Siege 13 (33 page)

Meanwhile, Aces mailed me his third black card, with a telephone number in Toronto. From what Annabella told my mother, he'd lived in the States for a number of years, “travelling here and there,” which she gathered from the libraries in Wyoming and Montana and New Mexico that kept calling her to ask if she knew someone by the name of “Imre Ászok” who owed thousands of dollars in overdue fines for books such as
The Secret Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismai'lis Against the Islamic World
;
Secret Societies of the Middle Ages: The Assassins, The Templars & the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia
;
Conversations With an Assassin: Reflections on Modern Society
, and many others, to which Annabella replied saying Aces was an adult and she had no intention of covering his fines.

In the previous year Aces had been kicked out of the States, and had brought a woman with him, Anna Kovács, who was “masquerading” as his wife. That's what my mother said: “I don't think she's his real wife. They didn't get married in a church or anything. I think Aces just helped her to become a Canadian citizen.”

“Maybe he loves her,” I replied.

Aces had been in love before, with at least one girl I could remember, Katie Smith. She was the daughter of Leo Smith, one of the top managers at the pulp and paper mill. For some reason, Leo had liked Aces, hiring him on the university
student program the summer before I worked there, even though Aces had dropped out of high school. Leo and Aces would go target shooting in the gravel pits up the north shore logging roads, Aces trying hard not to speak the script running through his brain—how each of the wine bottles, beer cans, and cardboard boxes were actually assassination targets. “Good one,” Leo would shout, looking through the binoculars and clapping Aces on the back. Meanwhile, Aces was thinking, “That's one less crazy communist dictator for the world to worry about.”

But Leo's daughter, Katie, was more exposed to Aces' craziness. Aces would show up hanging headfirst from the roof and gazing into her second-floor bedroom until she turned and caught sight of him and screamed. He'd take her out in his car and veer off into the alley that ran under the east-side power lines, racing along, trying to show her he was adept at executing a “Rockford” manoeuvre at high speeds. He'd take her to a dance at the Mercury Ballroom and look around as if he could see in the dark and ask if there was any guy there who'd ever looked at her funny, or made crude remarks, or treated her badly. “Tell me his name,” he'd say. “Tell me all their names.”

I wasn't there that night in the ballroom, but I could see her answer, gazing at Aces cruelly in the dim light, the smell of spilled beer and rye and Coke, the scrape of chairs as drunken kids fell to the floor, the blare of canned music. “Sure,” she said. “Lance Banks over there.” She pointed him out. “Ryan Olsen.” She pointed again. “He called me a cunt once,” she said, noting how it made Aces hop from his chair.
“Then there's Alex Johnston, by the beer counter. He told me I could suck his dick any time I liked.” She peered around some more. “Oh, yeah, Bruce Norris over there. Another dickhead. And George Hazelton, Jerry Alsop, Judson Astor. This one time, they wanted to do a four-way. Can you imagine that? It'd be like a porno.”

I went to visit Aces in the hospital a few days after he'd regained consciousness. The first three fights had gone well, but they'd worn him down, and it was on the sixth one, when Jerry Alsop was kicking him repeatedly in the head, that Aces realized, with a tinge of disappointment, that he probably wasn't going to get a chance to take on Judson Astor. “But more than that,” Aces told me through the stitching on his lips, “I was sad because I knew this was Katie's way of breaking up with me.” I had to look away from Aces then, turning my face to the window, afraid I'd see him cry. “I've got to find some way to get her back,” he whispered.

He was serious. He loved her. It took me two anxious days to figure out what to do, knowing I had only as long as they kept Aces in the hospital. The next day, when my mother stepped out, I went into her jewellery, stuff that seemed famous to me from the stories that surrounded it—which aristocratic branch of the family had worn these rings, how this necklace was recovered from a collapsed apartment in the war, why the emeralds in this pair of earrings were traded for a wedding dress—until I found exactly the thing.

I tracked Katie down that night, waiting in the parking lot for her to close up the clothing store where she worked, watching as she turned the “open” sign to “closed,” pulled
in the rack of sale items from the sidewalk, cleared the till, turned out the lights, turned on the alarm, then lowered the grille, at which point I got out of the car and walked over.

“What do you want?” she said, glaring at me. It was the exact opposite reception I got whenever I went inside the store, where my mother had been buying me clothes for years—stuff to wear to St. Joseph's for mass, to concerts and better restaurants—and where Katie always remembered everyone's names, plus an anecdote or two, to make them feel welcome, though she always walked past you without saying so much as hello when you ran into her anywhere else.

“I have a message from Aces,” I said. “It's really important.”

She looked at me as if I was crazy. “What the hell does
he
want?”

“It's right here,” I said, reaching into a pocket, then another, hoping it didn't look rehearsed, and finally coming out with a piece of paper. I cleared my throat, noting how the hostility in her eyes had been replaced with apprehension. “‘Dear Katie,'” I started. “‘I hope you don't mind me sending my cousin like this, but I know you're probably afraid to see me given the condition I'm in, and because of what happened. I want you to know that I'm grateful that you gave me the chance to defend your honour. We haven't been going out very long—well, I'd call what we're doing ‘going out' anyhow—but I think my actions at the dance made it clear how much I love you. I have sent my cousin to deliver this message because I wanted you to know as soon as possible that I will never stop loving you no matter what, and the minute
I'm well enough I'm going to finish the job I started on Saturday night, and when that's done, when Jerry and Judson have hauled their broken bones over to your place to apologize, then you and I can finally get married.'” At this point I pulled out the wedding band that had belonged to my mother's father—a beautiful orange-gold ring that looked like a twist of tiny flowers and leaves—and knelt in front of her, trying to look awkward, and said, “Will you marry my cousin Aces?”

Katie looked at me in horror. “You guys are totally fucked!” she said.

“He's not sure, however,” I continued, “that he can wait until the wedding night to consummate the marriage.”

Within three days Katie was gone. I heard she'd quit her job suddenly and gone to live with an aunt in Halifax, where she was planning on attending university that fall. Aces was heartbroken, but he was safe, and that was all that mattered to me.

 

Once I found out that Aces was in Toronto I called and said I really wanted to see him and Anna. Aces faltered on the other end, saying it was really a long drive, maybe I should reconsider the cost of gas, the lunch I'd have to stop for along the way, the endless traffic on highway 401. He didn't want me to come, which of course only made me all the more interested.

I was not surprised when Anna Kovács met me at the door wearing the sort of long, low-cut dress you'd see in movies about 1950s cocktail parties. From the moment she opened her mouth, it was obvious she was from California, and from
the moment Aces entered, the way she looked at him, it was obvious she had as little interest in loving him as Katie had.

“She's the great-granddaughter of Elke Gábor,” Aces said after we'd sat down to the dinner he'd made (barbecued steak, plus salad), pointing at Anna with his knife. “I couldn't believe it,” he said. “There I am, sitting in my place in L.A. (I had a great apartment there for a while, man), when I get a call from this librarian, saying Billy . . . well, one of my associates, had gone into the L.A. Public Library and mentioned that I was doing research on Hungarian assassins, and since it's her research obsession, too, she was actually calling
me
to see if I could help
her
.” Aces grinned, and Anna leaned over and kissed him. “Things just took off from there,” he laughed.

“Aces needs someone to help find those little libraries he goes to, don't you, honey?” Anna turned to me and smiled one of those smiles where it was clear she knew I didn't like her, and instead of expecting me to smile in return was looking for something else, a wince, a series of blinks, some sign of the wound she'd gouged into me by the way she turned her lips. “At first I thought I was crazy getting involved with Aces, with the kind of work he does, but it's exciting.”

“My people really liked the idea,” Aces said. “They'd give Anna directions to the places we were supposed to go, and all I had to do was drive. It was a legal thing, they said. If the two of us only knew half the plan each, it would make it easier for the lawyers if we got caught.”

“You aren't by any chance related to an art historian by the name of Christine Banks?” I asked Anna, and then, without waiting for an answer, said, “What year did you guys meet?”

“June 2007,” she said. Two years before the Banks book was published.

“How are you doing?” Aces asked, changing the subject as if he knew exactly where my questions were headed, and wanted to stop before we got there.

“I'm a prof.” I laughed. “Every day is the same.”

“Already looking forward to retirement?” Anna said, smiling that smile again.

“Absolutely,” I replied.

There was a long silence. “Well . . .” Aces began, rubbing the tops of his thighs.

“Tell me about your great-grandmother,” I said to Anna.

“Just a minute,” she answered, and left the room.

Aces looked like he was finally going to give me that beating I was afraid of as a child, but he just shrugged. “They caught me in Nevada,” he said. “I never saw it coming. We get out of the car in some parking lot. Anna disappears into the Ramada, says she's got to go to the bathroom. It's night.” He raised his hands over his head to suggest the dazzle of Las Vegas. “And suddenly there's cops everywhere. Guns. Padded vests. Face shields. The works. I'm down on the ground, a boot pressing on the back of my head.” He lowered his hands and shrugged. I knew the rest of the story. He'd been thrown in jail, then, through some finagling by his father, got transferred to a kind of holding tank, really a halfway house for illegal immigrants and foreign nationals who'd committed crimes the police thought were more annoying than significant, too much trouble to prosecute, and then Jancsi Bácsi's lawyer convinced the police that Aces was too stupid to have been the brains behind all those drugs in the trunk of
the car, and eventually Aces was kicked in the ass back over the border and told that under no circumstances would he ever be allowed back into the U.S.

“I liked living in America,” Aces said. “It was easy to get guns.” He shrugged. “It was also easy to get arrested. They have more police than I've ever seen.” He tilted his head and gazed at the ceiling, and I noticed a new tattoo, a series of tiny devils rising up his neck to his left ear, their tails linked like the little plastic monkeys we played with as children.

Anna returned, slapped an envelope down on the table, and took a drag on her cigarette, wincing as the smoke went in her eyes. Reaching inside, I took out a photograph as old as the pictures Aces had shown me so many years ago, and then, in the real shock of the night, realized it was another photo of Elke Gábor. It was unmistakable. I glanced at Anna, still staring at me, and was unsure if her squint was because of the smoke or something more pitiless.

“I got that from my grandmother,” she said. Whatever the truth was, I knew she hadn't gotten it from Aces, because I still had the original picture in my possession.

“Tell me about your great-grandmother.”

And she did, for the rest of the evening—the Okhrana, the poisons,
Оmpaвumелеŭ
— filling in the details according to Aces' original version, but also adding personal bits—the children Gábor had, how they were spirited out of Russia just in time for the revolution but too late for Elke herself to get out, their emigration from Hungary during the Kun dictatorship. It was all there, wonderfully imagined, and the feeling that she was telling the truth followed me west along highway 401, into Kitchener, and right to my door, where
with the turning of a key it vanished. Who was Anna Kovács? What did she want with my cousin?

 

I started working on a plan, but nothing came of it, because the next time I called Aces, only two days later, an automated message told me the number had been disconnected, and when I called information to get his new number there was nothing. I even drove to Toronto and went back to the apartment but the place was empty, cleaned out, the landlord already showing it to another couple. Naturally, he had no idea where Aces had gone, and he handed me three letters that had arrived for my cousin, saying he was hoping someone would get in touch so he could pass them on.

They were three notices from three different archives, all of them in such tiny towns I'd never heard of them—Smuteye, Alabama; Hot Coffee, Mississippi; Why Not, North Carolina—all saying that they'd made a mistake with his request, that upon “further digging,” an “uncatalogued file” had turned up “pertinent to [his] request for information on Gyula Hegedus,” and though the contents were “too precious to send by mail” they'd be happy to “photocopy the contents upon receipt of a fee payable to the Why Not Public Library.”