Strega Page 11
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 Geograp
hic 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.
28
NONE of this was getting me any closer to the answers I needed. I pulled out the roll of bills Julio had handed me at the pier. There was a century note on the outside, and it was no Chicago bankroll—every bill was the same, fifty of them, all used. Five thousand bucks. Too big to be a tip for the Forest Park job and not enough for the work the girl wanted me to do—but just the right amount for a warning. In case I missed the message, the last piece of paper inside the roll wasn't green—it had a phone number and the name "Gina" in a spidery, old–man's handwriting.
I went back into the other room and got a piece of mirror glass with a small red dot painted in the middle. I set it up so I was comfortable and sucked a deep breath in through my nose and down into my stomach, expanding my chest when I exhaled. I kept working on this, taking the air deeper and deeper each time, forcing it down to my lower stomach and then to my groin. I kept watching the dot, waiting to go inside, setting my mind to take this problem with me. The dot got bigger and bigger, filling the surface of the mirror. I concentrated on the sound of my own breathing, picturing the breath moving inside my body, waiting for it to happen. Images floated in: all gray tones—the prison yard, Julio's lizard eyes, a pool of dark water, a street in the rain. I came out of it slowly, feeling the cold spot between my shoulder blades. My hands were shaking.
I lit a cigarette, blew the smoke at the ceiling. The old man was trying to tell me something, and him wanting me to do the job for the girl was only part of it. I didn't need the dough, for a change. The girl wasn't going to lay off, and the old man wouldn't call her off. I should never have taken any work from Julio. My parole officer used to have a sign in his office: "Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life." Sure. The trick is to make sure the first day isn't the last day.
I wanted to sleep for a while, but I knew what that meant. I wasn't tired, just depressed. And scared. It was safe in my office, so I wanted to stay. Some guys tried to sleep through their whole bit in prison. You could get all the medication you wanted from the unlicensed reject that passed for a doctor, and they let you have a TV in your cell too. But when they finally open the door, you could get killed while you were blinking at the light.
I always know what the right thing to do is—the hard thing. So I gave Pansy a pat, told her I'd bring her back a treat, and hit the street to buy some time.
29
I PULLED out of the garage thinking about what I'd need to cover my trail. The Plymouth is legally registered—to Juan Rodriguez, who lives in an abandoned building in the South Bronx. I wasn't worried about it being traced to me: in the South Bronx, every abandoned building has dozens of registered voters—they never miss an election.
You have to change with the times—using Juan Rodriguez as an alias today was like using John Smith thirty years ago.
The name "Burke" was legally registered too—I took some of the cash from a decent score a few years ago and invested fifteen grand in a piece of a junkyard in Corona, a Queens neighborhood that's Italian to the south and black to the north, with an expanding seam of Puerto Ricans down the middle. I'm on the books as a tow–truck driver. Every two weeks, the owner mails a check for my salary to the post–office box I keep at the main station, across from Madison Square Garden. I cash the checks at this bar near the junkyard and give everything but fifty bucks back to the junkyard owner. It's a good deal for both of us: he gets a business deduction for paying an employee and I get a W–2 form and a legit source of income in case anyone asks. The owner even throws in a set of dealer plates I can legally slap on any car when I do salvage work for him. I give the desk clerk at the hotel where I used to live ten bucks a week for insurance, and I'm covered all the way around. If I get arrested, the desk clerk verifies that I'm a permanent guest and the pay stubs do the rest—I'm a citizen.
I use money orders to pay the yearly registration on the Plymouth. Juan Rodriguez is a straighter shooter: he pays his bills, never gets a parking ticket, and he's never in an accident. He insures the Plymouth through this outfit in the Bronx which specializes in cheap coverage. He even votes regularly. Not only that, he lends me his car whenever I ask him, and he's in no hurry to get it back.
When I have to use the Plymouth on a job, I get the Mole to strip off the paint. The cops are used to seeing old cars in the process of getting painted, especially in the neighborhoods I work. I also have some vinyl sheets in different colors I can just press right over the paint. That kind of cover doesn't last long, but I only use it for a few hours and then pull it off. The Mole has thousands of license plates in his joint—he takes a couple of them and splits them in half, then welds two halves together to make a new set of plates that won't come up on any computer.
Julio wasn't the only reason I had to see the redhead—I had to find out what she knew about me and then go back and erase the tapes.
As I drove through Chinatown, afternoon was fading into evening. The streets were clogged with women making their way home from the sweatshops—their eyes were down and their shoulders slumped, the only hope in their hearts that their children would have a better life. And as they walked from the blackout–curtained rooms, where a straw boss watched their half–paralyzed fingers fly over the sewing machines, to their walk–up apartments with toilets in the hall, other children took over the streets. But these children had no dreams. The Blood Shadows—they took their name from the chalk outline the police coroner draws around a body on the sidewalk. Wearing their trademark black leather coats, silk shirts, and glistening black shoes, they were living proof that hell is cold. The newspapers called them a "street gang," but they were nothing like the bopping gangs from East Harlem or the South Bronx. No cutoff dungaree jackets with their colors on the back for these boys. And no social workers either. Every year Hong Kong disgorges more of them, nobody knows how they get here, but they keep on coming. And America tolerates it like any toxic–waste dump as long as there's money in it for somebody. The Blood Shadows disdain common street mugging—they don't do their gang fighting with knives and chains. Chinatown runs on gambling and dope—organized extortion of these industries forms the Holy Triad, and the Blood Shadows were the sole survivors of a territorial war with other cliques for vulture's rights. The other gangs either merged with the Blood Shadows or got very dead. That left the old guard—what was left of the Tongs.
The old men had first tried to recruit the Hong Kong boys to their own use, but that wasn't working anymore. The old men retreated deeper and deeper into the networks they had spent years developing—but all their political contacts were useless against young boys with flat eyes and hungry guns, kids who didn't play by the rules. The old folks didn't have a chance. They had to import muscle while the kids were growing their own.
I nosed the Plymouth through the alley in back of the warehouse. Clotheslines stretched across the alley, and children ran past, shrieking at each other in a mixture of English and Cantonese. The kids were like birds in a jungle—everything was
safe as long as they were making noise. When they went silent, a predator was walking the trails.
I pulled around the front and into the garage. I left the engine running while I pulled the door closed behind me. The Mole had once offered to wire the door so a light would blink and tell Max someone was around, but Max bowed his thanks and said he didn't need it.
I wasn't going to call the redhead from anyplace that could be traced—with cocaine accounting for half the gross national product of the city, half the pay phones in town have been tapped by one agency or another. I'd have to wait for an hour or two anyway. When Max didn't materialize on the landing at the back of the garage, I made a pillow out of my jacket, put it against the passenger door, and stretched out. I put on a Judy Henske tape and listened to her raw–silk voice sing "If That Isn't Love" while I smoked a cigarette in the soft darkness of the garage.
Max might be back in five minutes or five hours. In my life, time isn't important—so long as you're not doing it inside.
30
SOMETHING dropped onto the Plymouth's hood from upstairs, waking me up. I glanced through the windshield—it was a new deck of playing cards, still in the original box. Max was telling me he wanted a rematch of our last game of gin, and warning me not to cheat.
I pocketed the cards and went through the downstairs door all the way to the back. We had a little table back there and a couple of chairs. The table held a big glass ashtray and a chrome ghetto–blaster some would–be mugger had donated to Max. A true liberal, Max never called the police, realizing that the young man needed rehabilitative services instead. He left that task to the emergency ward.
Max floated in the side door, bowed to me, and made a motion like he was dealing the cards. I opened the new deck and riffled them between my hands, getting the feel. Max reached into one of the cabinets and pulled out one of those thick telephone message pads they use in government offices—we used the back for a score sheet. We play three–column gin: 150 points a game, twenty–five for a box, double for a schneid in any column, and double again for a triple. The stakes are a penny a point—first man to a million bucks wins the whole thing. I looked through our stack of tapes, asked Max which one he wanted me to put on. He pointed to Judy Henske. I slammed the cassette home and put the volume on real low. I know Max can't hear. I used to think he listened to music by feeling the bass line in his body or something, but Henske's voice doesn't get real low. One time I slipped a Marie Osmond tape on the player. Max listened for a minute, pointed to me, made a face to say "You like that shit?" and hit the "stop" button. He reached in, pulled out the cassette, and crushed it in one hand. He threw the mess into a bucket we use for a garbage pail, folded his arms, and waited for me to display some better taste. I still don't think he can hear the music, but maybe he can feel how I react to it. Lucky there's no bluffing in gin.