Lisa Unger - Smoke

“Is that what happened to you?”

“Yes,” he nodded. “If you stayed, you were given a job the next day, something easy like dusting or emptying wastepaper baskets. They gave you a clean set of clothes, this cotton tunic and blue jeans, a pair of flip flops. You feel so peaceful, so relaxed… but it’s more than that. It’s like this low-grade euphoria. You’ve found the way. Then it was the next day and the next day.”

A kind of a half-smile had spread across his face as he remembered the experience. He’d moved up in his chair and leaned into them. He looked back and forth between their faces.

“But you left eventually,” said Lydia.

He nodded.

“I saw something that frightened me,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “I saw horrible things. I was cleaning floors and I walked into a room filled with computers and closed-circuit monitors.”

He put his head in his hands.

“I saw it, too,” said Jeffrey. “The people in restraints, on feeding tubes.”

“Their heads shaved, their eyes open in terror,” he said, his voice low. The room had taken on a kind of hush and no one spoke for a moment.

“What did you do?” asked Lydia softly.

“I stopped drinking the tea,” he said, giving her a small smile. “Suddenly, the euphoria was gone and I felt like a prisoner, even though ostensibly I could leave at any time. I realized that I had told them virtually every intimate detail of my life. I had told them every mistake I ever made and, believe me, there were some big ones.”

He released a shuddering sigh that seemed to come from deep inside of him.

“I was afraid then, afraid to leave. But when Rhames asked to see me, started talking about my turning assets over to The New Day and entering the ‘cleansing’ phase of my initiation, I realized that the whole thing was just a scam, just a way to steal people’s money. I got mad. I flipped out.”

“How did Rhames react?” asked Lydia.

“Very calmly,” said Samuels. “I was ranting and screaming and he was just sitting. We were in this room with the door locked. It was dim, so he flipped on a light that sat on his desk and he slid this file over to me. I took it and opened it.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at the blank space on the wall behind Lydia.

“What was in it?” she asked finally.

“Everything,” he said. “Everything about me, about Monica, about Lily and Mickey. There were copies of my tax returns, medical records, account numbers. It was a complete dossier.”

His breathing came quickly now, labored and slightly raspy. “He said to me, ‘It’s too late, my friend. You’ve shed this life. It belongs to me now.’ I told him to go fuck himself and I walked out of there. No one stopped me. I went back to Monica. I didn’t tell her about The New Day. I begged her to forgive me. She let me move back in and promised to work on our marriage but no guarantees. I changed all my bank accounts and was terrified for a few weeks. I called some of the guys that used to work for my security firm and I asked them to hang around me and Monica, Lily and Mickey. After a few days with no incident, I started to think everything was going to be all right. And for a while, it was.”

He laughed a little at his own stupidity.

“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you just go to the police and tell them about The New Day?” asked Lydia.

He laughed again; it sounded hard and angry like the bark of a dog. “With what they knew about me? Not an option.”

“What did they know about you?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not falling for that again.”

Lydia looked at him and thought he had the aura of a kite with its line cut, as if there was nothing to hold him to this world.

“Then slowly,” he said, “they started to take my world apart.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “First, I was notified that I was being audited by the IRS for the period of fifteen years during which I owned the security firm. My tax attorney who’d been with me since 1980 told me, ‘Hey, buddy, don’t worry about it. We’ll handle it.’ I was relieved. He was a powerful guy, had a way of making problems disappear, if you know what I mean. The next night, he was mugged and died from a gunshot wound to the heart. All my records disappeared from his office.”

“So what happened?” asked Jeffrey when he didn’t go on.

“Nothing yet. I had copies of everything here at my house. My meeting with them is scheduled for next week.” He smiled quickly.

He slumped back down in his chair, as if he’d been drained of all his energy in the telling of his tale.

“Then Mickey committed suicide, and Lily disappeared. Monica was nearly psychotic with grief, medicated to the point of catatonia. I was alone, on the verge of losing everything. Still part of me refused to believe that The New Day was behind it. Part of me believed it was punishment for my selfishness, my foolishness, all the crimes and sins of my life.”

“When did you come to believe differently?” asked Lydia.

“When you came to see me, started asking me about The New Day.”

“Is that why you went there?”

“I went there to make a deal.”

Lydia frowned at him. “What kind of a deal, Mr. Samuels?”

He shrugged. “I have something he wants. He has something I want. I proposed a trade.” Again he fell into silence. Then, “You know what’s brilliant about Rhames is that he doesn’t break you completely. He took Mickey. How? I still don’t quite know but I have an idea. But with the death of my son, he showed me what he was capable of doing. Everything else he just left dangling. He knows that once a man is without hope, once he has nothing to lose, there’s no way to control him. Things might go all right with the IRS, Lily might come home, Monica might come back from her place of grief. Things might normalize a bit someday. He knew it was that hope that would bring me to him.”

“What does he want?” asked Jeffrey, shaking his head. “It can’t just be your money. All of this… there are easier ways to get a person’s money.”

“No. Not just my money.”

“He wants you to say Uncle,” said Lydia. “He wants you to surrender.”

Tim Samuels shrugged. “Something like that.”

“So what kind of deal did you make, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia. “Whatever it was, please let us help you.”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t need any help, Ms. Strong. I got my family into this and I’ll get them out.”

“How?”

“The less you know, the better. And now, I’m going to ask you to leave.”

“Mr. Samuels, you know we’re going to have to involve the police.”

He rose and started walking toward the door. Lydia and Jeffrey exchanged a look and followed.

“You do what you have to do,” he said in the foyer.

Lydia didn’t like his calm. It was eerily incongruous with the things he was saying.

Samuels opened the door for them. His hand was pale with strawberry blonde hair and a riot of freckles, nails bitten to the quick. He rested it on the brushed chrome door handle and turned tired eyes on them.

“Why are you telling us all of this now, Mr. Samuels?” asked Jeffrey.

He didn’t smile; he didn’t open his mouth. He just looked at them and the answer was clear. That whatever arrangement he’d made, it was too late to stop it. Tim Samuels had wrangled with the devil and lost.

What now?” asked Lydia as she climbed into the passenger seat of the Kompressor. Jeffrey didn’t answer, just put the car in gear and headed up the drive.

“We can’t just go,” she said, looking back at the house. She felt the tension of helplessness in her hands, a deep frustration constricting her chest. She knew what Tim Samuels apparently did not; that there were no deals with people like Trevor Rhames.