“I didn’t ask for forgiveness.”
“And yet here you are.”
“I need the help of a lawyer.”
“I don’t doubt it. Apparently, one of your gang is being followed by the police. I got picked up just for talking to you.”
“Next time go out the back. I need a lawyer who can help me with a delicate situation, and Stony suggested I come to you.”
“How delicate?”
“There’s a girl involved.”
“Funny how in delicate situations there always seems to be a girl involved.”
“This one needs help.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Immigration.”
“Is she legal?”
“Would there be a problem if she was legal?”
“I could give you the name of a good immigration lawyer.”
“I don’t need the name of a good immigration lawyer. I have nothing but the names of good immigration lawyers.”
“And all the good immigration lawyers have told you it’s hopeless?”
“Nothing to be done.”
“You must be pretty desperate to seek help from the likes of me. Did she do anything criminal, this girl?”
“Beyond overstaying her visa?”
“Yes, beyond overstaying her visa.”
“No.”
“And no one else in the Brotherhood can help?”
“This is federal.”
“Ah, yes, now I see. I’m not good enough for your club, but I’m plenty good enough to put myself and my contacts on the line for some girl I’ve never met.”
“She’s not just some girl.”
“They never are, Maud, are they?”
“No.”
“You stuck me with the check,” I said.
“Funny how that happened.”
“You’re not even sorry.”
“I don’t traffic in regrets.”
“You’re not even telling me how wonderful she is, how raw her deal is, all the good I’ll be doing.”
“Would any of that matter?”
“No.”
“You might have a future after all.”
I looked at her closely. Strong and wary, she’d be a bad enemy and a good friend. I had enough of the former and too few of the latter.
I took a pad and pen out of my desk and leaned forward. “Okay,” I said. “Tell me what I need to know.”
The girl’s named was Lyudmila Porishkova. She had slipped into the country on a tourist visa and, after developing a taste for filter cigarettes, American football, and hamburgers, had decided to stay. It’s not so hard to stay hidden in the shadows, and all would have been fine except someone at the job she worked, a travel agency where she helped book tourist trips to the fleshpots of Belarus, had notified Immigration. Lyudmila had just been promoted from travel-agent trainee. Nothing ruffles feathers like a promotion. The immigration cops arrested her in the midst of booking a week’s sojourn to Minsk for a bald-headed computer programmer from Cherry Hill.
I knew how it would go if I played it straight, like a lawyer. I would have called what contacts I had, made an appearance at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office on Callowhill, schmoozed with the agent in charge of Lyudmila’s case, shared drinks with the supervisor at his favorite bar in the Tenderloin, a joint with bored go-go dancers and pictures of busty burlesque queens in the bathroom. I might have even headed out to the ICE’s contracted detention facility in Lords Valley to talk to the detainee herself. I would have run through the motions, and dutifully kept my hours, and written my letters, and made my petitions, and appeared on Lyudmila’s behalf before the immigration judge, all the while knowing there was nothing to be done. See, Maud would never have come to me if any old lawyer could have done the job. The hearings had gone as could be expected, the deportation order had been signed, Lyudmila’s exit chute had been dusted and greased. Lyudmila was on her way out, never to be allowed to return, unless . . .
“I need something,” I said into the phone after Maud left the office.
“Victor, sweetie, that’s not how it works,” said Melanie Brooks. “I call you when I need something, not the other way around.”
“You’ve given me a job to do.”
“Yes, and you’re being paid well to do it.”
“But I need your help to finish it up.”
“Don’t be wearying, Victor.”
“I’m starting to get a whole new appreciation for Colin Frost’s pernicious habit.”
“What is it you want?”
“There’s a woman named Lyudmila Porishkova who is being held for deportation by Immigration in Philadelphia. I need her released.”
“Let me think about it. Okay, I thought about it. No.”
“Melanie.”
“The Department of Homeland Security is very touchy and very expensive.”
“That’s why I called you.”
“Did you talk to the sister?”
“Yes.”
“And you received the register?”
“I’ve begun working my way down it already. It’s going to be expensive.”
“If you need the bag replenished, we’ll set it up. Stay on the register and off the sister. Do you understand?”
“Oh, I understand.”
“Don’t be naughty, Victor. It’s for your own good. Now do you have any news for me?”
“The police are interviewing the Congressman in a few days about Shoeless Joan.”
“We know.”
“I expect he’ll lie, so it will help if I have an idea of what lies he tells them. I was picked up by the police yesterday and expect to be questioned again.”
“I’ll get the information to you as soon as I can.”
“I’ll say what I can to cover him, but I won’t cover for a killer if it comes to that.”
“Of course not.”
“And don’t think I’m not going to protect myself. I’m going to protect myself at all costs, and everyone should know that.”
“It’s assumed, Victor. I must say, it’s like you were born for this business. Anything on Bettenhauser?”
“Not yet, but I have a lead that I’ll be able to follow if you can get someone to talk to someone at ICE.”
“How are you doing, Victor? Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Entirely too much.”
“And dressing better, also, if the receipts from Boyds are any indication.”
“I’m thinking of getting some new suits, too.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. My partners continue to be impressed despite the problem with the newspaper. If this all works out, we’re thinking of promoting you from temp to full-time contract employee. That would require you to deal with some very impressive people. And impressive people don’t like unimpressive suits. But until then—”
“Be a good boy and do as I’m told.”
“You always were the cleverest one in study group. Not the smartest, mind you, but the most clever. Now what was that name again?”
“Lyudmila,” I said. “Lyudmila Porishkova.”
When I hung up, I leaned back and propped my shoes against the edge of my desk. If I’d had a cigar, I would have lit the thing and polluted the whole of my office with its choking stench of arrogance. Timothy had pointed out that I still didn’t know what I wanted to be in the world, but even so, just then I was feeling pretty good about things.
Someone was coming after me, sure, and I was being set up hard for a murder, sure, and none of that was salutary, sure, but they don’t come after the pilot fish, do they? And it wasn’t like I wasn’t playing the game like a master myself. Here I was, letting others do the hard work for me, while I sat behind the scenes like a fat duck in a still pond. I had Duddleman inve
stigating the Jessica Barnes murder without my fingerprints on anything she did. I had Stony Mulroney working to get me in good with the local union. I had Reginald acting now as my snitch in the Devereaux manse. And now I had Melanie, my ostensible boss, working to save some poor Russian immigrant from the feds so that I would end up owed a favor by a personal friend of the mayor. It had taken me a while, but eventually, like a girl with bouncing braids maneuvering the shifting space between double-Dutch ropes, I had found my rhythm. If just then I had been gripping a lit cigar in my teeth, I would have pulled it from my mouth, blown one large circle, and then sent a series of smaller through the ever-widening hole.
There wasn’t much to being a bagman, I was learning. It was just a matter of knowing the rules.
CHAPTER 27
THE BRIGGS MULRONEY RULES FOR ASPIRING BAGMEN
It is not enough to pick up the money and lay it down again. It is not enough to run your errands to the letter. As with every worthy piece of corruption, there is an art to it all.
“My father, may he rest in peace, he taught me the trade,” said Stony Mulroney, “and the rules that went with it. Are you drinking that or watching the ice melt?”
We were at the table at Rosen’s, just the two of us, in the otherwise empty establishment. Stony leaned forward in the booth, his hat on the table next to my new trilby, his glass half-full, his cigarette lit, his sharp voice whetted to a knife’s edge. I lifted my glass, swallowed an oversized gulp, winced. This was not a Sazerac, but an old-fashioned concoction of bourbon, sugar, and bitters over a single cube of ice. It tasted like hard cases and backhanded deals and the moist environs of the Sternwood conservatory.
“In the old days, before Hump showed up in our fair town with his Sazeracs,” said Stony, “this is what the old men drank when they discussed their murky trade. My daddy brought me here back in the day when I was just a boy, brought me here to meet the crew. I can still see all the old scarred faces, beneath dark fedoras with snap brims and feathers in their bands. They all knew Frank, they all screwed showgirls from the Latin Casino, they all drove Cadillacs. In a town of nobodies they were somebodies, and this is what they drank. It seems right to drink the old drink, given the nature of our enterprise today.”
“Enterprise?”
“Order us both another,” said Stony. “Maybe two, to be efficient.”
“You in a rush, Stony?”
“A man the size of me is bound to die young and leave an impressive corpse; I don’t have time for half measures. And neither did my father. In his world there was a way to do a thing, and he passed the way of it on to the rest of us. Now, since you’ve stepped into our world, for your felonious edification I’m going to give the way of the bag to you. Eight sturdy rules in inverse order: the Briggs Mulroney Rules for Aspiring Bagmen. And don’t take notes.”
“Is that one of the rules?”
“That’s just common sense.”
And then he laid them out for me, one by one, each illuminated with legends of the old days, when dinosaurs with cigarettes and cruel hats roamed the streets. And here they are for your own sweet edification, illuminated with stories of my own: the rules of the game, as passed on from Briggs Mulroney to Stony Mulroney to Victor Carl to you.
Rule Eight: A bagman’s tools are twofold: greed, to fill his bag, and fear, to keep his grip.
The handoff is to be smooth, quiet, like something out of a spy novel. The instructions in the letter are explicit. An envelope, folded into a newspaper, passed like a football on a Statue of Liberty play: look left, handoff right. The recipient is a union leader with a sterling reputation for integrity; it is as important to us as to him that this reputation be maintained. He insists we keep our distance. The deal is as simple as dirt.
I stuff the envelope with the stuffing from my bag and use a rubber band to keep the envelope inside the paper. I spot him walking toward me on the street. I know him from his picture in the paper. As he approaches, I turn my shoulder. We brush up one against the other and, quick as that, in the crook of his arm, the paper now rests. He moves on, I move on, the deal as neat and clean as an obituary.
When it’s done, I turn and watch him go. He walks away from me with calm, unhurried steps. He deftly slips the paper from his left arm to his right. He turns a corner and disappears from view. This job couldn’t be easier.
A few minutes later I step into a Starbucks, order an overpriced coffee, black, let it burn the roof of my mouth as I look for a seat. I find one at a small table, across from a man reading a newspaper. I place my bag on the floor, toss my hat onto the table, sit down heavily.
“I actually like the coffee,” I say. “It’s the rest of it I hate, the whole grinding Seattle vision crap that pisses me off.”
“Okay,” says the man at the table without looking up, letting me know how welcome the disturbance is.
“I’d pay more, actually, if they put it in one of those blue paper cups they give out at Greek diners. You know what I mean? ‘We are happy to serve you.’ I’d pay more if they just stopped being so stinking precious. And you want to know something else? In the whole damn book, there’s only one boring character. Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Stubb: great, great, great, great. Not to mention the whale. But upright Starbuck? Yawn. They should have named the place Stubbs. I’d go to Stubbs for coffee any day. Starbuck was a scold and a prig.”
The man looks up now, jaw muscles working. “What are you doing?” he says.
“Did it go off okay, our little switcherooni? I felt like I was in a 1930’s movie. I could even see the camera pans and the cuts as we approached. ‘Get the paper,’ says the director. ‘Now the hand.’ ”
“This defeats the whole purpose, you fool,” he says, wrapping his paper and standing.
“Don’t make me shout after you as you rush to the door,” I say calmly. “That’s a scene that’s not so easily forgotten.”
“What do you want?” he says through grinding teeth.
“To stop pretending to be what we’re not. I’m the guy who brings the money. You’re the guy who gets the money and delivers on his promises. I’m the guy you face if you don’t deliver. And later, when it goes as we both hope, we get to do this all over again. The raw truth is quite bracing, isn’t it? I’ve always thought meeting face-to-face is so valuable.”
“I have to go.”
“Well, if it can’t be avoided. But we’ll see each other again, I’m sure.”
I give him a quiet toast with my coffee as he storms away. He trails anger like a cloud, causing a few glances in his direction. Bad form. I take a sip of the coffee. It is a bit cooler now and I can taste the dark bitterness of the roast. I have to admit, despite it all, I do like the coffee.
Rule Seven: The street is our stage, the bag holds our tricks, and we never reveal our secrets.
Outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building on Callowhill Street, I’m in full battle regalia: beige raincoat despite the sunny skies, heavy brown diplomatic bag, my gray trilby. When I catch my reflection in a storefront, it’s like Inspector Gadget is on the loose.
“Did you get the time right?” says Maud, standing next to me. She is tall in her heels. Bright-red lipstick marks the filter of her cigarette.
“I got the time right.”
“Someone is late.”
“It’s the federal government.”
“That’s right,” she says. “How much did it cost?”
“Plenty.”
“I’ll pay whatever it is.”
“It’s covered.”
“Don’t be a fool.”
“A hundred thousand dollars,” I say.
“Well, if you’re covering it.”
“Yeah.”
“How did you do it?”
“A single phone call.”
“To whom?”
“Oh, Maud, you kn
ow better than that. Let’s just say I had one Monopoly card and I played it.”
“For me?”
“For Lyudmila. Poor little thing. It feels good to do good.”
She stares at me sideways before a mordant laugh kicks the smoke out of her lungs.
We’re surrounded by families of all colors and shapes waiting outside the office. There are chairs inside, but there is no smoking and so we are all outside in a choking cloud of nervous hope. The door opens and a young man walks through it to be enveloped by his family. An older woman is hugged by her son. A couple hurries out, arms around each other.
And then: a tall, lovely woman with bobbed black hair and lips like ripe peaches. She steps out slowly, hesitantly. Her heels are spikes. She towers over the waiting families. Maud drops her cigarette and twists her shoe to kill it. The woman steps toward Maud, and Maud steps toward the woman until they are face-to-face, staring one at the other, not embracing in a grateful hug, not touching in any way, but staring stares alone that could rip the clothes off lesser figures.
Before they walk off, side by side, still not touching, but leaning one toward the other as if from some accelerated gravity, Maud comes over to me. She raises her eyebrow as if to say it is all just a little thing, but even the act itself is an acknowledgment of its falsity. And then she leans forward and kisses me on the lips and it is as startling as being kissed by a cobra.
“See you Thursday,” she says.
Rule Six: No matter the size of the cake, the bagman always takes his cut.
“We’ve got such plans for the organization,” says Hanratty, leaning back at his desk. He is big and bald and wears a blue-and-yellow tracksuit with three thick lines down the side. Scattered about the office are racks of basketballs, peaks of neon traffic cones, bags of soccer balls. The envelope remains untouched on his desktop. “We’re spreading out, expanding our footprint and offerings. There are so many kids we still need to reach.”
“The Congressman has always been supportive of your good work.”
“We know that, and are quite appreciative. But things are in flux.”
“Flux?” I say.
“An organization like ours, it has two choices: we grow or we wither. And our mission is too important for us to wither. We can’t do business anymore as if nothing in the future will change. As our footprint grows, so does our influence. We’ve been speaking to Mr. Bettenhauser’s people.”
Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Page 16