Carlucci's Edge

by Richard Paul Russo

  “They’ve got to keep their stream of fresh bodies coming in,” Mixer said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Paula said. She remembered sitting with Tremaine in his car at Hunter’s Point, watching the huge crates being unloaded from Jenny Woo’s van. Bodies, Tremaine had said. He’d been right.

  No one said anything for a long time. Paula kept staring at the discs, as if they had some kind of answer for her. Hell, they had the answers for someone.

  “What do we do with it?” she finally asked.

  “We were hoping you would have an answer to that,” Mixer said.

  “Me?”

  Mixer nodded. “Chick paid for this with his life.” He put his hand on the stack of discs, then pushed it toward her. “They’re yours now. You tell us what we should do.”

  Paula didn’t know what to say. St. Katherine put her hand over Mixer’s, looking at Paula.

  “Minor said you would know what to do. He said you would know what’s right.”

  Paula stared at the discs again. She would know what was right? Maybe they should just destroy the discs, pretend they’d never seen them. As soon as she thought about it, though, she realized it would be pointless. There had to be something else.

  “I think we should give them to Carlucci,” Paula eventually said. “We should give him the discs, and tell him what we know. He’s stuck his neck out trying to find out what happened to Chick. And I trust him.”

  “Passing the buck?” Mixer said, smiling. “Let Carlucci decide?”

  “No. He might not take them. But he probably knows more about this than we do. He might be able to do something, use them to stop this shit somehow.” Mixer snorted, and Paula said, “You have a better idea?”

  Mixer looked at St. Katherine, then at St. Lucy. They both nodded, and he turned back to Paula. “Okay,” he said. “We give them to Carlucci.”

  Carlucci stood at the head of the alley, in a warm, steadily falling drizzle, and watched the flames of the barrel fires ahead of him. His raincoat kept his clothes dry, but he wore no hat, and his hair and face were wet. He felt certain the last of the answers were waiting for him down this alley. He didn’t know if that was going to be good or bad.

  He had been home from work for an hour, settling in to watch a movie with Andrea and Christina, when the call from Paula had come. Brief and simple.

  “We’ve got something for you,” Paula had said. “You’ll want this.” Then, before he’d had a chance to reply, “Do you remember where Saint Lucy brought you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be waiting for you.”

  He’d known, then. Something in Paula’s voice. She had the answers. She knew.

  So here he was, in a warm and strange, heavy mist that softened the sounds of the Tenderloin night. Carlucci entered the alley, approaching a barrel fire surrounded by several men and women and sizzling from the mist and a rack of fish grilling above the flames. A man held out a brown bottle, said, “Want a beer, paisan? We’ve got plenty.” Carlucci shook his head, said, “No thanks,” and continued along the alley.

  He passed another barrel fire and slowed, searching the building wall, hoping to recognize the right door. A cloaked figure stepped out of an alcove and stood directly in front of him. St. Lucy. She smiled briefly, touched his arm, then turned back and opened the door for him.

  Inside the building, they didn’t speak. St. Lucy led the way upstairs to the same small kitchen where he’d first seen Mixer after his trial. This time the kitchen was full: Mixer and Paula Asgard, and a tall, beautiful woman who had to be St. Katherine; and now St. Lucy and himself. On the table was a stack of media discs in cases, maybe ten of them.

  “Please, sit down,” St. Lucy said.

  Carlucci hung his coat on the chair, face and hair still dripping. St. Lucy got a towel for him, while Mixer got up and put coffee and tea and a bottle of Scotch in the middle of the table, white ceramic mugs all around.

  “Thanks for coming,” Paula said.

  “Sure.” Carlucci finished drying off, set the towel on the counter, and sat. He tried to read their expressions, tried to guess whether what he was about to hear was going to be good or bad. But he couldn’t tell much from their faces, only that he was in for something serious, and he’d already known that. Then, everyone at the table watching him, it began.

  Mixer and Paula, with occasional help from the two Saints, told Carlucci first where the discs had come from ... and then everything they knew about what was on them—the translations and diagrams, the certainties and the probabilities and the guesses; what New Hong Kong was working on, and how they were doing it. Life extension and autopsies and vivisection and bodies harvested for longevity treatments. Everything.

  Carlucci asked a few questions as they talked, but mostly he listened. He grew increasingly tired and depressed as all the final pieces now came together, shifting into place. It was as bad as he’d expected.

  “You don’t seem all that surprised,” Paula said when they were done.

  Carlucci managed a slight smile. “I’m not, really.” He paused, thinking. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’ve had two rather oblique offers of a couple hundred extra years of life if I would forget about all this and bury a couple of murder cases.”

  “Now you can take them up on it,” Mixer said.

  Carlucci gave a short laugh. “Yeah, sure. I doubt the offers are still good.” He looked directly at Mixer. “I know why the mayor wanted you dead.”

  “Tell me.”

  Carlucci did. He told them about Jenny Woo and the rigged body-bags. “You were bootlegging the body-bags with her and Chick,” Carlucci said. “The mayor knew you and Chick were friends. He assumed you knew what was going on.”

  “I didn’t,” Mixer said.

  “I believe you.”

  Mixer turned to Paula. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  Paula nodded. “I’ve never trusted anyone more,” she said. She reached out and took his hand of metal and flesh, squeezed it gently.

  “There’s more,” Carlucci said.

  “How much more?” Paula asked. “Something about Chick?”

  Carlucci nodded. “Yes, about Chick.” He told them some of what he had learned from Sparks and Tremaine, about Chick and the nephew and the mayor and New Hong Kong.j He even told them a little—leaving out names and details—! of what had been going on inside the police force, the orders to bury cases, the pressure from the mayor.

  “So now what?” Carlucci asked when he was done.

  “We were hoping you might know,” Mixer said.

  “Me.”

  “It was Paula’s idea to come to you.”

  “You looked into this mess when no one else would,” Paula said. “You’ve been working on it from the beginning, taking risks. We thought you might be able to do something with the discs. Or you’d know what we could do with them. Something, maybe, to stop all this.”

  Carlucci didn’t say anything for a long time. He felt lost, unsure if he could find a way through this. The last of the answers had been here all right, but that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. He looked around the table, then reached for the Scotch and filled his cup. “Give me an hour alone to think, all right?”

  Paula looked at the others and nodded. The four of them got up from the table, and left the room.

  Paula and Mixer sat on the fire escape outside Mixer’s room, drinking beer and watching the container fires in the alley below them. The rain had become little more than a light, falling mist, warm on Paula’s skin. The alley was filled with shadows, figures moving in and out of the firelight, music

  • pounding from a boomer across the way, bells ringing some* where out on the street. Loud cracks, maybe gunshots, but they were far away, maybe not even in the Tenderloin. Paula could see white and red lights of vehicles moving along the streets ^ at either end of the alley.

  “What do you think Carlucci’s going to say?” Mixer asked. Paula shrugged. “I almost d
on’t care anymore.”

  “Two hundred extra years,” Mixer said. “Live into the twenty-third century.”

  “Christ, who would want to?” Paula drank from her beer and shook her head.

  “I would,” Mixer replied. “I almost died. Didn’t like it. I I like being alive, and I’d like the chance to keep on doing it as long as possible.” He snorted. “I won’t get the chance, though.”

  “No,” Paula agreed. “Neither of us will. If they find the answer up in New Hong Kong, only the rich and the big sharks will get a shot at it. We won’t get shit.” She shook her head again. “Fuck ’em. Let them have it.”

  Mixer laughed. “Yeah, well... Not everyone’s going to take that attitude.”

  Paula looked at him and smiled. “No, they won’t. That’ll at least make it a little rougher for those rich fucks.”

  In the building across the alley, one floor down and just to the left, Paula could see a man and a woman standing next to each other by the open window. Their shoulders were pressed together, and they were talking, smiling. She heard the woman laugh, then saw her pull back and playfully slap the man’s shoulder. The man grinned, then put his arms around the woman, and they held each other, the woman digging her face into the man’s neck.

  “You love her, don’t you?” Paula asked.

  “Saint Katherine? Yeah, I guess I do.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Paula said.

  “No,” Mixer replied. “But maybe easier than you think. We’ve both got gashes scorched in our brains, and they seem to match in a way. It’ll work out.”

  “I hope so.”

  “What about you and Tremaine?”

  Paula shook her head. “Who knows? All this crap, we’ve never had much of a chance.”

  “This will all be over soon, one way or another.”

  “You think?”

  Mixer nodded “Yeah, whatever Carlucci decides, there’s going to be some kind of explosion. He won’t just let it go. Not tomorrow, maybe not for a week or two, but it’ll happen.” He stared down at the container fires. “And when it does, I’ve got something in mind for Mayor Terrance Kashen.”

  Paula looked at him. “What, Mixer?”

  Mixer shook his head. “We’ll never have to worry about him again. That fuck.” He wouldn’t say anything more.

  Paula looked away from him, back to the couple across the alley. “Chick sure got himself into something this time, didn’t he?”

  “You still miss him,” Mixer said.

  “Yeah. Always will. I don’t know why. He could be a real asshole, sometimes.” She smiled, looking at Mixer. “I guess you know that, don’t you?”

  Mixer nodded. “Mostly, he just didn’t think. He never really meant to be an asshole.”

  “No.” Paula finished off her beer, resisted the temptation to throw it over the side of the fire escape. She set it beside her and pressed her face into the railing bars.

  “I’ve got to start playing again,” she said. “I’ve bailed out on so many gigs lately, Sheela and Bonita are about ready to get a new bass player. Besides, I really miss it. I need it.”

  Mixer put his hands on her neck, worked at the tightened muscles. “Then do it,” he said.

  He continued to massage her neck and shoulders for several minutes, strong and hard with his left hand, noticeably weaker with the right. The pain felt good, loosened the knots, but she imagined it must be hard on his injured hand and arm. She put her hands over his and stopped them. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Everything’ll be okay,” Mixer said.

  Paula laughed once and shook her head. “No it won’t.”

  “No,” Mixer agreed. “It won’t.”

  Paula pressed her face harder into the bars and stared down at the flames below.

  Carlucci sat at the kitchen table and drank bad Scotch, trying to think. The alcohol wasn’t going to help him, but he drank anyway, relishing the burning warmth it sent out from his belly. He stared at the stack of discs. Two hundred extra years of life. It wouldn’t matter if it was five hundred, it would never do Caroline any good. She would still die before she was thirty. The thought of himself and the rest of his family living to be over two hundred years old while Caroline never made it out of her twenties made him ill. He knew it wasn’t logical, that they were all going to significantly outlive Caroline anyway, but it still seemed somehow obscene to him.

  Carlucci sipped at the Scotch, tongue and lips burning. The building was quiet; he could hear faint sounds of movement above him, but not much else. There was flickering light outside, visible through the kitchen window, but the Tenderloin’s night sounds were muted. He felt very much alone.

  What to do. Paula and Mixer and the two Saints wanted his advice. Because he was a cop? Yeah, he was a cop, and he was supposed to find out who committed crimes, collect evidence, and then arrest those responsible. And if he did his job well enough, a lot of those criminals would be tried and convicted and pay the price this society had decided they would pay. More or less.

  But there had been plenty of crimes committed in this business, probably a lot that he didn’t even know about yet, and he couldn’t make one fucking arrest that would ever stick.

  There was no way he could see to make those who were ultimately responsible pay. This time, he could not do his job.

  It wasn’t his fault, he knew that. It wasn’t from lack of effort, or some inadequacy of his. But he still felt ineffectual. There was nothing, it seemed, that he could do.

  He got up from the table and walked to the small window. Leaning against the counter, looking down and out through the grimy window, he could just see the alley below, dark figures moving in and out of the light of fires. Why did they have fires? The nights didn’t get cold. But there was something comforting about the drum fires, and he almost felt like going downstairs and taking up that guy’s offer of a beer. It was a better offer than the ones he’d had from the mayor and the slug. It was an offer he could live with.

  Directly across from him, a large, heavy cat sat on the ledge of a lighted, open window, chewing at its claws. A bright light flared overhead, and red embers showered down into the alley, but the cat wasn’t in the least distracted. Fat cats, he thought. The mayor, his buddies, everyone up in New Hong Kong.

  No, he could not do his job. Which left him with only two options.

  Try to bury it all and walk away; let the mayor and Jenny Woo and New Hong Kong all go on, undisturbed, shipping their bodies, doing their research.

  Or somehow blow it wide open, and hope nobody else got killed.

  Carlucci returned to the table, sat, poured himself some more Scotch, and waited for the others to return.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “GIVE IT TO Tremaine,” Carlucci told them. “Give him everything.”

  Outside the Tenderloin, Carlucci and Paula skirted the DMZ and headed for the Polk Corridor on foot. He’d had too much to drink, and was glad he wasn’t alone; he didn’t trust his own judgment. The drizzle had stopped, but everything was wet. It was well after midnight, and the sidewalk was almost empty. The street wasn’t much busier.

  No one had argued with him. No one had offered any other ideas. They had agreed to turn over hard copies of the text and translation and diagrams to Tremaine—Paula had them with her now, tucked up inside her jacket. They would all, Carlucci included, tell Tremaine everything they knew. And Carlucci had taken the discs, promising to destroy them once Tremaine’s story was out.

  “Do you want the discs?” Carlucci now asked Paula. “For Chick’s music, his videos? No one but me would know.”

  Paula shook her head. “No, but thanks. I was thinking of asking you for them, but it’s not worth the risk. Like you said, anyone finds out somebody has them... whatever music’s on the discs, it won’t really matter that much if I don’t have it.”

  “I’ve thought about scattering them around the city,” Carlucci said. It was a crazy idea that had come to him. “Drop one on the sidewalk he
re, toss one onto a roof in the Asian Quarter, leave another in a coffee shop. All around the city. See what the street does with them.”

  Paula smiled at him. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

  Carlucci shrugged.

  “You’re not going to do it, though, are you?”

  “No.”

  They continued in silence until they reached the Polk Corridor. There was more traffic, now, more lights and noise, more people. The sidewalks were almost crowded.

  “Home,” Paula said.

  They passed Christiano’s, where they’d eaten and talked, where he had told her he would look into Chick’s death. It seemed to Carlucci like a long time ago. Things had changed quite a lot since then.

  Music banged out of a window across the street, and two women were dancing to it in the street, hopping in and out of traffic, smiling when cars honked at them. A man with a see-through prosthetic arm nodded at Paula, who nodded back. Two heavy women bundled in long coats staggered down the sidewalk, cigarettes in hand, both of them drooling. Other things didn’t seem to change at all, Carlucci thought.

  A few more blocks, then they cut down a street to Paula’s building. Carlucci stopped on the bottom step of the porch.

  “You want to come in?” Paula asked.

  “No. I should get home. Andrea will be wondering what the hell has happened to me.” ‘

  “I wish I’d met her.”

  “Maybe someday.”

  Paula nodded and sighed. “Who’d have thought?” she said. “When I first tracked you down and asked you to check out Chick’s murder. It seemed so simple, then. And it turned into such a mess.” She paused. “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  “Don’t be,” Carlucci said. “You couldn’t have known. And it was the right thing to do. Sometimes that’s what’s most important.”