Tim Green - Exact Revenge

I will take the name of the son of the man who gave me this second life. I will not be overeager or impulsive. I will have ice in my veins because I have already been dead. I will now become Seth Cole.

This is what I tell myself.

I take the money pinched between Russo’s fingers and turn to go. I promise myself the time will soon come.

“Tell Bonaparte the rest is coming,” he says after us, then we hear that nervous nasal laugh.

“We’re not gonna bust him up some?” Bert says to me in a low tone.

We are standing on the dock and I have the mooring line of the party boat in my hands. Its aluminum pontoons ring hollow as they bump against the wood. A yellow bulb in a broken fixture on the wall of the boathouse glows dully and insects swirl through its beams.

I tilt my hat back and look up at Bert so he can see my eyes.

“Do you want a job?” I ask.

Bert giggles and looks around.

“What do you mean?” he says. “I got a job.”

“You want another? You want to work for me?”

“You’re not gonna take that money?” he says, his eyebrows furrowing.

“I’ll pay it back,” I say. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay it back double by the end of the week. You want a job?”

“Workin’ for you?” he says. “Just you?”

“Just me.”

“Yeah,” Bert says, smiling big, the slits of his eyes nearly invisible above those big round cheeks. “I want that job.”

I reach out and squeeze his thick arm and we step onto the boat.

I drive all night to just outside New York City, where we flop down in a motel under the shadow of Bear Mountain. We sleep until midmorning, then go into Manhattan. Bert waits in the truck while I go into Zegna on Fifth Avenue and buy a dark blue suit, shoes, a shirt, and a tie with Russo’s money. I step out onto the sidewalk and see that Bert doesn’t recognize me without the Bills hat and frumpy clothes that I carry in a Zegna shopping bag.

I go around the corner to a hairstylist and pay for a hundred-dollar trim, pick up a fake Cartier watch on the street, then have Bert drive me to a 49th Street diamond shop. I deal my stones in the backroom with a Hasidic grandfather who gives me a briefcase half full of crisp hundreds banded together in narrow paper sleeves that read: $10,000.

The old man stares up only briefly from beneath his black felt hat and thick round glasses before he tells me where I can get some fake identification made up. The next stop is Western Union so I can wire Bonaparte notice of our respectful termination along with Russo’s money in full plus another equal amount as interest for the day’s use.

We eat bulging pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli before circling the Bronco back to the garment district, where hopefully they’re finished making up my identification. For ten thousand dollars cash, I get a valid Mississippi driver’s license, a library card from the Oxford Public Library, and a Social Security card all bearing the name of Lester’s dead and long-forgotten son. I give the guy one of the packets of hundreds from the diamond merchant, then Bert and I leave the city.

We hire some strong young kids from a guy Bert knows at the Turning Stone Casino, the Oneida Indian Reservation casino just west of Utica. I rent a U-Haul with a twenty-four-foot van and buy three sets of handheld radios along with a six-horse Johnson outboard motor. It’s ten o’clock, pitch black, with the wind promising rain when we post two of the kids along Uncas Road with radios to keep a lookout.

It takes four hours to empty the cottage vault into the truck. During the last half-hour, it begins to rain. I give the kids each ten one-hundred-dollar bills and they grin all the way back to Turning Stone. After we drop them off, Bert and I get a start on our drive back to New York City, stopping when we get to a motel outside Hamilton and hurrying inside to get out of the spattering rain.

The next day, the sky is clear. We find a stout-looking storage facility in one of the sprawling new suburbs of Bergen County across the line into New Jersey. It takes me three days to sell a Cézanne for three hundred and fifty thousand. I know I’m being taken, but it’s just one painting, and I want to get out to Los Angeles to begin my transformation.

I use the two months it takes my face to recover from surgery to enhance the knowledge Lester has already given me about moving rare and missing works of art and jewels. I meet buyers from Japan, Germany, France, England, and Indonesia. I get some credit cards going and some brokerage accounts too.

I send Bert back to New Jersey to rent a modest house close to where my paintings are stored. I have a stop to make that I want to do alone. I get off the plane at Syracuse with my head held high, confident I won’t be recognized. My eyes will always be the same liquid brown as Raymond White’s, but the skin around them has been tightened. My chin is broader than his was and my nose is smaller and straighter.

To return before my surgery would have been stupid. The same thing goes for trying to contact my father. I’m sure Raymond White is still a wanted man and not enough time has gone by for the authorities not to be keeping an eye on the only person in the world who he was connected to.

As I approach the airport security doors, I look up and see the camera. I swallow my spit and quickly take my wallet from my suit coat pocket and look down at it, pretending fascination with its contents as I pass by the screening station and through the doors. I slide the wallet back inside my coat and look around at the crowd of people waiting for family and friends who have arrived on the same flight I was on. It’s a lonely feeling to see their eager faces and have their eyes slip right on past me.

I am downstairs and standing in line at the Hertz counter when I see two uniformed police walking toward me. Their faces are set in concrete and they are scanning the terminal. When the one with the brown crew cut meets my eyes, he taps his partner and they head my way. My heart jumps and my muscles go tense. I look around. There are enough people milling about that I think I could get out of the building, but where I’d go from there, I have no idea. I would have to jack someone’s car. It would end in a mad chase, probably with a bullet in my spinning head. Before I can act, they are here.

“Excuse me,” the crew cut says, “are you Seth Cole?”

“Yes.”

The cop smiles in a knowing way and says, “Thought so. You dropped your wallet upstairs.”

He is holding the wallet out to me. I reach out and take it. They stare at me with their smiles fading. When I finally sense the tension, I thank them, and thank them again. Their smiles return. They nod and they walk away.

I rent a Cadillac and drive out to my father’s. In the weeds that have grown up around the mailbox is a crooked Realtor’s sign. I grip the wheel and speed up the hill with rocks clattering off the undercarriage as I search the trees for the lines of the house. There are no vehicles in the driveway, and a blanket of leaves from last autumn has been piled up into the corners of the porch. A torn window screen wafts gently in the breeze.

It’s a warm day for October. Indian summer. My armpits sweat, and I sniff at the unfamiliar scent of mothballs in the stuffy air. I peer through the window and the spiderwebs. None of the furniture is familiar. Broken children’s toys are scattered about the dirty floor. My spirits are lifted though when the roar of a blast soars over the treetops from the direction of the quarry. I jump down off the steps and speed around the hill, the Cadillac trailing dust in the heat.

The old office trailer is sunken and buried in a sea of saplings and high grass, but down in the quarry I see men in lime green hard hats moving about. The old payloader lies with its back broken in a rusted heap beside the road, but I see fresh yellow equipment crawling like monstrous beetles up ahead. It’s obvious there is money being made here, and it’s not at all unlikely that my dad finally moved out of the woods.