Mortal Bonds

by Michael Sears

  A moment later, I almost lost it.

  We were sitting in a large room that might have doubled as a small cafeteria. One wall held snack, soda, and coffee machines, and long tables, built like Formica picnic benches, lined the room. There was enough space that all of the visitors were able to spread out and get some privacy. Then an oversized metal door at the end of the room opened and the prisoners came in.

  It was the gray jumpsuits that did it. I couldn’t see Vinny’s face. All I saw were four shadows fanning out across the room and approaching. I rose and stumbled back over the bench, almost falling. Vinny grabbed my arm and held me upright.

  “Easy there, sport. You all right?”

  Past and present flickered in my head. I was in prison. I was gagging on the acrid smells of men locked down in too-close proximity. Sweat, urine, semen, and a blend of cleaning chemicals that never seemed to truly rid the air of those other scents. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I was not all right.

  My third day of incarceration, I wandered down to the dayroom, a twenty-by-twenty space that boasted a television mounted on one wall and plastic chairs arranged in rows. A soap opera was on, a pair of beautiful actors mumbling at each other in deadly earnest. There was no one in the room. I stood there, still feeling like I had landed in an episode of The Prisoner, with no idea of the rules of this alien world. Could I sit down? Could I change the channel? Was I allowed to be there? These issues had not been covered in the handout when I first checked in.

  After a few minutes, the murmuring voices on the screen were starting to get to me. I looked for some way of changing the channel. No luck. I grabbed a chair and stood on it. The small black buttons on the set had long lost their markings. I tried pushing one. The volume increased. I pushed another. The screen went blank. Shit.

  Then the chair flew out from beneath me and I hit the ground. I felt a heavy foot swing by my head. I rolled away, smashing through a cluster of chairs until I was clear. I rose up to see three gray jumpsuits coming at me. One of the men was screaming something about me and TV and who the fuck did I think I was and how he was now going to welcome me properly to Ray Brook. Then he called me “Punk.”

  One of the services offered by my crack legal defense team, after the production of my PSR—pre-sentencing report—and just before I surrendered myself directly at Ray Brook, was an afternoon session with their team of Survival Consultants. Two ex-convicts answered my questions about my upcoming experience and gave me advice on a range of subjects.

  Never look directly into another man’s cell—it’s an invasion of privacy and you will pay for it.

  When you’re on the can, be polite. Flush halfway through. It cuts down on the aroma.

  Never join a gang. The protection offered is an illusion and they will own you.

  Looking a man in the eye is an act of intimacy, which can lead to sex, violence, or both.

  No one is your friend. Least of all, the Correctional Officers.

  Don’t be a snitch.

  Don’t hog the phone. There’s a line of angry, impatient convicts behind you.

  And so on, down to the final:

  And never—never—let a man call you Punk. Punks belong to anyone. Prey for anything. It is far better to take a beating than to be branded.

  I backed away, letting the guy follow, let him back me into a corner of the room. It was a dead-end move, but it made it hard for all three of them to come at me at once. The two on the flanks held back and gave me my chance.

  I grabbed a chair and swung it as hard as I could at his face. He ducked back, but not quite fast enough. I caught him across the bridge of the nose. Not hard enough to put him down, but hard enough to hurt. He roared and swiped at me clumsily, giving me enough time for a second shot. This time I connected cleanly with his temple. The light plastic chair did not make a formidable weapon, but I lucked out. He dropped like Mike Piazza getting beaned by Roger Clemens.

  The other two rushed me. I held the chair in front of me like a shield. It held them up for about a nanosecond. There was plenty of room in the corner for two guys to beat on me, and the walls made it worse, holding me upright a lot longer than my legs did. I flailed a couple of times, but I’d never been a fighter. I had no idea how to throw a punch and make it hurt. They did.

  Long before the COs arrived, the two guys had to make a decision whether to kill me or let me collapse to the floor. Luckily for me, they chose door number two.

  I spent three days in the hospital ward, with my ribs taped, a concussion, and a fracture of the left eye socket that the doctor thought could give me eyesight problems later in life. When the guards asked me who had done it, I was able to identify them only as “three white guys in gray jumpsuits.” They thought I was wising off, so I did two weeks in SHU—Special Housing Unit—what was called “solitary” in less Orwellian times and otherwise known as “the hole” or “the bucket.”

  My first day back in gen-pop I was terrified—if my attackers wanted to see that I returned to the hospital, they could take me just about anywhere. When two nights passed and I was still alive, I began to remember some of the other lessons of my survival class. My cellmate, a black man half my age but with twice my street smarts, confirmed my thoughts.

  “Check this out. See, G, them Caspers thinking they found themselves a Gregory to put the hurt on, but you come down like a clown with some serious drama. You peeled that ding’s wig!” He slapped my palm at that point. “And when the COs wanted you to snitch, turns out you solid. You do the bucket and come out stand-up. You got cred now, dog.”

  And after some patient explanations on his part, I understood that in defending myself and refusing to give up my attackers—who I couldn’t have identified anyway—I had gained the respect of my colleagues and had no reason to fear retribution.

  And I had only another seven hundred and ten days to go.

  Vinny sat me down and brought me a Diet Coke.

  “I thought I could do this,” I said. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

  “Come on, don’t embarrass me, okay? I gotta live here. I can’t have my tough-guy visitors having fainting spells.”

  I managed a small smile. “Sorry, boss.”

  “Jeez, I got cred to maintain in here.”

  I took a few deep breaths. “It was the suits that did it.”

  “No shit. They are ugly, aren’t they?” He laughed. Vinny was thin, gray, and ageless but had always looked good. My father would have called him a “natty” dresser. Always put together but never showy. The jumpsuit hung on him like a shopping bag.

  I fought my way to some semblance of normalcy. “How you doing, Vinny? Nobody knew where you were. We asked around, but it was like you just disappeared after the old place closed. People just figured you were drinking someplace new.”

  “Yeah, well. They shut down my shop on account of this bullshit over the Internet business. I don’t even want to talk about it. I told my lawyer to get me a deal, and I took it.”

  “How much longer will you be here?”

  “I copped to three—two and a half to go. I’m hoping it gets crowded, though, and they send some of us home early.”

  “You’ve got somebody rooting for you?”

  “I’ve got some friends—investors, I guess—who owe me, ’cause I neglected to mention their names when the Feds were asking. They got me a very good lawyer and they’re working pulling in favors.”

  I never knew just how connected Vinny was, or with whom. He ran a betting shop over the OTB on Seventy-second Street for a bunch of years without any interference from the NYPD. Someone must have been watching his back. The place was ostensibly a private club, but that was pure fiction. They’d take anybody’s money. There was fresh coffee all day long, comfortable couches and chairs, and when Madison Square Garden put their first flat-screen TV in one of the VIP booths, Vinny already had six of them in his
shop.

  “And how’s things here?” I asked. “You getting by?”

  “I got no problems. I’m bunked with a three-hundred-pound ex-boxer from Albania with a wife and a two-year-old kid up in Hartford. I’ve arranged for her to get a check every month. It’s not a lot, but Vllasi appreciates the gesture. No one bothers us. It’s a quiet kind of place, anyway, you know?”

  I filled him in on the community news. Chitchat. Gossip. When my Pop had come up to visit me, I had found myself hanging on his stories of bar denizens I didn’t know, just to hear a kind voice talking about something almost normal. I stopped when I heard myself telling a story about MaJohn’s mother’s knee operation.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why you would care about that.”

  He smiled. “Nah, it’s okay. Tell John, if she needs anything, she should call my cousin, Al.” He rattled off a phone number. “He works in Boca. He’ll take care of her.”

  “Is he in the same business as you?” I could not imagine why an eighty-five-year-old widow with bad pins would need a bookie.

  Vinny laughed. “No. Al’s legit. Well, quasi-legit. He’s a medical supplies distributor. He can get her a walker, or whatever she needs. One of those go-cart things. Scooter? Whatever.”

  What could be more profitable than your own casino? A medical supply house in Florida.

  “I’ll pass that on,” I said.

  “So, give me something juicy. You working on anything? Something with lots of rich people getting screwed, that’s what I want to hear.” He gave a mad grin.

  “I was hoping to pick your brain.”

  “I got the time.”

  “What I say goes no further.”

  “Come on, who you talking to? Tell me a story. A good one.”

  “I’ve got just the thing,” I said.

  I filled him in on the last three weeks of my life—from the helicopter ride to Newport through dropping the Kid at school and convincing the formidable Mrs. Carter, who guarded the front desk and logged in every student, teacher, and parent who passed in front of her, that the two guys in suits and Terminator sunglasses were okay and would be hanging around outside all day to see my son back home. I left out the debacle of the theater, because I didn’t think Vinny would care. And I left out Skeli’s good-bye picnic, because it was none of his business.

  He interrupted with a few questions as I went along, but when I was done, he was quiet for a long time.

  “So,” he finally said. “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, first, I take it as a given that no one is telling me everything they know.”

  “You include your buddy Paddy in that?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  “Right.” He gave a slow blink of approval.

  “The dead lawyer is important.” I described the method of meeting in the café and returning to the bank to place the bonds back in the safe-deposit box. “But I don’t see yet how to bust it open. He’d have a key, I guess.”

  Vinny was shaking his head. “But that leaves a trail, don’t you see? The bank clocks in every visitor to a safe-deposit box. There’d be a paper trail. Video cameras. I don’t buy it. These guys are too smart for this.”

  “They’re passing tens of millions of dollars of bearer bonds at a time, Vinny. They’d want to keep them fairly secure, ya think?”

  “When you went away, you probably stashed a little something for when you got out, am I right?”

  I nodded. “And my good watch.”

  “And did you put all that in a safe-deposit box?”

  “No,” I said, ready to concede the point. For the two years I was away as a guest of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, my father had kept my briefcase “hidden” on a shelf in my old bedroom upstairs over his bar in College Point. The briefcase had held fifty thousand dollars in crisp fifties, still in the bank wrappers.

  “Whyzat?”

  I was being schooled again. “So there would be no record for the Feds. They’d be able to trace a box.”

  He smiled.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I wasn’t dealing in billions. I had fifty grand in my old briefcase. I left it in my Pop’s apartment. He’s lived there fifty years and never had a break-in. I think it’s the safest place in the universe.”

  “So why would this lawyer do things any different?”

  “Size matters. I would think they’d be a bit smarter about it than I was.”

  He shook his head. “You’re thinking like an investor. These guys aren’t collecting interest. They’re hiding principal. Their greatest fear is what? Losing their shirt? No way. Their only concern is having some cop put together an evidentiary trail. They’d rather keep the money under a mattress. They can always get more money. What they won’t be able to buy is their way out of prison.”

  “We’re talking about one hundred million dollars. No one takes that kind of hit and brushes it off.”

  “Where do you hide sand?”

  “What?”

  “At the beach. You with me? When you’re that big, your number-one problem is visibility, not security. Trust me.”

  “All right, I hear you. But I’m not a hundred percent. Yet. And I still have a half-dozen other trails to chase down.”

  He shrugged. “Go back and talk to the girlfriend. She’s the only one speaking the truth, the way I hear you tell it. She knows more than she said, but she may not know that it’s important.”

  I dreaded going back there. “She’s nucking futz.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “First, you’ve got to eighty-six the muscle. They don’t work for you, they work for this other guy who works for your client. When something bad happens, they’re not gonna be there for you—or the Kid.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “You want me to take care of it? It’s done. There’s people who owe me favors. Let me talk to Vllasi. He’s very creative this way.”

  • • •

  THE BIG WHITE SUV with the dark tinted windows picked me up as I drove out of the forest. It came out of the driveway of an abandoned house, the roof sagging so badly it resembled a pagoda. The driver hung back three or four cars once we were up on the Thruway, but he was still there as I came across the GW Bridge and turned down the West Side Highway.

  I lost him getting off the Highway at Seventy-ninth Street. Or he kept on going because he’d never been following me in the first place. Or it was a succession of similar-looking vehicles. Or a second vehicle picked up the tail. Or I was turning into a first-class paranoid. I left the rental in the Ansonia garage and stopped by Hanrahan’s before heading home.

  | 25 |

  Angie and I waved to the Town Car as it pulled away from the curb, taking Mamma and Tino to the airport. The trunk held two suitcases more than when they had arrived—Angie had made sure to take Mamma shopping. Our smiles lasted until the car was halfway down the block.

  “I don’t think there is much for us to say right now,” Angie said. “I don’t know why, but I thought you would be more supportive.”

  Two more weeks, I reminded myself. Two weeks and she would be gone, back to Louisiana. I could do it. I could make it two weeks.

  “I’m going to be busy wrapping up some work things the next few days. Have some fun with the Kid. I’ll be out of your hair.”

  “You’re not going to miss his graduation?!”

  It wasn’t really a question—more an expression of annoyance.

  “It’s not graduation. There’s no ceremony. No awards. It’s his last day of school.”

  “And you would miss it?!” She did it again.

  There had been a send-off the night before. I should have enjoyed it. The Kid stayed home with Heather and the bodyguards, while Angie and I took her mother and Tino out to Brooklyn—to Peter Luger’s
for steak. Pop and his honey met us there. I immediately liked her. They were both a bit formal with each other, but also comfortable—as though they’d been together years instead of weeks. Mamma had had two martinis and declared the creamed spinach to be “sinful.” Judging by how much of it she had put away, “sinful” was a supreme compliment. Tino and my father swapped funny horror stories about the demands of dealing with customers in a retail service business. Angie and I had sat at opposite ends of the table and did our best to pretend we weren’t there. It was the kind of night I would have enjoyed if Skeli had been there. A bit loose, a bit liquid, surrounded by funny, interesting people that I liked. But Angie—by her presence alone—managed to suck every bit of pleasure out of it.

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “And listen, I don’t like those bodyguards any better than you do, but they are there to keep the Kid safe. Just let them do their jobs.”

  “This is some paranoid fantasy you’ve come up with to interfere with my time alone with my son. I will give this nonsense just two more days, and then I will put a stop to it.”

  She gave me a smug, victorious smile and walked back into her building.

  I shook my head three or four times, took some deep breaths, unclenched my fists, and went home.

  I had just walked in the door when the house phone rang—the front desk.

  “There are two men here to see you, Mr. Stafford. I thought I should check before I sent them up.” The concierge sounded nervous.

  “Thank you, Richard. Did they give their names?”

  “No, but they say they were sent by Vinny. Is this okay with you?”

  “Keep them there, Richard. I’ll be right down.”

  I saw immediately what had made Richard nervous. While Blake’s thugs were big men, muscle-bound and angry-looking—like giant trolls—these two were slender, wiry, and dark. They were polite, a bit formal, and oozed menace. I could see the trolls beating someone to death in slow motion, taking their time. These two would just get it over with.