Is That All There Is?

 

It was years before they pushed me out.

I was working with Barney on some fucking thing, I can't remember, in some sweaty sardine can of place. I was holding--lifting really--something heavy. I did a lot of that.

Barney was laser-focused on whatever it was he was doing.

You couldn't talk to him when he got like that.

Sweat's running down my back and into my eyes. I can taste the salt. I kept blinking like my mom cried at those Douglas Sirk movies we used to go to whenever I was home on leave.

This was my life now.

Sure I was serving my country, seeing the world and defending everything Superman stood for, but, somehow, it always sounded better when I described it to someone else than it did when I told it to myself.

And they'd made sure there wasn't anybody I could tell it to....

The more I thought about the decisions that lead me to that moment, that precise location, the more I thought about all the other things I had promised myself I was going to do with my life.

I'd always wanted to drive through the Alps in a really nice road car--you know, something that could really handle the corners. I wanted to have a room lined with bookshelves floor to ceiling, a really comfortable chair and a fireplace. I wanted a place to dream, to draw, to create. I wanted to get lost in Scotland, more than once. I wanted to see Australia....

But there I was, a human jackstand.

I started having trouble breathing.

I couldn't catch my breath. It came and went faster than money when I was on leave.

And then it felt like I was breathing into a paper bag. I know that's supposed to calm you down, but it only ever made me panic more.

I could feel the shaking deep in my legs. It wasn't visible right away, but I knew it was coming.

I was going to drop the heavy thing and there wouldn't be anything I could do to stop it.

And the more I tried to control myself, the worse it got. It was one of those "don't think about pink elephants" moments. Don't think about the panic attack. CALM THE FUCK DOWN.

I tried to get Barney's attention.

By now I couldn't speak. My mouth was pasty-dry.

I nudged him with my foot.

He swatted in my direction like I was some sort of house fly.

I'd worked very hard so that he would never see me like this, and now it was coming and there was noting I could do about it.

I could feel my pulse throb on the side of my face, down my neck, and in my legs.

My palms were sweating.

Up until that moment, I had usually been able to get through by making promises to myself, things I would do, actions I could take to change my circumstances, get promoted.

I think they call it "hope."

The calendar kept turning, the threats kept coming, and I kept lifting, sweating, and handing Barney a wrench whenever he'd ask for one.

Promises, no matter how hollow, would not work this time....

My equilibrium was shifting.

I wasn't moving--aside from the throbbing--and yet I felt like I was going to lose my balance.

I tried once again to get Barney's attention, but he wasn't having any of it.

All the bad thoughts in my head, suddenly, like a group of lemmings, rushed to one side of my brain.

Just before I fainted, I managed to kick Barney clear.

After that, things were different.

After that, the cake mix was in the bowl and the eggs were cracked.

 

 

Blood and Soap

The soap suds and the blood met and swirled awkwardly around each other like teens at a high school dance before slipping into the darkness of the drain.  

And, like a high school dance, there were elements that blended and that would not.  Like the clean-up committee, they stayed on the sidelines waiting for the crowd to thin out and the water to stop before they could leave.

Soap washing off mixing with blood dripping out.

I was having an out-of-body experience.  Watching the blood and soap dance and mix, not dance and keep to its own, was hypnotic.

It didn't hurt.

At least I don't think it did.

It could have been the whiskey, it could have been the cocktail of prescription meds I scooped up from the cabinet over the vanity starting to kick in.

It didn't hurt.

In fact, it wasn't until I got in the shower, that I found out I was bleeding.

I shouldn't have been surprised.

They'd started with the drugs--everybody wants clean hands.

I don't know if they were afraid to put their hands on me because of my age, or they just had a thing for needles, but when they finally got ready to work on me, they decided to go straight to the point.

I don't know what they gave me, but I could feel the surge of warmth pour through my body like when they give you a hot towel at the barber, or a warm blanket at the hospital.

That very pleasant feeling was followed almost immediately by the overwhelming urge to pee.

This was their opening strategy, they were going to force me to talk so I could avoid the embarrassment of pissing my pants.

I smiled.  I actually smiled at that point and I know it made them mad.
 
They were trying to be all serious and scary and they were counting on embarrassment.

Comes a point, you live long enough, that stops being a thing:  embarrassment loses its hold over you.

It's different for everyone, but you know you've reached that point when you spend a little too much time talking to people young enough to be your grandchild and the hair restoration ads stop being funny.

I was an early victim of embarrassment and it took over my life for a long time.  I was embarrassed by everything.  And not that awkward embarrassment that comes from being a teenager; I was consumed by the thought that everyone--whether they knew me or not--was consumed by thinking about and judging me.  It wasn't until I could walk into that gym and be in command of my own body, not until I knew for certain that it would do what I was asking that I could begin to raise my head and look people in the eye.

Looking people in the eye was a big thing in my house.

My dad said it was a privilege and not a right.  You look a man in the eye when you are his equal and not before.  You look a man in the eye when you take his life.  It's transactional, an exchange:  you trade your amateur status for a seat at the big table.

I understand that now, but only because I wasted a lot of time waiting for an invitation.  I kept expecting that I would be deemed worthy.  All I had to do was collect enough merit badges and I would graduate to the big table.  I had buckets of merit and there was never a sear for me:  you circle the chairs listening to the music, but when it stops there is never an open seat.

That's what it felt like to be me.

And that was the me that these "professionals" thought they had strapped to that chair:  the guy who would roll up his dog rather than piss himself.

I love my dog.

I can always get more pants.

Turns out, my "hosts" had more drugs in their store and they worked through a bunch of them.

They tried several different hypnotics and amphetamines--separately and together--anti-psychotics, pro-psychotics.  (Before they got bored and started beating me, I think they were just making shit up the way teenagers experiment with alcohol:  a little of this and a little of that.)

It is often surprising to me how and where you learn that benefits of experience.  Jim used to say that life is prologue and it took the longest time to figure out what he meant.  

At one point, I felt certain that he meant you accumulate skills and experience and like it is some sort of account that you can draw from to confront challenges and identify opportunities.  It's only as I have gotten older that I see it as more of a toolbox:  you draw on elements and apply them as circumstances demand.

When you're young, the box is small and the tools are inexpensive--they don't hold an edge and they feel rough in your hands.  Time goes by, you get better tools, higher quality and, most importantly, you learn how to use them.

During my time at The Farm, we had a whole course on interrogation by drugs.  More than anything, this was the course that everyone feared.

You have to remember this was shortly after the war and whispers had been heard about MKUltra.  Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had gone into the field and come back "changed."  We didn't know what had happened or who was doing it, but we all were certain that there was "brain stuff" going on and we didn't want to end up in the produce section.

Nobody was certain where he came from but they had a guy teaching the interrogation course that they "found" somewhere in Europe right after the War. 

He was considered such an important asset that nobody knew anything about him.  

When you got to The Farm, the first thing you heard was about this class and the second thing was somebody's version of The Instructor's history with the company.  Some said he was an asset and others were equally certain he was a penalty--the "cost" of unfettered access to West Berlin.

"Instructor 37" was a name right out of the Saturday morning serials, but it didn't stick.  Everyone called him The Beefeater.

He got that name because his fondness for the gin.

Morning, noon, or night, it didn't matter what was going on, or who it was going on in front of, he was never far away from a glass, some ice and a siphon.

The Beefeater was the heavily-accented boogeyman that you told your deepest and your darkest secrets too, whether you wanted to, or not.

They called it a "course" but this was education not in the Socratic sense, but in the same way that birds teach their young to fly--by kicking them out of the nest.  You were not going to be given theory, instead they administered the actual drugs and evaluated your responses.  If you managed to keep your shit together, didn't freak out too badly on the way down, then you made it to graduation.  

Almost everybody did; most of those that didn't it was because of what they said when they were under--usually stuff that hadn't shown up during the checks.  

The more time I spent in the field, the more I came to appreciate the value of that experience.  It's not until you've had the needle in your arm and heard the words that you swore would never be said come tumbling out of your mouth that you really understand what interrogation can accomplish and at what price.

Spending time with The Beefeater you understand that nobody really says anything under the needle that they weren't prepared to say anyway.  The drugs give you the permission to betray yourself and to betray your country.

And, once you understand that, the drugs have no hold on you: you can always get clean pants.

So then they started beating me and that's when I knew I was able to escape.

In the Groove of a Scratched Record

He told us exactly what to look for, I mean, EXACTLY and then he did it.

We all smiled and applauded, but, truth is, nobody saw it.

There was nothing to see.

I mean NOTHING.

One minute, the world was one way and, the next, it was a whole different way:  the guy was that good.

Fifty years he's making a life with those hands and so you think he's gotta be good, but you also think, after that much time, there's gotta be some slippage, but no.  I mean, if he's lost a step or two in that time and we still can't see shit he must have been un-fucking-believable back in the day.

All the time in this business you run across people drunk on their own Kool-Aid.  They make a bit of a name doing whatever it is that is their thing and they stop doing the work and start talking.  They turn into librarians. Down goes the membership and up goes the shingle.

Funny how so many went into the Invisible Business looking for the spotlight.

I'm watching this guy working the tools of his trade and I'm thinking about the professionals I met along the way.  I am trying to think of the ones I knew that made their date with the sheet cake and I am seeing the faces of each of those that did not.

There was a period of time , back when we were working The Curtain, when there was a series of stories about how so-and-so had discovered another Japanese soldier on some out-of-the-way Pacific island who had been cut off and did not know the war was over.  

Can you imagine...?

It'd be like living your whole life in the groove of a scratched record:  the same musical phrase played over and over....  

That's your whole world....

Operators--real operators, not those waiting for a call from their publishers--would be fine with it.  You go in, you do your job and then you disappear; you don't wait around to be saluted, or to get a fucking sticker.  

Do the thing, disappear.

Soldiers have to be relieved; soldiers have to stand at attention and march in a line.  Operators can do neither unless they are playing a part, the part of a soldier.

I remember reading one of those stories about a Japanese soldier turning up on some island.  At the time, I was stuck on another one of those Albanian taxis with only all the God-damned gear that everybody else was too good to be seen with.  In the head I find this old copy of Look magazine that is being "re-purposed" one page at a time.  I was just about to tear off a sheet of my own when I saw the eyes of the "rescued" soldier.  The brought him back to the world, but you could see it in his eyes, the circuits were blown.  

We'd met guys like that.

Out in the field, at that time, you would still run across the True Believers for whom the world stopped when the Chancellery fell, or the wall went up.  There was nothing left to say, nothing new to learn.  Everything either fit, or it did not; you were either in, or you were out. There was nothing left for them but disappointment.

You don't send a soldier to do an operator's job.

When it does happens that current events get out in front of an operation--happened all the time back in my day--you fade into the background, or you become part of the landscape.  

After the Wall--those of us that were still around--we heard whispers about colleagues with second lives as loyal Party members.  We also heard about those that couldn't and took the pill.  When you're an operator, you find a way to operate; and when you can't, you disappear.

They took a break and re-set the room for some dice. 

As good as the guy was with the cards--a real mechanic--he was a whole different level with the dice.  Reminded me of watching Rollin get ready to take down a gambler.  

The guy told us how he was never the shooter, he would just position himself on the rail and "help."  He would pass the bones back up the table to the shooter and ring in the shavers and ring out the coolers.  

This one thing was the whole thing: a simple, fluid, innocent-looking move that passed right under your nose.  It passed.

When you knew what to look for, it still passed.

He did it with two different colors of dice and even after you saw the red dice go in and the white dice come out, I know there were still people in that room who would swear that he hadn't done a thing.

You gotta respect the skill.

The discipline that it took to get the touch and to run the tables on his terms right up until the last game had been played:  that's a real operator.

He was taking a well-earned victory lap and talking about a period when he could make a living, a period that is now long-gone.  He would show a move and tell a story about a time and a place and a person and some money and you could see he got a kick out of it:  not from his face so much, but the eyes.  They were lit a little differently when he was telling his war stories.

He said he was telling his stories for his grandchildren.  He wanted them to know the man their parents had never met.

I understood that; that was a move I could see.

It's Up to God, or Darwin

They had a lot of questions.

Beginners always have a lot of questions.  It's like they don't think they'll ever have another chance and so they want to make certain that nothing is overlooked.

"How were you recruited?"

It's such a loaded word.  It makes it sound like there are scouts roaming the countryside looking for new talent.

They don't develop new talent for my line of work the same way you find linebackers or point guards.  No one who does what I do--what I used to do--has ever had someone in a sweater vest sit down with their parents and talk about the future, or the value of service to country.

People who get into this line of work are not invited in; nobody holds back the velvet rope.  You fall into this line of work.

Bad habits, bad choices, or both:  those are at the core of a good operator's skill set.  Everything else can either be beaten in, or out, of you.

I had one instructor once who boasted about his ability to teach anyone to jump out of a plane.  Walking away from a parachute landing was above his pay grade.

"It's up to God, or Darwin," he would say.

Back in the day, before operators got book deals, there was always somebody waiting for a spot and so, if the chute didn't open, nobody really gave a shit.

That's the thing about huddled masses and wretched refuse:  there's always more where that came from.

In my case, I took exception to some asshole that pulled out in front of me.  Sonofabitch made me use my brakes, so I chased him down and "modified" his steering wheel.

Stupid fucking thing to do....  Just reached in through his window--I think it was open--and folded it in half, like a taco shell.

Shouldn't have cut me off....  He didn't know, I could have been crazy.

I still have no idea who flagged my file.  It might have been somebody in the guy's insurance company.  Lots of operators with a background in insurance; turns out, we're all in good hands.

So, I'm minding my own business.  I wasn't even all that worried about the court case.  I focused on making money figuring that I'd be liable for expenses and court costs.  I took every job that I could and so didn't think that much about it when the phone rang.

"Mr. Armitage?"

"Yes?"

"I'd like to discuss an opportunity with you...."

"I'm listening," I said.

"Not over the phone; can we meet?"

I'd been through this before.  I'm not sure whether it was that nobody believed the photos, or it was that they just wanted to see for themselves.  

I had my share of lookey-loos. Some that wanted to do more than look, too.

None of it bothered me, so long as the cash was right.

I go to meet this guy and it was a whole different thing.

"Mr. Armitage?"  

It was like being back in school; nobody ever called me that unless I was in trouble.

I was in trouble.

The guy on the other side of the uncomfortable table in the uncomfortable room looked like a lifer in an under-performing school district:  a veteran of too many parent-teacher conferences and team-building exercises.  He had the look of someone hoping their health held together long enough to make it to retirement.

"My name is Smith."  They were always named Smith.

It was my first pitch meeting and I guess I was supposed to be impressed, or honored, or something.

He had a whole speech:  they had been watching me; had taken an interest in my future;  blah, blah, blah.

I wasn't really paying attention.  It only mattered that his check cleared.

I entertained myself by trying to calculate how many more of these "bookings" I would have to take before I could pay of that guy for his steering wheel.

I was in the middle of carrying a four when there was a loud crash and my focus snapped to the table top and the taco shell-shaped steering wheel that had apparently just come in for a hard landing.

"Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?"

Mr. Smith suddenly looked very familiar, like that guy in that car.

"Like I said, we've been watching you for some time."

And they had because he proceeded to run through a list of my many faults, bad habits and questionable relationships.

"And?" I asked; I was very proud of my come-back.

"And I think we can help each other," he said.

I knew what that meant and it usually meant the better part of a bottle to flush that kind of "help" out of my system.

And a check-up.

"We can make this go away," he said as he put the People's exhibit on the floor behind him.  "With our help, you can be a free, upstanding citizen once again."

"And?" I was killing it with my razor-sharp wit.

"Naturally, we would want a little something in return."

Here it comes....  

"Look," I started to say, " I don't know what you think you know--."

"Relax," said Smith.

He slid a box across the table.  It was smaller than a deck of cards.  Maybe about the size of a pack of Wrigley's; it was the same color as the table and just as uncomfortable.

"What is it?"  Not so clever now.

"A key," he said.

"To what?"

"Post Office box."

"Where?"

"Wherever you are; wherever you need to be."

"What's in it?" I asked.

"Depends:  sometimes a piece of paper, maybe a photo, some money; whatever is required."

"'Required' for what?"

"For the work that we might ask you to do."

For a full minute, I looked at the key and considered the possibilities of what he was saying.

"It's a leash," I said.

"It's opportunity," he said after a long pause.  "It's an opportunity to close one door and open another; an opportunity to use your...obvious talents in the service of your country."

Nobody had used that patter before, well, not since Korea and the way he said it it didn't sound nearly as noble.

"Listen Smith," I said.  "You've obviously got your wires crossed somewhere.  I was just a dumb grunt; a motor pool corporal and not a very good one.  So, unless 'my country' is looking for me to lift weights and get drunk, I am not your guy."

"Don't sell yourself short, Willy"

My jaw clenched audibly.

"My name is not Willy," I hissed.

"I see," said Smith as he put down his pen and sat up a little straighter in his chair, his hands disappearing into his lap.

"We have all the tools we need," he continued.  "What we lack, at the moment, are operators with the talent to use the right ones at the right time."

"I have no training for this type of work."

Smith seemed to relax somewhat.

"You have more than you realize, and what you don't know we can teach you."

"How long?"

"Things are in a highly fluid state just now.  Let's just say ours will be an open-ended arrangement."

"Your grandfather give you that?"

"What?"  For the first time, Smith seemed genuinely surprised.

"The steering wheel:  is it some kind of an heirloom?  All this bother, it suddenly seems very expensive."

"It came from an uncle," he said.

Ones and Nothings

You're not buying what?

The part about the hand; this hand?

And what, exactly, don't you "buy"?  What is it that you think I'm selling that you are not prepared to purchase?

Oh.  Really.

Well, take a look at that. There.  

What do you mean, "where?"  Right there; right fucking there.  That, sure as shit, ain't no beauty mark.

"Pass out?"  What the fuck are you talking about?  I've never....  In my whole life, never once.  I don't know about you, but I was trained.  I'm a professional.  I'm a trained fucking professional.

I have no idea where you got your wings, but I'm talking about real fucking field work, not the shit they do know with their ones and nothings.  That is not how business was done.

Business was personal.  

Everyday, every single day, you suited up to play and not just sit on the bench.

A good day was when you made it back to the locker room, period.  Heads and shoulders, knees and toes were all bonus and never taken for granted.

Turning the ship of any state is hard work and, in those days, we were the power steering.  Skin was a lot thicker then, you couldn't change policy with a mean Tweet on SnapBook, or whatever the fuck it is they do now.

They fucking broke my hand with a hammer, that's how I know.

I got a whole game's worth of dirty laundry and bad judgment that they could have used, but they didn't.  They dropped a bag on me and took me to an out-of-the-way and they broke my fucking hand.  One phone call to some Adderall-fueled joy-sticker and they could have had me droned-out, just like that:  no runs, no drips, no errors.

But they didn't do that.

For some reason, they thought I was worth the business.

How the fuck would I know.

Somebody told me once that you want to make a point, you look the mark in the eyes....  They put a face to a voice, a smell to an idea and they can feel the warmth of your presence in a way that never leaves them.  

And you give the mark something they can get over; something to survive and they will NEVER forget what it is you want them to know.

Christ, where did you go to school?  I bet you trained with the Limeys, didn't you.

We're all of us hunters:  that's the first thing.  Some better than others, but it's all in there; just a matter of tapping into it, letting it out.  You can put in all the layers and embroidery that you want, but, at the end of the day, we are all wiping away the same shit.

We know hunting.  Most of us have taken the easy way out, but we know chasing and being chased, we know scents and their short trip to memory.  

Why do you think it is that you can tell when an animal, or another person is afraid?  I'll tell you why, it's because your survival depends on it.  Dogs and people are most likely going to attack out of fear.  You bring another human person right to the point where they are about to do something stupid and desperate and then let them go, you own their ass.

They see you can do that and they know they are no longer in control.

You can actually see the moment when they go from being afraid because they're desperate to being afraid because they know they are no longer in control:  the eyes stop moving.  It's like they don't need to know where the door is, because they know it won't help.

That's how I knew.

What do you mean, "knew what"?

These guys were day players:  hired to look the part, but they didn't know what else to do other than follow the recipe.  

They were supposed to put the spook on me, but they really didn't want anything.

Pissed me off, that's what.  After all, that's what they thought of me?  Discount spook show?  Christ, I was mad.

It's what happens when you fight with proxies, or at arm's length, you forget that it's a people business.  

You get in a room with a person and it's your job to make something happen:  hearts and minds.

Of course, it fucking hurt, but I got over it because of the whole disrespect thing.  There's a world of difference between appearing to do a thing and really doing it.  There's no form, no flow chart for the work I did.  They sent us to do a thing and we did it; no projections, or evaluations, or estimate, we did it.

You fix the problem, or you don't.  Getting close is the same as not leaving the bench.

A generation ago, I probably could have still taken them out, but, you know, time and tide and all that shit.

I took the hit and they dropped me off.

Back to the locker room.

I wrapped up and that was that.

Knees or Knuckles

"Knees or knuckles...?"
 
The question hung there like the last chocolate chip cookie on the plate:  you pick it up and, right or wrong, you are out of options.

For a good part of my life, I had been on the other side of the table watching as the mark, or some bit player in the show, wrestled with the question.

Knuckles or knees?  It was the same question you got if they caught you trying to be too clever in the casinos.  It would never be enough to give them their money back, they wanted to make sure you never forgot them.

Naturally, it always fell to me to hold the bat or the hammer, and stare down the guy on the other side without expression.  They had to believe that, given the nod, I wasn't going to hold back.

I only ever had to do it once, actually follow through.

It was the time Cinnamon went missing.

She had disappeared in Berlin and Jim was convinced the other side had her.

I wasn't so sure. 

I figured she'd gone shopping, or maybe met someone in that way that she had.  

We could find ourselves in the worst kind of shit hole and Cinnamon always seemed to be able to smoke out some minor celebrity or member of the local elite.  Unlike some of us, Cinnamon always slept indoors.  Barney said once that she was the only person he knew that could find a marquis in a minefield.

Barney didn't make a lot of jokes.

I can't really complain because tat talent of hers saved our bacon more than once, but I also couldn't get that worked up if she went dark without telling any of us.

Paranoia is just a fact of life in that life.  You spend so much time looking over your shoulder that you can easily become convinced that somebody is looking  back.  And you can't ignore it because of the one time you might be right.

She's late for a meet and, immediately, Jim is in full defensive mode.  He wants to roll up the operation and bug out.

We learned early on that when he got like that there was no arguing with him. It didn't matter how close we were to closing a mark, if Jim even smelled a tail or someone changed their mind in a way he hadn't planned for, he had us heading for the exits.

This time started like every other time when Cinnamon pulled a no-show.  We did the usual:  we checked her crib, called her numbers and checked out the players she had been working.  Everything seemed to be on the level.  

She was probably just shacked up with some baron....

And then we found the car she'd been using.  It was parked several blocks away from her crib.  Nothing unusual there--standard protocol really--but it was where she had parked it.

It was on one of those side streets lined with row houses and dead-ending in the Wall.

According to Jim, it was not a prearranged signal, but it still felt like someone was trying to tell us something.

Barney swept the car for bugs and passive trackers:  clean.

That freaked Jim out.

That's how we found out that he had trackers on all of us.  Not like the stuff they use nowadays, these were super low-frequency jobs--about the size of a shoebox--that tapped into the battery.  Nowadays the bugs they have can post what you had for breakfast all over the internet, but then, the best you could get is if you were about a block away you could tell if we were, or were not, where we said we would be.

That Cinnamon's car didn't register on his black box meant that the sweepers had taken his shoebox too.

This was real.

This was also at a time when we were expected to be squeaky clean.  The Secretary was waiting for the Church Committee report to find out exactly how much of the laundry was going to see the light of day and nobody wanted to give anybody an excuse.

Jim was in a corner and he knew it.  He couldn't stay and he couldn't leave.  It comes out that one of ours was working in the open in Berlin and the stink would be on everybody and everything.

It was against everything that he knew to be right, but we had to find her and find her quickly.

The gloves were off.

Jim called out all the Hartford boys and, together, we burned down network after network looking for anyone who could lead us to Cinnamon and the people who had her.

And we didn't lack for leads.

Perhaps it had something to do with the price of gas, or something, but it was like everybody we got to wanted to talk, they just didn't have anything we needed.

We really didn't get any traction until we started in on Cinnamon's old fashion contacts.  Like I said, she had a way of knowing people who knew people.  

We started with some piece-of-shit-camera-assistant and worked our way up to what we later found out was a sleeping triple run by the Canadians.

Can you believe it?  The fucking Canadians...?  Still can't believe it.

Found out later that this guy was an asset developed out of the Gouzenko defection.

Nobody knew anything about this guy.

Well, until we found him, that is.

That was the guy sitting across the table from me.

He represented himself as a cultural liaison who led tours for western scholars to various historic sites on the other side of the curtain.  It was a perfect cover.

In any other circumstances, he would have been an ideal candidate for one of Jim's elaborate plays, but, with multiple governments and an alphabet soup of security agencies breathing down our necks, we didn't have time for subtlety.

We needed an entree to the people who had Cinnamon and we were pretty sure that this was our carte de visite.

Jim felt certain that the guy had been trained so we weren't going to get much out of him, but we could set him up to report back to his handlers on the other side.

So, a couple of the Hartford boys dragged him into the well-known darkened room and, after they cuffed him to the chair, Jim gave me the nod.

The guy caught the look and immediately started talking.  

Did we know who he was?  Who were we to take him from his place of business?  Didn't we know he had friends?  Had we any idea how sorry we were going to be?  All the same old, same old....

I uncuffed his right hand and, with my hand around his wrist, I forced his hand to the table.

He tried to twist himself into a knot, as if to get as far away from me as possible.

With my free hand, I picked up the ball-peen hammer.

I remember thinking it felt like slamming a glass jar down on a wet sponge.

Trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate, triquetral, lunate, scaphoid:  they shattered like heavy china as I buried the rounded tip of the hammer into that helpless hand.

His is one of the screams....

Still.

After about fifteen seconds, he passed out.

I didn't figure I'd pass out, but then again, I am not as young as I used to be so I had no way of knowing how I was going to take it.  

If I could take it.... 

There was a moment when I actually thought it might do me some good.  I have the arthritis bad in both hands, but mostly in that hand so, I thought, it might just do me some good....

It didn't.

Didn't squirm either.

Not sure how I pulled that off, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction.

I'm not saying it was a picnic; don't get me wrong.  Definitely not a picnic, but really, who gets to be our age and doesn't have at least one fucked up hand?