Gun Church Read online

  In any case, I had foreshadowed that scene earlier in the book when Kant is forced to improvise a new trading strategy as a crisis in the Middle East-yeah, like that could ever happen-forces oil prices to soar. Pandora, who up until that point had been cool to Huxley’s advances, gets totally hot for him while watching him ad-lib a new strategy with billions of dollars on the line. Later in the book, when Kant feels Pandora slipping away, he pays the desperate Marx to act the role of the vengeful partner. Of course it all goes wrong in the end.

  “It has to be a distinctive-looking gun,” I had told Bart.

  Bart, who was a complete gun nut, had first selected a Luger. “Behold!” he said, carefully removing the Luger from its original packaging, handling it as delicately as a slippery newborn. He laid it across the palms of his white gloves. “Fine German craftsmanship and machining; an intricate firing mechanism, beautifully balanced, and its shape … Kipster, there are few things on this earth as immediately recognizable simply by its shape than a Luger.”

  “No, Bart. I want something brutal and American, the firearms equivalent of a muscle car.”

  “I’ve got just the thing: an elegant beast.” With that, he curled the fingers of my left hand around the grip of a hefty, blue metal revolver with a weird-looking barrel. “Meet the Colt Python.357 Magnum: the Rolls-Royce of American handguns. That’s a 1955, one of the first Royal Blues with a six-inch barrel off the production line.”

  Now as I stood across the classroom from Vuchovich, I struggled to remember what else Bart had taught me that day nearly three decades back and how I had used it in the book. Problem was he hadn’t told me much.

  I played for time. “Is the Python yours?”

  A smile. “It’s mine now.”

  Good. This was progress. I gave myself an invisible pat on the back.

  “A 1955?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Vuchovich, his cold eyes receding into their original broody slits. “You tell me, since you seem to know so much.”

  This was not progress. In the span of a few seconds I’d changed the dynamic from common ground into a pissing contest.

  “That’s a trick question, Mr. Vuchovich,” I said, inching slowly closer. “I’d have to see the serial number.”

  The smile turned malevolent, detached-a smile as disconnected from joy as a legless man’s collection of spare shoes. His finger was back on the trigger. “You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you?”

  Clever! I hated the word. Clever is what my father used to call me. I wasn’t smart or bright or talented. I was clever. Drunk as he was most of the time, I suppose I should have been pleased he noticed I was alive.

  I found that I was no longer inching toward Vuchovich, but taking full strides. The room got deadly silent.

  “Hold the gun out into the light again!” I barked at the kid.

  He complied, extending his arm and lifting the Colt so that it was once again captured by the sun. I was now no more than a few feet away and on a very, very lonely island.

  The scene in Flashing Pandora, as originally conceived, had Harper Marx angrily waving the gun at Kant and Pandora. Kant, as always, would act like he had everything under control, which-having paid Marx off to load the burly gun with blanks-Kant would assume he had. Already rendered impotent, literally and figuratively, by his financial ruination and impending trial, Marx had different plans. There would be no blanks in this gun. He meant to kill Pandora, the only possession in Kant’s life that was more to him than just another proper noun. I needed a way for Kant Huxley to prevent Harper Marx from taking a shot at him after shooting Pandora.

  “That’s easy, Kipster,” Bart said. “Have Kant grab the cylinder and hold it tight against the gun frame.”

  “Grab the cylinder? That’s fucking crazy!”

  “Here, try it. There’s not a person alive who can exert enough trigger pressure to make the cylinder spin if it’s being held properly. Pull the hammer back and then when I grab the cylinder, try to pull the trigger. Ready?”

  … Kant’s ears were still ringing from the shot. Harper Marx’s eyes were as loving as a shark’s, black and cold as the sea at night. He turned and saw Pandora slumped against the soot-stained Bowery brick, her blood turning pink in the rain.

  “Too bad it’s raining, Huxley, old chum,” Marx snickered. “You’ll never hail a cab in this weather. Let me save you the trouble.”

  Kant grabbed the gun.

  Bart grabbed the gun.

  I grabbed the gun.

  It dawned on me, perhaps a little too late, that this was hand to weapon and not words on the page. I peeked over my shoulder to see my students frozen in place, still huddled in the opposite corner.

  “Run! Get the fuck out of here!”

  Now there was a mad rush, the pressure that had built up in the room over the last several hours exploding out the door in a single panicked burst. It all happened so fast that I half expected the chairs and textbooks to be sucked out the door in the wash. I felt myself smile, thinking about the St. Pauli Girl being proud of Grandpa.

  Outside the door someone was screaming, “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

  Vuchovich, who like the rest of the class had seemed momentarily stunned by my newly grown balls, had scrambled to his feet and was tugging on the gun. I clamped my other hand on the gun and leaned back for leverage. Vuchovich lost his balance. As he pitched forward, I stumbled backward, reflexively throwing out my arms to cushion the fall. On the way down I had the following thoughts:

  Fuck!

  I hope I don’t fall on my wallet.

  I wonder where Amy is right now?

  It’s amazing what you think about sometimes.

  The ironic thing about the “Passion Play” chapter in Flashing Pandora was that I never used it. Moira Blanco hated it.

  “It’s too facile, too off the shelf, Kipling.” That’s what she used to call me. “You want to take Pandora away from Kant without killing her. Her death would be painful for Kant, but not crippling. You want to cripple Kant, to punish him for his transgressions. If you want to cripple him, she must survive and live just beyond his reach.”

  She was right. Moira, in contrast to her angry young men, had lived a little. She felt her job was to introduce subtlety to the young writer’s palette.

  “Men get older, Kipling, but they never do grow up.”

  She was right about that too. I was living testament to it.

  I edited the chapter so that Harper Marx lures both Kant and Pandora up to the roof of his old loft building in SoHo. He holds them at bay with a chef’s knife, explaining in excruciating detail to Pandora how Kant ruined him, how Kant had paid him to play the part of the vengeful partner, how he was supposed to menace them the following night at CBGB. When Marx sees that Pandora believes him in spite of Kant’s feverish denials, Marx leans over the edge of the building and plunges to his death. Like the smell of my father’s suicide, I hadn’t thought about that chapter in decades.

  I peered up at Frank Vuchovich standing over me, that blue hunk of metal in his hand. He looked more perplexed than angry, as if he hadn’t ever considered the endgame. He just sort of stared at the gun as if it held the answer about what to do next. He might just as well have clicked the heels of his ruby slippers or strung together all his blown-out birthday candle wishes for the good it would do him.

  “Frank, put it-”

  A window shattered. I felt the spray of warm liquid on my face before I could make sense of it. Another window broke and the kid sat down on stringless legs; his head making a sickening thud as it smacked against the tile floor. I scrambled over to him, but it was no use. The shots had ripped holes through his heart and liver. Death had come so quickly that Frank Vuchovich hadn’t had time to rearrange his expression. He was puzzled even in death. And in that second I felt every feeling I’d ever felt, including things that hadn’t stirred in me for a very long time.

  Three

  Keith Richards

  “Lazy,
undisciplined, untalented writers who can’t figure out bridge scenes-how to get from point A to point B-employ dream sequences.”

  I never forgot Professor Archer Knox’s admonition, although I stopped quoting it to my own classes a long time ago. The Kipster was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. By the advent of the ’90s, I was Archer Knox’s poster boy. Money had made me lazy. Coke made me undisciplined. And who the fuck knew what disappeared my talent?

  I had included dream sequences in my last three novels and they were some of the best things in the books. That’s when I knew my career had come to utter shit. Talk about work destined for the remainder bin! If it hadn’t been for Meg Donovan, I wouldn’t have even bothered retrieving the rights to those books.

  “Christ, Meg, it’s like asking the surgeon for the tumor back.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Weiler. You can’t afford it.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me, your agent.”

  “Who in their right mind is going to pay me to put out new editions of this puke? If no one liked lunch going down, they’re not going to like it any better coming back up.”

  “This is publishing, Kip! Since when does logic have anything to do with it?”

  I may have written my final dream sequence many years earlier, but I seemed to have been living in an extended one these last couple of weeks. I had appeared on all the network morning shows. I had done the circuit before in the ’80s, many times; although, my memories of those spots ranged from vague to nonexistent. I was usually hung over, sometimes drunk, and often lit up like a Christmas tree. By ’89, I was live television poison and my on-air comments about the size and shape of Jane Pauley’s ass hadn’t exactly helped my cause.

  Meg had hoped to slap some sense into me by sharing with me what the head publicist at Ferris, Ledoux had told her about trying to book me on the morning shows.

  “Kip, a producer at GMA told your head publicist to go fuck herself. She said that watching Capote self-destruct on air was one thing, that him doing it was Greek tragedy, but that you were an incoherent clown. ‘If I want incoherence, I’ll book Keith Richards. If I want a clown, I’ll book Bozo. When your guy writes In Cold Blood, I’ll think about it.’ That’s what she said.”

  But I laughed it off as I laughed everything off in those days because I’d yet to hit bottom. I had no way of knowing the terminus would be Grand Central Nowhere and that it would smell of pine tar and asphalt.

  For now, all the satellite trucks had gone back to the state capital or New York City or whatever termite mound they crawled out of. The Newsweek, Time, and People reporters were history. Even the local rags had moved on to the next school shooting and photos of the county’s biggest pumpkin. School was back in session. Frank Vuchovich was buried. The police had finished up their investigations, such as they were. Cashiers, who for weeks had refused my attempts to pay for my meals, were once again accepting my money. My bottomless cup of coffee was drying up. But not everything had returned to the rocky depths of normalcy.

  I hadn’t slept soundly for two weeks, which, I suppose, wasn’t altogether a bad thing because at some point every night I would find myself in front of my laptop. There was one night when my shaking hand had gone to Documents and I’d double clicked on the file saved as McGuinn.doc. It wasn’t exactly cause for celebration. The file was nearly as empty as my soul.

  McGuinn.doc was nothing more than a collection of feeble first lines from a book I had wanted to write for many years. Problem was that by the time the inspiration train pulled into the station, the train with my talent aboard had long since pulled out. So over the course of the last decade and a half, I would, upon occasion, sit and cringe at what I’d written:

  Terry McGuinn

  Terry McGuinn killed.

  Terry McGuinn was a killer.

  Terry McGuinn was an assassin.

  What Terry McGuinn did could not be called a living.

  He was a nondescript man of no discernable age who drank like he

  I met the ghost of Terry McGuinn in a pub in Deptford High Street and

  That one there, the one about the ghost of Terry McGuinn was the one with the most promise, but I had no promise. I had nothing to add after the and. I cursed the day I met the man who I always thought of as Terry McGuinn; rather, I cursed the timing of it. He’d actually never told me his name.

  It was during that period in my life when simple downward momentum had succumbed to gravity and it was all going to shit-when my world was a blur of cocaine, alcohol, and fading celebrity. You can’t imagine how desperately you want to hang on to celebrity until it begins to fade. Bill Septan, a friend of mine at Rolling Stone, wanted to assign someone to do a long piece on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but he said he was sick to death of the unremittingly dark tales of woe that came out of the place. For some bizarre reason, he seemed to think the Kipster’s biting cynicism was a good fit for the piece. The whole idea was madness, of course. I jumped at the chance. It offered all sorts of things that appealed to my worst instincts: money, escape, and a chance to fuck up on the big stage.

  I didn’t disappoint. Not only did I have nothing fresh to write, I had no juice in the tank with which to write it. No one who spent five minutes in that bubbling caldron of religious hatred, political radicalism, and violence would question why the reporting from the North was categorically dark, moody, and full of woe. But I had to write something in order to collect the kill fee from the magazine. The only thing I could be cynical about was my own pathetic life, so that’s exactly what I wrote about: my endless pub crawl from the Catholic ghettos of Belfast to the streets of London. Naturally, the day after I faxed my piece to Rolling Stone, I met a nameless man in a bar in Deptford.

  I was in Deptford because I vaguely remembered-I suppose all of my memories from those days were vague-that the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe had been murdered there and because the band Squeeze came from there. I liked Squeeze a lot more than Marlowe, frankly: more danceable, catchier lyrics. Some literary genius I turned out to be, huh? I was just getting started on my afternoon drunk when a man walked over to my booth.

  “Yer Weiler, then? Would ya mind if I pulled in the snug next to ya there?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

  His charming introduction aside, his voice lacked any hint of the disarming lilt Americans associate with an Irish brogue. On the contrary, there was menace in his alcohol-thick voice and a distance in his stare that stretched light years. At about five eight with a pot belly, sandy hair going thin and gray, a rough and ruddy complexion, and bad teeth, he was utterly unremarkable: a laborer or lorry driver, not an assassin, certainly.

  I offered him my hand. “What should I call you?”

  “Whatever ya fancy.”

  “How about McGuinn?” I said, picking a name out of the air.

  “Good a name as any.”

  We drank to it.

  He said, “I hear ya’ve been to the North looking for a story.”

  “And you have one?”

  “We’ll see about that, lad,” he said. “Come ’round the churchyard at St. Nicholas half ten and we’ll chat.”

  The meeting with McGuinn all those years ago, that’s what I was thinking about when the doorbell rang.

  It was late. Then again, late was a relative concept. Back in the day, I’d just be firing up the engine about now and the brittle blonds with their vampire complexions and C-note nostrils would just about be rising from their cocaine coffins. These days, “late” was defined by the local news. And local news doesn’t get more local than in a place like Brixton. The bell rang again; my laptop screen still displaying the sum total of my literary output over the last decade-plus: seven first lines of a book never to be written. I figured I’d better get the door.

  I trudged down the stairs and through the vestibule to the front door. In spite of having rented this big old house on Spruce Path for the past six years, I felt a strange unease in the place.
I was an apartment rat by temperament. House-living fit me like a fat man’s coveralls. I was lost in space. Around Brixton there were more synagogues (one) and mosques (one under construction) than rentable apartments. The closest rentable apartments were over the state line and if I’d been willing to pay state income tax, I would have made the move and done the daily commute. But at the whopping salary of $37,400 per annum, I could afford neither the luxury of more taxes nor the extra gas. Besides, what I paid per year for a three-bedroom house with a garage on a few acres would just about pay the security deposit for a one-bedroom in Chelsea.

  I pulled back the front door.

  “Renee!”

  The St. Pauli Girl stood on the porch dressed in low-cut denim skin, a midriff top, and a brown hoodie. Her navel was pierced-a small silver cross dangling on a short chain. Her nipples asserted themselves in the chilly night air. She stared directly into my eyes, her rapid breaths visible in the moonlight. Without a word, she kissed me softly on the mouth. I might have said something vaguely romantic if I could have separated my thoughts from my desire.

  “Aren’t you cold? Would you like to come in?”

  “Shhhhh,” she said, placing her index finger across my lips. “Thank you for saving me.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Please come.”

  I stood there, frozen, watching her retreat down the porch steps. I listened to the crunch of her footfalls, the slamming of a car door, tires spitting up gravel. I followed her taillights until they became red pinpoints darting through the trees like deer eyes. When I lost sight of her car, I looked down at the piece of paper. Somehow I couldn’t quite focus.

  Four

  Gun Smoke and Blood

  I thought I was lost.