Marked Man

58

Did it rankle? You bet it did.

What do you know about changing your life? had said Theodore Purcell. Nothing. You’re a punk, adrift in the wind, and you always will be. You’re weak. You’re normal. You end up with nothing because that’s what you deserve. Consider the source, I told myself. What lessons did I want to learn from a pornographer with a homicidal past and a crippled soul? But still it rankled. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because he was right, and I knew it in my gut.

The whole flight home from L.A., while Monica sat silent and morose beside me, I ruminated on the words Theodore Purcell had spit at me. Monica had met me at the airport with a silent nod and a poignant sadness in her moist eyes. What was I to tell her? How do you convince a believer that her faith is misplaced?

“How are you holding up?” I said to her as we waited to board.

“Let’s not talk, okay, Victor?”

“You got the right guy for that, Monica. If you want quiet, that’s what you’ll get. I can be as tight-lipped as the-”

“Ssssh,” she said, and I got the idea.

So we sat together in silence on the plane as Monica stared blankly out the window at the silver wing of the plane and I thought about all I hadn’t yet achieved in my life.

My entire career I had been whining about my lack of opportunity. Clients weren’t paying bills, opponents were judgment-proof, the million-dollar case had not come walking in my door. Boohoo. I had become a sob sister of defeat as my legal practice collapsed, my love life grew ever more pathetic, my apartment lay in ruins. But it wasn’t my fault, I told myself. Boohoo-hoo. Teddy Pravitz had taken control of his life and turned himself into Theodore Purcell, and whatever the results, at least he hadn’t sat back and whined. And the same with Stanford Quick, who had made his move and taken all that to which I had aspired, my job, my house, my dog, my SUV, my pretty blond wife, my life. My life. They had seized their opportunities, I had let mine wallow.

Finally, too angry at myself not to want to hurt someone else, I said to Monica, “It’s not her, you know.”

“I know,” she said.

I was frankly shocked. “When did you figure it out? When she referred to Ronnie as a he?”

“Before then. I knew it right away.”

“How?”

“I just knew.”

“So why did you stay the night?”

“I liked her,” she said. “And I wanted to know why I had been led to her.”

“Because that lying bastard was trying to set you up,” I said.

“No, something else was behind it, I’m certain. Lena asked me to come back and visit. Maybe to stay with her for a while.”

“You’re not thinking of actually taking her up on it?”

“She was nice.”

“It was all an act.”

“Not all of it. Everything has a purpose, Victor. There’s a message here, if I just listen hard enough.”

“The message is to get help.”

“You’re being mean again.”

“The lie didn’t shake your faith?”

“Only the truth can do that.”

“Well, that’s what we’re going to find back in Philly. Are you ready for the truth, Monica?”

“I’ve been ready all my life.”

“We’ll see, won’t we?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find your sister,” I said, “and maybe change my life in the process.”

“How?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

And that’s what I tried to figure out the rest of the long trip home. Maybe it was time to take to heart the lessons I had been learning from Teddy and Stanford Quick. Sure, I knew that Purcell was a total creep and Quick was a total corpse, but still, they had known more than I ever would about taking hold of the reins of life and forcing it to do your will. And sure, Nietzsche was an incestuous nut job with acute gynophobia and the mustache of a porn star, but maybe the guy had a point. Leap the abyss or stay on the wrong side of life for all eternity.

Enough with the law of either/or, enough with letting the richest fields lie fallow for matters of decorum or quaint moral qualms. It was time to seize my opportunities. To seize my destiny. To follow the lead of Sammy Glick and create my own damn success. It was time, damn it, to get some cable in my life.

And son of a bitch if I didn’t come up with a plan.