William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“Lenny called Dante from the cell phone in the car once they dumped you. Dante sent me over to check out you was okay. We was only trying to take care of you is all.”

With that, Andy Bandy loosed the iron snakes around my shoulders and neck. Once again I dropped in a sprawl onto the ground.

“Pull yourself together, Vic,” said Cressi. “I’m not used to seeing you squirm like a slug such as you’re doing here. It’s enough to get me thinking, you know. It’s not a good thing to get me thinking, pal. It ruins my whole day.”

He reached into his pants pocket and jiggled what was in there for a moment before pulling out a small peppermint swirl wrapped in cellophane. He lifted his hand and with a quick squeeze he squirted the candy into his mouth before tossing the wrapper to the side.

“I can understand you being all shook up and all, but I hate to see you down there afraid of me.” The peppermint candy clicked in his teeth as he spoke. “What do you think I am, an idiot? You’re my lawyer. What kind of idiot would hurt his own lawyer?”

He leaned over me, but I found myself unable to look him in the face. Instead I was staring at something else, something I couldn’t yet understand the significance of, cringing and sniveling on the floor as I was, numb with fear of the two men standing over me. I couldn’t yet understand the significance but still I couldn’t stop staring, as if somewhere within me I knew the truth, that what I was staring at from the floor of the Philadelphia Zoo’s reptile house was the first loose thread in the eventual unraveling of the darkest secrets of the Reddman demise.

CRESSI AND ANDY BANDYdrove me home and waited for me to enter the vestibule before they drove away, waited as if I were a schoolboy dropped off in the middle of the dark. “You want I should stay around some and keep an eye out for you, Vic?” had asked Peter from the front seat of the Lincoln. “No,” I had answered. The problem with Peter guarding my back was that I would have had to turn it to him and I didn’t trust him far enough for that. So I went into my apartment alone and stripped off my ragged suit and took a shower and put on a new white shirt and a relatively fresh suit and tightened my tie and looked at myself in the mirror. Then I loosened the tie and took off the suit and took off the shirt and the shoes and the socks and went to bed. It was now early afternoon and there was much work to be done at the office but still I went to bed.

I get this way, I guess, after I stare death in the face and she laughs at me. The fierce whine that had slid by my head in that car was death’s chortle, there was no doubt about that, and I had all but accepted her embrace when Andy Bandy held me aloft and Cressi reached into his jacket for what I was certain was a gun. But then death had slipped away for the moment, satiated, so it would seem, by the acrid scent of fear secreted by my endocrine system, satisfied with having reminded me once again of exactly what I truly was. I know people who look at the stars and say the night sky makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t believe them when they say it. When I look at the stars I don’t shrink but grow, filled with the perverse certainty that the whole of the universe has been put here solely for my amusement and enlightenment. But face to face with the grinning mask of death I know the truth. I am a randomly formed strand of DNA no more significant than random strands of DNA that define the leaf of grass upon which I tread or the cow whose charred muscle I gnaw. I eat Chinese food and crap corn and sweat through my socks and stink and the same DNA that gave me this nose and this chin and my ten fingers and ten toes has also sentenced me to oblivion. It directs my arteries to clog themselves with calcified fat, it directs my liver to wither, my kidneys to weaken, my lungs to spew bits of itself with every cough. And in the face of this utter randomness and planned obsolescence I can’t even imagine mustering enough energy to get out of bed and to walk the streets, to dry clean my suits, to return my library books, to vote for judges whose names I can’t pronounce, to act my part as if any of it really matters.

So for the whole of that afternoon I lay with my head beneath the covers, shivering, though I wasn’t cold, smelling the dried sweat of the fifty nights it had been since I last had laundered my sheets, trying and failing to come up with a reason to get out of bed. As if the smell of fifty nights of my dried sweat was not reason enough. Trying and failing until the phone rang.

Should I answer it? Why? Who could it possibly be that would matter at all? The answer was that it could be no one. I let it ring almost long enough for my machine to answer it, but maybe four hours of smelling old sweat was enough, because I peeked my head out of the covers, picked up the phone, and, with a little high-pitched squeak of a voice, said into the receiver, “Yes?”

“Did you hear what happened on the Schuylkill Expressway today?” said Beth in a gush. “A van with a hole bored into its side slid up to Raffaello’s Cadillac and shot it all to hell. It’s all over the news. Somehow the Cadillac got away. Raffaello is recuperating in some unnamed hospital, they won’t say, but can you imagine? Everyone’s talking about it. On the Schuylkill Expressway. Everyone wants to know who was driving the Cadillac. Apparently it got away even with one of its tires blown to pieces. The driver’s an absolute hero. I want him driving for me. Amazing. I think, Victor, it’s time to find ourselves another class of clientele, don’t you? Where have you been anyway?”

“I’m feeling a little under the cosmic weather, so to speak,” I said. Beth didn’t need to know I was part of it all. No one needed to know, no one ever needed to know, which was exactly why Raffaello had pushed me from the careening Cadillac.

“Are you all right?” said Beth. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No. Did they say on the news who did the shooting?”

“They have no idea. Just that there is apparently an internal dispute of some sort. The authorities are all mystified. You sound terrible. Do you need some soup or anything? Have you eaten?”

I had to think about that for a moment. It had been a day and a half, really. I had a quick lunch yesterday afternoon, but then there had been the repulsive offerings at Veritas and I hadn’t had time for an edible breakfast before Jimmy Dubinsky’s funeral. I wondered if my deep existential soul searching was less a result of my brush with the grinning mask of death than mere sugar depletion. Maybe there did exist a surefire solution to all our deep metaphysical dilemmas-a Snickers bar. “No,” I said. “Not for a while.”

“Let’s do dinner.”

“You sound obscenely cheery.”

“I’ve been going to that place in Mount Airy you wanted me to look into. The Church of the New Life. We should talk about it.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Interesting as hell,” she said.

We met at a restaurant on a deserted corner in Olde City. Beth had suggested a retro diner off Rittenhouse Square but all I could think of was its wide plate glass windows. I didn’t want to be behind wide plate glass windows just then, so I suggested this place well off the beaten track, and on the other side of the city from my apartment, and she had agreed. Café Fermi was a pretentious little restaurant with a pickup bar and bad art and an ingenious menu one step above the chef’s ability to deliver. I took a cab to the funeral parlor and picked up my car and still got there ahead of her. I ordered a Sea Breeze and drank it quickly to give myself a brave front. I went through a basket of bread while waiting. Beth arrived with a strangely serene smile on her face. A guy on his way out bumped her slightly and she just turned that smile on him.