Zins of the Father #7 Greed
Kate Williams
First came Josie, a woman scorned. She poisoned a bottle of Chateau Sangfroid and gave it to ex-husband Thomas, wishing him dead. Thomas and Anne gifted it to the ridiculously rich Breretons, who passed it to their immigrant gardener Javier. It then slipped into the hands of Fat Pat and her stoner-kid Ronnie. In the previous installment, Ronnie totaled a car but not the deadly bottle, and Officer Ebert laid claim. Seven deserving sinners, seven sleights of hand, seven chapters, one unopened bottle of wine. In this final chapter of Zins of the Father, novelist Kate Williams wraps things up.
Officer Ebert likes to frighten people. He gets a kick out of watching thick-waisted housewives go stiff with nerves when his cruiser falls in line behind their Volvos. He enjoys the furtive scanning of mirrors and the shushing of brats, their eyes darting and their teeth clenched. He likes startling old men with his lights and sirens, especially the vaguely European sounding one that screams HEEEE-yo, the one he uses to make motorists pull right. But his favorite by far, the highlight of each eight-hour shift, the pinnacle, oddly enough—is the routine traffic stop. He loves the fear in their eyes.
Ebert likes stretching it out, savoring the details, letting his target work himself into an anxious lather. By the time he leans down to give the perp’s closed window an authoritative little tap, adding a pantomimed cranking motion for effect, the cop knows the civilian has begun to register a nervous wetness pooling under an arm, or a brittle dryness at the back of the throat, perhaps an anxious urgency to pee. He likes letting them stew.
Friedrick Ebert’s German mother stuffed him with strudel and bratwurst, stollen and beer soup. Deeply and fervently Old Country, from her sensible shoes to the money stuffed in her mattress, Olga Ebert never quite managed to cross the pond in the metaphysical sense. She dressed young Friedrich in lederhosen and woolen knee-highs for church, oiling his white-blond hair into a greasy helmet that category four hurricanes wouldn’t muss. The other boys tormented him, capturing his queer felt hat for interminable rounds of keep away, inflating their bellies to waddle behind him shouting, “Heil Hotdog!” While his mother spent hours tidying the church kitchen and gossiping with her American friends in the strange language that never felt right in her mouth, young Friedrich dodged his tormentors, his pale complexion flushed crimson, his round cheeks aflame.
“I hate them all, Mama!” A rope of viscous snot slides from Freddie’s nose.
“Ach, Friedrich! This is nothing! To have troubles such as this is to have no troubles at all. Nein, my boy. Be brave.” She clamps her bawling son to the suffocating topography of her traffic-cone breasts, patting him sternly on the back. “Let me tell you about troubles, my son.” And she begins the windy narrative Freddie knows too well; of ancestors caught up in the War of Wars, hungry and broken, all their lovely possessions gone. The air raid sirens that sent little Olga and her sisters scrambling for the imagined safety of the suffocating space beneath their beds; the ignoble defeat that forced all of Germany to hang its noble head; an entire generation shamed. Still only a girl, her pigtails braided high and tight, but Olga knew troubles. Freddie hears, but no longer listens, his mind lost to the lush landscape of someday. Someday I’ll show them, he thinks. I’ll show them all someday.
The mood in the black Jaguar stuffed with cheerleaders has suffered a sea change, Officer Ebert knows, a complete reversal of the high-octane hilarity of just seconds before. Idling at the side of the road, its occupants furtively digging for gum to cover the beer and spritzing perfume to disguise the reefer, Ebert feels a momentary pang of empathy. He has absolute power to ruin their night. Even if their music hadn’t been cranked to look-at-me-max, Ebert would have noticed. He has that special gift endowed to so many officers of the law: the canny ability to assimilate social data at high speed. Like the killing machines in all the old Schwarzenegger movies, Ebert has a droid-like capacity to absorb and analyze the cogent information of human groupings. This is how he understands from thirty paces that these girls are top tier, local hotties who date super jocks. Little rich girls, whose chest-thumping daddies own sprawling wineries, and whose well-preserved mothers play tennis on Tuesdays. He knows they’ll be firm and ripe, wafting pheromones that can buckle a man’s knees. Juicy. His mouth watering, he jams the cruiser into park and kicks open the door.
There is no hubris quite like that of a powerful man with a gun on his hip. It accentuates his already pronounced swagger, straightens his naturally straight spine, lowers his baritone to bass. The big black weapon strapped to Officer Ebert’s slim hip transforms him instantly into a cock-a-doodle dick, a leggy banty rooster with firepower, which is not to suggest he won’t quid your pro quo. He’s the consummate back scratcher, really. Friedrich Ebert is all about the secret handshake, the chummy old boys club, the tit for tat. But piss him off, son, and life changes fast. He’s got the gun, after all.
“Evening, girls.” Ebert places both hands on the car’s open window ledge, leaning down to eyeball his catch. “Going a little fast back there. You ladies in a hurry tonight? ”
“No sir,” the driver answers, offering up her most bewitching smile. “I’m just giving my friends a ride home from church is all.” A titter rolls across the back seat. The sharp scent of Altoids perfumes the Jag’s cabin.
“That right.” Officer Ebert gives each girl a good long look, pulls himself upright and mumbles into the radio strapped to his chest. Leaning back down, he says, “License and registration, please.”
The girl digs through her littered bag and the tidy glove box, surrendering both with a practiced flirt, her fingers grazing his open palm a nanosecond too long. “I don’t know how far over the speed limit I was, Officer, but I swear I’m a totally safe driver and I totally promise I’ll slow down. I’ve never even had a parking ticket before, swear to god. I hope you can just give us a warning.” Her big green eyes try to telegraph innocence. Ebert grunts, slides both documents into his ticket book, and strolls back to the cruiser.
He pretends to run the car’s plate, fiddles with the gadgets on his dash while his eyes stay locked on their rear window. He can see the driver’s face reflected in the mirror, can see that she’s not the least bit afraid as she issues commands to the underlings riding shotgun and crowding the back seat. This makes Officer Ebert mad. He knows that in every flock of alpha chicks there’s always an uber. One mega-girl in possession of preternatural calm; a cocky little thing, who knows exactly what she’s packin’ and how to play it. He knows this, but he doesn’t like it. He furrows his brow, eyes narrowed to slits, kicks his door open wide and plants his feet in the dust.
“I’m gonna need you to step from the vehicle, miss,” he tells her moments later, staring at a point just north of her hairline. She shoots a nervous little look toward her crew but recovers totally by the time she’s out of the car. Flips her long blond hair, hooks a thumb through a loop in her low-rise jeans, and pops a hip west.
“Something wrong with my license, Officer? I’m legal to drive my friends, you can check with my parents.” She juts her delicate chin defiantly at the cop, daring him to take her on.
“You and your friends have been drinking, miss.”
“No we ha—“
“And you’ve got six people buckled into a car built with restraints for five.”
“Well isn’t that better than—”
“Miss, I advise you to zip it. Now.” Ebert stares her down, leaning forward on his toes, rocking into her airspace just a little. She drops her eyes. Better.
Friedrich Ebert takes a slow walk around the girl, openly appraising the tight young body, the remarkable narrowness of her waist. Circling back he crosses his arms across his chest and sighs. “The way I see it, we’ve got two choices. We drunk test you—and you’ll certainly fail—or you and I play ball. Is that about the way you see things, ah —” Ebert looks down at his book, “Tiffany?”
“What do you mean, play ball?” Tiffany’s eyes are lasering the toes of her little boots now, and her voice has dropped half an octave. All the giggly perkiness of before evaporated. Better still.
“Well, now, let me think. How might you and I make a deal? What might you girls have that someone like me might want?” Ebert taps his chin with the index finger of his right hand, pretending to contemplate the question. Tiffany shoots a look at the other girls, all of them stone-still and doe-eyed now. She glances back up at the cop, pulls a strand of hair into her mouth and bites it.
“I dunno…,” she trails off, crossing her arms across the flat, tan belly, trying to cover the gap between T-shirt and jeans. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Nothing? A sweet, little girl like you has nothing for someone like me? You can’t think of a single thing I’d like?” Ebert leans in, his nose practically touching Tiffany’s hair, and takes a long, noisy inhale. Letting it out, a broad smile lights his face. He lowers himself several inches, waits for Tiffany’s eyes to meet his, and repeats, “Nothing?”
And now she’s crying. Quick hot tears fill her eyes, all the bold mojo gone with the wind. She keeps one arm wrapped across her belly and raises a hand to wipe furiously at her face. Ebert grins, showing all of his teeth. It was all he really wanted in the first place. Just a little respect.
Food was Olga’s canvas, each plate a masterpiece. Heaped upon the Bavarian china, handed down through four generations and kept intact through an impossible world war and a difficult ocean crossing, were daily servings of high calorie love: sausage and gratins and pastries oozing cream. In Olga’s mind, there wasn’t a single life experience that couldn’t be enhanced by food: celebration, lamentation, conquest, or surrender; all improved by a heaping plate of schnitzel. For the first twelve years of his life, Little Friedrich sidled up to the trough like the good son he was. And then, one day, he pushed back from the table like a man possessed, shouting “No more!” He changed from rosy-cheeked cherub to straight-backed young man, in what seemed—at least to his heartbroken mother—mere minutes, refusing her completely on the turn of a dime. No more potato pancakes, no more kinder punch. No lederhosen, no church. No more old stories. No. No. A vast chasm formed between them that day, and though she spent the remainder of her life looking for it, Olga never found the bridge that would carry Friedrich back.
Officer Ebert steps from the shower, his pink skin glistening. He grabs a clean towel and shimmies himself dry, steps up to the full-length mirror, and stares. The terrible pudge of his boyhood has long since given way to the angles and planes of the hard body reflected in the glass; the beautifully sculpted V from shoulder to waist; the graceful, curving musculature of his powerful thighs. He’s proud of his physique. Spends a significant percentage of his time building and admiring it. Flexing from this angle and that, he rotates slowly, taking in his reflection from three hundred and sixty degrees. He adores the plump curve of his butt: ripe and full as summer melon. Loves the chiseled plane of his belly. Returning the towel to the bath bar, Friedrich drapes it in equal measure on either side with a compulsive little tug here, a fussy pinch there.
Tonight wasn’t something Ebert had seen coming, though he’d been rubbing up against the possibility of it for a good while. They saw each other often, their coded communication creating a kind of intimate shorthand before he even knew her full name. Josie Winslow, ER nurse. Built like a brick house, and brainy too.
Newly single after her dumb-ass husband skated off on the scent of something fresh last year, Ebert could almost taste her fear. No sane woman wants to be alone at forty, even one as empirically fabulous as Josie Winslow. Women grow dependent upon the approval of men, and wither too quickly in its absence. The twin threats of solitude and celibacy made them reckless, and Ebert was getting good at positioning himself for the swoop. Josie had been letting him nearer by minor degrees for the last several months, and Ebert felt he was finally within striking distance. But when he’d brought the kid in last week, the gangly boy with a blood alcohol of 2.2, and a rough case of acne, something shifted between them. Josie spotted the boy on a gurney looking like six feet of ground chuck and before Ebert knew it, she was in his arms, sobbing. She’d told him the kid was a neighbor, someone she’d known since he was in diapers. For a shot at Josie, it was no big deal to Friedrich to pretend that it mattered.
He had sat with her in the spartan little courtyard off the emergency room until she’d pulled herself together, patted her hand and stroked her long hair until the hiccupping sobs ran their course. She looked up at him, grateful and a little embarrassed, and asked simply if he would come to dinner. “Let me cook for you,” Josie said. “It’s been too long since I’ve fed a man.” Ebert was delighted, if a little off-balance. It wasn’t often he missed such an obvious cue.
He stops at Appleman’s for a classy bouquet of blooms. The girl puts sweet pea and gardenia together in an understated display, somehow intuiting that Friedrich doesn’t wish to appear overeager. He nudges his car into the flow of traffic, and places the flowers in the seat next to the bottle of wine. Chateau Sangfroid. Excellent. Probably fifty bucks, retail, but this particular bottle was a lucky find. Discovered miraculously intact at the nasty crash site of the very kid Ebert owes for this long-coveted date, it hadn’t set the cop back a single thin dime. He smiles, and with a flourish, pops the car into third.
Her house is lit up nicely from the street. The warm golden glow shining from the panes makes Friedrich nostalgic. His mother was something of a freak about, what she called, the quality of light; refusing to eat in restaurants that were glaringly fluorescent, and fanatical about candles at home. There’s an attractively understated wreath made of fall foliage at Josie’s front door, and a stately antique fixture illuminating the brass numbers of the address. Ebert locks the car, rubs a smudge off the left fender with the cuff of his wool overcoat, and steps onto the skinny brick path. In his right hand are the flowers, in his left the bottle of wine. The pinprick in the wine’s foil top has disappeared, worn smooth by the grappling of many hands. There is no scar remaining from the syringe Josie used to poison this very same bottle of wine, no physical mark remaining from which to identify it from another. Its label is dirtied by the hands that have held it, its edges frayed and battered. Like the seven souls who laid claim to it on its long, twisted journey, the wine is fatally flawed. Capable of devastating destruction, infused with potent sins.
Friedrich Ebert marches up the garden path. In the open doorway, Josie stands in a halo of light, lit from within by some deep, private fire. Thrusting his gifts into the small space that divides them, she claps her hands like a child reborn and holds them out to him, palms open. “For me?” she cries, beaming. FL
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