“You didn’t sound like that kind of person this afternoon.”
“It was something you said, actually, if you must know. You called me a sideshow. At the time, it just made me angry. But then I got home, thought about torturing Sugar, but instead just polygraphed him for what I needed to know. And you know what, Michael? I felt… gratified.”
“So you had an epiphany,” I said. “You could change your mind tomorrow.”
“Do you want to know how long I have to live?”
“I’d say three months,” I said.
“Could be less, really. My number of epiphanies is limited. I’d like to spend my last days happy, if you can believe it. Maybe I’ll travel. Maybe I’ll buy a spot on a Russian spaceship. Or maybe I’ll just keep running numbers and sending my minions to beat the shit out of people until I take my very last breath. Before today, those seemed to be my best choices. But then I had this… epiphany, as you call it. I call it a moment of reckoning. A moment of understanding my place on this planet.”
This all sounded too good to be true. “I don’t believe that I can totally trust you,” I said.
“You shouldn’t,” he said. “You’d be foolish to.” There was another beeping sound, this time from Big Lumpy’s iPhone. “Do you have anything to eat? I have to eat something every hour or else my medication will make me sick. Isn’t that funny? My medication will make me sick.”
“It’s ironic,” I said.
I opened up my fridge and took out two yogurts, blueberry for me and strawberry for Big Lumpy. He regarded the yogurt like it was poison, then exhaled in resignation, asked me for a spoon and started eating. When he was finished, I offered him a glass of water or some orange juice, but he declined both. I didn’t bother offering him a beer.
“Big Lumpy,” I said. “You like that name?”
“Not particularly.”
“What do your friends call you?”
“I don’t have friends.”
“What about family?”
“My brother, Jeff, calls me Buddy,” he said, “but I hate that, too. But then I haven’t spoken to him in a decade. So he probably just calls me ‘asshole’ now.”
It was weird to think of someone like Big Lumpy having a brother. Or parents. People like him just seem to exist outside of the normal world sometimes. “Anyone ever call you Mark anymore?”
“No,” he said, “no one calls me Mark anymore. Not in a million years.”
I’ve never trusted adults with nicknames. If you want to hold on to some childish thing, make it that you look both ways before crossing or that you are slavishly dedicated to making others share. But letting yourself be called something like Big Lumpy suggests a larger emotional problem. Which it was clear Big Lumpy had. Here he was nevertheless, as raw and vulnerable as a newborn. I could step on his oxygen line and he’d be dead. Or I could just shoot him. Or break his neck. He’d come unarmed and alone into an enemy war zone.
He was acting like a person with nothing to lose, which I suppose was true.
“So, Mark,” I said, “tell me what you want to do.” Big Lumpy made a few clicks on his computer again. “Yuri Drubich, you recognize, is not a positive part of international relations. He deals with terrorists. As much as I don’t care for working for our government, that has more to do with pay rates and backstabbing than some jihad madness, as I’m sure you can appreciate.”
“I can.”
“So you didn’t really blow up a preschool in Panama?”
“No,” I said.
“Good to know,” he said. “I’d like to represent your interests to Yuri. Tell him I’m the man behind the plan and that I have all of the actual information, but that it will cost him. What sounds like a good round number?”
“Four million?”
“That’s not a round number. Six has more curves.”
“So he pays. You give him the information and then when he finds out it’s bunk, what then?”
“You get him for purchasing government secrets with the intent of distribution to terrorists.”
“But this isn’t a government secret,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “But when I share Brent’s ideas with a few associates of mine in the NSA, it certainly will be. His broad ideas for transference are nothing short of profound. Just because they are theoretical doesn’t mean they aren’t inherently plausible.”
Or valuable. I wasn’t sure what angle Big Lumpy was working. Part of me wanted to believe that there was this new soft core of altruism inside the artist formerly known as Mark McGregor. And part of me knew that I was dealing with a man who played incredible odds in every part of his life. What was the bet here? And who got the payoff? At the worst, this was a suicide mission on Big Lumpy’s part. At the best, it was a path toward freedom for Brent, if indeed that was what Brent wanted. What nineteen-year-old knows what he wants, after all?
“And who gets the money?”
“I do,” he said. “And then I leave it to Brent, with a few provisos.”
“If I say no, what then?”
Big Lumpy spun his computer back toward me. On the screen was a satellite image of a house. I didn’t recognize it, so I pulled the image back until I began to see recognizable landmarks: the Stratosphere Casino, the Luxor Pyramid, the stretch of cars along the Las Vegas Strip. The house didn’t look familiar because I’d never actually been to Nate’s place in Las Vegas.
“Your brother Nate still owes me money, but I’ve taken that as a loss,” Big Lumpy said. “No use crossing state lines just for a few hundred dollars. Killing someone, that’s a reason to travel. Do you know what he used as his call-in code? Goldfinger007. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Hysterical.”
“I’m a reasonable man now, Michael,” Big Lumpy said. “And I’m a serious man. I trust that we have a partnership?”
“I can’t tell you what Brent will decide,” I said.
“You’re basically asking him to sit beside you and learn how to be an evil genius. Kids today, they have their own ambitions.”
“He’ll have choices. Good or bad genius is still genius. He can be good if he wants, too. You must know that eventually someone will come along to try to corrupt him, if he’s not dead before then.”
Big Lumpy had a very good point. A man like Yuri Drubich, even if he was arrested and imprisoned by the American government, would still be able to come at a person. He’d keep coming for as long as it took. It was a compelling argument.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “What about Sugar?”
“He’s an exceptionally annoying person.”
“I shot him once,” I said.
“You should have finished the job.” Big Lumpy got up from his seat and began to make his way to the front door, then realized he was still plugged in and waited for me to unhook him from the extension cord. He was an odd combination of extreme smarts and confounding helplessness. He was strong of mind but incredibly weak of body, so he was smart enough to threaten Nate’s life, smart enough to know that I was powerless to stop anything from happening to Nate three thousand miles away and blacklisted from conventional air travel, but too weak to do anything himself. Like take a breath, for instance. Or kill Nate.
It’s hard to kill someone once they’ve stopped being an object and started being a person, which is likely what Nate now was to Big Lumpy. But he wouldn’t be the one killing him. He’d just hire that out. If nothing else, I’d come to know that Big Lumpy was a man who covered all of his possible angles. I could muscle him if need be, but I wouldn’t outthink him.
I helped him to the door. When I opened it, his assistant was waiting on the landing with Sugar. Or someone who I presumed was Sugar. It was hard to be definitive since he had a canvas bag over his head and his torso was wrapped in what looked to be the plastic wrap commonly used by movers.
“He’s unhurt, at least physically,” Big Lumpy said.
“And there’s nothing there emotionally to tarnish, so I suspect he’s fine.”