Stuart Kaminsky - Always Say Goodbye

With enthusiasm and arm movement, laughing at his own timing and punch lines, Kerudjian told a string of jokes, pausing after each to say, “Funny, huh?”

“It’s funny,” Franco agreed.

Kerudjian looked at each of them. He had been the only one laughing.

“You’re not laughing,” he said.

Lew looked at the man whose surface of good humor had suddenly vanished. Without it, Kerudjian wore a look of defeat.

“Lewie doesn’t laugh,” said Franco, “and I’m a little pissed right now. Somebody shot a hole in my truck. You see it?”

“I didn’t know it was a bullet…”

“It was. It is,” said Franco. “Someone was trying to kill Lewie. He’s my sister’s brother.”

“Lewie?”

“Me.”

“When…?”

“About half an hour ago,” Franco said.

“This is a joke, right?” asked Kerudjian. “I tell a joke, you top me, right?”

“No,” said Lew.

Kerudjian smelled of distant garlic, ink, hints of sweat.

No one spoke till they got to the garage. They dropped the car and the confused Kerudjian, who had given Franco a credit card to pay for the tow.

“Not bad,” said Franco as they got back into the truck. “And I get a referral fee from Raphael. It’s a long tow to Naperville.”

John Pappas never left his house. Never.

This was, Pappas knew, in crisp, sharp contrast with Andrej Posnitki who was forever moving, flittering, following, threatening, maiming, killing and reciting secondhand poetry.

Seated in the kitchen, Pappas, who had lived with Posno for years, could hear his former partner delivering a flat monotone recitation of a poem neither he nor Pappas understood.

Everyone seated at the heavy, knife-scarred wooden table knew the truth about the siege that kept John Pappas in his house. His mother, Bernice; his sons, Stavros and Dimitri; and John himself knew that it really wasn’t fear of Posno that kept him inside the house.

John Pappas was agoraphobic. It had started suddenly, on a Sunday morning while he was reading the Tribune at this table. Nothing particular seemed to have triggered it. He simply knew that he was afraid to go outside. There were ghosts out there, people he had killed. It didn’t matter if they were real ghosts or memory-conjured and imaginary. They were beyond the protection of his home. Even thinking about leaving the house started an undulating wave of anxiety that moved toward him, an invisible flow under the level of control and consciousness. To keep the ghosts away, and to keep Posno outside, Pappas simply stopped considering opening the door and stepping out.

And he blamed Posno.

Sipping his coffee as he chewed a grainy sliver of warm halavah his mother had finished this morning, John Pappas wondered if Posno was now afraid of being inside. It would be an almost Mother Goose irony.

John Pappas didn’t go out.

Posno didn’t come in.

And so it was between them both

They had much room to sin.

“Irony,” Pappas said with a grin.

“What, Pop?” asked Stavros, cocking his head to one side so he could clearly see his father with his remaining eye.

“Nothing,” Pappas said. “Nothing.”

Pappas knew too much about Posno. If the police or the State Attorney’s Office or Fonesca found Catherine Fonesca’s file, Posno would be done; John Pappas would be uncovered. Pappas could not, would not allow that to happen. Pappas had only once killed emotionally. All of the other times, including the stabbing of LeRoy Vincent, had been acts of pride and payment, displays of professionalism. The people who hired John Pappas knew and respected him. Pappas was a legend in the darkened dining rooms of those, like him, who gave little value to the lives of those outside their family.

“We all die,” one of his clients, Mitch Dineboldt, had said. “You just make the inevitable happen sooner.”

“We’re sorry,” said Dimitri, playing with powdered sugar between thumb and finger.

“It’s all right,” said Pappas, reaching over to touch his younger son’s cheek and then looking at Stavros. “You?”

Bernice Pappas sat back upright next to her son. Bernice was clean, hair neatly combed, wearing a dark dress and yellow sweater. She had been to church that morning, St. Adolphis Greek Orthodox Church. She had driven herself.

“I think you should kill him,” she said.

Her grandsons looked at her. Her son turned away.

Stavros thought his grandmother was telling him and Dimitri to kill their father. Dimitri thought she was telling him to kill his brother. Pappas knew who she really meant.

“Kill them both,” she said to her son.

Now the brothers thought their grandmother was telling their father to kill his two sons.

They feared their grandmother as much as they loved her baking. They knew what she had done with a kitchen knife. Dimitri and Stavros Pappas also both knew that she was insane.

“Your grandmother means Fonesca and Posno,” Pappas said with a sigh.

“In the pay of others, to protect others, my son didn’t hesitate to kill,” she said. “Now to protect your family, yourself, you are a Popsicle.”

Stavros and Dimitri had not lost their desire to escape, to get away, but it would have to wait. The brothers looked at each other. They both knew, understood, that the threat of Posno and the possibility that Fonesca might find the file were real.

“Posno will die,” Pappas said.

“And the nice Italian?” she asked.

“Fonesca,” Stavros said.

She nodded.

“We wait till we’re sure he has that file or that he won’t find it,” said Pappas.

“No,” she said, shaking her head and moving to the oven.

“We wait,” said Pappas.

Neither Dimitri nor Stavros had ever killed anyone, but their father, sitting benignly lost in thought as he drank thick, black coffee, had told them that he had never felt hesitation or guilt when he had “assassinated.”

“Tonight,” said Beverly, getting up slowly, hand on the table to steady herself. “I’m making my lamb, couscous and peas. Soup will be a surprise.”

Pappas wondered what Posno would be having for dinner and where he would be having it.

Andrej Posnitki had a bowl of Vietnamese soup with noodles, vegetables and pieces of fish. He sat at the counter of the little storefront restaurant-grocery on Argyle off of Broadway. His was the only non-Asian face among the twenty-seven customers. He had a Kiran beer, no glass, and ate. The other customers talked quietly and occasionally looked his way.

Posno had tucked a napkin under his collar. He ate seriously. He was more interested in quantity than quality, but he had limits and favorites. Pasta of any kind satisfied him, if there were enough of it. He ate the noodles slowly, carefully, noiselessly, wielding his chopsticks expertly to pluck out noodles, bits of fish and even tiny peas.

Music was playing, generic Asian music, the same rippling strings, the same beat, that he heard in every Thai, Japanese or Chinese restaurant.

He would kill Fonesca. The little wop would find that incriminating file of Catherine Fonesca’s and then he would kill him and then deal with Pappas. He and Pappas, the phony Greek, had never been friends, but they had been tenuous partners. And now Pappas wanted to protect himself, to let Posno take the blame for all that they had done. Pappas wanted to destroy him.

It would not happen. It would not happen unless Pappas was willing to go down with him. It would not happen if Fonesca were dead and that file found and destroyed. And that is just what Andrej Posnitki fully intended to do.

Inside Toro’s garage, Lew sat behind the wheel of a white 1993 Cutlas. The car had belonged to Ernest Palpabua, a Samoan former left tackle for the Green Bay Packers and later a wrestler. Ernest had plowed the Cutlas into a horse. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for the Samoan, but not for the dead horse or the Cutlas.