Kem Nunn - Chance

He could hear Carl on the phone as he entered. The old man, in a dark brown suit and brilliant yellow scarf, was pacing between an armoire of the late French Modernists and a sculptural coffee table of Japanese design. The one-sided conversation was indistinct but animated, the still bandaged old man turning upon his toe in the manner of some brightly plumed fowl, his free hand in conduction of an invisible orchestra. Taking note of Chance’s presence, he paused just long enough and with such hand movements and facial gestures as might indicate to Chance that he was to proceed on his own to the rear of the building. Or so Chance was willing to interpret the elaborate combination of head feints, grins, and fluttering eyebrows. In passing, it seemed to him that the old man was just giddy enough with excitement to suggest a new leather boy had entered his life, this or the use of stimulants.

Chance went on through the store. He paused at D’s work window but was unable to lay eyes on his furniture. A noise from outside led him to the rear door and a view of the alley where D was wrestling what appeared to be a new radiator into a 1950 Studebaker, a Starlight coupe, to be exact.

“What’s with Carl?” Chance asked, moving outside. “New boyfriend?”

“How’d you guess?”

“The look of love, as they say.”

D nodded and heaved. The radiator dropped into place. He snatched up a rag, set about wiping his hands. “Ever heard of the Frozen Lake?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Then you haven’t heard of it. It’s the thing you want so badly you’ll go to the center of a frozen lake to reach it.”

“Where the ice is thinnest.”

“But you won’t think about that. Everyone else will, just not you. I learned it in the Teams. Let’s say I’m rolling with my guys and someone says to me, ‘You’re on your frozen lake, bro.’ What that means is… I need to stop and think, what ever it is that I’m doing… I need to stop ’cause he sees something I don’t. May even be we’re stateside, may be I’ve got eyes for my buddy’s wife and he picks up on it. Whatever. Everybody has his frozen lake. In conflict… you discover your opponent’s, you’re one up. The old man likes his leather boys.”

“You point that out to him, about the frozen lake?”

D’s sigh was one of resignation. “About a thousand times. What are you going to do? Fucker’s as old as the hills.”

Chance smiled but he was thinking about frozen lakes and not the old man’s. He studied the coupe, a brilliant lemon yellow. The vehicle was pointed fore and aft in the manner of a boat. “That’s a Starlight coupe,” Chance said. “My grandmother had one just like it.”

“No shit?” D was either interested or he was fucking with him a little. Chance suspected the latter but chose to indulge himself. The car was a time machine. “I was little, I thought they looked like flying saucers. What my grandmother and I did, we went to the army surplus and bought an old gas mask. Then she would prop the trunk open with a stick and drive around while I rode back there wearing the mask and shooting at things with a plastic gun.”

“Lucky she didn’t get rear-ended.”

“She was about four and a half feet high; barely see over the wheel. The car was covered in dents. It was like Destruction Derby.”

“And you got back there.”

“With great enthusiasm,” Chance said.

D had taken to tightening bolts on radiator mounts. “He’s no good either.” He nodded at the back of the store. “You’ve seen that bumper sticker: ‘I Brake for Hallucinations’?”

“This is his then?” He meant the Studebaker.

“Picked it up at some estate sale. I’m restoring it for him. Ought to be good for something.” The comment served to remind Chance about why he’d come, to inquire after his furniture.

“It’s gone,” D said.

Chance was not certain that he’d heard correctly. “Gone?” he asked.

“Yesterday. Figured that was why you were here.”

It was at just this moment that the old man appeared at the rear of the building. Bandages still peeked from beneath the brim of his hat although the swelling about his eyes had gone down. The yellow scarf draped about his neck was a dead-on match for the Starlight coupe.

“Young man!” Carl intoned. He was looking straight at Chance, a golden tooth prominent in his smile. “Would a check in the amount of eighty thousand dollars brighten your day?”

Carl had photographed the furniture before it left the building, mounting the pictures on black paper then arranging them in a black cardboard folder that Chance now carried. He’d thought, after visiting the warehouse, to get back to his office and Bernie Jolly. His report was due by week’s end and there was still the matter of arranging for an interview. But the sale of his furniture had put him off stride and late afternoon found him having a beer on the waterfront, Oakland across the bay. He’d placed the eighty-thousand-dollar cashier’s check from Allan’s Antiques in a safe-deposit box at his bank. Given his troubles with the IRS, it seemed prudent to consult with his attorney before actually depositing the money. But that was only the half of it and did not account for the intermittent waves of vertigo, palpitations, and excessive perspiration the check had inspired. The furniture had been sold as a set of originals.

“But I thought it was what we had agreed upon,” Carl had said, surprised by Chance’s initial reluctance to accept the check. “It was why we did the work.” And so it had been, but hadn’t he also imagined some final opportunity to rethink his position when the time came and the buyer at hand? The set had gone to a Mr. Vladimir of San Francisco for the sum of one hundred thousand dollars with Carl holding back twenty for D’s work and his own commission. “And that’s a deal,” Carl had added. “D likes you. So do I. And we know what you’re going through.”

D’s work was of course not the issue. He was welcome to whatever was fair, as was Carl. It was the other side of the thing that bothered him, what for lack of a better term he was coming to think of as the dark side.

“I thought you’d be happier,” Carl had said.

What was left but thank you and good-bye?

That done, he’d returned to the office just long enough to give Lucy the afternoon off. He’d imagined leaving the folder but found the pictures required looking at now and again as some means of reassurance, that the pieces really did look like other pieces, in other books, the ones with all their parts intact.

“Vladimir?” Chance had asked, his final query before vacating the warehouse. “He’s a Russian then?” The thing was complicating by the second. He was thinking of an article he’d read in the Chronicle on the presence of the Russian mob in San Francisco. But Carl had only clucked and shaken his head. “The stuff looked terrific, my young friend. Mr. Vladimir is very rich. And now he’s very happy. The set will probably be in his family for the next hundred years. You should be happy too.”

Chance had agreed to try. He placed the folder on the bar before him and sat looking at it yet again by the pale light of the room’s high windows with their views of the Bay Bridge and the Oakland hills but the happiness continued to elude him. The water separating the cities appeared gray and forbidding, lashed by a late wind and a good deal of the charred hills lost to a thick haze that lay across the entire region as might the gauze upon a weeping wound, but he knew what lay beneath, the treeless summits, the skeletal remains. He knew the score, as would the Russians, should his cover ever get blown, in which case it was hard to imagine them taking it well.