The Goldfinch, Page 63

  speeding by in the dark much too fast to see.

  “Food is so awful,” said Boris. “Sprouts and some hard old wheat toast. You would think hot girls go there but is just old gray-head women and fat.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because quiet street in the evening,” said Victor Cherry. “Lunchcafe is closed, after hours, but because semi-public nothing will get out of control, see?”

  Everywhere: strangeness. Without noticing it I’d left reality and crossed the border into some no-man’s-land where nothing made sense. Dreaminess, fragmentation. Rolled wire and piles of rubble with the plastic sheeting blown to the side.

  Boris was speaking to Victor in Russian; and when he realized I was looking at him, he turned to me.

  “We are only saying, Sascha is in Frankfurt tonight,” he said, “hosting party at a restaurant for some friend of his just got out of jail, and we are all of us confirmed on this from three different sources, Shirley too. He thinks he is being smart, staying out of town. If it gets back to Horst what has happened here tonight he wants to be able to throw up his hands and say, ‘Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.’ ”

  “You,” said Victor to me, “you are based in New York. I have said you are an art dealer, arrested for forgery, and now run an operation like Horst’s—much smaller scale in terms of paintings, much larger in terms of money.”

  “Horst—God bless him,” said Boris. “Horst would be the richest man in New York except he gives it all away, every cent. Always has. Supports many many persons besides himself.”

  “Bad for business.”

  “Yes. But he enjoys company.”

  “Junkie philanthropist, ha,” said Victor. He pronounced it philanthropist. “Good they die off time to time or who knows how many schmeckheads crammed in that dump with him. Anyway—less you say in there, the better. They will not be expecting polite conversation. This is all business. It will be fast. Give him the bank draft, Borya.”

  Boris said something sharp in Ukrainian.

  “No, he should produce it himself. It should be from his hand.”

  Both bank draft, and deposit slip, were printed with the words Farruco Frantisek, Citizen Bank Anguilla, which only increased the sense of dream trajectory, a track speeding up too fast to slow down.

  “Farruco Frantisek? I’m him?” Under the circumstances it felt like a meaningful question—as if I might be somehow disembodied or at least had passed beyond a certain horizon where I was freed of basic facts like identity.

  “I did not choose the name. I had to take what I could get.”

  “I’m supposed to introduce myself as this?” There was something wrong with the paper, which was too flimsy, and the fact that the slips said Citizen Bank and not Citizen’s Bank made them look all wrong.

  “No, Cherry will introduce you.”

  Farruco Frantisek. Silently I tried the name out, turned my tongue around it. Even though it was a hard name to remember, it was just strong and foreign enough to carry the lost-in-space hyperdensity of the black streets, tram tracks, more cobblestones and neon angels—back in the old city now, historic and unknowable, canals and bicycle racks and Christmas lights shaking on the dark water.

  “When were you going to tell him?” Victor Cherry was asking Boris. “He needs to know what his name is.”

  “Well now he knows.”

  Unknown streets, incomprehensible turns, anonymous distances. I’d stopped even trying to read the street signs or keep track of where we were. Of everything around me—of all I could see—the only point of reference was the moon, riding high above the clouds, which though bright and full seemed weirdly unstable somehow, void of gravity, not the pure anchoring moon of the desert but more like a party trick that might pop out at a conjurer’s wink or else float away into the darkness and out of sight.

  ix.

  THE PURPLE COW WAS on an untravelled one-way street just wide enough for a car to go through. All the other businesses around—pharmacy, bakery, bike shop—were shut tight, everything but an Indonesian restaurant on the far end. Shirley Temple let us off out front. On the opposite wall, graffiti: smiley face and arrows, Warning Radioactive, stenciled lightning bolt with the word Shazam, dripping horror-movie letters, keep it nice!

  I looked in through the glass door. The place was long and narrow, and—at first glance—empty. Purple walls; stained glass ceiling lamp; mismatched tables and chairs painted kindergarten colors and the lights low except for a grillside counter area and a lighted cold case glowing in back. Sickly house plants; signed black-and-white photo of John and Yoko; bulletin board shaggy with leaflets and flyers for satsangs and yoga classes and varied holistic modalities. On the wall was a mural of the Tarot arcana and, in the window, a flimsy computer-printed menu featuring a number of Everett-style wholefoods: carrotsoup, nettlesoup, nettlemash, lentil-nutspie—nothing very appetizing, but it made me remember that the last honest-to-God, more-than-a-few-bites meal I’d eaten had been the take-out curry in bed back at Kitsey’s.

  Boris saw me looking at it. “I am hungry too,” he said, rather formally. “We will go get a really good dinner together. Blake’s. Twenty minutes.”

  “You’re not going in?”

  “Not yet.” He was standing slightly to the side, out of view of the glass doors, looking up and down the street. Shirley Temple was circling the block. “Don’t be here talking to me. Go with Victor and Gyuri.”

  The man who sloped up to the glass door of the cafe was a scrawny, sketchy, twitchy-looking guy in his sixties, with a long narrow face and long freak hair past his shoulders and a peaked denim cap straight from Soul Train 1973. He stood there with his ring of keys and looked past Victor to me and Gyuri and seemed undecided whether to let us in. His close-set eyes, his brushy gray eyebrows and his puffy gray moustache gave him the look of a suspicious old schnauzer dog. Then another guy appeared, much much younger and much much bigger, half a head taller even than Gyuri, Malaysian or Indonesian with a face tattoo and eyepopping diamonds in his ears and a black topknot on the crown of his head that made him look like one of the harpooners from Moby Dick, if one of the harpooners from Moby Dick had happened to be wearing velvet track pants and a peach satin baseball jacket.

  The old tweaker was making a call on his mobile. He waited, his eyes cagily on us the whole while. Then he made another call and turned his back and walked away into the depths of the lunchcafe, talking, palm pressed to cheek and ear in the manner of a hysterical housewife while the Indonesian stood in the glass door and watched us, unnaturally still. There was a brief exchange and then the old tweaker returned and with wrinkled brow and seeming reluctance began fumbling with the key ring, turning the key in the lock. The minute we were in he began yammering to Victor Cherry and throwing his arms about, while the Indonesian strolled over and leaned against the wall with his arms folded, listening.

  Some disturbance, definitely. Discomfort. What language were they speaking? Romanian? Czech? What it was about I had not a clue but Victor Cherry seemed cold and annoyed while the old gray-head tweaker grew more and more agitated—angry? no: irritable, frustrated, wheedling even, a whine climbing in his voice, and all the time the Indonesian kept his eyes on us with the unsettling stillness of an anaconda. I stood about ten feet away and—despite Gyuri, with moneybag, pressing in on me much too close—put on a self-consciously blank expression and pretended to examine the signs and slogans on the wall: Greenpeace, Fur-Free Zone, Vegan Friendly, Protected by Angels! Having bought enough drugs in enough dodgy situations (cockroach apartments in Spanish Harlem, piss-smelling stairwells in the St. Nicholas projects), I knew enough not to be interested, since—in my experience anyway—transactions of this nature were mostly the same. You acted relaxed and disengaged, didn’t talk unless you had to and spoke in a monotone when you did, and—as soon as you got what you came for—left.

  “Protected by angels, my ass,” said Boris, in my ear, having sidled up noiselessly on my other side.

/>   I said nothing. Even all these years later, it was all too easy for us to fall into the habit of whispering with our heads together like in Spirsetskaya’s class, which seemed like not a good dynamic in the situation.

  “We are on time,” said Boris. “But one of their men has not shown. That is why Grateful Dead here is so jumpy. They want us to wait till he comes. It is their own fault for changing the meeting place so often.”

  “What’s going on over there?”

  “Let Vitya handle it,” he said, poking his shoe at a desiccated furball on the floor—dead mouse? I thought, with a start, before realizing it was a chewed-up cat toy, one of several strewn across the floor beside a clumped and piss-darkened cat tray which lay half-hidden, turds and all, at the base of a table for four.

  I was wondering how a dirty cat tray placed where diners were likely to step in it was possibly convenient in terms of food-service logistics (not to mention attractive, or healthful, or even legal) when I realized the talking had stopped and the two of them had turned to Gyuri and me—Victor Cherry, the old tweaker with a wary expectant look, stepping forward, his eyes darting from me to the bag in Gyuri’s hand. Obligingly Gyuri stepped forward, opened it, set it down with a servile bow of his head, and stepped away for the old guy to look at it.

  The old guy peered in, nearsightedly; his nose wrinkled. With some peevish exclamation he looked up at Cherry, who remained impassive. Another obscure exchange ensued. The grayhair seemed discontented. Then he closed the bag and stood up and looked at me, eyes darting.

  “Farruco,” I said nervously, having forgotten my last name and hoping I would not be required to produce it.

  Cherry gave me a look: the papers.

  “Right, right,” I said, reaching in the top inside pocket of my jacket for the bank draft and the deposit slip—unfolding them, in what I hoped was a casual way, checking them out before I handed them over—

  Frantisek. But just as I was extending my hand—bam, it happened like a gust of wind that blows through the house and slams a door loudly in a direction where you aren’t expecting it—Victor Cherry stepped fast behind the grayhair and whacked him on the back of the head with the pistol butt so hard his cap flew off and his knees buckled and down he went with a grunt. The Indonesian, still in his wall-slouch, seemed as startled by this as I was: he stiffened, our eyes connected in a sharp what the fuck? jolt that was almost like a glance between friends, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t moving away from the wall until I looked behind me and saw to my horror that Boris and Gyuri both had guns on him: Boris neatly resting the butt of the pistol in the cup of his left palm and Gyuri, one-handed, with the bag of money, backing out the front door.

  Disconnected flash, someone flitting from the kitchen in back: youngish Asian woman—no, a boy; white skin, blank frightened eyes sweeping the room, Ikat print scarf, long hair flying, just as quickly gone.

  “Someone’s in back,” I said rapidly, looking around, every direction, room wheeling around me like a carnival ride and heart beating so wildly I couldn’t make the words come out quite right, I wasn’t sure if anyone heard me say it—or if Cherry heard, at any rate, since he was hauling the grayhair up by the back of his jeans jacket, catching him in a chokehold, pistol at his temple, screaming at him in whatever Eastern-European tongue and jostling him to the rear as the Indonesian un-slouched himself from the wall, gracefully and carefully, and looked at Boris and me for what seemed like a long time.

  “You cunts are going to be sorry for this,” he said quietly.

  “Hands, hands,” said Boris cordially. “Where I can see them.”

  “I don’t got a weapon.”

  “Right there anyway.”

  “Right you are,” said the Indonesian, just as cordially. He looked me up and down with his hands in the air—memorizing my face, I realized with a chill, image straight to data file—and then he looked at Boris.

  “I know who you are,” he said.

  Submarine glow of the fruit juice cooler. I could hear my own breath going in and out, in and out. Clang of metal in the kitchen. Indistinct cries.

  “Down, if you please,” said Boris, nodding at the floor.

  Obligingly the Indonesian got to his knees and—very slowly—stretched himself full length. But he didn’t seem rattled or afraid.

  “I know you,” he said again, voice slightly muffled.

  Fast darting movement in the corner of my eye, so fast I started: a cat, devil black, like a living shadow, darkness flying to darkness.

  “And who am I then?”

  “Borya-from-Antwerp, innit?” It wasn’t true that he didn’t have a weapon; even I could see it bulging at his armpit. “Borya the Polack? Giggleweed Borya? Horst’s mate?”

  “And so if I am?” said Boris genially.

  The man was silent. Boris, tossing the hair out of his eyes with a flick of his head, made a derisive noise and seemed about to say something sarcastic but just then Victor Cherry came out of the back, alone, pulling what looked like a set of flexcuffs out of his pocket—and my heart skipped to see, under his arm, a package of the correct size and thickness, wrapped in white felt and tied with baker’s twine. He dropped a knee in the Indonesian’s back and began to fumble with the cuffs at his wrists.

  “Get out,” said Boris to me, and then, again—my muscles had locked up and hardened; he gave me a little push—“Go! get in the car.”

  Blankly I looked around—I couldn’t see the door, there wasn’t a door—and then there it was and I scrambled out so fast I slipped and nearly fell on a cat toy, out to the Range Rover puffing at the curb. Gyuri was keeping watch out front, on the street, in the light drizzle which had just begun to fall—“In, in,” he hissed, sliding into the back seat and waving me to come in after him, just as Boris and Victor Cherry burst out of the restaurant and hopped in too and off we drove, at a sedate and anticlimactic speed.

  x.

  IN THE CAR, OUT on the main road again, all was jubilation: laughter, high fives, while my heart was slamming so hard I could barely breathe. “What’s going on?” I rasped, several times—gulping for breath and looking back and forth between them and then, when they kept ignoring me, babbling in a percussive mix of Russian and Ukrainian, all four of them including Shirley Temple: “Angliyski!”

  Boris turned to me, wiping his eyes, and slung his arm around my neck. “Change of plans,” he said. “That was all on the fly—improvised. We could have asked for nothing better. Their third man didn’t show.”

  “Catching them short-handed.”

  “Flatfooted.”

  “Pants down! On the crapper!”

  “You”—I had to gasp to get the words out—“you said no guns.”

  “Well, no one got hurt, did they? What difference does it make?”

  “Why didn’t we just pay?”

  “Because we lucked out!” Throwing up his arms. “Once in a lifetime chance! We had the opportunity! What were they going to do? They were two—we were four. If they had any sense, they should never have let us inside. And—yes, I know, only forty thousand, but why should I pay them one cent if I don’t have to? For stealing my own property?” Boris chortled. “Did you see the look on his face? Grateful Dead? When Cherry whipped him back of the dome?”

  “You know what he was complaining about, the old goat?” said Victor, turning to me jubilantly. “Wanted it in Euros! ‘What, dollars?’ ” imitating his peevish expression. “ ‘You brought me dollars?’ ”

  “Bet he wishes he had those dollars now.”

  “I bet he wishes he kept his mouth shut.”

  “I’d like to hear that phone call to Sascha.”

  “I wish I knew the name of the guy. That stood them up. Because I would like to buy him a drink.”

  “Wonder where he is?”

  “He is probably at home in the shower.”

  “Studying his Bible lesson.”

  “Watching ‘Christmas Carol’ on television.”

 
“Waiting at the wrong place, most like.”

  “I—” My throat was so constricted I had to swallow to speak. “What about that kid?”

  “Eh?” It was raining, light rain pattering on the windshield. Streets black and glistening.

  “What kid?”

  “Boy. Girl. Kitchen boy. Whatever.”

  “What?” Cherry turned—still winded, breathing hard. “I didn’t see anyone.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “What’d she look like?”

  “Young.” I could still see the freeze-frame of the young ghostly face, mouth slightly open. “White coat. Japanese-looking.”

  “Really?” said Boris curiously. “You can tell apart by looking? Like where they are from? Japan, China, Vietnam?”

  “I didn’t get a good look. Asian.”

  “He, or she?”

  “I think is all girls that work in the kitchen there,” said Gyuri. “Macrobyotik. Brown rice and like that.”

  “I—” Now I really wasn’t sure.

  “Well—” Cherry ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair—“glad she ran, whoever, because you know what else I found back there? Sawed-off Mossberg 500.”

  Laughter and whistles at this.

  “Shit.”

  “Where was it? Grozdan didn’t—?”

  “No. In a—” he gestured, to indicate a sling—“what do you call it. Hanging under the table, in some cloth like. Just happened to see it when I was down on the floor. Like—looked up. There it was, right over my head.”

  “You didn’t leave it there, did you?”

  “No! I wouldn’t have minded to take it except was too big and had my hands full. Unscrewed it and knocked the pin out and threw it in the alley. Also—” he pulled a silver snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket, which he passed over to Boris—“this!”

  Boris held it up to the light and looked at it.

  “Nice little conceal-carry J-frame. Ankle holster in those bell bottom jeans! But to his misfortune he was not quick enough.”

  “Flexcuffs,” said Gyuri to me, with slightly inclined head. “Vitya thinks ahead.”

  “Well—” Cherry wiped the sweat from his broad forehead—“they are light and slim to carry, and they have saved me many times shooting people. I do not like to hurt anyone if I don’t have to.”

  Medieval city: crooked streets, lights draped on bridges and shining off rain-peppered canals, melting in the drizzle. Infinity of anonymous shops, twinkling window displays, lingerie and garter belts, kitchen utensils arrayed like surgical instruments, foreign words everywhere, Snel bestellen, Retro-stijl, Showgirl-Sexboetiek.

  “Back door was open to the alley,” said Cherry, elbowing off his sports coat and swigging from a bottle of vodka which Shirley T. had produced from under the front seat—hands a bit shaky and his face, the nose particularly, glowing a flagrant, stressed-out, Rudolph red. “They must have left it open for him—their third man—to come in at the back. I closed it and locked it—made Grozdan close and lock it, gun to his head, he was snivel and crying like baby—”

  “That Mossberg,” Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. “Evil dirty thing. Sawed off—? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.”

  “Good trick, no?” said Victor Cherry philosophically. “To say your third man is not there? ‘Wait five minutes, please’? ‘Sorry, mix up’—? ‘He will be here any moment’? While he is all the time in back with the shotgun. Good double cross, if they had thought of it—”

  “Maybe they did think of it. Why else have the gun back there?”

  “I think we had a narrow miss, is what I think—”

  “There was one car pulled up front, scared Shirley and me,” said Gyuri, “while you were all in there, two guys, we thought we were in the shit but was only two gays, French guys, looking for restaurant—”

  “—but no one in the back, thank God, I got Grozdan on the floor and cuffed him to radiator,” Cherry was saying. “Ah, but—!” he held up the felt-wrapped package—“first. This. For you.”

  He handed it over the seat to Gyuri, who—gingerly, with his fingertips, as if it were a tray he might spill—passed it to me. Boris—downing his slug, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand—chucked me gaily in the arm with the bottle while humming we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas

  Package on my knees. Running my hands all around the edge. The felt was so thin that I sensed the rightness of it immediately with my fingertips, the texture and weight were perfect.

  “Go on,” said Boris, nodding, “better open it, make sure it’s not the Civics book this time! Where was it?” he asked Cherry as I began to fumble with the string.

  “Dirty little broom closet. Piece-of-shit plastic briefcase. Grozdan took me right to it. I thought he might fuck around a bit but burner at the head was all