Driver

Driver - Chapter 15

***

The carpet store across the street was doing good business.

Not that Warszawa was struggling.

It was a typical 1920s bungalow; made by craftsmen probably. Rooms opened into one another with non-existent hallways. Hardwood floors, large double-hung windows. Four rooms had become dining areas; the largest of them was divided by a wall running through its middle.  Lace curtains framed open windows. No air conditioning needed at the place that was so close to the water’s edge.

Bernie sat at a corner table in the second room by the French doors with three quarters of a bottle and half a glass of wine in front of him.

He rose as Danny approached him and stretched out his hand for a handshake. Here were two men trying their hardest to be civil with each other in spite of all that had happened between them in the last few days; shaking hands with their right hands while holding rocks in their left.

“Care for a glass to start with?” Bernie asked as they sat facing each other. “Or would you prefer your usual scotch?”

“Wine’s good,” Danny replied.

“Actually, it is. Amazing what’s out there these days. Chilean, Australian. This one’s from the old North-west vineyards.”

He poured the North-west. They clinked glasses.

“Thanks for coming.”

Danny nodded. A waitress wearing a black uniform of the Warszawa restaurant emerged from the kitchen and began moving table to table taking order from the new patrons. For the smallest time that the kitchen door opened, men in the kitchen could be heard speaking Spanish. Danny could hear their voices even as his companion went on.

“I can recommend the duck. Hell, I can recommend anything, Hunter’s stew with homemade sausage, red cabbage, onions and beef. And the best Borscht in town, served cold when it’s hot outside, hot when a chill comes on. But the duck’s to die for.”

“Duck,” Bernie said when the waitress came to the table, “and another of these.”

“You got it,” she responded.

“Duck,” echoed Danny. Had he in his entire life eaten a duck?

People arrived with packages to be ushered into the third room. The owner came by to greet them. She asked them to let her know personally if there was anything they needed, anything she could do for them. It let the patrons know this was a place where you came for the service as much as you came for the food.

Bernie Roth replenished the glasses.

“You’ve been on a roll boy,” he praised, “Cut yourself quite a swathe out there.”

“I’ve never asked for any of it,” replied Danny.

“We usually don’t, but it comes down on our heads regardless. Thing that matters is what you do with it.” Looking at the other diners around him, he sipped his wine. “Their lives are a mystery to me, you know. Absolutely impenetrable.”

Danny nodded again.

“Nino and I have been together since before I can remember. We grew up together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

Tasting the duck, he wasn’t.

“So where do you go from here?” Bernie asked.

“Hard to say. Back to my old life, maybe. If I haven’t burned far too many bridges for that. You?”

“Maybe head out back east to where I came from. Never quite liked it much here anyway.” Bernie continued, “This friend of mine used to claim the story of America is all about the advancing frontier. Push through to the end of it, which is what we had done. Here at land’s end, there’s nothing left. The worm starts eating its own tail.”

Danny would have never figured Nino to say something like this. Guy sounded like a completely different man according to Bernie’s recollection.

“Should have had the steak instead.”

Despite himself, Danny laughed.

The two men worked their way through their expensive meal, normal life going on around them. For a moment they’d landed on a kind of an island which they could pretend to be stranded. Away from all the business that brought them together in the first place.

“Think we chose our lives?” Bernie wondered loudly as he cruised into the cognac in front of him.

“No, but I don’t think they are thrust upon us either. What it feels to me is that it is forever seeping up under our feet.”

Bernie nodded. “First time I heard about you word was you drove, that’s all you did.”

“True at the time. But times change.”

“Even if we don’t” Bernie added.

The two men continued with their meal without once bringing up the topic of Nino or the missing bag of money.

The waitress brought the check which Bernie insisted on paying. Danny could not pay it even if he wanted to. Not for a dinner this expensive anyway.

They walked out into the parking lot. Stars bright in the sky; the carpet store in front of the Warszawa was closing. Its employees rushing to find their way back home to return to their families.

“Where’s your ride?” asked Bernie.

“Over here,” Danny answered. At the back edge of the lot, half-hidden by a fenced area for the garbage. Figured.

“You don’t think we change?” Danny asked.

“Change? No. What we do is adapt. Get by. Time you’re ten, twelve years old, it’s pretty much set in you, what you are going to be like, what your life’s going to be like. That’s your car?”

“I know it doesn’t look much. But then neither do we. A friend of mine specializes in redoing these. Good cars to start with. When he finishes with them, they scream.”

“Another driver?” asked Bernie trying to know if he had any friends helping him all along.

“Used to be till both hips got shattered in a crash. That’s when he started tearing them down, building them back up.”

The parking lot was empty now.

“Guess we won’t be seeing one another again. Take care boy.”

Reaching to shake hands, Danny saw the knife. He caught a flash of moonlight on it actually, as Bernie brought it out, left-handed in a low arc.

He drove his knee hard against Bernie’s arm, caught his wrist as it shot up and sank the knife into his throat. He’d stuck a bit central, away from the carotids and other major vessels, so it took a while but he’d taken out a pharynx and breached a trachea, through which Bernie’s Roth’s last breathe whistled. So not too long.

Looking at Bernie Roth’s falling eyes, he thought. This is what people mean when they use words like grace. The man was patient the whole evening, not showing the slightest bit of anger or resentment against him.

He drove the rest of the way down to the pier, bore Bernie’s body to the edge of water and released it. From water we come. To water we return. The tide was going out. It lifted the body, carried it ever so gently away. City lights sparkled on the water.

Afterwards, Danny sat feeling the fine roar and throb of his Ford around him.

He drove. That’s what he did. That’s what he always did.

Letting out the clutch, he pulled away from the beach parking onto the street, reentering the world here at its very edge, the car’s engine a purr beneath him, yellow moon above, hundreds upon hundreds of mile to go.

This was far from the end for Danny. In the years to come, before he moved to LA, before there was his job, before his life turned around, there’d be more killings, there’d be more bodies.

Bernie Roth was the only one he ever mourned.

***