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  Start-Up

  Olen Steinhauer

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  Start-Up

  Olen Steinhauer

  It wasn’t even my idea; it was Jerry’s. He was inspired by a pirated copy of From Russia With Love, sixteen years after his first viewing at the age of fourteen, nearly fifty years after the film was first released, and two days before I went back to Texas to watch my mother die. We sat in his uncle’s mildewy basement in south Chicago watching it on his uncle’s widescreen monster. It was a terrific film, and by the end we were both a little in love with Daniela Bianchi, but while the film was inspiring me to pick up and move to Italy to find more girls who looked like her, Jerry was inspired in an entirely different direction. He wanted to become a master criminal. A super-villain.

  This was long before I betrayed him, and to be fair I should point out that Jerry was not stupid by any stretch of the imagination. He’d done well enough at school, and while the rest of us became experts in various humanities-related subjects, focusing usually on the passive arts like television and film and music, Jerry did actual legwork for his obsessions, which these days included international relations. He hadn’t gone to school for it—he’d studied literature for two years before tiring of the expensive tuition—but he applied himself each morning with the newspaper and spent hours online, reading not only news but forums and blogs written by people in war zones and in Washington, tracking not only the world’s hot spots, but also what he called “the international world of corporate espionage.” On his laptop he kept organized folders of “intelligence” he’d gathered from sources all over the place—the Internet, he liked to point out, could feed any curiosity. His AFRICA file had detailed information on places like Somalia, Libya, and the Sudan, while his ten-gigabyte EUROPE file went deep into history, charting the causes of wars and the eventual economic interdependence that gave that continent its own weird kind of peace. He could talk everyone I knew under the table when the subject was China or Mexico or even Australia, and what amazed me most was that he knew numbers—he knew GDPs the way the rest of us knew the discographies of Radiohead and the Velvet Underground. He even had a slick cell phone—unlike me, he hadn’t been blacklisted from all three major phone companies due to unpaid bills.

  So when he picked up his can of Heineken and said, “Tom, I finally know what to do with my life,” I had no choice but to give him all my attention. When the smartest guy you know, at age thirty, says something like that, what else do you do? And even when he followed it with, “I’m going to become the most successful criminal mastermind in history,” a part of me simply believed it because… well, because it was Jerry saying it. Yet I still couldn’t help but crack wise:

  “You’ll need a knife in those shoes, then.”

  “I’m not talking about Lotte Lenya.”

  “You’re talking about Blofeld.”

  “Exactly.” He saw from my face that I wasn’t getting it. “Look, Tom. The problem with criminals is that they’re stupid. Even Blofeld. He does things like let Bond hang around still breathing. If he’d only just shoot the guy through the temple, he’d be free to take over the world.”

  “I don’t think he wants to take over the world. He just wants money.”

  “Whatever. You get my point.”

  My beer was empty, so I got another from his uncle’s mini-fridge, which was only used for Heineken. On top of it was a phone in the shape of Mickey Mouse. It was a good place to live, and I’d never forgotten Jerry’s generous invitation to move in. That said, I wasn’t going to just nod and pretend that his head was screwed on right. “You’re broke, Jerry. Blofeld’s got SPECTRE behind him. That bankrolls everything.”

  “Even he started somewhere. Someone started SPECTRE.”

  “It was once a start-up company.”

  “Exactly.”

  I thought about that. “You’ll have to kill people, you know.”

  “It’ll be hard at first,” he said, then frowned as if I’d brought up the deal-breaker. But I hadn’t. He said, “If you really want something, you’ve got to be willing to make sacrifices. If you want to be at the top of the game, you have to do what’s required. Being nice has nothing to do with it.”

  “So you want to be a mobster. A wise guy.” I’d learned everything I knew about the Mafia from Scorsese, and it didn’t look like a pretty life.

  “I want to be above all that. Don’t you see?”

  “You want to be the guy with the cat and the voice and the face people don’t see.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Then get a cat and a big chair. No one will see your face in this room.”

  “I’m serious, Tom.”

  He was, but I couldn’t see it. Sure, it was Jerry, but when he drank he sometimes went off on imperfect tangents, and this was one of those times. He was the kind of guy who thought aloud without worrying how ridiculous he sounded, and despite being the smartest guy I knew he could sometimes be the stupidest.

  The next day, as I was packing up to fly to Austin, he came into my room clutching three slim paperbacks—Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice. Apparently, those were the only Bond novels in which Blofeld appeared. I asked how the criminal enterprise was coming along, and it disappointed me that he didn’t know I was joking. He frowned. “It’s not easy. In the books he’s smarter, but he’s still defeated.”

  “The good news,” I said, “is that everyone’s fictional. Blofeld, sure, but you’ll never have to match wits with James Bond.”

  He blinked a few times. “Good point, Tom.”

  It wasn’t, but I let him go with that, and when I saw him next he was well on his way.

  Though I hadn’t betted on more than a couple weeks, a whole summer passed before we were in the same room again. I’d flown to Austin to take care of my mom during the final stages of her breast cancer. She’d come down with it three years before, and that first year she’d had both breasts removed, but it hadn’t done much good. She’d deteriorated quickly, and my sister Jenna, who lived with her husband and kids in Boulder, hired a nurse to watch over her. She had the money to do such things. But Consuela got into trouble with Immigration and had to leave. Jenna pointed out that, being the only sibling without a job, I was the obvious choice to help out. I had nothing else going on.

  My mom and I had never been particularly close, but even with the fights and the nagging I didn’t want her to end up eating cat food, so I tried my best to make life easy for her. For most of June it worked. I developed a schedule, even filling out the squares of a calendar with repeated errands to make sure the refrigerator was stocked and she had all her pills lined up. Toward the end of the month, though, I tired of it. I think anyone would have. When she lost control of her bladder after falling asleep on the deck, my head sort of shut off and I left her there, crying, and drove out to the Ginger Man. I can see now that it was a mistake, and extremely unchristian, but if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have met Sarah, an artist from California who brought me home that evening, drunk, and eventually became my girlfriend, sort of. She had a wonderful body and a nice way of explaining how even my worst faults weren’t even my fault—my mother and her long-dead husband were to blame. It
made July and August more bearable. It didn’t hurt that she had a stash of the best skunk weed I’d ever smoked.

  Anyway, Austin is another story. The point is that, with Sarah’s help, I survived Texas, even though my mother didn’t. She died on August 21 or 22—at least, I found her around noon on the 22nd after a long night with Sarah. She was in the kitchen, surrounded by a scattering of about a hundred pills in six different flavors. Staring at her, I thought about our last conversation from the day before, when she asked why I hated her so much. I didn’t hate her, I said. I didn’t hate anybody. “That’s because you don’t care about anyone,” she told me.

  Dealing with the bureaucracy of death was beyond me, so once Jenna arrived in her big sunglasses and blingy fingers, I gave Sarah a lot of empty promises, called Jerry, and flew back to Chicago.

  He was looking tired when he picked me up at the airport, driving his uncle’s Subaru, but he also looked better. He’d cut his stringy hair short, close on the sides, and he’d tamed his errant unibrow. Also, he looked taller, maybe a half inch. I checked his shoes, but he was wearing the same old sneakers. “Drink?” he asked once we were on the highway into town.

  “Two, please.”

  We went downtown and parked at the Kerryman, an Irish bar across from the Chinese consulate and a Walgreens that advertised, in English and Chinese, passport photos for $7.99. The inside looked like every Irish bar I’d been in, and after waiting for him to bring two pints of Killian’s Red to the table, I asked him about his criminal enterprise. He didn’t smile. “I’m making progress,” he said without a trace of humor. “Good progress. Collecting funds.”

  “Robbing liquor stores?”

  “Of course not,” he said, almost a sneer.

  “Don’t tell me you got a job.”

  “A guy like me,” he said, raising his glass, “I make my own job description.”

  “Well, you’ve got the attitude down pat.”

  He finally smiled, and with the smile it occurred to me that he really was different. The old Jerry would have been smiling from the start, cracking jokes about me and himself. He hadn’t even asked how things had gone with my mom—condolences hadn’t occurred to him.

  “So how are you collecting funds?” I asked.

  He arched his brow—a new mannerism—and asked if I could keep my mouth shut. I told him I could. He said, “I’m selling things.”

  “Your uncle’s TV?”

  “Information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “The kind of information that important people need.”

  It was an elusive enough statement that I had to give him a hard stare, one of those looks that tells someone that he’s not going anywhere until he spills the beans. He finally said, “Across the street.”

  Though I knew what he was talking about, I pretended I didn’t. “You’re selling information to Walgreens?”

  An impatient “What?” The impatience was new, too.

  I leaned closer, lowering my voice. The Kerryman was empty enough that this was necessary. “You’re selling secrets to the Chinese?”

  He bobbed his brow now—what was with all the facial expressions? Only later did I realize that he’d been living off a diet of Bond films and their lesser imitations, where arch expressions came with the territory.

  I said, “But you don’t know any secrets, Jerry.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  He shook his head, lips pouty.

  “You actually walked into that building and said, ‘Excuse me, but I’d like to sell you some secrets?’”

  “Something like that. They kicked me out the first time, but when I came back a guy asked me into a back room to talk.”

  “And you sold him what, exactly?”

  “Information.”

  There were obvious questions to ask at this point, issues of how and why, but I didn’t ask any of those things. Instead, I said, “So how much do you get for this information?”

  “Depends on how good it is. That first time, I got about three thousand. In cash. For one hour’s conversation.”

  My last job, at Einstein Bros. Bagels, had netted me nine bucks an hour, before taxes. I whistled.

  “See what I mean?” Jerry said.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you mean?”

  “I mean that I’m done with chump work. This isn’t hard—it’s hardly even dangerous—and with one visit I can pull in more than a month of a nine-to-five.”

  “But it can’t go on, can it? I mean, you fool them once…”

  “Who says I’m fooling them?”

  Briefly, I couldn’t find the words. “But, Jerry. Whatever you’re telling them you’re making up. They’re not idiots—they’ll figure it out soon enough. Two meetings, max, and then you’re screwed.”

  “I’m not making things up,” he said after a significant pause. “You know how much time I spend researching things. What I give them are the results of my research.”

  “Have you told them this?”

  “Of course not. They think I’ve got a friend who works for the Feds.”

  “But you don’t.”

  “Tom, you’re getting flushed. Drink. I’ve met with them five times, and they don’t have a clue. I’ve got another meeting scheduled for tomorrow.”

  I did the math in my head. Five times three grand. In three months he’d filled a savings account, while I’d gone even broker watching my mother wither away.

  “Look, I know it can’t go on forever,” Jerry said in the middle of my math. “This is a temporary project. I’ve just made contact with another consulate.”

  “Jesus, the Russians?”

  “They’ve got no consulate here. I’ll have to go to Washington or Manhattan for that. Later. But there’s a little Serbian consulate over a 7-Eleven on Ohio Street. I doubt they’ll pay as much as the Chinese, but they’ll pay. I should be able to sell the same intelligence to the Croatians over on Michigan Avenue. Pakistan is a possibility. There are dozens of consulates in town, and by the time I’m done I should have a pretty healthy savings.”

  “For SPECTRE?”

  “Yes,” he said, straight-faced. “I’m thinking about calling it that.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shrugged. “It’s untraceable. I’m not going to call it Jerry McLaughlin, Inc., after all. And it’s a great name: Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. I mean, it’s awesome.”

  I think it was then that my palms started to sweat profusely. Though I’d realized before then that he was serious, it was only at the mention of a name for his criminal organization that my body really grasped the heft of what he was telling me. A part of me wanted to talk some sense into him—he was going to get caught, and soon, long before he had amassed much of a fortune—while another part of me wanted to ask for a job. At the same time, though, I understood that this was a different Jerry. I wasn’t going to talk sense into him. He’d been changed by his minor successes, and he was no longer the deadbeat who flopped at his uncle’s house. In other words, he was no longer like me—not in his own mind, at least. A part of me even considered walking into the FBI office over on West Roosevelt and turning him in—would there be a reward?

  In the end, of course, I did none of these things. I only played along, listening to his plans. Once he’d collected enough money—he refused to say how much “enough” was—he would bring in a gunman and, over the space of a week, commit a series of robberies. “A week on the outside, and then nothing. Most criminals make the mistake of thinking they can keep shitting in their own backyard. Not me. We hit them with a quick series of jobs, and then fade away. We’ll be done with Chicago. We go somewhere else, do the same thing, and then move on. By March, we’ll be millionaires. We’ll move the base of operations out of the country.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Hell, no. Some drug cartel will shoot us down.”

  I re
membered all those Bond films. “You’re going to buy an island.”

  “That would be nice, but no. It’s another of those big mistakes. It’s like putting down a flag and saying, Come get me! There’s no escape from an island. I want a place I can retreat from if necessary.”

  “But with a warm climate.”

  He smiled again, but it wasn’t the smile of happiness. It was the smile of superiority. “Greenland. They expect you to go somewhere nice, so instead you go to a country that’s covered in ice.”

  “And then?” I said.

  “And then, to work.”

  “Yes…?”

  “The big plans begin.”

  “You’re not going to tell me the big plans.”

  No, he wasn’t, not yet. But after five beers, when the bar was full and we had to raise our voices to hear each other, he said, “Hit the oil and they’ll pay anything.”

  It wasn’t particularly original, but originality wasn’t his aim.

  “Later we can put laser satellites in space, swallow nuclear submarines and shit. But first, you go to Galveston.”

  “Galveston… Texas?”

  “Major oil port. Make it look as if you’ve planted bombs in key locations—or maybe you do plant some bombs (I haven’t figured that out yet)—and send a message to the President. A half billion dollars, or you see one port wasted, and the country’s oil supply totally disrupted.”

  I was drunk enough that these subjects weren’t making me sweat anymore. They were still so hypothetical that I could treat them as fantasy. I said, “In that case, you do it when the streets are full.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Mardi Gras.”

  He stared at me a moment, considering that, then blinked. “I forgot. You’re from Texas.” He seemed to have forgotten that he and I had grown up together, but there wasn’t much point reminding him. He just stared into the mid-distance between us, envisioning a scene from a film, his film, of Homeland Security agents stumbling frustrated through crowds of drunken idiots in face paints, a soundtrack of throbbing drums. This time his smile had a touch of lust to it. He said, “You want a job?”