Born Slippy Read online

  As they walked away from the gym, the young fighters, like extras in a swords-and-sandals epic, bowed and scraped congratulations to Dmitry.

  “And having to retire from jiu-jitsu, or at least public bouts? That’s because something, someone is after you.”

  They entered the noodle shop and sat at a table near the front window.

  “Ah, you see, Franky, even when I think something has gotten by you it hasn’t — you kept a very good poker face when I made that little slip. In a word, yes.”

  He seemed unconcerned. They both stared out the window of the noodle shop toward the nondescript Southern Californian street. Across the way one of the hundreds of furniture stores that never seemed to have customers sat next to a Thai massage place with a sagging and tattered, faded yellow, decade-old Grand Opening banner.

  “And so you may, after all, need me to look after Yuli and the boys.”

  “Touching, Franky, touching,” he said, tranquil, placid, and something else — for a moment Frank felt he might be the next bug under Dmitry’s magnifying glass, the next fly whose wings might be pulled, the next jiu-jitsu match.

  Dmitry left the next day. Frank’s daily routine, in the months that followed, was more or less distressing. His daily life with Isa was gone forever, and it felt like an open wound. Friends started setting him up on proper dates, rather than pretending to see how he was doing, but he still never felt like his heart was in it. Silly though it might be, it felt sad as hell to be a forty-year-old man going on dates. The women his age were all astounding, so interesting that he wondered if being interesting was somehow fatal to marriage, because all of them had a marriage or two in their dossiers. They were smart, professional women with open minds and eyes, and he would leave the first jury-rigged dinner party or restaurant meet-up sure that there were real possibilities. A couple of the women thought so, too, but some important psychic catalyst was always missing, some neurotransmitters not doing their job. He would get fond, and when the women were interested and engineered it, they would end up in bed once, or even twice or three times. But things never got airborne. He didn’t know if this was a function of age, but nine-tenths of his impressions seemed only to act as recalls of feelings from the past, and perhaps this was true for these women as well, that he was acting as an understudy for some ghost. Nobody at this age was interested in muffled passion, and so they didn’t do the thing younger people tend to — panic about not finding someone else, settle for whoever was around, and wait for long-term propinquity to turn into love. Instead, they would just not so much call it quits as slow down and wander away from each other.

  Once he was carried away by a young, spunky girl looking for her requisite affair with an older man, a metallic-black-and-blue-haired, neon-eyelinered, acid-tongued barista who had an art “practice” that sometimes did and sometimes didn’t involve a band, and another time a way-too-young bespectacled wild poet from his bookstore. He spent a couple weeks with each of them having great get-to-know-you sex, with all the standard charms such times entail, including that he could pretend to be young again and they could play grown-up. The women spent about ten minutes apiece fantasizing about becoming the mistress of the pretty fabulous house and pool in Nichols Canyon he had spruced up, but then they would realize how thorny it would be trying to tell their friends and family about it and about him. They started wondering how boring it would be to actually live some middle-aged, middle-class life. They wandered away, too. He did nothing to discourage the tapering off.

  The problem for him, if was going to be honest, was that everyone he met suffered in comparison to his image of Yuli’s brilliance. He wasn’t so scatterbrained that he confused this by now airbrushed, colorized, rewritten image with the real Yuli — or at least, he knew he was confusing them. Everyone, in their love life, develops some kind of standards, or at least predilections, and his had developed quite strongly in her direction: she was the only one who seemed to fit them.

  He worked much less, doing little more than managing clients and overseeing the labor his employees did. He spent part of each morning with his laptop out by the pool, and after the flimsy camouflage of glancing through the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, he would read the English-language Asian papers: the Jakarta Post, the Hong Kong Standard, the Bangkok Post, Taiwan News, and the Taipei Times. He did this more religiously than he checked his industry pages or pretended to be involved in his investments. At night he read biographies of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh and Mao and histories of the Long March and the Cultural Revolution, trying to force his way through Sumanasåntaka, the sixteenth-century Javanese epic poem, and reading the novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the only Indonesian novelist translated into English he could find on Amazon. He checked BoatQuest.com and the other yacht sales sites every day, always curious about what was in available in Sunda Kelapa harbor, the old sailing-fleet harbor of Jakarta, or in the various marinas around Taipei. He had kind of fallen in love with the Scorpio 72, a seventy-two-foot ketch built in Taiwan with classic, old-fashioned lines and a bowsprit straight off the cover of some book he read as a kid. They went, used Scorpios, for anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a million dollars. He’d whip up an Excel sheet and calculate whether, if he sold the house and the company, he could walk away with enough to buy and outfit the boat, send the kids a house down-payment apiece, and still have enough to live on the water for the rest of his life. He probably could.

  It was a Monday when he sat down to his normal breakfast rounds on the computer, looking forward to his newspapers and boat sites and blogs, and the center picture on the Taipei Times’ homepage made him catch his breath: a photograph of the once-gleaming silver office building that housed Dmitry’s Credit Lyonnais office, with a gaping, jagged hole in the middle and what looked like a half dozen missing stories.

  Black smoke spilled out of it and rose into the sky.

  PART FOUR

  2013

  He sprang for business class on Lufthansa rather than wait until the next day, and talk about a different world. It left LAX at midnight, and he had a free Manhattan and a Xanax, then wine with a pretty good dinner, then more wine, then a Baileys, ate another Xanax, laid full out and took a drooling nap, then another Baileys, dozed on and off watching a movie, ate some little petit fours, wandered around stoned in the dark, wrote a draft of a probably useless email with everything he might have forgotten to tell his office manager, maybe had another Xanax and Baileys, fell back asleep with a mask on and woke up to breakfast with model airplane glue for a brain. He continued the self-medication with a Bloody Mary. He was either depressed, or nervous, or mentally ill, or all three.

  After a couple hours googling around on the laptop at LAX he had put together the basic facts. No one was taking responsibility for the bombing, and the reports were a little vague about what kind of bomb it was, or if it even was a bomb rather than a gas leak or something else. The explosion happened at 11am, give or take a few minutes, and so the building was full. The police identified some fifty bodies, they had parts of as many as another fifty, and estimates were that there might be as many again vaporized by the blast. The Taipei Times listed the presumed dead, including Dmitry. A corporate picture of him accompanied the article, since he was the head of the firm, and Frank couldn’t help but think he had been within days of his extraordinarily early retirement. They’d take out your whole village to get you, he had said.

  The usual suspects — Islamists, Marxists — were cycled through the speculative machinery alongside a series of competing business interests. Murder was a not an entirely uncommon business strategy in that part of the world, and there had been a number of similar bombings in the last few years in Bangkok, suspected to be perpetrated by security companies attempting to discredit their rivals. None of those, though, had been quite so big a blast, none had killed as many people, and none had involved a major foreign corporation. Unless something more plausible came along, he had to assume that whatever trouble
Dmitry had got himself into had cost not just his life but that of more than a hundred innocent people. Maybe being so close to retirement was not a coincidence — maybe whoever it was figured it was their last chance. The idea filled him with something like dread, or guilt, like he was somehow responsible, like he should have warned someone.

  On the off chance that Dmitry had missed the blast and was hiding, Frank had g-mailed him right away, but got no response. It was the only contact he had, no home phone and his cell was always different — burner phones to avoid roaming charges, he said, but maybe to avoid being tracked? Like a lot of rich people, he was very cheap about little things, and except for business hated to spend money on fancy restaurants, always preferring the taco trucks in LA or the small fast-food shops in Thai Town. The cheap motels. The disposable phones. Like someone on the lam.

  How was Frank going to find the family? His one time at their house he had been hungover and driven there by Ralph-Prabam. The home phone and address were unlisted, and he could find no trace on the internet, even on the pay sites that track people down for you. The Credit Lyonnais phones rang and rang, their answering system, he assumed, obliterated. Their Paris office kept him on hold for a half hour before telling him they had no contact information except for the office, now nonexistent. He thought about emailing the parents in Liverpool, halfheartedly searching for email addresses for them, and was relieved not to find any. He probably would have chickened out anyway. If they knew already, they wouldn’t want a stranger invading their grief, especially a stranger who harbored theories of their son’s own culpability. If they didn’t know yet, he wasn’t sure he should be the one to tell them. Either that or he was a coward.

  A certain logic suggested staying at home, calling the Taipei police, maybe even hiring someone there to help; find some of Dmitry’s coworkers and then Yuli through them. Instead, he was flying to a city he hardly knew, to find an apartment without an address, on a mission as ill-defined as conceivable. Maybe he could find the gym where the fight club worked out, or the brothel, where the madam might know something. Many of the other men from the office, he assumed, would be dead, too, but some must have been out or on the road, and the fight club guys all worked elsewhere. Maybe one of them would know where his house was. Maybe not, though, since he didn’t seem to have any real, intimate friends — one of the reasons, Frank thought, that Dmitry kept in touch all those years. Frank was the little drawer where he dropped a few home truths, where he put a few private doubts, the box on the top closet shelf for the old pictures too corny to show anyone else.

  Frank would find Yuli and the boys, though, he had faith. He’d figure out something.

  He had a vague memory of the apartment being east or northeast of the office. He spent some time during the long layover in Narita, once he sobered up, looking at satellite maps, identifying probable neighborhoods, places where the trees were thick enough and the commerce contained enough to fit his fragmentary recollections. He imagined hiring a cab, going around for hours and hours and hours finding nothing, going in circles, and to avoid that he rented a car at the airport. As he pulled out of the parking lot he realized what it meant to rely on Chinese signage and had a moment of panic. Some operatic traditional music was on the radio, which was pretty scarifying, and thousands of motorcycles and scooters whizzed in and out of lanes, so the first few minutes were tough. Then he eased into it, and his route was straightforward: Highway 15, the coast road, east, until it curved around to follow the Danshui River to the first bridge; cross the bridge onto the conveniently named Route 2, which winds its way to the Shihlin District, where, with any luck, there would be a transliterated sign or the GPS on his phone would be working properly. On the Google satellite maps and pictures, Shihlin looked like the neighborhood he remembered, verdant, not too crowded, northeast of the center where the charred remains of Dmitry’s office probably still smoldered. If he was wrong about Shihlin, he hoped it was at least in the neighborhood of the neighborhood.

  Driving along the coast was thrilling, mainland China fifty miles away in the haze, the small whitecaps registering a good twenty-knot breeze, and he imagined how great it would be to sail across. He had another moment of panic, imagining his boat being boarded by the Chinese Coast Guard — he was jittery and paranoid and out of it, still hazy from the pills and booze and flipping his circadian clock. As he hit the bridge over the Danshui, the traffic got thicker. He crawled along and was glad, since going slow gave him plenty of time to check his maps and GPS and keep track of where he was. He got off the highway and headed into Shihlin at TianMu North Road, nicely spelled out on the sign in English, the GPS jumpy and wandering a little, but eventually matching up with where he thought he was. He consciously tried to appreciate the strangeness and odd familiarity of his surroundings and not be too fretful.

  Except for a few outsized buildings, and a few more Chinese-styled roofs, it was much like driving around Monterey Park or San Gabriel, the suburbs of Los Angeles — the same mix of Chinese characters on some big plastic signs, other reading things like “Mister Donut.” The drivers — except for the kids on motorbikes — were exactly as deliberate as the Asian drivers in LA. He started doing concentric circles, wavering between the feeling that he was recognizing everything and the fear that he was recognizing nothing. He kept being fooled by buildings that were roughly the same shape and size as Dmitry’s, having to pull up, get out and look at a couple of them closely to make sure, but none were right. Then he saw the concrete Chinese Culture University, remembered Dmitry pointing it out, saying “This is a place where they teach people to make culture, Franky, you should get one of these in California,” and knew he was close.

  A few minutes later, boom. Coming around a corner, he saw it, looking very familiar indeed, and in another block there it was, right in front of him, unmistakable up close. What were the chances? Running up the center of the building was a twelve-foot-wide molded concrete frontispiece, a Taiwanese version of a Frank Lloyd Wright version of a Chinese architectural detail. He didn’t remember it until he saw it, but when he did, there was no doubt. He pulled over and parked, and for the first time it dawned on him that he had not, in any way, shape, or form, thought past this moment, except for imagining holding her — he had not an inkling what to do or even think about doing except find her and envelope her in his arms. He walked up to the front door and rang the bell, which was surprisingly and happily labeled “Heald.”

  No reply.

  He backed up to see if he could tell anything from the windows, but he wasn’t even sure what floor was theirs. Four? Maybe it was four. He rang the bell again, waited, looking around the very quiet neighborhood. A car or two went by, but nobody was walking. He rang a third time, then went back to his rental car. For all he knew, they were out at a memorial service, or maybe she was getting grief counseling, the boys and their nanny sitting in some waiting room as she got instructions about what to say to them. Maybe she was out food shopping with them, except that chances were she didn’t do any of her own food shopping. Maybe they were at a lawyer’s office, reading Dmitry’s will.

  A man came out, held the door open as two others were trying to squeeze a large refrigerator on a hand truck out the front door. A panel truck was waiting on the side street. Frank hopped out of the car, ran up, and grabbed the door as they got the fridge out. He nodded at them and smiled. Nobody questioned or even looked directly at the Euro-guy. He walked in, got on the elevator, and hit buttons three through six. When the elevator stopped at the third floor, he looked out, saw that it wasn’t right, then the fourth, again not right, and then on the fifth, he recognized the hallway. The large pedestal stand in the middle held an orange-flowered plant, droopy from lack of water. He felt the hairs on his arms rise. Something was not right.

  He walked up to the door and knocked, and like in an old noir film, it swung open slightly. He called in and got no response. He toed the door open further. The apartment was empty.

 
Completely empty. Furniture gone. Nothing but a couple dozen boxes, stacked and waiting to be picked up to the right of the entrance. The pictures and wall hangings were gone, and he had to assume that the refrigerator had just come from here — he checked the kitchen, and the space was empty. Although it was clear no one was home, he called for Yuli, for Prabam, and poked his head into the other rooms. All were empty, with rectangles of dust where furniture had stood.

  The movers were probably coming back for the last boxes, he decided, and went into the furthest room to hide in an alcove. He had no idea why. He could just see the front of the truck out the window. One of the men got in the driver’s seat. He put it in gear, and Frank moved to get a better view; the other men got in the passenger door, and the van drove off. Maybe it was full, and they would come back for the last boxes.

  This had all happened very fast. He was on the verge of concluding that the move had started well ahead of the bombing — they couldn’t have packed and emptied the place this fast otherwise. But before he could think it all through, he started to weep.

  Something about the emptiness of the place, the finality it represented, flooded him with the irremediable, irrevocable fact of death. The image that came back was of Dmitry, standing in the shell of the house in Connecticut, surrounded by framing, yelling hello to an old neighbor, a guy who came by every morning they were on the job, riding a slow, decrepit, anomalous horse. He was ninety-three and deaf as a post, but each day he saddled up that horse and rode through the woods from wherever he lived to see how they were doing. As he approached, Dmitry would yell, Hallooo! How are you this morning! all sunny, at the top of his lungs. The old man would shout back, in his screechy, cranky, old man’s voice, What? cupping his ear with his free hand. Dmitry would gamely, enjoying the ritual nature of the exchange, yell again, even louder, I said ‘HallOOoo! How ARE you?!’ The old man would act irritated then, like Dmitry was purposely mumbling, and every single morning he would shriek, What did you say? SPEAK UP! sounding more like the Wicked Witch of the West than a man on horseback. And Dmitry, partly for Frank’s amusement, partly just to finish the routine, would bellow, red in the face, I said, ‘HALLOOO!’ hands cupped around his mouth, ‘HOW!’ blasting, enunciating every word, ‘ARRE! YOUUU!!’ and invariably, the old man would finally process it, and squawk back, irritated again, You don’t have to shout! I can hear you! They knew the old man was ninety-three because he told them he had gone to his seventy-fifth high school reunion the week before. Yes, he said. It was just me and four old biddies. And they didn’t look too long for this world, either! He would make some comments about the progress on the house, usually disapproving, and then, before leaving, say, I’ll have to bring my dog over here someday. He’s a truly great dog, never a better, you’ll have to see, you’ll love my dog. Dmitry encouraged him, saying Yes, please do, we always welcome visits from dogs, and the man would scream, What?!