Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

For my part I kind of liked the steam room. It was dirty but it gave meetings a kind of ancient Rome feeling.

“Adam’s getting his own apartment in Manhattan,” Locano said when I got there. He looked depressed. He was hunched forward in his towel skirt.

“Yeah,” I said. I sat down next to him.

“Were you going to tell me?”

“I figured you knew.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yeah, I went with him to look at it.”

That made him wince. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“I don’t know. You should ask him.”

“Yeah, right. I can barely talk to him. Even when I get to see him.”

“He’s going through a phase.”

Which was true. Skinflick was spending all his time with Kurt Limme. But I wasn’t too upset about it. I had my own shit going on, and in a weird way the fact that Skinflick would rebel against me as well as his father was flattering. It showed that Skinflick saw me as an influence on him, just as he’d been an influence on me.

His father felt otherwise, though. “It’s that fuck Kurt Limme,” he said. “He wants to put Adam in the business.”

“Skinflick won’t go through with it,” I said.

He nodded slowly. Neither one of us believed me.

“I really don’t want it to happen,” Locano said.

“Neither do I.”

He lowered his voice. “You know it means he’d have to kill somebody.”

I let that sit for a minute. “What about getting him an exemption?” I said.

“Don’t jerk my chain,” Locano said. “You know there aren’t any exemptions.”

I did know that, I guess.

It still freaked me out to hear him admit it.

“So what can we do?” I said.

“We can’t let him do it.”

“Right, but how?”

Locano looked away from me, and whispered. I couldn’t hear him.

I said, “Excuse me?”

“I want you to kill Limme.”

“What?”

“I’ll pay you fifty grand.”

“No way. You should know better than to ask me that.”

“A hundred grand. Name it.”

“I don’t do that shit.”

“It’s not just for Adam. Limme is bad news.”

“He’s bad news? Who gives a shit?”

“He’s a cold-blooded killer.”

“How’s that?”

“He shot a Russian grocery clerk in the face.”

“To get made?”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes a shitload of difference. You’re telling me Limme shot someone what, five years ago? That sucks. He deserves to die for it, and I hope he at least goes to jail for it. But it doesn’t give me the right to kill him. It doesn’t give you the right, either. If you feel that strongly, call the cops.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“Well I can’t murder someone for being a bad role model for Skinflick. Who’d you kill to get made?”

His voice turned hard. “That’s none of your fucking business.”

“Whatever,” I said.

“What the fuck’s gotten into you?” he said. Then, a moment later, “I hear you and Limme spent some time together at Denise’s wedding.”

“We spent about thirty seconds insulting each other. I hate that dick.”

“And Adam fucking worships him,” Locano said. “It’s gonna get him killed, or sent to jail.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well maybe you should have thought about that twenty years ago.”

What can I say?

Your best friend’s dad. Somewhere along the way you start to think of him as kind of like your own dad, or your idea of what your own dad should be. You come to believe that he likes you, and that you can trust him, and even talk shit to him.

You never think This guy’s a killer, and he’s smart. You piss him off, he’ll turn on you. Like that.

You never think it in time, I mean.

When I got back to my apartment there was a message.

“Hello. This is Magdalena.” Breathy, like she was keeping her voice down. Then a pause, then a hang-up. Nothing else. No number.

It flipped me out. I played it five or six times, then called Barbara Locano, then called Shirl, feeling weird about the Limme thing. Shirl gave me the name of the wedding planner in Manhattan who had hired the sextet.

The wedding planner told me from the cell phone in her car that she didn’t give out contacts, “for their privacy.” She said, “I mean, I’m sure you’ll find a perfectly nice orchestra if you arrange your own wedding.”

I made an appointment to meet her at her office the following day for an estimate, and when she got all flirty and demanding I didn’t bother to find out how serious she was, just did everything to her she asked for. I barely even noticed.

Getting Magdalena’s upcoming schedule was easier. Marta, her booking agent, seemed to think of giving it out as advertising, and worth the risk—at least to Marta. Apparently no one stalks the booking agent.

Most of the parties on the quartet’s schedule were in private homes, which might or might not be big enough to crash without drawing attention, so I picked a wedding in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan, that didn’t begin until nightfall. When I got there it turned out to be in a single large tent attached to the side of the stone-walled restaurant in the middle of the park. The event wasn’t large, but it was laid back, and as soon as it was even slightly crowded I was able to mix in. I was wearing a suit, having assumed, correctly, that no one would hold a black-tie wedding in Fort Tryon Park.

Magdalena had on the same white shirt and black waiter pants. I stayed out of her sight until the group took a smoking break on a roadway up the hill, and I approached her. She was talking to the cello player near their van.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” the cello player said. The challenge in her voice made her underbite worse.

“It’s all right,” Magdalena told her.

The cello player said something in a language I couldn’t even identify, and Magdalena said something back in what I assumed was the same language.

“I’ll be over there,” the cello player said to both of us, and walked off.

Magdalena and I stared at each other.

“She’s protective,” I said eventually.

“Yes. She feels she has to be. I’m not sure why.”

“I understand it.”

She smiled. “Is that a pickup line?”

“No. Kind of. I want to know you.”

She put her head to one side and closed one eye. “You know I’m Romanian?”

“No. I don’t know anything about you.”

“It’s not likely it would work out, with a Romanian and an American.”

“I don’t feel that way at all.”

“Neither do I,” she said.

On the off chance that I had heard her correctly, I said, “When can I see you?”

She looked away. Sighed. “I live with my parents,” she said.

For an awful moment I wondered if she was sixteen or something. It was certainly possible. Just as it was also possible she was thirty, since she gave off a feeling of ancientness like you’d imagine from a vampire, or an angel.

To be honest, if she had been sixteen it wouldn’t have stopped me.

“How old are you?” I said.

“Twenty. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well then.” She smiled. “Perfect.”

“Come away with me right now,” I said.

She touched the back of my hand with her strong slender fingers. I brought my hand up to interlace them.

Later, when she would sleep with my balls in those fingers, which were barely able to contain them, I liked to think back to that night in the park. But at the time she said, “I can’t.”

“When can I see you, then?”

“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

“I need you to call me.”