Black Water Transit (36 page)

They were both quiet for a time. The big car purred and rocked through the turning curves and New York filled up the skyline.

“So Greco’s playing him out. She knows he’s angry. She’s seen for herself that he’s dangerous. She’s letting him run.”

“And they stay right with him in that chopper.”

“Yeah.”

“To see who he goes after,” said Casey. “Does that mean that Greco thinks he’s innocent? A guilty guy would just split for Belize.”

“I don’t think so. I think she thinks he’s Italian, and all us guinea goombahs are crazy for revenge, right? So she’s standing back to watch him swing a wrecking ball through his friends and family. Then she comes in to kick ass, take names, and corner all the credit.”

“Derry said that somebody had called in a tip. That means somebody inside Vermillion’s company. Or family.”

“That’s right. Greco may even know who it was. So she sits back and watches Vermillion go hunt for a snitch to kill.”

“Yeah. And while he’s out hunting for a snitch to kill?”

“Earl Pike is doing exactly the same thing? I don’t think so, Nicky. We talked about that. If Pike was there
when Vermillion escaped, why not just kill the guy then? Save himself a lot of work?”

“I can think of a good reason. Other than the cat-and-mouse thing that Flynn was talking about. Think about it.”

Casey was silent for a long while.
Lakmé
was getting a bit hysterical in the third act, so Nicky found a jazz station and settled back to let Casey work it through.

“Okay,” she said finally. “I see it.”

“Yeah?”

“Pike’s after more than Jack Vermillion.”

“Maybe. But what?”

“Jack on the loose means the ATF out looking for him. They’re distracted. Looking elsewhere. In the meantime, Pike’s working out a way to get back the only thing that really counts with him.”

“His weapons? The collection? That’s a theory. But …?”

Casey flashed a sidelong look at Nicky.

“I think I know what’s bothering you.”

“Yeah? Enlighten me.”

“Pike came in on his own.”

“Yeah. But he doesn’t know what we have on him. The DNA. So I guess he figures he can finesse the Red Hook thing somehow, beat the ATF charges, then he’s home free. I ought to feel good.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. Actually, I feel worried as hell.”

“Because Pike knows something we don’t?”

“Yes,” said Nicky, looking out at the highway. “I think so.”

“Yeah,” said Casey. “So do I.”

Rain drumming on the roof of the marshals van woke Jack out of a dream about black helicopters. He’d been dreaming that he heard a chopper hovering somewhere close, but the sound was elusive, fading and rising, as if it were coming from between the buildings, the direction impossible to guess. The chopper sound changed into the sound of rain on the roof and he sat up, rubbed his face, looked out at the water. Although the clouds were broken and sunshine glittered on the rollers from time to time, the farther sea was blurred with rain and seemed plated with iron, a kind of hammered plain that resembled fish scales. Surfers were rising and falling on the slow rollers, backs hunched over, wet hair hanging down, riding on stubby boards, now and then sliding down the glassy green face of a slow-moving beach break. Jack idly prayed for a big fin in the water, but didn’t expect to get one, God being too busy fucking him over to pay attention to the lesser creatures of the sea.

The ocean sounded like a sheet of tin that somebody was rattling. Thunder was out there somewhere, he could hear it in the distance, like enemy artillery. Low clouds heavy with unspilled rain lay across the horizon line, looking like a fence running along the edge of the world. And now Jack could see a single figure trudging along the waterline in the hazy distance.

“Okay, here we go,” Jack said, talking to himself, watching as a man came down the shoreline, old and slightly bent, but big, powerful, heavy in the chest and shoulders, wearing a gray plastic raincoat over a dark
brown suit, thick black leather shoes. Now and then he’d put a cigarette up to his face and puff at it and shreds of smoke would fly away from him like white birds let out of a cage.

Jack popped the door of the van, stepped out into the warm wind and the feathery rain. He reached back inside and took one of the uniform jackets hanging on a hook, shiny dark brown with a big gold star on the right breast, slipped it on, and walked out onto the beach. The old man saw him, stopped and waited. The beach was long and wide and empty and the whole place had an end-of-the-earth look. The old man was facing out to sea, watching the surfers.

“Hey there,” Jack said, coming up slow on his right side. “Mr. Senza. Thank you for coming.”

The man did not turn or speak. Fabrizio Senza was a big man, over six-two. Up close like this, Jack could smell his cigarette smoke in the wind off the sea, and a scent coming off him like garlic and wet wool. His hollowed-out cheeks were heavily tanned, dark as hardwood planks, covered with spiky gray hairs, and his trimmed white mustache was large and stained with tobacco. His deep eyes were surrounded by lines and rays of seamed skin, as if he’d been freeze-dried. His shirt had once been white and expensive and his thin black tie was pulled in tight.

“Mr. Senza,” he said again, and reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. Senza moved it just enough to avoid the contact.

“I know you,” he said, still not looking at him. “Little Jackie Vermillion. Used to see you on Ditmars. Your momma was a wonderful woman, lovely like a cypress. Your pop I knew as a man you could talk to. Had the flower truck, I think? Big blue one with the yellow letters. I don’t remember so good anymore. Frank says they’re both dead now. Everybody’s dying these days.
Where’s your buddy, what’s his name, stupid name? Like a ditch, only smaller?”

“Creek. Creek Johnson.”

“Yeah. The party boy. I seen him at Frank’s all the time. Booze, women. Always with the Vegas line, always the bookies and the bets and the booze. Not a serious guy. Frank says you’re a serious guy. That’s why I come. Carmine says to say hello. Hello from Carmine. Will ya look at those mutts out there? What is that, spend all your day out on the board, waiting for a wave to ride? Why ain’t they working?”

Jack watched the surfers, waited.

“Okay,” the old man said. “Open up your jacket there.”

He turned around to face Jack. Four hundred yards away, on the roof of a shabby apartment block called the Sea Heaven Towers, two ATF agents huddled next to the seaward wall of the roof and struggled to keep their gear dry. One was Derry Flynn, wearing a rain slicker over black jeans and a black tee, combat boots, the other a female in full rain gear, late forties, thick around the middle, with a wide Slovak face and small bright black eyes, skin powdery and coarse, by the name of Maya Bergmann, one of the agents who had been there at Red Hook and survived.

“Who is it?” she asked Derry. Derry had his eye up to the scope of a video camera fitted with a directional microwave mike. Maya was handling the Nagra recorder.

“I don’t … okay, dammit! It’s Fabrizio Senza.”

“That’s Torinetti’s gardener, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe now. Back in the seventies he was a button man for Johnny Papalia, ran the family business in Montreal and Toronto. They called him the Barber because he liked to use a straight razor on guys who pissed him off. He’d take an hour if he had one.”

Maya Bergmann peered over the roof at the distant figures standing together on the shoreline.

“So tell me Vermillion’s not connected.”

“I don’t know,” said Derry. “When the law itself starts to fuck you over, who you gonna call? Amnesty International? The UN?”

“You still soft on this hapless mutt, Derry?”

“Quiet,” he said. “I’m trying to follow this.”

The old man stepped in close to Jack and frisked him expertly. Jack had left the Glock in the van, knowing that a pistol would do him no good with Fabrizio Senza and maybe a lot of damage. The old man even raised Jack’s cuffs to see if he was trailing antenna wire. A gull shrieked into the thin gray sky and wheeled away over the water. Jack watched it go, keeping very still. Then the man stepped back, shrugged, and let his hands fall to his sides.

“You may be clean. I dunno. Could have some guys taping all this from a truck up there. Got a guy on the roof. Forget it. Who cares? Frank says to check you out. Me, I got no game going. What do I care, you wanna tape me anyway? Frank’s a worrier. Lotta things have changed since I was a player.”

“You got that right,” said Jack. “Last time I had a guy feel me up like that, I was twenty years old and the guy was the doctor at Camp Lejeune.”

“I’m being careful. Frank said be careful. Frank says to me, go down there, talk to him. I’m here. Fine. I do what I’m told. I’m a fucking errand boy now. But I know you supposed to be inna slam, and here you are walking around inna jacket widda nice gold star. Why, I don’t know. Maybe now you got a federal leash on you, you working against Frank.”

“I’m not the only guy standing here,” said Jack. “This is Far Rockaway. They know you all over here.
How’d it be, Jerry Vale comes back to Queens and nobody knows him?”

“Nobody
would
know him,” said the man, baring his sharp yellow teeth. “It’d be ‘Jerry Vale? Who the fuck is Jerry Vale?’ ”

The man closed his eyes and pulled in a breath, let it go slowly out. Jack saw that his eyes were sunk into dark pouches and rimmed in red. He remembered Fabrizio being drunk that night at Frank’s, and Carmine saying something about a dead child.

“Carmine said you lost somebody. A relative?”

The old man rocked as if buffeted by a wind off the sea, his craggy face hardening. He looked at Jack as if Jack had struck him.

“You don’t mind, we don’t speak of her. I don’t like to think about it. Nothing can be done. Let’s stick to the business.”

“I’m sorry. I apologize. I saw you at Frank’s last week, I thought you were in Sicily. Everybody said you had gone home.”

“Hah. Where you think a guy like me is gonna go? I went up to the north for a while, shit, Milan’s just like Pittsburgh, fulla Swiss and Krauts, and the weather’s worse than here. I’m old, I need sunshine. I got some friends in Taormina, nice view of Etna in the morning, sun’s on it from out of the Aegean Sea there.”

“I know it,” said Jack, smiling at the memory. “My father was from Catania. I was back there just last year. Why’d you leave a beautiful place like that?”

“You hear things. Even
il papa
was shooting off his Polack mouth about our business. Crazy old prick. Why we let some Polack get the job instead of one of our own, that’s all screwed up there, hah? Old ways are changing. People start acting funny around you, stop talking when you come in the room. I figured I should go.”

“For your health, Zio?” said Jack, asking politely,
but maybe teasing a little. Fabrizio Senza had been caught up in the federal RICO actions of the late seventies, busted for tax evasion. He pulled his time and never testified about anything. But the Mafia didn’t like to take chances. Nothing personal, but we need you to be dead now,
paisano
. The old man didn’t smile back and seemed to have decided to stop talking for a while.

“So … how long you been back, then?”

Another long silence. The gull came back from the sea with something dead hanging from its beak. Other gulls appeared out of nowhere and tried to take it away. They cawed and screeched in the voices of schoolyard children, and then the whole flock soared away inland and the silence came back down.

Eventually the man spoke.

“I dunno … six years, maybe. What’s it to you? You was gonna rat me out to the press, you’da showed up with the New York One truck. So, what is it? You in a jam. What do you want from Frank?”

“You know I have some trouble. With the feds?”

“The feds,” growled the old man, suddenly angry. “Forget about it. Those mutts couldn’t throw a cluster-fuck in a steambath.”

Stung, Jack’s temper flared.

“With respect, Zio, they did a job on you.”

The old man blew out his cheeks and went for another cigarette. His hands were bumpy and knotted like lumps of oak burl. A wedding ring, thin and pitted and bent, was almost buried in the arthritis that had swollen around his knuckles and in his fingers.

“
Stati di grazi, io
. I said nothing, ratted out nobody. Took my time and ate it cold in solitary. Still the Papalia family sent a guy after me, a
pezzo novante
nigger with a shank. I cut his
pezzo
off and flushed it downa crapper, him lying there on the floor, bleeding and squealing, beggin’ me don’t do it. Hah! I’m supposed to worry about
the guys running things now? Alla old-timers, the serious men, they’re gone. Big Paulie was the last of the good ones, and that fashion model had him whacked. Now what? The Jews, the Russkies, the blacks? I saw that, I figured,
salud
, there goes the neighborhood. And I was right too. That mook Gravano calls himself Sammy the Bull—nobody else ever called him that—I hear he has a book out. Alla ’bout the hard guys he personally whacked. What is that? My day, you
did
things, you didn’t
talk
about it. I’m gonna hide out from a bunch of celebrity mutts like that? From TV stars? Let them come find me. I am in my
stagione morta
and I am not afraid. What am I now? Fucking gate boy. Frank’s dying. Everything is different now. Enough of this. I’m getting wet here. You talk to me, your situation, what Frank’s supposed to do about it.”

The old man fell silent, waited for Jack’s answer. There was an air about him of livestock, of animal calm. Jack nodded once, cupped his hands in front of his mouth and blew into them, rubbing them.

“Here it comes,” said Derry Flynn, up on the roof of the Sea Heaven Towers. Maya Bergmann shivered in the wind and pulled her collar up against the dripping rain.

Jack looked out to sea, thinking about Fabrizio’s question. What was Frank supposed to do? What was fair to expect?