Romeo's Way Page 5

  “Good,” I said. “Now I just have to emphasize this with a consequence for your bad behavior. Hang on.” I took hold of Knife Guy’s right index finger and bent it back until it cracked.

  He screamed.

  Baton Guy had grown silent.

  I pulled Knife Guy off and laid him down next to his partner. He had a wallet in the back of his pants. I took it. I rolled Baton Guy over. He was almost out. He had a wallet, too. I took it.

  “I’m going to call for an ambulance now. I wouldn’t try to get away. You’re bleeding too much. You’ll get taken care of. I’ll make sure to follow your progress. If I feel you haven’t learned a lesson here tonight, I’ll find you. I know your names. I’ll be like an angel, okay? You do bad things, I’ll know it. And I’ll pay you a visit.”

  I stood. If anyone had seen the commotion in the alley, they did the standard urban thing and ignored it.

  “You two have been given a great gift tonight,” I said.

  With that I grabbed my duffel bag and walked out of the alley. I walked with my head down for a block, then another. I called 911 and made my voice sound like Cary Grant. I reported what looked like a bleeding man and gave the location of the alley and then signed off.

  I doubted the cops would find the two guys. They would do what it took to get away from there. I really hoped Baton Guy wouldn’t die. Everybody should read the Sermon on the Mount at least once before they die.

  THE HOTEL WAS called The Serene and it looked like it was built in 1930 by the Salvation Army. Inside the tiled lobby, behind a Plexiglas window, sat a combover with a man underneath it. His scanty hairs were fighting his forehead like a last bastion of guerrillas in the hills. The end of the war was near.

  I gave him my name and he told me the bill was taken care of, pay-as-you-go with someone already paying, and wasn’t that a good deal for me? He slipped an old-fashioned key with a green plastic fob into a metal tray and shot the tray out to me.

  I asked him how late room service was open and he didn’t smile. This place needed a sense of humor to go with its end-of-the-line look. But clearly it wasn’t going to be found here at the desk. And not in the empty lobby, where some old chairs waited for desperate butts to give them warmth in the morning.

  I got to my room on the second floor with a view of the blank wall next door. The faceless, windowless building squeezed up tight against my room. If I pressed my face against the glass, I got a crack of a street view.

  Closing the curtains, I mumbled a line from Epictetus. Make thou the best of use of what is within thy power, and take the rest as it happens.

  You got it, Epic. I tossed the two wallets on the bed and made an inspection. After a couple of minutes I took out the pre-prepped phone Steadman had given me and called Ira. In addition to being an ex-Mossad assassin and current avuncular rabbi, Ira Rosen is one of the great computer geeks with connections to Israel and U.S. intel. He is handier than Google and smarter than the NSA.

  “Ira.”

  “Mike! How’s the city by the bay?”

  “Unfriendly,” I said. “I got jumped by a couple of guys.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not kidding. One had a knife and one had a club. I had to hurt them.”

  “Oh no.”

  “I took their wallets.”

  “Oh no, no.”

  “It’s okay. They may have made it to a hospital.”

  “May have?”

  “I wasn’t going to drive them, Ira.”

  “How bad was it?”

  “One guy lost a lot of blood.”

  “Oh no.”

  “But here’s the good news—”

  “There’s good news?”

  “Yes, there’s a nice little sandwich shop right outside the hotel.”

  Silence.

  “Ira?”

  “I’m here. God help me, I’m here.”

  “Let me give you their names. You can run them for me.”

  “Why?”

  “For informational purposes. You never know.”

  “You never know what?”

  “I can’t tell you that. That’s what you never know means.”

  He sighed. “Okay, give me the names.”

  “Neil Smoltz is one, and Gavin Thomas is the other. They both live in Walnut Creek.” I gave him the addresses.

  “Anything else I need to know?” Ira said.

  “Things can only get better from here,” I said. “Or worse.”

  “You know, Romeo, sometimes your philosophical musings seem like complete nonsense.”

  “It’s a gift.”

  I cut off the call and took off my shoes and looked around the room and thought this would be a good place to be a monk with a vow of silence and one hard-boiled egg for breakfast every morning. I pulled one of the books Sophie had saved for me, the volume on Thomas Reid, and it brought good thoughts of her again. I stripped down and propped myself up and read Scottish common sense realism for about half an hour, then fell asleep. I dreamed that life was logical and made sense.

  A scream woke me up.

  My own.

  I’D BEEN DREAMING of chestnuts roasting on the streets of New York, at night, during Christmas. A smell I always loved. Even better than the eating. In the dream the chestnuts were roasting on my shoulder. But I was only eight, a kid again, and my father was standing next to me, in his big black overcoat and the fedora he loved, the black one with the black ribbon. The library was all lit up, the one on 42nd Street, the place I always went when my dad or mom brought me into the city. And the chestnuts were burning, burning, and then they popped, popped loud, not like chestnuts but like gunfire, and my father went down with holes in him and that’s when I screamed and woke up.

  I do that once every six months or so.

  Then I stare into the darkness until my heart slows down and my breathing gets normal, and if I’m lucky, I fall back asleep.

  IN THE MORNING I showered in water the color of Seabiscuit’s doping sample. At seven-thirty I left my elegant hotel and walked in the morning gloom to Columbus Avenue and the place Steadman told me I’d find Katarina Hogg.

  She was there. The face was unmistakable. It was framed by shoulder-length chestnut hair parted on the left side with a little curling action under the chin. She wore a brown, pinstriped suit over an open-collar black blouse.

  She also had a neon Do Not Disturb sign on her forehead as she studied a tablet propped at an angle in front of her. A large-sized white cup with a brown heat sleeve was on the left side. A southpaw. That was good to know. Lefties are quirky. You can play to their quirks.

  I was dressed like a lawyer on vacation––khaki pants, pale-blue Oxford shirt, slip-on brown shoes. A pro costume.

  “Ms. Hogg?”

  She snapped me a look. She had a tight, unsmiling face that was not unfriendly. It was rigid with the cool impatience of the interrupted professional. It would have taken a blowtorch to defrost those lips so the teeth could come out for a laugh.

  “Yes?” she said, clipped, as if every word she said was going to be deducted from a time sheet.

  “I understand your campaign is looking for some security.”

  She sat back, looked me up and down, back at my face. She could have been a federal meat inspector.

  “We have an office for that,” she said.

  “I thought you might like to see that I can find somebody if need be. And I figured it would save us both time.”

  More inspection. “Just how did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” I said. “Photos on the net, and an article said you like to work here.”

  She locked her eyes on mine. It was a look intended to secure the high ground, like Buford at Gettysburg. She was making it clear who was in control. “It’s kind of creepy, actually.”

  I recalled my Sun Tzu. If your enemy has superior strength, pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. “You’re right,” I said.

  She raised her eyebrow
s.

  I said, “But once you get to know me, I’m only disturbing.”

  The mouth defrosted for a moment and one corner of it curved up.

  She gestured to the opposite chair. I sat.

  She put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands together, looking at me over her tablet. “Name?” she said.

  “Mike Romeo.”

  “Experience?”

  “Ten years.”

  “References?”

  “One,” I said.

  “That’s not very many.”

  “The rest are confidential.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for that?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She picked up her coffee and put it to her lips. She sipped, her eyes never leaving mine. “Why us?”

  “I’m looking for work and I’m good at what I do.”

  “What’s your party affiliation?”

  “None.”

  “You’re not registered voter?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like being registered by anybody.”

  “That’s quite an attitude,” she said.

  “It started in nursery school,” I said. “I wanted to schedule my own naps.”

  Both sides of her mouth curved up. I was flanking my way up the high ground.

  Kat Hogg looked at her tablet and tapped the index finger of her right hand on the table. Finally, she said, “You’d better go through the application process.”

  There are times when you’re in a cage when the decision has to be made without analysis. You just hope that all your training and experience pays off when it needs to. Kat Hogg was trying to get me off balance, and I had to determine if she had a good stance or was wobbly herself.

  I chose wobbly.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll look elsewhere. Nice meeting you.”

  I got up from the table, gave her a nod, turned my back. I calculated that three steps would mean I was cooked, that I’d failed, that I’d head back to L.A. and tell them the whole plan was in the dumper. But thanks for the trip to Frisco.

  But when I took the second step, Kat Hogg said, “Wait a second.”

  I turned.

  “Let me ask you a question,” she said. She nodded at the chair and I sat.

  “Have you heard of Father Dwayne Weaver?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Like him?”

  “What’s not to like?” I said. In reality, I’d seen him on news clips once or twice and thought he was a loud-talking faker, a religious charlatan and an untrustworthy hack. Not that I had a strong opinion or anything.

  “Do you ever think he’s over the top?”

  “In what way?”

  “The words he says, the way he says them?”

  I sensed a trap. But I also sensed part of her harbored a small whiff of doubt about the man she was describing.

  “If you believe something,” I said, “you should say it with conviction. But you should also be able to back it up.”

  “Back it up how?”

  “With principles, facts and logic.”

  She shook her head slightly. “You’re interesting,” she said.

  “I’ve been called worse,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I want you to meet somebody.”

  “JAY J. PARSONS, I’d like you to meet Mike Romeo.”

  Parsons stood and offered his hand. His expression was wary, but I figured that went with his territory. The hair he had left on his head was sandy-colored, mixed with oncoming gray. His eyebrows and trimmed beard were almost all white. He looked like he kept himself in shape. There was a mountain bike leaning against the wall of his office.

  “When Kat brings a recommendation, that’s pretty high praise,” he said.

  “We can all use a little praise now and then,” I said.

  He motioned for us to sit. Through the glass windows of his office I could see worker bees at desks, doing various things—stuffing envelopes, scanning tablets, talking on phones. A large, framed portrait of Genevieve Griffin smiled from a square pillar in the middle of things. Big Sister looking down on a campaign in full swing.

  “What are you known for, Mike?” he said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Everybody’s known for something. Take me. You know what I’m known for?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  “I’m known for my powers of persuasion. I used to be in sales. And you know what they used to say about me?”

  “I really can’t say that I do.”

  “They used to say I could have sold brass knuckles to Gandhi.”

  Kat smiled. So did Parsons.

  Parsons said, “So what is your thing, Mike? The thing that you are known for among the people who know you.”

  “That’s not a big circle,” I said. “But I suppose you could say it’s that I do what needs to be done. I protect who needs to be protected.”

  Parsons picked up a letter opener, put the point on his index finger, and twirled it. “Who’ve you worked for?”

  “Confidential,” I said.

  “Except one,” Kat said. “I’ve got it.”

  Parsons studied me a moment. “You can keep confidences then?”

  “It goes with the job.”

  He nodded. “I have a job to do, too. My job is to run a smooth campaign and use only trustworthy people. What makes you trustworthy, Mike? I mean, for example, can you do what you’re told?”

  No.

  “Yes.” I took a method acting class once, when I was sixteen. My mom thought it would be good for expanding my social skills, which were not exactly well developed. But I loved that class. It was taught by a disciple of Stella Adler. And I learned that’s what acting is, being able to lie convincingly. The way you did it was adopt something of your own life and mold it like Silly Putty into the life you were creating for the character. I learned from that class how to look someone in the eye and speak with conviction.

  As I was doing now with Jay J. Parsons. I was playing the part of Mike Romeo, trustworthy taker of orders. Brando would have been proud.

  Kat said, “I can run the regular background, Jay J. And we can use the balance.”

  Parsons nodded. “One of the things a guy in my position has to do is keep everybody happy. It may surprise you to know that not everybody in this world is happy.”

  “Valle lacrimarum,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sounds like Latin,” Kat said.

  “Vale of tears,” I said. “One description of life.”

  Parsons tapped his bearded chin with the letter opener. “You interest me, Mike. Where’d you go to school?”

  “I’m mostly self-taught,” I said.

  Kat was smiling. She seemed to be enjoying whatever this was.

  Parsons said, “The security detail for Father Dwayne Weaver is always handled by Shipp’s crowd. You know who I’m talking about?”

  “Of course,” I said. Everybody knew about the Reverend Rodney Shipp and his crew. He considered himself a marked man.

  Parsons said, “He has his own detail, the military look and all. I’m sure you’ve seen that on Fox News.”

  “I don’t watch Fox News.”

  “I like you already.”

  “So what’s this about balance?”

  “It’s a touchy subject, so we’ll just keep it simple. This is supposed to be a rally for Genevieve Griffin. I mean, she’s the one running for reelection.”

  “Will she be there?”

  “Not till later. For security purposes. It’ll be a surprise. But when you get Shipp and Weaver together, there’s a rivalry. Shipp tends to try to dominate things wherever he goes. Sometimes that’s good, but other times, well ...”

  “You don’t want any bad Shipp happening.”

  Parsons blinked. Kat smiled.

  Parsons said, “He’s a great man, a legend, but he’s been saying some things we wish he
wouldn’t say. And if his security team is the one that’s seen all over the place, it’ll just feed into that narrative of his being, you know, dangerous to white folks. So we’re trying to balance the racial makeup of the security team. Make sense?”

  “Image is everything,” I said.

  “Pretty close,” Parsons said.

  “So this will be a good tryout,” Kat said.

  Parsons leaned back in his chair, looked at the ceiling and fiddled with the letter opener.

  I looked at Kat. She winked at me. I hadn’t had a good wink thrown my way in a long time. I liked it.

  Parsons swung back and said, “Mike, I wonder if you might give Kat and me a moment?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Outside the office, I listened to the hum of activity and watched the volunteers. I wondered how many of them were true believers and how many had challenged themselves to think about what they were doing, and why.

  One figure by the window looked out of place. Not because of her physicality, which was San Francisco friendly. She had dark, black eye shadow, blackened hair without shine, and tattoos snaking under a black tank top. If I had to guess, I would have said she was into black. One of her ears was a stud garden. There was more silver than flesh showing.

  She was stuffing envelopes.

  Then she looked at me. Her eyes were like an abandoned building. The lights had been on once, but now the electricity was shut off.

  She flipped me the bird.

  I guess that’s how you win elections in California.

  Kat called my name. I went back into the office.

  “Congratulations,” Jay J. Parsons said. “Subject to the normal background check, you’ve to the job. Kat will fill you in.”

  First step accomplished. In with Kat Hogg and on the periphery of the campaign. If I wasn’t yet in the belly of the beast, I could at least now smell its breath.

  AN HOUR LATER, Kat was driving us in her red Subaru across the Bay Bridge toward Oakland. About which Gertrude Stein once said, There is no there there.

  But at least there was a reason for me going. Part of the prep for my muscle job. And that meant meeting with the security team, the one Parsons was worried would turn off grandmothers in Orange County.

  “Shipp is smart,” Kat said. “He doesn’t want them to have a formal name. He doesn’t want some news hound calling them the New Black Panthers.”