The Bright Spot Read online

  “To life,” he said.

  The wine was perfect.

  “I’m being watched by the feds,” I offered. “We are now, I imagine.”

  He wasn’t impressed. “They watch everybody, that’s why they never see anything. By the time they figure out what they’re looking at, it’s over. Information goes astray. They really should be better paid, don’t you think? Public servants, elected officials? Working for the good of us all?”

  “Presidents?”

  “That dumb fuck would be overpaid at half the price. What do you make, Nick?”

  “Less than the President.”

  “Maybe you’d like to make more.”

  One of the spotlights seemed to miss its mark, illuminating an empty patch of floor. Then I realized it was the ’ware chef who was out of place, off his mark. Several were. They were shifting our way, repositioning themselves closer and closer. The goons looked past them like they were invisible.

  “I don’t care about money,” I said, keeping the conversation going.

  “Everybody cares about money,” Trey said. “Unless they’re a fucking idiot. You want work, is that it? That’s not a problem. I have interests.”

  “What’s the part?”

  “It doesn’t fucking matter what the part is, Nick. We agree in principle, am I right? Big part, big money, big name. That’s what all you guys want, right? Fine, you got it. So speak to me.”

  The ’ware chefs were arrayed in a crescent around us. One of them started toward the table with his little cart. The goons didn’t even give him a glance. He rolled the cart up next to us and fired up a burner. He peeled bananas, sliced them lengthwise, making a big show of it, then started sautéing them in a copper pan.

  Trey followed my gaze. “Bananas? What is this shit? We starting with dessert? Where is that idiot manager?”

  With an expert flick of the chef’s wrist, the bananas did a somersault in the air and landed back in the pan. A pinch of this, a pinch of that. He was quite a show-man—or whoever wrote the routine was. Trey missed the whole performance, searching the dining room for the manager. He still didn’t get it. The chef picked up a bottle of brandy and splashed it into the pan, then lit a spoon full of the stuff with an old-fashioned Bic and let the blue flame cascade into the pool below, poofing into an eyelash-singeing ball of blue flame. The oohs and ahs sounded even without a spotlight on us. Trey gave the whole performance a bored roll of his eyes. Then the chef brought his arms up like a conductor, the pan and bottle still in his hands, and dumped the flaming bananas onto Trey’s lap.

  “What the fuck!” he said, as a stream of brandy from the upended bottle hit the flame and doused his clothes, enveloping him completely in flames. He jumped to his feet, and the chef brought his arms down as abruptly as they’d gone up, smashing the empty bottle over Trey’s head and smacking him a good one upside the head with the skillet.

  The goons took their first clear shots, and the dessert chef did a jerky dance and fell, taking his still-lit cooking cart with him, blocking the goons’ way as they tried to reach their boss, who was careening through the empty tables. He finally crashed to the floor, still burning and screaming, a trail of burning tablecloths behind him. The sprinkler system kicked on, but it was too late for Trey.

  I was still sitting at the table alone, like I was at a sidewalk cafe waiting for the check in the rain. The goons stood over Trey behind me. The chefs surrounded us. “Guys,” I said over my shoulder, and the goons turned around.

  All the chefs raised their right arms and brought them down. I dove under the table as a squadron of knives passed overhead. I grabbed a couple of table legs and started chugging toward the exit as fast as I could chug. I looked back, and the goons weren’t going down easy. They both had knives sticking out of them every which way, most of them stuck in body armor, but not all, and they were losing a lot of blood. Their boss lay in a smoldering heap behind them, but they were leaning up against each other, guns blazing, chewing up the place and everybody in it with bullets for as long as they could stand and fire.

  They finally dropped dead, but the bullets kept up until the guns were out of ammunition or jammed, leaving a couple of gaping holes in the dining room floor, where the water gathered and cascaded into the basement. All the chefs, easy targets, lay dead. They literally never knew what hit them. It was the surviving customers who were screaming, crying, cradling their dead and dying in their arms. Blood was everywhere, though somehow I’d managed to make it to the exit without a drop on me.

  I crawled out from under the table. I looked around the dining room just above the suffering, the likely angle for the surveillance system to be looking back, and made sure it had a good look at me. With shaking fingers I took out a card and laid it on the table, Mr. Kennemeyer’s table, where it might easily be found. With any luck, the locals would find me first. Best they came looking for me. Here I might get lost in this crowd of innocents. I walked out to Dee’s car and went back to the Patriotel.

  It was late, Lu was asleep. The band over at the lounge covered my noise as I slipped out of my wet clothes and stashed them out of sight. I slid quietly under the covers beside her, and she came half awake. “Find out anything?” she murmured.

  A sob was trying to escape my throat, but I couldn’t let it. It wasn’t in the script I was playing. The mole. The ram in the thicket. “Not really,” I said. “Nothing new.” And I guess in a way that was true. I’d already figured out James Dumfries was insane. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it. I lay awake a long time in the dark, considering my options. What price freedom? How long a wait for a table?

  I eventually drifted off to sleep to the sounds of a familiar guitar riff out front of a decidedly Latin rhythm section, as Los Refugios over at the pancake lounge made the Patriotel windows rattle with a festive yet plaintive rendition of “Tierra Dulce Alabama” (where the cielo is so azul).

  Sometimes I was proud to be an American, like all the signs said—not very often, and for all the wrong reasons, I’m sure—even if the signs had taken on an increasingly commanding tone since the war. But pride was a deadly sin, I’d been told, and was inclined to believe it. Maybe it was pride that got us into this mess, lulled us into letting things go to hell while we looked the other way. And now it was all of us humans, American or not, wired to the same madness, running the same ’ware. But it didn’t work perfectly. Not yet. Los Refugios slipped through. That was the part that made me proud, proud to be human.

  Morning came too early. Lu reminded me I had an early breakfast with Wally and Gary and Brenda. She declined to join me, as I knew she would. She couldn’t stand to watch Wally eat.

  I found Gary and Wally sitting at the same pancake lounge table where Trey and I had spent the evening. The TV was shut off, so I didn’t know whether the dead Trey had made the news yet. We were way early—it was still dark out—and our hosts were busy cleaning. The lights were up. The bar was stacked with dirty dishes. Stray swizzle sticks were everywhere. From behind the swinging door to the back came the steady clatter of dishwashing. In the far corner of the room, an ancient Hoover roared.

  I sat down in the same chair I’d had last night. The table topper with the drink list and band schedule had been replaced with a lazy Susan sporting six kinds of syrup. The waitress fixed us up with coffee and took our orders.

  “Brenda’s still in my room,” Wally said, stirring his three-sugar, three-cream coffee. “She’s real tired.”

  “Don’t gloat,” Gary said. “It’s gross.”

  “I’m not gloating,” Wally said. “I’m just explaining to Nick.”

  “You and Brenda are back together again?” I asked Wally.

  The question seemed to catch him off base, not that Wally was ever entirely on base. “I guess you could say that. I’m not really sure. We haven’t discussed it.”

  He seemed on the verge of discussing it with me, and it was way too early for that. So I launched into my story while I had the chance. I sta
rted with the diner scam, making my way through murder and attempted kidnapping. I left out my dinner with Trey and Trey’s murder. The less they knew about that, the better—later on, when they were questioned.

  When I was done with the tale—Ed and dozens of innocent workers dead, the feds constantly watching, one of their number murdered, and a madman attempting to kidnap me—Wally said, “These are some great ideas, Nick. I’d like to work them in somehow.” He smiled at me and Gary, dancing his eyebrows.

  I couldn’t speak. I considered screaming. Fortunately, Gary broke in. “I don’t think Nick’s pitching an idea here, Wally. You’re not? Right? You’re serious, aren’t you, Nick?”

  “I don’t see what difference that makes,” Wally said. “If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea. Whether he’s pitching it or not, whether he’s serious or not. It can still be a good idea, can’t it?”

  “That’s ridiculous. Of course it matters. He’s saying someone’s trying to kidnap him, maybe trying to kill him. Feds are spying on us, Wally. Don’t you even care?”

  “Of course I care.” He smiled around the restaurant. He looked dangerously close to having another idea. “It’s just like being in a virtual, isn’t it?” he asked me.

  I didn’t know whether Wally was incapable of understanding what was going on in the real world, or I was just incapable of explaining it. But there was one thing I did know, whether I could explain it or not. It was an essential bit of knowledge in my line of work, and with illusionists generally: “No, Wally. They most definitely are not the same. The whole point of make-believe—the stuff we do—is that it’s not real, even when it seems real, especially when it seems real, it’s not.”

  “Oh,” he said. This seemed to come as something of a blow.

  Fortunately, the waitress showed up with our food, and Wally gleefully laid into something called the Plantation Breakfast and cured his sorrow with a medley of cured meat, flanked by the obligatory pancakes, eggs, and grits.

  “These people wouldn’t know a bagel if it bit them on the ass,” Gary said. “What should we do here?” he asked. I knew he wasn’t talking about his bagel.

  “I think we need to go about our business, stick together, stay visible. I hope things will come to a head very soon, Dumfries will be arrested, and we can all just go back to work.”

  That’s what I was always telling Gary in one form or another: The show must go on. And he always listened. That was my role. If it weren’t for me, we would’ve packed and split when William got his teeth knocked out.

  “Are you listening to the man, Wally?” Gary asked. “We have to stick together.”

  Wally, chewing thoughtfully on a slab of ham, was peering furtively around the room, busily pursuing his own thoughts. “How many people do they use, do you think, to listen to us and watch us? I mean, do they work in eight-hour shifts? What if one of us goes back to our room or goes to the bathroom? What if one of them has to go to the bathroom? Seems like it would be awful hard to work out. What do you think?”

  “I think we should talk about something else,” Gary said. “This shit’s depressing.”

  “No it’s not,” Wally said. “It’s interesting. What do you think, Nick? How many people are listening to us?”

  “Why don’t you ask them?” I said, being cute. Sometimes I’m too smart for my own good.

  He looked puzzled for a moment. “Oh, I get it.” He spoke to the air in the voice he might use for a bad phone connection or a non–English speaker. “How many of you are there? Want some ham?” He held up a forkful. That cracked him up. The piece of ham wriggled on the end of his fork like a speared fish, while Wally himself jiggled all over with laughter.

  What had I started? I tried to talk him down. “Wally, they might not be literally listening and watching all the time. They probably let machines do that, using software looking for key phrases, face recognition, stuff like that.”

  “You mean like, like ... Blow up the President! Overthrow the world! Conquer Cleveland! ” He laughed uproariously. “Ass-ass-ass-assinate Wa-wa-washington!” He flung his arms wide, and the piece of ham arced across the dining room.

  “Wally, would you please keep your voice down?” Gary implored. Other customers were definitely starting to notice. It was mostly an older crowd who’d been drifting in couple by couple, looking for bran muffins and decaf. I worried that among them a retired general contemplated caning Wally for his insolence.

  He was oblivious. The only thing slowing him down was he was laughing too hard to speak, but he managed to pull himself together for another whooping fusillade: “Fuck you, Attorney General! Bite me, sp-spooks! Doo-doo! Caca! Ch-child p-p-pornograph-y! ” At least that’s what I think he said. He was laughing so hard it was hard to tell, punctuating his laughter with dish-bouncing thumps to the table. I was tempted to join in.

  The waitress came over, and I thought she was sure to toss us, but she righted and refilled our tumbled coffee cups, smiling sympathetically at Wally, his face buried in his arms, his shoulders still heaving with laughter. “Is okay,” she said. “My brother in Caracas, he have the exact same thing, only in Spanish. Sugar help him sometime.”

  I dumped a half-dozen sugars in Wally’s coffee and stirred the sludge well. It took the rest of the meat and half the coffee to get him to the point where he quit making random faces at the air and giggling. I encouraged him to try all the syrups, and he did, finding the strawberry-and-ham combo to be particularly delectable. By the time the kind waitress cleared his plates away, he was eager to discuss my ideas, a smile of satisfaction on his face. I understood why so many Buddhas were fat.

  “I like the part where you figure out they’re trying to kidnap you instead of kill you,” he said. “Kidnapping’s more interesting, more complicated. You have more options. You kill somebody, and they’re just dead, and ghosts are stupid. Did you know the English kidnapped Pocahontas?”

  Gary had his eyes closed and was pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “I’d heard that,” I said.

  “True story. She was just a young teenager. Can you imagine if that happened now? Then she married the tobacco guy, Rolfe. I like that name. Rolfe! Rolfe!—like a dog barking, isn’t it?—then she became a Christian somewhere in there, went to England, met the king, and died of tuberculosis. Brenda told me that story last night.”

  “Is that all you can think about?” Gary demanded. “Some stupid story Brenda told you in bed? Have you been listening to a single word this man’s been saying?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Wally said. “People are looking at you. Besides, it’s not a stupid story. It’s history.”

  Gary did a slow burn, and I took the opportunity to excuse myself. I figured I had a big day ahead of me, a lot more explaining to do before it was over. Wally was better off with his own reality anyway. Why should I deprive him of it when I should be trying to work a trade? Syrup, sex, exciting stories—Wally’s life had it all.

  THE SNOWMAN RULE

  19

  Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

  —JOSEPH HELLER, Catch-22

  BACK IN THE ROOM, MUNCHING THE EMPANADAS I’D brought her, Lu asked, “Did you explain to them what was going on?”

  “Hmmm ... I’m not sure, exactly. Let’s just say I made a full-faith effort. Wally had his own take on things. He and Brenda spent the night together last night, and he was feeling frisky. Gary told him not to gloat.”

  I did a little Wally-Gary scene, got a good laugh, and left it at that. Everybody was happy this morning, ready to ride out to where the nation was born to watch the sun come up, and do some ReCreating. Why bring up my dinner with Trey and spoil it for everyone? Hadn’t I shared enough already?

  “You coming?” Lu asked, standing in the open doorway all bundled up in the hooded fake leopard-skin coat that was the She-Creature’s cold-weather gear. The sky behind her looked like steel wool. Snowflakes swirled in the air. Wally might have to rethink shooting the sunrise. It lo
oked dead already. But the smiling face ringed with leopard spots made my heart swell, and I smiled bravely back. The show must go on.

  Everybody accepted my story that Trey decided to leave the car behind. A drowsy Dee rested her head contentedly on Stan’s shoulder, his arm wrapped around her. Last night she’d walked away from a few billion dollars to be with him, and he didn’t mind a thing. I was glad to know Trey wouldn’t be bothering them again.

  Lu and I held hands and watched the snow transform the woods. Where I grew up, winter wonderland was an oxymoron and the name of a bad acid that made the rounds one spring. This was the real deal, like a Currier and Ives print. We all seemed to float down the Colonial Parkway through the swirling snow. Ahead of us in Wally’s boxy Mercedes, Wally chattered at Brenda, hatching the day’s plot, as Gary scowled, at the plot or the crew or both. Just as we were leaving, the crew called to say they’d gotten lost (code for just crawled out of bed) and Gary liked to fume about such things, though he never fired anybody.

  The road was a strictly tourist thoroughfare from Yorktown to Jamestown, with CW in the middle. Cluster marketing, I think it’s called. Today we had it to ourselves. The route was laid out to be pretty, and it was, skirting the broad James River, where almost five hundred years ago the English showed up in three dinky wooden ships to permanently alter the planet.

  They’d been a business enterprise like we were, here to strike it rich like that Spaniard Cortéz who’d done so well for himself down Mexico way. They came with the blessing of King James of Holy Bible fame, armed with muskets and their own secret weapon—viral disease.

  We, however, hadn’t even called ahead. It hadn’t occurred to Wally that the National Park folks who ran Historic Jamestowne might want to be consulted before ReCreation just showed up and started rewriting history. You needed permits for that. The island didn’t have much to offer as a location anyway. There were few ruins, and the old woods were long gone. They had something called an archaearium, but even Wally couldn’t figure out a way to fit that in.