We stashed the truck in a warehouse Lazzaro used a lot, made a couple of calls, and Big George and Benedict met us there. After staring at the weird box for just about forever, Benedict finally grabbed it by the handle on top and took it. Didn’t get zapped or anything. He climbed down from the back of the truck and gave George one curt nod.
George held his hand out to me, palm up. “Gimme the keys.”
Lazzaro narrowed his eyes. “What are you gonna do?”
“The Slob says I gotta get rid of all this shit.”
“It might be worth a lot of money!” Lazzaro protested.
“Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t, but the Slob don’t want nothin’ to do with it. He said get rid of it, I’m gettin’ rid of it.”
George drove off in the truck, and that was the last we saw of it. Thankfully.
Chapter 6. Confession
I didn’t sleep too well that night, or the night after. I kept waking up with visions of that arc of blood and broken teeth, still hearing the strangled sucking sound and awful wheezing of the truck driver before Lazzaro finished him off. They came back to me every time I closed my eyes, and that was plenty bad enough, but when I was awake other thoughts plagued me.
Where had that kidney come from? It seemed safe to assume all the other cans had an organ in them, too. Maybe there were twenty-five sets of kidneys, each in its own refrigerated, oxygenated container. Or maybe there were whole sets among the cans—kidneys, pancreas, heart, lungs, liver—oh, and eyes, let’s not forget eyes, and thank Christ and whoever else was listening that Lazzaro hadn’t opened up a can with a pair of eyes inside looking balefully back. How many people would you have to take apart to fill fifty cans? I counted the human body’s organs on my fingers, and thought of all the ways a body might be carved up.
When I got tired of counting, of assembling and disassembling all the configurations, I always came back to the original question: Where had the organs come from?
Our find was all anybody could talk about at the club, and I listened avidly as the soldiers and capos traded anecdotes and conjecture.
“Cuz he’s crazy, that’s why! Old Man Chebyshev is batshit, apeshit, off-the-deep-end, frog-humping crazy!” the Slob shouted.
“He’s gonna get us all fucked, is what’s gonna happen,” Sam the Shiv agreed. “I mean, the kidneys and shit is too goddamn far. Plus, I heard he had a couple of cops whacked.”
“They were crooked as the day is long, Sam,” somebody else said. “Everybody knew it.”
“Yeah, and that’s the only reason we haven’t all got our balls busted. I don’t think he’s too particular, though, you know?”
“And what about those whorehouses he runs?” the Slob asked. “Buncha girls young enough to be my daughter shipped over from Poland or Lithuania or wherever the fuck. They’re not gonna talk—hell, most of ’em don’t speak English anyway. He gets ’em hooked on smack, wears ’em out, and uses ’em up by the time they’re eighteen, and what the fuck does he care? He just ships more over.”
There was a particularly perverse irony in this crowd getting all indignant about Old Man Chebyshev’s atrocities, but I thought most of their outrage was genuine. Sure, a small part of it was jealousy that they hadn’t thought up a couple of his schemes first, but the Slob’s comment about his daughter was deadly serious, and his face got bright red and his fingers stretched and contracted as he talked.
I didn’t need further excuses to hate the Russians, but the guys provided me with plenty anyway.
“It’s gonna be a war,” Lazzaro told me while the others shouted and raged. “Gotta be.”
“I don’t think that’d be a real good idea,” I said. Everybody knew we were outnumbered and outgunned. Hell, the boss was clear up in Providence—what did he care about us? We had the Russians on one side and the Irish on the other, and getting either of them good and pissed at us would be ugly. We were already pushing it, as much as we were moving in on Russian turf. It hadn’t turned into a shooting war yet, and I still hoped it wouldn’t, but I thought Lazzaro was better than me at scenting blood in the water.
Benedict came in a little while later and took me aside, and he didn’t make me feel any better. He looked at me with clouded, troubled eyes.
“Did you open that box, Jimmy?” he asked, voice barely audible over the racket from the wiseguys.
I didn’t have to ask which box. “No. No way.”
He nodded absently. “Good. There were things in there. . . . Papers. Notes. Chebyshev’s new guy is messing with some very bad things. Very bad indeed.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, then stopped, shaking his head. “With any luck, he’ll get himself killed before we have to worry about it.”
I wanted to know more, but Benedict’s face hardened, and I got a very clear sense that he had slipped into one of his no-questions moods. A moment later, he turned and headed for the wiseguy table, and the opportunity was gone.
Lazzaro, who had been ten feet away from the whole conversation, gave me a curious, questioning look as Benedict walked off. I ignored him.
I went home afterward perturbed, staring at the ceiling while I tried vainly to sleep. The stories about Old Man Chebyshev’s whorehouses really bugged me, and I thought maybe they gave me the answer to that terrible question: Where had the organs come from? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made—they had come from used-up seventeen-year-old heroin addicts. Or maybe he shipped girls over—and boys, hey, why not—and skipped straight to carving them up. From the stories they told about him, that seemed like just his speed.
I thought about that, and about Benedict’s cryptic concerns about the contents of the metal box, and I wondered just what the new wizard was up to that had Benedict so worried.
No sleep came Saturday night, either.
* * *
When I came out into the living room the next morning dressed for church, Ma was so shocked she couldn’t even think of anything snide to say. My habit lately had been to sleep until noon or so on weekends, ignoring her entreaties until she went away, so I don’t think she could have been happier that I was coming back to the fold.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had an ulterior motive.
I crossed the threshold into the half-empty little cathedral with Benedict’s words echoing in my head again. Little bites. I half-expected to catch fire or get struck down by lightning as I went in, but I didn’t feel so much as a tingle. Apparently the bites had been small enough so far.
It had only been a month or so since I’d last attended Mass, but the experience was just like school—I didn’t seem to be from the same world as these people anymore. The priest railed on against the “Culture of Death” politicians in Washington, and where once I would have nodded agreement with him, now I couldn’t even find a context in which to put his statements where they made sense. I had hijacked a truck full of stolen human organs and watched a man get his face shot off only a few days before, and now I was supposed to get worked up over the idea of a living will? Please.
I sang the obligatory hymns, stood up, sat down, knelt, and followed the usual procedure, but mostly I was looking for Kit. By the time Communion rolled around, I still hadn’t seen her. That bothered me. I didn’t know anyone more God-and-country than Kit Truman, and I didn’t think she’d missed Sunday Mass since she’d been conceived.
I got in line, put the wafer in my mouth, drank a little wine. I didn’t start on fire then, either. When I sat down again, I saw Kit in line, to my relief. She took Communion like everyone else, then made her way to a seat somewhere behind me. I hoped she didn’t leave before I had a chance to talk to her.
When at last the service ended, I rushed out of my pew and to the back of the cathedral. I stood to the side of the doors and tried to smile as everyone walked by. Kit’s parents filed past a few moments later with Kit right behind them.
“Hey, Officer Truman,” I said. “Can we talk for a minute?”
Kit stepped to the si
de of the procession, waving her parents on as they looked a question at her. “How you doing, Jimmy?”
“I, uh, I got a problem. Do you mind if we step over there?” I pointed toward the stairs at the end of the hall. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have in front of the nosy old women of the neighborhood.
My parents walked past, and Ma and Dad each gave me a nod of approval. They had no idea.
“Sure,” Kit said. “Be good to get out of the draft, anyway.” She pulled her coat around her and followed me over. We went downstairs and turned the corner.
Kit gave me a very frank look. “I told you not to mess around with those guys,” she said. “What are you into?”
“It’s not that,” I said. She flattened her lips into an expression of disbelief. “I mean, it’s kind of related, but not really.”
“Spit it out.”
I paused. I was about to cross a line here that could get me good and fucked, if Kit wasn’t the person I thought I knew.
Once, when I was about ten years old, I’d swiped a bag of M&Ms from the shelf at Mr. Peluso’s corner store. I don’t remember what had possessed me to do it, but I remember the sweat trickling down my back as I slipped the candy into my pocket, casting nervous, darting glances at the bored clerk the whole time. Kit was keeping an eye on me that day, and I’d talked her into walking with me down to the store and buying us a couple of sodas. She didn’t look at me once while she was paying for them, but the second we left the store, she turned and told me to go back in and put the candy back. Didn’t make a big deal out of it or anything—just told me she wouldn’t say anything to Mr. Peluso or to my folks as long as I put the M&Ms back.
I did, of course, and returned with my face burning and awkward tears of humiliation in my eyes. “No harm, no foul,” she’d said. Back then, she hadn’t confused some abstract, righteous concept of JUSTICE with simply doing the right thing.
I sincerely hoped that was still true.
“What do you know about the Russian mob here?” I asked.
“Iosif Chebyshev and his guys?”
“Uh, I think so. I mean, everybody just calls him Old Man Chebyshev.”
“That’s him. Please tell me you’re not mixed up with him.”
I shook my head. “No way. But I know some of the stuff he’s into.” I licked my lips nervously, suspecting I looked like the emperor, high priest, and head accountant of all stool pigeons rolled into one. “I mean, some really bad stuff.”
“Such as?”
I couldn’t help but look down the hall, even though I knew nobody was there. God, I made a shitty informant. “I don’t know a lot of the details, but—”
“Quit wasting my time, Jimmy. This isn’t kid stuff.” She started up the stairs. “Go home,” she said.
“Organs!” I blurted out. It echoed down the short hall, and I winced. Kit turned around, though. “Organs. I think he’s got some kind of black market organ thing going on. I think—I think he might be, uh, harvesting them himself.”
The look on Kit’s face was the interested kind of look a guy gets from a girl after he’s said something witty or profound, and I felt myself wanting to keep running my mouth rather than let that look fade. That would be very stupid, Jimmy. Be careful.
“Do you have any evidence?”
I pulled the scrap of paper out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Go here.”
“I can’t just go there. I need probable cause, Jimmy. Are you willing to testify?”
I put my hands up, palms out. “No way. I haven’t been there, I don’t know anything. Can’t you say you got an anonymous tip or something?”
She glanced at the paper and frowned. “It’s in New York. I couldn’t do anything there if I did have probable cause.”
“Call the FBI or something. You’re the cop—figure it out.” I stepped closer to her and lowered my voice. “You gotta do something, Kit. There is some really bad shit going on up there.”
Her cop expression closed her face like a slamming door. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She left me shaking in the stairwell.
* * *
I went home with my folks, and surprisingly I felt better. I no longer had any doubt that Kit would do the right thing, even if it took some procedural acrobatics on her part to get it done. I couldn’t help wondering, though, just how far omertà extended. I knew you didn’t rat out other Mafia guys, but this was different. Old Man Chebyshev was a fucking animal, and this was one case where we couldn’t solve our own problem. If the feds cleaned out his New York operation, it would only be good for us.
I hoped the guys took that into account if they ever found out what I’d done.
Chapter 7. Getting Into the Swing of Things
I spent the next couple of months trying not to jump every time somebody moved too fast, waiting for the moment when the cops knocked at my door or, worse, the moment when Benedict and Joey the Slob invited me into the back room of the club for the kind of short, one-sided chat that ends with a dismembered corpse in somebody’s trunk.
Instead, I got nothing, and my unease gradually tapered off. It wasn’t like I didn’t have plenty to keep me occupied. Benedict was cramming magic lore into my head as fast as I could absorb it. Night after night I sat in his vast library—it took up most of his apartment, I discovered—going over incantations and diagrams, rituals and potions, chants, magical gestures, and everything else he could think of. He even had me learning Latin and Greek, for fuck’s sake, claiming the ancient languages tapped into some kind of global pool of unconscious wisdom or some bullshit like that. He kept threatening to make me learn Sumerian. I hoped he was joking.
When I wasn’t poring over ancient tomes, I was busting my ass to make the weekly nut. A thousand bucks a week wasn’t shit compared to the other guys—some of them had to make numbers like five large every single week, if you can believe that—but I wasn’t all that well connected, and I was new at this. I got in on every job I could. I was amazed at the breadth of activities these guys got involved with. Truck hijacking was pretty common, and they’d shift anything—coats, shoes, kids’ toys, lawnmowers, construction materials, furniture, drill bits, boat anchors, lobsters, you name it. Once we got a truck full of floral-scented shampoo. Tink was so mad he could have chewed up a fistful of ball bearings (we got some of those one time, too), because the truck was supposed to be shipping laptop computers. Sure enough, though, somebody found a buyer and we offloaded the shampoo. Then we went and beat the hell out of the guy who gave us the bum tip. When we found out later that we’d snagged the wrong truck, missing the truck full of computers by about ten minutes, Tink got so much shit from the guys that he stormed out of the club and didn’t come back for almost a week.
Since I was the only guy in the lot who was sort of computer literate, I ended up making a shitload of phony invoices for a construction scam Big George was running. I actually did a fair amount of basic computer shit for the Slob’s crew. The guys hated computers, largely because they didn’t know how to use them, though they claimed that the reason for their hatred was that the information age had thinned out their margins. Apparently they used to do a pretty brisk trade in bootleg porn. “Now every horny fourteen-year-old with a Innernet connection can bootleg it himself,” Big George told me. “Fuck computers.”
There was other work, too. Patsy, another of the Slob’s guys, had a numbers racket going, and I ended up doing some of the running for that. I collected bags of cash from bookies on his behalf, too. A few times I went with the guys to beat some money out of a lowlife who was late on his payments.
You’d be amazed how easy it is to get used to this lifestyle. It requires a certain knack for compartmentalization, but once you get the hang of that, it’s not so bad. I told myself the guys we were shaking down were scumbags, that they mostly deserved it—and they did. Once I got used to that, it wasn’t so hard to move on to other things. I even found myself getting in on the protection racket, and I slept
like a baby afterward. More or less.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time left in my schedule for things like, say, secondary education. I started missing a day of school a week, then two or three. By Christmas, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going back after the break, but I resolved to talk with Benedict about it anyway.
I caught Benedict one night while I was supposed to be studying a particularly obtuse text on cleaning spells. Yeah, cleaning spells. Supposedly, they were particularly useful at crime scenes, though I wasn’t yet convinced that Benedict wasn’t planning to make me wash his windows. Benedict sat across from me, staring into a mostly empty glass of bourbon, his face a blurry reflection in the gleaming wood of the library’s table. Typically, he’d grill me on the details of whatever I was working on, but lately he’d been pretty worn down trying to root out Old Man Chebyshev’s new wizard. From the bags under his eyes and the new lines of worry carved into his face, I suspected he was also spending a fair amount of time on the mysterious box of nastiness he’d gotten from the organ truck.
That was okay with me. When Benedict was tired, he tended to get morose rather than grouchy, and it was usually safe to ask him questions. I didn’t hesitate.
“Hey,” I said. He tore his gaze away from the glass and fixed red eyes on me.
“Yeah?”
“You ever try to go straight?” I asked. I wouldn’t get within fifty yards of that question with any of the other guys, but I thought Benedict was safe.
That fleeting sadness turned down the corners of his eyes. He pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked. “No, Jimmy. Never did.”
A long pause, utterly soundless. In Benedict’s apartment, you couldn’t hear the road, a dripping faucet, a clock, anything.
He drained his glass, ice cubes clinking against his teeth. “There is no straight for guys like us,” he said. “I mean, look at you. You’re a good kid, Jimmy, and smarter than any six of those clowns at the club put together. And here you are.”
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