Born Slippy Read online

  “Weren’t the Bartons home?” Frank asked.

  “They were all asleep in bedrooms,” Tracy said. “It was like 3am. It landed in the living room and took out most of the kitchen, but no one was hurt.”

  “Another couple of feet any direction and somebody’d be dead,” said Trog. Dmitry stared at his hands.

  They sat silent, the presence of death making Frank aware of his own carcass. He watched his arm raise his coffee mug to his lips from somewhere else.

  “They’re pretty shook up,” Tracy said. “As you can imagine.”

  “The only good thing,” Trog went on, “is that we don’t have to put a new engine in the thing.”

  “New engine?”

  “Yeah, you didn’t know?” Trog asked him. “Serious rod problems. Dimatteo’s Garage said it would be a minimum of four grand to get the thing saleable.”

  He clocked Dmitry, who was looking out the front window. He pointedly stared at him, but Dmitry wouldn’t look back.

  Trog decided it was time to change the subject. “I hear it’s a pretty fancy mansion you’re building down there,” he said.

  “Yeah, it is,” he said. And it was. It would take quite a few motorhomes thrown from the sky to take it down.

  They small-talked their way through the next half hour, Trog doing a rant against the income distribution that allowed Paul to build a mansion while farmworkers in California lived in tents. And carpenters in Connecticut, Frank could have added, but he was too preoccupied. After a bit more nonsense, Trog and Dmitry got up to leave. Dmitry was headed to Boston on the late bus, flying back to Britain the next day. Tracy gave them both equally warm, equally chaste hugs goodbye — she was always a pretty good dissembler — and then they all walked out to Trog’s truck.

  “So if you were leaving today, what were you planning to do, Dmitry? Leave me with the bum engine?”

  “No, Franky. I was planning to stay another week. When this happened I moved my flight up.” He looked wary now, alert, snapped out of his lethargic apathy.

  “But you’re leaving us to clean up.”

  “I called your insurance, Franky, and reported it,” Dmitry said. “They will be taking care of everything.”

  “They didn’t ask you to stay, or give a statement, or anything?”

  “No. In fact, Franky, you should know — I didn’t give my name. I guess they assumed I was you when I called.”

  They were looking down the hill, down at the disaster, outlined with Snowe’s yellow tape.

  “So they think I’m the one who parked it on a hill without putting it in park?”

  “It was vandalism,” Trog said. “These fucking hillbilly kids, snorting meth and opioids, you know how it is. It doesn’t matter who parked it.”

  “OK.” Frank knew he should be figuring out what this meant, liability-wise, but he was too stunned. People had almost died.

  “The Blue Book is still at $8,500, Franky,” Dmitry said. “They will send you a check. The difference will pay the deductible.”

  As if that made everything all right.

  “And the Bartons’ house?”

  Trog answered. “Their insurance guy was down there this morning. He said the two insurance companies will figure it out.” Trog was a worldwide conspiracy theorist, a person who assumed the CIA, the KGB, the interlocking multinational corporate directorate, the Chinese, and the Mafia were all in cahoots, that they were all out to fuck us, the little guys, and that they were about to turn the Earth into an eternal fireball any day now. At the same time, although the entire world was careening toward cataclysm, his own little corner of it was always looking up, doing great, about to bloom forth: he was a universal pessimist, a familial optimist. The economy was always heading for the toilet for everyone except CEOs and Blue Chip coupon clippers, but he, personally, against the odds, was always about to make a big score. “The insurance flack said, by the way, that it wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever seen,” he added. “Hard to believe that.”

  “I’m sorry, Franky, if —” Dmitry said, uncharacteristically fumbling for words, “If, you know, there’s any, well, unpleasantness.”

  “If?”

  “I mean for you, with the insurance.”

  “So just to be clear,” Frank said, unable to keep the blooming ire from his voice. “As far as anyone knows, I was the one who parked the motorhome up there. This is on me.”

  “Franky!” Tracy said again, this time scolding him as if he was being needlessly oversensitive in not wanting to be blamed for destroying someone’s house.

  “Well,” Trog said. “Legally, the thing is yours, nobody was driving, so like I say it doesn’t matter who parked it. I don’t think you have to worry, though. They could never prove negligence or anything. So unless one of those cretin kids spontaneously confesses, it’s going down as a freak accident. You don’t have to worry.”

  Frank was always much more comfortable when Trog was declaiming against the Republican Party or the New World Order, always thrown off by his silver-lining side. Not to worry? Untold Bartons almost died.

  And he was thrown off by Dmitry’s guilty moping, too. Not like him to stand there quiet, with his head hanging.

  Tracy put a hand on the back of Dmitry’s shoulder, as if he was the one who needed comforting. Was it possible that Frank was alone in seeing that Dmitry had pushed the motorhome down the hill himself, that because the engine problem had made it unsaleable, he had involved Frank not just in a freakish liability suit but in an insurance scam — was he the only one? What the hell?

  Finally he turned to Trog, and without thinking about it, blurted: “What makes you think it was kids on meth?”

  “Who else?” Trog asked.

  “He probably thinks I did it,” Dmitry muttered.

  “Oh, Franky!” Tracy again overemphasized.

  “Did you do it, Dmitry? Did you push it down the hill?” Frank asked.

  “Of course not, Franky.” The of course was, of course, a mistake. It gave him away as much as the moping.

  “Fuck, Franky,” Trog said. “It’s not bad enough?” It pissed Frank off that they were both covering for him.

  “Maybe it was the Trilateral Commission, Trog,” Frank said. He was a loose cannon, and felt a need to pass this gaping wound he felt somewhere, anywhere. He knew he should be quiet, but he was leaking at all the seams.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Trog asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing. I’m the asshole.”

  They all stood there, the New England countryside spread before them, the quilted fields with treelines as perfect as Lincoln’s beard, in odd serene contrast to the four twisted souls, bristling at each other, seething for their own separate reasons. Except maybe Dmitry, who wasn’t agitated — he had deflated again and just looked sad.

  Like that was good enough.

  PART THREE

  2013

  Frank had had one last chance, on that first, fateful trip to Taiwan, to talk with Dmitry about his dire straits, the day he was leaving, his head full of Yuli and not much more. Prabam drove him to the immaculate Credit Lyonnais building on the way to the airport and Dmitry came out to meet them. He and Frank walked across the street to a Starbucks, where they were handed large lattes the minute they walked in. He must have ordered them from the office. He said something in Chinese to the clerk and they walked back out.

  “Don’t we have to pay?”

  “I bought this franchise, Franky, once I calculated how much I was spending here. It’s a fine product, Starbucks. The people on the Green Tortoise all seemed to think Starbucks was the Great Satan, and we would ride around for miles looking for substitutes, which baffled me. I tried to explain that Nescafé was in fact the Great Satan. They had no idea what I was talking about.” He was keeping up the banter, but it was obvious he was worried.

  “So what’s the trouble?” Frank asked and Dmitry looked at him with that assessor’s gaze, as if he were not so much read
ing Frank’s expression as doing math.

  “Nothing in particular. You have to understand, Franky. When you deal with the sums I do, you necessarily end up dealing with some perfectly atrocious people.”

  “Criminals,” Frank said.

  “Yes, and worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Yes, heads of state.”

  Frank laughed.

  “Well, naturally that works as a witticism, Franky, but it is also true. You know who Robert Mugabe is?”

  “The dictator, from Zimbabwe.”

  “Yes.”

  “You take care of Mugabe’s money?”

  “Of course not, Franky, or I wouldn’t have used him as an example. But a lot of people just as bad, and almost all of them richer — Zimbabwe has a tiny GDP.”

  “The generals from Myanmar.”

  “No comment.”

  “That guy in Sudan.”

  “No comment.”

  “Putin.”

  “I wish. Now there’s an account. But they do it all in-house. If they need a banker they seize a bank. But you get the picture.”

  He ushered Frank back across the street. Dmitry looked like a different species among the passing Taiwanese, a foot taller and a foot wider, much slower and whiter.

  “You don’t feel like you’re aiding and abetting genocide helping these guys?”

  “Well, that’s rather dramatic, isn’t it? But look, you know that I knew, the minute I started to tell you this, that you would lecture me, right? That you would launch into a dissertation on my ethics?”

  They had walked back to the car, waiting in front of the snazzy glass office building, under the Credit Lyonnais logo. Prabam got out and waited at a discreet distance, ready to grab the door.

  “And you also know that I already know exactly what you’re going to say, that I know the lecture by heart. So can we please cut to the chase and say, you are absolutely right, point taken, and then move on?”

  Frank didn’t feel that needed a response.

  “As you know, the accounts in your name, with money for you and for my family —”

  “I don’t really need the money any more, the retirement account, I’m doing fine, doing well.”

  “Yes, that’s wonderful, Franky, but we are not talking about that kind of money, not pay-the-mortgage money. We’re talking about owning a few thousand performing mortgages, that kind of money. Your-own-plane-and-island money. And since there is a possibility that, should the worst-case scenario occur and I disappear —”

  “Disappear?”

  “Come, Franky, don’t play coy. Some of these people have no qualms about killing off an entire ethnic group, much less disposing of a witness to their embezzlement. So it could happen. I am fairly certain that I have enough safeguards in place —”

  “Safeguards? Prabam’s great, but doesn’t seem like much of a bodyguard.”

  “It’s not like that, Franky. This is not the Hollywood version, the lone killer, the foiling of security systems, the car chase. There aren’t enough bodyguards in the world to protect you from these people. They’ll irradiate your entire town to get you. If they decide you need to die, you die. But I have made clear the retributive exposure that would follow upon my death, what hell would break loose — legally and financially, that is, not Bruce Willis with some big guns. So I think we are all clear, Franky, and do not worry, I’m not asking you to be involved with anything along those lines; I have people in place.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “But there is always the chance that irrationality triumphs. These people are sociopaths, naturally, and well — like living in California, it makes sense to be prepared for an earthquake.”

  He was going to say something else, but stopped himself, before concluding: “If there is an earthquake, you take care of the family.”

  “The family.”

  “Yes, Franky, I can count on you there, can’t I? And don’t look so glum! There may be nothing to worry about at all. The only thing, right now, that you need to worry about,” he said, making the smallest of facial gestures to the driver, who opened the door for Frank, whereupon he got, semi-automatically, into the car, “is catching your plane.”

  Prabam had lowered the window while he held the door for him, and as he closed it, Dmitry leaned down.

  “I’m glad you came, Franky, to see me in my native environs,” he said, and then he turned to go. “Safe trip!”

  Prabam got in the front seat, and as he pulled from the curb Dmitry was already disappearing into the building.

  Frank felt, what? Foreboding? Mourning, almost. Did he lecture Dmitry that much? Maybe he did. Why? Obviously it did no good. They had been talking about ethics for over a decade now, and he was more glaringly amoral every time Frank saw him. So why did Dmitry keep asking for more, and why did Frank come here? Did some part of Dmitry want to be talked out of this life he’d chosen? Did he want moral support and guidance, however much he said he didn’t? Or what?

  Frank stood up, over the Pacific, massaged his neck and walked toward the restroom. People were watching movies or sleeping, the plane dark. He flashed on a future in which he needed to take care of Yuli and the boys, and in the process assume control over some evil empire of Dmitry’s making, running an international cartel from the glass penthouse of that gleaming building, and realized Dmitry was right, that the only way he could think of that kind of life was in Hollywood terms — every image, every notion, every possibility corrupted by cinema and novels, double-crossers and assassins, guns and fedoras, felonious schemes and drugged drinks, suckers and mugs.

  The only thing that seemed real was Yuli.

  However ignorant Frank was, however mixed up he was about Dmitry and Yuli and the phantasmagoria of high-rise brothels and fight clubs and genocidal fortunes, whatever incalculable combination of temperaments and contingencies and conspiracies were at work, he could look back at that afternoon, meeting Yuli in their living room, as ground zero, as the day his life took a solid left turn into oncoming traffic, as the beginning of his one and only true, hopeless, and endless love. The moment when everything came together, and everything started to fall apart.

  Frank had no idea how Dmitry did it, how he managed all those mistresses and sex partners and a marriage. As soon as he got back from Taiwan, he found it impossible to compartmentalize. Isa picked him up at LAX and drove them to Versailles for Cuban roast pork on the way home, and he found it agony to sit across the table from her. She was a sweet person, really, they had had a great sex life for the last several years, and they thoroughly enjoyed each other most of the time they were vertical too. He was constantly surprised by the depth and subtlety of her wit. She learned languages easily, and could throw Spanish around with his workers, making them laugh and yearn, and she could quote French poetry, even say some things in Chinese and Japanese.

  For all that, she was a vocationally lost soul. She kept fretting about what she was going to do with her life. She loved every job she had for a week, and then hated it with a passion, convinced that it was taking her farther from the career she was meant to pursue. She just had no idea what that career was supposed to be. This drove Frank nuts, but it was really her problem, not his or theirs, except that she also wanted to have kids. Frank thought of his own mother, stuck at home with her kids, under the thumb of her fearsome, tyrannical husband, frustrated, sickly half the time, absent-mindedly binge-drinking her way to the hospital every year or two. Her problems were not Isa’s, he knew, but he had always assumed his mother’s depression had something to do with not having meaningful work. She was a big reader, which is why Frank was a big reader. She could have done anything and instead she just languished. And like his mother, and Tracy for that matter, Isa was languishing. It wasn’t fair, Frank knew, to project his mother’s dejection onto them, but the simple fact was that Isa was unhappy a good half of the time. Unhappy is not fun to live with. Raising kids with an unhappy woman? That seemed unfair to the kids, if nothi
ng else.

  Versailles was crowded, as always, and across from each other at a tiny Formica two-top, he immediately missed being in the car: sitting in the front seat, both looking forward, her eyes on the road gave them both a little psychic distance. At the restaurant, there they were, seeing each other. She looked stunning, her ridiculously long auburn hair shiny and luxurious, wearing stuff she knew he liked, offering him the guileless beauty of her eyes. They ordered right away and were brought a beer instantaneously, as always seemed to happen at Versailles. It was like the waiters carried some in refrigerated pockets.

  “So your big Asian adventure,” she said, not unkindly. “Was it all you hoped?” She had met Dmitry twice. She didn’t like him. Most women didn’t.

  “It is different there,” was all he managed. I’m an idiot, he thought. She had to notice how evasive that was.

  He had met Isa at a blues bar so soon after his journalist decided, unilaterally, not to renew his option that he assumed he was just having a rebound affair. He had been at a nadir, a month or so after he got to town, a little dip in the chart before the business really got going, and the sunshine had started to feel like mockery rather than beneficence, the beautiful people the same way. For a moment he hadn’t been sure about LA at all, hadn’t been sure he’d stay, hadn’t been sure of anything. Isa, as it turned out, wasn’t sure of anything either, so there you have it.

  She was ten years younger than him, and a serious ten years — when they met he was thirty-two and worried about getting old, she was twenty-two, painfully young, but already on about her biological clock. She had plenty of problems. Her mother, who had been sexually abused by her grandfather, had been a psychological mess, and, to top it off was felled by cancer when Isa was only seventeen. A year later her high school boyfriend died of leukemia and a college boyfriend bought it on a motorcycle not too long after that. She spent a couple years of celibacy dealing with the belief that she brought death to those she loved, which was absurd but nonetheless real, since the feeling overwhelmed every invitation to intimacy. When she emerged from those depths, at least partially, she was met by a series of further disasters: dates who turned into rapists, lovers who turned out to be secretly married in other states, that kind of thing.