Devils in Exile (6 page)

“Is this a program you think you could get with?”

“Probably, yeah,” said Maven. “I should.”

Royce uncrossed his legs and sat forward, again glancing at the revolving doors. “You’re earnest, Maven. A rare quality these days.” Three guys in business wear walked past towing golf bags and carry-ons. “Those guys are about your age, right? Doing all right for themselves, looking to get eighteen holes in before dinner. See, me, I rotated out in the midnineties. Boom time. The Internet boom, the dot-com boom. Boom, boom,
boom
. In the NASDAQ nineties, there was money everywhere. I mean, I struggled at first, sure. But there were opportunities. But now you come back, you rotate out of this bitch-mother of a war, and they drop a recession over your head like a black hood. Now everyone’s ahead of you. Everybody your age either has a college degree or else years invested in the job market. They have employment equity, because they’ve been enjoying the fruits of
your
labor, working here in this nice safe bubble of Fortress America. Now you come back, and it’s like, ‘Thanks, kid. Let me shake your hand. Damn proud of ya. Now take a place at the back of the line.’”

Maven watched the golfers with a mixture of anger and envy.

Royce said, “Why, after all you’ve done, would you ever want to wait in a line?”

Maven looked back. He wanted to hear more. But Royce’s eyes were trained on the hotel entrance now, and not looking away.

Maven turned and looked in the same direction as Royce.

The man in the sage green jacket entered the lobby, grip in hand.

Maven instinctually turned away. Royce produced a slim mobile phone, one-touch dialed it, and brought it to his ear. “Ready-up,” he said, then closed the phone again.

The man in the sage green jacket walked to the elevators behind
the registration desk. Royce stood, and Maven rose and followed him around the opposite corner, past restroom doors, into the stairwell.

Royce said, “Let’s see how your wind is, soldier.”

They ran up each floor, half-flight by half-flight, Maven sucking air after eight, feeling pain after twenty, going totally out of breath at the top. He stood doubled over before a fire door numbered 29, Royce blowing air too, but upright and smiling.

A small window looked into the carpeted hallway. Maven straightened behind Royce, watching as the man in the sage green jacket turned the far corner, reading room numbers as he went.

“What … the … hell?” whispered Maven, between breaths.

Royce shushed him. “What do you think about the jacket?”

Maven swallowed. “The jacket?”

“A Zegna. Cashmere, retails about two grand. The briefcase?”

“Yeah?”

“A thirteen-hundred-dollar Mulberry. Now, what’s that tell you?”

“The guy overpaid.”

“You say that because you’ve never touched anything of real quality.” Royce said this without insult, a simple declaration. “What you should realize is that the stuff he’s used to carrying inside that case must be worth considerably more than the case itself.”

The guy slowed before a room halfway down the hall. Both Royce and Maven ducked away from the window, in case the guy looked left and right before going inside.

Maven said, “What does this matter to you?”

He heard faint knocking. Maven edged back to the window just in time to see the door open and the guy step inside.

Royce pulled open their door and went silently down the carpeted hallway. At first, Maven thought they were moving to the same door, only to stop behind Royce at the one before it.

A
DO NOT DISTURB
card hung on the handle. Maven heard a television playing inside.

Royce produced a key card from his jacket pocket, fed it into the slot, and when the light turned green, he eased the door open with barely a click, moving inside.

Maven lingered where he was. Another moment of hesitation. He felt strangely exposed, standing alone in the hallway. The door was closing and he stopped it with his fingertips just as the lock was about to catch.

He entered and shut it quietly behind him. Past a closet and large bathroom on his right, the room opened into a wide suite. Two men, both of them close to Maven’s age, stood between a writing table and the loud boxing match on television. A laptop was on the table, and one of the men, a blue-eyed Latino, watched the screen intently, listening through headphones, not even looking up at Maven. The other one, a spike-haired, blond, all-American type, wore a gun in a shoulder holster, and didn’t take his eyes off Maven until Royce gave him a nod.

A third man, closer in age to Royce, his skin dark brown, reclined on the high, made bed with his fingers laced behind his head. The television remote was nestled in his crotch, a handgun on the comforter at his side. The guy sized up Maven without expression before returning to the roaring of the Ali-Holmes fight being rebroadcast on ESPN Classic.

The room smelled of coffee and last night’s Chinese food. The curtains opened on west-facing windows, looking out over Fenway Park and the city limits to neighboring Brookline beyond.

A thin, firm cable ran from an intermediate box plugged into a USB port on the laptop, leading under the locked door between the adjoining rooms. Royce plucked one of the earphones off the Latino’s head and joined him, listening.

Maven saw a video playing full-screen, good quality from a low, Dutch angle, as though from a camera dropped on the floor. The side of a bed, the top of a closet, the ceiling.

The Latino tapped the keyboard arrows, and the cable under the door quivered the slightest bit, the camera view twitch-panning incrementally.

On-screen, the man in the sage green jacket walked into view.

The cable under the door was a scope camera snooping into the adjoining room.

The Latino guy looked at Maven for the first time. “This the new man?” he said softly.

Royce, watching the laptop feed, nodded.

Maven opened his mouth to speak, but Royce silenced him with an open hand. On the screen, two other men appeared, just heads and shoulders, but Maven could see that they were heavyset, both wearing New England Patriots team jerseys. They looked like brothers. The man in the sage green jacket opened the straps of his briefcase on the bed and handed them a paper packet. The brothers opened the packet and emptied the powdery contents into a hotel drinking glass. One brother then produced a vial from a small, zippered pouch and squirted it into the glass, swishing the solution around until it turned blue.

There was more conversation then, and Maven lost focus, what with the TV fight blaring, armed men in the room with him, and the edge of the city spread out twenty-nine stories below.

The Latino guy looked over at Royce and nodded. “Same Bat-time,” he said quietly. “Same Bat-channel.”

Royce pulled down his ear wire and said, “Pack up, check out, then reregister under a different credit card. A regular room, a few floors down.”

He started toward the door, making his exit without any formalities. Maven started after him, glancing back at the man on the bed, whose fingers were still laced behind his head, watching Maven go.

Royce turned right out of the room, walking boldly past the door to the adjoining room and continuing to the corner. He pushed the button to summon the elevator, and they waited in silence until the doors opened. Inside, Royce pressed the starred button for the lobby, and the doors closed. The car started to descend.

At about the twelfth floor, Maven said, “You’re a cop.”

Royce smiled, checking the fit of his jacket in the mirrored wall, brushing some lint off his lapel. He said, “That’s strike two.”

They walked through the lobby and the revolving doors to the circular driveway outside. Royce passed the ticket to the same valet as before, who jogged off.

Maven stood next to Royce, near an ash can, trying to figure out which question to ask first.

Royce said, “Why did you rotate out, Maven?”

Maven’s mind felt wobbly, like a table with one short leg, which Royce kept leaning on with his elbow. “Because my contract was up.”

“You could have stayed. They offered a bonus to retain you. Sure, it sucked over there, but for someone with your level of training, it took a lot to walk away. What was the real reason?”

Maven shook his head. He was waiting for Royce to tell him.

Royce said, “Maybe you were worried you weren’t cut out for anything else.”

Maven stared at Royce, in the way you watch a magician up close to see that his talent really is sleight of hand and not some mystical power.

Royce said, “Maybe you were afraid that was all you were. A soldier. A killer. So you opted out. You wanted to see what life was like back home. To see if it’s for you. The job, the car, the house, the wife, the kids.”

Maven said, “What was that up there?”

Royce ignored him, taking out the room card and jamming it into the ash can. “Every fear reveals a wish. You know what that means? The reason you fear something is because part of you secretly desires it. Or desires what it could get you. Or what it might turn you into.”

“I don’t desire to reenlist.”

Royce smiled to let Maven know that he was missing the point. “You come back home looking to find your way in this world, to stake your claim. That’s what warriors have done for centuries. But you can’t figure out how to take these military skills you have and
use them to get ahead. You can’t find a way back into the peacetime world.”

Maven stared at him. “Those guys up there, in your room.”

“Associates of mine. All ex-military, like yourself.”

“And the guy in the two-thousand-dollar jacket? The one we saw at lunch?”

“An importer, wouldn’t you say?”

“A drug dealer. We just watched them do a deal.”

“The prelude to a deal, a meet and greet. A taste test. The Venezuelan with the Mulberry briefcase, he is a courier, but at the highest level. This is no mules-shitting-balloons operation. The two mooks in the Patriots shirts, they are the Maracone brothers out of East Saugus. Someone’s fronting them the financing to take a giant step forward in the local powder trade. The substance they were testing in there is pure, uncut, top-quality cocaine, no more than one week removed from processing plants in the eastern jungles of Colombia. Tomorrow, cash and drugs will change hands. The Maracones will transport their purchase to a safe house on the North Shore, where they will lock themselves inside a strong room, and after setting aside an ounce or two of pure for themselves, will use pastry scrapers to chop up the caked kilos on a large, glass worktable. They will then sweeten the product—most likely with mannitol, a baby laxative with anticaking properties—increasing their volume, in turn increasing their profit, growing two kilograms into three. Using electronic jewelry scales, they will repackage the new weight into half-kilo bricks for distribution by their lieutenants, who will further trample on the product, now with pure lactose or actual flour or ground plaster or whatever the fuck else they can get their hands on that’s white and granular. Much of it will be cut with baking soda, that mixture then heated to remove moisture, forming into small, crystal-like rocks known as crack. The end product will be out on the streets by noon Friday.” Royce unfolded his sunglasses and slid them on. “What do you think about that?”

“I think it sucks.”

Royce put a finger in Maven’s chest, as though injecting this idea straight into his heart. “What if somebody were to step in unexpectedly, say tomorrow, at this hotel, at this same time—and interrupt this transaction? Stop the flow of drugs into the community.”

Maven was starting to get it now. Royce radiated confidence like heat. Maven felt electricity in his own hands.

“I’m on a crusade here, Maven. There’s a war on in this town, only you can’t see it. Turf battles everywhere, victims dying slow-motion deaths every day. There’s blood in the streets—but you can’t fucking see it, and you know why? Because junkie blood is too thin to stick to the pavement. It hoses off too easily, washing right down into the gutter.”

Maven was nodding, even feeling that same old precombat testicular tingle.

“This is what you were trained for. Sneak-and-peeks. Hit squads and house raids. You
know
the drill. Now, what if you could do some good in this world—some real good, for a change—and at the same time profit handsomely from it? I mean, how often does a clear moral imperative come complete with a get-rich-quick scheme? The fucking win-win situation of all time. You feeling me now, Maven?”

Royce’s conviction was an intoxicant. “I think so,” Maven answered, feeling the edge of his bitten tongue against his teeth.

“‘Think so,’ nothing. You’re feeling me. I see it in your eyes.” The valet reappeared, Royce’s car pulled curbside. Royce tipped the kid and sent him on his way. As Royce climbed into the driver’s seat, he said to Maven, “I’m your ticket out of that parking lot and into one of these cars.”

W
HERE YOU AT TONIGHT
?”
ASKED
R
ICKY, CHEWING
S
OUR
P
ATCH
Kids.

“Huh?” said Maven, zoning out on a stool before the wall of cigarettes behind the counter, ruminatively working his deformed tongue against his gums. “Nowhere. Tired maybe.”

“Two a.m.” Ricky flipped on the small television between the cash register and the pump monitors, tuning in a re-airing of that afternoon’s
The Tyra Banks Show.
“Time for my girl.”

When Ricky was still stateside in Kentucky during the ramp-up to Iraq, Tyra Banks visited Fort Campbell as part of a post–9/11 USO thing. Ricky lucked out, drawing the assignment to escort her vehicle back to the airport. Before they left the base, Ricky was sneaking a Snapple out of the hospitality tent when Tyra and her entourage breezed past him, as close to him as Maven was now.

“And it wasn’t even her body, you know, which is, by the way, ka-
pow
! No, it was her skin. No lie. She has this perfect, like, creamy cocoa complexion that you’ve never even seen in your life.
And her hair—she had on a patrol cap with her name on the back,
BANKS
—her hair had a life all its own, like a fifth limb. And the way she moved … I mean,
lust
just demeans it. It was true love. I seriously understand now why kings and shit launched entire wars over just one woman—risked their countries, their fortunes, gave away everything they had. I understand chivalry now, dude. She is Tyra of Troy. Just look at her.”