Red Shirt

by A. J. Stewart

  He looked like a mobster. I tried hard to think of it in some other way, but nothing else came. It felt like laziness on my part, given that I obviously knew of his connections to people in the city who were variously referred to as New York families or Bronx crime syndicates. Sal was part of an organization that never mentioned the words mafia, racketeering or payola but was familiar with all three. But in his short sleeves and mopping his sweating, hairless brow, he never looked the part. He really did look like a guy who just owned a West Palm pawn shop on the wrong side of the Florida Turnpike.

  Not today. He straightened his crooked back as far as it would go and stood. He was in a black greatcoat with a gray scarf wrapped around his neck like a noose. He wore a black hat over his bald pate and leather gloves on his stubby fingers. He looked like a Don, like a made man, which I suspected he was. He looked, in short, like a mafia guy.

  The driver slammed the door closed and Sal nodded to him and then stepped toward me.

  “Look at you,” I said.

  “People choose to live here, can you believe that?”

  “Some people like four seasons.”

  “Aach. Some people ain’t screwed together right.”

  “What are you doing here, Sal?”

  “You want the short story or the long story?”

  “The short.”

  “You need help.”

  “That’s par for the course. What’s the long story?”

  “I ain’t telling you the long story standing out here freezing my canastas off.”

  I led Sally inside. Kerry was standing at the window having watched Sal get out of the car, and Coach stood up. Mrs. D and the kids came out from the dining room, and together they all looked at me as if I had just brought Tarzan home. Lots of people in the Northeast wear big coats and gloves, and lots of them are old and Italian, but not so many look like Tony Soprano’s grandad.

  “This is Sal Mondavi,” I said, not improving the impression at all. “He’s a friend from Florida.”

  “From Florida?” asked Kerry.

  “Aha.”

  “Good to see someone from Florida having the sense to dress appropriately,” said Mrs. Dunbar. “Welcome, Mr. Mondavi.”

  I made introductions and Mrs. D asked Sal if he would like coffee.

  “Decaf, if you have it, otherwise I’ll be up all night.”

  “That’s all we have,” she said with a knowing smile, and she left for the kitchen.

  “So what brings you to New Haven, Mr. Mondavi?” asked Coach.

  “I’m up for Thanksgiving,” said Sal. “I have family in New York. I happened to be passing.”

  Coach nodded like that all made sense but any further inquiry would only serve to keep him from his game, so I suggested we retire to the kitchen. Coach returned to his recliner and Sal, Kerry and I sat at the kitchen table. Mrs. D made coffee and we made small talk while Sal did the hospitable thing and drank it. Kerry watched me the entire time.

  I wanted to know why the hell Sal had flown all the way from Florida, but I didn’t want to bring it up in front of the Dunbars, so eventually I suggested we take a walk out the back. Both Kerry and Mrs. D worked hard to not suggest they should come, and we stepped outside.

  “Damn it’s cold,” said Sal.

  “You’ve gotten soft.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  I shrugged and led Sal up the stairs to the room over the garage. He took the chair by the desk and I sat on the bed.

  “Nice people,” he said, unwrapping his scarf.

  “They are.”

  “You owe this guy, right?”

  “I do.”

  “A lot?”

  “Everything. Why, what’s your point?”

  “This guy with the money? Pickering?”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s in with some bad people.”

  “The Russians?”

  “Yeah, except they’re not Russians. They’re Kazakhs.”

  “Kazakhs? What are Kazakhs?”

  “It’s a country, genius. Kazakhstan. It’s a former Soviet territory.”

  “How is that different from Russia?”

  “How is New Orleans different from New Haven?”

  “Point taken. So they’re Kazakhs. What does that mean for us?”

  “My people know this guy, Nurlan. He has a bit of a reputation.”

  “Why do I think it’s not as a stamp collector.”

  “It’s an historical thing, right? So all these countries are individual nations until the Soviet bloc is formed, after the war. And all these decades we are told they are like one big country, the Soviet Union, like Soviets are a race or something.”

  “Okay.”

  “But they’re not, are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did they teach you at Miami?”

  “Football and baseball.”

  Sal rolled his eyes. “No, they’re not. Russia is the biggest part, so it’s their culture that becomes pervasive, but all these other places have their own languages and cultures and religions that they basically have to hide away. That is until the whole thing falls apart.”

  “Right, Gorbachev.”

  “Oh, you did go to school. So in the late ’80s all these republics start splintering off, starting in the Baltics and spreading east.”

  “Were you a history teacher before?”

  “You’re an idiot. Listen to what I’m saying. By ’91, the whole thing is fractured. Gorbachev is trying to restructure like a failing company but it isn’t working. So he finally dissolves the whole thing and resigns.”

  “How does this get us to New Haven?”

  “Over the next decade, Russia becomes this half-communist half-capitalist state. It’s the rise of the Russian mafia and the oil oligarchs. Lots of people, mostly former members of the KGB and the like, become wildly rich. And where do rich people want to be, more than anywhere?”

  I shook my head.

  “I weep for the future,” Sal said. “New York City, kid, New York City. So the Russian mob starts popping up all over town, and that causes a lot of problems for those already there.”

  “Like your people.”

  “My people? I don’t know who you’re talking about. But these Russians, they can’t just come in and get a slice of the game. They have to take it. They have to be more ruthless than the other guys. And they are.”

  “I still don’t get the point.”

  “I’m getting there. So all these former Soviet republics are also opening up, Kazakhstan included. Did you know that Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the union before it dissolved?”

  “I did not.”

  “That tells us something.”

  “What does it tell us?”

  “They’re pragmatic. Did you also know that it is the largest country in Central Asia, and has massive oil reserves of its own?”

  “I may have read that in the Wall Street Journal.”

  “You’re a comedian. They are also very culturally different from Russia, or at least from Moscow. Russia’s a big, diverse place. But Kazakhstan stands apart. The ethnic Kazakhs trace their history back to Turkic nomads and Mongol tribes. You know the Mongols?”

  “Not personally, but I may have seen a diorama about them at the natural history museum. Pretty ruthless bunch.”

  “Right. So here we have these guys, they are pragmatic but newly wealthy, and then we add into the mix that they are a predominantly Muslim country.”

  “They are?”

  “They are, and the Russian and Soviets tried to suppress Islam, at first passively and then more actively.”

  “So?”

  “So these guys believe that pure Kazakhs stand apart. Now we know that these guys hate the Russians for their cultural and religious oppression. They hate everything about them. So during the whole breakdown of the Soviet Union, some of them fled the religious persecution and found new homes in a place where freedom of religion is a bit more of
a thing.”

  “And that would be here,” I said.

  “More specifically than you know. See, the Italians run large sections of New York, from the Bronx and up the Hudson, and over into Long Island. The Russians took some action but ended up with a lot of Brooklyn and Staten Island.”

  “I had no idea organized crime was all so neatly divided. Is there a map?”

  “It’s not neat, knucklehead, it’s an overview. You’ve then got the Irish in Massachusetts, they’ve had a stranglehold up their forever. So these Kazakhs, they see the lay of the land, and they’re vicious but they’re pragmatic. They’re also few on the ground. The word is that they only bring in their own people—Kazakhs with a lineage back to the nomads—not just anyone with a Kazakhstan passport. So they don’t really want a war. They see a big herd to the south and big herd to the north, and what do they do?”

  “Take what’s in between.”

  “There you go. They pick off the weak and the lame on the outskirts of the herd, and they carve themselves out a little territory in Connecticut. They home in on Fairfield County. It’s close to New York but not too close, and it flies under the radar a little. And like any good organization, they change to suit the environment. Sure, they’re into the usual stuff, protection and so on, and they dominate the sanitation and road works contracts, but there’s something else here.”

  “Which is?”

  “The movement of money. Investments, hedge funds, all that.”

  “I’m feeling a connection now,” I said.

  “Never let it be said you were slow on the uptake, kid.”

  “So what happened?”

  “That I don’t know. But I can speculate.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Any organization that operates, shall we say, slightly off the beaten path of legality, will at some stage get into legitimate business as well. It provides cover, and it also provides a means to move some perhaps ill-gotten gains from a not-so-legit enterprise into a legal and upstanding business.”

  “You could just say laundering.”

  “You can call it what you want,” said Sal with a frown that was barely discernible from his regular face. “So I suspect that is what our Kazakh friends were doing. Moving dirty money into a clean, or should I say cleaner, enterprise.”

  “Cleaner? You don’t think what Brett was doing is legal?”

  “Legal, probably. Clean, hmm. That’s a different thing altogether.”

  “So what do we do? With these Kazakhs?”

  “My people say there’s only one thing to do. Pay them back.”

  “I don’t know if Brett has the money.”

  “Then we have to find it, by hook or by crook. Can you get a look at this guy’s books?”

  “I’m going to his office first thing tomorrow. What should I be looking for?”

  “Don’t worry yourself about it. I’ll come with you.”

  I nodded at that. In our business, it was Ron who looked at the books, and took the lead on any cases that involved such things. It was all Chinese arithmetic to me. So I was glad Sal was here to help. I just didn’t understand why.

  “Sal, I appreciate the help, I really do, but why are you here?”

  “Two birds, one stone, kid. The family is always bleating on about me coming back for Thanksgiving, and every few years I give in, just to keep them quiet. So since you were here, I thought I’d come back.”

  “So you should spend time with your family.”

  “The thing about family is, there’s a three-day rule. Any longer than three days and tempers start to fray, you know? And it’s only Sunday, so I figure I stick with you for a couple days, then I don’t violate the rule.”

  I had no wisdom to add to that, so I asked him if he’d like to stay for dinner.

  “I got some people to catch up with in the Bronx, but thanks, kid.”

  I walked Sally out to the driveway where the town car was waiting.

  “You hire this guy?” I asked.

  “No, he’s my sister’s husband’s brother’s boy. He’s doin’ it to pay his way through college.”

  “He has to pay his way through college?”

  “Not to the point of a mortgage-sized debt, but everyone should have some skin in the game, kid. It keeps it real.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “He could have come inside,” I said.

  “Aach, you know these kids. He’d rather sit in the car and watch YouTube videos or goodness knows what.”

  As we reached the car, the driver saw us and stepped out and opened the door. Sal said he’d be by in the morning to pick me up, and then he dropped into the seat and the kid closed the door. He offered me a nod and then jumped back into the driver’s seat and pulled out and drove away.

  I turned back to the house. Kerry was standing at the window, watching. I wandered up to the porch and she opened the door before I could.

  “Do I want to know?” she asked.

  “You do,” I said. “But just not yet.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Sal’s town car was in the driveway bright and early, unlike the sun, which was neither. The sky had gotten heavy and bloated and a hard rain looked imminent. I wandered out in all the warm clothing I could borrow, and I ended up looking like one of those mature-age college students who never seems to move on and get a real job.

  The kid went via a drive-through coffee shack and we loaded up on caffeine and pastries, and then we trekked back down into Greenwich. The parking lot at Brett’s office building was almost empty, and the cars that were there suggested it was the admin staff and not the so-called movers and shakers that were the early birds.

  All except one vehicle. It was different for two reasons. One, it looked like Sally’s car, black but with Connecticut livery plates instead of New York. The second point of difference was that there were two men standing beside it. They were standing there as if they were smokers and weren’t allowed to smoke in the town car. Two tall, thin guys with matching mustaches, just standing in the cold in heavy black coats, smoking cigarettes, watching an empty parking lot.

  The kid pulled into a slot near the entrance to the building but he stayed in the car. Sal and I walked up to the door and I used the intercom to call the same woman I had spoken to the previous Friday. I didn’t think that she remembered me. That may have been because I told her we were from the IRS and failure to admit us was a federal crime. Once inside, we took the elevator in consideration of Sal’s ancient knees, and found the same door with the same name plate and the same intercom I had used before. I buzzed again, and I saw a face appear at the thin window by the door. I stayed at the intercom by the wall and let Sally get inspected by the woman inside, who must have been either thoroughly confused or scared out of her wits, or both. Sal wore his godfather uniform—the coat and the gloves and the hat—and he carried a black medical bag that made him look like an old-time doctor or a contract killer, depending on your frame of reference.

  The woman buzzed the door and Sally pushed it open and I followed. The woman was in a plain blue suit—jacket and skirt—with a white blouse done up to the neck. She was middle-aged and looked like she had seen a thing or two, but none of the things she had seen included what she was seeing now. She looked over Sal, who took off his hat and unbuttoned his coat, and then she looked at me. I looked like I might have just wandered in off the sidelines of a football game, with my chinos and warm up jacket and school sweater.

  “You’re the IRS?” asked the woman with a good hint of disbelief in her voice. She was quick, I had to give her that. I smiled.

  “Where is Mr. Pickering’s office?” asked Sal.

  “Um, don’t you need a warrant or something?”

  “A warrant?” I replied. “Why would we need a warrant?”

  “You’re the IRS. You can’t just barge in anywhere you want. This isn’t communist China.”

  “IRS?” I said. “No, we’re not the IRS.”

  “Yo
u said you were the IRS. You said if I didn’t let you in it was a federal crime. Well, I’ll tell you, impersonating a federal officer is certainly a crime.”

  “IRS? No, I said we’re Irish.”

  “You’re Irish.”

  “Yes, certainly part of me, somewhere along the line. And I didn’t say federal crime, I said waste of time. As in we have arranged with Mr. Pickering to inspect his books and there can be no delay.”

  “He told me nothing about this.”

  “Oh, it was arranged on Saturday, so maybe he didn’t get a chance. So if you’ll show us to his office . . .”

  “I’ll do no such thing. You’ll wait right here while I call Mr. Pickering to confirm this.”

  We didn’t wait right there. Sally wandered into the offices to the protests of the woman, whose name I had yet to get. There was an open plan space with gray cubicles, a few of which had people in them, staring at computer screens. Sally didn’t stop. He banked around the cubicle area toward a large boardroom that had a glass wall on the interior, and on the exterior, floor to ceiling windows that looked over Greenwich Harbor. The water looked dark and unwelcoming.

  Sally ambled past the boardroom toward the corner of the building. The head cheese was always in the corner of the building. Brett Pickering would be no exception. Impressions were everything. The large corner office that looked across the harbor and out toward Long Island Sound. Sally tried the door. It was locked.

  “You can’t get in, it’s locked,” said the woman, defiantly. She lifted her chin to Sally as if to say she had won, so he could leave now. He didn’t leave.

  “You can open the door for me,” he said quietly, “or I can go and get a fire extinguisher and throw it through the window.”

  I saw her eyes dart around the room looking for said fire extinguisher, and then come back to rest on Sally. But she didn’t open the door. She snatched a phone from the nearest desk.