(2004) Citizen Vince (3 page)

But today he
listens
to the conversations of the regulars—two guys on their way to the dump to look for a washing machine; a man advising another man to put his money in gold; a woman showing pictures of her grandchildren—and he thinks that there might be serviceable washers at the dump, that the woman’s grandchildren must be adorable, that gold is a great investment. It takes a sort of courage to live a quiet life.

There used to be an inspirational poster on the door to the library at Rikers. It showed a night sky, and across the bottom were the words:
The community of men is made of a billion tiny lights.

The community of men…at night on the ward (institutional sleep is like morphine, dreamless and cold) Vince imagined a real place, a town somewhere that he could actually see, like the old TV shows
Leave It to Beaver
and
Ozzie and Harriet,
a 1950s city where there were always two parents and houses had picket fences, where policemen smiled and tipped their hats.

And now…here he is. Spokane, Washington.

Tic has finished the dishes and is putting them away. Vince goes to his locker and grabs his paperback book—he always reads on his coffee break—but he walks to the sink instead, sets his book down, puts one foot on a stool, and lights a smoke. Stares at his young assistant. “I ask you something, Tic?”

Attention makes Tic uneasy.

“How many dead people would you say you know?”

The young man takes a step back.

Vince shifts his weight. This is not what he meant to ask, necessarily. He takes his foot off the stool. “I don’t mean, specifically, how many dead people. What I mean is, you ever get some crazy thought stuck in your head—like today, I just kept thinking about how many dead people I know. Anything like that ever happen to you?”

Tic leans forward seriously. “Every fuckin’ day, man.”

NEVER LET YOUR
job get in the way of work. That might be Vince’s motto, if he believed in mottos. By noon, he has finished his job at Donut Make You Hungry, and closes the place. Outside, in the blue cool daylight, he feels better—although he still finds himself counting. The whole thing is like some pop song he can’t get out of his head. Fifty-seven at last count (Ann Mahoney’s father). He walks south, crosses the river, and glances once more over his shoulder. Finally he steps inside a small brick storefront with a stenciled sign that reads
DOUG’S PASSPORT PHOTOS AND SOUVENIRS
.

A college kid is getting his picture taken. Vince sits at the counter, grabs a magazine, and waits for Doug—fat, white-bearded, and red-faced Doug, like Santa’s bad seed—to finish making the guy’s phony ID. “How she hangin’, Vince?”

Vince ignores him as he reads a story about the new Ford Escort, which is supposed to get forty-six miles to the gallon, but is roomier than the Chevette. Cars all got so small and boxy. When did that happen? They look like lunch boxes. Must be tough on car thieves. Where do you fence a four-cylinder lunch box?

Doug seals the kid’s new driver’s license, waves it in the air to cool, and hands it to him. Takes twenty bucks for his trouble. “Some bartender grabs that thing, you tell him you got it in Seattle, understand?”

The kid doesn’t look up from his new ID. Finally, he grins—all braces and dimples. When he finally leaves, Vince sets the magazine down on the counter.

“You got numbers for me?” Doug asks. He hoists his big haunches onto a stool behind the counter. Vince hands him a sheet of paper filled with names and numbers from the latest run of stolen credit cards.

Doug runs his finger down the list. “Monday okay for these?”

“Fine.”

Doug shifts his considerable weight, opens a drawer, and removes a handful of phony credit cards—made from Vince’s last batch of numbers.

“So where do you get all of these? You can’t be stealing all these credit card numbers from the donut shop.”

Vince doesn’t answer.

“Is this the way they do it Back East?”

Vince doesn’t answer.

Doug sulks as he looks over the numbers. “Shit, man, why are you so edgy?”

“I’m not edgy.”

“Then why can’t you tell me where you get the numbers?”

There is a hint of forced nonchalance in the question. Vince takes the phony cards and hands Doug a small roll of bills.

“Come on,” Doug says as he counts. “I got a right to know.”

Vince puts the cards in his pocket.

“I mean, I got a pretty good idea how it works,” Doug says. “I haven’t been asleep the last six months, you know.”

“Okay,” Vince says. “Why don’t you tell me how it works?”

“Well, you steal these cards
somewhere
. You write down the numbers and then you give the cards back so the owners won’t report them stolen. I make copies of the cards. You take the cards I make you, buy shit with them, sell the shit, and then sell the cards. So you get paid twice. Am I right?”

Vince doesn’t answer. Turns to leave.

“Come on”—Doug laughs—“we’re partners. What do you think, I’m gonna go against you?”

Vince stops, turns back slowly. “Someone want you to go against me?”

Doug straightens. “What are you talking about?”

“What are
you
talking about?”

“I’m not talking about anything. Jesus! Lighten up, Vince. Don’t be so paranoid.”

That word again. Vince stares at him a moment, and then
walks outside. He looks back in through the front window. Doug mouths the word
paranoid
again.

There was this old guy named Meyers who ran a chop shop back in the world. This Meyers worked only with recent Vietnamese immigrants, because he could pay them less and, according to Meyers, they were too unsettled by America to backstab him. Used to sit in this big rocking chair while the Vietnamese kids stole cars for him, stripped them down, and hauled the parts all around New Jersey. And he paid them shit. Then, one day, Meyers just disappeared. Next day, some old Vietnamese guy is running the chop shop, sitting in that rocking chair. There’s a lesson in there—something about condescension. Or maybe rocking chairs. And what is that? Fifty-eight?

VINCE CAMDEN WALKS
everywhere. In two years he still hasn’t gotten used to all of the cars; everyone drives everywhere here, even the ladies. In this town, five guys drive to a tavern in five cars, have a beer, then get in their five cars and drive three blocks to the next tavern. It’s not just wasteful. It’s uncivilized. People say it’s because of the harsh winters in Spokane, which are a cross between upstate New York and Pluto. But outside a few places in Florida and California, the weather is shitty everywhere. Every place is too hot or too cold or too humid or too something. No, even in the cold Vince prefers walking—like now, strolling away from Doug’s storefront toward downtown, which looms ahead, a couple of newer twenty-story glass-and-steel slabs surrounded by brick-and-stone stumps. He likes the cluster of buildings from a distance like this—the suggestion of cornices and pillars; imagination fills in the blanks.

Vince stops at a little diner, orders coffee, and sits alone at a table, staring out the window, chewing a thumbnail. Twice in one
day: that word.
Paranoid.
Still, how could you possibly tell if you’re paranoid when worrying about being paranoid is a symptom of paranoia? It’s not the fact of Doug asking where he gets the credit cards, necessarily, or of Lenny showing up in the alley two days early—although either one of those things would have made him suspicious. It’s this feeling he’s slogged around with since he woke up—this sense of being herded along, that his time is coming. What if death is just
out there,
at some fixed point, waiting for you to walk under it like a piano suspended above the sidewalk? He feels like a chess piece, like a knight that’s come out with no support and is being chased around the board by the other side’s pawns. He can escape the pawns, but he senses other pieces, larger pieces, more significant pieces—a move, two moves, three moves away. After a minute, Vince goes to the front of the diner and drops a quarter into the pay phone. Dials.

“Hey. Is he in?”

Waits.

“It’s Vince. You up for a game of chess?”

Listens.

“Oh, come on. Why do I gotta do it like that?”

Listens.

“Jesus. Okay, okay…This is twenty-four-fourteen. I need to come in. There. How’s that?”

Listens.

“I need to see you now. Today.”

Listens.

“Of course it’s an emergency. What do you think?”

He hangs up, walks back to his table, and finishes his coffee. He zips up his windbreaker and steps outside. He walks with his head tilted forward, toward downtown. It’s cool and sunny and the combination thrills him in a way; he pulls a deep breath through his nose and takes in the bare, skeletal trees, the strip of black avenue
leading downtown. It really is a beautiful city in its way. Not so much architecturally, but in contrasts: glimmers of style against those drastic hills and urban trees, and through it all the river cut—a wilderness very nearly civilized with a few tons of concrete, blacktop, and brick. A real place. He walks without looking back, uncharacteristically.

If he did look back, he wouldn’t like what he saw. Two blocks behind him, Len Huggins’s burgundy Cadillac sits in front of Doug’s Passport Photos and Souvenirs.

DOUG RUBS HIS
jaw. “How much?”

“He said for gratis.” Lenny takes off his sunglasses. “Means free.”

“I know what it means. Who is this guy?”

“Just a guy. Name’s Ray.”

“Where’s this Ray from?”

“Back East, like Vince. He just got into town.”

“What’s he doin’ here?”

“I don’t know, man. He didn’t say.”

“But he does this for a living?”

“Oh yeah. He pushes buttons.”

“Buttons?”

“That’s what they call it.”

“Buttons?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said. He works for some serious guys back there.”

“And you’re sure he ain’t a cop?”

“He ain’t a cop, Doug. Not this guy.”

“I don’t know.”

“Look. This guy wants to do it for gratis. How can we say no?”

“It’s not
for gratis,
Len. It’s just gratis.”

“Whatever. Look, this Ray says they do the whole credit-card
thing different Back East. Vince is making a lot more money than he’s paying us. That ain’t right. And he won’t tell us where he gets the cards? That ain’t right, neither. We’re supposed to be partners and he’s holding back on us, man.”

“It’s just…I like Vince.”

“I like Vince, too. Everyone likes Vince. It’s got nothing to do with Vince.”

“So what would we have to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Just show him where to point the gun.”

WALK ANY BLOCK
in Spokane and you can see in the city’s design the way it was settled—a slow, 150-year flood of homes, filling the river gorge first, west to east, and then rising onto the ledges, ridges, and hills: outward and onward, north, south, east, and generally up. The downtown, seven blocks by fifteen blocks of brick and block and terra-cotta, covers the first ledge, and beyond and above that are neighborhoods of Victorian, Tudor, and Craftsman, and beyond that Deco, cottage, and bungalow, and beyond that rambler, rancher, and split level, neighborhoods that have begun to spill over the far sides of the facing hills.

At the center of this sprawl are the pearly waterfalls that the city oystered around, and two blocks above the falls sits the Federal Courthouse, a bland new box of a building, ten stories tall. In an office on the sixth floor, on either side of a chessboard, sit Vince Camden and a chunk of a deputy U.S. marshal named David Best. Vince has moved one pawn out, and Deputy Marshal Best has his hand on his queen’s knight and is considering putting Vince’s pawn in jeopardy. He looks all around the board, under and over his own arm, eyes darting from piece to piece.

“You moving that horse or grooming it?”

“Just a sec,” says David. He is fifty and looks it—overweight and gray, his cheeks and nose flushed with blood, a bald circle at the peak of his scalp. He wears wrinkled slacks, a herringbone jacket, and a thick knit tie pulled into a knot that would choke the very horse he’s contemplating moving. Finally, David brings the knight out and threatens Vince’s pawn.

Vince quickly moves his own knight out to protect his earlier move. Slaps an imaginary chess timer. “How about Christensen?”

“Vince Christensen?”

“Carver?”

“Vince Carver?”

“Claypool?”

David rests his hand on a pawn and takes in the entire board again, looking under his arm in both directions as he considers his move. “Look, you can’t just go changing your name every six months. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Does it work better if someone kills me?”

“Come on. Who’s going to kill you, Vince?”

“I told you. Camden is a city in New Jersey. Right? Vince
Camden?
Might as well call me Vince Capone. You don’t think they’ll figure that out?”

David looks up from the chessboard. “Who?”

“What?”

“
Who
will figure it out? You come in here every six months thinking someone is out to get you. Last time—”

“Yeah, but this time—”

“Last time, you almost killed that poor guy from the phone company.”

“He was on the pole outside my house for forty minutes! You tell me what a guy’s doing up on a phone pole for forty minutes.”

“Fixing the phone?”

“I’m just saying, this time—”

“This time!” David spreads his hands. “Who are these people
out to get you, Vince? I looked up your case. There’s no one after you.”

Vince just stares at him.

“The crew you testified against doesn’t even exist anymore. Bailey’s dead. Crapo’s dead. And the only guy who was even connected…what’s his name? The old guy, Coletti? He was nothing—a soldier. An old man. Didn’t even do a year after his conviction. And he’s retired now. Frankly, I’m shocked they put you in the program. I don’t really see the protection part of this witness protection.” David stares at Vince, his thick nightcrawler fingers resting on the pawn.