Rocks Beat Paper

by Mike Knowles

  I left the bag in the pile and got on the next bus I saw. I let the bus be my getaway car and put a few miles and hours between me and Mendelson’s. Eventually, I got off, found a cab, and went to LaGuardia. I walked the terminal until I found a crowd of people waiting on a delayed flight from London. There were numerous angry conversations taking place; some in person, but most of them over the phone. I stood on the periphery of the group and became just another member of the cellular herd. Saul answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?” The old man’s voice was confident; it wasn’t the voice of a man who was scared for his life — or his property. The single word sounded more like a gloat than a greeting.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  “Just one? I’d think you’d have a few more than that.”

  “Was it you who hurt the girl?”

  The question caught him off guard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Saul sounded disappointed. He was like a magician dying for me to ask him how he did his trick.

  I believed what he said. He wasn’t responsible for what had happened to Monica. “You aren’t who I thought you were,” I said.

  “You are exactly who I thought you were the whole time.”

  I let the insult slide. “I know you now,” I said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  I didn’t answer. “I have one more question.”

  Saul laughed. “I’d say you earned one more for what you paid.”

  “Why did you kill David?”

  The line went quiet and for a moment I thought Saul had hung up on me; then the old man cleared his throat and said, “Everyone wants to be king. The people who stay king never forget that.” Saul sighed. “David spent too much time staring at the throne. He was so focused on the chair that he never considered the man on it might be staring right back at him. I saw him. I saw what he wanted. I loved the kid; don’t ever think I didn’t. I loved him enough to give him time to change his mind. But he didn’t change his mind did he?”

  Saul hung up before I could answer.

  It had all gone wrong with David. He had come to us with a story about an old man ruining a business worth millions. David loved the man and he served him loyally until senility began erasing the man and the business’ profits. It was a tragic story that we all bought into, but it was just that — a story. Everything that David had told us had been bullshit. Everything except the payoff — the diamonds were real.

  I walked away from the crowd of frustrated family and friends still waiting on the plane from London. I pulled the SIM card out of the phone and dropped both into the first garbage can I passed. I checked the boards and saw that the flight I wanted wouldn’t be leaving for a couple of hours. I bought my ticket and then found a seat at a quiet table in a shitty chain restaurant. I ordered, but I left the food alone; I wanted the spot more than the meal. I needed time to think. Saul was not anything close to the feeble-minded old man that David portrayed him to be — in reality, he was as sharp as a razor. And when Saul found out that David had plans to rob him, he showed that he was as deadly as a razor, too. Saul had killed David and Alvin; I was sure of that. What I didn’t understand was why we were still alive. Saul wasn’t shy about killing, but for some reason he delegated the chore of dealing with us to the cops and hid behind his facade of respectability. Most crooks knew only one tune, and they liked to play it over and over again. The lucky ones found a way to turn that melody into a soundtrack that lasted their whole lives. Saul knew more than a few tunes — that made him more than a regular crook. He was smarter than the average bear, and that made him more dangerous, too. He might have made jewellery, but he was no jeweller; Saul was a player. He had played all of us and won.

  I got up from the table and paid for what I should have eaten. I left the restaurant and headed towards the airline counter. It wasn’t time for a rematch — it was time to leave town.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  It wasn’t until a month after everything in New York had gone to shit that something pinged on a thought buried deep in my subconscious. I had gotten away clean, but clean didn’t pay the bills. It didn’t take me long to pick up a line on a job out of Detroit.

  At the time, I was sitting in a bar watching two bank employees enjoying a quiet conversation over wine. One was the bank manager; the other was a teller who the manager’s wife didn’t know he was sleeping with. The couple made a habit of leaving the bank within minutes of one another for a quiet lunch break together. I had tailed the couple to the bar and chose a stool on the other side of the room that allowed me to watch their interaction in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar. The manager always left work as fast as possible to maximize his adultery time, but I wasn’t interested in whatever action he could grab on his break. Rushing bred mistakes, and I was looking for any missteps I could take advantage of.

  “Buy me a drink?”

  The slurred words had pulled my eyes away from the mirror and my quiet surveillance. The fifty-something beside me had done it all the hard way. Deep lines on her face mapped out a lifetime measured in bottles and packs. Everything about her was thin; her hair, her body, her eyebrows. She had plucked her face clean long ago and in memoriam, she sketched two thin dark lines that plunged sharply after they passed her pupils. The result was a set of eyebrows that resembled the claws of monsters drawn by children.

  “I’m Joyce.”

  Joyce didn’t need a response to keep talking. I guessed this conversation was a script she recited often.

  “I’ve seen you in here before.”

  That got my attention.

  When she saw that my eyes were on her, she smiled and leaned in closer. “Have you noticed me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You felt it, too, didn’t you? We have some kind of connection.”

  “No.”

  She reversed course on her lean. “That was rude.”

  “No. It was the truth,” I said.

  She put a hand on her hip. “The truth can be rude.”

  “No,” I said, “it can’t. The truth is what it is. Any weight given to it is on the part of the subject.”

  “What?”

  I checked the mirror and saw the bank teller looking at the two of us out of the corner of her eye.

  “Sit down. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Joyce smiled and I forced myself to do the same. “That’s more like it,” she said.

  I signalled the bartender and checked the mirror. The teller had stopped looking.

  “You’re not off the hook, y’know.”

  I looked at Joyce.

  “For being rude.”

  I sighed. “I have been in this bar exactly two other times in the middle of the day. That was enough for you to notice me and size me up as a mark.”

  “That your name?”

  I looked at Joyce again. She wasn’t smiling now, but there was a smug grin. I liked the grin.

  “I think you come here every day and play the same game. You come on to a guy, and if he turns you down, you play the victim until he smoothes things over by buying you a drink.”

  The bartender put a glass in front of Joyce on his way past us. He didn’t need to ask her what she wanted. She took a small sip of what looked like straight rye.

  “How often do you get the date?”

  She looked me in the eye. “I do alright.”

  “How often do you get the drink?”

  Joyce pulled her eyes away from mine and took another sip; this one larger. “More than I get the date.” Joyce looked at me over the rim of her glass. “You think you got me all figured out, don’t you?”

  “I do. You got your drink, so stop pretending I offended you.”

  “You don’t know the first thing about me, mark.”

  I grunted a response and nursed my drink some
more. If Joyce stormed off, the couple from the bank would likely notice. I didn’t want their attention, so I needed Joyce to stick around a bit more.

  “Tell me what I missed.”

  “Where do I start?” She sighed and put down her drink. “What’s the point? Guys like you don’t change your mind. You’re no different than everyone else. You see me in here and you decide this is all I am. You never think that I’m more than this, that maybe you’ve just missed something — something important that would show you the real me. But it’s like I said —”

  I wasn’t listening anymore; I wasn’t watching the couple anymore, either. I was thinking about what Joyce had just said. I stood and put a twenty on the bar. “Get yourself another — on me.” I walked out of the bar and away from the bankers.

  I walked straight to my car and drove back to the motel I had been living out of that week. I powered up my laptop and downloaded David’s slideshow off the website I had backed it up to. I had watched the slideshow countless times looking for information that would help me get inside. This time, I watched it not for angles on how to get inside but for information on the man who had wanted to get us there. I had spent a lot of time thinking about how Saul had conned the three of us and not enough time thinking about how David had conned us. I had missed something — something important that would have shown me the real him.

  I found it on slide twenty-seven. It was an image of an office. David had told us that the offices were locked when they weren’t in use, so he took pictures of the only one he could access without raising suspicion — his own. David’s office had a desk, a computer, some kind of jewellery microscope, and various other tools that were presumably for working on jewellery. The equipment made sense. What didn’t make sense was the money counter in the middle of his workspace. The jewellery equipment was arranged around it. Arranged was the key word. The machine was in the centre of the desk. What kind of jeweller had a bill counter on his desk? Answer: the kind who counts money more than he counts stones. David wasn’t wholly a jeweller, either.

  I thought back to David’s pitch. David had been with Saul for years; he was his number two. David ran the business and waited for Saul to let him ascend to the throne. Saul was like a father to David — words the old man echoed. I didn’t take that to be a coincidence; the best cons always had elements of the truth sewed into them, and I had just found one of the seams. Another seam was David’s motivation. He was willing to be our inside man and put himself at risk because he was tired of waiting for Saul to turn over the business. He wanted it all for himself, and he thought the robbery would make that happen. Why would a man turn against someone who had been a second father to him? I thought about it, but it didn’t really require a lot of thought. People looking to steal were motivated by money, lust, or power; sometimes, it was a combination of the three.

  This job felt like money was at the core. David was Saul’s number two and yet he called a meeting at his Jersey townhouse. The ten of us barely fit in David’s basement. I bet there would have been more room in any of Saul’s bathrooms. However Saul felt about David, he obviously didn’t love him enough to share the wealth, so David decided to take what he thought was his. But he couldn’t do it himself. David hired us to do it for him. That’s not the usual gangster MO. Most times, a coup is Shakespearean in body count; you can’t rest easy in your new seat of power if you think the old king is coming for revenge. David’s play didn’t make any sense; unless the crime was about more than the money — maybe it was about insurance. Something in those safes had the power to neutralize Saul.

  The only problem was David; he wasn’t anywhere close to as slick as he thought he was. His boss figured out what he was up to and put him, and his brother-in-law, underground. The jeweller didn’t do his own dirty work, though; Saul was a real professional, and he had people for the dirty business. He wasn’t about to pull that fancy little pistol to settle his own score.

  The last thought stayed with me. It was something I had heard before. Donny of Donny’s Diamonds had said something similar about his fence. When we pressed him about the name of his guy, he got uncharacteristically quiet. He said his contact wouldn’t shoot him with his fancy pistol; instead, he’d have some Russian do it for him. I had been so focused on getting the diamonds that I ignored what Donny had said. He was talking about Saul. Saul was Donny’s fence. I cursed under my breath. Saul was ahead of me again. I had robbed Donny and then tried to pass his stones off to the same guy who was going to fence everything else in the shitty jeweller’s store. We stood in the street after we showed him the stones and wondered what took an old man so long to get dressed. Saul was likely on the phone with Donny. It took him ten minutes to confirm his suspicions and get his pants on. He had time to work out what came next on the drive over to Mendelson’s.

  We had lost because we had never been playing the same game. Away from the board, I gained some perspective and saw where I had gone wrong.

  Someone had once passed off the words of Mark Twain as their own in an effort to impress me and sound smart. The guy botched the quote, but there had been enough there for me to track down the rest. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. David had put a hammer in my hand and convinced me that there were nails everywhere. Standing in that motel room, I now understood that David had led me on from the start. Everything he had set in motion had been tainted with his own personal machinations. David had thought he had all of the angles covered, but he miscalculated Saul’s intelligence and his capacity for violence. Saul was no old man. He had years on his body, but they were just camouflage; age hadn’t touched the real man underneath. Saul had derailed everything David had orchestrated and left me holding the hammer. Despite the missteps, the realization made me smile. There were no more nails, but I wasn’t ready to put down the hammer. A hammer can do a hell of lot more than hit nails — especially when you stop worrying about being quiet.

  Detroit went better than New York, and when it was over, I banked the money and used the downtime to take a vacation to the Big Apple. I spent a couple of weeks watching the old man walk back and forth from his store at the same times every day. I was seeing the same things I had seen before, but I was looking at them with fresh eyes. I no longer had any illusions about who Saul was, and that changed things. Before I left the city, I made a few trips back to Mendelson’s after hours. I timed my visits between laps of the security company prowl car and used the quarter of an hour to explore the building up close.

  The vacation ended when I got word of a job down South; someone wanted to steal something in Miami and they needed a crew and a plan. The Miami job took longer than I had initially thought it would, but I didn’t mind — it gave me plenty of time to plan what I would do when it was over. I left Florida with more than I arrived with and a contact who had more work he wanted to throw my way. I agreed to come back after I took a vacation.

  “You want to take a vacation from Miami?”

  Arnold Miller was an ex-professional poker player who learned the hard way that he wasn’t very good at cards. Learning that you’re bad at gambling is usually a lesson taught by serious people whose idea of homework is a trip to the emergency room. Arnold should have been an expert at walking on crutches, but he never needed them. In addition to being a bad poker player, Arnold was one hell of a second-storey man. Arnold paid off his loans with stolen jewellery and never saw a reason to go back to the cards. Arnold made a hundred times what he lost, and he invested in a few nightclubs. The clubs were a safer source of income and they made money, but not enough. Arnold could have easily gone back to stealing jewellery, but he was smart enough to know that he was too out of shape to start climbing through windows again. He was a thief who was too old to steal, so he did the next best thing — he financed other people’s crimes. Arnold put up money for almost anyone as long as he got the first cut of the take, plus interest — a lot of interest.

  I loo
ked at the silver-haired man sitting poolside in a Hawaiian shirt. He was a man who had totally embraced Miami, and he had the skin-cancer scars to prove it. “I need to go up North,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ, North? Don’t tell me you ski.”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to visit some friends.”

  Arnold smiled. “It’s cute that you think a guy like you can have friends. People like me are all you get — remember that. And remember to call me when you’re done pretending you’re a regular person.”

  The work in Detroit and Miami had been intermissions; they made me money, but, more importantly, they bought me time — time to think and time to plan. Ten months later, I was ready to go back.

  I called Tommy’s Super Fantastic Funporium and asked to speak with the manager. The call was transferred and went directly to voicemail.

  After a saccharine greeting and a monotone beep, I said, “My name is Irving Steele, and I was interested in booking a private room. I need space for eight plus myself.” I gave some vague details about my party before leaving my number. Jake would get the voicemail and understand the real message immediately. A message from a man named I. Steele let him know what business the caller was interested in. The number of people was the amount to add, or take away, from each digit of the phone number; asking for a party of eight plus myself meant Jake would add nine to every number I gave him. The number was to a prepaid burner phone I had picked up a few hours before.

  Jake called me back two hours later.

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Steele?”

  “My friends call me Wilson.”

  “Long time, pal.”

  “Ten months.”

  “You got something in mind? Or are you looking for work?”