Every Man a Menace (11 page)

Semion stared at her while she chewed, trying to picture a smaller version of her
—a little baby sister
—stabbing a gangster in the stomach.
Why do I love you?
he wondered.

She asked him if he’d been to Brazil then, and he told her that he had, that both he and Isaak—instantly, he regretted mentioning Isaak—had gone to Rio last year.

“And you didn’t call me?” she said—truly angry.

“I didn’t know you.”

She laughed again, and her phone buzzed: facedown on the table, it lit up and shook. Someone had texted her. She didn’t check it, didn’t turn it over, didn’t acknowledge it, nothing. Semion watched her ignore it. The significance of this, he thought, could be revisited later.

Their date ended abruptly. When they finally stepped out of the restaurant, Semion, his mind working over the problem of what to do next, could only watch as Vanya turned and—in the strangest moment of the night—lifted her arm, sniffed her underarm, and, after making a face like she’d been confronted by a bad smell, closed her eyes and leaned forward for a kiss. He stared at her, and the street became quiet. Then he kissed her once, softly, on the lips.

“Thank you,” she said. “It was the best dinner I’ve ever had in my life.”

When he offered her a ride home, she refused, pointing vaguely at a few towers to the west. She had to meet someone, she said.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s a girl.” She kissed at the air in front of his face, and then turned and walked away.

Who walks in Miami?
he thought.

On their second date, after dinner at a French restaurant, she suggested they go back to his place and have a drink.

“Oh! Let me take a picture,” she said, when they entered his apartment. She walked around the living room taking photos with her phone. She was looking at his furniture like she was shopping in an expensive store. “I wanna make a house like this,” she said. He was thankful he’d hired a designer, proud of the place’s white elegance, the view of the bay from the windows. He went to the kitchen to open a bottle of Krug Clos du Mesnil.

He popped the cork, poured the champagne, and put the bottle on the counter label side out. Then he returned to the living room, took her hand, and led her to the balcony overlooking the water. They toasted, sipped, and she asked where the bedroom was.

Startled, he pointed toward the hall. She led him that way, sat down on the bed, and then flung herself back. He kissed her; they pulled each other’s clothes off. She wore plain underwear.
This is how I want to die,
he thought.

They had rollicking, brawling, sweaty sex. When they were done, tangled in sheets, her hair a mess, he looked at her and she pretended to pant like a dog. He laughed, and then they lay there while he wondered what he had gotten himself into.

Semion had, of course, slept with many women during his time in Miami. But since he’d left Israel, he hadn’t had a serious relationship with anyone, and now he wondered if maybe this woman, this strange Brazilian shiksa who sniffed her own armpits and walked around Miami at night, this woman with a man’s name, might end up being the girl he married.

She had fallen asleep and lay breathing next to him. She smelled spicy, he decided, like coriander mixed with mango. And then, just like that, in the midst of all this happiness, a gray cloud moved in: he pictured Isaak, saw his face, imagined him kissing her. He tried to push the thought from his mind, but the harder he pushed, the stronger it became. He stared at her for a moment, and then, quietly, he got out of the bed.

In the kitchen, after sipping champagne straight from the bottle, he noticed her bag sitting on the floor.
I’m a drug dealer,
he thought.
I have an obligation to protect myself.
He picked up the bag and brought it over to the marble counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room.
A man can’t be too careful,
he thought.

It wasn’t the little clutch she’d carried that first night; this was bigger, an expensive-looking black leather handbag. He wondered who had bought it for her. He sprung the latch and spread the bag open.

There was a clean pair of plain black underwear on top—the kind someone might wear to the gym. Next, a pair of socks, white and worn. He set them to the side and found her phone, a gold iPhone. He pressed the button on the top and the screen came to life, no passcode needed. He thumbed the photo icon first.

There were only three pictures: they showed his living room and bedroom. He didn’t know she’d taken a picture of his bedroom; it gave him an odd feeling. He checked her call history next, and saw that it had been cleared. He moved to her contacts: hundreds of names and numbers,
some just first names, some first and last, but nothing that jumped out. He didn’t recognize anyone.

Finally, he checked her text messages. There were none. Zero. Maybe it was a new phone, he thought. But he could see paint missing from the corners, scratches on the back, a few scratches on the screen. He angled it under the light and saw that it was covered in oily smudges. An uneasy feeling spread through his chest.

She’d wiped her phone for some reason. Maybe she was recently divorced, or going through a breakup. Maybe she was married. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

He went back to the bag. There were other womanly things: tampons, hair bands, makeup, some kind of face powder, eyeliner, red lipstick, lip balm, tropical-flavored gum. He found a condom, one lone gold-foiled Magnum. He pulled out her wallet, fingered every pocket. She had $387 in cash, a lot of money for a young lady. He found a California driver’s license, and spent a moment looking at the large photo of her smiling face. Between it and the smaller ghost image on the right was her date of birth: 2/21/88. And, of course, her name: Candy Hall-Garcia. His breath caught.

What game was she playing? He looked back at the face on the license: it was her. The memory of her spelling her name for him on that first night played through his mind:
V-A-N-Y-A.
The license listed an address in San Francisco, on Oak Street. He found his phone, snapped a picture of the ID, and slipped it back into her wallet. She had one other card in there—a credit card, also bearing the name Candy. Nothing else.

He put everything back into the bag, set it on the floor, and walked to the window.
Candy Hall-Garcia.
He thought back to the dinner they’d had that evening. “I love Miami,” she’d said. “It feels just like home, you know? Sun, beach, music, Brazilians—but not dangerous like home. No kids in the street, no gunfights—well, yes, gunfights, but not like Brazil,
ba-ba-ba-ba.
” She’d pantomimed firing a machine gun. He’d listened to her, smiling at the way she spoke with her hands, the way she shook her head while she talked, smiling at her accent.

“But here,” she’d said, “in Miami, the only problem is everyone is fake. Nobody is who they say they are.”

When he got back into bed, she scooted over to him. She didn’t open her eyes, but she spoke.

“I had a crazy dream,” she said. “I was at the airport and I’m taking all this stuff out of my suitcase, and there were all these lights and people everywhere. Like a stadium.”

Semion stared at her face, trying to discern if she knew what he’d just done.
Taking stuff out of my suitcase.
She stopped talking. She had fallen back asleep already.

In the morning, when he woke, she was gone. There was a note on the counter:
Bye-Bye baby.

Later, Semion went down to Isaak’s apartment. He pressed the buzzer on the door and waited. Isaak, wide awake and not hungover at all, opened the door, smiled brightly, and waved Semion in.

“Where were you last night?” he asked. They tended to speak Hebrew when they were alone together.

“I need you to answer a question,” Semion said, walking into the living room. It had the exact same layout as his own, and had been decorated by the same American woman; it made Semion feel like they were living in a luxury hotel. “Did you fuck her?”

“Who? The Brazilian?” asked Isaak. “Stupid, I told you: I’m not going to do this every time you meet someone. Look at you. You’re acting crazy. No, no, no.” He shook his head. Semion studied his friend’s face. If he was lying, he wasn’t showing it.

“
I never have known this woman
,” Isaak said, switching to English. “Look at me—never. Never kissed her. I met her one time at the club, two nights before you did.”

“I like this one,” said Semion, wiping his hands together and flopping down onto Isaak’s leather sofa. “I like her big-time.”

“She’s poor, you know?” said Isaak.

“What?”

“I can tell. I can tell when women grew up poor. I get a vibe from them. It’s fine if you’re into it. I like my girls to be rich. Better educated.”

As soon as he was back upstairs Semion called their American lawyer friend, Jimmy Congo. The man was a criminal defense attorney. He had access to private investigators and was always willing to give out favors in return for a little VIP treatment at the clubs.

“Wait—wait a second,” Jimmy Congo said. “You’re saying you looked at her driver’s license and she had a different name?”

“Yep.”

“So what? This is Miami, she’s probably a fucking illegal alien! You of all people should show a little sympathy on that issue.”

Semion had already thought of that. “Can you look into it?” he said.

“It’s dangerous to start looking into things—you know that, right? It’s like an old house,” Jimmy Congo said. “You never know what comes up when you start moving shit around.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“Give me her name.”

“Supposedly, Vanya Rodriguez. That’s what she told me. The name on the license was Candy Hall-Garcia. There’s a hyphen—you know, Hall-Garcia.”

“And the DOB on the card?”

“February twenty-first, nineteen eighty-eight.”

“Got it. What else?”

“That’s it.”

“Jesus, Gurevich, you know I charge four hundred an hour, right? You ever heard of Google?”

That night, Semion went to a bar owned by a friend of theirs. Isaak was there already, with two Russian girls. The Russians wore skirts and sleeveless shirts and dark red lipstick. They were absorbed in their iPhones when Semion joined them at the table and kissed each girl on the cheek. After having his first drink—vodka on the rocks—he proceeded via text message to get into his very first fight with Vanya.

She had texted him just after he arrived, asking what he was doing.
With Isaak,
he responded. She said she could meet him. He replied, using an American expression:
Boys’ night.
She sent an emoji of a crying face. He smiled and thought the conversation was over. His phone remained silent for a few minutes, and then a flurry of texts came in:
I meet u later.
Then:
Boys’ night how?
Then:
Misericordia.
Then:
Isaak and 2 sluts.

The last message landed on target; he turned in his seat and looked at every person in the bar. It was a small place, and there were only about twenty people in it, counting the staff. The owner, a man named Carlos, was behind the bar making cocktails for a trio of soft-shouldered women. Semion looked toward the window facing the street. Had she passed by and seen them sitting there? It didn’t seem likely. He looked at the two women seated across from him. Isaak was showing them some photos on his own phone, making them laugh. How had she known? Or had she guessed? Of course she’d assume that he and Isaak (two men) would be accompanied by two women (two sluts).

Semion excused himself from the table. In the bathroom he received another message:
If you busy with sluts I find my own fun.

He put the phone in his pocket, washed his hands at the sink, fixed his hair in the mirror, and felt his paranoia collapse into depression.
Shit,
he thought.
She’s crazy.
His phone buzzed again. He took it out and read the message:
Just kidding, ha ha. I’m playing.

He felt so relieved that his hands shook. He punched in three hearts and sent them to her, watching the emojis pop up on the screen.

When he got back to the table, Isaak, his eyebrow raised—it was the kind of look that says,
I know exactly what you’ve been up to
—lifted his glass in a toast. Semion saw that his drink was empty and motioned to the bartender to come fill everyone up.

Two nights later, back at Ground Zero, he ran into Jimmy Congo. The lawyer—apparently still dressed for work in a black-and-white-striped button-up shirt with white cuffs and a white collar—approached Semion at his table and massaged his shoulders in a way that seemed meant to say:
This is my friend; this is how I can touch him.

“Let’s go to your office,” he said, bending down close to Semion’s ear.

Upstairs, Jimmy produced a brown glass vial, patted a small pile of cocaine on Isaak’s desk, chopped out two fat lines, rolled up a hundred-dollar bill, and offered it to Semion. After they’d both sniffed a line, Jimmy wiped his nose and assumed the posture of an attorney in front of a jury—fingertips steepled in front of his chest, head cocked just so.

“I’ll tell you, my guy—and my guy is good, ex-cop, the whole thing—he looked into your girl, and she came back clean,” he said. “Candy Hall-Garcia, February twenty-first, nineteen eighty-eight, lives in San Francisco, just like the card says.”

“San Francisco?” Vanya had never mentioned California. The card must be fake, Semion thought.
In Miami, the only problem is everyone is fake.
“And what about Vanya Rodriguez?”

“He said no obvious matches. Nobody her age with that name in Miami or San Fran. Blank walls, baby. Not much for Candy online, either. No Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blah, blah, blah. There was one, I repeat,
one
news article from seven, eight years ago—Walnut Creek, California—regarding a high school track meet. Take my advice: a girl like that, no online nothing …” He shook his head.

“What?” asked Semion.