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  Nathan

  Book

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  Nathan

  A Novel

  Curt Weeden and Richard Marek

  Oceanview Publishing

  Longboat Key, Florida

  Copyright © 2010 by Curt Weeden and Richard Marek

  first edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-933515-91-5

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing,

  Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  printed in the united states of america

  For Marti, our children, and grandchildren

  —C.W.

  To Dalma

  —R.M.

  Book

  of

  Nathan

  Prologue

  There was nothing distinctive about the woman. Her olive skin was commonplace in this part of New Brunswick, New Jersey, where the neighborhood had gone from white to black to brown over the past few decades. Bodegas and front yard statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe left no doubt about present-day demographics. It was an hour short of midnight—the start of the Latino parade to one of two downtown hospitals that fueled their backroom nightshifts with the sweat of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans. Under ordinary circumstances, watching an Hispanic, forty-something woman walk to a job that paid a notch above minimum wage wouldn’t warrant a second look.

  Except tonight the circumstances were far from ordinary.

  “Él va a matarme!” she screamed. “Él va a matarme!”

  The woman stormed toward me, her arms flailing. A dull light filtering through the iron-barred windows of the Gateway Men’s Shelter caught the terror in her eyes.

  “Él va a matarme!” The woman was a few feet away when the tip of her laced-up oxford jammed into a chunk of sidewalk cement pushed out of place by the root of a half-dead oak tree. She landed hard, her right knee taking most of the punishment. Oblivious to the blood running down her shin, she clawed at my trousers.

  “No dejarlo matarme para! Satisfacer!”

  You can’t run a men’s shelter in Central Jersey without picking up a little conversational Spanish. I had become all too familiar with violar, asalter, muerte since rape, assault, and murder were never more than a few streets away from where I worked. Va a matarme wasn’t hard to decipher either—going to kill me is an inner-city refrain that gets replayed far too often. But even if I hadn’t been able to translate, the panic in the lady’s eyes was sending the same message.

  I knelt at the woman’s side and said as gently as I could,“No, senora. Él no es un asesino.”

  My words weren’t enough to stop the woman’s shaking. She peered into the darkness and her fear materialized into a giant, grotesque form. The thing that loped toward us wore layers of worn, ripped clothing and a hood that covered most of its face.

  “Él es un hombre sin hogar,” I explained calmly. “A homeless man, senora. Coming here—to this place.” I gestured to the building behind me. The Gateway Men’s Shelter—depending on one’s perspective, either a Dumpster for losers or the last-chance changing room for those who wanted to claw their way back into the ranks of the socially acceptable.

  “El Dios nos ayuda todos,” the woman whispered and struggled to her feet. “God help us all,” she repeated in broken English. I handed her a handkerchief that she pressed against her knee.

  “Him especially.” I nodded at the bogeyman.

  The creature moved into a pale yellow swath of incandescent light that leaked out the Gateway’s window. His hood fell from his head. The lady gasped, made the sign of the cross, and ran into the night, the sound of her footsteps gradually swallowed by the white noise of the city.

  Later, I would learn his name. Miklos Petris Zeusenoerdorf. His sallow skin was speckled with bumps and boils—a giant pickle with pimples. His sparse hair grew in patches, the longest strands dangling like brown threads over deformed cauliflower ears. Zeusenoerdorf was huge, but his bulk wasn’t muscle. Blobs of fat rippled over his body like sheaves of discolored bubble wrap.

  In time, one in-the-know wino would sketch out the man’s background. On the street, he was called Zeus and he had just finished a stint at East Jersey State, a lockup that used to be called Rahway Prison.

  “You scared the hell out of the lady,” I said and took the man’s arm.

  Zeus grunted out a mix of clicks and groans. It was his own Morse code that I would never quite figure out. I led him toward the Gateway’s front door, the portal for so many who had fallen to the bottom of the pile, usually because of addiction, mental illness, or just plain bad luck. Inside, I gave Zeusenoerdorf a closer inspection, and when our eyes locked, a twelve-year-old memory took over with such an intensity that several seconds passed before I could speak.

  “You need a place to stay?” I asked him, trying to get past the recollection of that autumn afternoon when I jogged past the Bowery Mission on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I couldn’t shake the picture of the twenty-five-year-old woman helping a gaggle of booze-beaten men through the front door of the mission. The woman told me her name and I handed her my heart.

  “A place to sleep—do you need somewhere to stay?” I asked, trying to clear the image from my mind. Mercifully, the woman’s face faded away but not before she pulled back the curtain to show me more of Miklos Zeusenoerdorf. The man’s ugly exterior hid a simple, easily confused, gentle person who had an IQ of an eight year-old and a speech impairment that only made him all the more imperfect.

  “A bed?” I asked again. “Do you need a bed?”

  A mumbled, unintelligible response that I took as a “yes.” I motioned Zeus to sit down and retreated to my office, pretending to look for a Gateway sign-in form. When I was alone, I covered my eyes and drew in a long breath. It had been a long time since I last held my wife, Anne. Yet she still visited me often.

  I would see her mostly on those days and nights when I had been kicked hard by a job that came with a paltry paycheck and even less respect. That’s when she would remind me why I was here—why I left behind a very different life. The year Anne and I were married, I was an advertising executive on a fast track and my wife was a social worker with the Coalition for the Homeless. When I made senior V.P., which brought me a fat six-figure salary and a load of perks, Anne could have easily given up her long hours and skimpy compensation. But she didn’t. Our East Side condo and the summer rental in the Hamptons were far less important to her than the coalition’s mobile soup kitchen that kept hundreds of New Yorkers from going hungry. Not often, but sometimes, she’d draft me into the coalition’s volunteer core so I could experience what it was like to pull a man out of a gutter and onto his feet. After a night of handing out blankets, underwear, and toiletries, I’d retreat to my day job and try like hell to put my heart into pitching an ad campaign for a new fragrance air freshener or a longer-lasting chewing gum.

  For the first few years of marriage, I never really got to know the homeless. Even though Anne made sure that I periodically worked my way down humanity’s ladder just long enough to catch the stench of poverty and hopelessness, the exposure came with a light coating. One
whiff of despair was enough to send me running back to Madison Avenue.

  Eventually, though, I came to understand the passion Anne had for her job. She was a converter; someone with an exceptional ability to transform the wretched. Anne didn’t use threats or intimidation. No incantations or banging the holy book. She did it all with her words—and her incredible gray blue eyes that tunneled into the minds and souls of those who had been dumped into America’s waste bin.

  I scooped together a few sheets of blank paper from beneath a small glass paperweight that usually went unnoticed: For helping others to help themselves.

  I’ve never put much stock in awards—but I kept this Coalition for the Homeless memento as a reminder of the special connection Anne had to those nine thousand families in New York City who have no permanent address and no shortage of trouble. If it weren’t for my wife, I doubt I would have come to understand what homelessness in America really means. If it weren’t for a rare but deadly brain tumor called glioblastoma multiforme that killed Anne, I doubt I would have had the guts to try to do something about the problem.

  “Okay,” I said, “you’re good to go. You’ve got a bed.”

  The man cocked his mouth into a smile. Then I noticed he wasn’t looking at me at all but was staring through the open door of my office at a barely visible eight-by-ten framed photo.

  “My wife,” I explained after turning to see what was captivating Zeus. It was as if he knew Anne. “She died. Cancer. A long time ago.”

  Zeusenoerdorf grunted softly and lowered his head.

  “Let me show you where you’ll be staying,” I said and headed toward the corridor that led to the first-floor resident quarters—a complex of small rooms sparsely furnished with bunk beds, used army lockers, and not much else. The big man pulled himself upright and took an awkward step toward me. As if he didn’t have enough problems, Zeus also walked with a limp that put his body slightly off center. When he reached the threshold that divided the Gateway’s common area from the resident hallway, Zeus’s left foot caught the edge of a small throw rug and he tumbled forward. His shoulder drove into my hip and both of us fell hard to the floor. I disentangled myself and got back on my feet, but Zeus stayed on his hands and knees. Eyes closed and mouth clinched tight, he braced himself as if expecting the sting of a balled-up fist.

  I reached for the man. “It’s nothing. An accident. Take my hand.”

  Zeus was suspicious. The Gateway was filled with men accustomed to punishment and distrustful of those quick to help—so I anticipated his reaction.

  “It’s all right.” I kept my arm extended.

  Seconds passed and then Zeus grabbed my wrist. I hauled him from the floor.

  Mrrmph.

  It was the man’s way of saying thanks.

  “It’s all right,” I said again, not disguising the compassion I felt for him.

  Again—Mrrmph.

  I suspected it wasn’t something he said that often.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Dr. Douglas Kool’s moniker fits perfectly with his buttoned-up personality, his thousand dollar suits and an impressive collection of Bruno Maglis. Doug lives and works in Manhattan where high fashion and a suave demeanor resonate like a mellow chord to those roosting at the top tier of society. Good thing. Because Doug’s occupation is all about hustling money from the rich and the powerful.

  “You can’t be serious!” Doug gave me a hard look.

  “Totally serious,” I replied, at the same time doing a mental rundown on the long list of differences between Doug and me. He was manufactured slick from his hair transplants to his “Doctor” title, courtesy of an honorary degree from the State University of New York. I was a forty-something Joe with a plain vanilla bachelor’s degree from Penn State and a retreating hairline. For all our dissimilarities, we had a weird kind of connection that had weathered a dozen years.

  Doug adjusted his glasses the way he did when he was super serious. “Bullet, your boy murdered Benjamin Kurios!”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “No, not maybe. Two witnesses saw Zeupeneltoth—”

  “Zeusenoerdorf.”

  “Whatever. The fact is, your guy used a two-by-four to punch a hole in Kurios’s head.”

  “It wasn’t a two-by-four. It was a cross.”

  “All right, all right,” Doug moaned. “So it was a cross. Your boy banged together two two-by-fours and then whacked the crap out of the world’s most famous Bible thumper.”

  “He’s not my boy,” I protested.

  “The hell he’s not!”

  I could have argued, but it would have meant confronting the disconcerting fact that Doug was probably right. In many respects, Zeusenoerdorf did belong to me.

  Doug glared at me over his nearly finished lunch. “What am I doing here?”

  “Eating osso bucco—which I’m paying for.”

  “Yeah, right,” Doug laughed. “If you’re paying, then I’m being set up. What do you want?”

  Doug Kool might be superficial, but he was far from dumb. He knew I was picking up his tab at Panico’s, one of the city’s better restaurants, because I needed a favor.

  “A meeting with Zeusenoerdorf,” I said bluntly. “Face-to-face.”

  Doug gave a little tug on his tie. “Mission impossible. The man’s sitting in an Orlando jail cell.”

  “I know.”

  “And even if you could work out a way to talk to him, the bigger question is why would you want to bother?”

  “Because there’s a chance the guy’s innocent,” I explained. “Zeus could be—”

  “Zeus?” Doug interrupted.

  “That’s what he’s called.”

  Doug puffed his cheeks, shook his head, and motioned for me to continue.

  “Look, I know it’s a stretch, but it’s possible Zeus didn’t kill anyone. Maybe he’s in custody because he happens to be a little—strange.”

  “Strange?” Doug cut in. “I think it’s safe to say that somebody who pounds the bejeezus out of an evangelist is a few notches beyond strange.”

  “Being odd doesn’t necessarily make the man a murderer.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Doug pressed. “If you can get eye-to-eye with this nutcase, you’ll figure out whether he’s innocent or guilty. Am I hearing you right?”

  It wasn’t the easiest case to make, but I was determined to give it my all. I leaned forward so Doug wouldn’t lose what I was about to say in the noontime buzz of the busy restaurant.

  “There are a couple of things you should know.” I spoke with as much sincerity as I could muster. “First, Zeus is slow. Second, he’s got a serious speech defect.”

  Doug grimaced. “I see. The man’s not a killer—he’s just got a communications defect, right?”

  I shrugged. “Could be.”

  “Good God.” Doug waved down a waiter and ordered a cannoli and cappuccino. My wallet groaned.

  “I’m not saying he’s innocent.” I tried the you-may-be-right tactic. “But I’m not totally convinced he’s guilty.”

  Doug took a deep breath. “Can’t help yourself, can you?”

  “What?”

  “Standing up for every loser who falls on his ass.”

  “Not every loser.”

  “Most. I gotta tell you, you’ve really found your calling.”

  “My calling was your lucky day,” I reminded my pal. And for a few moments, both of us were spun into the past.

  I first met Doug a couple of years after he started with Harris and Gilbarton. H&G was arguably the top fund-raising firm in the nation, and Doug had been hired because he was born and bred rich, which meant he was hardwired to big money. But it wasn’t his connections that rocketed him to the top of his firm’s talent pool. It was his I-won’t-take-no-for-an-answer salesmanship. I figured his annual salary had to be about five times what the Gateway put in my pocket.

  Granted, Doug had raw talent, and he might have climbed to the highest rung
of his work world without me. But he wouldn’t have gotten there so quickly if I hadn’t given him a boost. What brought us together was the United Way of America—the charity goliath that H&G had been trying to land as a client for years. The notion that the fund-raising United Way needed help from another fund-raising consulting firm probably would have forever been written off as a bad idea if I hadn’t opened the door for Doug.

  It happened a few months after Anne died. That was twelve years ago and yet I could easily reconstruct every detail of the Morgan Stanley executive dining room where I was brought in as the dessert-and-coffee performer for ten United Way board members and an H&G representative named Dr. Douglas Kool. H&G, as I would later find out, had volunteered Doug as a pro bono consultant to review my agency’s plan for a national United Way public service ad campaign.

  I showed up at the Morgan Stanley lunch about the same time I decided to exit the advertising business. I was still on my agency’s payroll, but after Anne’s funeral, my heart wasn’t in the game. That became painfully obvious to the United Way board members who found the crème brulee and cappuccino far more interesting than my story boards. Later that same day, I handed in my resignation.

  After my poor Morgan Stanley performance, Doug was invited into the United Way’s inner sanctum as a paid consultant. H&G had finally landed one of its most elusive prospects, which might never have happened if it weren’t for me.

  “It still amazes me that you dumped Madison Avenue,” Doug said.

  “Every so often, principles trump the pocketbook.”

  “Principles my ass. You bailed out of New York six months after your wife died. The reason you’re running a homeless shelter is your crazy way of paying homage to Anne.”

  “There are crazier things I could do.”

  “You’ve been at this for twelve years, Bullet! You’ve turned your job into a kind of hair shirt memorial to your wife, for God sakes. You don’t take vacations. You don’t date. Your life is half about running a boardinghouse for lowlifes and half about begging for money to keep the Gateway’s lights on.”