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Contents
Title Page
You Were Never Really Here
Also Available from Pushkin Vertigo
Copyright
Joe felt something behind him. It was the presence of life and the coming of violence, and that anticipation, that sensitivity, enabled him to turn in time and catch the blackjack on his shoulder, which was better than taking it on the back of his head.
Also, it was his left shoulder and Joe was right-handed, and, turning around completely, he was able to grab the man’s wrist before the blackjack came down again, and they were face to face, the same height, and Joe immediately drove his forehead, like a brick, into the bridge of the man’s nose, shattering the bone, and the man, his eyes blinded by red pain, began to fall, and Joe brought up his knee, brought it up hard, without mercy, into the man’s jaw, breaking it.
The man went down completely, strings cut, lifeless but breathing.
Joe quickly swung his head to the left and the right. He was in an alley wide enough for a car. He’d come out of his flop hotel’s service entrance in the middle of the passageway, and no one was walking by or had stopped at either end. No one had seen. There was street light coming from the avenue, but the alley was mostly in shadow.
Joe wiggled his left arm, trying to get life into it, the blackjack had numbed the whole limb, and he dragged the body behind a dumpster and quickly went through the pockets of the light coat, a blue windbreaker. The fallen was a pro. No wallet. No ID. Just keys and a money clip with about two hundred dollars. But there was a cell phone. So he wasn’t a total professional. He didn’t anticipate losing, and he didn’t anticipate being hunted, like Joe did. Joe never carried a cell phone.
Joe looked at the blackjack. Police issue. Probably a bent cop from the Cincinnati suburbs doing a little moonlighting in the big town, where his face wasn’t known. Whoever had sent him didn’t want Joe dead. Not yet, anyway. They wanted to bring him in, talk to him. There was probably a partner waiting in a car, waiting for a call. Joe would have been spooked by a car in the alley, so this one had hidden in a cove of a doorway. He’d sap Joe and call his partner. They’d throw his body in the car and bring him to the boss. That had been the plan. It didn’t work.
Joe looked at the last text message sent: “Keep engine running. We’ll want to move quick.” “Copy” was the reply. Probably two bent cops.
The alley went one way. That meant the partner would be to the left, idling, so he could pull right in, not circle the block. Joe hesitated. He was ready to leave Cincinnati. He had done his job. Extracted the girl. He didn’t need to take out the one in the car. His informant had given him up, gave them his hotel, even his use of the service entrance, but that’s all they could have gotten, because that’s all the informant had.
Joe thought about what was in his room: a toothbrush, a new hammer, a bag, and a change of clothes. But nothing important, nothing identifiable. He had been heading out to get something to eat and was going to leave tomorrow, but he should have left as soon as the job was done. Sloppy, he thought. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Soon the one in the car would come looking. Joe didn’t want any more fights, because you didn’t win every fight. Joe figured they just wanted to know how he had gotten to them and if others would follow, and then they would have killed him. But he didn’t need to take them all out because they wanted information. He was just one man. Not the complete arm of justice. I did enough, he thought. The girl is damaged but free.
So he ran the opposite way down the alley, darted his head out fast, looking to his left and right—there wasn’t a third man guarding that end. Nobody sitting in a car, nobody planted in a doorway trying not to look like a plant. He stepped out into the street, started to walk. It was late October and there was a sweet smell in the air, like a flower that had just died. He thought about a time when he’d been happy. It had been more than two decades.
Then Joe spotted a green cab. He liked the cabs in Cincy. The cars were old and the drivers were old. It felt like the past. He got in.
“Airport,” he said, and he fingered the money clip. He’d give the driver a nice tip.
Joe lay in bed in his mother’s house. He thought about committing suicide. Such thinking was like a metronome for him. Always present, always ticking. All day long, every few minutes, he’d think, I have to kill myself.
But in the mornings and before going to bed, the thinking was more elaborate. He knew it was a waste of time—it was going to have to wait till his mother passed—but he couldn’t stop. It was his favorite story. The only one he knew the ending of for sure.
The past few weeks it always involved water. His plan of late was to slip into the Hudson at night, during high tide, by the Verrazano. The currents were strong, and he would be taken out to sea. He didn’t want anyone to be bothered with the body.
Once, when he first got out of the Marines, long before he had gone back to live with his mother, he had nearly done it. He had been processed out of Marine Corps Base Quantico and ended up in a motel near Baltimore, drinking by himself for a few days and going to a movie theater, seeing the same three pictures over and over. Then one night in the motel, he had taken a lot of sleeping pills and wrapped his head in a few layers of black plastic bags, duct-taping them around his neck. He felt himself diminishing, a shadow around the edges of his mind, and he heard a voice say, It’s all right, you can go, you were never really here.
But then he clawed off the bags and pumped his own stomach. After that, the story never involved leaving a body behind, leaving a mess behind. That was shameful. When it was time to be removed, that’s what it would be—a complete erasure. So the sea would have him. It wouldn’t mind one more piece of waste. He had nowhere else to turn.
He heard his mother downstairs and got out of bed. He did one hundred push-ups and one hundred sit-ups. His morning ritual. That, walking a great deal, and squeezing a handball as often as possible was all he did for exercise. He especially liked his hands to be strong. It was good in a fight. You break your adversary’s fingers, you have an immediate advantage. It frightened even the hardest men to have their fingers snapped, and in a fight, like a dance, you often held hands.
So his hands were weapons, his whole body was a weapon, cruel like a baseball bat. Six-two, one-ninety, no fat. He was forty-eight, but his olive-colored skin was still smooth, which made him appear younger than he was. His jet-black hair had receded at the temples, leaving a little wedge, like the point of a knife, at the front. He kept his hair at the length of a Marine on leave.
He was half-Irish, half-Italian. He had a long, twisting Italian nose and eerie Gaelic blue eyes, set back and deep, Italian but for their color. It was a mournful face, a self-i
nvolved face, with a thick forehead, another weapon, and his jaw was too big and long, like the spade of a shovel. When he passed security cameras he tucked it in. The black baseball hat that he always wore hid the rest of his face, which in its entirety was not ugly but not handsome. It was something else. It was a mask that if he could tear off he would. He was aware that he was not completely sane, so he kept himself in rigid check, playing both jailer and prisoner.
He put on pants and a T-shirt and went down to the kitchen for breakfast. His mother sat in her chair by the window in her housedress and slippers, waiting for him, patient and still, intent only on watching the door for his arrival. His plate was set. She was eighty, very short now, and had the look of a Mediterranean widow. In Genoa, where she was born, she’d be dressed in black, the widows there turning into nuns of a sort during the quiet, protracted ends of their lives.
Her silver-gray hair was piled in a knot on her head, and she wore large glasses that took up most of her sallow face, which was round and sad. Her hair, uncut for years, when set free, reached all the way to her waist. Joe had seen her once in the bathroom in her housedress—the door was slightly ajar—and her head was in the sink, she was giving herself a shampoo, and then she had risen up and thrown her hair back, like a young woman, and the hair snapped out in an arc like a long silvery rope. It struck him as magnificent. She had been beautiful once.
She got up slowly to pour his coffee and make his eggs. Behind her glasses, she looked at him with love, a slight flicker in her eyes, but she didn’t smile. That look was the only joy in his life and her only joy as well. They hardly ever spoke.
As he did every day around 2 p.m., Joe left their house in Rego Park and went for a walk, tacking thirty blocks west, following a different meandering route each time but always running parallel to Queens Boulevard. Eventually he would pass, at Sixty-third Drive, Angel’s #1 Bodega, which was Joe’s answering service. If McCleary wanted to get in touch he called Angel, and Angel, following Joe’s instructions, each time put the same sign in the window, with the same misspelling, for Joe to see: “Egg and Bacons Sandwich $1.50.” Angel didn’t know Joe’s name or where he lived, which kept Angel safe and which kept Joe safe.
Joe was thinking, though, that he needed a new service. The only time he interacted with Angel, after their initial meeting, was to buy a pint of milk once a month, leaving five hundred dollars hidden in the refrigerator. Sometimes Angel’s son—a fourteen-year-old named Moises—was there when he bought the milk. Moises, tall and skinny, ready for his last bit of growth, was a smart kid, noticed everything, and Joe felt that Angel had told the boy something, though he warned him not to.
Then a week ago, just before he left for the Cincy job, Joe was going into his mother’s house, using the back entrance off the alleyway where each house had a small stand-alone garage. Joe never went in the front door, and hardly anyone ever saw him going into the house—the alleyway was mostly deserted, and Joe had a way of moving quickly and nearly invisibly—but as he unlocked the back door, removing the small cardboard wedges that let him know if the door had been opened while he was gone, he felt something and looked behind him.
Moises had just come onto the second-story fire escape of a house across the alley and was looking right at Joe. Then Moises’s friend came onto the escape—they were going to smoke cigarettes—and Joe slipped inside. With all the thousands of dwellings between Joe and Angel’s bodega, it was bad luck that Moises should have a friend who lived just across the way.
The signal to call McCleary was in the window, but Joe went into the shop to talk to Angel. He tucked in his shovel-jaw and lowered the brim of his hat so that the security cameras couldn’t record his face. He was wearing a tan Carhartt jacket, a blue T-shirt, jeans, and steel-tipped work boots. All his clothing was old and worn. He looked like any of the thousands of laborers and construction workers who alternately build up and tear down the city. It was good cover.
Angel was behind the deli counter, and when he saw Joe he stiffened, looked nervous. It wasn’t the end of the month. It wasn’t time to get paid. They went into the back room. Angel was short and fat and looked like a liar, but he was a good man, which was why Joe had chosen him.
“Did your son tell you he saw me?” Joe didn’t make small talk. The more he talked, the more someone might know him, and the more someone knew him, experienced him, the greater the chance they could be damaged.
Angel instinctively cowered, his back against the metal shelving of extra stock. He hesitated. The five hundred dollars a month was a blessing, but maybe too good a blessing.
“Yes, sir,” Angel said, coming out with it. Joe seemed to warrant a military response, though Angel had never served.
“Did he tell you where he saw me?”
“No, sir, I told him ‘Don’t tell me.’ I knew you wouldn’t want me to know. My son don’t mean to see you. He’s a good boy.”
Joe looked at him. Angel wasn’t lying. Joe gave a slight shrug of resignation and closed his eyes slowly and gently, almost as if he was going to fall asleep standing up. It was a semaphore, Joe’s way of saying goodbye. Then he left the back room without speaking, moving in the liquid way that he had, and he headed for McCleary’s. He didn’t plan on seeing Angel ever again. It was no longer secure.
Joe sat across from McCleary, with McCleary’s scarred, battered desk between them. McCleary had a tiny, cramped office on the top floor of an old building on Thirty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. He was on a long, winding hallway of third-tier accountants, insurance agents, real estate lifers, coin experts, and Medicare dentists. His window looked onto the air shaft, with a fraction of the sky visible above the roof of the adjoining building. Joe glanced at an odd series of clouds. They looked like the X-rays of rotten teeth.
McCleary was finishing up a call—he had been on the phone when Joe came in—and, using a pencil, was pushing around the dead cigarettes in his ashtray. They were twisted and tormented-looking, crushed little worms. Every few seconds he said, “Yeah … yeah … yeah.”
Many of the big security outfits and white-shoe law firms used McCleary as a middleman for the blacklist freelancers. This kept things off their books, showing only a payment to McCleary, who was clean. Jobs that called for illegal tactics were then farmed out by McCleary to men like Joe, who were paid in cash, and a very specific kind of job was almost always given only to Joe.
McCleary was in his mid-sixties, an ex–state trooper and ex-PI with the hideous, vein-ruptured nose of a whiskey drinker. He was a big, loose man gone to seed. His cheap gray suit hung on him like jowls. His fat sausage fingers were clubbed—his yellow fingernails floated above the tips of his fingers, a hard brown substance, from beneath, pushing them up. No oxygen reached the end of McCleary’s limbs. He had been smoking cigarettes longer than he had been drinking whiskey. Joe tortured himself, imagining what McCleary’s toes must look like. He thought of putting them in his mouth. Joe hated his own mind. He wished he could be put down like a dog.
Like a lot of hard drinkers, McCleary hadn’t lost any of his wood-brown hair, and none of it was gray, which made his veined, pink-red face all the more obscene. He was a rotting husk of something that had once been powerful, but he could still man a desk and run off-the-books operatives. He grunted into the phone and looked at Joe, letting him know he was almost done.
McCleary liked Joe, but he didn’t have much to work with. Joe played it closer to the vest than any cop or dick or con he had ever met. An FBI agent named Goulden with big-time credentials had sent him Joe and a partial dossier two years ago. That’s all he really had. He wondered if he liked Joe because he looked Italian. McCleary’s wife had been Italian, and hardly a minute went by that he didn’t think of her. Somehow she had died before he did. They never had children. He wished he could have given her that gift. Maybe she would have lived. McCleary grunted one more time and started to lower the phone.
“Get rid of Angel’s number,” Joe said
as the phone hit the cradle. “I’ll find a new service.”
“Okay, no problem,” said McCleary, glancing at his Rolodex, where he kept the number. He was old-fashioned, he mostly relied on pen and paper, but he also had a computer, a nice laptop. You couldn’t keep up if you didn’t. “How was Cincinnati?”
Joe closed his eyes and nodded, hoping that would pass as some kind of answer. He knew that the agency would have been paid by the client, followed by McCleary getting his cut soon enough and then Joe would get his, and so what more was there to say? He certainly wasn’t going to tell McCleary about the bent cop in the alleyway. That slipup embarrassed Joe.
McCleary looked at him. The bastard’s going to sleep again, McCleary thought. He always wished Joe might open up so they could talk a little shop—McCleary missed being in the field—but he knew it was hopeless. But damn it, the guy had to crack someday. He was going to wait him out this time.
“Why am I here?” Joe asked, opening his eyes, moving things along.
McCleary sighed, giving up, and then launched into it: “This is a job I got directly, so we’ll split the money, which is good. Maybe I’ll go to Peter Luger’s just for the hell of it. Anyway, you know State Senator Votto? For a while, in the eighties, I ran his security detail when I was a trooper.”
Joe nodded. Votto had been a big power broker in Albany for decades, but because of massive corruption and ties to the mob, which had finally come to light after years of rumors, he had been removed from office and arraigned. While awaiting his trial, free on bail, he died in his sleep, avoiding judgment and conviction. An aneurysm burst in his brain, and he never knew he was gone.
McCleary continued: “Well, his son, Albert, called me. Now he’s a big shot in Albany. Got elected a year ago and right away they started saying he could be governor. All you need in politics is name recognition, even if the name is shit. But then six months ago, his daughter, thirteen years old, went missing. Supposedly a pervert off the Internet got her, but you know what that means, and the wife committed suicide a month later, couldn’t deal with it, which is too much tragedy. He won’t be able to run for governor for a while, but then in a few years it’ll probably get him the sympathy vote. You read about it in the paper?”
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