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?              

Powdered Bone

Before I even opened my eyes, I felt the sun on my face, well, part of it anyway.

It was the darnedest thing, one side of my face was cold and the other wasn't. In fact, I was sweating.

I didn't want to get up.

I was awake, but I had another one of my headaches and I just wanted to stay in my private cocoon and wait for it to go away.

I knew it was going to be a cold morning because of the dull pain in my right hip; a souvenir from a short-hop job. Like so many of the others, that one was supposed to be quick, stealthy and calculated to bring about the change that somebody somewhere wanted.

The job was quick, but the souvenir I picked up while we were there has never left me.

Like my dog, who comes over and puts his clammy muzzle on my lap, my souvenir frequently disrupted whatever I was doing to I never forgot it was there.

Right now, something was pressing on it.

It didn't really hurt that much, but it was annoying; like when you touch your bare ankles together and just hold them together. Sooner or later, all you can think about is bone touching bone and the thin layers of skin that are keeping them apart. And then, you think about what would happen if that skin wasn't there: the bones would grind on one another like peppercorns in a grinder. And then you think that's crazy; that would never happen, but its still all you can think about. Bones grinding on bone and never being able to walk right again. Still, you tell yourself, as calmly as possible, how ridiculous that is and how it could never happen. So, just to prove it to yourself, you are going to keep your ankles together, keep the contact and overcome your fear. Peppercorns; grinders, shredding, powdered bone falling away. But if you pull your feet apart then you're no longer in control: your weak. So you keep on holding on and listening to the echo of thought follow thought fall away like powder.

And then it's over.

Your feet are no longer together and you breathe a big sigh of relief.

Actually it's more like a gasp because, without knowing it, you had been holding your breath so your mouth explodes open to catch as much air as possible.

Struggling to get your pulse down, you try controlling your breathing, but that only makes you more anxious, like when your on a diet and every bite of food reminds you of the food you aren't getting. Somebody's keeping your food from you.

And what if they're eating it?

How will you ever get back what's yours?

Your breathing starts accelerating. You can feel the pulse in your neck. You can feel your ankles touching even though you know they are as far apart as you can hold them.

It was like that all the time.

I tried turning on to my good hip, but that didn't work, now something was sticking into my cheek.

I still didn't want to open my eyes, but I didn't want this whatever it was sticking in my cheek.

I started moving every face muscle I could, trying to get this thing to move. I moved my jaw back and forth, my eyebrows up and down. I winked first with one eye and then the other. But still the poker kept poking me.

Snaking one hand up from under the warm blanket, I reached for the foreign probe.

Straw...? It sure felt like....

I opened my eyes.

That's when I saw it.

High over my head was the underside of a vast wooden roof and just beyond that was outside.

I wasn't guessing.

I could see through to the other side of that roof because there were wide gaps between the boards and the sun was shining through all of the dust and godknowswhat that hung in the air.

A barn?

What was I...?

Where was I?

I scanned as much of the area as I could see without moving my head. If anyone was watching, I didn't want them to know I was awake.

At least not yet.

I remember a time we were on a job in eastern Europe and I was watching a mark who was doing business in an old Byzantine cathedral.

The outside of this one place, I remember was pockmarked with signs of the revolution, and all but drowned out by the urban sprawl that had grown up all around it like mold on cheap siding, but on the inside.... On the inside was this immense dimly lit space full of candles and splashes of color. Beautifully carved statues of the saints filled the niches and topped the railings that ran around the upper stories. Murals, framed in gold leaf covered every archway and beyond, toward the center of the hall was a single shaft of sunlight streaking through an opening and falling, as if by design on the altar.

You could feel the centuries of the building's history as you made your way along the stone floors worn uneven by shuffling feet. It was impossible to ignore the passion of the generations of craftsmen who had worked on this building as a tribute to their community and their faith.

Impossible unless you were the guy I was tasked to follow....

Anyway, this place reminded me of that place then.

It spoke to a time of prosperity when the size of man's barn was the size of his crop.

As far as I could make out, this barn had, at one time, housed cattle and horses and all the feed needed to keep them going through the winter.

I found myself caught up in the careful post and beam construction that held this cathedral together and losing track of my situation.

My brain still hurt, my bad hip was screaming at me.

Time to get this party, whatever it was, started.

So I sat up.

And that's when I saw them.