A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion] Page 6

  “That’s when I found myself back in front of Nomar, in his office, surrounded by a pack of his guards. He was living in some grotesque party mansion out in la-di-da Ladue. He had rings on his fingers and sunglasses rimmed in gold, a harem servicing him, an entourage filling his glasses and laughing at his jokes. He had everything I thought had been destined for me. Tell me crime doesn’t pay.

  “After my brush with suicide I knew I needed a plan. I had almost finished college, I could have gotten my degree and started as the new man in a company, the intern, the clerk, I could have risen up like every other slob, but there was still a vestige of the can’t-miss kid in me, and I didn’t want to start at the bottom, I wanted to start high up with somebody who knew what I was when I was somebody. With Nomar I didn’t have to say anything, my presence was enough. He had gotten me, just like he told me he would. He was my inevitability and all he had to do was open his arms to bring me into the fold.

  “‘Can’t use you, Gordo,’ he said. ‘Ain’t no room for you.’

  “What the hell was that? I might not have been pro football material anymore, but I was big enough and could still hit, I was my mother’s son after all. He had been chasing me from my childhood and now, when I needed the gig, he was pushing me away? That was bullshit and I told him so. And I must have told him with more than a touch of passion because the room suddenly bristled with heat, guns appearing like rabbits in a room full of magicians.

  “‘You are one sorry-assed fucker,’ he said. ‘Shit. You was the one I was never going to get. That was the point. The whole neighborhood heard me calling out to you. Them other boys they came to me because they couldn’t be you. You were proof of their weakness, you were my control. If I bring you in, it’s like the world shifts and their weakness disappears. Then what do I have? A bullet in the head? Can’t use you, Gordo. But maybe I got something you could use.’

  “That’s when he scrawled a number and a name on a card, tossed it across his big empty desktop.

  “This ain’t for you, mind you, because I truly don’t give a shit about you—nothing more common in this world than an arrogant asshole athlete with a bum knee—but your mother, she was a hell of a lady. I’m doing this for her. You call this number, you ask for Mr. Maambong, you tell him Nomar sent you. And when you make his team, you make sure he pays me my cut. I need a get something out of the mess you made of your life.”

  “And so here I sit,” said Gordon, “with one last chance to make it right. I need this gig, but then it looks like we all need this gig.”

  “We’re all last chancers,” I said. “That’s why we’re here, auditioning to be Hyenas.”

  “How many jobs with the squad you think are waiting on us?” said Riley.

  “More than one for sure,” said Kief. “We all have different skills. Athlete, engineer, hacker, lawyer. The only one of us sort of useless to them is the lawyer.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” I said. “It will be a nice little spur as we compete against each other.”

  “Maybe we should work together,” said Gordon. “Edge out the others before we go head-to-head.”

  “Is that even allowed?” said Riley, glancing over at Bert.

  “Everything is allowed as long as you don’t ask for permission first,” I said. “Joey Mitts taught me that.”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Kief after blowing out a line of smoke. “I like rolling with a crew.”

  “Riley?” I said.

  “Sure, why not. Let’s grind them other suckers into the dirt.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Gordon. “We’ll be the Last Chance Crew.”

  “It’s got a ring to it, doesn’t it?” said Riley.

  “Yes it does,” I said.

  See, it wasn’t so complicated. I had surveyed the chessboard and made my first move. Having an antagonist is how you build a team, so I had built an antagonism between us and them. And for some reason, listening to a confession always puts the confessor in your debt, which is why I had started our string of confessions. A team is a useful thing in any competition: something to support you when you need support; something to betray when the opportunity arises.

  Hyena indeed.

  8. Morning Exercise

  Cassandra, in a tight green bodysuit that glistened in the sun, led the morning run, ten miles on a flat course within some nature preserve full of marsh and reed and skittering bird, along with flocks of birders and their monstrous cameras. She set a mean pace, nothing Gordon, who ran with a predatory grace, or I couldn’t handle, but which left Riley and Kief struggling to keep up. Churning in the lead with Cassandra was the A team, consisting of the frat-boy twins, Don and Derrick, Angela, whose black ponytail bounced as she sprinted forward, and Tom Preston, with his closely mown beard and distant eyes. He was never looking at you, Tom Preston, he was looking through you.

  The Last Chance Crew ran together, falling progressively farther behind with each step. When Riley or Kief struggled for air in the humid morning, I would drop with them and gently bring them up to speed as the other two slowed to absorb us again. We formed a proud pack of laggards and spent the time tossing snark about the crew in the lead.

  “You think they get extra credit for keeping up with Cassandra?”

  “Only after they polish her sneakers.”

  “With their tongues.”

  “Did Mr. Maambong warn you guys against sleeping with her?”

  “Quite specifically.”

  “Almost like a dare.”

  “Good thing, because she’s just my type.”

  “Inaccessible?”

  “That too.”

  “Is there a problem?” said Cassandra, who was waiting for us at a turnoff. “Any of you suffering cardiac arrest?”

  “We’re enjoying the scenery,” I said.

  “How is it?”

  “Getting better all the time,” said Kief.

  Cassandra turned her still-pale face toward him. “Talk less and run more; we have a busy day,” she said before sprinting off.

  The run ended at a squat maintenance building near the entrance to the nature preserve. Mr. Maambong, in his white suit, leaned on his cane at the door, his dark round glasses following our progress.

  “We’ve been waiting,” he said.

  “It wasn’t a race, was it?” I said.

  “Life is a race, Mr. Kubiak,” said Mr. Maambong. “You know that better than anyone. The fit part of the group is inside. Let’s join them, shall we.”

  In a dim space cleared in the center of the building, amidst a welter of workbenches and power machines, two tables had been set up with charming arrays of flowers, yellow blossoms with blue highlights. One of the tables was laden with bottled water, the other with a bounty of apples, bananas, protein bars, little plastic cups of yogurt. I rolled a cool bottle of water against the edge of my forehead as I watched the lead runners huddle together on the far side of the room, trying to hide their smirks.

  In the middle of the floor, illuminated by the room’s one bright light, stood a boxing ring. Two pairs of yellow boxing gloves were slung over the ropes. Bert stood in the middle of the ring in black trousers and a white business shirt.

  “We thought we’d have a friendly competition,” said Mr. Maambong to the assembly. “The positions for which you are applying do not require the martial arts per se, but one never knows when situations will spin out of control. Our deals are not always the most conventional and the sites we travel to are not always the safest, so we appreciate flexibility in all matters. Your opponents will be picked at random. You will each fight one three-minute round. We are merely trying to get a sense of your abilities. If you are fearful or on the edge of being hurt, call out the word ‘submit’ and Bert will ensure that the fight is stopped. Do we understand each other?”

  “But you want us to win, right?” said Don, his chest like twin boulders stretching his T-shirt. He might as well have been cracking his knuckles in anticipation.

 
; “We appreciate winners,” said Mr. Maambong.

  “What are the rules?” I said.

  “We just told you the rules,” said Mr. Maambong. “The fight will last three minutes and if you are afraid of being hurt, just call out ‘submit.’ What could be clearer?”

  “No other rules?”

  “Is my name Queensberry, Mr. Kubiak?”

  There was laughter, which I joined in. Then Mr. Maambong took a bowl from the table and gave it a shake. He pulled a card and read it out loud. “Angela,” he said and then walked the bowl to Angela. Angela reached in for a card of her own.

  “Derrick,” she said, and the smaller of the frat-boy twins raised his arms like he had just won the heavyweight championship.

  Mr. Maambong pulled out another card. “Riley,” he said, and brought her the bowl. She visibly winced as she read the name on her card out loud.

  “Don.”

  Her opponent, with the body of a lumberjack and the broad, ugly face of a boar, said something to his twin and chuckled.

  Mr. Maambong’s hand swirled in the bowl for a moment. “Phil,” he read from the card, before bringing the bowl to me.

  “Kief,” I said, without looking at Kief, short, thin, and weighing about forty pounds less than me, who was standing just a few feet away.

  The final drawing was a formality, Tom Preston’s name being called and his pulling out Gordon’s card.

  “Excellent. We’re due a first-class entertainment. There is a box of rubber mouth guards by the yogurt. No need for chipped teeth or severed tongues. Now let us, as they say, get this show on the road. Angela and Derrick, you two are first.”

  Ding.

  As soon as Cassandra rang the bell, Derrick waded forward like a young bull in a Pottery Barn, throwing out roundhouse rights and lefts, scaring the very air about him, but not his opponent. Angela backed away with what looked like practiced grace. Her arms were longer than Derrick’s and she flicked a few jabs, just enough to show she knew the rudiments of the game. She had played field hockey in college, we later learned, and had been kicked off the team for incessant fighting. I would have liked to see her pop Derrick once but good in the teeth, and she could have done it, too, but she stayed away and let him frustrate himself. As he kept charging, she kept dancing, snapping his head back now and then. Jab, jab. Retreat, shift, retreat. Jab.

  Ding.

  “You ready?” I said to Riley as Bert helped the fighters off with their gloves.

  “That damn bronco’s going to kill me. I’m going to die.”

  “It’s just a friendly boxing match,” said Kief.

  “Does fat face look friendly?”

  I peered over at Don, who was already inside the ring, fitting his thick hands into the yellow gloves. There was something about him that pissed me off—his arrogance, his stupid smile, the way he chuckled. I’ve always thought chuckling was a mark of deranged arrogance; there ought to be a law against it, there ought to be chuckler’s ward in the state hospital for the criminally insane.

  “I’ll trade you cards,” I said.

  “We can’t do that.”

  “Of course we can. No rules, right? You and Kief are a better match anyway.”

  “I can handle you, dude,” said Kief, his hands up in some fake karate position.

  “Sure, and you’re not standing in a puddle. Just do me a favor, Riley, and don’t hurt him too badly.”

  “Are you certain about this?” she said.

  “This whole fight-club thing is stupid,” I said. “I’m a lawyer, you’re a hacker, Kief’s an engineer. Who the hell are they to require us to fight like this for a job? I’ll just rope-a-dope the lug for three minutes and we’ll go on to the next game, which might actually test our applicable skills. Trust me.”

  In the middle of the ring Don hopped from sneaker to sneaker and blasted combinations at his shadow, hook, hook, uppercut, hook. He purposely wasn’t looking at Riley as he played at being a boxer, and so he was a bit surprised when he looked up and saw me climbing through the ropes.

  “Huh?” said Don.

  “What are you doing, Phil?” said Cassandra. “This isn’t your match.”

  I lifted the little card with Don’s name on it and waved it in the air.

  Cassandra looked at Bert, who looked at Mr. Maambong, who stared at me for a moment through his beetle-eye glasses before nodding ever so slightly.

  Ding.

  Don charged out of his corner and socked me in the side so sharply I nearly buckled.

  I backed away and raised my hands and he started slugging at my arms, left right left, each blow like a sledge to the bone.

  He slugged my side again and I fell onto a knee as a hook grazed the top of my head.

  I looked at Bert, who stood still as a statue while Don loaded up once again. So I quick-punched him in the balls. Twice. Bada bing.

  Don staggered back. I leaped up, stepped forward, jammed a sneaker atop his lead foot, and elbowed the sumbitch in the nose, which gave in with a squish, like Silly Putty smacked by a baseball bat.

  I jumped back, danced to the left, to the right. Big Don was bent over, his arms forming an X over his stomach, and he looked up at me with confusion in his eyes, his nose now a mashed melon, gushing blood.

  I spread my arms wide. “I submit,” I said.

  Before Don could take a step forward, Bert was between us, arms out to keep us apart.

  I hopped like I was jumping rope, banged my gloves together, spit the rubber guard onto the canvas to get the bitter taste of copper out of my mouth.

  “That was a nice thing you did for Riley,” said Cassandra. “Taking on Don in her stead. Almost noble.”

  We were standing by the edge of the pool, set between the house and the canal. The whole crew was taking a break after a morning of running and fighting and an afternoon of test taking and puzzle solving, where each movement we made was noted and evaluated. Well, almost the whole crew.

  Cassandra’s red hair was loose, the pieces of her bathing suit were pink and white and small, her glistening lips held the barest hint of a smile. She was as luscious as a ripe plum. I turned from her and looked at Tom Preston, lying on a chaise, his dark chest bared to the sun. On the next chaise over was Don, whose eyes were drugged and whose face was covered with gauze and swaths of tape. Tom Preston was talking softly, and Don, no longer chuckling, was nodding along.

  “I’m neither nice nor noble,” I said.

  “Mr. Maambong will be pleased to hear that.”

  “And you know how much we all want to please Mr. Maambong.”

  “It pays to please Mr. Maambong.”

  I turned my gaze to her. “What about pleasing you?”

  She reached down and with her cool touch gently caressed the growing bruise on my side, before she pressed it. Pain slithered through my ribs like a shiv. “I don’t please easy,” she said.

  The first fight after I’d smashed Don’s ugly face with my elbow had gone as expected. Riley and Kief, both relieved to be facing each other, danced and flailed, each getting in enough shots to show that they were trying while avoiding any heavy combat that could have resulted in something decisive. But it was the second fight that I’d found as illuminating as a slap to the face.

  When the bell dinged, Gordon, broad-chested and quick on his feet, his mop of hair bouncing with each step, shuffled forward and clocked Tom Preston but good right on the jaw. Tom Preston was half a foot shorter and a good fifty pounds lighter than his opponent, who moved with the solid assurance of a natural athlete, despite the long scars on his right knee. Bam: another shot to Tom Preston’s face. A hook to the ribs, a straight that barely missed as Tom Preston ducked and back away, shaking his head to get the cotton out of his brain. Gordon rolled forward with the inevitability of a bulldozer.

  And then Gordon stopped, hopped back, spread his arms, and smiled. It wasn’t an expression of mercy so much as one of solidarity. They gave us three minutes; let’s play. And Tom Preston, after a
moment’s hesitation, stepped forward and put his hands up. They looked like fighters, they danced like fighters, they fired off jabs and hooks, each giving as good as he got, but there was something of the exhibition in it. An agreement had been reached and a bond created. It was almost sweet, and it pissed me off because I recognized that there were skills at work that I hadn’t noticed in my teammate before. Gordon, giving his soulful confession and running with the last chancers, yet bonding with Tom Preston in the ring, playing all sides like a champion. Gordon. Damn.

  There is a moment in every fierce competition when the realization dawns that you are competing against more than you expected and you better step up your game or be annihilated. In Mr. Maambong’s competition that realization dawned during that fight, when Gordon flicked out a friendly left jab and Tom Preston ducked down, leaned to the left, lifted his right foot, and slammed it with all his power into the side of Gordon’s knee, the one with the long surgical scars. The knee snapped with an audible crack, like a rotted branch giving way to an ax, followed by a howl as Gordon tumbled to the canvas and grabbed at his flopping leg.

  Tom Preston now stood over him, his fists still up, his face as impassive as a raw piece of rib eye.

  I turned from the scene to look at Mr. Maambong, to get a sense of his thoughts on Tom Preston’s brutal piece of betrayal. I wondered if I would see a pucker of disappointment, a smile of satisfaction, a flat sneer of indifference. But what I saw was more frightening than all those possibilities. Maambong’s impassive beetle eyes weren’t trained on the carnage in the ring; instead they were trained on me.

  This was not an open competition between me and the other seven for a position in Mr. Maambong’s operation. Riley and Kief, Gordon and Angela, even the frat-boy twins, all of them might be in the midst of their own competitions, but the only opponent I was facing was Tom Preston, with his bland handsomeness and gapped teeth and the instincts of an assassin. Mr. Maambong had set up a one-on-one, and I wasn’t sure the loser would end up in one piece.