While Drowning in the Desert

Chapter 13

Sami didn’t shoot me.

As we headed further south into the bleakest terrain I have ever seen (and I have been to Bayonne, New Jersey), he just kept trying to interrupt Nathan’s latest stream-of-semiconsciousness soliloquy with a persistent line of questioning.

“Do you recognize me?” Sami asked.

“So Arthur was laughing and-Sure I recognize you.”

“Who am I?”

“Who are you?” Nathan asked. “You’re the for-shit, fekokteh, no-goodnik who is kidnapping me, that’s who you are. So Arthur-”

“I mean before that, okay?”

“Before what?”

“Before I kidnapped you, okay?” Sami asked. “Do you recognize me?”

“No,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry, but I do not recognize you. I’m eighty-six years old, sometimes I don’t recognize me. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is this old man?’ So, excuse me, I don’t recognize me sometimes, I’m supposed to recognize you?”

Sami got an especially crafty look in his eye.

“Okay,” he said. “So you don’t recognize me as your… neighbor, for example?”

“And Arthur Minsky, who was a gentleman-What?”

“So you don’t recognize me as your neighbor, for example?”

“Excuse me,” Nathan said. “I live in a development that didn’t get developed. What neighbors? I got no neighbors. What I got is a burned-up smelly mess next door. So, are you my neighbor?”

“No, no, no, no, no, okay?” Sami said. “That was just an example.”

“Example of what?” Nathan shook a cigarette out of his pack and started to light it.

“Of how you might recognize me,” Sami said. “Please don’t smoke.”

Nathan took a drag of the cigarette and went into his usual coughing spasm. When he was finished he said, “I don’t recognize you.”

“And,” Sami said happily, “I don’t recognize you.”

“Must have been two other guys,” I said.

Nobody laughed, so I said, “Having established that nobody recognizes anybody, why don’t we just turn around, you can drop us back at the rest stop, and we’ll all forget about the whole silly thing?”

This sounded like a very good idea to me. Especially because Sami now turned off the blacktop onto a dirt road. I have learned from long experience watching movies, that when a guy kidnaps you and takes you for a ride on a dirt road in a vast desert, you can cue the vultures.

And the smoke in the car was going to kill us all anyway.

“So what do you think?” I asked.

“I don’t know what to think, okay? ” Sami said. “I have to make a phone call.”

“To tell you what to think?” I asked.

“Yes, okay?”

Sami punched some numbers on his portable phone. Being the ace private eye that I am, I memorized the number so that if I lived, I could get the name of the guy he was talking to.

“Hello, Heinz?” he said. There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll stop using your name on the phone, Heinz, okay?… Yes, I still have him. Someone else, too… You don’t have to yell, Heinz… Sorry, I forget… Who else? Some younger guy, I don’t know. Says he is working for the old man… What?…Okay.”

Sami turned to me.“Are you an insurance investigator?”

“No.”

“He says he isn’t, Heinz, okay?… Okay, I’ll ask.”

Sami turned to me again. “Do you know Craig Schaeffer?”

“No.”

“He doesn’t know him,” Sami told Heinz.

“He says you’re lying,” Sami said to me.

“Who does?” I asked.

“He-” Sami said. “The person I’m talking with.”

“I’m not lying.”

Sami got back on the phone. “He says he’s not lying, Heinz… He’s lying when he says that?… Okay, I’ll ask.”

“Are you a Jew?” Sami asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

It was a truthful response, seeing as how I was, to quote Smollett, “a love-begotten babe” and could only answer to half my lineage.

Nathan interrupted his soliloquy long enough to observe, “He’s too stupid to be a Jew.”

“He’s not a Jew,” Sami said into the phone.

“I’m a Jew,” Nathan said.

“Heinz said that even if you were a Jew you’d lie about being one,” Sami said to me.

“Okay,” I answered. “I’m a Jew.”

Nathan moaned.

“He is a Jew,” Sami said happily.

“If he’s a Jew,” Nathan said, “I’m an Arab.”

“I’m an Arab,” Sami said.

“Of course,” groaned Nathan.

“Good news, Heinz! The old man does not recognize me. I don’t have to take care of him!” Sami said into the phone. “What? Both of them?”

Nathan said, “Of course. I get kidnapped by an Arab talking to a Nazi on the telephone.”

“Both of them, Heinz?!”

Both of them what? I wondered. This didn’t sound good.

“Both of them what?” I asked.

“I don’t know about this, Heinz, okay?”

“Both of them what?!”

“We had a girl at Minsky’s used to do an Arab routine,” Nathan observed. “Not that she was an actual Arab, which she wasn’t. She was a French Canadian. Name of Paulette something. Did a belly dance. Girl had a belly flat like a sheet of glass. Lovely girl. Used to go out with a fellow with a glass eye named Hannigan…”

I could have made him happy and asked what the name of the other eye was, but I was too concerned about Sami’s conversation with Heinz. Sami’s complexion at that moment looked a lot more Scandinavian than Semitic. He was ashen and blubbering, “I don’t know about this, okay?” several times.

“I don’t know about this, okay?”

“Let me talk to him,” I suggested.

He didn’t let me talk to him. He just said, “Yes, Heinz, I understand,” and hung up the phone.

“What is it you understand, Sami?” I asked.

“What I understand,” Sami said sadly, “is that I’m supposed to take care of you. Both of you, okay?”

“And by ‘take care of,’” I said, “you mean…”

He nodded.

This time I went for the gun.