Strega (11 page)

26

I
GRABBED the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side and drove across, staying in the right lane. I took the first off–ramp and kept bearing right until I hit the light under the overpass. To the right was the federal courthouse. It's a good spot to meet someone like Julio—nice and private, but too close to the
federales
for anyone to start shooting. I turned left onto Jay Street and kept rolling my way through the side streets until I was just past John Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. I turned the Plymouth parallel to the water on the passenger side, dropped my window, and lit a smoke. The deserted slips hadn't seen a boat in years. I was about fifteen minutes early.

I only had a couple of drags on the cigarette when the white Caddy pulled up. It pulled up to the Plymouth, stopping only when it was nose to nose. The passenger door opened and Julio got out. I opened my door and started to walk away from the cars, my back to the Caddy. I heard one man's footsteps crunching on the gravel behind me. When I got to the railing, I turned so I could see both cars, looking past Julio to see if he was going to be stupid.

The old man had both hands in his overcoat pockets, collar turned up, hat pulled down over his eyes. Maybe he was cold.

"What's so important?" he wanted to know.

"Your friend's daughter—you told her where to find me?"

"Yeah."

"She wants me to do something for her."

"So you do it. You get paid. What's the problem?"

"What if I don't want the job?"

Julio turned away from me, looking out over the water. "Times have changed, Burke. Things aren't like they used to be. It's different inside too, you know?"

"I know," I told the old man. And I did: When I was a kid, it was always "Do the right thing." You couldn't go wrong if you did the right thing. When the new cons roll up on a new kid inside the walls today, they still tell him to "Do the right thing." But they mean get on his knees or roll over. Even the words don't mean the same things.

The old man just nodded, watching me.

"You told her about the Nazis too?" I asked him.

The old man went on like he hadn't heard me. "Remember how it used to be? If you was a rat in there, guys would shank you right on the yard…just to be doing it. You knew where you stood. Now guys come in
bragging
how they sold their partners for a better deal."

"What's that got to do with me, Julio?"

The old man was wasting away. His cashmere overcoat looked three sizes too large. Even his hat was too big for his head. But his alligator's eyes were still the same—a man on chemotherapy can still tell someone else to pull the trigger.

He looked me full in the face. "I always thought it was you that did the hijacking," he said.

I moved closer to him, my right hand on the handle of the ice pick I kept in my overcoat pocket. The tip was covered with a piece of cork, but it would come right off if I pulled it out. Julio had spent more time in prison than on the streets—he knew what it meant for me to stand so close. You spend enough time inside, you don't even think about getting shot—there's no guns behind the walls. It takes a different kind of man to stab someone—you have to be close to do it—you have to bring some to get some.

"You thought wrong," I told him, holding his eyes.

He looked right at me, as cold as the Parole Board. "It don't matter anymore. People do things…maybe it's the right thing to do when you do it…who knows? It don't matter to me.

"So why bring it up?" I asked him, my hand still on the ice pick, eyes flicking over to the white Caddy.

"I want you to understand that some debts get paid, okay? Whatever you did years ago, you always been a standup guy, right? Enough years go by,
anybody
should be off the hook."

I knew what he wanted me to say, but not why. "Yeah," I told him, "we all got a life sentence."

He gave me a chilly smile—he was lying about something and I was swearing to it.

"You told her about the Nazis?" I asked him again.

"Yeah," he answered again. His voice was dead.

"Why?"

"She's like my blood to me, you understand? I can't refuse her anything." He moved his shoulders in a "What can you do?" gesture.

"I can," I told him.

The old man didn't say anything for a while. He lit one of his foul cigars, expertly cupping his hand around the wooden match. He blew a stream of blue–edged smoke out toward the water. I just waited—he was getting ready to tell me something.

"When I was a young man, the worst thing you could be was an informer. The lowest thing. That's all over now—you can't count on anything," he said.

"You said that already. When I was a kid, it used to be 'Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.' Now it's 'Don't do the crime if you can't drop a dime.' " The old man made a dry sound in his throat—it was supposed to be a laugh. "Only now it's a quarter," he said. The laugh never reached his belly, like the smile never reached his eyes.

"I still want to know what this has to do with me, Julio. It's your family, not mine."

"Yeah. My family." He took a breath, turned his flat eyes on my face. "Gina is my family," he said, as if that settled it.

"Whose idea was it to send that clown with my money?"

"Okay, it was wrong. I know. She wanted him to do it—I didn't see the harm. There was no disrespect. You got your money, right?"

I just nodded.

"Did Vinnie get stupid?" he wanted to know.

"Vinnie is stupid," I told him.

Julio didn't say anything. Being stupid wouldn't disqualify Vinnie from employment.

"The girl threatened me," I said. "Like I do her work or else…"

"She don't know no better, okay? When she wants something, she's like a crazy person. I'll talk to her."

"Do that. I'd appreciate it."

"It's done," he said. The old man put his hand in his pocket, came out with a roll of bills wrapped in a rubber band. He handed it to me. I pocketed the money, waiting.

"For your trouble," he said.

"My past trouble or my future trouble?"

"For the past. I apologize. I never thought she'd go all the way on this."

"You know what it is?"

The old man took a breath. The smoke came out his nose in two faint wisps. He took too long to think about the answer. "Yeah," he said. "That picture."

Now it was my turn to just nod. The jackpot question was still on the table.

"I just walk away? No problems?" I wanted to know.

"Burke, you want to walk, you walk. But if you did this thing…for the girl …if you did it, I would be grateful. You would have my gratitude, understand?"

I nodded again. A hundred feet away the two cars stood in silence. They looked like two giant dogs, nosing each other to see who was in control. It was a good question.

The old man walked over to the Caddy. He never looked back. His door closed; the Caddy backed away from the Plymouth and pulled out with a chirp of tires on the pavement. I was alone.

27

I
SAT in the front seat for a minute, lighting a cigarette and looking around. The pier was empty. I didn't expect anything else. There was no need for Julio to have me followed—I don't advertise in the Yellow Pages, but people know where to find me if they want to bad enough.

The bridge was quiet too, that time of day. I drove slowly back to Manhattan, thinking my thoughts, trying to put it together. I was making the turn onto Allen Street when this old fool stepped right in front of the Plymouth. I hit the brakes just in time. Instead of apologizing, the old bastard gets red in the face and screams, "Why didn't you blow your horn?" A real New Yorker. "If I'd known you were fucking blind, I would've!" I shouted back. I live here too.

I pulled into the alley behind the old industrial building near the Hudson where I have my office. It's all been converted to "living lofts" and the landlord is making a bundle. Except on me. I unlocked the garage and drove the Plymouth inside. The back stairs go all the way up to the top floor, where I have the office. Steel doors block the stairway at the top and bottom. There's a sign that says the doors have to be kept unlocked in case of fire, but it's always too dark to read it. The top floor has a door near the front stairs and another near the back. The one near the back is sealed from the inside—I haven't tried to use it in years. The other door has a fat cylinder set into the middle—when you turn the key, a bolt drives into both sides of the doorframe and into the floor too. I never use it unless both Pansy and I are out. I don't carry the key with me either—I leave it in the garage.

I took the door–handle key out and twisted it hard to the left before I turned it to the right to make it open. I heard a low rumbling from Pansy as I stepped inside. "It's me, stupid," I told her as I stepped over the threshold. If I hadn't twisted the key to the left first, a whole bar of lights aimed at the door would blast off, and whoever entered would get a few thousand watts in their face and Pansy at their groin. She wasn't supposed to move unless the lights went on or if I came into the office with my hands up, but I didn't want to get careless with her—like I seemed to be with everyone else lately.

Pansy goes through personality splits whenever I walk into the office alone. She's glad to see me, but she's disappointed that there's nobody to bite. She followed me through to the back of the office. There's a door back there that would open out to the fire escape if this building still had one. The metal stairs go up to the roof. Pansy knew the way—she'd been dumping her loads up there for years, and I guess she still had room to spare. I keep telling myself that one day I'm going to go up there and clean up the whole damn mess. One day I'm going to get a pardon from the governor too.

The office is small and dark, but it never makes me depressed. It's safe there. A lot of guys I know, when they get out of jail after a long time, the first thing they do is find themselves some kind of studio apartment—anything with one room, so it feels like what they're used to. I did that too when I first hit the bricks, but that was because even one room was a strain on my budget. I was on parole at first, so my income was limited.

The office looks like it has two rooms, with a secretary's office on the left as you walk in. But there's nothing there—it's just a tapestry on the wall, cut so it looks like there's a way through. That's okay—there's no secretary either. Michelle made me up a bunch of tapes so I can have her voice buzz someone in from downstairs if I have to. I can even have her voice come over the phony intercom on my desk in case some client has to be reassured that I run a professional operation. To the right, it looks like a flat wall, but there's a door to another little room with a stall shower, a toilet, and a cot. Just like jail, except for the shower. It was supposed to be for when I had a big case running and I'd have to spend a lot of time in the office. I stopped kidding myself about stuff like that when Flood left. I stopped kidding myself about a lot of things—it's dangerous to lie to yourself, especially when you're as good at it as I am. I live in the office. I have a good relationship with the hippies who live downstairs. I don't know what they do for a living, and they don't know I use their phone.

The whole floor is covered in Astroturf. It's easy to keep clean, and the price was right. I can lock the front door with a switch on the desk in case I want to keep someone from leaving too quick. And the steel grate on the window makes it real tough for anyone to just drop in unless they bring along a cutting torch. Michelle always says it reminds her of a prison cell, but she's never been in prison. It's not a prison when you have the keys.

I left the back door open so Pansy could let herself back in when she finished on the roof. She lumbered over to me, growling expectantly. She was just looking for a handout, but it sounded like a death threat. Neapolitans were never meant to be pets. I checked the tiny refrigerator: I still had a thick slab of top round and a few slices of Swiss cheese. There's only a hot plate—I can't cook anything except soup. I cut a few strips from the steak, wrapped each one in a slice of cheese, and snapped my fingers for Pansy to come. She sat next to me like a stone lion—her cold gray eyes never blinked, but the drool flowed in rivers through her pendulous jowls. She wouldn't take the food until she heard the magic word from me—I didn't want some freak throwing a piece of poison–laced meat at her. I tossed one of the cheese–wrapped pieces of steak in the air in front of her. It made a gentle arc before it slapped against her massive snout, but her glance never flickered. Satisfied that she was in no danger of backsliding, I tossed her another piece, saying "Speak!" at the same time. The food disappeared like a junkie's dreams when he comes out of the nod. Her jaws didn't move but I could see the lump slip down her throat as she swallowed. "Can't you ever
chew
the damned food?" I asked her, but I knew better. The only way to make her chew was to give her something too big to swallow in one piece.

I sat there for a few minutes, patting her huge head and feeding her the rest of the steak and cheese. Pansy wasn't a food–freak like a lot of dogs. Most dogs will eat until they kill themselves if you let them. It's left over from being wild—wild things never know where their next meal is coming from, so they pack it in when they get the chance. When Pansy was a puppy, I got four fifty–pound sacks of the dry food she was raised on and lugged them up the stairs. I opened them all, dumped all the dog food in one corner of the office, and let her loose. She loved the stuff, but no matter how much she ate, there was always a big pile left. She ate until she passed out a couple of times, but once she got it that there would always be food for her, she lost interest. I always keep a washtub full of the dry food against the back wall of the office, near the door. And I have a piece of hose hooked up to the shower so her water dish refills itself every time the level drops. Now she eats only when she gets hungry, but she's still a maniac for treats, especially cheese.

The phone on my desk rang but I didn't move—it couldn't be for me. The Mole had hooked up an extension to the hippies' phones downstairs. I could make calls out when they weren't on the line, but that was all. I only had it ring to let me know if the line was in use, and to let clients think I was connected to the outside world. My clients never asked to use the phone—I don't validate parking either. The hippies didn't know I lived up here, and they couldn't care less anyway. All they cared about was their inner space, not who was sitting on top of their cave. It was my kind of relationship.

I glanced through the pile of mail left over from the last time I went to the drop and picked it up. It was the usual stuff, mostly responses to my series of ads promising information about opportunities for would–be mercenaries. When I get a legitimate response—one with the ten–dollar money order inside and a self–addressed stamped envelope—I send them whatever crap I happen to have lying around at the time. Usually it's a photocopied sheet of names and phone numbers in places like London or Lisbon. It's the real stuff, like "Go to the Bodega Diablo Bar between 2200 and 2300 hours, order a vodka tonic, and tell the bartender you want to speak to Luis." Sometimes I throw in a Rhodesian Army recruiting poster or a
National Geographic
map of what used to be Angola.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in this just for the ten bucks—I keep a nice sucker list of anyone who replies to my ads. I've had a lot of careers, and as I get older I play it safer and safer. Stinging suckers and scamming freaks won't make me rich, but it won't make me dead either. And I'm much too old to go back to prison.

I used to sell other things, like handguns, but I stopped. I have to move between the cracks if I want to keep on being self–employed. Robbing citizens got me sent to prison, and the heroin hijacking almost put me down for the count. In the wild, when a wolf gets too old and slow to work with the pack, he has to go off on his own to die. If he's lucky, he gets captured and they put him in a cage to prolong his life. I already had that chance, and it wasn't for me. The way I figure it, I can always keep feeding myself if I work easier and easier game—prey without teeth. So what if the disturbos and petty crooks and outpatients don't ever add up to a retirement–level score? They might get mad, but they don't get even.