by Con Lehane
Once more, I felt the gulf between Barney and me gaping wide. What had Mary’s husband Pat said, “born into cruel and harsh conditions, the poorest of the poor.” Barney had a ruthlessness at his center that I couldn’t conjure up. Neither the streets of Flatbush nor the bars of upper Broadway had toughened me up enough to run my own tribunals.
At this point, I made the mistake of telling Barney about the conversation we’d had the night before, which reminded Betsy of what Francois had said.
“What was that?” asked Barney.
“You’d have to be a Georges Simenon reader to get it,” I said. “It has to do with taking off your jacket, maybe opening a window, ordering sandwiches and beer from the Brasserie Dauphine, and questioning the suspect through the night until the wee hours of the morning when he confesses.”
Barney looked at me quizzically. “You’re a great man for a story, Brian McNulty, but I don’t know what the hell you’re blathering about.”
“Sweat the truth out of him, is what Francois suggested,” Betsy said.
Barney nodded.
I wished she’d kept her mouth shut. “Francois didn’t say we should question Eliot. He said the Police Judiciaire should.”
chapter twenty-one
On the way back on the train, Betsy brought it up again. “What else can we do, Brian?”
Since I’d already thought this through a number of times, I knew I didn’t have an answer. “Sam and I already talked to Eliot. We didn’t find out anything.”
“Brian, if we don’t do something, they’ll arrest me or Barney, or both of us. They’ll take Katie away from me.” The D train rattled like a bucket of bolts, so she leaned close to me to speak, her chest brushing my elbow and her lips brushing my ear when the train jolted around a corner. Her tone was pleading. “Maybe you and Sam didn’t do it right. Barney said in Ireland they were able to get people to admit things.”
Taken aback for the moment, I wondered if Betsy understood what she suggested, which was that if we put the fear of God into Eliot, he would tell us who killed MacAlister and Tierney and who chopped off Barney’s fingers. What if he didn’t? The tribunals Barney was talking about were kangaroo courts, the product of war, where they tortured and executed people. Barney didn’t actually say this—and I didn’t ask him what his tribunal involved—but my understanding of the ways of the IRA suggested this was not a dog-and-pony show he was talking about.
When we got back to my apartment, Sam the Hammer turned Katie over to her mom and went off about his business such as it was. Betsy and I and the tyke went to the West Side Market. Walking down the aisles, pushing a cart with Katie in it, handing her a bagel out of a bin to gnaw on, brushing shoulders with Betsy, she putting her arm around me casually to lean across to grab something off a shelf, the twenty minutes in the store, and the walk back, carrying Katie in my arms, then playing on the floor with her and Otto, while Betsy rustled up tuna sandwiches—this hour or so with Betsy and the kid brought me a kind of peace I hadn’t experienced in many years, reminding me of when Kevin was a baby, and of my own childhood, a kind of togetherness and belonging to others, I realized with an intense pang of sadness, I must have missed much more than I knew.
Betsy and Katie left after lunch. I kissed them both quickly on the lips, and Betsy hugged me. “We’ll talk,” she said cutely in Brooklynese as she left.
I went downtown an hour early for work to talk to Downtown Sam and to see how seriously Francois took his own suggestion about questioning Eliot. Francois explained that he meant what he said to be a comment on the ineffectiveness of police interrogation in this country. “Brutality instead of psychological intensity,” said Francois. “The criminal, he confess—il veut admettre—une conscience coupable.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He needs son âme. His soul.”
“The criminal wants to confess because he feels guilty?”
“Oui!! Correct!!” said Francois, clapping me on the back.
“That may work for your French criminals. Over here, we’ve bred the conscience out of most of ours. I’m not sure a stake in the heart would work anymore.”
Francois shook his head, his hand on my shoulder, his eyes lined up with mine. “No, mon ami—my friend Brian. C’est l’état humain pour admettre sa culpapabilité—to be forgiven—pour avoir besoin de remission.”
“Maybe. But I doubt it.”
“Crime et châtiment, mon ami. Crime and punishment.”
If you’re having an early dinner in a hotel dining room, you’d little suspect that behind that closed kitchen door the chef and bartender are discussing the human condition and the nature of guilt. But in my experience these sorts of discussions often take place among hotel work crews, much like the discussions among the players on Charlie Brown’s baseball team. I left the kitchen deep in thought about this idea of the need to confess guilt and went to the bar in search of a Beefeater martini and advice from Sam.
Like Uptown Sam, Downtown Sam wasn’t much inclined to give advice. He knew how to make a martini, though: stirred in a mixing glass, not shaken in a metal shaker, made with Beefeater and a dash of vermouth, from a bottle, not a mister, and the vermouth stirred with the gin, not sloshed around the glass and poured out before the gin goes in—it’s a mixed drink, for Christ’s sake—the stem glass chilling while the drink is stirred for twenty to thirty seconds, then poured into the glass, not left to dilute in the mixing glass, and garnished with an olive. No one born after 1955 knows how to make a martini.
I sipped the drink and told Sam some folks wanted to lean on Eliot to see if he’d tell us anything. “What do you think?” I asked him.
“This ain’t your fight, man. Why you wanna get mixed up in the middle of it?”
“The fight more or less came to me when Eliot’s bosses decided I killed those guys.”
“That and Betsy.” There was a wariness around Sam as he talked that he seemed to be trying to pass on to me through force of will. “Why would Eliot rat on himself?”
I tried out Francois’s theory on Sam. “It’s human nature to want to confess and ask forgiveness.”
“Bullshit,” said Sam. “What if it ain’t Eliot at all?” He waited while I squirmed.
I squirmed long enough to finish the drink. “I don’t want to think about that.”
Sam shook his head. “We already talked to Eliot.”
I thought this over, this time with a cup of coffee. “I’m inclined to think we should have a talk with Eliot on our home court this time.”
Sam nodded. “Better than his. It’s takin’ a chance of everything blowin’ up. You know what I mean? If it’s just Eliot, we might can handle it. If that guy you had lunch with thinks it’s his fight, we got trouble.”
“We need to isolate Eliot.”
“Ain’t that what I just said?”
When I got home that night, Sam the Hammer was still on guard at my apartment. Asking Sam anything is a risky venture, because he’s almost never thinking along the same lines you are, but I gave it a try.
“Talk to him. Why not?” said Sam when I finished explaining what I thought were the complex dynamics involved in talking to Eliot without upsetting the underworld powers-that-be.
“That’s it? We won’t get whacked?”
Sam shrugged.
“We might get whacked?”
Sam shrugged again. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
When I explained the situation again, in case he missed something the first time, he put on his jacket, saying he had something to take care of.
“Does it have to do with what I’m telling you about?”
The glance he cast back over his shoulder made clear it didn’t.
After thinking it over for a few minutes, I realized Sam had told me all I needed to know. I might well be fucked if I tried to get information from Eliot, but as things stood, I was fucked anyway. Trouble ahead and trouble behind. I didn’t need to talk to anyone else.
I don’t know the exact point I decided I was going through with this, but somewhere along the line I did, and if I was going to do it, I needed help. Uptown Sam hadn’t offered; this left Downtown Sam and Barney, both of whom, unlike me, had experience with strong-arm stuff. We’d also need a driver—a wheelman, as we said in my new trade.
Late the next afternoon I called Ntango’s dispatcher and asked for him to stop by my apartment. He was there in a half hour. As we pulled away from my building and passed the Canadian guys selling Christmas trees on the corner, I noticed their sign read THREE DAYS TILL CHRISTMAS.
“Where to, Mr. Brian?” Ntango asked in his lazy drawl.
“Don’t throw the meter flag.”
He flipped on his OFF DUTY sign. “Another one of those, eh?”
I told him what we were up to. “You don’t have to do this, you know. It’s dangerous and probably foolish.”
He slid the cab easily through the light Sunday traffic, relaxed in his seat, his wrist draped over the steering wheel. One of the things I liked about Ntango was that he never got angry or frustrated at the traffic—probably because he was stoned most of the time. “But you ask me, my friend. Who knows, someday I need a favor from you?” Ntango was a tough guy, a veteran of his own country’s “troubles,” one in the fellowship of the dispossessed.
We headed to the Bronx and caught up with Barney at the butcher shop. No jars of porter at the Old Shillelagh this time. I propelled him out of the store and into the cab. Despite his prominent role in the incubation of this plan—a role he immediately repudiated—he was not enthusiastic for the task at hand.
“Bejaysus, Brian, you’ve lost your senses. To grab the likes of him? Sure, we’ll all be killed.”
I explained my thinking to Barney, and he continued to resist, putting the kibosh on every reason I came up with. Barney never out-and-out disagreed with you. Instead, he shook his head sadly and doubted.
“Aragh, I don’t see how it will work, Brian.” He shook his head. “Mind you, I’m as ready for a fight as the next man. Many’s the night I lay awake wishing I’d get me hands on Eliot, but I don’t see this is the way.”
Ntango headed for the hotel to pick up Downtown Sam when he got off work while Barney and I argued in the backseat. That I was leading the charge into action and Barney was trying to hold us back was a surprise, yet try to hold us back he did. I knew Barney wasn’t afraid, although he was extremely agitated. Maybe he was right, and it was a lousy idea. We didn’t have any others, though.
Before we got to the hotel, Barney spoke softly, fervor in his tone, almost as if he prayed. “Brian, I don’t think you realize what you’re embarking on.” He paused to consider his words. “The things I’ve seen done in these situations are things no man should have to do.”
I wanted to object, to tell Barney this was easy, just a few questions, no violence, but that was kidding myself, and he wouldn’t fall for it. What we were about to do was violent. There was no denying that. I didn’t intend to harm Eliot, but violence unleashed takes on a life of its own, a dynamic of unintended consequences.
chapter twenty-two
Once Barney realized he wouldn’t change my mind, he took charge of the operation. The first thing he did was have Ntango stop at one of the wholesale/retail dry goods stores along Broadway below Herald Square that happened to be open on Sunday, where he jumped out of the cab and came back with a bag of ski masks.
“It’s not so easy to recognize a voice when it’s muffled and you don’t have a face to put with it,” he said. “I’ll ask questions. If you want to say something, whisper to me.”
When we picked up Sam at the hotel, he told us Eliot would be waiting in front of the Empire Diner on Tenth Avenue. Sam had called and told him he had important information for him that he didn’t want McNulty to know about and would meet him Sunday evening but nowhere near the hotel or Eliot’s office.
Sure enough, Eliot was standing in front of the diner near the curb when the cab pulled up. I waited in the backseat on the driver’s side when Sam got out of the front seat and Barney the back. They jacked him up and shoved him into the backseat before he knew what hit him. Because it was the only thing I could think of to shut him up and keep him from jumping back out of the cab, I grabbed him in a headlock—a hold I’d learned from Kevin when he began wrestling in high school. It worked. Eliot kicked his legs, flailed his arms, and blustered into my pea coat where his face was buried and the sound muffled, until Barney, speaking in a fake cockney accent, told him to sit still and shut up, which he did.
When I let go of his head and he sat up, the terror in his eyes brought me up short. I’d seen that much terror only once in my life, right before a guy I once knew threw himself into the Hudson River to drown.
“You got the wrong guy,” Eliot said, talking a mile a minute. “You made a mistake. No one sent you after me. I’m Tom Eliot. Ask Angelo. Call your guys. Tell ’em to ask Angelo about Tom Eliot.” He paused for breath, his eyes darting around the cab. Because of the ski masks, all he saw was six eyeballs glaring at him, and another two watching the road if he looked in the rearview mirror.
“Tell us about the killing of the hotel manager,” Barney said in his phony accent.
“Da what?” His eyes darted around the cab again. “Who are youse guys?”
“Who killed the hotel manager and the cop? You or who besides you?”
“No. No. You got it wrong. Youse guys are nuts—” He paused. “No offense.” He directed what he said to Sam in the front seat, even though Barney asked the questions. I guess he thought Sam was the boss because he wasn’t saying anything. “I told Angelo, the guys from the strike did the killing. He knows it wasn’t me.”
“We know it was.”
Ntango had headed downtown on West Street along the Hudson after we picked Eliot up. We’d already made it through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and were driving along the Gowanus Expressway through Brooklyn toward the Belt Parkway and the wetlands by Jamaica Bay. This was Ntango’s idea, that the desolation of the Jamaica Bay wetlands would strike terror into the hardest heart.
For me, it was tough not talking, especially since Barney was getting nowhere with his questioning and veiled threats. I kept a lid on it because I didn’t want Eliot to recognize my voice. As soon as we hit the Belt Parkway, I could see the fear pouring out Eliot’s pores and leaking from his eyes. He stunk of it. Still, he told Barney nothing of the murders.
Barney kept his cool. He’d ask Eliot about the murders. Eliot would answer with variations of his first answer. At one point, Barney told Eliot he wasn’t going to leave Brooklyn if we didn’t get an answer. This one made me sit up and take notice.
Not many people besides truck drivers and cabdrivers know that New York City has a large body of wetlands at the far southern end of Brooklyn. When you’re headed toward Long Island and look out the passenger-side window of the car you’re in, it seems like you’re looking out over these marshes toward eternity. Before this ride, I knew about them by hearsay—the way I knew about the badlands of South Dakota. The folklore of my youth named the swamps and vacant lots of Canarsie as the dumping grounds for the bodies of those who ran afoul of the tough guys of Brooklyn. That the swamps had been renamed wetlands in the modern parlance didn’t lessen my apprehension at entering them, picturing dark roads that led to nowhere and would at any moment drop off into the murky deep. I imagined Eliot thought he’d come to his final resting place.
We found a deserted road at the end of Flatbush Avenue near Marine Park after we left the Belt Parkway. After driving alongside a golf course for a bit, we turned into a pull-off that featured pools and gullies of water and fields of gray-brown reeds. The wind off the murky darkness of Jamaica Bay was steady and bone-chilling. Clouds covered the moon and the stars, while the lights in the distance behind us merged into the darkness to become a half-lit gray curtain hanging over Brooklyn. Barney gestured for all of us to get out of the car, which we did, except Ntango, who s
tayed in the cab with the motor running. He hadn’t said anything, but I could tell by his grim expression and the way he was rigidly hunched over the steering wheel that he had a good mind to leave us all there.
By this time, Eliot was a wreck. He stumbled out of the car on my side and would have fallen if I hadn’t caught him. Dressed in a gray business suit, with no overcoat, he shook and shivered. The suit was wrinkled, and there was a broad dark stain in the back of the pants where he’d befouled himself. I would have felt sorrier for him if his fear hadn’t turned him so repulsive—there wasn’t enough of him left to feel sorry for. He’d given up talking in favor of lurching around like a captured animal. If he’d gotten loose from us, I think he’d have run off into the swamp.
Everything we were doing made me sick. I wished we’d never started. I wanted out of there. This had been a mistake—and it was my mistake. I was about to tell Barney and Sam that the deal was off. I didn’t have the stomach for any more. But Barney spoke first.
“Talking to the man is useless.”
My eyes sprung open. I let go of Eliot and sidled up beside Barney. “Whoa, Barney,” I said, barely above a whisper. “We brought this guy out here to ask him about the murders. That’s it. We still don’t know.”
“Look at him,” said Barney. “He’s that pathetic. What use is he to anyone?”
We argued heatedly in low voices.
“We want him to admit he did it,” I said.
“And even if he does, what then?” Barney asked. “It will be only us that knows the truth.”