Grab a weapon and attack like my hero, Ulysses S. Grant? It sounded right, except I had always avoided guns—yank one out and the next thing you know it might actually go off—so the closest thing I had to a weapon was my pillow. Grant could have taken Fort Donelson with less, but I wasn’t Grant.
Hide? I considered the bedroom closet, the space under my bed, behind a bureau. I had behaved with admirable stealth so far with my whimpering and rolling and thumping. What was the likelihood of actually making it to the closet without being detected? How do you say “nil” in Portuguese?
Flee? That was the ticket. My window was four flights up, a killer drop, but I could do it, without shoes and not knowing what was in the alley below me. I could leap. What was a compound fracture or two among friends?
But in the middle of all this flipping of options, I suddenly stood and, without weapon or plan, charged to the bedroom door and flung it open. It was a demented move born of righteous anger. What the hell were they doing in my apartment? What the hell were they doing to my stuff? I don’t have much in this world, sadly, and the stuff I had was mostly crap, but it was still my crap, dammit.
The less we have, the more bitterly we fight for it.
The living room I saw through the flung-open door was an utter shambles: books scattered, the cushions of my red couch slashed, the whole floor littered with my things. And in the middle of the room, a thin, weaselly, sparsely bearded kid in jeans and a loose-hanging flannel shirt, more junkie than mob flunky, was rustling inside my fancy-assed bagman bag. No more than twenty, the kid turned his head to stare at me in fear and surprise, like my appearance in my apartment in the middle of the night was some sort of astounding occurrence.
I stepped forward and said, “What the crap are you doing with my—”
I stopped in the middle of my exclamation when his eyes darted from my face to something behind me. I didn’t have time to turn around before the something behind slammed me in the shoulder blades, driving me to my knees. I can just remember kneeling in pain and inexplicably reaching out, as if to some divinity, when I got slammed again, this time in the head.
Then the reception got fuzzy and the television blinked into a test pattern with an Indian’s head in the middle. Everything didn’t so much go dark as disappear, and the world and my presence in it ceased to exist.
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
When I came to, I was alone.
I sat up with difficulty, my head a bowling ball rolling fiercely down a waxed alley. I tried to stand but, halfway up, the rolling ball rammed into a triangle of pins and I sprawled back down onto my hip. I took a moment to hold my head in my hands before I looked around.
My apartment was a fouled mess, like some revival meeting had ripped through it. And in the center of the disarray my brown bag was flopped on its side, its mouth open like the jaw of a dead fish.
I crawled to it and looked inside. It was scrubbed empty, of course it was. There had been a couple thousand dollars of the Devereaux money, and that was now gone, along with everything else I had stashed there. Maybe I had been targeted because of the newspaper headline, maybe a clever thief would have correctly assumed that a bagman would surely have cash in his bag, maybe this was a simple robbery.
And maybe frogs speak Hungarian.
No, my initial impulse had been correct; they had not come for the money, they had come for me. But not to murder, as I originally suspected, instead to deliver a message, the same message Melanie had given me, but this time with all the subtlety of a forearm shiver. And they had come not only to deliver a message. They must have known Jessica Barnes would have brought some proof backing her blackmail threat to her meeting with me. They must have searched her after they killed her, and not finding it on her they assumed correctly that she had given it to me. And they had come to me to find it.
I hadn’t looked in the envelope when Jessica Barnes gave it to me, discretion being a crucial part of my new job, and I hadn’t looked in it after I was shown Jessica Barnes’s corpse, because I assumed it to be just another piece of porn and to look on it then, I somehow thought, would be to dishonor a dead woman. But the time for hiding my head in the sand was over.
I hadn’t looked inside the envelope, sure, but I hadn’t left it in the bag either—I’m cleverer than that. It was in a square brown envelope, like a greeting card, and so I had taken it out of the briefcase and put it in a kitchen drawer with all my other greeting cards: from aunts and cousins, from a few married lawyer-types with bright-eyed children, and from my mother. You may accuse me of being a sentimentalist for keeping such things, but my mother sent me a yearly holiday card and that was pretty much it; putting them in a drawer when they came saved me the burden of reading the damn things.
The kitchen lights were like cocktail forks jabbed into my eyes. The drawers had been left open, the floor was littered with cutlery and towels, spare batteries, loose pens, screwdrivers. And greeting cards, scads of greeting cards, still in their envelopes. I crawled over to the scatter of cards and pulled them into a pile.
Mom. Mom. Aunt Gladys. Mom. The law firm of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, those stuck-up bastards, wishing me a prosperous New Year. My former partner, Beth, all the way from India. Mom. Mom. (Notice, none from Dad: we don’t communicate with greeting cards; we communicate by not communicating.) Mom. Aunt Gladys again. And then a blank brown envelope, no name, no address.
I leaned against the kitchen counter, closed my eyes for a moment to stop the cocktail forks, and then took a knife from off the floor and slit open the envelope, readying myself for a sordid slice of someone else’s sex life.
But it wasn’t porn. It wasn’t even a photograph.
Inside was a card, but not a greeting card, nothing with sweet sentiments and timeless virtues. It was just a blank card, white, with a broad, thick swath of something painted onto the paper. Something dried and dark maroon, something very much like . . .
I was out of my league, I needed help, I needed backup. And I was thinking I knew where to get it when I heard a banging on my door.
Knock knock.
“Open up. It’s the police.”
CHAPTER 21
ROSEN’S
In the midst of crisis, the heart yearns for brotherhood.
Rosen’s was an old-style steak joint on Twenty-Third Street, infused with nicotine and trimmed in red leather, with a surly barman in a plaid vest and a menu that hadn’t changed in decades. While other restaurants threw themselves into each new style of modernist cuisine, with their organic produce and sous vide cooking baths, Rosen’s had kept to the basics: meat, potatoes, a sprig of parsley, all of it doused with butter, accompanied by a mouthful of smoke to dull the taste, and a lowball of hard liquor to wash it down. It was so retro it had burst into style a few years back as a hipster hangout, before all the young hip things realized that Rosen’s wasn’t trying to be clever, it was simply preserved in amber. Since then, the younger crowd had found its way to craft-cocktail lounges and upscale bowling alleys, leaving Rosen’s to the same clientele it had served for half a century: the stiff and the drunk, the blue-haired, the red-nosed.
Above the bar was a sign, SMOKING PROHIBITED, but that was obviously for the benefit of the L&I examiners when they came in for their yearly inspections, because the law it represented was being roundly disregarded. And why not? If it was good enough for the ’50s, it was good enough for Rosen’s.
“Victor, my friend, over here,” said Stony Mulroney, waving his cigarette in the air as he gestured to a large round table surrounded by a red banquette. “You’re just the man what we’ve been talking about.”
“That’s a frightening thought,” I said as I stood before them, bag in my grip. Along with Stony sat three others, two men and a woman, the four of them with their own bags set by their sides, the men’s hats on the table. They were a strange, hard-boiled crew, with their cigarettes and their squat, ruddy drinks, enveloped by a veil of smoke as if it were a cloud of their own plots and schemes.
“Victor,” said Stony, “this here is Hump.”
Hump was tall and slim with close-cropped hair, and ears that stuck out like plane wings. He stood as if to politely greet me. I reached out a hand and he took it, but didn’t shake it. Instead, he squeezed it tight and twisted it around my back as he slipped behind me and roughly patted me down.
“What the hell?”
“Just a precaution, friend,” said Stony.
“I’m not armed.”
“We’re not looking for no gun,” said the third man at the table, a scrawny piece of gristle with a spectacularly bad comb-over and a sour mouth.
“You don’t think—”
“We don’t get paid to think,” said the gristly little man, and in his case I didn’t doubt it. Small as a child, he had a sparrow’s chin, a pinched nose, a broad forehead. His leather jacket fit him oddly, as if he hadn’t taken the hanger out before putting it on. But beyond all that was that comb-over, a sparse swoop of thin strands that barely dimmed the shine off his oversized dome. His comb-over was less attempted fraud and more a piece of performance art. It deserved an ovation, enshrinement in some hall of fame of self-delusion.
“He be clean,” said Hump behind me in a deep baritone with a Southern twist.
“I told you he’d be clean,” said Stony. “Victor doesn’t work for anyone but his own damn self, like the rest of us.”
“Stony tells us you’re the new Colin Frost,” said the woman. Her eyes were coldly blue, her blonde hair was hacked short, her face was pockmarked, her body was all sharp edges and angles. There was something rangy and old-fashioned about her, something of the prairie; she was a straightened piece of rusted barbed wire. “What happened to the old one?”
“Rehab.”
“About time he started stepping,” said the comb-over man. “Twelve steps off a pier.”
“Take a seat,” said the woman. “Have a drink.”
I sat down next to Stony, setting my bag on the bench beside me like the rest of them.
“Sazerac okay?” said Stony.
“I never had one.”
“You’ll like it,” said Hump.
“Hump is a transplant up from New Orleans,” said the woman, fiddling with a new and unlit cigarette.
“I started working for a fellow named Pampy,” said Hump. “We was in the parking lot business. Later I covered the Ninth Ward for a host of them aldermen.”
“Till the water covered it better,” said the little man.
“When he came up north after Katrina,” said the woman, “Hump brought along his favorite drink, the Sazerac, a New Orleans specialty. We’ve taken a fancy to it.”
“Nothing not to fancy,” said Hump.
“What’s it like?” I said.
The woman tapped her cigarette on the table. “Close your eyes and think of the woman who haunts your dreams. You know who she is. Imagine now she’s smoking a cigarette, menthol, and drinking a rye whiskey stirred with a licorice twist. And then she leans forward and kisses you long and soft, swirling her tongue across your teeth.” The woman lit her cigarette, inhaled deeply, let the smoke out in a slow, narrow stream. “That’s a Sazerac.”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Aubrey,” shouted Stony to the barman. “Two Sazeracs for the guest, and another round for the rest of us.”
“Two?”
“Before he entered the business, my daddy was a Marine,” said Stony, “and he taught us never to leave a soldier behind.”
“Nice bag,” said the woman, nodding to my briefcase. “Italian?”
“Yes, actually. I figured if I was getting in the game, I’d do it in style.”
“I knew a man carried an Italian bag that pretty, once,” she said. “He was so proud of it, showed it off like it was a rosy-cheeked baby. He went on endlessly about the quality of the workmanship, the softness of the leather. He got six years.”
“You’d be better off ditching the bag and picking up a sledge or a saw, something useful,” said the little man.
“Why’s that?”
“It’s going to hell is why, the whole business. The money is passing us by, but the feds sure as hell ain’t. We used to have twenty at every meeting, with armies trying to get in. Now there are more behind bars than at the bar. It’s just us left. We’re a dying breed.”
“Don’t mind Miles,” said the woman. “He’s a pisser and a moaner.”
“Sure I piss and I moan, I got what they call a weak stream, but that don’t mean I’m wrong about the business.”
“Well, I sort of fell into this new line,” I said, “and so I’ll take whatever advice I can get. I still have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”
“As soon as we saw your mug in the paper, we knew that,” said the little man.
“Yeah,” I said, “that was unfortunate.”
“Indeed,” said Hump.
When the drinks came, I lifted up the rosy-red lowball with a twist of lemon peel sliding across the bottom and admired the richness of the color.
“Wow,” I said after the first sip. “What’s that taste?”
“It’s the Peychaud’s,” said Hump. “That there’s the bitters. I have it shipped up from home special, so Aubrey won’t be putting that Angostura crap in it.”
“A cube of sugar,” said the woman, “a dash of Peychaud’s, two jiggers of rye, the whole thing stirred and then poured in a glass rinsed with a little Duplais Verte.”
“That there’s the absinthe,” said Hump.
“No,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Hump.
“Take my word for it,” said Stony. “Nothing settles the digestion like a good distillation of wormwood.”
As I drank my first Sazerac, wincing with each sip, Stony made the introductions. Hump handled the wilds of North Philly, hauling his bag from shop to shop, taking the envelopes all through the year and then passing out street money on Election Day. And Hump was the one to see if anyone was messing with the salad.
“Salad?” I said.
“The payload,” said the comb-over man.
“Ahh, yes.”
“Anyone helping himself to the salad, you see Hump,” said Stony.
“I take care of things for a price,” said Hump.
“You and me,” I said to Hump, “we need to talk.”
“And this beautiful rose,” said Stony, “is Maud.”
The woman, looking more like a thorn than a blossom, smoked impassively.
“Maud handles the city administration. If you want anything zoned, anything cleaned up or knocked down, anything cleared or shut down by Licenses and Inspections, anything from the Sheriff, the Prothonotary, the Register of Wills, anything anywhere in city hall, no matter how high up, she’s the one you want to talk to. And she’s a great friend of the mayor’s.”
“I introduced him to his wife,” said Maud.
“It’s a good thing,” said Stony, “that His Honor doesn’t hold grudges. And this sour grape, this bite-sized piece of municipal corruption, is the one and only Miles Schimmeck.”
The little man bowed at the table so that the top of his head under his comb-over glistened in the light.
“Miles handles all levels of the courts: Traffic, Municipal, Family, Common Pleas, Commonwealth, all the way up to the top. If you want influence in a custody battle, in a sentencing, if you want your DUI dismissed or your driver’s license reinstated or your appeal looked upon with favor, Schimme
ck is your man.”
“It sounds like something, but truth is, it’s not so hard,” said Miles Schimmeck.
“You don’t need to tell us that,” said Maud. “Buying a judge in this town is as tough as buying a tomato.”
“Cheaper too,” said Schimmeck. “But they’re so ungrateful when you do it. Hey, if you don’t want the salad, don’t go to the salad bar, I always say. I don’t need the griping. But even them judges, the greediest clan in all creation, are closing down on the likes of me. The game’s changing.”
“The Big Butter’s come to town,” said Hump.
“Big Butter?” I said.
“Big money,” said Maud. “There’s too much of it now.”
I rubbed my hands together. “And that’s a problem?”
“When you have the only canteen in the desert, everybody’s your friend,” said Maud. “Not so in a flood.”
“It’s Noah time,” said Miles, “and none of us now need a fool horning in on our territories.”
“A bagman’s territory is more than just a spot on a map,” said Hump. He took a closed blade from his jacket pocket, flicked it to life, scraped at his thumbnail with the long, shiny blade. “It’s his lifeblood and it needs to be protected. I learned that from my two best teachers, first Pampy and then Katrina.”
I looked around at my drinking companions. Schimmeck was smiling unpleasantly. Maud’s face behind a rising line of smoke was as impassive as the glass in her hand. Hump was staring at me with eyes black as coal. Stony, my new friend Stony, was looking down at the table.
“I guess I know what herpes feels like,” I said.
“It ain’t nothing personal, you understand,” said Hump.
“Actually, it is,” said Miles Schimmeck.
“We can’t afford to have someone like you involved in our business,” said Maud, “taking pieces of our routes, messing up the game for everyone.”
Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Page 12