Mark Costello - Big If

“Really, why? Because it’s violent, cheesy, and appalling? That’s just what you see. If you could see the source code, the logic of the monsters, you’d see that it was beautiful. Am I happy? When I’m creating a cool application, a sweet design, I’m happy because I don’t have to think about What It All Means. I left that to Walter, my self-appointed conscience. You should’ve heard him on the subject of the game. ‘BigIf is immoral, Jens — worse, it’s amoral.’ Nice distinction, Dad. Am I happy? I’ll be happy when we go IPO. I’ll be happy when I’m comfortable for life. Hey, check it out—”

An envelope had fallen from one of the files. In the envelope was a dollar bill, one of Walter’s specials. The bill said, IN US WE TRUST.

Jens held it to the light. “Incredible,” he said. “And to think”—he looked at Vi—“the man was a Republican.”

Vi reached for the bill in Jens’ hand.

“It’s just a dollar, Vi. Do you need gas money, is that it? Jesus, don’t they pay you in the Secret Service?”

Vi said, “I want it.”

“Why?”

She took the bill from him. She said, “I just do.”

Walter Asplund’s will included instructions for cremationand a scattering at sea, a location specified by longitude and latitude, minutes and degrees. Boyle the mortician handled the cremation, delivering the urn to Jens and Vi.

They hired a pilot and a plane at the county airport, Monday morning. They flew out to the designated square of open ocean, a few miles off the coast. Jens opened the side window in the Piper Cub, brought the urn up from between his knees. Vi helped him tip it empty. They pushed the urn out too and watched it tumble to the blue.

That fall in Manhattan,Vi played basketball on Monday nights, a lawyers’ league basically, the 2–3 up to Chelsea and the Y, law firm against law firm, the lady DAs, the U.S. Attorneys. There was always lots of cheating and cheap fouls, lots of trash talk, lots of ringers (black girls from Christ the King in Queens, willowy and deadly, hired by the hired guns). There was no Secret Service team, so Vi played for Customs.

She was living in Hoboken, two bedrooms over a karate school, next to a bar called the Blarney Castle. Her roommate in Hoboken was her teammate from the Y, a Customs agent named Dawn Imperiali, another rookie out-of-towner (Dawn came from Dearborn, Michigan). They got up early, took the Hudson ferry to the World Financial Center, then walked up to Federal Plaza, unless Dawn had airport duty and had to drive out to JFK.

Vi spent three years in New York station, before and after Walter’s death. She learned to love the early ferry in the summer, the Hudson peaceful in the heat, the walk up Broadway to Fed Plaza. She’d come in from a long surveillance, a day in a sedan, tailing John Doe Russians out to Nassau. She wore blue jeans and crosstrainers, a sleeveless cotton blouse with little roses on it, and a five-buck Yankee hat from a Chinese pushcart guy. She carried a black nylon briefcase (walkie-talkie, Glock, 40x binox, and a garlic bagel she had forgotten to eat).

Fed Plaza was a mass of slab and glass on lower Broadway. Every agency had an outpost at the Plaz, FBI, ATF, DEA, IRS, and the volume people-movers, Labor, Housing, Immigration, Social Security. On any weekday the broad lobby of the Plaz was full of wounded humans, the slag of the economy, single mothers, washer-women, refugees ashore, clients of the state who rarely went to office buildings and didn’t understand how to navigate the signage. The signs were mounted overhead, airport-style pictograms with arrows, pay phones to the left, rest rooms to the right, Information straight ahead. The symbol for Information was a ? The arrow meaning straight ahead pointed straight up.

Whenever Vi crossed the lobby, coming in or going out, she was accosted by the old, the alien, the lame. They were almost always women, asking for directions in semi-English or through their sometimes beautiful and also thuggish sons, dragged along as translators—

“Where is Room 2000?”

“Try the second floor.”

“Where is Mr. Crenshaw?”

“What agency is he?”

A shrug. “He is Crenshaw.”

“Yes, but who’s he with? Welfare? Immigration? What’s the nature of your problem?”

— a dangerously open-ended question, which the clients could answer only by recounting the entire sequence of events which had brought them to this lobby, going back to the asbestos in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Sinatra and the war, or a journey in an open boat from Haiti, the story always turning on some dumbfounding blunder or coincidence involving four changes of address, garbled doctor’s orders, and a disconnected phone, which was why they never got the Notice of Hearing and Termination, or the Second or the Third, or any of the notices, until they got the Final Notice, a form postcard from somebody named Herbert Crenshaw, Hearing Officer, who only heard the Final Notice people. The clients showed Vi the postcard, thumbed and folded, or totally pristine, as if they had carried it in plastic all these weeks as a true communication from the Mister Crenshaw man.

Vi listened as the women gulped from respirators or paused to let their sons catch up with the translation. They finished the history of the Final Notice, insisting that Vi listen to all of it, because if she only heard one part and not the rest, the part she heard would make no sense. They would finish and the sons would finish translating.

The mothers looked at Vi expectantly. “Please where is the Crenshaw?”

When Vi was new to New York, she did her best to help. She’d be going out on routine threats, a warrant, or a vehicle surveillance, leaving with other agents from the counter-counterfeiting squad. These agents were largely interchangeable, buck rookies, past fuckups, middle managers. Her group supervisor, a GS-9 named Rocky Panofsky, organized the annual all-law-enforcement charity golf outing at the Fresh Kills Country Club Marina, Service versus FBI, DEA, and Customs, and everybody tried to beat the prosecutors. Rocky spent the year organizing a smooth and perfect afternoon of golf and gag awards, then went into a month-long funk of purposelessness, then roused himself and started organizing the outing for the coming year. Rocky and the other grunts would wait for Vi, who waited for the mother to gulp from a respirator, or the mother waited for her bored thug-angel son to translate some crucial bridge of information. If Vi stopped to help, other people saw her fielding queries and stopped to ask their questions too. Lines formed in front of Vi, as Rocky tapped his foot—

“Are these the elevators?”

“Where is Fish & Wildlife?”

“Is jury duty over there?”

“Miss please green stamps.” A fleshy woman of indefinite ethnicity. Russian? Polish? Byelorussian?

Vi said, “Green stamps? I don’t think the government does green stamps, ma’am. The nearest supermarket would be Greenwich Street.”

“Please no foot,” said the woman. “Foot foot foot stamps. I wish to apply myself today.”

“Do you mean food stamps, lady?”

“But they say they cannot give me without green card.”

Rocky broke in. “She can’t help you, Mama.”

The woman looked at Rocky. “Does she know who can?”

When Vi was finally free of the women, she would follow her colleagues to the cars.

“Foot foot foot stamps,” said Rocky on the sidewalk. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

He offered to show Vi his personal technique for blowing off the questioners, which involved grandly sweeping past, or pausing, as he sometimes did, and giving people looking for the Labor Board precise and accurate directions to the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.