The Russian Heist, page 9
missed those high-carved cheekbones where light dappled her face, and he
longedtorunhisfingersthroughthethickcaramelthatchbetweenherlegs. A tenor poured out words he remembered from those better days:
“Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back . . . “ The mystic George
Herbert—tooethereal.HeneededsomeonelikeSirThomasWyatt,courtier
and whoremaster, wise in the ways of the world and perfidious women. “They flee from me who sometime did me seke . . . ”
Trashy Bobbi, flaunting her sex with her wet finger in his mouth. He felt sick to
hisstomachandwasconvincedshehadbeensubornedbySmittytostiffen
more than his spine.
Macbride wondered if the universe were indeed rushing backwards to
implode on the head of a pin. Or whether, as some physicists believed, it
was a huge cellophane bag hanging alongside other universes in their own
skins. When they accidentally touched membranes, a new world would explode into being. During one heat wave in the Northwest when he was a
boy,hehadseenpinetreesfullof writhingbagwormnests—Satan’sideaof
a Christmas tree.
What sane person, he wondered, could look at this world and derive
pleasure? Macbride himself was stripped of nearly all illusions, once cherished as boy and then as man, particularly those about love and women.
He knew one thing with a grim, iron certainty: beyond sex and death, life
had no meaning whatsoever.
That night he dreamed of Guadeloupe and its sandy beaches. He saw himselfstandingonahighhillinfrontof ahouseoverlookingtheturquoisebay. He was smiling in the dream. Then Shrivastava, the nuisance, trotted into view dressed in a white guayaberra and carrying his clipboard; he pointed down to the bay where a single-masted sloop lay at anchor. Soldiers in French uniforms marched and prinked with burnished muskets on the beach.OthersoldiersstoodbehindShrivastavaontheverandaholdingaset of manacles. He looked down at himself and saw he was dressed in filthy
rags . . .
He awoke at five, his face damp from the last vestiges of alcohol seeping from his system in a film of greasy perspiration. His pillow stank. His
bladder clamored for release. As he stood over the bowl in the harsh light,
hewatchedhisshriveledprickconflate,abloodwormthatwouldnotbedenied. He masturbated into the toilet. Bobbi, that brainless succubus, had
waited for dawn to finally give him release.
Hedrankgreenteatosettlehisstomach,fedTod,andthoughtabouthis
incomplete microeconomics final that afternoon at Hiram College, a white
masonryandglassaffairinaclumpof woodsinthemiddleof Amishcountry. The narrow rural highways were treacherous with huge drifts and frugal truckers avoiding the toll roads.
Smith’s plan played over in his mind. Macbride had never been confronted by the law outside of his three divorces and traffic court for a pair
of speedingticketsinasingledaywhilehurryingtoclassfromasexualrendezvous with a student. Lawyers, cops and judges were servants of a lesser
society. He knew they existed in the same way he knew geriatric wards and
insane asylums existed, but he never expected to poach on their territory.
He knew dimly of the state penitentiary in Lucasville down on the river
where the worst felons in the state were confined. Guards and convicts
were being killed there all the time.
Besides the possibility of physical violence, which absolutely terrified
him to the core of his being, the best feature of the plan depended on
serendipity. For all that the little criminal brain bragged about his “inside
source,” whether the million dollars in deposits would be in the airport on that day seemed to depend on luck. His own role was simple enough but everything depended on it. He acted insulted when Smith asked him whether he was sure he could impersonate a big shot from his company to
get them past the gate. What was teaching but acting without a script? SmithandBobbiarguedinfrontof himwhetherhewasbetteroff playing a district supervisor from headquarters or one of Smith’s local bosses.
The argument seemed to waver on the question of his shape. (“He looks
more like a chef,” she said.) Finally they tossed a coin, tails, company supervisor. What did he expect from these two, Occam’s razor?
The swelling on his forehead had subsided to a blue knot and, except
for the crescent of blackened skin below his eye, he was fully recovered
physically from his second and worse fall. The problem was that stress
was aggravating mere sniffles into a full-blown head cold. Tod displayed a
rare moment of affection by grazing against Macbride’s bare legs with his
humped back. Between sips, Macbride propounded the dilemma in the
cold light of morning for Tod’s benefit by looping them into a pro-con
framework.
Enter lawyer voice for the prosecution.
“Whereas I neither know nor trust my white-trash cohorts, whereas I
have sufficient evidence of the caliber of their minds via their patchwork
scheme to see with my own eyes how flawed is the planning, whereas the
risk versus reward is disproportionately greater on the side of risk, I cannot proceed with this action.”
On the other side of the courtroom, defense counsel raised its objections.
“Whereas I discover myself to have no qualms about spending for my
own benefit a vast sum of money I have no moral claim to, whereas only
adesperateactionisgoingtoliberatemefromthecurrentdifficultiesof my
life—to wit, I am deprived of money, goods, property, and chattels—” I must proceed with this action.
Todreceivedbothsummationstothejurors.IamgettingoldandtheReaper
is beckoning. Debate over, the cat flicked his tail and bolted off to make his
rounds.
Macbride went into the other room and took paper and pen out of his
satchel. He wrote down questions. He stared at the paper and dialed the
Smiths’ number.
“Wha—Who is this?”—the voice scratchy from interrupted sleep. As soon as Smith recognized the professor, he cursed. “You better be
fuckin’ calling from a land line, God damn it.”
Macbride spoke calmly. “Answer these questions as precisely as you can
and without a single obscenity, please. If you hesitate or if you fail to answer any one of them to my satisfaction, I’ll hang up and you can lose my
number.”
“Shoot.”.
“Did you put your wife up to seducing me?”
“Take a look in the mirror and take another look at Bobbi.” “Answer it.”
“I thought it would help bring you around.”
“Do you have a criminal record?”
“They do background checks before hiring anyone. They bond you. I
could never have got the job with a record.”
“That’s not an answer..
“I had a juvie record, some small-time shit with a dime bag of dope,
but it was scrubbed years ago. Like I say, if I had a felony —” “What about her?”
“Neverevenshoplifted,”Smittysaid.“Worsethingsheeverdidwasunderage drinking at fifteen in some old shitkicker bar where she grew up.
You think a doll built like her is going to get carded?”
He went through all his other questions and scribbled notes. He looked
down at the page with checkmarks, doodles, ticks, and question marks or
exclamationpoints.HisdoodlingrenderedapopeyedSmithunconsciously
withathickarrowthroughhisheadandplussignsforhiseyes.Bobbi’scaricature was an hourglass with pendulous breasts and a dark curly bush. Finally, in the lull, Smith yawned and asked, “You all right, professor?” “I’m thinking.”.
“That piece of paper you’re reading from . . . burn it.”
“There’s one more thing.”
“Jesus Christ, the pigs’ll eat my brother before—”
“You say a reducedcrew, maybe sixat most, but you don’t have an exact
number.”
Smith’s high voice cracked. “Skeleton crew is normal during holidays.” “If there are more of them than there are of us, precisely how do you,
how do we, uh, subdue them?” Smith had not mentioned any options at the
meeting.
“One female guard—you’re afraid of one little ole skinny girl with a
gun? Look, we don’t get past the gate, it’s all over but the shouting.” Macbride’s heart fluttered like a broken-winged bird straight into his
throat. He thought he heard shooting.
“But it seems to me we don’t have anybody in the back of the van but
your inside man, and he’s a . . . uh, an effeminate fellow, from what you’ve
told me. Now I have nothing against homosexuals, you see, but, uh, this
seems to call for a more . . . vigoroustype of male because I have no intention of holding a weapon on anybody. ”
“Relax, professor, don’t go getting your panties in a twist. I’ll introduce
you to one tonight.”
“Introduce me to—what did you say? One what?”
“That vigorous male you was just now mentioning.” He burped. “You
didn’t think I was counting on you for the muscle, did you?”. Macbride was stunned to silence when he realized the implication. “Hedon’tsaymuch,unlikeyou,”Smithcontinuedwithsuppressedglee,
fully recovered from his sleep. Macbride imagined his bug eyes glinting in
his semi-darkened bedroom; he could see Smith’s rat-fur helmet of hair
coiffed by the pillow he had risen from next to his sleeping wife. “He’s got the apples, professor, trust me.”
The spit had dried in Macbride’s mouth but he finally found his voice.
“Wh-wh-why haven’t you mentioned him before?”
“Like I said, it’s all need to know. You don’t need to know, man.” “But—but where did he come from?” Macbride’s voice was a tremolo
wheeze. His heart was going arrhythmic and his brain whirled with new
phantoms, worse fears.
“Somewhere in fucking Russia, I don’t know. What’s it fuckin’ matter?” Macbride hated this man more than he had once hated his adopted father.Asrattledashewas,heunderstoodhowSmith’sdeviousmindworked. “You used your wife—trawling for males.
“So what? One more slice off a cut loaf, way I see it.”
Macbridesqueezedthephone,hismouthwideopen.Nosoundcameout. “Like the moolies say, professor, you can axe him yourself where he
comes from, you want to know so bad.”
“I don’t care where he was born. I’m asking you—”
“Hell’s fuckin’ bells, ask him in Russian,” Smith snorted down the line,
ignoring him completely, so pleased was he with his own repartee—“you
speak it.”
Click, buzz, gone.
Macbride looked down to see the moist imprint of his hand evaporating on the receiver.
O, what net have the gods been weaving for me since my birth?
When Macbride left the house, five crows were mobbing a lone tercel circling high over Lake Milton. Some patchy clouds had broken through the graymantleandrevealedraggedbluetearsinthesky.Itwasthefirstskyneither gunmetal nor leprous-white he had seen in weeks. A few robins took advantageof thebreakintheweathertoscourthefrozenground.Thesurface snow was speckled black with particles of soot carried on the winds, giving some evidence that heavy industry still existed somewhere in the Mahoning Valley. The air vibrated with traffic on the distant interstate.
His bowels were constipated again and he was dosing himself with sodium phosphate. Between fiery voidings of his intestines, he thought he had reached the nadir of his life. He saw the heist fast becoming a ludicrous imbroglio, one colossal fiasco led by a vertically challenged megalomaniac, and all of them apprehended on the scene—that is, if they ever made it past the gate. And his head cold grew worse overnight.
Hesawhimself inaYoungstowncourtsentencedbysomeconservative white-haired judge who wore his pants up to his nipples beneath his robes. He heard the bitter condemnation from the bench and the words life without parole. He would live in a cage inside a cement block filled with dangerous, unwashed dullards and psychopaths. Smith’s atrocious wife would be sent to Marysville, where he had no doubt she would seduce every male guard and form meaningful lesbian relationships with her prettier inmates. His bleak imagination painted scenarios with him as nuclei of gang rapes and intimidation unceasing. He ground his teeth that a single night’s debauchery could bring him to this pass.
As soon as his tortured bowels allowed, he would go into his closet and use a belt to rig up a hanging device. Loop it over the door and will himself to tolerate a few seconds’ agony. He thought of his wives reading the account,althoughGodknowshowtheywouldgettheirhandsontheobituary column of the Youngstown Vindicator. He wanted them miserable with guilt. Then Helena—it would be her, of course—would cock her hand on her hip in that way. The others would join her in a chorus of ribald laughter, spiritual sisters in grief converted to mockers, who found hilarity in his ignominious suicide, the bitches. Even Siobhan, lovely angel he once thought her, would refuse to shed a tear.
Another thought poked through the sentimental vapors of his daydream. The papers might call it auto-erotic asphyxiation. Stupid teenagers were doing it; they called it Space Monkey. Better a gun—except that he feared the terrible havoc a lead projectile produces—too ghastly. Macbride let his mind drift to Guadeloupe, his polar star of sanity in a mad world.
On the drive to collect his last check from the university, snatches of remembered conversation rose to the surface and fell like frog spawn in a filthy ditch.
Hewasuneasyaboutthemilitarypresence,whichwasthecasesincethe war in Iraq. Big transports flew supplies out of there all the time. That meant military police and greater security. The Democratic party editorials were blistering an indifferent administration for the amounts of money being spent on projects over there. Government agents in Baghdad were throwing it at Iraqis in the millions, theft was rampant; it was worse, some said, than when the Diem brothers ruled Saigon in the Kennedy era.
He: “They aren’t likely to tell you what security’s in place.” Smith: “ThemaintenanceguysintheWingDingwouldhavesaidsomething.”
He: “Everything’s different since Nine Eleven—”
Smith: “Oh fuck Nine Eleven. You think those towelheads got a pin sticking into Youngstown on their wall map?”
The slick roads slowed rush-hour traffic north of Youngstown on the 680 turnoff to a serpentine crawl. Roads converged in a looping maze of interstateturnoffsandexitsthatboxedthecompassforpointseasttoNew York City, north to Cleveland, and west to Akron and Canton.
He: “Maybe we’ll find nothing but bags full of nickels instead.”
Smith: “I told you, Sonny already give me the waybill.”
He: “Wh-who? Who is Sonny!”
Smith: “You’ll meet him soon.”
He: “But . . . but . . . but—”
Smith: “Him and Dimitri round out the team.”
He: “Who—who is Dimitri!”
Smith: “Get your stutter under control, professor. You’ll meet ‘em all tonight.”
ThebanditshadmultipliedlikeCanadianmuckleheadsinJune.Macbride was furious. A real den of thieves in his house—hishouse! Who was this lowlife to put his house, his life and freedom, up for grabs? He tried out a conversation with a phantom Smith, but the bug-eyed gargoyle proved every bit as recalcitrant, reducing rational dialogue to mush, logical argument to a bag of Jell-O. Smith would have given Socrates nervous tics. Macbride, however, was sickened by his rapid descent into the quagmire of this half-melded motley crew of comic-book desperados, led by a slick führer with Tourette’s syndrome, a cuckold with a promiscuous wife—
His Volvo’s malfunctioning heater vaporized the air into whitened smears of condensation across his windshield. He swiped at it, swore violently, and made it worse.
He swung the wheel hard and missed clipping the edge of a trailer carrying steel pipes he never saw until he came up on it, missing a projecting I-beam by inches. He went into a skid at 55 mph and felt the car’s back wheels hydroplane through slushy ice. The skid became slow motion. He couldn’t remember which way to turn the wheel. The Volvo went threesixty and he found himself facing backwards down the highway looking into the shocked face of the driver directly behind him in the passing lane.
Thetractor-trailerwasnowrunningparalleltohisskidatthesamespeed, blasting its air horn and pumping its engine brake in furious staccato. For agonizingly long seconds Macbride looked at the three faces traveling in this surreal fashion. Then, amazingly, Macbride’s Volvo eased onto the shoulder—seeminglyof itsownvolition.Thecarrighteditself,hittheouter edge of the snowplow’s drift packed against the median guard rail and swung back again facing the right way. It had all taken five seconds, but he felt such—exhilaration—yes, exhilaration. He was alive!
Macbride whooped and shouted and beat the visor with his fist while cars raced past and blared their horns at him. He would not call it a miracle; others of weaker intellect would do that. He was alive, breathing, and that was all that mattered.
The rest of the drive to school was uneventful—Shrivastava was nowheretobeseen.Hesatinthecommonsanddrankaliquidfromapaper cupdecoratedinhollythatbilleditself aslatte.Tonighthewouldmeet“the team.”Tresbien.“I’mnotlookingtogotothetopof theFBI’smost-wanted list,” he said to a phantom Smith.
“You’ll be on an island without an extradition treaty,” it said back.
Macbride grudgingly acknowledged Smith’s improvement in Hegelian dialectic.
Smith: “What choice do you have?”
He: “You said a fenced-in area with just one padlock?”
Smith:“Yessiree,Bob.Onelittlepadlock.Crowbar’sallweneed.Allthat glorious money, sittin’ right there shrink-wrapped all nice and tidy, waiting for us. Free money.”
