He spent that day and the next trying to clear his head of the pictures Millie Jacobs had put there.
”A pretty little thing,” she said. And a hot sailor. Out of that dim sketch, Fallon had begun to create a total image. There are no fat sailors. Pretty little Megan, therefore, would be about five-three, a hundred eighteen pounds. Living on a boat, she'd have a year-round tan. Her hair, bleached by the sun, would be a dirty blond and she'd wear it in a low-maintenance cut. A ponytail, most likely. Fastened with a simple rubber band. Megan would be about twenty-six years old. Her eyes would be ... what? Dark and piercing? No ... something softer. Her eyes are gray, the color of a winter sky.
He saw those gray eyes dancing as she drove her boat through a dangerous blow. It's gusting to fifty. She knows she's carrying too much sail. She ties off the wheel, then scrambles forward onto a pitching bow to set a storm jib and reef in the main. She moves like a cat. Keeps her whole body flexed and fluid. Now she's dancing back to the cockpit. Back at the wheel, jaw set, she's brave and purposeful, ignoring the salt spray that's stinging her face.
But those eyes. There's pain in them. A longing in them. She's thinking ... if only the right man would come along. Someone to share this with. Someone like Michael Fallon. Even now, she sees him in her mind just as he sees her. She's picking up his psychic energy. But she has no idea that he's this close. And that he's coming to Woods Hole to meet her.
Yeah, right.
In your dreams, Michael.
More likely, she'd tell him to get lost. That was Millie's opinion as well.
Millie said that over the last two summers, several of the Taylor House regulars, all of whom had heard of her, had tried to arrange consultations with her. A couple of them offered some fairly big bucks for just a thirty-minute session. She had turned them all down. Nor would she talk to reporters, doctoral candidates doing theses, psychic researchers, or representatives of any federal agency.
“Feds? What would they want with her?”
“They probably never got a chance to say.”
“Hmmph.”
About the last person she would speak to, therefore, is a New York dropout whose inn makes funny noises. She was probably a pain in the ass anyway.
Chapter 11
The Pakistani had been released on a Friday morning. A Department of Corrections van delivered him to the homeless shelter floors of the old Lenore Hotel in time for breakfast. He was last seen hobbling outside for a smoke. Two days later, it was the Giordano brothers' turn to ask Brendan Doyle to lunch.
Doyle arrived at Villardi's Seafood Palace to find them already seated. Fat Julie, imposing, immense but not actually fat, sat on the right. He was dressed in leather sneakers and warm-up suit of green velour because he played handball on Sunday mornings while Connie, his wife, and the children were in church.
People wonder, thought Doyle, how mobsters get their nicknames. Julie, who was nearing fifty, had been seriously overweight while in his early twenties due to two years of inactivity while recovering from an attempt on the life of his father, whom Julie had shielded with his body. Big Julie became Fat Julie.
Fat Julie, however, was a clear improvement over Queer Julie, which the kids his age called him before that. Not that he was queer either. The thing was, a movie came out, Carousel, starring Shirley Jones as Julie Jordan, and there was a song in it entitled “You're a Queer One, Julie Jordan.”
Julie Jordan . . . Julie Giordano. Kids pick up on things like that.
His father finally put him to work on the docks so that he could turn that fat back into muscle. He was also to observe how longshoremen steal so that Rocco, his father, could more profitably organize their efforts and also build a loan-sharking operation for purposes of maintaining cash flow between major cargo heists.
Julie did lose the weight. He also felt called upon to resolve the occasional challenge to his father's authority. He did so with the aid of the stevedore's box hook that, for a time, he carried everywhere in the hope that people would get the message and start calling him Julie the Hook.
Rocco, his father, thought this was dumb. Julie the Hook was a very good name for an enforcer but a rotten name for a loan shark. Loan sharks don't make people borrow money from them and they're scary enough as it is. Why would anyone want to borrow money from a Julie the Hook when he could go a couple of blocks and get it from some guy named Willie or Ernie, for example, both of which are nice friendly names? “It's like,” said old Rocco, ‘‘if they could get it from a bank, they wouldn't go to one named First Foreclosure Savings and Loan.”
The name never caught on in any case. While certainly dangerous if provoked, he was, on the whole, simply too good-natured to sustain such a handle.
His brother, Johnny G., sat on the left. Johnny G. was ten years younger, closer to Michael in age and build, and, in fact, had been Michael's friend since high school. Johnny G. favored dark Italian suits and subtle neckties. He could have passed for an attorney. Between them was a nervous, dark-skinned man in a soiled windbreaker who kept his eyes on the table. For an instant, Doyle thought they had brought the Pakistani with them. But this one wasn't bald.
“Meet Mohammed Yahya,” said the younger Giordano, rising to shake hands. “Born in Pakistan, runs a crane for us down the docks, deals pills on the side.”
Fat Julie raised a finger as if to say, That last part will keep.
“Past couple of days,” said the elder Giordano, “he's been our interpreter. We're all done with the other guy.”
Doyle grimaced. This statement, if it meant what he thought it meant, had just made him an accessory to murder. “You're sure this table's clean?” he asked.
“Place gets swept twice a week.”
The lawyer was less than reassured. He looked up at the ceiling, which was decorated with fish nets and colored glass floats, any one of which could hide a surveillance camera..
“Trust me,” Fat Julie said impatiently. “Except don't say nothing near the bar.”
Doyle glanced in that direction. There were two bartenders working it, one in his twenties, the other about fifty. They wore red jackets.
“Don't gawk either.” Fat Julie rapped the table to get Doyle's attention. “Kid on the left? He's wearing a wire.”
Doyle sighed audibly. He brought his hand to that side of his mouth.
“The one you're ‘done with,’ ” he said quietly, “what's his name, again?”
“Mohammed Mizda. Half of Pakistan is named Mohammed.”
“Tell me that Mohammed Mizda is still among us.”
Fat Julie understood. “You asked Hennessy for a sheet on the guy. You don't want him all of a sudden floating past Hennessy's window. Relax. He's on ice.”
That phrase covered many possibilities. Doyle chose not to try to narrow them. He pulled up a chair and sat.
“We needed Yahya, here,” said Fat Julie, “because the other guy knows about six words of English. One of them is heroin, by the way.”
“I'm listening.”
The younger Giordano produced a notebook. Fat Julie made a face that showed mild displeasure. He did not approve of writing things down but Johnny G. had gone on to college, graduated from Villanova with a degree in business, and knew the value of taking good notes. Some of them, Doyle saw, were in English. These were neat and bold. Johnny's writing. The others were scrawled in a different hand and in a language that Doyle presumed to be Pakistani.
“It's called Urdu.” Fat Julie had followed his eyes. “Johnny knew that from crossword puzzles.”
Fat Julie was proud of his educated brother.
Johnny G. cocked his head toward the notebook. “I'll tell you . . .” He took a breath. “This has been one hell of a learning experience.” His expression said that he was only just beginning to believe some of it himself. “Mizda—the guy we interviewed?—started off as a smuggler.”
“You're gonna love this,” said Fat Julie.
“Guy's whole clan were smugglers. I mean, it'
s like a caste thing. You could go back a thousand years and you wouldn't find one who ever did anything else.”
Fat Julie made a series of circles with his finger. The gesture said skip to fast-forward. Johnny G. made a face but complied.
“What they'd do lately,” he said, “they'd bring this chemical out of India on the backs of camels. They'd haul drums of it over deserts, mountains—whatever they got there—to drug factories in Pakistan, Afghanistan, even all the way down to Myanmar.”
“That used to be Burma,” added Fat Julie helpfully.
“Um . . .” Doyle raised a hand. “Could we start at the top? Mizda and the Jamaican attacked Michael. Was that a hit or not?”
“Oh, yeah,” Johnny G. answered as if that had been obvious.
“Who ordered it?”
“Guy named Parker. Runs that security service where both those guys work. All Parker told them was that Michael's a spy who could get them deported and they should make it look like a street crime. He said they had two, sometimes three teams out trying to catch Michael alone. They started using teams because they blew two chances already just sending one guy.”
“One blown chance was the subway incident?”
“And before that, the Korean's. That was them too.”
Doyle drew a deep breath. He let it out slowly. Until now, he'd been unwilling to believe that the convenience store killing was anything more than a botched random stickup.
“He volunteered all this? He mentioned Bronwyn's murder with no prompting from you?”
Johnny G. stared. “We know how to do this, Mr. Doyle.”
“My apologies.”
“You ready to hear about the camels?”
Doyle was rubbing his eyes. He tossed a hand as if to say that at this moment, he had scant interest in any subject but the attempt to murder the last remaining Fallon.
“You want to hear it,” said the younger Giordano. “You really do.”
“Let's get some drinks first,” said Fat Julie.
Young Johnny Giordano had always been bright. His father, now dead, would carry copies of his report cards and read off his grades to anyone who would listen. If old Rocco were here now, thought Doyle, he would probably read them aloud to that wired bartender just to get them into the record. Fat Julie might do the same thing.
A big difference, however, is that old Rocco Giordano would then break the man's head. At one time Fat Julie might have done so as well but that was before Johnny G. came of age. Through Johnny G., he became more circumspect. A bug, once discovered, is better left in place. They should look for ways to use it. There is no better way to drop a dime on a rival or to discredit a bothersome judge than to be overheard talking about them.
Doyle had seen all the report cards. He had even attended Johnny G.'s graduation and had noted some of the more enlightened business practices that he had subsequently brought to the family business. Loan-sharking, for example, was now computerized. During the course of this luncheon, however, the lawyer would develop a whole new appreciation of the younger Giordano. He showed a mind that was both inquisitive and patient. Far more patient than his brother would have been. The interrogation of Mohammed Mizda had been thorough.
The camel story was this. Mizda, along with most of the men of his clan, would deliver drums of a chemical called acetic anhydride to the drug factories over the border. Acetic anhydride is essential to the production of heroin. The camels would come back loaded down with high-grade heroin, automatic weapons, gold and silver. Most of the Golden Triangle dealers were now moving their heroin in this fashion, which is to say through India, because of increased pressure from local and Western drug enforcement agencies.
Johnny G. thumbed forward through several pages of notes. He found what he was looking for.
“Oh, yeah,” he said brightly. “This is interesting about the gold.”
Inquisitive, Doyle would note later, but discursive. He had an unsettling habit of leaping between subjects as if indifferent to the one that was of immediate interest to his audience.
“You want to bring gold into India,” he began, “you have to smuggle it. Otherwise they tax the hell out of it to protect their own gold fields which are down around Madras.”
“Madras,” echoed Fat Julie. “Like in Madras shirts.”
“Thank you.”
“Kid's smart,” said Fat Julie proudly. “You listen to this.”
“Yahya here,” Johnny G. continued, “says one time a car drove in, they searched it and came up empty until a border guard scratched it by accident. The whole damned body was made of gold.” He shook his head as if in wonderment. ”I mean, this is India. Didn't you always think India was poor?”
Doyle closed his eyes. “The chemical, Johnny. Finish about the chemical.”
Johnny G. smiled. “You already guessed, right?” He flipped back to the beginning and read from the page. “It's manufactured by a company in Akra, which is near Calcutta. It's called Bhatpara Chemical. Bhatpara Chemical is a wholly owned subsidiary of . . .” He smirked expectantly at Doyle.
Doyle frowned. “AdChem?”
“Give the man a cigar. That's also where the gold goes.”
As Fat Julie signaled the waiter to bring menus, Doyle looked across at the nervous Pakistani, who had not uttered a word. He wondered why they brought him. He threw a questioning glance at Johnny G.
“Just wait,” said the younger Giordano. “We'll get to the good part in a minute.”
Chapter 12
Michael Fallon, at that hour, was on the ferry to Woods Hole. He had not, he told himself, set out to see the famous Megan. The most she had to do with it was that she started him thinking about getting a boat of his own. Nothing big at first because he probably wouldn't have the time to enjoy it, let alone keep it up. Maybe a Boston whaler that he could use to buzz around the island. Whalers have a shallow draft. Perfect for clamming and for running up onto quiet beaches.
A used one had been advertised in Saturday's paper. It was up in Vineyard Haven sitting at the town dock. He drove over to see it on Sunday morning.
The town dock happened to be near the ferry landing. The ferry to Woods Hole just happened to be in and was taking passengers. On an impulse, similar to the one that brought him here, Fallon bought a round-trip ticket and walked aboard.
This had nothing to do with Megan. All he wanted was to sit out in the sun with a cup of coffee, enjoy the crossings, then wander around Woods Hole, which he still had never actually seen, until it was time to catch the next ferry back. But he just might amble by her slip if he can find it. Check out her boat. See what she really looks like.
Fallon saw her before the ferry reached the landing.
He spotted her boat first. Millie said it was a ketch, blue hull, white top, with hatches and rails of richly polished teak. He saw only one ketch. It fit that description.
There was no one on the deck but suddenly, near the stern, a diver in a wet suit broke water. She, if that was Megan, had been down cleaning her bottom. Fallon watched as she rinsed off a scouring pad and tossed it aboard. Next, without the aid of a swimming ladder, she launched herself up and over the gunwale. Fallon held his breath. She unbuckled her SCUBA tank and stowed it in the aft locker. She stripped off her hood and shook out her hair. The hair was blond but a bit darker than he'd imagined and it wasn't tied back. But everything else was the same. The height, the weight, even the way she moved. He couldn't see the eyes.
She slipped out of the wet suit and draped it over the railing. Underneath, she wore a one-piece bathing suit that was nearly backless. The front of it covered her entire chest and tapered to her throat. She reached behind her neck to undo it. A male voice near Fallon said, “Hey, check that out.” Another said, “Man, I'd like some of that.”
Fallon felt a flash of anger. He threw an annoyed glance toward the source. Three young men of college age had been watching as well. One of them met his eyes and nudged the others. “You got a problem, buddy?” he said.
Fallon wanted to say, “Yeah, I've got a problem with your mouth.” But he didn't. He remembered Doyle's warning and, that aside, he knew that getting into a brawl over a girl he'd never met would be terminally dumb. He looked away, back toward the boat, but by then she was gone.
He stayed on the upper deck watching, hoping that she would reappear. Ten minutes went by. Passengers were walking off. Some had already reached the parking lot. He was about to turn away, hurry down to the gangway deck, when she emerged from the cabin hatch. Now she wore short cutoff jeans and a loose-fitting blouse. She was knotting its ends at her waist, leaving the midriff bare.
Her stomach looked rock-hard. And she had tied her hair back. Dried and straightened, it was now a lighter shade. She was, to his astonishment, just as he had envisioned her.
Fallon, he told himself. Get a grip. You have about as much ESP as a banana.
The phrase “pretty little thing/’ he realized, tends to narrow the field in terms of height and weight. It suggests that she's young. Women who live on boats, and who single-hand them in any weather, do not look like couch potatoes. And they would have good color and their hair, unless black, would be some shade of blond from the bleaching effect of the sun. It's the same with women skiers. Downhill racers. They all look like Megan for most of the same reasons. They might be pretty little things but any one of them could run ten miles cross-country without breaking a sweat.
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