Talking Heads (32 page)

“What, down there? You interested in that stuff?”

“That's where they've found the, the artifacts?”

“Invaluable artifacts.” Leo shook his head. “So invaluable those Harvard wise guys didn't even come in today.” He shared a look with the men beside him, shaking his big head. Kit too, though in his case he was shaking off a flashback to Garrison's raging:
Fucking rich-boy faggot Harvard
.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

Leo's smile showed some tongue. Kit couldn't believe how he'd sounded, breathless, desperate.

“It won't take long,” he went on. “I've, I've got other appointments.”

“Sure, Kit. You're a busy man, sure. There's been a lot going on over at your place.”

Jab, twist. Again Kit recalled Garrison, the secrets he'd known, the things Zia must have let slip to her Pop. Maybe Kit should have taken a break after he'd wrestled free of the guard. A walk in the sea air. But now Leo was shrugging again, nodding again, and with a flat gaze he let the hardhats know he and Kit needed some privacy.

*

Leo said nothing till his friends on the crew looked like figures on a distant TV. Kit couldn't make out faces.

“Whew,” the old man began. “If I'd had my head on straight, I'd've done this
inside.
”

He'd gone right into his act, fixing up a fat Brando smile as he pulled together his checked lapels. An act, but it worked: for the first time in a while Kit noticed the cold. The wind here whistled along the lower site's dam, high-pitched enough to be heard through the traffic.

Or you could hear it if you were off by yourself like this. Just you and the crooked money man.

“Kit, come on.” Leo's expression turned smutty. “You're looking at me like I'm one of those wise guys from the Human Sexual Response.”

“I need to talk to you.”

He touched his neck. Shamed again by his voice, blinking across the cluttered pit, he noticed the surrounding factories. Sweatshops from the turn of the century, they loomed on three sides. Blunt places, efficient.

“Anyway,” Leo was saying, “I got what you want.”

“I don't want it any more.”

“He-ey.” Leo kept his head down, fishing under his coat for a pants pocket. “Kit, at least wait'll you see it.”

“I don't want it, that's what I came to tell you, I can't take it. You can't trick me into taking it.”

Leo brought out the cash, a thick fold in a money clip. A Nutshell Library of his own.

“You can't trick me, Leo. I know what's going on. After this I'm going right over to the office to explain.”

“Trick you? Kit, kid, lighten up.” Leo waggled the clip beside his broad face. “You call this a trick?”

Leo had the fistful of hardpacked cash, and all Kit had was this flyaway rush of words. “It's—I call it a mistake, Leo. It's the same mistake I made just last week, the same all over. I have to figure out why it happened.”

“What? What are you talking about? Kit, you don't mind my saying so, you're sounding kind of nutty these days.”

Kit frowned. “Garrison already tried that one, Leo.”

“Garrison, ayy. Guy like that, Kit, you're lucky we got him to talk to you at all. He had his way, he'd rip you open and pull you out from inside.”

Still the old man smiled, holding the cash in one relaxed hand. All Kit could think was—
we
.

“But it's not just a gorilla like him, says you're sounding nutty. You should've heard my daughter last night. She needed some money, you should've heard her talking.”

To Kit, even the site's TV-sized workmen seemed part of that
we
. They seemed there just to whisper about him.

“She was counting on that next paycheck, Kit. You're no friend of hers, man. No friend of that girl.”

She needed the paycheck? But Kit had told her … “She asked you for money, Leo?”

“Yeah, she asked. What, that surprise you?”

Kit shook his head, or tried to. Just what were they talking about? Garrison, Zia?

“Kit, come on. What's your big news?” Now Leo held the cash at his belly. “What, you expect some kind of wrestlemania here? Let it all hang out? Hey, I'll let it all hang out.”

“Leo, I, I told you …”

“You want to know how my daughter fits into this, Kit? ‘Zia,' huh. Hey, I didn't set that girl up down there just so she could write about her faggot friends.”

In the surrounding factories, glare filled the windows. The winter sun in Boston: it hurt the eyes but gave no heat.

“I told that girl myself, Kit. Last night I told her. She was all excited about
Esquire
, I said, ‘I don't give a shit about you and your sick faggot friends.' I mean, her brothers, they listen to me. They understand how a man does business.”

Kit straightened his spine. “Leo, they're not the only ones. Your sons.”

“Oh yeah? Kit, you think you know about my business?”

“I know about
Sea Level
, what it means for you. It's about cash, isn't it, Leo. A cash business, that's what you wanted. And not for taking down to Surinam either.”

“Surinam.” The old man had never quite lost his smile, and now it came on strong again. “The scams I can play off that Surinam. It's as good as Pozzuoli after the war.”

“Don't change the subject. Don't try to trick me. The cash is for right here in Boston, isn't it.”

It was a child's smile, Little Leo knows a secret. The man flipped and caught his money clip.

“I'm sure Forbes Croftall gets his share, for instance.”

“Ahh, Croftall.” He waved the money as if shooing a fly. “That guy never needed me to help him find trouble.”

Kit had been bracing for hardball. In one coat pocket he'd made a fist and in the other—since the gun was in the way—he'd gotten a grip on the stock and trigger.

“You're, you're not denying you've done business with Senator Croftall?”

Leo snorted. “Kit, kid. If you're going to finger me in front of that Grand Jury, don't do it just because I know Croftall and I carry a lot of cash. I mean, at least get me for something juicy.”

Kit had his hands out of his pockets, clasping and unclasping them against the cold.

“At least Kit, huh. Let's think about your home, there.”

“My home?”

“It's a nice little place, I hear. Nice Cambridge place for you and the wife. Nice wood.”

Kit couldn't be sure of the singing in his ears. Nerves? Or the wind along the lip of the dark lower site?

“Nice old wood,” Leo went on. “Old, old, dry wood.”

Now it was nerves. “What?”

“Place like that, wood can get very dry. Downcellar out of the weather, it gets dry like a newspaper. Just like one of your old newspapers, Kit.”

The old man changed the angle of his chin. “That old wood.”

“Leo, I don't believe this.”

“And that's everything you own, there, right? Everything you care about's up on the second story, there.”

“You know,” Kit said, “generally speaking, people don't try frighten other people unless they're—”

“Frighten you? Frighten you, I'm trying to help you.” Leo tapped his cash against Kit's tightened chest. “Kit, stay with me here. Remember what I'm trying to tell you, here. I'm saying, you're going to go after me in that Grand Jury, at least get me for something juicy.”

Kit backed away from the tapping, the grinning. He stumbled on the corrugated lip of the lower site's dam; he tried to get Leo to admit he'd been talking about arson.

“Hey. You think it's that simple, Kit? Just one word, the right word? One word, and you've got the old man at last?”

Kit steadied himself. “Skip it. I said what I came here to say.”

“If I were you, Kit, I'd be worried about this. About how nutty you've been, trying to get the old man.”

“Keep your money, Leo. I'll find my own way out.”

“Bullshit.
Bullshit
, asshole. You're going nowhere.”

Across the work site, the hardhats didn't look quite human. Faceless over the heavy equipment, rodent-like amid plumbing and cable, they whispered together.

“You're going nowhere till I say so, and same with the Grand Jury. That Grand Jury, ayy. You're going to walk into a room where everybody knows your worst secret.”

Turning from the workmen, frowning down into the dig, Kit was aware of the heat in his hands. In his fists, in his pockets.

“Kit, I already gave them the note from yesterday. The note where you asked for the money.”

“Leo—no more tricks. I'm going to stop you.”

“You're going to stop me?” The old man's smile was his worst yet. “What're you talking, the Crimefighter's Code?”

“That note I left, it doesn't matter. What you know about
Sea Level
, that doesn't matter.”

“Kit, I know it all. Got my daughter right down there under my desk all this time, her and you and her junkie bitch friends across the hall too. Nothing I don't know, Kit.”

“It doesn't
matter
. Leo, when it's just you against me, people will know the difference.”

“Got her right down there. Protecting my investment.”

“It's just you against me now. Everybody will know what's right.”

“The girl, you know, she told me about when you came making a play for her at the Sons of Columbus. Stoned off your
ass
. She told me about your
wife—
”

Kit pulled out the brother's gun. Leo, openmouthed, mid-sentence, jerked his cash hand to his chest.

In time, Kit became aware of damage. His knuckles had torn against the hem of his pocket. His thinking was broken up by shouts behind his back. And uneasy, unprepared—his feelings hadn't changed much from when he'd come onto the site, but now with this iron in his hand he was even more off-balance, a big white gooney bird with something in his beak that it would kill him to swallow. Out in the weather like this, Louie-Louie's .38 didn't look sleek and Euro. Rather, it appeared more of a piece with the rest of the metal here, another gray slash of naked function. Kit understood he still had the safety on, and neither of the two remaining rounds had been chambered. Yet he couldn't drop his arm. He couldn't take back the gesture, make the weapon disappear. Leo spoke up again:
Hey, wildman
, something. The old man got his hands moving, too. He had no trouble making his own bundle disappear, and when he held up his two open palms there could be no mistaking what he meant.
Easy, cool it
, something. Such an obvious signal, those two raised hands, sweat-pink against the site's clay-black. Even the shouting behind Kit's back relaxed, even the worker rodents got Leo's message—but what Kit was most aware of was damage. Damage in his least, most fleeting images: the men behind him weren't rodents.

Leo started talking again, words Kit imagined rather than heard. Hey, where'd you get that?

Words words words. Kit was beyond them, apart from them; he struggled instead with the muscle groups in his arm, with the blood circulation in his ears, even with his sense of smell. The gun had a thick odor, its oils warmed by Kit's lap. He held it pointed at the shorter man's mouth, his interior walls graffiti'd with obscenities.
Dicksuck. Niggerdick up the ass
. Bad damage. There was nothing sexy about the moment, a cold closed moment, the whole world collapsing around the .38. But then again, there was everything sexy about it: the muscles out of control, the mushroom density of the smell, the oil in his hand. Everything was a spasm, an outbreak.

Leo started smiling again. Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the bad guy.

The shouting behind Kit's back was part of it, part of how standing here with a gun in another man's face seemed like nothing but reflex and impulse. Yes, the shouting had simmered down, since Leo had raised his hands. When Kit glanced over one shoulder he saw tough guys in unsteady clusters, staring wide-eyed but keeping their distance. Nonetheless, every time one of the hardhats called, it broke up his thinking. It poked through the Expressway rumble, noise more like Garrison's than like Leo's, rough stuff and toilet talk. The sound of damage. Kit had heard nothing else since he'd left his testimony on the kitchen table. Then what was he doing here in the middle of it? Here between these familiar outcries, fear and bluster, warning and greed? So he got his first clear thought—from out of left field, wouldn't you know it. He recalled a conversation somewhere about the Fifth W, the
Why
, about how the why always came down to the same grubby handful. To fear, bluster, hubris … Kit's second thought, at least, was more with it: Drop the gun. Drop it. It's wrong, absolutely the wrong thing to have in your hands in the middle of all this damage.