The Goldfinch

“I’d like to hear that phone call to Sascha.”

“I wish I knew the name of the guy. That stood them up. Because I would like to buy him a drink.”

“Wonder where he is?”

“He is probably at home in the shower.”

“Studying his Bible lesson.”

“Watching ‘Christmas Carol’ on television.”

“Waiting at the wrong place, most like.”

“I—” My throat was so constricted I had to swallow to speak. “What about that kid?”

“Eh?” It was raining, light rain pattering on the windshield. Streets black and glistening.

“What kid?”

“Boy. Girl. Kitchen boy. Whatever.”

“What?” Cherry turned—still winded, breathing hard. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“I didn’t either.”

“Well, I did.”

“What’d she look like?”

“Young.” I could still see the freeze-frame of the young ghostly face, mouth slightly open. “White coat. Japanese-looking.”

“Really?” said Boris curiously. “You can tell apart by looking? Like where they are from? Japan, China, Vietnam?”

“I didn’t get a good look. Asian.”

“He, or she?”

“I think is all girls that work in the kitchen there,” said Gyuri. “Macrobyotik. Brown rice and like that.”

“I—” Now I really wasn’t sure.

“Well—” Cherry ran his hand over the top of his close-cropped hair—“glad she ran, whoever, because you know what else I found back there? Sawed-off Mossberg 500.”

Laughter and whistles at this.

“Shit.”

“Where was it? Grozdan didn’t—?”

“No. In a—” he gestured, to indicate a sling—“what do you call it. Hanging under the table, in some cloth like. Just happened to see it when I was down on the floor. Like—looked up. There it was, right over my head.”

“You didn’t leave it there, did you?”

“No! I wouldn’t have minded to take it except was too big and had my hands full. Unscrewed it and knocked the pin out and threw it in the alley. Also—” he pulled a silver snub-nosed pistol out of his pocket, which he passed over to Boris—“this!”

Boris held it up to the light and looked at it.

“Nice little conceal-carry J-frame. Ankle holster in those bell bottom jeans! But to his misfortune he was not quick enough.”

“Flexcuffs,” said Gyuri to me, with slightly inclined head. “Vitya thinks ahead.”

“Well—” Cherry wiped the sweat from his broad forehead—“they are light and slim to carry, and they have saved me many times shooting people. I do not like to hurt anyone if I don’t have to.”

Medieval city: crooked streets, lights draped on bridges and shining off rain-peppered canals, melting in the drizzle. Infinity of anonymous shops, twinkling window displays, lingerie and garter belts, kitchen utensils arrayed like surgical instruments, foreign words everywhere, Snel bestellen, Retro-stijl, Showgirl-Sexboetiek.

“Back door was open to the alley,” said Cherry, elbowing off his sports coat and swigging from a bottle of vodka which Shirley T. had produced from under the front seat—hands a bit shaky and his face, the nose particularly, glowing a flagrant, stressed-out, Rudolph red. “They must have left it open for him—their third man—to come in at the back. I closed it and locked it—made Grozdan close and lock it, gun to his head, he was snivel and crying like baby—”

“That Mossberg,” Boris said to me, accepting the bottle passed over the front seat. “Evil dirty thing. Sawed off—? sprays pellets here to Hamburg. Aim it way the fuck away from everyone and still you will hit half the people in the room.”

“Good trick, no?” said Victor Cherry philosophically. “To say your third man is not there? ‘Wait five minutes, please’? ‘Sorry, mix up’—? ‘He will be here any moment’? While he is all the time in back with the shotgun. Good double cross, if they had thought of it—”

“Maybe they did think of it. Why else have the gun back there?”

“I think we had a narrow miss, is what I think—”

“There was one car pulled up front, scared Shirley and me,” said Gyuri, “while you were all in there, two guys, we thought we were in the shit but was only two gays, French guys, looking for restaurant—”

“—but no one in the back, thank God, I got Grozdan on the floor and cuffed him to radiator,” Cherry was saying. “Ah, but—!” he held up the felt-wrapped package—“first. This. For you.”

He handed it over the seat to Gyuri, who—gingerly, with his fingertips, as if it were a tray he might spill—passed it to me. Boris—downing his slug, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand—chucked me gaily in the arm with the bottle while humming we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas

Package on my knees. Ru

“Go on,” said Boris, nodding, “better open it, make sure it’s not the Civics book this time! Where was it?” he asked Cherry as I began to fumble with the string.

“Dirty little broom closet. Piece-of-shit plastic briefcase. Grozdan took me right to it. I thought he might fuck around a bit but burner at the head was all it took. No sense getting popped when all that good space cake still around for the taking.”

“Potter,” said Boris, trying to get my attention; and then again: “Potter.”

“Yes?”

Lifting the briefcase. “This 40 rocks is going to Gyuri and Shirley T. Keeping them green. For services rendered. Because it is thanks to these two that we did not pay Sascha one cent for the favor of stealing your property. And Vitya—” reaching across to clasp his hand—“we are more than equal now. The debt is mine.”

“No, I can never repay what I owe you, Borya.”

“Forget it. Is nothing.”

“Nothing? Nothing? Not true, Borya, because this very night I carry my life because of you, and every night until the last night…”

It was an interesting story he was telling, if I’d had ears to listen to it—someone had fingered Cherry for some unspecified but apparently very serious crime which he had not committed, nothing to do with, perfectly i

“See?” said Boris, interrupting Vitya right in the heat of his story. “Looks good, no, your zolotaia ptitsa? I told you we took care of it, didn’t I?”

Ru

“He still alive back there?” Victor Cherry.

“Think so.” Boris dug an elbow in my ribs. “Say something.”

But I couldn’t. It was real; I knew it, even in the dark. Raised yellow streak of paint on the wing and feathers scratched in with the butt of the brush. One chip on the upper left edge that hadn’t been there before, tiny mar less than two millimeters, but otherwise: perfect. I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.