Strega (6 page)

11

T
HE NEXT time the muscle boys stopped at the red light before they turned onto the bridge for Harlem, things were a little different. The battered Con Ed truck was nosed against the metal support for the traffic light, blocking most of the intersection. The black Chevy slid to a smooth stop—running red lights wasn't the best idea when you were carrying a trunkful of dream dust.

I climbed out of the driver's seat, wearing a set of Con Ed coveralls and a thick leather tool belt around my waist with another strap over one shoulder. My eyes were covered with blue–tinted sunglasses—I had pasted on a heavy mustache a few minutes ago. The Con Ed cap covered a thick blonde wig and the built–up heels on my work boots made me two inches taller. The Prof was slumped against a building wall, an empty bottle of T–Bird by his side, dead to the world.

I walked toward the Chevy, spreading my hands in the universal civil–service hostile apology: "What can I do?" The driver wasn't going for any delay—he spun the wheel with one hand to pull around the truck: I could get out of the way or get run over. His hard face said it was all the same to him. He was in control.

Then it all went to hell. I tore open the snaps on the coveralls and unleashed the scattergun I had on a rawhide cord around my neck just as the Mole threw the truck into reverse and stomped the gas. The truck flew backward right into the Chevy's radiator, and one chop from Max took out the guy in the passenger seat before he could move. The Prof flew off the wall, an ice pick in his hand. I don't know if the driver heard the hiss from his rear tires—all he could see were the twin barrels of the sawed–off staring him in the face from a distance of three feet.

I flicked the scattergun up a couple of inches and the driver got the picture—his hands never moved off the wheel. He didn't see the Mole slither out of the truck and around to the back of the Chevy—another couple of seconds and the trunk was open and Max had the suitcases.

I patted the air in front of me to tell the driver to get down in the front seat. As soon as his head started to drop, I cut loose with the scattergun right into his door. I blasted the second barrel where his head had been a second ago, taking out most of the windshield, and sprinted for the side of the warehouse where the cab was waiting. Max was at the wheel, with the Mole beside him, the engine already running. I tossed the empty scattergun to the Prof in the back seat, dove in beside him, and we were rolling. Everyone knew what they had to do—we were pretty sure there was no backup car, but it was too early to relax. The Mole had his grubby hands deep in his satchel and the Prof was already reloading the shotgun for me.

12

W
E LEFT the suitcases with the Mole in his junkyard and split up. We didn't make our move for a few weeks—the mobsters were too busy murdering each other to answer anonymous telephone calls. I don't know if they dusted the driver and his partner or not—probably kept them alive long enough to make sure they were telling the truth, and then started looking. But they weren't looking outside the family. Me and Max and the Prof were sitting in Mama's restaurant when we read the headline in the
Daily News
.—"Torched Building Was Gangster Tomb!" It seems someone had wiped out a whole meeting of the heroin syndicate and then set fire to the building—the Fire Department hadn't discovered the bodies for a couple of days, and it took another few days for the cops to make positive identifications. That kind of massive hit didn't sound like it was connected to our little hijacking, but we didn't know who we could ask.

The Prof looked up from the paper. "Sounds like Wesley's work to me," he whispered.

"Don't ever say that name again," I snapped at him. Wesley was a guy we had done time with before—if I thought he was operating in New York, I'd move to the Coast.

Anytime you pull a snatch–and–switch, the last part is the hardest. You can grab the goods easy enough—the mark isn't expecting the move—you just disappear and let them look in their own backyard. But when it gets down to exchanging the goods for cash, you got major troubles. It's easy enough to do if you don't mind losing some of your troops along the way, but our army was too small for that kind of sacrifice.

We agreed to wait another two weeks. It was fine with the Prof. Max looked unhappy. I spread my hands, asking him "What?" He just shook his head. He'd tell me when he was ready.

13

W
E WERE in the sub–basement of Mama's restaurant, planning the exchange. It was simple enough—I'd make contact over the phone, explain my problem, and wait for the solution to come from them. Sooner or later they'd agree to use one of the freelance couriers who work the fringes of our world. These guys worked off a straight piece, no percentage—maybe ten thousand to deliver a package and bring something back. You could move anything around the city that way—gold, diamonds, blueprints, funny money, whatever. None of the couriers were family people, although one was Italian. They were men of honor—men you could trust. Even back then, there were only a few of them. There's even fewer now. Anyway, the scam was for them to suggest some halfass plan that would get me killed, and for me to act scared and start to back out. They'd eventually get around to suggesting one of the couriers, and Max was on that list. We'd agree on Max, and that would be it. Simple and clean—the heroin for the cash. I laid it out for the others, figuring on scoring about fifty grand apiece when this was over.

"No," said the Mole, his pasty face indistinct in the candlelight.

The Prof chipped in, "Burke, you know what the people say—when it comes to junk, the Silent One don't play."

And Max himself just shook his head from side to side.

I knew what the Prof meant. Max would carry anything, anywhere. His delivery collateral was his life. But everybody knew he wouldn't move narcotics. If he suddenly agreed to do this, it'd make the bad guys suspicious. Even if they let him walk away, he'd have to make dope runs from then on. No matter what kind of sting we pulled off, if Max was the courier he was finished.

There wasn't much to say after that. I watched the candle flame throw shadows on the walls, burning up my plans to be free of this nickel–and–dime hustling once and for all. I wasn't going into the dope business, and I wasn't giving this up without another try.

"Prof, your cousin still work for the post office?"

"Melvin's a lifer, brother—he's hooked on that regular paycheck."

"Would he hold out a package for us if we paid him?"

"Have to pay him a good piece, Burke—he
loves
that joint. What's the idea?"

"The idea is, we
mail
the stuff back to them. Mole, how much was in the suitcases?"

"Forty kilos—twenty bags in each case. Plastic bags. Heat–sealed."

"Prof, that's worth what on the street?"

"Depends—how pure is it now, how many times you step on it

"Mole…?"

"It's ninety, ninety–five percent pure."

"Prof?"

"They could hit it at least ten times. Figure twenty grand a key, at the least."

"So they'd pay five?"

"They'd pay the five just to stay alive.

"That's two hundred thousand, okay? How about we mail them four keys, okay? No questions asked. Just to show good faith? And we give them a post–office box number, and tell them to mail us the money for the
next
installment. We keep running like that until we're near the end. All they can beat us for is the first and last piece, right?"

"No good," said the Prof. "They'd trace the box, or have some men waiting. You know."

"Not if Melvin intercepts the shipment. He still works in the back, right? All he has to do is pull their package of money off the line when it shows up."

"Melvin don't work twenty–four hours a day, man. He's bound to miss some of them."

"So what? We don't need
all
of them. Every exchange is twenty grand coming from them. If Melvin can pull ten out of twenty, it's
still
fifty apiece, right?"

"It's shaky, man. I don't like it."

I turned to Max. He hadn't moved from his place against the wall, standing with his corded forearms folded, no expression on his face. He shook his head again. No point asking the Mole. We were back to Square One. The Prof was looking at me like I was a bigger load of dope than the one we'd hijacked.

I lit a cigarette, drawing into myself, trying to think through the mess. Keeping the dope wasn't a problem—the Mole's junkyard was as safe as Mother Teresa's reputation, and heroin doesn't get stale from sitting around—but we took all this risk and now we had nothing to show for it. Waiting didn't bother Max, and the Prof had done too much time behind the walls to care. I watched the candle flame, looking deep into it, breathing slowly, waiting for an answer.

Then the Mole said, "I know a tunnel." He didn't say anything else.

"So what, Mole?" I asked him.

"A subway tunnel," he explained, like he was talking to a child, "a subway tunnel from an abandoned station back out to the street."

"Mole,
everybody
knows about those tunnels—in the winter, half the winos in the city sleep down there."

"Not a way in—a way out," said the Mole, and it slowly dawned on me that we could still pull it off.

"Show me," I asked him. And the Mole pulled out a mess of faded blueprints from his satchel, laid one flat on the basement floor, and shone his pocket flash for us all to see.

"See here, just past Canal Street? You come in any of these entrances. But there's a
little
tunnel—it runs from Canal all the way up to Spring Street …see?"—pointing a grubby finger at some faint lines on the paper and looking up as though even an idiot like me would understand by now.

When he saw I still wasn't with him, the Mole's tiny eyes blinked hard behind his thick lenses. He hadn't done this much talking in the last six months and it was wearing him out. "We meet them in the tunnel near Canal. We get there first. They block all the exits. We give them the product and we take the money. We go out heading west…see, here?…they go out heading east. But we don't go out the exit. We take this little tunnel all the way through here"—tracing the lines—"and we come out on Spring Street."

"And if they follow us?"

The Mole gave me a look of total disgust. He was done talking. He took his satchel, pushed it away from him with his boot, so it was standing between us. "Tick, tick," said the Mole. They wouldn't follow us.

Now I got it. "How long would it take us to get to the Spring Street stop?"

The Mole shrugged. "Ten minutes, fifteen. It's a narrow tunnel. One at a time. No lights."

Yeah, it could work. By the time the wiseguys figured we weren't coming out any of the Canal Street exits, they'd have to go back inside to look for us, and we should be long gone by then. They'd figure we'd be hiding out, waiting for darkness to fall, or that we'd try to slip away in the rush–hour crowd. And even if they did tip to the plan, we'd have too much of a head start.

"It's great, Mole!" I told him.

The Prof extended his hand, palm up, to offer his congratulations. The Mole figured the Prof wanted to see his blueprints, and tossed the whole bundle into the Prof's lap. Some guys are just culturally deficient.

I looked at Max. He was watching the whole thing, but his face never changed. "What's wrong
now
?" I asked him with my hands.

Max walked over to us, squatted down until his face was just a few inches from mine. He rolled up his sleeve, pulled off an imaginary tie, and looped it around his biceps he put one end in his teeth and pulled it tight. Then he drove two fingers into the crook of his arm, where the vein would be bulging, used his thumb to push the plunger home, and rolled his eyes up. A junkie getting high. Max watched my face carefully. He folded his arms in the universal gesture of rocking a baby, then opened his arms to let the baby fall to the floor. And he shook his head again. Max the Silent wasn't selling any dope.

I pointed to my watch, spread my hands again. "Why
now
?" I wanted to know.

Max tapped his heart twice with a balled fist, nodding his head "yes." Then he rubbed his fingers together to make the sign for "money," moving his hands back and forth with blinding speed. He was a warrior, not a merchant.

Fuck! I threw up my hands in total disgust. Max watched my face, his own immobile as stone. I used my hands to shape the one–kilo packages of dope in the air, laid them end to end until Max got the idea. We had a whole pile of heroin between us. Then I rubbed my first two fingers and thumb together the way he had before. Money, right? Then I separated my hands, and crossed them in front of my chest, opening them as I did so. Exchanging one for the other. "How?" I wanted to know.

Max smiled his smile: just a thin line of white between his flat lips. He bowed to the Mole and the Prof, then to me. He made the same signs for the dope as I had, and followed it with a gesture that meant throwing something away. Okay, we disposed of the dope—maybe threw it in the river. And then?

Max pointed to the blueprints, nodding his head "yes." We'd make the meet in the tunnel like the Mole wanted, only we wouldn't have any dope with us. I spread my hands wide for him again—how would we get out of there with the money? Max bowed, stepped back out of the circle of light cast by the candle, and vanished. It was dead silent in Mama's basement. I watched the candle burn down, along with my hopes of making a respectable score for the first time in my life.

"Hey, Burke," called the Prof, "when Max comes back, I want you to say something to him for me, okay?"

"Yeah?" I asked him, too depressed to give a damn.

"Yeah. You know how to make the sign for 'chump'?"

The Prof was good at this. Plenty of times he'd cheer us all up on the yard when nothing was happening. It didn't even bring a smile this time.

It got darker and darker in the basement, so quiet I could hear water dripping off in the distance. All of a sudden, the Prof shot straight into the air as if he'd been hoisted by an invisible crane. "Put me down, fool!" he barked, his short legs dangling helplessly. Max stepped into the tiny circle of light, holding the Prof by his jacket in one hand. He opened the hand and the Prof unceremoniously dropped to the floor. I pulled a fresh candle from my pocket and lit up. The shadows flickered on the walls and the darkness moved back another few feet. Now I understood.

"You get it, Mole?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Prof?"

"Yeah. We meet them in the tunnel, Mole kills the lights, and Max does his thing, right?"

"Right."

Max bowed to each of us, waiting for recognition of his superior problem–solving ability. The Prof was right—he
was
a chump.

"It's no good," I told them. "It'll take too long. If Max jumps them all in the tunnel, we'll be running for our lives, okay? And even if we get away with it, they'll never stop looking for us. It doesn't play, okay? It's not what we planned."

"You mean it's not what you planned, man," countered the Prof. "We took the shot to score a lot. Max don't want to give them the dope, and you don't want to rough off the money. That leaves us with what?"

That's when I got my brilliant idea that saved me twenty years in the joint. "Mole, you said the stuff was near pure, right?" He didn't answer—the Mole doesn't say anything twice. "Okay, how do you know?"

"Test," said the Mole.

"Test?"

"Heroin is morphine–based. You add something to it, it turns a certain color, you know it's good."

"Mole," I asked him, trying to keep the hope out of my voice, "can you make it turn the right color even if it
isn't
real dope?"

The Mole went into one of his trances—lost in thought. We all kept quiet, like people do around a volcano that might go off. Finally he said, "There would have to be
some
of the morphine–base——or else they would have to pick the right bag to test."

"How far down could you cut in and still make it pass the test?"

"I don't know…" said the Mole, his voice trailing off. He pulled out a pencil as stubby and greasy as he was, and starting scribbling formulas on the side of the blueprints, lost to the world.

Finally, he looked up. "How will they pick a bag to test?"

"Who knows?" I told him, looking over at the Prof, who nodded in agreement.

"Two bags of pure," said the Mole, "six bags cut deep. The rest no morphine–base at all. Okay?"

"
Okay!
" I told him. The Prof's grin split the darkness. And then there was Max. But before he could say anything, I took a deck of cards out of my pocket, held it up for him to see, and motioned for him to come close with the others. I dealt out forty cards, one for each bag of dope. Then I separated the cards into four stacks, shoving one in front of each of the others, and keeping one in front of me. I reached over and took the stack away from Max, held it up before his eyes, made a motion like I was spitting on the cards, and tossed them into the darkness of the cellar. I did the same thing with the Mole's share. And then with the Prof's. From my stack, I slowly counted off two cards, then six more—the amount the Mole said he needed to work the scam. And I threw my other two cards away too. I looked at Max, caught his eyes, then took six cards from my little remaining stack and tore them into small pieces. I threw away the big pieces, leaving only scraps behind—and two untouched cards.

There was a long count. Then Max slowly nodded, and we had a deal.