The Amateurs (32 page)

She didn’t respond. Wasn’t sure how much she wanted to comfort him. Or even who he was, exactly. The new Mitch, the old Mitch, the Mitch on her living-room floor. It was too much to deal with.

Finally, he said, “What did you tell the cop?”

“I told him I didn’t know anything about it.”

The words brought his head up, and he looked her in the eye. “You did that for me?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Her cheek hurt, and she tasted copper from where her teeth had cut the inside of her mouth. “I was scared, I guess.”

He nodded. “Scared I understand.”

They sat on the floor, not touching, not looking at each other. She could hear the faint sounds of life going on around them, but she felt apart from it. In a bubble.

Then she heard a voice from the door.

 

 

IAN HAD BROKEN every traffic law racing from the martini bar to Jenn’s apartment. It was Saturday night, and after eleven, but even so, he made it in fifteen minutes, Davis’s calm voice ringing in his mind as the chemist explained what it was they had stolen.

When he found her front door standing open, he imagined the worst. Forced himself to keep moving anyway. “Hello?”

There was a long silence, and then he heard Jenn’s voice. “Come in, Ian.”

He stepped inside, closed the door behind him. Until last week he’d never seen the inside of her apartment. Now, as he rounded the corner into her living room, he felt almost at home. Until he saw her and Mitch sitting on the floor.

At first he thought maybe they had been attacked. But by the weary way they both looked up at him, he realized it was something more complicated than that. Her cheek was bright red. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” she said, looking not at him but at Mitch. “We have bigger problems.”

“You don’t have any idea how true that is. You know how we assumed this was a drug deal? It wasn’t.” Ian took a deep breath. “It was something much, much worse.”

G
OD, he loved predictable people.

Bennett was used to watching, to spending long hours staring at someone’s window. Waiting for the five minutes that justified days or even weeks of patience. It wasn’t his favorite part, but he’d developed a kind of Zen about it.

But watching the chick’s place hadn’t required much patience thus far. Victor’s hunch had been right. She was at the center of everything. Each member of this little drama had stopped by. Even a cop: Around ten, Bennett had gone to piss in the alley, and was just walking back when he saw the sedan pull by. Municipal plates going the wrong way on a one-way street. Police, gotta love them. Enforce the rules for everybody else.

He’d taken a seat on someone’s stoop, dialed Victor on his cell. “There’s a cop going into her apartment.”

“Uniform?”

“Detective. Alone.”

There had been a pause. “OK. There’ve been some developments on this end too. I applied a little more pressure. We may be moving ahead faster than anticipated. Maybe even tonight.”

“Great news. Any specifics I need to know?”

“Not on a cellular line. What’s your read on the detective?”

“Not sure. If he stays more than twenty minutes, or any others show up, I’ll call. Otherwise it’s likely nothing.”

They hung up, and Bennett leaned back on the porch. Something was happening. He could feel it, almost taste it.

This thing would end tonight.

 

 

JENN WONDERED how much worse it could get. Wasn’t there a limit to how messed up life could become?

As she wobbled to her feet, Mitch said, “What do you mean? Johnny is a drug dealer—”

“Yeah, well, he seems to have moved up in the world.”

“But—”

“Would you
shut up
?” Ian’s voice had none of the comic distance he usually tried for. The tone was iron, and it caught them both. He continued, “I talked to a chemist friend of mine. No way that stuff was drugs. When I described it to him, do you know what he said? He said”—Ian paused, rubbed at his eyes—“he said that it sounded to him like it was . . .”

“What?”

“A chemical weapon. Nerve gas.”

She was suddenly conscious of the little sounds, of the slow, regular draw of her own breath. The continuing pace of the world, the way it just kept going, like it or not.

Then she started laughing.

It wasn’t a giggle. It was high and came from somewhere deep and flavored with hysteria. “A what?” She choked the words out.

“Chemical weapon. Probably sarin gas.”

“Sarin?” Mitch’s tone was strangely dead. “The stuff from those subway attacks in Tokyo?”

“Yeah.” Ian raised his hands. “I know.”

“But. We opened it.”

“You didn’t touch it, though, right?”

“No.”

“That was one of the things that told him what it was. If that had been sarin, you might have died. This is what’s called a precursor. Apparently, if you’re the kind of evil fuck who makes chemical weapons, you make them in two parts. The part you guys found is called the precursor. Based on your description, the headaches, the clenched muscles, the rest of it, my friend said it sounded like something called”—he dug in a pocket, came out with a bar napkin, squinted—“methylphosphonyl difluoride. DF for short. That’s the part that’s hard to make, and that’s worth a lot of money. The other part is just alcohol.”

Her laughter got harder.
Drug dealers and terrorists and chemical weapons, oh my!
Her breath came in short gasps between gales that hurt her stomach.

“I’m serious,” Ian said. “The dangerous half of sarin gas. That was what Johnny was buying. What he planned to sell to Victor. That’s what the money was for.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. How would Johnny—”

“I don’t know. Maybe the guy you killed put him up to it. Maybe he was just a middleman. It doesn’t matter. The stuff was moving through the black market, and we intercepted it. That’s why Victor is coming after us this hard. Drugs are easy to get. But can you imagine how much something like that would be worth to the wrong people in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

Jenn’s vision was getting spotty from lack of air. The boys were talking around her, talking sheer madness, and neither of them could see how
funny
it was.

“We cannot give this stuff to Victor,” Ian said.

Mitch stood up, walked over to her. “Jenn?”

She gasped, fought for breath. “Don’t you see—”

“Pull it together.”

“I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m a fucking travel agent.” She doubled over again. Mitch caught her shoulders gently.

“Shhh. Come on.”

“This is bad. This is so bad.” Ian had his hands to both cheeks like the kid in those movies, and it didn’t make breathing any easier.

“Jenn. Stop.”

She closed her eyes, clenched her fingernails into her palm. The sharpness helped. Just as the laughter was dying, another thought occurred to her. “You,” she said, fighting back more, “your timing was lousy, Mitch.”

“Huh?”

“You slapped me too early.”

It was meant as a joke, but no one else laughed. She felt them looking at her and saw herself from their eyes. Slowly, she stopped, the sounds dying like a baby’s cry, strangled and kind of embarrassing. She straightened, wiped tears from her eyes.

“This is serious.” Ian’s voice was somber.

“I know,” she said. “I know.” She took a deep breath. “It’s just, you can’t be right.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . just because.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am. And if you two will listen to me for a second, you’ll see.”

The laughter was gone, but the hysteria was still inside her, twisting and coiling and looking for release. She took a moment to calm herself. “Tell us.”

Ian started, his words like freezing water. How he had called a friend who had helped him before, and described what it was that they had found. How the man had gone through it logically, the possibilities; the material the bottles were made of, the value, the reaction they had both suffered. The logic cool and hard and diabolical. On some level, she realized, it wasn’t really a surprise. Some part of her had known all along that whatever was in those bottles was more important, and more dangerous, than mere drugs. She just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

And still didn’t. “What if he’s wrong?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Mitch said, “What if he’s not?”

“This stuff, you know how it kills people?” Ian somehow looked even worse than he had that morning. “It causes all of the muscles in your body to contract to their maximum amount. People break their arms, their spines. They eventually die of suffocation because their lungs won’t move. But first they feel their body tearing itself apart. He said that a drop of it was enough. One drop on bare skin.”

One drop. Jesus. There had been a gallon of the stuff.

The silence was unlike any she had known. Within it, her thoughts and fears curdled and spun, foul twisting things. She felt a childish panic at the enormity of what they were dealing with. It made her want to crawl under the table. “If we hadn’t robbed Johnny, this would still be out there.”

“So?”

“So, it’s not our fault. We didn’t make it. We wouldn’t sell it. It’s not our fault.”

“Not our fault?”

“Like you said. We just intercepted it. We weren’t even supposed to be there, but we were, and we ended up with it. But that doesn’t make it our fault.”

“Did you understand what I told you? This stuff, it could kill—”

“Ian,
Victor will kill my parents
. And your dad, Mitch’s brother, Alex’s daughter.” She knew what she was saying was selfish, but she wasn’t sure that made it wrong. Who didn’t look after their own first?

“That doesn’t make it right to ignore—”

“I didn’t say it does. But that’s the situation. If we don’t give him what he wants, he’ll kill our families. And regardless, it’s not my
fault.
”

There was a pause. Then Mitch said, “It’s like one of your games, Ian. An impossible situation, no way to win, just ways to lose less. Is it better to lose a few people you love or a lot of people you’ll never meet?”

Ian looked from one to the other of them. “Those are just games. This is real.”

“Yeah. But it’s also true. He’ll kill them.”

“That nerve gas could kill
hundreds
of people. Maybe thousands. And maybe it won’t be in Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe it will be in Chicago or New York. Maybe it will be in a subway station at rush hour.”

“I didn’t ask for this,” she said. “I didn’t agree to it.”

“None of us did.” Mitch stood, walked to the window.

The whole thing was surreal. It reminded her of the kind of talk they used to have on Thursday nights, back when life made sense and everything was casual. When it could all be viewed with ironic detachment, when their problems were jobs and rent and their love interests. Back when everything had been play.

Even their lives.

They had all been treading water. Playing the game of life, but unwilling to actually make a move, put their chips on the table. Staying in dead-end jobs and bullshitting themselves about what mattered. Pretending nothing did.

“Do you remember,” Mitch said, staring out the darkened window, “how we used to talk about the rich guys, the CEOs and politicians? How we used to hate them for acting in their own interests instead of for the good of everyone else?

“We went into this thinking we were going to stick it to guys like that. Like Johnny. People who broke the rules for their own good. And now here we are. Thinking the same way.”

“So what do we do?”

He took a breath. “All I know is what I won’t do.”

“What’s that?”

“Settle for the lesser of two evils.” Mitch spoke with a quiet calm. His back was straight and his voice steady.

“But—”

“There has to be a third way,” he said. “There has to be something better.”

Again, the silence fell.

Then Mitch said, “You know what?” He turned to face them. “There is.”

“What?”

“I take the stuff to the police. I turn it over and tell them everything.”

“But—you—the alley. You . . .” Even now, she found it hard to say the words.

“I killed someone,” he said. His voice was steady, but she heard the stress beneath it. “I shot someone. And I’ll admit that.”

“They’ll arrest you,” Ian said.

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But it’s the only way. Take responsibility for what I did.”

“That’s crazy. They’ll send you to jail.”

“Maybe that’s where I belong.” His voice cracked a little, but he kept going. “Look, I’ve been hiding from this since it happened. Pretending I can be something else, that I can just go on with life. Maybe there are people who could forget it, but that’s not the way it works for me. I did it to protect you, and I’ll tell them that. Maybe it will help. Maybe not. But I can’t go on pretending, and we cannot let Victor have this.”

“But it’s not our fault,” she repeated, hating that they were making her play this role. “I know that sounds weak, but if we hadn’t come along, Victor would have bought and sold it, and we wouldn’t have known a thing.”

“Sure. But if we give this to him, chances are, one morning we’ll turn on the news and see a story about a terrorist attack with sarin gas. Maybe here, maybe somewhere else, and we won’t even know for sure it was the same stuff. But there will be hundreds of people dead. And we’ll have to stand and watch, and wonder if we could have done something. Can you live with that?”

She looked at him. The streetlight outside cast raindrop shadows across his face. His back was straight, but his hands trembled. She imagined herself making breakfast in her kitchen. The radio on, a bagel in the toaster, hummus on the counter, coffeepot gurgling. Alone in her little world. And on the TV, images of innocent people twisted and broken, their faces locked in eternal screams.