I thought about that for a while. “Surveillance still going?” I asked.
“Until you say otherwise,” Neary said.
“A couple of days more, then.” I looked at Sikes. “You think that friend of yours will give Czerka a heads-up?”
A chilly grin spread across Sikes’s face. “He’s not that stupid.” He and DiLillo got up and left. Neary sat back in his chair.
“Somebody’s spending a lot of money on this,” he said.
“You mean besides me?”
“Besides you. And that means somebody with deep pockets and motivation. It also means that Marty will suck at this tit for as long as he can.”
“If buying him doesn’t work, there’s always charm or deceit— or both.”
“Charm’s no good on Marty; he’s got no receptors for it. And I wouldn’t put too much faith in trickery either. He’s no rocket scientist, but Marty has a sewer-rat kind of shrewdness.”
“How about a nice beating, then?”
“You’re not paying nearly enough for that. No, I think we take a walk up to Marty’s office and have a talk. He’ll either negotiate or he’ll tell us to fuck off. And if he does, we can still make a run at the hired help.”
We were quiet for a while and Neary gave me a speculative look.
“I figured you’d be a little more excited about this,” he said.
“I’m smiling on the inside. I got Danes’s phone records last night— his home and his cell.”
“Were they worth the wait?”
I nodded. “They cover a thirty-day period starting about five weeks ago, just a few days before he last called in for his messages.”
Neary nodded. “And?”
“The home number was no surprise; no calls made from there during that time. The activity was on his cell. There were a couple of calls to Reggie Selden, the lawyer representing him on the custody thing, and calls to his own home, to get messages. There was a call to Nina Sachs’s number—”
Neary cut me off. “I thought she hadn’t heard from Danes.”
“So did I, but according to Billy his father left a couple of messages for him on the answering machine. He didn’t mention them to his mother.” Neary nodded, and I continued. “Then there’s that final call to his home number— which corresponds to the date and time on his caller ID— and that’s it. There are no other calls.”
Neary’s brows came together. “That was the last one?”
I nodded. “Not only did he stop calling in for his messages, he stopped making calls altogether.”
Neary sat back in his chair. He tapped a finger lightly on the edge of his desk. “He could have another phone,” he said.
“I guess so, but I haven’t turned up another number in his name.”
“It could be one of those prepaid throwaway things.”
“It could be.”
“You talk to Sachs about this?”
“She’s made it pretty clear she’s not interested.”
Neary shook his head and drew a big hand slowly down his jaw.
We walked north on Broadway. A skim coat of pearly cloud had spread itself across the sky, and glare and heat and intimations of summer had begun to build beneath its shell. Bus fumes and car exhaust and the smell of ripening trash stayed close to the pavement, and I was sweating a little when we turned east on Canal. Both of us were thinking about Danes’s phone bill and what it might mean, but neither of us put it into words.
Czerka’s office was in a soot-gray building near Centre Street, and convenient to the House of Detention. The lobby walls were green and the linoleum floor was sticky underfoot. The lone desk guard barely glanced at our IDs when we signed in. We took a dim elevator up.
The ninth-floor corridor was fluorescent-lit and painted a nasty blue. It was empty and quiet and smelled powerfully of disinfectant. The doors to the office suites were metal-clad and bristled with locks. Czerka’s office was to the left, tucked between a bail bondsman and a bathroom. The plastic sign on the door read CZERKA SECURITY BUREAU. There was an intercom box mounted on the wall, and Neary leaned on the buzzer.
Nothing happened for a while and then a storm of static erupted from the speaker and abruptly stopped. Neary hit the buzzer again and was rewarded by another burst of noise and then nothing.
“If you’re talking, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he shouted into the box. A feeble buzzing came from the vicinity of the doorknob. Neary pushed and we went in.
It was a cramped, windowless room with fluorescent lights and a smell of cigarettes, old food, and flatulence. The walls were lined with battered metal file cabinets and most of the floor space was taken by two metal desks, facing each other across a narrow aisle in the center of the room. There was a computer on the left-hand desk, with a huge monitor, a modem, and a rat’s nest of cabling that snaked away behind the cabinets. The right-hand desk was covered in food wrappers and magazines— Burger King, KFC, and Krispy Kreme, Soldier of Fortune and Maxim. A sound mind in a sound body. There was no one in the room, but there was a doorway straight ahead, and a voice shouting out from it.
“Who the fuck is it?” It was a man’s voice, deep, wheezy, and wet and with a strong Long Island accent. I followed Neary in.
The inner office was larger than the outer one, and was graced by a dirt-fogged window, but it was no less crowded and smelled even worse. It too was lined with file cabinets, and all of them were topped by dusty heaps of newspapers and magazines. To the right was another big workstation, perched on a frail-looking card table, and in the corner was a half-sized refrigerator with a coffeemaker on top. In the center of the room was a scarred oak desk. Its surface was obscured by layers of file folders and newspapers and glossy catalogs, and by an immense glass ashtray that overflowed with cigarette butts and spent matches. In front of the desk were two plastic guest chairs, and wedged behind it was the man I took to be Marty Czerka.
He was spread out in his green leather chair like a toad on a lily pad. His big head was liver-spotted and mostly bald, and the fringe of hair at the sides was coarse and gray. His skin was mottled pink and white; it fell in deep folds around his eyes and meaty nose and flowed over his shirt collar. More gray hair bristled over his hooded blue eyes and above his thick upper lip.
His shirt had once been white, and from its size it might also once have been a spinnaker. Now it had French cuffs and gold cuff links shaped like little nightsticks. A stained yellow tie hung limply down its front, the knot obscured by Czerka’s double chin. His pale hands were veined and speckled, and his fingers looked like bad sausage. He stubbed out a cigarette, and ash dribbled over the sides of the ashtray. He looked at Neary and his thick brows came together.
“Neary, right— ex-Feeb, with Brill?” he said. Neary nodded.
Czerka shifted his big head and looked at me. There was a spark of recognition and surprise in his hooded eyes, but he doused it quickly and put on a game face of indifference and lethargy. It was deftly done. He looked back to Neary.
“Who’s he?” he asked.
Neary smiled and sat in one of the guest chairs. I sat in the other. Czerka didn’t seem to mind not getting an answer to his question. He found a cigarette in the wreckage of his desk and lit it with a wooden match. He sighed in some smoke and coughed wetly. He rolled the cough around in his throat and savored it, as if it were the best part of smoking.
“You’re not on my calendar today,” Czerka said.
“I thought I’d drop in,” Neary said, “just on the off chance.”
Czerka nodded. “Sure,” he said slowly. He looked at me again. “And you?” I smiled and said nothing.
“I thought maybe you could help me out, Marty,” Neary said.
Czerka took another drag and coughed a little more. “Help,” he said absently. He shifted in his seat, and a greasy popping sound issued from somewhere below his desk. A moment later, a noxious sulfurous smell filled the room. Charming. I looked at Neary, who kept on talking.
&n
bsp; “I have a friend who’s feeling a little bit crowded lately.”
“Crowded, huh? What, he needs a bigger apartment? Or a laxative maybe?” Czerka’s blue eyes glittered. He cleared his throat loudly and for a long time. “You the friend?” he asked me, when he finished. I was quiet. Neary ignored the question too.
“We’re in the market for a name, Marty,” he said. “We can buy it or swap for it or whatever, and nobody has to know where we got it from.”
Czerka played one of his fat fingers along the edge of his mustache and then slid it into his nose. “What name?” he said finally.
Neary was full of elaborate disappointment. “Come on, Marty. The name of whoever’s paying for the small army you’ve got on the street these days.”
Czerka treated himself to another drag and another ripe cough and was about to speak when the outer door opened and banged shut. There were heavy footsteps and a man stood at the office door.
He was young, no more than twenty-five, and medium height, but with the neck and shoulders of a serious gym rat. He wore shiny gray warm-up pants and a black T-shirt from someplace called the Platinum Playpen, and a heavy odor of sweat and leathery cologne preceded him. His dirty-blond hair was buzz-cut on his small head, and his eyes were pale and vague and set close below a bony brow. The left eye was blackened. There was a bandage across his pulpy nose, stitches at the corner of his undersized mouth, and bruising along his jaw. There were foam-and-metal splints on three fingers of his left hand. He held a couple of paper bags in his right, and he put them on Czerka’s desk.
“I got the smokes, Uncle Marty, and the sandwich and the lottery tickets,” he said. His voice was cracking and adolescent. He looked at us and wondered who we were, and it seemed like a lot of work for him. He fixed his gaze on me, and after a while a dim light came into his eyes. He didn’t try to hide it, or even realize that he should. There was irritation on Czerka’s face and in his voice.
“Yeah, great work, Stevie. Now go watch the front room— and close the door behind you.”
Stevie stared at us harder, in what I realized was supposed to be a tough look. “You got a problem here, Uncle Marty? Something I could help with?”
“Go!” Czerka barked. Stevie colored but did as he was told. Czerka stubbed out his smoke and looked at Neary and chuckled. It was moist and mocking.
“Since when are we such old pals that you waltz in here calling me Marty? And since when do I give a shit about you or your friends or their problems or whatever the hell you’re in the market for? You may not be a Feeb anymore, but you still got that Feeb attitude, that’s for damn sure.”
He took a loud breath and laughed some more.
“You got a lot of fucking nerve coming in here, thinking I got something to sell you. What, you think you’re the only stand-up guys in the world? You think the rest of us lowlifes are just looking for a chance to roll on a client?” Czerka got winded and his laughter dissolved into a racking cough.
Neary nodded at him. “I didn’t realize your sensibilities were so refined, Marty,” he said. “You have my deepest apologies. And now we can talk cash money, or I’ve got some business I could push your way, or we could do some of each. Or maybe you’re interested in something else. But if you are, you’ve got to tell me, because I can’t read minds.” Neary paused and smiled. “So, do you want to do yourself some good here or not?”
Czerka flicked at us dismissively and dug through the bags on his desk. He pulled a brick-sized package in white butcher’s paper from one, tore back the wrapping, and hoisted a sloppy pastrami on rye to his mouth. Grease bled down his hands and left his chin and mustache wet, and the smell of meat and fat rose to mingle with the other delicate aromas in the room. He put the sandwich down and pulled a cigarette from somewhere and lit it even as he chewed, open-mouthed, on the pastrami. Jesus.
“Forget it, Neary,” he said, and bits of food fell from his mouth to the desk. “Your pockets aren’t deep enough to make it worth the trouble.” He glanced at me and shook his head. “Even his aren’t deep enough. Now get the fuck out of here and let me eat my lunch.” He picked up his sandwich again.
Neary looked at me and shrugged. I took a deep breath and tried not to choke. I spoke quietly. “Mesmerizing as it is to sit here while you smoke and fart and smear yourself with lard, I’d be more than happy to go get myself steam-cleaned and leave you in peace, believe me. But I’ve got a client who’d really like to know what’s going on, and frankly so would I. I know you don’t give a shit about who wants what, but my client has some resources, and I do too, so maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss. Maybe you should get your brains out of your fat ass and reconsider.”
Czerka stared at me, his sandwich poised above his desk. He was quiet and his blue eyes were hard beneath their folded lids. Red patches spread over his cheeks, and his shoulders and fat arms began to shake, and then a gurgling sound came from his open mouth. Czerka put his sandwich down and shook and laughed for almost a minute, until his face grew dark and there was a hissing in his breath. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Son of a bitch!” Czerka laughed, “Fucking steam-cleaned, huh?” He looked at Neary. “See— your pal thinks I’m dog shit, just like you do, but he comes out and says it. He can barely stand to breathe the same air as me, but he puts it right out there. I got to say, I kind of like that. But sweet talk won’t get you into my pants, March.” He looked at me as he said my name, but I managed to keep my composure. Czerka laughed a little more and took hold of his sandwich again. After a while he glanced up.
“Door’s right there, boys,” he said.
We walked out of Czerka’s office, past Stevie and his bandages. He tried to give us another hard stare as we went by, but it came off looking like constipation.
On the elevator, Neary sighed loudly. “Not just another pretty face, is he?” he said.
“But a great personality. My guess is he won’t have a lot of second thoughts.”
“He won’t have any. We’ll pull together a list of the people my crew has ID’d and see if anybody in my shop knows any of them. If they do, that might give us a place to start.”
It was warmer outside, but compared to Czerka’s office the air seemed fresh and clean. We walked back to Broadway in silence and stopped outside the subway station.
“What do you think happened to Stevie?” I asked.
“Tripped over a barbell maybe?”
“Maybe it outsmarted him.”
I was still trying to clear my lungs when I pushed open the glass and wrought-iron door of my building and stepped into the entry vestibule. And then I stopped. There was a large manila envelope taped to my mailbox. It was blank except for my name, which was printed in capitals, in black marker. I peeled it off the mailbox door. It was light. I opened the flap. There were just a few sheets of paper inside. I slid them out and felt a rush of heat in my face and a surge of blood through my temples.
They were photographs, in color, printed on plain paper. Their quality was mediocre at best, but the subjects and their surroundings were clear enough and so were the little date-and-time stamps in the corners.
“Jesus.” My legs felt shaky and my heart was pounding, as if I’d just run a long way. I leaned against the wall for a moment. “Jesus.” I pulled out my cell phone.
My fingers felt clumsy as I punched her number. Jane’s phone seemed to ring forever, and I looked down at the photos while I listened. Her assistant finally answered.
“Jane Lu’s office.”
“Is she there?” My throat was tight and it was hard to get the words out.
“Hi, John. I’m afraid she’s not available right now.”
I ground my teeth. “Is she in, though— actually in the office now?”
“Oh, yes. She’s in the conference room, in a meeting.”
“You’re sure of that? You’ve seen her?”
“I just saw her go in.” She sounded puzzled. “Is something wrong, John?”<
br />
Something loosened in my chest. “No, nothing. Just have her call me when she gets out. First thing, okay? Tell her it’s important.” I hung up and punched another number. Janine answered.
“Johnny— you must’ve read my mind. I was just about to give you a call.”
“Are the boys at home, Janine?”
“They just this minute walked through the door,” she said.
I let out a deep breath.
“They’re still washing up, so they haven’t opened them yet.”
My throat tightened up. “Opened what?” I said.
Janine laughed. “The presents you sent. They came about an hour ago. But what’s in them, Johnny? And what’s the occasion?”
23
“Tell me what the hell this is if not a warning shot,” I said to Tom Neary. I tossed the envelope in his lap and got into the back of the Volvo sedan. It was double-parked in front of Jane’s office on West 22nd Street, and Sikes and Pritchard were sitting up front. “And tell me who it’s from, if not that bloated bastard.”
Neary took out the photos. There were three of Jane— leaving our apartment building, entering her office building, getting into a cab someplace in midtown— and three of my nephews, Derek and Alec— outside of their apartment building, in the park, and leaving their school. Neary studied them carefully and I looked along with him, until another wave of anger came over me and I turned away and stared out the window. But it did no good. The scene uptown kept playing in my head.
Janine had met me in the lobby of her building. Her face was pale and she was rigid with worry and embarrassment. Her voice was a stiff whisper.
“What is going on, John?”
“Where are the boys?” I asked. The doorman and the concierge were casting sidelong looks at us, and Janine took my arm and led me to the sidewalk.
“They’re around the corner, at the Miltons’. What is this about?”
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