something he’d rather I not see. He’s protecting me from something.”
“From what?”
“If I knew—”
“Come on, Jhochelle. You married the fucker, I thought you had him figured out.”
“As if.”
“So are you worried or just pissed?”
“Considering the last couple of years…” Jhochelle contemplates the question, swaying lightly from side to side like a scale adjusting to an unbalanced weight, a movement that conveys neither anger nor pressing concern. “Let’s just say I’m wary. Zero is not impulsive, your father had trained that out of him at an early age. You must have been sleeping during those lessons. I’m assuming he’s decided to lock the safe to protect me from something. Making this not the first time he’s chosen to shield his family, would it?” Jhochelle referring to both my parents’ role in the Bank of Boston robbery, knowledge Zero had kept to himself until things began to spiral beyond his control.
“I won’t lie and say it doesn’t bother me, but now is not the time to press the issue. Is the gun you have registered?”
“The serial numbers have been filed off.”
“Has it been fired recently?”
“How would I know?”
“Wonderful.” Jhochelle shakes her head. “That’s why I love you, Zesty, you’re a paragon of responsibility.”
“Hey,” I say. “Since when did you master sarcasm?”
“When I married your brother. And irony as well, you’ll soon see. I need you to go pick up Zero.”
“From where?”
“The Lounge in Charlestown. Do you know it?”
“I know of it.” Only I preferred to frequent bars where women with teeth might show up. And then stay long enough for me to show off my tough guy scars. “What’s he doing at the Lounge in the middle of the day?” Zero’s not a boozer; aside from occasional beers with his work crews after a job I’ve rarely seen him drink in daylight hours.
“Last I was informed, he was tearing the place apart.” Jhochelle smiles bitterly. “I’d have called Sid but he’s covering your father right now and as you saw from the empty garage, all the men are out. Which leaves you.”
“Has he done this before, Jo?”
“Done what?”
“Gotten plastered in the middle of the afternoon.”
“I never said he was drunk, Zesty, I just told you where he is. But I do think perhaps the combination of fatherhood and your father’s steady decline have brought up issues for him which I don’t think he can rampage his way through. Try as he might. Talk to him, Zesty, he’ll listen to you. And get him out of that fucking bar before the authorities have to. The last thing we need is the Boston Police Department all over our business again; god only knows what Zero is really up to.”
“Will do,” I say. “But quick question. You still keep up the logbook for the storage bins downstairs?”
“Of course. It’s part of the rental contract.” With a two-signature itemized list so Zero is held accountable for the belongings while simultaneously the renter can’t take something out and claim the movers stole it.
“Can I see it?”
Jhochelle starts studying me anew, like she missed something in the first read; as if asking her to stash a stolen gun wasn’t troubling enough. “Why?”
“It’s probably nothing, but…” I fill Jhochelle in, her eyes darkening, recalculating at the mention of Brill and Wells; like Zero is wont to do, weighing the opportunity against the risk as I report Sam’s prolonged absence and his tenuous connection to Rambir Roshan.
“So Wells hasn’t been able to get ahold of Sam since this young man was murdered and this was how long ago, two weeks?”
“To the day. But I’m not sure how long after he was killed that Wells established the connection to Sam.”
“Well, personally, I didn’t see your friend, but as you know I’m not here full-time.…” Jhochelle selects a binder from a shelf and flips pages, running her eyes down each one until she comes to a stop. “He was here.” She spins the book so I can see. “And if it’s been two weeks precisely since Mr. Roshan was killed, it was the day after.” She pins the date with her finger, Sam’s signature and an item marked box/miscellaneous added to the storage bin.
“There a backup of this in the computer?” I close the binder.
Jhochelle smiles at me without meaning. Record keeping at Zen Movers is a nebulous matter, cash payments encouraged and generous discounts offered to customers who are willing to forgo any formal bill of service.
“Can I get into the bin?” I ask Jhochelle.
“You’re concerned?”
“Too many coincidences, considering the timing of Sam’s visit and ghost act.”
“Zesty, I sympathize but you know damn well going into a bin runs counter to policy and violates the renter’s bill of rights,” Jhochelle admonishes me with a mother’s tone. “It also happens to be against the law.”
Which is probably why the hard snap of the bolt cutters feels so satisfying to her. I kick the lock aside, roll up the door to the unit. The cardboard box is at the front on the floor, marked textbooks in black Sharpie ink.
I pick it up and can tell immediately it’s not full of textbooks. Any experienced mover would have come to the same conclusion, especially if the contents are purported to be made of paper. Porn is especially easy to gauge—though sometimes we’re fooled by National Geographic—gay porn heavier than hetero, don’t ask me why, it’s something about the paper stock. Imported Swedish gay porn is even heavier, they might as well just print it on the tree trunk.
Jhochelle opens the box with three quick slashes of a box cutter. At the top is a rough draft of Sam’s dissertation, the exact opposite of porn. Buried under the papers is an aluminum poker chip case with a little bit of heft to it. I bring it over to the weight bench where there’s a fresh de Kooning swirl of white and green pigeon dropping hardening on the bar. I open the case, run my fingers over the full rows of chips, and look up. The pigeon inches a few steps to the right, trying to line me up.
“Don’t even fuckin’ think about it,” I say, pulling out a random handful of chips, and show Jhochelle the markings.
“They’re real?” she asks.
“I think so. They’re all Vegas casino chips.” Caesar’s. Mandalay Bay. The Venetian. No chip has a valuation under a thousand dollars. With space now between the rows, I run my fingers down them again. Not a single chip matches the chips Brill had described Oleg Katanya using for the poker game he ran for Jakub Namestnikov and which Rambir Roshan had hidden in his shoes when he was killed.
“You’ll take care of the box and the lock?” I return the chips to the case, slide the case into my bag.
“Of course. And perhaps it’s best you keep the gun,” Jhochelle says, pragmatically.
“Like I’ve got a choice.” I hear the pigeon cooing directly above me now and step swiftly beyond its target range before noticing it’d already scored a hit; something green and slimy on my sneaker. “Fuckin’ bird,” I mutter aloud before recognizing what it really is: seaweed.
And it’s wet.