Devils in Exile Page 4

  A dumpy man in his thirties exited a shoe store across the street, dressed in a T-shirt, loose shorts, and flip-flops, mobile phone wedged against his ear.

  “Out-of-shape guys in the prime years of their lives. I see someone walking around town in flip-flops, you know what I think? Gazelle sunning itself on the plain. Who’s he going to outrun in those things? Who’s he going to take in a fight? That’s a willing victim right there. I think to myself, ‘I could take your wife, your kids.’” Royce snapped his fingers. “You saw it, right? Iraqis whose families were taken from them? This guy would say, ‘But this isn’t Iraq.’ And I say, ‘Neither was New Orleans.’” Royce passed behind Maven like a breeze. “Nobody’s fucking ready. None of them. Take away their mobile phones, and you’ve all but cut their throats. When the shit goes down, you might as well scratch ‘nine one one’ in the dirt with a stick, the good it’s going to do you. They think big-daddy government is going to protect them? Think the police can keep them safe?”

  Maven said, surprising himself, “Cops are out jerking off to Cheri magazine in their cruisers.”

  Royce shot Maven an approving glance. “Damn right they are. I’m telling you things you already thought of but never put words to. You’ve been to the other side. You’ve seen what happens when the strings get cut. These people, the fight has been programmed out of them. These poor fucks actually believe they are entitled to peace and security. That war thing in the newspaper? It’s a message that’s not getting through. A warning they just don’t want to hear. They’d rather trust, and be lied to. It’s easier that way. But you, you’re ready. You’ve got that good tension just below the surface. These fucking sleepwalkers—they have no idea. You’ve come back to a dream world, Maven. A world of virgins. They don’t know.”

  Maven did look around. He looked with fresh eyes.

  The neat brick-front stores. The self-absorbed consumers. The smokeless blue sky. Everything moving in slow motion for him, like a trick revealed.

  “You ever wish sometimes,” said Royce, so quietly it was as though he were talking in Maven’s ear, “that you could have brought a bit of war back home? Just a taste? Enough to wake them up, show them what it’s really like?”

  Maven experienced a vision then, of Newbury Street under siege. Mortar impacts zapping the air pressure, exploding parked cars, and cratering the street … smoke grenades billowing, swirling green as Cobra helicopters thumped overhead, opening up 20 mm machine guns … rocket volleys painting the sky with white burn trails … armor-penetrating SLAP rounds collapsing the brickstones, rubble and dust cascading into the street … and shoppers fleeing with bleeding eardrums, while Maven, in full armor, M4 in hand, was cleared hot for Newbury Street …

  Maven turned back, smiling, until he saw the man in the sage cashmere jacket again. Standing on the sidewalk now, his phone in one hand, a smart leather grip with long, buckled straps in the other. He looked bigger and harder up close, like a rugby player dressed for a business meeting. He handed his ticket to a second valet, who ran off.

  Royce remained at Maven’s side, seemingly ignoring the other guy, and yet—Maven was sure—completely aware of the man’s presence.

  “What I’m looking for,” said Royce, low and quiet, “is somebody reliable. Somebody who can keep it tight. Somebody who’s good in a pinch. Somebody who likes the action, but isn’t a cowboy, who isn’t going to light up a room just for the fuck of it. Somebody smart, or who can pass for same. And, yes—somebody who’s lucky, and interested in staying that way.”

  The car arrived without Maven’s noticing. A shiny black Audi with a cream interior. Royce went around to the driver’s side and duked the valet, who then jogged over to open the passenger door for Maven.

  Maven hesitated. The purring car, so smooth and sexy that the valet should have tipped Royce just for the privilege, woke Maven up a little.

  “What?” said Royce, seeing him waiting.

  “What happened to the Escalade?”

  “Gave it back. In case anyone saw it in the parking lot that night.”

  Maven looked down at the soft leather seat, a marshmallow waiting to suck him in, maybe hold him there. Royce’s rap was seductive. Maybe too much so. Maven’s faulty trouble sensor was giving him fits. He was torn.

  “You know …” He tried to wriggle away gracefully. “Thanks for lunch, and the food for thought. I think maybe I’m gonna go walk it all off and digest.”

  Royce’s arm remained relaxed on his open door, his head and shoulders visible over the roof of the car. “What are you talking about, what?”

  “It’s just that, I’m not really … it’s not my scene, I don’t think. With all due respect.”

  “Not what scene? What? What do you think this is? Speak in sentences.”

  The street was busy enough that Maven could speak over the roof and not be heard by anyone else. He framed his words with a forgive-me wince. “You’re a drug dealer.”

  Royce smiled. He smiled wide, and he laughed, with something knowing in the laugh, something that told Maven there was so much more to this world than he knew.

  Maven said, “Aren’t you?”

  The laugh faded. “Maven, get the fuck in.”

  THE TINGLE

  ROYCE TRIED TO SETTLE IN, BUT SOMETHING WAS WRONG. “They always adjust the seat. They’re in here three fucking minutes.” He pushed a button and the driver’s seat whirred, automatically readjusting to his comfort.

  The dashboard readouts glowed cockpit red. Maven saw that the odometer was under two thousand miles. The new-car smell hit him. “How do you give cars back?”

  “A place by the airport, rents luxury vehicles.” Royce fiddled with the air, generating a gentle breeze. “My only beef with your homeownership idea, by the way. The American dream is just another scam. A trap. You haven’t figured that out yet. The shit you own does wind up owning you, and not in some Zen bullshit kind of way. Giving you something to lose if you don’t play by the rules.” Royce put them up on his fingers. “Houses. Cars. Women. These are pearls I’m dropping, scoop them up. You got to stay liquid in order to stay alive.”

  Maven said, “Got it,” though now he wondered again about Royce and Danielle Vetti.

  Royce pulled into traffic, Maven using his side mirror to look back.

  The guy in the sage green jacket was still at the curb, waiting for his vehicle.

  So they were leaving him behind. Maven wondered what the hell all that had been about.

  They stopped three cars back from the red light at the Mass. Ave. intersection, art students and Berklee College musicians winding between the cars, a guy with a folding table selling incense sticks out in front of the futon store across the way.

  “Where we headed?” asked Maven.

  The light turned green and Royce turned left, crossing over the turnpike. He slowed in the left lane, as though waiting to turn onto Boylston, against the traffic.

  Maven said, “You’re not supposed to turn here—”

  Royce took it, peeling across two lanes of traffic, horns blaring in his wake.

  “See, here’s what the U.S. military does,” Royce said. “It takes boys and turns them into men—but while still preserving that adolescent sense of invulnerability. Without that innocence, all they’ve got is a bunch of nineteen-year-olds standing in a puddle of piss. Everybody goes in thinking they’re going to be the hero. The guy on your left will take a round in the head, and the guy on your right will turn chickenshit, but you, you will stand and fire. You will slaughter the enemy and pink-mist the suicide bomber and save the fucking day. Because it’s your own personal movie, right? And the hero in the movie never gets his leg blown off, or his face, or his cock. Following me?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Maven.

  “Now here’s the other thing. What you see, what you experience, the things you learn in this quest for glory, are way beyond what other noncombatant twenty-seven-year-olds know. More life and more death have been burned into your young
brain than you know what to do with. Like in The Matrix, when they upload kung fu and Drunken Boxing into Neo’s head? Even the laziest-ass, PlayStation-playing reservist got more animal knowledge by pure osmosis over there than anyone here with the same number years of college.

  “So—now you’re out, and here’s where you’re stuck. Socially, developmentally, you’re really not much older than the teenager you were when you first went in. But, mentally, experience-wise, you’re at least a decade older than your calendar age. It’s like those body-switching movies. There’s a progression of life that every human being goes through, and for you it’s been messed up. You’ve been taken out of life, dropped onto a desert battlefield half a world away, then taken out of that again and dropped back into peace. You’re off by ten years from where you should be, going each way, backward and forward. You feel ten years younger and think ten years older. And it fractures you. What I’m saying makes sense?”

  “Yeah,” said Maven, borderline amazed. “Yeah, it does.”

  The car stopped under the carport overhang outside the big Sheraton hotel on Dalton Street. Royce stepped out and instructed the valet to keep it close, he wouldn’t be long.

  Maven followed Royce inside the busy lobby. It was wide and deep but not grand, flanked on both ends by escalators ferrying pedestrians up to the connected Prudential Center shops and the Copley Place Mall. Royce found two high-backed chairs together and sat in one, Maven taking the other, both of them half-facing the rotating doors at the entrance.

  Maven’s head was buzzing. This wasn’t a job interview, this was like a life overview, and a lot to take in. Maven waited for more.

  Royce checked his watch—thick-faced, the size of an Oreo cookie—then crossed one leg over the other, folding his hands in his lap. “Now I’m gonna drop my theory on adaptive mental health on you.”

  Maven said, “Your what?”

  “The Tomorrow Man theory. It’s pretty basic. Today, right here, you are who you are. Tomorrow, you will be who you will be. Each and every night, we lie down to die, and each morning we arise, reborn. Now, those who are in good spirits, with strong mental health, they look out for their Tomorrow Man. They eat right today, they drink right today, they go to sleep early today—all so that Tomorrow Man, when he awakes in his bed reborn as Today Man, thanks Yesterday Man. He looks upon him fondly as a child might a good parent. He knows that someone—himself—was looking out for him. He feels cared for, and respected. Loved, in a word. And now he has a legacy to pass on to his subsequent selves.”

  Royce glanced at the hotel entrance before returning to the subject at hand.

  “But those who are in a bad way, with poor mental health, they constantly leave these messes for Tomorrow Man to clean up. They eat whatever the hell they want, drink like the night will never end, and then fall asleep to forget. They don’t respect Tomorrow Man because they don’t think through the fact that Tomorrow Man will be them. So then they wake up, new Today Man, groaning at the disrespect Yesterday Man showed them. Wondering why does that guy—myself—keep punishing me? But they never learn and instead come to settle for that behavior, eventually learning to ask and expect nothing of themselves. They pass along these same bad habits tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and it becomes psychologically genetic, like a curse.

  “Looking at you now, Maven, I can see exactly where you fall on this spectrum. You are a man constantly trying to fix today what Yesterday Man did to you. You make up your bed, you clean those dirty dishes from the night before, and pledge not to start drinking until six, thinking that’s the way to keep an even keel. But in reality you’re always playing catch-up. I know this because I’ve been there. The thing is—you can’t fix the mistakes of Yesterday. Yesterday Man is dead, he’s gone forever, and blame and atonement aren’t worth a damn. What you can do is help yourself today. Eat a vegetable. Read a book. Cut that hair of yours. Leave Tomorrow Man something more than a headache and a jam-packed colon. Do for Tomorrow Man what you would have wanted Yesterday Man to do for you. Does that sound like an action plan?”

  Maven nodded. This was like watching a magician shuffle and reshuffle the deck, pulling Maven’s card again every time.

  “Is this a program you think you could get with?”

  “Probably, yeah,” said Maven. “I should.”

  Royce uncrossed his legs and sat forward, again glancing at the revolving doors. “You’re earnest, Maven. A rare quality these days.” Three guys in business wear walked past towing golf bags and carry-ons. “Those guys are about your age, right? Doing all right for themselves, looking to get eighteen holes in before dinner. See, me, I rotated out in the midnineties. Boom time. The Internet boom, the dot-com boom. Boom, boom, boom. In the NASDAQ nineties, there was money everywhere. I mean, I struggled at first, sure. But there were opportunities. But now you come back, you rotate out of this bitch-mother of a war, and they drop a recession over your head like a black hood. Now everyone’s ahead of you. Everybody your age either has a college degree or else years invested in the job market. They have employment equity, because they’ve been enjoying the fruits of your labor, working here in this nice safe bubble of Fortress America. Now you come back, and it’s like, ‘Thanks, kid. Let me shake your hand. Damn proud of ya. Now take a place at the back of the line.’”

  Maven watched the golfers with a mixture of anger and envy.

  Royce said, “Why, after all you’ve done, would you ever want to wait in a line?”

  Maven looked back. He wanted to hear more. But Royce’s eyes were trained on the hotel entrance now, and not looking away.

  Maven turned and looked in the same direction as Royce.

  The man in the sage green jacket entered the lobby, grip in hand.

  Maven instinctually turned away. Royce produced a slim mobile phone, one-touch dialed it, and brought it to his ear. “Ready-up,” he said, then closed the phone again.

  The man in the sage green jacket walked to the elevators behind the registration desk. Royce stood, and Maven rose and followed him around the opposite corner, past restroom doors, into the stairwell.

  Royce said, “Let’s see how your wind is, soldier.”

  They ran up each floor, half-flight by half-flight, Maven sucking air after eight, feeling pain after twenty, going totally out of breath at the top. He stood doubled over before a fire door numbered 29, Royce blowing air too, but upright and smiling.

  A small window looked into the carpeted hallway. Maven straightened behind Royce, watching as the man in the sage green jacket turned the far corner, reading room numbers as he went.

  “What … the … hell?” whispered Maven, between breaths.

  Royce shushed him. “What do you think about the jacket?”

  Maven swallowed. “The jacket?”

  “A Zegna. Cashmere, retails about two grand. The briefcase?”

  “Yeah?”

  “A thirteen-hundred-dollar Mulberry. Now, what’s that tell you?”

  “The guy overpaid.”

  “You say that because you’ve never touched anything of real quality.” Royce said this without insult, a simple declaration. “What you should realize is that the stuff he’s used to carrying inside that case must be worth considerably more than the case itself.”

  The guy slowed before a room halfway down the hall. Both Royce and Maven ducked away from the window, in case the guy looked left and right before going inside.

  Maven said, “What does this matter to you?”

  He heard faint knocking. Maven edged back to the window just in time to see the door open and the guy step inside.

  Royce pulled open their door and went silently down the carpeted hallway. At first, Maven thought they were moving to the same door, only to stop behind Royce at the one before it.

  A DO NOT DISTURB card hung on the handle. Maven heard a television playing inside.

  Royce produced a key card from his jacket pocket, fed it into the slot, and when the light turned green, he eased the
door open with barely a click, moving inside.

  Maven lingered where he was. Another moment of hesitation. He felt strangely exposed, standing alone in the hallway. The door was closing and he stopped it with his fingertips just as the lock was about to catch.

  He entered and shut it quietly behind him. Past a closet and large bathroom on his right, the room opened into a wide suite. Two men, both of them close to Maven’s age, stood between a writing table and the loud boxing match on television. A laptop was on the table, and one of the men, a blue-eyed Latino, watched the screen intently, listening through headphones, not even looking up at Maven. The other one, a spike-haired, blond, all-American type, wore a gun in a shoulder holster, and didn’t take his eyes off Maven until Royce gave him a nod.

  A third man, closer in age to Royce, his skin dark brown, reclined on the high, made bed with his fingers laced behind his head. The television remote was nestled in his crotch, a handgun on the comforter at his side. The guy sized up Maven without expression before returning to the roaring of the Ali-Holmes fight being rebroadcast on ESPN Classic.

  The room smelled of coffee and last night’s Chinese food. The curtains opened on west-facing windows, looking out over Fenway Park and the city limits to neighboring Brookline beyond.

  A thin, firm cable ran from an intermediate box plugged into a USB port on the laptop, leading under the locked door between the adjoining rooms. Royce plucked one of the earphones off the Latino’s head and joined him, listening.

  Maven saw a video playing full-screen, good quality from a low, Dutch angle, as though from a camera dropped on the floor. The side of a bed, the top of a closet, the ceiling.

  The Latino tapped the keyboard arrows, and the cable under the door quivered the slightest bit, the camera view twitch-panning incrementally.

  On-screen, the man in the sage green jacket walked into view.

  The cable under the door was a scope camera snooping into the adjoining room.

  The Latino guy looked at Maven for the first time. “This the new man?” he said softly.