“Churls. Okay.”
“You wouldn’t think it’s possible. You can outshine him when you want to, in every way that matters most to me. But you don’t seem to want to anymore. You’d rather be this. It makes no sense, but you’ve chosen it, you keep choosing it.”
“I haven’t earned the right to this feeling, you mean? Of course I haven’t. But you wouldn’t think of me like you do if I didn’t already believe that something, capital-s Something, is going to come from me, and that it isn’t all that far off now. And that it’s all a fait accompli, before I can prove that it is, or that there’s any such thing as one.”
“I know.”
“That’s the balls of it, and the trouble with it. Justifying—”
“What?” she taunted. “Justifying what?”
“I don’t know. Contempt. You know, there’s this story that back before everything, before he had the books, Wittgenstein told Russell how distressed he was, justifying his contempt for the philosophers around him. For all the ones who couldn’t or wouldn’t clear it all away, untie themselves from everything they knew or thought they did, and try to recover the world from that mess. Justifying, because he hadn’t recovered it himself yet. But the way he was going at it, untangling knots, it was only a matter of time. But he couldn’t hold himself to a standard that demanding, ask that of himself, without the contempt. It was the fuel. They were one thing. However fucked up that is, they were.”
A long silence followed.
“Wittgenstein,” she said.
“Whatever. Naipaul then. The feeling came long before the right to it, that’s the point. And if you see me as in any way the same as Larent—”
“But you just said how, basically. What he’s trying to do in music, isn’t that untangling knots?”
“No, still, if you see me as operating on the same plane as that meek shit — or any of these literary men you go on about, their pathetic shticks. Charming, right.” He felt himself beginning to flail.
“Look, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t. And I know who you are, what you are. That’s why we’re here. But I can’t keep telling you who. My angel.”
“I am always, always waiting,” he said. His voice was brittle and dark now. “Always there’s something between you and me. Does it make sense to you that I, not me, really, just anyone like me, should be waiting? And fine if you run into a greater mind on the way home, but not this effete—. He can’t be why I’m waiting. Or any of the others. But if you find a Wittgenstein out there, yeah, by all means, take him home. Or bring him over. I’ll suck him off too.”
“He was a fag, right? Wittgenstein?”
“One way to clear all the dumb cunts out of your life.”
“You can’t really think you can talk to me like this. Maybe the hooker, I don’t know. But not me.”
The bed rocked sharply. What came next was the sound of glass breaking glass, two ways, a doubling. The ambient hum of night entered and it made the room seem somehow blacker.
He pulled the sheets over his head after that, just as the switch snapped and the light annihilated something. Now there was the sound of cloth sliding, the swoosh of a long zipper, the rustle of laces, the clack of boot heels on wood and the hushed click of a gently closing door.
28
Jenko’s intelligence would always be greater. He had more eyes than Penerin, and they were trained without training. His men had grown up in these untoward neighborhoods. It lent them the kind of easy attunement that the state’s agents could never quite match.
Jenko’s stake in the matter was also greater, which gave him the advantage of urgency, one the police couldn’t have felt, not for this demographic. Half the maimed hookers were his, though even the victims wouldn’t have known they belonged to him. Jenko operated at a remove. His girls answered directly to a committee of pimps he’d handpicked, or rather, that his assistant had. Two removes then.
Tending to the beaten girls cost Jenko much; but then, there had to be some benefit to working for him, splitting their earnings with him instead of going out on their own (though that had its own risks). He would pay for the girls’ hospital care, and then for some time afterward their rent, nursing them back to health. Erin, Mariela’s friend, was the last of his that had been hurt, many weeks ago. She was better now, back to maximum capacity, seeing one or two johns most days of the week.
It took longer than expected to identify the source of this cost, the one troubling Jenko’s girls. But in time the profile his men developed, the portrait they painted, turned singular. Its subject, Lewis, came into view, though he remained as obscure as ever to Penerin and his agents.
How to deal with him, though? A warning of some sort? A tit-for-tat beating? The only rule Jenko insisted on observing in this business: no deaths.
“So that’s him,” Aaron said. “Lewis Eldern.” It was midday, and he and Jenko were in their not-yet-reopened pool hall. Its windows were still boarded. Aaron was Jenko’s assistant, the one he used for the operations Jenko suspected his business partners, especially Celano, might not smile on. Prostitution, say.
In a Platonic sense, the old friends shared a politics. But Celano’s blood was bluer, his money purer, so the ordinary world, the one of flux, did less violence to his ideals.
This is how Jenko explained the complications. Certainly he himself believed the country had failed the weak. He was in fact only a few generations removed from having that very same grievance, though against another country (Slovenia), on another continent. Equally, he was doing what he could to arrange the world in a way that fortified labor, though he left the details to men like Celano. He’d spent far too much time and money on Celano’s political projects for that to be gainsaid.
But he also believed he was part of a family enterprise. He drew no line between his own fortune, his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and felt more than a little duty to keep it in good health. And a fortune, a business, an empire that wasn’t growing could never be in good health. So he’d done his part and expanded it, overseas, in America, in partnership with other developers like Celano.
It was true that the Jenko empire wasn’t pretty from all angles. It hadn’t been in the beginning either, when it was just in London. There were girls then too. But it had to be said, Jenko thought, that until the state might be remolded to provide decently for these sex laborers, he was giving them a livelihood, as well as protection. There was something stark about the arrangement, of course, nothing like ideal, but this was what Celano didn’t understand: the world that is has a claim on us that the world that might be must settle before it can come into being.
Anyway, on the broader issue, Celano must have felt the same duty toward his own father’s business concerns, to keep things growing. He was just lucky they were cleaner, purely in construction and real estate, or at least seemed to be. There were things Celano, his dear friend, must be keeping from him, after all. What exactly was he doing in Spain now, for instance, so soon after the museum defacement? The unannounced trip had left Jenko to answer most of the police inquiries into the attack alone.
But really he didn’t mind that he didn’t know. No man can reconcile all the facts about himself, for another or for himself. No man should be asked to. What Jenko needed to rely on Celano for, in construction and in politics, he could, and vice versa. That was enough.
Aaron pointed at the lean man in rolled French cuffs on the wall-mounted screen, viewable from anywhere in the now partitionless hall. The place gleamed. The virgin felt was as rich as green could be, and the wood of the tables was an oily reddish brown: matched rosewood, bought from black-market stock and inlaid with ebony. The bar itself had doubled in size since everything had been burned.