Ball Park

by John Farrow

  They both straightened up, suddenly aware of what they’d agreed to do.

  ‘Thanks, Captain.’

  ‘You bag of yellow piss, don’t thank me. You’re always on my ass about the morals, the fucking ethics. “Don’t bust his jaw, boss, how’s he going to talk if it’s wired shut?” I put up with your crap because you’re smart, and maybe you’re right – always, the times move on. Yet here we are – you messing with me, wanting to roll out the troops and damn the house rules.’

  ‘Time and place, boss.’

  ‘Your time, your place. Just tell me what you need with this scheme of yours. It damn well better work.’

  Cinq-Mars hesitated only a beat. ‘Eudo and Huguette.’

  ‘What?’ Touton demanded. ‘Why? How?’

  ‘Say that again,’ Huguette asked. She already sounded thrilled. From the opposite side of the room Eudo Lachapelle boomed, ‘What!’

  Cinq-Mars spoke up for everyone to hear. ‘I need a couple who won’t look like two cops in disguise. The guy we’re playing would sniff that out in the blink of an eye. I need two people who can pull off crazy as if it’s their normal. I need two people who can pull off being in love as if that’s their normal too. I need you, Eudo, and you, Hu, to be your normal crazy selves. Can you be in love for a day?’

  ‘Excellent!’ Huguette exclaimed.

  ‘Young man, I’m insulted!’ decried Eudo.

  The other three in the room laughed. Cinq-Mars drove home his offer. ‘Your lives won’t be in danger, but you’ll be saving someone whose life is on the line.’

  ‘We’re both in,’ Huguette said.

  ‘Do you presume to speak for me now?’ Eudo asked her.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Of course,’ Eudo confirmed.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Cinq-Mars told them. ‘Be home or be here. Agreed? This will be a daytime job. You might want to sleep tonight.’

  Captain Armand Touton did something he’d not done before. He mimicked plowing his massive fist into the younger man’s gut. Then let his hand fall.

  ‘You realize,’ he reiterated, ‘this depends on the girl prolonging her silence. She won’t hold out forever, if she holds out for even a minute. She can’t.’

  Cinq-Mars conceded the point. ‘I’m aware. Everything depends on her.’

  ‘Go,’ Touton ordered. ‘I need to put a war machine in motion.’

  ‘Blaze of glory, Armand.’

  ‘Depends on who lives. Who dies. Whose career gets washed away. We’ll see.’

  Dieppe Revisited

  (A villa in Tuscany)

  She caught herself on the verge of blubbering. An impulse that betrayed her. She needed to block it off. She could not permit herself to break down when they hadn’t even started on her yet. Quinn clenched her facial muscles and pulled herself together.

  Her guard opened the door. As if to check that she hadn’t vanished as she’d been so quiet.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Quinn’s throat was scratchy, dry.

  ‘Nothing. We’re waiting.’

  ‘For who? For what?’

  ‘Don’t rush it, sweetie.’

  ‘Can you help me out? Please. Just loosen the straps a little.’

  ‘Ask me that again, I’ll cut your tongue out, make you eat it. You want mustard on that? Ketchup? Your own blood, that OK for the sauce?’

  Quinn could tell when someone was trying to act super tough. Growing up in Park Ex, guys and girls often gave it a shot. They were all morons. This woman was a moron. She was not as tough as she talked. Maybe she was frightened by what might occur there. By what she might see. She’d made her point, though. Quinn would not ask a favor of her again.

  Despair, like a drug, diffused through her veins.

  Then, as though her despair really was a drug, she grew weary. Time ached by. With her arms spread wide and strapped in place, her head slumped forward. Then snapped up, waking her. It happened a second time. A lack of air, she thought. A lack of hope. She stayed awake for another hour, then bone-weary and mentally fatigued she allowed her head to slump again.

  Waking up slowly – this time, not a violent, involuntary reflex – Quinn had no idea how much time had passed. She called out to her guard to tell her the time. She wouldn’t. Had she slept for two minutes or forty? The dreams she’d had.

  The spell satisfied her need for sleep. Alert again.

  The guard poked her head in again, to make sure she wasn’t up to no good.

  ‘What if I scream?’ Quinn asked her.

  ‘Nobody will hear you.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘See that roll of toilet paper? I’ll stuff it down your yap.’ The woman held up the roll. Half-used. ‘Sounds good? The hole in the roll? Guys still come down your throat but you can’t bite.’

  Left alone again, she cried. Quinn couldn’t help it. Embarrassed, ashamed, she wept. The woman had insinuated what might happen. She was terrified.

  Her guard came back. She deliberately crossed her arms and stood over her. Without showing sympathy, she gave advice. ‘Sweetie, tell them what they want to hear. Truth, lies, just tell them. Make it up if you gotta. You’re better off saying what they want to hear.’

  She believed her.

  Alone again. Quinn tried to control her torment. It didn’t help to think about her mother, but she did. That made her cry and perhaps it made her stronger, also, somehow. She felt less alone. She wished her dad could save her, but mostly she dreaded him finding out that she was dead. Or worse than dead. She feared the things that could be done to her and tried to halt the way her imagination was bending, but it wasn’t easy. She needed to breathe. Breathe quietly. Easy. Easy, girl.

  She held on.

  Then, movement. Followed by footsteps. The door opened. A man stood there. She didn’t know him. He stared at her. He wore a suit, like a banker. She felt her blood pool into her feet. Quinn glanced at him. She didn’t want to provoke him and looked away quickly. He didn’t look like anything, just a man in a suit. He was an older man. Maybe he wanted nothing from her except that damn baseball.

  When barely removed from boyhood, Captain Armand Touton survived Dieppe. Wounded, exhausted from swimming out to a British destroyer only to see it blow up, he swam two miles back to the beach. Captured by the Germans, he was interned for the duration of the war. A French doctor operated on him for his three bullet wounds without anesthetic and declared him the bravest man he’d met. Near the end of the war, he was force-marched back to Germany from Poland in the dead of winter and was close to dying of dysentery when an American tank rumbled into view. He recovered in Montreal and became a cop after exposing a practice of doctors taking payoffs. Examining physicians declared perfectly healthy ex-servicemen who wanted to be policemen unfit, unless they received a contribution. Touton tore that system down by having military doctors attest to his good health and, further, they announced that any physician saying otherwise would be brought before a tribunal with his license in jeopardy. Armand Touton imposed himself upon a corrupt system and fixed it.

  He’d spent two and a half years as a prisoner of war because the ship he was swimming to had exploded. Only after the war did he learn that the explosions were a pyrotechnical ruse to make the Germans think exactly what he believed: that the ship was finished. Nearly three years of fear and misery because someone pulled a fast one and he fell for it, hook, line and sinker. He nearly sank.

  After that, having learned a hard lesson with horrific consequences, he kept his eyes peeled for smartass human shenanigans. No one put anything over on him again.

  As a cop, his heroics, his bravery, his reformist agenda, his inherent attitude that if the Third Reich couldn’t kill him neither could any crummy pack of hooligans, and the legendary power of his fists that could destroy a man’s will to live with a single blow, made him both a national hero in line with hockey players or rock stars and a moral force within the police department.

  The Night Patrol was being disbanded
so that never again would an officer accrue his significance, fame, or power. Or, most importantly, his independence.

  So. One last hurrah. Why not? He was all in.

  Not easy, to organize a multitask strike force on the fly. He called in favors. Signaled friends. Arm-twisted the hesitant and fired up his loyalists. Rousted the day shift from their evening meals and TV sofas. Pulled patrolmen off their beats. Detectives quit their cases for a night. Any Captain or Loo or Sergeant-Detective with an idea – raid a whorehouse, disrupt legitimate strip clubs, barge into a numbers cellar, collar drug pushers on their rounds, end the festivities in Mafia bars and restaurants with a menacing police presence – was granted a green light to do so. He’d take the heat. Cops took the gloves off for a night, getting back at criminals who’d taunted them, provoking street fights without concern over warrants or arrests or convictions. One warden even issued a command to seize incarcerated henchmen from their bunks and drop them into solitary for the night.

  Every cop made it known that Ciampini was to blame for the whole nine yards.

  Within a seven-minute period, police hit twenty-three establishments – legit and illicit – then doubled that number over the next two hours.

  Lawyers taking umbrage were ignored or asked to get in line behind the other lawyers taking umbrage. Or were arrested themselves on trumped-up charges later to be deemed accounting errors. Officers who signed the arrest warrants were found not to exist.

  Arrested souls were lined up a block long and advised to hold their water. Processing them would take time. Roughly, the better part of the night.

  Giuseppe Ciampini stood in the bathroom doorway, stared, assessed, and then departed. He returned ten minutes later with his jacket and tie removed. He sat on the edge of the bathtub and glared at Quinn Tanner as though that’s all that was necessary to coerce her to collapse.

  She stiffened. Became stronger.

  ‘You sit on the can with your panties off. Why?’ His voice remained calm, neutral. ‘You know?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘Explain to me why.’

  ‘Because what you do will scare me. I’ll go pee.’

  ‘You go pee. What else?’

  Her lower lip quivered.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘We’ll scare the shit out of you, too. That’s why.’

  ‘OK,’ she whispered. Quivering all over.

  ‘Not only scare you.’

  ‘I know,’ Quinn said. Her voice weaker now.

  ‘When you bleed, we don’t mop up. Only flush. Easy.’

  She peed then. The tinkling in the bowl not only embarrassed her, it made her angry. ‘Oh Gawd!’ she cried out. Then wished she hadn’t. ‘Please, don’t,’ she implored him, then wished she hadn’t done that either. To be brave was too hard.

  ‘We don’t have to. We might enjoy, but we don’t have to. I want to know what I want to know. If you don’t tell me, the guys will hurt you. Maybe too much. I cannot control. You met the Rabbit. He wants first crack. Nobody says no if the Rabbit goes at you. You will scream everything to me if I put him on you tonight.’

  She believed him. ‘Don’t. What do you want to know? I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I’ll ask you when I ask you. When I ask, you will answer. First, I want you to understand our situation.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I can save you from the Rabbit. In Italy I have a villa. In Tuscany. You could go there, for instance. I also have one in Sicily. The one in Tuscany is a very nice villa. I could take you there, away from the Rabbit. Are you still virgin, you?’

  Quinn didn’t answer.

  ‘I asked you serious question.’

  She didn’t know where her defiance came from, but it popped out. ‘That’s none of your business,’ she said.

  ‘I knew your mother,’ Ciampini said. ‘She taught your father everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He raised a hand and performed a dialing motion.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Your mother, I respect. She was a safecracker. The best. She taught your father. Then he became the safecracker. Not bad. Not as good as your mother. Later, she became everybody’s mother when she got reformed. To go straight, I respect, but she wanted everybody to fucking go straight. Come on, I have a business. Whacko nut job, your mother. But I respect.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘For sure I don’t lie. Are you the one causing me my trouble tonight?’

  ‘What trouble?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. He didn’t want to say. He stood and moved close beside her. Then closer. He drew his thumb down one side of her jaw to her chin, then two fingers down the other side. He did the motion repeatedly. She tried not to turn her head away. She tried not to show how much she was repelled. She would not give him that. He got no reaction from her. She let him caress her jaw like it was nothing to her. Nothing.

  ‘Answer me this time. Are you still virgin?’

  She could not prevent the tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘Of course not,’ she whispered.

  ‘So. You are a dirty little whore,’ he accused. ‘You admit.’

  She hated how close he was. How his trousers brushed up against the side of her face. She broke. ‘You’re a gangster. A mobster. You’re a fucking monster and you think calling me a whore makes me worse than you?’

  ‘Nothing worse to me than dirty whores.’

  ‘Yeah? I’ll tell you who’s a whore. Your own daughter. She’s the whore.’

  The slap was powerful and came as a shock. He was too close to her, the blow lost momentum when it struck high on her head, not on her cheek. A slap, not a punch. She understood the difference.

  ‘I broke into her house,’ Quinn railed at him. ‘She was fucking another man. Not her husband.’

  He took a step back to hit her a second time, and her head fell to one side as she suffered the clout.

  Recovering slowly, she spoke quietly. ‘Her husband’s saving lives in a hospital while she’s screwing around.’

  He walloped her again. Open-handed, and she took that as a sign. Had he closed his fist she might not be alive.

  He supported his hands on his knees and leaned down to speak at the level of her face, their mouths inches apart.

  ‘Her husband,’ Ciampini informed her, ‘that fungus, that pile of mouse shit on top of dog puke, was outside his house sticking a knife in your boyfriend.’

  Another shock. ‘Why would he kill Deets? I don’t believe you.’

  ‘You want to know? You got a right. Savina found evidence. The doctor thought somebody in his bed who didn’t belong. That fool got jealous. Like he had the right. Came home early. Saw the boy leave the house, the one who maybe helped you climb inside, eh? The doctor sees the handsome boy leave the house, go to the car. He pegged him to be Savina’s lover. When my daughter and me found out this surgeon was playing like a gangster, killing her lovers, we had to discuss. Make a decision. The same way I need to make a decision with you.’

  ‘I saw him come home, after Deets was already dead.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid in your face. He covered his tracks. Drove the knife away to ditch it. Maybe a knife from surgery. Except the stupid man left blood on his shirt – on the cuffs – for Savina to notice. You saw him come back the second time, after you robbed my daughter like you think you had a right. You never had that right.’

  ‘I’m sorry, OK? I won’t tell anybody anything. I promise.’ She didn’t like this. He had all but admitted to killing his son-in-law. How could he release her now?

  ‘Oh sure, I am to believe you in my heart. I walk through my life with my belief in people. Now, I ask to you a question. You will give back to me the answer. We will hurt you if you don’t. Me, the Rabbit, the Rabbit’s men, maybe that whore outside. Then for sure you will tell us the right answer. But it’s too late then, we go on hurting you more. Different ways. Because you did not tell to me what I want to know quick, fast, right n
ow. Put me to the trouble, pay ten times over, then more. Tell to me. Right now. Where’s my fucking baseball?’ Then he said something that took Quinn by surprise. ‘Ezra, him, does he have it?’

  Rather than answer, Quinn said, ‘I know why you want it.’

  She was not denying anything. She was keeping him talking.

  ‘You don’t know the dick in your mouth from the one up your tight ass. Big, small, they’re the same to a dirty whore like you.’

  ‘It proves you killed your old boss,’ she said. ‘The baseball does that.’

  That stopped him.

  Then came a knock on the door.

  Ciampini straightened up, not taking his eyes off her. She returned his gaze.

  She didn’t know if what she said would keep her alive or quicken her demise. Her pulse pounded so hard in her throat she worried she’d gag.

  The knocking persisted, more urgent. Quinn glanced at the door, as though to suggest that Ciampini should, too.

  ‘What?’ Ciampini barked out.

  The door opened a crack. Quinn waited for the woman guard to speak, but a man’s voice parleyed a message. ‘More trouble,’ the intruder said.

  ‘More?’ Ciampini barked back again.

  The voice sounded mildly fearful to be conveying the news. ‘Hell, yeah. They’re hitting restaurants.’

  Ciampini turned, opened the bathroom door, and went out.

  A few minutes later, the woman guard looked in.

  ‘Still alive?’ she asked.

  ‘Still, yeah,’ Quinn said. Clearly, she was breathing.

  ‘Don’t worry, babes, it’s only temporary.’

  Giuseppe Ciampini assessed the situation. His empire was under siege. New York called. News was traveling the pipeline. Everybody around him was hot. He couldn’t permit himself the luxury. He had to stay cool.

  He was seeing for himself what the situation looked like when all hell busted loose.

  ‘Every contact. Inside the police, outside, on the street, call it in. Tell me what they do next before they think it. When, where, who they hit, how. Smack me in the eyeball? I cut off their nuts. One ambush, we stop this in its tracks.’