No Such Creature

“It passes the time.”

There was a long pause after that. Just the sound of the television as someone flipped channels, and magazine pages turning.

“So, you got any more questions for us?” Clem said.

“Yeah, how about you unlock this chain and let me out of here.”

“No,” they said.

The theatre department at the University of El Paso was planning a production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and Max took the opportunity to provide them with several high-quality wigs. It was not a huge sale, but it was excellent cover, and the university itself was quite entertaining, having been built for some reason in the manner of a Tibetan lamasery.

After that, he drove over to the hospice affiliated with Thomason General, where John-Paul Bertrand, alias the Pontiff, alias Sabrina’s father, was dying on the third floor. Sabrina and Owen were sightseeing. Even at his age Max found it difficult to believe someone so young and pretty could be so heartless.

The Pontiff lay in bed in a wash of sunlight, a shrivelled, shrunken thing. His previous address had been the Huntsville state prison, and usually inmates put on weight from the lack of activity combined with a steady diet of television and candy bars. Either that or they inflate themselves into rippling muscle-men by relentlessly pumping iron. But the shape under the sheets was scarcely more substantial than a child’s.

His face was turned away from the window, the mouth slightly open. A comb-over was plastered to his skull, and a hundred hairpieces appeared in Max’s mind as improvements. One bony hand was splayed on his chest, no watch, no jewellery. The stalky neck, the bony hand, the hollowed cheeks-the Pontiff was Coventry after the Blitz.

Max sat down beside the bed, the small chair creaking under his weight.

The eyes fluttered open. Bombed-out eyes.

“Magnus Maxwell at your service.”

“How long you been here?”

“Mere moments, squire. Moments.”

“Sorry. All I do is sleep all the time. Well, doze. I never actually sleep. Sleep …” He let the word dangle, as if it were the name of an old friend fallen in battle.

“I brought you something.” Max propped the stuffed angel he had found in the hospital gift shop on the nightstand.

“To see me on my way. Thanks, Carl. That’s kind.”

“Max, old son. There are a million Maxwells in the universe, and no doubt one of them is Carl. I, however, am Magnus-known to all and sundry as Max. You asked me to look in on Sabrina, remember? I’m happy to tell you she is very bonny. Socking away the gold, planning to go back to school.”

“Sabrina.” The Pontiff coughed weakly, but even that small strain made his eyes water. “She’ll be glad to see the last of me.”

“Not a bit of it. She was so happy to hear they let you out,” Max said. “Finally saw the error of their ways.”

“Department of Corrections is not equipped for …” The bony hand gestured at the curtains, the television, the pale blue walls.

Max touched the IV unit. “Stoli?”

“No.” John-Paul looked at the saline drip and grimaced. “We’ve had a parting of the ways, vodka and me.”

Where was the Pontiff? Where was the sly thief? The party animal? The robust friend yelling jokes and insults, slapping you on the back? Who was this thing, this carcass that had taken his place?

Max pulled out a bottle of Stolichnaya from his sample case, and two glasses. “It’s time the two of you made up,” he said, proffering a shot.

The Pontiff made no move to take it. “Only good thing about all this,” he said, in the dry remnant of his old voice, “you lose your taste for alcohol. Stuff never did me any good.”

“Rubbish,” Max said. “I’ve seen you hold forth in bistro and tavern, in song and rhyme and just about any form that would suit one of the world’s natural born master thieves.” He leaned forward confidentially. “You remember the party after the Chemical Bank job? You rented the house in Seaview? What a time we had then, hey?”

“Stupid.”

“It was worth it just to see Bobo Valentine dressed up as Wonder Woman.”

“It was all stupid.”

“Ach, man, don’t tell me you have regrets! Regrets aren’t for the likes of us.”

“What’s your name again? Sorry, between the chemo and the radiation …”

“You remember me-Magnus Maxwell. Old Max. The one and only.”

“Let me tell you, Max, you and me, we’re a dime a dozen. Not even a dime. A thief is nothing but a parasite.”

“But I only prey on parasites, your grace. That makes me a metasite, a net contributor to the economy.”

“Call it anything you want, pal. A thief’s a thief.” The Pontiff was taken by a series of feeble coughs. With the bruise-coloured circles under his eyes, the sunken cheeks and papery skin, he was a wisp of life, as if there would soon be nothing left of him but the tiny rasp of a voice, and when that was gone, nothing at all.

He took a drink of water-a slow process, even with Max’s assistance with glass and straw-then he continued.

“I took things that didn’t belong to me-out of greed and selfishness and laziness. Couldn’t be bothered to get a real job, do something positive in this world. I got more respect for the guy mops this floor. I got more respect for the guy fixes the toilet. Those people are adding something, and they don’t do it for big bucks and they don’t do it out of some cockamamie philosophy and they don’t think the entire world should pay them to do nothing.”

“You were a tower of strength,” Max said, “a leader of men.”

“An asshole leading assholes. It’s not like I was running a research team. My advice to you is get out while the getting’s good.”

Max decided to change tactics. “Sabrina’s hoping to visit soon.”

The Pontiff closed his eyes and shook his head. “Girl hates me.”

“Not possible, my liege. Nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. I told her I’d be visiting you and she said, ‘Tell him I’ll be there, soon as I can.’ Absolute monster of a boss, Luigi. Wouldn’t give her even two days off.”

“Sa-bri-na.” The Pontiff’s thin rasp separated the three syllables as if they were unrelated, as if they didn’t add up to a word, let alone a person.

“The very girl,” Max said. “I remember you requisitioning a bicycle for her first Communion.”

“Uh-huh. You see any family here?”

“Well, hmm, time and distance do sometimes beggar the sweetest intents.”

“No, my friend, no one’s coming. My family got sick of me a long time ago. All those years, I never cared what it meant to Paula, my line of work. She never knew if she’d be seeing me from one day to the next, one year to the next. Finally got sick of my lies and evasions. I don’t blame her. It just wore her down, and she offed herself. Sabrina’s never gonna forgive me for that. Why should she? So spare me your bullshit, old man.”

Max tried again. “Listen, Ponti. Why don’t you come on a road trip with me and my boy? We’re travelling cross-country in a luxurious vehicle.”

“I don’t want to die in a vehicle.”

“Your holiness, allow me the honour-”

“Your holiness. What is that?”

“Don’t you remember? You were known as the Pontiff, being named John-Paul-and also owing to a certain infallibility.”

“Obviously. Which is why I spent seventeen years in jail.”

It was amazing to Max that such a frail creature as the Pontiff had become could contain such quantities of negativity. Of course, the dreary little room with its plastic glasses and straws, its faint smell of urine, its lurid TV