Kersh left, and for a while John listened to the larger man’s footfalls creak down the office corridor. There was the familiar grind of the elevator being called to their floor, the ding! of the bell as it arrived, and the lethargic swoosh as the elevator doors opened. After a second or two, the grinding started up again, and he listened to the elevator slowly descend.
Closing his eyes, he reclined in his chair, squeezing the handball in one hand. The events of the past two months whizzed through his brain like a video on fast-forward. It wasn’t until the phone at his desk rang, startling him that he realized he’d fallen asleep.
It was one of the agents at the duty desk. “John. Wasn’t sure you were still here.”
“What’s up?”
“There’s a woman here to see you. She looks pretty upset.”
“Her name?”
“Says her name is Tressa Walker.”
The handball rolled to the edge of the desk, paused for a moment … then fell off; it bounced a few feet away from the desk, then began rolling across the floor to the wide bank of office windows. Looking up at the windows, John saw his face reflecting back at him.
“I’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up the phone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
INSIDE A SMALL, WINDOWLESS INTERVIEW ROOM ON the main floor of the New York field office, Tressa Walker sat at the end of a long rectangular table with her white, fisted hands pushed into her lap. When John opened the door and stepped inside, the young woman looked up nervously. For a split second, she looked as though she wanted to rise and quickly run out of the room. Fear and confusion registered on her face, pulling the lines of her mouth and eyes into sad fishhooks. It had been close to a month since he’d last seen her, and it now looked as though the girl had aged twenty years.
“Tressa,” he said, moving into the room and shutting the door behind him, “what are you doing here? You can’t come around here like this. You wanted to talk, you should have called me.”
He took a seat not across from her but beside her, with one empty chair between them. Her eyes had a difficult time staying on him, or in any one place for any length of time. She looked much more frightened now than on the evening at McGinty’s. The worry in her face prompted him to lean forward in his chair, suddenly worried that something had gone wrong, horribly wrong.
“What?” he said. “What is it?”
“They’re asking questions about you,” she said in an unsteady voice. It was as if she were confessing her sins to a priest, embarrassed by her misdeeds and terrified of the consequences. “Mickey and Jimmy. They’re goin’ around the neighborhood asking about you. They saw me tonight, cornered me, started pumping me for information. I didn’t … I mean … when I saw them, saw who they were, I knew right away something was wrong. Christ.” Her body was trembling. “John, what the hell’s going on? What’s taking so long?”
“First of all, calm down.”
Nodding rapidly, she formed her lips into a wide circle and sucked in a deep breath.
“What did they want to know?” he said. “What did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them nothing,” she insisted. “They cornered me, scared the shit outta me. I thought…” She fell silent, not needing to continue. Tressa Walker had thought she was going to die.
“What did they ask you?” he pressed her. “What did they say about me?”
“No, nothing,” she said, shaking her head. She fumbled a cigarette from her purse and lit it with one shaking hand. “Just … they just wanted to know stuff … I don’t know …” She pulled a long, hard drag from the smoke. The insides of her cheeks almost touched. “I can’t give ‘em answers for all their questions, John. I’m gettin’ scared. They start askin’ me things I don’t got answers to, I screw up and say the wrong thing, they’re gonna know. These guys don’t play around. What the hell is taking you so long to get them?”
“We’re working it.” He tried to sound confident and convincing. “We’re close, but it takes time. You just have to chill out. It’s all right.”
“It’s not. They’re still trying to move the money through Francis, you know, but he don’t have no buyers lined up. And really, he’s too goddamn scared to deal with them anymore.” Another pull on her cigarette and John thought her eyes would roll back into her head. “This is taking too long, and I don’t like it. I wanna get out of the city now, get away from them. I don’t like where this is going. That witness protection thing we talked about—you gotta get me out of here now …”
“Listen to me—Tressa, you have to stay calm. They’re just pushing you—that’s all. We’ve been doing some deals, and they’re starting to trust me now—”
“They don’t trust nobody.”
“If we move you out now,” he continued, “it’ll raise suspicion. It’s better for you to hang here until this thing blows over. They’re just trying to put a scare on you, see if you tell them anything. As long as you don’t, there’s nothing to worry about.”
But he could see from the look on her face and from the nervous shift of her eyes that any further pressuring by the West Side boys would surely result in her collapse, regardless of what the penalty might be. What had seemed like her ticket out of Hell’s Kitchen just a short month or so ago now seemed like a death sentence.
“They been trying to find out where you come from, who you’ve dealt with,” Tressa explained. “They been whispering your name all through Hell’s Kitchen, see if anybody’s ever heard of you. John, they find out you’re Secret Service, they’ll fucking cut me, fucking hurt—”
“Relax.”
He realized then just how fragile a foundation the entire case was built on. One word—one false word, false action, false anything—put a lot of people in danger.
“This thing’s almost over,” he told her. It was a promise he made to himself more than to her. “A little while longer and we’ll grab them. Just hang in and be smart. Nothing bad is gonna happen.”
Looking down at her lap, she said, “I hope so.”
Yet she already sounded defeated.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 23, ROUGHLY fifteen hours before he would have a gun pointed at his head, John Mavio awoke early and in a good mood. Slipping his pants on, he turned to watch Katie sleeping in bed. She stirred and twisted her body around to stretch across the width of the mattress. She’d grown accustomed to sleeping alone; he could tell just by the way her body curled into a comma, taking up both sides of the bed simultaneously even in her sleep. That was the way he’d sometimes find her when he would come home at night.
He walked silently down the hallway and crept into the spare room at the front of the apartment. There were still boxes here from the move—now just mostly his junk—and the television and VCR had been propped on a stained butcher block. Beside the television, Katie had erected and decorated a scrawny-looking fake tree for Christmas.
Silently, in the gloom of morning, he began wrapping his wife’s Christmas presents.
In the days since Tressa Walker’s surprise visit to the field office, he’d purchased two more guns from Mickey, neither of which had been linked to any unsolved homicides or possessed any of Jimmy Kahn’s fingerprints. And in the passage of those days, he could feel the urgency to move things along like a festering disease at the pit of his stomach. Each subsequent time he met with Mickey, he found it very difficult to put Tressa’s face out of his mind. The nervous sound of her voice served as a constant ticking inside his head. He feared it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the structure of his undercover operation started to show.
“You’re up early,” Katie said from the doorway.
“Did I wake you?”
“Not you,” she said. “The phone. Didn’t you hear it ringing? Bill Kersh is on the line.”
On the phone, Kersh sounded more energetic than usual.
“What’s up, Bill?”
“Sorry to ruin your day, but
we gotta roll out.”
“What’s the matter?”
“You’ll never guess who just called me.”
Morris, Evelyn Gethers’s butler, stood outside a strip of storefronts along the Bowery. Dressed in gray Brooks Brothers slacks, a pinstripe shirt, and a long black coat, he looked out of place among the subverted streets and devastated buildings. More incriminating was Morris’s black El Dorado, buffed to a dull shine and idling in a street surrounded by burned-out VW Beetles and an old Comet stripped of its chrome.
Following Kersh’s phone call, John had headed into the city and met Kersh at the field office. Now, in Kersh’s sedan, they both pulled up together behind Morris’s Cadillac. Morris approached John’s side of the car and began speaking before he was even out the door.
“I thought I should call you, thought you should know. It’s—come with me—it’s up here.”
The road rose to a slight incline. John and Kersh followed Morris up the sidewalk. To their left, five-story tenements pressed against the colorless sky. To their right, a chain-link fence surrounded a series of dilapidated storefronts, each of their windows soaped, their fronts the bleached color of bone. Metal roll-down doors covered some of the entranceways, most of them locked with industrial-sized padlocks and chains.
“We’ve had this space for years,” Morris continued. “It’s all Mr. Gethers’s stuff. His wife refused to part with it after his death, so she had it all tucked away here. It’s all junk, really, but it has some sentimental value to her, I suppose.”
Morris led them through the fence and over to one of the storefronts. They lined the street here, identical brick buildings with spray-painted steel roll-down doors. Some of them had numbers painted above the doors, but time and the elements had caused the numbers to fade. Most were hardly legible.
While Morris dug around for a set of keys in his coat, John rubbed his gloved hands together, exhaled warm breath onto the palms. The day before Christmas Eve, but one would never notice down here: the streets looked vacant, the windows in the buildings like blind, gaping eyes. As far as he could see, the only evidence of red and green were the cheerless bulbs of the traffic lights at each intersection.
“Here we are,” Morris muttered, finding the appropriate key. He bent and slipped the key into the zigzag niche at the base of a padlock. The lock was as large as a grown man’s fist. It popped open, and Morris slid it from the loop that held the giant roll-down door closed. “I’m going to need some assistance …”
Bending down, giving his hands one last rub, John grabbed the lip at the bottom of the roll-down door and helped Morris hoist it off the ground. It opened with surprising effortlessness. Above their heads, the beams that secured the door rattled and clanged like the chains of Marley’s ghost. There was a grinding of gears that echoed through the dull afternoon. One final push, and the door locked in place.
Behind the roll-down door was a smaller door, accessible after a simple turn of the knob. Morris reached out and unlocked this door, too, turned the knob, and held the door open.
The inside of the place was dark, and it took their eyes a few moments to adjust as they stepped inside.
“What’s that smell?” Kersh said, taking small, shuffling steps and sniffing the air.
John recognized it, too. It smelled like the computer room back at the office, after the ink jet printers became too hot and overworked.
Morris felt along the wall for a light switch. He clicked it on, throwing shadows into corners and crevices.
John whistled.
At first glance, the stuff that filled the room looked like junk jettisoned from the Museum of Natural History’s basement. Packaged wooden crates lined most of the walls, unlabeled and in a variety of sizes. The center part of the room served as a collage of ancient, mismatched artifacts: splintered furniture; a number of headless dress-maker’s dummies; a large mattresses, sodden with mildew and folded into an upside-down V; a dusty leather trunk with brass buckles; what appeared to be an interior door of a house, the knob and hinges still attached; a bookshelf littered with wires and cables and hoses coiled like snakes. And that was only the beginning. The room went far back, most of it cloaked in shadow. With each step closer to the rear, more and more of Charles Gethers’s forgotten relics appeared, like great reaches of stalagmites.
“Come toward the back,” Morris said, already on his way past the junk. It was like maneuvering through an obstacle course. “Like I’ve said,” the butler continued, “Mrs. Gethers has kept this place running for some time. She obviously pays the electric bill, but as you can imagine, no one comes here often and the bill is not much. However,” he added, swinging one leg around a large ceramic lamp with some difficulty, “I’ve recently received the electric bill to cover the past several months. It was through the roof. I thought there had to be some mistake, so I called the company—but they insisted it was correct. So I figured I’d come down here and see what the heck was going on. That’s when I discovered this.”
Morris stopped abruptly toward the back of the room, and John nearly slammed into the man’s back. Behind him, Kersh grunted and knocked over the ceramic lamp Morris had been careful to avoid.
The first thing John noticed were the two large machines that rested against the back wall. He immediately recognized them for what they were: dry offset printing presses. That was the smell he and Kersh had noticed upon entering the storage room—the smell of ink. Lots of it. He was aware of Kersh saddling up beside him, then pausing, just as dumbfounded by the presses as John. When they finally averted their eyes, they glanced at each other with a twin look of amazement on their faces.
This was where the money was printed.
Yet the printing presses were not what Morris had taken them here to see. The butler was looking in the direction opposite of the presses, pointing to a jumbled swath of clothing balled against the floor. Behind the clothing was a New York Jets duffel bag, the canvas dotted with specks of spilled ink. More ink had dried like syrup on the cement floor behind the duffel bag.
“These are his. Clifton’s,” Morris said. “I recognize his clothes.” He turned to the agents, scowling. “That bastard’s been living here.”
It occurred to John that Morris was not aware Douglas Clifton had taken a nosedive out his hospital window last month. And although the butler would have undoubtedly received some great satisfaction from the knowledge, John did not say anything to him about it.
Instead, he walked slowly around the printing presses. “These presses,” he said. “Mr. Gethers …”
“He was in publishing,” Morris said. “It was his career. As you know, it turned him into a very wealthy man. These were his first two printing presses, I believe, when he was developing magazine prototypes, mockups … those sort of things.” Morris cleared his throat. “Is there something wrong? What about these clothes? What about Mr. Clifton?”
“He had access to this place?” John asked the butler.
“Apparently he does,” Morris said, “though neither myself or Mrs. Gethers knew about it until now.”
“Anyone else?”
“Anyone else what?”
“Have access to this place? “John said. He bent down and peered around the side of one of the presses, then turned and glanced over at the pile of Clifton’s clothes and the Jets duffel bag. The clothes looked hardened, molded to one another. They hadn’t been worn in some time.
“Just myself and Mrs. Gethers,” Morris said. Then, after a pause, he added rather unwillingly, “And, I suppose, anyone else our friend Clifton passed the key along to. Do you think he’ll be back here this evening?”
Considering the mess Clifton must have left on the sidewalk below his hospital window, John said, “Doubt it.” He leaned closer, looking at the spilled ink on the floor. “Bill … come take a look at this …”
“What?” Kersh said, leaning over one of John’s shoulders.
“This ain’t ink.”
“What is it?” But at the
last second, something clicked at the back of Kersh’s throat, and John realized the older agent suddenly knew exactly what it was.
“Blood,” John said. “Coagulated. Almost dry.”
“I’m sorry?” Morris said, taking a hesitant step closer to the duffel bag. “Blood? Whose?”
If I had to guess, John thought, I’d say this is where Douglas Clifton lost his hand.
“John.” There was an excited tremor in Kersh’s voice. He felt the man’s fingers close around his shoulder. “John … take a look …”
Turning his head to follow Kersh’s finger, his eyes landed on a Rubbermaid trash receptacle, the triangular ecru corners of paper jutting from above the receptacle’s rim. Printing paper.
Kersh went over to the receptacle, tipped it at an angle, peered inside. With one hand he fished out crinkled sheaves of paper, held them up, examined them in the light. Many of the discarded sheets of paper had partially printed hundred-dollar bills on them.
Cocking a thin eyebrow, Morris said, “What’re those?”
“Waste,” Kersh said, tossing the paper back into the receptacle. “Dry runs.”
“Excuse me?”
John lifted some articles of clothing. They were damp and stiff, and he moved several articles in a heap at one time. Large, black roaches had taken up residence in the sodden channels and darkened creases of the clothing; they scattered like dust the moment they were struck by light. The powerful, coppery smell of blood mingled with the moist reek of mildew made his stomach caterwaul and roll over.
Reaching over the pile of clothing, John grappled with the zipper of the Jets bag, and with a series of rigid tugs he managed to unzip it.
“Bill.” His own voice sounded very far away. “Bill, I got your Christmas present over here.”
Inside the duffel bag and wrapped in lengths of cloth were the plates and negatives necessary for printing counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.
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