by Mike Knowles
I bumped off the ground ready to fight. The junkie saw that Steve was between us and rushed out the door. Steve tilted his head forward, and with a hard jerk he sent his hair flying back. He used a rubber band from his wrist to tie the hair up into some kind of shabby samurai topknot. I threw a weak jab before he was done with his hair as a setup to something much worse; he surprised me, pulling my arm tight — hyperextending it. Steve twisted and pulled the arm in front of him and began pushing against it like he was at the turnstile to get on a roller coaster. I grabbed the brass rail on the bar and pulled against my arm, interrupting Steve’s momentum. He stumbled into my field of vision, no longer able to put me to the floor. My elbow drove back over my shoulder and connected with his jaw, but it did nothing to loosen his grip. I hit him five more times in the jaw and side of the head until my twisted arm was free. The fight went on for three more minutes. Steve tried repeatedly to take me down while I tried to knock him out. I used fast hard punches and elbows out of fear of getting a limb broken in a painful joint lock.
After three minutes, we both were slow to get up and Sandra had just come back from the store. She walked up to the fight, unafraid, and pulled Steve away by the arm. At once, his eyes softened, and he followed her behind the bar. The junkie was long gone, and my left knee and right arm were severely stretched. I staggered to the bar and did the only thing I was able to do. I ordered a Coke.
We weren’t friends after that, not by a long shot, but I did my best to respect the bar, and Steve did his best to turn an eye every now and then when I had to brace someone a little rough. Three years ago that all changed — not because of some touching Hallmark moment, but rather because of something much worse. We both got blood on our hands together. Blood has a way of making two people stick together like nothing else.
The neighbourhood where Sully’s Tavern was located was rough. No one lived there because they wanted to — they just had nowhere else to go. Every violent offender, addict, and pedophile was like a magnet dragging others like them to the area. Sully’s Tavern was the eye of the hurricane; it was the one peaceful spot in a mass of human depravity. The only real order in the neighbourhood came from Paolo’s men. It was mob turf, and everybody was expected to pay into the local protection fund. The hoods in charge of the collecting left Steve alone for the first little while because his bar didn’t turn a profit, and he didn’t care who came in with who so long as they didn’t start trouble. But when the bar started getting regular customers, the neighbourhood boys became more interested in Sully’s Tavern. The first visit was on a Tuesday, then every other day after Steve refused to pay. The boys just didn’t understand, being so low on the food chain and used to intimidating everyone, that Steve wasn’t going to be scared into anything.
I heard rumblings of what was going on and I talked to Steve about it. “Those aren’t punk kids, Steve, they work for a dangerous man. Just give them a piece of the pie and call it the price of doing business.”
Quietly, under his hair, he said, “It’s my business, my pie, no tastes. You want another Coke?”
I came in a week later, on a Monday, to find Steve ramming a man’s head into the brass footrest of the bar. Another man was on the floor, his left arm and leg at unnatural angles. On the floor between the two men were baseball bats.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Steve paid no mind to my question as he finished with the hood. The gong sound of his skull hitting the hard metal was replaced by the sound of a skull falling into blood and teeth. The sound was like raw chicken falling off a counter onto the floor. Steve never once looked at me or said a word. His wiry body rippled under his thin white shirt as he grabbed each man by a foot. He didn’t even flinch when one of the men began shrieking because Steve was pulling on the leg that was obviously damaged. Steve walked right past me, dragging the bodies into the street in front of the bar. As he walked back in he ran his fingers through his hair, removing the rubber band; his face once again becoming hidden.
“Time to put out new peanuts,” was all he said to me.
I found out that night, through the grapevine, that the two men were collectors. After Steve’s repeated refusals to pay, they had decided to step things up by coming into the bar with bats.
The next day, I went to the office and found Steve waiting outside the door dressed in khakis and a white T-shirt. The veins in his forearms pressed out hard like overfilled balloons, and his hair was up in the topknot.
“Where can I find your boss?” was all he said.
I could see that he was ready to go through me to find out so I said, “Tell me.”
Steve said he went for napkins, and when he came back Sandra was gone. A phone call came a few minutes after he walked in; it told him that to get his wife back he had to pay up all the “rent” he had missed. The kidnappers gave Steve three hours to get together all the money. Steve was no idiot; he knew that after what he’d done there was no way Sandra was coming back. He might get pieces of her, but she wouldn’t be back as he knew her.
“The good thing is the time,” I said. “They want the money so they’ll keep her alive until they know they’ve got it. How much time is left?”
“Two hours.” Steve’s gaze was out the window; his fists were tight, clenching imaginary ghosts.
We left the office together and took my car downtown to Barton Street East; I parked in a public parking space, and we moved on foot over the pavement. The concrete had been repaved with chewing gum and cigarettes, making the rough surface smooth with urban grime. As we rounded the corner of an alley to Barton, its stream of people flowing by unyielding, I stopped and spoke to Steve. “This building around the corner — the barbershop — is the gate; Mario is middle management for some heavy hitters on the east side. Everything on the street goes through Mario. You do this and you are on everyone’s radar.”
Steve looked at me for about one second, long enough for me to see pure fury, pure hate. He turned and walked into the crowd, vanishing amid the faces. I followed, trying to keep up, but Steve moved fast, his thin body gliding through the human traffic. He entered the barber-shop without hesitation. As I followed in his wake, I eyed the barber pole spinning. I took a breath and thought about nothing, relaxing so I could commit to what I was about to become a part of. I was helping Steve, and back then I never once thought that I shouldn’t — never once. I took one last look at the pole spinning white then red, and got ready for a lot more red.
When I opened the door the chime didn’t turn any heads my way. Two barbers were unconscious on the floor. Beside the barbers lay a man in a finely tailored black suit. Six feet above his body was a fine spray of red on the white wall.
I moved through the room and into the next. The door to the office had been torn from one of the hinges; it hung on like a loose tooth. In the doorway, face down, arms cradling his head, lay another suit, dead. I could see the defensive wounds that had leaked onto the floor — Steve had come in slicing high. The pool of blood was growing; so were the screams inside the office. Steve wasn’t talking; he was taking off Mario’s ear with a barber’s straight razor. He must have taken the razor off one of the barbers when he came in. Steve was using the razor like a conductor’s wand, making the fat Italian man scream a bloody aria. His pockmarked face was made even uglier in its agonized distortion. The ear came off despite the pawing of stubby fingers. Steve slammed it on the desk and started on Mario’s nose. When it was half off he looked at Mario and demanded, “Where is she?” The question had an exclamation point in the form of a haymaker.
When there was no response he moved the razor back to the nose, and the answers came like water from a faucet. “Tommy took her! He did it! Talarese did it, all right? Just stop!”
“I know him,” I said.
Mario saw me, and his eyes widened. “You fuck. You yellow traitor shit. I’ll spit on your grave.”
“Did you know?” Steve’s voice was like a window breaking; it got everyone’s attent
ion.
Mario’s eyes focused on Steve’s, and he spit out hate camouflaged in English. “What did you expect when you acted like an animal. Everyone pays, everyone. Some just pay more than others.” His last words were framed by a small smirk.
Steve stepped back and bent so that he was eye level with Mario. “Where does Tommy live?”
“Why?” Mario’s smirk vanished, and he looked puzzled. I knew what he was thinking: no one would go looking for Tommy Talarese.
The nose came off with screaming and pleading, and then, once again, answers came. Tommy’s mother, wife, and son lived in a red apartment building on King William Street. Tommy had made his home in the centre of the city, away from his bloody work on the east side. I knew the area. The building was one of several luxury complexes in the heart of downtown. The city tried to create upscale buildings, like Tommy’s, that would offset the rapid decay of the city. Each building that went up pushed more people out. It was the city council’s secret hope that they could move every undesirable citizen out of the city a block at a time — a transfusion of wealth to revitalize the decaying concrete. The lobby furniture in one of the complexes would be worth more than a year’s rent in any of the older buildings in the area. The new buildings also had doormen working twenty-four hours a day to protect those with money from those without.
The sound of Steve’s foot hitting the bloodied face followed the answers. The kick knocked Mario from the chair to the floor, and then the stomping started. The sound was like boots walking in thick mud. Steve stomped Mario long after he had died on the floor behind his desk. It would take the authorities some time to decipher what the mess on the floor was, and even longer to figure out who.
Back in the car, I didn’t question what had happened — no one needed doubt. We moved through the streets fast and smooth. Neither of us spoke for the first few minutes. I was thinking about what Mario had told us. Tommy Talarese was as scary a human as I had ever met. He was a man who had gotten where he was through nights of blood. He revelled in cruelty as though it were a religion. Tommy had butchered entire families, raped children in front of their fathers, and tortured enough people to fill a cemetery. Tommy was a maniac of all trades, but he was especially fond of taking limbs. The east side was like a little Sierra Leone in the eyes of those who had come up against Tommy. He was out-of-his-mind crazy, and now he was interested in Steve.
“This Tommy Talarese,” I said. “He’s a big deal. He’s Mario’s boss, and a scary fuck in the truest sense of the words. He’s sadistic and violent on a whole other level. He got where he is fighting with the Russians on the east side. He killed and killed like it was eating or breathing. There were battles in the streets years ago — the Russians tried to keep up with Tommy, and they almost did. Eventually some boundaries were organized, and the Russians got a piece of territory. Tommy was kept on the east side as a reminder of the way things used to be; the way they could be again. The problem is you. Why the hell is someone like him interested in you? Why is he pushing so hard to get rent from a bartender?”
Steve didn’t say a word. His face and shirt were speckled with blood, and he held the razor from the barbershop open on his thigh as he stared out the windshield. His voice eventually broke the white noise of traffic. “However this goes, you can always walk away. You try to stop me and I’ll kill you.” His voice never faltered. He never thought about it, or weighed out what he was telling me. He was saying what he was going to do; how it made me feel, and the problems I had with it, weren’t going to change anything.
King William Street was lined with cars, so I double-parked outside number sixty-six, Tommy’s building. Steve was out of the car before it stopped moving. I caught up with him at the front doors.
“Give me your gun,” he said.
I gave Steve the Glock. He looked at it and asked if there was a round already in the chamber. I nodded, and we walked through the doors. Steve moved ahead, the gun hanging loosely in his hand. The doorman stood behind a counter protecting the tenants’ mailboxes. He took one look at Steve’s bloody face and reached for the phone. Steve walked behind the counter and kicked the back of the doorman’s knee. The doorman slumped to his knees, his red trench coat becoming a dress on the ground. Steve turned the pistol around in one quick flip and hit the doorman on top of his cap.
I checked the doorman’s book and found Talerese next to the number 5006. It was the highest number on the page. Talarese was on the top floor.
We got on the elevator and rode up side by side. I scanned for cameras, but saw none. The upscale building management must have thought the doorman was enough security. The elevator stopped just as a chime announced our arrival. We moved out and followed the direction arrow to apartment 5006. When we got to the door Steve knocked and waited. The knock was loud and authoritative.
A male voice said, “Who is it?” The voice was muffled, as though the man inside had his mouth full.
Steve knocked again. The voice barely got out, “I said who is —” before it was interrupted by Steve’s boot kicking the door in. The door ripped through the lock and flew past the safety chain, knocking the owner of the voice to the floor. Steve fluidly moved through the door frame, firing a bullet as he crossed the entryway. Screams erupted like applause after the gun exploded. The bullet wasn’t for the male voice; it was for the grandmother, the Nona, of the family. Mrs. Talarese — Tommy’s wife — was shrieking as she rushed to the floor beside the body of the elderly woman. Steve quickly moved to the huddle of women on the floor and silenced the younger woman with a kick. The hard shin to the side of her head snapped her body onto the elderly woman already on the floor. The young man flattened by the door rolled to his feet and started to run at Steve. I grabbed him by the hair as he passed and yanked. His body, surprised and pained, straightened enough for me to loop an arm around his neck to hold him. Fuelled by rage, he strained against my body, pulling past the point of exhaustion. After forty-five seconds he was tapped, and his back slumped against my chest.
After the struggle was over, I had time to survey the situation. The son, a thin kid in his early twenties with a protruding Adam’s apple, was hanging in my arms. Tears streamed his cheeks, and saliva hung in strands between his lips as he gasped for breath. He was like a mad dog surging against a chain on his neck, instinct forcing him to push against the yoke no matter the consequences. From the shape the side of his face was in, I could see he had already been worked over in a bad way. The other two occupants of the apartment lay huddled together. The grandmother was lying on her side near an overturned wicker chair and a toppled cane. Her white hair was thin and cut short. I could see her scalp through the strands surrounding her head. Her mouth was closed, and her chin sat higher on her face than it should have. She was old-world by the look of her. The old woman’s toothless mouth would confirm her poor rural Italian heritage better than a birth certificate ever could. As she lay there unblinking, the centre of her blue dress bloomed a stain — one much darker than the light material of the dress. Tommy’s wife moaned and held her rapidly bruising face as she recovered from the short kick she had received to the left side of her head. Her appearance was unlike her mother-in-law’s. She was a petite woman, with a plain, unpretty face and large dark hair artificially expanded to twice its natural volume. The massive amount of jewellery on her hands and ears showed her to be far from the farm her mother-in-law grew up on a continent away.
Steve produced the razor from his pants and opened it slowly. The blade was black with the crusted blood that had pooled and dried while the razor was closed. The sight brought Tommy’s wife to full attention.
“Where is the phone?” Steve asked.
No answers came from Maria’s lips, so he slapped her hard across the face. When her head lolled back, Steve presented the question again, this time with the blade of the razor resting just under her nostrils.
“Call your husband and tell him what I have done.”
Tommy’s wife looked
confused, but she did as she was told. She dialled the phone with shaking hands, softly whispering a prayer until someone picked up. “Tommy? It’s Maria. Just listen. This guy just . . . just came here and shot Momma, and she’s dead, and he hit me, and this guy he told me to call you. Help us! Please help us! I don’t want to die, please, baby, please!”
The conversation turned into sobs and pleas. Steve took the phone from Maria. “Tommy, this is Steve. Sandra goes home now with you and she calls me when she’s there. After she calls, you come home. Any tricks, and the boy and your wife die. You have twenty minutes.”
The phone call ended with the beep of the portable. Steve looked around the large family room of the apartment. A dim light beside a beige sofa pushed away the dark from the corner of the room. The sofa was surrounded by wood furniture and encased by maroon walls the colour of dark blood. Steve told both mother and son to sit on either side of the couch.
Before I let the kid go, I asked Steve, “You know this one?”
“Came around the bar the other day.”
It fit: Tommy was introducing his boy to the family business. The kid had been given a low-level muscle job to toughen him, the way his old man had probably been toughened. The kid tried to deal with Steve and came out with the short end of the stick and a swollen head. Steve had made an impact that no one could miss. The kid’s face was like a billboard broadcasting the boy’s ineptitude to everyone. The billboard caught Tommy’s eye, and turned it to Steve and Sandra. The kid fouled up, and dear old dad was stepping in to show junior how to handle a tough situation. I grabbed the kid by the belt and heaved him to the couch. He had to use his hands to prevent himself from crashing into his mother. Once they were seated together on the couch, the rage began.