That’s what the lookouts were for. Stationed on key corners, stoops, and rooftops, they watched for cops, at which point they’d call out “Llegada!” (Coming!) and the whole operation would simply fold, disappearing into the woodwork. So, for anyone who wanted to do more than collect a few minor arrests and fill a quota, the first thing to do was take them down. The gray van pulled up, and two men got out. Both wore tracksuits, the camo of this neighborhood, and as they passed the lookout on the corner, one said, “Hey kid,” and distracted him, while the other hit him with a taser. He fell and they dragged him between two parked cars to sleep it off. Then they broke into the basement door of the building and ran up the four flights. The lookout on the roof never saw a thing; he was too busy looking out, down the street, for police. The first man through the roof exit shot him, a silencer on his pistol, then took off his pack and set up in his spot. His partner got on his earpiece mic.
“Ready.”
The van driver pulled out now and came down the block, stopping in the center, as though he were a customer looking to cop. The runner came up to his window. “What you need? C and D, man. Gran Diablo is on the money . . .”
“What I need, bro,” the driver, a muscled-up white man with a blond ponytail, “is for you to tell your boss to close up shop. We’re taking over this block. White Angel is moving in.”
“Huh?” The white dude had an accent, sounded like a surfer or something, but that wasn’t the problem; he was just talking nonsense. But he’d parked so that he blocked the whole street so, after a couple of tries, the runner ran back and told Miguel, who was overseeing the crew from the doorway of a nearby building. Miguel sighed, cursing in Spanish, and grabbed his piece from where it was hidden in a disused planter, stuffing it into his jeans, then went down to see what this joker wanted.
“Sup?” he asked the white guy in the van.
“You the boss here?”
“Why?” Miguel asked. “You ask to see the manager or some shit?” He lifted his oversized Yankees jersey and showed the gun. “You want to talk to the complaint department?”
The white guy smiled. “No complaint, bro. Just letting you know, White Angel moves in here tomorrow. Giving you the chance to pack up and go in peace.”
“Right,” Miguel said. “Thanks for sharing. Now why don’t you peace the fuck out man, before I lose my sense of humor.” He half drew the pistol, finger on the trigger.
The white guy raised a hand. “No problem. Take care.” He pulled away. Miguel spat in the gutter, shaking his head, totally unaware of the sniper’s scope trained on his forehead. One shot took the top of his head right off.
Panic erupted, but there was no time to hide. In thirty seconds the key members of Maria’s top crew lay dead or wounded on the ground. And the shooters were on their way out. They got back in the van and headed for another building nearby. Maria’s own.
Maria’s apartment, on the top floor of a building with a river view, was almost impregnable. She had another, fancier house in the Bronx, but this was home, where she had lived her whole life, and everyone in this building knew her. The kids sitting on the stoop worked for her and kept an eye on the whole block. The super’s wife, who kept her ground-floor apartment door ajar, noted whoever got on the elevator. Even the guy who sold flavored ices on the corner would have alerted someone if a van full of armed men had pulled up. So they went in the one way she didn’t think to worry about: from above.
First the van stopped one street over, on the other side of the block from her building. Four men slipped out, and unobtrusively broke into a basement door of a building. They took the elevator from the basement to the top floor and left via the roof exit. No one bothered to notice. They crossed over to the roof of Maria’s building and, with a crowbar, busted open the door to her roof. Then they came down the stairs. Using a battering ram like the cops did, they rushed down the hall, broke her door open, and entered.
Their attack was flawless, and should have succeeded without a hitch, except for two things: First, Maria happened to be in her bedroom with her boyfriend, Paco. If she had been in the living room, watching TV with her Tia, she would have been killed instantly. As it was, they shot Tia, an old woman and the one truly harmless person on the premises. Her eyesight was too poor to shoot anyone, and the strongest substance she handled was hot sauce. But the commotion drew the attention of Maria, Paco, and Duque, who was the second problem.
Duque was Maria’s dog, a ferocious pit bull. As soon as the action started in the living room, before Maria and Paco could even get out of bed, Duque was up and running. He tore into the living room, leapt onto the man who had just shot Tia, and sank his fangs into his groin. The man howled in pain, dropping his gun and struggling with the dog, who locked his jaw and ground in deep, chewing his way through fabric and skin. The gunman beside him was distracted, trying to get a clear shot at the damn dog, and the other two had gone to check the kitchen and the office. This gave Maria and Paco a chance. Paco was twenty-two and pretty, with a neat goatee, dark, deep eyes, a lean muscled chest and gold cross, wearing only his boxers. He was a good lover and a fine companion for Maria, who was at least twenty years his senior, but he was not the smartest guy in town. He grabbed his Tech 9 from under the bed and rushed out. Seeing the dog ripping into the man’s groin, and distracted by the screaming, he yelled “Duque!” and shot the guy Duque was attacking, just as the second gunman shot him and the dog both.
This, however, gave Maria time to think. Dressed in her red bra and panties, she pulled her Uzi from where it was always strapped under her bed, peeked carefully through the doorway, and opened fire, killing the man who’d killed her dog and boyfriend. By now the two other gunmen were coming back into the room and she shot the one pushing through the kitchen door first, blowing him back into the kitchen and sending the door swinging after him. But the one coming from the office got her.
He had dropped to the carpet when he saw Maria shooting, so when she swung back to pick him off, she missed, riddling the wall with bullets. From his prone position, he fired back at Maria under the dining table, shattering her shinbone. She stumbled back, firing wildly just to keep him pinned down, then threw her door shut and hit the button on the wall. By the time the gunman got up and across the apartment, he was too late. She was in her panic room and the metal door had bolted, essentially sealing her in a vault. The gunman tried to gain entry with the crowbar, but by now the whole building was in an uproar, so he fled the way he came. The last thing Maria had the presence of mind to do before she went into shock was text the super’s wife the code to her panic room door. That way the EMTs were able to gain entry.
Joe was watching Jeopardy with Gladys when Yelena came home. She knew the routine—no talking during Alex Trebek—so she went to the kitchen and got her vodka from the freezer, then sat on the couch and waited for a break, while Gladys called out the answers, getting an impressive number right. “What is phosphorous? Who was Bertolt Brecht? Where is the Suez Canal?”
At the commercial, Yelena followed Joe into the kitchen while he got himself a seltzer from the fridge.
“So,” he asked quietly. “Who’d you see?”
“Someone I hoped never to see again. Unless my gun was in his mouth. Nikolai Kozlov, the SVR agent who threatened me with life in prison if I didn’t work for them.”
“Your Russian handler? What was he doing at the Wildwater building? Watching the show?”
She shrugged. “I saw him getting off the elevator. So I followed but he got in a car and left.”
“It’s a big building,” Joe pointed out. “He could have been visiting some other office.”
“Yes, if you believe in coincidence,” Yelena said.
“I don’t,” Joe admitted. “So with Wildwater involved and now this Russian, this is starting to smell like spooks.”
Yelena wrinkled her nose and poured herself another drink. “Smells like bad shit to me.”
Joe nodded. “That’s the CIA sce
nt I remember, all right. As soon as the spies get involved, everything turns to shit.”
“A lot of our oligarchs come out of the old KGB. Your Richards, the Wildwater CEO. He is like one of these too.” She sneered. “They’re just greedy pigs who don’t have the courage to be real outlaws.”
Joe grinned. “I didn’t realize you were so politically engaged. You’re an anarchist.”
She laughed. “No. I met some of those anarchists. They talk too much. I’m just an honest thief, like you.”
Joe clicked his soda bottle against her vodka bottle as Gladys called in from the living room. “Bring me a Fresca, will you? It’s Final Jeopardy.” So they went in and joined her, and then ordered Indian food, and Joe was pleasantly surprised to see how well his grandmother played host, matching Yelena drink for drink, regaling her with tales from her grifting days, and swapping shoplifting tricks. Then his phone rang. It was Gio. Someone had just tried to kill him.
Gio had been busy all evening, taking care of one of his most boring chores, counting money. Like many businessmen with varied and far-flung enterprises, he spent a fair bit of his time simply making the rounds. The difference was that while more conventional business owners hoped to be picking up earnings at these stops, Gio was dropping them off. He was laundering money, with Nero driving beside him and Big Eddie in back with a duffel bag full of cash, tribute that had been passed up the line from the many rackets Gio owned or allowed to proceed with his blessing.
His first stop was Laundry Town, and he braced himself for the same stale jokes. Like clockwork, Big Eddie held up the duffle.
“Hey boss I got your laundry right here. Drop if off dirty, pick it up clean. Fluff and fold, am I right?”
Nero chuckled obligingly, but Gio couldn’t take it anymore.
“Let me ask you Eddie, how many years we been coming here?”
“I don’t know boss, five, ten?”
“And every week you make the same fucking joke. I just can’t stand it anymore.”
“Sorry boss.”
He turned to Nero. “And you laugh. How can you still think it’s funny?”
“Sorry, Gio.”
“Okay new rule. From now on, no jokes about laundry or dirty money or anything unless you just thought of it brand new and you are absolutely fucking sure it’s funny. Got it?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Sure, Gio.”
“Great, thank you.” Gio sighed. Still, as a way to clean illegal proceeds, he had to admit it was one of his brightest schemes. They showed up during a weekday night, a slow time, and immediately headed through the door marked employees only. Neither the senior citizen behind the counter nor the two West African women folding drop-off customers’ clothes, nor the few bored civilians watching their underwear spin, took any notice at all. In the back office, Gio sat at the desk, opened the old fashioned safe, and began to fill it with money while Nero did the paperwork.
Laundry Town, which was now a small chain of six laundries that Gio had built up using the old Italian couple who owned the first one as fronts, was a cash-only business. People dropped off clothes or dry cleaning at the counter, or they slid bills into a machine that put credits on a card to use the machines. Either way it was easy to simply add more receipts and more income to the books. The only real supplies were detergent, cleaning fluid, and water, so there was little to worry about in the way of inventory. The managers, that is to say Gio’s fronts, got to run the business and pocket the legit proceeds. Gio ran his own cash through, had the business show it as corporate profits, and then took it back as earnings from his stake in Laundry Town, Inc.
Next stop was Paradise Nail Salon. Same deal here. A Korean mother of three had been left to run the place alone when her husband died. Gio had stepped in to offer support and protection, and one of his corporate shells had bought the storefront where she worked. Now she managed three shops—two of them former video stores, another great cash business for Gio, and one of the few he enjoyed visiting, until the bottom dropped out of it—and Gio had the same arrangement with her.
The biggest hassle was Jocko’s, a bar and music venue out on the island, simply because it was the loudest and most crowded and because of the added attention that anyplace with a liquor license got. Gio made it work for him though: he had the manager order more booze to offset the extra cash he pumped in, then took it as a write-off and used it to supply drinks for the illegal gambling parlors he controlled. That was Gio, smart, careful, and on top of every angle. So the last thing he expected, when he finally arrived, tired and bored, at his last stop, was to be stepping into a trap.
Especially not at Café Primo. This place had been in the family forever. It was in Carroll Gardens, which had been a deeply Italian neighborhood in south Brooklyn for decades, with the scent of semolina bread baking on the corners, bathtub Madonnas on the front lawns, and even a mural in salute to John Gotti. The space had once been a social club, one of those storefronts with painted-over windows where wiseguys used to hang out, scattered all over New York. This one had become a Caprisi joint when Gio’s father won the building shooting craps. It sat there, a neighborhood fixture, hosting card games and the occasional load of stolen merchandise, until the area began to change. Rents rose, new, wealthier people moved in, the bakeries became boulangeries. Pretty soon the little storefront was simply too valuable for three old guys to sit out front on folding chairs in shorts and black dress socks all summer. It already had a marble counter and a fine, old-fashioned espresso/cappuccino machine, the kind with the eagle on top, and all the character, tin roof and tiled floor, that a chic designer would charge you a fortune to copy. Gio got a new sign painted—Café Primo—and put his cousin’s kid, who had “trained” as a barista, whatever that meant, in charge. The place did great business, though it was always a little sad to come by here. You know times have really changed when not even the Mafia can afford the rent. Still, he saved it for his last stop, so that along with dropping off the money, he could relax a little with a well-deserved espresso and a single pignoli cookie—his pants were getting tight.
So when Big Eddie came out with three coffees on a tray and set them down at the outside table that Gio’s cousin had reserved for them, Gio had asked, “What about the cookies?”
“Sorry boss, I forgot,” Eddie had said, turning back. Gio sighed and was blowing on his coffee when Eddie came rushing over, without any cookies, yelling “Boss!”
“What?” Gio had barked, impatiently, but before he could register anything else, Eddie had flung himself through the air, knocking Gio to the ground, toppling the chairs and tables and taking two bullets in his broad back.
Gio heard the shots and felt glass raining down, but from under Eddie’s bulk he couldn’t see what had happened. It was a drive-by. A car had pulled up, and a man had hung out the passenger window, raising a machine pistol. He’d opened fire at Gio, hitting Eddie instead and shattering the shop window behind them. Nero had dropped to the ground behind the upended table and drew his pistol, returning fire. Gio was unarmed, but as he rolled Eddie off, he drew the gun from Eddie’s shoulder holster and likewise shot at the car, which was now speeding away.
“Eddie!” Gio said, using all his strength to roll him over. “Eddie!” He was dead, with both rounds still inside him. It was only then that Gio realized some of the blood on him was his own. Splinters of falling window glass had sprayed his back like buckshot, shredding his white dress shirt, and now blood was soaking through.
The first call Gio made from the ambulance was to his family, to check on them and let Carol know he was okay while Nero dispatched soldiers to his house and his mother’s house and raised the general alarm. The second was to Eddie’s family. And the third call was to Joe.
PART III
20
WHEN JOE CAME DOWNSTAIRS the next day, Nero was waiting, standing at the curb with his car double-parked. They hugged and Joe told him, “Sorry about Eddie.”
“Thanks.” Ner
o nodded. “He was a stand-up guy to the end.”
“No doubt.”
Nero opened the rear door for Joe, and he slid in next to Gio, who shook his hand.
“Sorry,” Gio said. “I can’t hug with this fucking back.”
“Right,” Joe told him. “Sorry to hear about Eddie.”
Joe could see his friend was distraught, so he waited while Nero got in and they started moving. Then Gio spoke, looking out the window at the tumult of Jackson Heights, silenced now behind glass.
“You know he took those bullets for me,” Gio said.
Joe nodded, even though Gio couldn’t see him, and waited for him to continue. “And the last thing I ever said to him was yell at him for forgetting my cookie.”
He turned back with a bitter look on his face. Joe squeezed his hand. “I’m sure it rolled right off him. He was like that. Big shoulders.”
“Yeah. You’re right. He was all heart.” Gio smiled. “And no brains.”
“Better than the opposite.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Gio said, then yelled: “Fuck!” He punched the seat in front of him and Nero flinched. “I’m going to miss his dumb fucking jokes about the laundry.”
Nero took the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway into Brooklyn, then the streets. As they moved deeper into South Williamsburg, they seemed to be traveling not just through space but time. Soon they saw only men in black—black coats, black hats, black beards—and women in headscarves or caps and long skirts, pushing strollers or leading flocks of kids dressed like miniature versions of themselves. More and more of the writing on the storefronts was in Hebrew or Yiddish and Joe was struck, as he always was, by how many of the windows, whole sides of tall apartment buildings, were barred, elaborately so, with rectangular, cage-like structures. Were they to keep people from getting in, he wondered, or getting out?
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