Old School (4 page)

But that doesn’t mean I had to be the guy who teed up some thirteen-year-old for a piece of shit like Mopes.

I put my hands out toward grandma all conciliatory.

“Look, nobody wants this going south, so just stay cool and let me talk to my boy here,” me backing toward Mopes and the girl saying “Mister, please,” in this thready little voice and, Jesus, she even sounds like my daughter and grandma closing in, keeping the barrel square on my chest.

I get back even with Mopes, me and Mopes and the girl all in a tight ball, and grandma keeps closing in and I tell her to back off a bit, not to push it here, that it’s gonna be OK, and she takes a couple steps back and I get my mouth right up near Mopes’ ear.

“Stay with me here, buddy,” I tell Mopes. “We still got a play here.”

“Yeah, what fucking play is that?”

And with me to the side now and out of his way, he starts swinging the gun towards the woman and that moment of clarity finally comes and I clamp my right hand down hard on the top of the .38, and the webbing from my thumb gets wedged between the hammer and the chamber, and the hammer snaps down and nothing happens except it hurts some, and I whip my left hand up, getting Mopes around the head, holding the .38 down toward the floor with my right, and I yank Mopes out from behind the girl and grandma swings the Remington towards us, and she fires, and most of it catches Mopes right in the chest except for a few pellets that get me in the arm, and Mopes goes down on his back hard and the .38 is still dangling from my hand, and I look back at grandma and I see the smoke and I hear her rack the pump and I see the red shell cartwheeling and then I’m looking right down the business end of the Remington and I realize that the mouth of hell is a perfect circle, and I have time to say just one thing before she pulls the trigger.

So I say “It’s OK.”

Hilary’s Scars

Alphonse Cooltan was having a good month. OK, he’d had to go down on Ol’ Shrivel Tits that morning, but if you were going to work as a gigolo, then giving the occasional post-menopausal gash a little tongue bath was part of the gig. The money was the other part, and Shrivel Tits had just coughed up a check for ten large – even had her driver pulling around to run him to the bank. And Shrivel Tits wasn’t that bad for a fifty-something. Not Madonna material or anything, but Cooltan knew there were nights, if he had a couple drinks in him, he’d would have gone home with her for free.

She was a comedown after Hilary Lafitpour, though. That one had just fallen into his lap. Twenty one and hot as hell. That Persian skin, the Blackglama hair, those almond eyes. He wasn’t even looking for a payday when he saw her – just, you see something like that and you don’t make a play, then it’s time to turn in your man card and go home to your Elton John records, right? So when she bit on the ol’ Cooltan charm and wanted to take him home, well cool. When the valet brought the silver SLK around, well cooler. And when home turned out to be twenty-plus acres of lakefront North Shore estate, well cool-fucking-est.

He’d run the writer scam on her. Tortured artist, working on the novel about his Peace Corps days in Rwanda, and she’d swallowed the bait whole. Inside of three weeks, she’s talking marriage, but then he met her grandfather, and Alphonse had been the one who got cold feet.

Bahram Lafitpour had left Iran when the Shah went down. Been some kind of young hot shot with the Shah’s secret police. What did he call them? Savak? Anyway, Hilary tells him Grandpa wants to meet him, so he drives down to the old man’s office in the Loop, and the old man’s got his whole file – even the Juvie stuff that was supposed to be expunged. Tells Alphonse, very calmly, that there is $50,000 in the envelope on the desk and a plane ticket to New York. That $50,000 is a pretty good payday for Alphonse. That if Alphonse actually tries to marry into the Lafitpour fortune, then Bahram will drop him alive into a barrel of acid and pour him down a drain. Not personally, of course. He might ruin a suit. But that Alphonse should rest assured that Bahram had the acid, he had the barrel, and that there were men who worked for him who would consider it a personal honor to do that sort of thing. Alphonse was pretty sure Lafitpour wasn’t being metaphorical.

So New York. Took a nice room in the Benjamin while he worked out his options. A week later, Ol’ Shrivel Tits is making eyes at him across the bar. And she had that money smell on her so thick that her looks were no big deal.

***

Bahram Lafitpour stood in his granddaughter’s room at the private clinic in Zurich. She’d taken the pills the day after Cooltan had left. The immediate threat was past, but her kidneys had failed and her liver was failing. Such a beautiful child, but you had only to think of the name, Hilary, that American banality, to see the problem. Bahram’s son had grown up in America and put no stock in his own culture, in his thousand-years-old name. He wanted to be John Wayne or that cowboy cigarette man. Or had wanted to be until he’d driven that ridiculous Viper car into a tree. What chance did the child of such a father have? But there was time. If Bahram could find a transplant, there was time. His Blackberry vibrated against his hip. He snatched it up, read the message and smiled. There would be time.

***

Alphonse Cooltan opened his eyes. Fucking bright. He was laying on his stomach, naked, some kind of sheet over him. He tried to roll over, but he was belted down. His arms, his legs, something across his back. What the hell? He remembered getting in the car. He was going to the bank – Shrivel Tits’ driver was taking him to the bank. Now, he was cotton mouthed, his head foggy, he had a sense that a long time had gone by.

Something moved. Pants – somebody standing in front of his face.

“Mr. Cooltan, we meet again.” It was that fucker Lafitpour. Cooltan tried to say something, but his mouth was too dry – and he realized there was something running down his throat.

“Don’t try to speak, Mr. Cooltan. The feeding tube is still in. We wanted you healthy, of course. Did you know your DNA profile was in your record? Of course you did – part of that unfortunate statutory rape business in Louisville several years back. But to catch you up, after you decided to trifle with my granddaughter’s emotions, she became distraught. She took some pills. She is alive, but she needs a new kidney and a new liver. And, in a delicious irony, you turn out to be a match. Had only the kidneys failed, I would have made you an attractive offer for one, but since she needs a liver as well, and since you can’t live without one of those – well, we could just take a lobe, couldn’t we, but I’m told her chances are much better with the whole organ – I’m afraid an attractive offer would be wasted on you just now. We may as well take both kidneys, don’t you think? You won’t be needing either.”

Cooltan grunted, trying to yell through the tube as he struggled against the restraints. He saw two more pairs of legs – legs in surgical scrubs.

“I wanted you to meet the anesthesiologist Mr. Lafitpour,” a new voice said.

“This is costing me enough,” said Lafitpour. “And I’ll be spending a fortune on plastic surgeons later, taking care of Hilary’s scars. I don’t see any reason to waste money on an anesthesiologist, do you?”

A long pause. “I guess we’ll get started then,” said the new voice. More noises, people entering the room, the soft clatter of metal instruments on a sterile pad atop a metal tray. Cooltan felt someone pull the sheet off of his back, someone painting him with iodine, and the terror rose in his mind like the sun.

The Bard’s Confession on the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger’s Daughter

As must be any man of conscience in a nation that for three score years hast o’erthrown the eternal edicts of God for the temporal convenience of a king and where one might prick any bishop, or any bishop’s prick, and in the outflow find evidence of the basest private appetites against which in public the cassocked uniformly chastise, I am unchurched. Ermine is common to both crown and miter, but it conceals perfidy, whether it adorns the raiment of a prince or the mantel of an archbishop, and the favor of God is blunted out within the shadow of the cathedral, the whip-arm of Christ long since wearied of trying to drive out the commerce of favors and souls within.

But I am not unfaithed. I am each day reminded if only by an unexpected flower, a happy fragrance, a gifted tankard, of the unearned and pervasive benevolence that girds us each, and daily, with those few blessings by virtue of which we might transcend these corrupt shackles fashioned solely and soullessly by the hands of man to bind us tight to the depraved pestilence of our banal condition. What beauties we enjoy, we neither fashion nor earn, and yet they alone save us from the living damnation of our petty daily grubbing.

And it was so these few weeks past that I, like Saul, confronted that bedazzling grace, not whilst astride my horse, but instead afoot, and from the most unlikeliest of places, from beyond the befouled miasma of a fishmonger’s stall. Even now, having through my own vile alchemy transformed that purest human gold into putrefying corruption, I challenge any who mayst have beheld that face, that form, that lightly crimsoned hair, what little of that flawless skin their fortunes allowed their eyes to glimpse (and my own fortunes in that regard were enriched greatly beyond the first subtle deposit of her guileless glance; interest earned through my wiles and lust, so that I have explored each and every hillock and hollow of a creation so lithe, so sublime, so unspoiled as to drive out any doubt my faith might still have harbored) I challenge any eye that hath received that blessing to say it hath not gazed upon paradise; and I say so even knowing now I shall never pass its gates nor even again breathe another moment’s grace or blessing or peace, but shall instead know only imperfect torment the balance of this life before I am deservedly delivered unto the perfect torment that shall be my justly earned wage in the next.

I am wifed, but have treated the surly bounds of that churched alliance with the same elasticity to which they so oft have been stretched by even our most royal personages, and with the same diligence and honor with which our churchmen protect their pledged chastity, for I can envision no God who would, from a poor scribe, demand fealty beyond that expected of those kings and priests that He hath, in wisdom unbound by human frailty, chosen with his own hand. And whilst these august do oft pluck the first buds from God’s flowering, womanly harvest, I instead hath dallied only with those flowers already fully and freely in bloom. A mutual kindness that we bestowed, each upon the other, a corporal mercy by which we shared in those delights so heavn’ly granted, and, having done so, did cage the more savage beasts of our less holy appetites lest they, deprived of even such venal morsels, break the chains of conscience and loose themselves unbound in a mortal frenzied orgy of less willing flesh.

And thus conscience doth make lechers of us all.

Then I beheld the fishmonger’s daughter and in that moment abandoned any pretense, any costume of thought by which previously I had made polite my ravening lust. That she was scarcely beyond a child, just breaking the bud of womanhood mattered not; that in our first casual mutterings she revealed herself unschooled and naïve, a child who could be lead, and trustingly, into a forest of words within which I could with ease let her loose from the tethers of her moral bearings and lead her to betray to me solely for the amusement of my trivial lust that which, to her, was most precious and the province, through the agency of a husband, only of God; this mattered not. For the flame of her beauty like the magic fires of Sinai consumed not itself but burned away instead all else, leaving only my desire for her, any contrivance of decency charred to nothingness in the face of this seductive inferno, so I knew only my lust and my own gifts, having been told in countless beds and by varied lovers that I am comely of both face and form, that I have an easy wit and that I speak words that lay lightly on the ear -- and I would now with these Godly tools ply for Satan that unplied flesh.

My siege against the walls of her virtue was an artful campaign of such elegance that at first somewhere some angel must have smiled. Gentle affirmations of her beauty and my stunned surprise to find that even this easy ground was yet unplowed, my words gaining ever more purchase as, even in their magnificence, they had not to o’ermount the walls of any previous compliment, however poorly tongued. A brief touch, a lingering touch, a first chaste kiss, all the while I oiled her fall with subtle reminders of how many imagined sins she already had committed until, still within the bounds of any commandment, she felt herself so foreign to the deserved love of God that she thought herself already damned and surrendered completely to me on a borrowed bed, gifting a mattress soiled with the effluent of a thousand whores the offered sacrament of her unspoiled blood as I plunged once more into the breach.

I gorged on this ambrosial apple unsated, gaining no sustenance, and was become a beast hollowed out by unholy hungers, mad with ravening, debasing the child through acts previously only imagined, a carnival of perversity after which whatever ethereal light that had informed her features was instead transmuted into dead ash, her eyes less animate than those of the fishes she once had offered, and I tired of her obsequity and her despair, and she was become a mirror that held only horrors for me, and I saw instead in the streets of London hundreds of budding flowers, all more fair now than this wilting thing that spread her rot-mottled pedals with torporous indifference instead of the trembling, fearful resistance that did before so inflame my desires and so I visited her stall no more, frequented our borrowed chambers no more, until I learned that she had her own quietus made with bare bodkin and I knew that it had been my own hand upon the blade satisfied not only with my own damnation, but that her soul be also piled on the pyre of whatever claim to goodness I once could have made as an offering to my new godlessness.