Pirate: A Thriller

by Ted Bell

  “Yeah. Considering what we’ve got here, I think that’s a real good idea.”

  Chapter Forty-two

  Coney Island

  “WHAT’S HE GOING TO DO?” MARIUCCI SAID, “A FUCKING swan dive?”

  Congreve thought perhaps that was exactly what the Chinaman had in mind. His position was precarious. The second swipe of the ladder had crumpled the entire top section of the tower. The aircraft warning light formerly at the tower’s pinnacle was now dangling by tangled wires, sparking and snapping just above the killer’s head. The rotted black crossbeam he was standing on was sagging dangerously in the middle. It looked as if it could give way at any moment. The crowds below were swooning in anticipation. It was all faintly ghoulish, Ambrose thought, but he couldn’t turn away.

  “I’ll be right back,” the captain said, “I think they’re about to get the Ferris wheel moving.”

  Mariucci had no need of seeing another jumper. Congreve imagined he’d seen enough falling bodies for a lifetime on that cruel day in September.

  The captain squeezed the top of Ambrose’s arm gently and disappeared into the maze of police, fire personnel, television news crews, and their respective vehicles, all parked willy-nilly wherever they had come to a stop. The midway was now jammed with useless emergency equipment and mobbed with people who had no business being there. All massed between the two opposing attractions and all looking up into the sky.

  They stood with their eyes riveted on the drama unfolding a hundred feet up. Light rain was still falling. The beams from spotlights on the ground and mounted on the hovering helicopters looked like solid columns of light.

  All were trained on the little man in white coveralls. He had his back to the crowd. His arms were stretched above his head, hands clinging to the beam above. He hadn’t moved in ten minutes. His audience was rapt, transfixed.

  For those fortunate enough to have binoculars, the only thing missing was the expression on the man’s face as he unslung the haversack from his right shoulder and let it fall. It hit a beam or two going down, bounced once or twice, and dropped out of sight.

  “Jump!” some civilian screamed. It seemed not everyone in the crowd was rooting for the Chinaman. Some of them even laughed out loud. “Turn around so we can see you!” a woman cried out.

  As if in response to the crowd’s demands, the man could be seen to loosen his two-handed death grip on the skewed beam just above his head. He pried the fingers of one hand loose and slowly released the beam with that hand. He deftly turned ninety degrees, so that he was facing parallel to the beam. His grace and economy of movement, Congreve had to say, were those of a champion gymnast. An Olympian performance.

  He paused and took a deep breath, or so it seemed, and then released the other hand. He gently lowered both arms to his side and stood unassisted on the narrow beam. It was a feat of balance to be admired, and some in the crowd showed their appreciation with applause as if he were a circus artist. This was Coney Island, after all.

  The man then moved his feet slowly, tiny steps, turning carefully around so that he was now facing the midway.

  “I can’t look!” a woman cried out, but she did.

  The Chinaman raised his arms straight out from his side holding them poised like a high diver at shoulder height. After a long moment, he folded both arms across his chest and lowered his head. The crowd was stone silent now. Waiting. Many of them rubbing their eyes with the strain and the rainwater in them as they stared without blinking at a man surely about to plunge to his death.

  Behind them, the colored lights of the Ferris wheel had illuminated once more and the big wheel started revolving slowly. No one even noticed, not even Ambrose Congreve, but Joey Bones was coming back to earth.

  The Chinaman didn’t jump. He put his arms to his sides and lowered his head. He seemed to hang there for a second. Then he simply leaned out into space and pitched forward off the beam. He fell head-first, arms tightly held against his side, legs held firmly together, toes pointed. By diving in this way, Congreve estimated, he was able to increase his velocity from the normal speed of a falling object to approximately two hundred miles per hour. Terminal velocity.

  Terminal being the operative word.

  Ambrose watched him fall, feeling a wave of nausea wash over him.

  You could almost see him accelerate.

  At the last fraction of a second, he tucked up into a tight ball.

  The crowd screamed. It was terrifying and riveting to watch a human being fall to his death. It took all of two seconds for him to hit the ground.

  The Chinaman was dead. But he had gone out with a certain style, nonetheless, and Congreve found that interesting. Ambrose turned away and saw that the Ferris wheel was indeed turning. Joey Bones’s car was now at the bottom. You could tell because that’s where all the lights and news cameras were trained now.

  Because of the tall fence, few people, mostly policemen and ATAC team members gathered inside the fence surrounding the tower, actually saw the man hit the ground. But the sound of a falling body hitting concrete from great height was not one anyone there that night would ever forget.

  Nor was the sight of him sitting bolt upright on the cracked stone, his shattered legs sticking straight out from his erect, shattered body. From the back, he looked almost normal. Except that his shoulders were far, far too narrow. And his head rested right atop them, no neck to support it. From the front, those who dared to look at the corpse saw a face from a nightmare, its features rearranged in a surreal fashion, one eye below his nose, the mouth a vertical slit.

  “Chief Inspector,” a uniformed policeman at Ambrose’s elbow said, “could you come with me, please? Captain Mariucci is asking for you. He’s inside the Ferris wheel car with the victim.”

  “Victim?” Congreve said, his heart skipping a beat. After all this, he couldn’t believe they’d now lost their sole remaining eyewitness.

  “Yes, sir. It’s urgent. Follow me, sir,” the young cop said, and Ambrose did as he asked. When they finally got to the other side of the midway, Ambrose saw that one of the EMS vehicles was now backed up to the wooden ramp leading up to the Ferris wheel entrance. The back doors were flung open, the engine was running, and the rooftop lights were flashing. It didn’t look good.

  Congreve found Captain Mariucci and the two EMS responders from the ambulance inside the car. The two medical technicians were frantically administering assistance to a human skeleton lying on the metal floor between two opposing bench seats. He looked to be breathing, just barely, and the technician was standing by with oxygen. The stark features of Joey Bones’s drawn face were writ with pain. His skin was white as marble and coated in a thin sheen of greasy sweat.

  “What happened?” Congreve asked Mariucci. The captain was down on his knees beside the man, bending over him, cradling his head in one hand, and Ambrose joined him there, kneeling on the floor.

  “It’s bad, Ambrose. He broke his back. Lungs filling up with fluid. Maybe a coronary. They can’t move him.”

  “What happened?”

  “I guess he fell when it started down, landed the wrong way on the edge of the seat. Or maybe he was on his feet when a gust of wind hit the car.”

  “Is he able to talk?” Ambrose asked.

  “Barely. These guys are saying he probably won’t make it back to King’s County Hospital. They’re just getting ready to blast him with morphine. If you want to talk to him, this is probably it.”

  Congreve nodded and bent closer to the old man’s ear.

  “Joe? How are you doing? My name is Ambrose Congreve. I’m a friend of Captain Mariucci’s.”

  “Moochie—he’s the one who sent me away to college, y’know,” Joe Bones said with a tight grin. His voice was raw and barely audible.

  “Joe,” Ambrose said softly, “I want to talk to you about Paris. Do you understand?”

  “Off the record?”

  “Off the record.”

  Joe took a few shallow breaths.
“Yeah. Tell me about Benny, first,” Joe whispered. “Did they get to Benny, too?”

  “Naw, Benny’s fine, Joey,” Mariucci said. “He’ll be by to see you tomorrow in the hospital. Bring you some pretty flowers.”

  “Good,” Joe rasped. “That’s good. They didn’t get him, huh? Rat bastards.”

  “Joe, this is important,” Ambrose said. “You could possibly save a lot of lives, certainly a lot of trouble, if you can help me.”

  “Hey, listen, you’re talking to Joey Bones, right? The man. Go ahead.”

  “Joey, you were in France thirty-five years ago. Paris. What were you doing there?”

  “A beef with the Union Corse. That was the Mob in France, see. They was trying to move in on us over here. We—wanted to hit one of their own—on their turf…”

  “Where, Joe,” Congreve said. “Where in Paris?”

  “Napoleon’s Tomb. Yeah.”

  Congreve looked up at Mariucci and the two men nodded. “You were there?”

  “Yeah. Me and Benny both…but, you gotta know something, Mr.—uh—”

  “Inspector Congreve.”

  “Congreve? Funny name. I ain’t no button man, Inspector. I was just a soldier. A lowly shylock. I never clipped nobody.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But that night was supposed to be the hit. Benny’s crew had the contract to pop this guy. The Corse was getting big on the East Coast, and we wanted to send ’em a message. At the last minute, Benny took me along for the ride, said maybe I could make my bones, you know? I was just a middle-aged punk kid, a cugine. A fuckin’ nobody…”

  Congreve tipped some water from a cup into the man’s mouth.

  “Who was the hit, Joe?” Mariucci asked. He was scribbling furiously in his notebook.

  “Guy name of Bonaparte. Emile, I think. A Corse button man who’d pissed off somebody. Some Commie Brigade, whatever the fuck it was. Weird, we found out later he’d fucked up a job or something. Some internal shit over there, but the Commies wanted him burned, too. The really weird thing was his own k-kid—his kid was in on it…”

  “Who was that? What was this kid’s name?”

  “The big French guy. You know. On the news. The guy that’s trying to whack me and Benny, that’s who. Luca Bonaparte. The bigshot pol over there. That French fuck knows what really happened, see. And now he don’t want me and Benny talking about it, I guess. We’re like inconvenient.”

  “How’d you find out somebody was trying to whack you, Joey?” Mariucci said.

  “People called me. My goombah Vinnie at the deli. Said some foreign broad was asking around about me. Chinese. Japanese. I dunno. Vinnie said it sounded like she was coming to break my balls and feed ’em to me one piece at a time. And then, Lavon—”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” one of the EMS men said. “We have to give this man some oxygen. He really shouldn’t be talking like this.”

  “Can you give us one minute?” Mariucci said, looking plaintively at the technician.

  “Yeah, sure, Captain,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Joe, how are you holding up? Okay?” Congreve asked the dying man.

  “Yeah, sure. I ain’t going anywhere. Tough as nails. I fooled that little Chinese bastard on the tower, didn’t I? Sonafabitch thought he could fuck with me. Is he dead?”

  “He’s dead, all right,” Mariucci said. “Believe me.”

  “Good.”

  “What happened at the tomb, Joe?” Ambrose said. “Tell me about that night in Paris.”

  “Like I say, the guy’s kid was in on it. Whoever ordered the hit from their side, the Corse, they wanted the kid there. So, we played along, you know. What the hell. Crazy frogs.”

  “What next, Joe?”

  “We had the guy, the hit, up against a rail or something. Right over the friggin’ tomb of Napoleon. Benny gave me the piece and told me to do it. You know, make my bones. But—but then—”

  “Then, what? What happened, Joe?” Ambrose said, staring into the man’s eyes.

  “I don’t feel so good,” Joe said, his eyelids fluttering. “Feels like something’s wrong with my, uh—”

  “Okay, Captain, I think that’s it,” the EMS guy said. “We need to administer—”

  “Gimme a second, here. Please.” Mariucci said, holding up his hand with the forefinger extended. “This is very important. One second.”

  “Joe,” Ambrose said, “Did you kill Emile Bonaparte in Paris that night?”

  “Naw. I didn’t kill him. I couldn’t do it, see? God as my witness. We was in a cathedral, f’crissakes. A house of God. I couldn’t kill nobody in a cathedral. I’m a Catholic, Inspector. I couldn’t kill nobody. I ain’t proud of it, but I never did.”

  “Who did kill Emile Bonaparte, Joe?” Congreve said. “Tell me, please. Did Benny do it?”

  Joey Bones closed his eyes and for a terrible second, Congreve thought they’d lost him.

  “The kid,” he whispered.

  “The victim’s son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Keep talking, Joey,” Mariucci said, “You can do it.”

  “The kid did it,” Joe whispered through parched lips. “See, when he saw my hand shaking, that I wasn’t gonna shoot, this kid Luca grabbed the piece right out of my hand and shot his old man right in the heart. Never seen anything like it. His own father!”

  “Luca Bonaparte murdered his own father,” Mariucci said, looking Joe Bones in the eye. “In Paris, in 1970.”

  “Saw it with my own eyes,” Joe said. “Got no reason to lie no more.”

  “Thank you, Joey,” Ambrose said, looking up at Mariucci, his face flooded with relief.

  “Yeah, Joey, you did good, paisano,” Mariucci said.

  The captain flipped his notebook shut and put it inside his jacket. Ambrose had what he’d come to New York for. They could both use a drink.

  Joey lifted his bony arm and placed his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “You got something else, Joe?” the captain asked.

  “When we, uh, got h-home from P-Paris,” Joey Bones said, his voice rattling with effort, “Benny kinda let it get around on the street that it was me who’d whacked the guy. Why not, right? Who would know? Nobody in the neighborhood ever messed with me after that. I was a made man, you understand? I was Joey Bones!”

  It was very quiet in the car. Just the patter of soft rain on the tin rooftop.

  “You did good, Joey,” Mariucci said.

  But Joey was already gone.

  As they emerged from the car into the glare of the TV lights, Mariucci paused, squinting, and said to Congreve, “Who the hell is that?”

  “Who?” Ambrose said.

  “Over there. Edge of the crowd. There’s a woman in a black raincoat staring right at you. See her?”

  “Where?”

  “Never mind. She’s gone.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Berlin

  THEY WAITED UNTIL DARKNESS FELL AND THE MOON ROSE over the snowcapped mountains. Then they flew. Jet was wrapped in a blanket, sound asleep on a bench seat behind the pilot. She’d put another blanket on the floor for Blondi. Arnold was flying. Stoke sat in the copilot’s seat to his right, now wearing Arnold’s muscleman black VDI uniform, a perfect fit if a little tight across the shoulders. They were headed almost due north, destination Berlin. The moon was full, just rising over the ragged peak of the Weissspitze at nine thousand feet.

  “You do know how to fly this thing, right, Arnold?” Stoke had said to him as they trudged through knee-deep snow from the Zum Wilden Hund out to the black chopper on the pad. It was a specially modified Super Lynx helo that had once belonged to the German navy. Stoke noticed AIM missile brackets mounted under the belly between the skids and asked about them. The Lynx formerly flew antisubmarine warfare missions for NATO.

  “Yes,” Arnold said, “I know how to fly it.”

  “Good. Then we got the right Arnold.”

  Twenty minutes into the flight, Stoke leaned over
in his copilot’s seat, pressed his face against the cool Perspex, and stared down thoughtfully at the endless white ground. At this altitude, basically zero, give or take a foot or two, you had a pretty good sensation of speed. They were skimming across snow-covered fields, brushing the tops of the tall pines, and jinking and juking around any small hill that got in their way. There was a whole lot to be said for the fun factor, flying below the radar across Europe. Stoke concentrated on their little moon-shadow zipping along on the sparkling snow just beneath them.

  “What’s that up ahead?” Stoke asked Arnold.

  “Czechoslovakia,” Arnold said.

  “Let’s try not to hit it.”

  Sometimes, Arnold would get so low down, the Lynx and its darting shadow almost kissed. Catch a skid and you’re not sitting on top of the world, Stoke thought, and looked at his watch. If they could stay down on the deck and maintain this speed without cracking up, they’d touch down at Tempelhof well before midnight. It was nice and warm in the cockpit. It had been a long day. Stoke let his head fall back across the seat and closed his eyes.

  “Put it down just there,” Jet said to Arnold, waking him from some dream of swaying palms and convertibles and his beautiful Fancha climbing out of a turquoise pool dripping wet and naked as the day she was born. Soon as all this was over, first-class ticket nonstop to Miami.

  The black helo was approaching the LZ low and dark, no landing lights outside; inside, the cockpit was lit only by a dim red glow from the instrument panel. Stealth chopper. He hoped. Heavy armed resistance at this point would be a problem. He had only the Schmeisser and a few mags of ammo he’d been able to scrounge up going through drawers at the gasthaus. Jet had the dead Arnold’s automatic and two spare mags.

  They approached Tempelhof low and from the rear, away from the entrance where the guards were stationed. Here, boxy apartment complexes and warehouses would hide their approach from the guards at the entrance on the far side of the field. Arnold dropped down below the rooftops. He flew between the buildings, along a narrow deserted street that dead-ended at the fence line. They rose slightly and almost clipped the fence. A darkened helo, coming in low, a hush kit to dampen the engine noise, hell, they had a pretty good chance to arrive unannounced.