Flood (16 page)

24

MAX WAS BACK in a couple of minutes to let me know James and Gunther had vacated the immediate area. He touched his eyes and made a circle in front of his face, parallel to the ground, to let me know he was going out to see what happened to them. I told him I’d wait right where I was and sat in the empty warehouse. I didn’t enjoy the quiet. My first thought was that Gunther’s reaction had been unprofessional, that they were amateurs who had blundered their way into a weapons contract and didn’t know how to move from there. But it wouldn’t wash. They were professionals all right—but professional scam artists, not gunrunners.

If I could get my hands on a valid End Use Certificate, I wouldn’t need the likes of Gunther and James to do the merchandising for me. Any damn fool with money can buy all the weapons he wants in this country. The real money was out there for transportation and delivery, not outright purchase. The ten-grand deposit was all the money that they meant to change hands—sort of an international version of the Pigeon Drop game, except instead of an envelope stuffed with newspaper I’d get a phony Bill of Lading, F.O.B. London, telling me I was the proud owner of a bunch of nonexistent weapons. You can’t really cheat an honest man, someone once said, and they were right. Those lames thought I’d make the deposit an investment in my own ripoff scheme and steal the guns for myself. It told me two things—they thought I had some real contacts in Africa from the Biafra episode, and they thought I was a thief. Like most losers, they were about half-right.

So why did I tell them I’d get back to them? One reason was that I didn’t want them to do anything stupid, and James might have thought the con was still running for them. But there was something else, something I couldn’t isolate in my mind. They must be good for something, maybe something connected to this whole Cobra business, but I didn’t yet see exactly what or how.

I knew one thing, though: in the joint, the major child molesters and the neo-Nazis had one thing in common: they all wanted to be part of “law enforcement.” One of them—he had been running a school “for disturbed kids” with sodomy as therapy—told the Prof that he was working for the FBI. When the Prof played him along, he said he had a code name and everything—that the lawyer who came to see him regularly was really a Bureau agent. He told the Prof that he was gathering information about rival kiddie-porn dealers and passing it along. Just a good citizen. I didn’t think anything about it—it was just good information to have. But when I saw this creep buddy-up with a guy who called himself Major Klaus, I knew they had to have something in common. One of the mistakes I make sometimes is to lump all freaks together in my mind—like there are brand names for certain kinds of humans. I should know better. My survival instincts told me to keep James and Gunther on the hook, but a connection to the Cobra wouldn’t come to the front of my thinking. It was just lurking somewhere in the back. I didn’t press it. Whatever instincts, intuitions I had had kept me alive so far. From experience, I figured when it was time for the connection it would come to me.

While I was trying to dope out how they came to connect me with African work (and giving it up as a bad job because a lot of people knew something about that craziness—diamonds that weren’t there and starving kids that were), Max rolled back. He gestured that the two losers had been picked up in a cab about ten blocks from our base. He didn’t bother to find out where they went since it wouldn’t mean anything to us. I could see Max was still up for battle, pumping fire inside but handling it well. If you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see anything, but I did—this hadn’t been the first time. He followed the cab back to the taxi garage in the Plymouth. I turned in the hack, picked up my four hundred bucks from the half-a-grand deposit with the dispatcher (he returns all but a yard as the rental fee), and we headed home.

I could see Max wasn’t down to normal operating temperature yet, so I started telling him about this Cobra freak and Flood and what I wanted to do. The more we talked about how we’d pull it off, the calmer he got. Except when I told him how it all started, with me hitting that horse at Yonkers for a grand from Maurice. That he simply refused to believe, so I told him to go to Maurice’s and pick up the money himself and hold it for me. I wouldn’t even have to call Maurice and let him know Max was authorized to make the pickup—Max the Silent has a better reputation for honesty than the Orthodox Jews in the diamond industry. Max is often used as a courier for that reason, plus the fact that ripping him off would be past the capabilities of your average SWAT team. Max only moves money or things like money—jewels, paper, computer printouts. He won’t move dope, and people know better than to ask him anymore. He’s not bonded, so all you get for your money is his word. To a warrior like Max, that means you get your stuff or his life. Uptown when they want stuff delivered, they have guys in fancy uniforms who have passed polygraphs, given their fingerprints and all that—down here we have Max the Silent.

I told Max that finding the Cobra would be the real problem, and he made the sign of maggots under a rock again, then shook his head, held his hands toward the sky, and snapped his fingers like a magician pulling things from thin air. I got it. Maggots don’t come from outer space, they’re on the earth for a reason. They only move in the direction of decay—they help it along, eventually make it disappear and then they move on again. Like an old-time burglar told me once, explaining why he never worked with dope fiends, “Dead meat brings flies.” The Cobra had to be swimming in slimy waters or he’d stick out like an honest man at a political caucus.

That didn’t narrow the search much. Some people think slime is subject to zoning laws. They pick some part of a city and call it the Tenderloin, or the Combat Zone, or the Block, or even the Red Light District if they have a blue nose. Assholes. You don’t need a Ph.D. in sociology to understand slime. Slime needs fresh meat to live, and if you don’t bring it around, the slime goes shopping. The uptown glitzo who gets ready for Saturday night by slipping a vial of cocaine into the glove compartment of his Mercedes can’t see the slime lapping at his hubcaps. He pays his money and the money gets passed around until it coagulates into a movable mass. All money moves. Dope money moves into a pipeline, and at the other end you get loan-shark cash on the streets and kiddie-porn operations in the basements. The glitzo goes to his hip party and whips out his vial of nose candy and shows the other jerks that he’s connected—he’s down with the program.

A few blocks away, some dirtbag pimp passes his vial around in an after-hours joint. He got the money for his dope out of the body of some thirteen-year-old runaway who thought the smooth-talking man in the Port Authority Bus Terminal was going to make her a star.

Yeah, they’re both connected—to each other.

I move through slime like a poacher on some rich man’s estate. I take what I can. Whatever money’s out there is as much mine as any dirtbag’s. Some of them don’t like it—most of them don’t know it. I guess some people are still waiting for a man to walk on water. I wish them a lot of luck—I walk on quicksand. One time when I was a kid in the juvenile prison I made the mistake of telling one of those half-assed counselors what a bitch it was growing up in the orphanage—the miserable punk told me you have to play the cards they deal you, like that was supposed to bring on a flash of insight and make me into a good citizen. As I got older and kept doing time I began to realize that maybe the counselor had been right—you do have to play the cards they deal you—but only a certified sucker or masochist would play them honestly.

I asked Max if he would ride with me over to the piers to see if Michelle had learned anything. He nodded okay and I drove the Plymouth west. I told Max to stay in the car no matter what he saw going down. One time when I was looking for someone on the docks Max saw this freak all dressed up in a stormtrooper outfit standing out on the abandoned pilings. He was waving a giant bullwhip around like he was getting ready to drive some galley slaves. A bunch of locals were standing around watching the show—just entertainment for them, I guess—but old Max decided that they were all terrorized by this freak, and he slid out of the car and kicked the poor fellow into the Hudson River before I could stop him. When he pivoted to the crowd like he was expecting applause, the audience ran like they’d just seen their future up-close. Max isn’t desperate for recognition, and the locals weren’t exactly his peer group, but you could see he wanted some acknowledgement of his feat. So I told him he was now the undisputed champion of that pier.

Max doesn’t have a big ego about that kind of thing, but I didn’t want him suddenly deciding to defend his title, so I repeated the deal about staying in the car no matter what.

The piers were dark and murky, like they always are. Couples walked to empty buildings, hustlers waited, predators watched. No Michelle. No Margot. No cops either.

I drove Max back to the warehouse, waved good-bye, and watched him disappear into the interior. Drove back to my office, put the car away, went upstairs. As I put the key into the floor-level lock I heard Pansy’s low growl. When I got the door open she was poised about three feet away, the hair on the back of her neck standing straight up and her fangs, like they say, bared. Somebody had been around to visit—maybe a visitor for the hippies upstairs who got the wrong address, maybe someone with some bad ideas. I asked Pansy, who didn’t say. Whoever it was hadn’t gotten into the office.

I got some marrow bones out of the fridge and put them on to boil while I changed clothes and listened to the news. I switched to the police band for the local precinct, using the crystals I wasn’t supposed to be able to buy over the counter. The radio runs into an antenna lead, and the antenna itself runs up through the useless chimney stack on the roof, protruding about a foot. I got perfect reception, but all it picked up were routine crime-in-progress calls and cops telling the desk man they were going off the air for personals, which could mean anything from a bathroom visit to a shakedown.

I used a strainer and poured the boiling water off the marrow bones to let them cool. Pansy came down from the roof, a lot calmer now—whoever had come around hadn’t come over the rooftops. I started thinking about the roof and how I’d like to have a garden up there someday—there was sure as hell enough fertilizer already in place. I could tell I was getting tired because I was starting to think like a citizen. Putting down roots, even on a city roof, is blubber-brained. Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.

When the marrow bones cooled I gave one to Pansy and sat patting her massive head while she crunched it. Maybe real private eyes make up lists of things to do and places to go, but I like to work them out in my head—an old prison habit. Trees can’t run and people can’t Xerox your thoughts. If they could, they never would have let me out of that orphanage when I was a kid.

25

WHEN I WOKE up the next morning I was still in my chair. It didn’t look like Pansy had moved either. My watch said it was almost nine. I opened the back door to let Pansy out and went next door for a quick shower and shave. By the time Pansy trotted downstairs to supervise my work with the razor, it was just about time for my phone call. I went back into the office, picked up the receiver to check for hippie-interference, noted their usual early-morning silence, and dialed the direct line for an assistant D.A. I know in Manhattan. Toby Ringer was a real hardnose, with no political hooks, who battled his way up the bureaucracy by being willing to try cases that scared most of the other D.A.’s. You know the kind I mean—where the bad guy’s a hundred percent guilty but there’s no solid evidence and the odds are you’re going to lose it in front of a jury and get a black mark against your record. Some of those wimps won’t even touch a case unless there’s a videotaped confession and four eyewitnesses. Toby’s no cowboy—he doesn’t have fantasies of some death squad wiping out all the vermin in the city someday, but he has a genuine hate for the real slime, so we’ve been able to help each other out on occasion. He’s not State-raised, but he’s been around long enough to know how to act.

All the D.A.’s answer their phone the same way. “Mr. Ringer’s line.”

“Good morning, Toby. I got a present for you.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Your friend from the Gonzales matter, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, okay? But I got a gold-plated chance for you to nail a baby-raper, and I’ll throw in a homicide to boot.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For justice. I don’t want anything—I just want to tell you something that I can’t tell the cops.”

“This is Mr. B., I presume.”

“I’m your man. Can I meet you someplace tonight?”

“My office. That’s it—no other place. Deal?”

“Deal. What time?”

“Make it around eight. Everybody’s gone home by then and the night crew will be downstairs working the Complaint Room.”

“Want me to see the man at the front desk or just bypass him?”

“Go to the desk. I’ll leave word—what name?”

“Tell him Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“You’ll see, Toby. Tonight, right?”

“Right.” And we hung up simultaneously. I keep all my calls on this phone under one minute; this one had barely qualified.

I sat down at my desk planning to compose a suitable recruitment ad for the mercenary journals. It might bring the Cobra around but that would be a last resort, especially since it takes three or four months for the ads to get into print. He might be long gone by then—forget it. I locked the place up and aimed the Plymouth for the docks, figuring Michelle would be easier to find in daylight.

I backed into my usual spot facing West Street, lit up, and waited. There were plenty of hustlers working, but no Michelle. Waiting isn’t hard for me, though. Different people use different tricks to make the time go by, but it all comes down to the same thing. You can’t make anything happen, you just have to be ready when it does. Sometimes you have to hide the fact that you’re waiting so you use something like a taxicab and sometimes you find yourself a job to do while you’re waiting so if someone is looking they see the worker, not the watcher. Some places you stand out only if you
don’t
look like you’re watching, like in the cesspool—Times Square. If you’re tracking a man in that pit, the only thing to do is really gawk around and be obvious as hell about it. Then they only wonder what you’re looking for, not who. This job was like that. All the freaks parading by knew I was waiting for something or somebody. And after I was there a half hour or so, word would get around; they’d talk, compare notes. They’d know I wasn’t law, but they couldn’t be sure I wasn’t trouble.

In some neighborhoods, especially Italian or Hispanic ones, the young bloods would try their luck with a stranger just to be doing it. Not down here—everybody down here already knows their luck is permanently bad, and the nice-looking man in the cashmere topcoat coming down the block might just have gotten so bored reading muscle magazines every night after his frigid wife went to bed that now he’s stalking the streets with a handgun in his pocket and exorcism on his mind.

When I wait like this I usually listen to some of my tape collection. I started it by accident. I’d gone to a meeting that I wanted to record and the Mole had rigged me up with one of his devices, using sequential blank-tape banks with minicassettes. It was voice-activated and would record for six hours straight. I kicked it in before I even got out of the car, but I forgot to turn it off. So when I dropped by this cellar club later to unload a couple of gross of phony tickets to a rock concert, the tape was still running. They had a kid playing at the club that night who looked like he left Kentucky to work in the Chicago steel mills, but he was a blues singer, pure and simple. Someone once said the blues are the truth—maybe that’s why I listen so close when I hear that music . . . truth’s in short supply in my line of work. Anyway, when I got back to the office and played the tapes I found a couple of the kid’s numbers at the tail end. The Mole was right about the perfect fidelity—listening to the tape was exactly like being back in the club. And listening to the music was exactly like being back in my own life, like the blues are supposed to be. The blues don’t make you think—they make you remember. If you’ve got no memories, you can’t have the blues. I avoid physical pain like a vulture avoids live meat, but I call up the past sometimes and let it wash over me on purpose. Maybe it helps me survive. Maybe it makes me believe that survival isn’t a waste of time. I don’t know.

When the tape broke into the cellar club’s sounds I heard the rattle of glasses and the voices of the waitresses hustling drinks and the muted electric hum that meant nobody was listening to anyone else. The kid fronted a classic Chicago-style blues band: he sang and worked a mouth harp off the same microphone, a piano, a slide guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass, drummer. The kid didn’t have much of a rap—he didn’t have the years and confidence for that yet. But he understood that if you could make people in a basement club stop boozing and snorting and hustling long enough to listen, you had something real. Whatever that something was, the kid wanted it—bad. He leaned a bit into the microphone, said “This is ‘Bad Blood Blues,’ ” and the piano man started into a series of rolls and falls, going with just the bottom line from the bass player. It wasn’t loud, but it was intrusive, insistent—impossible to ignore. So much so that by the time the guitarists and the drummer were there, too, the crowd was waiting to hear what the kid had to say. He cupped the harp around the microphone, then appeared to change his mind and just got to it. Unlike most white blues singers, the kid didn’t try to sound black. The words came out firm and clean, not covered by the band:

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I didn’t mean to stay with that woman,

At least not for very long.

and you could hear the crowd shut down and shift over to a listening stance. By the middle of the second verse the kid was getting shouts of agreement when he sang:

Oh I knew that she was evil,

People told me she was mean.

Yes, I knew that she was evil,

And people told me she was mean.

I knew that she was evil . . .

But I always thought that she was clean.

Then the kid bridged into a hard, anticipative harp solo, taken against the bass and rhythm guitar, letting the crowd know he was going to explain the mystery to them in just a little while. And he did:

Well, she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

You know she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

And when she finally gave me something . . .

(By then, we all knew what he was talking about.)

I brought it home to my poor wife.

And behind shouts of “That’s right!” and “Had to be!” the kid picked up the harp again and the blues came out. Just that simple, and damn-near perfect. By then the people knew where he was going, where a story like his had to go:

Now my life is so empty,

My wife don’t want to see my face.

My life is so empty,

And my wife don’t want to see my face.

I got to walk this road alone,

Bad blood, it’s my disgrace.

And the kid rolled the harp down with the rest of the band and finished. He had them all moving now and he went uptempo but stayed with the blues. The harp barked into a fast lead, the piano floated off the top, and then the kid sang his own road song:

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come

And people in the crowd who knew what he meant chuckled in agreement.

I got a long way to travel, honey,

I’m sorry you can’t come.

You are all used up, babe,

And I have just begun.

Like a lot of the blues, sex got mixed up with everything else. The kid grabbed a breath:

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care.

I got a long way to go, babe,

And I know that you don’t care . . . just where

You wouldn’t like it anyway, babe,

They ain’t got no suburbs there.

And the harp barked its challenge to the crowd, wailing out the don’t-mind-dying credo of all bluesmen as the tape finally ran to its end.

That was the first tape in my collection—I’ve added dozens since. I got some early Paul Butterfield, Delbert McClinton, Kinky Friedman (and if you think this guy’s just a quasi-cowboy clown, listen to “Ride ’Em Jewboy” just once), Buddy Guy, Jimmy Cotton—all live. I had a Muddy Waters tape too, but it sounded like he was playing Prom Night in the suburbs someplace, the same way Charley Musselwhite did when I caught him at some college hangout near Boston. I don’t blame either of them, but I erased the tapes. I have some stuff I didn’t record myself too, some Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, stuff like that. I keep the tapes in the Plymouth to help me do the waiting—I’ve got more sense than to listen to them inside a closed room.

About an hour later I saw a black Lincoln Town Coupe pull up under the elevated portion of the West Side Highway, the part they’re never going to finish building. Saw a flash of nylons as a woman climbed out of the front seat, working before she hit the ground. She disappeared into the shadows and the Lincoln pulled away. I thought I recognized the woman, but it was long distance and I didn’t have time to put the monocular to my eye. I turned off the tape, set the system up to record instead, lit a smoke, and waited.

I was right. Margot approached from the far right. She must have crossed the street under the El, doubled back to the side, and walked along the river’s edge by the piers. She was swinging her purse like she was planning to do business. It might have fooled the pimp in the Lincoln if he was watching her, but it wouldn’t have fooled anyone who’d seen me sitting there for a couple of hours.

As Margot got closer, I saw she was wearing giant sunglasses that covered half her face. I slowly rolled down the window in time with her approach so that she arrived as the glass disappeared.

“Waiting for me, Burke?”

“I don’t know, Margot, am I?”

“Listen, I think he’s watching me, okay? Let me in the car—I’ll get on the floor like I’m giving you head and talk to you.”

“No good. I’ve been here too long. Other people have seen me—they know I’m not waiting this long just to get off.”

“I got to talk to you.”

“Go back where you were, okay? I’ll meet you—”

“No. Forget it—no, wait. Let me get in the car and just drive away. They’ll think you
were
waiting for me, right? A hotel job.”

“What’s the rate for that?”

Margot lifted up the sunglasses so I could see her face. One eye was swollen shut and there were traces of dried blood over a plucked eyebrow. She spoke in a flat, deliberate voice. “It used to be fifty, but now Dandy says I’m a full-fledged three-way girl so it costs a yard.” I just looked at her face—her eyes were dead. Her voice didn’t change. “And he says if I don’t make a success of myself going three-way I can try the Square and do some chain jobs. He gets two yards a night or I get worse—get it?”

We had already talked too long, in front of too big an audience.

“Get in the car,” I told her, and fired up the Plymouth. Pulling out of my slot, we rolled onto the highway, heading south toward the World Trade Center, hooked a deep U-turn, and rolled back north toward uptown. Nobody following.

I motored around for another twenty minutes to make sure. Still nothing. So I drove over to a basement poolroom with the dirty neon sign that said
Rooms
over the entrance and got out. Told Margot to come with me and keep her mouth shut no matter who said what to her. I handed her an empty attache case I keep in the back seat and said to hang on to it like it was full of money.

We went down the short steps to the basement and stopped by the wire cage, where an old man was watching a small-screen color TV with his back to us. To the right of the cage was a flight of steps leading upstairs, to the left was the basement with the pool tables. I rapped my knuckles on the counter. The old man didn’t even turn around from the TV. “No vacancies, pal.”

“It’s me, Pop,” I said, and he turned around, looked at me, saw Margot, and raised one eyebrow. “It’s business.” I pointed at the attache case. The old man reached under the counter, took out a key with the number 2 on the attached paper tag, and I handed him two fifties. He turned his back to us and went back to the TV set. I motioned Margot upstairs in front of me and we climbed in silence.

Pop only rents rooms to certain people and only for business. The key says #2, but it really means the whole second floor. When you’re finished you leave the key on the hook by the door, leave the door unlocked, and go down the fire escape. The rate is a hundred bucks until the next morning, no matter when you check in. And nobody stays past the next morning, no matter what they want to pay—house rules. Pop uses Max the Silent for evictions, but they don’t happen often.