Fat Tony -- Section Thirteen

    By the time Douglas dropped him a block from his home—no sense getting yourself observed by the FBI if there were no good reason, said Doug—Fat Tony was tired.  Bone tired.  What was deeper than bone?  Marrow tired.  Appendix tired, because the appendix doesn’t actually do anything, so for his appendix to be tired, Tony figured he must be really and truly exhausted.  He carried the forgotten geranium in his left hand and used his right to wave at the car he thought was most likely to hold his new FBI escort.  If he had an escort.  He wasn’t sure he cared at that particular moment. 
    True to their word, Roger and Grandma had left Fat Tony’s car parked in his space.  An earlier text from Grandma led him to the keys in the mailbox, and the fog in Fat Tony’s head led him into a daydream of the hours it must have taken her to learn to text.  Why does it keep finishing my words for me?  Do they think I’m so stupid that I don’t know what I want to say?  Or do they assume that I’m lazy?  Soon they’ll do the whole message for us, then before we know it, Samsung is ruling the world and we’re all speaking South Korean.  Is that different from North Korean?
    Fat Tony shut down the daydream with an effort of pure will and forced himself up the steps to his apartment.  Between his meeting with Mr. Robinson, worrying about Grandma, going on a date, and juicing up a stuffed bunny, it had been a full day.  Then, add to that the conversation with Sarah, if you could call it a conversation, not that he was thinking about it, because that was clearly beyond repair and thinking about it would make him even more tired, so he certainly wasn’t going to be doing any of aforementioned thinking about that conversation that rated as number one on his ‘Worst Romantic Discussions Ever’ list and in the top five of ‘Worst Discussions on Any Topic,’ but if you added that conversation to the day, it was more than full.  Not that he was adding it in.  Because he wasn’t thinking about it.
    He got his keys into the lock and leaned his head against the door.  Stupid, he thought to himself.  I am the king of stupid.  He banged his forehead against the door a time or three for emphasis.
    “Who is it?” called a voice from inside.
    Fat Tony rocked back and checked the number on the door.  No, he hadn’t found the wrong apartment, and his mind processed the sound of the voice.
    “Impossible,” he said.  “There’s no way he’s sitting in my apartment.  Not today.”
    He reached out and turned the knob.  The door was unlocked and swung open.
    “Fat Tony!” said Flap Jack.  “We wondered when you’d make it back, and honestly, I’m surprised, because I thought you’d have to get one of those apartments with extra-wide doors, like for people in wheelchairs and things like that.  Are there apartments with big doors?  I guess I’ve never seen one, but I assumed there would be one like that, and you’d be in it, but hey!  We all make mistakes, don’t we?  How have you been, big guy?”
    Fat Tony stared.  There, on his couch, was Flap Jack, holding one of Tony’s bottles of water, sharing the space with a twenty-something man so emaciated Fat Tony had to stop himself from rushing out to get the kid an I.V. drip in a (probably futile) attempt to keep him alive.  The skinny guy was stuffing down a meatball sub with speed that both impressed Fat Tony and inspired a very rational fear for the safety of his couch.  The thickness of the glasses on the man threatened to tip him over and made him look like a goldfish.
    “Flap Jack,” said Tony.  “I’m exhausted, and somehow I have an anorexic goldfish in my apartment.  Can you explain?”
    “Hah!  ‘Explain?’  You always kill me, Fat Tony.  This is Patrick, he’s a buddy of mine, and today he comes to me saying, ‘Flap Jack, you are the one man in this world I can count on.’  So I said to him, ‘Reliability is my middle name,’ which was funny, because I don’t have a middle name, though I don’t think that was really fair of my parents to do that to me.  Do you have a middle name, Tony?  Of course you do.  Without a middle one, you wouldn’t have enough name to cover you, and your parents wouldn’t do that, because I’m sure they’re like you: can’t leave a person in distress.  Which is why we’re here.  Patrick says to me, ‘I’ve got some bad people after me, and it has to do with magic,’ and I said, ‘I’ve heard rumors that one of my best pals’—do people still say ‘pal?’; I should change it to ‘homey’—‘one of my best homeys knows something of the mystical arts of illusion and prestidigitation, and I’d be glad to hook you up with him.’  So here we are.  I hope you don’t mind that I raided your fridge, though you are seriously lacking in the beverage department—wait, you don’t drink, that’s right.  Don’t have to tell me ten times.  Patrick had to bring his own food, though, because the way he eats, I think he is the great unknown cause of world hunger.  So you mind if we hang out here?”
    Fat Tony looked at Flap Jack, then looked at Patrick, who had stopped shoving the sandwich down his throat whole and had reconnected his jaw bone long enough to smile hopefully at the only person in the apartment who actually belonged in the apartment, who had a bed in the apartment, and who wanted to further develop the long and personal relationship with that bed that he had begun two years ago when he found it at steep discount in a going-out-of-business sale.
    Fat Tony closed the door behind him and put the flower pot on the island that divided the kitchen from the rest of the apartment.
    “Hey!  A flower!  Did you buy that for Sarah?  I bet she liked it.  She seemed like the kind of girl who likes flowers, and since you bought her a flower, I bet it went over really well.  Did you get all cuddly with her?  Run your fingers through her hair?  That could take all day, right there.  Get it?  Take all day to run your fingers through her hair because, let’s be honest, she has plenty of hair.  She’s like the Warren Buffet of hair.  I would have said ‘the Donald Trump of hair,’ but I think Donald Trump is already the Donald Trump of hair.  So how did it go?  Was that a sigh?  A good sigh or a bad sigh?  You gotta help me out here, F.T., because sometimes I don’t pick up on all the clues that people give in social situations.  I think that’s why I have so many friends.  You want to shake hands?  Oh, you’re pulling me up.  Thanks, big guy.  I was a little tired of sitting.  You thought of getting a new couch?  Oh, I get it.  You’re opening the door because you want me to go.  See, I do get some clues.  Like once, I was hanging out at a friend’s house, and for almost an hour he’d been telling me how tired he was, and finally it clicked, and I said, ‘Dude, if you wanted some of my coffee, you just had to say so.’  I’ll catch you later, Patrick!  Don’t be any stranger than you are.”
    Fat Tony closed the door behind Flap Jack and locked it.  He went to the fridge and stared into it.  What he really wanted was the coconut curry he hadn’t had time to finish, but that was a ship that had sailed, carrying the coconuts with it.  Instead he settled on an organic protein shake that he poured into a glass with plenty of ice.  He was shoving things around the cupboard looking for rice cakes—the plain ones; he’d once branched out to ‘white cheddar’ and regretted the aftertaste for hours—when Patrick spoke up.
    “Sorry for barging in like this,” said the goldfish.
    Fat Tony found the rice cakes, pulled them out and sat down at his small table.  His apartment wasn’t furnished for entertaining.  He never invited people over, and he hadn’t thought to buy furniture on the off chance that someone would break into his place in the middle of the night and want a place to have a snack.  He bit into a cake.  It was mild and gently crunchy, and he liked it.  The chocolate of the shake gave him all the flavor he wanted at the moment.
    “I know it’s an imposition,” said Patrick, “but I didn’t know where to go, and Flap Jack said you knew something about magic, and, well, one look at you and it’s pretty clear you do.”
    Fat Tony ate in silence, looking at the table in front of him.
    Patrick tried again.  “I’m not a bad guy, you know.  I didn’t kill anybody, or anything like that.  I work with animals.  I’m kind of an animal breeder.  I used to work with the government trying to magic up some mice.  It was an anti-terrorism thing, you know?  I mean, I probably shouldn’t even tell you that much, but I just want you to know that I don’t work for the bad guys.  At least, I try not to.”
    “The government fired you?” asked Tony.
    “Maybe.  Kind of.  A little bit.”
    “And then you got a job doing some breeding for someone who wasn’t as concerned about nit-picky details like whether what you were doing was ‘legal’ or ‘illegal.’
    “They’re not bad people!  It was a couple of old guys, old enough to have grownup grandkids, and they weren’t breeding killer dogs or toxic roaches, or anything like that.”
    “Thank you for bringing up roaches while I’m eating.”
    “Sorry,” said Patrick.  “All they wanted was to get pets for people.  That’s not a bad thing, right?”
    “Pets,” said Fat Tony.
    “Sure.  Cute ones.  Really cute.  You’d probably want to buy one.”
    “Cute pets,” said Fat Tony.
    “Absolutely.  We were going to strike it rich.  Almost had all the kinks worked out, too.”
    “This isn’t real,” said Tony, putting down his rice cake and looking at Patrick.  “You were breeding Livingstone’s Cottontails.”
    “How did you know?”
    “You worked for my grandfather.”
    “Oh,” said Patrick, and he swallowed, a very remarkable motion in his skinny neck.
    “And by ‘almost had the kinks worked out,’ you mean that you hadn’t figured out how to keep them from causing destruction wherever they land.”
    “We were making progress!” said Patrick.  “We’d reduced magical emissions by sixty-three percent, while at the same time increasing the breeding rate of those little guys from forty-years to four months!  There hasn’t been a breakthrough like this in magical animal breeding for decades.”
    “You ruined my date,” said Fat Tony.
    “Excuse me?” said Patrick, his eyes very wide through the lenses of his glasses.
    “Never mind,” said Tony, looking down at the remains of his rice cake.  He started breaking it off, grain by grain.  “So who’s after you?”
    “It was that Mr. Robinson’s guys.  We’d kept our breeding facility a secret for lots of reasons, but somehow they tracked it down.  This afternoon they show up knocking on the door looking serious, and two minutes on the intercom was all it took to convince me that I didn’t want to go with them.  So I slipped out the back way and went looking for help.”
    “It’s a truck, isn’t it?” asked Fat Tony.
    “How did you know?”
    “You’ve been parking it different places, all around the city, to minimize the leakage in any one place and to keep from being found.”
    “Did your Grandma tell you?”
    “Nope.  Someone noticed.  Did the FBI show up before Mr. Robinson’s employees?”
    “How did you know that?”
    Fat Tony stared at him, and Patrick swallowed again.
    “Sure, they came, but they didn’t have a warrant, and I didn’t have the Cottontails with me anymore, so I didn’t worry about it.”
    “Last question before I decide if I help you, and I’m warning you, I had better get a straight answer, because if I double-check this later, and I find you were trying to cover your own behind on this, I’ll take that behind and hand it over to Mr. Robinson myself with a bow tied around it that will look so pretty it will put Martha Stewart to shame.  She’ll probably quit her show and move to India, that’s how nice that bow will be.  Are we clear?”
    “Very clear,” said Patrick.
    “Did you tell my grandmother and Roger that you had the magical emissions fixed?”
    Patrick swallowed again, then nodded.  “I said I had it worked out.  I didn’t think it would cause any problems, and it would all be better within three generations anyway.  We were out of funding, and we needed a sale, and they didn’t have any idea that we weren’t quite there yet.  So we sold Buttons to Mr. Robinson, and used most of the money to—”
    “You did what?!”  Fat Tony was surprised at the volume of his own voice, and the fact that he was half standing.  He sat back down, reminding himself that he was deeply, truly tired, and lowered his voice.  “Mr. Robinson bought Buttons?”
    “We only realized how quickly the magic built up after the sale, so we told Mr. Robinson we needed Buttons for a checkup and whisked him away with the others.”
    “You did give him the money back, right?”
    “We didn’t have it!  I’d already spent lots of it on a new machine, but we were going to make it right.  We told him we’d pay him back, but he didn’t take it well.  That little man really has a thing for Buttons.  He’s practically obsessed.  Where are you going?”
    “Bed.  You can sleep on the couch.  ‘Night.”
    “But what are we going to do about Mr. Robinson?”
    “Tonight?  Nothing.  If they manage to find you and get into my apartment to get at you, they’re welcome to you.  You’re not in my ‘Top Ten’ at the moment, but after I’ve had some sleep I may elevate you from ‘the idiot who got my grandmother involved with gangsters’ to ‘subhuman that I’m willing to help even though he’s an idiot who got my grandmother involved with gangsters.”
    “But,” Patrick objected, “I didn’t get her involved.”
    “Excuse me?” said Fat Tony.  “Did I somehow give you the impression that I was rational at this moment?  Did I do anything that would indicate to you that I cared about the truth?  Tomorrow morning I may be able to look at you without longing to shove you into a cactus, but right at this moment I’m willing to blame you for everything, from global warming to the Kennedy assassination.  So do you want to continue this conversation tonight, or do you want to let me get to my bed?”
    “Sleep well,” said Patrick.  “The couch will be perfect.”
    “You’re smarter than you look,” said Tony.