The Merchants of Zion (37 page)

The authorities had taken the tablet's hard drive, and so I was unable to mine it for any contact information. Any business connections he might have had were unknown to me except for Vincent.

In the end, I couldn't come up with anyone besides Ruth and myself. I added Dimitri to the list, knowing he wouldn't respond, but a guest list of two seemed pathetic.

* * *

The morning of the funeral found me on my stoop, smoking and once again waiting for Ruth to pick me up. I was wearing a new suit, custom tailored; I'd fit right in if Ruth ever invited me to another one of her parties. It had been purchased with the insurance money, which I'd split in two: half for the funeral, half for me. Mourning clothing came under the funerary budget.

No one had come to remove the chestnut. The leaves had fallen off, encircling its corpse with a crisp brown halo. The naked branches blocked the sidewalk like 
un cheval de frise
.

Ruth was ten minutes late. Then twenty. After thirty minutes I was convinced she'd lied about coming and called for a car. The funeral was over an hour away and there was supposed to be a two car procession: us and the hearse. Whoever drove me was in for a payday.

The car I'd called pulled up to the curb. Ruth's silver hatchback arrived right behind it. Her window rolled down.

“I'm here,” she called.

My phone began to vibrate. It was the other driver. I silenced it.

The guy rolled down his window.

“You call for a ride?” he asked.

“It wasn't me, sorry.” I waved him away. He tried calling again. When no one answered he frowned and drove off.

“You're late,” I said as I climbed into the car. An enormous bouquet of flowers blocked the adjacent seat to her. I sat across from her. Our knees almost touched.

“I know. Sorry.”

“It's fine.”

“You look sharp. You even trimmed your beard.” As she leaned over to caress my face, I noticed she had a new ring. It was on her left hand and topped with a diamond you could choke on.

“Thanks. You look gorgeous.” She'd dyed her hair black, with neon pink highlights, and was wearing a plain black dress with a swooping lace neckline. She was more beautiful than I remembered, a real head-turner. It must have been the flush of grief—and of love.

“Where are we going?” I gave her the address, which she repeated to the car.

“I'm surprised they're letting you take it out of the city.”

“Well, I don't have to share it anymore. So there's no one to complain if I hog it.”

The hearse was idling in the parking lot when we arrived at the funeral home, which occupied the first floor commercial space of a bank of condos in Queens. It was a slow day for them, and no one mentioned our tardiness. The coffin had already been loaded into the hearse; we just had to follow it to the cemetery.

“You know, I'm still pissed at you,” Ruth said as we crossed the bridge into the Bronx.

“What for this time?”

“Because I never heard from you after the night James... after that night.”

“I contacted you about the funeral, didn't I?”

“You know what I mean,” she snapped. “I didn't have anyone who I could talk to about it.”

“Why not run to whoever gave you that ring?”

“What, are you jealous?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “Were we just your playthings? Had you been seeing him this whole time?”

“I told you already. I met him at the party.”

“The romance must have been overwhelming. I'm overcome with sentiment.”

“Like you would know anything about that. You have the emotional depth of a teaspoon.”

“You're projecting.”

“Keep telling yourself that.”

We passed an old cemetery, built up to the height of the freeway on which we rode. New Yorkers, ever irrational, had such a strong desire to be buried in a city without enough space for the living, let alone the deceased, that the cemeteries had begun building upward. When one reached its capacity, a new level was simply constructed atop it, a six-foot deep replica of the graveyard below. Artificial sunlight was installed on the lower levels, and the grass replaced with a variant genetically modified to thrive under fluorescent light. It resembled, more than anything, a car park for the dead. The cost of being interred in one of these was astronomical, and so I'd opted for James a more conventional burial upstate.

Ruth refused to continue with the conversation, or begin on a new subject. After an extended period of silence I could take it no longer; my curiosity was too strong. Who had waltzed in and won Ruth's heart, who was this superhero who had completed this impossible task?

“Who is he? Did you introduce us?”

“I don't think you met him.”

“Maybe I talked to him. I can meet people on my own, you know.”

“Forget it, Cliff. It's not important.”

“I won't be a jerk about it. I promise.”

She stared hard at me, then sighed. “Fine. It's Brian Anderson.”

I was shocked. I was stunned. I was incredulous. But I wasn't surprised. “The author. The famous author,” I said flatly.

“Him.”

“I thought he had a girlfriend. He told me she was your friend.”

“He did. I was.”

“And now you two are engaged.”

“Right.”

“He's only successful because of who his parents are. You know that, right?”

“You gave me one of his books for my birthday.”

“I was younger then. More susceptible to hype.”

“You said it changed your life.”

“Did you ever read it?”

“No.”

“Well congratulations, anyway.”

“Thanks. I hope you'll come to the wedding.”

“When is it? Next weekend?”

“Very funny. We haven't picked a date. But at least a year from now.”

“I'll have to consult my schedule.”

The hearse got off the highway. Ruth's car followed behind as if being dragged along by an invisible string, retracing its path down the back roads to the millimeter, copying every unconscious drift and over correction. It deviated exactly once, when the hearse's driver crossed for a brief second over the solid white line on the road's shoulder and the car recoiled like it had struck an electric fence.

“Perfectly obedient,” I said.

“James would've hated it.”

“Hey,” I started, and expressed the thought endlessly turning in my mind. “Did he ever hint what it was, exactly, he was up to. Like, why did he get shot?”

“I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head, then mouthing “Not here.” She pointed at the car's center console. “How far are we from our destination?” she asked.

“Approximately twenty-three minutes,” the car's toneless, feminine voice replied.

A lengthy red light turned twenty-three minutes into twenty-five, and we arrived at what would be James's final resting place with neither excitement nor aplomb.

Massive wind turbines sprouted from behind the tree lines on all sides, but the cemetery itself was a simple piece of greenery unrolled beside a duck pond covered in algae. Oft-mowed and unremarkable, I'd chosen it because the plot prices were a smidgen above the state median. James deserved better than a postage stamp in an industrial graveyard, his name printed on the Storebrand headstone in a font so small as to be illegible, but he wasn't around to complain if he wasn't interred in the custom-designed mausoleum he would've thought his due.

The burial crew was waiting for us next to the open grave. Two men wearing reflective construction vests were sitting on a backhoe, smoking and chatting with the service coordinator, who was also smoking. When we got out of the car he tossed his cigarette to the ground and approached us, arms open and upraised like he was preparing to impart good news. His face was streaked with dirt, and I noticed a third reflective vest draped over a nearby headstone; I wasn't the only one trying to cut costs.

“Greetings, ah, Mr. Mukavetz and Ms. Lee,” he said, reading off his phone. He looked up at us, then added, “And congratulations on your engagement. Sorrow often brings us closer.”

“What?” I said.

“No, it's not him. Someone else.”

“Oh,” he said, blushing. “Sorry.”

“It's an understandable mistake.”

There were a dozen chairs arranged in front of the grave. Ruth and I sat (and I smoked) while the service coordinator, hearse driver, and the two workers muscled the coffin on to a church truck.

“Those things are going to kill you, you know,” she said.

“They help with the grief.”

“Someone should figure out how to get electricity from the rationalization of addicts. They'd have their founder's million in a day.”

“So are you going to tell me what James was up to, or what?”

“Does it really matter?”

“I guess not. But why did he tell you, instead of me?”

“He told me in Rockford, after... after you went back to the city.” It took an enormous amount of self-control for me not to correct her, to refrain from referencing the event of which we were both thinking.

“But at that restaurant you said you didn't know.”

“Well, I lied.”

“So what was he doing?”

“He was laundering money for the Jacobins.”

“I thought that was impossible. Honest Abe sees every transaction.”

“He said he had access to some sort of shadow banking system. All done by hand. No computers. Normal people use it to avoid taxes.”

“So the real estate thing was fake and he was a revolutionary all along? And here I was, thinking it was his usual, misinformed bullshit.”

Ruth laughed cruelly. “He was in it for the money, nothing else. The real estate thing was his first hustle, but he dropped it when something better came along. I'm not sure how he found the Jacobins.”

“His business partner recruited him, I'm pretty sure. But he was an undercover agent. I saw him outside the house after, well you know.”

They placed James's coffin on the bier, and the service coordinator coughed throatily to get our attention.

“We find ourselves here today to mourn the passing...” Ruth nodded along. His repeated referrals to a loving family most obviously not in attendance confused me until I realized he was reading a script from his phone, replacing [insert deceased here] with a name. In this case, not even the right one: he kept mispronouncing 'Newsom' as 'Newson'. I'd left behind a flask of whiskey on my bathroom sink, thinking it inappropriate to bring along. A decision I now regretted.

“...and now I would like to—” he paused as he scrolled through the text, “offer the family of James Newson an opportunity to share their memories of happiness and joy.” He looked up from his phone for the first time. “Any of you two got something to say?”

Ruth nudged me. “What's the point?” I whispered. That I might be called upon to make a speech had crossed my mind, and I'd assembled vague, half-formed thoughts I'd hoped I would be spared from expressing. “No one's here.”

“I'm here.”

“Are you going to say speak?”

“Yes. After you.”

“Why do I have to go first?”

“Because if I do, I don't trust you to not back out of it.”

The service coordinator watched as we squabbled, bored. The two laborers were engaged in their own whispering and the hearse driver was looking at her phone. I wondered if they were paid hourly, or if they received a fixed fee. It was probably rude to ask.

“Fine,” I said to her.

Standing at the dais and uncomfortable from the sun beating down on my neck, I removed my jacket and draped it across one arm. At the base of a nearby row of hedges I saw squirrels playing, and behind me a cardinal chirped. The atmosphere had the pastoral oversaturation of a happy elopement at the end of a comedy, and here I was putting my friend into the ground and usher him to an afterlife in which I didn't believe. “Is it all right if I smoke?” I asked the service coordinator. He nodded, and in a smooth action that could have been choreographed, everyone but Ruth pulled out a cigarette.

“I met James Newsom,” I began, accentuating his last name and glancing at the service coordinator to see his sheepishness when he realized his mistake. I was disappointed: he either hadn't noticed the difference or didn't care.

“I met James Newsom in college. He was my freshman year roommate. One of my strongest memories of him that year is him telling me that when we first met he thought I was gay. Because of my limp wrists. Not that there was anything wrong with that, he'd hastened to add.

“But I also remember him lending me a nice chunk of money, no questions asked, when I blew through my high school savings during my first two months in the city. He lent me enough to see me through to the next semester, when I was able to cancel my meal plan and pawn my Christmas gifts.

“James came to college rough around the edges. He left that way too, but his abrasiveness brooked no malice, and was in many ways a virtue. We are all taught to mind every word we say, or write, even to some extent every thought we think, but James never learned that lesson, and he flaunted that rule to his continual remorse.” I could feel the tears streaming down my face. “You believed all those dumbshit conspiracies, then ignored every warning sign while you chased your founder's million. And now you're dead, you fucking idiot.” I returned to my seat. The workers were neither impressed nor astonished: angry outbursts must be a common response.

Ruth rubbed my back and whispered, “That was very moving.” She assumed the dais and retrieved a piece of her monogrammed stationery, folded in half, from her bra .

She read: “I didn't know James as well as Cliff, but I considered him one of my good friends, and the sad circumstances of our reunion hurt me beyond my ability to describe. Maybe Cliff, who is better with words than I am, could explain this sense of betrayal and unfairness that I feel towards James for his choices, and for the way I reacted to them.

“My final words to James will now forever be 'you ruined it, you fucking idiot.'” Here she paused to look up and added, “This appears to be a common sentiment that he evokes, both in life and death.” The workers chuckled at the line.

“James, wherever you are, I want you to know that I'm sorry. You were an easy scapegoat, strong enough for others to unload the failures of their consciences on to you. You were brash enough for others to find joy in being rude to you, or in trashing you behind your back. It is an uncommon gift, to be white and a man and to be so easily cast aside, with neither pity nor remorse. And I know—you told me so—that you found a kind of self-satisfaction in the abuse, because it proved your worst instincts about humanity were correct, and it allowed you to rationalize away any failures you might have. And you had many.