Chapter 11
In New York, Louis was sitting on a stool in PubKey on Washington Place.
He was sipping an old-fashioned and taking in the décor, which reminded him of The Shining, though not necessarily in a bad way.
The walls were painted black, the ceiling was made of pressed tin, and the floors, tiled in blue and white, were overlaid with rubber-backed red mats.
Tinsel hung both behind the bar and on the wall opposite, which, combined with strings of fairy lights, gave the place an all-year festive atmosphere at odds with the interior, like Santa’s grotto after the old man had died.
The drinks list included a lot of beers in cans, and the available snacks ran to nuts, Ruffles, and fried Oreos.
PubKey was a dive bar, occupying a space that had once housed Formerly Crow’s, also a dive bar, which itself had taken over from the Stoned Crow.
(Three guesses as to the latter’s nature, and the first would surely be correct.) So PubKey was maintaining a noble tradition of unpolishedness, even if it was a twenty-first-century version of the same: PubKey was Bitcoin-friendly, and Louis mistrusted money that didn’t rustle or jangle.
He had also reached an age where he firmly believed mankind needed to think long and hard before inventing new stuff, given how many people were still coming to grips with the old.
And while Bitcoin held a certain fascination for a man like himself, who preferred his financial arrangements to remain private, he was uncertain how one went about spending it.
He was aware that it might involve a smartphone, which immediately ruled it out, Louis regarding “smartphone” as a misnomer, being of the opinion that the dumber someone was, the more they lived on their phone.
Finally, Louis feared that some of PubKey’s regular clientele had either been bullied too much at school or hadn’t been bullied enough.
A Bitcoin bar inevitably attracted tech bros, and as far as Louis was concerned, the reputation of tech bros, never very high, had recently suffered near-terminal damage from the ongoing efforts of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.
When he’d first scouted the bar, a seminar was underway in a large, curtained-off area at the back, with a mostly young male audience taking notes on financial instruments and the growth of AI.
Curiously, Louis also identified a smattering of old West Village radicals who, in common with the rest, were seeking ways to protect themselves from regulation while sticking it to the Man.
Louis failed to understand how you could stick it to the Man by investing in crypto when the Man, in the form of the president and his family, was trying to sell you on a crypto of his own.
Ultimately, Louis concluded, it was all a hustle, and if you weren’t hustling, you were getting hustled.
On this particular afternoon, PubKey was quiet, with half a dozen drinkers along the bar or occupying the stools at the wall.
Louis was seated at the far end of the bar, with a clear view of the only door, accessed by a set of metal stairs, PubKey being not only a dive bar but a basement dive bar which was another factor in its favor.
Behind Louis, illuminated signs warned against CENTRAL BANK DIGITAL CURRENCIES, while a ticker displayed the latest Bitcoin price.
Otherwise, it was admirably murky. Louis didn’t think he’d want to be there when it was jammed, but on a Wednesday, he was prepared to concede that PubKey held no small appeal for someone who was happiest in the shadows.
The door opened and a young Black man entered.
He was wearing a tan jacket that hung loose over a white button-down shirt and blue jeans.
His sneakers were new, expensive, and very clean, and he carried an iPad in his right hand.
He ordered a beer, set the iPad on the counter, and peered around the bar as though seeing it for the first time.
But he’d given the impression of knowing exactly where he was headed when he entered, and that tan jacket, while loose, wasn’t loose enough to conceal the gun he wore on his left side, not from an expert eye, and if there was one thing Louis knew, it was guns.
He doubted the kid was right-handed, because that would have left him with a cross-draw, and cross-drawing was a good way to get oneself killed.
If Louis was correct about the kid’s identity, he’d been warned to leave the minimum distance between gun and gun hand, just as Louis had once instructed his employer.
A striking older female bartender leaned against the well, keeping a bored eye on the patrons.
When the kid raised a hand to order a Coke, she served him without speaking, and when he thanked her she merely nodded and smiled before returning to her station.
The kid’s gaze followed her, she caught him looking, and he quickly gave his attention to the iPad.
Over his left shoulder, two Japanese men played a rapid-fire game of chess on a miniature travel set, each responding as soon as the other completed his move.
The kid, who considered himself an accomplished forward thinker as well as a reasonable chess player, concluded that either of these men would have handed him his ass within a dozen moves.
A second female bartender joined the first, this one younger, blonder, and friendlier, and the kid forgot the game.
The second bartender leaned over to wipe away a moisture ring, revealing an expanse of cleavage that the kid was sure would come between him and his sleep.
Nevertheless, he did his best to concentrate on his screen.
Nobody else ordered a drink, and the hum of conversation was low.
So Louis didn’t watch the kid, and the kid didn’t watch Louis, and no one else watched either of them.
Time passed. Louis kept his hands on the bar, moving them only to lift his glass to his lips.
He listened to the music, which was the Genuine Negro Jig album by the Carolina Chocolate Drops—arguably not what one might have expected to hear playing in a Bitcoin bar, but if the incongruity registered with the kid, he didn’t let it show.
He was focused on his screen, scrolling through emails and, Louis assumed, communicating with whomever was waiting outside.
Finally, after a good fifteen minutes had gone by, the door opened again and another man entered, this one older than the kid by about a decade, which made him younger than Louis by thirty years—if Louis remembered correctly, which he did.
His skin tone was very dark, so dark that Louis’s appeared almost sallow by comparison as the two were simultaneously reflected in a mirror.
The new arrival was first-generation American, his mother and father Nuer from South Sudan, both long dead.
His name was Kade, which had Hebrew origins in war and battle and proved, if nothing else, that nominative determinism was alive and well.
Kade, like the kid who had entered the bar ahead of him, was wearing a white shirt, but his was accessorized with a gray knitted-silk tie, and his black trousers were well cut, the whole finished off with a black wool-mix blazer, black brogues, and a pair of round, steel-rimmed glasses that he didn’t need, fitted only with plano lenses.
His left wrist bore a tasteful but not overly expensive watch—Tudor, not Rolex—and he had a wedding band on his ring finger, though he wasn’t married.
He looked like a prosperous businessman in his thirties, or a successful young lawyer who didn’t have any court appearances scheduled that day.
Everything about Kade was designed to discourage police attention, which was undoubtedly a good thing, since somewhere on his person he would be carrying a weapon, or more than one.
This, too, Louis had taught him, even if he did not regard Kade as a protégé, no more than Kade considered Louis a mentor.
But once upon a time, when Kade was vulnerable and alone, Louis and Angel had taken him under their wing.
He had lived with them for just four months, but Mrs Bondarchuk, who had occupied the apartment below theirs since time immemorial, grew fond of him and made a valiant effort to put flesh on his bones, one destined to be defeated by his metabolism.
Even Mrs Bondarchuk’s Pomeranians, who didn’t like anyone not named Mrs Bondarchuk, had taken to Kade.
Back then, he seemed gentle and lost. Now, he was no longer either; the US military, and what came after, had made sure of that.
While Louis had not turned Kade into a killer, he wondered whether, by protecting him, he might not also have contaminated him, because a killer Kade had become.
Not one like Louis, never that, but a killer nonetheless.
A third man entered the bar, this one overweight, white, and carrying a copy of the New York Post. He took the stool nearest the door and ordered a soda.
Like the kid with the iPad, and Kade, he kept his jacket on.
Louis knew there would be at least one more outside, behind the wheel of a car, with a view of the entrance.
The engine wouldn’t be running—because that, too, was a sure way to attract the police—but the driver would be primed to act fast. Kade, trying to minimize the risks. Kade, failing.
Kade took the stool two down from Louis, leaving one seat unoccupied between them. He ordered a glass of Scotch before turning to acknowledge the man he had come here to meet, even to kill.
“No Angel?”
“He’s back in Portland,” said Louis.
“I’ve never been.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Too quiet?”
“Too white.”
Kade’s whisky arrived. He raised his glass to Louis, who did not respond in kind.
“Yet I hear you now call it home.”
“We still keep the place here,” said Louis, “but I’ve grown to appreciate life by the sea. It’s been a long time, Kade. You’re looking well.”
“You too. The gray suits you.”
Louis ran his left hand over his scalp. He kept his hair shaved close, but still the years showed.
Now and then, at Duane Reade, he dawdled a little too long by the men’s haircare products, tempted by the possibilities of gray-reducing shampoos.
He felt the companies missed a trick by not putting more Black men on the packaging: it was all middle-aged white guys with shit-eating grins.
However you chose to parse it, the message being communicated was that this was a white-guy solution for a white-guy problem.
They might have believed Black men to be less vain.
If so, they were leaving money lying on the table.
“If I let it grow too long,” said Louis, “I look like one of those old barbers I remember from childhood, the ones who always smelled of Barbicide and Bay Rum.”
Louis noticed that Kade flinched when he lifted his hand. The iPad kid farther along reacted too, and the dumpy white guy peered up from the newspaper he wasn’t reading. There were a lot of nervous people in the bar that afternoon, more than anyone but Louis might have guessed.
“I shave my own scalp,” said Kade. “I don’t like strangers standing over me with sharp blades. Blunt ones either.”
Louis tapped out a cadence with his fingertips.
“Why are you here, Kade? Why did you want to see me?”
This was it. This was the moment.
“Because there’s a contract on your life,” said Kade.
“And who picked up the paper?”
“I did.” Kade gestured loosely with his glass. “How many of these people are yours?”
Louis raised the index finger on his right hand and brought it down once, sharply, on the bar.
“All of them,” he said.
And it began.