Bruce Bauman - Broken Sleep

I wave to Alchemy, who is now slo-mo soloing with the trampoline. He reads my face that says I got an SOS call. We step outside onto the front lawn. I explain the dilemma. His head’s shaking in disbelief. Still, he gets it right away and surveys the options. “You go. Call me immediately. We’ll meet at the Pantera.” The Pantera been closed by then, but Falstaffa and Marty still live above it. “Don’t use his car. If we can fix him up, maybe we can get him on a boat at the marina and out of here.”

He follows me to my Escalade. “You aren’t holding, are you?

“No.”

“Give me your knife. I’ll keep it in the house.”

I hesitate.

“Give it to me.” I hand him my mettle. “Where’s your Colt?”

“In my room.”

Alchemy tells everyone I got an emergency but gives no other facts. He calls off the Absurda intervention for the night.

I race to the Vons and I spot the Camaro in a deserted corner of the lot. I bang on the fucking trunk. He don’t move. I look in the window and start screaming, “Fran-kee, Frank-ee Fuckin’ Novalino!” I think maybe he passed out. The door ain’t locked so I reach in and — goddamn it, the poor bastard is dead. I kick in the side of his damn car. I’m embarrassed to admit, I want to toss my cell and get my ass outta there, but that’s cowardly shit. I must do right by my man.

I phone Alchemy.

He says, very calm, “Call nine one one. You tell them this. Exactly this: He called you and said he was in deep shit. You tell them he said something about the jewelers, that they were after him. Only he never, never mentioned being shot. Got that?”

“Yes.”

“Never to anyone. Not even me, ever again.”

“Got it. I got it.” We keep that under wraps ’cause if we hadn’t, they would’ve jumped on us for not calling the cops right away, and we — I didn’t need that.

Alchy is on top of the situation. Andrew and a shyster meet me at Parker Center that night. He gets the PR people ready because this hits the news big time, insinuating that I’m involved with all kinds of gang shit.

Alchemy was stand-up through everything. He never blinked. Or talked about tossing me out. At least, not to my face.

After the performance I felt so high, younger, and more vital than I had in years. I was infatuated with Berlin life and didn’t want to return to America. I needed to. Hilda, who was phobic about flying and had no curiosity about the world beyond Orient, turned down my invitations to join us for Christmas and then again at Easter, which upset me more for Alchemy than for myself. He and I flew back to the States for a month in July.

The city repelled me. I sensated that the inquisitions of friends or former fucks could undo me. I avoided Gibbon and the Hamptons, that summertime G-spot of the self-anointed elite. Xtine drove me to Collier Layne to see Ruggles; he was pleased with my “progress.” I brought a copy of the Teumer photo. “It’s real.”

He raised his eyebrows and fingered his mole. “And?”

“I still mourn for myself and the child, only not in the same fashion. I found renewed faith my body. I forgive myself that indiscretion.” He only nodded.

Before going back to Orient, I crashed for two days with Xtine. We avoided the downtown cliques and ate dinner at the Supreme Macaroni Company. After dinner, the summer air stifled and my head felt as if it were encased in a plastic bag while I gasped for breath. We lolled inconspicuously down Ninth Avenue back to the Chelsea. Before we entered the lobby, from behind I heard an unmistakable voice. “Salome! Salome, please wait.”

Under the dim streetlights and headlights of the cars zipping across 23rd Street stood Lively with his saddle-sized sideburns and shiny cowboy boots. He hovered between the sidewalk and a double-parked black sedan. “Look, Xtine.” I poked her with my elbow. “It’s the archangel of Bad News.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“I do, Laban, so why don’t you — whoosh — vanish.”

“I have tried to help you in the past.” Of course there was a reason he told me about Gus. “And I don’t think what I have to say will qualify as bad news. Can we go somewhere to talk?”

“No.”

He blew his meaty nostrils into a white handkerchief, stuffed it in his pocket, and shook his head in disgust at the sloth around him. “Suit yerself.”

“So, surprise me with your good news.”

“Do you know why Nathaniel chose to go to Berlin?”

“The delicate cuisine?” I asked. He almost smiled as his molten features relaxed. “That’s not it? Hmmm. So tell me.”

“I’d say it’s due to his involvement with underground political groups in East Berlin. Smuggling money in and photographs out. Some of which were published in the West German magazine GEO .”

I’d never read it. “I don’t see how printing photos in a magazine is illegal.”

“It is in Communist Germany. I’d like to help him.”

“Your help he can do without.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. In this case we are both on the same side. There’s an old saw, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. The Stasi is both of our enemies.”

“You will never be his ‘friend.’ ”

“Ally, then.”

“You want me to help you to help him help you?”

“I wouldn’t have phrased it in such a way, but yes.”

“He’ll never pass information on his friends to you.”

“No need. His friends need funds. Supplies. They use a hand-cranked press to print their pamphlets. We can help them upgrade.”

“Why should he trust you? Why should I?”

“Because I’ve never lied to you.”

As beastly as he was, he believed that. His truths may have been false to me, but they were his truths.

“Laban, you’re a deal maker. I have one for you.”

“Shoot.”

“I lost a child when I was fifteen.”

His gaze squirmed away from mine. “Yes, I’d heard from the Bickleys. It was not my place to pursue any details.”

“I have questions about the father.”

He tapped the heel of his boot on the sidewalk and ground it on a now very dead cockroach. “Why do you think I can help you?”

“You’re a spy, Laban. Finding information on people is what you do.”

He chuckled, baring his oversized carnivorous teeth.

“You get me some information about him. Like where he’s living. And I’ll do my best to help you with Nathaniel.”

“Let me see if there’s anything I can do. No promises.”

I asked if he wanted the photo of Teumer. He didn’t need it. He knew more than I did about my own past.

Jay shielded herself behind the electronic curtain, unresponsive to Moses’s plaintive e-mails and calls. She finally sent a one-line e-mail: “It’s best I spend the night at Geri’s.” He considered a drive-by spy mission but dismissed it as too insidious. Alchemy called near ten that evening. Moses didn’t pick up. He sat in his darkened room and listened to Alchemy’s clipped cadence play on the machine, “Call me. ASAP. We need to talk.”

Moses had no desire to hear whatever wisdom Alchemy wanted to impart. Anxious and restless, he called Sidonna Cherry, who answered in her typical playful fashion. “You becoming one of those PI junkies I need to put on retainer?”

“Gosh, I hope not. Just have some questions. When you researched my father, did you have an inkling of a sinister past? Is he dead yet?”

“I’ll answer the second question first. I don’t know. You want me to find out?”