A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  I lingered at one of the blackjack tables long enough to watch a totally bald man double down on nines, which was probably his lucky number, and lose both hands to the dealer’s back-to-back jacks. I moseyed over to the roulette tables and stood for a while behind a young man wearing designer blue jeans and farmers’ suspenders jotting down the winning numbers in a minuscule notebook, as if the past of a roulette wheel could provide information about its future. Red or black. Odd or even. Go figure.

  I drifted over to the narrow door.

  “’Sup?” the lean, mean thug demanded.

  I wasn’t immediately able to translate his question into the king’s English but I offered what I thought might pass for an explanation of my presence there. “I need to talk to Giancarlo Baldini,” I said.

  “He know you?”

  “He would like to know me.”

  “You a wiseguy or something? Mr. Baldini don’t appreciate wiseguys.”

  “I am answering your questions to the best of my ability.”

  “Name?”

  “Gunn, with two n’s. I’m a private eye.”

  The lean, mean thug said something to his wrist. He must have gotten an answer because he glanced up at the long, narrow mirror and nodded. “They need to know about what you want to talk to Mr. Baldini,” he said.

  I looked up at the mirror and snapped off a casual Kabul two-finger salute, then turned back to the thug. “Tell them I want to talk to Mr. Baldini about the murder of his son Salvatore. I want to talk to him about the guy who set up Salvatore, Silvio Restivo.”

  The they watching from behind the one-way mirror must have had a microphone near the door because it clicked open before the thug could repeat a word I said. He seemed as surprised as I was to discover the door ajar. He looked up again at the mirror, listened to the tinny voice in his earpiece with his mouth drooping open, then reluctantly backed up to let me by. I walked into a white vestibule with small spotlights embedded in the ceiling and two more lean, mean thugs with BALDINI and CLINCH CORNERS emblazoned over the zippered pockets of their immaculate white jumpsuits. Both of them had skintight surgical gloves on their hands, which, I have to admit, made me uncomfortable—for a moment I was afraid they might be proctologists posted there to explore body cavities. Happily they concentrated on the usual places where firearms might be concealed when they frisked me: ankles, inner thighs, three-sixty degrees of waistband, small of back, armpits. I can say that the body search was very professional. I can see how when you do only one thing—when you specialize in patting people down, for instance—you wind up doing it well. One of them, a smirk of apology on his face, even threaded his fingers through my hair. Seeing I was weapon-free, he pushed a button in the wall and an elevator door opened. I stepped into it and turned back to confront the closing doors. The elevator rose one floor with excruciating slowness. The doors finally opened onto an enormous circular room with a high ceiling. What I took to be stereophonic Italian opera came at me from every direction. Off to my left, an accountant type wearing a green eyeshade was counting out stacks of money piled on a billiard table and securing each stack with a paper band. Off to my right, a very saddle-soaped saddle sat on a wooden trestle. Two teenagers dressed in identical blue school uniforms and ties were kneeling on cushions playing checkers on the floor. An ancient gentleman with a long beaked nose and a shirt that was several sizes too large for his neck—or had his neck shriveled since he bought the shirt?—sat in a wheelchair between them, tapping the squares on the board with the tip of his cane to suggest moves. Facing me, sitting in a plush leather swivel chair behind a shiny mahogany desk and in front of a picture window that followed the curve of the wall, was a young man with a face so pinched it looked as if it had been resized in a vise. Two computers were open on the desk in front of him. “You want to talk to Mr. Baldini,” he said, “you need to talk to me first.”

  Getting past Baldini’s gatekeepers was turning out to be almost as difficult as getting past Fontenrose & Fontenrose secretaries. I approached the desk. “I’m used to working through a chain of command,” I said.

  “You said your name is Gunn. You said you’re spelling Gunn with two n’s.”

  “I have a New Mexico private investigator ID, if you want to see it.”

  He leaned forward to read something on the screen of one of his computers. “There are seventy-three Gunns listed. Three of them are associated with the words ‘private investigator.’ One of the private investigators name of Gunn lives in Hawaii and is twenty-two years old. That’s not you. The second is an actor named Gunn who plays a private investigator in a television series. That’s not you. Which narrows it down to the third private investigator named Gunn. First name, Lemuel. No middle initial. Forty-eight years of age. This particular Gunn runs a shoestring detective operation out of a mobile home in Hatch, New Mexico. Before that he was registered as a Department of State security officer stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan. Before that he was a detective sergeant assigned to the homicide division of the New Jersey State Police.” Pinched Face looked up. “That’s you, right? Department of State security officer is a common CIA legend. When did you stop being CIA?”

  I figured why lie. “When I left Afghanistan.”

  “Why did you stop being CIA?”

  “Management and I disagreed about something.”

  “What thing?”

  “Murder.”

  “Who murdered whom?”

  “A half-assed lieutenant murdered the Taliban who taught English to Osama bin Laden. His men murdered the Taliban’s wife and two daughters.”

  “War is hell,” Pinched Face said.

  “Isn’t it,” I agreed. “Did you really find all that stuff about me on your computer?”

  “I Googled you.”

  “What does that mean, you Googled me?”

  “You want computer lessons, you go to a computer school. What do you want to tell Mr. Baldini about Salvatore and that scumbag Silvio Restivo?”

  “What I have to say is for Mr. Baldini’s ears.”

  “You’re talking to Mr. Baldini’s ears. I am his second son. My name is Ugo Baldini. The late Salvatore was my older brother.”

  “King me,” one of the teenager checker players said excitedly.

  “Hold on,” the other checker player said. “You’ve got to jump me first.”

  “King him, damn it,” the old man in the wheelchair told the first boy.

  “But he—”

  “Nuts to your buts,” the old man said. He spoke in a wheezing whisper. “Do it now, Fabio.”

  Ugo looked at the checker players. “When I was your age I kept my mouth zipped.”

  “Sorry, Uncle Ugo.”

  “It won’t happen again, Uncle Ugo.”

  “You’d think they was raised in a sewer,” the old man wheezed.

  Uncle Ugo acknowledged the apologies with raised eyebrows. He turned his attention back to me. “What do you know about Silvio Restivo that my father doesn’t know?”

  “I know where he’s been for the eight months since Salvatore was shot to death.”

  “Where would that be, Mr. Gunn?”

  “He was tucked away in an FBI witness protection program.”

  Ugo snickered politely. “You’re not telling us anything we don’t know.”

  “The Feds gave him a false identity.”

  The two boys kneeling on cushions stopped playing checkers and looked up. The ancient man had a toggle steering device on one arm of his wheelchair—there was a soft whirring noise as he backed and rotated and drove around the checker players to be nearer to Uncle Ugo’s desk. He thumped the tip of his cane on the floorboard to get my attention. “You can identify this false identity?”

  I turned my head and spoke directly to Giancarlo Baldini. “Yes, sir, I can. He was listed as Emilio Gava. He lived under that name in a condominium called East of Eden Gardens in Las Cruces, New Mexico.”

  The ancient man drove his chair so close he had to look up at
me. “He still there?”

  “No, sir. He got himself arrested on a drug charge, after which a woman put up a phony deed to guarantee bail and he was released. I work for the people who put up the actual bond and stand to lose $125,000 if Gava doesn’t show for trial.”

  “Emilio Gava is not going to show up nowhere,” the old man said. “Take my word for it, he was disappearing from the FBI’s disappearment program.” Mr. Baldini backed up his chair and spoke to Ugo. “Get the boys out of here. And turn that damn opera music off. I cannot hear myself think.”

  Ugo motioned with his chin. The accountant flicked a switch on the hi-fi behind him, collected the two boys and shooed them into the elevator. Giancarlo Baldini wheeled himself behind the desk. Ugo bounded to his feet and moved off to one side. I noticed the reflection of his ramrod-straight back in the curved window behind him. I’d seen soldiers stand to attention like that in Kabul when body bags were being loaded onto state-bound planes. It was obvious who was in command here.

  “If I hear you right,” Giancarlo Baldini said, “you know where Restivo was at. The question I have for you, do you know where he is at?”

  “I’m thinking maybe we can figure this part out together,” I said.

  Mr. Baldini’s eyes, what you could see of them with the soft lids of an old man half closed, clouded over with what I took to be hate. “When I was growing up in Palermo,” he said, short of breath, wheezing to beat the band, “we used to say revenge was a dish that tastes best cold. I been waiting eight months to get my hands on Silvio Restivo. I do not plan to die before I do.” He jabbed his cane in my direction. “Start at the start.”

  “When he was living in East of Eden, he used a neighbor’s telephone to call a onetime girlfriend in Searchlight.”

  “We know all about this Annabel,” Ugo said from the corner of the desk. He looked at his father. “We tapped into her mobile, Dad—there were no calls from Restivo.”

  “He called her at the beauty parlor where she worked,” I explained.

  Mr. Baldini turned on his son. “Why didn’t you think of that?”

  Ugo just glared at me.

  I said, “Annabel was the middleman between Restivo and someone named Mario in the Ruggeri stable.”

  “Stable is the right word,” Mr. Baldini sneered. “They are all up to their backsides in horseshit.”

  “Mario is Mario Caruso,” Ugo said. “He’s their purse-string consigliere. He cooks their books.”

  “He may have been paying off Restivo for services rendered,” I said. “The reason I think that is Annabel was passing on numbers. They could have been Swift numbers and bank account numbers.”

  “They was paying the scumbag off for fingering my boy Salvatore,” Mr. Baldini said. He was practically choking on the words. Maybe I was imagining it but I thought I detected a tear in his voice.

  “It figures,” Ugo said. “Small amounts in different banks so as not to attract attention.”

  I couldn’t resist asking, “How much is small?”

  Mr. Baldini answered for his son. “Small is small. Small is ten, twenty grand.” He tapped the tip of his cane on the desk in front of Ugo. “You need to have someone have a conversation with this Annabel person—”

  “Talk to her from now to doomsday,” I said, “you won’t get more out of her than I got. She wrote down numbers and read them to Restivo over the phone and threw them out afterward.”

  Ugo was nobody’s fool. “Maybe Mr. Gunn here has another lead,” he said. “Maybe that’s why he came looking for you, Dad.”

  Mr. Baldini’s beak nose twitched as he eyed me. “You got another lead you want to share with us, Gunn?”

  “As a matter of fact, there was something else Mario passed on to Annabel and Annabel passed on to Restivo,” I said. “Does the word ‘whistlestop’ mean anything to you, Mr. Baldini?”

  Mr. Baldini was ancient and serving out what was left of his life in a motorized wheelchair, but he had all his marbles. “Whistlestop,” he repeated, “don’t ring no bell—but it will. If it is a place, we will find it. If it is Silvio Restivo, we will wring his neck.”

  “Listen, if you wring his neck, you’ll have your revenge that tastes best cold,” I said. “The downside is that the truce between the Baldinis and the Ruggeris is hanging by a thread. If you kill Restivo, the Ruggeri family will consider the truce broken. You’ll be starting a new cycle of tit-for-tat killings in Clinch Corners. Your family business interests—your casino—will suffer. Another round of clan warfare and the Nevada authorities, who don’t bother you as long as you pay your taxes and keep a low profile, will come down on you like a ton of compacted automobiles. The families up in Reno won’t be too happy either. The last thing they want is for some Palermo family to give the state a bad name.”

  “He’s right,” Ugo told his father. “That’s not how they settle grudges in Reno. We need to keep the lid on. As long as we keep the lid on, nobody hassles our casino operation.”

  Mr. Baldini turned on his son. “I do not need lessons on how to do business from you, sonny boy.” He worked the controls on the arm of his wheelchair and drove it closer to the curved windows, which looked out on the endless procession of red taillights heading back toward Los Angeles after a night of gambling. His wheezing voice drifted back over one of his withered shoulders. “So what are you proposing, that we leave Restivo live so as not to kill business?”

  I said, “Mr. Baldini, when you decode ‘whistlestop,’ I’ll take care of him for you.”

  His wheelchair whirred as the old man came around to face me.

  I said, “I’ll take him back to stand trial on the drug charge, Mr. Baldini. He’ll pull ten, fifteen years for that. And there’s an FBI officer who is persuaded Restivo set up your son for the sniper. He’ll get a turn at him, too. One way or another he’ll wind up behind bars for a very long time.”

  “He makes sense,” Ugo said. “Once Restivo’s safely in prison, we have ways—”

  “I don’t need to know what’s going to happen to him in prison,” I told Ugo. “In the CIA, we used to have a rule of thumb—don’t share information with someone if it’s above his pay grade.”

  The old man wheezed as he weighed the fate of Silvio Restivo. “What is your pay grade, Gunn?” he inquired when he got his wind. “What’s in it for you?”

  “I get ninety-five dollars a day plus expenses,” I said. “I supply receipts for the expenses.”

  The younger Baldini scrutinized the expression on my face. “He is not making a joke,” he told his father.

  “I need Restivo to take a fall,” Mr. Baldini said. “Then I can pass away in peace. In the good old days vigilantes who brought in killers got paid a bounty. You organize Restivo’s fall, Gunn, there will be a packet in it for you.”

  “A not-so-small amount in an out-of-the-way bank,” Ugo said.

  Nobody shook hands when I left. Ugo stabbed at the button on the wall with his pinky. The elevator doors sprang open as if they’d been expecting the summons. “You and your lady friend come back this time tomorrow,” Ugo said. “By then we’ll know who or what or where this ‘whistlestop’ is.”

  I did my best to look perplexed. “What lady friend?”

  “The one you parked at the slot machine.” Ugo smiled a compact smile that fitted nicely onto his pinched face. “I take it we are on the same page, Mr. Gunn?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “I think we are.”

  He looked at me peculiarly. “You’re a piece of work, Lemuel no middle initial Gunn from Hatch, New Mexico, waltzing in here with a cockamamie scheme to take out the rat who set up my brother Salvatore.”

  “You are, too, Ugo Baldini from Clinch Corners, Nevada, for taking me seriously.”

  Twenty-one

  With the two other couples overnighting in Nipton—dog-tired, dewy-eyed honeymooners from upstate New York and older evangelicals (judging from the giant 3-D crucifixes painted on the sliding doors of their minibus) driving to L.A. to see
the palm prints of film stars on the sidewalk—we scrounged rations and beer in the general store and fried up burgers on the stove in the hotel’s common room. There was some strained table talk as the people we were breaking bread with tried to figure out where the others were coming from, I’m not talking geographically. The evangelicals, who hailed from a small pushpin-in-the-map township in Iowa, didn’t turn around the pot for long. “I couldn’t help but notice you’re not wearing a wedding band,” the woman remarked to Ornella. “You and your friend here common-law husband, wife?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” I said, “but we’re lover and lovee.”

  “Don’t pay attention to him,” Friday said without missing a beat. “He’s cranky because we’re winding down an eight-year marriage.” She smiled one of her cheerless signature smiles. “It may seem over-the-top sentimental,” she went on, “but hey, as we’re both big fans of Clara Bow, we decided to consummate the divorce in her bedroom.”

  Ornella said it all with such a straight face the others couldn’t tell if she was pulling their leg or what. The honeymooners got it before the evangelicals. They grinned, then began laughing so hard the girl got hiccups. “That’s rich,” the young man allowed. “Consummate a divorce! I totally gotta try that out on my mother-in-law.”

  “Henry, don’t—hic—go there,” his young wife admonished.

  After supper Friday and I crossed the railroad tracks and walked out into the dunes under an awning of desert stars that somehow managed to look as if they were shooting without even moving. Ornella quoted a line from an English poet whose name didn’t mean anything to me at the time and is lost to me now—something about stars still dancing. Obviously the poet had been looking at the same stars as us but seeing them better. We settled onto the overhang of one groundswell of a dune and watched the last of a last-quarter moon skulk out of sight into the haze obscuring the horizon—it left a track of light in the sand glistening like the wake of a ship at sea, not that I’ve ever seen the wake of a ship at sea. My luck, I’ve always crossed oceans by plane. Just before eleven, one of those endless freight trains passed between us and Nipton. It was so long it needed two locomotives to inch it across the surface of the planet Earth. Once it had gone by we crossed back over the tracks and bedded down for the night in the Clara Bow room.