What Came After (13 page)

Weller didn’t know whether to be thrilled or alarmed.

“It seems you’re being auctioned off,” Carmichael said. Staring right through Weller. “Somebody thought I might be interested.”

“I’m glad to hear you were,” said Weller. Hardly believing but believing anyhow. A dream come true.

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say I was interested.” Sounds echoing from his end of the connection. Men coughing and water running. “Honestly,” he said. “You people.”

“But.”

“You people have no idea.
Rigoletto
starts in five minutes and I get this call and I take it because somebody’s assistant tells my assistant it’s important.”

Weller opened his mouth.

“They tell me a friend of mine has run up against PharmAgra security. PharmAgra wants to talk to me about money and I say hell no, patch me through to my friend, and this is what I get. You. Unbelievable.”

Weller said, “You remember me, though.”

“I don’t mind saying I feel badly used.”

Weller opened his mouth.

“Badly used.
Rigoletto
in five minutes—four minutes—and why somebody thinks I’d want to bail you out is beyond me. You deserve whatever you get.”

Weller said the call wasn’t his idea.

Carmichael kept on. Saying Weller deserved worse than that. Worse than whatever he’d get. Picking up speed because the music was coming up louder and the lights had already flashed once and he was torn between finding his seat and getting this out of his system. Too angry to hang up and knowing it and angry at himself for that and that making it worse. What in the world got into these people.

Weller said making the call wasn’t his idea, and neither was whatever anyone had said. He’d just shown them the picture was all. The picture that Liz had taken. He raised it up again like a talisman. Penny coming over and standing alongside him, that green film trailing from her fist. Weller saying whatever call they’d made and whatever they’d said was their doing and not his. He was sorry, but it wasn’t his doing.

Carmichael said oh for Christ sake you brought the kid. Is that what smugglers do now? Three minutes to
Rigoletto
and I’m talking to an idiot who’s smuggling tobacco with an innocent little kid along to learn the trade. Saying he’d had a higher opinion of Weller than that but he guessed he’d been wrong.

Weller said he wasn’t smuggling anything. Honest. He’d come to cash in his IOU. Holding the picture up again, as if it had value independent of what the man on the screen might decide it had. Any value beyond Carmichael’s merest momentary caprice.

Carmichael checked his watch. He looked back at the screen, studying it and looking absent at the same time. He might have looked at Penny standing there with her deep blue eyes and her fistful of pale green plastic. He might have thought of his own son and that Polaroid. Who knows.
Rigoletto
in two minutes and he said all right. Consider that IOU cashed in. I’ll bail you out. But not until intermission, so you can just cool your heels.

Weller said that wasn’t what he’d had in mind by way of that IOU. What he’d had in mind was getting his daughter’s sight back. It was hopeless in the Zone. Carmichael knew that. Hopeless. She’d be completely blind before long and blind forever after that.

The sound of water running. Across the screen a single electric jolt of interference from somewhere.

“Please,” Weller said. “You said you owe me one. You did. You said it.”

A muscle in Carmichael’s jaw bunched.

“That’s why I brought her all this way.”

*

What was the word for a person like that? A useful idiot. That’s what they called a person like Weller, and they were right on both counts. He was an idiot by any measure, and he could be useful if you knew how to use him.

Carmichael sat half watching the opera and thinking. He never quit thinking. That was what had gotten him where he was. What had gotten him everything he wanted in the world or almost everything he wanted, and what would get him the rest of it someday.

He was thinking about Weller and thinking about the girl and thinking about cars. That yellow Hummer he’d driven down here from the apartment on the Upper East Side only to have a delivery truck just about clip it in the front passenger side. As if the driver hadn’t seen it for Christ’s sake. As if a blind man couldn’t have seen it. Carmichael had boxed the truck in and gotten out of the car to chastise the driver even though his wife hadn’t wanted him to and she’d been right. There was no satisfaction to be had. The man hadn’t even spoken English. He was Management, with a National Motors permit and everything, and he hadn’t even spoken English. What was the world coming to?

Carmichael tried concentrating on the opera. It was in Italian and he didn’t know Italian.

The surgery would cost peanuts. That was a given. So the thing that Weller wanted wasn’t the important thing. The important thing was that he was asking at all. His nerve in asking. His audacity.

It was the audacity had gotten Carmichael’s attention.

He thought about that yellow Hummer. Ever since the Boston trip he’d been making up his mind that he couldn’t trust it anymore. It was a Chevrolet under the skin. He should have thought of that when he’d paid good money for it. So what if it were the last of its kind. That was just proof that the rest of them had died. Good riddance.

His wife was watching the opera and glancing down at a libretto now and then. A libretto in her lap printed in both English and Italian. Carmichael listened to the singing for a minute and looked over at the two languages running side by side on the page and his mind went right back to the driver.
No English
he’d said, so apparently he’d had a little. Enough to deny it.

Give a person an inch back there in the Zone, and this is what happened.

His wife put down her lorgnette and people applauded and he applauded too. Wondering if it was the start of the intermission, but no.

Weller. Weller had poor judgment and he didn’t know his place, but he had nerve and he had a dream. Nerve and motivation could make him useful. Never mind what the surgery would cost. The real cost was elsewhere. The real question was what it would cost to acknowledge Weller’s request. What it would cost to stoop. And what he could gain from stooping.

There was a car, actually. The idea of a car. The possibility of one.

God, he loved cars. He’d always wished he owned one of those big old Cadillacs with the fins like they still drove in Cuba. How they kept them going was a mystery right up there with the resurrection of the dead. Those gigantic broad-shouldered road-eating monstrosities. Grilles like gritted teeth and fins to soar with. Here in the states they’d thrown out all of that midcentury American iron when gas first got expensive. They’d traded it for the lightweight stuff from China and Japan, or at least the lightweight stuff from those countries was what lasted. What remained, now that nobody was making cars anymore. Cuba had the right idea. Cuba had a sense of history.

Cuba might as well be Mars, even for Anderson Carmichael.

He looked at the opera for a minute, but his mind kept slipping.

There was this one car. He’d seen pictures of it. He owned the full run of
Road & Track
on paper and he kept the copies under glass and he’d seen pictures of it. There hadn’t been many made in the first place and there weren’t any left now that he knew of. None at all. It was a German car. A German car made here. The badge may have said Bavarian Motor Works, but it was put together in the southern Appalachians back in the time before the balance of trade went down the toilet and parts got scarce and the unions went under and people like Carmichael started to think Cuba had had the right idea all along. Those Castro brothers. You had to hand it to them. Extremely good health care down there and everybody qualified if you could believe it. Fidel was still kicking even now, if what you heard was true. Back on his feet and looking younger than he ever did. Younger than he did when Kennedy was alive and the Bay of Pigs blew up. A walking miracle, that Castro. According to the pictures that got out, the color had even come back into his beard.

But he’d just now realized how he could go Castro one better. A brand new BMW X9, fresh off the line in Spartanburg. Black if possible but he’d take any color. There had to be one or two left down there someplace, one or two parked on a lot gone halfway back to wilderness, one or two that they hadn’t been sold when they shut down the machinery and turned off the lights and locked the doors.

If anybody could get it for him, it was Weller. Make the trip and finish up whatever needed finishing on it. If anybody had the motivation it was Weller too. That was for sure. That little girl of his.

Christ, though, it was supposed to be a no-man’s land down there. The stories you heard.

Never mind that. Not his problem.

The cost wasn’t even worth thinking about. One trifling operation. Strictly speaking he wouldn’t even have to go through with it if Weller didn’t make it back, but he was hoping he would. What the hell.

The music rose up loud and died away and the audience began to applaud again. His wife putting down her lorgnette and the lights coming up. Before she could say a word he stood and went back to the men’s room and made the call.

SIX
Some People Wait Forever

They met upstairs in the middle of the night. On the top floor of One Police Plaza. Weller boneweary but hopeful and Carmichael with his necktie unfastened and Penny stretched out on a long low couch underneath a wide black window, sound asleep. Beyond the window was a panorama of breathtaking beauty and haunting strangeness. The city awash in windowlight and streetlight and the moving light of traffic. The river empty and gleaming, and beyond it the grayblack tenements of Brooklyn Heights rising up and lit with flame. The famous trashlit Promenade. Oil drums burning garbage, with clots of people gathered around. There was candlelight in some windows and lamplight in other windows but most of the windows were black and dead. Not even windows at all from this distance and in this light or this light’s absence.

Traffic moved on the far side of the river too, but not much of it. Buses. Long buses gliding through dim remote intersections like eels, appearing and disappearing, their segmented sides gleaming. The graveyard shift in a Management town. Commuters.

Carmichael sat behind the desk in a big low leather chair belonging to some security officer so far beneath him as to be anonymous, and Weller stood. Saying thank you, sir. I’m glad you reconsidered. You won’t regret this.

Carmichael saying I don’t know what got into me but there it is. A moment of weakness maybe. Looking over at Penny asleep.

Weller saying maybe it was just the car. Saying he’d understand if it was just the car he wanted and not the girl he wanted to help. It didn’t matter to him.

Carmichael looking up and thinking he’d found the right man for the job. You couldn’t fool this one. Not even about the thing that mattered to him the most.

Weller said, “So what’s the plan? When do we get her to the doctor?”

“Oh,” said Carmichael, stretching the syllable out as though he’d been required to do the impossible. The slaying of some nine-headed monstrosity. “These things take time.”

“We’ve waited five years now.”

“Some people wait forever.”

“People like me. Not like you. People like you don’t wait.”

“There’ll be patients ahead of her.”

“Not ahead of Anderson Carmichael.”

The rich man laughed. “It’s not that simple,” he said.

“I think it is. I think it is that simple.” For the system was only a machine, after all. A machine that had ground him down and lifted Carmichael up.

“You don’t understand.”

“I do understand.” Weller tapped his finger on the big walnut desk. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t that simple. I’d still be downstairs.”

“Don’t press me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. But fair’s fair. A deal’s a deal.”

“I know all about deals,” said Carmichael. “I know about deals if anybody does.” Turning away from Weller to look out the wide black window at this city of his.

Weller pictured Carmichael as a machine himself. Inputs and outputs. Power and leverage. He looked at his own reflection in the black window and said, “I’d really like to get started for Spartanburg, is all.” Stating his single condition without stating it. Applying weight where it would matter. “So how soon do we see the doctor?”

Carmichael didn’t pause more than a half-second. “We’ll get you in tomorrow,” he said.

“Fine,” said Weller. “And you’ll keep her in the hospital until I get back.”

“Of course. Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Good. Now tell me about the car.”

Which warmed Carmichael up considerably. He said according to
Road & Track
there was no reason for anybody in the world to own this particular vehicle. They said there were better choices. Could you believe that? Four hundred horses and eight forward gears and all wheel drive and they said there was no reason. Of course there was a reason. It just wasn’t apparent to everybody. So the company hadn’t made many of them and that was reason enough right there, wasn’t it? The scarcity. Plus gas went through the roof and kept going and getting fifteen miles to the gallon meant you’d spend a grand just to do a week’s commute back and forth to a job that was tenuous at best, so demand dried up altogether. There were certainly people who’d had them out in the suburbs of one city or another for a while, parked in the garages of those big cookie cutter mansions they’d built with money they didn’t have before the real estate bubble blew and credit went south, but one by one they’d run their tanks dry and sold them off for scrap. Steel and glass and rubber. Transmission fluid and grease. They’d held on to their cheap little Geelys and Toyotas for as long as they could, which wasn’t long, and then they’d scrapped them too.