by Chris Knopf
New Haven was about the same distance from Greenwich and Rocky Hill, which I thought only fair, and the club an ideal venue, with its tomb-like quiet and respect for discreet conversation.
I had to stop along the way to rent a motel room where I could switch my look from Auric Grenouille to Alex Rimes, at least the Alex Shelly had met at the restaurant. I brought along my blue blazer, grey slacks and the red and blue diagonally striped official tie of the University of Pennsylvania, where I received my Masters in Applied Mathematics. Natural camouflage.
Shelly, on the other hand, had opted for a bright yellow, nylon windbreaker over a white polo shirt and an orange baseball cap. If any deer hunters were passing through the Bulldog Lounge, he’d never be mistaken for a grazing stag.
I sat down and put the plastic bag on the table.
“It’s a note from Three Sticks,” I said. “Attached to three sticks.” I told him what the note said. “I provoked him into it,” I said, not telling him how. “I’m reasonably certain he picked up the sticks, wrote the note and placed it on the bed. A bit of bravado in response to my provocation, the way I signaled to him. I’m not a handwriting expert, but I’m fairly certain he wrote the note with his left hand. Unless he brought along surgical gloves, the paper should be covered in DNA.”
“Should be,” said Shelly.
“I also have a list of candidates, wealthy men in Greenwich who could conceivably be modern versions of the man in your photograph. I’m also reasonably sure one of these men left the message. If not, it was a subordinate, which might be good enough.”
I handed him a flash drive.
“I have all their names, addresses, business information and email addresses. And the names of their wives or dates. Also, recent photographs of them all, and some at younger ages that I pulled off the web.”
“That’s pretty good,” said Shelly.
“It gets better.”
A waiter showed up to launch the standard rituals, which I short-circuited by ordering an iced tea and a cheeseburger. Shelly did the same. When the waiter left, I put a box on the table.
“Cocktail and wine glasses. Fingerprints and DNA. Each identified by name with a piece of tape.”
He looked a little perplexed, then he grinned.
“You served them at a restaurant,” he said. “Or a party.”
“How quickly do you think you could run it through your files?”
He smiled.
“My buddies at the Bureau would find that question amusing. Some of the biggest cases in the country can take months to work their way through the labs.”
“I can’t afford days. This venture has a shelf life.”
“The more I ask of them, the more they’ll want to know.”
I sat back in my chair and thought through what I was going to say. Calibration was important. For better or worse, he beat me to it.
“As far as I can tell,” he said, “you don’t exist. That doesn’t mean you have no identity. I bet you have several, but none of them are you. They all belong to dead people. Before you get nervous, I don’t know this for certain, it’s just the result of forty years on the job. But I’m pretty sure if our people ran down the name Alex Rimes, we’d learn some very interesting things.”
He tapped his fingers on the box full of glasses, which he held as if asserting fresh rights of ownership.
“You got a dilemma,” he went on. “You need me because I can do things you can’t, at least not on your timetable. But the closer you get to me, the more I learn, the harder it is to stay invisible.”
“You’re right,” I said. “My risk is trusting you. But if you let others in on it, your biggest risk is losing control over the best, and last, opportunity you’ll ever have to snag the big fish that got away.”
He tapped some more on the table, and appeared to be chewing on the inside of his mouth. I imagined this as an insight into the state of his mood, a giveaway apparent to his former employees, yet oblivious to Shelly himself.
“Interesting situation,” he said.
“Indeed.”
“I have no problem keeping things close to the chest,” he said. “I’ll probably have to use every chit I have left, but we’ll do it your way. Up until the moment I learn you’re scamming me, and then all bets are off. I’ll be after your ass like a starving hound from hell.”
“So how quickly can you turn this around?”
He liked that.
“So who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.
The urge to reveal everything to him, to bare my soul and all my transgressions, was nearly unbearable. It was human nature to confess, to share intimate, sordid information. I’d exploited the tendency many times myself, so I was forewarned. Yet even so, it took willpower to counter the impulse.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” I said. “Even if I knew anymore. It only matters what I do.”
Our meals came soon after that, and we spent the rest of the time eating and sharing experiences we’d had in and around New Haven. I learned a lot about Shelly’s successful campaign to gut local crime syndicates, and he learned something about the historical and contemporary demographic makeup of the city and its environs.
When he asked me how I knew such things, I said, “I absorb a lot of minutiae. It’s a bad habit.”
An assertion he saw no reason to contend, whether he believed it or not.
I WAS glad to see nothing had changed when I got back to the house. The Colombians had joined in solidarity with the Bosniaks over the Celtics game, in which the favored team prevailed, and now everyone was swept up in a celebration fully fueled by the voluminous leftovers from the prior night’s party.
Little Boy, interpreting the expression on my face, assured me that his best man, cold sober, was outside guarding the periphery, well-armed and in communication with his second best—who was a little drunk, but famous for throwing a knife through the eye of a Serbian infiltrator after an entire night’s consumption of tequila shots, wherein he lost the drinking contest, but won the fight.
I found Natsumi in the library, curled up like a cat in an overstuffed chair, reading a copy of Pride and Prejudice slipped out of the crammed bookshelves that surrounded her.
“Oh, goody, you’re here,” she said, looking up from her book. “I’m so glad.”
“Me, too. It seems like our guests are settling in.”
“I’ve never met such polite people. We Japanese pride ourselves on social decorum, but I’m often suspicious of the sincerity. These guys seem to mean it.”
“You should know I’d only invite the most refined of criminal gangs into our home,” I said, then told her about my meeting with Shelly Gross.
“Do you think he’ll be true to his word?”
“Probably yes, if only because he’s got nothing to lose. I’m sure he has enough to get close to us, if not all the way, if he had the support of the FBI, and wanted to try. But it’s not yet in his interest to try. I realize my analysis of his psychological motivation is amateurish, but it’s all I have to go on.”
“I think your analysis is highly projectable, and this from a recently minted Bachelor of Science in Psychology.”
“You don’t look like a bachelor.”
“Did you use your sense of humor to flirt with your wife?” she asked.
It took a second to adjust to the hairpin turn in the conversation. I tried hard to give an honest answer.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “It was probably the foundation of the relationship. Couldn’t have been anything else.”
“You’re probably shortchanging yourself, but it doesn’t matter. She’s gone, you’re back from the dead and trying to reconstitute your life. Whatever existed before is moot. At least it should be.”
“We dueled a bit. I liked it, up to a point. As soon as she started to heat up, I’d retreat.”
“For fear of conflict,” she said.
“Yes.”
“So you actively avoided anything that might h
ave put stress on the relationship. You never tested the limits.”
“No. Florencia was a breathtakingly beautiful, and successful, woman. I held up my end in the household, but really, I was just a goofy nerd in awe of my good fortune to have the affection of such an amazing woman. No other way to put it. When you find yourself in such an asymmetric situation, you don’t question, you simply thank the gods and get on with it.”
“Are you questioning now?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m questioning everything.”
“How does that make you feel?” she asked.
“Like I love you, but you best not psychoanalyze me. Though I appreciate your good intentions in trying to do so.”
“You’re not just a goofy nerd,” she said.
“Just?”
THE NEXT few days would have been unexceptional but for the effort to integrate four Bosniak gangsters into our domestic routine. The burden for this fell mainly on the shoulders of the Costellos and ourselves. For their part, Little Boy and his men had the demeanor of cheerful unsophisticates who’d just won an all-expenses-paid holiday in a fantasy mansion, which essentially they had.
I spent most of my time racing around the Internet, downloading data, stalking Greenwich millionaires and skulking like a ghost in the financial and operating systems at Florencia’s agency.
Natsumi was less housebound, though she never ventured outside without Little Boy and at least one other Bosniak in tow.
No word from Shelly Gross. I spent hours on the web trying to keep my mind under load and out of emotional mischief. Though after a while, even I can get tired of staring into a computer screen. I find it can send me into tiresome feedback loops, sapping my intellectual energy. The only remedy was to get out of the house and clear my head with fresh air and a natural landscape.
And so one of those afternoons when Natsumi and three of the Bosniaks were out shopping, I thought driving down to Long Island Sound to look at the water and ruminate was a good idea. I dressed in jeans and a dirty work jacket and took the Subaru as a modest form of disguise.
It was cold, but clear, and though the sun still traveled a low arc across the sky, the light was getting warmer and less harsh to the eye. For some unknown reason, I brought along a beer, thinking I could go whole hog down at the beach, wolf down the beer and perhaps open some hidden doors of perception.
I made it to Greenwich Point and was about to crack open the beer when a crowbar smashed into the side window. The safety glass contained most of the blow, though a blizzard of tiny shards sprayed across the left side of my face. Knowing the next strike would get all the way through, I dropped over the center console and covered my head. I heard the wet, concussive sound of the crowbar penetrating the window, then the sound of the door opening. Cold air and strong hands rushed inside.
They pulled me out of the Subaru and dragged me a few yards across the parking lot. One of them kicked me in the stomach, which caused more shock than pain. I curled up and waited for what was to come.
“We tole you we’d contact you,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to Jenkins. “What’s with all the Eurotrash? Damn, that’s so unnecessary.”
“I’m just trying to be careful,” I said, without uncurling from the fetal position. “You’d do the same.”
“Not careful enough, eh brother?”
“Hurting me serves no purpose,” I said.
“Yes, it does. It teaches you to show a little more respect,” said Jenkins, before kicking me in the small of my back. Most of the shock was absorbed by the meaty muscles to the right of my spine, but some of it reached the kidney. I grunted, but held my defensive curl.
“Point well taken,” I said, picking my face up off the macadam. “From now on I’ll hold you in greater esteem. I’m not a physical person. More of this, and you’ll have to explain to the boss why his potential business partner died on the way to the deal.”
“I’ve a mind to shoot your ass.”
“Go ahead, but you’d only be shooting yourself. If Three Sticks doesn’t take you out for insubordination, some Bosniak certainly will.”
It was quiet for a moment, then Jenkins said, “You are one strange motherfucker,” with a hint of a laugh, which I took as encouraging. Several sets of hands grabbed me by the clothes and pulled me to my feet. I had trouble standing fully upright, my abdomen bruised and clenched like an angry fist. They shoved me back against the Subaru and rummaged around in my pockets, finding one of my disposable phones. Luckily one with no important numbers recorded in recent calls. I also had a wallet, but there was nothing in it but a little cash and a credit card belonging to Auric Grenouille. A minor victory for paranoid precautions.
Jenkins bundled me into the passenger seat of the Subaru and assigned one of his boys, a pockmarked white guy with unnaturally black hair and a fur parka, to drive the car. The only thing the driver said to me was, “Fuck up once and I’ll kill you.”
Which was a clear enough directive.
We drove in a caravan, following Jenkins’ Escalade along the coast into New York. The landscape quickly transitioned from seaside opulence to manufacturing ruin, with train tracks and metal-sided warehouses, forlorn gas stations and brick monuments to the industrial revolution. My driver held his silence and I was just as glad, as it freed up lots of bandwidth for self-recrimination.
We followed the Cadillac south into a suburban neighborhood of early fifties vintage—ranch homes packed close together, carports and curvy streets. We pulled into one of the driveways. It was plain, but better kept than most. Two trash cans were at the curb. The shrubbery, what there was of it, was neatly trimmed. Another SUV, a Range Rover, was parked in the carport.
Jenkins got out of the Escalade and went down the front walk, picking up a newspaper in a blue plastic sleeve along the way. He rang the doorbell and was let in. A few moments later, he came out and waved to us and the guys in the other car. My driver got out, walked around to my side and opened the door. With my driver’s encouragement, I led everyone to the door of the house.
The interior reflected the same spare tidiness as the outside of the house. You entered directly into the living room, which featured a long sofa against the far wall and two club chairs. Another pair of wooden chairs, colonial reproductions, completed the seating area, at the center of which was a large coffee table. In the middle of the table was the only object out of place—a futuristic black phone you commonly see in commercial conference rooms.
I sat in one of the wood chairs before they had a chance to direct me. Jenkins took the other one, facing me across the table. The big white guys, including the one who’d opened the door, filled in the upholstered furniture.
“A call’s gonna be comin’ in,” said Jenkins. “We’re gonna be discussin’ business. I’ll give you some inside information. People’re gettin’ sick of foolin’ with you. This is your last chance to make your case. I strongly suggest that you settle down and make the necessary accommodations. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I do.”
That seemed to make him happy.
“That’s good,” he said, looking around the room. The other guys all nodded, though no one said anything.
He looked at his watch, then at the phone, which buzzed as if on his visual command. He leaned forward and pushed a button.
“We’re here,” he said.
“With our guest?” the other party asked. It was a male voice run through a distortion device like they use to hide the identities of people during TV interviews, their voices a mechanical drone, their faces in shadow.
“That’s right. He’s right here.”
“Hello,” I said.
“I’m interested in coming to an agreement with you, but we need to iron some things out.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You need to agree to the provisions outlined in the note.”
“I agree.” It was quiet on the other end of the line. He obviously expected more resista
nce. So I kept talking. “You get the same terms I gave Little Boy. All product is available at a quarter of the market price set at the opening of the day it is sold. The agreed-upon quantity will be fulfilled. I prefer cash, but a wire transfer is acceptable. You can place your order now, or have Jenkins bring it to my house after you’ve had a chance to think about it. I’d prefer that he call ahead, in that some of my colleagues may react poorly to an unannounced visitor.”
“About that,” said the distorted voice. “Aggressive tactics would not be looked upon favorably.”
“Good. Then tell your boys to keep their hands off me.”
“Don’t be too enamored of the Bosnian bravado. It would be a contest they cannot win.”
“Conflict is never healthy for business,” I told him. “I’ll do my part, you do yours, everybody wins.”
Jenkins curled his lip at me, a gesture that clearly said, “What a bunch of bullshit.”
“You’ll hear from us,” said the voice, and the line disconnected.
On the way out I looked for the street number of the house, but had to do with the numbers next door and across the street. Likewise, the street name itself, which had been removed from the pole. But I caught the next one we passed, and the one after that.
Though we left by a different route than we used on the way in, it was easy enough to determine, as we crossed into Larchmont, that the house was in New Rochelle. I laid my head on the headrest and closed my eyes, a cheap signal to my driver that I had no interest in our surroundings. And it wasn’t that hard an act to fake. I was bitterly exhausted and sore, and now that the adrenalin had drained out of me, my nervous system began to crackle like static electricity.
And all the while, the quiet center of my mind kept asking the question: how, after all these months of vigilance and deliberation, could I be so stupid?
CHAPTER 23
I counted among Natsumi’s admirable qualities a consistent failure to overreact, no matter how fair it would be to do otherwise. She held true to that when I told her where I’d been and what I’d been doing.