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The first time Agent Kujan hears about them, he is sitting by the window in Jeff Rabin’s office, looking out at the simmering streets beneath the high California sun. He is reaching for a cigarette before he remembers that he isn't allowed to—there is an itch under his skin, leaving him dazed and uneasy. Instead, he reaches out and snatches up the phone.
The heist was a multiple-party job in New Mexico: breaking and entering of a weapons facility and larceny of over three hundred grenade-launchers and machine guns. There was a trail of gunpowder left at the door, drawn in the shape of a smiley-face, orange flames licking its contours when the helicopter arrived.
He has the cops on the East Coast, the department officials, the entire NYPD to blame for this. As if it’s any use, he thinks, as if there’s any point in sharing the blame around.
Kujan storms into the Los Angeles department in long, brusque strides and a face blacker than thunder, demanding investigations, names, suspects, lines of inquiry with forensics and SWAT teams. He wants any trace of fingerprints; he wants eyewitnesses, camera records, voice-identification; he wants the whole place locked down and dredged from top to bottom. He wants some way to be sure of this.
Jeff doesn’t help him. Jeff is leaning against the doorframe of his office—rumpled, pale-blue shirtsleeves rolled up and eyes bleary—looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else.
“I know what you’re thinking, David.”
Kujan paces around the California unit all night along, and when the first light of the sun spills over the edge of the horizon, he gets a report patched through. The photocopies run through the printer. The smudges of a few scattered, preciously salvaged fingerprints emerge on the system scanner just in time to meet the low, orange sigh of the sunrise. Kujan does not need to run the scan again. (He wonders if the fingerprints were a final touch: the cherry on top, the taunt.)
The breach they anticipated at the Mexican border does not occur. The fucking truck has vanished into thin air. They patch the information through to the state troopers. The Feds get called in.
In the coming days, David Kujan stays in California. The whole place is crawling with commotion, officers and agents buzzing through the hallways like it’s some frat-party on New Year’s Eve. He speaks to the FBI agents and appoints the right files. He tells them that this is a Customs job, border protection or not. Jeff Rabin, worried-looking and exasperated, keeps the office open.
He doesn’t sleep for the next thirty-six hours. When he finally drifts off, the dark-haired secretary drapes a forgotten coat around his shoulders. At some point, Agent Jack Baer saunters into the room with a cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth. He shoots both of them a surprised, eyebrows-raised glance as he dumps the pile of files—gently, for once—from the crook of one elbow onto the desk.
“Crazy guy,” Jack mutters.
*
The second time David hears about a heist, he’s back in D.C., working on a narcotics case when a fellow Customs officer gives him the call. There’s been a security breach at Pennsylvania State Penitentiary.
Somebody hooked up the north-west electric fence to a fuse and blew the whole thing up sky-high. The evacuation was messy: a dozen inmates injured in the stampede, the whole facility crumbled apart. Word got out to a local newspaper that the admin had been covering up dodgy murders in the facility, some dated as far back as ’77, committed by wardens and local cops alike. The press had a field day.
Over a hundred convicts escaped. The remaining thousands wreaked havoc on the rest of the buildings.
*
David flies back to LA a few weeks later. When he comes through the door, the officers don’t bat an eyelash. Agent Baer is still here, too—he’s assigned to the unit. Three months later and they’re still looking at the wreckage of the fire in San Pedro harbor. Unsolved cases tend to have that charm, like a missing tooth or a half-peeling scab you kept going back to. David should know.
Sergeant Rabin lets him borrow the office, for the meantime. Kujan tears down scraps of newspaper and peels Wanted posters from the bulletin board. He pins Keysor Söze to the middle of the collage. The rest of the documents in the Söze file get scattered around, tossed all over the board, maze-like, disorderly yet calming.
He takes a step back and leans against the desk to look at it, for ten minutes, maybe more. The eerie, rocking rush of the harbor waves rises like an itch in his veins.
He goes to the nearby hospital to see the Hungarian. Dr Plummer is there; she greets him with a single nod of her head. She tells him that Kovash’s injuries are sustained in recovery. He tells her that they have no plan to transfer him back to Europe, so they might as well make it comfortable for him here—have someone to talk to him, play him Liszt on a stereo or something. Dr Plummer fixes him with a quiet look and tells him that just because none of the burns have been infected doesn’t mean the Hungarian has a big chance of ever walking out of here.
Arkosh Kovash is sleeping when David Kujan comes in. The Customs agent stands for what feels like a long time by the windowsill, not knowing what to do with himself. When the Hungarian wakes up—the soft, stirring pattern of breathing morphs into silence—it happens so quietly that David doesn’t even realize. One single, startlingly blue eye peeks through the mass of bandages and swollen, purple-tinged blisters. It’s unnerving.
They don’t speak. David doesn’t bother bringing a translator with him. Whatever Kovash has to tell him, he already knows. He can see all the flames of the harbor reflected in that solitary blue eye.
Right before he leaves, Kovash growls a few husky syllables in his throat.
“I know,” David Kujan says. And then: “I’ll get him.”
The Hungarian’s clear, crystal-blue eye drifts up and fixates on Kujan’s face: mocking, a cold mixture of pity and scorn.
*
There was a fire in the San Diego’s north county, this week. It swept across woodlands and burned down a series of large coffee plantations and farms, including storages where the latest harvested crops have been processed, ground, and packaged. Too big to be a forest-fire—yet impossible to prove as deliberate. US companies take the hit. The price of local-grown coffee in North and South American shoots up over the course of a single week, and keeps on rising.
The daily newspaper’s economic column reports that a mysterious broker from New York bought large shares of coffee-companies in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, just days before the fire.
Little incidents, barely significant crumbs. David Kujan keeps an eye out for them. He cannot help it.
*
Some audacious buyer from Cincinnati invests large shares in tobacco companies. Three weeks later, rival firms suffer a drawback in their supply chains where they find crates of warehouses and stockrooms eaten through with dampness, the storage ruined.
Couple of months later, it’s pharmaceutics. A large supply of OxyContin and Vicodin disappears off the coast of Long Island, only to reappear again in Mexico in a seemingly legitimate supply chain. The same night, anonymous copies of medical prescriptions mailed to the police show that local pharmacies have been supplying irregularly large doses of Sudafed to certain buyers of the city. The crystal-meth lab in an underground basement is discovered a few days later. The fiasco manages to gain attention with the National Health Board.
(This unknown organization is, if anything, eliminating the competition.)
The next New York Times article refers to these as the works of outlaw vigilantes. David Kujan tries not to roll his eyes.
His collar feels hot against the back of his neck. He is itching for a cigarette.
*
The fourth time, it happens in Vegas.
There is a sex-trafficking ring somewhere in Nevada that’s been on the Bureau’s investigation board for years. The heart of the operation was exposed, through a series of photographs and testimony provided by a beaten-up lady hustler, to revolve around Mackie Smothers, a local casino owner.
Smothers’s casino was robbed of five hundred grand, along a hazardous purchase of diamonds, by an alleged infiltration of their office safes. The burglary occurred a couple of hours before the altercation with the cops. It triggered a shakedown for bookies, pimps, and drug-dealers alike. Pit-bosses who were suspected to be witnesses disappeared days later. Freelance scamsters were hauled in for questioning, but none of the usual crowd could spit a useful word.
In another life—in dark nights and tired moments—David Kujan could almost allow himself to admit that he’s impressed.
*
Agent Jack Baer is back at the headquarters when Kujan calls on him. Jack is not surprised, when the Customs Special Agent dumps the file on his desk, to see the name Keysor Söze. So much for the underground criminal’s secrecy. There has been an entire bulletin board in Dan Metzheiser’s office that reads Söze for weeks.
“You won’t be able to run jackshit with the Bureau on this.”
Kujan knows it. He knows it, and he is still here. Jack is bemused by the man’s resolve. The look on Kujan’s face reminds him, offhandedly, the printed sketch of Captain Ahab on his high-school copy of Moby-Dick.
The bureau won’t run jackshit with an imaginary criminal associated with a non-existent record and even less existing evidence. Söze—the mastermind, the Turkish underground prodigy—is no more than a name for cops and crooks alike.
But Jack indulges Special Agent Kujan—who has a history of successful cases under his belt, if only thanks to his sheer rugged refusal to let go of a wayward suspicion—and agrees to keep an eye out. Jack doesn’t mind trouble with the honchoes of the department. He’s dapper. He’ll move out of the way if it gets rough, sure, but meanwhile—this case makes him curious.
“Did they give you the final briefing on San Pedro?”
Jack grins. “Told me to finish up the report, put an egg in my shoe, and beat it.”
“Do they know how many people died out in LA?” Special Agent Kujan looks at him, furiously intent, dark eyebrows furrowed. His face is pale. “This guy’s a slaughtering nutbag. He’s out there wreaking havoc—”
“Spoken like you know him.” Jack sticks a Marlboro in his mouth. “Smoke?”
Agent Kujan looks as if he needs one, but he shakes his head. “No. I quit.”
Midnight: a desk over at Jack’s place, half-finished black coffee drying in porcelain mugs, stubs of Jack’s cigarettes in the tray.
“You’ve no proof any of them was ever in California.”
“I’m hoping you could get me enough information on the airlines to settle that one.”
Jack remembers San Pedro: pulling into the harbor at dawn and seeing the whole ship still ablaze, black smoke tainting the pale lights of the early-morning city and the salmon-orange shimmer of the sky. The money’s gone. The dope—assuming that there ever was any—got swiped. Whether or not there really were five suspects, not one of them left a single bloody footprint.
“Arms dealing,” Kujan says. “Maybe peddling in narcotics. I could get Customs in on this on the condition that you help me out.”
Jack likes a good case. It’s good for his blood pressure.
*
David Kujan flies to New York City and asks for an appointment with Edie Finneran.
He arrives early, but Edie beats him. She waits for him at an evening street-corner outside of the County Hall, the dim light gracing the shape of her skull.
And she says, as if they’ve known each other, as if they’ve shared more than a fleeting glance in a dim-lit fancy restaurant over Keaton’s head: “Hello, David.”
And so Kujan says, briefly unsure of himself: “Edie.”
Edie is working on a case at the moment—the prosecution for some battery-and-assault incident in Rhode Island—and a cup of coffee shared on an evening street-corner is all that she has time for. He is here under the pretext that Internal Affairs called him in on an imported-weapons charge in the East Precinct, but the cover feels like a torn sheet of gauze.
David gives her the usual briefing. He asks her questions about the case.
Edie Finneran takes it in with her soft, sea-blue eyes, the little crescent of a smile shadowing her lips. Her laughter is quick and graceful, like the slow, delicate fizzing of spilled champagne. Her quietness bleeds razor-sharp curiosity, aloof determination. She doesn’t miss a beat. Her demeanor is succinct, her charisma neat as the rim of her white porcelain mug. She’s the exact opposite of Dean’s sullenness, Dean’s wiliness, Dean’s stubborn, dark-eyed temper—and something about it all gnaws at David Kujan’s nerves. He remembers seeing Edie Finneran in court, a few years ago, and thinking that she was merciless. A girl with hidden talents.
He cannot prove it. He cannot connect anything to her.
They are standing out on a street-corner when he asks if she still keeps in touch with Keaton.
That pair of marble-like blue eyes meet his, cool, unruffled. “I didn’t know the FBI keeps tabs on whom I see.”
He has no search warrant. He has no authority. He cannot make her tell him, and she knows it. Nor can he confront her about the files that she has recently accessed—all those files on the previous Vegas trafficking cases, on criminals unrelated to the case—because as far as the Bureau’s concerned, system registers are all off-the-record, on the QT, confidential. Hush-hush.
And Edie Finneran knows that, too.
“If you see him, you can tell him that I’m looking for him.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Edie says. That little smile is in her voice again, damned if he couldn’t hear it. “If I see him.”
And all the empty streets of New York echo with her footsteps down the pavement.
*
The fifth time, it hits right in the middle of D.C.. Embezzlement of federal grants in the PD, knocking the whole department right off the board—there were tapes broadcasted, SWAT teams called in to clean the teeth from the floors when it was over.
But not even the Feds could clear up the information leaks that happened when the database was breached.
It is New York’s Finest fucking Taxi Service, all over again. David still remembers the weeks that followed where people threw rocks into department windows, trashed cruisers, painted pigs and crooked motherfucks in red on subway walls and street-side pavements. Newspaper headlines flew all over the country like origami birds with flapping, paper-thin wings. Does this promise a changeover? Does this encourage a governmental pushback against corruption?
Kujan grabs a few phone-calls with Dan Metzheiser, who confirms his suspicions: the data breach compromises state security, but also for valid information to be wiped in the confusion. This puts them in danger of losing what little data they have on Keyser Söze altogether.
He sets all his experts on tracking the bureaucratic server disturbances, even when the department puts the case out of his jurisdiction by classifying it as a domestic crisis. He searches for any bare scrap of evidence. There has to be, there fucking has to be—he says as much to his assistant, to Metzheiser, to Jack Baer; he hollers down the phone. But nothing happens.
*
David Kujan remembers the first night he met Keaton.
He remembers the night at the neighborhood tavern, after work, with all the rest of the rookies and sergeants. There was a party of some sort. Celebration for a successful case. Dean Keaton was quiet and modestly charming—but everyone knew him. Cut him, and he’d bleed ambition. Everyone had their eyes on him. Troublemaker. Even at twenty-seven, David Kujan had no eye for troublemakers—but this one blew smoke right into his face.
“I didn’t think you’d be working with us so long.”
“I take my time with cases.”
“Of course you do. I’ve read your reports. You think in riddles.”
“Sure.” There was a long, thin scar on the left of Keaton’s face from a recent fight. Skinny, lanky little shit. “You’re good with names, huh? Shame that I’m not.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Probably won’t even remember yours.”
Keaton had smiled. “Buy me a drink, and I bet I can make you remember my name.”
Cocky little motherfucker.
Oh yes, Kujan remembers Keaton. Twenty-four years old and not a mark on him, a head of tousled dark hair and a promise in his mouth. Keaton, standing in the doorway of Kujan’s office. Keaton perched on his desk, trailing a finger across the map over Kujan’s shoulder. Here’s what you’re not seeing. Keaton lounging across the couch in the New York bureau. Keaton, on the other side of the bar, head tilted back with a grin as he passes a round of drinks along the counter. Relax, boys, it’s on me. Smoke between Keaton’s lips, a tendril in the lamplight; Keaton’s fingers knotted in the silk of his tie. Still on the same case, David? Maybe you’re getting slow. His fingertips, plucking a shred of lint out of Kujan’s hair. Every insult, every taunt that they throw back and forth. The odd light in Keaton’s eyes when he explained his theory on a recent case, sleeves rolled up, yanking on a too-big suit jacket. Go on, convince me. The easy confidence that seeped from every pore.
Keaton, the night he got arrested. He spat in Kujan’s face.
*
If all cops are plagued by an unsolved case, then Dean Keaton is the scab—the black, furling scab that refuses to scar over, the one salt-biting sting that would not heal. Every so often Kujan picks at the scab too much with a jagged fingernail and the cut rips open, blood trailing like tiny beads of stars writhed open, splattered on white porcelain. Every so often Kujan lies on the couch with his head tilted back all night and thinks about Keaton, and sometimes it’s like the first night they’ve met. Same old story. Same suspects, different night. Keaton is the pack of cigarettes sitting on the desk, the bitter taunt, the salt grinded into the wound. It leaves an itch somewhere deep beneath his fingernails, the flutter of an uneven heartbeat in his throat. Sometimes David Kujan thinks that nothing has changed.
And nothing has, of course.
The same story, over and over: rewritten.
[May, 1997.]
“I know a place,” Verbal says.
“Where?”
The safehouse turns out to be some rundown mansion left on the coast of Florida, a few miles from Bal Harbor. It’s funny, how none of them bat an eyelash. None of them question it.
The night they stay over in Reno, hiding out in the basement of a nearby warehouse, they play poker together. You’d never seen someone who can shuffle a deck so quickly with one hand. Lucky they weren’t betting money, because Hockney sure doesn’t fancy the idea of every last penny he owns ending up the gimp’s pocket. Kint won his hand nearly every goddamn time. “What’s the secret?” Hockney asks him, sometimes halfway, tired and sick from the chain-smoking. Of course Verbal just looks at him and goes, “What do you mean?”
The first time they get to Florida, travelling in a stowaway ship with a smuggler captain somewhere from Somalia, it’s the middle of the night. The whole place is run-down, big, with lurking corners and long corridors, the garden out back a silent pit in the twilight. There is litter left all over the porch and in some of the rooms when runaways and strays have come to stay. They had to chase the waifs out to reclaim the place.
“Fuck me,” Fenster drawls, flinging himself down, draped boyishly across a dust-covered chaise longue with his feet cocked up and one arm raised over his head, admiring at the mosaics patterned across the high, vaulted ceilings, “now this is some place for a hide-out.”
Verbal Kint doesn’t say anything. But he stands there with one shoulder resting against the wall, pretending to be entranced by the flame as he lights a cigarette. He looks quietly pleased with himself, the way he does whenever they pull off a job. It’s Verbal for you’re welcome.
*
The beds are dusty. They find some clean mattresses in some storeroom down the hall, and clean towels buried in the closets. It takes a few days to get the water running, and when it does it’s a dark, rusty maroon, splattering onto marble, before slowly morphing into clear water. The pipes groan and creak and echo with dribbling leaks. Ivy sprawls across the walls in one of the bathrooms, its vines creeping through the broken window and climbing into the bathtub.
They each pick a bedroom for themselves because the whole place is big enough—which is a newfound luxury, as far as Hockney is concerned. Fenster and McManus usually bunk together in the west side of the house, where the breeze whistles through the cracked window like a low song. Hockney sleeps in the turret room, the one that used to be a study but is now all cleared out. He laughs and spits out fuck you when McManus greets him in the hallway on the first morning by saying, after you, princess.
One of the glass panels on the steeple-shaped roof is broken, like the gap of a missing tooth, leaving a patch of the night sky exposed. The cold will be a fucking bitch to deal with in the winter, but for now, the weather’s warm near the Key and Hockney doesn’t mind it. He falls asleep some nights with a joint of tobacco rolled between his teeth, looking at the stars.
*
“Corn or peas? That’s the real question.”
“Does it matter? All you eat is that canned shit anyway.”
Keaton ladles a splotch of sweetcorn on a plate and takes a sticky stack of baked ribs. He slides the plate across the table, to where Verbal is sitting. McManus is sitting cross-legged on the counter, taking belligerent bites out of an apple.
“Well,” Fenster says, a small frown between his eyebrows. He waves a wrist. “Think about it this way, right? You can pop corn—like, that shit that goes poop-poop-poop at the movie theaters—but you can’t get popped peas.”
“So?”
“So corn must be better. You get to do more with ’em.”
A week later, when their next haul from the supermarket comes in, McManus dumps the whole thing on the counter and dives into it. He emerges a moment later, a cigarette smoking away in one hand and a bright-green plastic carton held in the other. When he throws it up and catches it, it makes a rattling noise.
“Look a’ this.” McManus shakes the carton again, triumphant. “Pea popcorn.”
“That shit ain’t right,” Fenster says woefully. “It’s the wrong name. Ain’t they s’posed to be called pop-peas? I mean, you can’t find no corn in there.”
Hockney makes a grunt-like noise, which means he’s trying not to crack up.
“Can you please just leave it.”
“What? Pea popcorn don’t sound right.”
McManus plucks the cigarette out of his mouth. “Whaddya wanna call them instead? Pea pop-peas?”
“Uh-uh.” Fenster shakes his head. He looks solemn. “According to that logic, you gotta change the word popcorn too. You gotta be calling it corn-pop-corn.”
“Fenster, my buddy. If you wanna go explode some peas, you can go to town on it after we pull off the next job. We good?”
*
It’s a good place to lie low.
In the mornings, Fenster—with his fucked-up sleeping schedule—is usually up before the sun. By the time the rest of them are up, there would be flour tossed all over the counter and scrambled eggs charred in the pan. Fenster will open all the windows to air the rooms out. He and Verbal find an oddly companionable rhythm in the kitchen, with the coffee brewing and the radio playing on the windowsill.
At night, Keaton stays up at the large desk in the study, the array of papers spread out before him, calculating their assets. There are bank statements from an abundance of bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, shares purchased in businesses where they can launder the money. He traces the routes of where the profit gets channeled, evaluating reliability.
There are bottles of acetone and nitroglycerin on the floor of the garage. Hockney has turned it into a makeshift lab. McManus loves the trapdoor on the ceiling of the garage, so that he can poke his head down from the floor above and annoy Hockney whenever Hockney is working.
In the afternoons, sunlight seeps into every inch of the house like a glass bowl brimming with honey. There is not a closed door in sight. The corridors are vast and open. McManus likes to go out and practice with his rifle—place a bottle on the rocks and blast it into shards, in the crags above the beach where no one can hear anything for miles.
There is a sense of lostness that lives in the house. You could wander here and never find every room, McManus reckons.
In the evenings, they split a few bottles of wine from the cellar and play cards, batting away mosquitoes in the dusky light of the porch. There is an imitation of normality here: as if they are playing house, poking fun at the jaded old men they would never become.
*
Five a.m., the bay of Miami. The sky meets the sea with the faintest seeping of pink-tinged gold.
Verbal said he was coming out here to keep watch. When Keaton makes his way from the house down the pavement, past the patio and the deserted swimming pool, he can see Verbal silhouetted against the edge of the quay, legs dangling like a boy sitting on a wall, the Glock sitting beside him on the wooden planks above the slow whoosh of the tide.
The sea is still. Almost eerily still, like the vast stretch of a sun-shimmering desert. The buoys are bobbing so mildly they could be rocking a baby’s cradle.
“You’re pretty noisy for a thief,” Verbal says, without turning around.
A smile threatens to surface on Keaton’s lips. “You’re pretty sharp for a swindler.”
The waves rush in against the barest edge of rock, fizzes, then draws out.
“What are you doing out here?”
Keaton doesn’t reply. He takes a few steps closer, padding across the sand, until he steps onto the half-creaking wooden planks of the jetty.
“Trade,” he says. “You first.”
Verbal glances at him. “Someone needs to be awake,” he says. “Otherwise there’s no one around to keep an eye out.”
It’s funny, how Verbal Kint gradually assumes the role of the leader among them. It happened so quietly and so unobtrusively that Keaton barely even noticed. This is Verbal’s venue, after all: his place. His silent rules, his offer. His ideas. It’s funny how his idea becomes their ideas, in the end. Verbal’s sly, half-babbling speech, like water trickling over boulders, links words into threads and draws them in—Verbal could talk Hockney out of a petulant mood, could coax Fenster into agreeing with him, could get a sulky, hot-tempered McManus to see sense. Verbal’s watery-dark eyes drink in everything they see. The subtle hand, flipping cards, rearranges the deck. Being invisible is more than just a gift when you’re a crook. It’s a talent that saves lives.
Sometimes, in the mornings, Fenster—who takes delight in jokily playing mother hen to them by making a mess in the kitchen every evening—will leave a mug of coffee sitting on the table next to the armchair in the living room, because most of the time Verbal falls asleep there, right beside the largest window of the house, overlooking the bay, and because coffee is the first thing Verbal wants whenever he wakes up.
“Well,” Keaton says. He sits down, next to him. “I couldn’t sleep. I can take over.”
Verbal looks at him, head-tilted.
“Come take a walk with me,” Keaton says. When Verbal doesn’t object, he reaches a hand to tug on his elbow and help him up.
Verbal lets him, instead of brushing him off. He leans his weight into Keaton’s side. A year ago, that wouldn’t have happened.
Two years. Two years is a hell of a long time to be on the run with the same people.
Verbal is—
Letting his guard down, Keaton thinks. He thinks that it must take a lot out of a man, being unable to touch any resemblance of safety for so long.
They take their walk down the platform that marks the edge of the shoreline. Their footsteps thud against old, hollow wood. Verbal treads his careful, hobbling steps behind him.
“Can I ask you something?”
Verbal looks at him. Together they listen to the tide retreating, seeping across damp sand with a long, retiring whisper and back out to sea.
“Why’d you pick us?”
The footsteps stop. “What?”
“So many criminals out there who can do the work. So why’d you pick us?”
Verbal Kint—the sonofabitch who calls himself Verbal Kint—just looks at him. He stands there, lopsided, one hand curled around his left arm like grabbing onto a life-raft. He’s so good at this, so ridiculously good at this, sometimes, that it breaks Dean’s fucking heart.
Verbal’s voice: dry, emotionless, lanced with a wisp of far-off, jaded curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
His voice has softened. A quiet, dangerous monotone. “So what are you asking?”
“Because I’m wondering why you haven’t gotten rid of us.”
A beat of silence.
“Twenty-seven,” Keaton says, quietly. “That’s your count, right there. And it’s not for money, for dope, for firearms.” He grins. “The almighty Keyser Söze.” The glow of sunlight is peeking above the horizon, sending rays of gold into the clouds and the fish-belly pale sky. “I ran the files on it, you know. I asked Edie. That night on the boat? That’s the biggest slaughter job Söze’s pulled off in twenty years.”
He shakes his head. A little, half-choked laugh, under his breath.
“The only time you stick your neck out from underground in decades, the craziest scheme that you’ve ever planned. All that ’cause you’re scared shitless by the idea that, somewhere out there, there’s someone who can look you in the face and say your name.”
He hears the click of metal against a belt.
“You really are one sad motherfucker, you know.”
Verbal is quick, quicker than anyone has any right to be, dancing a step backwards. The gun aims itself at Dean’s throat.
The fight is brief. Keaton lands a fist in Söze’s shoulder. Strong fingers grip his collar, wrenches him backwards, spinning him, pitching him towards the deck. Knuckles smash into his lips, knocking a tooth; blood fills his mouth. Fist jammed against his ribs and an ankle behind his knees, stumbling. Keaton hits the ground on one knee. The tip of Söze’s foot kicks like a sledgehammer in the small of his back, keeling him over.
Elbow bruised against the ground. Keaton crawls a few steps forward. He twists onto his back, the splintered wood of the jetty creaking beneath him.
The man in front of him holds the gun with both hands.
Dean only shakes his head. Even when he closes his eyes, his mind’s eye runs over Verbal’s limp, his left leg, the crooked fingers of his left hand. They all knew. Oh, they knew. Maybe not consciously, maybe not at first. But they have all known for a long time. There’s only so far of an edge you can cross. There’s only so close you can come—in those spaces of half-cackling silence on the other end of an intercom, in a mug of coffee by his chair in the mornings, in late-evening poker games with his mouth on the same vodka bottle or the sight of his plaid-patterned shirts fluttering on a clothing line, in the low morning light cloaking the exchange of a smile—before you know.
(He remembers the nights, the living room’s hushed darkness, the house’s echo, the gentle, impossibly gentle dark—a hand around his shoulder, tightening, grabbing until fingertips dug into his skin, and the shy broken softness of Verbal’s voice crying out his name—a whisper, a moan—and was it his left hand or his right?)
Keaton raises his head.
“You’re lefthanded,” he says. There’s gravel in his voice, choked. Of course he fucking is.
It’s a fine ironic twist to end the story, of course, a good punchline to the joke—lefthanded to match the Devil. Verbal loves a good twist.
Keaton knows. He knew that it will end like this, because perhaps it was always meant to be: two bullets in his collarbone, blood in his mouth, the rush of the sea ebbing in his skull. When the man in front of him goes back into the house, he’ll tell the others a different story—that someone came along, that there was a cop or a passing crook they got into a fight with, that the four of them should be on the move again. He’ll spin it and make it stick. That’s what Verbal is good at, after all. That is the only thing he’s good at. They’ll believe him, or they won’t.
Keaton knows that it will end like this, and that is why he’s here. He wants Verbal to look him in the eye when it happens. He wants Keyser Söze to pull the trigger to his face.
“Go ahead,” he says.
Verbal Kint is looking down at him as if he has no idea who Keaton is.
“Two bullets,” Keaton says.
Verbal says nothing.
“Two bullets. Am I right?” Keaton doesn’t look down. He does not close his eyes. “You shoot twice. An extra one to make sure. That’s how you do your business.”
The single eye of the Glock stares at him like the end of a tunnel, close enough that Keaton can butt it with his forehead if he leans forward. The barrel—held in those bony, thin-sparse fingers and hard-tight knuckles—is quivering. Ever so slightly.
Verbal is shaking.
And the ghost of a smile surfaces on Keaton’s lips, because he remembers—he remembers the fingerprints they left on his skin: little, invisible, bruise-like kisses on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, scattered evidence all over a beautiful crime scene. It is a good thing to think of, perhaps a good thing as any other—a mad, stupid but wrenchingly lovely thing to remember right before he dies.
The others will be up soon. Keaton wonders if they’ll hear the gunshot.
“Can you tell me something?”
Verbal’s hand tightens on the gun.
“Your name,” Keaton says. “That’s all I want to know.”
The waves murmur against rock, seethes against stumps of wood.
“Keyser Söze isn’t real,” Verbal says. His voice is dry, emptier than before—the voice of a programmed recording speaking out of an ATM machine, the voice of a ghost. “He’s not here. And you know it. Keyser’s a myth.” His voice softens. “Keyser is a name the same way Roger Kint is a name.”
Söze is a skin that the man in front of him can slip in and out of, like a Broadway actress shedding an evening dress. Söze is no more than a cloud of rumors. Söze is a beloved collection of stories in a battered, crumbling briefcase that the man who calls himself Verbal Kint clutches close to his chest.
Söze takes a step closer, until the tip of his sneaker nudges Keaton’s knee.
Keaton tilts his chin out and looks at him. His gaze is hard, hard and real—an invisible hand gripping Verbal’s chin, pulling him closer. “So tell me something that is real.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Keaton’s breath catches in his throat, in his teeth. “Tell me something that is real. Anything. Anything except a story.”
A quiet word lands onto the wood in front of him, like a gobbet of spit. “Why?”
“Because it’s the least you owe me, you sick fuck.”
Söze’s foot shoots up and kicks Keaton right beneath his ribs. Pain explodes there like shrapnel. The cry is trapped beneath gritted teeth, hard enough to hurt his jaw—a low, throbbing ball of pain bleeds across his stomach. It’s payback for the first time they met each other, Keaton thinks, and in spite of—because of—the pain, he laughs. It shudders through him, a cough of agony.
Not-Verbal Kint is looking down at him, expressionless.
He drops onto one knee, still holding the gun in both hands. A single, neat thud hums against the wood, marking his knee inches away from Keaton’s hip.
There he is: on the ground, sprawled on his back, struggling to push himself up on one elbow, his breaths coming in ragged gulps as Keyser Söze kneels over him, holding the pistol with the barrel aimed at his nose. Two men on the edge of the quay, silhouetted against the horizon, as time slows. The sky is reflected in Not-Verbal’s dark eyes, orange-tinged clouds swimming in a gray sky, empty as the long stretch of water meeting the earth.
The early-morning breeze blows. It stirs in the dark curls of Keaton’s hair.
“When I was fourteen,” Not-Verbal says—slowly, so slowly, conspiratorial, in the voice of a child onstage at a recital, the voice of a father in the light of the night-lamp for a bedtime story, “I used to pay a visit to my uncle’s. Every other weekend.”
“He used to teach me card tricks. All these funny little gimmicks to show off in the schoolyard. And whenever I came over, he’d always have something new to show off—a new trick, or a new story, or some made-up myth about the old lady who lives down the street. He liked scaring the shit out of people. Me, mainly. As a kid.”
Not-Verbal’s hand rests on top of his own knee, wrapped bone-tight around the Glock’s grip.
“It was all desert-land out there, and there would be these days where he’d go out into town. He walked funny. He had CP as a kid. Not all that bad, but noticeable. There were these kids who used to imitate the way he walked. So did I.” The flicker of a smile, the shadow of a rueful pride—and you bet I was the best.
“He would always say how people felt bad for him when he first moved in, but now they see him on the other end of the sidewalk and they turn and run – because he had a reputation of turning nasty if you pissed him off. The local boogeyman.”
Keaton reaches out—on a brief, breathless whim—and smooths his fingers over Verbal’s knuckles. There are no calluses there, just soft skin and bone. At the end of the day, they are the hands of a conman. The fingers of a fraud, an artist.
“Don’t stop,” he says.
Keaton runs his thumb over the knobs of the conman’s knuckles. Gently, back and forth. There is silence, for a moment, where Verbal Kint looks down at him.
“He used to say that you make your own reputation the same way you make your own bed and sleep in it. He liked stories. I’d go driving with him in that pickup with the backseats full of cherry-flavored sodas and we’d park right above this hill overlooking the desert, and we’d just sit there and I’d do the talking and he’d do the listening. That was nice.” Verbal lets a smile surface, simple, child-like, rumpled and bruised-looking in the light of the morning sky, the color of cherry. Then he does that same plain, one-shouldered little shrug. “That was nice.”
“And then what happened?”
Verbal shakes his head. “Nothing. He was alive. Then he died. I thought you didn’t want a story.”
Keaton closes his eyes.
“Keyser,” he says, in a whisper, and Verbal Kint brings his head down and kisses him, a hard, smashing kiss that tastes of Keaton’s blood in his mouth. Bites down on his lip, a metallic, rusty tang, his mouth bruised all over and achingly sweet—Dean’s breathing snags in his throat, a small sound of pain or surprise. He is shaking, shaking so bad he can’t hold still, and Dean closes his own hand slowly over the other man’s fist, loosening the lock, prying his fingers open.
“Keyser,” he whispers, again, between Verbal’s teeth. Takes the Glock from Verbal’s hand and tosses it, clattering, across the wooden deck.
Verbal doesn’t move. His breathing is uneven. He thinks, for one of the few times in his life, that he is altogether speechless.
Keaton just shakes his head, as if he knows. The sonofabitch is smiling again, just barely. He reaches forward, winces, and rests his forehead against Verbal’s collarbone, the tip of his nose brushing Verbal’s shirt. Keaton’s hair smells like cigarettes and that stupid fucking cologne Edie gets him for Christmas.
Keaton’s hand, warm, heavy, grazes his knee, resting on top of his thigh.
“Dean?”
Looks up.
“Don’t stop.”
*
Hockney is in the kitchen when the two of them appear on the terrace together: half-dazed, bruised, tired, Keaton staggering against the smaller guy’s side, looking like he just crawled out of a ditch but wearing a smile as if he just won the fucking lottery.
“The fuck were you guys up to?” Hockney asks, grunts. It’s a good thing he didn’t actually expect an answer, because he sure doesn’t get one. All he gets is a request to grab an ice-pack from the fridge and hand it over to where Keaton is sprawled across the couch, feet propped up on the coffee table. Keaton asks for a cigarette, and Verbal lights it for him, leaning over in a half-shy stoop, reaching forward as their fingers brush and their eyes meet over a brief, solitary flash of gold. In a sigh of smoke Keaton lays his head back and grimaces, pressing knuckles down on the ice-pack on his chest. Keaton says he’ll be fine, won’t need a doctor, that if anything McManus can give him a check-up when he comes downstairs. Hockney doesn’t ask, because why bother?
He’s living in a house with four crazy-ass motherfuckers.
*
Two months later.
In the dusk, Verbal makes his way down the aisle between two looming silos. Keaton watches his hobbling silhouette disappear from view. Beside him, McManus is polishing his two rifles and loading them with tranquillizer darts to take out the guards when Keaton reaches out and grabs his arm. Factory smoke is pungent in the air. This is going to be a quick job. They need to trust Verbal to get all the way across the dockyard in the complete darkness to give them the signal.
“What?”
Keaton lets go of McManus’s wrist. “Cover him.”
McManus arches an eyebrow.
“Yeah?” Pulls the safety off on the rifle. “He need it?”
Keaton gives him a look. McManus looks back. Sunlight is fading rapidly beyond the edge of the building, securing their rooftop spot from view. He turns away to strap his own pistol to his leg.
“Just keep an eye out on him.”
“You’re a worrisome fuck, Dean. Lighten up.”
On him. Not for him. He thinks that McManus understands. They say nothing outright, and they never will.
“Fuck you. Get ready for position.”
“You too, old man. Run along.”
*
It takes time.
It takes time for all of them to change. The years will pass before they fully learn each other’s rhythms. Hockney’s guarded sarcasm, McManus’s restlessness. Fenster’s gibbering panic that is his defense when he doesn’t want to be understood.
At the end of the day, their sponsor is a man without a name. He is a man who wanted himself a crew that’ll look him in the eye and say, there’s nothing that can’t be done.
Verbal is a little bit different, too. These days, he stops limping so much when he’s with the rest of them. The gait of his wonky shoulder is less prominent. The sun traces the bent curve of his spine, straightening his back little by little as the light disappears.
It takes time.
Perhaps, one day, they’ll get to see him walk.
[March, 1998.]
The crew has a sharpshooter.
At least, that’s how the rumor goes. This sharpshooter had a bird’s eye, a deadly aim: he takes out targets from a spot hidden high above. He never misses. You’d see him before they strike, his footsteps clambering your rooftops like a spider’s, humming a nursery rhyme beneath his ghost-like breath.
Even if you spot him, you’d have a hard time taking him out—because the sharpshooter is protected by his twin, a ground-bound silhouette who shadows his every move from below. They’re two halves of a whole. You couldn’t outsmart their telepathy.
The crew has an explosives man. He allegedly engineered a combination of acetone and hydrogen peroxide that passed inconspicuously through three security checks. Rumor says that you’d see him right before they strike, standing on some street-corner with his hands in his pockets, a cap pulled down over his face.
The crew has a thief. Not just any hardcore hijacker, mind you—a quiet, charismatic thief who could turn your pockets inside out. His countless contacts in the police department lends him an ear to information and allows him to curry favor. He kills indiscriminately, with a body count of three men during his time in prison. Above all, he is a man who’s supposed to be dead. All those who testify against him have met gruesome ends. Same goes for witnesses of the warehouse explosion that killed him. One witness killed himself in his car. The other fell down an open elevator shaft. Like all dead men, his lips are sealed.
Part of this is what drives David Kujan insane. It wasn’t enough that Keyser Söze made himself a living story—he needed to make stories out of the rest of them, too.
A rumor’s not a rumor that doesn’t die.
*
Early spring. It’s still cold in Manhattan, these days. David Kujan takes the last step up to the rooftop in time to see that the foggy sun has just sunk below the horizon. The inky night spreads in the stain of the clouds. The tips of his loafers scratch the concrete. His hands are buried in the pockets of his coat. He rests his elbow against the railing, lightly—as if he isn’t fully sure if he should trust it.
It isn’t like him to abandon the workplace when reports are due. But these days, the sight of an entirely empty office bothers him.
Absently, David rummages through his pockets. A few bills, crumpled receipts. A box of matches. A packet of Marlboros.
Maybe this is what it means to grow old: to realize that some compulsions, some addictions, could last forever; to realize that although a job is a job, it is also a life.
It’s quiet up here. He hears the car honks at rush hour somewhere below, a murmur. He lets the box of Marlboros slide in his hand. Strikes a match. The flick pulses beneath his thumb. He lights the cigarette slowly, savoring every damnable second: his palm cupped around the flame, the promise of ash between his teeth. The spark falls. He crushes the match under his foot.
He pulls a breath of smoke. It burns his throat. It is harsh, cleansing—did he really think he would be able to live without this? A man could lie to anyone, but never to himself. There is no denying the itch that lives in his blood. He wants some peace. He wants this, this dirty, purgative smoke.
There has been account of a five-person artilleries heist in a military base near Bisbee. Earlier his fingertips had hovered over the keyboard, wanting to tell his secretary to book him on a flight to Arizona. But he is so tired.
There are some addictions that you can satiate; others, you can only chase. Someday he will have to make his peace.
David Kujan tilts his head back and breathes a mouthful of smoke into the sky. Not today, but—
Perhaps, one day, he’ll give this up.