Nina, the Bandit Queen (8 page)

She wasn’t sure whether the banging on the front door fit into the realm of ghastly dreams or horrible imaginings. The sound of the ice cream truck babbling and tootling off into the distance suggested it wasn’t the sleeping one, though. So did the sight of the welfare inspector who had been popping out at inconvenient times and making incomprehensible threats. He was standing there when she opened it. For some irresistible reason, her eyes were drawn to his sleeve. The sleeve of his plastic windbreaker. That was hanging straight down. Lifelessly. Completely empty.

Her heart started thrashing somewhere under her stomach. If the clarity of the realization paralyzed her, the paralysis was all that kept her from puking. There he had obviously been, doing nothing more than going about his business when, in the mistaken belief that he was somebody else, she had attacked him. And now here he was, back. Like those hideous ghosts she’d heard about that return to claim their former bodies or, in this case, a portion of their former —

“Madam,” said a clipped voice from behind the welfare inspector. That was when she noticed he wasn’t alone. That was also when she noticed that after losing a limb only hours before in a confrontation that was so violent his face and clothes were still smudged with dirt, the welfare inspector wasn’t also drenched with blood and hunched over in agony. There was no sign of blood anywhere. And instead of an agonized crouch, he was smirking.

When she said, “I’m out of my fuckin’ mind,” it sounded muffled because she’d covered her face with her hands.

“Madam,” the second man repeated, scowling at her around the welfare inspector’s armless sleeve, “are you, or do you claim to be, Nina Carson Dolgoy,” and he read out her welfare number. “And if you are this Dolgoy person, I am obliged to advise you that you are going to wish you weren’t by the time we get through with you.”

The one-armed welfare inspector smirked harder.

“Now,” the second man said, “in the course of performing his duties on or about last night, a departmental employee —” he nodded toward the welfare inspector “— fell into unlicensed renovations being undertaken on this site without even rudimentary precautions to prevent such a mishap: i.e. barricades, hoardings, blinking lights, sign advising motorists to slow down, sign advising pedestrians to cross to the other side, police officer on duty, and so forth, as stipulated. Whereupon the workman therein pummeled my subordinate and threatened his life as follows….”

The inspector stopped smirking long enough to pull out a notebook and read aloud, “You fuckin’ asshole. What the fuck are you doing? I’m going to kill your fuckin’ ass, you fuckin’ asshole.”

“Causing my subordinate to exit the excavation,” the other man went on, “and run for his life, whereupon you ambushed him. Employing some kind of broadsword or scimitar, you severed the Velcro straps attaching certain of his personal property to his personal self.”

“Below the elbow.” The inspector waggled his sleeve. “As must be specified for official purposes.”

“Jesus,” Nina said.

“But —” the inspector said.

“But —” the other man said.

“ — give it back to me and we’ll —”

“ — and the department will forget the whole matter. God knows it’s hard enough to recruit inspectors. If it turns out that they risk losing a prosthesis on the job, we won’t get any —”

“It’s not the money,” the inspector interrupted.

Nina squeezed past them.

“It has sentimental value,” the inspector said, following her around the side of the house.

“It was worn by his father before him,” the other man said.

“It’s been passed down in my family for generations,” the inspector said.

Give them the goddamn thing back,
Nina said to herself.
Give them the goddamn thing back. And get them the goddamn hell out of here.

But she couldn’t.

The goddamn thing was goddamn gone.

She scuffled around the hole. She scuffled around the busted fence. She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know where it went,” she said.

“You what?”

“Ohhhh,” the other man exhaled. “This is just like you people. Appeals to your humanity fail. Efforts to elicit your sympathy for an unfortunate fellow citizen are scorned. And as a result — it was ever thus, I don’t know why we even bother any more — as a result, you leave us no choice.”

The inspector smirked enthusiastically.

“Absolutely no choice,” the other man continued. “We do everything we possibly can to help you, but — what a waste. And so I herewith inform you that your name will be removed immediately from the rolls of welfare recipients.”

“Yowee!” The smirking inspector pumped his remaining fist.

“You can’t,” Nina said.

“We
can’t?
” The other man sounded taken aback. “Of course we can. At least I think we can. I’m certain we can. I thought I read it somewhere.” He looked at the smirking inspector. “Didn’t you think we could?”

“Nope. You can’t,” Nina said. “Nobody can remove my name, because my name has already been removed.”

“It has?” the inspector said.

“Yes, yes,” the other man said. “Of course it has. We knew that. We just wanted to see if you’d — um —”

“So there’s nothing you can do.” Nina headed around for the front door. “To me anyway, or to my kids.”

“You’re wrong there, madam,” the other man said. “We can hold this latest offence in abeyance until you are restored to the welfare rolls, and then take you off again immediately.”

“We’ll take you off every time you’re put back on until you return my personal property.”

“How could I get back on if you take me off?”

For a minute both men swivelled their eyes back and forth. Then the other man said, “Madam, there are matters that not even we are allowed to know. After all,” he said, “we don’t make the rules.”

“Then who does?”

“That,” the man sneered, as if Nina had finally shown how completely ignorant she was, “is classified.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Of course we do.”

“No you don’t.”

“We do too,” the inspector said. His smirk had an anxious tinge. He turned to the other man. “Don’t we?”

That night somebody kicked in the basement window and got inside. When Nina yelled downstairs that whoever it was better get the hell out of there, that she was calling the cops, that there were children upstairs who were scared to death, whoever it was pounded up out of the darkness and grabbed her head with both hands as if it was a basketball and started bouncing it off the wall. He kept bouncing it while he told her to go fuck herself. And while he told her she wouldn’t call the cops if she wanted to go on living. And while he told her he didn’t give a fuck about her fuckin’ children, that he just wanted what was fuckin’ his. Then the hall light clicked on, and there was D.S. wearing her pale blue nightie in the doorway to the girls’ bedroom with the four of them huddled around him. The guy looked at this tableau and said, “Ah, fuck it,” and let go of Nina’s head, walked out the front door, got in a car, and drove away.

“What’s his?” Lady said, when her sisters got over their shock enough to start whimpering.

“Huh?” Nina said, massaging the back of her skull.

“That he wants. That he said was his. What is it?” Lady said.

“I don’t know,” Nina said.

The night after that, there was a brawl down there. It sounded like there were five or six of whoever they were. Gwinny began screaming, and when one of them got going, it was hard for the other three not to join in. D.S. had the look of a man who, if he started to pee his pants, would keep peeing until there was nothing left of him but a little pile of dust. Nina made him take the girls across to JannaRose and Ed Oataway’s and then sat on the floor at the top of the steps holding the butcher knife in her fist. The lights were flashing and jumping around as if there was a thunderstorm inside the cellar, except instead of thunder there were thuds and swearing and people going “Umph!” Then it got completely quiet. Then it went completely dark. When she shouted down this time, nobody answered.

The next morning she borrowed a flashlight from Ed Oataway. She’d only been down the cellar once before, when they moved in, and not all the way down, either. It was too filthy. This time, as far as she could tell, apart from the window being smashed and the big hole in the back wall, the only difference was it was filthier. The smell was horrible, but in some strange kind of way. Strange because she both knew what the smell was and she didn’t. She knew it because it was the smell of mildew and mold and spilled food that had never been wiped up and feet that had never been washed and dirty diapers left in the bathtub forever that nobody cared about because nobody had any reason to care, so why bother? It was the smell inside every house in SuEz, it was the smell of the breeze in SuEz, it was the smell of being so poor for so long that the poor don’t even realize they’re poor. It was the way her life had smelled all her life, and it had always been there the way her life had been. But if you take some music you’ve known and have become accustomed to hearing your whole life and turn it up so loud it hurts, you no longer recognize the old familiar tune any more. All you recognize is loudness and pain. The smell in the cellar was the atmosphere Nina had moved through every day, except at maximum volume. It was the first time she ever noticed it.

She gagged.

Apart from that, nothing down there was very interesting. Cobwebs so thick she could have used them for blankets. Tools somebody had brought in — shovels and things. The cement floor had heaved and cracked, but nothing suggested any serious digging. In fact, it didn’t look like there had been any digging at all, other than the tunnel. There were a lot of scrapes and scuffs on the floor, what you’d probably get if a bunch of guys had been fighting — rolling around in the dirt and getting knocked down.

After she’d had a chance to think all these things over, to take all the things that had been happening to her family and fit them together with Frank and with Frank’s loot, she would say that she’d never had any ambition to be a genius, but it didn’t matter. Because if you took a look at the cellar that day, you didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what the hell was going on.

“What the hell is going on?” she said, plunking herself on a chair right in front of Ed Oataway.

It turned out to be something he didn’t care to discuss. Not there in his living room, not anywhere.

“What did you do, drive the getaway car?” Nina leaned forward like she was ready to punch his head in. “Tell me! You knew about the bank robbery.”

“Not exactly,” Ed said.

“
Not exactly?
” Nina said. “You knew as much about it as any other living person.”

“Drive the getaway car. I didn’t do that exactly.”

“
What
then?” Now JannaRose was chiming in. And after a little more of this encouragement, Ed gave up and explained exactly what he had done.

The story made Nina feel as if a bunch of giant people had kicked her in the stomach all at once.

“
For how much?
” JannaRose said, getting straight to what interested her in a way that nearly shattered the glass in the windows.

“Me?” Ed Oataway said. “A thou.”

“
And you were keeping it some kind of fuckin’ secret?
”

“Ex — Ex —” Nina was trying to say “Excuse me” so she could break into the conversation, but her voice had turned to sandpaper. “He — He —”

Ed stared over her shoulder as if he wasn’t going to say a word. About this. About anything. Ever again.

“When you made it so the getaway …” Nina had her eyes closed like she was doing arithmetic in her head. “ … when you made it so the getaway car couldn’t get away because you crashed into it …” The arithmetic was hard, though, and she had to go slowly. “ … but if the getaway car could have got away, it was supposed to take …” Could that be right? She went over it again. “ … it was supposed to take him somewhere?”

Ed looked as if he couldn’t even hear anything she was saying.

“The getaway car was supposed to take him somewhere? Where he was supposed to give the money to …” She seemed to be asking herself if this really added up. “ … to somebody else?”

Ed might have looked like he was tuned out, but JannaRose was taking in every word. “What?” she said.

“
Frank wasn’t supposed to keep the money!
” Nina said.

“
What?
” JannaRose said.

Nina stuck her face as far forward as it could go without her nose crunching Ed Oataway’s. “
He wasn’t, was he!
”

There was dead silence. It lasted about a minute. Then Ed leaned way back in his chair. “No,” he said.

“The son of a bitch,” Nina said. “Somebody hired him to steal that money. Then he turned around and stole it off whoever it was that hired him to steal it.”

“Jesus,” JannaRose said.

Ed had a reputation for not saying much, but there were a few things it would have been nice to know based on what he’d just said. A few details it would have been helpful for him to add. A few gaps he might usefully have filled in. He wasn’t going to, though. “No.” It was all he had to say. It was all he said.

If Ed was even more tight-lipped than usual, it stood to reason. But it wasn’t because he was a deeply loyal kind of guy, or because he believed everybody he was deeply loyal to would screw him the first chance they got. And it wasn’t as if he felt all knotted up inside by this loyalty, even though he could see how foolish it was to be loyal to what were, when you got right down to it, shits and louses. And what did he care about what Nina thought about him keeping his thoughts to himself? She’d made it clear a long time ago that as far as she was concerned, he never had a thought that was any use, no matter whether he kept it to himself or stuck it up his ass. And it wasn’t because Frank Carson had been his best friend for as long as he could remember. Or that over the years they had often talked about making one big score together so they could enjoy their lives free of want. Or that as the years passed, Ed became more and more convinced that his best friend was working up to that big score and not letting him in on it.

He wasn’t even sure Frank hadn’t pulled off the big score and then gone to jail to make Ed think he hadn’t pulled it off, to keep him from demanding the cut his friendship entitled him to, thus spoiling their friendship. He believed their friendship was so important to Frank that Frank was perfectly capable of doing something like that to preserve it and keep all the money for himself. It made Ed sad to realize that his best friend was such a completely fuckin’ two-faced cocksucker.

On the other hand, the two-faced cocksucker was the only real friend he had. They went back to first grade. They’d dreamed big dreams from the start. That counted for something. And as far as he could see, it had nothing to do with Frank lucking into the fake bank robbery when he was in jail, or that this amounted to a bigger score than either of them had ever dreamed of. Or that Frank had offered him only a very small chunk of change for handling a minor assignment in the transportation department while clearly planning to screw whoever it was who had hired him, and take the dough, and keep it all for himself. It wasn’t because Ed was bitter. He wasn’t. He knew how friendships worked and, given the chance, he would have done the same thing, including not paying Frank what he’d agreed to.

No, the reason Ed Oataway didn’t want to discuss this wasn’t quite as philosophical. He didn’t want to because when it was getting dark a few hours after the robbery, he’d seen Frank go into Dipshit and Nina’s house carrying the same big Nike bag he’d come out of the bank with. That was shortly before he was kidnapped in front of their house during the raging storm of gunfire. What happened after that — the way Frank got tortured and murdered — made Ed want to puke every time he thought about it. Because if Frank hadn’t shown how much he treasured their friendship by stiffing him all down the line, he might have wound up with a bigger part to play in the deal, in which case he could have ended up getting subjected to the same hideous treatment as Frank. He would be eternally grateful to Frank for this, just as he would go out of his way for the rest of his life to spit on Frank’s grave for screwing him out of what, by rights, should have been his.

Apart from that, the thing that stood out in his mind was that when they were all outside that night staring at the muzzle flashes from the towers and half-assed ducking because the sky was thick with what that fuckin’ bonehead Nina kept calling bees — what stood out in his mind then, and still stood out, was that when the heavies showed up and stuffed Frank into the trunk of their car, he hadn’t had the Nike bag with him.

That was why, shortly after two a.m., Ed had pried Dipshit and Nina’s back door loose, wrestled it off its hinges, carried it across to his own backyard and hidden it under all the scrap and stuff he had piled there. He’d discovered, however, that he wasn’t used to that much physical effort and was too tired to go back and snoop around their house right then, so he stretched out on the couch in his own living room for a little rest. He didn’t wake up until after daylight, and that was because Nina was yelling at JannaRose that she couldn’t fuckin’ believe it, somebody had stolen their back door.

What Ed Oataway couldn’t fuckin’ believe was the tremendous number of individuals who had been breaking into Dipshit and Nina’s ever since, making it impossible for him to sneak back in. Neither was he the kind of person to see the irony in this. As far as he was concerned, Frank would have wanted him to have the money in light of what occurred, the same as he would have wanted Frank to have it if it had been the other way around, and that’s all there was to it. These assholes who had started showing up out of who knows where didn’t give a shit about the emotions that were at stake. The 1.18 million dollars they were looking for was the same to them as any 1.18 million dollars they could lay their hands on would have been. It was stolen money and nothing more. It didn’t represent all that was left of the greatest friendship in the history of SuEz. All that was left apart from the memories.

By the time Ed thought this all the way through, Nina had gone home and JannaRose was lying down with a wet facecloth over her eyes, and there was only one thing he could do in the circumstances. He banged on Dipshit and Nina’s door. Nothing happened, and he was just about to start kicking it when he heard somebody on the other side. It was Nina. She didn’t open the door, though.

“What do you want?” she shouted.

“He never paid me,” Ed shouted back.

“Go fuckin’ fuck yourself.”

“The thousand he promised. I just wanted to make sure you know that.”