Crime Machine

16

CURTIS CARL WINSTON, WHO CALLED himself Papa, knocked on the bathroom door. He had disabled the lock, but he gave it a moment before entering. The old man was standing in the corner, hands folded before him, secured by the plastic ZipCuffs that bound his thumbs. He stood erect, a certain nobility to his posture, but even this impressive front couldn’t hide his fear. Much that was wrong in the world could be traced to a shortage of fear, and Papa did what he could to supply it.

“How are you doing, Lloyd? Got enough to read?”

“Mister, I’m seventy-five years old. Why don’t you just take what you want and leave? I can’t do anything about it.”

“Did you have enough to eat?”

“Yes. Look, I’m an old man, I can’t sleep in a bathtub.”

“If there was room for a mattress in here, I’d requisition one for you, but there isn’t. And I can’t have you needing the bathroom every five minutes, can I?”

“Lock me up in the master bedroom. It’s got the ensuite.”

“And probably a lot of sharp objects. I’ll think about it. I don’t want to cause you unnecessary pain.”

Papa gestured at the door. He walked the old man down to the basement office and sat him in front of the computer.

“I don’t understand why you’re here,” Lloyd said. “Or what you want.”

“Let’s just say winter camping gets a little hard on the nerves, Lloyd—even when you know what you’re doing. Like everybody else in the world, we appreciate warmth and comfort.”

“Uh-huh. And how long are you planning on staying?”

“That’s strictly need-to-know, Lloyd. You’re not going to be able to type with the cuffs on. If I take them off, you’re not going to give me trouble, are you? I need your word on this.” He placed a hand on his sidearm.

“How am I going to give you trouble? You’re the one with the platoon.”

“Just give me your word, Lloyd.”

“No trouble. You have my word.”

Papa bent and undid the cuff.

The old man rubbed his thumbs and placed his hands in his lap.

“Call up your calendar.”

Kreeger put his bony hand over the mouse and did so. The screen lit up with the month of December.

“You’re shaking, Lloyd. You don’t have anything to be afraid of. I have no intention of hurting you. None whatsoever.”

“It’s a frightening thing to have your home invaded.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But it had to be done.” He squeezed the old man’s shoulder. Thin cord of muscle. “Relax. Really. I’m not a violent person. I wish I could convince you of that, but I understand you’re going to be skeptical. Who’s Greener and Greener, coming on Thursday?”

“Landscaping outfit.”

“Why would you have landscapers coming in December?”

“An estimate. Work they’re going to be doing in the spring.”

“Send them an e-mail and cancel.”

The old man called up his e-mail and addressed a message.

“Don’t just cancel. Make some arrangement to reschedule. Otherwise they’ll keep calling.”

The old man typed a little more. He was surprisingly good with the computer.

“Good. Hit Send. You’ve got two more appointments this week. Do the same with them. Then we’re going to set up an Out Of Office reply. Not that you get a lot of e-mail. Bit of a recluse, Lloyd?”

“Not a recluse. I’m retired. I stay in touch with my family, and if they don’t hear from me, they’re going to be worried and call the cops. My daughter’s a worrywart—she’s done it before.”

“Wrong approach, Lloyd. I don’t like lies.” Papa spoke softly. A little bit of fear was one thing, but he didn’t want the old man to panic. A couple of Papa’s former recruits had made that mistake in the past, terrifying their targets, and it had gone badly for everyone. “Your daughter lives in Colorado Springs, way down in the good old U.S. of A., and you hear from her once a month. So let’s not pretend she’s going to be any kind of factor.”

The old man looked up at Papa, his face hard. Old, yes, but not dumb, not a pushover. “If you’re so honest, why don’t you tell me what you did with Henry? You killed him, didn’t you?”

Papa gave him a look of worried sincerity. “Henry would be your Aboriginal friend? Henry is safe and sound in the bunkhouse. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill anybody.”

“I heard the shots.” Those watery eyes looking at him, eyes that had seen a lot, maybe, but not enough to understand the kind of man he was dealing with.

“Relax, Lloyd. You’re letting your imagination run wild. The truth is, I’ve never killed anybody in my life.”

“Maybe not you personally. Maybe one of your associates.”

“You’re referring to my boys. Lemur’s only sixteen and he’s a good-natured kid—hardly your natural-born killer. And wait’ll you meet Nikki, my youngest. She’ll be here tomorrow. Jack’s a bit of a commodity—I’ll admit Jack can be a handful—but it’s not his fault. He runs on adrenalin the way you and I run on oxygen, the way you and I run on food and water. But Jack is no berserker and he doesn’t go around shooting people, and I won’t hear him accused of it. So stop worrying about Henry, Lloyd. When this is all over, the two of you are going to be telling stories to your grandchildren. Now call up that Vacation Response and then we’ll move on to financial matters.”

The old geezer had a high-def seventy-incher in his living room, and Jack and Lemur were totally into an episode of 24 when Papa came upstairs and asked Lemur to turn it off. He and Jack would need some privacy. The kid didn’t say a word of protest, just switched the thing off and headed to his bedroom. “And don’t stay up all night,” Papa called after him. “You rendezvous with Nikki at the airfield at 07:00.”

Papa’s word choices amused Jack sometimes. The guy hadn’t been in the military for it must be thirty years, but airports were still “airfields” and train stations were still “railheads.” He had the bearing to carry it off, though, you had to admit.

Papa stood in silence for a few moments, his back to the living room, hands clasped behind his back, staring out the window. He had turned off the lights—turned them off on the entire ground floor. The fire burned low in the grate, casting long shadows across the floor and up the walls. Jack loved this place—all the wood, and the thick carpets and expensive furniture, and the peace and quiet of the forest. The past week they’d been bivouacked in the woods, and God knows Papa had trained them well for that sort of thing, but it sure made you appreciate a comfortable house. Part of Jack hoped they could stay there forever, and part of him knew that it would never happen.

The plate glass window, large as a movie screen, looked out across the lake, the black patches of open water. It was snowing hard now, and a high wind whipped the flakes across the window in wild swirls. Every few moments lightning detonated and lit up the blizzard with a flash that made the world leap then fade to mauve, then black.

Jack—his full name was Jackson Michael Till—had been with Papa for six years. Long enough that sometimes he thought he knew the man, understood him even. Sometimes he thought he never would.

Papa turned from the window, placed a hand on his chest. “Storms speak to me,” he said. And he said it in that confidential voice, that soft voice that implied he would never talk to anyone else in quite this way. Jack would never have admitted it, but he loved that voice. He waited for it with anticipation, even yearned for it, and having those feelings probably put him at some kind of disadvantage, but it didn’t stop him loving that voice.

“Lightning, thunder—especially in winter,” Papa said. “They get to me in here”—he patted his chest—“in a way that nothing else does.”

“Me too,” Jack said, realizing this was true only as he said it. Papa often got him to say things that were both true and yet surprising to him.

“Will you have a brandy with me? Mr. Kreeger has a bottle of Delamain in the sideboard.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jack’s voice and words sounded ugly and low-class to his own ears after Papa’s slightly formal manner of speech. Being around Papa made you want to improve everything about yourself, even the way you spoke. Jack had never in his life drunk a brandy except when he was with Papa, but he cleared his throat and said, “Brandy would be perfect.”

Papa went to the sideboard and poured out two glasses. Firelight glittering in pale amber. “I’d like to propose a toast.”

“Okay.”

“I feel a little formal about it, Jack. Could you stand up?”

“Sorry.” Jack got to his feet.

“No apology necessary,” the older man said. “The last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable. I propose a toast to Jack—a man who has his own code of behaviour and follows it to the letter. A man with a mind of his own, who nobody can tell what to do if he doesn’t want to do it. A true soldier—with a sharp, discerning intellect, who doesn’t just blindly follow orders but who fights for what he believes in. In short, to you, sir …” He clinked his glass against Jack’s. “In gratitude for everything you’ve done for this family. For being my right hand. I owe you more than I can say.”

Jack took a sip. The brandy had a bite to it that almost made him cough.

“Okay, enough of this formal stuff,” Papa said, and clapped a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “What say we sit by the fire and you tell me your damn war story!”

There was one leather wing chair close to the fireplace. Papa lifted up another and carried it across the room. He placed it at an angle to the other.

“Take your pick,” Papa said. “And tell me everything.”

Jack sat down. He stretched his feet out and looked at them. Then he looked at Papa. “You sure? I already told you everything.”

“I know you did. But I’m like a kid with this—I want to hear it over and over. Or not a kid. It’s like in the old days. The days of Viking warriors. They’d sit around the fire and try to outdo each other with wild tales. Well, son, I can’t hope to outdo you, I’m just here to listen. And let’s face it, it’s not the kind of thing you get to tell a lot of people, so let me have it. I’ve got my brandy, I’ve got my fireplace, and I’ve got a total man of action with a hell of a story. You can’t beat that.”

So Jack tells him again how really it was Papa himself who laid the groundwork for the operation by telling the Bastovs he’d have a good realtor friend call them. Tells him again how he called the Bastovs with the news that he had the ideal house for a couple who liked winter sports. Tells him again how he drove them out to Trout Lake and showed them around. Tells him again how he pulled out the bottle of Stoli.

“Oh, that was smart,” Papa says. “A very good touch. Who knows—maybe one day you can retire to a life of selling real estate. You’d be good at it.”

Jack holds his snifter up in the firelight, watching the upside-down flames flicker in his glass.

“So you’re sitting down, the three of you having a drink,” Papa says. “What were they saying? What were they like? Were they suspicious at all?”

“Not really. The woman was real excited—about the lake, not the house. The location. The guy was, like, noncommittal.”

“Tell me again how you did it, Jack.”

So Jack told him again. The words came out and he couldn’t believe he was saying them, even though he’d done this before—told Papa other stories, about other “targets,” as Papa called them. Told him how he pours the third round—how those Russians like to just toss it back, not into sipping, those people. How the woman’s eyes are getting brighter, her laugh a little louder. And as they’re tossing it back, how he reaches into his shoulder bag and pulls out the Browning. How he whips it out and points it across the table at the man.

“How’d he look, Jack? How’d he look when you did that?”

“He looked like …” Jack had to think how to describe it, not sure what to call the emotion or state of mind that was so plain on the man’s face. “He looked like, just, ‘oh.’ You know?”

“His mouth dropped open.”

“It did,” Jack says. “His mouth actually did drop open. Anyway, I shot him right then and there. Just bang, no hesitation, right between the eyes. Well, forehead, I guess you’d say.”

Papa nodded. “Again smart. Neutralize the man first.”

“It’s how you always told me, Papa.”

“Yes, but you did it. The pressure was on and you did it right. And the woman?”

“I didn’t give her no time to scream. Place was isolated enough, but I didn’t want no screaming. Bring people running. So I just whipped around again …” He held his gun arm out, finger pointing, and showed Papa how he pointed to his right. He closed one eye as if aiming anew. “Like so. And I let her have it.”

“Between the eyes also?”

“She was looking at the guy, so she was turned a little—like so? Caught her in the temple and went right through.”

“Two shots, two down. You’re good, Jack. They’re going to be talking about this. Russian mob circles? The oligarchs? This is not going to go unnoticed.”

“They really Russian mob, those two?”

Papa raised his hand level above his head, as if showing deep water. “Up to here, Jack. Up to here. When the Communist system imploded, they basically handed Lev Bastov the industry. Those people have no concept of our values. All he had to do was pay off the right commissars and it was his.”

“They didn’t seem like gangster types to me. They didn’t have the tone of it. Not to my ears. Leastwise not the woman.”

Papa put his glass aside and leaned on the arm of his chair. “And there were no witnesses, right? No one saw you with them? No one saw you at the house?”

“Hell, you saw that place, you found it.” Lying had always come easily to Jack. He couldn’t even remember a time when he didn’t lie. But he did not like lying to Papa. “There’s nobody out on that damn point to see.”

“You’re right.” Papa’s blue eyes looking into him, sparks of firelight in the irises.

“How’d you know that place was out there, anyway? How come you knowed it’d be for sale and all?”

“I didn’t. Not until we reconnoitred. You could call it luck. But luck will always favour those who study the terrain. Tell me the rest.”

So Jack told him how he put on the raincoat he’d brought with him. Zipped it up and took out the axe. Then the skinner. He didn’t mention the sound of a window shattering. His shock and terror. A witness that got away? He wanted to confide everything to this man who had taught him so much, given him so much. But part of him knew he couldn’t. Papa already knew about the heads in detail—they’d planned all that out together, from the axe to the bags to the local wharf—but now he insisted Jack tell him anyway. So he did, and somehow the telling of it made it weigh less inside him.

“Beautiful job,” Papa said. “Terror and confusion, Jack. We’ve sewn terror and confusion—and you pulled it off. Flawless. Absolutely flawless. And the woman—Irena Bastov was quite a looker.”

“Really? That your assessment?”

“Be honest now, Jack. We can tell each other these sorts of things.”

“Truth is, I don’t get all fired up about Slavic sorts of women. But yeah, you could say she was good-looking.”

“And after you shot Bastov—how did you feel about her? You know you have a problem with lust—we’ve discussed that. You didn’t go after her sexually?”

“Never even thought of it. I just shot a guy and I’m about to shoot her. Never crossed my mind.”

“Didn’t cross your mind? Or it did cross your mind but you chose not to do it? It’s two different things, Jack. Think about it before you answer.”

Jack took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. He drank down the last of his brandy and could feel the room tilt a little. “Okay,” he said at last. “You’re right. As usual. I did want to mess with her. I can own that. But I remembered what we discussed and I chose to stay focused.”

Papa reached over and squeezed Jack’s arm. “That’s my man. I know that was difficult for you”

Jack shrugged.

“Discipline,” Papa said, sitting back. “God, I admire discipline. And to think how wrong people were about you. I can’t get over it.”

Jack couldn’t either. The schools he had been thrown out of, his pathetic attempt to become a cop, how even the army—an institution staffed entirely by maniacs and retards—had turned him down. And those reports in the juvenile detention facility. He wasn’t supposed to see those, but he snuck a look when the psychologist got distracted one day: low impulse control, emotional disturbance, personality disorder, all kinds of crap. That day marked the first of several suicide attempts. He had never thought about suicide since meeting Papa. Not once.

Papa stood up and they said good night. Papa shook Jack’s hand, looking him in the eye as he said it, as if saying good night was some special manly ceremony.

Jack went to bed in one of Lloyd Kreeger’s many rooms. He lay on his back for a time with a cellphone in his hand, flicking through images that were almost all of grinning teenagers, quite a few of them Indian-looking. Dark-haired girls making faces or laughing like crazy. The images weren’t labelled, but he was pretty sure which one was her.