by Mike Barry
“You know what?” Wulff said and reached out his arm again, hit the man in the mouth, knocked Scotti gasping into the booth and then, seizing a chair, dragged it over and sat close to the little man, wedging him in, “I’m sick of guys like you telling me I’m in trouble. I’m not in trouble Scotti, you are; you’re in the worst trouble of your life. The harder you punks are pushed, the closer you get into the line, the more you tell me I’m in trouble but that’s just like a dog being backed into a corner when he’s on a chain and his jaws are muzzled. Just whining, Scotti.” He hit the man across the face. “Jessup was to come here to give you some money,” he said. “Who were you to pass it on to?”
“You’re crazy,” the little man said, “you’ve got to be crazy.”
Wulff hit him again. Once you got into the rhythm of it it was fun. A small plume of blood spread from Scotti’s mouth, arced downward. “Come on,” he said, “be reasonable.”
Scotti rubbed at his chin. His eyes reflected deep pain although behind this light there was a hint of something darker. “Don’t do it again,” he said in a level voice. He struggled to stand, found purchase on the table, reeled to his feet, “I mean that.”
“Why not?” Wulff said and flicked out his hand. This one caught Scotti on the cheekbone, the man groaned and his head slammed into the wall. He came off it looking purposeful, digging into his pants pocket. When the hand came out there was a gun in it.
“All right,” he said. The gun seemed to give him calm and assurance. He even looked two inches taller. The gun must have been for him what a shot of heroin might have been for one of his contacts but then again was it that simple? Was anything that simple? “All right,” Scotti said, the gun, dull metal, wavering, then focussing, on Wulff’s gut. “Now I want you to answer some questions.”
“Questions?” Wulff said and laughed, “the questions are all coming from my end.” Carefully he estimated the distance between the two of them, calculated certain angles. Did not move. The fact was that even with the gun in his hand Scotti still looked terrified.
“Who are you?” Scotti said.
“A friend of a friend.” Wulff heard subtle noises behind, turned slightly expecting to see the bartender looking through the aperture. But communications in the Half-Moon Lounge did not appear too strong. Either that or the bartender had decided that his job was to provide space, nothing else.
“No good,” Scotti said. He moved slightly away from the wall, holding the gun stiffly. Wulff had the feeling that the man did not know how to use it.
“Talk,” Scotti said.
“Who was the money to go to, Scotti?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your friend was going to pass on some money to you. Who takes it then?”
“I’m asking the questions,” the little man said. A little trickle of sweat appeared near his eyebrows. He raised the gun.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Scotti,” Wulff said, “you’re not going to knock anyone down in this back room.”
“Why not?” the man said. He sounded almost inquisitive. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“In the first place you’d miss and in the second place if you didn’t miss there would be police all over the place in about thirty seconds but in the third place,” Wulff said, carefully calculating distance, “your job doesn’t include handling a gun. I’ve got you figured strictly for a contact man and you don’t even want to handle that gun. I’m going to do you a favor, you son of a bitch,” Wulff said.
He launched himself at the man. Old arrest training, never come on them frontwards but work from the side, use angles, tackle the surprise element and never give them a clear, open target. He came under Scotti’s guard, pivoting, threw a shoulder into the man’s armpit, sent him back in scatters to the wall, reaching for the gun. For a sickening instant he couldn’t find it, could only feel cloth and flesh squirming underneath him and in that moment Scotti could have killed him, he could feel the death closing on him in this little room … but then everything was all right. He found the gun. It slid into his seeking hand with a jolt and he yanked, twisted, tore it free and brought it protectively against his belly.
Then he kicked the little man’s legs out from under him roughly. Scotti fell unevenly, hitting chairs and floor, scattering wood, finally lay there in a clump of limbs, breathing shallowly, his forehead against an outstretched arm. He looked about as helpless as a man could get without being badly hurt.
Wulff put the gun into his jacket pocket noting that the safety had never been uncocked and looked down at the man. Two guns now. Two guns and almost five hundred dollars. If he could keep this up, he’d be half an army soon.
Sure he would be.
The bartender now was looking through the aperture, having concluded that the action was over. He stood there, wiping his hands on the towel flapping from his waist. “What’s going on here?” he said without interest.
“Small discussion. Little bit of a disagreement. He thought that the Giants were at least two touchdowns better than the Jets and I didn’t see the margin as more than five points. So I had to beat the shit out of him.”
“Uh,” the bartender said, wiping faster, “football fans, huh?”
“Not me,” Wulff said. “I can’t stand the game. He is.”
Scotti raised himself feebly on his elbows and said to the bartender “Get out of here.”
“You get out of here,” the bartender said, “I don’t know what’s going on; I don’t want to know what’s going on but I want both of you to get the hell out of here now. I just rent space, that’s all.”
“You only work here you mean,” Wulff said, “you have nothing to do with anything that goes on. That’s a good attitude.”
“Get him the fuck out of here. Or should I call the cops?”
“No,” Scotti said thinly, drawing his knees up under him, “don’t call the cops. It’s a private dispute.”
“That’s right,” Wulff said, yanking the man to his feet, dusting Scotti off almost paternally and pushing him against the wall, “just a little disagreement between friends.”
“All right,” the bartender said. He moved from the opening, gestured toward it. “Go on. Get out of here.”
Scotti looked at Wulff. “Go on,” he said.
“You’re coming,” said Wulff.
“What?”
“You’re coming. The two of us are leaving together. Good friends, right?”
“Oh come on,” Scotti said, sweat starting again. For a small man he certainly sweated a greal deal. “Cut it out now.”
“Cut it out?” Wulff asked softly, “man, you don’t understand anything, do you? I haven’t even begun.”
He took Scotti gently by the arm and led him from the room. The bartender looked at them and then past to the littered tabletop, the spillage on the floor. He seemed to be calculating how long it would take him to clean up and whether he could get away with a superficial job. But then again, as Wulff had pointed out, he only worked there.
“Hey,” the bartender said when they were already halfway down the line, the sounds of the game show piping them rapidly toward the door, “wait a minute! You forgot to pay me. That’s five dollars and fifty cents on that table.”
“Okay,” Wulff said, halting, releasing Scotti briefly and getting out his wallet. “Let this one be on me.” He took out a ten and placed it on the bar, rolled an ashtray over and sealed the ten in tight. “A pleasure to do something for a friend,” he said to the middle-aged lady who gave him a hideous wink. She must have taken him for a very nice young man. “Even though I had to beat him up for stupidity,” Wulff added and winked back at her.
He went back to Scotti who had not moved. The man seemed to have given up; he came so submissively against Wulff as he renewed the arrest-lock that Wulff decided that he could probably make it without any pressure. The trouble with these men was that they were all up front: they had plenty of style and mannerism but puncture it, one inch deep, and there
was nothing but fear and the desperation not to be hurt. All gesture, no center. Would that it be the same way all to the top. Wulff doubted it, however. There were levels of competence in any business organization and obviously the lower echelons possessed less of it than those at the top. The boys at the top had to be very good indeed, for the organization was excellent.
“Come on,” the Wolf said to the trembling man beside him, “let’s get to your car and take a ride. I want to meet your friends.”
“You’ll regret this,” Scotti said, “if you think that this is going to take you anywhere you’re just crazy. You’ll be killed.”
“And then I’ll be just like you, eh Scotti?”
The little man said nothing. They started to walk. At length Scotti pointed out a faceless Dodge Dart at a hydrant, bearing a ticket and said that this was his car. “I’ll drive,” Wulff said.
Scotti gave him the keys without comment.
Wulff and his new friend got into the Dart and, parking ticket still flapping, went off for a little drive in the country.
Fucking transmission slipped. Pity he couldn’t have stayed with the Rikker’s bigass Eldorado.
IV
Albert Marasco, sitting behind his huge desk, the paintings and shelves of ornaments on the walls gleaming in the late-afternoon sun of eastern Long Island, looked at the thick man in the sports shirt sitting in front of him and said again, “I thought I told you never to come into this house.”
“I couldn’t help it,” the thick man said. He weighed three hundred pounds and was close to six and a half feet tall but he looked terrified. “I had a problem. I had to discuss it.”
“Fuck that,” Marasco said with sudden passion, fury bursting out of his careful, businessman’s glaze and then he shrugged, sighed, reconstituted himself as a mild man in elegant clothing, late forties, an investment broker or at least a CPA. He took a bottle of scotch from an inner desk drawer, a paper cup from another drawer, poured himself a delicate shot and drank it down, ignoring the big man for a minute, savoring the terror he could bring upon this gorilla simply by showing disapproval. “Still,” he said more gently, “a mistake is a mistake, no? All of us should be entitled to at least one mistake—”
“The shipment didn’t come through,” the man named Joseph Terello said, “we were at the contact point and nothing happened. It seemed to me—”
“It seems to me,” Marasco said gently, allowing himself one more inch of scotch, watching the bigger man’s eyes gleam and then become sullen as he realized that this shot too was not for him, “that this is my house, my home here Terello, and it is not a place for the conducting of business. Shipments here, shipments there; that is a legitimate concern but not in my home.”
“I’m sorry,” Terello said, “we got frantic. That’s a quarter million, maybe three hundred thousand dollars worth of the purest—”
“Shut up,” Marasco said savagely and stood; then, in a controlled way let the power flow out of him. Now he was no longer a CPA or an investment broker but something in the quiet clothing that made Terello, a very big man begin to shake. “Do you think I give a shit about your probems with shipments? That’s your job Terello and if you don’t do it you’ll be replaced, that’s all. This is my home. I live here. I live here with my family and I do not bring business into my home ever. Do you understand that?”
Terello shambled to his feet, dropped his hands into his pockets, stood there, his mouth open. “Yes,” he said, “I understand—”
“Then why didn’t you understand before you came here?”
“I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”
“Aah,” Marasco said and turned from the man, looked out the window at the rolling empty carpet of green outside on which from a great distance he could see children playing, his wife moving slowly into position for another tennis volley, “you get me sick. Get the fuck out of here.”
“All right.”
“And don’t come back. Don’t try this again Terello. If you do it’s going to get very bad.”
“Yes. I know.”
Marasco turned and faced the man. “You know?” he said, “then what are you waiting for?”
Terello clambered out of the room as if he were lifting himself from a box. Graceless at best, the big man now frantic almost fell over himself getting out of the room. Marasco watched him go and then came to the door of the huge den which Terello had not closed and pushed it shut firmly, sprung the lock. He sighed enormously and then went back to the window. But this time there was no pleasure in looking out at the lawn: his children, his wife, the peace of Islip, Long Island on a late August afternoon. Instead, against his will, he found concern beating around his mind like a bee battering the inside of his skull with small, deadly stings, retreating and striking again.
The deal had fallen through somehow. The contact had been arranged: terms, prices, even the distribution had already been worked out and figured and now somewhere along the line something had happened and the deal was gone. That was bad enough, seeing something of this size go sour, but even worse was the fact that in Marasco’s life deals simply did not collapse. It was a bad omen; it meant that somewhere in the chain a malfunctioning part had been developed but the only way to find it was to trace through slowly and carefully and with the chain snapped, anyone could be an enemy. No one could be trusted once something soured. It was something Marasco had learned very early in his career; by the time he was sixteen and still on the streets he had known this. All the rolling lawns of Islip, all the tennis courts in the world could not take this insight from him.
He could not blame Terrello, then, for being frantic. Terello was good as far as he went but he was limited; keep him on a straight course which was what delivery was supposed to be and he was fine, occasionally even brilliant, take him out of the simple procedures though and he was lost. It would figure that he would come to Islip, right past the gates, into Marasco’s den to deliver the news. If nothing else it would take the responsibility off Terello, put it on Marasco where it belonged. But he had dedicated his life or at least the most recent ten years of it to keeping his home inviolate. Whatever he did took place outside of it; the home was his shell and his palace. It might represent the fruits of his work but it was not part of it. And now Terello had violated the code, used his name and his relationship with Marasco to talk his way past the gates and into the den. That was bad. That was very bad. Something was going to have to be done about the man.
It was regrettable because Terello was as good a lieutenant as Marasco had ever had, but that was business. Business was business; life was life and the two of them damned well had to be separated. Terello had crossed the line and would now have to be taken care of.
Which decision, Marasco thought, had absolutely nothing to do with the missed delivery which was even more serious. Like it or not he was going to have to move on this and very quickly. Carefully keeping his motions deliberate, playing as always to the invisible audience that was there at all times to evaluate the career of Albert Marasco and find that it was good, he lit a cigarette with an ornate lighter and moved deliberately toward the phone. Checking calls and pretty soon, through the careful network, a meeting would have to be arranged. Unless he could find that it was a simple screwup and the stuff was waiting there for Terello after all who had gotten impatient. That was to hope for. He doubted it.
Before he could take it up, the phone rang on the intercom unit.
“Yes?” he said picking it up carefully, taking the cigarette from his mouth. “What is it?” His impulse was to be curt but it might be one of his daughters. He would not want to show his agitation to any member of his family. “What is it?”
“Jack Scotti is at the gatehouse,” a voice said, “this is Paul and I’ve held him up.”
“That wasn’t a bad idea.”
“He wants to come in.”
“Does he?” Marasco said, “that’s interesting.”
“There’s a guy with him.”
“I don’t know,” Paul said, “I’ve never seen this one before.”
“Have you asked him?”
“He says he’s a friend of Scotti’s; that he goes everywhere that Scotti goes.”
“What does Scotti say?”
“He doesn’t say much of anything except that he’s here to see you.”
“I don’t like it,” Marasco said and then, because showing vulnerability to employees was one of the stupidest things you could do, caught himself. “Scotti must have something else to say, doesn’t he?”
“He doesn’t say a thing. The other guy, the big one, is doing all the talking.”
“It sounds like he’s got a gun on Scotti,” Marasco said.
“We took a frisk already. The guy had two guns on him. We’ve got them both.”
“That was good work,” Marasco conceded, “that was really very good.”
“We try.”
“Pass them in,” Marasco said with sudden decision. His home already violated once this afternoon could not be further invaded by letting this second invasion through. Furthermore, with instincts that had been worked out through thirty years of trouble, he had the feeling that this might tie into the matter of the missed shipment. He didn’t like it but there was no way of getting around these things; it might as well be faced now. “Keep a man on them.”
“I thought we would. Terello’s gone by the way.”
“Give me five minutes,” Marasco said and hung up.
He pushed the phone away, went to the windows and drew down all of the shades, shutting off the lawn, the children, the tennis court. He would have done this before Terello’s entrance except that that man had taken him without notice. Seal off, seal off: that was the whole point, set up partitions between your life and your work and make them hold. There were men whose fives were their work and they would not need the partitions, maybe, but Marasco was damned if he was going to fall into that category. His work was his work, his life was his life and the purpose of the one was to act only as a feeder for the others. To keep the lawns lush and green, as it were.