Greetings from the Vodka Sea (8 page)

Out of the filthy, starless sky, two enormous hands, beautiful hands, reached down to Wilson. At first the hands caressed him — he could still smell the soap on those hands, lavender soap, and a wisp of Pinesol — and then they lifted him, comforted him. And from deep inside his reptilian brain, the place, perhaps, where fear itself was born, a cry bored out like a tapeworm almost covering the sound of the gunshot.

“SoS!”

His accent was flawless. Perfect Klingon.

. . .

Murph called Starky to confirm the deal. They talked in code.
Our friend has arrived from out of town,
etc. It was stupid but had to be done. Starky was the perfect start. A doctor, discreet as all hell, who just liked some blow every now and again. His old score had gone up the river, literally, having retired inland to his private ranch. Business had been that good. Starky shot hoops with Murph, recreationally. They called him Doctor No, because he was always trying to nullify a good play with an after-the-fact penalty call: “Sorry, no, that was travelling”; “Sorry, no, that was goaltending.” No one really liked him, which made it even better. It was hard to sell to someone you really liked.

Starky was Murph's anchor tenant. He wanted a lot of product to squirrel away. Starky hated dealing with dealers (Murph hated to think of himself in such reductionist terms, but there it was) and wanted one big score to minimize contact. The plan was that Murph would make several small deliveries over the course of two days, to reduce the risk to everyone concerned. That was Russell's idea too. He'd been in the game since forever and never been dinged. That's not so remarkable when you think about it. Like anything — traffic violations, shop-lifting, murder — the cops only caught the tip of iceberg, and in fact, when it came to the product, they really only seemed to care about nailing the crackheads, black kids, mostly, who hung out downtown. It wasn't just racism at work, but, as Russell explained, it was a matter of self-preservation. First of all, the crackheads (Murph loved the term, it sounded so dumb, like something middle-aged women would say to make themselves sound cool) all carried guns. Every one of them. That made the cops nervous. Second, crackheads don't give a shit about anybody but themselves or about anything but their next hit. They'd kill their best friend to help them fuel up again, so cops — cops were nothing. It was the nature of the beast, Russell said. That was something Murph understood. The focus. The single-minded purpose. The beast. The addiction.

Boom-cha, boom-boom ba-cha.

. . .

What precipitated the downfall Kahless the Unforgettable?

Some say it was hubris, an excessive reaching. Not content with unifying the Klingon peoples, he strove to lead them. Not content with leading them, he strove to rule them. Not content with rule, he strove to conquer. It was his discontent, his lack of respect for Order, that brought him down.

Others believe that agents of Morath were at work, sowing the seeds of revolt. The Empire was still in its infancy, and many local warlords and chieftains were ripe for rebellion. In this context, Kahless's death could be viewed as a sacrifice, and ultimately, as the singular event that consolidated and confirmed the Klingon Empire. He needed to be dead, because only in death could he attain mythical stature. And that's what the Klingon Empire needed more than anything, a mythology upon which it could hang its politics. The living could subjugate and contrive: only the dead could unify.

Still others take a more romantic perspective. Kahless abdicated for love. While there is no direct reference to this in the formal canon, there are hints throughout the literature. Among historians, it is one of the most vigorous areas of research, hypothesis and speculation.

Regardless, Kahless the Unforgettable found himself by the Cleft of HurghtaHghach, faced with a simple but impossible choice: on the one side
Honour, on the other Duty. He had to jump, but which way, and why, ­he could not say.

Moonie was at the door. He came in without being asked and sat at the kitchen table, silently waiting for some coffee. He had a great idea, he said. A money-maker.

“This one's a sure thing — hear me out.”

Then there was a big long build-up about how everybody, the lucky ones at least, got old someday, and what with the baby boom and all, more and more people would grow old each and every year. “The trick is, the question is, how can we profit from this demographic phenomenon?”

“If the answer has anything to do with sponge baths or enemas, count me out.”

“Let me put it to you another way, Murph. There's four things everybody's got to do, no matter how old they are, right? They got to breathe, they got to pay taxes, they got to shit, and they got to eat. Well, I can't help 'em with the first three, but I got a great idea about the fourth.” Moonie paused for full dramatic effect. “Home cooked meals. Delivered right to the door.”

“Don't they already do that?”

“Don't who already do what?”

“Meals on Wheels. They cook dinner for old people, deliver it right to their doors. Dirt cheap, too.”

“I'm not talking soup and a sandwich here. I'm talking a real meal, meat and potatoes, gourmet stuff. But reasonably priced. You got to keep the price reasonable. That's the whole key.”

Murph shut up and let his friend talk. He must have been getting restless again. Every four or five months Moonie'd lift himself out of his funk by getting excited about some new scheme or another. Last year it had been real estate, he'd even taken the test for his license; before that, it had been home cleaning products.

“The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is start-up money. We'd need a couple trucks, of course, and a professional kitchen. We could run a store front operation too, you know, retail the food to take-out customers up front, and move out the deliveries from the —”

Moonie was dead in the water. Murph had never noticed before, but now he saw it clearly. Moonie had given up, completely surrendered. Somewhere between high school and death he'd taken the wrong turn, and defeat had piled up like an eternal snow. The snow was up against the door, and Moonie couldn't get out. That made Murph even more anxious to get to work. Addiction — addiction, he could understand. It was two notches up from defeat, so at least it was somewhere. Moonie was snowed under, he was frozen solid. His little schemes were just phantom limbs, invisibly twitching and jerking, the remnants of Moonie's amputated ambition. He got stuck looking at the hole, the bad decisions and hard luck that had left him ever on the edge of financial ruin. That was the last thing you wanted to do. You could itemize the mistakes you made — the bad marriage, career choices — but that wouldn't change a thing. You couldn't look at the hole. You had to look for a way out. Murph, he had a plan. It had its risks, in fact risk was at the heart of it, but risk also gave it a tremendous upside. He'd maxed everything, every credit card, every overdraft, his mortgage — everything — to get himself as liquid as possible. It wasn't much, $35 k and change, but with the right investment, the right product, he knew it could roll into something better. He wasn't greedy. He needed $90 k to clear his debts and cover interest, and what with the product he had — it was good shit, real good shit — that was totally doable. And then? He'd be back at square one. It wasn't great, but it was a hell of a lot better than where he was right now, too rich to walk away, too poor to file for protection.

He wasn't complaining. Murph knew he had no one to blame but himself. First, there'd been the marriage. It started poorly, with Marg knocked up and all that, and ended badly, with Marg hiding in a woman's shelter and the house breathing a sigh of relief. Another good love gone bad. Second — second he could sum up in two words: business machines. Faxes. Copiers. Computers. For a while there, you could say he was addicted to them, not in the key-lock way he'd been addicted to blow after high school, but addicted emotionally, like, say, the difference between lust and infatuation. Business machines weren't really the objects of his addiction, but the subjects, the representation of promises never quite fulfilled. See, he'd dropped out of college, then hung around for a while before cleaning himself up (he did it for the baby, he did it for himself). And then business machines just sort of fell into his lap. They gave him prestige and a territory, but Murph quickly maxed out on both of those and slid into the Great Recession, where his returns diminished even further. By the time all the smart money was moving out of the corporal (hardware) and into the cerebral (software, dot-coms, IPOs), Murph had gone from being a player — a young guy going places in Eastern Standard Business Machines — to a blocker, an old guy who'd reached his limited potential and was now just standing in everyone's way. And so he pushed harder, tying to move more product, and even started carrying other things, small stuff (staplers, postage meters, calculators) to push his margin, and in the process, found himself in hock up to his asshole. Which is precisely the moment Marg decided to walk, with neither a bang nor a whimper, just a handful of unsubstantiated accusations (even the counsellor at the sheltered conceded that) and an overriding need to hate her ex-husband for the rest of her natural life. Murph went liquid, bought her out of everything, and that was that.

Murph made his way back up the stairs. Moonie hadn't gone anywhere fast, and now time was getting tight. Murph'd promised to meet Starky at four-thirty. That left him less than an hour to finish scaling and packaging and get his ass to the mall uptown.
Boom-cha, boom-boom ba-cha
. The damned opera. Murphy knocked but got no reply, then knocked again, then just walked in. Rudy grunted some abuse and tried to cover the computer screen with one hand as the other scrambled for the delete. Murph had seen enough to get the gist. A Klingon woman, naked save for her helmet, sprawled on a rock as a Klingon warrior, hung and hard, prepared to ravish her.

“Are you just going to sit in your room all day?”

“I'm working on my opera.”

“Well, I could use a little help around the house. It's a pigsty. Maybe you could mow the lawn or —”

“Don't I get any privacy?”

“We're not talking about privacy —”

“You didn't even knock.”

Murph shut up. He could see where this was going. Nowhere.

“Look. I just need a little help around here, that's all. I'm not going to bark orders at you all day long. I'd just appreciate a little help.”

Murph backed out of the room, shutting the door as he left.

Rudy uttered some words in Klingon (
Vav qatlh ghaj SoH lonta' jIH
) and went back to work.

. . .

Cherry had just put Baby down. Baby was a good sleeper, a sound sleeper. You could put her to bed at seven, sing her a little song or two, stroke her head, and she'd go down like a garage door. She'd stay down too. Twelve hours, no problem. The other mothers talked. Their kids would be up four or five times a night, crying and nursing and needing their little nappies done. But not Baby. Shut her eyes and that was it. She was down. Just like her father.

Cherry made herself a sandwich from the steak that was left over in the fridge. There was a little wine left too, so she finished that off. She tried not to think of the pipe in the bedroom. It was right there in the dresser, bottom left-hand drawer. She'd always thought of finding a better hiding spot, but when she got right down to it, she couldn't be bothered. If they were going to get you, they were going to get you. It was easier to keep it in the same spot. That way she wouldn't forget where she'd put it, which could be tricky. She watched a show or two on TV, then phoned her mother. They talked about Baby. “Are you sure she's getting enough to eat?” her mother asked. She always asked the same question. After that, she went back into Baby's room and just looked at her, just watched her sleep for five or six minutes. Baby was so precious when she slept. Cherry went to the crib. She stroked Baby's cheek.
If only they stayed babies forever
. If she could give her daughter one thing, it would be that: babyhood, forever. Cherry went into the bedroom and got her pipe. She only had a couple of rocks left and smoked them both. Then she was up for hours. It was two or three in the morning when she finally fell asleep. She had the strangest dream. She was some kind of princess, standing on the crest of a hill. A sea of warriors approached from behind, screaming and waving their swords. Princess Cherry pitched herself into the darkness but woke before she hit the ground. It was morning already, and Baby was crying. Baby was crying and Wilson wasn't home.

. . .

Russell had one piece of advice: don't think you're better than it. The
it
he'd left open. He could have been talking about the product, which made sense. You had to respect the product — Murph learned that the hard way, years ago — because the product was the undisputed heavyweight champion. Lots of guys figured that the product could never beat them, that they were on top of it. They were the first to go down.

Russell might also have been talking about the game itself, and again, while it wasn't earth-shattering advice, it was a welcome reminder. Don't ever underestimate the cops; don't trust anyone, not your supplier, not your client, not your best friend, not your kid, not your dog; and, most important, keep your big mouth shut. Chances are you wouldn't go down, but if you didn't respect the game — if you thought you were too smart or too fast or too lucky or too much above it all — you were inviting trouble. Then again, Russell might have been talking about the customers, which was bang on too. Whether it was cocaine or copiers, you had to have a healthy respect for the enemy. It was a buyers' market (outside of love and sex, Murph figured everything was a buyers' market), and you had to work for every sale. Of course, there was one more possibility Murph barely considered. Maybe
it
was everything. The house, the kid, the failures, the small success, the debt, life — everything. Don't think you're better than it. That was the kind of thing Russell would say.