House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  “I’m in a civilian car,” Schliester said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Tell him you’re in Crown Heights,” the kid said. “And can the Jesus stuff.”

  Schliester started to repeat the message and then realized it was a joke. He looked over at the kid, who was wearing a yarmulke. “Sorry about that,” Schliester said.

  “No problem. Tell him to go east on Eastern Parkway. We’re going west. That ought to pretty much cover it.”

  “Did you get that?” Schliester asked.

  Gogarty said, “Yeah, but I’m nowhere near Eastern Parkway.”

  “Like where?”

  “What does it matter? Get out of the car, I’ll pick you up.”

  “Negative. I’m going to see where he’s going.”

  He put the radio back in his pocket even though Gogarty was still transmitting.

  “Is he supposed to be with you?” the kid asked.

  “I’m supposed to be with him,” Schliester said as he slid through the turn onto Ocean Parkway, the sideways drift taking him all the way across both westbound lanes of the divided roadway. Schliester could see the Mercedes well ahead and moving fast on the slick pavement. He eased down on the accelerator, but even this light touch was more than the bald tires could cope with. The wheels went faster but the car didn’t. The back end wiggled from side to side, like a minnow.

  “Hold it steady,” the kid said. “It’ll come around.”

  He knew his car. It came around, the back end lining up nicely with the rest of the vehicle, encouraging Schliester to try for a bit more speed. “Where does this go?” he asked.

  “Goes everywhere.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Aaron,” the kid said. He didn’t ask Schliester’s name.

  “If you’ve got a seat belt over there, I’d put it on, Aaron,” Schliester said.

  The parkway was flanked on either side by a narrow service road, separated from the main roadway by a tree-lined strip of snow-covered grass. The freezing rain was turning back into blinding snow that fell in heavy wet flakes. That was actually the good news because this stuff was easier to drive on than the sleet. The bad news was that Schliester couldn’t see a thing. The Chevy’s wipers left smeary streaks in front of his eyes, and even in the spots where they cleared the windshield, visibility was down to a block and a half or less.

  “See him?” he asked.

  “I think so,” the kid said, and then he added, “For some reason the wipers always work better on the passenger side.”

  Wise for his years, Schliester thought. “Keep me posted,” he said.

  The last time he had seen the Mercedes, it was doing around fifty. So Schliester went faster.

  Aaron asked, “Where are you from?”

  “From?”

  “Your voice,” the kid said. “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “St. Louis.”

  “And you’re chasing a guy in Brooklyn?”

  “Following.”

  “All right, following. What kind of cop are you?”

  “Dedicated and incorruptible,” Schliester said.

  The kid laughed. “No, I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. You ask too many questions.”

  “Hey, it’s my car.”

  “Do you work?”

  “I’m in high school.”

  “Do you pay taxes?”

  “No.”

  “Then you ask too many questions. Can you still see him?”

  The movement of the car felt a little like one of those dreams where you’re slipping through space and you can feel the motion except you’re not going anywhere and nothing else is going anywhere either. He tried the high beams but the snow just threw them back in his eyes.

  The road was straight and Schliester was able to close the distance to about a hundred yards.

  “The guy in the passenger seat just looked back,” the kid reported.

  “That’s all right,” Schliester said.

  The reason the guy in the passenger seat turned all the way around to look out the back window was because Jimmy Angelisi just said, “He musta got a car. He’s right in back of us.”

  When Fiore saw the car back there he said, “Jesus.”

  “Want me to lose him?” Jimmy asked.

  “No,” Fiore said. “I want to take him home and meet the family. Yeah, lose him. What are you asking for?”

  But Jimmy always asked everything. Which was sometimes a pain in the neck and sometimes comical but was better than if he didn’t.

  Jimmy threw a sharp right at Nostrand Avenue, then cut the wheel back the other way as hard as he could. The Mercedes slid through the corner and up onto the sidewalk of the service road, kicking up snow sideways so that it pelted the window at Fiore’s shoulder like kids throwing slushballs at the car. There was a crunch as some part of the car clipped a bench at a bus shelter, turning it into kindling.

  “I’m going to need bodywork,” Fiore said. “That cocksucker.”

  The Mercedes righted itself and lurched back to the roadway. Fiore looked back and didn’t see anything. “I think maybe that did it,” he said.

  Jimmy wasn’t so sure. “Just hold on,” he said.

  He threw another right onto Rogers Avenue, which put the parkway out Fiore’s window for a second, just long enough to let him see a pair of headlights making the turn at Nostrand Avenue.

  Now they were streaking past little frame houses set shoulder to shoulder. Fiore’s mother lived in a house like that her whole life, not here in Brooklyn but it was the same kind of thing out on City Island just north of the Bronx. She cluttered it with a million statues and trinkets and china tea plates in gaudy colors on counters and credenzas and little shelves built into the corners of the rooms, as though you could make a house bigger by filling it up. In other words, this was a depressing neighborhood just like the one he grew up in, and still lived in for that matter, and it would have been depressing even without a federal agent coming around the corner after him.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  “I’m trying but he’s still there,” Jimmy said.

  “I didn’t say you weren’t trying.”

  “Then shut the fuck up. And don’t worry about it. I know what I’m doing.”

  Jimmy Angelisi was the only person in the world who could tell Chet Fiore to shut the fuck up. They used to be just two kids together, and Jimmy more or less worked on the principle that they still were. So did Fiore. Once he had been told, by John Gotti himself, that it set a bad example, that a man in his position couldn’t afford to let people see other people treating him with disrespect. But Fiore shrugged off the advice. He was comfortable with the relationship.

  Jimmy hit the brakes again and then almost immediately jumped on the gas as he yanked the wheel through another right turn. This time he didn’t hit anything, sliding through the turn as smooth as all those ice-skaters on television in their little skirts and their tight pants. Jimmy’s wife watched ice-skating whenever it was on.

  Well behind the Mercedes, Schliester had made the turn at Nostrand Avenue without hitting anything. “Look at that,” Aaron said. “He wiped out the bench.”

  “Anyone waiting for the bus?”

  “No.”

  “Then forget about it.”

  “I’ll bet he doesn’t forget,” Aaron said. “They’re cement at the bottom. I’ll bet he’s looking at five thousand dollars’ worth of bodywork. A Mercedes, you know, they can’t just straighten the panel. It’s everything.” And then he said, “He’s turning again.”

  Schliester couldn’t see Fiore’s car but there was no reason not to take the kid’s word for it. He tried to match Fiore’s turn onto Rogers Avenue and almost lost it in the process. The back end came all the way around.

  “I sure hope my dad’s not looking out the window,” Aaron said.

  “You live there?”

  “Right on the corner. Let
’s get out of here.”

  Schliester didn’t have a chance to register a single thing about the kid’s house but he had a pretty good idea what it looked like without seeing it. They all looked like nice enough houses, with little yards and some hedges covered in snow. The front rooms were all dark. It was well after midnight by now. If he had been out in a storm like this when he was Aaron’s age, his father would have been pacing back and forth in the front room, looking out the window. “Hope I’m not getting you in any trouble, Aaron,” Schliester said.

  “No sweat,” the kid said. “Watch out, he’s taking another right.”

  The last turn put the wind across Schliester’s bows and the snow was blowing sideways instead of right into him, so that he could see the taillights of the Mercedes up ahead. He was less than a hundred yards behind it. He saw the brake lights flash on and he saw the right turn at the same time Aaron did. “Got it,” he said.

  There was a light up ahead, red, where the road ran into Eastern Parkway again. All they had done was go around the block, but Schliester looked at this as a kind of moral victory. He had Chet Fiore going in circles, so at least the night wasn’t a total loss.

  Which is when it dawned on him that there was no real reason to be here. Whatever was supposed to come next after Chet Fiore’s little visit to a banker’s birthday party wasn’t going to happen when Fiore knew he was being tailed. Maybe nothing was ever going to happen. Maybe Fiore went to high school with the guy. Maybe he went into the restaurant to take a leak.

  Bullshit, Schliester decided. There were never innocent explanations. For anything. Ever. The whole thing needed looking into, and Schliester knew where to look, starting with the banker.

  That was for tomorrow. Tonight was just for fun.

  As the Mercedes came back to the parkway, Jimmy Angelisi had just a split second to register the looming shape of the bus coming from his left. A quick calculation told him he stood no chance at all of making it around the turn in front of the bus and no chance of stopping. “Hold on,” he yelled, picking where he wanted the damn thing to hit him. Back end was better than front, so he hit the gas instead of the brakes, angling across the intersection the way a wide receiver cuts in front of the defense, giving away any possibility of making the turn but raising the odds that he could slice by without getting hit or at least hit bad, and then he’d worry about being in the wrong lane on the wrong side of the highway going the wrong way.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Fiore just had time to say.

  What he meant but didn’t say was What the fuck does that asshole agent think he’s doing? It would have been better if no one knew he had gone to Blaine’s party. All right, they knew. They couldn’t make anything of it. It was a public restaurant. He was only in there ten minutes, maybe twenty. They’d raise their eyebrows and they’d shake their heads and they’d look for a connection and wouldn’t find one. Because right now there wasn’t one. The trick, of course, was to lose this guy before anything else happened. He was confident Jimmy could do that. It would be nice, too, if he could do it without wrecking a Mercedes with less than five thousand miles on it. He had taken a lot of shit about this Mercedes because the older men drove Lincolns and Caddies, and everything else was dismissed as either a piece of shit, a foreign car, or a foreign-car-piece-of-shit. There would be a lot of laughs on Mulberry Street if he got hit by a bus, which was looking more and more likely every millisecond.

  Fiore checked back over his shoulder and the bus looked as big as the Queen Mary. He could see the bus driver’s mouth moving in all kinds of curses, a black guy with a little mustache and big eyes and one of those bus-driver hats low on his head like he was an airline pilot or something, and his hand leaning on the horn, which sounded as big as a ship’s horn when it went off practically in Chet Fiore’s ear.

  The bus kissed against the Mercedes a few inches behind the rear wheel, not a collision so much as a nudge, but it was like a hand catching your ankle when you’re running at full speed. The car spun like a top, squirting across the oncoming lanes in three directions at once. There used to be a ride like that at Palisades Park. When there was a Palisades Park. In fact, Fiore and Jimmy had taken it together when they were kids. But there the similarities ended. The big Mercedes turned completely around at least three times and it might have been four or even five times. Inside, it felt like the spinning wasn’t going to stop.

  The bus stopped, though, and the driver threw open the door and jumped out onto the roadway to see what assistance he could render. He had never seen a car spin like that and wouldn’t have thought it possible. He had seen them roll over onto their roofs and had seen them slide sideways, and once he saw a car do a complete somersault off an incomplete highway ramp and land on its wheels. The Mercedes was still spinning when the bus driver ran in front of his bus and started toward it.

  A horn screamed from behind him and a rust-colored Chevy slid through the same intersection the Mercedes had come from, making straight toward him in a kind of slipping, sideways motion. It was like all of a sudden no one in the world knew what the word ice meant or how to drive on it. Where the hell were these people from? Hawaii? He leaped toward the protection afforded by the front of his bus, and the Chevy floated right past him, kind of easy and natural, the way drunks move when they’re pretending they’re not drunk.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Schliester said, doing things with the steering wheel that had no effect whatsoever on the movement of the car. He held his breath until they were past the bus driver.

  Aaron looked back over his shoulder.

  “I didn’t hit him, did I?” Schliester asked.

  “You’re doing fine,” the kid said.

  The Mercedes stopped spinning. Its wheels had been turning the whole time, and now they bit pavement under the ice and the car lurched forward, westbound, which by luck was the direction Fiore wanted to go. The Chevy skated right to left directly in front of him.

  “What the fuck was that?” Fiore asked.

  “That’s them, I think,” Jimmy said.

  Fiore leaned forward to look past Jimmy out the side window. “That’s them?” he said out loud, marveling.

  The thought passed through his mind that maybe these guys weren’t federal agents or even cops after all. In which case they could have been absolutely anything. And they seemed to be pretty damned intent on what they were doing. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

  Fiore didn’t carry a gun anymore because that’s what he had Jimmy for, but right now he wished he had one.

  Schliester’s right foot was pressed so hard to the floor it almost went through. If he could have, and if it would have helped stop the Chevy from sliding across the highway, he would have jammed his shoe right through the floorboards and onto the roadway, the way bikers use their boots for brakes. He saw the Mercedes on his left-hand side, and then it was on his right. He saw it jump the divider and speed westward in the westbound lane while he was still sliding sideways westward in the eastbound lane. He feathered the brake even though the wheels were already locked. He knew he didn’t have control of the car, but at least he had the illusion of control, which wouldn’t last long unless the wheels started turning again.

  They did. A moment ago he had been sliding and now he was driving again. He made straight for the divider, intending to take it the way Fiore’s driver had done just a few seconds earlier. The impact felt like all his teeth were coming loose, and his radio flew out of his pocket. All four wheels left the ground at the same time and then came back down one at a time. But the suspension held. He couldn’t afford to look over to his right, but he asked Aaron how he was doing and the kid said, “So far, okay. But that’s what the guy said when he fell off the Empire State Building.”

  “What guy?” Schliester asked.

  “Never mind.”

  In just the last few seconds the visibility out front improved remarkably, even miraculously. The Mercedes was less than a quarter of a mile ahead of h
im. But all of a sudden there was something that looked like an enormous cement building floating in the air over the Mercedes and the Mercedes seemed to be driving right into it.

  “What the hell is that?” Schliester asked.

  “Grand Army Plaza,” Aaron said. “You better pray he bears right.”

  “What’s to the right?”

  “Everything.”

  “What’s to the left?”

  “You’ll see,” Aaron said. “He just turned left.”

  The taillights were gone. Schliester streaked toward the looming mass of what turned out to be a triumphal arch at the entrance to Prospect Park. Half a dozen roads seemed to converge at the same spot. “Hard left,” Aaron shouted.

  “You see him?”

  “No, but I know where he went.”

  Every kid in Brooklyn knew that the one place you could be certain of getting lost was Prospect Park. If a gang was chasing you, that’s where you went. Or the cops. Or people you owed money to. The roads snaked around as though they were going up and down the sides of a mountain. There were a million paths and almost no streetlights.

  Jimmy Angelisi was in his element here. For a driver like Jimmy, this was the equivalent of old-fashioned country hardball. There were trees everywhere, left and right, forming a canopy over their heads. There was darkness over the trees and in between them and off to either side of them beyond where the headlights cut a slender, almost insignificant hole through the middle of the night. The road itself virtually writhed under his wheels, twisting like a perch squirming in the air when you pull it out of the water. They were dropping down a pretty steep hill.

  “This is gonna be good,” Jimmy said. His left hand went to the dash and flipped a switch, and now the darkness swallowed whole everything it hadn’t swallowed already.

  “Chrissakes, turn them on!” Fiore yelled.

  “It’s all right,” Jimmy assured him.

  “Mother of Mercy!”

  Fiore just had time to think that this is what a cockroach must feel like inside a shoe.

  Schliester and Aaron both saw the Mercedes vanish at exactly the same instant.

  “He cut his lights,” Aaron said.