The Bialy Pimps (16 page)

Captain Dipshit, who didn’t know much about classic rock and thought that Pink Floyd was Hello Kitty’s brother, swallowed his dignity and ran.
 

Behind him, Bingham’s dumpster protruded into the connector. With his eyes still on Johnny Rocker, Captain Dipshit didn’t see it until it was too late. As he turned, he struck the dumpster hard and knocked himself unconscious, then fell face-first into a puddle of ancient Pizazzle’s pork fat that had leaked out of the Lloyd’s Inedible Grease barrel.
 

Johnny Rocker strutted past him as he collapsed, turned onto Pearl Alley, and was gone.

Dicky Kulane was leafing through a hunting catalog, trying to decide on the perfect crossbow for home protection, when his door banged open and Captain Dipshit literally fell into 3B.
 

“What the
hell
is the matter with you?” Dicky said. Then he went back to his catalog, turned two pages, marked his place with a carry-out menu, and walked over.

Captain Dipshit was practically in the fetal position. He was out of breath, soaked with sweat or urine or both, and was babbling more incoherently than usual. When he sat up at Dicky’s not-terribly-patient urging, Dicky saw that the right side of his head was covered in dried blood. His hair was matted with it. Everything on him was sticky and – Dicky could swear – smelled like bacon.
 

“What happened?”

“Someone attacked me. A guy. Hit me with... I don’t know, a pipe or something.”
 

“What guy?”

“I don’t know. A Bingham’s guy.”
 

“The manager?”

“No.”
 

“One of the employees?”

“No.”
 

“Who, then?”

“How should I know? Someone they hired, maybe. He was dressed like a roughneck. Had these cutoff gloves on and came right at me, yelling. Three days of missing deliveries and I guess they got pissed. I turned to run and he hit me, hard.”

“Are you sure?”

Captain Dipshit pulled his matted, bacony hair aside and showed Dicky a three-inch gash in his scalp. “I don’t know, what do
you
think? Maybe
you’d
like to handle the stakeouts from now on.”
 

Dicky sat back. This was unexpected. Matters of profit and loss were one thing and business was another, but violence was something entirely different. Not something he himself had a huge problem with, mind, but these were a bunch of idiot college kids. He’d visited Bingham’s every two weeks for a year. He
knew
these kids. And sure, they didn’t have it in them to try to kill anyone... but the bigger issue was that they simply didn’t care enough to do something like this. Bingham’s was a shit college job, the kind where you punch your ticket each day and you screw around and make five bucks an hour. You do the job and then you go home. Why would they care enough to... to feel the need to take revenge?

He wanted to question Captain Dipshit further and get at the truth, but the scalp wound spoke for itself.
 

He’d think about it later. For now, two things were clear: One, no more direct interaction. It was too dangerous. The kid would surely never go back, and Dicky wasn’t about to head over and start stealing things himself. And two, none of that mattered anyway, because it simply wasn’t doing enough damage. Cheating a competitor out of a few hundred bucks here and there as a way to put them out of business was like trying to empty a pond with a teaspoon.
 

But how to think bigger?
 

And, really, was it still worth it?

This had been his idea, technically, but really it was this idiot kid who had started the ball rolling. Dicky had started 3B, and he hated Philip and all that Bingham’s stood for (and all it got away with without effort while he worked his ass off), and he was about to go down the tubes, and he could use the advantage cheating gave him, and (let’s be honest) he
kiiiiiind
of wished the place would burn down with at least a few of the most annoying employees trapped inside. But he was always a working man. You got up early, you rolled up your sleeves, you put in your time, and you laid down at the end of the day satisfied that you’d done a good day’s work. You didn’t escalate. You didn’t sabotage.
 

Well, normally that was the way things worked, but this kid was so unhinged. Dicky hadn’t had to really, truly make any sinister plans. The kid was riled up and wanted to do something, so Dicky had simply made a few suggestions.
 

He wasn’t really breaking any rules. The kid was breaking the rules. He just wasn’t bothering to stop him.

It wasn’t fair to steal merchandise that someone else had paid for. Dicky would never do anything like that. But the kid thought the place was evil and wrong and sinister, and he’d had no such qualms. And hey, if the stuff was going to get stolen anyway, another establishment might as well benefit from it. No sense in wasting it.
 

But if the kid was through, maybe it should end here and now. Because if it didn’t end, that would mean that it was continuing under Dicky’s power. It would mean crossing that line. It would mean ceasing to be an ethical businessman and starting to be a... a dick.

Well, Philip was a dick.
 

And that other kid, the one who got mad when someone simply watched him work? He was a dick.

Come to think of it, everyone who worked there was a dick.
 

And the entire deli, if it had a personality as a whole, as its own entity, it would have the personality of a dick. That could even be the slogan. “Bingham’s Bagel Deli: We’re total dicks.”
 

They laid around. They didn’t do their jobs. They were rude. They were unaccommodating. They disrespected their suppliers, like Dicky in a previous life. They played offensive music no matter what anyone said. They were arrogant. They thought they were smart, and that everyone else was stupid. They laughed when bad things happened. What a giant building full of dicks.
 

Well, he could be a dick. It was in his name. He’d be good at it, too, like a superhero.

Dicky “Giant Hairy Dick” Kulane, throbbing avenger of rightenousness.

“Okay,” he said, helping Captain Dipshit to his feet. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

“Fucking Russians, man!” yelled a voice.

The Anarchist looked up from the magazine he was reading and saw that faithful regular Army Ted was sauntering through the front door, going on about something with a smile on his face.
 

Ted was the store’s biggest enigma. He was a spy (so said legend) and had been a key player in most of the top-secret military operations that kept America from falling to terrorist plots (according to rumor). He was married to a French model who had become a top-tier lawyer (apparently) and lived a life of leisure, spending copious time on his yacht in the Caribbean (reportedly).
 

He always got a medium Diet Coke, no lid. And in apparent contrast to his cosmopolitan Rambo Playboy life, he spent most of every Wednesday sitting in a bagel deli in Columbus, Ohio.
 

Ted was a tall, skinny man with knobby knees and short graying hair who had a spring in his step and an airiness in his attitude that made him seem fully twenty or thirty years younger than the fifty-five or sixty that he probably actually was. He always wore baseball caps which were too stiff, and always sported a devilish grin that made the girls cover their breasts self-consciously.
 

Over his shoulder was eternally slung a faded-blue canvas pack. He wore short sleeved T-shirts whenever it was warm enough, and wore them most often tucked into smartly cinched, brown-belted khaki shorts from which his emaciated legs and thick knees protruded like sticks with bulbous tumors.
 

The Anarchist studied him carefully as he approached. The game had begun.

As retardedly stupidly moronically idiotically obviously false as Ted’s tales of grandeur were, he told them compellingly and with a level of detail and sincerity that was disarming. Ted wasn’t like Roger, despite the similarities in their regular orders and their old-guy perv appeal. Ted was sharp, engaging, and from all appearances totally sane. He could be your fun uncle, who went out drinking with the younger guys and flirted inappropriately with college-age bartenders. He could be your dentist, or your co-worker in an office. He could be your black ops savior, combating evil and communism (synonymous, really, even in 1998), with James Bond gadgets, on missions of espionage.
 

“Those Russians aren’t shit!” Ted said as he reached the counter. He was smiling as he ranted, giving the impression of someone who has just been baffled by a great epiphany. “We used to think they were this huge, menacing power, that they were going to take over the world. Well, you know what? They’re not shit!”

Tracy found Ted particularly enjoyable. Watching Ted now, he nodded his agreement.

Then Ted switched tracks, forgetting this sudden revelation about his former nemeses as he remembered something more pressing.

“Oh, hey,” he said to Tracy, his smile doubling in width. He winked. “Did I tell you about that girl who came in here last month while you were gone?”

Army Ted had in fact told the story to Tracy, and to the Anarchist, and to Philip, and to Rich, and to several customers, and to a now-fired delivery guy several times. A pretty young girl had come in and ordered a sandwich. While waiting, she had spent a considerable amount of time adjusting her stockings by hiking up her dress under the counter. Her adjustments weren’t visible to the crew, but she hadn’t seen Ted behind her, perched quietly at his table like a fly on the wall. According to Ted, she had displayed “a lot of great ass.”

“That’s something I’ll never forget,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “But, right, the Russians. You remember the Russians?”
 

Tracy allowed that he did, in fact, remember the Russians.
 

“You remember how scared we were of them? Old Ivan?”

Tracy said that he knew an Ivan, who worked at a body shop off 16
th
, but that he’d never been particularly frightening.

“Old Ivan used to have us shitting in our britches.” Ted adjusted his own neatly belted khaki britches for emphasis. “Missile drills, fallout shelters, Cuban crises and all that. But they were all just a bunch of... of
not shit!”
 

Tracy told Ted: Just like the Wizard of Oz.

Ted explored and reveled in his rant, visiting such scenic Russian clichés as standing in line for toilet paper, wearing fur Cossack hats, being watched 24/7 by the KGB, the Berlin Wall falling, and borscht. “How could they be a big, bad threat when they can’t even get toilet paper?” he mused. Finally he concluded, again (with feeling this time) that they “aren’t shit.”
 

Everything about Ted was a mystery while simultaneously not being a mystery at all. Beckie and the Anarchist, who headed up the Ted Investigation Unit, knew virtually nothing about him. Lesser investigators pointed out that they knew virtually nothing about Roger or any of the other regulars either, but Beckie and the Anarchist knew that this was different.
 

They didn’t know about most of the regulars because
those
relationships were simply dispassionate customer-merchants relationships. By contrast, they didn’t know about
Ted
because he was hiding things from them with super-agent stealth.

“Why haven’t we been able to figure out where he grew up, where and when he served in the Army Rangers, and where he lives?” Beckie said to Philip when Philip questioned the legitimacy of her quest to uncover Ted’s secrets.
 

“Where do
I
live?” answered Philip.

But that was different, and everyone knew it. Everyone. Beckie, the Anarchist... everyone. Everyone, including the Anarchist. And what’s more, Beckie knew it too.
 

At the counter, Ted allowed one last wave of chuckles to pass and then seemed to let the Russians (who weren’t shit) die into the back of his memory. Instead, he relived the story about the girl and her ass, and then ordered his drink.
 

“Eighty-five cents,” said the Anarchist. Tracy was already filling the cup. No surprises here.
 

Ted reached into his back pocket and pulled out a beat-up brown wallet. Several cards inside had jarred loose, so Ted re-adjusted them. His license, which was loosest, fell to the floor. He picked it up and put it on the counter while he searched for a dollar to pay for his drink.
 

At that exact moment, Beckie emerged from the back room. She saw what had happened and what gem was, against all odds, sitting on the counter. It was like discovering radium or penicillin by pure chance. She almost wouldn’t let herself believe it.
 

The Anarchist, after fighting down a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
don’t-look-directly-at-it-or-it’ll-melt-off-your-face moment, was trying to make out the information on the license as he took Ted’s dollar and made change. But it was no good. The counter was at gut level and he was too high above it. He was back a few feet as well, thanks to the register’s intervening bulk. The license was tantalizingly close, but he wouldn’t be able to read it without leaning forward. And that, of course, would let Ted know that they were onto him.

But with Ted’s name, with Ted’s address? Oh, the layers of the mystery they could unravel!

Maybe if he dropped something. That way, he’d have an excuse to lean forward.

With something like a convulsion, the Anarchist belched Ted’s change into the air. It was briefly aloft, then fell into the gap behind the register.
 

 
The Anarchist leaned forward, eyes on the license. But Ted said, “I’ll get it,” and leaned in. When he straightened up, the license was gone. Ted re-folded his wallet and stuck it back into his pocket.