Bandits by Elmore Leonard
“Don’t worry about it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“You still haven’t told me anything.”
“I’ll check ’em out. Jesus Christ.”
“You’re in a shitty mood, Roy.”
“So what else is new?”
“Find out about a guy named Wally Scales, also suppose to be with Immigration. He came by looking for the girl, Amelita, and you know who he is? The guy last night with the fundraiser.”
“That one could be Immigration,” Roy said. “Or he could be Internal Revenue or Treasury.”
“Will you find out? Call me at Lucy’s, I’m gonna go pick up Cullen now, take him over there.”
“I’ll tell you where you’re going tonight,” Roy said, “case you didn’t know. You’re gonna go to work for a change, take a look in the guy’s room.”
“Roy, you feeling out of sorts? Didn’t get your period, or what?”
“I have to get out of this fucking place.”
“Now you’re talking.”
He phoned Lucy and asked her if it was all right if he came over with Cullen. She said fine, any time. He asked her if a guy named Wally Scales had paid a visit.
“He phoned this morning, told me who he was. He said, ‘I understand you were at Carville Sunday, to pick up the body of a deceased friend of yours.’ I told him no, that wasn’t true.”
“Your first lie.”
“Of any importance. I asked him where he got his information.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said it didn’t matter, he was sorry to bother me.”
“Good. He was here, but I got the feeling he was just going through the motions. Didn’t have his heart in it.”
“But then he said, ‘Next time you see your dad, give him my best.’ ”
12
* * *
“I’LL TRY TO TELL YOU,” Lucy said, “but I’ve tried before and when I hear myself, well, it’s never exactly what I want to say. I guess because it’s a gut feeling that brings you to the point of doing it. You make a choice. If you don’t do it, you can list reasons why, all kinds of reasons. Or you can say, ‘What, do you think I’m crazy?’ But if you go ahead with it, if you do it . . . that’s something else.”
They were in the sun parlor of Lucy’s mother’s house, the banana-tree room in dim afternoon light, rain coming down outside. Lucy came away from the gray windows to sit down facing Jack and Cullen, both of them on the sofa.
“I became a nun because of a love story that took place eight centuries ago. Because of a man who was in love with love and because of a seventeen-year-old girl named Clare who, I’m convinced, was in love with the man. And I fell in love with the whole idea. I was nineteen, at a time when I could empathize with her, the poor little rich girl, not happy but not sure why. Her mother and dad arranging her marriage, planning her life. I was, well, I got caught up in what I believed was a mystical experience. I even thought, if I’d been around in the year 1210 I could have been that girl. I attend mass at the cathedral of San Rufino and hear a man named Francis speak quietly but with great passion about God’s love and my life is changed. I put myself there. I could smell the candles, the incense, and imagine falling in love with the man in the brown Franciscan robe.”
Cullen sat hunched on the edge of the sofa, hands folded on his knees. Jack could hear him breathing through his nose, both of them held by the mood, the quiet tone of Lucy’s voice, Lucy sitting in sweater and jeans, gray light behind her, telling about a mystical experience.
“Five or six years earlier I might’ve left to join a commune.” She looked right at Jack. “But by the time I was ready to make my run the flower children had gone home. I’m thankful for that, because I would have been running from rather than to something. What Clare did, under the influence of Francis and a wild, I mean extraordinary, combination of romantic and universal love, ran away and started an order of nuns, the Poor Clares. And it was Francis who performed the tonsure, cut off all her blond hair. He had spoken to her before, advised her, but never alone. I think because Clare was stunning, they say incredibly beautiful, and I really believe he saw more than just love of God in her eyes. His biographers say, oh, no, he was never tempted. But he had another friend in Rome, Jacqueline de Settesoli, he used to visit whenever he went to see the pope and there was never a hint of scandal with Jackie. Because I think she was mannish if not unattractive, so there was no problem. He even called her Brother Jacqueline. But Clare was something else. I have a feeling they would look at each other and there it was, in their eyes, without a word spoken.”
It had begun with Cullen meeting Lucy and making casual conversation with a former nun, saying he’d thought about entering the seminary when he was fourteen, the one up on Carrollton Avenue, and Jack saying he did enter it; they were living across the street and he went over there with his mother and sister during a hurricane alert when he was two years old. Then Cullen had come right out and asked her, “Why would a good-looking girl like you . . .”
“You know that before he acquired that gentle Saint Francis image, with the birds flocking around him, he was from a fairly wealthy family and ran with the swingers. But when he gave it up he went all the way. Stripped himself naked in the town square, in Assisi, and gave all his clothes to beggars. Everyone thought he was crazy; they called him pazzo, madman, and threw rocks at him. But he got their attention. Maybe he was in a state of metaphysical delirium, divine intoxication, I don’t think it matters. He preached unconditional love, love of God through love of man, love without limits, without the language of theology, and he touched people. . . . He kissed the sores on a leper’s face.”
Cullen said, “Jesus Christ.”
“That’s right, in his name,” Lucy said and looked at Jack and, for a moment, seemed to smile. “He took money out of his dad’s business, you might even say he stole it, because a voice said to him, ‘Francis, repair my house.’ He offered the money to a priest, to rebuild his church that was falling down, but the priest wouldn’t take it. Maybe because he was afraid of the dad. So Francis returned the money. But the church, San Damiano, became the first convent of the Poor Clares.”
Cullen said, “He really kissed a leper?”
“He bathed a leper who cursed God, blamed him for his condition, and the man was healed.”
Jack said, “You believe that?”
Lucy looked at him. “Why not? He said he couldn’t stand the sight of lepers, but that God led him among them. ‘And what had seemed bitter turned to sweetness. ‘ “ She paused. “ ‘And then, soon after, I left the world.’ ”
There was a silence in the room.
Jack felt the back of his neck tingle. He watched her cross her legs and saw the sandal hanging loose on her toe. She didn’t seem to be the least bit self-conscious. She could sit here in her mother’s house and talk about a mystical experience, about going back eight centuries and feeling herself there, knowing what it was like. . . . He saw her look at Cullen.
“He washed a leper. But do you know what the Saint Francis experts argue about? Whether he did it before or after he received the stigmata. It would seem to have happened after. But if it did, how could he wash the leper and pick clean the man’s scabs with his bloody hands bandaged?”
Cullen said, “You lost me.”
“That’s what happens,” Lucy said. “We lose sight of the act of love in what he did and get carried away questioning details. They say he had the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, that he bled from his hands, his feet and his side. But whether he had the stigmata or not, would it change who he was? He didn’t need his hands to touch people.”
Cullen said, “He touched you and you joined the nuns.”
“I got out of myself, the role I was playing as the little rich girl, to find myself. It comes with being touched and then touching others.”
Jack said, “That’s good,” narrowing his eyes and nodding, wa
That straightened Cullen. “He did?”
“When he was still in his teens,” Lucy said, “Assisi was at war with another city. There was a battle—well, a skirmish, and Francis was taken prisoner and spent a year in a dungeon.”
“The hole,” Jack said. “I’ve seen more than one come out in their white coveralls saved, born again.”
“So not much has changed,” Lucy said. “He was ill the rest of his life. Tuberculosis of the bone, malaria, conjunctivitis, dropsy. They don’t call it that anymore. What is it? . . . But his poor health didn’t seem to matter because he was never in himself.”
She paused and Jack could see her concentrating, wanting to tell about this man who’d changed her life in a way they would understand.
“He was childlike. He attracted young people especially because he was never pretentious, theologically preachy. He accepted people the way they were, even the rich, and never criticized . . . which is something I have to work on. What he was saying is, if you need nothing, you have everything. . . .”
Cullen stirred, moved his hand over his face.
“The first step in finding yourself is not to be hung up on things. And when I was nineteen it all seemed very simple.”
Cullen said, “Excuse me, but you have a powder room I could use?”
Jack said, “Back in the real world after twenty-seven years.” He waited while Lucy walked Cullen to the hall and pointed the way. When she came back he said, “What about Clare? Did he ever see her again?”
“She would invite him to San Damiano, but he always refused to go, until near the end.”
“Didn’t trust himself.”
“He told his Franciscans if they were ever tempted by carnal desires, find an ice-cold stream and jump in.”
“What’d they do in the summer?”
Lucy smiled. “I don’t know. . . . I used to picture a bunch of guys in brown robes running through the snow, diving into a river. . . .”
Jack said, “Clare went all the way, became a saint. But you decided not to go for it, huh?”
She said, “If you’re aware of going for it, Jack, you don’t have a chance.”
“I was kidding.”
She said, “Were you?” and kept looking at him.
Now he didn’t know what to say and had to think of something. “You were in, what, nine years?”
“Eleven, altogether.”
That would make her thirty. “Well, you must’ve decided something. You came out.”
“Into the world. It’s changed a lot.”
“Yeah, but you stepped right back in. You know what the ladies are wearing better than most ladies.”
“That part’s easy, you get it out of a magazine. But it’s only a cover, Jack, while I change into something else.”
“You don’t mean clothes.”
“No, it’s more like changing your skin, your identity.”
“Are we talking about another mystical experience?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think you’re going to turn into?”
“I don’t know that either.”
She kept looking at him, looking at him in a strange way. Or else it was the mood, the quiet, the rain, faint daylight showing in the windows of the room. But he could feel something.
“You’re different every time I see you.”
She said, “So are you.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I was burnt out.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was touching without feeling.”
“You were taking care of people that need you.”
“There are always people who need you. They’re everywhere you look.”
“I thought you left because of Amelita.”
“That was a reason to leave when I did. But the time was coming. . . . I finished one life when I became a Sister of Saint Francis and I finished that one when I left Nicaragua.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. “I need to be used.”
He never knew what she was going to say.
“I need to lose myself in something.”
“You don’t think this deal we’re into, walk off with five million, is gonna require any concentration?”
“Yes, but what’s my part? I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re the brains.”
Her reaction came slowly, a look of mild surprise. “You see this as a game.”
“It isn’t like going to the office.”
“You sort of shrug at the idea. But you’re willing to do it. Why?”
“Money.”
“No, you were willing right away, before you knew we were going to keep it. Remember? You said we’d be doing something for mankind. Were you serious?”
“I don’t know. . . .”
“Are you ever serious?”
“Sure, I am. It’s just, I don’t see that many things to be serious about.”
She began to grin, across the coffee table from him in the dim afternoon light, and it surprised him. She said, “Jack, I love you. You know why?”
He felt that tingle again on the back of his neck.
“You remind me of someone.”
The tingling stopped.
“What we do is serious, our motive. But how we go about it is something else, isn’t it? How we look at it, our attitude.”
“How we look back on it a year from now,” Jack said, “and think it was pretty funny. If it works, and if we’re not looking back on it from the joint. You have to be optimistic, assume you’re gonna make it. And you think of it as a game, because then it’s not as scary.”
He could make out lights in her eyes, her lips parted, Lucy beginning to smile at him again. He wanted to ask her who he reminded her of, but Cullen came back in, followed by the housekeeper.
Dolores said, “Phone for Mr. Delaney.”
* * *
Roy’s voice said, “Crispin Antonio Reyna was convicted in Florida, 1982, of uttering fraudulent checks and did nine months in South Dade FCI.”
“What’s uttering mean?”
“Like hanging paper, only a higher-class way of doing it. He was brought up another time, falsified his 4473 making a multiple gun purchase, also Dade County. Trying to buy five dozen model 92s Berettas he said were for a gun club. The indictment fell through. The feds tried to get him for running dope from Florida to Baton Rouge, said he was selling it to the students up at LSU. They couldn’t make that one stick either. Crispin Antonio’s originally a Cuban. His family moved to Nicaragua in ’59, he was an officer in the National Guard and came here in ’79, to Miami. Franklin de Dios, it says his nationality is Miskito Indian, born in Musawas, Nicaragua. Came to Miami a year ago and was a major suspect in a triple homicide, but was never brought to trial.”
“They don’t sound like they’re with Immigration,” Jack said.
“Except Second District radio cars were told to leave ’em be. They were assumed to be working as federal agents.”
“Assumed to be—what kind?”
“Call Wally Scales and ask him. His number’s 226-5989.”
“Roy, what is he?”
“He’s the fucking CIA, Jack. I want to know what side we’re supposed to be on, the good guys or the bad guys.”
13
* * *
THERE WAS NO WAY to miss Little One, even at night, the size of him coming along Bienville from the hotel, toward Royal, where Jack was waiting near the corner. Little One put out his hand and palmed Jack the room key. He said, “That fucking Roy. Okay, now we even. Tell him that.”
“We appreciate it.”
“You better ‘preciate it. Leave the key under the chifforobe, where t
“I may have to go back in.”
“Come on, Jack.” Little One twisting his head, in pain. “You see how far out my neck is right now?”
“I’m not gonna take anything. The guy won’t even know I was there. In and out, take me ten minutes.”
“Yeah, you slick, like all those boys at ‘Gola use to think of themselves, cool dudes. I remember correctly, Jack, was up there you and I met, wasn’t it?”
“I did something pretty dumb one time,” Jack said. “I should’ve known better. This is different. One more time, that’s it.”
“Yeah, like the Count say, ‘One more once,’ huh? Only that was ‘April in Paris’ and this is April in N’Awlins, man, gets hot and sticky.”
“I’m not back in business, anything like that.”
“Just want to check the man out.”
“That’s all. Take a look around.”
“Man with the Cuban skin and five-hundred-dollar suits. Sweep his room, see if he’s got a badge or any bugs ‘fore you start to deal.”
“Nothing like that.”
“Jack, when you get back up to the farm, give my best to Smoke and Too Good, and that cute little rascal Minne Mo, if he still there. Lemme think who else . . .”
Jack walked through the empty lobby and across one end of the garden courtyard to the cocktail lounge, cream-colored in soft lights, elegant, and not a soul here. The Oriental barman came to life and poured Jack a vodka.
If he were back working his trade he would have looked in, turned around, and walked out to find a big downtown hotel full of noise, full of tourists and people with name tags drinking and having fun in the bar. He’d become someone else as he felt the glow, breathed the scent of girls in cocktail dresses, girls scouting their own game while Jack looked for ladies wearing respectable diamonds, husbands who brought billfolds out of their jackets or folds of currency in silver clips. He’d take a few days to sort them out, then ride up in the elevator with a likely pair, get off a floor below the button they punch and run up the stairs to watch them going into their suite. An hour later he’d try their door to see if they put on the chain. The next day he’d slip into those rooms while they were snapping pictures in Jackson Square; go through the drawers, their suitcases and bathroom kits, look in their shoes, feel through clothes hanging in the closet. He’d look at the door chain then. If they used it he’d remove the chain and replace it with one he’d brought along that had three or four more links in it. The couple would slip the chain on that night and never notice the difference. He’d come along later, open the door with his fire key, and be able to reach in and slip off the chain. Then hook it up again on the way out, if it was a better-than-average score and he was feeling good. Or else he could cut it going in.