The Bialy Pimps (42 page)

The coming storm was so much like the storm in his dreams that he half expected to see reality breaking apart in front of it, or to hear Joey Pants over his shoulder, shouting into the wind.
 

It was coming from downtown, marching up High Street like a dark visitor. Below the thunderheads was a blue smear that meant rain, and heavy rain at that. Lightning forked out from under it like spindly legs. Was the tornado watch still on? He thought so. They hadn’t heard the sirens that heralded a warning, but it hardly mattered. Bingham’s had the granddaddy of all basements. Armed with a few hastily gathered provisions from the surface, they could practically live down there until the end of the world had passed.

The wind was winding up. It felt moist, and pulled at his hair like a second gravity, infusing it with mist so that it curled into waves. He sat with his knees up and his arms around them, his face unsmiling.
 

Pedestrians were few, and those who were still on the streets held their coats closed at the collars to keep possession of them. A group stepped passed him and through the door, seeking refuge inside of Bingham’s to wait out the storm. He let them go. It would be like old times once the storm hit. Nobody would fight. Nobody would bother anybody else. Crew and customers of circumstance alike would all be bunker-mates, holed up against the ravages of nature.
 

When the first raindrops began to fall, he stood up and went inside.
 

Within minutes, the world became a blue tempest, rain coursing down the windows in sheets. The wind whipped up and gusted. Showers billowed in crashing waves outside. Rich was already shored up at one of the tables with a cigarette, and Philip, Tracy, and Slate joined him as it became obvious that nobody else was coming in, that they could stop being performers and be normal people again, at least for a little while. The Anarchist got a coffee and joined them. He nodded respectfully to the four pedestrians who had been forced off the streets by the storm. They nodded back.

It seemed as if the world might end that day, or as if it might stand still for a while and regain a forgotten serenity. It was as if the walls were falling down around them, and they didn’t care. Even with the chaos outside, and the audibly chattering rats in the basement, and the time bomb of Dicky Kulane’s malicious intentions waiting in the shadows, the day felt right.

The world made sense again.

BOOK THREE:

Trouble A-Brewin’

“I want to be different, just like everybody else.

I want to be just like all of the different people.”

– King Missile

“I’m coloring outside your guidelines.”

– Jawbreaker

Army Ted was the math tutor.

The news swept through the ranks with ferocious rapidity, setting off a new round of speculation. Tracy swallowed the mint that he had stolen from the “Save the Orphans” honor box in surprise.

“292-5040?” he asked, recovering his breath. “Levels 050 to 895?”

“Yep.” It was Artie, one of Rich’s friends who had been hired recently to deal with the deluge of new business. Hiring at Bingham’s had become complicated, given the new nature of the store, so Artie had had to endure a comprehensive screening before Philip would agree to take him on. Philip had asked if Artie had any weed. Artie had taken Philip up to his roof, where he had a mad scientist grow operation underway. Philip had shaken Artie’s hand and welcomed him aboard.
 

“No way,” Tracy said, shaking his head. “No way is Ted the tutor.” He was thinking of the disheartening news Beckie had given him and the Anarchist the other day. His expectations of Ted were abysmal. At this point, he would have denied it if someone had told him that Ted knew how to count to ten.
 

“Swear to God. I was using an ATM machine the other day and Ted was in line behind me. I waited for him to use it, then went over after he was done – snooping, you know? – and saw that there was one of those little fliers stuck to it, covering half of the screen.”

“You must be mistaken. The tutor is the Easter Bunny. He’s the Tooth Fairy. In other words, ‘the tutor’ doesn’t really exist. The fliers themselves are... I don’t know... some kind of elaborate mind game.”

Rich, who was sitting near the slicer eating lunch, heard what Tracy had said about the Easter Bunny and shrieked.

“Why don’t you call the phone number and see if Ted answers?” Artie suggested.

“You don’t understand. Spiderman himself couldn’t get fliers into all the nooks and crannies they’re in. The other day, I saw one inside of an unopened package of English muffins at the supermarket down on King Avenue. Explain
that
. Ted isn’t the tutor. Some kind of... I don’t know... giant, powerful, faceless organization is behind the tutor.
”

Artie shrugged. “All I know is that Ted was at the ATM, and then a flier was there.”

Tracy inhaled and pinched the bridge of his nose as if in pain. There was no way.

“There’s no way,” Beckie told Tracy when he passed on the news. “Ted is pathetic. Mister Zero. None of what he’s told us is true, except that he was in the Army.”

“Or simply has an Army flag,” said the Anarchist. He was reclining against the stainless steel countertop, cleaning the undersides of his fingernails.

Tracy shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Artie said,” he told them.

“Artie, Fartie,” said Beckie cryptically.

“Look, Tracy,” said the Anarchist, “the 292-5040 math tutor is an urban legend. Nobody would ever call the tutor to tutor them; the purpose of this particular tutor is just to place fliers. It’s like how gang members tag everything with their little spraypaint signatures. He’s not a real tutor, just a mysterious flier bandit.”

“Why would he not be a real tutor?”

The Anarchist threw up his arms. “Look at the things he does! Most people on campus stick pieces of paper to flagpoles to advertise. This guy is inhuman. Have you ever been in a classroom on campus that did
not
have a math tutor flier in it?”

Tracy thought for a minute. “No,” he admitted.

“Have you ever been in a
bathroom
that didn’t have one?”

“Well, no. I guess not.”

“Have you seen any
flagpoles
that don’t have some stuck to them?”

“No.”

“Have you ever seen one regenerate?”

There was silence. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.

“
I
have,” the Anarchist said ominously. “I remember how in my freshman English class, there was one just above the blackboard that really caught my eye. It caught the professor’s eye too, and he said that he had been teaching in the English department for twelve years and that the flier had been there for as long as he had. He said that it had always bugged him because it seemed so presumptuous, putting an ad right up at the front of the room as if it were university-endorsed. So one day, he reached up and tore it down.”

Tracy and Beckie gasped. Rich, who’d booked an extra-long shift because he needed to work on his pile driver, was walking out from the back room and crossed himself.

The Anarchist continued. “The next day, the flier was back in the exact same spot. The prof noticed it right away and pulled it down again. Then, it came back
again
on the next day. For more than a month, the prof would pull the flier down each day, and it would return each morning. Eventually, he gave up. I was intrigued, so I conducted an experiment. I pulled another flier down, but took this one from an obscure, random spot. I took it off of the back side of a telephone pole behind the rec center. I felt stupid doing it, but the next day, it was back, too. I’ve been playing the game ever since, whenever I think of it. Sometimes I see one in such a strange, out-of-the-way place that I can’t imagine how anyone would ever see it, and I pull it off. They always come back. So you see, the tutor is not a real person. This is a phenomenon as inexplicable as ball lightning or the Loch Ness monster. It just
is
. When you live here, you learn to accept it without question. Even if the tutor
does
exist, he is no mortal. He is Godlike.”

Rich whistled.
 

“Why don’t we call the number and find out?” said Tracy. “If it’s Ted, we’ll recognize his voice.”

“We can’t call it,” said Beckie. “What if he has Caller ID?”

“Who?”

“Ted.”

“I thought you said it couldn’t be Ted,” said the Anarchist. “I thought you were on my side.”

But it was no use. Ever since she’d discovered Ted’s boring secret, Beckie had been vacillating between nihilistic depression and a new, even more preposterous level of suspicion. Ted was a fraud. Ted was even more amazing and clever than they’d imagined. Nothing mattered. All that mattered was figuring out what Ted was
really
up to.

“But maybe it
will
turn out to be Ted,” she said, “and if we call and he has Caller ID, then he’ll know we’re on to him. And if he finds out we’re on to him, he and his wife and J. Edgar Hoover might stop protecting Bingham’s, and then we’ll all get arrested.”

The Anarchist sighed.

Tracy looked at Beckie, then nodded in support. “Yeah. We can’t risk calling. It’s enough that we now know, finally, who the tutor is. And we can therefore consider the possibility that what Beckie saw the other night was what Ted
wanted
her to see. Maybe he’s a ninja secret agent after all. Maybe there are teams of men monitoring all of his magical fliers.”

“Ted’s not the tutor,” Beckie said, flipping polarity. “Ted is less than nothing.”

“But you
just
said
...” Tracy began.

“There is no God,” she interrupted.

“Do I have to call the number on the fliers to prove it to you two?” said Tracy. “I’ll do it, I swear. I’ll risk rocking the boat if that’s what it takes to convince you.”

Beckie shook her head. “There is no tutor.”

“Ted is a dead end, Tracy,” the Anarchist said. “Listen to how ridiculous you sound. Some superhuman intelligence is advertising tutoring services. One of our regulars who Beckie has proven is just a normal guy is somehow not only a secret agent with powerful connections, but is also this self-same superhuman being. Ted has polluted your mind.”

Tracy was silent for a moment. Then he looked up. “He
could
be the tutor, though. He could be just a normal, mortal tutor.”

“Fine,” said the Anarchist, rolling his eyes. “Call the number.”

“We can’t do that,” said Beckie. “What if Ted has Caller ID?”

But just as the Anarchist was about to respond, Tony from UltraClean Hygiene walked through the front door. Everybody except for Rich, who had the People’s Elbow needed to deal with Tony, ran into the back room.

Tony whistled while he worked without thinking about it. In the small, tiled women’s room, the sound was canned and tinny.
 

He took a rag from his converted tackle box and wetted it with spray from a bottle. He wiped the porcelain, taking pride in his work. He used a different chemical on the chrome, then polished the mirror above the sink with Windex.

He stood up straight in the dim room, looking it over as a butcher might look at a particularly impressive cut of beef. He put his hands on his squat hips and moved his glasses into place by wrinkling his nose until the frames jostled to fit. His mouth was open – something which might have been called his signature look.
 

He wondered if he had gotten anything good this week.

The small plastic cage that housed the air freshener was notoriously difficult to open, but Tony knew the trick. He snaked a practiced finger underneath it and pulled just right, and it popped open. He made quick work of changing the deodorizer and then flicked the small wire next to it as he always did, to shake the dust off of its optics. This was an expensive piece of equipment, and he wanted to take care with it. He made sure that the small, fiber-optic lens was still lined up properly, then lifted another tiny panel inside.
 

He was always astonished by how small it was.

The CIA probably had camera setups much smaller than this one, but it was still amazing what a private citizen with a voyeuristic obsession and nothing else to spend his money on could find out there on the Internet. The size of the camera never really surprised him anymore because he had been using it for a few years now, but this new recorder was
amazing.
A pain in the ass, but amazing nonetheless.

Tony had been disappointed by the camera’s limited transmission range when he’d first installed it. Bingham’s walls were thick, and he was lucky if he could even pick up a video signal from his van outside. Sometimes he got nothing but pixilated fuzz. Sometimes he got glimpses of empty room and nothing else. And sometimes, customers would notice his van on their way in, then do a double-take when they saw it again – with Tony still in it, still just sitting there – on their way out. So he’d gotten the recorder. It had more than doubled his investment, but it had been worth it. Yes, he had to wait a week before he could pick up his footage, but this way he could watch it at home, without wasting and risking the entire day away by sitting in the van, watching a screen in real time.
 

The thing was motion-activated. Given normal usage, it’d trim a week’s worth of time down to maybe a dozen hours of footage, all of which would fit neatly into the tiny recorder. Amazing, the wonders of this modern world. Used to be, you had to stand outside a girl’s house and peek through the drapes. And you’d better be wearing your running shoes, because sometimes they caught you, and sometimes their fathers had guns.
 

Tony sighed. In the short term, he didn’t like the deal that Dicky Kulane had offered him because it would mean several weeks (or possibly months!) of being unable to record Bingham’s bathroom footage. But in the long term, it would mean poontang jackpot. Once Dicky had captured the footage
he
wanted with Tony’s camera, Dicky would have to fulfill his end of the bargain, and he’d promised to let Tony plant a camera actually
inside
one of 3B’s toilets. Once Bingham’s closed and the crowds moved over there, the new footage would be absolutely amazing.