Beat the Reaper

  I made an appointment to meet her at her office the following day for an estimate, and when she got all flirty and demanding I didn’t bother to find out how serious she was, just did everything to her she asked for. I barely even noticed.

  Getting Magdalena’s upcoming schedule was easier. Marta, her booking agent, seemed to think of giving it out as advertising, and worth the risk—at least to Marta. Apparently no one stalks the booking agent.

  Most of the parties on the quartet’s schedule were in private homes, which might or might not be big enough to crash without drawing attention, so I picked a wedding in Fort Tryon Park, in upper Manhattan, that didn’t begin until nightfall. When I got there it turned out to be in a single large tent attached to the side of the stone-walled restaurant in the middle of the park. The event wasn’t large, but it was laid back, and as soon as it was even slightly crowded I was able to mix in. I was wearing a suit, having assumed, correctly, that no one would hold a black-tie wedding in Fort Tryon Park.

  Magdalena had on the same white shirt and black waiter pants. I stayed out of her sight until the group took a smoking break on a roadway up the hill, and I approached her. She was talking to the cello player near their van.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello,” the cello player said. The challenge in her voice made her underbite worse.

  “It’s all right,” Magdalena told her.

  The cello player said something in a language I couldn’t even identify, and Magdalena said something back in what I assumed was the same language.

  “I’ll be over there,” the cello player said to both of us, and walked off.

  Magdalena and I stared at each other.

  “She’s protective,” I said eventually.

  “Yes. She feels she has to be. I’m not sure why.”

  “I understand it.”

  She smiled. “Is that a pickup line?”

  “No. Kind of. I want to know you.”

  She put her head to one side and closed one eye. “You know I’m Romanian?”

  “No. I don’t know anything about you.”

  “It’s not likely it would work out, with a Romanian and an American.”

  “I don’t feel that way at all.”

  “Neither do I,” she said.

  On the off chance that I had heard her correctly, I said, “When can I see you?”

  She looked away. Sighed. “I live with my parents,” she said.

  For an awful moment I wondered if she was sixteen or something. It was certainly possible. Just as it was also possible she was thirty, since she gave off a feeling of ancientness like you’d imagine from a vampire, or an angel.

  To be honest, if she had been sixteen it wouldn’t have stopped me.

  “How old are you?” I said.

  “Twenty. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Well then.” She smiled. “Perfect.”

  “Come away with me right now,” I said.

  She touched the back of my hand with her strong slender fingers. I brought my hand up to interlace them.

  Later, when she would sleep with my balls in those fingers, which were barely able to contain them, I liked to think back to that night in the park. But at the time she said, “I can’t.”

  “When can I see you, then?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you.”

  “I need you to call me.”

  “I will. But we only have one phone.”

  “Call me from anywhere. Whenever. Do you still have my number?”

  She recited it from memory, which I knew would have to satisfy me.

  But another entire week went by without her calling. Insanity. I forwarded my phone to work, then drove like a maniac to get there so I wouldn’t miss her. I took the cordless everywhere in the house. People who weren’t her I just hung up on.

  She called on a Sunday night, late. I was doing handstand push-ups against the wall and screaming. Out the window it was raining. I rolled forward and came to my feet with the phone in my hand.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Magdalena.”

  I fell still. I was completely slick with sweat. My pulse felt ready to blow apart my fingertips, and I couldn’t remember whether it had been that way a minute ago or not.

  “Thanks for calling,” I croaked.

  “I can’t talk. I’m at a party. I’m in the bedroom. Everyone’s purse is here. They’ll think I’m stealing something.”

  “I need to see you.”

  “I know. I need to see you too. Can you come meet me?”

  “Yes I can,” I said.

  The party was at a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. She was waiting for me under the awning of the apartment building across the street, to stay out of the rain. She had her viola with her in a nylon case. As soon as I saw her I swerved the car into the fire-hydrant half-space in front of the building. She ran over and put her viola in the back seat and got in the front. I already had my seat belt off.

  We kissed for a long time. It was difficult because I needed so badly to look at her, but I was also so hungry for her mouth.

  Eventually she put her head on my chest. “I want you but I can’t have sex with you,” she said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’m a virgin. I’ve kissed a couple of boys, but that’s all.”

  “I love you,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  She grabbed my face and looked into it to see if I was serious, then started kissing me again, a thousand times harder. I heard a zipper, and she took my hand and put it on her crotch, then pulled the cotton of her underwear aside.

  Her pussy was blazing, and sopping. When she squeezed her thighs together it forced my fingers up into it.

  Skinflick approved, by the way. Magdalena was completely honest and never questioned herself, and while Skinflick was no longer exactly like that, he still respected it in other people, and recognized how rare it was. Once when he and I were alone together he said “She’s perfect for you. Like Denise was for me.”

  The three of us smoked pot together sometimes. Magdalena would announce that she wasn’t feeling it at all, then go lazy-lidded, then start kissing my neck and whisper, “Take me to the bedroom.” Skinflick, on the other side of me, would say, “Make Pietro do it. I’m watching cable.”

  But that was later, when Skinflick was living with me again.

  What happened was this:

  One night in October I came home to find him sitting in my living room with a gun in his hand. A chunky .38 revolver. I’d been out running, something I’d started to do with Magdalena, but right then she was either playing with the quartet or at night school, where she was studying accounting.

  When I came through the door Skinflick didn’t point the gun at me. But he didn’t put it down, either.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Did you kill him?” he said.

  He looked fucking awful. He was pale, and a weird mixture of skinny and flabby.

  “Who?” I said. Thinking: Oh shit. David Locano is dead.

  “Kurt.”

  “Kurt Limme?”

  “You don’t know anyone else named Kurt.”

  “How the fuck would you know? I haven’t talked to you in weeks.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was dead. What happened?”

  “Someone shot him in the face in the doorway of his apartment,” Skinflick said. Limme’s apartment was in Tribeca. “Like he buzzed the person in.”

  “What do the police say?”

  “They say it wasn’t a robbery.”

  “Maybe it was your Uncle Roger,” I said. Shirl’s husband.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Sorry.” For a second I wondered if I had killed Kurt Limme, and somehow forgotten about it. “What does your dad say?”

  “He says you didn’t talk to him about it, so if you did it you did it alone.”

/>   “Nice,” I said. I pulled a chair over from the table. “I’m going to sit down now. Don’t shoot me.”

  Skinflick tossed the revolver onto the coffee table heavily as I sat. “Fuck you. I wasn’t going to shoot you,” he said. “I’m just worried they’ll come after me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I’m sorry about Kurt.”

  “It’s not gonna stop me.”

  “Not gonna stop you from what?”

  He turned away. “From getting made,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize that was on the agenda,” I said.

  “Yes you did.”

  “You’re right: maybe I did. But it’s a shitty idea, and maybe you shouldn’t think about it right now.”

  “I don’t need to think about it. I’m doing it.”

  “You’re gonna murder someone to impress a bunch of scumbags?”

  “It’s what Kurt would have wanted.”

  “Kurt’s dead.”

  “Exactly. And I’m gonna say ‘fuck you’ to whoever killed him.”

  I said, “You think whoever killed Limme cares whether you get made?”

  “I have no fucking idea!” Skinflick said. “I don’t even know who did it!” He sulked for a moment. “Anyway, who are you to question me? You got revenge for your grandparents.”

  “That doesn’t mean it was right.”

  “But it was, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, it sure as hell doesn’t mean it’s right for you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Between me and you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus,” I said. I sincerely did not want to get into that. “For one thing, I had someone to kill. I wasn’t just killing to do it.”

  Skinflick’s face flashed a hint of relief.

  “Well, fuck, dude,” he said. “I’m not gonna kill somebody innocent. I’m not an asshole. I’m gonna find some scumbag. Like the ones my dad finds for you. Some sick fuck who’s begging for it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’ll run the whole thing by you first if you want.”

  “Okay,” I finally said.

  That’s all I said: Okay.

  Now, you tell me.

  Was that some kind of promise?

  13

  First I go up to Medicine to get my antibiotics and antivirals, which my med students have thoughtfully placed in a urine sample cup.

  “Sir, you may want to check—”

  “No time,” I say. I use a random patient ID number to open up a fluids cabinet and take out a bottle of water with 5 percent dextrose.* I bite the cap off and slug down the pills.

  And if my students are wrong, and I overdose?

  It probably won’t shorten my life by all that much anyway.

  My watch keeps scaring the shit out of me on my way up to the visiting surgeons’ office.

  Outside the office door, Dr. Friendly’s resident is leaning sullenly against the wall. He gives me a look, then stands and walks away.

  The interval between my knocking on the door and Friendly finally saying “What?” makes me want to bang my forehead on the wood. I don’t answer, just go in.

  The visiting surgeons’ office is meant to look like someone’s real office. There’s an oak desk you can sit behind to deliver bad news, and the wallpaper has a repeating pattern of diplomas on it that from a distance looks better than you would think.

  Friendly’s behind the desk. Stacey the drug rep is sitting on the edge of it, right near him, surprised to see me. Friendly, noticing me looking at her, leans and puts his hand on her thigh just below the hem of her short dress. Which I can see up.

  “What is it?” Friendly says.

  “I’d like to scrub in on your procedure on Mr. LoBrutto.”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s my patient. I’d like to help if I can.”

  Friendly thinks about it. “Whatever. If it’s not you, it’s my resident, so it’s no loss either way. I’ll leave it to you to tell him you’re taking his place.”

  “I’ll go find him,” I say.

  “I’m starting at eleven, whether you’re there or not.”

  “All right.”

  Stacey shoots some kind of facial expression at me, but I’m too grossed out to try to decode it.

  I just leave.

  In order to make it to Squillante’s surgery I figure I’ll have to do about four hours of work in the next two hours, then another four hours of work in the two hours afterwards. I realize right off that this will require draping my med students with a bit more responsibility than is usual or legal, and also keeping at least one Moxfane under my tongue at all times. To balance things out ethically, I don’t give my med students any Moxfane.

  We start. We see patients. Oh, fuck do we see patients. We see them and wake them up and shine lights in their eyes and ask them if they’re still alive so fast that even the ones who speak English don’t understand what the fuck we’re doing or saying. Then we replace their IV bags and tap their arteries and shove medications through their veins. Then we slash through their paperwork. If they’re in a tuberculosis tank, which you’re not supposed to enter without suits and masks, we fuck the HAZMAT procedures and just get in and out as fast as we can.

  Speaking of HAZMAT, we dodge the two hospital teams— Occupational Health and Safety and Infectious Disease Control—that are trying to run me down and ask me about my needlestick with the Assman sample. Right now the injection site barely hurts, and I don’t have time for that shit.

  As we move we get reminded, again and again, of what a fascinating mix a hospital can be of people in a huge hurry and people too slow to get out of their way.

  We even save a couple of lives, if you can call correcting a medications error saving a life. Usually it’s just some nurse about to give someone milligrams per pound instead of milligrams per kilogram, but occasionally it’s something more exotic, like a nurse about to give Combivir to someone who needs Combivent.

  A couple of times we get asked to help people make difficult decisions, the outcome of which will affect whether they live or die. We do this quickly too. If there’s a clear solution, it would have presented itself up front, and since it didn’t, there’s not much we can say to these people. That’s what crackpots on the Internet are for.

  “Go home,” I tell my med students when we’re finished. We’ve got, like, ninety seconds to spare.

  “Sir, we’d like to watch the surgery,” one says.

  “Why?” I say.

  But I can use the help.

  We all race down to Prep.

  The anesthesiologist is there, but Friendly isn’t. The nurse asks why, and whether I’ll do the paperwork and get the fucking patient down here already.

  I “do” the paperwork with the speed and legibility of a seismograph. Then I send my students to look up some shit about abdominal surgery, and go myself to get Squillante.

  “I screwed you, Bearclaw,” he suddenly says as we’re waiting for the elevator. He’s still in his roller bed.

  “No shit.”

  “I mean I screwed you a little more than I meant to.”

  I press the button again. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I thought Skingraft was in Argentina.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s here in New York. Right now. I just found out.”

  “No. I mean, who the fuck is Skingraft?”

  I figure it’s probably one of Skinflick’s two younger brothers, though as people to be afraid of they’re both a bit lacking.

  That or it’s more bullshit with the nicknames.

  “Sorry,” Squillante says. “Skinflick. I forgot you guys were friends.”

  “What?”

  The elevator arrives. It’s packed. “Hold on a second,” I tell Squillante.

  “Everybody out,” I say. “This patient has rabbit flu.” When they’re gone and
we’re on board with the doors closed, I use the same button Stacey did to stop the elevator.

  “Now what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Skinflick,” Squillante says. “They call him ‘Skingraft’ now because of his face.”

  “Skinflick’s dead. I threw him out a window.”

  “You did throw him out a window.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “It didn’t kill him.”

  For a second I can’t say anything. I know it isn’t true, but my guts don’t appear to be so sure.

  “Bullshit,” I say. “We were six stories up.”

  “I’m not saying he enjoyed it.”

  “You are fucking with me.”

  “I swear it on St. Theresa.”

  “Skinflick is alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’s here?”

  “He’s in New York. I thought he was in Argentina. He was living there, learning to knife-fight.” Squillante’s voice drops even further, embarrassed. “For when he found you.”

  “Well, that’s fucking great,” I finally say.

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I figured you’d have a little time if I died. But now you probably won’t, is what I’m saying. If I do die, you’ll probably just have a couple hours to get out of town.”

  “Thanks for the consideration.”

  To keep from hitting Squillante I palm-strike the “stop” button, and speed us toward surgery.

  14

  At the beginning of November Magdalena took me to meet her parents. They lived in Dyker Heights, in Brooklyn. A place I’d never been to before I started dropping her off there.

  I’d already met her brother, a tall gangly blond high school kid who wore soccer uniforms all the time and was strangely shy, even though he spoke half a dozen languages and had been born five thousand exotic miles away. His name was Christopher, but his friends called him Rovo, because the family’s last name was Niemerover.

  Like I say, I’d already met him. The parents were news, though.

  They were blond and tall like Rovo, but also husky. Next to the three of them Magdalena looked like she’d been raised by greyhounds.* The father worked for the subway system, as a shift manager for the IRT out of Grand Central, though in Romania he’d been a dentist. The mother worked in a bakery owned by a friend of theirs.