Screwed: A Novel

  I looked down at the book with the spatter of his blood soaking into its leather cover, then at the man, my grandfather, who had given it to me. He wanted me to throw it back in his face, but I wouldn’t, because when little Patrick was older, ten grand could get us to London. Far away from our father. I’d take Mom with me then, just as I would take her out of here now. So I said:

  “You better take two steps back, old man, or you’ll be going into the ground a lot sooner than you planned.”

  He wasn’t convinced I was serious, so I played the schoolyard trick of faking a punch. The old man wasn’t used to that sort of behavior. It had probably been a long time since someone faked out Paddy Costello, so he flinched and I laughed in his face. I saw in his eyes then that he would kill me if he could, right there in his office, and I knew I had sealed Mom’s fate as an outcast, but there was no upside to being beholden to this man.

  “Get out,” he spat. “Take my . . . your mother with you. And do not ever come back.”

  So I took my mother with me and I never came back. Until now.

  And the book? I sold it the following day and hid the ten grand in the trunk of our car inside the first-aid kit. It was incinerated when Dad rammed that wall.

  I often remind myself that there are people worse off than me; in the Lebanon and so forth, or Calcutta. But on dark days, I can’t help thinking that I’ve been cursed to live a certain kind of life. I try to take care of my friends and run a straight business but instead I get people hurt or run foul of people who want to hurt me. Maybe I have some kid of dark destiny, or maybe that old maxim the luck of the Irish doesn’t apply to me.

  Years later, I spotted a secondhand copy of The Fountainhead at a stall on Mingi Street, the rambling souk adjacent to the UN HQ in Beirut. I tried to resist but a person clings to anything with resonance in a war zone. So I paid my ten bucks and pocketed the paperback along with some editions of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I liked The Fountainhead fine, and I realized that Paddy Costello’s whole “I regret nothing” speech was lifted from the book. I understood then that Gramps considered himself to be in the same principled genius bracket as Rand’s architect Howard Roark.

  When I hit on that notion, I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks and the guy in the top bunk threatened to smother me with his pillow. Of course I couldn’t stop laughing then on principal so there was a bit of argy-bargy and I may have popped someone’s shoulder out.

  You might not believe it, but I like thinking about Granddad; it vindicates me for despising his ghost.

  So anyways, Edit swipes us into the apartment, where every trace of Paddy Costello seems to have been replaced with stuff that Howard Roark might actually have approved of if he ever took a break from being noble. I don’t know much about modern design but I bet most of the furnishings in here come from some Scandinavian store that ain’t IKEA, and the artwork looks so bovine and gloomy that it must be worth a fortune.

  Evelyn is on her last legs, usually by this time in the evening she’d be keeping herself topped up with Everclear and getting set to commit to a major bender, but she hasn’t had a drink in several hours and she’s hurting. Edit leads us down a corridor longer than a subway car and into a guest bedroom that probably cost more to decorate than my entire club. Nice though. Tasteful. Chocolate brown rugs on golden wooden floors, and a king bed in the same colors set askew in the corner.

  I lay Evelyn on the bed and she whimpers a little, begging me for a drink and I can’t help remembering how she used to be.

  What’s the word?

  Vivacious.

  Now she’s a drunk, and drunks all have the same personality; a blend of cunning and pathetic. Evelyn looks pretty far gone in the face and it occurs to me that this beautiful room is going to look like a portaloo exploded in here pretty soon.

  “She’s bad,” I tell Edit. “Running on fumes. It’s gonna be a rough night.”

  Edit sits on the bed and takes Evelyn’s rough hand in her manicured fingers and even that little snapshot tells a lot about how each woman spent the past decade.

  “A doctor is coming, Evelyn. He’ll make you feel better.”

  “One drink,” Evelyn mumbles. “I’m a goddamn heiress, aren’t I?”

  Aren’t I? Ev’s Manhattan/Hamptons accent is reasserting itself faster than that kid Shea jettisoned his.

  “Of course you are,” says Edit soothingly and she gets in close to hug Evelyn tight, ignoring the grime compacted in the folds of her stepdaughter’s clothing, ignoring the sour, stale smell of alcoholism. “Everything will be all right.”

  When I said that, it sounded like Christmas cracker cliché, but when Edit says it, in her singsong accent, it sounds true. I want to believe it myself.

  Can everything be all right? Is that possible?

  Edit offers Evelyn a couple of light sedatives and Evelyn gobbles them from her palm. You will never hear an addict ask what’s in that? Whether it kills or cures doesn’t really matter, as long as the edge is taken off. The mere fact that she has ingested a drug of some kind calms my aunt and she lies back on the bed, good-naturedly cursing us for assholes until she nods off, snoring through a nose that looks like it may have been busted since I saw her last.

  Only then does Edit allow her own shoulders to droop a fraction and the worry to show in her eyes.

  “I’ve seen people come back from worse,” I say. “She’s got all her teeth, which is a good indicator. Once they loose their teeth there’s not far to go.”

  Edit shivers at the thought. In her ivory tower, people only lose teeth they don’t like.

  Edit laughs. “You know what, Dan? I need a drink.”

  I smile. “You know what, Edit? Me too.”

  I am surprised to find Buttons the gorilla still guarding the office door.

  “I didn’t figure you for a taxidermy girl,” I say, rubbing the big ape’s nose for luck.

  Edit pushes through the doors. “Buttons. Toward the end, he was all the company I had.”

  I don’t express my sympathies because I don’t feel any. Edit is an okay lady, but she knew what she was getting into, marrying a billionaire who could probably remember when Johnny Carson took over The Tonight Show. Sure it cost her ten years of her life but she came out of it pretty sweet.

  Edit has left her mark on the office too. The trophy case has been replaced with a Japanese bamboo water fountain and where Paddy’s old desk used to squat, now stands what looks like reclaimed railway sleepers on brushed steel legs.

  I could never live here. Even the furniture has a philosophy attached to it. Trying to interpret the wallpaper would give me an aneurism.

  “Whiskey okay, Daniel? Irish, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Edit pours a couple of generous shots from a bottle of Bushmills that looks nearly as old as I am.

  “You better lock that cabinet when we’re finished. Or better yet have someone shift the entire cabinet out of here. Locking the door would only work for about ten seconds.”

  Edit passes me a glass and we clink. “You’re right. Don’t worry, Dan. I’m committed to this process. Evelyn will have the best treatment. No sending her away this time, I’ll have her treated here.”

  We sit on opposite ends of an L-shaped sofa with fake zebra cushions, our feet sinking into a patterned rug that is probably loaded with symbolism that I am too brutish to understand, and we sip our velvety drinks in a civilized manner. I am so glad that Zeb is not here as he would doubtless blanket bomb this classy situation with crass comments in an attempt to get Edit to either sleep with him or lend him money.

  Zeb told me once that society dames like to fuck down, as he called it. Why else you think Rapunzel kept throwing her hair out the window? You honestly believe Prince Charming was the first swordsman up in that tower?

  When I was a kid I read Rapunzel maybe a thousand times and that particular moral never occurred to me.

  Something does occur to me now. It took a while, but I
am not accustomed to being around decent people.

  “I admire you, Edit. What you’re doing for Ev.”

  My gran studies the pointed toes of her shoes. “She’s family, Dan. I’m all alone without her, and you too.”

  “Maybe. But like she said, Evelyn’s the heiress. She comes back and you’re out of the driver’s seat, right?”

  Edit laughs. “Oh God no. I’m not that much of a do-gooder. Paddy was pretty hard on Evelyn. When she disappeared, he left everything to me, except a trust fund should his prodigal daughter ever come back. It’s a big fund, don’t get me wrong, but she’s very much a guest in my home.”

  This simple statement calms any niggling doubt I may have harbored about Edit. I think I’ve always been suspicious of saints. If I’d been Joseph the carpenter and the Virgin Mary had come home with the line that she’d been impregnated by the Holy Spirit, then Christianity would have gone a whole different way.

  “I also should thank you for letting me stow away here for a few days. I’ll be no trouble.”

  “I know you won’t, McEvoy.”

  McEvoy?

  What happened to Dan, Danny, Daniel, my hero?

  Also a new tone, not hostile exactly but definitely imperious. I suppose she’s entitled.

  “Don’t worry, Edit,” I say swirling what’s left of my whiskey. “I don’t want to bring trouble to your door. Two days max and I’m out of here.”

  “I’d say that’s about forty seven and a half hours too long for me, Mr. McEvoy.”

  I glance up from my sophisticated spirit swirling to find Edit not even looking my way. She’s got her BlackBerry out, searching for a number.

  “What I said about Paddy leaving me the empire. That was true. Unfortunately, thanks to this recession a lot of those businesses are pretty strapped at the moment. I can fix it, but I need a cash injection, which brings us to Evelyn’s hefty trust fund.”

  What’s going on here? Edit is talking like a bitch now but she can’t be.

  I read people.

  “As for you. Evelyn phoned me a couple of weeks ago to ask for money. I tried to talk her in, but she wasn’t ready. Said good old Daniel would sort her out.”

  She finds the number and selects it. “You know Paddy cut you off, right? But Ev was going to have the final laugh.”

  Final laugh. It’s grammatically correct, but not really in popular use. Edit slipped up there because she’s Swedish. She would be so screwed for that in The Great Escape, if it was set in New York with American Nazis.

  American Nazis? What is going on in my brain?

  “Dear Aunt Evelyn put you in her will. If anything happened to her, you get the entire trust fund. Twenty-five million dollars.”

  Twenty five million dollars is always a nice thing to get in the post delivered by a stork, like babies.

  “Luckily I’ve had two crooked policemen on my payroll since they worked in the city so I sent them to pick you up and see if you knew where Evelyn was.”

  The package. Evelyn was the package, not Mike’s envelope. No wonder Fortz laughed when I claimed to have the package in my pocket.

  “If not, they were supposed to kill you as a precaution,” continues Edit. “And wait at your sleazy club for Evelyn to show.”

  A precaution. Like a condom. We call those Rubber Johnnies in Ireland, which is pretty hard to take if your name is John, even harder if your name is Robert John.

  “I am so glad you escaped from my pet policemen. I followed you from their torture room and it really has worked out perfectly. You brought Evelyn to my door. I cannot believe that. I should have hired you directly instead of Krieger and Fortz.”

  Hey. Edit and I have people in common. She knows Fortz, I know Fortz.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” she says into the phone and I know then that I’m screwed.

  Or as Zeb would say: More fucked than the chief fuckee of Fuckville during Fuckapalooza on the fuckteenth of Fuckuary.

  And worse: I’ve delivered Ev to the lion’s den.

  The lion’s den with a gorilla in it. That’s hilarious so I laugh a little.

  Edit laughs along with me.

  “No,” she tells whoever’s taking the call. “I don’t think he’ll be any trouble now.”

  There used to be a show on TV with that guy from Oliver except he had a magic flute called Jimmy or Billy. Anyway it was a flute. There was big monster too but he was friendly. Genuinely friendly too, not like a grizzly bear who’s gonna eat you as soon as his smaller food sources run out.

  Balls. I’ve been drugged.

  I’m on the main stage at Fuckapalooza.

  Hello, Fuckville.

  Focus, soldier. Rescue the civilian.

  “I would prefer to just let you go,” said Edit. “But Evelyn might refuse to change her will. And also, my little policemen don’t want you and your big mouth on the loose. And they have been faithful and useful boys to me. So . . .”

  I squint down at my feet and try to marshal them but they seem so far away on long spindly legs that are definitely not mine. Some idiot has dropped a crystal tumbler and it tumbles down . . .

  Of course it does. It’s a tumbler.

  . . . Catching the light in its facets, which is so beautiful that I want to cry.

  What the hell did she give me?

  I will have to rely on my trusty arms. I topple forward onto the rug, which I realize that I can understand now.

  Of course. It’s so simple. The meaning of life is hidden in our fingerprints. All I have to do is take a photograph of my fingers and blow it up so I can read the whorls.

  Edit lifts her feet daintily and swings them away from the broken glass, and over her shoulder I see the door open and Buttons the gorilla is standing in the doorway.

  This sends me right back to my teen years and I know Buttons heard me threaten his master and he’s been waiting for a chance to shut my mouth for good. I am suddenly more scared than I have even been. There is not a doubt in my addled head that Buttons intends to tear my head from its shoulders.

  My life begins to flash before my eyes, which I do not want to happen because we all know what that means.

  No. Not yet. I’m not ready yet.

  The flashing continues regardless. I see my father stretching a Band-Aid across a cut on my knee, saying good soldier, good soldier. Did that happen? I don’t remember him being human. There’s Pat, my baby brother, with a pillowcase tied around his neck like a cape and the poker in his hand for a sword. He’s going to catch a belt later for getting coal dust all over his clothes. I want to warn him, but my lips are sealed. I’m in the car now, on that last fateful journey and I see for the first time that the only reason I’m alive is because the rear window was open to let out Dad’s cigarette smoke. I hear the screech of the tires and see the wall rush at our puny vehicle and mom’s hair fan out like it’s underwater. I reach for Pat but he is rag-doll dead and I am flying.

  Buttons shambles into the room and I see a smaller figure behind him that could be Tarzan or maybe Mowgli. I am afraid to look and I am frozen by chemicals but I see that Buttons has some kind of blackjack in his hand. He squats before me and I see the gorilla is wearing shoes.

  “Don’t do it here,” says Edit to the gorilla. “I don’t want any evidence if his cop friend comes looking.”

  “Remember this, McEvoy?” asks the gorilla, dangling the club before my face. “Every cop in the state knows what you did to me with this fucking thing.”

  I have no clue what Buttons is talking about. I never touched him with a big dildo.

  Buttons pulls his arm back, and I hear his labored breath burr in my ear.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he says and I close my eyes.

  I read people pretty good, right?

  CHAPTER 7

  IN EVERY NOIR BOOK I EVER READ THERE’S A BIT ABOUT THE guy, the gumshoe, coming to after a beating. I never liked those passages because some of those scribes put their shit together pretty good, and it all gets a
little close to the bone for a guy like me, who’s been clipped enough times to move down a bracket on the IQ scale. I’d swear I was a gifted kid, now I’m barely average thanks to Tasers, rubber bullets, spiked drinks, steel-toe-capped boots and now a goddamn dildo. There was also a time with high heels and a spiral staircase but I don’t know anyone well enough to tell them that story. And I will never go to a hypnotist’s show just in case I might let it slip.

  You come out of it different each time. Fast or slow. Easy or so damn hard you want to be dead. Sometimes the pain is so massive, so everything that you feel it can no more come to an end than the universe itself. This is gonna be one of those times, I just know it. Drugs with a side of dildo? There is no way this is gonna be anything but a nightmare.

  I feel myself surfacing and part of me is glad not to be dead but most of me wants to stay down here in the cool dark and have no network for a while, but my subconscious is running the show at the moment and picks up on some red flags that need my immediate attention, and so sends me surging toward consciousness like an oxygen-starved swimmer pulling for the surface.

  I hear a screeching noise that could be a large bird, something from the Amazon maybe, and my body is being vigorously shaken. Am I riding some huge Amazonian bird? Could that be it? How has my life arrived at this point? I stop worrying about the bird when I realize that I can’t breathe. Imagine the panic our friend the oxygen-starved swimmer would feel if he broke the surface only to find no breathable air in the atmosphere. That is how I feel. Panic and pain are my motivators. How could I not have realized how happy I was back then, in the past, when I could breathe freely and there was no constant pain?

  My eyelids open themselves, allowing my eyeballs to swell and bug out. No photos please. I am in the back of a car, which is skidding sideways toward a cowboy cushion on the freeway. The screeching is the protests of four melting tires that were not designed for lateral hops. There are two familiar-looking heads in the front and they are howling in panic, slapping at each other like kindergarten girls in a yard fight as if that can help. The side windows are filled with the elevated grille of the Hummer that has rammed us. I don’t even know who’s trying to kill me now. Probably everybody in both vehicles.