Niko was trying to be mister cool but he wanted to throw up. Van’s head was still against the steering wheel, the eyes so like his own still stared at nothing, and he still laughed when he first saw it. The bloodrose still bloomed in one dulled eye. No time had passed in that tableau.
He wiped his palms on his thighs. “Jemma got a CAT scan last week.”
Phil shook his head. “All this time and this is how you say hello.” From somewhere he brought forth an iPhone in a beige leather case monogrammed with a single letter M. He tapped the screen and frowned. “Jemma, that’s the wife, right?”
“We’re not married.”
A wide smile. “For purposes of conversation.”
Madge arrived with Phil’s coffee.
“She started getting headaches. Having dizzy spells, short term memory lapses, problems concentrating.”
Phil spooned sugar and dumped clotted creamer into his coffee and stirred it with a finger.
“Sometimes blurred vision.”
Phil blew across his coffeecup and sipped and toasted Madge who had already left them.
“A month ago it started getting worse. She’d stare at nothing for twenty minutes and then pop out of it without being aware the time had gone by. Like a little epileptic fit.”
Phil drained his coffee in one gulp and looked around for their waitress.
“Two weeks ago she fell down when we were out shopping. She didn’t even reach out to stop her fall. Just fell. She nearly broke her nose on the concrete.”
The empty coffeecup pushed away and the iPhone went back into a pocket. “Well we all have our little problems, Niko-lodeon.”
“Her doctor thinks it could be some kind of cerebral virus. But you know what it is. Don’t you.”
A hand spread across the linen shirt. “Me? I’m just a gobetween, Niko-rama. A glorified mailman. I pick up and I deliver.”
“Then deliver this.”
The smile vanished and the man grew absolutely still. “Careful, Niko-san.”
“Just one word.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t? Not even please don’t?”
Madge returned and refilled their cups.
“Thanks, beautiful. I’ll bet you’ll make some guy very happy someday.”
“I’ve made too many guys happy already.”
He brayed like a mule. “Bam! Let me shake your hand. You can call me Phil for short.”
She avoided his hand like an Aikido master. “I wouldn’t call you Phil for long.”
Phil watched her go and shook his head. “That’s so great. These girls. They’ve seen everything. You gotta love em.” He saw Niko reaching into his valise and grew annoyed. “Oh have a heart, will you? Have some selfrespect.”
Their food arrived and Phil looked up wide eyed at Madge. “Madge my darling dear, I am going to devour this fine meal as if you prepared it with your own loving hands.”
“Don’t blame me for it.”
Phil dug in and talked to Niko with his mouth full while he gestured with his dirty fork. “Trust me when I tell you that we have the best lawyers ever born. A lot of them. And they’ve been over our boilerplate about a million times each. But you and every other armchair Daniel Webster think you’re going to be the one to find the loophole and beat the rap. Well you’re not.” Egg sprayed from Phil’s mouth. Niko watched him devour his omelette like a man who had not seen food for a long time.
The son of a bitch was right about the contract. In the bad old days after Niko had cleaned up but before he’d owned a nice big house in the Hollywood Hills he’d once taken the contract to a lawyer named Carlton Howard, whom Niko’s manager Avery Kramer had recommended. Howard was thin and graysuited and gold cufflinked, round spectacled and baldspotted. For all that he had the same leonine largesse and sleepyeyed look Niko would later learn to recognize in sparring partners who could kick his ass at will. Niko gave him the contract with much trepidation. It had never been out of his possession. He told the lawyer that the document was part of an elaborate prank and that he wanted to be sure it read like the real thing.
Howard called him back a few days later. “I’ve read your little prank, Mr. Popoudopolos, and I must tell you that what Shakespeare is to the stage this contract is to law.”
“That’s bad?”
“Hardly. It contains some of the most effective contractual language it has been my fearful pleasure to read. I’d rather fight the law of gravity than go up against this thing. Did you know it won’t photocopy?”
“No kidding.”
“I tried to make a Xerox of it to show some associates. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither.” Niko closed his eyes. “So if it were real would you sign it?”
“I personally would not wipe my ass with this thing. But it’s a masterpiece.” Howard chuckled. “Sign it hell. I’d frame it.”
PHIL POINTED HIS fork at Niko’s valise. “Really, Niko-polis. I expected more from you.” He dabbed his mouth with a paper napkin. His plate now spotless. “So what exactly is the purpose of this meeting? To tell us Don’t, like Jimmy Cagney? Keep ya mitts offa my goyl?”
“Jem has nothing to do with this. She’s not part of—”
“Read the fine print, Niko-saurus. Section three sub a little i. Valued chattels attached.” Phil leaned back on the seat and drummed his fingers.
“Your business is with me. Leave her alone.”
Phil slid his shades down his nose and leaned forward and looked at Niko over the frames. Bald eyes wanting iris or pupil, eggwhite sclera redwormed and dull. “Or else what, you pusfilled maggotfeast? You’re meat, asshole. And you’ve been our meat ever since you signed on the dotted line. What part of Sell did you not understand?”
Niko quailed beneath that cueball gaze. A look around the restaurant showed the diners tending to their own affairs. One of the oddest things here in fact was that he’d not been recognized. Nobody seemed to know him, everybody passed him by.
Phil slid his shades back up and resumed his former velvet tone. “What you’ve got there in your dorky lawyer bag is a receipt, shitbag. With your signature guaranteeing delivery. We can run a DNA test on the ink if you want.” He smiled. “So get off your high horse and listen up, Niko-sabe.” He pointed a pinky at Niko and his tone allowed no contravention. Niko smelled burnt matches on his breath. “Our business, as you put it, is with what the philosophers like to call your irreducible self. Such as it is. And guess who’s part of that now.” The hand lowered to the table. “What, you thought you had a get out of jail free card if you didn’t marry her?” The braying laugh again. “You’re the one who fell in love, Don Juan. Maybe you should have kept your pecker in your pocket.” He moved his plate aside and slid Niko’s untouched chicken fried steak in its place. He picked up knife and fork and dug in like a dire wolf while Niko tried to think of what to say or do. Phil glanced up at Niko and held his knife and fork before him in a cross. “Here comes the whiny beggy part. I hate that as much as I hate coming up this way, so spare me before I choke on my lunch here.” The utensils turned outward with his shrug. “You signed and we delivered and now it’s your turn and you want to welsh. I’ve heard this song so many times it gives me a headache.” He chugged his coffee in one gulp again and slammed the empty cup on the table. “Every damned one of you tries to renege. You’ve even tried before.”
“How could I have? I haven’t even seen you since—”
“Not now, pinhead. Different times, different guises, different means. You don’t remember because that birth thing fucks you guys up something awful. And I end up meeting you in the woods or in some cheapo movie graveyard at midnight or in some artery clogging choke and puke—” he indicated at the restaurant with the knife and fork “—and I sit there listening while every one of you maggot banquets tries to cheat his way out of a binding contract freely entered into. But somehow we’re the bad guys. Well piss on that.” Phil abandoned the utensils and picked up the gravyclotted slab of batterfried meat with his bare hands and his mouth opened impossibly wide and he dangled the steak obscenely over it like a rat held by the tail and he dropped it into his gullet and swallowed loudly without chewing and then picked up the plate and licked it clean. He wiped his fingers with his napkin and pulled another from the dispenser to pat his lips. Then he dropped the napkin to his plate and leaned forward again to tick off points on his slender fingers. “Now here’s the straight dope, Niko-lette. You don’t make demands. You don’t ask favors. You don’t even call me up again. Are the clouds parting here?”