Revolution Number 9 (3 page)

“My pit bull, chained up outside. You should see him, Mr. Nuncio.”

Nuncio didn’t want to see Flipper. Except for the fact that he was often in trouble and always paid up, Brucie was a poor client. You couldn’t counsel a client to lie exactly, to make up a false story. That would be unethical. Worse, it could lead to criminal charges, probably disbarment. On the other hand, there was no law against gently guiding a client toward an interpretation of the facts of the case that might raise reasonable doubt as to guilt. That was what the practice of criminal law was all about. Raising reasonable doubts. Raising reasonable doubts meant coming up with one measly crackpot theory and planting it in the mind of one measly crackpot juror. Finding the right juror during the impaneling was Nuncio’s job. No problem. He’d done it hundreds of times. Where he needed Brucie’s cooperation was in coming up with the crackpot theory. But Brucie was tapping his foot again, and knocking ash on the carpet.

“Brucie?”

Brucie looked like he was about to—Yes, he yawned. “Yeah?”

“Think again.”

“What about?”

“About the possibility, however remote, of someone getting into the glove compartment of your car before you drove to Laverne’s.” Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough. Maybe he should have said “getting into the glove compartment and
planting that counterfeit money.” Dangerously close to the ethical line, though. Besides, wasn’t it perfectly obvious what he was fishing for? What kind of a human being could now fail to say: “My God, Mr. Nuncio! Someone must have planted that stuff in my glove compartment!” Then they could rise on wings of creativity, spinning tales of enemies, setups, dark deeds.

Brucie Wine said: “But how could they, Mr. Nuncio? I already told you. I lock the car. I lock the garage. I even lock the goddamn glove compartment. And then there’s the alarms.”

“You left out Flipper.”

“Right. Flipper.”

The two men fouled the air with smoke. Nuncio glanced at the clock. He had a nice round belly under his purple vest, and it liked to be fed promptly at noon.

“Brucie?”

“Yeah?”

“This time you’re going down, son.”

“What?”

“To jail, Brucie.”

“Jail?” Brucie was appalled. He was not the kind to do well in jail—or even survive.

“They’ve got you by the balls, Brucie, and you’ve got nothing left to give them. No one to finger.” Had it been Churchill who had said something about giving me the tools and I’ll do the job? Nuncio took a drag on his twenty-five-cent cigar. “You’ve got to give me some tools, Brucie.”

Brucie frowned. “Tools? You mean like the press and stuff?”

God. “A body. Some crook to cough up to the D.A.”

Brucie’s little eyes lit up. “I did driver’s licenses for some spics last month.”

“Christ. What does the D.A. want with more spics? He’d probably tack on an extra year for aggravation if I even raised the idea. Think, Brucie. Think.” For a moment, Nuncio considered hiring a hypnotist, at Brucie’s expense. “Think way back into the past. Is there anybody you’ve worked with or done work for that the cops might be interested in?”

Brucie scrunched up his face like a five-year-old asked to
spell
dog
. It was a revolting sight. Brucie thought and thought. Nuncio’s stomach rumbled. Twelve o’clock. He started to get up. Then Brucie surprised him. He opened his eyes and said, “I got an idea.”

“Yeah?” said Nuncio, sitting back down.

B
lurting the answer to twenty-six across in the Sunday
New York Times
crossword was the first big mistake Charlie Ochs had made in twenty years. Playing Ben Webster was the second.

There had been other mistakes along the way, but small ones—once when a dog made off with a baseball, for example, and Charlie, passing by the field, had taken it from the animal’s mouth and unthinkingly zinged it to the catcher, over three hundred feet away, on the fly. That had been stupid, but without consequences. The ballplayers were kids and had soon forgotten. Charlie didn’t forget—and never touched a baseball again, although he sometimes recalled the feeling of that particular one, worn and slightly damp, in his hand.

The crossword puzzle mistake did have consequences. It would never have happened at all if he had stayed in bed, or if a monster hadn’t crawled into one of his traps.

But.

Charlie had a little shingle house on Cosset Pond, bought at a time when you didn’t need a city job to afford one. Kitchen and sitting room on the first floor, bed and bath upstairs. He had a tumbledown garage where he kept his car, a yellow Volkswagen Beetle with almost three hundred thousand miles on it and an engine he had rebuilt twice. He had a patch of
land, big enough to stack his pots, and a floating dock with
Straight Arrow
tethered at the end. He had no wife, no kids, no close friends. He had a silver saxophone he played at night.

On the day of twenty-six across and Ben Webster, Charlie awoke at first light, as he always did. He rolled over and raised his head to look out the window. There was frost on the glass. Charlie scraped it away with his fingernails. He saw
Straight Arrow
straining its lines at the dock. White caps stormed over Cosset Pond, and heavy seas roiled outside, beyond the Cosset Pond cut. The flag on the roof of the Oceanographic Studies Center across the pond was flying straight out, and overhead, charcoal clouds sped by, fraying at the edges.

Meanwhile, the bed was warm with the heat of his body. It would have been easy just to lie down, pull the quilt over his head, and listen to the weather, as though it were a New Age recording entitled
Nor’ easter
. But he hadn’t checked his pots in three days, and if he didn’t do it, someone else, someone who didn’t shrink from a little weather when there was a dishonest dollar to be made, would. Charlie threw back the covers with more force than necessary and got up.

A few minutes later, carrying a thermos of yesterday’s reheated coffee, wearing long johns, wool pants, flannel shirt, sweater, oilskins, and rubber boots, Charlie walked down the path from his back door and onto the dock. The wind was blowing harder than he had thought, whipping sound from the bare trees, the wires, the rigging of the boats on the pond, like the conductor of a rough-and-ready orchestra. It was a cold wind, and stung his face. Charlie, boarding
Straight Arrow
, whistled into it; a tune of his own devising, inspired by bebop, and far from New Age.

Straight Arrow
was a beamy twenty-six foot Corea with a hundred and sixty-five–horse Palmer diesel. Charlie had bought it at a DEA auction of seized smuggling assets. He had scraped off its red paint, repainted it white, changed its name from
Shake Dat Ting
and added a small deckhouse for days like this. He switched on the engine, felt it rumble under his feet, and cast off.

Charlie took
Straight Arrow
across the pond at half throttle.
A plume of light snowflakes hooked down from the clouds, and then another. Not enough to affect visibility, he thought, steering through the cut, under the bridge, out to sea. Almost immediately, a wave broke over the bow, smacking hard against the Plexiglas screen of the pilothouse. Suddenly the air was white with driving snow and Charlie felt as cold as though he were wearing nothing at all. He was considering turning back when another wave came smashing in, looped over the screen and caught him in the face. Icy water ran down his neck, seeped through the wool sweater, the flannel shirt, the long johns. Charlie laughed, laughed at the futility of his preparation, preparation in general.

And all at once he was fully awake, shocked into an acute state of consciousness, where he heard every change in the pitch of the wind, saw the individual patterns of the snowflakes that flew by his eyes, felt the currents of cold, some wet, some dry, that came from all directions. Fully awake for the first time in how long? And fully aware of the power of the sea to do with him as it pleased. Well, you either slipped through the cracks or you didn’t. Charlie laughed again, loud and free with no one to hear him, and swung
Straight Arrow
west, into the weather.

Charlie’s floats were red with three white stripes. They were lined up with landmarks—the lighthouse, the water tower, the radio station antenna—but Charlie couldn’t see any landmarks, only the violent circle of seascape immediately around him, bounded by the pointillist walls of a white cocoon. He kept going, although he knew that he would have to run right over one of his floats in order to see it.

After a few minutes, he did. A wave tossed up a flash of red and white off the starboard side; Charlie slowed, circled, and grabbed the float on his first pass.
My lucky day
, he thought.

With
Straight Arrow
in neutral, rising and falling on moving hills of water, Charlie uncoupled the line from the float, hooked it to the winch in the stern, and hit the switch. Nothing happened. He glanced at the motor. The casing was covered by a sheet of ice. He kicked it, not hard, and tried the switch a few more times. Nothing—and not the moment for taking motors apart. He began pulling by hand.

Charlie had five pots on the line, spread along the bottom at
a depth of about fifty feet. They were old, waterlogged, heavy. Charlie pulled. His body wasn’t the kind Milanese couturiers cut suits for; but useful for what he was doing now.

The first pot came up covered in seaweed, and empty inside. The second was empty too. And the third and the fourth. Despite the cold, Charlie was sweating by the time the last pot broke the surface. It seemed much heavier than the others—he was barely able to haul it over the stern. For a moment he thought he must be getting old. Then he looked between the slats. In the fifth pot was the biggest bug he had ever seen. It seemed to be looking back at him. After twenty or thirty seconds of that, it jabbed an enormous claw in his direction. The claw encountered the wooden cage, twisted sideways, opened, closed. With a crunch, the slat snapped in two. The claw jabbed through the opening. “Jesus,” Charlie said, backing away.

Carefully, he took the fifth pot off the line and lowered the others over the side. There was no point in continuing with a broken winch. Charlie checked the compass and turned for home. All the way, he heard scary sounds from the pot on the deck behind him.

Charlie tied up at the dock behind De Mello’s Wholesale Fish. No one was there but De Mello, sitting in his cold office, with fish scales on the floor and Amalia Rodrigues on the tape player. He stuck a bottle in the drawer as Charlie walked in.

“You went out in this shit?” De Mello said.

“Got something to show you.”

De Mello followed Charlie down to the dock. He looked in the pot and made no comment. Charlie had always known De Mello was hard to impress. Now he knew the man couldn’t be impressed. It was a character defect.

They weighed it on De Mello’s scale, the one all the fishermen suspected was a little light. It weighed forty pounds, one ounce.

“Is that a record?” Charlie said.

“Not even close,” De Mello told him. “I’ll give you one twenty.”

“Thanks. And how much for the lobster?”

“That’s today’s price. Two ninety a pound, times forty, and rounded off in your favor. It was two seventy-five last week.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie, “but that’s for lobster. This isn’t a lobster—it’s a tourist attraction. No one’s going to eat it, De Mello. It’ll spend the rest of its life in the display tank at Jimmy’s on the Wharf or someplace like that. And Jimmy’s going to pay you five hundred.” He looked closely at De Mello to see if it was a good guess. De Mello’s face was expressionless. “At least five,” Charlie said. “So I’ll take three now.”

They settled on two fifty. De Mello took the roll out of his pocket, the roll that had a fishy smell, and counted out the bills with care. He had to be careful counting money, even if it wasn’t sticky—thirty years on a trawler had cost him three fingers and a thumb.

Charlie went home, had a hot shower, came out with his skin tingling and his senses still wide awake. Lunchtime, and a bowl of egg salad waited in the fridge. He saw himself sitting at the kitchen table, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee, alone. He put on a jacket and went out.

Snow was falling thickly now, covering the ground. A woman in black tights clicked toward him on cross-country skis, her eyelashes fluffy white. She didn’t appear to see him as she passed. Charlie went the other way, following the road that led around the pond to the Oceanographic Studies Center and the Bluefin Café next to the bridge over the cut. Charlie opened the door and felt a warm smoky breath on his face. It smelled of pine, garlic, oranges. He went inside.

Sunday afternoon at the Bluefin Café. A fire made popping noises in the stone hearth, and Dinah Washington was singing “Unforgettable” on the sound system. The seven or eight little tables in the café were all taken. Charlie sat on one of the two vacant stools at the bar.

“Hey, Charlie,” said the bartender. “What’ll it be?”

“Egg salad on rye.”

“Something to drink? I got Guinness on tap.”

That sounded perfect, but Charlie said: “Orange juice.” He didn’t like to drink in public. It was just a habit now, a long habit; but habits, in the case of Charlie Ochs, made the man. Still, on top of the weather, the lobster, the tingling in his skin, a mug of Guinness would have been perfect.

Charlie was halfway through his sandwich, lost in the sound
of Dinah Washington’s voice, when a woman came into the café and took the only seat left, next to him. With his consciousness still fully awake, slapped to life by the cold wave over
Straight Arrow
’s bow, Charlie was acutely aware of her presence. The first thing he noticed was the melting snowflakes on her eyelashes: she was the skier in the black tights. He glanced out and saw her skis leaning against the window. Then she took off her backpack and her jacket and Charlie smelled her smell: lemon, wool, and the faintest hint of fresh sweat. He breathed it in, let it linger in his nostrils. He was thinking of doing it again when the warning went off in his mind. Charlie picked up the rest of his sandwich.