Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
Dinner was spaghetti instead of Romanian food, out of “politeness” and a desire to point out how alien Magdalena and I were to each other. We ate in the dining room of the family’s crazily narrow three-story half of a townhouse. Everything in the room—the rugs, the dark wood clocks, the furniture, the yellowed photos and their frames—ate light. Magdalena and I sat along one edge of the table opposite Rovo, with Magdalena’s parents at the ends.
“When did you become interested in Romanians?” Magdalena’s father said shortly after we started eating. He had a mustache and was wearing a tie and what looked like a detachable collar, but couldn’t have been.
“When I met Magdalena,” I said.
I was trying to play it harmless and respectful, but I had too little experience and wasn’t doing very well. Plus Magdalena kept sliding over practically into my lap to prove to her parents how serious she and I were.
“Which was how, exactly?” her father said.
“At a wedding,” I said.
“I didn’t know the quartet was so sociable.”
I didn’t tell him it had been a sextet that night. I didn’t want to correct him, and I didn’t want to say “sextet” in front of him, either.
“It was a sextet,” Magdalena said.
“I see.”
Magdalena’s mother smiled and looked pained. Rovo rolled his eyes. He was slumped so low in his chair that it looked like he was about to slide off.
“Do you speak any Romanian?” Magdalena’s father said.
“No,” I said.
“Do you even know who the president of Romania is?”
“Ceauşescu?” I was pretty sure I was right.
“I sincerely hope you’re kidding,” he said.
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “I am. Comedy about Romania’s a sideline of mine.”
“So is sarcasm, evidently. You know, our Magdoll is not some American girl who will have sex with you in your car.”
Rovo said, “Jesus, Dad. Gross.”
I said, “I know that.”
“You appear to have nothing in common with my daughter at all.”
“Nobody has anything in common with her,” I said. “I wish they did.”
“That’s right,” her mother said, approvingly. Magdalena’s father glared at her.
Magdalena herself just got to her feet and went and kissed her father’s forehead. “Papa, you’re being ridiculous,” she said to him. “I’m going home with Pietro now. I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day.”
It stunned all three of them.
It stunned me too, but not so much that I didn’t let her grab me and get me the hell out of there.
Around that time, David Locano asked me to meet him at the Russian Baths again. I still had athlete’s foot from the last time, but I went.
“Thanks for telling Skinflick I killed Kurt Limme,” I said as soon as I sat down next to him.
“I didn’t. I just said it wasn’t me.”
“Was it?”
“No. Word is it was some dipshit he was blocking on a relay tower deal.”
I wondered why I’d bothered to ask. If Locano had killed Limme, or hired someone else to do it, why would he tell me? And what did I care anyway? Just because I had refused to murder Limme didn’t mean I had to mourn him.
“So what’s up?” I said.
“I’ve got a job for you.”
“Yeah?”
I had decided in advance that if he offered me a job I would say no. And that I would continue saying no until he understood that I was leaving the business behind.
Magdalena had changed the way I thought about it. Not that she knew I killed people. She didn’t. She knew I worked with scumbags, though, and she was afraid to know the details, which was bad enough.
“You won’t be able to turn it down,” Locano said. “You’ll be doing the world a lot of good.”
“Well—”
“I mean, these guys are foul.”
“Right. But—”
“And it’d be the perfect job for you to do with Adam.”
I stared at him. “Are you kidding?” I said.
“He wants to join. He’s got to pay the price.”
“I thought the idea was to keep Adam out of the mafia,” I said.
At the word “mafia,” Locano looked around. “Don’t be a Chatty Cathy,” he said. “Even in here.”
“Mafia mafia mafia,” I said.
“Enough! Jesus.”
“I’m not interested,” I said. “Not even in doing it alone. I’m done.”
“You’re quitting?”
“Yes.”
It was a huge relief to say it. I had thought it would be much harder. But I was still unsure how Locano would react.
He stared into space for a moment. Then he sighed. “It’ll hurt to lose you, Pietro.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re not going to ditch me and Adam entirely, are you?”
“Socially, you mean? No.”
“Good.”
For a while we just sat. Then he said, “Tell you what. Just let me pitch this to you.”
“I’m really not interested.”
“I hear you. But I’ve got to do my best. Will you let me just tell you about it?”
“Why?”
“Because I think you’ll feel differently once you’ve heard about it. I’m not saying you have to change your mind. I’m just saying I think you will.”
“I doubt it.”
“That’s fine. Just let me tell you. This one’s like the Virzi Brothers all over again, but a hundred times worse.”
Right then I knew I really didn’t want to hear about it.
“Okay,” I said. “As long as you don’t mind if I say no.”
“You know how prostitutes get turned out?” Locano asked me.
“I’ve read Daddy Cool.”
“Daddy Cool is sixties bullshit. Nowadays they get them en masse from the Ukraine. Hold a modeling audition then ship them to Mexico, where they beat them and rape them conveyor-belt style. A lot of the time there’s heroin involved too, so the girls won’t run away. We’re talking fourteen-year-old girls here.”
“And you’re involved in this business?” I said.
“No fucking way,” he said. “That’s the point. Nobody I work with can stand that shit, but there’s not a lot we can do about it when it’s out of the country.”
That seemed like bullshit already, but I just said, “Okay.”
“But now there’s a guy doing it stateside. In New Jersey. You know where Mercer County is?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get you a map anyway.”
The door to the steam room opened, and a pulse of cold air entered. Then a guy holding a towel around his waist.
“Excuse us for a minute,” Locano said to him.
“What you mean?” the man said. He had a Russian accent.
“I mean, please leave for ten minutes. We’ll be done then.”
“Is public steam room,” the man said. But he left.
“Where was I?” Locano said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Mercer County. There’s three guys out there: a father and two sons. They call it the Farm. They still fly the girls into Mexico and smuggle them up in NAFTA trucks, but they do the beating and raping right here. That way more of the girls survive the trip. But with what these guys end up doing to them, not as many more as you would think.”
“Is this about production quotas, David?” I said.
He looked at me. “No,” he said. “Not even slightly. This is about it being part of my job to look shit in the face before anybody else has to. As soon as I found out about this, I decided to stop it. And as soon as I told the people I work with about it, they said ‘Go ahead.’” He paused. “It pays a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“I know. I’m just trying to show you how seriously everyone is taking this
I’d almost managed to forget that detail. “Why would you send Adam into a situation like that?” I said.
“Because I’ve got the Farm rigged,” Locano said.
What he meant by “rigged” was this:
A couple of months earlier, the owner of the Farm, Karcher the Elder, first name Les, had called some plumbing contractors out to extend the water pipes from the kitchen out to a shack he and his sons had built alongside the house. The plumbers thought the shack might be for a meth lab, so they looked around for anything they could steal, paying particular attention to smells. This led them to another outbuilding, farther off in the back yard, which turned out to have what seemed to be a naked, decomposing teenage girl in it, though the flies on the body were too thick for them to really tell.
On the way back to their truck, completely freaked out, one of the plumbers looked in through Karcher’s office window and saw what he believed was a rack, like from a medieval torture chamber.
The crew was so bothered by the whole thing that they almost called the cops. Then their training kicked in, and they passed the information up the mob line instead, where it eventually reached Locano. If you believed Locano’s story— which I must very much have wanted to do—this was the first time anyone realized what the Karchers were doing, even though the Farm had been supplying prime product for almost two years.
Not that it mattered. The mob now wanted Karcher dead, either because someone who really had been ignorant now wasn’t, and objected, or else because someone had decided that any operation that could be discovered by a vanful of consistently stoned plumbers was probably riskier than it was worth.
Whatever the case, Locano had quickly decided that this was the job for me to walk Skinflick through. He’d had the plumbing guys go back to the house to finish the pipes, but had them use cardboard instead of drywall to edge off the hole between the house and the new shack.
According to the plumbers, they had covered the cardboard with wax paper before painting it to keep it from warping, and the patch was so low to the ground, and so impossible to see from inside the house, that the Karchers had basically no chance of discovering it. Once Skinflick and I got into the shack, it would be a simple matter to tunnel through the wall and go shoot Les Karcher and his sons in their sleep.
Locano even had a plan to get us to the shack. For five grand and a leg up in the organization, the kid who delivered the Karchers’ huge grocery order every week was willing to take us in the back of his pickup truck. Both this kid and the plumbers reported that there weren’t any dogs on the premises.
How I came to sign on to this plan—the first I’d ever followed that came from someone else, or even involved someone else, or that anyone else even knew about, and which had so many variables about which I myself knew so little—remains something of a mystery to me. When I recall that time now, it seems like my mind was fogged. Though maybe it’s my memory that’s off.
I wanted Magdalena and I wanted out. And I knew both would require a sacrifice. I also hated myself pretty significantly, and understood that freedom, let alone Magdalena, were things I could in no sense claim to deserve.
Or maybe it was that I still trusted David Locano—if not in his intentions toward me, then in his intelligence and protectiveness toward Skinflick. I had to believe that no one with Locano’s amount of experience would lead the two of us into a situation that was fucked.
Let alone one as fucked as the Farm turned out to be.
I told Magdalena everything.
I had to. Watching her love me without really knowing me was like watching her love someone else, and the jealousy was killing me. I fantasized all the time about having a different life, and past. About actually being just some garbage scumbag, even.
But that wasn’t reality. So I told her. Even though the thought that she might leave me was fucking awful.
She didn’t leave me. She cried for hours and kept making me tell her over and over again about the people I had killed. How evil they were, and how likely they were to kill again. Like she was searching for permission to keep loving me.
Part of what I told her was that I was going to kill the man and his two sons who ran the Farm, then never kill anyone again unless they threatened her. Shutting down the Farm would be a favor to Locano that would smooth my way out of the business. And it would be justified by the lives it would save.
“Can’t you just call the police?” she said.
“No,” I said, with more certainty than I felt.
“Then you have to do it right away,” Magdalena said.
I thought she meant she needed me to get it over with so she could stop sharing me with the Devil, and start working on trying to forgive me.
“To keep any more girls from dying,” she said.
That may be the most shameful part of it. Not that I felt I couldn’t betray David Locano’s “trust” by calling the police. But that it hadn’t yet occurred to me that each passing day was a day in hell for the girls I was supposedly about to rescue.
It shows something, though: if you’re going to be soulless, you should at least consider outsourcing your conscience to someone else.
“It has to be a Thursday,” I said. “That’s the Karchers’ grocery day.”
Magdalena just looked at me. Thursday was four days off. Not nearly enough time to get ready.
Another rule broken. Another step taken into fog. Another among many.
“I’ll move it to this Thursday,” I said.
15
A couple of nurses and the anesthesiologist and I use Squillante’s bedsheet to lift him from his wheelable bed to the fixed table in the center of the operating room. It’s not that he weighs anything, but that the operating table is so narrow you need to get him perfectly squared up on it or he’ll fall off. As it is, his arms flop down until I lock a couple of armrests into place under them.
“I’m sorry,” he says as I screw them to the rails.
“Shut the fuck up,” I say through my mask. Squillante’s the only one in the room not wearing scrubs, a mask, and a shower cap.
The anesthesiologist gives Squillante an opening salvo through one of his IVs. A mix of painkiller, paralytic, and amnestic. The amnestic is in case the paralytic works but the painkiller doesn’t, and Squillante spends the whole operation conscious but unable to move. At least he won’t remember to sue.
“I’m going to count backwards from five,” the anesthesiologist says. “When I get to one you’ll be asleep.”
“What am I, a fuckin infant?” Squillante says.
Two seconds later he’s out cold and the anesthesiologist has a steel laryngoscope that’s curved like a crane’s beak down his throat. Shortly afterwards there’s a respirator tube down there too, and Squillante is, as the anesthesiologists say, “sucking the plastic dick.” The anesthesiologist checks airflow, squirts some K-Y-looking shit onto Squillante’s eyeballs, and tapes the lids shut. Then he bags Squillante’s head so that just the respirator tube sticks out. It instantly makes Squillante look like a medical school cadaver, where you bag the head for the first few months of anatomy class so it won’t dry out before you get to it.
I push Squillante’s empty bed out into the hall, where it will shortly be stolen and given to another patient, probably without the sheets being changed. But what am I going to do, use a bicycle lock? Then I go back in and velcro his arms and legs to the table, like in a monster movie. “Is this table electric?” I ask. Somebody laughs. I find a crank and arch Squillante’s back by hand.
A nurse finishes cutting Squillante’s gown off with scissors, revealing the fact that his scrotum drapes halfway down his thighs, like an apron. The nurse reaches for an electric razor. Another nurse is wrapping Squillante’s limbs in what looks like an inflatable mattress. If anyone remembers to turn it on later, it will fill with hot air and keep him from getting frostbite.
“Sir,” one of the medical students says, behind me.
“You want to scrub in?” I ask.
“Yes sir!”
“Go,” I say. To my other med student I say, “Go look up the LD50 of defenestration.”
Then I ask the circulating nurse to get Dr. Friendly on the phone.
Friendly answers after five rings, out of breath. Instead of “Hello,” or any other acceptable thing, he says, “I’m not the father. Kidding. It’s Friendly. Who’s this?”
“It’s Dr. Brown,” I say. “Your patient’s almost prepped.”
“I thought you said he was prepped,” Friendly says, when he finally shows up. Stacey comes in behind him, sheepish in her own mask and cap. Friendly has his hands up, soaking wet, with the backs facing forward.
Squillante is prepped. He’s just not draped.
Draping is when you cover everything but the precise area you’re operating on. Most surgeons want to be there when it happens, so that the patient doesn’t turn out to be, say, face down by mistake.
Then again, most surgeons don’t wear knee-high rubber boots to a gastrectomy, like Friendly is wearing. It can’t be a good sign.
Washing your hands, by the way, which Friendly has just done and which I did forty-five minutes ago, is the best part of surgery. You do it in the hallway, smacking the front of the steel sink with your hip to turn the faucet on. Despite the frigidity of the air, perfectly hot water comes out. You peel open a presoaked sponge pack that you get from the dispenser (presoaked in either iodine or an eight-syllable synthetic sterilizer made by Martin-Whiting Aldomed—your choice, though iodine smells better) then wash the shit out of your hands, including under your nails. You always wash upwards, from the fingertips to the elbows, making sure no water runs back down toward your fingertips. You’re supposed to do it for five minutes. You do it for three, which feels like a vacation, then bang the water off. The sponge you just drop in the sink. Cause you are done doing anything menial for the next few hours.
Right now, the five of us in the room who are “scrubbed in”—Dr. Friendly, the scrub nurse, the instruments nurse, my med student, and I—literally can’t scratch our own asses. In fact, we can’t pass our hands above our neck or below our waists, or touch anything that isn’t blue.*