The Bialy Pimps (50 page)

Bingham’s was impervious to intervention. Dicky saw that now. They were the Timex that took a licking and kept on ticking. They could do whatever they wanted and get away with it, and nobody could do a damn thing about it. Dicky hadn’t been able to stop them. Captain Dipshit hadn’t been able to stop them. Their own highly public crimes hadn’t been able to stop them. Paul had even watched a lawyer, complete with papers to serve, be carted away by four men in suits. Could the police stop them? Who knew. Police had been notably absent, so the question was whether that was because they hadn’t been summoned, or because they were powerless, just like everybody else.
 

No matter how much you banged Bingham’s up and beat on them and put them through the ringer, they always came out smelling like a rose. They were relentless. They were like OJ Simpson in those Hertz commercials from the 1970s – running through the airport, deftly leaping and dodging all of the obstacles thrown into his path, unstoppable.

Well, things would be different this time. In the movies, even the nastiest of the monsters could be destroyed if you marshaled a big enough weapon. Dicky just had to think bigger.
He
had to become unstoppable.
He
had to become OJ Simpson.
 

The city – hell, the
world
– would thank him. Putting Bingham’s out of business was for the greater good. It was nothing short of a public service. What nobody else could do, he’d somehow,
somehow
find a way to do. He had to be the hero. The destroyer. Maybe even the martyr.
 

“Tony,” said Dicky.
 

“Yeah?”

“You’re not going to get your camera back.”

Tony shook his head angrily. “I know.”
 

“So what if you could get reimbursement? Get your money back instead?”
 

“How?”
 

“From Bingham’s.” And then he laid out a plan for Tony, and for Captain Dipshit. A break-in. Some aggressive food poisoning. A little bit of safe-cracking. And a lot of public attention at the wrong time, for exactly the wrong reason.

“That sounds risky,” said Tony.

“Life is risky.”

“Call the cops. Tell them to come to the place at night and peek in the windows.”
 

“The rats will hide,” said Dicky. “It’ll be too dark. A fire will break out across the street at the last minute. The police will spontaneously go blind.”
 

“You’re not making sense.”
 

“Unless we do something, those kids get to play you for a fool, and take you for almost a grand of your hard-earned money,” Dicky said. Then he added – and this was the real crux of the issue: “And if
we
don’t do something, nobody will. ”
 

On the sidewalk that night, in the dark, in the cold, part of Dicky’s mind had cheered because the camera was capturing the rat melee and giving him the proof he needed to get Bingham’s closed down. But Paul’s innocent questions had raised excellent points.
How long until the health department came out?
Who knew.
How long until the place was shut down?
Who knew. It was up to the whims of bureaucrats and automatons and politicians. Between the night of the rats and the day Bingham’s closed were a thousand opportunities for Bingham’s guardian spell to intervene. The camera could turn out to have been blocked. The hard drive could malfunction. The LEDs could fail so that the camera recorded only darkness. Dicky could show an inspector, and the inspector could have a heart attack the next day. The file could get lost. The case could be forgotten. The inspection could take forever. The department could be paid off. Hell, the department might be
fans
.
 

And there was another possibility, this the likeliest of all: Dicky would get his footage and show the world, but the world simply wouldn’t care. What were a few rats and some rabies between friends... especially at the home of the Face-Kicking Machine?
 

“I’ll go,” said Captain Dipshit. “I owe them for things they’ve done to me in the past.” He looked at Tony. “Don’t they owe you, too?”
 

Dicky smiled. The expression was entirely without joy and looked fake, like he’d stolen it. “See? Sense coming from the senseless. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of the cops who won’t arrest people for assault, and who won’t help you get your property back?”

“What makes you think you can get into the safe?” said Tony.

“I’ve seen it, back when I used to rep for them,” said Dicky. “My dad used to have the exact same model in his store. That specific model has a fault that Dad was always complaining about. But if that’s not enough for you?” He shrugged. “We’ll take the big dolly. Their safe isn’t bolted down.”

“And the alarm? The lock on the door?”
 

“I have a friend who can help,” said Dicky. “Believe me, we’ll get in.”

Tony stood in the middle of 3B’s lobby, indecisive.
 

“Seven hundred dollars, Tony. Seven hundred dollars they stole from you.”
 

After a beat, Tony gave a small nod. “Fine.”
 

That made three. And with Paul and Plato, both of whom were complicit and could be bought, the total party would be five. That was plenty to do what he had in mind.

The missing camera was irrelevant. It didn’t matter what was on the device’s hard drive when it had gone missing. The only person who mattered had seen what he needed to see. The only person strong enough to take action now, when it mattered, without red tape and polling public opinion and permits and rules, had all the evidence he needed to reach a verdict.
 

The night Dicky had peeked through the windows, he hadn’t just seen rats. What he’d seen was his adversary’s true nature. This was what Bingham’s looked like with its makeup off. It oozed. It seethed. It crawled and cavorted and bit and chewed and pissed and shit and spread disease. You couldn’t let something like that multiply. You couldn’t rely on public servants and clerks and rulebooks and procedures to do the right thing. When faced with malevolence, you had to destroy it yourself, then sort out the details later.
 

People chose their actions willingly. Each person made their own bed. Each person dug their own grave. Each person was captain of their own ship, and each captain made the decision whether to avoid the storm, or to steer right into it.
 

Philip had chosen poorly.

Bingham’s had chosen poorly.
 

Those thousands of rats, to whatever degree rats could choose, had chosen poorly.

All had cast their own dice. They deserved what was coming.

Philip leaned forward and spoke into the microphone.
 

The microphone was thin and flexible. It craned toward his mouth like a cobra toward a swami’s flute. His words were broadcast, greatly distorted, through a speaker set into the mouth of a giant plastic clown head mounted on the front of the counter. Bricker had stolen the setup from a Jack in the Box.
 

“Washhin iee yelptu it?” said the clown head.
 

The customer on the other side of the counter regarded Philip through the thick new Plexiglas partition.

“What?”

“Iashee wassie yelp tuwit.”

“I can’t hear you. Your intercom is
fucked up!”

Philip’s lips moved above the microphone on the other side of the Plexiglas.
 

“Seeshe wallup hoofa,” said the clown. “Langoo playfy boolean.”

“Woah, dude,” said the customer

“Wuagh?”

“Dude?”

As of today, a three-inch soundproof shield could be lowered from the ceiling to isolate the workers from the customers. The shield formed a tight seal against the top of the counter that ran around the employee area, and the only way to communicate from one side to the other was to use the intercom. The intercom was unintelligible and made communication impossible. This was, of course, exactly the point.
 

The customer was looking at the pass-through drawer in the counter, waiting for his sandwich. The drawer remained closed.

“Where’s my
bagel,
man? I can’t understand you over that speaker!” He made gestures that were apparently supposed to indicate a sandwich.
 

Philip furrowed his brow and shook his head. Then he leaned forward and spoke to the serpentine microphone. “Weshee gwentho hawanabet.”

“Ba-gel.” More pantomime. “
Baaa-gel.”

“Plugheef jayun reeshee dwongo,” the clown speaker droned. “Zafurr backel moof.”

“Baaa... Son of a
bitch!”
The customer yelped as Bricker poked him with an electrified cattleprod.
 

“Move along, please,” said Bricker. “Let’s keep the line moving, sir.”

Darcy walked up and stood next to Philip. Philip was easily twenty pounds lighter than he had been two months ago, and his head was indeed beginning to look as if it was too big for his body. His hair had grown longer and had begun to curl into a disheveled mess.
 

“So what’s the verdict?” she asked. “On the new sneeze shield?”

“Oh, it’s wonderful,” said Philip. “I haven’t been sneezed on once since I lowered it.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re sure we can afford it?”

Philip smiled at her naïveté. “Oh, yes. With the new single for ‘Gonna Slap Your Ho Around’ now getting radio play and with all of the merchandising, we’re sitting on a pile of cash fifty feet high. Besides, I like the shield. It makes me feel secure.”

“Secure against what?”

“I don’t know. Stuff. Besides, if you don’t like it, you can raise it when I’m not here.”

Darcy tugged at her collar and shivered. “It’s making me claustrophobic. I feel like I’m in the back of a taxi.”

Philip shrugged.
 

Darcy looked out into the lobby. Bricker was poking people randomly with the cattleprod – a sort of high-tech goose. She could see his head drifting above the sea of shorter customers like a shark. Then, suddenly, someone near him would jump straight up in the air. When the person looked back to see who had shocked them, Bricker invariably turned around and whistled.

Darcy watched and waited. Watched and waited. Anything to break the monotony.

The boredom. The boredom of the extraordinary. It was a paradox worthy of the Anarchist’s overanalytical musings, but even the musings, now always posited while high on Cherry Alka-Seltzer, were becoming mundane.

“Do you think that when Hammer says ‘U can’t touch This,’” he’d say, ‘he’s suggesting that U are not
allowed
to touch This, or that U are literally
unable
to touch This? Because the metaphysical ramifications of U being
unable
to touch This in a literal sense really open up the question of whether This even exists.”
 

“Dude,” Philip would say.

“If Hammer fell in the woods and no one was around to hear him drop some phat rhymes, does his Grammy exist?”
 

And again Philip would say: “Dude.”
 

Darcy was getting tired of it. Tired of all of it. She was tired of fame. Tired of being recognized. Tired of the customers, the crowds. Tired of serving people. Tired of abusing them. Tired of ignoring them. She was tired of Philip and the Anarchist and their stupid questions about Hammer and House of Pain and whether Marky Mark literally needed to see sweat “coming out your pores,” or if seeing you “sweaty in general” was enough. But most of all, she was tired of putting on a show every damn day.
 

“So put your shirt on,” Beckie would tell her.
 

But that was just nonsense, and it was only part of the larger issue. The bottom-line truth was that the job was starting to feel like a job. And everything they did was starting to feel rote and scripted, filled with déjà vu, like it was on an endless loop.
 

Come in. Put on your little act. Go home. Sleep. Repeat.
 

“If Everlast’s got more rhymes than the bible’s got psalms,” the Anarchist would say, “is the church under any obligation to inform Everlast if a bunch of new psalms are discovered?”

The whole thing was just beginning to feel so
been there, done that
. A sneeze shield here. A cattleprod there. The abuses were technically new, but at this point it was just about running through the permutations. Whatever they did, people would accept. It was like playing chess against a sock.
 

The irony was that their unbridled freedom had become another set of restraints, another list of expectations, another script to live by day, after day, after day, after day. It was impossible to think outside the box for too long, because eventually the box just reassembled itself wherever you stopped to rest. Routine. And repeat. And routine. And repeat.

“If you took Jawbreaker’s
Unfun
album,” the Anarchist would say to Philip, “and left it on top of Matthew Sweet’s
100% Fun
for long enough, does entropy dictate that eventually you’d have two albums that were both approximately 50% fun?”
 

And Philip would say,
Dude
. And the cycle would repeat.
 

She wanted out. And Beckie wanted out. And Tracy wanted out. And everyone else kind of, maybe, when you got down to it, sorta, probably mostly wanted out. But there was no way out, because the loop just kept repeating.
 

“If Men Without Hats don’t wear hats,” the Anarchist would say, “do they get a lot of women pregnant?”

Standing behind the Plexiglas with a temporarily non-effervescent Philip, Darcy drew circles on the floor with her foot. Circles. And circles. Around and around and around. And then she hit a Styrofoam cup that had been mostly under the make table and it popped out, dancing to a stop standing right-side up. Darcy reached down to grab it. The cup had teethmarks on it.