“Are you drunk?”
“Smiley Wimple was here. He said Jaime O’Banion is here, too. Don’t call the locals.”
“Why not?”
“They hate my guts. They’ll put me in the can. Or worse.”
“Where are you?”
Clete said the name of the truck stop and town and passed out again, the cell phone bouncing on the carpet.
• • •
SMILEY WAS NOT equipped to understand a phrase like “intimations of mortality.” But he understood its smell. The smell was in the ditches behind the cantinas where the prostitutes poured their buckets at sunrise, and in the slums where the poor raked rotting food with their bare hands from a smoldering garbage dump, and under a bridge outside Torreón where the narco-gangsters hung their trophies from wire loops and left them for bats to eat.
Smiley never thought about what lay on the other side of death, but he knew one thing for sure—people killed other people all the time. They just did it in a different way. With bombs from an airplane. With drones or rockets. That way the images were reduced to a neat and tidy satellite video, one that had no sound.
Smiley was not one to argue. Nor did he brood upon the ways human beings conducted themselves. The issue for those at the bottom of the pile was simple: Don’t be drawn in by lies, and don’t let others use you. The only people who dismissed the importance of power were those who possessed it or those who liked their roles as human poodles.
The only true friend he ever had was a girl a little older than he in the orphanage. She loved him and washed his body in the morning and hid his wet sheets so he wouldn’t be punished, and sometimes read poetry to him. He understood little of the meaning, but occasionally a line stuck with him that somehow defined a central mystery in his life. He remembered one line in particular. It came at the end of what she called a sonnet, one written by a young man named John Keats: On the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Did that mean we were on our own, and that love and fame were of no value, and that neither the earth nor the crowd provided reward or succor? Did our only victory lie in survival, in solitude, far from the distant crowd? Or was the poet saying it was better to be the giver of death than its recipient?
Smiley chose to believe the latter. But now he was undoing his own ethos, helping the man named Purcel instead of taking care of business first, which in this instance meant dealing with Jaime O’Banion, known as the cruelest and smartest mechanic on the East Coast. The choice of O’Banion as the hitter meant the Mob was going to make an object lesson of Smiley, old-style, the way they did Tommy Fig in the Irish Channel years ago when they freeze-wrapped his parts and strung them from a wood-bladed ceiling fan in his own butcher shop.
Smiley’s problem with O’Banion wasn’t simply professional. They had run into each other at Disney World and at the track in Hialeah and also at the Jazz Festival in New Orleans. O’Banion wore white suits and silk shirts and tight vests and two-tone shoes and a Panama hat, and he had a coarse Irish face that reminded Smiley of a twisted squash. Sometimes a prostitute was glued to his arm. An entourage of sycophants usually followed him. O’Banion called Smiley gusano (worm) to his face; he once said to his friends as Smiley walked by, “Here comes queer-bait. Grab your cocks, boys.”
The sycophants snickered openly, safe in O’Banion’s presence.
r /> Now Smiley was parked behind a truck stop in a stolen pickup, the stars bright, dawn one hour away, wondering how O’Banion would make his play. He reached inside his tool bag and retrieved a long-barreled, silenced, .22-magnum semi-auto, one of two that he had custom-made. He loved to touch the barrel and trace his fingertips up and down the coldness of the steel, his eyes closed, his wee-wee stiffening inside his pants. He could hear himself breathing inside the truck cab, his heart slipping into overdrive. He set down the pistol until his arousal went away, then swallowed and cupped his mouth, longing for the release his work gave him.
O’Banion would be coming soon. But where and how? The truck stop and motel employed servicepeople who came and went at odd hours. O’Banion was a legend when it came to disguises and deception. Wearing surgical garb, he had walked into an OR in Tampa and popped a confidential informant on the operating table. In horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed suit and a wig that fit his head like a football helmet, he’d followed a Mississippi judge into the men’s room of the county courthouse, exchanged pleasantries with him at the urinal, then, on his way out, casually blown the judge’s brains all over the mirror. He also used disposable backup, usually junkies and black gangsters who thought they were about to make the big score and ended up in a Dumpster.
Smiley took a breath. What was the smart thing to do? Easy answer. Let Purcel worry about himself and catch O’Banion down the road with one of his women on his arm, out in public. Yes, stipple his vest with tiny red flowers and look into O’Banion’s eyes while he did it.
Yes, yes, yes.
Smiley twisted the key in the ignition and felt the pickup’s engine jump to life. He saw a black man enter the side door of the motel, pulling a laundry cart behind him. A woman with a vacuum followed. A man in a delivery uniform was smoking a cigarette in front of the main entrance; he flipped it in a high arc and went inside the building. A couple got out of a cab, laughing, walking unsteadily, and also went inside.
Smiley cut the engine, his head pounding. It wasn’t fair. He was being given a choice between abandoning his entire ethos or abandoning Purcel. The only person whose advice he had ever sought and depended upon was the girl in the orphanage in Mexico. But he had killed her and her lover, and now he had only the voice of Wonder Woman to guide him.
What should I do?
Use your imagination, she said.
Go inside?
Pretend you have my magic bracelets and golden lariat.
Those are for women.
Don’t make sexist remarks.
I’m sorry.
I was teasing. I love you, Smiley. I’ll always be with you. These are evil people. You know what we do with evil people, don’t you?
• • •