Keith Thomson: Once a spy

“Do you, by chance, have family in the New York City area?” she asked.

The humming ceased. The man sat ramrod straight. “Yes, ma’am. My son, Charles. Three-oh-five East Tenth Street in Manhattan, unless he’s had difficulty making the rent again.”

A few keystrokes at the social services database, and her computer screen filled with the driver’s license data and a photograph of Charles Jefferson Clark of 305 East 10 Street. He was a year and a day older than she, five eleven and 170, with strong features and playful blue eyes that shone through scruff and tangles of sandy hair. In that shabby Yonkers Raceway T-shirt, she thought, he could be a rock star who dressed in defiant opposition to his means.

Feeling flush already, Charlie took a taxi to Aqueduct, stopping first at a Lightning a$h. Into the gulley at window B, he dropped his driver’s license and the key ingredient of his Great Aunt Edith wager: three Social Security checks made out to his mother, Isadora VanDeuersen Clark, each in the amount of $1,712.00. In a wispy cursive he imagined old-lady-like, he’d endorsed them, “Isadora V. Clark.”

The first check had appeared in his mailbox in October, after what would have been her sixty-fifth birthday. If she hadn’t died twenty-six years earlier. His horseplayer cronies were unanimous in the opinion that it was literally a gift horse. Still, he leaned toward notifying the Social Security Administration of the error. Until today.

Lightning a$h looked and smelled like it was never mopped and never would be. The appeal was it accepted any check issued by the United States government without calling for verification; and the tellers paid so little attention to detail, they were likely to cash a check issued by the Confederate States of America. Usually.

It occurred to Charlie now that, given the run of luck he’d been on, today was the day the tellers would be replaced by undercover agents looking to bust deadbeats who cash their dead moms’ Social Security checks.

Sure enough, the teller-a trim, middle-aged man with a self-assured air-licked his thumb and forefinger to enhance their adhesiveness, raised one of the checks to his lenses, and began to examine it.

Charlie tried to blink the horror out of his eyes. “My mom endorsed them to me.”

The man muttered something in reply that sounded like “Yes, sir” but just as easily could have been a dubious “Yeah, sure.” And continued his examination.

Hot acid jetted into Charlie’s intestines.

An eternity passed.

Finally the teller opened his cash drawer and withdrew $5,058.96, the value of the checks minus Lightning a$h’s 1.5 percent fee. Charlie’s acid ebbed and cool relief flowed in its place. The relief was mitigated by that blend of probability and superstition unique to horseplayers: You don’t want to be lucky before the starting gate opens. It’s that much less luck you’ll have when you need it.

The sky above the Big A grandstand was an ominous, scowling gray. It would have taken a meteor shower to divert Charlie’s attention from the oval. From the moment the stall doors banged open, Edith was a bullet. She finished five lengths ahead of the favorite. But two lengths behind a nothing chestnut named Hay Diddle, who won going away.

“There’s a reason you never hear of anyone getting rich at the track,” Charlie said to no one in particular as he crumpled his ticket. He left feeling heavier by a hundred pounds, the bulk of it melancholy and foreboding. On the stairs he used the handrail, the first time he could remember doing so, to counter the dizziness.

As the Q11 bounced him through potholes and back to Manhattan, the squeaky suspension sounded as if it were reiterating his exact thought: Now what?

He fantasized about staying aboard all the way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and from there skipping town on the first Greyhound to Montana or South Dakota or someplace like that. He’d clear the damned horses from his head once and for all, then find steady employment, maybe go back to school at night and finish his college degree. Then he’d meet “her” and they’d buy the two-story brick colonial with a tidy lawn that had room for a swing set and sandbox. And he’d find a thrill less risky than the horses. Like skydiving.

Running now would only make things worse though. Grudzev’s men would bring the sand to one of Charlie’s friends.

Also, Charlie had tried fresh starts. Several times after a big score, he’d hopped a taxi straight to LaGuardia. But the Daily Racing Form was everywhere-once even at a beachside newsstand consisting of a milk crate nailed to a coconut palm. He developed a theory that money won at the track, like water to the ocean, found its way back to the track. Or, put another way: A gambler doesn’t make the same mistake twice. It’s usually nine or ten times.

His cell phone’s ring ended his rumination. The readout flashed a number he didn’t know, but the area code was 718.

Almost surely it was the Christmas Call.

As if today couldn’t get any better.

The holiday had been yesterday, but his father traditionally didn’t remember Charlie’s birthday until days afterward. If at all. Charlie used to go see him on the big holidays, at places that could get them fed and out in under an hour, with televised ball games to minimize conversation. The last couple of years, it had dwindled to just the calls.

The old man had some means; he could bail Charlie out of the Grudzev thing without much hassle on his end.

Writing Santa would be a better bet, Charlie thought.

Reflected in the window across the aisle was a face so cross that, for a moment, he didn’t recognize himself.

He let the phone keep ringing.

Walking to his apartment, where rent had been due a week ago, Charlie saw a Cadillac Eldorado idling in the handicapped spot. Sitting at the wheel was Karpenko. Forged in a part of Russia where men killed one another over as little as a dirty look, Karpenko was hardened well beyond his age of thirty-five. Word was he once shot a man just to make sure his gun was working. One look at him, at all his muscles and his sharp black goatee, and anybody would think, Satan on steroids. He had on a high-collared black leather overcoat, which actually made him less menacing; Charlie had seen Karpenko in warmer weather, when he’d worn just a tank top, displaying crudely rendered dragons and skeletons and other gulag tattoos.

Karpenko served as muscle for the man beside him, Leo Grudzev, a jack-of-all-criminal-trades whose favorites were small arms and narcotics trafficking and shylocking-his preferred term for high-interest moneylending. Not that Grudzev needed muscle. The forty-year-old’s keg of a torso was joined to a proportionately sized head by a neck that would have been indiscernible if not for the thick gold chain and gold cross the size of a railroad spike. He had a sour face that jutted forward like a ski slope. Charlie thought of Grudzev as evidence anthropologists were wrong-Cro-Magnon man hadn’t died out. Were Charlie to voice that, Grudzev probably would shoot him. If Karpenko didn’t shoot first.

Charlie steeled himself as he approached. Behind the steel were bones and tissue that fear had turned to putty. Grudzev’s window rolled down. Charlie was belted by musky cologne and garlic.

“Belated Merry Christmas,” Charlie said.

“Same for you,” said Grudzev through a thick Russian accent, “if… ”

Karpenko reached into his coat, probably for a weapon. The glint in his eye alone caused Charlie’s heart to jump.

Until Charlie hit upon a possible solution. “I have a plan to pay you by tomorrow with an extra five K on top,” he said to Grudzev. “And if I don’t, I’ll go down to Brighton Beach and eat every grain of sand there.”