The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (39 page)

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘Listen. I need a vacation. OK? I – need – a – break.’

Rem understood the distinction: her disagreement wasn’t about the event, per se, it was about the timing. And hadn’t he felt wrong-headed all day? Besides, it wasn’t about the beer, it wasn’t about getting drunk, but some continuing aggravation set against him: a bad curve to the day of nothing being in place, of everything beginning to prickle. Another Gunnersen self-detonation

‘You – Rem Gunnersen – need – to – work.’

Cathy Gunnersen could wrastle a problem until it became unbearable. Formerly these situations were managed with sex. Rem would just unbuckle and they’d have at each other. These days, right now, that possibility was spoiled by her habit of closing conversations with a monumental sulk, which demonstrated nothing but disappointment. Most times she walked off in less and less of an act.

‘Get over this,’ she said. ‘Start over.’

Rem held his tongue. It’s always the people who don’t have to start over who speak like this.

The wedding party had ended badly. It wasn’t that Rem disliked his sister-in-law’s partner – a fashion buyer for a high street chain Rem could never remember – he just couldn’t stop needling the man (
Don’t worry, you’ll always be her first husband
). In return the groom preened at the news from Cathy about Rem’s business
not doing so well
. Everything was headshakingly ‘too bad’. But times were tough for everyone, right? At least Rem still had a business, right? However diminished. And he could always go back – where was it now – to I-raq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, wherever it was he’d gone that first time, and earn some more? Right?

Cathy wouldn’t hear of it.

Rem’s speech, volunteered without request, included a joke about men who design women’s clothes and another about sodomy.
A couple,
newly-wed, come into the doctor’s office, and after a thorough examination the doctor finds the woman to be a virgin, despite her husband’s claim that he ‘puts it to her’ every night . . .

Cathy repeated Rem’s jokes to Maggie at work. She specified the targets, punch by punch, the blows levelled at the groom’s faith, his occupation, his sexual prowess (about which, she had to admit, her sister never expressed enthusiasm). It wasn’t embarrassment or humiliation she’d felt as Rem slowly pumped his hips in demonstration: this crudity, these dim thrusts meant nothing. Cathy drew a picture of Rem looming acute over a long table loaded with plates and glasses and lit candles, a table dressed with flowers and napkins, with creams and fleshy pinks – and this she found inexcusable. Rem, top heavy, ox-like, boxy, overburdened, ready to topple, slake off and hammer down like some great hunk of glacial ice. It was this: his pure force, his size against the delicacy of the table which she found humiliating, and how the entire room remained silent for the duration of his speech, listening to his Continental English, aching for him to hit the deck and take out the cake.

As it happened, Cathy was the one to fall over. Not one drop of drink in her, she flopped to the floor. Couldn’t remember catching a heel in the carpet, but one moment upright, the next, prone, knees spread, and a feeling afterward of indigestion, a low-grade bellyache stuck to the gut that lasted too long.

Rem slept with his head on one arm, the other tucked under the pillow. Cathy spoke to the back of his head. The vacation became a simple matter. She didn’t want to go anywhere, she wanted to stay home, in any case she couldn’t leave, not with her work. They could spare her, sure, but her last break had resulted in Maggie receiving the promotion to shift-supervisor – and wasn’t that the start of everything going wrong? No, this vacation would come under a different arrangement. Rem, who wasn’t doing much except a whole lot of moping around, would have to find a
real
job that paid
real
money, and send the money back. He could use this time to consider his drinking, his attitude, his habit of grinding people down, of riding someone’s back until they were just plain tired of carrying him. Better than sun beds, a Mexican beach, an ocean of mojitos, this vacation would cost her no effort and no expense. Which is exactly what made it perfect.

Rem sat up and turned on the light – which improved nothing.

Cathy drew herself to her elbows. Looked about ready to say something she’d been saving.

‘This isn’t a discussion.’ As Rem left the room he felt it drag after him. Nut followed in a sympathetic sulk.

Maybe going someplace else was a good idea. He looked out the window at Clark. A subterranean night, yellow and dim. The changing stoplights. The lack of traffic. The taqueria, open and empty.

Nut settled half-on, half-off the rug, raised his head and huffed. A heaviness to the sound that Rem could appreciate.

Cathy’s stubborn disconnection outlasted any other bad mood, and through the weekend it became obvious that things weren’t going to settle in their usual way. Rem knew when to stay clear, and Cathy took on double shifts at the Happy Shopper, took anything extra that Maggie could offer.

Cathy blamed Rem for the dog. He never locked the doors. Never checked they were locked. Despite Rem’s claims, she didn’t find it strange, just sad, and didn’t blame a third party for the dog’s disappearance. Once again, this all came down to Rem.

‘The doors, Rem. See for yourself. They aren’t forced.’

Rem kept the payment to the Colemans to himself, along with his certainty that Nut’s disappearance was related. He took a two-day job refurbishing a dentist’s office at 5 North Wabash, and for two days lost himself to the sticky swipe of a roller, to the soft spray of white emulsion, the thrum of the El as the trains scudded the corners on the raised tracks. While he painted he boiled with plans of revenge. He spoke with Mike, who said he’d be up for anything, if Rem could devise a workable plan. Rem realized that neither of them were graced with SEAL-like stealth or had any kind of smarts for housebreaking. He couldn’t see them storming the Coleman compound, then roving SWAT-like through the apartment to find the dog, expose the Colemans, then
fuck them up
. Mike’s ideas involved juvenile desecrations, urinating on beds, crapping on dinner plates, and they agreed that in all likelihood Coleman had driven the dog someplace and just let him loose.

He abandoned himself to the dream of being elsewhere. Cathy’s idea of a vacation wasn’t so extreme. With the business on hold he could return to Holland, spend time with his brothers, maybe even go back to his family’s roots and see his sister in Norway. While he was away he could canvass for work, reimagine the business, and return with energy. His enthusiasm soon failed him. Could he even call Halsteren home after so many years away? And did he really want to go back now that his mother was dead? And would this really be the best time to set the business aside? Aren’t you supposed to work through the tough periods? Persist?

At the end of the second day Rem found himself disinclined to return home: hours festering over stale possibilities had fed a bad mood. He understood Cathy’s proposal for what it was – a failure on multiple fronts. Home. Business. Wife. Work.

Unwilling to drink at the Wabash Inn where he might meet people he knew, he chose the cubby-hole bar at the Palmer House Hotel.

Rem sat with his back to the counter and looked over an area divided into zones by arrangements of furniture and potted palms. He lost an hour to watching men in suits amble from the elevators to the lobby to the bar with unengaged distraction – then realized, just as he was watching the businessmen, that one man, seated in an armchair close to the bar, was watching him.

The man – smart, trim, black hair, white skin as if he never spent time outdoors – watched Rem, unabashed. Dressed in a smarter suit, with smarter shoes, a trimmer haircut, the man appeared separate from the other businessmen gathered in the lobby.
You come to a town, any town, you stay in a hotel, you do business. This could be any week of the year.

Rem decided to go, toasted the businessman and drank down the beer. The man turned his head to the side, glanced at leisure along the bar, then back at Rem, and Rem wondered if he was missing something. He couldn’t suppose what the other man was thinking, and thought the exchange so blank that it bore a hint of hostility.

The man stood and came up to the bar, and while he didn’t face Rem, it was clear, by the way he spoke and the turn of his shoulder that he was being addressed.

‘One of my favourite novels opens on a street in New York. The main character thinks he’s being followed, so he slips into a bar to lose him, and this man follows right after. Another?’

The businessman watched the last foam spitline slide down Rem’s empty glass.
Did he want another drink?
Hooded eyes. Dark lashes. A man so carefully presented that he might be playing himself. His accent, Southern, not a drawl so much as an affectation, pronounced and aware.

‘Another?’

Rem said he would, though he shouldn’t. The businessman nodded. ‘Same. I’m supposed to meet with people.’ He signalled to the waiter for two more beers. ‘
Business
. They talk figures. Statistics. Money.’ He took a twenty from his wallet and folded it around his forefinger.

‘You were talking about a book?’

The man drew a quick breath. ‘He thinks he’s being followed. It’s a great moment, because he’s right, he is being followed, although he’s wrong about the reason.’ The businessman leaned against the bar, all smooth friendliness, a light turned on. ‘It’s just. Well, it’s just very strong, how he thinks he’s being followed because he’s done something, and he thinks he’s been found out – and, you know, you never find out what that trouble was, the reason for him being so anxious. You never learn. Instead this man offers him a job. He wants him to go someplace and find someone because he’s mistaken this man for someone else. So both men are mistaken. It’s a really nice place to start.’

Rem looked to the elevator. The doors opened to an empty cab. ‘I never read.’

The man smiled at Rem’s accent. ‘You sound British,’ he said, ‘but I’m guessing you’re not. I’m hearing something else?’

‘Scandinavian. Raised in the Netherlands. Norwegian father. Dutch mother.’ Rem spoke as if giving evidence. Nearly four years in his early twenties working ad-hoc jobs in London had fixed his accent, and once in a while it struck him, came to his ears at a wrong angle, and he’d wonder at the foreignness of his speech, of the assumptions people made, the unintended deceit of belonging to one place but sounding like another.

‘Family?’

‘Wife.’ Rem raised his glass. ‘From Texas. You?’

‘Pittsburgh, then North Carolina, then Virginia, now Europe. You don’t look like you’re here for the expo?’

Rem said no and set his glass on the counter. No he was not.

‘You look preoccupied.’

‘I do?’

‘You do. So tell me, what do you do for work?’

‘I have my own business, house painting, decorating, but . . .’ Rem opened his hands, showed them to be empty.

‘It’s like that?’

‘Most definitely.’ Rem sucked in air, slow and deliberate. ‘I’m thinking of letting everyone go. Putting it aside and waiting out whatever we’re going through.’ He looked at the man. ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’

‘How many people do you have?’

‘Three full time. Seven part – or casual – depending on the job.’

‘Small. I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder. And this means what? You’ll go self-employed?’

‘Natural step.’

‘Self-employed, you’d be looking at, annual?’

Rem shrugged, stretched his back against the bar; he had no idea. ‘Twenty-seven?’

The man gave a laugh as if this was a good joke. Twenty-seven, now that was funny.

‘I meant twenty-seven is what I owe.’

The businessman hesitated, absorbed the statement, then offered, ‘Twenty-seven isn’t so bad. If it’s fixed.’

‘If you have work.’ Rem explained himself in a low voice, keen not to be overheard. ‘Twenty-seven. That’s what I owe in wages and loans, debt I’ve taken on.’

The man drew a wallet then a business card out of his pocket. His suit, tailored, black, a little feminine with a sharp-blue lining, behind or ahead of the times, Rem couldn’t tell.
Paul Geezler, Advisor to the Division Chief, Europe, HOSCO International.
Rem shook the man’s hand and repeated his name. Geezler. German?

‘Pennsylvania Dutch. If you’re serious about looking for work,’ Paul Geezler took back the card and wrote a booth number on the back, ‘take a look at the expo. If this doesn’t interest you there are others recruiting, and they’ll be looking for people with skills.’ He pointed to Rem’s paint-specked hands. ‘They’re looking for anyone who’ll take on a challenge. People who don’t mind a little hardship as long as the money is good. And the money is good.’

Rem couldn’t help but smile. ‘Where’s the work?’

‘Dubai, less and less. Now it’s Kuwait. Kuwait and Iraq.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘You’ll clear your debt.’

‘That’s how I raised the start-up money: Kuwait, worked on the hotels.’

‘Construction?’

‘Six weeks. Fitting, finishing, painting. They kept building. You could watch them go up. Fourteen new builds in six weeks.’ Rem raised his hand and tower blocks grew around them. ‘Every one a hotel.’

The businessman nodded. Rem referred to the card, the memory of those six weeks caught with him.

And when was Kuwait? Before the surge or after? He couldn’t remember. He could hardly say he’d seen Kuwait, just views from hotel rooms in which buildings grew faster than flowers. It wasn’t even six full weeks on site, closer really to five. Five short weeks with a team of men, one from St Louis, one from Cedar Rapids, and two Brits from Dev-un, that’s how they pronounced it, Dev-
uhn
, all particular and resentful, not Dev-
on
, the way it’s spelled. For five or six weeks the men barely spoke and worked in high-rise high-class hotels, progressing floor by floor, and paid in cash by the completed unit. Money rained down. Tax-free. Divine.

Paul Geezler nodded, brisk and dismissive. ‘There’s a good number of possibilities.’ He became distracted as four men, all suited, came out from the elevator and drifted across their line of view. Paul Geezler fixed on them the same attention he’d fastened earlier on Rem.