Born Slippy Read online

  And then, bizarrely, Dmitry showed up. Frank got a call one morning with a Las Vegas area code.

  “Good morning, Franky!” he said all bright and cheery.

  “You’re here.”

  “No, Franky, that’s an illusion created by our modern communications system, which allows me to speak to you from a great distance and sound like I am standing right next to you; this marvelous invention is called, euphoniously, telephony. I am not there, I’m in Las Vegas, Nevada.” His accent added an R to the end of Nevada.

  “Are you coming to LA? Family with you?”

  “No, Franky, you sly dog!” Was he that transparent? “I’m alone, training at a dojo here for the last month, getting ready for the world championships next week.”

  “Sly dog?” he said. “World championships?”

  “No comment and yes, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships, Franky. I will be competing in a number of different categories. They are in a town called Fullerton, California, do you know where that is?”

  “Yeah, twenty or thirty miles from here. Close.”

  “Excellent, Franky. I was hoping you would be my videographer for the event. I’ve brought a camera.”

  One thing that had surprised Frank was how solicitous Isa’s single girlfriends turned out to be once she was gone. Were they spies, or was it some kind of rubbernecking at the roadkilled relationship? Or — and this is the depressing realization he was leaning toward — was the near-illicit thrill of fucking your friend’s ex the allure? However bad he had felt before about his night with Matty, or his bizarre fixation on Yuli, he had to admit it seemed all the more grotesque seen from the other side. It was impossible for him to even think about any of them romantically. He feared he had just made the most harrowing blunder of his life, that he had doomed himself to a life of grievous loneliness and remorse by letting her go, that no one, no one would ever love him again with her care and enthusiasm and intelligence. He knew — he knew, blah, blah, blah — it sickened even him to hear himself, knowing full well that it was entirely his own fault and that it’s the same pathetic shit everyone says when they ruin a relationship. But that didn’t make it any less true.

  And then, always, offstage, left and right, still, Yuli.

  One of the girlfriends, Kristine, had wheedled him into going to the farmer’s market with her on the Saturday morning of Dmitry’s event, supposedly for his own good. Since he didn’t really want to do it, he was glad to cancel. He called and explained that a friend had unexpectedly shown up in town from Asia, and was only here briefly, so he’d have to reschedule.

  “Is it that Dmitry?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, nonplussed.

  “Man, Isa hated him,” she said.

  Why do people save up things to tell you after you break off a relationship? What is that about?

  “I know,” he said. “Well, maybe not hated.”

  “Yeah, hated,” she said. “She said you turned into a dick every time you spent time with him.”

  “Gee,” he said. “I’m sorry we won’t be spending the morning together, Kristine. You could tell me about all the other ways I’m a dick.” He hoped it sounded like banter.

  “It would take more than a morning,” she said.

  The odd thing is that he really did think she wanted to give a romantic relationship a try with him. And he did think it would take her more than a morning for her to tell him what a dick she thought he was. People are odd.

  The competition was in a mammoth gym on the CalState Fullerton campus, with thousands of contestants and fans and staff milling about, thirty rows of bleachers up either side. “The thing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu,” Dmitry said, as he signed in for the day’s matches at the entrance, “is that there is no striking. You can throw, but the majority of the fight is grappling, groundwork, we call it. My doctor convinced me that blows to my head weren’t the best idea, and it turns out I’m marginally better at this, too.” He was as keyed up as Frank had ever seen him. “I’ve been winning quite a few matches. In fact, I have yet to lose. After twelve Federation fights I’m undefeated, including the two here yesterday. That’s the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation, Franky, don’t accept substitutes.”

  The championships had started on Friday afternoon, but one of Frank’s few remaining security projects, in Mandeville Heights, needed his attention for the usual reason — the customer was trying to play contractor and screwing everything up. When Frank arrived Saturday, everyone seemed to know Dmitry, some because they trained at his Las Vegas dojo, some from other competitions, some he had met the day before. Matches were starting in the many rings, the men in the traditional keikogi, the broadcloth pajamas and belt that are regulation attire, circling each other or wrestling, a referee hovering and giving points, judges and coaches and photographers and entourages along the edges of the mat. Spectators would occasionally burst into cheers or shrieks in different corners of the stadium. A dozen matches were underway simultaneously. They found the mat where Dmitry’s next match was to be and set Frank up with his camera and tripod in some bleachers above it.

  Dmitry went down to warm up, and Frank watched the bizarre collection of humanity that had gathered for this event. Old friends and new friends and competitors met with a lot of hand-clasped thug-hugging and bowing. Some of the fighters were obviously big stars in this firmament, and as they cruised through the crowd, people made a point of greeting them, striking up conversations with various looks of awe and reverence on their faces. Dmitry, whatever his status before this, had upset a famous fighter from Brazil the day before, and was a bona fide international celebrity. Frank followed his progress for a while with the camera, zooming in to see people’s expressions. The more he watched these men and boys, the more it felt familiar, this mostly-male social dynamic. He had seen it somewhere before, and it took him a while to remember where: a documentary about neo-Nazi groups. Not that these were racists or fascists, though there were a disturbing number of skinheads. In the film, many of the neo-Nazi leaders and followers were quite obviously closeted and conflicted, and toward the end of the film Ewald Althans, the “New Fuhrer” as he was called by some, the thirty-year-old Aryan hunk who had been elected as the head of some international organization, was arrested by police in Germany for soliciting sex from a policeman in a public toilet. A number of these men were looking at Dmitry the way the pimply neo-Nazi youth looked at the New Fuhrer, with love and longing, and the whole rigmarole — not least the rolling around on the mats in each other’s arms — started to look more and more like sex through other means.

  Dmitry wanted the video for two reasons — his sons liked to see his matches, he said, and he used the tapes for training purposes. He could review missed opportunities, see what he was doing wrong. If he ever lost he would be able to know exactly how and why. Frank filmed him warming up, which consisted mostly of the bent-over arm swaying he had seen him do in Taipei, almost like an elephant in a zoo, very OCD, back and forth, back and forth, his arms almost sweeping the ground like two trunks.

  His first match was with one of the skinheads, a guy who probably weighed the same as Dmitry but was almost a foot shorter, practically square, with massive shoulders and a neck the size of a football player’s thigh. They greeted each other with a bow, listened to the referee’s instructions and then, unexpectedly, Dmitry lay down on the mat. His opponent threw up his arms as if to say, what the hell is this? Dmitry waited, and when the man finally approached to wrestle on the ground, he threw his legs up and around the man’s neck, locking his ankles behind his head. The man stood up, trying to break the hold, which lifted Dmitry upside down, with only his head and shoulders still on the mat. The man clawed unsuccessfully at the ankles behind his neck while Dmitry was doing something to the man’s knee with his elbow. It was the oddest bit of fighting Frank had ever seen, one man standing almost still except for his desperate arms grabbing at the back of his own head, the other upside down in front of him, also virtua
lly immobile. Adding to the oddity was the peculiar calm Dmitry exhibited, more like a man absentmindedly waiting for a bus than someone in the throes of martial struggle. The scorecards had his opponent up two points, and knowing nothing, Frank assumed Dmitry was about to lose — in Olympic wrestling he would have lost already, his shoulders to the mat now for a solid minute and a half. The seconds ticked on and then, presto, it was over, and he was shocked to see Dmitry declared the winner. The loser gave him an almost tearful post-coital hug and Dmitry, accepting congratulations along the way, joined Frank in the stands.

  “What was that?”

  “Your legs are much, much stronger than any other part of your body, Franky. It’s very simple really. He had such a low center of gravity that I would be at a serious disadvantage in any other position, opening myself to a damaging throw. My only chance was on the ground.”

  “How did you win if he had more points?”

  “He tapped out, Franky. He submitted.” He said this last with a degree of serious self-satisfaction he didn’t often indulge. “If you can’t reach the mat to tap out, you tap the other fighter, usually at the point of most pain, in this case his knee, which I was really, really hurting. I looked to see that the ref caught it and let go.”

  They moved to set up the camera for his second match, taking place across the gym. As Dmitry went down to stretch and warm up again, Frank sat remembering two early childhood memories Dmitry had shared one night, back in the tent in Connecticut. Both occurred in an apartment in London, where he had lived until he was three, before moving into what was now his mother’s house in Liverpool. In one memory he was crawling around the apartment while his mother was vacuuming, and he experienced an overpowering desire to lick the gray and chrome, bullet-shaped machine. He chased it on his hands and knees with his tongue out, and when he caught it, a blue arc jumped from the vacuum cleaner to his tongue with a loud snap, throwing him into a fully conscious, complete paralysis for a number of minutes. His mother screamed, the neighbors rushed in, and then he regained feeling in his limbs and toddled away. The second story he remembered more vaguely, but it was a standard poop-on-the-wall story, except that the wall had just been freshly painted that morning by his mother, who in anger banged him on the top of the head with the porcelain potty bowl.

  “Perhaps, Franky,” he had said, after finishing the two stories. “Perhaps the combination of electroshock at such a tender age and my maternally-administered concussion are the source — and I’m speaking neurophysiologically, Franky, not psychoanalytically — of my severe dysfunction now as I enter adult life.” He was being funny; he didn’t think he was dysfunctional.

  His second jiu-jitsu match was more spectacular. His opponent had a few pounds and a few inches on him, and it seemed to Frank that Dmitry was not as self-assured as he had been. When they went into a clutch the first time, the man swung a great club of a hand and gave Dmitry a blow to the back of the neck as he grabbed it. A gasp went up in the crowd, and many looked at the ref, expecting a disqualification for striking. Dmitry said later he did, too, that the blow dazed him, but the ref let it slide. A few seconds into the match Dmitry was on his back, his opponent’s forearm across his windpipe. It looked to be over soon. But Dmitry was very slowly, methodically, working his left leg up between the two bodies. Even with his face turning red, his oxygen cut off, he remained remarkably calm, as if his adrenal glands had simply been snipped off to float harmlessly through his innards. He managed to wheedle his left foot under the other man’s chin — this is what he had been angling for, apparently — and slowly peeled the man back, using both arms to brace the piston of his leg, finally prying the guy off altogether. He stood back up, did his elephant sway and coughed, waiting for the man to come in and clinch again, which he did.

  This time, as if he had now made an adequate study of his opponent, Dmitry managed to twist him onto the ground, scissors him across the midsection and start pulling the man’s arm back, leaning all his weight against it. He had the perfect angle, the man’s arm levered across his own leg, pushing the forearm unnaturally backward. As the elbow became visibly hyperextended, the crowd was squirming in reflected pain, but his opponent refused to tap out, vainly trying to untangle Dmitry’s ankles with his free hand. The man was enraged, having been so close to victory only to find himself in this mess, thrashing about and searching for an escape.

  Dmitry moved the arm further up his thigh, giving him better leverage, and the crowd moaned in unison as they saw the elbow bend grotesquely backward, something that looked even worse when Frank zoomed in on it with the camera. The man was twisting a knuckle of his other hand into some pressure point on Dmitry’s ankle. He had an obscene smile on his face, maybe a smile of pain, maybe of some S&M pleasure, as he continued trying to wriggle out of the scissors lock. Dmitry slowly, affectless, like a ladies’ maid tightening a corset, maneuvered the man’s arm into more and more calamitous angles and pushed and levered it, causing the crowd to again squeal in distress, and then, as if they had all been waiting for it, there was a POP! The entire crowd screamed, Frank too, and the ref jumped in, patted Dmitry off, and called for medics. Dmitry stood up, bending over his now unconscious victim, more out of idle curiosity, it seemed, than empathy.

  “It was quite surprising, Franky, wasn’t it?” he said later. “I kept thinking, what is wrong with him? Why won’t he submit? His elbow’s going to pop! And then, sure enough, pop! Very strange.” Dmitry was declared the winner of that match and champion of his age and weight class, and he won several matches in unrestricted competition, too.

  “It was really important to me, Franky, to win in the Master class, because in a few years I’ll be thirty-five and in the Senior class, and since I never know when I will need to retire from the sport, or at least in its public venues…” He broke off and smiled for a second, then resumed his amiable chatter. “The real champions win in the Adult class, but that only goes up to twenty-nine, and I hadn’t started yet at that age, so I couldn’t have won it, could I, Franky? Not really.”

  “You said you were in Las Vegas for several weeks, training,” he said. “How did you get so much time off?”

  “Well, let’s sit down over here, Franky, and I’ll look at the film of my man’s elbow popping once and then I’ll catch you up. The fact is I’m retiring a few years earlier than I planned.”

  They sat back in the bleachers as the circus continued below and Dmitry watched the film with all the detachment of a scientist tagging tranquilized penguins. Then he turned to him and explained that in the few months since Frank had seen him, things had gone exceptionally well.

  “I thought they were already going well,” Frank said.

  “Yes, but a number of things serendipitously converged, Franky, and I have now reached my financial goals. I determined some years ago the capital I needed to give me a certain income — it would be vulgar to say how much — in tax-free bonds, no market fluctuations, absolutely minimal risk, and, well, let’s say henceforth that base is secure. Using even the worst projections for my more speculative monies, my children’s children’s children will be unable to spend it all. I’ve just taken my last vacation; I’ll go back in for a final tour of duty, wrap up all my loose ends and then retire for good in fifteen months, so that, in my Christological year of thirty-three, I will experience my death as investment banker and have an appropriate resurrection as a man of leisure. I’ve arrived.”

  “Last we talked, you were in trouble.”

  “All part of the same process, Franky. You either make money, or you make trouble, or both if you’re good, once you get involved in my kind of business. The old saws — no pain, no gain; no risk, no reward; no gall, no glory…”

  “I’ve never heard that last one.”

  “Yes, William Penn, Franky, the inventor of Pennsylvania and penicillin, in a speech before mine own British Parliament: No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown — but I was saying that all
those old saws are correct, they are built into the economic system. And I have, over the years,” he made it sound like he was sixty rather than thirty-one, “been risking more and more thorns and gall, and thus, when I win, I’ve reaped gargantuan palms and crowns, or, in the vernacular, gobs and gobs of money.”

  “But you were already rich, right?”

  “There’s rich and there’s rich, Franky, you know that. I was never, until quite recently, Forbes-list rich.”

  “And how did you manage this?”

  “Oh, Franky, come now, part of the game is knowing not to take risks when there is no corresponding reward, and given the intimate relationship between risk and information, and given your lack of leverage, you can’t afford to know how I managed it, and I will never tell you.”

  “So this was not entirely legal — that’s why you were so worried in Taipei.”

  “Franky, don’t be stupid.”

  He got up, not mad, with the same kind of nonchalance he had popping a man’s elbow out of its socket, but clearly finished with that particular conversation. “Why don’t we get some noodles? I’m told there’s a Japanese place around the corner.”

  “You sounded so worried, asking me to help take care of your family,” Frank said as they left the gym.

  Dmitry stopped, peered at him, thought about what he wanted to say. “Franky there is only so much money in the world at any given time, and to get a lot of it, you have to take it away from people. The money I now have used to belong to someone else, and naturally, they would like to have it back, and just as naturally, some of them, at least, would like to see me die a horrible death, but that’s just personal. Oh, sure, there’s some new money, always, a few percent growth in population, a few percent in productivity, but the same basic principle applies — other people think they should have my pile, not me, and some of them are scheming to get it. Popping elbows from sockets would be, for some of these people, just a kind of earlybird special” — it did sound funny in gangsterese — “on their menu of options. And some governments — they are the scariest, most corrupt criminal gangs in the world, Franky — one of them might find a pretext to confiscate a significant portion of my portfolio. The main instruments they use — the legitimate governments, not Russia or the tinpot crazies nationalizing industries — are laws against money laundering. Nonsense, given that governments are the world’s largest money launderers, but that’s the subject of a more advanced lecture. Let’s go get those noodles.”