Big trouble, p.7
Big Trouble, page 7
"They have a blowgun league?" "Every other Monday night," said Eliot. Anna laughed, causing one of the ring-game contestants, who was at a crucial point in his pullback, to look over and frown. Lowering her voice, Anna asked, "They shoot blowguns in the bar?"
"No, that would be foolhardy," said Eliot. "They shoot them right here, on the patio, while drinking heavily, attempting to hit targets set up only a few feet from the sidewalk, where innocent civilians are walking."
"Better safe than sorry," Anna said. "How'd you do?"
"Well, I never hit the targets, but I never hit any civilians either, as far as I know. Of course it was pretty dark. But I never heard screams. You wanna get some lunch?"
"Sure."
They went inside and sat at a table near the window. Anna gave Eliot back his glasses so he could see the menu. They both ordered fish sandwiches and iced tea.
"So," said Eliot, "did the police come up with anything?"
"No," said Anna, "and I don't think they're going to, either. I guess I'm kind of naive; I pictured them going around with magnifying glasses, you know? Looking for clues!"
"Dusting for prints!" said Eliot. "Analyzing fibers!"
"Yeah," said Anna. "But they're like, 'So somebody took a shot at you. So what's the problem?' "
"Geez, it has to be scary, not knowing who did it."
"Or if they're coming back."
"You think they will?"
"I don't know. But I get the feeling my husband knows something he's not telling me. He's been acting weird, even for him. He left last night and he wasn't back this morning. Which is actually fine with me, although I promise I'm not gonna start dwelling on that subject again."
"It's OK," said Eliot. "Dwell away." He kind of liked it when she dwelled on that subject.
"No," she said, "no more talk about me. Let's talk about you. What do you do?"
"Advertising."
"What kind of advertising?"
"Well, today I did a gazomba ad."
"A what kind of ad?"
"Gazomba. As in, Get a load of those gazombas."
"Ah."
"Maybe we should go back to dwelling on your marriage."
"No, I want to know about the gazomba ad."
And so he told her about Hammerhead Beer, and the Big Fat Stupid Client From Hell. He told her about the CPA next door who hated him. He told her about the rise and sudden fall of his journalism career. He told her about how he and Patty met in college and fell in love and went dancing all the time, and then Matt was born and that was wonderful, but they didn't dance as much, but they swore they would, one of these days, when Matt got a little older, but they never did, and after a while they stopped talking about going dancing, in fact they stopped talking about pretty much everything, and they made love only when neither of them could immediately think of an excuse not to, which happened very rarely, because any excuse would do, starting with "I'm kinda tired tonight," which they both were, every night. He talked about the slow, agonizing slide down the slope of divorce, and how guilty he felt, and how understanding Matt had been, and how that made him feel guiltier. He told her that he drove a Kia.
"Now you," he said.
She told him that she had been married twice, the first time to the guy she dated for her last two years at the University of Florida, who was captain of the tennis team and came from a very wealthy family and was so incredibly handsome that everybody, particularly her mother, drilled into her brain that she would be crazy not to marry him, because they made such a Beautiful Couple.
"We had a really great marriage, no problems at all," she said, "until maybe the second hour of the wedding reception, which is when my maid of honor told me in the ladies' room that my new husband had just put his tongue into her mouth all the way down to her tonsils. This guy just could not keep his wee-wee in his pants. He was like Bill Clinton, but without any domestic policies."
But she stuck with him, she said, because her mother told her that you have to Make the Marriage Work.
"The thing was," she said, "while I was trying to make the marriage work, he was trying to make every woman in Dade and Broward Counties, and generally succeeding. Never marry an incredibly handsome man."
"I won't," Eliot promised.
"So," she said, "after Jenny was born, maybe the fiftieth time it took him three hours to get back from taking the baby-sitter home, I filed for a divorce. That was when I found out that his family became very wealthy by not letting anybody, ever, get a nickel."
"Didn't you have a lawyer?" asked Eliot.
"Oh, sure, I had a lawyer. But my ex-husband had like the entire Supreme Court. So he got basically all the money, and I got Jennifer. Which is why we ended up living in a dump of an apartment, which is why Arthur looked good to me, which I promise I am not going to start dwelling on again."
The lunch lasted for four iced teas. On the way out of the Taurus, Eliot and Anna were accosted by two disabled homeless Vietnam veterans. Except they weren't really disabled homeless Vietnam veterans; they were Eddie and Snake, who were ages nine and six, respectively, when the Vietnam War ended. Snake's ankle injury had given them the idea of being disabled vets; they hobbled around the Grove, hassling people for money, and on some days it was more lucrative than helping people park. Eddie saw it as a potentially important career move.
"Hey, man," he said to Eliot, "can you help out a disabled veteran?"
"No," said Eliot, who recognized Eddie from around the Grove.
"Fuck you," said Eddie. "How about you, pretty lady?" he said to Anna. "You wanna give me something?"
Snake grabbed his crotch and said, "Hey, I'll give you something."
Anna and Eliot kept walking. She said, "And people have the nerve to say romance is dead."
When they reached Anna's car, she said, "Thanks for lunch."
"Hey, my pleasure," Eliot said. "You want to keep my reading glasses, so we could do this again?"
Anna laughed, but didn't answer. She started looking in her purse for her car keys.
Eliot said, "Do you think I'm incredibly handsome?"
She looked up from her purse and studied his face for a moment.
"No," she said.
"Whew," he said.
She laughed, then studied his face some more. She had the greenest eyes.
"Just so you know," she said, "I love to dance."
"Man," said Eddie, watching Eliot and Anna walk away. "I can't believe the way some people treat veterans, after what we done for this country."
"We didn't do shit," Snake pointed out. "We ain't veterans."
"They don't know that," said Eddie. "And I bet I would of been a vet, if I was old enough."
"I think you have to graduate from at least, like, eighth grade," said Snake.
"Well, that ain't the point," said Eddie. "Point is, these people are some ungrateful fucks." He spat a wad of brownish glop on the sidewalk. "We ain't made but three dollars today."
"Speaking of which," said Snake. "Somethin' I wanna do."
Eddie waited.
"You know that little punk at the Jackal?" Snake said. "Who did my ankle?"
"Yeah."
"I heard he works there now, sometimes."
"So?"
"So I wanna pay him a visit."
"I dunno, man. I don't wanna fuck with that bartender again. Him and his baseball bat."
"His bat don't mean shit if we got a gun."
"We ain't got a gun."
"I know a guy can get us one."
Eddie thought about it. "I dunno," he said. "Why don't we just jump the punk outside?"
"Because the cash register is inside."
Eddie looked at Snake.
"So this ain't really about the punk," he said.
"Oh, it's about the punk," said Snake. "And the bartender. And the cash register. Three birds with one stone."
Eddie thought about it.
"I don't know nothin' about no guns," he said.
"Time you learned," said Snake. "Bein' a veteran and all."
five
When the guy walked into the Jolly Jackal, Puggy was sitting at the bar, watching a rebroadcast of The Jerry Springer Show. The topic was husbands who wanted their wives to shave the fuzz off their upper lips. The position of the wives was that fuzz is natural; the position of the husbands was, OK, maybe it's natural, but it's also ugly. The wives were now arguing that if the husbands wanted to see ugly, they might look at their own selves in the mirror, because they were not exactly a threat to Brad Pitt. Nobody on either side of this debate weighed under 250 pounds. So far, there had not been any punching, but Puggy could tell, from the way Jerry Springer was edging away from the stage into the audience, that there soon would be.
The guy who walked into the Jolly Jackal was carrying a briefcase, so Puggy figured he was going to go to the back to talk to the bearded guy, John. That's what the guys with briefcases usually did.
Puggy was not the sharpest quill on the porcupine, but he had figured out that the Jolly Jackal was not a regular bar. There were few drinking patrons: The best customer, as measured in total beers consumed, was, by a large margin, Puggy, who did not pay. The real action at the Jolly Jackal, Puggy noted, took place in the back, at the table where John sat. A couple of times a day, a guy, or maybe several guys, would come in to talk to John. Every few days, Leo the bartender would call Puggy back to the locked room with the crates, and they'd grunt and shove and heave a crate or two into, or out of, the Mercedes, or some van, or sometimes a U-Haul.
Puggy still didn't know what was in the crates. If he had to guess, he'd say it was drugs, although it seemed kind of heavy to be drugs. But basically his position was, as long as they let him watch TV and drink beer, it didn't concern him what was in the crates, or who John and Leo were.
In point of fact, John and Leo—whose real names were Ivan Chukov and Leonid Yudanski—were Russians. They had met in 1986, when they'd both served as maintenance technicians in a Soviet army division whose mission was to protect and defend—which meant occupy and, if necessary, stomp on—the Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan.
This was not a plum assignment. The Soviet Socialist Republic of Grzkjistan was a remote, harsh, mountainous, extremely tribal nation whose economy was based primarily on revenge. The Grzkjistanis spent their adult lives thinking up and carrying out elaborate plots to kill and maim each other in connection with bitter, centuries-old grudges, many of them involving goats.
The only group that the Grzkjistanis hated more than each other was outsiders, which meant that the Russian soldiers were as popular as ringworm. Fraternization between the two cultures was officially banned, but every now and then a soldier would try to hook up with one of the Grzkjistani women. This required a breathtaking level of horniness, because after centuries of inbreeding, the average Grzkjistani was, in terms of physical attractiveness, on a par with the average Grzkjistani goat.
Nevertheless, such liaisons did occasionally take place, and when they were discovered, as they inevitably were, the army had learned that it was wise to get the soldier involved out of the country immediately, because otherwise, sooner or later, he would be found tied naked to a rock with his genitals nowhere near the rest of his body.
And thus most of the soldiers assigned to protect the Republic of Grzkjistan wisely elected to perform their mission by staying in their barracks and getting as drunk as humanly possible. Ivan and Leonid were in an excellent position to facilitate this mission, because, as maintenance technicians, they had access to large metal drums full of solvents and fluids that could, taken internally, put a real buzz in a person's brain. Unfortunately, some of these chemicals could also permanently shut down a person's central nervous system; the trick was to know exactly what was safe to consume, and in what quantities. Ivan and Leonid had developed considerable expertise in this branch of maintenance, and pretty soon they built up a nice little franchise, supplying recreational beverages to their comrades in exchange for money, cigarettes, Debbie Does Dallas videos, et cetera. Ivan was the brains, good at organizing and negotiating; Leonid was the muscle, good at keeping customers in line, if necessary by fracturing their skulls. As their business grew, word got around that if you needed something—and not just something to drink—Ivan and Leonid were the guys to see.
One day in 1989, a man came all the way from Moscow to visit Ivan and Leonid. He wore nice clothes that actually fit, and he identified himself as a businessman, which Ivan and Leonid correctly understood to mean that he was a criminal. The man had an attractive proposition: He was willing to give Ivan and Leonid cash American dollars, and all he wanted in return was some machine guns that—while not technically the property of Ivan and Leonid—were basically just sitting around.
And thus Ivan and Leonid moved up the career ladder from bootleggers to arms merchants. The timing was perfect: The Soviet Union was imploding, and Moscow was having trouble feeding, let alone paying, its far-flung troops. At remote outposts such as Grzkjistan, discipline and morale—not to mention inventory controls—were virtually nonexistent. Ivan and Leonid found that if you were paying American dollars, you could have just about any piece of military hardware you wanted. You need machine guns? Right over here! A tank? Pick one out, comrade!
Ivan and Leonid had a knack for procuring and selling army property, and their new business grew rapidly. When their terms of enlistment expired, they left the army, but they maintained their network of contacts throughout the vast and increasingly chaotic Soviet military complex. They expanded their customer base, sometimes traveling abroad; soon they were dealing with foreign governments, terrorists, revolutionaries, paramilitary organizations, religious leaders, and random wackos in places all over the world, such as Idaho.
In the marketplace of international arms sales, Ivan and Leonid developed a reputation for flexibility and customer service. Unlike their larger competitors in the arms trade, particularly the American government, Ivan and Leonid didn't put you through a lot of red tape, and they would go the extra mile to locate that hard-to-find item. For example, when a Jamaican Marxist group called the People's United Front was looking to trade a large quantity of high-grade marijuana for an attack submarine, Ivan was able to broker a complex deal involving—in addition to the Soviet navy—the government of Paraguay, a Chicago street gang named the Cruds, and the Church of Scientology. The deal culminated, six months later, in the delivery of a semi-reconditioned World War n-era Russian sub, the Vrmsk, which the People's United Front renamed the Mighty Sea Lion. As it turned out, the People's United Front had considerably more zeal than nautical expertise, and the Mighty Sea Lion, while attempting a dive on its first revolutionary mission—an attack outside Kingston Harbor on the new Disney-built luxury cruise ship Goofy—sank like an anvil. But this did not reflect badly on Ivan and Leonid. They were in sales, not training.
By the late 1990s, with the Russian economy melting down, Ivan and Leonid decided to move their operation abroad, and they settled on South Florida. They had visited the area when they had worked on the submarine deal, and they liked the warm weather. They also liked the seaport and airport, which were very hospitable to the international businessperson; if you dealt with the right people, you could bring in almost anything, including probably live human slaves, without having to answer a bunch of pesky questions from Customs. Guns were easy. Ivan and Leonid always got a kick out of going through the airport security checkpoint, seeing surly personnel in bad-fitting blazers grimly scrutinizing the Toshiba laptops of certified public accountants, while, in the cargo tunnels a few feet below, crates containing weapons that could bring down a building were whizzing past like shit through a goose.
So Ivan and Leonid, now calling themselves John and Leo, became the proprietors of the Jolly Jackal. They found it amusing to be, once again, in the field of recreational beverages. And the bar was good cover for their real business: Random people could come and go at all hours, and nobody official cared what was going on, as long as John and Leo paid off the various municipal inspectors. The only downside to owning a bar, they found, was that people sometimes came in and actually wanted to buy drinks. But Leo was able to keep that to a minimum via a combination of poor service and occasionally hitting patrons with his bat.
Miami turned out to be a great market: It seemed as if everybody here wanted things that went bang. You had your professional drug-cartel muscle people, who needed guns that shot thousands of rounds per minute to compensate for the fact that their aim was terrible. You had your basic local criminals, who wanted guns that would scare the hell out of civilians; and your civilians, trying to keep up with your local criminals. You had your hunters, who, to judge from the rifles they bought, were after deer that traveled inside armored personnel carriers. You had your "collectors" and your "enthusiasts," who lived in three-thousand-dollar trailers furnished with seven-thousand-dollar grenade launchers. You had an endless stream of shady characters representing a bewildering variety of revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, counter-counterrevolutionary and counter-counter-counterrevolutionary movements all over the Caribbean and Central and South America, who almost always wanted guns on credit.
But their best local customer, by far, was a local outfit that was always in the market for serious, big-ticket weapons, the kind of weapons real armies fight real wars with. John and Leo had no idea why anybody in Miami would need so much firepower, nor did they care. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was that when they got hold of a serious weapon, this outfit would usually buy it, no haggling, for cash.
The man who delivered the cash was the man who walked into the Jolly Jackal with the briefcase while Puggy was watching the couples argue about lip fuzz on Jerry Springer. Leo, standing at the cash register, nodded as the man walked past. John rose from his table and quietly greeted the customer by name.
"Hello, Mr. Herk," he said.
It was, indeed, Arthur Herk, spouse abuser, embezzler, and legal owner of Puggy's tree. Arthur's employer, Penultimate, Inc., builder of faulty buildings, was John and Leo's big local customer. The reason Penultimate was buying weapons—in fact the whole reason Penultimate existed in the first place—was that it was planning to take over Cuba once Fidel was dead. Quite a few organizations in South Florida, not to mention Cuba, were planning to do this. One thing you could say for sure about post-Castro Cuba: It would not lack for leadership.
