by J. S. Cook
Picco’s eyebrows climbed toward his hair. “Jonah Octavian is dead. Are you drunk?”
“No, dammit, I’m not drunk. Listen to me, would you? He even greeted me by name.” I told him how Octavian had been standing there, almost like he’d been waiting for me. “He was killed in Egypt. I saw him die myself.”
Picco gazed at me for several long moments. “Sure he did. And he somehow came back to life and was waiting for you in the park.”
“Not just in the park. He showed up in the Heartache one night, with some guy.”
Picco shuffled some papers on his desk. “Stoyles, don’t be wasting my time with your foolishness. I got enough on my plate. I did what I could for you, now go on home out of it.”
“You have to listen to me. Goddammit, Picco, put that down!” I yanked the folder out of his hand so hard it cut him. “I’m sorry.”
He sighed and reached for a Kleenex. “Stoyles, look. You’re not a bad sort of fellow. Sure, you’re a Yank, but unlike the rest of ’em around here, I like Yanks.” He sucked the blood away from the cut, watching me over the edge of his hand. “But you got no respect for proper protocol.”
“Picco—Phonse—this is the same guy who snatched you off the street and stuck you in a cave over on the Southside. You know how dangerous Octavian is.”
“Octavian’s dead.” He sat back in his chair and regarded me wearily. “Do you think we haven’t been keeping an eye on him? I know everything that’s happened to him since he left last year. He is dead—I didn’t need you to tell me that, by the way—so whoever you saw in the park, it wasn’t Jonah Octavian.”
“Phonse, you gotta listen—”
“Jack!” He stood up, and we were suddenly eye to eye and toe to toe. “That’s enough. Octavian is dead. I got a copy of the signed death certificate from the Egyptian officials, forwarded here by priority air post the day after he was killed. I even contacted the head of the Cairo police force and had him check the teeth. Octavian is dead, and that’s the end of it.”
“Yes, but couldn’t there have been some mistake?” I was, I knew, grasping at straws, but the sight of whoever that was in Bannerman Park had shaken me to the core. It was starting to feel like Octavian’s ghost was chasing me. “Maybe the Egyptians got something mixed up. Maybe they only thought Octavian—”
“Good-bye, Mr. Stoyles.” Picco stepped away from his desk, took my arm in his strong policeman’s grip, and steered me to the door.
“You’re making a mistake.” The door closed and I was on the outside of it. I heard the key turning in the lock. “Fine, if that’s the way you want it.” I waited to see if Picco would change his mind, but there was no sound from behind the door. It was already well after twelve, so I used the phone at the front desk to call a cab and waited outside until it pulled up: a rickety black-and-white number with a skinny guy at the wheel.
“Where to, buddy?” His graying hair was combed straight back and secured with something that looked and smelled like axle grease. His face was seamed like a crumpled paper bag, and he was chewing a toothpick so old it was probably a sliver of the True Cross. He reeked of old booze and too many cigarettes—the kind of guy who’d benefit from a strong gargle and some good, thorough dentistry.
I gave him the address of the Heartache and sat back. The inside of the cab hadn’t been cleaned since the horse-and-buggy days, but I didn’t have time to be picky. I’d left Tex alone to prep for the lunch crowd, and with Chris out of commission, I needed to get back before the afternoon rush. “You can head straight down Prescott if you like—that’ll probably be the fastest.” But he bypassed the hill and kept going east, toward the Newfoundland Hotel. “Hey, wait a minute! I’m already late as it is.”
“Don’t worry, my son. I knows a shortcut. You’ll be there in plenty of time.”
Something about this was making me very, very nervous. I’d grown up in Philly, and I knew cabbies often tried to take the rubes for a ride by going the long way around, but this was just weird. He swung around the hotel, heading south toward the waterfront, past the long line of red brick houses on Devon Row, and down the steep incline of Temperance Street. “Hey! Where are you going?”
He caught my eye in the rearview mirror and nodded at me. “Don’t worry, Stoyles. This way you’ll beat all the dinnertime traffic.”
“How’d you know my name?” I reached for the door handle. “Put the brakes on. I’m getting out.” The handle wouldn’t budge: the door was jammed shut. “Stop this car! I want to get out.”
He turned around to face me, giving me the weirdest, most disturbing smile I’d ever seen in my life. “I’m going to get out, Mr. Stoyles, but you won’t be going anywhere. See, I got ’er rigged so she gets ’er gas even if I’m not pressing on the pedal.”
The view out the front windscreen was chilling: a wide expanse of dark, dirty water. We were heading for the harbor unless I managed to stop this thing in the next few seconds. “Hey! You can’t just leave me here!”
He wasn’t listening to me. His narrow shoulders jerked as he yanked on the handle, trying desperately to get the door open. “It won’t come open. Why won’t it come open?”
“Put the brakes on, dammit! Put the brakes—”
There was a loud thump as the underside of the car struck the dock, and then we were airborne, the sea and the sky hurtling around me in a sickening kaleidoscope. We hit the water, and as the car began to sink, I remember thinking this was a stupid way to die.
WHEN I woke up, it hurt to swallow and I had the worst headache of my life; I tried to talk but there was something down my throat.
“Rest. Do not try to speak. You are in Grace Hospital. You have been through a terrible ordeal, Jack.” Sam Halim looked about the same as always—perhaps a little older, perhaps a little wearier, and there were new lines around his eyes. “My darling. Why do you do this to yourself?”
Sam. My eyes were full of tears, and I reached for him with both hands: he was real. I missed you. I wanted to talk to him and couldn’t; whatever was down my throat was getting in the way, and I tried to get at it.
“You mustn’t take out the tube.” He stroked my cheek, leaned in, and kissed my forehead. “It’s very late. Sleep now, and I will come to you when I am able.”
Don’t go. The darkness was clawing at me, pulling me under. I tried to fight it, but my eyelids felt like garage doors, and before I knew it, I was out.
When I woke up again, it was later, and a trim young nurse in a starched white uniform was yanking open the curtains with the kind of grim efficiency you only ever see in such places. She picked up my wrist and felt for my pulse, then lifted my open eyelids and peered into my eyes.
“Mr. Stoyles, you have had a very close call. A very close call indeed. The next time you decide to go swimming in the harbor, I recommend you wait till at least July.”
“It wasn’t my choice.” They’d apparently removed the tube sometime earlier, which explained why my throat felt like I’d been gargling with broken glass. “Can I have a drink of water?”
She came around the other side of the bed and fluffed my pillows. “Nothing by mouth until the doctor’s seen you. You had nearly half the harbor down your lungs.”
“Any of it get into my stomach?”
She wasn’t amused. “Nothing till the doctor’s seen you.”
“You’re no fun, sister.” I lay back on my pillows and tried to figure out why a cab driver, a stranger to me, would want to kill me by driving into the harbor. I’d developed a theory or two when Sergeant Picco arrived, looking like he hadn’t been to bed for ages. Since this was an official visit, I lost no time in telling him my version of events.
“Why would Rocky Power—the cab driver—want to kill you?” Picco sat on the edge of the hardbacked hospital chair, trying desperately to convey an image of self-assured command. “Did you do anything to him?”
“No. I never saw him before in my life.”
“Hm. So how come he wanted to kill you
?” His expression said he wondered why more people didn’t try to kill me.
“I don’t know, but he did.”
Picco scribbled something in his notebook. “Mm.”
“You sound like you don’t believe me. Goddammit, Picco, they fished me out of the harbor.” I still didn’t remember anything that happened after we hit the water. Everything after the accident, from then until I’d woken up in hospital, was a complete blank.
“I never said I didn’t believe you,” he said tiredly.
“Then put me in touch with this Power guy. I’ll get the truth, supposing I have to beat it out of him.”
“That’s hard to do. As far as we can tell, you somehow managed to free yourself from the car before it went to the bottom. Power wasn’t so lucky. He’s dead.”
“Huh.” That probably hadn’t been part of his plan. “How’d I get here?”
“You were found lying on the American army docks, soaking wet and suffering from exposure. An anonymous call came through our switchboard, saying a man had been fished out of the harbor. Sounds like someone was looking out for you, Stoyles.”
You have been through a terrible ordeal, Jack. No, it wasn’t possible. Sam was in Egypt. He’d been nowhere near the American docks when the cab went over. His supposed presence in my room the night before was probably nothing more than the aftereffects of my near-drowning. “Hey, Phonse, how is Chris doing?”
He brightened. “Good. He had a bit of a fever and they were afraid he mightn’t make it, but he’s all right now.”
“You stayed with him?”
He nodded shyly, his pale cheeks suddenly flushed with hot color. “I was there all night. He was sitting up having his breakfast when I left to come over here.”
That was good news. With any luck at all, Chris would make a full recovery. I was about to say something when the nurse came back. “Sergeant Picco, there is a telephone call for you, from a Mr. Scala, I think he said. Long distance.”
Scala? Andros Scala?
Picco stuck his notebook back into the breast pocket of his tunic and got up. “Thank you, nurse. Jack, I have to go.”
“Phonse, wait—do you think this taxi driver, this Rocky Power guy, could have been hired by someone?”
He seemed reluctant to answer. “It’s possible. Don’t go getting any ideas.”
“Right. Well, I’m not going to lie around here waiting for them to come and kill me.” I threw back the bedclothes and put my feet on the floor. The room swung around me, and I swayed. Picco caught me and sat me down on the bed. “Thanks.” My attempt had left me shaky, sweating, and nauseous. It almost felt like a repeat of the quinine poisoning episode a few months ago. “Just need to get my bearings and I’ll be fine.” God only knew what was in the harbor water: on a clear day you could smell it for miles. I’d probably ingested some horrible bacteria that would kill me. Well, that’d save Octavian the trouble.
“Get back in bed, Stoyles, you friggin’ fool.”
I held on to his arm for a moment longer. “I’ll be fine. Just got up too quick is all.”
“Look, if there’s somebody after you, the safest place you can be is here in the hospital.” Picco helped me lie down and pulled the blankets over me. “I’ll even send a constable to stand watch on the door, just in case.” He patted my shoulder. “Stay here. Now, you mind me. I’ll come back later on and see how you are.”
Picco meant well, but his suggestion that I stay where I was didn’t make any sense to me. Maybe Octavian was dead and maybe he wasn’t, but this whole situation was cockeyed from beginning to end and lying flat on my back in a hospital bed wasn’t doing me any good. I dug my clothes out of the closet and got dressed. It seemed to take twice as long as usual, and I was exhausted by the time I’d finished tying my shoes.
I’d just slipped into my coat when the nurse came back. “Mr. Stoyles! Get back into bed right this instant.”
“No, thanks. I’m getting out of here.” I slipped past her and out into the hallway. A door at the end of the corridor had a big, red Exit sign over it, and this drew me like a magnet draws iron filings.
“Mr. Stoyles! You can’t leave this hospital!” The nurse followed me, but I wasn’t interested. I had no idea how long I’d been here, but I’d already wasted too much time. She shouted at me that she was going for the doctor, and I shouted back that was fine, and hurried down the stairs. A door at the bottom let out onto LeMarchant Road, and from there it was easy to find my way back to the Heartache. Twenty minutes later, I was hauling myself in the front door.
Tex, a towel slung over his shoulder, came running to greet me. “Jack, what the hell are you doing out of bed? That cop was here—what’s his name with the gray eyes—and he said you were fished out of the harbor.” He guided me to a chair. “We didn’t know where you were. Anita came in here crying, saying something about how you were drowned and all that. Shoot. You scared the life out of me.”
“I’m okay. Just a bit shaky, you know, kind of tired.” I felt like I’d been dragged backward through the wringer of an industrial washing machine.
“Yeah, you look it. Hell, why don’t you go on up to bed? Me and Anita can handle the lunch crowd. It’s been nonstop in here ever since your accident. I guess some people got a taste for that sort of thing, huh?”
“Yeah.” My head was spinning, and I rested it in my hands for a moment. “How long was I gone?” My sense of time was horribly distorted: it could have been a day, or I might have been gone for a week.
“Day before yesterday.” Tex regarded me with concern. “You’re lucky to be alive. From what I’ve heard, most people who go into that harbor don’t come out again. Oh, hey—” He fished in his pocket. “I almost forgot. This came yesterday, special delivery. Normally, I wouldn’t open your mail, but I was afraid it might be something important. There was only this card.” He handed it to me. It was an ordinary-looking calling card, with nothing except a name printed on pale cream card stock: JONAH OCTAVIAN.
“Tex, where’s the envelope this came in?” Seeing that name made me sick to my stomach.
“It’s around here somewhere.” He went to my office at the rear of the cafe and returned bearing a pale blue envelope. The postmark indicated it had been sent from St. John’s, but there was no return address and no way of knowing who had sent it or why.
“Hm. Yeah, that’s about what I figured.” I crumpled the envelope in my fist. “Goddammit.” I got up.
“Jack, where are you going?” Tex came around the table and started buttoning up my coat; it was a cute and curiously tender gesture, and it made me smile like an idiot. “It’s freezing out there, and besides, you just got out of the hospital.”
“I need some information on this Rocky Power guy.”
“The cab driver.”
“Yeah.” I squeezed his shoulder to show him there were no hard feelings between us. “You okay to handle the lunch crowd?”
“You know it.”
THE CITY directory showed a Rocky Power at 74 Signal Hill Road. This was a modest wooden house attached on one side to a row of similar houses and with an open field on the other side. I knocked on the door and waited, but nobody answered, so I knocked again, a little harder this time. After half an eternity, a middle-aged woman came to the door with her hair in curlers. “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t mean to bother you. You’re obviously getting ready to go out.”
She stared at me. “Wha’?”
“Your… curlers, there.” I pointed. “I said you’re obviously getting ready to go out.”
“No, my son, that I’m not.” She stood back and held the door open. “I might go to Bingo tonight with my sister, Margo, but then again I might not. Are ye coming in or what? I’m not heating up St. John’s.”
I stepped into the entryway, which was absolutely filthy, even to the handmade rag rugs on the floor. The walls were made of sagging ten-test, painted an improbable pink, surmounted with numerous holy pictures and religious relics. A cross-eyed Jesus,
squeezing the Sacred Heart in his clasped hands, ogled me from the opposite wall. The house smelled like boiled cabbage and dirty socks. “I’m looking for a cab driver named Rocky Power. Are you Mrs. Power?”
“No, I’m not Mrs. Power. I’m Mrs. Cahill. He used to board here.” She peered up at me through a pair of filthy cat’s eye glasses. “How come you’re asking about him? He’s dead, sure.”
I still felt pretty crummy, and I didn’t intend to get into it with her. “Is there anybody here who knew him?”
“His brother came in from Gambo yesterday for the funeral. The poor bugger’s getting buried this afternoon. You want to talk to him?”
“Sure.” The brother might be a waste of time, but since I’d come all this way, I might as well see something for my efforts. I followed Mrs. Cahill into the next room, stepping over empty milk bottles and discarded foodstuffs in varying states of decay. A pair of angry yellow eyes watched me from under a chair, and a set of needle-sharp claws slashed at my ankles as I went by.
Mrs. Cahill stopped at the foot of the stairs and bellowed for Rocky Power’s brother. “Here he comes.” A shadowy figure appeared in the semidarkness at the top of the stairs. “You can talk to ’en in here if you wants to.”
Rocky Power’s brother looked nothing like Rocky Power. First of all, he was a good deal younger and a lot better-looking, but there was something hard about him, something sinister. I’d gotten a similar feeling once before, in Philadelphia, when Frankie Missalo and I had done some construction work for a friend of Frankie’s father, a big, burly man with a cigar stuck in his face and expensive rings for every finger. He’d been nice enough, but something told me not to turn my back on him. I found out later he was the number one button man for the Sbarro crime family, and he was personally responsible for at least a hundred deaths.
He came downstairs slowly, walking on his heels and letting his body’s weight sink noiselessly down under its own impetus. He was very well-dressed, in dark trousers and a silk shirt open at the neck. His face was narrow and watchful, and his heavy-lidded eyes were obsidian dark, with thick, almost feminine lashes. The nose was thin and sharp, like the beak of some predatory bird; the lips, in contrast, were full and fleshy, a little oversensual for my taste. He could have been the man in the photograph, the one I’d seen in Picco’s folder. He stopped in front of me and looked me up and down. “Good day. I am Nicholas Power. How can I help you, Mr.…?” The accent belonged to Newfoundland about as much as I did.