I have that note. It was his last gift to me, a Get Out of Jail Free Card, if I played it right. But the only place to play it was from Death Row.
So he’s gone now. And I talk to him sometimes. In my mind. The only place any of us ever say his name.
Wesley.
I knew what Michelle meant. The whisper-stream flows everywhere, a toxic blend of rumor, legend and lies—but it always carries a current of truth too. It said there were only two pro snipers working the city—Wesley and El Cañonero. But El Cañonero only worked for the Independentistas, a man with a cause, a soldier under the flag of Puerto Rican liberation. Wesley worked for whoever paid him. A long time ago, I faced some men in a parking lot. One of them was a karateka called Mortay, a death-match fighter who wanted Max. And threatened his baby daughter to bring the Mongolian into the ring. One of the men died in that parking lot, picked off from the nearby rooftop. The whisper-stream said it was Wesley, working for me. It wasn’t. It was El Cañonero, but that’s what the whisper-stream does with the truth.
Crystal Beth might have tapped into it, thought I was the man for the job. Maybe it was me she’d been looking for all along.
“But Herk’s the wild card,” I protested. “He doesn’t run with us.”
“He did,” the Prof reminded me.
“That was Inside,” I told him. “No way that hippie chick has those kind of wires.”
“The other bitch, she knows your business?” the Prof asked.
I didn’t take offense. We don’t talk to outsiders, and I’d had all the lessons, but tight pussy makes loose lips sometimes, and the Prof was within his rights to ask.
“Nothing,” I said. “Zero. I’m a slumming fuck for her, that’s all. But who knows what kind of bullshit she’s cooked up in her head.”
“That’s the place for it, all right,” he agreed.
“What do you think, sweetie?” Michelle asked Clarence. That was her way, always. To build us up, all of us, spread the respect. If she hadn’t asked, Clarence would never have volunteered an opinion.
“I do not know,” he said carefully, uncomfortable on center stage. “But it seems to me, if this woman—the one who hired you, my brother—” he said aside to me, “if she somehow knew Hercules would be the one Porkpie would select for the job, she would still have to know it would end . . . as it did. And she could not know this. Nobody could know. It was not the plan. What if Hercules did not have his knife? Or if he was not so quick?”
The young West Indian slid out of the booth, stood on his feet, addressing us like a doctoral candidate at his orals, glad for the chance and nervous at the same time.
“If she was running a . . . If it is murder she wanted, why would she have been so satisfied when you did the work on that other man? Scaring him off, that is what she wanted, yes? I believe that is all she asked Porkpie for too.”
“So it was an accident that she grabbed me at Rollo’s?” I asked him.
“You do not go there enough,” he replied, more confident now. “It is not our place. I think, maybe, she was just . . . looking. And when she told the other one—”
“Vyra,” Michelle said. Like you’d say “maggot.”
“Yes, Vyra. When she told her, then this Vyra, she said, maybe, ‘I know that man.’ And then, perhaps, it all came together.”
“So, if Porkpie had passed the test, she would have brought him into it?”
“Ah, I do not know this girl, mahn. But she seems too clever for that. She must know the difference between a contractor and the hired help, yes?”
“Yeah, I think so too.”
“That goes together like barbed wire and panty hose,” Michelle said, venom dripping from her candy tongue. “Little sister don’t think so.”
“Little sister?” Clarence said, puzzled.
“Me, honey,” Michelle cooed at him. “I’m your little sister, aren’t I?”
“I . . . mean, if you—”
“You don’t see me as your big sister, do you, baby?” Michelle asked him, sugar-voiced, but the Prof knew better. He shot Clarence a warning glance.
Too late. “Not a sister, no,” Clarence said. “I mean, you know how I love you and respect you. But I always think of you as like my—”
“What?” Michelle asked, still sweet.
Oh Jesus . . . , I thought to myself, catching the Prof’s eye.
“Like my auntie. A sister to my—”
If Clarence hadn’t been honed to a lifetime of quickness, the flying bowl of fried rice would have cracked his skull.
It took us a good half-hour to get Michelle calmed down. That crazy, all-class broad would catch a bullet for Clarence as casually as she’d touch up her lipstick, but her self-image was baby sister—bossy baby sister, maybe, but not anybody’s aunt. While the Prof crooned confection into her ear, I grabbed Clarence and poured some survival truth into his.
I don’t know where he got them at that hour, but the armful of orchids—I warned him not even to think about some chump-change Reverend Moon roses—he came back with went a long way toward banking the fire.
Mama watched all this impassively. Treat her like she was younger than you and she’d show you where the “chop” in chop suey came from. And she thinks losing your temper is an Occidental thing anyway.
Hours to go yet. No point in leaving—the restaurant was the only number Crystal Beth had. I told Mama I needed Max, then I went to the bank of pay phones and started to work.
“A llo?” A young woman’s voice, distinctive French accent.
“Is Wolfe around?” I asked.
“Pretty late at night to be calling, chief.” Pepper’s voice, the accent gone. She’d recognized me, though. I didn’t know she did voices, but I could see why Wolfe’s crew could use that skill.
“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “I didn’t expect to catch her in. Can I leave word?”
“Sure.”
“Just ask her to call me.”
“Is this hot?”
“No. But it’s not social either.”
“Okeydokey.” She laughed. And hung up.
Last time I saw Pepper she was in Grand Army Plaza dressed in a pair of baggy striped clown pants, teaching a whole pack of little kids some kind of gymnastics. And walking point for Wolfe to set up a meet. Wolfe told me once Pepper was some kind of actress, but I’d never paid much attention. I guess she was, though. A real good one.
As soon as I put down the phone, Max was at my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come up, but that’s nothing new—they don’t call him Max the Silent just because he doesn’t speak. As soon as he finished his soup, we went down to the basement. Mama keeps a long table set out there. “For counting,” she’d explained when I’d first asked her why.
I went through all of it. Slowly. Not because Max couldn’t follow otherwise, but so I was sure I had it straight in my own mind. Max shook his head impatiently, interrupting my hand signals. He got up, went over to a black lacquer cabinet in a dark corner of the basement, opened a drawer and came back with some sheets of cream-colored origami paper. Then he gestured for me to start over.
Every time I came to a name, I’d spell the sound out with my lips. And Max would fold paper. By the time I was done with the first pass, Max had a table-full of distinctive little paper sculptures. He had me say each name again. And for each one he held up one of the sculptures . . . until we were on the same wavelength.
And then he gestured for me to start again.
HERCULES
ME
PORKPIE
CRYSTAL BETH
HARRIET
VYRA
WOLFE
PRYCE
Max looked at the neat row he had fashioned. Then looked at me and held up the Vyra sculpture, reached over, and touched my watch.
I held up three fingers on each hand. It was maybe about six when I knew Vyra was in the safehouse.
Max shook his head no hard, looked another question at me.
I didn’t get it
. Told him so.
He got up, went upstairs. He was back in a minute, with one of those cheapo calendars insurance agents send to everyone on the planet. He placed it carefully between us, held up the Vyra sculpture in one hand, probed his finger at this month’s calendar page with the other.
“When’s the last time I saw her before tonight?” I asked him, words and gestures together.
He nodded yes.
I showed him. Max switched the order, now placing Vyra first.
Then it was my turn to shake my head no. I made the sign of talking into a telephone, made the gesture for Mama so he’d know the call came in here, and picked up the Hercules sculpture. Then I touched another day on the calendar—one just before when I’d been with Vyra at the hotel. Herk had called the night before and left word about the meet.
Max’s face went into repose. But his hands were busy, fingers flying now. He was creating more sculptures, duplicates of the ones he’d already made, as precise as a cookie-cutter. If I hadn’t seen him do this before, when he made an entire origami chess set for his daughter, Flower, I would have been astounded. Even so, I had to shake my head in wonderment.
Max was like the rest of us. He had so many gifts. So many skills. He could have been anything. Should have been . . .
I felt his hand on mine, looked up and snapped out of wherever I’d been going. Max made the sign of a man being stabbed, showed me the sculpture he’d fashioned to represent the guy Herk had taken down. Then he made the sign of a frightened man—Harriet’s stalker. Showed me that sculpture too. Then he laid out a new configuration of the players:
CRYSTAL BETHVYRACRYSTAL BETHWOLFEPORKPIEMEMEPRYCEHERCULESHERCULESVYRADEAD MANPORKPIECRYSTAL BETHHARRIETSCARED MAN
I nodded that he was right, then held up three fingers, pointing at the stack of unused origami paper. Three more players. I went through it slowly, Max making the new pieces as I talked. I took them from him, placed them on the table so it looked like this:
CRYSTAL BETHVYRACRYSTAL BETHPRYCEPORKPIEMEMELOTHARHERCULESHERCULESLORRAINEDEAD MANPORKPIEVYRACRYSTAL BETHMARLAHARRIETLOTHARSCARED MANWOLFE
And then I started to see it.
Max took the sculptures for Vyra and Crystal Beth, moved them back and forth in his hands, eyebrows raised in question.
I told him I didn’t know. Didn’t know who came first, who started it, who was in charge.
He did the same with Lothar and Pryce. I gave him the same answer.
Finally he pulled the Pryce sculpture from the layout, placed it way off to the side. All by itself.
It was almost one the next morning when the phone rang.
“He called,” Crystal Beth said as soon as she heard my voice.
“And . . . ?”
“And I told him there was someone I . . . wanted him to meet.”
“That’s all you told him?”
“No.”
“What else?”
“Your name.”
“He didn’t ask any more questions?”
“No.”
“Didn’t ask who I was to you?”
“No.”
“Didn’t ask why you wanted me to meet him?”
“No. Nothing.” Her voice was . . . something. Sad maybe, I couldn’t tell.
“And he said . . . what?” I asked her.
“That it was okay. That he would do it. Tomorrow. At three-thirty.” Then she named a midtown deli on the East Side.
“All right,” I told her. “Let’s do it. You know the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Astor Place?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you there at two, okay? In the coffee shop.”
“Vyra—”
“Isn’t coming,” I said.
I hung up on her silence.
I slept until almost ten the next morning. When I used the cellular to check with Mama, she told me Wolfe had called. There wasn’t any point calling back—when Wolfe went outlaw, she’d adopted a series of phone cutouts, same way all of us did. Pepper would catch the calls. And you could catch Pepper, if you could make the connections and move fast enough. But Wolfe would never be in that net. I decided to let it ride for now.
And do some riding myself.
I slammed a new tape into the cassette player, letting the blues take me to the Chicago stop on that deep dark tributary reverse-flowing out of the Mississippi Delta, carrying players and poets in its lush stream. Junior Wells doing Little Walter’s “Key to the Highway,” paying homage, father to son. Mighty Joe Young’s subdued, pain-seared version of “The Things I Used To Do.” Luther Allison and Otis Rush and J.B. Hutto chasing both Sonny Boys. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. And the next wave. Dave Spector’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is” following the blood-spoor of Delbert McClinton as the Texas troubadour breached another border behind Lightnin’ Hopkins. Paul Butterfield lurking out-side “Yonders Wall.” Charlie Musselwhite barking out “Early in the Morning.” Buddy Guy coaxing witchfire from a slide guitar. Hoochie-coochie through the back doors. Jailhouses and graveyards. Part-time jobs and part-time women. Grown-upschoolgirls and black Cadillacs not every man could ride. All of them on Robert Johnson’s don’t-mind-dying hellhound trail.
When I’d had enough I switched to my girl. Judy Henske. Little Miss Magic, all six feet plus of her. Judy can bring it back from places the other torch singers couldn’t go at all.
I don’t share my music with citizens. They never get it. One time I was waiting in this joint for a guy who said he was a buyer to show up when I overheard some earnest dweeb talking about how “profound” the Beatles are . . . if you just listen to them. That’s when I started wishing bars had metal detectors.
That poor chump would never get it—you can’t get jellyroll from a white-bread bakery.
Just over the Brooklyn line, a guy in a red Jeep Cherokee cut me off. One of those deep-dish-overcooked fools who believed four-wheel drive would give you traction on ice. I tapped the brakes, let him slide by. He stuck a fist out the window, waving a kid’s baseball bat, screaming something I couldn’t hear before he sped away. I got a glimpse of his tags. Handicapped plates. I didn’t have to guess what his was.
Herk’s room was prison-clean. That’s one of the things you do Inside. Scrub every surface. Slow. Taking time the way the State took yours. And making some little space more your own. Inside, nobody calls it their cell. “My house” is what you say. And keeping it clean means keeping more than just the roaches and the mice at bay.
“Thanks for the books, brother,” he greeted me. “Sure helps.”
“It won’t be much longer,” I promised him.
“Burke, I could do . . . something, right? I don’t dig all this sitting around.”
“You got to lay in the cut until we scope what’s out there,” I told him.
“Yeah, I know. But I been reading the papers. Every day. And listening to this here radio. They ain’t got nothing on the . . . guy. I think I’m in the clear.”
“You could be,” I said. Thinking, if it wasn’t for the connect to Crystal Beth, he probably was. “But let’s play it this way for a bit longer, okay?”
“Your call,” he agreed. “But . . . if I’m gonna do more time here, you think you could get me some more books?”
“More of the same?” I asked him.
“Yeah. I heard about a new one too. Mercedes, it’s called. And Jonah Hex. Hell, anything by Joe Lansdale.”
“He’s a writer, right?” I said, into his rhythm.
“Oh yeah,” Herk said fervently.
“You cannot overdress for a first meeting,” Michelle informed me in her “don’t-argue-with-me” voice. “It’s so true what they say about first impressions.”
“You want me to rent a tux?” I asked her.
“What I want is for you to be quiet long enough for me to coordinate. And tell that heinous hound of yours to stop following me around—this place isn’t big enough for me to use an assistant.”
I made the silent command for “Place�
�� and Pansy trotted obediently into her corner just to the side of the door, arranging herself on the thick sheepskin rug I’d gotten her to take the chill off the floor in the winter. “Good girl!” I told her, reaching into the refrigerator and coming out with a handful of raw hamburger. I patted it into the shape of a baseball, held it up to get her attention, and tossed it underhand. Pansy snapped it out of the air like it was a dog biscuit.
“It’s amazing she doesn’t weigh five hundred pounds, the way you feed her,” Michelle said over her shoulder, her face buried in the steel locker I use as a closet.
“She works it off,” I said defensively. Truth is, Pansy’s maybe thirty pounds heavier than she was at her peak. She’s almost fifteen now, and I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be with me. Neapolitan mastiffs are long-lived. And I never thought I’d be here longer than her anyway. Things didn’t work out like I thought. Some people died—friends and enemies both—but not me. Every time I think about Pansy going first, I can’t stand it. She’s been with me since she was born. I weaned her myself. She’d die for me. What I should do is put her on a strict diet, grind a few more months of life out of whatever allotment she has left. But she loves food so and I want her to have a . . .
“What is this junk?” Michelle snarled, her hands full of my clothes. “This is so not now. Where’re the suits I bought you?”
Bought me? Michelle picked them out all right, but it was me that paid. Through the nose, if I remember right.
“In the other locker,” I told her, not self-destructive enough to voice my thoughts.
Michelle rummaged around, finally hauled out a handful of black wool. “Oh, Burke, this is a genuine Hayakawa, for Susan’s sake. Eighteen hundred dollars—and that was a bargain—and you have it stuffed in there like it was polyester.”
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