I know what you're thinking: I thought Jim was dead and I thought Rollin was dead. How can I be certain about anything?
Fuck you, that's how.
I know about Barney, okay? I'd heard about the others, even that bitch Cinnamon, but I know about Barney.
In that business, you hear things. Nobody knows anything for certain, but you hear a lot of things. It's like the old Ivory soap ads, only with bullshit: “ninety-nine and forty-four-one hundredths percent pure” bullshit.
Somebody disappears from your life and then someone else tells you they've passed, what's the difference?
Even when we were working full-time, when we'd get to the end of a job and everyone would go their separate ways, you had to accept that you might not ever see them again. You had to be ready to write them out of your life.
People got reassigned all the time.
Hell, toward the end there, we had a revolving door of people passing in and out of the team.
There was a period of time toward the end of the fifth year when I didn't work very much. Months at a time there would be nothing. I would convince myself that I had been disavowed, or that the team had been somehow burned. Maybe one of those replacements had been a mole for the “other” side.
They would leave me out there to twist in a derecho of my own paranoia only to call me back.
I'd get the call and be directed to a dead drop. Was it a trap? Were they calling me in just to drop a bag on me? Who exactly was “they”?
I'd always go, just in case. And every time it was on the square, but every single time there was that voice screaming in my ear, telling me that I was walking into a trap.
Sadly, as shitty as the work was, it was my drug of choice and especially after a long dry spell, I would be desperate for a fix, for a chance to get back in the game and work with those people, even if they could be really terrible to me.
I'd get the call and grab my go bag and head to the drop.
They were fond of putting them in places where nobody would ever think of going, like parks and libraries, schools and churches.
Sometimes there would be a monitor watching over the drop and sometimes not. If there was a monitor, they'd give me a line or two of dialogue to drop on them.
I always wondered who came up with these password scenes. They were supposed to seem perfectly innocent: “'Do you happen to have the time?' 'I do, but I wouldn't trust it.' 'Guess not.' 'They sure don't make watches like they used to.' 'They don't make much using the old ways anymore.'”
I don't have any trouble admitting it: I took acting classes. I was pretty good too, but I could not make those lines sound like anything other than what they were.
I mean, it's one thing to remember the words and get them out in the right order, but try and do it when the guy you're talking to is listening for even the slightest hesitation and you are both watching the other for some sign, some non-specific sign, that they can't and shouldn't be trusted. You can't be casual in that moment when you know that your freedom and your life can depend on getting those lines right and delivering them to the right person.
It's really about the only thing they get right on TV. When you see one of those spy shows and they get to the moment when the good spy has to meet an unknown contact and they say things like: “'The...swallows...are...late...this...year.' 'Yes...they...are.' 'Have...you...ever...seen...such...a...wet...spring?' 'Not...since...college.'”
I'd go through all of that every time just to get back to that life.
And, for as much shit as we gave one another, I would go through it just to work with Barney.
Barney made terrible coffee. He talked too much. And he would always wait until he had tested a new whatever-it-was on me before “remembering” to hook up the ground wire. But if it hadn't been for him, I don't think I would have lasted as long as I did. I certainly don't think I would have made it to that fucking sheetcake.
Barney was a fighter and he fought for me.
I think a lot of people forget that he was fleet boxing champ. It's tough to reconcile the image of a guy with the requisite fine motor control needed to work with precision parts and defuse munitions with someone who took repeated shots to the head, but I guess he had more than enough brains and could afford to lose a few.
Barney was an excellent businessman with an eye for talent.
He took his cover job as the owner of electronics company and parlayed that into a small fortune. And he did it at a time when it was not easy for people who looked like him to be successful at much.
He always found a way to get paid. More than once I have wished I had known his secret.
The frustrating part is I can't ask him.
I can't ask him about that, or anything else.
We spent all that time together and I know I learned a lot, but I don't feel like I learned anything. You know?
We'd get called out on a job and, before we left, we'd make lists of what we needed and talk a little bit about how it was going to go once we got to the place to do the thing, but once we were on the ground, he would barely say two words.
He'd shut up and do the thing. Whatever it was, he would put his head down and get to work and it was my responsibility to make sure he had whatever he needed whenever he needed it.
I was always surprised when Phelps would call him up to rope, or be the inside on a job.
I would watch him and it was like he was a different person. He could turn on the charm and spin the legend like he had been doing it everyday for his whole life and then, when that role was over, he would put on his coveralls and we'd get back to it.
I remember once he doubled Rollin on a job behind the Curtain. At a key point, he was to take over and perform a piece from a famous cabaret act. Rollin, the old ham, could do that kind of thing in his sleep, but Barney....
He may have been fast on his feet, but cabaret was a whole different animal.
He went about it like he did everything: he put his head down and he did the work. He put the time in so that he could match Rollin move for move. Barney was relentless, like rust.
It was the cigarettes that got him.
Long before he would have been up for a cake of his own, he started coughing.
I think we all sort of agreed that we wouldn't notice. Barney was a private man and his business was his business, but his coughing got progressively worse.
Rollin was the one who convinced him to see a doctor and by that time all they could do was hang a label on him.
As I said before, Barney was a fighter and so he tried to solve this just like he had addressed all the other impossible challenges that had been set for him. He hit the books and he hired anyone and everyone who even looked like they may have an idea how to beat it.
In the end, all he did was spend a lot of money and waste a lot of time.
Good thing he had a lot and too bad he couldn't leave more of it for his kid.
I'd been on the bench for about a month and was completely caught-up in my usual why-and-what-if spiral when the phone rang.
I was going back to work.
That's what I thought.
I got called to a drop, but, instead of some anonymous monitor, there was Barney sitting on an overturned trash can clutching a paper bag in the shape of a whiskey bottle.
There was an awkward cadence to our conversation as neither one of us knew what to say and had to figure out how to say it in between the wet, hacking, coughs that racked his well-below-fighting-weight frame.
“Helluva diet,” I remember saying.
“Don't recommend it,” I remember him saying.
I tried to tell some stories from before and he pretended that he had forgotten them and pretended that he was grateful for the memories.
He told me a couple of things about the others that I had kind of figured out for myself and one or two that I hadn't.
We talked about doing good things and all the bad stuff that had to be done along the way.
We were swapping the second bottle-shaped bag when he asked me.
I didn't think about it. I didn't have to.
For a lot of years, I had made it my business to make sure he had what he needed when he needed it and this was no different.
He told me some more stuff that he thought I might need to know and a couple of things I was supposed to tell his boy.
He had thought to bring an old canvas tarp—one that had seen a lot of weather—and it made the last bit easier.
I will never forget the look in his eyes.
He was surprised.
I had never seen that look from him before. He was unflappable, super-cool even under fire, but then, in that very specific moment, he was surprised.
No other way to describe it.
I don't think..., I can't think it was because of what was happening, but more because of what was about to happen.
I brought him back to the water because that's what he wanted.
He was sure and certain about that.
The sun was slowly losing altitude and the blood-stained sky was just heart-breakingly beautiful.
He would have loved this.
I spent some time on counter-surveillance before letting him go.
There really was nothing to say. I thought about all those movies about the Navy where it was always the kid from some land-locked state that got killed and had to be buried at sea.
More movie moments flashed before my eyes as I let him go.
I immediately wanted to second-guess myself, to turn back the clock, to make a different choice, but that was...
...impossible.
I walked back to the “borrowed” car that I had used for this last part and as I did, I made a commitment to myself that this was a moment in my life that had no value. It was so important, so valuable that I would never trade it, I would not barter this moment for anything. It was so important as to have no worth and I would never exchange it.
What could anyone give me that compared to the trust that Barney had placed in me?
And now, in this moment, someone was asking about that moment, about something that was not for sale.
Who was asking?
Why were they asking now?
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