“Very very really yeah. Now where you going to hide with a mug like that? I like your look, kid, the movie-star makeup thing. But here’s a news flash: it’s dripping off ya, and you still need plastic surgery and a trip to the salon. Fake as a snake, di-rect from central casting. You are painted into a corner, buddy boy ol’ pal.” The Octopus smiled glazed manila teeth. “Lucky you, I run this place. Way out, hear? Follow me, through the kitchen, down the rabbit hole, here we go. And pull down that cap low, try ’n’ block out your mug. That ash can’s a lotta unwanted attention, homeslice.”
The Octopus wrapped his tentacles around Murphy’s wrist and they swam out of the bathroom into a sea of body parts and perspiration, police radios hissing close by. The bar brimmed with chatter and sloppy kisses, budget beer, the pall of forced happiness. Murphy floated through a swinging door into a hectic kitchen. “Hey, José,” the Octopus quipped, removing bills from his pocket “taking the back way,
¿vale?
Don’t like the fuzz buzz.” José nodded and led them to a skinny rusted door and
they were out in the cold, Murphy Ahn, the Baby Cop Killer, and Octavius Maximus, the Octopus Beat Poet.
They shivered across the street and around the corner and up a flight of shag-carpeted stairs. The Octopus relaxed his suction cups, and Murphy fell into a cavernous room, maple floored, marble rimmed, chandelier topped. Leather sofas, leather chairs, leather-padded walls, an Impressionist over the fireplace, a sterile well-founded smell like the lobby of a sports club for elderly plutocrats. The Octopus disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a glass of soda and a bottle of beer, just as “What Am I Gonna Do With You” came on the stereo.
“Now, which one you want, dig? You read
Hamlet
? The death scene, switched cups and all? Probably not, huh. Not a reader.”
He noticed the gun in Murphy’s hands and smiled.
“Hey buddy, you took out your gun, whyzat? Bad news: I’m not into pervo swordfights. Leave that to the online bovines, man; I’m just helping a likeminded trouble-brother out of a jam.” He held up the drinks in a two-fisted toast. “Truth is, I see you, I see a new recruit, officer corps. Market’s always low on brass balls.”
“I work for D,” Murphy stated. Octopus was just another fast-talking felon with bad fashion sense, he realized, meaning not-awful odds of claiming self-defense if it came to that. “D says you’re dead,” he said louder.
“He said that? D did?” The Octopus sighed. “You know, I thought we had something, you and me. Couple of cool cucumbers, good rapport across topics. Already we’ve hit criminal justice. Fashion. English lit. But I guess once a Baby Cop Killer, always.” He tilted his head sideways and slid toward the wall, the bookcase, the handgun he kept taped under the third shelf. “Tough nuts I can’t help you through this awkward goofball stage. Fix the unslickness, put on the panache. Cuz I’ll be toasted with a fork sticking outta me. From D.”
“You owe him money,” Murphy said and shot him in the chest.
The Octopus fell on his knees, his lips pursed and hard-swallowing air like sucking paste through a straw.
“You serious, huh?” he gasped. “How much he paying you?”
Murphy counted in his head. “Seven hundred thousand dollars.”
“Seven!” The Octopus winced. “I guess I gotta double it. One point four. And you actually get the cash, dig? Unmarked bills, et cetera, repeat.” He rolled onto his side and coughed up brown phlegm, blood. “We cool?”
One point four million dollars. A preposterous sum, more than enough to melt down and recast and bounce back fresh. Wasn’t like they’d miss him down at Château Versailles. It was a big country. “You gotta get me outta town, far away,” he slished, “California or something.”
“Look, man, one point four’s some dough! Getcha a first-class bus ticket to the state of your dreams.” The Octopus leaned onto an elbow, firmed up his head in his fingers. “You gotta make a call.”
Murphy walked over to the Octopus and pressed the pistol into his crusted hair. “Sneak me out to California. Professionally.”
The Octopus wheezed. “Fuckzit, fine. Make the call, kiddo, time’s starting to drip-blip away. Speedy now, Gonzalez, kay?”
“How do I know you’ll do it?”
“My word’s straight shit now? Shoot me or pick up the phone, the deal’s the deal, no welshing, get on with it! Scout’s motherfucking honor.” The Octopus sank into the wine-colored puddle forming at his thighs. “Puh-lease?”
Murphy dialed. A minute later a platoon of heavy boots pounded into the apartment. One of them connected with his forehead. He woke up in the same clothes, sprawled across the back row of a Greyhound bus. A highway scrolled past his window, slick with drizzle and dotted with orange construction barriers. He watched the rolling gray hills and the sifting gray air and the roaming gray cars, lazing through the day like lost clouds.
He was anywhere and nowhere, gorgeous anonymity. After a while he felt something move in his jeans pocket.
He discovered a cellphone, muted, the size of a dog bone. He opened it.
“Yeah?”
“Kiddo!” The Octopus was distant but peppy, clearly feeling better. “Got that bus ticket to the bank, didincha? Saved from shit by the one honest crook in all the land, believe dat. You are made, man. You’re a made man, man. Man!”
“What?”
“There’s a metal suitcase under yo seat. Combination’s one-seven-nine-three. A lovely year for Bordeaux I hear.”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“Seventeen ninety-three, kid, bank it. Or findjaself a blowtorch. It can be done. But your welder might get greedy, know-Imsayin? Also, ticket stub in your ass pocket takes you straight on to Sac-town, Cali. Didn’t know where you wanted to go, L.A., San Dee-egg, Frisco, whatevadeva. So Sac-town’s your hub. Play it like you see it.”
Murphy listened to the drone of the bus and wondered if anyone else could hear.
“Thas it then! Bon vo-yage, fro-mage. What, you ain’t got nothin to say?”
He gurgled: “Thanks.”
“Thanks! Cranks!” The Octopus exhaled viciously. “Best thing coulda happened to you, skipping out on that faux French cesspool. Too nice, boy. Too nice. They’d eat you like sautéed snails, watch that S-car go. Later, skater.”
Octavius Maximus was an adroit businessman, a clever linguist, a strangely honorable crook, Murphy thought, but he was miles off on this one. Murphy wasn’t tender like buttery pan-seared mollusks; he was short-tempered and ruthless with a long motherfucking memory. A bottomless motherfucking memory. A hard-ass non-snail short-tempered Baby Cop Killer with an endless
motherfucking memory logging law-enforcement tactics from television and sound racketeering principles at the car wash.
A fourteen-year-old kid with 1.4 million dollars underneath his seat riding to Sacramento on Thanksgiving Day.
At the next rest stop, he took the metal suitcase into a handicapped stall and counted the banded packs of bills. A hundred bucks light, Murphy guessed for the bus ticket. He bought all the newspapers he could find and climbed back on the bus, looking for his picture in every section and even the ads but finding only the hand-painted mirror reflection, somebody handsome and mildly sexy, definitely not him.
Four days later he debussed in San Francisco. Downtown was cool but not cold, the people dressed casual, a policeman walked right by him drinking beer on a bench. He watched bike messengers slap fight in a plaza, then went to a bakery and paid two dollars for the best chocolate-chip cookie of his life. Nobody asked any questions at the banks, just ushered him into a private room, counted his money twice, and gave him pamphlets about financial advisors. He found a small creaky bookstore and bought a stack of guides to stocks and real estate development, the clerk taking his hundreds without blinking, a separate drawer in his register full of them.
That night he stayed up late reading and eating room service in a suite at the Fairmont. In the morning he’d buy new clothes and find a short-term rental, he decided, start scouting dumpy businesses to reinvent. He wanted to build a lasting place. He would leverage debt, hire a team of financial wunderkinds, and piggyback off profitable, no-lose trends. Thinking a focus on real estate, owning the earth and building it up into indestructible skyline empires. His 1.4 million dollars could do a lot better than interest, he knew this from Big D; it took some risk but not much. And his way it would all be double-insulated, audit-proof, invincible.
At four he forced himself to bed. So tired he was seeing
shapes, evolving phantom amoebas, he hadn’t done more than doze for days. He looped the silk sheet tight around his body and under his back, over his head, binding his legs and feet, locked into physical calm. Still his mind exploded in blissful trajectories, cranes constructing cities, colors blowing out black, and he rocked softly in his sarcophagus until he heard the morning paper drop at the door and decided he might as well get back at it.
THERMIDORIAN REACTION
The fall of the dictator so emboldened that large number of people who were determined to end [the Terror], that its continuance proved impossible.
—HENRY PACKWOOD ADAMS,
The French Revolution
The Thermidorian Reaction, as the end of the Terror is called, left the National Convention free to resume its task of devising a permanent republican constitution for the country.
—CARLTON J. H. HAYES,
A Political and Social History of Modern Europe
They put Fanny in
the ground amid a full downpour, a ten-minute ceremony conducted in five by a Methodist priest for hire who mispronounced Fanny’s name. When he clamped shut his Bible, they threw flowers on the anchor-adorned gravestone and raced back to the office for a respectful few minutes of black coffee and drying off in the bathroom. They slipped into a taxi before the manager could give Esmerelda the bill and rode home in bumper-to-bumper traffic, an hour of painful proximity standing in for a funeral procession.
Released from the cab confines, Esmerelda heaved her great wool bag to the floor and stomped enthusiastically to the kitchen for her first-ever Fanny-free meal in the house. Unfortunately she couldn’t find any cookies in the cupboard, and they appeared to be out of marshmallows, so she hit the fridge for a cheese sampler
or a side of bacon. The door snapped to a halt after an inch, and after giving it six more increasingly vigorous yanks she looked down to discover a thick metal chain snaking through the refrigerator and freezer door handles, padlocked shut by a Kryptonite bike lock. “Kids!” she called. “We’re locked out of the fridge!”
The twins filed into the room staring at the floor so they wouldn’t cry or laugh or sock a hole in the wall.
“Repo man, I bet. Somebody better check out Fanny’s bills. I haven’t been able to give it the proper study.” She noticed the kids’ downcast eyes and clucked her tongue. “Somebody lose a contact?”
“It’s not the repo man, Ma,” Robespierre said.
“Hang on, there’s a hatchet in here somewhere.” She grabbed the knife block out from the counter and pulled out a pack of rusted steak knives, serrated bread slicers with the teeth sawed flat, a dull-as-a-thumb sushi blade, a hybrid slice of metal that looked like a cross between a can opener and a barber’s straight razor. “Raw deal,” she mumbled. “Maybe we can do one of those urban bombs you make from the medicine cabinet. I know there’s matches in the bathroom, lighter fluid in the garage. Marat, why don’t you grab a few of your firecrackers?”
“Can’t do it,” he said.
“Come on, hup hup. Dinner bell’s ringin.”
“You’re too big, Ma,” he shot back.
“It’s a medical condition,” she clarified. “Metabolism and thyroid.”
“You’re overweight,” Robespierre pressed.
“So are most people! It’s like a national tradition!” She flung the knives at the fridge lock, watched them clatter to the ground.
“Not this bad,” Robespierre said. “You have to lose it.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” she sputtered. “Why are you picking on me, today of all days?”
“We’re gonna do things differently,” Marat told her. “We’re starting a new way starting now.”
“What’s wrong with the way we got?” They let a minute of quiet answer that one for her—melodramatic soap opera dialogue running upstairs, the stench of gin-soaked carpeting, the oxidizing Harold Van Twinkle portraits patching the dining room walls from floor to ceiling, the phone ringing and the answer machine picking up and Slippy Sanders whining about where the hell was she, they had a line out the door and an overheated photocopier, they needed reinforcements on the double, drop everything, run.
“The contract’s done now,” Esmerelda went on. “All those rules are gone.”
“The contract wasn’t the problem, Ma,” Robespierre said. “It was just another excuse. Point is, if you want to live past dessert, you’ve got to change.”
“The real question is why you want me around that long,” Esmerelda snickered. “The real question is why I wasn’t invited on that trip to the zoo.”
All they got from Marat was breathing, long scratchy draughts and endless exhalation, his chest bobbing like a squeezed bellows. He wiped a thumb beneath both eyes and stuck it in his ear. “We’re gonna help you get better, Ma,” he gasped, “if it kills us.”
“Marat.” Robespierre guided his hand to his side and gave him a quick sideways hug. That face, Esmerelda thought, they had the same conniving, Jasper-cursed face.
“Show’s over,” she blurted, “and I’m hungry. I’m ordering pizza. And buffalo wings. And a salad for the health nuts around here.” She clicked her teeth and smiled wide. “You’re welcome.”
They parted as Esmerelda plodded to the phone.
“The funeral feast is on its way,” she reported a minute later. “Forty-five minutes. I’m gonna slip out of my mortuary garb.”
Marat and Robespierre sat at the kitchen table and went over Fanny’s finances while Esmerelda tramped over to the bedroom and wrestled with her clothes, starting off a soundtrack of wall-to-wall yelling and overturned furniture; tearing fabric and paintings crashing to the floor; leftover snack plates and milkshake
glasses shattering grotesquely. They listened as Esmerelda’s epithets and hyena screams gave way to frustrated pillow tosses and whines for help, moving on to mumbling rambles and, eventually, quiet whimpering. They heard the doorbell ring, and Esmerelda’s soft moan, and the follow-up doorbell ring, unanswered. A few minutes later came the phone call, the answering machine pickup, the angry message. All was quiet for the hour required to finish their review of Esmerelda’s bills and receipts and update their plan for boosting household revenues, at which point Marat put away the files and set the table while Robespierre took a key from her shoe, opened the bike lock, and prepared a Caesar salad made of local organic vegetables and topped with fresh goat cheese and toasted sourdough cubes.