by Todd Merer
He’d tracked her down in person soon after the 2006 incident. From afar he’d admired her beauty and her haughty carriage. He’d finally approached her at a sidewalk table in a Beverly Hills café just off Rodeo Drive, half a dozen designer purchase bags at her feet. She’d seemed more interested in them than in the handsome young Italian man seated with her.
Watching, Richard had thought, She’s absolutely perfect.
“Pardon my interrupting,” he’d said, joining them.
“Sir, you’re being rude,” the Italian man said.
Ignoring him, Richard addressed Missy: “Luck, be my lady tonight.”
“Go, Paolo,” Missy Soo told her date.
Once alone, Richard and Missy Soo spoke for ten minutes. She immediately realized he was the American agent who had sent the message that he wanted to bed her. Until now, he’d been her shadow opponent. Her lovely features darkened.
“You killed my parents,” she said.
“Duke’s people did. As I previously communicated, I had no knowledge of the incident before the fact. Had I known, I would’ve prevented it. My mission is to end the violence. I am authorized to act on behalf of the United States. We wish to assist China to retrieve her lost treasures.”
“And in return, you want . . . ?”
“Twenty-five million dollars.”
“Payable to . . . ?”
“Me.”
“So that’s the way you are.”
He nodded. “Just like you.”
Ten minutes later, Richard hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the entrance door of a Beverly Wilshire hotel room. When he turned, Missy was already naked.
They’d bonded spectacularly. Now, their mutual future would soon be secure: lovers, best friends, accomplices. Total honesty, no secrets . . . well, just two.
Missy Soo didn’t know he’d killed her parents.
Nor did she know that, in her absence, he’d cheated on her. And not only with Dolores. With Stella as well. It had been a strange interlude. No small talk, no flirting. He’d just reached beneath Stella’s blouse and squeezed her breast, and she had closed her eyes and let him proceed. Kept them closed throughout the act. Shown no response but lain still, as if acquiescing to a rape. Richard thought she was acting out a fantasy. Crazy girl. Next time he’d screw the bejesus out of her, make her beg him for more. Stella was still hiding with Dolores. He’d enjoy a farewell fling with both of them—a threesome, yes—before joining Missy Soo for good—
The Corregidor’s foghorn moaned.
The loading was complete.
Almost time to hunt.
CHAPTER 38
At twilight, Duke and I walked along the bluff overlooking the Sound. He leaned heavily atop his blackthorn shillelagh. As we walked, he idly swiped the stick across a stunted pine that sprouted from the scree. The stick was blunt, but the speed with which he wielded it so fast that the sapling was severed. He stopped and turned toward me, one eyebrow raised in a silent question.
“Glad I’m not a tree,” I said.
“Quick mouth, fast death.”
He took the stick from beneath himself, raised it, as if to smite me. I shifted my weight so, if he swung, I could duck the stick instead of backing away and throw myself at his legs. In his day, he probably could’ve punted my ass through the Brooklyn Bridge’s towers, but his day was long gone. In fact, Duke looked sicklier than ever. He was noticeably gaunter, and his elevens were up: the parallel tendons on the back of one’s neck that, when protruding, are a harbinger of death.
“You and my granddaughter,” he said. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”
I shrugged. “Welcome to the club. Lots of people want to kill me.”
He lowered the stick. “Richard sure as hell does. He thinks you’re no longer necessary to the op. Not to mention he plain doesn’t like your face. The vain son of a bitch thinks Dolores has a thing for you.”
Words that would have uplifted me some other time, but not now. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need to know. You’re necessary.”
“After I’m not, you feed me to Richard?”
He smiled. “By then, Richard’s dead.”
“When is then?”
He took out the gun he’d threatened me with before, although this time he didn’t point it at me. “If sidearms could speak, this one has a helluva story. It belonged to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s personal executioner. A murderous bastard. I intend to add a notch to the gun by shooting Richard.”
“Right. What’s next on my agenda?”
He tapped his stick atop my shoulder. “I hereby dub you Sir Curious George. All right, I’ll tell you this much: the clock is at L-Day minus six, and counting.”
“L as in Lucky, I presume?”
“Stop asking and start listening. I’ve got a cadre of bad types. Ex-Legionnaires, former IRA hit men; in short, a small army of highly skilled killers. But all of them together aren’t nearly enough to ward off both the Chinese and the Americans.”
“The Americans?”
“Richard. When I was cooperating, he was my case agent. A thieving snake I paid a fortune to over the years. Made a lot of cases for him, too, enough for him to work his way to the position he holds now. Against him, no way we can stand our ground.”
“Then what do we do?”
He smiled. “Go to sea.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
As I left, a jeep was parked nearby. It hadn’t been there when I arrived. The rear door of the house was ajar, and as it closed, I glimpsed Dolores inside. Which led to two unpleasant thoughts:
One, for some reason Dolores was avoiding me.
Two, which side would she take, come L-Day?
CHAPTER 39
That night I came across the document from Duke’s file I’d been about to read when Uncle had summoned me. It was written seventy-five years ago by the chief medical doctor of the British Royal Burmese Constabulary and, although yellowed and fading, was clearly legible. It was a typewritten description of a rare medical event that he’d learned of in September 1942.
Very enlightening, although I didn’t understand how it related to the scenario. Still, Duke had thought it important enough to include in his file, so I warehoused its content until its significance surfaced—if it did—and hit the sack. My last waking thought was why Duke had let me glom the file. We abhorred each other, and yet . . . I had the feeling he was trying to help me . . .
My phone awoke me. I’d been dreaming of my pa, Louis.
But, as some dreams do, it quickly faded from mind.
I picked up the phone. “Who’s this?”
“Derek Lau.” His voice broke; he cleared his throat, said, “Grandfather passed overnight.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “My condolences.”
“I’ve texted you my address. Please come to my place as soon as possible. From there we’ll go to the funeral home.”
“Today? Isn’t it customary to wait—”
“It has to be now. Please, hurry.”
He hung up, leaving me wondering: what possible importance required Uncle’s funeral service to be immediate?
I went to my garage to retrieve my new Jaguar, but it no longer was factory fresh. The tires had been slashed and the windshield shattered. There was a note beneath the wiper that said, Have A Nice Day, with an extra-large smiley face beneath it. Richard.
I cabbed to the address Derek had given me.
There’d been an accident on the Williamsburg Bridge, so from Houston Street south, the streets were a parking lot. I got out and started walking down the Bowery. In my long years of drug lawyering, I’d driven the Bowery a thousand times, always with my thoughts focused on my next stop. Only now, while walking, did I fully appreciate how the city was so rapidly changing. I’d still thought of the Bowery as flophouses for drunken bums. But that was then. Now there were no slums in Manhattan proper. The richest city in the world had transformed
its Bowery to a plethora of new condos and renovated lofts and très cool shops and restaurants. It was as if I’d been wearing blinders for years and only now had removed them. Blinking, I looked around, thinking:
Oh, Benn. Where have you been?
But I already knew the answer:
To hell and back . . . and forth.
A far better question:
Where was I going?
Derek’s address was a wide three-story building, formerly a plumbing-supply discount outlet, now with an upgraded face: freshly pointed bricks, new windows, and a sturdy steel door on which a stenciled sign said YELLOW SUBMARINE.
It seemed Derek had bootstrapped his way up in the world, but some things never change. Like a sense of irony. Obviously, the name Yellow Submarine was an homage to the old Green Dragon lair. That had been a damp cellar below a fish market on Pell Street the gang boys had dubbed the Green Palace. Now this multimillion-dollar structure was a Beatles song. Imagine that.
“Benn, my man,” said a familiar voice.
I turned and saw a young black guy getting out of a stretch limo. I did a double take. Him, here, now? I’d known Billy Shkilla since the ethnicity of my mother’s Brooklyn hood had morphed from white to black. After my ma died, young Billy helped keep an eye out on her old, lifelong friend, Bea, a childless widow who lived across the alley. After Bea died, Billy got into a serious jam. He was lead man of a rap group—the Shkillas—whose act featured brandishing guns and boasts of having used them. Never mind that the guns proved to be stage pieces, the local precinct dicks made Billy as the hitter in a gang killing. Another case opened by an ambitious prosecutor whose progress was measured by his body count.
Billy’s jam coincided with my own tiff with the feds, the same that nearly led me to jail. Ultimately, over the long course of negotiation and giving up every hard-earned dirty penny I had, I’d managed to include in my agreement with the government that Billy’s state case be tossed.
The initial response to my demand had been, “We’re federal. We have neither the desire nor the ability to interfere in the New York State courts.”
“Sure you do. Just make one goddamn call,” I said.
The prosecutor had shaken his head. “I can’t—”
“Do it,” said the fed honcho. “Do it now.”
The call was made. Arrangements were made. A ranking DOJ—Department of Justice—prosecutor would call his equal at the Brooklyn DA’s office. A request concerning an unnamed investigation would be made. The Brooklyn DA, who aspired to be a federal prosecutor, would agree. The fed honcho who’d started the ball rolling was the indomitable, string-pulling Richard.
I hadn’t seen Billy since. “What the eff you doing here at seven in the morning?” he asked.
“I was about to ask you the same thing.”
He sighed. “Friend of mine was buried yesterday. Heroin. I drank the night away.”
Heroin. I’d sworn to remove it from my world but had blundered into working with—for, whatever—one of the biggest players in that filthy game.
“You okay, man?” said Billy.
“Fine,” I said.
The Yellow Submarine door opened, and Derek emerged, then stopped short. “Billy, what’re you doing here?”
Billy grinned. He’d had a diamond implanted in his white teeth, and his grin sparkled in skin so black, it seemed blue in the hazy morning light. He said, “D, you my yellow bro, right?”
“Right,” said Derek. “Like, separated at birth.”
“Benn here? He’s the lawyer who saved my ass. My white bro.”
Derek cocked his head, reappraising me. Then he and Billy did some extended, secretive handshake.
“Later, Shkill,” said Derek. “Benn and me got business to discuss.”
“Go to it, my friends,” said Billy and got into his limo.
Derek and I entered the Yellow Submarine, whose theme was neither psychedelic nor Asian. The interior was sleekly modern: exposed brick, wide-planked floors, leather and glass furniture. There was plenty of art, too, not absurdly splashed canvases or meaningless installations but tastefully classic landscapes, and what looked like a real Hopper of a woman framed in an opened window, her face half-shadowed. For a moment, she reminded me of Stella; then I realized she was Stella. Amazing how similar they were. Or maybe I just thought so.
“What is this place?”
“Sometimes I help Uncle out, or at least let him think I am. Truth is, since you got me off, I’ve been on the straight and narrow. I’m in the software biz. My boys have become expert, ah . . . techies.”
“Hackers?”
He shrugged. “You might say so. But only for the big companies. That’s where the money is. Follow me.”
He led me up a curved stairway to a mezzanine partitioned behind shoji screens, antique originals probably worth a small fortune. Again, I thought Derek had come a long way since being Scar. It occurred to me that, had I bothered to look at him instead of just his case, I probably would’ve picked up on his hidden potential. Man, I could hardly wait to quit lawyering and start living in the real world.
We sat at a carved teak desk. He said, “Any news of Stella?”
I shook my head. “As they say, no news is good news.”
He nodded. “Listen, about you and her, I bear no grudge. She’s got issues, and when I disagree, she gets crazy. Tries to hurt me by hurting herself. You catching my drift?”
I nodded. Stella’s anger always simmered. Just like Dolores’s.
He lit a joint and passed it to me. One hit, and I was not only lightened but enlightened, having noted that his matchbook was from a bar in the town near Madame Soo’s California estate. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who’d been carrying cross-country messages. The difference being, I’d been there for Duke, and no doubt Derek had been there on behalf of Uncle.
He saw me looking and made a dismissive notion. “Yeah, I visited Madame Soo and Missy. I negotiated between them and Uncle.”
“And Duke.”
Derek evaded my comment, said, “We need to move fast.”
“Explain.”
“The other side is about to jump the gun as soon as they clean up here. By cleaning, I’m talking about you. When your buddy Richard gets high, he gets sloppy. Instead of his texts that self-delete in one minute, his delete in five minutes. More than enough time for my boys to snatch ’em.”
He slid a paper across the desk. It was a transcript of a texted conversation.
The text read, I’m waiting for him alongside the funeral home.
The response was, I’m across the street by the park.
The response was, Send the pet to the vet and get.
Derek said, “That was Richard and this FBI lapdog, Ianucci, one hour ago. Him means you.”
Another twist in my road that opened to a new vista. I had proof that Richard and Ianucci were conspiring to kidnap me. Maybe. “How can I be certain this was them, talking about me?”
Derek smiled. “People think Chinatown’s a ghetto of uninformed people who converse in harmless gibberish. It ain’t. Like everywhere else, Chinatown’s wired to everything. It was child’s play for my boys to capture the fed phones. We’ve been listening to them for a while. Sometimes they call one another by their names. Arrogant assholes. We ran the old and latest conversations through an oscillograph. Richard and Ianucci? Their match is as good as fingerprints.”
I took out my device.
Derek picked up on that and forwarded me the conversations. In turn, I forwarded them to Richard, along with a message: YOU TALK TOO MUCH.
“You want them knowing their nuts are in your hand?” said Derek.
“Yep. Now they won’t dare touch me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. Maybe it only gives them more reason to snatch you. Or off you. I’d understand if you didn’t want to go to the funeral.”
“I’m going,” I said. “They’ll back off.”
He smiled. “Want to get in their faces, huh
?”
I nodded. Now that Richard knew I had him cold, he wouldn’t dare touch me. Would he?
“The funeral,” I said. “Why so quickly?”
“Because there’s no time to waste.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s about to start.”
“What’s it mean?”
“The countdown.”
“To what?”
“L-Day.”
CHAPTER 40
Derek’s ride was a Bentley driven by one of his boys. The morning rush hour hadn’t begun, and we quickly entered Chinatown. Derek got a text. Concerned by it, he said, “Richard’s moved to Worth Street, just across from the Wah Wing Sang funeral home on Mulberry. There’s more feds watching from Columbus Park. Benn, maybe you should reconsider.”
I already had and decided instead of entering, I’d first scope out the scene.
Even if they spotted me, I wasn’t worried. Wah Wing Sang was a fixture on the corner of Mulberry Street, in a direct sight line to the federal courthouse on Worth Street, which was guarded by uniformed and plainclothes cops twenty-four seven. Even if Richard figured he could delete the texts, he wouldn’t dare snatch me in plain view of law enforcement, not to mention the many mourners come to bid farewell to Uncle.
We were nearing the funeral home. Derek said, “You sure?”
“I intend to pay my respects to your grandfather.”
“Your call. Get out at Bowery and Worth. Walk west on Worth. Just before the corner of Mulberry, there’s an unmarked back door to the funeral home. It’ll be open. Go in that way. At the same time, I’ll distract Richard by going through the main entrance.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
A minute later, the Bentley pulled over, and I got out. I walked up Worth and—
Stopped short. Richard had moved and was now in the lee of an underground garage that allowed a direct view of the back door to Wah Wing Sang.