“Of the total value of the goods?”
“Certainly not, Mr. Burke. We realize that individuals don’t have that kind of cash available. Only two percent of the value of the commission you are to receive for the certificate.”
“So ten thousand?”
“Exactly.”
“So I put up ten thousand, and you put up what?”
“Mr. Burke, we put up title to the goods—in your name or in whatever name you desire. Title to the goods in your name, F.O.B. London. Of course, the goods will never leave the States until you hand us the certificate, but you will have title.”
“So what would prevent me from just selling the goods on my own?”
That was Gunther’s cue to role-play again. He leaned forward. “It wouldn’t be worth it to you.” Picking up the brass knuckles, he rapped them on the table for emphasis.
I sat back like I was thinking about it but then Gunther had to overact again and spoil everything. He looked over at Max. “What’s the matter with the chink? How come he don’t talk?”
James looked pained, as if Gunther were a dangerous madman just barely under control. A good act, but the wrong stage.
“He talks,” I said. “I interpret for him.”
“Oh yeah? That’s real nice. Ask the chink what year this is?”
“What year?”
“Yeah, you know. The gooks all have names for years, right? Like the Year of the Dragon or the Year of the Horse. Ask him what year this is—I got a feeling this is the Year of the Pussy.”
I knew I shouldn’t have made that crack about faggots, but it was obviously too late now. Max looked at Gunther, smiled, tapped his forehead, and shook his head negatively. I was in it anyway by then, so I translated. “He says he knows what year it isn’t.”
“What year is that, wise guy?”
Max repeated his earlier gestures, then reached out onto the table with his hand like he was groping for something, stopped when he found it, and turned his palm over. Then he made a disgusted face, gently turning his palm over again, and shook his head once more.
“He says it’s not the Year of the Maggot,” I told them.
Gunther glared over at Max, who gave him a beautiful soft smile in return. When he spoke he accented each word with vicious precision. “Tell that slant-eyed punk that one day I’m going to meet him when you’re not around with that scattergun to save his ass. Tell him that I’m going to make him polish my boots with his tongue. Tell him that.”
Max smiled even more sweetly. Taking the brass knuckles in his two hands, he rotated them against each other. His forearms looked like twisted ropes of heavy telephone cable, his face was flat—lips parted just enough to show a tiny gleam of white. His nostrils flared, his ears flattened against his head and the flesh moved away from his eyes. The deaf-mute gook had become the Mongol warrior lord as though the metal in his hands had flowed into his face and upper body. The brass knuckles resisted, then yielded, bending almost double in his grip.
Gunther’s face lost its blood, but he couldn’t look away from Max. I put the shotgun on the table butt-first toward Gunther, shoving it right into his hands. “Want to try this?” I leaned my chair back against the wall. A smell that you can find in the lobby of most any housing project suddenly filled the room. Gunther got up, backing away from the table and the shotgun as if they were radioactive. James slowly pushed his own chair back and walked over to Gunther. The shotgun and the brass knuckles lay untouched on the table.
“Don’t ever come back,” I told them. “Don’t ever think about coming back. I’ll call you at your number three nights from now, at six o’clock, and tell you if I’m interested in your deal. You understand?”
James mumbled yes and they walked out the door, his hand on Gunther’s arm.
Max and I sat there for a second, then got up to get away from the aroma. Max put his hands together and flicked them back and forth to show me he would clean up. I went over to the cab to get my cigarettes, lit two, and let them burn in the glass ashtray. Max came over, took one. He touched his hand to his heart to thank me for showing him respect by putting a loaded shotgun in the hands of his enemy. I made an it’s-nothing gesture to indicate that even with the shotgun Gunther was no match for him. Max drifted to the front of the warehouse to see if they might have some crazy idea about coming back. While he was out front I took up the shotgun and exchanged the blank shells inside it for some real ones in case they did.
24
MAX WAS BACK in a couple of minutes to let me know James and Gunther had vacated the immediate area. He touched his eyes and made a circle in front of his face, parallel to the ground, to let me know he was going out to see what happened to them. I told him I’d wait right where I was and sat in the empty warehouse. I didn’t enjoy the quiet. My first thought was that Gunther’s reaction had been unprofessional, that they were amateurs who had blundered their way into a weapons contract and didn’t know how to move from there. But it wouldn’t wash. They were professionals all right—but professional scam artists, not gunrunners.
If I could get my hands on a valid End Use Certificate, I wouldn’t need the likes of Gunther and James to do the merchandising for me. Any damn fool with money can buy all the weapons he wants in this country. The real money was out there for transportation and delivery, not outright purchase. The ten-grand deposit was all the money that they meant to change hands—sort of an international version of the Pigeon Drop game, except instead of an envelope stuffed with newspaper I’d get a phony Bill of Lading, F.O.B. London, telling me I was the proud owner of a bunch of nonexistent weapons. You can’t really cheat an honest man, someone once said, and they were right. Those lames thought I’d make the deposit an investment in my own ripoff scheme and steal the guns for myself. It told me two things—they thought I had some real contacts in Africa from the Biafra episode, and they thought I was a thief. Like most losers, they were about half-right.
So why did I tell them I’d get back to them? One reason was that I didn’t want them to do anything stupid, and James might have thought the con was still running for them. But there was something else, something I couldn’t isolate in my mind. They must be good for something, maybe something connected to this whole Cobra business, but I didn’t yet see exactly what or how.
I knew one thing, though: in the joint, the major child molesters and the neo-Nazis had one thing in common: they all wanted to be part of “law enforcement.” One of them—he had been running a school “for disturbed kids” with sodomy as therapy—told the Prof that he was working for the FBI. When the Prof played him along, he said he had a code name and everything—that the lawyer who came to see him regularly was really a Bureau agent. He told the Prof that he was gathering information about rival kiddie-porn dealers and passing it along. Just a good citizen. I didn’t think anything about it—it was just good information to have. But when I saw this creep buddy-up with a guy who called himself Major Klaus, I knew they had to have something in common. One of the mistakes I make sometimes is to lump all freaks together in my mind—like there are brand names for certain kinds of humans. I should know better. My survival instincts told me to keep James and Gunther on the hook, but a connection to the Cobra wouldn’t come to the front of my thinking. It was just lurking somewhere in the back. I didn’t press it. Whatever instincts, intuitions I had had kept me alive so far. From experience, I figured when it was time for the connection it would come to me.
While I was trying to dope out how they came to connect me with African work (and giving it up as a bad job because a lot of people knew something about that craziness—diamonds that weren’t there and starving kids that were), Max rolled back. He gestured that the two losers had been picked up in a cab about ten blocks from our base. He didn’t bother to find out where they went since it wouldn’t mean anything to us. I could see Max was still up for battle, pumping fire inside but handling it well. If you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see anything, but I
did—this hadn’t been the first time. He followed the cab back to the taxi garage in the Plymouth. I turned in the hack, picked up my four hundred bucks from the half-a-grand deposit with the dispatcher (he returns all but a yard as the rental fee), and we headed home.
I could see Max wasn’t down to normal operating temperature yet, so I started telling him about this Cobra freak and Flood and what I wanted to do. The more we talked about how we’d pull it off, the calmer he got. Except when I told him how it all started, with me hitting that horse at Yonkers for a grand from Maurice. That he simply refused to believe, so I told him to go to Maurice’s and pick up the money himself and hold it for me. I wouldn’t even have to call Maurice and let him know Max was authorized to make the pickup—Max the Silent has a better reputation for honesty than the Orthodox Jews in the diamond industry. Max is often used as a courier for that reason, plus the fact that ripping him off would be past the capabilities of your average SWAT team. Max only moves money or things like money—jewels, paper, computer printouts. He won’t move dope, and people know better than to ask him anymore. He’s not bonded, so all you get for your money is his word. To a warrior like Max, that means you get your stuff or his life. Uptown when they want stuff delivered, they have guys in fancy uniforms who have passed polygraphs, given their fingerprints and all that—down here we have Max the Silent.
I told Max that finding the Cobra would be the real problem, and he made the sign of maggots under a rock again, then shook his head, held his hands toward the sky, and snapped his fingers like a magician pulling things from thin air. I got it. Maggots don’t come from outer space, they’re on the earth for a reason. They only move in the direction of decay—they help it along, eventually make it disappear and then they move on again. Like an old-time burglar told me once, explaining why he never worked with dope fiends, “Dead meat brings flies.” The Cobra had to be swimming in slimy waters or he’d stick out like an honest man at a political caucus.
That didn’t narrow the search much. Some people think slime is subject to zoning laws. They pick some part of a city and call it the Tenderloin, or the Combat Zone, or the Block, or even the Red Light District if they have a blue nose. Assholes. You don’t need a Ph.D. in sociology to understand slime. Slime needs fresh meat to live, and if you don’t bring it around, the slime goes shopping. The uptown glitzo who gets ready for Saturday night by slipping a vial of cocaine into the glove compartment of his Mercedes can’t see the slime lapping at his hubcaps. He pays his money and the money gets passed around until it coagulates into a movable mass. All money moves. Dope money moves into a pipeline, and at the other end you get loan-shark cash on the streets and kiddie-porn operations in the basements. The glitzo goes to his hip party and whips out his vial of nose candy and shows the other jerks that he’s connected—he’s down with the program.
A few blocks away, some dirtbag pimp passes his vial around in an after-hours joint. He got the money for his dope out of the body of some thirteen-year-old runaway who thought the smooth-talking man in the Port Authority Bus Terminal was going to make her a star.
Yeah, they’re both connected—to each other.
I move through slime like a poacher on some rich man’s estate. I take what I can. Whatever money’s out there is as much mine as any dirtbag’s. Some of them don’t like it—most of them don’t know it. I guess some people are still waiting for a man to walk on water. I wish them a lot of luck—I walk on quicksand. One time when I was a kid in the juvenile prison I made the mistake of telling one of those half-assed counselors what a bitch it was growing up in the orphanage—the miserable punk told me you have to play the cards they deal you, like that was supposed to bring on a flash of insight and make me into a good citizen. As I got older and kept doing time I began to realize that maybe the counselor had been right—you do have to play the cards they deal you—but only a certified sucker or masochist would play them honestly.
I asked Max if he would ride with me over to the piers to see if Michelle had learned anything. He nodded okay and I drove the Plymouth west. I told Max to stay in the car no matter what he saw going down. One time when I was looking for someone on the docks Max saw this freak all dressed up in a stormtrooper outfit standing out on the abandoned pilings. He was waving a giant bullwhip around like he was getting ready to drive some galley slaves. A bunch of locals were standing around watching the show—just entertainment for them, I guess—but old Max decided that they were all terrorized by this freak, and he slid out of the car and kicked the poor fellow into the Hudson River before I could stop him. When he pivoted to the crowd like he was expecting applause, the audience ran like they’d just seen their future up-close. Max isn’t desperate for recognition, and the locals weren’t exactly his peer group, but you could see he wanted some acknowledgement of his feat. So I told him he was now the undisputed champion of that pier.
Max doesn’t have a big ego about that kind of thing, but I didn’t want him suddenly deciding to defend his title, so I repeated the deal about staying in the car no matter what.
The piers were dark and murky, like they always are. Couples walked to empty buildings, hustlers waited, predators watched. No Michelle. No Margot. No cops either.
I drove Max back to the warehouse, waved good-bye, and watched him disappear into the interior. Drove back to my office, put the car away, went upstairs. As I put the key into the floor-level lock I heard Pansy’s low growl. When I got the door open she was poised about three feet away, the hair on the back of her neck standing straight up and her fangs, like they say, bared. Somebody had been around to visit—maybe a visitor for the hippies upstairs who got the wrong address, maybe someone with some bad ideas. I asked Pansy, who didn’t say. Whoever it was hadn’t gotten into the office.
I got some marrow bones out of the fridge and put them on to boil while I changed clothes and listened to the news. I switched to the police band for the local precinct, using the crystals I wasn’t supposed to be able to buy over the counter. The radio runs into an antenna lead, and the antenna itself runs up through the useless chimney stack on the roof, protruding about a foot. I got perfect reception, but all it picked up were routine crime-in-progress calls and cops telling the desk man they were going off the air for personals, which could mean anything from a bathroom visit to a shakedown.
I used a strainer and poured the boiling water off the marrow bones to let them cool. Pansy came down from the roof, a lot calmer now—whoever had come around hadn’t come over the rooftops. I started thinking about the roof and how I’d like to have a garden up there someday—there was sure as hell enough fertilizer already in place. I could tell I was getting tired because I was starting to think like a citizen. Putting down roots, even on a city roof, is blubber-brained. Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.
When the marrow bones cooled I gave one to Pansy and sat patting her massive head while she crunched it. Maybe real private eyes make up lists of things to do and places to go, but I like to work them out in my head—an old prison habit. Trees can’t run and people can’t Xerox your thoughts. If they could, they never would have let me out of that orphanage when I was a kid.
25
WHEN I WOKE up the next morning I was still in my chair. It didn’t look like Pansy had moved either. My watch said it was almost nine. I opened the back door to let Pansy out and went next door for a quick shower and shave. By the time Pansy trotted downstairs to supervise my work with the razor, it was just about time for my phone call. I went back into the office, picked up the receiver to check for hippie-interference, noted their usual early-morning silence, and dialed the direct line for an assistant D.A. I know in Manhattan. Toby Ringer was a real hardnose, with no political hooks, who battled his way up the bureaucracy by being willing to try cases that scared most of the other D.A.’s. You know the kind I mean—where the bad guy’s a hundred percent guilty but there’s no solid evidence and the odds are you’re going to lose it in front of a jury and get a black mark a
gainst your record. Some of those wimps won’t even touch a case unless there’s a videotaped confession and four eyewitnesses. Toby’s no cowboy—he doesn’t have fantasies of some death squad wiping out all the vermin in the city someday, but he has a genuine hate for the real slime, so we’ve been able to help each other out on occasion. He’s not State-raised, but he’s been around long enough to know how to act.
All the D.A.’s answer their phone the same way. “Mr. Ringer’s line.”
“Good morning, Toby. I got a present for you.”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Your friend from the Gonzales matter, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, okay? But I got a gold-plated chance for you to nail a baby-raper, and I’ll throw in a homicide to boot.”
“In exchange for what?”
“For justice. I don’t want anything—I just want to tell you something that I can’t tell the cops.”
“This is Mr. B., I presume.”
“I’m your man. Can I meet you someplace tonight?”
“My office. That’s it—no other place. Deal?”
“Deal. What time?”
“Make it around eight. Everybody’s gone home by then and the night crew will be downstairs working the Complaint Room.”
“Want me to see the man at the front desk or just bypass him?”
“Go to the desk. I’ll leave word—what name?”
“Tell him Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“You’ll see, Toby. Tonight, right?”
“Right.” And we hung up simultaneously. I keep all my calls on this phone under one minute; this one had barely qualified.
I sat down at my desk planning to compose a suitable recruitment ad for the mercenary journals. It might bring the Cobra around but that would be a last resort, especially since it takes three or four months for the ads to get into print. He might be long gone by then—forget it. I locked the place up and aimed the Plymouth for the docks, figuring Michelle would be easier to find in daylight.
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