This Is How It Really Sounds (28 page)

“Hey,” Harrington said softly, in a flat tone of voice. “I'm Pete Harrington.”

“I know you are!” the financier said. “I really like your music!”

He was frozen there, and Charlie was just gaping at him now, five feet away, with this look of anger and fucking horror, like,
How could I go all this way with you, all the way to China, and you're just fucking going to forgive and forget because this guy's a fan?
Charlie was shaking his head now, subtly, but visibly.

“Yeah, well—” He could barely get it out: “You're a fucking dirtbag!”

He saw the expression of puzzlement and hurt on his opponent's face; then the bodyguard started to move toward him. In that instant, Charlie came lurching toward him, saying,
Listen you, who do you think you are!
And then Charlie seemed to trip and go stumbling sideways into the bodyguard. He spotted Charlie's leg wrapping behind the bodyguard's leg, and then both of them went down in a tangle of limbs, with Charlie sprawled out on top of him, swearing.

The financier had a look of disbelief on his face. Pete stepped forward, his left hand moving up to execute the trap, even though the banker was too stupefied to raise his hand. In a motion he'd practiced thirty thousand times, he shuffled in with his left foot, drew his right fist back, and then sent it snapping forward like the piston of a locomotive. He felt the small bones of the bridge of the other man's nose under his knuckles, and heard a faint clicking, mashing sound as he hit. Harrington staggered backward a few steps and then sat down clumsily on the sidewalk.

The bodyguard was trying to struggle to his feet, but Charlie was rolling around on top of him, tangled up with his legs, yelling, “Get off of me! You're hurting me!”

The financier was curled up on the pavement with his hands over his face. Pete stepped in and kicked him a couple of times in the legs. “Remember this while you're spending all that money!”

He turned and began walking quickly toward the car. There were at least ten people with cell phones out, filming him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Peter Harrington still on the ground, covering his nose, while the bodyguard was still trying to get free. He reached the car and ducked inside. The bodyguard was up now, but it was too late, and as they pulled out into traffic he took a few running steps and then stopped. A million cell phones were out, a million eyes. He had done it. He'd touched the untouchable. He just wasn't sure what he was supposed to do next.

 

V

Return of the Noise

 

1

The House near Monthey

When Beth Blackman
was in third grade her classroom had featured a poster printed by the Swiss Ministry of Tourism. It showed a steep-roofed chalet floating in a vast green ocean of pastureland. There were flower boxes below the windows and stacks of logs, and she spent hours as the teacher droned away in the distance, wandering into its spaces and imagining who lived there. It never occurred to her that one day she would find out.

It happened when she was thrashing in the wake of her divorce from Pete Harrington. She was trying to put the experience behind her and Nino seemed like the perfect vehicle for that. He was the exquisitely dressed scion of an old Italian family who had come to Los Angeles to be a movie producer. Nino was beautiful and hapless and she knew within ten minutes of meeting him that he would not be successful. He presented no threat to her whatsoever, and that was why she'd accepted his invitation to go skiing in Switzerland. She wasn't really a skier: three days into the trip, she sprained her wrist and was content to sit in the lodge reading or poking through the little villages below the slopes.

They would stay at one resort for a few days and then drive to the next in the 1962 Alfa Romeo that Nino kept telling her was a classic. Somewhere between Gstaad and Monthey the red light on the dashboard of the old car began to flicker. Nino pulled to the side and opened the hood, absorbed in his little drama of the manly and mechanical. She got out and glanced at the engine in a show of support, then turned to examine the landscape.

They were in a wide snow-caked valley that ran along the left side of the road. On the right the mountains sprang directly upward, silhouetted against a colorless sky. It was high, empty farmland, and she imagined that in the summer it was transformed into lush grassy fields with cows and wildflowers. Now, it was a great empty tablecloth scratched by stone walls and leafless branches. Nino declared that they needed water for the radiator, and they got back in the car and drove slowly along, their eyes on the steadily climbing temperature gauge. Soon they came to a small stone house that seemed anchored there among the heaving landscape.

The roof was high and peaked, with deep overhanging eaves, and someone had stacked firewood to head level along the heavy walls. It reminded her instantly of a house in a tourism poster that had hung in her classroom, and in moments she had convinced herself that it was the same house, or, if not the very same, somehow,
the same
.

They pulled into the driveway and turned the car off, opened the hood, and then stood for a moment in the silent landscape. She breathed in the crystalline air. Around them, the sky was stuffed with undulating masses of silver and gray that vaulted over the mountains. She'd never seen clouds like that before. Sets of skis were leaning against the wall, five or six pairs of different sizes, and a snowboard. The ground floor of the house seemed to be a sort of stable for animals, and she could hear the scoffing voices of the goats as they climbed the wooden stairs to the front door. Something exciting was happening. It was that house. She was actually here. Nino rang the bell.

The door was opened by a blond woman who seemed in her forties and wore a sweater and jeans. She looked heavy and strong, in the way of German women, with big breasts and hips, but not ungraceful. More like a very well-made object: strong and in proportion and not liable to break easily. She had a wide, clean face with light-colored eyes. She looked like the kind of woman she might want to be at that age, if she lived here in Switzerland, instead of in Los Angeles.

The woman looked at Nino, and then her eyes moved to Beth, and she seemed more at her ease to see a petite young American in a ski jacket and fur-topped boots. Beth smiled at her and said, “Hello, I'm Beth!” as if it was a professional setting. The woman smiled back and said her name, but it wasn't Marta, or Gertrude, or anything Beth had ever heard before, and she forgot it as soon as the woman finished speaking. Nino started explaining about the car, but the woman didn't seem to know English, or French, or Italian. Finally Nino motioned at the steaming chassis and said “
Wasser? Wasser?
” The woman hesitated a moment, her gaze moving between the two of them. She glanced past them, up toward the mountains, and stared at the heights for a few seconds. She uttered a few words in a language that might have been Polish or Hungarian, and then she pushed open the outer door and motioned them in.

It took a few moments for Beth's eyes to adjust to the interior. It seemed like an old house, with wooden walls interspersed with stone that had been plastered and painted over. There was a cuckoo clock above the sink, and the black cast-iron woodstove in the corner had a kettle on it, gently steaming. She could imagine the woman getting up each morning and lighting the stove and winding the cuckoo clock. A steep stairway disappeared into an upper floor.

The woman offered them coffee and then set a pot of water to boiling before leading her to an armchair by the woodstove. She turned to Nino. “W
asser!
” she said with great emphasis, and she led him outside.

Beth sat in the armchair, feeling the dry warmth of the stove and looking out the picture window at the white landscape. Her mind wandered out into the vast porcelain trough of snow-covered valley, off past the wooden fence posts that poked from the snow, down toward the faraway clumps of trees and to the neighbor's houses, so small that she could hide them with her thumb.

What did this woman do here, alone each day, hour after hour? There was a family: she could tell by the selection of boots and shoes by the door. She could imagine their footsteps moving across the ceiling as they woke up. What was her husband like? Was he handsome, quiet? Did he have a pleasant voice, or a harsh Germanic manner? And what about their children? She could spot several feminine coats, and the sort of colorful rubber rain boots that looked like they might be worn by a teenage girl. A schoolbook sat on the bench by the door.

She tried to imagine all the circumstances that had led their hostess to this house in a country where she didn't speak the language. She made guesses about her life: this was a woman comfortable in the cold. This was a woman who could carry things. This was a woman who cooked, who bought gifts for her children. She thought, with a pang of grief: this was a woman whose husband would never cheat on her.

Beth heard footsteps coming up the wooden stairs. The woman knew a little bit of English after all, and she and Nino were trading the few words she had. She seated them by the stove and returned a few minutes later with a tray that held a French press full of coffee and a plate with cookies on it. Nino was eyeing her breasts and her hips as she turned sideways to place it on the table, but Beth suppressed the flash of anger she felt rising. She didn't care enough about Nino to be jealous. That was the whole point of coming on this trip with him.

Their hostess told them with signs and words that she had two children: a girl and a boy, seventeen and nineteen years old. The girl was away at the university in Zurich. The boy, she couldn't explain. She said the word
ski
emphatically, twice, and she motioned out the picture window toward the mountains in a very general way, as if he was in the sky, up above the horizon. She seemed a bit agitated. She tried to explain something about her husband, and they could tell it involved her husband and her son, but they didn't know what. The woman finally gave up trying to explain. They held their mugs quietly as she stared nervously out the window at the mountains, occasionally glancing back to them and giving them a quick uneasy smile.

They finished the coffee and went to the door, thanking her. She walked out with them to their car, scanning the far ends of the road and looking up at the heights, as if she expected to see something there. She mustered a last burst of warmth as she said good-bye to them, then glanced up again. Looking in that direction, Beth saw parallel tracks that made a path up and around the hill until they disappeared from sight.

Beth snapped a picture of the chalet before she got in the car. Nino started the engine and said they could probably reach the next town. As they pulled away Beth turned to wave one final thanks, but the woman wasn't looking at them at all. Her face was turned upward toward the high mountains, gazing as if she could see far into them, at things happening beyond this hill and the next, where the lives she possessed were swirling and burning in secret orbits Beth could never imagine. There were suddenly innumerable perfect ashes hanging in the growing distance between them. Millions of pale white eyelashes, sliding softly from above, like silent messages. Something about the sky, about clouds. The Swiss woman stood in the empty road as they fell all around her, becoming small and indistinct behind the thickening curtain of snowflakes, until she was lost forever in the memory of winter, without a name.

 

2

Return of the Noise

The whole operation
had gone off better than Pete could have dreamed. The bodyguard stayed with his client, just like Charlie said he would. The driver was waiting at the traffic light, as planned, and Charlie'd clocked the whole thing out so that he arrived at the airport an hour before the flight, breezed through the first-class security setup, and was sitting next to some French businessman without even breaking a sweat. This was hit-man shit, and he felt like he imagined a hit man would feel: bland, detached, moody.

He got in at two in the afternoon, and Bobby called while he was waiting in line at immigration. Charlie must have sent his flight reservations ahead.

“Welcome home. How'd it go?”

“Textbook, Bobby. Direct hit. I sent him to the bottom like the fucking
Lusitania
.”

“Excellent. How'd the footage come out?”

“What do you mean?”

Bobby was quiet for a second. “Footage … I mean, did you kick him when he was down, like you said you were going to? Wait, don't tell me anything! I want to hear about this in person. I'm waiting for you outside baggage claim.”

Wow! Bobby picking him up at the airport! How long had it been since that happened?

Bobby jumped out of the car wearing a leather sport jacket, soundlessly high-five'd him with a huge grin on his face. “Welcome back, Pete!”

He wanted to hear about the whole operation, from start to finish, and listened to it like it was the gospel. He wanted to know what was said, exactly, and how it got said and how the financier had reacted. Did he kick him when he was on the ground? Where was Charlie in all this? Did he get out of the way? How did they deal with the bodyguard? He didn't get why Bobby wanted to know those kind of details, but in any case he was happy.

“You know, though, Bobby, it kind of bothers me.”

“What do you mean?”

He explained about the look on Harrington's face, and then how he'd felt sorry for him when he was on the ground. Defeat was an ugly thing, under any circumstances.

“Pete! He's a fucking bankster! He ripped you off for eight million dollars and the government had to fork over billions to try to stabilize the financial mess he left behind. Where's the moral ambiguity here, man? Because I'm just not seeing it!”

“Well, I think the guy's a fan.”