The Three Fates of Henrik Nordmark: A Novel (14 page)

twenty

Abraham Arnold parted his blinds and gazed outside. The fire trucks and ambulances, police cars and lookie-loos assembled around the retirement home gates had mostly dispersed. But the news vans and reporters remained. It was almost
6
p.m., the day after the terrible explosion at the retirement home. Abraham brought his hand to his forehead. He’d done everything in his power last night to keep this quiet. A lockdown was declared. The central phone line was disconnected and orderlies were instructed to intimidate any senior who even looked like they might have loose lips. Abraham had almost succeeded. Had it not been for two tech-savvy grandmas in the south wing texting their family on cell phones, this might all have been swept under the rug. Now Abraham stood in his office picturing the content of tonight’s evening news. The explosion and the partially decapitated grandmother were bound to be the lead story. Abraham knew reporters, he knew how their minds worked. Despite his quick-witted insistence that Roland’s grandmother had been suicidal for months — suicidal and senile, a piteous combination . . . heart-wrenching really — Abraham knew the reporters would turn this into something salacious. They would have a field day with the headlines.

Catastrophe at Shady Oaks Park!

Love, Betrayal and Death in Retirement Village!

Crooked Director Responsible for Sweet Old Lady’s Death!

Abraham turned around and picked up a ruler. He slapped it hard on the desk and stared at the three prime suspects sitting in a row in cold plastic chairs. Billy Bones was on the left, Alfred on the right and dead in the center was Abraham’s nemesis, Conrad, staring into space with those glassy blind eyes. That old English bastard! He had to be responsible for this. He just had to. Abraham felt his blood pressure rise. His chest tightened up. It had been tight for months, ever since his wife started gallivanting about town. And now he had another controversy on his hands, as if his home life wasn’t in enough disarray, as if his professional career wasn’t already on life support. How he longed for his days at the esteemed Cottage Estates, where the residents were well-bred, where they came from family money, where these three retired gangsters wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting in. If only Abraham had been more discreet in his money laundering, if only he hadn’t been so greedy, he would never have had to slum it in a place like this.

Abraham rounded his desk and shot daggers with his eyes at the three old geezers.

Conrad stared back at him, or rather Conrad stared two feet to the left where he assumed Abraham was standing. “My dear chap,” he said. “You seem agitated.”

Abraham tossed his ruler across the room. It hit the wall with a resonant slap.

“You’re damn right I’m agitated. I know you’re responsible for this.”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about,” Conrad said. His tone turned to one of feigned concern. “You know, you should try to relax a little. If you don’t, you’re going to give yourself a nosebleed. Take a walk in the park. Smell the flowers. Eat a nectarine.”

Abraham leaned in until they were nose to nose. His nostrils flared. “There’s a reason I didn’t turn you in to the police. I’m going to prove you did this myself and when I do, I’ll be the hero. My name will be cleared and you’ll rot in prison, for all three months you have left to live.”

As he spoke, a slight burst of saliva shot out of Abraham’s mouth and sprayed in a mist over Conrad. Instantly the bemused smirk vanished from the elderly assassin’s face.

“Step back,” he said.

Abraham didn’t move.

“Step. Back,” he said again, slowly this time. His fake English accent shifted from East Cockney to West Anglia and landed square on something resembling a Welsh dialect.

Abraham saw the intensity behind Conrad’s blind eyes, the rigidity in his jaw. Suddenly he realized just who he was talking to. He backed away and turned to Conrad’s right. Alfred looked as guilty as a cat with a feather sticking out of its mouth. The only resident who even came close to matching Abraham’s lofty height, Alfred’s eyes avoided contact, his skin glistened with the first showings of perspiration and he and his three-piece suit seemed terribly uncomfortable in that plastic chair. If Conrad weren’t sitting right there, Abraham would have launched into a stern interrogation, he would have cornered Alfred alone and interrogated him until sunrise. Only, how do you extract information from a man who can’t speak?

He stepped over to Billy Bones. Bones, with his doddering laughter, his bemused expression and his general confusion — he was Abraham’s best chance. Abraham leaned in close. His tone softened.

“Billy, you don’t need to be afraid of Conrad. You can tell me what happened, tell me why you did it. You don’t need to be afraid. I promise I’ll look after you.”

Bones, who had no idea why he and his classmates had been summoned to the principal’s office, didn’t hear a single word this tall man said. He took a good long look at Abraham’s round skull and said, “You sure got a strange head on you.”

Abraham stepped back, defeated.

“You say that every time I see you.”

Billy smiled and nodded.

Abraham addressed all three. “I’m going to find out who did this. I’m going to have the orderlies search your rooms, I’m going to have them search Alfred’s car.”

“It looks like a Christmas ornament, or a dreidel,” Billy Bones said.

“You’re going to slip up soon and when you do, I’ll be waiting. You have to sleep sometime.”

“Idle threats,” Conrad said.

Billy sat straight upright. “My cousin gave me a menorah when I was twelve. But I told him — I’m not Jewish. It’s your dad who converted.”

“I will have my day of reckoning,” Abraham said.

“All fire and brimstone is what that’ll bring you . . .”

“Billy!” Conrad stood up. He extended his cane and walked toward the door. Alfred and Billy Bones followed.

As they reached the doorway, Abraham couldn’t help but have the last word. “It’s only a matter of time before I prove it was you.”

Conrad ground his dentures. He was beginning to lose his patience with this man. A half century ago, when the impetuousness of youth still lingered in his veins, a gangly halfwit like Abraham would never have escaped a confrontation like this alive. But Conrad had a mission to complete and damned if anyone or anything was going to get in his way. He threw his cape over his shoulder and the three elderly assassins exited the director’s office. They walked a safe distance down the hall before he stopped his associates. Conrad curled his gloved hand into a fist.

“This ends tonight,” he said.

twenty-one

At
8:53
p.m. that evening, Henrik arrived at the address on the card to discover what turned out to be a restaurant. He entered the restaurant and was greeted at the door by a
25
Dates employee. This woman wasn’t the same one Henrik met on the street, but she was just as beautiful and equally as bubbly. He paid his forty dollars and headed inside. Henrik was stunned by what he saw. There were twenty-five women sitting in the far corner. His eyes drifted to the other side of the room where a near equal number of men had congregated. Henrik felt cheated. He wasn’t going to be unique at all! This was some sort of bizarre sex party of which he wanted no part. It was one thing to have sex with twenty-five different women, but it was an entirely different thing to participate in a gross, sweaty orgy. Henrik wanted his forty dollars back.

He looked around for the woman who took his money but she was nowhere to be found. Furious, he sat down in the corner with the other men and waited for her to appear so that he could demand his money back and declare her an even more vile pervert than that old man in the retirement home bathroom.

In the seat beside him, someone was crying. Henrik looked over and was astonished to see that same young man who’d been thrown out of his office building and later came into the hospital with the elderly patient who’d been blown to smithereens. The other men had purposely sat far away from him because he was bawling out loud, occasionally slamming his fist on the table and generally making an uncomfortable scene. Henrik tapped the young man on the shoulder.“Why are you crying?”

Roland looked at him with distraught eyes.

“I lost my job,” he said. “I lost my girlfriend and I lost all my friends. Then my grandmother spontaneously combusted.”

“Spontaneous combustion? Is that even possible?”

“Apparently.”

“Why did you lose your job?” Henrik said.

“Because I’m an idiot.”

“And why did you lose your girlfriend?”

Roland brought his hands up and rubbed his eyes. “Because I’m shallow.”

“Have you tried getting her back?” Henrik said. “I hear that sometimes when men lose girlfriends, there’s a technique for getting them back.”

“It’s called groveling.”

“Yes, that’s it. Have you tried groveling?”

“No, not yet.”

“Do you think it works?”

“Maybe,” Roland said. “I don’t know. Who cares?”

Henrik was confused. “Why would you come to this orgy if you were having such a bad day?”

“I came because I already lost four million dollars today. I couldn’t stand to lose the forty bucks I paid for this as well.”

“So then it’s as I feared,” Henrik said. “The money is nonrefundable.”

“I don’t even know how I’m going to talk to these girls,” Roland said.

“You have to talk to them first?”

“Yes, you talk to them for three minutes and then you decide if you want to go on a date with them.”

Henrik couldn’t believe his bad luck that in his first attempt at finding love, he’d inadvertently paid to attend an orgy that involved a great deal of talking. He glanced across the restaurant. “But I can’t talk to these women,” he said. “I’m simply not prepared.”

“Try to get as many phone numbers as you can,” Roland said.

In the corner, a bell rang. The
25
Dates employee reappeared and led the participants in a group cheer. As the cheers faded, the
25
Dates employee read a list of rules for the event. She ran around the room and placed numbers on everyone’s shirt and before Henrik knew it, the speed dating session had begun.

Conversations got underway immediately. Tension akin to that of a high school dance hovered in the air. It filled each dater’s posture, channeled through their bodies and burst unrestrained from the pauses between words. The walls teemed with electricity.

Henrik sat down at his assigned table across from a woman with incredibly large shoulder muscles who proceeded to tell him a slightly funny, slightly frightening story about the time she put a man in a headlock for grabbing her ass in a bar. Henrik waited to speak and when she was finally done, he told her that he would never grab her ass in so much as a cocktail lounge without her express verbal permission. He felt quite pleased with his response. Not only was it accommodating and polite, but from his perspective it bordered on modern-day chivalry. The woman, however, didn’t seem impressed. She sneered and launched straight into a second story about a man who rightfully deserved to be placed in a headlock but through sheer luck and social circumstance would likely never receive the uncomfortable roughhousing he had coming.

Henrik had just started to clue in to the fact that she was talking about him when the bell rang. He moved to the adjacent table to start the next date. This woman didn’t seem at all impressed when he sat down. Henrik shook her hand and, remembering Roland’s advice, promptly asked her for her phone number.

“Aren’t you a little too old to be here?” she said.

Normally Henrik would have been so demoralized by that question he would’ve placed his tail between his legs and run home to eat an entire container of Oreo ice cream. But two tables away was the most beautiful woman Henrik had ever seen in real life. She had wide, round eyes and lips shaped like a tiny red heart. He couldn’t wait to talk to her and not even this woman’s rampant ageism could dampen his spirits.

Eight and a half minutes later, Henrik finally sat down at the table with the beautiful woman. He forgot all about the matchmaker’s rigid rating system and did his best to seduce this incredible creature.

It would have gone so much better if she wasn’t completely insane.

“Hi, my name’s Henrik.”

“I’m Jessica,” she said. “But you can call me Evil Jessie.”

“Evil, you say?”

“Yes, I’m evil.”

Henrik immediately became afraid of this woman. No other person in his entire life had ever been brazen or candid enough to divulge their sinister inner workings to him, let alone insist that evil be part of her name. A single drop of nervous perspiration formed in his left armpit.

“Question for you,” she said. “Do you rollerblade?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Because only gay guys rollerblade.”

“Isn’t that an offensive stereotype?” Henrik said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not true. Do you see that guy over there?”

Henrik looked over to see Roland with his head down on the table, whimpering and rubbing his eyes as some poor woman tried to get him to discuss his three favorite movies.

“He probably rollerblades,” Evil Jessie said.

This woman made him so nervous that Henrik started to wonder whether or not she was truly insane. The longer Jessie spoke, the more Henrik started to believe that the mentally deranged, at least those defined as legally crazy by a governing medical body, should be required to wear buttons, or at the very least medical alert bracelets engraved with the specifics of their condition, in order to preclude them from speed dating. It took all his power not to suggest this out loud. After the bell clanged, Henrik walked over to the next table. Evil Jessie seemed to have forgotten all about him as he overheard her telling the next guy that she was positive playing water polo will give you a venereal disease.

Henrik sat down across from a lovely Egyptian woman who, in rapid-fire succession, proceeded to tell Henrik about her job, her apartment, her three cats, her broken wrist at age fourteen, her ex-boyfriend Rob who never understood her and her preference for men with sandy blond hair. She then looked at him for all of five seconds and then said, “So, tell me about yourself.”

Up until this point, Henrik had been able to slip through these brief three-minute dates without having to recite anything akin to a monologue. He was now expected to drone on for, at minimum, ninety seconds on subjects that interested him. Moreover, he was probably expected to interject a subtle subtext along the way, extolling his own exceptional qualities in the hope he was memorable enough that this woman might look past their obvious discrepancy in looks and decide to allow him, out of all these men, to bed her.

Henrik wanted to run away and hide. He opened his mouth to speak but only dry air came out. Henrik began to feel faint. Just as he was about to be overcome, the clock proved merciful. The bell clanged and Henrik moved on without saying a word.

He barely had time to compose himself before the next three-minute date started. Henrik sat down across from a mildly unattractive woman wearing a revealing top that prominently displayed her breasts. Henrik suspected that if he looked close, he could see a hint of nipple protruding from her low-cut V neck. For fear of getting caught, he refrained from even a cursory glance.

“My name’s Penelope and I’m a Buddhist,” she said. “But I live my life through the principles of Scientology.”

Henrik glanced around to see if there wasn’t some master clock counting down the seconds until this date was over. “Isn’t Scientology a religion?” he said. “Aren’t Scientologists and Buddhists separate things?”

“Actually, that’s a common misconception. Scientologists can belong to other religions as well. Have you read
Dianetics
?”

“No, not recently.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“Lately I’ve been learning a lot about Nanak,” Henrik said.

“Nanak? Isn’t he the founder of Sikhism?”

“I believe so.”

“But you’re white.”

Henrik looked down at his hands to confirm he was indeed Caucasian.

“Are you saying Buddhists can be Scientologists, but white people can’t be Sikhs?”

“Yes,” she said.

Henrik searched for that clock again.

Penelope leaned back in her chair. Her plentiful cleavage swelled to the rafters. “So are you religious or not?”

Henrik suspected this question might be a trap. The more of these dates he participated in, the more it seemed to him that evil and trickery were the defining characteristics of these sexual deviants. Penelope was still waiting for an answer. The clock wouldn’t ring in time to save him. Henrik had to come up with something. He couldn’t lie; she would see right through him. He also feared that were he to answer incorrectly, Penelope might threaten to put him in a headlock. He chose his words carefully.

“I’m not religious, per se. But I believe I have the potential to be quite pious.”

Penelope churned her jaw and shook her head. She promptly excused herself to go to the washroom. Thirty seconds later, the bell rang and a five-minute break was announced.

After the break, Roland sat down at the next table and immediately placed his head on the surface and began sobbing uncontrollably. He felt a hand on his arm, comforting and warm. Roland looked up with pleading eyes and was met face-to-face with the most startling creature he’d seen in his entire life. Sitting across from him was a beautiful woman with striking cheekbones and captivating eyes. She had a warm smile and, from what Roland could tell, an athletic figure hiding beneath the table.

But above those captivating eyes lurked a ghastly collection of eyebrows. Earlier that day at the old folks’ home, Roland thought he’d seen the epitome of wild, uncontrolled eyebrows. This woman looked like 60
Minutes
’ Andy Rooney. The thick, multicolored strands on either side of her forehead were like log cabins that had collapsed and now lay in piles of rubble. At one point, as the woman described her ideal date — a romantic dinner followed by a moonlit walk along the beach — Roland thought he saw one of her eyebrows move — not just side to side; it slithered serpent-like, as though her eyebrows were snakes that had escaped from Medusa’s head. Roland stopped crying and gave her a look of bizarre curiosity.

“I feel we have a good connection,” the woman said without Roland ever speaking a word.

The bell rang.

“I’m going to check you off as a yes on my little sheet,” she said. “Don’t forget to check me off too.”

Roland would have rather had an electric eel shimmy up his rectum.

“Um, okay,” he said.

By the time Roland started his next date, his tears had pretty much abated. He sat down across from a redhead wearing a Coldplay T-shirt. The redhead had green eyes and her long scarlet hair was braided like Princess Leia’s in
The Empire Strikes Back
— not the giant kaiser-roll buns on either side of her head from the original
Star Wars
, but the wraparound loop Carrie Fisher wore in the sequel.

The bell rang and instead of burying his face in his arm and bawling hysterically, Roland decided to give this speed dating thing a shot. After all, what did he have left to lose?

“Let’s see here,” Roland looked down at the sheet
25
Dates had provided with conversation starters. “My name’s Roland,” he said. “I’m a business analyst, or rather I was a business analyst. I’m currently unemployed.” He glanced at the sheet again. “My favorite movie is
Heat
starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. My least favorite movie is
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
. It’s not that bad a movie I suppose, it’s just that people talk about it like it’s the next
Citizen Kane
and yet every time it comes on
TV
, I’m bored out of my mind.”