“Are you crazy?” Sal Peretti asked.
“That’s a good question. They say a man suffering from severe mental illness is often ill-equipped to assess that state of mind.”
“I’ll kill you,” Sal vowed.
The sallow-faced thug yanked furiously at his chains. His breathing became erratic.
“Lemme up from here!” He tried to keep the plea tone out of his voice, but the fear of death is a close relative to truth.
The swelling in Sal’s jaw was slowly closing his left eye.
“What?” he asked after almost two full minutes of struggle and failure.
“Who’s the guy with his arm in a sling?”
The left eye shut completely. A clear viscous liquid oozed from the fold of flesh.
“You know what’ll happen if I don’t show up for my boss at the end of the night?” He tried his best to make the question sound threatening.
“Probably wonder where the twenty-four thousand seven hundred twenty-two dollars went,” I said. “Then, after a few months, people’ll be asking, ‘Whatever happened to Sal Peretti?’ Then…nothing.”
Nothingness. That’s the big fear of all creatures. To be blotted out of existence, facedown and floating in the river Styx.
“Bernard Shefly,” Sal said in a state of complete moral defeat.
I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head to the side, telling his one good eye that I needed him to fill in the blanks.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Said he needed to find this old nigger…Afro-American…He told me he needed to find this African American guy, all right? And I, I took him there.”
“How would you know where he was?”
“I asked a cop I’m friendly with to do a hotel registration search for a man named Worry. You know—since anti-terrorism, the cops know how many peanuts in your shit. Anyway, Shefly didn’t tell me he was gonna shoot the guy.”
“Okay. I already know what he looks like. Now all I need is a location.”
Crooks hate snitching the way aging beauty hates the mirror; it’s an act that is both humiliating and, ultimately, unavoidable.
“He eats at Mama So’s every afternoon.”
“That’s all?” I asked.
“What the fuck else do you want?”
“It’s not what I want, Sal. It’s what you need.”
“Fuck you, man! What’s that even supposed to mean?”
“It means that I’m gonna leave you down here while I check this guy out. It means if I get slaughtered leaving Mama’s, no one will know where you are.”
It was an evil pleasure seeing Sal’s left eye trying to open wide. He cut loose with a loud fart and yanked against his chains some more.
“I just know where he eats at,” my prisoner whined, his rank fragrance filling the small torture room. “How’m I gonna know what kinda protection he got?”
I nodded, smiled, and then strolled toward the door. From there I saluted Sal. When I pulled the door open, he screamed for all he was worth. It didn’t matter. That room was the only one in the subbasement—no sound could escape that crypt.
At 5:00 a.m. I went to Gordo’s eighth-floor gym. The scrawny nonagenarian watched me throw punches at the heavy bag for eighteen minutes or so.
“Go on up to your room and take a nap,” he said when I began to falter—not even half the way through my regular routine.
Glancing his way, I saw two of him and thought that the one on the left was probably right.
A little more than a year earlier, Gordo came down with a virulent strain of cancer. I took him home either to live or to die. He lived, and afterward dedicated a simple room to me a few floors above the gym. It was easy for him to do, seeing that Gordo owned the entire midtown office building.
I slept like that imagined corpse, floating in the river of death, not dreaming or hoping or believing in anything; just a lump of flesh with ice water for blood.
I woke up at noon, conscious but not really refreshed.
At 1:30 I walked into a third-floor restaurant a few blocks south and east of Broadway and Canal.
Mama So’s is a need-to-know kind of place. You won’t find it on Yelp or Google. American Express can’t book you a reservation, and no credit card could cover the cost. Many a man’s fate had been sealed at the dozen or so spindly-legged black-lacquered tables. More than a few lives had been spared there, too.
A man in a light blue work shirt and dark blue trousers was seated alone in a corner. His left arm hung in a sling; he was deftly eating noodles with a pair of chopsticks using his unimpaired right hand. There were other customers scattered around the dining room. Most of them looked up when I walked in. More than a few recognized me. No one waved. When I was an active crook, my presence was sought after, often as a last resort…but rarely was I welcome.
“Mr. McGill.” The accent was cultured American English.
I turned and said, “Hello, Harry.”
Harry Wong was somewhere between thirty and sixty with short black hair and an expression that was happy to see you come or go. He was born wearing that tuxedo, and his soul had been bartered away three generations before his birth.
“I don’t have you in the book,” Harry told me. It was a fact that was also a warning.
“Mr. Shefly and I have business to conduct.”
“That is not in the book either.”
“He’s right over there,” I observed. “Why not ask him?”
Wong was four inches taller and thirty pounds lighter than I. We were both dangerous men. He had no fear of conflict, but like any successful son of Darwin, he preferred the path of least resistance.
“Wait here,” he said.
Harry asking Shefly the question was the most I could hope for. Mama So’s was not a place you could force your way into. But even if the wounded gangster sent me away, he’d still know I was onto him. And if he didn’t know who I was, Wong would serve up that information.
Looking around the room, I found unbidden memories filling my mind. The recollection of past meetings disturbed me. I had done some bad things in my life: helped the worst criminals evade justice, sent men and women on that one-way trip down the river. Some of them never returned. They might have been guilty of other crimes but not the ones I set them up for. At one time I blamed my father’s abandonment for these sins, but I had learned that in the end, wrong is wrong and every man has to carry his own water.
“Mr. Shefly would be happy for you to join him, Mr. McGill,” Harry Wong said, and past sins took a back seat to my current revival.
“Mr. Shefly,” I said, standing over the man and his noodles.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill.”
I settled into the chair opposite, looking into the would-be killer’s eyes. His chest, sculpted by weight lifting, was topped off with a ruggedly handsome face and hair that couldn’t make up its mind between blond and brunette. His eyes were gray.
“Can I order you something to eat?” the gunman offered.
“Not just yet.”
“Mr. Wong tells me that you used to be a regular around here,” he said to break the silent stare.
“I was in a slightly different line of business in those days.”
“What brings you around this afternoon?”
“I have entered an agreement to protect Catfish Worry.”
“You got to me right quick,” he said, plucking up a snow pea with his sticks. “You should really try these noodles, L.T.”
He knew my reputation and why I was there and still showed no fear.
“I need to talk to the man that sent you up to Harlem yesterday. Can you give me his name?” I didn’t expect any kind of direct answer, but I needed to ask before I acted.
“Hilton Zeal,” Shefly said, and the room actually seemed to dim.
I’m known as a man who keeps his cool, but that name made me blink.
“You know him?” Shefly asked, doing a pretty good impression of Mona Lisa’s smile.
“S
ince you’re being so forthcoming,” I said by way of answering, “maybe you can tell me where to find him.”
Shefly popped another snow pea into his mouth and chewed on my question.
He swallowed and said, “I can’t imagine you’d have anything to say to the man.”
“Where you from, Bernard? I never heard of you.”
“I came from Chi about a year or so ago.”
“Then maybe you’re not fully aware of my standing in our community. If I say I need to talk to somebody, then they need to talk to me.”
Bernard put down his sticks and leveled that gray gaze at me.
“I’ll tell him that,” he said.
I’d gotten further than I’d expected but not the distance I had to go. Harry Wong was watching me from the entrance. There were probably a dozen other hidden eyes watching, waiting for my next move.
Adding those eyes to the name Hilton Zeal, I decided it was time to depart.
“Thank you, Mr. Shefly,” I said, rising to my feet. “You’ve been quite helpful.”
He nodded, gesturing that he didn’t want to speak through a mouthful of noodles.
“You should call the next time,” Harry said to my back as I went out the door.
I didn’t answer him.
“Hilton Zeal,” Hush said.
Hush, Catfish, Lamont, and I were sitting around a coffee table in the four-bedroom apartment the ex-assassin kept over Pruitt’s Drugs and Sundries in Nyack.
“Who’s Hilton Zee?” Catfish asked.
“He’s considered the most dangerous criminal on the East Coast by law enforcement,” Hush said. “And quite a few on the other side of the line agree with that assessment. He’s only about fifty but old-school and slick as shit in olive oil.”
“You know him?” Lamont asked me.
“Only by reputation. I’m sure he knows me the same way.”
“So why’s he after me?” Catfish asked.
“Zeal’s an upscale crook,” I replied. “Rich people come to him because they believe he’s more reliable than those further down the line. You know, people like me. Odds are your son hired him.”
“So what you sayin’?” Catfish wanted to know.
“The safest thing to do would be for you two to drop the whole thing and go back to Mississippi,” Hush advised.
“But,” I added, “if you still want to move ahead, it’d be best to try and convince your son to back off.”
“And if he refuses,” Hush said, finishing the round, “maybe we should make him die.”
“No,” Catfish asserted. “He’s my son. I don’t even know for a fact that he hired this Zee.”
Worry was adamant, and he was the client. And things weren’t as bad as Hush made them sound. But even if he was right—the good thing about being between a rock and a hard place was that you don’t have much of a choice.
“How’s the shoulder, Mr. Worry?” I asked.
“Kinda stiff,” he said. “That lady doctor said it was a twenty-two caliber. You know I still got muscle up in that shoulder from my cotton-pickin’ days.” It was almost as if he were putting together his next blues song. “You got a answer for this tangle, Mr. McGill?”
“Maybe. I’ll need a little more information from you, but I already know how to get to your granddaughter.”
We talked for a little while after that, and then I took the 516 bus back to Manhattan.
My anarchist father and chaotic wife had dinner with Twill and me almost every night over the next week. Katrina was very nice and loving to me—always a bad sign. In between domestic festivities, I planned the two-pronged attack on Charles Sternman and his unsuspecting daughter.
I’d sent Mardi and her younger sister to stay with Hush and spent most days at home in my den making calls; now and then I went out on errands or for sessions at the gym.
We were eating dinner about a week before the Sternman wedding. That evening my father talked about the politics of gender and the megacapitalist cultures playing geographic and ecologic roulette, the fallacy of what he called DNA-derived identity and how the wick of capitalism was destined to sputter and go out.
“Speaking of capitalism,” I said, “what are you doing for money?”
“Leonid,” Katrina chided.
“That’s all right, Kat,” my father said with aplomb. My father is a hale man, tall and charismatic. “He’s right. I can’t live on your charity forever. I mean, I was on the front lines of the revolution in Asia, Africa, and South America, too. But they don’t have retirement plans for insurrectionists. Every man and woman, boy and girl, domesticated animal and wild beast, must contribute to their survival or die.”
“I know a few folks could use a competent explosives expert,” I offered.
“Leonid,” was Katrina’s reply to my impudence. “Your father was…he is a hero.”
“Not to me and my brother. Not to our mother, who’s no more than dust and bones somewhere out there in a potter’s field.”
Even then, I knew that I wasn’t angry at my father, not really. Just like Johnny Cash’s boy named Sue, I had been made strong by his gift of travails. No, what bothered me was the complexity and dangers posed by the case at hand. Charles Sternman was the billionaire son of a poor man he wished dead. I had put my body in the way and so made myself, and my son, potential casualties. Then there was Justine Sternman and the letter I intended to deliver. There was no telling what response she’d have to learning about her true lineage.
And I wasn’t forgetting Hilton Zeal, who had made an honest-to-goodness profession out of being a gangster.
As I said, the past week had been given to preparation for the upcoming trials. A day or so after the kidnapping, I sent Hush to release Sal Peretti from his subbasement cell. He returned the collection money and sent Sal on his way. That meant, even if Hush didn’t say a word, Sal would stay out of my way.
Just after my meeting with Bernard Shefly, I called a man named Jacob Indigo.
“Hello,” he said before the first ring was reported on my phone.
“Hey, Jake, it’s Leonid.”
“Mr. McGill.”
“I need you to make me an introduction in the form of an invitation.”
“Send me the dimensions, content, quantity, and any other particulars. I’ll give you an estimate on the price in twenty-four.”
I called another number later the same day. It connected me to an automated answering device that only beeped. I explained to the silent sentry of the telephone dimension all the ins and outs of the case so far.
Every day I went to Gordo’s gym to shore up my aging physical prowess. This because when your father walks out, leaving you to fend for yourself, you learn certain lessons. One unalterable bit of knowledge is that in the end, it might come down to your life or the life of the man standing in front of you. Kill or be killed was on the menu for the next few days, so after Katrina and my father turned in, I took Twill to a twenty-four-hour diner six blocks from our Upper West Side domicile.
The Pinta Inn overindulged in a seafaring motif. There were real ships’ wheels, replica anchors, framed lithographs of boats, and oil paintings of ships at sea.
Our waitress was Barbara Cutler, a Columbia journalism student who thought working in a diner would jump-start her investigative instincts.
“What can I get for you tonight?” Barbara asked us. She was a cross between American black and Irish Irish. Her face was broad, golden-hued, and freckled. Her light brown hair was kinky, fashioned into long braids.
“Just coffee, B,” Twill said. “Can’t be up to no good on a full stomach.”
The waitress gave my son a winsome smile. She liked him; most women did. I’d’ve said he inherited his charm from my father if I didn’t know they had nary a drop of blood in common.
After our coffees had been served, I asked Twill, “Are you ready?”
“Sittin’ in a car, waitin’ for a phone call…How hard could it be to get ready for that?”
&
nbsp; “Getaway is an essential element of any job,” I countered.
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
“What if you asked me to wait for you? What would you think if I didn’t take it seriously?”
Twill heard. He shrugged and flashed a resigned grin.
“I need you to be armed, too,” I said.
“Why?”
“Don’t think of this as a one-off job. It’s more like the first volley in a war. At any step along the way, we could find ourselves under attack.”
“Then why we doin’ it? We don’t know Catfish or Lamont. They sure not payin’ us enough to be puttin’ this much on the line.”
It wasn’t a criticism. Twill really wanted to understand the inner workings of what I did.
“It was you singing,” I said.
“Say what?”
“Yeah. You and Mardi singing. That’s something I never heard before. And like you said, Mardi is willing to help them. I mean…the first thing a parent learns about children is that you have to listen to them. You have to hear what they’re telling you. Sometimes they might be talking about one thing but saying something else.”
“So what did me and Mardi mean when we sang that little piece of a song?”
“Lamont was like Catfish’s mouthpiece. Through him, Catfish was telling us how broken and misused him and his have been; how broken and misused all our people are.” I hardly recognized myself in the words I was saying.
“I never heard you say our people before,” Twill said, echoing my inner confusion.
When I was a criminal, most of Twill’s life, I didn’t have time for right and wrong. People were on the run, getting thrown on the scrap heap of prison, and hankering after revenge. Back then, there was no such word as innocence in my lexicon. An innocent man or woman was simply the lucky one found not guilty, or better, never even charged. I couldn’t think of my victims other than as a means to an end. I was so hardened to suffering that somehow even the casualties of history fell outside the borders of my self-imposed sovereignty.
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