Floating City (12 page)

They clung wordlessly to one another. What could he reply? Anything he would say would be a lie, so he chose silence.

Both of them longed to be alone, but it was impossible—Margarite had only an hour to spare, and Croaker needed to check the logs and go over her movements for the last twenty-four hours—and, in any event, there was Francie to think of. Instead, they went into the kitchen and had lunch together, all of them pretending there was no subtext, nothing odd, no hidden agenda, and in that way the real world was, for the moment, kept at bay.

The next morning, he was parked on the east side of Park Avenue at Forty-seventh Street, and yesterday’s encounter felt like a dream. Movement at the corner of his eye brought him to full attention. Two cars behind him, a woman had stepped into the street to hail a cab. She was a handsome woman in her midforties, affluent, as attested to by her suede and fox-fur coat and black patent-leather Chanel handbag. As she raised her hand, a rail-thin black man on a bicycle lowered his helmeted head and, his thighs pumping, put on a sudden burst of speed. He swerved to his right, cutting off a car, whose horn blared angrily. At the point he was abreast of the woman, his hand hooked out, snatching the Chanel bag off her shoulder. She spun around, slamming her hip into the bumper of a parked car, went down on one knee.

The cyclist was just hitting his stride when Croaker flung his door open right into the bicycle’s front fender. The cyclist went flying and Croaker was out of the car, sprinting along the tarmac. He kicked aside the bike, bent down to reach for the bag. The cyclist rolled over, grabbed the bag, and in the same motion, slashed upward with a switchblade.

“Motherfucker, you want this back, you betta be ready to die for it.”

Croaker struck out with his left hand, luminous blue and matte black. The blade of the knife struck two fingers and sparks flew, metal on metal, and the cyclist’s eyes opened wide.

“Oh, mama!”

Croaker curled his titanium and polycarbonate fingers inward, trapping the blade. With a quick twist of his wrist, he flung the knife from the cyclist’s grip. Then he placed his hand in front of the man’s strained face, slowly extruded the wicked-looking stainless-steel nails. He placed the tips against the cyclist’s shirt, scored five rents in the fabric.

“Hand me the bag,” he rasped, “or I’ll put these right through you.”

“Okay, okay,” the cyclist said, throwing the bag at Croaker. He slithered up, never taking his eyes from Croaker’s hand. “What the fuck
is
that thing, anyway?”

“If you’ve got to ask, you don’t want to know.”

The cyclist went warily to pick up his bicycle, but Croaker put a heavy foot on the rear wheel. “This is mine now.”

“Hey, chill out, I’ll lose my job without it. This my livelihood, man.”

“You should have thought of that before you snatched this.”

Croaker watched the man slink off, then walked back to where the woman was staring at a run in her Fogal stocking. “I believe you lost this, ma’am.”

“You should have beat the shit out of that animal,” the woman said, taking her Chanel bag. Her gray eyes were already searching for a taxi, “Damnit, now I’m late for my meeting at Sotheby’s.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” Croaker said, getting back into his car. He left the bicycle where it lay in the street.

Jesus,
he thought.
What’s become of this city?
It was here that he and Nicholas Linnear had met many years ago. He reached for the paper cup of cold coffee on the dashboard, regarding his left hand as he did so. In the course of then-subsequent work together Croaker had lost his left hand. In its place, a team of clever Japanese surgeons had attached this biomechanical substitute. He still marveled at it. The fingers were realistically articulated like flesh-and-blood digits. Powered by a pair of special lithium batteries, the hand was sheathed in matte black polycarbonate, stainless steel, and blued titanium. Inside were the bones, muscles, and tendons of boron and titanium. It was an altogether impressive construct, part implement, part weapon. It had taken him months to get used to it, a year to master the intricacies of its multiple uses, but now it seemed to him an integral part of his body.

Croaker was a big beefy man. In recent years, he had let his muscle run to fat, much like an out-of-work football player, but Nicholas had put him on a strict regimen of exercise and healthy food, and his softness was slowly burning off, leaving hard muscle in its wake. Croaker had always been enormously strong. The addition of his biomechanical hand had only made him more so. He had the weather-beaten face of a cowboy.

Some years before, he had prematurely retired from the NYPD to Marco Island in Florida where for the past several years he had been running a charter fishing boat service. Vegetating, in other words. Alix, the woman he had lived with down there, had claimed he looked like Robert Mitchum, an opinion he found amusing.

He glanced at his watch. Three minutes to ten. He saw Margarite a moment later in a tweed suit the color of ox-blood as she got out of the taxi down the block. Her beautiful face was tense as she headed toward her weekly ten
A.M.
meeting at her accountant’s office. She had the look of a professional gambler, the successful integration of intuition and logic that was the key to beating house odds, no matter which house.

It was torture seeing her this way and not being with her, but what other choice did he have? At least, if he kept his distance he could maintain the thin fiction that this was just another job tailing a suspect, and thus keep his sanity.

Croaker unfurled a newspaper in front of his face like a wall. His relationship with Margarite was liminal. His sense of her was constantly changing, the layers of her personality and her role in his life peeling away to reveal others beneath. She was not only Dominic Goldoni’s sister, but his successor. Through her husband, Tony D., she now ran the Goldoni empire as efficiently as Dominic had. But what had been Dominic’s ultimate purpose? Through the course of his investigation Croaker had come to understand that Dominic Goldoni had been a good deal more than a cold-blooded gangster. He had had more lofty goals in mind than merely raking off his percentage from almost every major business sector in the East. His ties to the entrenched Washington establishment were exceedingly strong.

He and Mikio Okami, the Kaisho—the head of all the Japanese Yakuza bosses—had formed a clandestine alliance. But to what purpose? Neither Nicholas nor Croaker had yet found out. First, they had to find Okami. Periodically, the Kaisho had funneled useful information to Dominic Goldoni. Though Dominic was dead, the conduit was still open and Margarite was using it.

Nicholas and Croaker had together decided that this would be Croaker’s dread assignment: to shadow the woman he loved in order to trace the information conduit back to Okami. As he watched her cross the wide, plazalike sidewalk, Croaker knew he was at risk from a double-edged sword. Not only did he need to keep his work secret from Margarite, but he also had to be on guard lest Okami’s enemies get wind of what he was doing and piggyback on his investigation, using him as a stalking horse to get to Okami.

Through large glass panels, he watched Margarite step into the elevator that would take her up to the twenty-eighth floor. That she could stay in the same house as Tony D. was a measure of how seriously she took her responsibility to her late brother, Dominic Goldoni. Tony had a history of abusing her; their intimate relationship was nil, and as a result, their daughter, Francine, was chronically depressed and bulimic. Still, it seemed strange to Croaker, when he was with Margarite, to know that she was married, bound to a man who was, in effect, her mask for the dark world she chose to inhabit. The words on the printed page were not registering, and he closed his eyes. But he could not stop his thoughts. The irony of his being in love with a woman on the other side of the law was devastating in its simplicity.

“Hey, buddy, this is a no-standing zone.”

Without looking around Croaker dug out the federal badge given to him by his former boss, the late and unlamented William Justice Lillehammer, the man who had put him in charge of the investigation into Dominic Goldoni’s murder. He held it up at the window so the traffic cop would go away.

“Turn off your engine and get out of the vehicle, please.”

Croaker put down the paper. Instead of one of Manhattan’s brownies, he saw a uniformed policeman, a young man with an unmanageable stubble and muddy brown eyes.

“You see this shield, Officer? I’m on assignment, not in your jurisdiction. Give it a rest.”

Keeping his eyes on Croaker, the cop reached in, unlocked the door, opened it. “Please do as I say.”

“Are you nuts? I’m a fed.”

“Now.”

Croaker found himself looking at the cop’s right hand as it wrapped around the wood grips of his handgun. Where was this guy when the rich bitch was having her handbag snatched? He put the badge away, got out of the car. He could see the blue-and-white squad car parked just behind him, its revolving lights off. There was a uniformed cop behind the driver’s seat, who seemed to be staring straight ahead, at nothing.

“Come with me, please,” the young cop said amiably but firmly.

Croaker shrugged, got into the back of the squad car as blue-jaw indicated. The cop got in beside him and they pulled out into traffic. They did not use their lights or their siren.

Croaker sat back and said nothing. He was too much a veteran to ask questions he knew would not be answered. He’d be better off concentrating on these two and where he was being taken.

The driver was older, a heavyset man with a mole on the side of his nose, and a wooden toothpick rolling back and forth between his liverish lips. He seemed uncomfortable, as if his uniform were a bad fit.

They went west, then downtown to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel.
New Jersey,
Croaker thought.

“Don’t even think about it,” blue-jaw said. His gun was pointed at Croaker’s rib cage.

Sure,
Croaker thought.
What New York cops would be taking me across the river to Jersey?
No wonder the driver was uncomfortable in his uniform. This was probably the first time he’d had one on. Who were these guys?

They seemed to be a long time underwater. When they emerged, it was to a long sweep of fuel-stained concrete, the front porch of New Jersey.

The air had changed. It was sweaty, soot-laden, as if the entire area were one vast mill. Cars, concrete, steel, and high-tension wires made an unappetizing mosaic, an environment devoid of color or life.

They turned off right away, heading toward Hoboken. But they never actually made it there. The blue-and-white pulled in past a rusting gas station that must have been a relic of the forties. An old VW Beetle, stripped and burnt out, hunkered on the blackened concrete apron where underground gas tanks hadn’t been filled in decades. A black cat scrounged indifferently through piles of litter.

Behind the deserted station was a junkyard full of rusted cars of no conceivable use to anyone. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. It had the appearance of a POW camp. Rubble was everywhere as if, at some time in the not-too-distant past, this had been a war zone. A couple of bundled-up homeless people trundled dispiritedly past, their backs bent as they pushed shopping carts full of brown bags, string, and old, soiled clothes. They crossed the street in a racket as the carts collided. A brief argument ensued, then one of them made a brief attempt to capture the cat, but it was too nimble, streaking away at the first clumsy lunge.

“Nice neighborhood,” Croaker said. “You boys come here often?”

“Shut up!” blue-jaw said, jabbing him with the muzzle of the pistol.

“Careful, sonny,” Croaker said. “You might get careless and shoot yourself.”

“I told you—”

“Clam up!” the driver snapped. “He’s here.”

Croaker turned in time to see a midnight blue Lincoln Mark VIII gliding around a corner behind them.

The driver put the blue-and-white into gear and they went through open gates in the chain-link fence into the junkyard. The Lincoln followed them, its huge engine purring contentedly.

They jounced over a bed of broken-up brick and concrete, then stopped. The driver turned off the engine, got out without a word.

“Move!” blue-jaw said, and Croaker slid out of the squad car. He could see the driver with his back to them, taking a leak against the bole of an old scabrous plane tree that had somehow survived the industrial abuse and pollution.

The Lincoln slid to a halt several feet away. Its windows were tinted that odd dark color one saw all the time in Florida to keep out the sun and the heat.

A man emerged from behind the wheel, and Croaker let out a little breath. It was Tony DeCamillo, Margarite’s husband. Tony D. came walking across the rubble. He was dressed in the suitably subdued chalk-stripe suit of the upscale show biz attorney he was. Only his silk shirt with his initials embroidered on one point of his collar betrayed his ambition. He would never be the criminal genius Dominic Goldoni had been. In fact, Croaker mused, now he would not be much of anything, except a figurehead, robed in the trappings of Dominic’s vast power.

“Beat it,” Tony D. said to the phony cop contingent that had brought Croaker to him.

“But, Tony,” blue-jaw protested, “this jamoke’s dangerous.”

“Sure he is,” Tony said. “But I have Sal in the car.”

The blue-and-white took off, backing out of the junkyard.

“This place one of your premier holdings, Tony?”

Croaker regretted the flip remark the moment he’d said it, but the truth was he hated this man, not only for the stink of corruption that followed him around, but because he was a violent man with his family. Croaker thought of the beatings Margarite had taken from Tony D. and his heart began to pound so painfully in his chest he had to take slow, deep breaths through his mouth.

DeCamillo was a good-looking Mediterranean. He was olive skinned and his brown eyes were hooded, liquid, lascivious. He came up very close to Croaker and shot his cuffs.