The Boston Tangler
Chapter Four: The gathering storm
By Roland Merullo
"So the first date, it goes OK, Louie pal?" Max Twice asked, as they sat over their ice cream sundaes late on Monday afternoon.
Louis nodded, balancing a maraschino on his spoon. "Perfect." He had not told Max - or anyone else - about the suspicions the ATM blackout had raised in him. What was there to tell? That he and Luba, the new woman in his life, had said a few words about ATMs on their first date, and then, just as they were kissing goodnight, all the ATMs in the city had gone berserk? Since Alicia, he had no patience at all for the extrasensory: psychic readings, energy fields, climbing certain mountains at certain times of the year to receive the blessings of the universe. That was his ex-wife's territory.
"Any the kiss activity?"
Louis held up one finger.
Max produced a smile unstained by even a trace of concupiscence. "Now you will start to think about the lovemaking, about taking off the suit for protection you wear."
"Whoa, Max. Months I've gone with no lovemaking in my life. Years. The bigger part of certain decades. I'm 35, not 19. When the sex comes, fine, but ... "
"Sure. Of course. Naturally," Max told him. "But what now I'm saying is, you start thinking about the lovemaking. Tell me you already aren't."
"I'm not. I am."
"See. Also is she. It pulls your thoughts like magnet, the first lovemaking. This is why, during old days, they didn't let it be until after the wedding."
Chalk one up for the new days, then, Louis thought, but another little downpour of anxiety was soaking him. The old days. Hadn't Luba said something about the Old Days, in that same tone? And didn't Boston's string of strange occurrences point in that direction as well - the good old days, without ATMs, subway announcements, video replays at Fenway Park? The media had started to connect these events, too, suggesting they might be the work of pranksters waging war on the forces of progress and modernity. Some columnist had even come up with a name for the mystery criminal: The Boston Tangler.
"What do you think about this Tangler thing?" he said, to get Max off the subject of sex.
Max's face lit up. "I was waiting for you to say about it. It's you, isn't it?" he said. "You're the Dangler."
"Tangler."
"Yes."
"No. Of course not. What the heck are you talking about?"
"Don't worry, Louie. They were pressing on Maximov again, like the old days. Asking, pressing. Maximov doesn't stitch on his friends."
"Snitch. Who's pressing? What are they pressing? What is being pressed?"
"The two cops - the giant and the woman chewing gum. They come again this morning in the garage, asking about Louie Robinson and the money machines. I tell them you have nothing to do with this Dangler, don't know anybody who has nothing to do with it."
"Thanks."
Max was positively beaming now. He reached out and squeezed Louis's shoulder in one strong hand. "You will make people think about life they lead, Louie. Fast all the time. Machine life, no good for the mind inside."
Legitimately innocent though he was, Louis did not have the energy just then to plead his case. His will to resist Max's assumptions seemed to be mired in a bog of self-pity the likes of which he hadn't waded through since the divorce. A little romance in his life, finally, and it had to be mixed up with questions of law and loyalty, the police, the press. "Somebody has to turn the world right side up again," he said, weakly.
Max winked at him like a co-conspirator. They finished their snack and strode out into the humid evening.
They were standing at the subway entrance, about to go their separate ways, when Louis glanced at a nearby newsstand and saw that the Tangler story had made the headlines onPage 1.
"I'm proud for you, my friend," Max whispered. "Just don't end up in the jail. Your new girlfriend will have her heart breaking."
"Right."
"What's anyway her name, this woman? You never told."
"Luba."
"Luba!" Max Twice shouted. Passersby glanced at them and then quickly away. "Do you know what means in Russian, Luba? `Love!' Is the short name for love!"
Even worried as he was, Louis had to smile at this.
"What about the last name?"
"Neazhidana. Accent on the zhee."
Max's smile stretched until it seemed his face would split in two. "`Unexpected,' in Russian, this means."
"Unexpected love," Louis said. "True enough."
Max wrapped him in a bear hug, giving him a small chiropractic adjustment at the same time. "The real Louie Robinson now is coming out," he said. "Revolution-maker, lover for executive woman with beautiful Russian name. Max likes."
But Louis didn't like. Nor, upon returning home to Allston, did he like finding the police standing in front of his house when he made the corner from Brighton Ave. onto Linden. It was the police again, Small and Bella; they seemed to be working overtime on the case. He had an urge to duck down Ashford Street and run, but he made himself walk on.
"Come to confess?" Bella asked. She was working her nightstick up and down in its loop, snapping her gum. She had eyes like bullets.
"No, I live here. I thought you knew. I thought you were here to ask me more questions."
The two officers looked at each other, then back at him. "We're on another case," Bella said, though it seemed to Louis an obvious lie.
"Your neighbor from Haiti, the so-called phone psychic."
"Vizelot?" Louis said. "What did she do? Tell somebody they'd get famous and find love, and it didn't work out?"
Bella hooked two thumbs under the top of her belt, and wiggled her revolver around uncomfortably. "You're not here about Vizzy," Louis said. "You're here about me. You're assigned to the Tangler case, and you think I have something to do with it. I don't. You can ask me any questions you want, and I'll tell you everything I know without even having a lawyer present. That's how innocent I am."
This offer proved more than Small and Bella could resist. They followed Louis up to his apartment and sat in the living room while he brewed a pot of coffee and set out a plate with hummus and triangles of pita bread. Small seemed grateful for the unexpected hospitality. Bella frowned at the strong coffee, ran her eyes around the apartment, spending a long time studying two framed Wyeth posters, as if they were evidence of an old-fashioned attitude, a resistance to the vibrant ugliness of so much contemporary painting. Too pretty, too accessible, too much a reflection of the recognizable world to be considered real art.
"We weren't here to see you," Small said. "Really. But we do have some questions, as it turns out."
"Shoot," Louis said. Bella looked at her partner's gun, then away.
"You were married at one time, correct?" "Yes."
"To Alicia Robinson, formerly Bogart."
"Right."
"Who did some time for a drug charge," Bella said.
"Marijuana," Louis admitted. "She was growing marijuana in our backyard in Saugus. We had a little house there. I thought it was some kind of decorative bamboo or something."
At this, Bella snorted. Louis stared her down.
"And you were the one who turned her in?"
"No, no. She thought I was the one. That's what made her divorce me. For being disloyal, you know, for snitching to the cops about her little stash."
"So you didn't turn her in, then."
"I didn't know about it, I tell you. She didn't smoke it - she ate it. Cooked it in brownies. I don't eat brownies. My dog Cookie choked to death on a brownie when I was a kid. I never touch them."
"What do you think of the modern world?" Small asked suddenly.
"What?"
"The modern world. What do you think of it?"
Louis had a cup of gourmet coffee in his right hand and a triangle of hummus-laden pita in his left. At this startling question, the phrase "Satan's playground" leapt to his mouth, and he bit down on it so hard his front teeth ached. Satan's playground. It was something he'd heard Vizelot say once or twice: "The modern world is Satan's playground, Louie." Without meaning to, he glanced at the wall between their apartments. When he looked back, both officers were staring at him. He took a sip of coffee, and then, absolutely unable to stop himself, proclaimed: "I believe the modern world is Satan's playground."
ufdropp,2That incautious comment catapulted Louis Robinson into the top rank of Tangler suspects and began the next stage of his transformation. This transformation was, in a sense, similar to the way nature makes diamonds from coal, a process involving great heat and pressure. Is this not the way all evolution works, including the evolution of the soul? Isn't it the heat and pressure of living - the bumps of childhood, the furnace of adolescence, the skirmishes of failed relationship, then the career ladder, in some cases marriage and child-rearing - that forge that rare creature, the genuine adult?
Louis might not have said so. His degree in English literature (four years wasted, as he saw it), the failed marriage to Alicia (three more wasted years), four years of lonely bachelorhood - these hardly seemed to him like evidence of some benevolent force of nature, nudging him along the road to perfection. And yet, that was what Max Twice kept telling him. Max Twice, who had survived a horror few people ever know - and turned into a good husband, a good father, a good friend. "What plans we make never happens," as he liked to put it. "We figure for yourself route one, you get pushed down route two. Because is better for us, Louie, route two, only we don't know it."
As the millennium's last July moved toward its steamy conclusion, Louis Robinson did, indeed, find himself traveling a route he could never have imagined. Though Bella and Small acceded to his request that they no longer interview him - or his friends - on company property, their attention was unwavering. The middle of the summer was littered with Tangles: automatic toll booths malfunctioning; elevator Muzak being replaced by the taped ranting of fanatical Luddites; gas pumps spitting out credit cards so that two humans were forced to complete the transaction face to face; graffiti artists spraying GIVE RURAL NEW ENGLAND A REAL TRAIN SYSTEM on the face of South Station. And with each new strike of the Boston Tangler, Bella and Small made another visit to 898 Linden Street. They requested copies of Louis's trip sheets and asked about his habits, his friends, his religious and athletic affiliations.
This, of course, made Louis jumpy. The jumpiness made him take refuge in an increased coffee intake. The increased coffee intake, coupled with his tweaked pride, led him increasingly, perhaps perversely, to dangle before Bella and Small the wholly imaginary possibility of his involvement in Boston's great summer scandal.
All this, though, was neatly balanced by the evolving relationship with Luba the Unexpected One. They went on several more dates, each involving great food. There was a near-perfect breakfast at Gerard's in Dorchester, a gourmet vegetarian lunch at The Five Seasons in Brookline, a wonderful dinner at Jae's in the South End, a superb steak sub at Ronnie's in Roxbury. With each meal, and the walk they took after each meal, and the kissing and touching and talking that followed upon the heels of every walk, Louis came to know Luba better and to like her more.
Her father, it turned out, had emigrated from Uzbekistan (Max Twice, whose prison camp had been located in Uzbekistan, practically had a stroke in his enthusiasm, telling Louis what fine people the Uzbekis were), and her mother was a part-African woman from Costa Rica. Luba had made pilgrimages to both places over the last two summers. One night every week, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women in the Back Bay. One evening every week, she golfed in a mixed league somewhere on the North Shore. Louis, who had never traveled but badly wanted to, who had a tremendous aversion to physical violence of any stripe, and who'd been addicted to golf since his teens, took all of this as only more evidence of the inevitability of their eventual happy union.
And thoughts of this union, as Max had predicted, moved inexorably to the forefront of his days. The fire that had been kindled by their first kiss caught and spread in the heat of midsummer as if their bodies were made of nothing but dry brush in Yellowstone.
By the last days of July, it was apparent to both of them that the hour of their relationship's consummation was approaching like a freight in the dark, unstoppable.
Or nearly so. On the last Friday of that month, they had dinner at Sai Gon, a lovely little Vietnamese restaurant in Allston, just a few blocks away from Louis's apartment. There were thunderstorms predicted, and they could see flashes of lightning as they ate their spring rolls, crab soup, and chicken with bamboo shoots. When the meal was finished, they took their usual walk, hand in hand, fingers playing, exploring, shoulders lightly bumping, and a certain ease, a certain pure bodily joy filled the electrified air between them. There had been a small difference of opinion at dinner. Louis, trying to be completely honest with her, had set forth his theory of the Red Sox as Masters of Creative Disappointment: failure every year, though always in a different pattern. Luba defended them as a loyal fan. But that little tiff seemed only to enhance the attraction.
After they'd walked along Harvard Avenue for 10 minutes, Louis summoned his courage, took a breath, and said, "I live only right around the corner. Want to take refuge from the gathering storm?"
"You planned this all out, didn't you?" Luba asked, laughing. "The restaurant close to home, the thunderstorm. Louis Robinson's master strategy for lovemaking."
Louis had taken an ibuprofen before leaving for the date. It seemed to be working: At the word lovemaking, he felt only the smallest twinge at the base of his neck. "Yes," he admitted. "Thunderstorm and all. I'm the devious type."
She reached down to his hip and took hold of his belt there, tugging on it twice in a playful way. "Lead on, oh devious one."
It was two blocks to Linden Street, seemed like 26 miles. The first scattered drops were slapping the pavement now, thunder booming somewhere over Newton, the sky lit, from time to time, by streaks of fire. For this one night, Louis had decided to banish his swelling suspicions. So Luba said she never used a golf cart on the course - what was so strange about that? So she kept saying she lived "in the South End" and would never be more specific. So, sitting in his taxi in front of the Ritz-Carlton, he'd read a Newsweek article stating that Uzbekistan and Costa Rica were the centers of a new breed of eco-terrorism in the world - a terrorism of pranks and technological upset, never violent. So what? So what, even if she was the Tangler - what real harm had been done?
The rain started falling a bit harder, they were getting wet, nearly running now. There, at last, was the rusty chain-link fence, the damp front walk. And there, standing at the edge of the porch with her arms crossed, watching them approach, stood Louis's neighbor, Vizelot Masjardins, the Goddess of Gab, on the lookout for someone to talk at for half an hour or so.
Look for Chapter Five of The Boston Tangler in next Sunday's Globe Magazine.
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