Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence

by Aleas, Richard

  The heavy-featured man I’d seen on his way in turned out to be the bartender. He was hanging his windbreaker on a hook by the cash register when I took an open stool and signaled with a finger to get his attention. I passed my last two twenties across the bar.

  His accent wasn’t Bela Lugosi thick, but it was close. “What you want?” he said. Vot you vont?

  “An introduction,” I said. “I want to find a man named Ardo.”

  His fingers closed slowly around the money. “There’s many men named Ardo,” he said. “It’s a common name.”

  “Only one Ardo someone would pay for an introduction to,” I said.

  “You sure about that?”

  “Pretty sure,” I said.

  “What’s his last name?”

  I’d assumed Ardo was his last name. “I don’t know. Some people call him Black Ardo.”

  “Ardo Fekete,” he said. He pushed the bills back across the counter to me. “You don’t need no introduction to him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Young man, I think you should drink a beer and go,” he said. “What you like, Beck’s, Heineken, Miller? Or we got Dreher, you want something Hungarian.” He was trying to sound casual, but his tension was obvious and the accent made his voice ominous: You vont sumting Hongeiryen. I noticed his eyes slide briefly to the left, then back. There was no one sitting next to me. But there were people behind me. I didn’t turn to look.

  “This man, Ardo,” I said, “he hurt a friend of mine badly. Another friend of mine is dead. Today a man with a gun chased me through a tunnel and I got this for my troubles.” I lifted the tail of my shirt, let him see the bandages. “I need to talk to him.”

  “What you need”—vot you nihd—“is to go home and lock your door and be glad you don’t got worse than that.”

  “That’s what I keep hearing,” I said. “But I can’t spend my life behind a locked door.”

  “You want to have a life to spend,” the bartender said, “you’ll walk out right now.” He put his hand on my forearm to emphasize the point. It was heavy, like a block of wood. I lifted it off, took my money back.

  “I’m pretty sure someone here can help me. If you won’t.”

  “Mister,” he said quietly, “this is not a game. You gonna get yourself killed.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not walking away. I don’t let people get away with murder.”

  “You don’t let...?” he said. “Do you hear yourself? People get away with murder every day.”

  “Not of my friends,” I said.

  He leaned close, so that I could hear but no one else. “You’re young. You’re American. You don’t know. During the war...you know which war I mean?”

  A Hungarian man in his seventies? I knew which war he meant.

  “I was on Széchenyi Utca, the street where my family had a house,” he said. “This was 1944. I saw them take my sister, the Arrow Cross, they took her to the Danube, put a gun to her head, and they shot her, just like that.” He made a gun of his forefinger and thumb, touched his fingertip to my temple, pushed gently. “You say you don’t let. It’s not up to you to let or not let. There are things you can’t stop, and you can’t punish either. You understand? The Arrow Cross soldiers, I wanted to kill them—I wanted to kill them. But I knew better than to try.”

  “You were a child,” I said. “You must’ve been—”

  “That’s right. I was twelve years old, with a six-years-old brother to take care of, and if I’d done anything, we’d both be dead too. Floating in the Danube with our sister. So I walked away. I took my brother’s arm and we walked away.”

  “That’s awful,” I said.

  “What they did to our sister? Or that I walked away?”

  “You were twelve.”

  “And you’re what, twenty-four? Twenty-five? A bullet kills you just the same. Listen to what I am telling you. You’re a young man, you got a life ahead of you. Walk away.”

  There was a part of me that wanted to. It was the part of me that had walked away three years ago while Murco Khachadurian and his brutal son were climbing upstairs to Miranda’s apartment. I’d known what they were going to do. I’d made it possible for them to do it. In that instant I’d even thought I wanted them to do it. But I’d been dreaming about it ever since, reliving it every night. You can’t walk away from some things.

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to tell me,” I said. “Really. I do.”

  “But you won’t do it.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”

  I pushed back the stool I was on, walked to the center of the room. There was a table with one empty chair. I pulled it out, stood on the seat. I took Jorge Ramos’ wallet from my pocket. Held it up over my head. Conversations petered out one by one.

  “I have something here for Ardo Fekete,” I said. “For Black Ardo. It belongs to a man he sent to kill me. Which of you can tell me where to find him?”

  There was silence in the room. I’d never heard such silence. The dripping of the beer taps, the creak of a chair leg. Breathing. Shallow, shallow breathing.

  “Which of you,” I repeated, “can tell me where to find him?”

  I turned, took in the room. Looked every man in the face. At the far end was one of the men sitting alone. He still had half a glass of beer and as I watched he drank it down. He set the glass down on his table with a crack that sounded like a gunshot.

  He raised his hand. He had the longest fingers I’d ever seen.

  Chapter 11

  Miklos rose from his seat, came forward. Even standing on the chair, I was only half a foot taller than him. He held his hand out, that enormous mitt like a basketball player’s, and I dropped the wallet on his palm. He didn’t look at it. His eyes were locked on mine.

  Suddenly I felt hands at my elbows, gripping tightly, lifting me into the air. More hands at my back, on my shoulders. They set me jarringly on the floor. Then a piece of heavy fabric came down over my face. A bag, maybe burlap. It stank of spilled whiskey and wet rope. Someone cinched it at my throat, the drawstring digging into my skin. I felt a hand on my chest, pressing, turning me around, then around again. My head spun. I tried to say something but I couldn’t make myself heard. The bag was muffling my voice, blurring it.

  I shouted, “I’m a private investigator. The police know where I am—” But even to me, the words were unintelligible, echoing inside the bag. My face was sweating and I was finding it hard to breathe. I felt myself steered across the floor, then down a pair of steps. For an instant, it was cooler—I felt a breeze.

  I had no sense of direction, hardly even a sense of time. How far did we walk? Led through the dark, my nose filled with the stink of damp burlap, my heart pounding against my sore ribcage, I couldn’t say. We walked. That’s all I knew.

  After a time, I was led by the wrist across a short distance—were we still outside?—and then along an echoing corridor and down a flight of stairs, stumbling twice. Only the grip on my arm kept me from falling.

  I was shoved into a chair, a wooden ladderback from the feel of it. Someone tied my feet to the legs and my arms behind the back. Blackness turned to a diffuse honey color when they turned a light on.

  “So,” a voice said. The bag distorted it, but I could hear an accent. More mild than the bartender’s but similar. “So. You wanted to meet Ardo.”

  Someone stepped in front of me, blocking the light. I felt metal against my neck. The side of a knife blade, then the point. Not breaking the skin, just tracing a gentle line. I fought to stay calm, to slow my racing pulse, tried to fight the pressure building in my bladder.

  I’d faced worse. That’s what I kept telling myself: I’ve faced worse. Murco Khachadurian was worse. The son. He tortured people by pulling their teeth with a pair of pliers. I hadn’t pissed myself when I’d faced him.

  But he hadn’t had me tied to a chair, hand and foot, with a bag over my head and a knife at my throat.

  I found myself gagg
ing from the stink of the bag. “Please take the bag off,” I said.

  There was no response.

  I spoke louder. “I’m going to throw up if you don’t take this bag off.”

  I heard a sentence in Hungarian and the knife went away from my throat. The string holding the bag closed was roughly loosened and the bag was whipped off my head. My glasses came with it, landing on the floor a few feet away. I blinked against the sudden light.

  In front of me was a chair and a man was sitting in it, but they were both blurs.

  “Give him back his glasses,” the man said.

  Someone retrieved my glasses from the floor and pressed them into place on the bridge of my nose.

  Now I could see it was Miklos standing in front of me. In one hand he was holding a long kitchen knife with a slight curve to the blade, the sort you see chefs on TV use to filet meat. He moved to one side and I got my first look at the man in the chair.

  He sat with one leg up on the seat, one arm draped over the knee. His shoulder-length hair looked filthy, a yellowish gray. He had a fat mustache that hung down over his upper lip, concealing it almost completely. His features were broad, heavy, a little like the bartender’s: wide eyes deeply sunken in their sockets, swollen cheeks, a spade for a jaw. His eyelids hung like curtains, but beneath them his stare was merciless. He might have been a gypsy king, a savage old wolf watching an enemy squirm before him.

  “So,” he said again. “I understand I tried to have you killed. Explain to me, then, why you aren’t dead?”

  It took me a moment to find my voice. “I got lucky,” I said.

  He stared at me and after a while his lips spread in a cavernous grin. “Yes. Just look at you. I’ve never seen anyone luckier.”

  I strained against the rope holding my hands together. It didn’t give at all.

  Ardo picked something up from the arm of his chair. He threw it at me. It bounced off my chest and landed in my lap. It was the wallet I’d given Miklos in the bar.

  “Now,” Ardo said. “Who the hell is Jorge Ramos?”

  I tried to keep my voice from shaking. “You tell me,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He stood, walked up to me, took my chin in his hand and turned my face slowly to one side, then the other. “No, Mr. Lucky. I don’t tell you. You answer my questions, or I let Miklos here cut your eyes out.” He bent forward. I could smell his heavy cologne. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Ardo paced around me. He put me in mind of a cat in a nature film, a lion or a cougar on a sun-drenched African plain, sluggish-seeming until the moment it attacks.

  “I never heard of Jorge Ramos. You, I’ve never seen in my life. But you come into my brother’s bar and announce that I paid this Jorge Ramos to kill you. You’re not a crazy, are you?”

  “No,” I said. Thinking: his brother’s bar. I remembered the bartender’s words—I was twelve years old, with a six-years-old brother to take care of.

  “No. You’re not a crazy,” Ardo said. “And it isn’t that you don’t know who I am. Andras says he warned you, though why he did I don’t know. You’re not his type.”

  Miklos said something in Hungarian and laughed rudely at the end. Ardo shot a glance his way and the laughter quickly died off.

  “My brother says you want to revenge some friend of yours who’s been killed,” Ardo said. “This friend, what’s his name?”

  “Her name,” I said. “Dorrie Burke.”

  He spat on the ground. “Dorrie Burke. Another I never heard of.”

  “You might have known her as Cassandra.”

  He shook his head.

  “She worked with a woman named Julie. Julie worked for you at Vivacia.”

  Now his eyes narrowed beneath their heavy lids. “Julie I do know. Julie we taught a lesson. She knows better now than to do what she did. She should’ve known better to begin with. You say your friend worked with her?”

  I looked over at Miklos. “Ask him. Dorrie was there when he taught Julie her lesson.”

  Ardo looked at him and Miklos said something I couldn’t understand.

  “Your friend is a black woman?” Ardo said.

  “No,” I said. “The other one.”

  Ardo leaned forward till he was just inches away from my face. “Well, I didn’t kill her. Either of them. The black one or the white one. Or the Korean. We don’t kill women.”

  “What about the waitress at Bishop’s club?” I said. “The one in the hospital.”

  “We don’t,” he said, taking hold of the bridge of my nose and squeezing hard, “kill women.” The pain was intense. When he let go, my head fell forward, my chin against my chest. There were spots in front of my eyes.

  “People who work for me sometimes make mistakes. They pay for them when they do.”

  “Well, one of them killed my friend.”

  “No,” he said flatly. “No. I would know it if they had.”

  “Well, someone did,” I said. “And people are saying it was you.”

  “Who’s saying?”

  There was real anger in his voice.

  “On the street,” I said, my heart pounding. “People told me this is Black Ardo’s work. He’ll kill anyone.” Ardo had stopped pacing. He stood in front of me, and I could see the springs winding tighter under his skin. “Men, women, children, he’s an indiscriminate murderer. Kills like—” Ardo’s hand shot out, wrapped around my throat. “—the Black Plague.” I could barely get the words out.

  He held me. I felt the calluses of his palm against my Adam’s apple. I was conscious of how little force it would take for him to crush it. His voice, when he spoke, was a guttural whisper. “You know why they call me Black Ardo? You want to know why, you little ant? It’s my name. Fekete. It means black. That’s why.” A long moment passed, then his hand slowly unclenched and I could breathe again. “Black Plague.” He spat again. “I kill people I need to kill. I hurt people I need to hurt. I am not indiscriminate.”

  He walked out of my line of sight. I heard him behind me, pounding up a flight of stairs. He called down to Miklos, who hesitated for a moment, reluctant to leave me with two perfectly good eyes still in my head and all sorts of bones not yet broken. But Miklos lowered the knife, picked up the wallet from my lap, and followed his boss up the stairs. I heard a door open and then the lights went out.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I know my arms lost all circulation. After the first hour, I could only feel pins and needles and after the second I felt nothing at all. My legs ached. My back ached. I spent ages struggling to loosen the ropes or to reach the cell phone on my hip and only managed to give myself severe rope burns. I was tempted to rock the chair over on its side, but I didn’t, for fear that I wouldn’t be able to get up again.

  I listened for any signs of movement, of life, any hint of where I was. There were the sounds of plumbing in the walls, water sloshing through pipes on the way to some distant toilet, but nothing else. Not even, thank god, the skittering of rats or insects. It was quiet, and it was cold, and my twisted, strained, abraded hands were numb.

  I thought about dying. It wasn’t the first time. But this time I thought I was closer to my own death than I’d ever been. They could kill me here and no one would ever know. I wouldn’t show up for work and they’d wonder what became of me, but after a few days they’d write me off. In a program like GS, people came and went. Lane would hire some other assistant. Michael would find someone else to rent the apartment. My father, living out in Petaluma, might wonder why he didn’t get a Christmas card from me this year, or he might not. The people who ran the cemetery out in Brooklyn where my mother was buried would wonder why I’d stopped visiting. Or they wouldn’t.

  My disappearance wouldn’t be the stuff of headlines. I hadn’t spoken to Leo in years, Susan in months. If Dorrie were alive, she’d have done something, she’d have stood up for me the way I was trying to stand up for her. But Dorrie was dead and who else was left?

&nbs
p; It was dark, the complete dark of a windowless room, and I felt adrift, as though my chair were a tiny boat and I was on a silent, starless sea. Some unused corner of my brain dredged up a line of Coleridge remembered from my days at NYU: Alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on my soul in agony.

  I shook my head, fought against the temptation to fill the void with self-pity. No one had forced me to go looking for Ardo. I could have guessed this was how it would end. A psychologist might even tell me I’d been wishing for this outcome. You go to a zoo and walk into the lion’s cage, you can’t complain when he bites you.

  But I’d leave that to the psychologists. The only question for me to consider now was how I could get out again. Not whether I wanted to. I wanted to. I had a job to do. If Ardo hadn’t been behind Dorrie’s death, someone else had, and if I didn’t get out of here, the person responsible would go unpunished. That was unacceptable.

  But it was dark and I was so very tired. My nose, my ribs, my legs—I was a symphony of aches, and the pain was part of the huge weight drawing me down. I didn’t notice when my eyes slid shut. I didn’t know when I slept. Only when I woke.

  There was light in my eyes. A hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. I couldn’t see till the hand holding the light swung away. I blinked, tried to clear my vision. A face swam into focus. The bartender. Andras.

  “What are you...”

  He raised a finger to his lips. Then he stepped behind me and began tugging at the knots in the rope. Looking down, I saw he’d already freed my legs. I stretched them out in front of me, tried to get the blood flowing again. It felt like knives were stripping the muscles from the bones.