From the Heart of Darkness (27 page)

“Goddamned right,” Mullens agreed with an angry nod. “Any way you can.”

“And we're part of your organization afterwards,” the corpse-pale newcomer added. Neither of them had any expression in their eyes. “We get half of anything we bring in, and you give us a free hand.”

“I already said so!” Big Tom blazed. “Now do you stand here all night waiting for Tullio to set up one last hit?”

Smokie Joe broke in with a laugh that chilled the room. “Oh, don't worry about Tullio. Not after tomorrow morning.” He was still laughing when Nick and Angelo turned and left the room. They closed the door very gently behind them.

*   *   *

The black Cadillac got a final dab before Tullio's chauffeur folded the chammy and stepped back. Every Sunday morning he parked squarely in front of St Irenaeus to let out two bodyguards and his employer: Tullio had not missed mass or made confession in thirty-seven years. By now people knew not to take Tullio's place at the curb. People knew—or they learned, like the owner of the red VW was going to learn. The chauffeur spat a gobbet that dribbled down the suitcase lashed like a dorsal fin to the Volkswagen's roof.

The small bomb behind the altar of St Irenaeus rattled the Sunday quiet and shivered the rose window on the street side. The chauffeur's jaw trembled. He dropped the cloth and jumped in to crank the big, silent engine of the Cadillac. The church doors slammed back, the bodyguards fanning to right and left with pistols in their hands. Tullio stumbled out behind them, his thin face yellow except where spatters of the priest's blood had marked it. The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards' tongues. Ruthless elbows and gunbutts had ripped the gangsters through shocked churchgoers, but now the doors spilled-out net-veiled women and men in dark suits.

The directional mine on the Volkswagen's roof sawed them down with over a thousand steel pellets.

Tullio's chauffeur hammered at his door, wedged by the force of the explosion. The four-inch glass of the windshield was fogged with shatter marks. The church facade was a haze of powdered stone; fresh splinters raised a hundred rosettes against the dark wood of the doors.

The steps of the church were an abattoir. In the middle of it sat Enrico Tullio, screaming like one of the damned. Much of the blood splashing him now was his own.

*   *   *

“Seventeen fucking bodies,” screamed Big Tom Mullens, “and you didn't get Tullio! He'll use an H-bomb on us now if he has to!”

“Tullio won't use anything,” Nick said unconcernedly. He opened his black eyes and stared full at Mullens. The heavy gang-boss felt the impact. His stomach sucked in and he used the back of his right fist to wipe spittle from his mouth.

“Tullio lost his guts through the holes that Claymore put in him,” amplified Smokie Joe from the chair he had leaned back against the wall. “Sure, he'll live. He'll set up somewhere else, maybe go back to Chi and crawl to the boys who backed him for the takeover here. But
you've
seen the last of him, Big Tom. Every time he hears your name he'll remember the blast and the blood pouring down the stone beside him. When you play for keeps, you play the man; and Tullio knows now he can't play as hard as you.”

The phone rang, loud and terrible in the silent room. Danny Mullens bit blood from his lower lip and backed against the wall. Big Tom stared at the phone as if it were a cobra clamped on his leg.

“Go ahead, Big Tom,” rolled Smokie Joe's smooth voice. “It can't be worse than you're already thinking, can it?”

Mullens shot him a glance full of violence. He had no one to back a play, though, beyond a terrified 16-year old and a bookkeeper shock-stoned to immobility. He turned his anger on the caller instead, snarling, “Hello!” into the receiver. His red Irish face changed as he listened, moving through neutral blankness to beaming, incredulous triumph. “Sure,” he boomed, “but you got one hour. If you can't get through the hospital bullshit by then, then God have mercy on you, Tullio—because I sure as Hell won't.”

Whooping, Big Tom slammed down the receiver and swung over the table as if it were a vaulting horse. His arms embraced the two torpedoes. In his bubbling happiness he did not notice that they were still as coldly aloof as when he thought he had been tongue-lashing them for failure.

“Time to talk about payment, isn't it, Big Tom?” suggested Smokie Joe easily.

“Pay? Oh, Christ, yeah,” Mullens said with startled generosity. “Look, what do you guys really want for what you done?”

“What you promised,” said bone-pale Angelo. “Half the take my girls pull in.”

“And half of what I turn from skag,” Nick added. “That'll be plenty when a few kids get strung out and start pushing it to their friends.”

“Huh?” Big Tom said. “Jesus, nobody could get hooked on the shit that gets out here. It's already been cut fifteen to one.”

“I've got contacts in Asia,” Nick grinned. “What I move'll be pure as Ivory Soap.”

His words jogged a scrap of newsreel in Big Tom's memory. “You were in Viet Nam, weren't you?” he asked. “That's where you learned to use one bomb to set up the real one out in front.”

“We were in Nam,” Angelo agreed with a smile that would have made a shark flinch. “We were sort of instructing there.”

Lod Mahoney stepped to Mullens' side and caught him by the wrist. “Tom,” he pleaded, “for the love of God, you don't mean to go into heroin? There's money, there's all the money we need in numbers. You know the people you got to deal with in drugs and whores.”

“Money?” sneered Smokie Joe from the other side. “Peanuts! If you stick with that, you'll be a set-up for somebody else like Tullio who knows what can be done by a guy who's willing to. And if you welsh on us now, Big Tom, you won't have our help the next time it happens. What'll it be?”

Mullens tongued both corners of his lips, looking from Mahoney to the expectant violence of the two torpedoes. “I gave my word,” he said at last. “I'll back anything you need to set up.”

Their smiles dreadful reflections of one another, Nick and Angelo stepped to either side of the whimpering bookkeeper. “Smart cookie,” said Smokie Joe. Nick's fist smashed Lod beneath the breastbone. As Mahoney doubled over, Angelo punched him in the back with enough power to pop a rib audibly. The plump man writhed on the floor like a crushed dog.

“He ain't dead,” Nick said. “He ain't even unconscious. But his spleen's busted and he'll bleed out in ten, twenty minutes.”

Danny Mullens turned his face to the wall and vomited.

“Get rid of the meat, boys,” Smokie Joe ordered. “Never trust somebody who gets religion,” he added earnestly to Big Tom as Nick and Angelo carried Mahoney out the door. “They're worse than the ones who've been goody-goody all the time. They think they've got something to make up for, and they don't mind putting your ass in the hot seat if they decide it's the ‘right' thing to do.”

The forelegs of Joe's chair thumped the floor as he stood. He tapped Big Tom playfully on the shoulder. “Come on, give us a smile. We're going places.”

Big Tom shook himself, a great bull of a man tearing loose the jaws of an emotion that troubled him. He forced a bloodless smile. “Yeah, up.”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Smokie Joe.

*   *   *

“I can't believe this,” said Big Tom Mullens, shoving the account book across the scarred table.

“You think I'm cheating you?” asked Smokie Joe without rancor. “I'm not. And Nick and Angelo will keep their part of the bargain.”

“It's not that I think you're dragging me down,” Mullens admitted, frowning perplexedly at the slim figure. Smokie Joe had proven as perfect an accountant as he had been an operations man before Lod's—death. “It's—well, Hell, Joe; I don't see how Nick could bring in this
much,
starting from scratch with no street organization. And Angelo running a cat-house in a college town—Christ, he could sell ice to Eskimoes.”

Joe laughed in a satisfied way, a father preparing to explain to his son how he has gotten the stalled lawnmower to work. “There's no secret about Nick,” he said. “Sure, people push skag for money; but the best pushers are the ones who've just been turned on to it themselves. They're riding the crest, they're happy, and they want all their friends to be up there with them. God's a white powder to them, and they've got just as much enthusiasm as Paul the Apostle did.”

Smokie Joe's laughter as he stood was suddenly a terrible thing. He faced the window for a rippling but unshaded view through the Lexan panels. “And these kids, they're so smart. They ‘know' they can't get hooked if they only snort the stuff, it doesn't put enough in their bloodstream. Only they don't know that what we sell is 97% pure heroin—not until it's too late for them to care.”

Big Tom pressed his temples. The wealth that had trickled, then poured in over the past months had not improved his appearance. His suits were tailored silk, but his belly had begun to slop over his belt and sweat quickly marked whatever he wore. Perhaps his hair had not really thinned and it was only the heightened ruddiness of his face that made it seem so. “What about Angelo, then?” he asked.

Smokie Joe turned. “You sell a customer what no one will give him,” he said quietly. “I think a tour will do better than any words I could use to explain. Come on, let's take a ride down to Third Street.”

“At three in the afternoon?”

Joe cocked a thin line of eyebrow. “At ten in the morning, Big Tom. Even bankers have started staying open the hours customers want—and we're selling what they can't get free, remember?”

The drive was short and without further discussion. Big Tom's headquarters were in the old industrial section, near the railroad station and the car shops. Angelo had set up in a huge frame house, a Victorian leftover on the outskirts of the business district. The previous owner had once refused to sell, Mullens remembered, prefering to hold the property against future rezoning to commercial or apartment use. Until now, Big Tom had not wondered why the old fellow had decided to sell to Angelo.

Smokie Joe swung the car through the alley entrance to the fenced courtyard behind the house. There were already three cars within: a Buick, a Chrysler, and a rusted gray Nash. “The staff doesn't park here,” Joe said. “Of course the girls don't leave at all.”

The door opened before either of the visitors rang. Angelo gave Smokie Joe a brief nod that could have been either recognition or obeisance. “Good you could come, Mr Mullens,” he said. “I think you'll be impressed by our operation—your operation, that is.”

Within, the house appeared to have been little modified from its original design. Down the rear stairs came a pair of laughing men, a huge black with boots, a loincloth, and a whip; and a middle-aged white man who used the brim of his hat to shield his face when he saw Big Tom. Mullens had already recognized Judge Firbairn.

Firbairn scurried out the door. The black nodded to Angelo, eyed Joe and Mullens with mild interest before he swaggered down the front hall and into a room to the side. Something had dripped from his quirt onto Big Tom's wrist. It seemed to be blood.

“That's Prince Rupert,” Angelo volunteered. “Some of our customers prefer watching to doing. Rupert does real nice for them. And we use him for other things too, of course.”

“Why does he pad his crotch that way?” Big Tom asked, disgusted but unwilling to admit it.

“It's not padded,” Smokie Joe cut in, leading his employer down the high-ceilinged hall. “He has lymphogranuloma, and the scarring in his case has led to elephantiasis.”

“Jesus God!” Mullens grunted. “I don't know how you could pay a woman enough for that.”

“We couldn't,” agreed Angelo with a smile. He unlocked the first doorway to the left. “Not money, at least. All the girls are strung out. So long as they get their four jolts a day, they don't care—they don't even
know
—who does what to them.”

He threw open the door. Big Tom gagged as he took in the bed, the extensive props and the mewling woman who lay in the midst of them. He pulled the door closed himself. “She's only eighteen!” he said.

Angelo spread his palms. “They age quicker than you'd think,” he replied. “Then we got to sell them south or to Asia.”

“They come to us, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. His eyes were as intense as diamond needles. “Remember that. Every one of them asks, uses the words, for everything that's done to her. If they change their minds later, that's too bad.”

Mullens shook nausea from his mind. “How in Hell are you running this? No fix on earth would cover up a deal like—” He waved his hands to save words he did not want to speak.

“Think Judge Firbairn would sign a search warrant for this place?” Smokie Joe gibed.

“There's other judges in the district. They haven't all been here.”

“You'd be surprised,” said Angelo. “And even some who don't.…”

His voice trailed off but Smokie Joe had already opened the door of a converted broomcloset and unlocked a drawer of the filing cabinet within. “Suppose you were about to launch a push against—well, you'd call them ‘the forces of crime and decay' when you held your press conferences, I suppose. Then your daughter got drunk enough to take a dare from some girlfriends—girls she'd grown up with, though maybe if you'd paid more attention you wouldn't have cared for some of the company they'd been keeping recently. Took a dare and got in a little deeper than she expected.

“So the next morning,” Smokie Joe continued, snaking out a packet of photographs, “a messenger brings you a roll of Super-8 movie film. What do you do then, Mayor Lawrence?”