“Don’t get me started, hey?”
“So where did our damaged corporal decide to go?”
“He told them he wanted to go to Chicago, where there was a better VA hospital.”
“Or a better something,” said Rosie.
“The Gypsy Promised Land,” I said. “Did they give him a pension, to boot?”
“Just a little one, ’cause he was only a little crazy. Three hundred bucks and change, every month.”
“That was a lot of money back then. He was maybe crazier than we think. Does he still collect it?”
“Would you believe he does? Never did get sane, I guess. Also never died. Or never admitted to it.”
“Probably never will, either. Want me to guess where the pension gets sent to?”
“General Delivery, Skokie, Illinois.”
“Bingo,” said Rosie.
“More bingo than you know,” said Wilkie. “That’s also where the money for the eighteen hundred dollar check from Amy Cox came from. First Bank of Skokie, Illinois.”
“Did we get his mustering-out medicals?” I said.
“I already told you, he was absolutely sort of crazy is all. Everything else was just your normal used-soldier stuff.”
“Let’s see.”
Wilkie pulled the appropriate part of the file, and I looked at the grainy faxes of the even grainier old mimeo forms and found the section headed “Distinguishing Scars or Marks.”
“Seems our man Cox had a nasty scar from a burn on his left forearm,” I said. “And fairly new, back then.”
“This is important?”
“This is the clincher,” said Rosie, and I nodded in agreement.
Wilkie gave us a perplexed look and I gave him a short version of the story about the Ardennes Forest. “He had to burn himself to cover the tattoo from the concentration camp,” I said. “I thought at the time Yonkos told me the story, he was lying about something, but I couldn’t tell what. All that poetic stuff about not knowing where the story came from originally? Hell, he was the story.”
“Well, part of it,” said Rosie.
“Exactly half,” I said. “Now the question is…”
“Who was the German?” said Wilkie.
“That’s the question, all right.”
“I don’t think even the Prophet can run that one down for us.”
“He doesn’t have to. The man will come to us.”
“Yeah, I’m so damn sure he wants to,” said Wilkie.
“He will?” said Rosie.
“You bet. In a shiny black LTD with a bag of money in it. We’re going to accept the last offer from Mr. G. Cox.”
“I don’t trust him,” said Rosie.
“I don’t trust him twice as much,” said Wilkie. “And when I don’t trust people, that’s not a good thing. Especially for them.”
“Hold onto that thought, both of you,” I said. “Hold it really well.”
***
Wide Track went back to my office to send the email to Cox accepting his offer, and to wait for a reply. Rosie and I took the limping pickup into town and to the Amtrak depot, to pick up my BMW. It had evolved into a much nicer machine in my absence. Or maybe it just profited by comparison with the 1968 International Harvester pickup. Rosie went inside the terminal to get a schedule, so I would know what train to claim I had come back to town on. I wiped down the pickup, checked it one last time, and left it with the keys in the ignition. It was a sort of feeble, blind payback gesture. The naive but sincere young woman who had rented me the Pontiac might or might not get in trouble when I didn’t bring it back. Not a damn thing I could do about that. But some poor bastard fresh off a freight train from North Bumjungle might just get a shot of unexpected good fortune by finding the clunker. It wouldn’t really balance the cosmic scales, but it was the best I could do.
Rosie brought me a printed schedule that showed a train arriving from Seattle in about an hour, which meant any time in the next half day, and I made a mental note to come back and hassle the ticket clerk again at the appropriate time. If I had time, that is. But first, we got in the BMW and went to see my friendly pawnbroker.
***
Nickel Pete was sitting on his regular perch and, as usual, took his hands from under the counter and smiled when he saw me.
“Herman, my friend! And with a brand new blonde, too. Is this maybe a new feature of the bonding business I didn’t know about? I renew my offer to partner with you.”
Rosie gave me a raised eyebrow and I told her the last time I had been there was with Amy Cox.
“I hope that time didn’t set a precedent,” said Rosie.
“Don’t give it a thought, young lady.” Pete waved a hand dismissively. “Nobody will ever do that to me again, I promise you. But I still got good instruments to show, if you want.”
Rosie looked more puzzled than ever at that, with a look that asked, “do what to him?” I didn’t bother to explain for Pete. He was a big boy; he could extract his own foot from his mouth. Or choke on it. I took the pawn ticket for the Amati out of my wallet and laid it on the counter. “Let’s have a look at this one,” I said.
“Ah, Herman, what can I say?” He put his hands against the sides of his head, as if it needed to be kept from exploding. “Forget about paying off the ticket. Forget about the vig, even. I owe you way more than that for my stupidity. I don’t know how I’m ever going to make it up to you.” Apparently simply paying for the lost violin never occurred to him.
“Let’s just see it, first,” I said.
He went in the back room and returned with the battered black case, which he put down on the counter and opened. I couldn’t remember the original one Amy Cox had shown me all that well, but this seemed like a plausible likeness.
“Have you looked at it since we talked on the phone?” I said.
“Why would I do that? To remind myself what a dope I was? This I do not need. I’d be happy if nobody ever looked at it again.”
Once again, I had a tiny flash of insight into why some con games work so well. Once the mark decides something is a disaster or a triumph, he never looks at it again.
“It looks old, anyway,” I said.
“Sure it looks old. You think I’m going to get taken in by a shiny new plastic one? The broad was slick, Herman. The slickest. She must have made the switch right after she asked if she could kiss her old violin, just for sentimental reasons.”
“She did? I didn’t see that.”
“You were busy scribbling numbers on your little pad or something. It was just so damned corny that I thought I’d be polite and ignore it. And it was a really short time, anyway. Ten seconds, tops. Well, maybe fifteen. But I swear, she never had both cases within easy reach at the same time.”
“But she held the Amati up to her face for a little while, with the bottom towards you, hiding what she was doing?”
“Well that would be how you’d kiss the stupid thing, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe. But in this case, I think it was how she changed the label.”
“You’re a nice guy, Herman, but you’re nuts.”
“That’s a different topic. You got a dentist’s mirror and a little flashlight? A long tweezers with a kink or two in the prongs would be good, too. I had a professional lecture about violin labels a while back. I want to see if it was true.”
“You mean like, ‘labels come and labels go’?”
“Mostly, they accumulate, is what I was told. Get the stuff, will you?”
He went in the back again and returned with an enameled steel box full of tools. I picked a little maglight, shone it in one f-hole, and peeked in the other one. I didn’t need a mirror or a magnifying glass to read the name Yamaha.
“This label is oval-shaped and sort of big,” I said. “Is that what a Yamaha label should look like?”
“Who the hell knows? The logo is right. Sometimes companies change the shape of the rest of it o
ver the years. And they have been making Yamahas for a while, you know. I don’t know them all.”
“Uh huh. Give me the tweezers, will you?”
“Sure.” He handed me something that looked like a surgical tool. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Peel the label off.”
“Excuse me for saying so, Herman, but now you’re talking like the amateur you are. Those things aren’t meant just to be peeled off. They’re stuck on with some damned good glue that has to be steamed or scraped or…”
“It’s coming.”
“It can’t be.”
But it did. First one small arc of an edge, then a bigger and bigger blister, and finally the whole thing. The label paper wasn’t exactly happy about it, but it didn’t pull apart, either, and soon I had it hanging from the jaws of my tool like the skin of a tiny molting reptile. I carefully pulled it out through the f-hole and held it up.
“Looks like stickyback,” said Rosie. “Sort of yellowy-colored, but definitely new.”
But Pete wasn’t looking at the newly peeled label. He was peering intently into the f-hole again, where the faded black script on a crackled paper label could still be clearly seen to say, “Nicolò Amati, A.D. 1643.”
“Holy shit,” he said.
“No, just an old violin,” said Rosie. But she took a look, too.
“Of some kind,” I said. “Have you got anything here that will make a small, directable jet of steam?”
“I got a thingy I use to clean complicated jewelry sometimes. What do you want it for?”
“Now we’re going to see what’s under the Amati label.”
Chapter Nineteen
Fiddle Game
Considering that the mighty Mississippi was once the very highway of commerce for St. Paul, it’s amazing how much of the present-day waterfront is either undeveloped or abandoned. On the flats below limestone bluffs that hold up downtown are some railroad tracks, an empty warehouse that used to hold huge rolls of paper for the Pioneer Press, the back door of the jail, and at the bottom of the appropriately named Steep Street, the County Morgue.
Farther upstream, I’m told there used to be an Italian neighborhood called, not too surprisingly, Little Italy. But it couldn’t survive the triple plagues of flood, fire, and the Zoning Board, and by the time I came to St. Paul the area had reverted to a wasteland of weeds, scrubby trees, and surreptitiously dumped junk. There was also a scrapyard and two power plants, one abandoned and one working, but the dominant landscape was urban wilderness. They shot a really awful movie there once, with Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, about small-time crooks. I think the former Little Italy was where they went to bump people off.
Next to the river, there’s a couple miles of paved walkway. Nobody ever uses it because it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s exposed to traffic on the area’s only road, and you can’t park within half a mile of either end. Also, the police don’t patrol it much. And that’s where Gerald Cox, which was not his name, chose to trade me eighteen thousand dollars for my violin, which was not really mine. And I didn’t even consider refusing. Was the spell of the thing getting to me, too?
Wilkie didn’t like the setup, but then, he wouldn’t. When he covers my back, he likes to do it from close range, where his sheer physical presence and strength are big advantages, and his lack of speed doesn’t matter. He also likes to hear what is going on, and in the time we had to get ready, there was no way we could get a hidden radio rigged up. Somehow, I didn’t think the hastily scrounged cell phone in my pocket, even with an open connection, was going to be much help. I had slightly more faith in the nine-millimeter semiauto tucked into the belt clip at the small of my back. Slightly. I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in anything just then. But if we quibbled about the setup, we were liable to get another one just as bad, besides making our man more wary and less likely to go through with the deal at all. I didn’t want that. I wanted some kind of conclusion. It was time to quit being sneaky and clever and make something happen.
The offer was simple enough:
mr. jackson
bring the violin to the pedestrian walk along shepard road, across from the metal scrapyard, at midnight and walk from the upstream end to the downstream one. You will be given eighteen thousand dollars cash for your violin, and our business will then be at an end. You will not need any assistants or observers.
tonight.
g. cox
And wasn’t that just too, too fearsomely cloak and daggerish? Some bored bureaucrat, dying for a bit of drama and intrigue? Wilkie bitched and said it was the perfect setup for a hit. Rosie just rolled her eyes and shook her head sadly. I accepted the offer. Then I went off to the Amtrak depot to wait for the train. After all, it wouldn’t do for me to get killed down by the river if I hadn’t yet come back from Seattle.
***
There weren’t a lot of streetlights along Shepard Road to begin with, and several had lamps that needed replacing. The ones that worked made a ragged line from the black parking lot of the abandoned power plant to the illuminated arches of the Robert Street Bridge, some three or more miles distant. The walkway itself wasn’t lit at all. It was not as dark as the cellar in Skokie had been, but it damn sure wasn’t the Great White Way, either. On my right was a line of concrete freeway barriers about three feet high, which are used to hold sandbags during floods. I touched the tops now and then to keep my spatial orientation. Beyond them, the river rushed and gurgled, occasionally showing a glint of reflected light on its dark, undulating surface. It looked fast, powerful, and very close, and it occurred to me that I would not care to find myself trying to swim in it. No wonder Wilkie hadn’t liked the setup. But I had agreed to be there, I reminded myself, and it was too late to back out now. The streetlights beckoned and I went.
Off to my left, the expanse of scrubby brush got wider as I went east, downstream, finally flaring out to a full quarter of a mile. Rosie was out there somewhere, shadowing me as well as she could without being too obvious about it. Our thinking was that if she got spotted, our mystery man, assuming he was local, was not so likely to associate her with me, though the new all-black catburglar outfit she insisted on wearing probably made her more, rather than less, conspicuous. Wilkie, on the other hand, would stand out like Wilkie, no matter what he wore. I didn’t know where he was. He had told me I didn’t want to know and I had believed him. But wherever my people were, I definitely felt alone. Alone and vulnerable.
I started down the walk exactly at midnight, using one of the flashlights I had bought in Skokie for occasional guidance and moral support, carrying the violin case in my left hand. I walked steadily but not in any hurry, and I stopped from time to time to listen to the river. There was nothing else to listen to. No footsteps, no cocking of guns, no banshees or werewolves.
A thousand yards down the walkway, as I was about to pass under High Bridge, I came upon a leather briefcase sitting on top of one of the flood barriers. It had a tiny flashlight on it which was turned on, presumably so I wouldn’t miss the case in the dark. I stopped and played my own flashlight beam over it, and I saw something glint on the side, under the handle. When I went closer, I could see it was a shiny brass plate. Closer still, and I saw my name engraved on it. Nice touch. A personalized booby trap. But I didn’t think so. I put the violin down on the sidewalk.
From inside my jacket pocket, I could hear a small, tinny version of Wilkie’s voice. I think he was trying to whisper and scream at the same time.
“Don’t open that thing, Herman! Don’t even touch it!”
I popped the latches.
“Goddamn it, Herman, I know you can hear me!”
I opened the lid.
“Get away from that thing, now!”
I looked. Inside the case were several stacks of bundled bills and a note. The bills were all used twenties, and I didn’t try to count them, but it seemed like about the right amount of bulk for eighteen grand. The note was no
t as elegant as the brass plate. Done in magic marker on a plain sheet of typing paper, it simply said:
LEAVE THE VIOLIN WHERE YOU FOUND THE CASE
TAKE THE CASE
GO
Simple enough. I saw no reason to argue with any of those instructions, other than the fact that I had really come there to meet their author. I snapped the case shut, picked it up, placed the violin in the same spot, and stepped back. But I didn’t leave right away. I had no urge to kiss the fiddle, or even shake hands with it, but it didn’t seem right simply to turn away and never look at it again. Maybe I thought it owed me an apology.
In my pocket, the mechanized Wilkie shouted, “Will you please get the hell out of there?” His voice had less conviction than before, but I knew he was right. As I was about to oblige him, I heard the crack of doom from the jungle to my left. It was loud and high-pitched, and it had that kind of lingering reverberation that comes only from very high-powered, heavy caliber rifles. A deer rifle, I thought. Definitely not one of Rosie’s handguns. Not a seven-millimeter, either. I hit the dirt, or rather the sidewalk, and put the briefcase over my head.
The first shot hit the concrete bumper, close to the center, making a distressingly large crater and showering me with shards and powder. One shot to find the range. The next one will be for real. The second one hit the violin. It hit it squarely and explosively, smashing both case and instrument into splinters and dust and sending all the pieces spinning off into space. Or rather, into the black river, which swept them away forever. I tipped the briefcase up on edge, making an inadequate wall out of it, and I braced myself for the heavy slug that I was sure would find me next. After a second, I also drew my knees up in front of my torso, thinking it was better to have a shattered leg than a bullet in the gut. Then I drew the nine millimeter from under my jacket, and I waited. And waited. Where the hell were my partners?
There was no third shot.
After what seemed like forever, Rosie came running at me from the bushes, her big revolver at high port, eyes scanning all directions.
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