After the intros, Big George and Tink went back to shooting pool, and the other four invited Benedict to sit down and play cards. There wasn’t a chair for me or Lazzaro, so we just stood near the bar and watched. This went on for approximately forever, and I could tell Lazzaro was getting pissed off. He stepped from one foot to the other, clenched and unclenched his fists, ground his teeth. He wasn’t much older than me, and I guess he was ticked about having to sit—so to speak—at the kids’ table.
It didn’t bother me any, other than boring me out of my skull. Any anxiety I had was long gone. After Joey the Slob’s seventh or tenth improbable story about his conquests in the sack, they all started to run together, and even the occasional interruption by one of the other guys, usually in the form of spouting further bullshit about jobs they pulled, didn’t help much.
“What are we doing?” I finally asked Lazzaro.
“Fuckin’ waiting. What’s it look like?”
“Looks like we’re sitting on our thumbs.”
That got a sharp bark of laughter out of him. “Yeah. That’s about right.” He checked his watch. “Probably some time in the next couple hours, somebody’ll come along with a message for Benedict, and then we’ll go help him do whatever it is needs doing. Until then . . .” He rolled his eyes.
“Uh, what sort of thing needs doing? Usually?”
Lazzaro put a fist in front of his mouth and stifled a yawn. “Who knows?” He gave me a sly grin. “I don’t guess you’ll have to kill anybody tonight, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I ain’t worried,” I said.
Another grin. “Sure.”
The conversation died there. I stuck my hands in my pockets and leaned against the bar. A couple of hours. Jeez. Over at the card table, Patsy spun out a tall tale that ended with him sawing somebody’s arm off with a dull hacksaw. Apparently the arm just wouldn’t come off, and it took “like twenty minutes of fuckin’ sawin’—I thought my fuckin’ arm was gonna come off by the end of it.” He finished his story to uproarious laughter, and I was suddenly glad I’d skipped dinner. My stomach turned over and flopped around like a drunk falling down a flight of stairs. Benedict caught my eye and one of his eyebrows went up slightly, but I couldn’t tell if he was asking if I was okay or asking if I was chicken. Maybe both.
I looked away and walked over to the pool table. What are you doing here, Jimmy? I wondered. Up until then, I’d looked at this whole thing as a way to keep my old man from getting pounded into oblivion, to keep the shop open, and to play with magic, but now I was hanging out in a room full of guys for whom sawing somebody’s arm off was just an irritating chore in a night’s work. Eventually, maybe in a few minutes or hours, I was going to have to do something really bad. Was I prepared for that?
“Hey, I want next game,” I said to Big George. Playing pool had to be better than working myself up while I waited for . . . whatever.
Big George’s block-shaped head swiveled around, and he made a show of looking over my head. “Who’s talkin’?”
“Come on,” I said. “I want winner.”
He finally “noticed” me. “Hey, Tink,” he said, “you know any made guys from the kindergarten?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Then who the fuck’s this kid, thinks he can talk to me?”
The weasely guy, Tink, grinned. “Just a dumb kid. You gonna give him your stick after I get done wiping the floor with you, or what?”
Big George laughed, and he clapped me on the back, giving me a surprisingly warm smile. “I’m out three hundred bucks already tonight, kid. You want the next one, you can have it.”
Three balls later, Big George was done, and he handed me his cue.
“It’s fifty bucks a game, kid,” Tink told me.
“Uh . . .”
“I’ll spot you this time,” Big George said. “You can owe me, if you lose.”
This night kept getting better and better. I’d never owed a mobster before, and while that didn’t sound like a smart idea, they were both staring at me. “Sure,” I said.
Winner got to break, in keeping with mob tradition of kicking losers while they’re down. Tink sank four balls before I even got a turn. I wondered how seriously a guy like Big George took fifty bucks. Surely he wouldn’t break my arm over fifty bucks, not the way he threw around cash.
Still, it didn’t pay to mess around, so I cheated like hell. Benedict hadn’t taught me much, but I knew enough already to be able to nudge a few pool balls around with only a muttered incantation under my breath, instead of busting out into nursery rhymes in front of the guys.
Benedict caught my eye from the other table after the first little shove and gave me another of his inscrutable expressions. I put the ball in and moved to the next one.
It was a good effort, but Tink was a hell of a pool player, and if I made it any more obvious that I was cheating, I’d probably get the beating of my life. He won by two balls, just as Benedict came over.
“Time to go,” Benedict said. “We have a job to do.”
I handed the cue back to Big George and started to leave.
“Vig on that fifty is ten bucks a week,” Big George said. I had no idea if he was joking or not.
* * *
“This should be easy,” Benedict said. We stood across the street from a pawn shop. Guitars hung by their necks like dead convicts in the window, a stack of useless electronic shit piled up below them. What did anybody need a VCR for these days? Or a Betamax, for God’s sake?
Benedict walked through the alley, around to the back, and Lazzaro and I followed.
“A bookie with the Russians owns this place,” Benedict said. “Tomorrow, he’s gotta pay up, which means tonight his safe is full. We can fix that.”
I guess somewhere way back in my head the conscience of a nice, formerly law-abiding citizen was yammering about something, but it was way in back. The rest of me was surprisingly okay with this. Any dollar we took here was a dollar the Russians didn’t get—it made us stronger, made them weaker. Two for the price of one. And, like Lazzaro said, we weren’t going to kill anybody.
“Fuck it,” I mumbled.
“What’s that?” Lazzaro asked.
“Nothing.”
The door to the back office was a slab of gray metal, dented and battered but strong-looking all the same.
“All right, my students. What’s the best way to get through a locked door like this?” Benedict asked. That was the first I’d heard of Lazzaro being one of Benedict’s students, and it surprised me.
Lazzaro glanced up the alley. There was no one. “Fire spell. Melt the lock, and we’re in.”
Benedict scowled and shook his head. “Jimmy?”
“Uh . . . Maybe talk to the lock? See if we can convince it to open up?”
“No,” he said. His eyes were shadowed, but something about the wrinkles at their edges seemed oddly somber. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a little bundle of oily cloth. “Lockpicks,” he said.
I remembered what he’d told me about asking questions, but I didn’t get it. Lockpicks seemed so crude. “Huh?” I said.
He didn’t get angry, but his voice was stern. “Don’t ever use magic when a mundane solution will work. It leaves traces, for one thing. For another, there’s a cost. Always a cost.”
The sudden dark note in his voice worried me. “What cost?”
“We’ll talk about it another time,” he said. “For now, just remember.”
He fiddled with the lock for a few minutes while Lazzaro looked on, arms crossed and a “Do you believe this crap?” expression on his face. I puzzled over the question of cost. I would definitely follow up on that later, Benedict’s policy on questions be damned.
I grinned as Benedict opened the door—and then my heart lurched as the alarm went off. It must have been a relatively quiet beeping sound, but it seemed like an air raid siren in the quiet night. Benedict stepped calmly inside and punched a few number
s on a keypad, and the noise cut off.
“Jesus,” I said. “How’d you know the code?”
“I know a guy. Come on.”
I crossed the threshold with my heart still trying to kick a hole in my chest. Yellow street light filtered past the clutter of stuff in the front windows, past the scattered crap resting on tables and standing on the floor—a push lawnmower, a slumped and broken easy chair—and faded to nothing by the time it got back here. I couldn’t help but imagine a big Russian ogre leaping out of the darkness and pummeling me into a broken heap.
Lazzaro pushed past me. I followed him in, and my dread dimmed somewhat, partly replaced by the illicit thrill of trespass. If I didn’t get caught and pummeled here, this would be as good as walking right up to that big bastard and giving him the finger. Maybe better. I stepped around a shelf loaded with silver-white lumps, indistinct in the dimness.
Benedict found the office door and opened it. It was really dark back there, so he got out a flashlight as we went into the cramped space. He got me and Lazzaro to push a heavy filing cabinet aside, revealing a heavy-duty wall safe.
“I can’t crack this,” Benedict said. “Jimmy, open it.”
Half a dozen protests leaped into my mind—But I don’t know how! Can’t Frankie do it? and What about the cost? for starters—but, after the episode with the cushion, I knew how far that would get me.
I whispered to the lock, a simple movement incantation Benedict had taught me. The incantation wasn’t quite right, though—I can’t quite explain how. It was like it had jagged edges where it needed to be smooth, or something like that. I varied the rhythm, substituted a few words, running mostly on intuition. I had a knack for improvisation, for sussing out how a thing was supposed to go, even if I didn’t quite have the tools handy, Benedict had told me. I hoped he was right. At any rate, the tumblers started to spin, and a buzzing excitement built in me, starting in the center of my body and building, radiating to my fingertips.
My breath came faster as the shape of the incantation revealed itself to me, as the lock itself muttered and hissed its secrets. I changed a word here, chanted louder there, the energy building and the hidden pattern of locking and binding unfolding before me. A tremor of something like ecstasy coursed through my body, and—
A sizzling bolt of blue-white electricity blasted forth from the safe. It hit me dead center in the chest, knocking me to the ground, and I jumped and jittered as that crazy lightning arced from the safe to my body. I was dimly aware that my clothes had caught fire.
Benedict barked a harsh syllable and made a gesture with his hand, and the electricity stopped, cut off as if by a switch. Another gesture and the fire on my chest blinked out.
“Shit!” Benedict swore. “Shit! Frankie, help him up. We need to go.”
Lazzaro started to reach for me, but I pushed myself up. “I—I think I’m okay,” I said, though my hands shook and I was still having a hard time breathing.
Benedict opened the safe. He varied the incantation too fast for me to follow, but there was a popping sound and a whiff of ozone at one point, and I understood that he’d disabled some kind of magical trap or barrier.
He pulled the contents of the safe into a bag. “Go!” he said. “Go, go, go!”
We ran out the back, Lazzaro pulling me as I staggered. A block down, the car and driver waited for us. We piled in and sped off.
Benedict turned around in the front seat and inspected me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“You did well,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Trap,” he said. His forehead creased, and his eyes were troubled. “Looks like Old Man Chebyshev has got himself a new wizard.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit.
* * *
I slipped into the apartment at about a quarter to two. The lights were out, but I knew my way around.
“You okay, Jimmy?” Ma said. She sounded tired.
“Jeez, Ma, you scared the heck out of me. What are you doing up?” I couldn’t see her, not really, just a vague light shape on the end of the couch.
“Worrying.”
I was suddenly grateful for the darkness. I hadn’t had a change of clothes, so the front of my shirt was mostly a hole with crispy black edges. Hopefully Ma wouldn’t turn the lights on.
“Nothing to worry about,” I said, thinking that was easily the biggest lie I’d told my mother since telling her I was staying after school with Fuzzy Betts to study and sneaking off with Judy Alia instead.
She hadn’t believed me then, either. “Sure,” she said.
“Night, Ma.”
“Good night.”
I went down the hall to my room, shut the door, and turned on the lamp. Benedict had handed me a paper sack when I’d got out of the car, no explanation. I now emptied the bag on the bed.
Ten or so banded stacks of twenties tumbled out onto my sheets. With trembling fingers, I counted four thousand dollars. It was more money than I’d ever even seen in one place.
“Holy shit,” I said. I sat down just before my legs gave out.
Chapter 4. The Way of Things
The rigors of Boston’s public school system seemed a hell of a lot less rigorous the next day. It’s tough to keep education in perspective when you’ve just made four thousand bucks for a few hours’ work, when you’ve spent an evening hanging with the hardest bastards in Boston, and when you’ve had the piss zapped out of you by the magic of your enemies. I stepped through the paces, but already I wondered if my school days weren’t drawing to a close. Ma would kill me. My grades weren’t top of the class or anything, but I probably could get into a halfway decent college if I tried. If I did, I’d be the first in the family. That would beat Southie tradition of dock work, factory work, or the army, but I was starting to think I might be able to do better than that still.
I left after the last bell, blew off my friends, who had already begun to seem like children to me, kids I had little or nothing in common with, and went straight home. Benedict had told me to expect his driver to be there when I got done with school, and I was pretty anxious to see him. I had a lot of questions.
I turned on to our block, and Benedict’s Cadillac was parked out front. I walked faster.
Then the blue-and-white rolled up, pulling in right behind the Caddy. No sirens or anything, but Benedict’s driver suddenly remembered somewhere he had to be, and the Cadillac drove off.
I put my head down and headed for the shop, pretending not to see the cop car, trying not to even look at the Cadillac as it turned off our street. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two cops get out of their car. I thought of the four grand I had stashed in my sock drawer. They’d need a search warrant or something, right?
“Hey, Jimmy!” one of them said, and my hand fell away from the shop door. I turned around.
“Hey, Kit,” I said. She frowned at me. I had the hardest time remembering that she liked to be called Officer Truman when she was on duty. Up until last year she’d been just another of the girls who lived on the street, a few years older than me, and a sort of unofficial big sister of half the kids on the block. God knew she’d babysat for most of us at one point or another, walked us to school, and generally kept us out of trouble until we got too big to keep from finding trouble when we really wanted to. And then, just last year, she got her spot with the Boston PD. She still lived right down the street with her folks, only now she patrolled the neighborhood, too. I should have known she’d see me coming and going, but what can I say? I was new at all this.
Her partner, Eddie Donnelly, slouched against the car and leered at me. I hated that fucking guy. I think nobody’d ever told him the seventies had ended, what with the big sunglasses and the Freddie Mercury ’stache and all. That’s not why I hated him, though—he just creeped me out. I guess the ’stache didn’t really help with that. “What’s goin’ on, Jimmy?” he asked. “Keeping your nose clean?”
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“Yeah.”
Kit walked toward me. She had her cop expression fastened in place, so I couldn’t read her face at all. It was a weird thing. I could still remember how much I liked to look at her in the summer when it got hot out, but now she had the cop face, the cop gun, and the cop uniform. I wondered if I’d ever see her pretty legs again, and I decided no, probably not. Even then I knew we were headed in radically different directions.
“What are you into, Jimmy?” she asked.
I shrugged. I couldn’t seem to look her in the face when she had her cop expression on.
“I mean it,” she said. “I seen you get in this guy’s car every day for the last week. You know whose car that is?”
Another shrug. It felt weird to be accosted by Kit this way—it was like she wasn’t Kit anymore, but A Cop, and it seemed like I could feel everybody in the neighborhood staring out their windows at me. Look, everybody. Jimmy’s in trouble with the cops!
She didn’t let up. “According to the DMV, it’s owned by a little old Italian lady from over on Bacon Street. I haven’t seen any old ladies driving around in it, though. What do you suppose that means?”
“I dunno, Kit. What’s it mean?”
“You know those Mafia guys. They never own anything in their own name, on account of RICO.”
I tried to look hurt. “Nice. I’m Italian, so that means I’m in the mob, right? That’s great, Kit. Nice police work.”
Her cop face didn’t budge. “These aren’t people you want to hang around. They’re trouble.”
I didn’t know if that was a threat or what, but that immobile, porcelain face ignited something low and mean inside me. “What kind of trouble are we talking about? Like maybe the kind where somebody comes and stomps on my old man’s face? Cuz that’s the kind of trouble we were in last week, and I sure didn’t see no cops around.”
That cracked her armor, and a faint line of worry scrawled itself across her forehead. “If you’re in trouble—”
The Price Page 3