The 500: A Novel (11 page)

HOWEVER MUCH I
wanted to play nice with high society, there was still a little punk in me, and a little pride. So you know what I ultimately decided at the party at Chip’s? To hell with Sir Lawrence Clark. He was a lost cause anyway. The guy had me pegged from the get-go, and I had a few ideas percolating on how to get him off my back. I gave him a big wink across the room and headed out of the party with Walker.

The only man I really owed anything to was Davies, and I owed him everything: the fresh start, the job, the house, the chance to meet Annie. I’d do whatever Davies Group asked of me. If I stepped carefully and watched myself, I could stick with Walker on his midnight monkey business without betraying Annie. It was work, after all, official duty. At least that’s what I was telling myself as Walker murmured something ominous about Tina.

Should I wait up?
Annie texted me.

Late night, hon. Work stuff. So sorry. Miss ya!
I texted back. It was all technically true. Walker punched something into the Cadillac’s navigation system, and I pulled out. We drove in silence, except for the occasional snap of Walker chewing his fingernails and the cheery female voice telling us to “Continue. On. Wisconsin Avenue. For Two. Point. One Miles.”

I think we were in Maryland. We pulled off the highway near a strip of box stores and into a development called Foxwood Chase. It was one of those bulldozed patches of woodlands where the contractors built so quickly there was not a tree or a bush left standing, only houses circling a retaining pond that looked like a gravel pit. I could see empty houses, and empty lots beyond them, not uncommon out in the exurbs of DC. A lot of developers had gone under, a lot of houses had been foreclosed. It gave the whole place the feel of a ghost town.

Our chirping navigator directed me into a gated driveway. Walker leaned over from the passenger seat and waved at the little video camera beside the fence. Open sesame. We pulled up to a mock villa McMansion: columns, three-story entryway, spiral shrubs, the whole nine.

A bodybuilder type—young, maybe about 280 pounds—opened the door. He had a baby face and dimples and wore a wife-beater and a white Cleveland Indians baseball cap set at a rakish angle. He gave Walker one of those bro-style handshakes where you clasp fists and pound each other’s back. He gave me the hairy eyeball, at least until Walker said, “It’s cool, Squeak, I vouch.” Then the dimples were back in full effect as Squeak walked us inside.

I guess I, like many people, carry around a lot of preconceived notions about whorehouses. I’d pictured a Victorian mansion in New Orleans, an elegant, still-beautiful older madam, a lot of lace.

But the more I thought about it, the more this made sense: a four-thousand-square-foot white box of a house, unfurnished except for black leather couches and a sixty-inch plasma TV. I’d assumed there’d be a bar to hang out at, or maybe some kind of strip club setup where I could keep my eye on Walker without doing anything that would make me hate myself too much. This was VIP style, however, and there was nowhere to hide. Reluctantly, I took a spot on the couch.

A seatmate joined me, promptly entering my personal space and introducing herself: “My name is Natasha. I am from Russia.”

“Very original.”

“I thank you.”

Where to begin with Natasha? She had a fake-diamond Monroe—a piercing in her upper lip meant to approximate Marilyn’s beauty mark. She wore mostly glitter makeup and what I will generously call a dress. She started to get a little handsy, but I wasn’t too worried about myself. I might have to make a scene or storm out, but there wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to play moose-and-squirrel with this one. I didn’t care what Marcus said. I had to draw the line somewhere.

Curled up next to Walker was a pigtailed Korean girl whose name I didn’t catch. I began referring to her in my troubled internal monologue as Hello Kitty. Both girls were fresh off the boat; you could almost still smell the packaging. Kitty couldn’t hold a candle to Natasha’s trashiness; she was actually quite pretty and naive-looking. By luck I had gotten the girl who completely skeeved me out. No temptations.

I was playing good defense on Natasha as she walked two fingers of her left hand up my thigh, and I actually thought I might make it out of this with skin and soul intact. I could almost calm down.

Except for the kid in the kitchen. He was slight and young, maybe just college age, and paid no attention to what was happening in the living room (the house had one of those echoing open floor plans). Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island with a dead man’s stare, utterly absorbed by his cell phone, he tapped the keys nonstop with his thumb, and with the other hand picked at acne scars on his cheeks. Every time I managed to ignore him, something diverting would come through the ether to his cell and he would explode with a girlish titter that filled the house and set my short hairs on end. The kid couldn’t have weighed more than 110 pounds but somehow he scared me more than Squeak did.

Natasha seemed to have grown an octopus’s worth of arms. The kid giggled again. Just when I thought things couldn’t possibly get any creepier, Squeak walked over to the stereo and put in a CD. The strings swelled through giant speakers. It took me a moment to place the music: it was from
Dusty in Memphis,
“Just a Little Lovin’.”

Somehow that gave the whole scene the quality of a nightmare. That was it. I was out. It wasn’t worth losing my license to practice (I’d passed the Virginia bar in February) or betraying Annie. The question was whether I could escape without completely scotching all my work with Walker so far.

As I was rising to leave, some conversation-without-words eye contact took place between Walker and Squeak. Squeak nodded and reached for a lacquered box on the side table. I had a bad feeling about what lay inside.

And I guess it speaks to my unhappiness with the whole situation that I was relieved when he pulled out drug paraphernalia: a glass bowl.

I sat back down. I almost (
almost
) wanted to give Natasha a big hug. These weren’t prostitutes! They were drug skanks. I nearly slapped my forehead. I hadn’t smoked pot in years but I knew a bowl when I saw one. I wanted to explain the whole thing with a laugh to my new friends here at Foxwood Chase. I could even (maybe one day) tell Annie the whole story. She’d get a kick out of it: Representative Walker took me to his dealer’s house to smoke a little weed and I got all freaked out thinking he’d dragged me to a brothel. Shit, I probably could have used a puff after I’d gotten myself worked up into such a lather.

“You want to throw a cloud?” Squeak asked me.

“No. Thank you,” I said. Squeak looked at me as though I were a narc but loaded the pipe nonetheless. I’d never heard “throw a cloud” as slang but didn’t think too much of it—I wasn’t exactly in the scene—nor did I attach any particular significance to the butane torch Squeak pulled out, or the gentle tinkling noise as he packed the bowl.

No, it wasn’t until he blazed the damn thing up and a sickly sweet vapor reminiscent of bathroom-cleaning chemicals wrinkled up my nose that I realized we weren’t dealing with good old “a little bit in college” American ganja.

I didn’t want to set off Squeak, especially now that he had two lungs full of whatever that drug was, so I tried to inquire casually.

“Oh, is that…”

“Tina,” Walker said.

“Tina, right.”

“Ice,” Squeak added unhelpfully.

Crack? Was it crack? Was I in a fucking crack house?

“Oh, right,” I said. “Coke.”

“No, Tina. Crystal.”

Natasha giggled at my language troubles, which I thought was pretty rich. So…crystal meth! Aha. I felt like I’d just won at Clue and infinitesimally better knowing that my new friends weren’t smoking actual crack.

Here’s what I did know about meth (from the navy, where a not-negligible number of snipes, the bilge-rat engine workers, were or had been tweakers). It makes your dick shrink as surely as a dip in the North Atlantic, and it makes you impossibly horny, a situation rife with paradox that leads to all types of trouble I certainly didn’t want to find myself in the middle of.

Natasha let out a big puff of meth smoke and ran her eyes over me like I was a buffet dinner. Squeak, Kitty, and Walker beat it out of there (though I noticed both gents took some kind of pill first), leaving me alone with my Soviet love, who did a head feint and then successfully, finally, broke through my defenses for a proper grope. I managed to pull her hand away without her taking any important parts of my anatomy along with it.

She looked heartbroken, to be honest, but she was still almost shaking with energy from the drugs.

“Listen. I’m sorry. You’re very nice. But I’m not this kind of guy. I’ve got to go.” I stood up.

And then, bless her heart, Natasha leaned back and gave me a sweet, saintly look.

“I understand you.”

“Good. Yes, it’s nothing personal. I just need to go.”

“Yes. You are faggot. No problem. I fix.”

“No no no no,” I said.

She said something to the kid in the kitchen in a language that sounded more Polish than Russian, then shouted it a second time to get his attention. He looked put out, then sulked upstairs. I should have pegged that sketchball for a speed freak the minute I set eyes on him.

I checked my phone. From Annie:
Heavy lids, sweetie. G’night. Give me a hug when you come in.

I’d been feeling like I was betraying her before, but that twisted the knife. I walked into the foyer, near the stairs. “I just need to tell Eric I have to go,” I yelled up to the kid.

I waited there for a minute, rocking on my heels and occasionally, like an idiot, giving Natasha a nervous smile.

Finally the kid appeared at the top of the stairs and waved me up. The second-floor hallway was even more spare than the ground floor. He led me down a long corridor and into a small room with sliding doors on both sides, like the kind that separate hotel suites.

“Wait here,” he said, then disappeared.

One minute passed, then two. I thought of bolting, but to keep Marcus happy—he’d told me expressly to stick with Walker—I figured I had to at least tell the rep I was heading out. Finally Squeak, the baby-faced monster, came out in a bathrobe, his cheeks looking rather rosy. “I just need to talk to Eric, or maybe you could tell him—”

Squeak gestured to the sliding doors with a flick of his head, then spread the doors wide.

“Hey, Eric,” I said as I recognized the congressman. Then speech failed me. He was tangled up in an orgy so elaborate it resembled a cheerleading pyramid. I looked away instantly, only to get a glimpse into another room where an older guy, who I didn’t even know was in the house, was in a clinch with two ladies.

I stared at the wall next to me, momentarily paralyzed, summoning the muscular control required to book it the fuck out of there, when I heard Walker say, “Mike! Come on in.”

Squeak shed his robe. Whatever pill he had taken more than made up for the side effects of the meth. “Natasha said you wanted me,” he said.

I lunged for the door that would lead me away from all this. Squeak stepped between me and it.

“What’s your problem?” he asked. I stared at the ceiling and gave him a wide berth as I sidestepped toward the exit. “I mean, Eric already paid for everything.”

Squeak moved closer to me, as relentless as a zombie army. I hate to miss a party or a good deal, but by that point I started running as fast as I had ever run. For those of you keeping score at home, I was wrong when I thought it was just any old cathouse, and also when I thought it was some pot emporium. No, ladies and gentlemen, we had hit all the numbers: I was in a meth-fueled full-service bordello with the good gentleman from Mississippi.

I was in shock, trying to erase it all from my mind as I raced down the stairs, taking them three at a time, then stumbled on the landing and stood up to find that the cops had arrived.

For a half a second, I was almost glad. The cavalry would save me from the bad bad people and Squeak’s giant dong. But as the cuffs closed around my wrists, I began to understand the enormity of the clusterfuck I now found myself in. This was no easy-to-beat trespassing rap, which was the worst thing that could have happened after I sneaked into the Met Club. Now I was looking at two or three felonies, and Virginia is packed with hanging judges.

But the only thing I could think about was my dad. The old bastard had told me so.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A THIRTY-FOOT-TALL
clown is the kind of thing you remember. This particular one, on a ratty stretch of Virginia highway, smiled maniacally in front of an abandoned store that had been called Circus Liquors. It gave me déjà vu and a serious sense of the creeps, but I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen it before.

It’s where my dad had told me to turn. His place was about a mile down the road. It was a gas station: two pumps, a garage, and a tiny box of a convenience store. I poked my head into one of the garage bays and found him working with a hog sander on the fender of a 1970s Cutlass, throwing out sparks. The garage was too cluttered for me to get into his field of vision, so I stepped a little closer and hoped he’d notice me. Nothing. Finally, I waited for him to pull the sander back and then gave him a little tap on the shoulder.

He flinched and turned, holding the sander up like he was about to take my head off with it. It took him a second to relax.

“Oh Jesus Christ, Mike.” He put it down, and gave me a hug. “Might still be a little jumpy.”

Lesson: don’t sneak up on someone who’s been watching his ass for sixteen years.

It was March, ten months in at Davies Group, and a month before the cops picked me up at Representative Walker’s meth house fiasco. My dad had been out of prison for about six weeks. I’d spent some time with him since, of course, but it was all welcome-home dinners and BBQs, the kind of thing where everybody puts his best face on and drinks too much and gushes and promises to keep in touch.