Ghostman (39 page)

I cared what was in that bag between his ankles.

It was just a simple brown paper bag, like ones you get a submarine sandwich in from the corner store. It was a wrinkled little thing, hardly worth noticing. The mouth had been crumpled up several times, so it was half open. Peeking through, I could barely make out the contents. It was filled with paper, but all I could see were the edges. A book, I thought, at least for the first few seconds. I’m good at noticing things, though, and this was no book. The edges were off white, with the ever so slight hint of black and green ink stains. The paper was worn thin.

A whole bag of money.

I couldn’t see it all, much less count it, but knew it had to be a lot. It filled the whole bag, as thick as a Sunday paper. It sat there next to his messenger bag. I can’t really describe what happened in my head in that moment. I didn’t really have any thoughts. No rush of greed or anything like that. I didn’t fantasize about being wealthy, but I didn’t consider the consequences, either. I saw me, I saw him and I saw the money.

I felt like I watched him forever, even though it was probably only about a minute. When I finally moved, it was like I was watching myself from the outside. I asked the man behind the counter for a paper bag to wrap up my leftovers. He brought me one and I left him a tip. I threw the rest of my hot dog away but kept the brown paper bag. I crumpled it, then slowly worked my copy of
The Aeneid
inside. It fit perfectly, so all you could see at first glance were the edges of the pages.

At no point did I ever stop to think about what I was doing.

I casually stood up from the hot dog stand and walked past the balding man in the white shirt like I didn’t have a care in the world, or like I was some simpleton tourist boggled by all the flashing lights. He didn’t seem aware of me, even when I was right behind him. I pretended to trip, just a little, on a crack in the pavement, then knelt down as if to tie my shoe. It took maybe a quarter of a second to replace his paper bag full of money with the one containing my book.

I thought it would be as easy as that. Nobody had ever noticed me before.

But I was wrong.

As I stood up again, the man turned slightly in his chair. To this day, I have no idea what I did wrong. His gaze began to shift before landing right on me. I could see the thoughts forming in his head, like he didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, the realization slowly showing in his eyes. The emotions on his face shifted. Wonder. Surprise. Anger. He had caught me and we both knew it, in that split second before anything happened. I saw the first syllable of what he was going to say move up in his throat like a bullet sliding into the firing chamber of a gun.

It never got to his mouth.

I grabbed the back of his head and slammed it into the counter as hard as I could. The force was hard enough to shatter his coffee cup against his forehead and send ceramic shards into his skin and break his nose. The hot coffee burned his face and splattered the counter under him. The scalding liquid seeped into his eyes and he couldn’t
see. Maybe he went blind.

He screamed. My god, can I remember his scream.

I don’t know why I did it. I can barely describe to you the storm of thoughts in my head. It wasn’t handcuffs and police officers and jail cells and courtrooms and official letters sealed with wax stamps. It was the shame of having failed, and the sense of something inside me that wouldn’t let that happen. It was the fear of being noticed, of being caught red-handed and, worse than that, the pleasure of being the aggressor for once in my life. It was the sudden feeling of having everyone there looking at me, except for him. For the first five seconds after I did it, not a single person stood up to stop me. They just sat there and watched me as blood erupted from the man’s nostrils and ran into his eyes and filled his mouth. He fell off his stool and rolled on the ground, grabbing at his face. I wasn’t breathing. I tried to let it out, but I couldn’t.

“Don’t you dare look at me!” I heard my voice say.

Then came the rush. The adrenaline and the fear and the greed and the hate and the guilt of it all. It overcame me and I was back in that moment again. I could taste the air. I could hear my own heartbeat, and the scream of my victim as he clutched at his face in agony.

I picked up the paper bag and walked away. The man crawled after me. Broad daylight, but nobody helped him or tried to stop me. By the time I got to the service street behind the casino, my heart rate was going down. I disappeared back into the crowd on the Strip and was nobody again. Police jogged right by me. I breathed and breathed again until I thought I couldn’t take it anymore.

That was the first robbery I ever committed.

I got on the next bus that showed up and took it down the line to another and then another. I never went back to that hot dog stand. Sometimes I wonder if it’s still there, or if anyone even remembers it. I wonder if anyone who was there that day still remembers the man I left pawing after me on the sidewalk, his face still burning. I wonder if anybody except me and him remembers anything about it at all.

On the bus, alone in the back, I opened the paper bag in my lap and looked inside. It was filled with fifty-dollar bills, a thick stack yellowed with age. Series 1979 through 1981. I counted them and fanned them out in my hands. Four hundred in total, divided into four straps of a hundred bills each. Twenty thousand dollars. I let my breath out slowly. It was more than I ever could have imagined.

Afterward, I never wanted to stop.

* * *

I was fourteen years old.

At that age, twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money. And this was 1988. Twenty thousand dollars could have paid my way through college. It could have bought a brand-new car, with all the options and a tape deck. Twenty grand was a year’s salary for a cop. The whole pile was two inches thick.

When I felt that paper in my hand, I felt like I
was
somebody. For the first time in my life, I had accomplished something that nobody else could’ve done. I was better at something. Smarter. I wasn’t just another kid from the suburbs anymore. I wasn’t just hiding behind history and science-fiction books or working the night shift at the gas station for $3.35 an hour. No. I was alive. I was someone to be reckoned with.

When I closed my eyes, I could still see that man on the sidewalk behind me. Some nights I felt guilty, but the feeling would fade by morning. I can barely remember him now, but I always can see the money vividly.

What started right then soon grew in my mind. It would eventually consume me, though not all at once. I can’t tell you the number of nights in those first few years that I sat in bed and stared up at the ceiling fan and thought about those stacks of faded green currency at the bottom of my closet. I worried that my parents would find them. I worried that men in uniforms would track me down by my fingerprints and arrest me. I worried that when I got caught, that would be the end of my life as I knew it. Four hundred pieces of paper and I’d never go to college. Or graduate from high school. Or vote. I imagined the image of that man would be with me forever.

The money grew old in that shoebox, and so did my anxiety about it. I barely spent any of it the first four years. In high school, it was easy to forget. I would drift off again into my own thoughts like I was bobbing around lost on some ocean. I didn’t know who I was. Not yet.

The money was still there when I packed it away in my suitcase at seventeen and flew across the country to Maryland, to attend St. John’s College in Annapolis. I learned ancient Greek and French there. I read all the old masters of Western civilization, and
when I was done I read them all again in the original, word by word, with a red pen. I received top marks. At St. John’s, each semester ends with a don rag, where two of your teachers sit and talk about your performance as if you weren’t even there. It is meant to be a harrowing experience, but I was used to being ignored. My professors never had much to say.

College passed.

When I was twenty, I drove to a gun show in Virginia and bought a .38 revolver. The next month I walked into a bank in Wilmington, Delaware. I placed the gun on the counter between me and the teller. I didn’t make one sound. They handed me seven thousand dollars through the glass and I left.

I missed the feeling of being someone. I missed having some purpose other than to read and get lost in my own thoughts. I missed holding that money up and smelling the ink and feeling the cotton against my fingertips. I missed everyone watching me with that total attention in their eyes. The fear and the thrill of it. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be—I just knew I didn’t want to be myself anymore. I killed what was left of my old life. I burned my driver’s license, Social Security card and school ID, then drove as far as I could. I didn’t want to be me. I didn’t want to be Baby Boy.

I walked into a QuickCash in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995. I poked a gun under the bulletproof plastic shield between me and the cashier. She handed me thirty-two grand in a plastic bag and begged me not to hurt her. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. The gun was just a symbol, like the color of a man’s tie or the name on a baby’s birth certificate. It means only as much as you want it to.

I’m not a sociopath. At least I don’t think I am. I don’t live on the grid and I’ve never wanted to. Maybe wanderlust just runs in my blood. Maybe it’s the only trace left of my mother, except for those last few molecules of diamorphine substrate in the fatty tissue over my liver that will be with me until the day I die. I was born to be alone.

I robbed another bank. Santa Monica, California.

Then another. Roswell, New Mexico.

There were other men like me, I found. Word traveled fast among those types. I found them easily enough, or they started finding me. Simply robbing banks wasn’t a challenge anymore; I wanted something more than that. A fence named Morty Finn was my first contact. He connected me with the kind of people who knew how to do what I
wanted to. All sorts of men. Some knew guns or cars, others banks or prisons. What I knew was people, how they worked and how they thought. I could be no one, and when you’re nobody you can be anybody. That was my talent. The adrenaline rush never did it for me. I was in it for more than that. I was in it to be alive.

I never robbed people’s homes. I never mugged anybody, or hurt anyone who deserved it less than I did. I never stole drugs or guns, just cash and art. A driver named Jackie was the first friend I ever had, and I didn’t even tell him my name. He called me Ulysses, after the president whose face is on the fifty-dollar bill. I’m not sure he’d ever heard of the more famous Ulysses, but I never asked him. We talked only over blueprints or cups of coffee in the car. We robbed an armored car and got half a million each, which is enough to retire on in this business. A security-camera picture of me was broadcast on the evening news, but they had no name, no fingerprints and no leads. The photo didn’t even look like me. I was no one. I was everyone.

A few years later I hooked up for a couple of jobs with an older pro named Angela who taught me everything I know. She was my mentor for a while, at least until I fucked up a job in Kuala Lumpur. After that I never talked to her again.

Now, when I’m not on a job I feel like I don’t exist. Whole years can go by between heists, depending on what opportunities I get and how much I have in the bank. I thought that when I got my first million, all my problems would go away. I spent hundreds of thousands on travel so I could go to all the places I’d only read about. I lived fat and fast. I thought seeing the ruins of ancient Ravenna from my own private villa on the Adriatic would make me feel at home. I thought maybe I’d find myself by reenacting some ancient battle in my head on the very hill where it was won. I thought that if I ran my fingers over some old inscription no one had ever seen before I could be a person again, or maybe for the first time. I thought all this might finally banish that man on the sidewalk from my consciousness.

None of it worked.

When not on the job I’m just a suit in the back corner table of a restaurant, staring at the empty place setting across from me. No waiter has ever remembered my name or my face, no matter how much money I spent. To them I’m yet another scribble in the guest ledger, to be greeted only once and then forgotten the moment the check is signed. I am physically average in every respect. I suppose that’s my talent, and always has been. It’s the one thing I’ve ever been good at. I’ve been nobody from the beginning, and I will
be nobody until the end.

I have never been fingerprinted. I have never been arrested or detained. I don’t have a real Social Security number, driver’s license or passport. My bank account is a ten-digit number with no name on it in some computer in the South Pacific, which I’ll never visit. I’d burned the only copy of my high school records right after I graduated. I cast the ashes from the top of my parents’ house into the wind and watched them disappear into the desert. When I left home, my father stopped planting the grass.

For guys who do what I do, notoriety is the last thing you ever want. Jackie got busted before he was thirty-five years old. A man from his old crew pointed some feds at him for shooting a few innocent people during a job. I never got to ask him if he did it, but after a while I stopped wanting to know. I realized that was his last lesson to me: he wanted me to be alone. If you spend too much time around people, sooner or later you’ll end up trusting one of them. You can’t do that if you want to survive. When you’re alone, the only person who can betray you is yourself.

So when I’m not working, I try to fill the time and keep my mind sharp. The months between jobs seem to slip away faster now than they did at first. Maybe I’m just older, or maybe I’m losing my touch. It’s hard sometimes, but I have a routine. I check my e-mail. I jump rope on the roof. I punch an old speed-bag. I sit at my desk facing the window and watch the sun come up. I read the classics again and translate them on a yellow legal pad. Mostly Latin, but some Greek and French too. Some days I don’t do anything except sit there and read. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. My translations go on for hundreds of pages. Aeschylus, Caesar, Juvenal, Livy. Reading their words helps me think. There’s no alternative, I guess. I have no words of my own.