Iron House

by John Hart

  She laughed. “Just like that?”

  “Yes.”

  She put a palm on Michael’s cheek, and the laughter dwindled. “No, Michael. I won’t marry you.”

  “Because?”

  “Because you’re asking me for the wrong reasons. And because we have time.” She kissed him. “Lots of time.”

  That’s where she was wrong.

  * * *

  Elena worked as the hostess for an expensive restaurant called Chez Pascal. She was beautiful, spoke three languages, and at her request, the owner had hired Michael, eight days ago, to wash dishes. Michael told her that he’d lost his other job, that he needed to fill the days before he found a new one or the student loan finally came through, but there was no other job, no student loan, just two more lies in a sea of thousands. But Michael needed to be there, for while no one would dare touch him while the old man breathed, Elena was under no such protection. They’d kill her for the fun of it.

  Two blocks from the restaurant, Michael said, “Have you told your family?”

  “That I’m pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.” Emotion colored her voice—sadness and something dark. Michael knew that Elena had family in Spain, but she rarely spoke of them. She had no photographs, no letters. Someone had called once, but Elena hung up when Michael gave her the phone; the next day, she changed the number. Michael never pushed for answers, not about family or the past. They walked in silence for several minutes. A block later, she took his hand. “Kiss me,” she said, and Michael did. When it was done, Elena said, “You’re my family.”

  At the restaurant door, a blue awning offered narrow shade. Michael was slightly in front, so he saw the damage to the door in time to turn Elena before she saw it, too. But even with his back to the door, the image stayed in his mind: splintered wood, shards of white that rose from the mahogany stain. The grouping was head-high and tight, four bullet holes in a three-inch circle, and Michael could see how it went down. A black car at the curb, gun silenced. From Elena’s apartment, the drive was less than six minutes, so it probably happened just after five this morning. Empty streets. Nobody around. Small caliber, Michael guessed, something light and accurate. A twenty-two, maybe a twenty-five. He leaned against the door and felt splinters through his shirt, a cold rage behind his eyes. He took Elena’s hand and said, “If I asked you to move away from New York, would you do it?”

  “My job is here. Our lives…”

  “If I had to go,” he tried again, “would you come with me?”

  “This is our home. This is where I want to raise our child…” She stopped, and understanding moved in her face. “Lots of people raise babies in the city…”

  She knew of his distrust for the city, and he looked away because the weight of lies was becoming too much. He could stay here and risk the war that was coming, or he could share the truth and lose her. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to be late today. Tell Paul for me.” Paul owned the restaurant. He parked in the alley, and had probably not seen the door.

  “You’re not coming in?”

  “I can’t right now.”

  “I got you this job, Michael.” A spark of rare anger.

  Michael showed the palm of his hand, and said, “May I have your keys?”

  Unhappy, she gave him the set Paul let her use. He opened the restaurant door and held it for her. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  Her face was upturned and still angry. Michael wanted to touch her cheek and say that he would kill or die to keep her safe. That he would burn the city down. “I’ll be back,” he told her. “Just stay in the restaurant.”

  “You’re being very mysterious.”

  “I have to do something,” he replied. “For the baby.”

  “Really?”

  He placed his hand on the plane of her stomach and pictured the many violent ways this day could end. “Really,” he said.

  And that was truth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  There comes a time. Michael did not know how long the words had been there, but they ran through his head as he walked, a refrain timed to the sound of his shoes on concrete. He’d tried to do it right and respectful. He’d tried to be nice.

  But there comes a time.

  Michael hailed a cab and gave the driver an address in Alphabet City. When they arrived, he pushed a fifty through the glass and told the man to wait.

  Michael’s apartment was a third-floor walk-up with two bedrooms, bars on the windows, and a reinforced steel door. Elena had never been there, and he planned to keep it that way. The second bedroom closet held rifles and handguns, body armor, and stacks of cash. There was a long shelf of knives and edged projectiles, neat coils of shiny wire. Things that might be difficult to explain.

  Michael disengaged the alarm and crossed the large living room. Tall windows let in midday light, but he ignored the things it touched: the wall of books, the fine furnishings and original art. He made for the short hall at the back, walked past the room that held his gear and into the bedroom beyond. The bed was large, but clean-lined and spartan, and on the dresser sat the only photograph he owned. Pressed between glass, faded and cracked, the picture was of two boys in a snowy field splotched with mud. Not sure that he would ever see the apartment again, Michael slipped the photograph from its frame and carried it with him to the closet. It was the only thing he owned that really mattered.

  At the closet door, Michael stripped out of his clothes and left them in a heap. From a long cedar rack he selected a pair of hand-tooled English shoes, then a custom suit from a row of twenty. The suit was English, too, as were the shirts. He slipped into a cream-colored one and a tie dark enough to mirror the occasion of his visit. The old man appreciated a good suit. He considered it a matter of respect, and so did Michael. He put the photograph in the jacket’s inside pocket, then returned to the cab, where he gave the driver another address. They rode north and east to where the river touched the upper fifties. If you were rich and wanted privacy, Sutton Place was a good area to call home. Celebrities and politicians lived there, and no one looked twice at long cars with mirrored glass. The old man owned the entire building in which he planned to die, and while the FBI undoubtedly knew who lived in the five-story town house with a view of the river, none of the neighbors had a clue; that was the point. After a life in the press and in the courts, after three incarcerations, forty-seven years of persecution, and public scorn, the old man wanted to die in peace.

  Michael didn’t blame him.

  He had the cabbie drive by the residence, then stop a full block north, near the defunct Sixtieth Street heliport. The space was a dog run now, and when Michael stepped from the cab he saw well-dressed women chatting while small dogs played. One of the women saw him and said something to her friends, so that all three turned as Michael paid off the cab. Michael nodded, then turned to walk twice past the house, once moving south, then coming back north. A portico drive led to private parking in the back. When he stopped before the door, he stood with his palms up, eyes moving between the security cameras mounted at the corners and above the main door. Someone moved behind a third-floor window. Curtains stirred at the ground level, too.

  Eventually, Michael knocked, and after a long minute the door swung open to reveal four men. Two were low-level soldiers whose names Michael had never bothered to learn. In their twenties, they wore dark pants and shirts that shone like silk under their suit jackets. One chewed gum, and both stood with fingers inside their coats, as if Michael needed to be told they carried. Under slicked hair their faces were lean and frightened. They’d heard stories of Michael, of the things he’d done. He was a fighter and a killer, a prince of the street so widely feared he rarely had to kill anymore. His presence alone was sufficient. His name. The threat of his name.

  The third man was a stranger, young and calm and lean, but the fourth, Michael knew well.

  “Hello, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy stood an inch taller than Micha
el, but weighed thirty pounds less, narrow-shouldered and thin to the point of desiccation. Dapper in bottle-green pants and a brushed velvet coat, he was forty-eight years old, balding on top and vain enough to care. Michael knew from long acquaintance that his arms and chest carried more than a dozen scars. Knife wounds. Bite marks. Bullet holes. Eighteen years ago, he’d shown Michael things that would make a grown man faint. Michael was fifteen years old at the time, hard but not cruel; and Jimmy was all about cruel. He was about message and fear, a hard-core, brutal sadist who even now was the most dangerous man Michael had ever known.

  “May I come in?” Michael asked.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Well, think faster.”

  Jimmy was a complicated man, equal parts appetite, ego, and self-preservation. He respected Michael, but didn’t like him. Jimmy was a butcher, Michael a surgeon. The difference caused problems. It was an ego thing. Matters of principle.

  Their gazes held for long seconds, then Jimmy said, “Whatever.”

  He moved back a pace and Michael stepped into the dim interior. The entry hall was massive, with white and black marble floors and a red-carpeted stairway that curved up both sides of the room before meeting on a landing twelve feet higher. A billiards room filled the space to Michael’s right, and he could see through into the formal parlor, the small study beyond. He sensed movement deeper in the house, saw food on a long table, other men, other guns, and Michael knew then that they were marking time, waiting in stillness for the old man to die.

  “I’d like to see him, Jimmy.”

  “He can’t save you.”

  “No one’s asking.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Michael. All these years, all the things you’ve been given. Opportunity. Skills. Respect. You were nothing when we found you.”

  “You don’t have the right to feel that way, Jimmy.”

  “I have every right.”

  He was angry and barely hiding it. Michael tilted his head to see the men behind him, then looked back at Jimmy. “The opportunity came from the old man, not you; the respect I earned on my own. Some of the skills may have started with you, but that’s all it was, a start. I’ve made my own way since then.”

  “And yet, I helped choose you.”

  “For good reasons.”

  “Are you really so arrogant?”

  “Are you?”

  The silence held until Jimmy blinked. Michael said, “I want to see him.”

  “Do you still think you have that right?”

  “Step back, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy shrugged, half-smiling, then moved back and allowed Michael to enter all the way. In the light of the chandelier, Michael saw how wired Jimmy looked, how taut. His dark eyes pulled in light, and there was emptiness there, the same vacuum-behind-glass look Michael had seen so many times. It was the look he got before people died.

  “The old man released me, Jimmy. He gave standing orders that I was to be left alone. I’d say I still have the right to see him.”

  Jimmy blinked, and the look faded. “Tell Stevan that.”

  Stevan was thirty-six years old, with degrees from Columbia and Harvard, not because he cared about the education, but because he craved respectability in a city that knew his name too well. The old man’s only son, he and Michael had been friends once—brothers—but that bridge was burnt to smoke and ruin. Eight days had passed since Michael quit the life. One week and a day. A world of change.

  “How is my brother?” Michael masked the rage with sarcasm. Stevan drove a black Audi, and Michael knew for a fact that he kept a twenty-five in the glove compartment.

  “How’s Stevan?” Jimmy mimicked the question, rolling the words on his tongue as if tasting them. “His brother’s a traitor and his father is dying. How do you think he is?”

  “I think he’s making mistakes.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Where was he at five o’clock this morning?”

  Jimmy rolled his shoulders, turned his lips down. “Stevan has offered to forgive you, Michael—how many times, now? Three times? Four? All you have to do is repent. Come back to us.”

  “Things have changed. I want out.”

  “Then you leave him no choice.”

  Michael pictured the bullet holes in the door of Chez Pascal. Two double-taps. Head height. “Nothing personal, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the wishes of his father? The man who built this from nothing? Who built you from nothing? What about him?”

  “The son is not the father.”

  A moment’s irony touched his eyes. At fifteen, the old man had made Michael Jimmy’s student, and in that capacity he became a mirror to Jimmy’s vanity, something Jimmy could point to and say, “Look at this instrument I’ve made.” The old man’s business had thrived with the two of them on the street, for as effective as Jimmy had been by himself, it was nothing compared to what they’d done together. They’d killed their way from one river to the other, north to south and over into Jersey. Russian mob. Serbians. Italians. It didn’t matter. If somebody crossed the old man, they took him down. But after all these years, that’s all Michael was to Jimmy, a weapon.

  Disposable.

  Michael looked from Jimmy to the man he’d never met. He stood three feet behind Jimmy’s right shoulder, a spare man in linen pants and a golf shirt tight enough to show straps of lean, hard muscle. “Who’s he?” Michael asked.

  “Your replacement.”

  Michael felt a pang that was neither loss nor hurt, but one more broken strand. He looked the man over and noticed small things he’d missed. Fine white scars on both forearms, one finger that lacked a nail. The man stood six feet tall, and looked vaguely Slavic, with wide-spaced eyes and broad planes of cheekbone. Michael shrugged once, and then dismissed him. “I would never turn on people who trust me,” he said to Jimmy.

  “No? How long have you been with this woman of yours? Three months? A year?”

  “What does it matter? It’s personal.”

  “It matters because you only told us about her eight days ago. You kept her a secret, and keeping secrets from us is one step away from spilling ours. It’s two sides of the same coin. Secrets. Lack of trust. Priorities.”

  “I said I would never turn.”

  “And yet, you made your choice.”

  “So did the old man. When he let me go.”

  “Maybe the old man’s gone soft.”

  That was Michael’s replacement—a crisp voice with a slight accent—and Michael could not believe the disrespect, here in the man’s own house. He held the man’s Slavic gaze, then stared hard at Jimmy and waited for him to meet his eyes. “I’ve seen you kill a man for less,” Michael said.

  Jimmy picked daintily at the nail of his smallest finger, then said, “Maybe I don’t disagree.”

  “I want to see him.” Michael’s voice grated. Every man here owed his life to the old man. What they had. Who they were. Honor the old man and the old man honors you. That’s the way it was done, old school and proper.

  In some ways, Jimmy agreed. “Nobody walks away, Michael. That’s how it’s always been. The old man was wrong to tell you that you could.”

  “He’s the boss.”

  “For now.”

  Michael’s heart beat twice as he considered that. “You were in the car last night. With Stevan.”

  “Pretty night for a drive…”

  “You bastard.”

  Jimmy saw the anger and rolled onto the balls of his feet. It had long been a question between them, who could take who. Michael watched the glint come into Jimmy’s eyes, the cold and narrow smile. He wanted it, was eager; and Michael knew, then, that there would be no easy out, no graceful exit from a life he no longer desired. For too many people, the matter was personal.

  Fingers tightened on holstered weapons and the moment stretched; but before it broke, there was movement on the stairs, a nurse on the landing. In her for
ties, she looked like a smaller version of Jimmy, but vaguely female. When Jimmy turned and lifted his chin, she said, “He wants to know who’s here.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Jimmy told her, and cold touched his face when he looked back at Michael. “Stay here.” He motioned to the young Slavic man. “Watch him.”

  “Where’s Stevan?” Michael demanded.

  Jimmy offered a second slit of a smile, but otherwise ignored the question. He mounted the stairs on light feet, and when he came back down, he said, “He wants to see you.” Michael moved for the stairs, but Jimmy stopped him. “Not yet.” He twisted a finger like he was stirring tea, so Michael lifted his arms, and let the man pat him down. He checked Michael’s legs to the groin, his arms to the wrist. He smoothed fabric over Michael’s chest and back, then fingered the collars of his jacket and shirt.

  “None of this is necessary,” Michael said.

  Jimmy’s gaze moved from low to high, and the gaze lingered. “I don’t know you anymore.”

  “Maybe you never did.”

  A hand flapped on his wrist. “Enough. Go. Up.”

  On the second floor Michael saw a nursing station filled with monitors tinted green. Cables snaked down the stairs and under the table that held the equipment. The nurse sat with her feet flat on the floor, eyes glued to the monitors. In a small room behind her, an iron-haired priest sat in a comfortable chair, eyes slightly closed, fingers crossed in his lap. He wore shined shoes and black clothing with a white collar at the throat. When the nurse looked up, Michael asked, “Are we that close?”

  She glanced at Jimmy, who nodded in permission. “We’ve resuscitated him twice,” she said.

  “What?” Michael’s anger flared. The old man wanted to die. Resuscitating him was a cruelty. “Why?” Michael demanded. “Why would you put him through that?”