“Nice of you to wrap him up for me,” I said. I watched as Big Lumpy was helped down the stairs by his manservant-I really needed to get one of those-and was struck by how difficult it was going to be to explain all of this to Sam and Fiona, when Big Lumpy stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back up at me.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“Trusting me. No one trusts me.”
“I’m not sure that I do. You did threaten to kill my brother after all.”
“It’s just part of the odds. You know that.”
“I suppose I do. I just don’t want to take a bad beat like Henry Grayson.”
“You won’t,” he said. “We’ll speak tomorrow and in a few days all of this will be over and I’ll be dead or dying and your friend Brent will have a new life. Isn’t that nice?”
Big Lumpy didn’t wait for my reply. He and his assistant walked through the courtyard and out into the street, climbed into the white Escalade and were gone. I pulled the canvas bag off of Sugar’s head and saw that they’d also duct-taped his mouth and stuffed his ears with cotton. That they hadn’t just cut out his tongue was probably only due to Big Lumpy’s new world-view. I ripped the duct tape off of Sugar’s mouth and he immediately began apologizing, making threats and essentially babbling incoherently, so I put the tape back over his mouth, but pulled the cotton out of his ears.
“Sugar,” I said, “I want you to listen to me. You ever tell anyone who I am, where I live or even the color of my eyes again, and I’ll kill you myself. We clear?”
Sugar nodded his head. It was about all he could do, since he was still wrapped in plastic.
“All right,” I said. “Come on in and I’ll make you some yogurt.”
11
The first kamikazes, the first fighters willing to commit suicide in order to defeat their opponents, are generally thought to have been the Jewish Sicarii and the Islamic Assassins. Unlike modern-day suicide bombers, the Sicarii and the Assassins weren’t required to die in order to do their jobs, but if that was what happened, so be it. Undertaking a suicide mission requires a different psychological makeup than merely putting yourself in a position where you might die as a result of your actions.
With someone like Big Lumpy, however, where his death was already foretold, taking a risk like presenting himself to Yuri Drubich in order to defraud him was an entirely different beast. He could die in the process, but maybe it would be a less painful way to go than via whatever was eating him from the inside out. No matter how this all played out, Big Lumpy was a dead man. And in the end, if he went for it, Brent’s father’s debts would be gone, he’d be able to get the help he needed, and Brent would have choices about how to use his talents. Or at least he’d have the financial security to make choices. I couldn’t imagine what Big Lumpy’s provisos would be, as he said, but they’d hardly be enforceable with violence after he was dead.
“What sort of person goes by Big Lumpy?” my mother asked.
It was the next morning and I’d just finished explaining to Brent (and a befuddled Sugar… and my chain-smoking mother) the deal Big Lumpy was offering him, right down to the potential for millions of dollars. We were sitting at the same kitchen table where I’d had eight thousand conversations with my own mother and father about how crime doesn’t pay. The same table where Fiona and Sam-who were on their way over to take Brent to school-and I had planned more than one enterprise that might normally be considered criminal if we weren’t such good law-abiding citizens… or, well, at least Sam and I were, in any case.
I hadn’t mentioned to my mother that Nate was being threatened in all of this, figuring that all things being equal, she really didn’t need to know that Nate was also into a psychopath-or a former psychopath, as it were-for some marginal sum of money. Parents really don’t need to know everything about their children.
“It’s a nickname,” I said. “Because of his huge brain.”
“What about you, Sugar?” my mother asked. “Why do people call you that?”
“I’m sweet, Mrs. Westen,” he said.
“Isn’t that nice,” she said. She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “Brent tells me you used to live under Michael’s place. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
“It’s a small world,” he said.
“So you’re the drug dealer, then, that he had to shoot?”
“Yeah,” he said. “You know. We all got checkered pasts, right, Mike?”
“You don’t have a checkered past,” I said. “You have a checkered present. You really do need to consider another line of work, Sugar. Eventually someone is going to have better aim and will get you in the head.”
“I was thinking maybe I’d go back to school. Hit up twelfth grade again at night school and then just bounce once I get my paper. You know, but I gotta get mine until then. I’m going to get up out of that game when I can, Mike, on the real. Soon as I get a new ride.”
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, “but I have no idea what you just said. Could you interpret into English for me, Michael?”
The thing about my mother was that she could be lost and adrift and then she could just seem to be lost and adrift. It was a good defense mechanism and a good way of putting people like Sugar in their place. She would have made a good preschool teacher or Cossack.
“He’s going to quit dealing drugs just as soon as he gets his high school diploma and a new car,” I said, “but not in that order, I suspect.”
“And do you also call yourself Sugar because you sell cocaine?” she asked.
“Allegedly,” he said.
My mother turned to Brent. “If you’re smart,” she said, “you’ll get him out of your life as soon as possible.”
Brent shrugged. If he could figure out a way to convey the word “like” by using a repetitive body action, he’d have the basis of his entire emotional range covered.
“Anyway,” I said to my mother, “Big Lumpy is a genius. Geniuses get to call themselves whatever they want. Though my understanding is that he doesn’t actually care for the name, if it makes you feel any better, Ma.”
“He might be all smart and stuff,” Sugar said, “but he’s mean.”
“He let you live,” I said. “He didn’t need to do that.”
“Whatever,” he said. “He wrapped me in plastic wrap like I was a sandwich or some shit. That’s messed up, yo.”
Through all of this Brent was strangely silent. “So,” I said, “what do you think, Brent?”
“Why does he want to do this?” he asked.
“Honestly? I think he sees himself in you.”
“I’ve never met him,” Brent said.
“I don’t mean it literally,” I said. “But in your work. The Web site. The guts it took to stand up to him and to screw Yuri Drubich over. He thinks you’re smart, Brent. I think you’re smart, too. But I’m not offering you an opportunity to do… well, whatever he wants you to do.”
“What do you think that will be?”
“My guess is that he wants you to go down a better road than he went on,” I said. “At least eventually. My sense is that he thinks he can train you a bit. And then send you to work for people who could use you for the good of our country. What you did to Yuri, what you came up with, InterMacron, that technology you just made up out of the ether? He thinks it could work, Brent. That’s the biggest thing. He thinks your theories are sound.”
“I was just doing what I could to help my dad,” he said. “I did what anyone would do.”
I looked across the table at my mother. She was sitting beside Brent attempting to be as motherly as possible, which wasn’t easy, since she was always better at being vaguely distant and demanding, and I could tell she wanted to say something. She kept opening her mouth and then closing it, like a fish.
“Go ahead, Ma,” I said, “say what you’re going to say.”
“Well, Michael,” she said, “I think Brent makes a very good point. Doing whatever he could do to take care of his parent. That’s a very kind, very wise, very sweet thing for a boy of just nineteen to do.”