Herbie's Game (28 page)

Angelis said, “Felipe’s not here.” He looked at the floor again. “I have your word?” His voice was soft, but there was no mistaking the will beneath it.

“You do.”

“I don’t need no bathroom.” The words sounded like they’d been spoken in the center of a very large and very empty room. The curtains opened again, and Ghorbani was standing there. He was bigger than he’d looked through glass.

“Ruben,” Father Angelis said apprehensively.

“They’re going to come sooner or later,” Ghorbani said. He had one of the deepest voices I’d ever heard, the kind of sound that might echo for miles over the hills on the seabed. “It might as well be now.”

“Who are
they
?” I asked.

Ghorbani said, “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend,” I said, “of Herbie Mott.”

Ghorbani pulled his face back half an inch, as though I’d tried to slap it. He said, “A good friend?”

I thought for a second and said, “Yes.”

“Dr. Angelis,” Ruben Ghorbani rumbled, “this man is in pain.”

“No,” Ghorbani said
. He shook his head, and his jowls rippled. “I ain’t seen Herbie Mott in years. I ain’t seen nobody in years, not from that part of my life.”

“Ruben is not the man he once was,” Dr. Angelis said.

“Yeah?” I said. “Who is he now?”

“I’m a worthless piece of shit,” Ghorbani said, “but I ain’t
that
worthless piece of shit.”

“The one who did this, he means,” Dr. Angelis said, turning a palm toward his face. The three of us were on folding chairs in a little room at the back of the shop. A fluorescent buzzed and flickered overhead, as though debating with itself whether just to give up and go dark.

“And who did you?” Ghorbani said, studying me. He nodded something that looked like professional approval. “Had to be a pro, or else there was three or four of them.”

“Well,” I said.

“I used to know a couple guys,” Ghorbani said, “who could, like, team up for that, hurt you that bad, I mean. Got top money, too.”

“It wasn’t a couple of guys,” I said. I could feel myself blushing. It was hired muscle from the Philippines. What’s happened to you?”

Ghorbani said, “I beat up the wrong guy.” His smile wasn’t so much sudden as it was unexpected.

“Ruben,” Dr. Angelis said, “is a minister now.”

“Downtown,” Ghorbani said. “At the mission on Skid Row.”

“They listen to him,” Angelis said.

“I still
look
scary,” Ghorbani explained.

Angelis swatted Ghorbani on the knee. “You know better than that.”

“Grace,” Ghorbani said to me. “It comes when you can’t see a foot in front of you.”

I held up a hand. “Okay. Look.” I thought for a moment, and rubbing my eyes seemed to help me organize it. “Herbie wrote a letter, supposed to be given to me if he died—you know—wrong. In it, he said if he got killed, you were probably the guy who would kill him.”

“I probably would have,” Ghorbani said. “But I kind of lost interest.”

Angelis said, “Believe him.”

“I do, I guess. But how? What happened?”

Ghorbani leaned back in his chair, which creaked, and closed his eyes. “Couple days after I messed the Rev here up, it was in the papers. Pictures and all.” He looked at me. “I seen the picture, which was taken the day after, when things look even worse—”

“I know,” I said.

“And I read he was a Rev and that he, you know, he refused to describe me to the cops, both him and Felipe. They wouldn’t say nothing about what I looked like. Said they didn’t want me punished, he wanted me to be reborn. At first I thought, oh, fuck him,
reborn
, what a bunch of crap.” He glanced at Angelis, who gave him a nod of encouragement. “But then the word came back, and when it did, I saw writing on the wall, swear to Christ—sorry, Rev—on the wall in my bedroom, and what I saw was, like—in the Bible?—the words on the wall at the king’s feast:
Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin
. I saw
them
. You know what those mean?”

“No,” I said.

“They’re
weight
.” He let the chair come down and leaned toward me as he bit off the final word, his eyes the green of lime leaves. “The shekel, or
tekel
, was the basic Babylonian unit of weight. Like an ounce or something.” He had both palms up, cupped, and he raised and lowered them like an old scale. “The
mene
was heavy, like fifty shekels. You following me?”

“Through a fog.”

“The
upharsin
was half a
mene
, or twenty-five shekels. I knew that because when I was a kid my parents dragged me to church, made me memorize most of the Old T.”

“Testament,” Angelis interposed.

“Yeah, testament. So I seen those words in front of me when
I read who the Rev was in the paper, and I knew what I was seeing was my own weight, the weight I was pulling around. I was seeing that the weight I was carrying was
ancient
, it was as old as evil, and the reason I had all them muscles was to carry that weight, the weight of the bad things I done. It was fucking crushing—sorry again, Rev—it was crushing me. Evil was.” He looked down at his lap, and I thought for a second he was embarrassed, but when he looked back up at me, the green eyes were shining. “And something had wrote that on my wall. I cried,” he said. “First time since I was eight years old, I cried. And it was like the whole earth had been lifted off my back. Like I’d been all bent over in a cave all my life, crawling through this tiny dark cave on my hands and knees under the weight of the earth my whole life, and all of a sudden I could stand up straight, and I was standing in the light. Like a person, not an animal. Then I found out where the Rev’s church was and I come down here.”

“I will confess,” Dr. Angelis said, “that I didn’t rejoice when I saw him coming.”

He and Ghorbani laughed.

“I stayed here three days,” Ghorbani said. “Me and the Rev and Felipe.” He pushed a knuckle against his lower right eyelid and blinked away a little moisture. “And that finished it. Never talked to none of them again, the people in the other Ruben’s world.”

“Bless their souls,” Angelis said. “The Lord has infinite mercy.”

Ghorbani brought his eyes back to mine. “You want me to talk to this Filipino bruiser? I mean, if
I
could be healed—”

“I think he’s beyond help,” I said. He and I looked at each other for a moment. “But I know someone you probably
could
help.”

“Who?”

“You remember Burt the Gut?”

Ghorbani’s face darkened, and for a moment I thought it was probably like looking at the man he’d been before. “I remember him. Don’t want to, but I do.”

“He’s old and sad and lonely,” I said. “He’s eighty and he hurts all over and he’s got a young wife who hates him, with good reason, I guess. Just waiting for him to die.” I inclined my head in the direction of the front room. “He’s like some of the people out there, except that they’ve got you and Dr. Angelis and Felipe. He rattles around in this big house with furniture jammed on top of furniture, and the only person he’s got wakes up every morning disappointed that he made it through the night.”

“I’ll call him,” Ruben said, looking at Father Angelis, who nodded. “Maybe go see him, if he sounds okay.”

“You’d make him happy,” I said. I pulled up Burt’s number on my phone and wrote it down. Ghorbani put it into his shirt pocket, and I heard myself say, “Don’t lose that. He’s a sad old man.”

“Gotcha,” Ghorbani said.

I pushed my chair back but stopped without getting up. “Before I go,” I said. “Tell me why you wanted to kill Herbie.”

“Worst fall I ever took,” Ghorbani said. “It put me away for three years. I got pounded pretty good in the jug, damn near every day, until I beefed up. Worst thing in my life. So anyways, what they got me for, I did it to protect Herbie. And Herbie ratted me to the cops.”

Ratted
is just
about the worst word in the crook’s dictionary. Ruben Ghorbani wouldn’t be unique, or even unusual, if he offed someone who sent him up for hard time. I knew half a dozen people who didn’t think of themselves as killers in spite of the fact they’d aced a rat.

I was listening to Ghorbani’s words ricochet around in my head as I came out of the church, hip-deep in the shadows of the
other buildings, the sun well on its way west, plowing its path to the ocean that you couldn’t see from Sylmar. I hit the broken pavement of the parking lot, running a finger along the dust on Ruben’s purple neon and thinking about Herbie, and I almost had my hand on the door of my car before I saw the person in the passenger seat.

I backed up, reflexively reaching for the gun at the base of my spine, but before I grabbed it the person leaned forward to look at me, and I saw it was a kid in a baseball cap, not more than thirteen or fourteen. He smiled and wiggled four fingers at me in a cheery little wave.

Before I did anything else, I took a slow, deep-breathing 360-degree turn to survey the lot. No cars other than Ruben’s and mine, no one on the sidewalk, no one lurking in any of the doors to the remaining shops. No one anywhere I could see.

The kid in the car mimicked me, looking around everywhere, and when he turned his back I saw the long, straight, black pony-tail hanging out of the opening at the back of the cap, saw the bright red ribbon tied around it to hold it in place.

A girl.

When she turned back to me and smiled again, I realized she wasn’t Latina. She was Asian, either Chinese or Korean. She had a sharp face, a fox’s face, with a tiny, pointed nose, the nostrils looking almost too narrow to breathe through, the cheekbones swelling above the delicate jaw to create a V-shape that was emphasized by the upward tilt of the eyes. She lifted a hand, palm down, and paddled with her fingers, meaning
come on
.

I looked around the parking lot again and then opened the door—which was, of course, unlocked—and got in.

She said, brightly, “Hi.”

I said, “Who the hell are you?”

“Anime.”

“Anna May?”

“Anime,” she said. “You know, like the Japanese cartoons?”

“I know what
anime
is. Anime what?”

“Anime Wong.”

I said, “You’re kidding.”

She drew a question mark in the air, backward, so I could read it. “Why? Why would I be kidding?”

“Fine,” I said. “Now, beyond the dubious name, who are you?”

“I’m your guide,” Anime Wong said. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

“To where?”

“Shut up and she’ll tell you,” said the man behind me, who had been jammed down between the seats. Something cold parted my hair and touched my skull. “Forget about your gun,” he said, sounding like a hood in a 1930s movie, “and stop looking in the mirror. Just keep both hands on the wheel and go where Anime says. Are you capable of that?”

I said, “Sounds manageable.”

“If I have to shoot you,” he said, “she knows how to drive, and she’ll have the wheel before you’ve had time to kiss your ass goodbye.”

Anime Wong’s eyes widened, apparently at the news that she knew how to drive.

“I see,” I said. “And how about I jam the accelerator down with both feet and just take us across the center line? She going to whisk you out of the way of the oncoming truck after my spirit has departed?”

“
Mon
ty,” Anime said, with the massive patience only a teenager can pack into a couple of syllables, “just park it, okay? Jeez, look at him. Even
you’re
scarier than he is.”

“Give me the gun,” Monty Carlo said.

I said, “No.”

Anime Wong snickered.

Monty Carlo said, “So …” and let it trail off.

I said, “Is there someplace we really have to go? The tree house or something? If not, do you guys know where there’s some good Mexican food? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

I waited. The guy in the backseat didn’t brush his teeth enough, and he exhaled a kind of mossy vapor. I was analyzing its components when the gun, or whatever it was, stopped prodding my neck, and Anime said, “Out the driveway and make a right.”

“Where were you going to make me go?” I said, once we were in traffic. There was no reply, and he was still sitting too low in the back for me to see him in the mirror without making a big deal out of it.

My question was still unanswered three-tenths of a mile later. I said, “Did you actually
have
anyplace in mind?”

He said, and he sounded like he was sulking, “I don’t plan on that level.”

“Really. What level do you plan on?” No response. I might as well have been talking to myself. Anime shot me an amused glance, and then Monty cleared his throat.

“Subaqueous,” he said.

I waited for more, but it wasn’t forthcoming.

Anime said, “Monty doesn’t always speak English”

I said, “So I gather.”

About half a mile farther west, Monty said, “Talking is old media.” He sat up a little, and I saw a high forehead with long brown hair pulled tightly back, perhaps in a ponytail. Maybe I was in the clutches of the Ponytail Gang. “Talk is never precise, and when it
is
precise, it’s usually untrue. Information gets re-prioritized by the brain or muddled by qualifiers or misshapen by emotions when it’s said out loud. Or it’s misheard. Not a
problem in coding, not a problem in math. They can still be wrong, but they’re precise. And they’re rarely untrue.
Untrue
is just one form of
wrong
, right?”