Page 14

JULIA

Caspian? I have no idea what kind of fucking name that is. I think it’s a sea, but I’ve never met a guy named Arctic or Baltic.

I set the bowl of ramen on the table and sit across from him.

“In my house,” I say, “men wear shirts at the table.”

“What about the women?” He sits.

“I’m letting you slide, is what I’m saying.”

“I appreciate it.”

He smirks and rolls noodles around his fork. He’s neat and precise when he eats. He uses a napkin. He chews with his mouth closed. A whole man can do all those things without acting put-upon and formal.

In the bedroom, he seemed kind of hapless and confused, but the more he eats, the more he comes into himself. He sits straighter. His gaze is sharper. When he speaks, he says what he means and means what he says.

When the bowl is half-empty, he slows down. “It’s coming back to me. Who I was.”

“You can start talking any time now.”

He nods. Eats a little.

“Will you promise to leave tomorrow?” He’s trying to get me to do something, but his naked body is the most distracting thing on the planet.

“Dude, you’re not even supposed to be here. You don’t get to boss me.”

When he puts down his fork and crossed his gorgeous arms over his magnificent chest, he looks at me as if he knows he’s going boss me soon enough and I’m going to damn well like it.

I cross my arms.

“I was a thief.”

“What kind of thief?”

“Ever heard of the Port of Long Beach?”

“Ever heard of planet Earth?”

A smile teases his lips, but he gets control of it. “I was a foreman on Pier D—goods from Japan and Hong Kong. Now, that wasn’t a career choice. I wasn’t in the union so I could collect a pension. I was a thief first, and I was installed as a foreman to do that job.”

“Installed. That’s a word choice.”

He holds out his arm to show me the inside of the elbow. There’s a thin silver scar across it. “I was a made man. You know what that means?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know the mafia bled guys. Did they drink your blood or something?”

“No. Just a cut, then a bandage, then a kiss on each cheek.”

“You have to kill someone?”

“Jesus Christ. I rerouted goods. I didn’t murder people.”

“Cool, fine. You just ‘rerouted goods.’” I make air quotes, then shrug. “I mean if you did whack a guy, I’m sure he had it coming.”

“Julia. I want to be perfectly clear. There is no mafia. As far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t exist. You understand?”

“I…” The joke dies on my lips. He’s absolutely ready to derail this entire conversation until I agree that the mafia never existed and the entire world is under a mass delusion. “I understand.”

“Good. So. My job.”

“What year was this? So I can orient myself?”

“1994.”

“Holy shit. You’ve been a screwdriver since then?”

“It wasn’t that bad. It makes you stupid, so the time doesn’t matter.”

I nod at the sheer plausibility of getting dumber without a brain. In Bizzaroland, it all makes total sense. If this is a con job, and I’m open to the possibility that it is, I’m just going to let myself get conned.

“We had fifteen guys on the crew. Four were, you know, us. We moved containers. I’ll skip the boring parts and say one thing.

Logically, if there’s a container from China, with a manifest that says it’s full of Chinese shit, that was locked shut in Macau, there shouldn’t be a crate of some other non-Chinese shit in there. ”

“Yep. Container from China has China stuff in it.”

“Until this day, we get a crate from Porto do Napoli .”

“Port of Naples?”

“Yes. The old country. The whole crew has parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers there, so we all take a personal interest in this crate.”

“You stole it.”

“It wasn’t on the job list, not from the dock or from our organization.

So, truly a personal interest.” Suddenly concerned with his bowl, he takes it to the sink to wash it.

“Tony especially. He’s the logistics guy, and he says it came from nowhere.

He calls Napoli trying to find out why it came around the world, in the opposite direction, then Messina, Taranto…

but nothing. The manifest is right there, but it doesn’t connect to anything.

So I tell my boss. My real boss, in Las Vegas, you understand? ”

“The one who… doesn’t exist?”

“You really are perfect.” He sticks the bowl in the rack. “He says ‘why are you bothering me if you don’t even know what’s in it?’ So, we get the crowbar and pry it open. Before we can even dig past the wood wool, out comes this rat.”

“Ick. Not a fan.”

“A talking rat.”

“Get the fuck out.” I slap my hand on the table. He opens his arms as if to remind me that he has no clothes. “No, I mean, come on, dude.”

“You believe I was a screwdriver, but you don’t believe a demon can possess a rat?”

“For fuck’s sake. I am on full overload. Whatever. Just go on. Tell me what the rat said.”

“It said, ‘where am I?’”

“Of course it did.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Because it’s the most plausible thing. Unless the crate had a hole in it?”

“No hole.”

“So, this rat went through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, then around all those little islands, then all the way up the Chinese coast. That’s the wrong direction for… how long?”

“Weeks.”

“In a crate that was nailed shut. It’s still a rat, with a rat-size brain, so of course… of course it doesn’t know where it is and can’t do anything until it does.”

“That’s a good point. When I was a screwdriver, like I said, I wasn’t smart.”

“When you told it where it was, what did it say? It didn’t expect to be in Long Beach, did it?”

“It did not.”

“And then what?”

He’s about to tell me when there’s a knock at the front door.