“Have you got the paperwork on that new guy?”
“He’s no longer with us.”
“What do you mean he’s no longer with us? He was only just hired.”
“Dickerson canned him the other day; said he was fucking with him.”
“Dickerson? Where the hell does he get off doing something like that? And anyway, I thought Dickerson was still in the nuthouse?”
“His landlord sprang him last week.”
“His landlord… What the fuck?”
“And the new guy… what was his name?”
“Dmitry… or at least that’s what Dickerson called him. He also called him a liar and a sneak and accused him of posing as Saint Stephan…”
“Saint Stephan. But he’s dead!”
“Not any more he ain’t… resurrected by the halls of justice a year or so ago on slander charges. Welsh Losser was apparently the plaintiff, even though he wasn’t even in the country at the time… seems to have made a name for himself in the States of late… was on America’s Newsroom and everything…”
“I don’t give a shit about Welsh Losser. What about Step? Last time I checked he was undercover…”
“Under cover of a meat wagon, you mean. They hauled him out of that apartment in Podil right under the noses of those news boys, then everything went hush-hush. The old man saw to that. No one’s seen hide nor hair of that Heavy Heeb ever since.”
“You mean the guy at the drycleaners?”
“Yup.”
“I just went by there… there was a Sunday special advertised on the front glass window in big bright colors.”
“Be that as it may…”
“This is complete bullshit!”
The man was now mad, hot under the collar, tugging at his coffee-stained tie and stretching the seams of his wrinkled white shirt, wet under the armpits, bulging around the waistline, over baggy dark pants, cracked black leather shoes that slid across the smooth floor, slapping the tiles in anger, inadvertently, as if helpless to respond otherwise to what his ears up above were hearing.
The other guy, skinny and pucker-faced with an Adam’s apple that went up and down his long neck like an elevator, perked up, his face now animated and full of warm hues. He says:
“Dickerson came in on Monday, all calm and cool, see, like nothing had happened, like he hadn’t been hauled out under the elbows by the boys in blue from that same flat in Podil.”
“Yeah?”
“Then he sort of saunters up to this desk I’m sitting at and puts up his foot – in those jet-black cap-toe shoes he wears…”
“Sure, I know the ones.”
“Then he pulls out a pack of smokes – Red Man Tobacco, I believe… he rolls them himself and then slips them into a hard pack of some generic cigarette brand…”
“I know what you mean … I’ve seen him do that myself.”
“So I say: ‘There ain’t no smoking in here and you know it.’”
“And what does he say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s right – nothing. He’s just got that foot, that black cap-toe polished like a mirror, propped up practically right under my chin on this here typewriter pad that pulls out from my desk.”
“I know, I’ve got the same one on my desk.”
“I was about to get up, you know, and just walk out, so as not to provoke him. You know the way he is… Remember how the old man warned us.”
“I remember.”
“But he starts talking to me, not nasty or aggressive but, like, as if he wanted to get something off his chest… it even seemed to me after a while that he didn’t notice that I was there.”
And Dickerson related the following story to the apple-necked fellow in the agency office:
“‘After being sprung from the facility for the spiritually disturbed on Frunze Street, just walking distance from Taras Shevchenko Metro Station, by his landlord, who’d spent no little time at the place himself and not so long ago, Dickerson got all spiffed up, with the shoes and that new suit that he’d bought way back when but had never worn because it reminded him for some reason of his wife, who by all accounts had taken up with a Cuban. Dickerson presumably did all this to make a new start, clean-pressed and ready for whatever action just might be thrown at him in this town.
“‘It was no poodle-grooming party on Frunze. First, they dowsed him with cold water, he said, while he was tied to a table in his underwear. Someone hooked some wires to his forehead and the next thing he remembered he was being awakened by a turnip-faced nurse with rough hands who stuck a needle in him and then flung the sheets back over his bare ass and left the room.
“‘It was in that facility on Frunze Street that he saw what he saw…’”: But more on that later.
“‘Already back at the agency, Dickerson went straight for the heavy gray metal file cabinet that held all the operatives’ files. It was there he’d found the file on “Dmitry”, the guy he’d been warned about while drugged out at the facility…’”: But more on that later.
“Some bird, that Dmitry. He wasn’t bald but wore a skin wig. Pretended to be Ukrainian, too, but appears to be from up north. Turned over a police car one night in Podil, for whatever that’s worth.”
“How the hell did he end up here?”
The pucker-faced man turns, walks over to the heavy metal gray file cabinet, opens the uppermost drawer with a large key hanging on a chain from his belt, removes a thick file folder and places it on the desk in front of the man.
The man reads it: “Who the hell is The Half Guinea?”
Filed by John Smith, September 7, 2017