I shine the light all around me. Crate after crate, lining the shelves, stacked three tiers high to the massive beams of the ceiling. If anything, Lester grossly underestimated the worth of his fortune.
I sit for several minutes until the light-headed feeling passes, then I go back across the lake to Bert.
“Find it?” he asks.
“What?”
He shrugs, tosses away his switch, and says, “Whatever you were looking for.”
“Yeah,” I say, adjusting the brim of my cap down over my face. “I found it.”
“My grandmother used to say when you found what you’re looking for, it’s time to start looking for something new,” Bert says.
The sun is going down when I pull over the old Ford Bronco at a place called Byrd’s Marina. An old guy rents us a party boat for the rest of the day and gives us a map of the lake. I catch him staring at our hair. Bert’s is tied in a long ponytail and mine sweeps down to my shoulders. I’m still not used to the way white men look at Indians and I feel that my lips are tight. He puts an X on the spot where Bright Side is and tells us to watch the buoys.
“There’s rocks all over this lake,” he says, forcing a smile. “Have fun.”
I keep my head down, but take the wheel. Bert clutches a life jacket to his chest, the same way he does every time we cross into Canada by boat. A slight breeze coming from the direction of the sunset ripples the water. Lights begin to go on in random cabins around the lakeshore, but most of the places stay dark.
Bright Side is a dinosaur. Big and old and missing a few pieces. The boathouse has been patched together with bald pressure-treated planks. The dock stretches out from a crumbling concrete pier that is cloaked in green moss. The hotel itself is freshly painted, but looks as if it has shifted from the effects of an earthquake. It’s easy to see why whoever runs it supplements their income by selling small bags of weed.
We are docked and halfway up the lawn when someone skips down the front porch steps and jogs up to us. His hands are raised in the air in the act of surrender. I peer through the gloom from beneath the brim of my hat and my heart jerks to a stop.
Grinning stupidly at us is a stooped and wrinkled version of Paul Russo. The bags under his red-rimmed eyes are darker now and his shoulders sag and curl forward at the same time. In an attempt to diminish his baldness, he has grown a long flap of dyed-black hair that he sweeps over the top of his head from one protruding ear to the other. His clothes look like they come from an L.L. Bean catalog.
“Hey, guys,” he says with false cheerfulness. The wheezy sound of his voice losing its way in that big nose removes any doubt that this is the man from my past life. “I’ve got some guests in the lobby. Okay if we talk right here?”
I can see Bert staring at me from the corner of my eye, but I keep my face angled down under the brim of the hat and my mouth shut. Bert starts to shift his feet.
Russo laughs nervously through his nose and says, “I know you guys are here for the money and I’ve got most of it. Here. It’s right here…”
He pulls a fat wad out of his pants pocket and begins peeling off bills, counting by twenty. When he’s finished, he holds the stack out to me.
My bones ache. That’s how bad I want to show him my face. To see his eyes go blank. To smell him wet his pants when he stares back at this ghost. To savor his muffled shrieks as we take him away, out to the middle of the lake where I can choke him to death with my bare hands before we tie the anchor to his neck and sink him forever. I know we could do it. It would be easy.
This is my first test.
31
WHEN I WAS BORN from the pipe in that prison wall, my second life began. It is a simple life with a single purpose. The lessons of my past life have stayed with me, but gone is the scattered focus. I am here to bloody my sword with the mess of everyone who destroyed Raymond White. I am no longer him and I am no longer Running Deer, or Quick Buck, or Quick Book. The joke is over.
I will take the name of the son of the man who gave me this second life. I will not be overeager or impulsive. I will have ice in my veins because I have already been dead. I will now become Seth Cole.
This is what I tell myself.
I take the money pinched between Russo’s fingers and turn to go. I promise myself the time will soon come.
“Tell Bonaparte the rest is coming,” he says after us, then we hear that nervous nasal laugh.
“We’re not gonna bust him up some?” Bert says to me in a low tone.
We are standing on the dock and I have the mooring line of the party boat in my hands. Its aluminum pontoons ring hollow as they bump against the wood. A yellow bulb in a broken fixture on the wall of the boathouse glows dully and insects swirl through its beams.
I tilt my hat back and look up at Bert so he can see my eyes.
“Do you want a job?” I ask.
Bert giggles and looks around.
“What do you mean?” he says. “I got a job.”
“You want another? You want to work for me?”
“You’re not gonna take that money?” he says, his eyebrows furrowing.
“I’ll pay it back,” I say. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay it back double by the end of the week. You want a job?”
“Workin’ for you?” he says. “Just you?”
“Just me.”
“Yeah,” Bert says, smiling big, the slits of his eyes nearly invisible above those big round cheeks. “I want that job.”
I reach out and squeeze his thick arm and we step onto the boat.
I drive all night to just outside New York City, where we flop down in a motel under the shadow of Bear Mountain. We sleep until midmorning, then go into Manhattan. Bert waits in the truck while I go into Zegna on Fifth Avenue and buy a dark blue suit, shoes, a shirt, and a tie with Russo’s money. I step out onto the sidewalk and see that Bert doesn’t recognize me without the Bills hat and frumpy clothes that I carry in a Zegna shopping bag.
I go around the corner to a hairstylist and pay for a hundred-dollar trim, pick up a fake Cartier watch on the street, then have Bert drive me to a 49th Street diamond shop. I deal my stones in the backroom with a Hasidic grandfather who gives me a briefcase half full of crisp hundreds banded together in narrow paper sleeves that read: $10,000.
The old man stares up only briefly from beneath his black felt hat and thick round glasses before he tells me where I can get some fake identification made up. The next stop is Western Union so I can wire Bonaparte notice of our respectful termination along with Russo’s money in full plus another equal amount as interest for the day’s use.
We eat bulging pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s Deli before circling the Bronco back to the garment district, where hopefully they’re finished making up my identification. For ten thousand dollars cash, I get a valid Mississippi driver’s license, a library card from the Oxford Public Library, and a Social Security card all bearing the name of Lester’s dead and long-forgotten son. I give the guy one of the packets of hundreds from the diamond merchant, then Bert and I leave the city.
We hire some strong young kids from a guy Bert knows at the Turning Stone Casino, the Oneida Indian Reservation casino just west of Utica. I rent a U-Haul with a twenty-four-foot van and buy three sets of handheld radios along with a six-horse Johnson outboard motor. It’s ten o’clock, pitch black, with the wind promising rain when we post two of the kids along Uncas Road with radios to keep a lookout.
It takes four hours to empty the cottage vault into the truck. During the last half-hour, it begins to rain. I give the kids each ten one-hundred-dollar bills and they grin all the way back to Turning Stone. After we drop them off, Bert and I get a start on our drive back to New York City, stopping when we get to a motel outside Hamilton and hurrying inside to get out of the spattering rain.
The next day, the sky is clear. We find a stout-looking storage facility in one of the sprawling new suburbs of Bergen County across the line into New Jersey. It takes me three days to sell a Cézanne for three hundred and fifty thousand. I know I’m being taken, but it’s just one painting, and I want to get out to Los Angeles to begin my transformation.