by Mike Barry
Terello drove through Rego Park on Queens Boulevard, heading toward the 59th Street Bridge. That was the best way to go this time of night; not much traffic build-up on Queens Boulevard, the street of high-rises. All right, he should have gotten out of Rego Park years ago. The area was going to hell with all the black stuff starting to move in on the edges and who wanted to live in fucking Queens anyway? He would have wanted a little house in Jersey, not too far out from the abridge but far enough so that he could have gotten some decent air but he had been so caught up in the job that there was never time to sit down and read the papers and really take the time and trouble to think out a move. Besides, without kids it didn’t particularly matter whether they stayed in Rego Park or not. Who cared about the school system? And his wife would have lived anywhere at all with four walls and a television set.
Hitting the bridge he picked the Electra up to fifty. It skittered and knocked a little but fifty was a good speed for a nine-year-old car. He felt a little twinge of anticipation and fear: what would Peter Vincent say when Terello confronted him face to face? Exactly what would Peter Vincent do?
Terello did not know. Nor did he particularly care. He had never met this Vincent clown nor after this one confrontation did he expect to see him again. But he was going to make it clear to Vincent that the Joe Terellos of this world could not be put under wraps, locked away under cover like dogs in a pound.
No. No sir. He would not stand for it nor would he permit Vincent to get away with this. He had worked with Marasco in good times and bad for ten years now. Marasco was his boss; Marasco was the man who told Terello where to go and what to do and he was not taking orders from any clown who in the absence of Marasco thought that Joe Terello was property.
In fact, he thought, pulling the car off the bridge and taking the sweeping turn onto First Avenue at thirty miles an hour, the hell with the traffic light, in fact, he would not be surprised if Vincent was simply some kind of sharp operator himself, a guy who thought that with Marasco out of the way he might be able to wedge in a little bit on the line of succession. He might even be trying to keep Terello from the job which was rightfully his. Terello might succeed Marasco.
“Son of a bitch,” Joe Terello said aloud. Now that he had had a chance to get behind the wheel of the Electra and really think this situation out, all of his senses had returned to him and he was beginning to understand the situation. Of course. What had happened to Marasco was unfortunate but it sure as hell had nothing to do with him; he had worked loyally and without question for ten years. Now everybody knew that it was Joe’s turn to move into the position which had been vacated by Marasco. Wasn’t it? That was the way it worked when a man was a loyal soldier.
Except that this Vincent had horned in from outside, some sharp guy, an operator on the fringes of the line of succession who thought that now he had a chance to take advantage of the situation by cutting a piece for himself. All that he had to do was to keep Terello out of the picture for a couple of days until he had had a chance to make his moves and that would be the end of Terello’s possibilities. He wouldn’t be there at the funeral, he would not have shown proper loyalty, he would be passed right over.
And there would go the ten-year, waited-for, down-the-line chance.
“Son of a son of a bitch,” Terello said again. He burst the car up York to 82nd Street, started the long drive toward the river, went back three blocks and came up 83rd. Six-eighteen Eighty-Third Street, there it was. Did this Vincent really think that he had no understanding at all? Did he take him for such a fool? Didn’t he realize that Terello had contacts, friends, moves and a brain too and that he would be able to dig out the address of this silky mother-fucker just as quickly as he wanted?
He grunted, putting on the foot brake and bringing the car to a halt across the street from six-eighteen. Illegal parking all the way up and down both sides of the block of course; trust the sons of bitches in the high-rent district to treat their streets like private property. That was all right, he wouldn’t be here that long. His business might be very simply accomplished. He was going to get face to face with this clown and show him where he stood and if the clown got funny with him … well, he would have to get a little more serious than that. This was the ten-year down-the-line chance and it was not likely to come again.
He used the trunk key to open the glove compartment of the Electra and took out the point thirty-eight. In ten years he had had to use it only four times, each for a distinct reason. He was not a violent man; he knew himself to be in fact a man of great gentleness and basic compassion who could only become violent regretfully and with much pain. But he was as tough as he was gentle, as firm as he was compassionate. Nobody was going to take his ten-year chance from him now. Nobody.
And he had been able to work all of this out on his own too. That certainly showed that he had far more brains than he might be generally credited with at least by the likes of Peter Vincent. They thought he was some hired man, some bully and fool, some errand boy who carried the late Albert Marasco’s coat and wiped his nose for him. Little did they know that it was Terello’s right, his absolute right, to be the next in the line of succession.
He came out of the Electra brutal and quick, ready for any kind of attack, doubling himself over and hitting the side of the car, then whirling with the gun, but the street was quiet. There was simply no sign of life whatsoever. For a moment he felt like a little bit of a fool, carrying on with a gun on a perfectly empty street but then he reminded himself that nobody ever fell behind in his work because he was cautious. Or took preparations.
Now to get the job done. He holstered the gun inside his jacket, gave the Electra a last affectionate look, started across the street. It gleamed in the streetlight. It got maybe seven miles to the gallon and had a hell of a dent in the left rear door but from this side it looked absolutely flawless. From bumper to bumper the right side of the Electra 225 was magnificent. And some day he would get the necessary body work done on the left side too.
Boy, he thought, this was some townhouse. For the first time he got a good look at six-eighteen. A massive yet somehow squatty building hulking by the river, dangling ornaments and brass. This was some security trap that Peter Vincent had gotten for himself. Maybe the guy wasn’t such a small-timer after all.
Didn’t matter. Terello reconnoitered, got onto curbside, paused a minute before heading for the stoop. Absolutely quiet, no light from behind the windows of six-eighteen although it was probably set up on dead shades. Sure, he had heard of something like that. They probably had him under observation. So what? They must have known that sooner or later Terello would come to settle out his side of the bargain.
A few scraps of paper wafted down the street, moving lightly in the August breeze. He felt them brush his ankles as they continued their strange journey to the river. A foghorn sounded from far to the North; something probably going under the Triborough Bridge. He vaulted the four steps of the stoop quickly, lightly, and seeing the huge knocker on the door lifted, hit. Hit that door once. Twice. Three times. Let there be no doubt in their minds but that Terello was here and that he was heading in. He felt the point thirty-eight inside his jacket and smiled at the weight of it. It was a good one. It had never failed him. There were dead men, a couple, who would testify to that.
The foghorn again. That was a big motherfucking ship or at least a loud one. Probably come to think of it it was some little tug with a big sound like a tiny woman with a big ass and mouth. The door opened and a short man with grey eyes wearing flowing robes was looking at Terello from what appeared to be some kind of vestry. Cold, impermeable, measuring eyes.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m here to see Peter Vincent.”
“Peter Vincent is not at home now, I do not think sir.”
“You don’t understand. My name is Joe Terello.”
The eyes seemed to glint. “Ah,” the man said, “perhaps there was some kind of misunderstanding in that
event. Would you like to come in, Mr. Terello?”
“Maybe Mr. Vincent would like to come to the door.” He was no fool. What did they think he was; a fool to walk into a blind entrance like this?
“I see,” the short man said, “I may have to discuss this with Mr. Vincent of course.”
“Of course.”
“In the meantime, while I am discussing it, would you like to wait inside the vestry?” The short man seemed very amused. He seemed on the verge of winking. “No harm can come to you in the vestry, Mr. Terello,” he said, “and we do prefer to keep the door closed.”
“Do you?”
“We dislike the street traffic that might come in otherwise, with an open door,” the short man said. His robes wafted in the night. He giggled.
“All right,” Terello said. He stepped inside. What the hell could they do to him? He felt the gun swaying reassuringly inside his clothing. He almost touched it but decided not to. Too risky to call attention to it in that way. Better to save it for the crucial moment if it ever came.
The short man closed the door, locked it, opened the inner door which appeared to lead into a long hallway which had carpeting not only on the floor but the walls and ceiling in mottled red hue. “Wait right here, Mr. Terello,” the short man said, “and I will be back quite promptly.” He closed the door. Again there was the sound of a sliding lock and Terello, now free to hold onto the gun, was left in the vestry.
He stood there holding it loosely, balancing on the balls of his feet, prepared for anything. After a few moments he noticed that it seemed to be becoming a little bit hot in the vestry which well it might since, he saw, there was no ventilation. A moment after that he noticed that it was becoming much hotter in the vestry and, as a matter of fact, due to the absence of any ventilation he was having difficulty breathing. He loosened his tie, sighed, exhaled, wished that the little son of a bitch would come back already and give him the word. Wasn’t he aware of the fact that he had sealed Terello in here?
Well yes, Terello realized, it was possible that the man was aware. It must have been over a hundred and twenty degrees in here now and he could not breathe, he simply and absolutely could not breathe. They were trying to suffocate him.
They were trying to kill Terello. It was a new thought; this Peter Vincent, whoever the hell he was would have to be crazy. He was serious. Terello had come over to try to have a reasonable discussion and Vincent wanted to kill him.
What kind of people were these? Terello did not have time to ponder the question. Panic began to gnaw at his edges; he felt as if a huge, black cloak had been dropped over his body. Swaddled within the folds of this cloak he simply could not breathe. He went for the gun, the point thirty-eight caliber that had never failed him and could not possibly fail him now. He began to shoot, methodically but desperately at the lock toward the outside. The bullets hit metal, spanged back, the second hit him on the hand, grazing bone and drawing blood. He gasped with fear and pain, dropped the revolver. He scrambled for it, his knees hitting the plain boards painfully, sending small circuits of pain wafting through him but he could not seem to find the gun. He felt as if a scarf was being tightened across his neck. He could not breathe. He literally could not breathe.
The lights began to go out. Consciousness whisked away from him the way that life had whisked itself away from his wife. Scrambling on the floor of the vestry Joe Terello knew that he was a dead man. He had been stupid, incredibly stupid, and now he would never see the light again.
And then, giving him the first and last break of a lifetime—because after giving him a glimpse of the light it killed him and sealed him to the darkness forever—the whole house blew up.
XIX
Wulff had done the best he could. The incendiaries he had given up on pretty much. Simple household devices, that was what he would need to blow up the Vincent mansion. Start getting spectacular about it though and that mansion would blow up in his face. Professional results through amateur techniques, that was the ticket.
He got the metal cutter in the hardware shop along with the instant coffee heater; the Eveready batteries came from the cigarette store right around the corner. The only other stuff he needed was in his own head. He needed patience and a good deal of discipline. The luck part of course was in a different territory.
He thought that he could bring it off. He was no explosives expert but he had fiddled around here and there in Vietnam, he knew land mines, grenades, the sense of an explosion and what constituted an ignition point. Any man who hangs around the ordnance depot out of simple curiosity for a couple of days is one step ahead of the game right there. Wulff had confidence. He had reasonable confidence in himself.
Back in the room he got to work. Most of the work would be done on the site but a dry-run was important, he had to see if he could manipulate the materials, if they would go together in the right way. It looked okay on paper but what the hell was paper? On paper the drug war was working too and there were seventy million worth of drugs, street value, safely locked away in the department property room. The metal cutter, an intricate little saw with sharp tiny teeth cut a neat swathe in the door of his medicine chest, attacked the steel door of the room itself with some efficiency. With pressure and luck he would be able to cut a swathe the size of a man’s arm. The coffee heater worked fine from standard current, producing a neat, mean little glow within a minute and a half that would have turned anyone’s flesh to water. He timed it from plug-in to glow, it came down to eighty-three seconds, give or take a few and it seemed to work just as well when the cord was cut, the lines exposed, and the lines worked around the batteries, but at that point you moved into unknown territory. The batteries worked fine now but heater and batteries wrapped together would have to survive a drop of something like six feet. Would the splicing hold? Well, you could only hope so.
It was interesting work, whatever else you had to say about it. He was going to try to knock over a fucking guarded townhouse with a couple of five and ten cent tools. If he brought it off the deed should live forever but then again he could not go around looking for praise or awards. He looked through the materials Williams had given him, carefully, using his fingers, tracing the gas lines, the point at which they entered the basement. It looked all right. Of course the plans were old and Vincent himself might have made changes in those points of entrance, not being anyone’s fool. But Wulff doubted that. People who bought guards and constructed elaborate doors just didn’t think of little details like gas lines.
No. No indeed. They just did not know, as Wulff did, what it was like to get behind the enemy lines. He would get behind them. Part of it was a matter of desperate efficiency—Wulff was now dealing with an enemy who was aware of him and he would have to strike before that enemy or not at all—but another part of it came from a feeling that if he did not deliver this killing punch immediately, everything that he had already done would be meaningless. Jessup, Davis, Scotti, Marasco, the blond, all of them would have died in vain. Aborted mission. He owed it to these corpses to carry out the job just as far and fast as he could.
So Wulff ran through it again, over and over again until everything was mechanical and he could do it even in the dark. Cut steel, tie in the batteries to the heater, drop the heater. It worked every time but on a softer surface. Still, how hard could the floor of Vincent’s basement be? He waited for dark. He was ready to go, more or less, but nothing to do until he had darkness and that meant, in late August, waiting until at least eight o’clock to go.
He couldn’t hold out. At seven-thirty he was ready to go, the hell with it. Fog and soot had rolled in from the river, the city was reeking and stinking anyway as only the city could at the end of summer, no one would be looking for him in the haze if it was still light when he began to work. Wulff tossed the materials and the prints into the empty suitcase and got out of the room carrying nothing but that and a gun. The suitcase was amazingly light Demolition equipment fit to blow up a townhouse and it co
uld not have weighed, all of it, more than two pounds. The gun wouldn’t hurt although the way things were set up now he doubted that it would do him much good. He would either bring this thing off, in which case the gun would not be necessary, or he would fail and if that happened, the gun or even a full machine clip weren’t going to make much difference. They would wipe him out. The gun was only for security because actually he was going in there unarmed.
He walked the suitcase down Lexington Avenue into the eighties and then all the way over to the river. The six-eighteen block was empty of course. No traffic on it at all, no people, no cars. Nothing. It was as if the medium-to-bigger-fish like Peter Vincent or Albert Marasco made sure that their own areas were clear of the cancer which was otherwise poisoning the country, the cancer which they had themselves created. It was a pact between the Vincents and other parties to keep it the hell out of their part of the world. Just like he had figured it before, things had long since reached the point where the enforcers were merely another part of the overall operation. They were getting their share too. For a healthy little piece of the action, they could make sure that the Vincents would live undisturbed. Virtually invisible.