Only Child b-14 Page 6

Three nights after my meeting with Mama, I nudged the Plymouth through the still-thick Manhattan traffic, taking my time. This was a quicker contact than I’d expected. When Mama told me who was playing, I’d been sure they’d use foot soldiers to screen me before going face-to-face.

  The upper roadway of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge took me past the luxo highrises on my right as I crossed the river, into another country.

  I found the adult-video store wedged into a concrete triangle under the bridge extension on the other side, just before where Queens Boulevard starts its long run through the borough. The store’s back was crammed up against a no-star hotel. A long-abandoned gas station made up the third leg of the triangle.

  They’d told me I could leave my car at the gas station, but I didn’t like that option much. I turned left, up Skillman Avenue, and motored along, watchful. When I saw the white rag dangling from the door handle of an old brown Buick sedan, I flicked the lever into neutral and blipped the throttle.

  It was as if the Plymouth’s deep-chested snarl had knocked on the Buick’s door. I caught a brief glimpse of Asian faces, at least four of them. I pulled up a few lengths, made a U-turn, and waited as the Buick maneuvered out of its spot. Soon as it left, I parallel-parked into the space they’d vacated. I settled in carefully, cranking the wheel full-lock to make sure I could blast straight out if it came to that. I wasn’t worried about the decrepit station wagon parked in front of me—it would stay there until the boys in the Chinatown war wagon came back to collect it sometime tomorrow.

  I still had a forty-five-minute cushion, so I did a last-minute check to make sure I had everything I needed for the meet. Which was nothing.

  Then I took a walk. Up Skillman to Thirty-sixth Street, then a right to Queens Boulevard, across from the old Aviation High School. I glanced at my watch. Still early. I strolled back down toward the triangle, relaxed.

  And thinking about Mama. “It don’t take no crystal ball, son,” the Prof had concluded. “Mama don’t want the whole pot. She must have got word, her one chip ain’t making this trip.”

  Maybe. And maybe all the money this meet promised made it worth her while to wait.

  At least I was done with trekking out to Long Island all the damn time.

  The porno shop was fortified as if some sleazy alchemist inside had turned gash into gold. Gun-turret windows in a slab-faced cinderblock front, the flatness broken only by a pale-blue door behind a set of bars that wouldn’t have looked out of place in San Quentin. Red neon, twisted into the usual promises, glowed reptile-cold.

  A pair of cross-angled cameras in weatherproof boxes were mounted at the top of the door, as subtle as a handgun pressed against your temple. I pushed the buzzer, waited, my back to the street.

  The door was opened by a tall, skinny guy with a hollow-cheeked face. The forehead above the orange sunglasses he wore was an acne graveyard. In the sullen light from overhead, his crooked teeth looked like an ad for nicotine.

  I stared into his mirrored lenses until he stepped aside.

  The interior decorator’s palette had been limited to gray and yellow. A few old posters on the walls, some half-empty video racks, one wall of limp magazines. Not a DVD in sight. No private booths, no lingerie shows. The joint was as erotic as a used condom floating on an oil slick.

  The cadaverous-looking guy went back to whatever he’d been doing. I browsed through the racks, playing the role. Ignoring the two other men in the place, but not before I absorbed that they were both wearing the latest in Sopranos-chic.

  Time passed. No new customers. I didn’t look at my watch. I’d gotten there on time, and I was working flat-rate.

  Finally, they glided up, one on my left, the other somewhere behind me. I kept my focus on the greasy pictures, letting the sense impressions flood in. Textures and colors. Sharp tang of too much cologne. They never touched me, just air-cushion-herded me toward the back of the store.

  Nothing too fancy in the back, just a long rack on rollers, with a door behind it. A door with no knob. A hand came into my field of vision. Two-knuckle rap. A panel slid up in the door, revealing a Plexiglas window. Maybe fifteen seconds passed. The panel slid down. The door opened. I stepped inside.

  The only thing in sight was a flight of stairs, going down. “Uh-huh,” a voice behind me said.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a man in a white lab coat pointed at a long bare workbench. I walked over there.

  One of the men stepped close. He was a muscular guy, a couple of inches shorter than me, with longish, heavily gelled black hair. He made eye contact: communicating, not challenging. I opened the channel, waited for his next move.

  He held one finger to his lips, making sure I got it. Then he unbuttoned the overtailored jacket to his onyx suit, carefully took it off, and draped it on the workbench. I took off my own jacket with a little less ceremony, placed it on the bench the same way he’d done.

  By the time we finished, we were facing each other in our shorts and socks. Without his shoes, he was much shorter than he’d been before. His body was nicely cut and defined, but I had better scars.

  The guy in the white lab coat started working on my clothes with some kind of wand.

  The guy facing me held his finger to his lips again. I didn’t change expression.

  It didn’t take long.

  Then we got dressed.

  The next door was much more elaborate; no way you would see it unless you knew it was there. It looked as if the stone wall of the basement had just retracted into itself. I followed the guy in the onyx jacket into a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Each of the three walls I could see had a separate door, undisguised. In the far corner, two men were seated in padded armchairs. A third chair stood empty, facing them. I walked over until I was standing in front of the empty chair.

  “You’re Burke,” the man to my left said. He was Italian, mid-thirties, darkly handsome, saved from pretty only by a nose that hadn’t been perfectly set the last time it had been broken.

  I just nodded. It hadn’t been a question.

  “I’m Giovanni,” he said. “And this is Felix.”

  The man to my right was Latino, maybe a decade older than the Italian. Or maybe a generation; it was hard to tell much in that light. He was lighter-skinned than the Italian, with the face of royalty. Ruthless royalty.

  “Sorry about all the...precautions,” the Italian said. “You understand.”

  I nodded again.

  “Sit down, please,” the Latino said.

  I caught the briefest flicker in the eyes of the Italian. He wasn’t a man who liked being one-upped, not even when it came to class and courtesy. He made a tiny gesture with his right hand. A man came forward, put a fresh pack of cigarettes—same brand as the half-empty pack I’d carried in with me—and a heavy gold lighter on the low table in front of me. A large amber glass ashtray was sitting there, sparkling clean.

  “You’ll get all your stuff back when you leave,” the Italian said. “You want a watch to wear in the meantime?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I heard a lot about you,” he said. “From a lot of people. For a long time.”

  “About my brother, you mean.”

  “Your brother, yeah. But the Chinese lady, she said you were the same.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like you could do the same stuff. The exact same stuff. Dealing with you, it would be just like dealing with him. Is that right?”

  “Exactly right.”

  “I have heard much about you as well,” the Latino said, offering his hand for me to shake.

  I gave him a light-pressure grip. He turned his palm up, holding my hand a second longer than he had to. Long enough to verify the tattoo. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “To lose one so close to you...”

  “Thank you,” I said, my eyes empty. Is he playing it straight, buying the “Burke’s brother” thing? Or being cute...telling me he knows about Pansy?

  “Reason you
’re here is,” the Italian said, “me and Felix, we’ve got a problem. A problem for both of us, maybe. Or maybe not. That’s where you come in.”

  “I’ll tell you where I don’t come in,” I said. “That’s between the two of you.”

  The Latino smiled. “We do not want you to take sides, señor. We want your...advice. Your counsel. And, perhaps, your skills.”

  “Why me?” I asked them both.

  “You’ll see,” the Italian said. “You’re a natural for it. And you’re getting five large just to listen—like we agreed, right?”

  They spent the next half hour marking turf, asking me if I knew so-and-so, if I’d been Inside when such-and-such went down, like that. As they talked, their two crews drifted away from our corner. One of them watched a ball game on TV, with the sound turned way down. A few started to play cards. A couple just stared into the middle distance.

  “What I’m going to tell you, it’s nothing illegal,” the Italian said. “I’m the victim, not the perp. But it’s not nothing I’d want anyone to hear about....”

  “You say that to say what?” I challenged him. I wasn’t any more impatient than their crews were. But you let a man warn you too many times, he starts to think he has good reasons for doing it.

  “We have decided to trust Mr. Burke, yes?” the Latino said. “That was our agreement. Mr. Burke is a businessman. He has a reputation. He knows the value of things.”

  That last was a nice touch, telling me I better know the cost of things, too.

  “I’m sorry,” the Italian said. “It’s just that this whole thing may sound...weird, right?”

  The Latino nodded gravely, but stayed silent.

  “I got a...position, okay?” the Italian said. “I’m not the boss, but I’m a boss. I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I?”

  “No.”

  “‘No’ because you can work it out, or ‘no’ because you been looking at charts?”

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t want to be hostile. And, it’s true, you bought my time. But you keep tossing these shots at me, and I don’t get it. What am I supposed to say now? No, I’m not an undercover? No, I didn’t get your ranking off some OC chart?”

  He took a deep breath through his nose. Let it out, slow. “Sorry,” he said again; a reflex, not an apology. “I’ve been over some rocky ground. All twists and tricks. It’s hard to trust.”

  “I didn’t come to you,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah. I know.” He took another deep breath. Looked over at the Latino. “Fuck it. All right. Me and Felix, we’ve got a business relationship. A good one, for both of us. But it’s the kind of thing that some people wouldn’t understand. You following me?”

  “Sure. Want me to spell it out?”

  “A little. Just so we can be sure you—”

  “You’re like a salesman,” I said, as casual as if I was giving directions back to Manhattan. “The boss gives you a territory. He says, You got the franchise; now go out there and make us all some money. Your franchise, say it’s for vacuum cleaners. And a lot of other stuff. But not for TV sets. Those, you got no license to sell.

  “Now, there’s a lot of money in TV sets, but the boss doesn’t make TV sets, and he doesn’t trust the people who do. So they’re off limits. But you got a crew to take care of. If you don’t give them a chance to earn, they get...unreliable. So what you do, you find yourself a good solid manufacturer of TV sets. And you sell a few of them. Carefully, and only to the right people. This is good for you, good for your crew. Hell, it’d be good for everyone if your boss would just green-light it. But he’s not going to do that, and you know it.”

  Giovanni looked bored. Except for his eyes.

  “Meanwhile,” I went on, “you’ve got a regular payroll to meet, a big nut to crack. Much bigger than the boss knows. You’ve got to keep those wheels oiled. Another problem you’ve got, you’ve been one of the top salesmen, on the books. And the way you manage that, you sweeten all the deals on vacuum cleaners. Say the boss expects a hundred a month. But you, you’re handing him ten more. Keep him happy. But what that means is you’ve got to move a few more of those TV sets to make up the deficit.

  “Now, maybe, probably, in fact, the boss knows you’re into TV sets. He’s got his rules, but so long as you’re earning that strong, and he gets his taste, he might not be so heavy into enforcement. Some bosses, they’re like bitches; you know what I’m saying? ‘Bring me that money, honey. Buy me presents. Get me stuff. Take me places. But don’t tell me where you get it all, that’s not my problem.’ Then, when you get popped for something, they go, ‘Ohmygod, I had no idea!’ That sound about right?”

  “Like you were listening in,” the Italian said.

  “A big boss is always a politician,” the Latino said, trying to smooth over his partner’s habit of playing picador. “This is the same in my business, too. A politician wants things done, but he doesn’t want to touch the work with his own hands.”

  I nodded the way you do when you hear great wisdom, marking what the Latin was really telling me—he wasn’t the boss in his organization, either.

  “How can I help you?” I asked them.

  The two men exchanged looks at the outer edge of my vision. I leaned forward, opened the pack of cigarettes they’d brought me, fired one up with the gold lighter. I took a deep drag, then put the cigarette in the ashtray, stared at the smoke, waiting.

  “This gets complicated,” the Italian said.

  I watched the smoke. The trick is to look into it, never through it.

  “You got any idea how dirty the feds play, sometimes?” the Italian asked.

  “There’s all kinds of feds,” I told him. “Vietnam was the feds. Waco and Ruby Ridge, that was the feds. So was COINTELPRO.”

  “What’s that last one?”

  “Political,” the Latin answered for me.

  “This isn’t that,” the Italian said.

  “Political?”

  “What it is, it’s personal.”

  “I don’t know any feds,” I said, to head him off in case he was talking about solving his problems with a bribe. I’ve got no moral problem with being a bagman, but I’d never trust strangers at either end.

  The Italian did the thing with his breath again. The Latin lit a cigarette of his own, apparently used to it.

  “You know the best way to flip a man?” he asked me.

  “Depends on the man,” I said. “And where his handle is.”

  “Right. But it’s not true that everybody’s got one. Gotti took the ride alone. And he never said word fucking one.”

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed. “Everybody talks Old School, but only a few walk it when the weather turns bad.”

  “Remember the first of the super-rats?” he asked me, like a kid testing a newcomer’s knowledge with a soft lob down the middle of the plate.

  “Valachi?”

  “Joe Valachi. He blew the covers off our thing major, back in the day. You know what turned him?”

  “Same thing Henry Hill said turned him. Barbosa, Pesnick, plenty of others, too.”

  “‘Said’ is right. But Valachi, see, they thought he was going to roll over. So they put out a contract on him. And they missed. They didn’t clip him, so now what’s he going to do?”

  “What he did.”

  “Yeah. You ever wonder how they got the idea that Valachi had gone rotten?”

  “Who knows? Maybe some old man got paranoid. Or maybe they figured, He’s doing forever, and you never know. So, what the hell, let’s eliminate the possibility.”

  “What happened,” the Italian said, his voice almost religious with conviction, “is that the feds planted that word. It’s perfect. You hear you’re on the spot, what’re you going to do? Sit down with the boss, ask him, ‘Hey, you got a hit out on me?’ You got no place to run, because you been around the same people all your life and that’s all you know. You know how easy it is to get someone done in prison. The only safe harbor is to make a deal wit
h the feds. And since you got so much to trade...”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I wasn’t there. You know where I was once? In a war. That war’s been over for a while. Guess which side gets to say who was in the right?”

  “Verdad,” the Latin said. “Same as in my country.”

  “This isn’t fucking history,” the Italian said, his voice tight as piano wire. “This is right now. Today. Look at how the feds use the super-maxes. Pelican Bay, they lock you down for being a gang member. Then they tell you, right to your face, you’re staying there until you get out of the car, all right? Only thing is, you do it, you have to prove it. And how do you do that? The only way they accept is, you turn rat. Give some people up.” He stopped talking, closed his eyes so hard the corners crinkled. The way you do if you don’t know the technique to fight a headache. “So, if they want to kill a man, all they have to do is fucking put him back in population, am I right?”

  “Yes,” I said, waiting.

  The Italian did his breathing thing again. I ground out my cigarette, stayed patient.

  “There’s a new twist on that game,” he finally said. “The way this one works, you put word out that someone’s already cooperating.”

  “When he’s not?”

  “When he’s not; right.”

  “What’s the gain for them? Getting someone whacked?”

  “No. They don’t want the guy whacked. What they want is for the rumor they planted to be true. To become true, see?”

  “What you’re talking about, it’s too delicate. Valachi was a gift, dropped in their laps. They could never be sure a hit would miss.”

  “Exactly! But what if the guy got a warning first?”

  “A warning not to rat? That doesn’t make any sense. The way you’re laying it out, the cops would already know he’s not.”

  “It would make sense if the warning came from...people who weren’t sure, maybe. But worried...”

  “You’ve lost me now,” I said, telling the truth.

  I caught the glance between them again. Went back to waiting.

  “Fuck it,” the Italian said again. Not angry, resigned. “I got a daughter. By a...girl I knew when I was a kid. It was an outside-the-tribe thing, you understand what I’m saying?”