by Scott Frank
“You didn’t know these things, which is why you shouldn’t have mouthed off to me like I’m just another low-level finger-breaker like you. You should have shown me some respect, just in case. Don’t pass out yet, Larry. Do not pass out.”
“I’m sorry…” Barely above a whisper now.
“In French, we say Mille fois pardons. A thousand apologies.”
“What?”
And then he tipped forward, his chin all the way to his chest, the blood from his neck dumping into his lap.
Albert kicked him over and said, “Apology accepted.” He stared at him another minute, then turned to Roy and said, “Have you got a pen?”
Albert walked back out into the bar, sat down in what had been Larry’s chair across from the old man, and said, “Hello, Mr. Bianchi. My name and number are written on your boy’s forehead.”
The old man started looking around for his muscle. Albert jerked a thumb toward the back and said, “He’s in the john.”
Albert smiled and leaned forward.
“At some point, I’d love to sit down and talk business with you. Talk about how I can make you safer and richer at the same time.” He then kissed the hand of one of the hookers, smiled, and said, “Au revoir, ladies.”
—
Naturally, Harvey was furious when he found out about Albert’s dumbass move. “You killed the man’s muscle?”
“He knows I have balls.”
“What he knows is that you’re out of fucking control.”
“On the contrary, I was completely in control. Ask them.” He nodded to where Roy, Bob, and Danny all sat on the couch like scolded teenagers, trying to look anywhere but at Harvey.
The old man shook his head, began to hobble out of the room, and said, “We’re all dead.”
Two days later the call came. Bianchi wanted to meet. Harvey was certain that Albert wouldn’t leave the meeting alive. Albert insisted that the meeting be with his whole crew and, to everyone’s surprise, Bianchi agreed.
Harvey refused to come along. He again stressed that this was good for Bianchi, bad for them. They don’t need to do this. Albert said, “Do what you want,” then spent the better part of an hour in the shower, another half hour shaving, and then asked Roy to cut his hair. He insisted that Bob wear clean clothes and spent some time alone with Bob, presumably going over how to behave, what to say, and most importantly in Bob’s case, what not to say.
Danny was nervous, bouncing off the walls even more than usual. He confided in Roy that this would be an entirely different league for him. He didn’t want to be a part of something like this, especially if he ever wanted to get back to California. He said to Roy, “You shouldn’t do this.”
“Why not?”
“You should split,” Danny said. “Right now.”
“Where would I go?”
The meeting was at a steakhouse. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and Leo Bianchi, the only customer, sat at a booth in the back reading a newspaper. A waiter set down an espresso and disappeared while two ape-shapes in slacks and tight polo shirts got up from an adjacent table and began frisking everyone.
Albert smiled at them. “Leo’s new muscle.”
They looked like they wanted to spit in his face.
One of them looked at Roy and said, “Your daddy know you’re here?”
Albert said, “He’s twenty-eight. Probably older than you are. And he killed his daddy. When he was eleven.”
Leo Bianchi didn’t look up from his paper as he motioned them all to sit, went back to stirring his coffee.
“Mr. Bianchi,” Albert began, “I’ve brought you a tribute.”
Albert then dropped a handful of diamonds onto the tablecloth in front of him. Bianchi ignored them and said, “Albert Budin.” He then looked up at Albert over the top of the paper and said, “Your mama disowned you.”
Albert just smiled.
Bianchi carefully folded the newspaper and reached for a black cigarette case as he continued. “There’s a story I heard not too long ago, that you fucked the wife of a dead friend before the man’s body even got cold. That was after you cheated the same friend out of fourteen grand, and then lost twenty pounds so that you could fit into the dead man’s clothes. You then got the wife pregnant, beat her so that she lost the kid, and then you split.” Bianchi then picked up his coffee and said, “Have I left anything out, Monsieur Budin?”
“Yes, you have. You neglected to mention that I was the one who killed this man in the first place.”
Leo B stared at Albert, not so much studying him as deciding what he wanted to do with him and how he wanted to do it. For the first time in a long time, Roy felt the desire to run.
“And so,” Bianchi said, “today, you come to me asking for my sanction, but only after you kill my bodyguard and only after you and your so-called crew,” he waved a dismissive hand at Roy and the others, “have already robbed in my territory.”
“That’s all true.”
“So tell me, Mr. Budin, why should I bother talking to you at all? Why shouldn’t I have Theo and Chris throw your frog ass out a fucking window?”
Albert leaned forward. “First of all, Mr. Bianchi, I’m not French. I’m Canadian.” Then he smiled at the old man and said, “It’s an easy mistake to make, I know, because of my accent.”
Bianchi cut a look at the two bodyguards. Can you believe this guy?
Roy thought that he might be able to get a gun away from one and shoot the other one with it. But only if Danny and Bob got up when he did. And even then, Roy made their chance of getting out in one piece less than even.
“Second of all,” Albert went on, “my mother, God rest her soul, was a drug addict and a prostitute who OD’d a week after I was born on a speedball that, from all accounts, was so hot that her loving generous heart exploded.”
Albert then leaned forward, clasped his hands, and rested his arms on the table.
“Finally,” he said. “We both know that the man you referred to earlier, the one I killed, was Kolby Beck. Your personal chef and a snitch about to give you up to the FBI in return for a new zip code. Had Kolby lived to do this, you and I would not be sitting here having this nice conversation. You’d be in Leavenworth with the rest of your familia cooking your orechetta on a fucking hotplate.”
—
After hearing the story, Harvey couldn’t believe that they were all still breathing. Bob and Danny were laughing and drinking one beer after another just to calm down. Albert was laughing, too, like it was all no big thing, but Roy could see there was something else there. This was important to Albert, a long fermented ambition. For the first time, he cared about something, and wanted to make it work.
Bianchi had offered them a job right there in the room. He gave them a grand up front to shoot a man named Gale Collins, recent resident of the federal prison in Joliet and now living in Kansas City. The man’s sudden parole was suspiciously coincidental to the capture of an Italian American fugitive who, until recently, had been living under an assumed name in Legion, Nebraska, for the past eighteen years.
The job was important to him, so Albert wanted to get every detail right. They would watch Collins’s house, follow him everywhere for a week, and then once they knew his schedule, they would grab him up, take him to an isolated spot that Albert had long ago scouted along the Republican River, and shoot him. They would then put him in a barrel, fill it with acid, seal it, and sink it.
But from the minute they started their surveillance of the house, Roy knew that something was wrong.
The four of them were parked out front of the little house in the mostly industrial area of the West Bottoms. Bob and Albert up front. Danny and Roy in the back. They had enough food, dope, and beer to last a week.
For the first two days they watched the house and never once saw Gale Collins. They didn’t see anyone until the third day when a woman showed up and went inside with her own key. The woman was Hispanic, looked to be about thirty, and dressed i
n some kind of domestic uniform. She would turn out to be the only person they saw going in or going out. The curtains were pulled on all of the windows, so there was no way to look inside and see if the man was actually there or not.
But they could hear him.
On several occasions, during the night, the lights would come on and they’d hear the man yelling at someone. Twenty minutes later the woman would show up. There would be some more yelling, before the house would go quiet for the night.
Finally, on the fifth night, they were sitting out there in the rain, watching the house, when Albert said, “Fuck this,” and got out of the car. They watched as he went around the back and disappeared. A light went on inside, then off. Ten minutes later he came jogging back to the car and sat there staring straight ahead for a minute before Bob, sitting behind the wheel, finally spoke.
“You do him?”
“Nope.”
“Is the guy even in there?”
“Yep.”
“So—”
“Shut up, Bob.”
Albert then turned around and looked at Roy.
“You go.”
“Me?”
“No sense in all of us going in and marking the place up.”
Albert opened the glove box and then turned back to Roy holding a .22 target pistol with a silencer attached.
He said, “One to the ear. One to the back of the head. One under the chin. Put the other three wherever you want, I don’t care as long as you come back with an empty gun.”
Danny reached for the gun and said, “I’ll do it.”
Albert pulled it away, said, “Roy’s going to do it,” and put the piece in Roy’s hand.
Albert then turned back around and faced front. “The back door is unlocked.”
Roy got out of the car and crossed the street, too distracted to feel the rain. The house was one of only three left in a neighborhood otherwise full of warehouses and manufacturers. Roy found the back door, paused to look up at a tall dark building that hovered over the house, the name KC BOLT & SCREW stenciled eighty years ago, but still visible on the rotting wood.
Everything about this neighborhood seemed wrong.
Roy took a breath, opened the door, went inside, and was immediately hit with the twin odors of fried fish and VapoRub. He felt his eyes water and pulled the neck of his shirt up over his mouth and nose. He was standing in a small kitchen, and even in the dark could see that nearly every inch of counter space was covered with dirty dishes or trash of some kind. He heard the TV in the living room, local news it sounded like, and put his hand on the gun in his pocket and started moving.
It was even darker in the front room with just a tiny square of light coming from the portable TV sitting on top of a card table. Roy stood for a moment behind a couch that split the room. There didn’t seem to be anyone in here. Roy tried to pull the gun, but it caught in his coat pocket and he dropped it on the floor with a loud clunk.
There was a groan from the couch and Roy froze as an old man sat up on the couch right in front of him.
“Who’s there?”
He fumbled about and turned on a light.
The guy had to be ninety. Beneath a few wisps of gray hair were a pair of watery yellow eyes set into a face the color of faded cardboard. Whatever the man was sick with, it was eating him from the inside out.
“Claudia?”
Roy retrieved the gun, came around, and asked, “Are you Gale Collins?”
The man squinted at him. “Jacob?” He then stood up and said, “C’mon, help me, I gotta piss.”
The man grabbed a walker and started down a short hall. Roy saw a light go on and the old man turned and looked back.
“You just gonna stand there?”
Roy didn’t know what to do, so he put the gun back in his pocket and started down the hall to the bathroom.
The old guy turned around and said, “I can’t do the buttons.”
Roy looked at his pants, stained in the front, and then up at the guy, who waited.
Fuck.
Roy unbuttoned the man’s pants. Then helped him get them and his reeking boxer shorts down around his ankles.
“I gotta sit,” the man said. And fell back onto the john. “Like a girl.”
Roy turned away as the man began to urinate and fell back asleep on the toilet.
Now Roy understood why Albert was upset. Leo Bianchi had fucked with him. This was no job. This was an insult. Payback for Albert’s disrespect. Of course, Albert wouldn’t play along, so he sent Roy into the house. Roy was the only choice. Bob and Danny would forever question him if they saw what the job was. Harvey, if he were to find out, would certainly never let Albert forget it.
But Albert knew that, of all of them, Roy would say nothing. Roy would always protect him, because Roy would always owe him that much.
“I’m hungry.”
Roy saw that the old man was once more awake and struggling to stand. Roy pulled him off the john and helped him get his pants up.
“I want some Jell-O.”
And so Roy led him into the filthy kitchen and sat him down at a table covered with pill vials and old magazines. He found a bowl of green Jell-O in the refrigerator and brought it along with a spoon he fished out of the muddy sink to the table.
“I need my medicine.” The old man nodded to the vials on the table. “She puts it in the Jell-O.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know.”
Roy looked at the man and for a moment saw the old guy who had pulled his father out of the sinking car and saved his life. Gale Collins looked like a man at that advanced age where the animal part of him starts to take over the human part. Roy looked at the table and realized that he had just been given a way out.
He grabbed several of the vials and went to the sink and dumped the pills onto the counter. The old man fell asleep in the chair while Roy crushed up the pills from three different vials. He couldn’t identify the medicines, but was reasonably certain that, whatever they were, the amount would be enough to kill Gale Collins.
That task done, Roy sat down at the table and shook him by the shoulder.
“Hey.”
He pushed the bowl of Jell-O in front of him.
The man took a bite and winced. He looked up at Roy. His eyes seemed to clear as he studied Roy for a good long while. He then dipped his spoon back in the Jell-O and said, “You’re a good boy, Jacob.”
Albert was standing in the backyard getting soaked by the rain when Roy finally slipped out the door.
“What the fuck took so long?”
Roy just stood there. Albert held out his hand.
“Give me the gun.”
He passed it to Albert, who checked it and looked up at him, his face a question.
“I gave him some pills.”
“Pills?”
“He’s sick. He’s gonna go anyway.”
Albert shook his head and started for the house. Roy called after him. “Bianchi’s fucking with us, Al.”
Albert ignored him and went into the house. Roy stood there a moment, then went in after him.
Roy had helped the old man back onto the couch and he was out cold when Albert found him and slapped his face, “Gale. Wake up.”
The old man opened his eyes and Albert shot him in the head.
The following day, Albert, Roy, Danny, and Bob—each armed with a shotgun sawed off by Harvey the night before and full of his custom loads, walked into Leo Bianchi’s restaurant and quickly cut down both of his bodyguards before spreading a screaming Leo B all over the wall behind his favorite booth.
And while it all went without a hitch or a witness (the staff stayed hidden in the kitchen), Roy wondered why Danny’s shots all went wide. Albert may have wondered the same thing, for it would be a long time before he brought him along on any hits, letting him work the robberies only.
And there were a lot of hits. Albert became a kind of folk hero and for a time that led to all kinds of work. So
much work they couldn’t keep up with it. Leo Bianchi’s death set up a long-brewing war for control in Kansas City, one that would end with pretty much everybody losing and K.C. becoming a wide-open city.
Rita, freshly paroled and anxious to do something beyond cook for and clean up after Harvey and his crew of assholes, took over managing the money and running the murder for hire side of things. She knew a lot of people, had been with all of the old guys at one time or another and was still trusted by them. Albert would jokingly refer to her as their “agent.”
Rita said to Harvey that if they could just sock away enough money, put enough “nuts in their cheeks for a long winter,” they could get the fuck out of Missouri. Something Rita had been urging since before her trip to Topeka. She just had to finish out her parole.
Within a year, Harvey and the boys had garnered a near legendary reputation as fixers, killers, and thieves. Drinks were bought wherever they went. Girls followed. They earned approving nods from men who would have scared the shit out of most anyone else. Even Bob landed himself a steady lady. Though “lady” was somewhat of a loose description given she was at least twenty years Bob’s senior, outweighed him by a good fifty pounds, and had previously worked in such varied fields as roller derby and the rodeo.
Harvey didn’t trust any of it and kept saying to Roy, whenever they were alone in the workshop, that it was all too easy. Why hadn’t they even had a single conversation with anyone in law enforcement? They had to be on some agency’s radar. Furthermore, Roy noticed that Albert was starting to become cocky and careless. The very qualities that his father said would kill pilots. Worse, Albert’s behavior “in the field” as they called it, was becoming increasingly sadistic. He enjoyed torturing people. He would stand over a “client,” announce that they had violated some code or another and, therefore, needed to suffer a long, drawn out death.
What finally ended their run wasn’t so much Roy’s growing distaste for Albert’s behavior, or the law—though the FBI certainly played their part. In the end, the person who brought them down, who blew them apart, was the same person who, in a way, had brought them all together: Roy’s mother.
One day in Kansas City, Roy and Danny had been in a bar watching the Royals lose when Danny asked Roy to show him his old neighborhood. They drove over in Danny’s old Saab and Roy told him the story of his father, the plane they tried to build together and how he had really died. Danny asked a lot of questions, particularly about Roy’s mother and little brother. Where were they? Why didn’t Roy try to find them? Roy didn’t see the point. He remembered the way his mother had looked at him during her one and only visit to Boonville. He was certain that she would never let him speak to his brother again.