Baker frowned and cocked his head. Someone else had died, he thought. A woman. What woman? The only woman he knew here was sleeping safely behind him. Was there another woman? ... Tina?
His stomach twisted. “Tina?”
In Greenwich, Tina awoke suddenly from a dream. A dumb dream. She was in this cave, just napping there, and her father rushed in all excited to find out if she was all right, and she said sure. And then he just let out a breath and went out again. Dumb dream. She turned over and closed her eyes.
Baker relaxed. It wasn't Tina. Who was it, Charley? He pressed close to the glass to look down at the deadened street. He couldn't see the sidewalk. Who's there, Charley? Who's moving around down there?
Never mind. He really didn't want to know. Time enough to deal with it when daylight came and there would be crowds of people rushing to work. People in too much of a hurry to notice a man who didn't look quite right. To notice Abel.
For now, Baker felt safe from those who were moving around on the street. Taking positions. And if he was safe, so were they. From Abel. “Count your blessings,” he whispered aloud.
He raised the cup to his lips and sipped. A thin haze of steam coated the window as he did so, blurring the reflection of his face. The image he saw glowed red from the dim light of the digital clock near Tanner's bed. For an instant, he thought he saw Abel's face looking back at him. Slowly, he raised his left hand and covered that side of his face so that only the right half showed. The image of the right half glared back.
“Go back to sleep, Abel.” Baker wiped away the haze and stepped away from it. Then he drew a chair toward the window and sat listening again.
Connor Harrigan had folded a blanket from his trunk into six thicknesses and placed it on the pavement outside the stone wall of the park. The place he chose was in deep shadow.
From one coat pocket, he drew a quart-size thermos of tea and from the other a small binocular of the type used by birdwatchers. These he laid beside his transceiver and he eased to a sitting position.
At that spot, the wall of Central Park South turned north, perhaps thirty yards short of Fifth Avenue. There was a sign there, a green metal legend of the park, that further obscured his position. From it, he could not see the blue Oldsmobile where Tom Dugan now manned the radiophone. But he could see the main entrance to the Plaza and the fountain entrance as well.
It was not quite dawn. The streetlamps still gave more light than the morning sky, and the streets were largely empty. Anyone passing, he thought, would see him as a sleeping bum if they noticed him at all. Harrigan realized idly that the horse-drawn hansom cabs that normally would have blocked his view were gone. He wondered where. Where does one keep a horse in New York? Certainly not at the Plaza. And only a single taxi sat at the Plaza's hack stand, its driver dozing. No doorman could be seen. Up the street, he could hear the grind of a garbage truck.
Harrigan focused his field glasses and studied the cab driver's profile for a few moments before deciding that he was legitimate. None but a trained actor could have simulated the heavy-lidded boredom of a taxi driver during the first hours of a four-to-noon shift.
Nor did Harrigan expect much of a disguise on the part of the visitor he was waiting for. But a visitor there would be. He or she was somewhere near. Probably arguing with a superior. Arguing that it would be better to wait until full morning. Until the breakfast crowd or at least the joggers began moving through the lobby. And the superior would be arguing back. No, he would say. We have to know if he's in there with her. We don't even know if she's the one. Go there and ask the night clerk. One hundred dollars, and all he has to do is tell you whether she's there with a man. Say it's not her you want. It's him. Say you just want to slap a subpoena on the terrible man for not paying child support on the four little girls he abandoned, the dirty dog. Gets them every time.
But that, Harrigan thought, is assuming Tanner Burke is the lady in question. And assuming, even then, that Mr. Baker is still with her. But if she isn't, and he isn't, then the appearance of a visitor would tell one tale at least. It would tell that you, Michael Biaggi, you little bastard, are a man of flexible loyalties. It might tell that you're on a second payroll, possibly even a third.
He was on his second cup of tea when the visitor came. Harrigan grunted in disgust as he once again raised the binoculars. He'd been hoping for Stanley Levy. The appearance of a Stanley Levy would have been definitive. It would have explained Michael's odd nervousness upon learning that the lad whose destruction he did nothing to prevent was the son of Domenic Tortora. It would have meant that Michael had somehow found his way onto Tortora's payroll. The appearance, on the other hand, of a government type would mean that Michael had made a quiet call in that direction. Grounds there for a reprimand, to be sure, but perhaps not the fatal reprimand that a Tortora connection would require. And it would mean that old friend Duncan Peck does indeed have an interest that is something more than academic.
But it was not Stanley Levy, nor was it one of the trench-coat types. It was a man who would need no tale of neglected children to pry loose information from a desk clerk. The man climbing the green-carpeted steps was the tall, uniformed policeman from the faraway Sixth Precinct.
Stanley Levy too was in the park. A mile from Harrigan's station, Levy shivered on a bench he'd just wiped clean with one of the handkerchiefs he carried. Vinnie Cuneo loitered a few feet away at the curb of the Eighty-fifth Street roadway, spitting through his teeth as he watched for the headlights that would turn into the park from Fifth Avenue.
Domenic Tortora's summons had come an hour earlier. Stanley had answered it reluctantly. He'd been very close to Baker. And he'd sensed an increase in activity along the block of hotels that bordered Central Park on the south. Perhaps Baker was about to make a move, or place a call he shouldn't place, or take one of his walks again. If he did, Stanley would have been near. And ready. Had not the summons come. Had he not been forced to wait here with this ignorant lump of shit, watching him expel his excess saliva.
The rising sun had almost touched the horizon. The softly lit sky reflected now off the huge glass expanse of the new American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It sent a dim veil of light across the place where Stanley waited, exposing him. Uneasily, he looked at his hands. It had been almost two hours since he last washed them. Levy fished a dew-dampened cloth from his pocket and began working it between his fingers.
“Boss is comin',” Cuneo muttered.
The headlights of a dark Mercedes swept across the museum as the car turned into the park. The thug waved and gestured in what he presumed to be a posture of vigilance. Levy remained seated.
The car's high beams locked on the larger man's body and homed on it, stopping only inches from his legs. It sat there idling, its tinted windows closed, as if waiting for Vin-nie Cuneo to conclude that it was time to take another post. Time to wait where he could watch the park entrance. Vinnie nodded that the message had penetrated and lumbered quickly in that direction. The door at last fell open, inviting Stanley.
“Good morning, Stanley,” came the curiously gentle voice from inside the car. Tortora was in the driver's seat.
“Good morning to you, Mr. Tortora.” Stanley rose to his feet and eased his body into the sedan's front seat, closing the door behind him. He did not extend his hand. Tortora, he knew, would understand that. Tortora's own hands remained folded on his lap and his face was almost swallowed by the collar of an oversized coat that was too warm for this time of year. He sat sunken into the farthest corner of the soft leather seat, his features gaunt in the blue glow of the dashboard lights. He seemed very small, much smaller than Stanley knew him to be. A white silk scarf that covered most of his lower jaw gave him all the more a look of frailty. And his cheeks and eyes had a powdery cast to them, the somehow hollow look of a man wasted by illness or blanched by too little sunlight.
Stanley Levy had never seen Tortora in the light of day. He was, Stanley knew, only three
years past sixty, but he managed to look twenty years older. Levy knew what his mother would say. She'd say all it took was some cod liver oil every day starting sixty years ago and he wouldn't look like he had one foot in the grave, and besides, he shouldn't be driving his fancy-schmancy car in the damp air instead of being home watching out for his health, which is the most important thing along with a good upbringing. But Stanley had a feeling that cod liver oil wouldn't have helped the way Tortora looked. Maybe years ago it might have, but he was past that. What it really was was the genes. Tortora must have had genes like from hanging judges and witch burners and those monks from the Spanish Inquisition. In picture books with old-time drawings, these guys always looked like Tortora, especially with that white scarf around his face. But that's appearances, Stanley reminded himself. You can't go by appearances. Style is what counts. Next to health and upbringing, style is the most important thing.
Stanley's admiration for Tortora was as total as his loyalty toward him. He could not remember a time it had been otherwise. Sometimes he could not recall a time before at all. He regarded Tortora as a “serious man,” a high compliment in Stanley's mind. A contemplative man not given to rashness. To Tortora, violence was a tactic sometimes unavoidable and always regrettable. It was to be employed only when the gentler forms of persuasion had failed. Tortora was a conciliator. And that was good, Stanley thought. But he never stepped over the line into appeasement and that was even better, and it made him easy to respect because you knew no matter how slow he moved, he'd always get the other guy. The other hoods knew that. That's why they left Tortora alone and never tried much to move in on him. It's respect that does that, he thought. And style.
Tortora, for all his apparent esteem within Greater New York's extralegal community, was an almost delicate man. A bookish man. Dickens was one of his favorites. And Trollope and Jane Austen. But especially Arthur Conan Doyle. Domenic Tortora could recite whole passages from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes without missing a single nuance of dialogue. He knew when a semicolon required a lowered voice and when a pause suggested an arching eyebrow. The escapades of Holmes and Watson were a minor passion that Tortora delighted in sharing with Stanley Levy. Levy remembered a time long ago when Tortora quoted from The Hound of the Baskervilles and he, Stanley, astonished him by replying with the answering line from the text. Stanley couldn't remember when he'd read it, but he knew he must have. And then Tortora found out somehow that Stanley had once been a member of the Baker Street Irregulars. At least that's what Tortora said. Stanley couldn't remember.
Anyway, it didn't matter now. Now there were much darker thoughts on Tortora's mind. He seemed lost in deep thought. Perhaps two minutes had gone by since his greeting before he spoke again to Stanley Levy.
“You know about my son, Stanley?”
Levy shook his head slowly. He knew almost nothing of John Tortora except that he was an embarrassment to his father. A freak, speaking of genetics. One of those bad jokes that God plays on some men in the same way that big athletes seem to have nothing but daughters and business big shots always seem to have sons who are faigeleh.
“I've come from Mount Sinai Hospital,” Tortora said quietly. “My son has been beaten. His face .. . has been devastated. His jaw, his teeth, his nose. There is one cheek so shattered ... so pushed in ... that it will never again come fully to the surface. There are blue holes near his eyes that will always mark him. And his arm ... There is no bone left in one of them. Only splinters of bone like a board that has been crushed.”
“Who did this thing, Mr. Tortora?” Stanley's voice was gentle.
Tortora did not answer. Rather, he sat slowly shaking his head in the manner of a man who knew the answer but could not bring himself to accept it.
”A friend was with my son,” he said finally. “His injuries are even more terrible. It's the boy Warren. Perhaps you've seen him with John.”
“Fat kid.” Levy nodded. “Eats fettuccine by the bucket.”
“No longer,” the older man answered. “Warren is dying. I saw it in him. He has the look of a man who is afraid to live.”
“I'm very sorry, Mr. Tortora.” Stanley cared less for Warren, if that were possible, than he did for John. What was significant, however, was not that these two nudniks were hurt, but that a son of Domenic Tortora had been attacked.
“Mr. Tortora,” he asked again, “do you know the people who did this?”
“Jared Baker did this.” His voice was hard and flat. “Your man, Jared Baker, got away from you and destroyed my son.”
Levy held his breath and watched the old man carefully. “Your man.” What's that supposed to mean? Does it mean he was somehow to be blamed for the harm that had come to John Tortora? Levy slipped his fingers over the shaved handle of the ice pick he wore at his wrist and flicked his eyes back toward Vinnie Cuneo's post. He would not have used the ice pick on Tortora. Not even if it meant his life. But he would use it on Vinnie if Tortora waved for him. Then he would go away for a while until Tortora could get over being upset.
Tortora sensed his unease. He smiled sadly and reached to pat Stanley's sleeve.
”I am not deranged by this tragedy, Stanley. You would be the far greater loss. My son, as you know well, is a swine.”
“He's a kid,” Stanley protested, relieved. “Kids grow up. You could still be proud of him someday.”
“Your sympathy and good will are noted, Stanley. We may now forgo all ritual condolence. The boy was a despicable child and a worse adult. My . . . stature, if you will, only served to make him a bully in the bargain.”
Stanley shrugged and sat back in his corner. He drew a dry handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe away the film of nervousness that had formed on his palms. Although he was mildly surprised by Tortora's assessment of his son, it surprised him not at all that the boy had turned out badly. It's what happens, he thought. It's what happens when a kid grows up without a mother. The kid's mother got tuberculosis or something just as bad, he remembered hearing, just after the baby was born. Ended up in a grave out in Tucson, God rest her. And God only knows what he, Stanley Levy, would have turned into if he hadn't had a mother who looked after him and taught him things like only a mother can show you. Refined things. And how to be nice. And about going to the library and reading books and going to the museums on Sunday. Boys need that kind of teaching just as much as girls. And now look at Baker's kid. It was an especially terrible thing, her losing her mother, because now she has to grow up with one leg all mashed and ugly and she won't have a mother to talk to her about how she's got other things she can feel good about. You watch what happens. Baker's kid was going to get all screwed up too. Who's going to teach her different? Her father? Even if he doesn't die too, which now the smart money has to say he will, he's already all fucked up.
“So what happened? Did John and his pal try to show off by taking Baker for you?”
“They did not seek out Baker. I'm convinced of that.”
“You talked to the kid?”
“To the extent that John was lucid. It seems that they knew Jared Baker was in town and that a denouement might be at hand. John, you'll recall, was a sometime friend of young Andrew Bellafonte, who suffered a similar fate at Baker's hand. He and Warren decided they'd come to town and watch the excitement.”
Stanley frowned. “How did they know about Baker?”
Tortora gestured toward the rear window with his head.
“Cuneo?” Stanley asked.
“Your associate was apparently in the habit of telling them campfire stories dealing with his own thuggery. John's own pathetic standards were such that he was impressed. Most recently, he took to regaling them with tales of Jared Baker and of an imminent clash of titans, specifically Baker and Cuneo. The idiot even showed them Baker's picture.”
“And they found Baker. But you said they didn't seek him out.”
“They didn't. They might have, but something distracted them.” Tortora grimaced. St
anley saw that whatever was coming was especially distasteful to him. “It seems that an opportunity for forcible rape presented itself in the person of a visiting actress named Tanner Burke. They seized her when her evening stroll took her too near the park entrance for her own safety. They tormented her, I'm sure, just as John liked to torment birds and cats as a boy.”
“Except then Baker shows up,” Stanley offered.
Tortora didn't answer. He sat back, waiting. It became clear to Stanley that he was expected to draw some penetrating conclusion.
“Am I supposed to call this?” he asked.
“If you have a thought, I'd like to hear it.”
“You say Baker and the kids really didn't know each other?”
“Baker knew nothing of John's presence in New York and probably not even of his existence.”
Levy turned up his hands. “That only leaves two ways,” he answered. “One, Baker just happened to be taking a walk himself and he heard the action where Domenic Tortora's son just happened to drag this new bird he found. You don't like that answer because it's a million-to-one shot. Two, Baker knew the girl and it's her he was tailing. It's still long odds that the son of a man who's been on his ass shows up out of nowhere, but at least you've got a reason for Baker to be there. Those odds I'd make maybe a half-million to one. If you have to bet, the way to go is, Baker knew the girl.”
“How much of your own money would you bet?”
“Not a dime.”
“Where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us that you were wrong about Baker not knowing the kids would be there. He was looking for them. Girl or no girl, he was going to dust them in order to get at you. Look how Baker marked him. It sounds like he took his time. Maybe Baker wanted to leave you something to look at for the next twenty years. If this is true, you still want to find out how he found them, because the way you talk, the kids were in the park on impulse. What that leaves is that they were set up. If so, the finger would point to Cuneo, except he couldn't set up a pup tent.”
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