Firm Ambitions (21 page)

“Still,” I said doubtfully, “it was really creepy here last night.”

“You've got new deadbolt locks. And you've got Ozzie.”

“I just don't know. Ah, here it is.” I removed the telephoto lens from an old shoebox. “Come on.”

As we started up the basement stairs I heard my mother laughing, and then I heard a familiar male voice.

“Look who's here,” my mother said when we stepped into the kitchen.

It was Judge Maury “Tex” Bernstein. “Well, hello there, little lady,” he said to me. His drawl was just (jes') a little thicker tonight, and he had dressed the part: a Western-style shirt, string tie, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. “Ah,” he said as Benny walked into the kitchen, “this feller must be Ben Goldberg.” He stuck out his hand toward Benny. “Put it there, pardner.”

Benny grinned as they shook hands. “Just call me Slim, Judge.”

Tex roared with laughter.

My mother was beaming. “Maury came over to stay with us tonight.”

Tex put up his hands assuringly. “Strictly on the up and up,” he said and winked at Benny. “I'll sleep downstairs. Brought my own bedroll,” he said, gesturing toward the breakfast room, “and some firepower.”

I looked toward the breakfast room. On the floor by the table was a neatly rolled sleeping bag. Resting on top of the sleeping bag was a large shotgun and what looked like a box of shells. I looked back at Tex and then over at my mother. She looked radiant.

“Go,” she said to me. “We'll be fine. I'll bring you both breakfast.”

Chapter Twenty-three

“Probably because normal people believe that a bowel movement is a private act,” I said.

Benny clicked off the flashlight and closed his book. “And sex isn't?”

“Yeah, but sex sells books.”

“I'm not just talking hot-sex junk fiction,” he said. “I'm talking front page of the
New York Times Book Review
fiction. I'm talking Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Alice Hoffman. You've got people shtupping like crazy in those books. Blow jobs, hand jobs, rim jobs—you name it.”

I shrugged. “Maybe the authors think that a sexual encounter is a way to reveal something about a character's personality.”

He gave me an astounded look. “And taking a dump isn't?”

“Benny, I'm not a writer,” I said with a shrug. “I don't know why no one goes to the bathroom in novels.”

We were seated in the front seat of my car, which was parked on an unlit and cracked asphalt lot overlooking the back of Mound City Mini-Storage. We were parked behind what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse. A barely legible EMPLOYEES ONLY sign hung at an angle from a rusted metal pole at the entrance to the parking area. Spikes of grass and clumps of prehistoric weeds grew out of cracks in the crumbling asphalt. My car was pulled up against the chainlink fence of Mound City. From where we sat there was a clear view down the main row of storage facility all the way to the electronic gate at the entrance. The eighteenth garage door on the left was the one rented to Firm Ambitions.

It was a few minutes after midnight. We'd been there for close to two hours. Benny had followed me in his car and parked it out of sight around the side of the warehouse. We had brought both cars, just in case.

Benny shifted in the passenger seat. “I think it's a little strange that no one ever has to take a leak in any of these goddam books.”

“I think it's a little strange that you would think that that's a little strange.”

“Rachel, this is breakthrough thinking going on here. We're talking literary revolution. Pick a character.”

I rolled my eyes. “Forget it.”

“Jay Gatsby,” he said.

I looked out the window and shook my head. “I can't believe this conversation.”

“Bear with me here. I'm on to something. Jay Gatsby. Mr. American Dream himself. Mr. Fresh Green Breast of the New World. Did you ever wonder if he was the type who took the newspaper into the john and spent a half hour on the crapper, grunting and groaning? Or was he one of those strafe bomber types, in and out in two minutes?”

I gave him a look. “Although you may find this difficult to believe, Benny, that particular question has never, ever crossed my mind.”

“Watch that tone, lady. They laughed at Sigmund Freud, too. I bet a thorough study of the bathroom habits of world leaders would yield some truly chilling insights.”

“I'll tell you what's a truly chilling insight: the impact of four years of undergraduate education at Yale. Is this the kind of question that you philosophy majors were trained to ponder in New Haven?”

“Oh, no. We skipped the little stuff and focused on the biggies, the pivotal questions, the mysteries of the cosmos.”

“Such as?”

“Such as what's the story with Jews and four-wheel-drive vehicles?”

I burst into laughter. “What?”

“I'm serious. I mean, have you ever met an American Jew who's had an offroad-driving experience? Other than maybe pulling onto the shoulder of the road to call his broker on the car phone? What exactly is going on here?”

I shook my head, still smiling. “It's not just Jews, Benny.”

“Forget about the goyim. They throw everything out of whack. I'm talking Jews. Think about it! You got brain surgeons in Broncos, you got labor lawyers in Land Cruisers, you got exodontists in Explorers. For chrissakes, you got Reform rabbis in Range Rovers! It's nuts. Suburbia is filled with nice Jewish mommies driving Hebrew-school car pools in vehicles designed for chasing wounded rhinos over the African veldt. What the fuck is going on here?”

“Well,” I said when I'd stopped laughing, “what did you geniuses at Yale decide?”

Deadpan, he shook his head and sighed. “I'm sorry to report that the juxtaposition of Jews and four-wheel-drive vehicles remains one of the principal enigmas of our generation.”

I pretended to mull it over. “I think the key is Reform rabbis in Range Rovers.”

“Huh?”

“Jews and Jeeps. Atavism. Buried in our genes is the memory of wandering forty years in the desert.”

Benny raised his eyebrows and nodded. “I am impressed, Professor Gold.”

I squinted through the windshield. “Here we go.”

Headlights were visible at the far end of Mound City Mini-Storage. I took the lens cap off the telephoto lens and zoomed in on the license plate as the gate slid open.

I snapped a picture. “Missouri plates,” I said. I read the license number to Benny as the car pulled forward. Benny jotted it down on the note pad.

“Coming our way,” Benny said as the car crept forward down the middle aisle.

I lowered the camera and watched. The car stopped four doors shy of the Firm Ambitions space.

I exhaled slowly. “Nope.”

Both front doors opened. A chubby guy in a business suit got out on the driver's side. He loosened his tie as he straightened up. A blonde in a miniskirt and heels stepped out of the passenger side.

Benny said, “Hey, it's that babe again.”

I raised the camera and focused. Sure enough, it was the same woman we had seen over an hour ago. She had arrived that time in a different car and with a different middle-aged guy.

“You're right,” I said to him.

“Definitely a hooker,” Benny said as I watched her punch in the combination on the lock. She turned to the guy, who pulled up the garage-type door. A light went on inside the storage space as the door slid down.

They came back out thirty minutes later. She was applying lipstick, he was adjusting his tie. They got in the car, waited at the front gate while it slid open, and drove off into the darkness.

“There's some weird shit going on in here,” Benny said.

I nodded.

The weird shit continued. At 1:15 a.m. an older man in a black jumpsuit drove in on a motorcycle. Turns out he had a vintage car—Benny said it was a Packard—parked in one of the storage garages. He pulled the Packard out, along with a lot of cleaning supplies. For forty-five minutes he cleaned and polished his Packard, and then he roared off on his motorcycle. While he was polishing his car, two guys in a pickup arrived and unloaded at least two dozen pink flamingo statues from the back of the truck and put them in one of the storage spaces. They were followed by another two guys in a van, who stopped in front of a different storage space and unloaded what appeared to be several dozen assault rifles. Later, we witnessed what looked like a drug deal take place outside another storage space. At 3:45 a.m., three men in a Ryder truck unloaded two red fifty-five-gallon drums, each of which had the letters K-Y painted on the side—a combination of letters that, naturally, reduced Benny to hysterical laughter.

By the time my mother arrived at 5:15 a.m. with homemade blueberry muffins and a big thermos of fresh coffee, we had watched another half-dozen folks come and go, moving things in and out of their storage spaces. But our hooker didn't return, and no one visited the Firm Ambitions space.

***

Later that morning, back in my office, I tried to reach the two law school friends with possible contacts in the Cayman Islands. The guy from my first-year section at Harvard—the one in Paris—was now in Malibu, having left the practice of law two years ago to become a television scriptwriter, a career change that might charitably be described as a lateral move along the evolutionary ladder.

But I had better luck with Bob Ginsburg—a law school boyfriend turned investment banker at Bear Stearns. I tracked Bob down in the New York office. We talked some, mostly reminiscing about our law school days. Bob and I had had a brief romance that, in classic Cambridge style, got derailed over politics. He was a conservative Republican—one of those pro-life, pro-death types—who was, in that absolutely maddening fashion so typical of conservative Republicans, a lot of fun and very sweet and wonderfully thoughtful when not enmeshed in THE CAUSE. We parted friends. Although he was no longer in the Bear Stearns international banking division, he promised to poke around to see what he could find out.

“It could take a while,” he warned. “People like doing business down in the Caymans, because it's so goddam discreet.”

“It's probably a dead end anyway,” I told him, “but I want to at least go all the way down the path before I scratch it off the list.”

Exhausted, I left the office around noon, went back home, set the alarm for five-thirty, and woke up feeling worse than before. I got to Mound City by seven. Benny showed up thirty minutes later with a Chinese takeout feast. We put out the blanket I had brought and the two of us had a picnic.

“This smells wonderful,” I said as I opened the lid on the container of Hunan shredded beef with hot peppers and orange peel and inhaled deeply. In addition to the Hunan shredded beef, Benny had brought fried rice with pork, cold noodles with sesame sauce, smoked chicken with spicy black bean sauce, kung pao squid, General Tso's prawns, spicy sour cabbage, and moo shu pork.

“I swear, Benny,” I said as I lifted a portion of Hunan shredded beef out of the white cardboard container with my chopsticks, “if Chinese takeout was the key to compatibility, you and I could have the marriage of the century.”

***

Our hooker showed up at ten-thirty that night, this time in a Hertz rental car driven by a guy who still had his convention nametag pinned to the lapel of his blue blazer.

Around eleven, I dozed for a while and Benny did some stretching exercises in the parking lot. A few cars came and went, but nothing special. At midnight, Benny started fiddling with the AM radio dial, looking for weird call-in shows. I got out of the car to do a short jog around the warehouse parking lot. I started off at a slow pace but came sprinting back. “Look,” I said, panting tensely as I got back in the car.

“What?”

I reached for the camera. ‘The van.”

Benny squinted through the windshield. “At last.”

A battered Ford Econoline van had pulled in front of the Firm Ambitions storage space. Its headlights went off and someone got out on the driver's side.

“Go get in your car,” I told Benny as I fumbled with the lens cap on the telephoto lens. “This looks for real.”

A minute later I had the Illinois license plate in sharp focus.

Click
.

Still squinting through the viewfinder, I advanced the film one frame and aimed the camera at the open door of the storage area. He was in there. I couldn't see him, but I did see the beam of his flashlight sweeping back and forth in the darkened storage space.

I heard the crunching of a car approaching across the cracked asphalt. It was Benny. He pulled alongside my car and rolled down the passenger window.

“Is he in there?”

I nodded. “You know the drill?”

“I think so.”

“Repeat it.” Although we had gone over it several times this shift, I wanted to make sure we knew our roles.

“You'll stay here,” Benny said, “and I'll go around the front. We both follow him. If he meets up with anyone, we split up. I go with the new guy, you stay with the old.”

I nodded, still staring at the open storage door through the camera viewfinder. “All we do is follow.”

“Right.”

“No heroics, Benny.”

“Heroics? Don't worry. My colon already feels like it's filled with ready-mix cement.” He shifted into reverse. “See you back at the house.”

I looked at him. “Be careful, Benny.”

“You, too.”

Benny backed away with his lights off and pulled out of the parking lot. The sound of his car faded as I lifted the camera back up and pointed it at the open storage space.

A moment later he came out carrying what must have been a large framed picture. It was hard to tell, though, because it was draped with a sheet.

Click
.

He was a short, skinny guy with long black hair and a goatee. There was a lit cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. He had an angular face with a hatchet nose and was wearing a plaid short-sleeved shirt, black jeans with a big silver belt buckle, and cowboy boots.

Click
.

I was able to snap off another shot before he disappeared behind the van to load it into the back. I took another when he came back around and flicked the cigarette butt in a high arc beyond the front of the van before stepping back into the storage area.

I took several more pictures as he came out twice more, both times carrying large flat objects shrouded in sheets—two more framed pictures, I assumed. Then he closed the garage door, checked to make sure it was locked, and climbed back into the van. I started my engine as he pulled the van forward, turned it around at the end of the lane, and drove back toward the gate.

I caught up with the van and Benny's Nova as they turned onto the eastbound entrance ramp to Highway 70. We followed the van into the city and then south on Kingshighway to the Central West End. The van turned east on McPherson Avenue, drove several blocks, and pulled to a stop in front of the Leo Beaumont Gallery. Benny was the second car in the convoy. Wisely, he drove down the block past the van and turned right at the next corner.

The Leo Beaumont Gallery was two doors in from the street corner. So as not to draw attention to my car, I turned at the street corner before the gallery and pulled the car over just beyond the bus stop. I grabbed my camera, jogged back to McPherson, and walked cautiously down the sidewalk along the opposite side of the darkened gallery. Using a parked minivan as a screen, I crouched near its back fender.