“The fact that any other civilian would be pissing themself right now, but you’re still talking. After all, you acted pretty scared when Maranzano did the same thing.”
Her face went blank.
I continued, “The crime scene at 72nd and 3rd. No civilian would have known there were four bodies. Not even Commissioner Shen knew. We never released a statement, and Viessman’s people don’t talk.”
Allen handed me the photo it had nabbed earlier, and I raised it to her face.
“André Mercier. And this is you with, we presume, the rest of your family. Not smart to leave it lying around your apartment, was it?”
“I didn’t expect a pervert to walk into my bedroom to snoop,” she said through gritted teeth. I could see that Allen was getting spooked.
“You lied to me. Your little slip-up and your bruise — the one Allen dealt you — gave you away. You had me fooled when you showed me your arms — there were no cuts.”
“You’d be surprised what Syneal and makeup can do for a wound.”
I frowned. “Care to explain everything before I put a hole in your head?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“He would,” Allen piped up. Simone’s eyes snapped up to meet its gaze. “We both know he would have killed you that night if I hadn’t tried to stop him, letting you catch him off guard.”
“A punch right to my fresh stitches.” I felt my side tingle and the wound stretch with each breath. “Why? Money? Infamy? Some great conspiracy to destroy the Maranzano Mob?”
“My father,” she spat, staring at my gun with malicious intent.
“Your ‘father’ seems to be doing fine, especially if he lives up on the Plate.”
“He’s suffering. He’s in his seventies, and while he may look fine, he’s not all there. Some days he forgets my name. One day it’ll be my face. He was pushed out of Upper City, and now he lives in the Upper East Side.”
“Your father is …” I faltered, trying to make sense of it. “He’s registered as a resident on the Plate, everyone says as much. They’re saying he might be made secretary of defense someday. Why would they lie?”
“So that the government doesn’t look bad shoving some old bastard in the Lower City with a pitiful retirement fund. They wait for him to pass before they fill the slot. It’s all for appearances.”
“But why keep him registered in the Upper City? Surely they could just move him off the island to a nice retirement home.”
“The last thing the Upper City wants is for people to think they’ll toss you off for the slightest indiscretion. But he’s a liability now. The moment he stumbled saying his own name, they set him up down here and made sure to keep all the paperwork the same.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but how is that a motive? That sounds like an Upper City problem, not a Mafia problem,” I said.
“The Mafia is exploiting him. Threatening him. I know how Maranzano found out where he lives: Hartley tipped him off, seeing as he was never a fan of my father. Do you know what I’ve done to try to get him to safety?”
“So that’s why you wanted to transfer to the Upper City,” Allen interrupted. “I eavesdropped on your conversation with Schafer. I thought it was odd that you wanted to go up there —”
“Shut the capek up before I beat it to death with this fridge.” She looked at me, ignoring Allen. In response, it went unnaturally silent. “My father is all I have left. Blood or no blood, he is family. Maranzano has been exploiting both him and the people of New York, and he needs to be put in his place.”
Something didn’t add up.
“But what does threatening your father accomplish?” I asked. “What do they have to gain from roughing him up?”
“Money.”
“They make more in a minute than your father could ever provide from his own bank account,” I retorted. “And that last place you hit wasn’t even Maranzano’s.”
“Of course I know that! The Iron Hands are just as bad, if not worse.”
“How did you know Rossi was part of the Hands?”
“A girl has her ways.” She squinted at me. Hard to tell what she was hiding.
“So what started out as a poorly founded personal issue transformed into vigilantism?”
“Call it whatever you like, but I’m making good headway dealing with them.”
“You’re starting a war,” Allen interjected. “Violence is ramping up in the Lower City. According to the 5th, Maranzano and the Hands have clashed more this week than they have in years. If this continues, the Lower City will become a war zone, and the only way it ends is when one group annihilates the other.”
“Fine, let them kill each other!” Simone spat back. “The sooner this city is rid of those blights, the sooner the people can focus on the root of their problems.”
“You have no qualms condemning innocent people to death?”
“They’re only condemned to death if they choose a side.”
“Your actions will force them to choose a side!”
It was like looking at myself all over again. To my right was a younger version of me, full of hope and pride, believing she could be the one to fix everything and save the world with the business end of her gun. And to my left was another me, one who accepted that oppression was better than death, that peace was something to strive for, no matter the quality of the peace granted. No, no, I wouldn’t do this again. Otherwise, I’d be back at square one, with another person trying to prove a point, and me hunting them down once again. It was high time I started thinking. And doing the right thing.
I reset the hammer and put the Diamondback under my arm. Simone looked shocked, Allen doubly so.
“The Eye sent me after you because you’re now a threat,” I whispered to myself. “We need a threat, now more than ever.”
“What?” she asked
Allen stared at me in disbelief. “Roche, you can’t be serious.”
“This is the only way.”
“No, it is not!” it said, raising its voice. I’d never seen this side of it before. “Elias, she is a danger to everyone! She’s brewing a war between the two largest Mobs in America, and you want to let her continue? There’s no telling how great the casualties will be.”
“I know that —”
“No, you don’t! You have the foresight of a blind man! Her actions alone will cause havoc, and we’ll be the ones who have to clean it up! The people don’t deserve the wrath that you and she and the Eye will bring upon them! I won’t allow this!”
“Well, good thing you ain’t the one making the decision.” I slid the key into the cuff around Simone’s left wrist and unlocked it.
“Roche!” Allen yelled, making me turn just as the latch came undone. Before I could speak, I was cut off by a slap in the face.
Fuck … that was hard.
“You’re lucky I don’t punch you in that wound again, asshole! Don’t you ever do that to me again!” she screamed, pushing me away from her. She looked at Allen. “And that thing is lucky I don’t want to break my fist on its head.”
Allen didn’t speak. It only glared at me. It looked like it was actually angry.
“Ow …” I rubbed my cheek. That’s not going to look good tomorrow. “I’m sorry. You see what kind of pressure I’m under.”
“Which is why I don’t trust you. Why let me go?”
“Because you can do what we can’t. You can sow some discord and make the Mobs suffer, give this city a chance to be free of their influence. It’s a long shot, but it’s better than working for her and getting my friends killed. You are objective, unaffiliated with anyone who presides over this hellhole.”
“Not entirely objective, but …” Her shoulders relaxed a little, though she still didn’t trust us, especially not Allen, who was beside itself. She looked at it. “That pistol-whip hurt, capek.”
“It was meant to,” Allen said. Its hand was on the grip of its gun, the one I’d gifted it.
“Al,” I said, “stand
down.”
It didn’t like that. It complied, but with reluctance.
Simone spoke to me but kept her eyes fixed on Allen. “What’s next? Going to stalk me to make sure I do everything according plan? Maybe try to sneak a knife in my throat while I —”
“The gun,” I interrupted.
“What?”
“The Vierling. Which one have you been using, and how?” She blinked. “Show me.”
She sighed, rolling her eyes, and moved past me, heading for the front door of her apartment. Allen and I followed in hot pursuit.
She led us down to the basement, entering with the use of a key. It was a laundry room full of currently empty washing machines and an uneasy stillness. She stepped over to a large cabinet of cleaning supplies and nodded at it. Allen took the initiative, sliding it aside. There was a conspicuous vertical crack in the wall large enough to fit a hand through. Allen yanked at it, discovering that a large portion of the wall was set on a hinge; it swung outward to reveal a hidden second room. While it did all this, Simone locked the door to the laundry room so no one could get in — and no one could get out.
“I’d better not get shot down here,” I said.
“If you’re smart, you won’t,” she responded.
The room was messy, but functional, containing everything from tables to racks to filing cabinets. Near the entrance hung the outfit we’d caught her in so many days ago: goggles, hood, heavy coat. The filing cabinets contained pictures and documents. Strewn about were black-and-white photos of the Edison Hotel, 72nd and 3rd, and Rossi’s little whorehouse. An image of her next target sat in plain view: Chelsea Piers, the Eye’s new playhouse and the perfect place to set a bomb off to ignite an actual, honest-to-God war.
And there at the far end of the room, on a worktable covered in tools and materials, was the item of the day: Mercier Vierling number four, Renaud, the lost masterpiece. Not as immaculate as the one I had seen in the museum, no engravings, and the trigger mechanisms were so different it was like a completely different gun. Three triggers, four barrels, the bottom one longer and rifled to fire 15mm Von Whisper shells instead of the common 12-gauge shell. Speaking of which, there were half a dozen shells on the table nearby, along with several stripper clips of Lebel cartridges beside an ammo press.
“Like the place? Put it together myself after getting here a few months back,” she said.
“A few months? How long have you been operating?”
“Back in May was my first real jump into the fray. You think I started at Edison? The only reason you got on my tail is because the stiffs belonged to GE. Every other corpse I’ve made was from the Maranzano Mob, and since they drop like flies, no one noticed when they died in fours. People do suddenly take notice when the higher-ups are threatened, though, funnily enough.”
“Jesus, and the Mob is only starting to feel it now?”
“It took some effort to root out the big players. Now the killings are quick, but before now, I had to get up close and personal. I brought some of them back here, tortured them for hours, days even, to get what I needed. That’s how I found out about Hartley and my father. I’ve been working my way up the chain, taking out key players, but it seems Maranzano is paranoid — not a bad trait to have, with me on his tail. It’ll take time to get him.”
“Christ …” Impressive. Barbaric, but impressive. “Where did you get the money for all this?”
She paused, lowering her voice. “A girl has her ways …”
She still wasn’t telling me everything. How did a girl like her finance quality clothes, an apartment in Lincoln Square, and resources like this? How did a girl in the Lower City get Von Whisper cartridges without going through the cartels? I didn’t think she’d let on to me, but there was something there. Perhaps she wasn’t working alone …
“I’m guessing this hasn’t been your first foray into combat,” I said.
“Correct,” she affirmed.
“Your father lived in Reims, near Verdun. You weren’t here when the War broke out, were you?”
Simone didn’t face me. Watching her lean wearily against the workbench, I could tell this wasn’t an easy thing to talk about. “I was fourteen when the War began, seventeen when it ended.”
“You served?”
“Not exactly. I wasn’t recruited, if that’s what you mean. After everything began and the country started to conscript, my father and brothers joined up, and when the trench was pushed near Reims, my mother and I decided to do our part, too. But by the end … I lost everywone, everything. My mother first, then my brothers, one by one. My father died a month before the surrender. A month.
“I did get you, Roche, when you talked at the restaurant about your service, how you were unable to go back to a normal life. I understood then, and I still do now. I never had the chance for a normal life after my childhood. I was fucked up, and there was no going back. I spent more time around American and British and Canadian soldiers than with my own family. Morane — Dad, I mean — felt something like pity for me, so after I lost my father, he offered to bring me to America and give me a life far away from the hell of France. How could I say no? I was seventeen and an orphan. I had no other options unless I wanted to scrub shitters for the rest of my life. So of course I accepted his offer.”
“Did he have any idea that you were capable of … this?” I motioned toward the table full of equipment.
“Thankfully, no,” she said. “I’m not proud of what I did to survive, nor of what I do now, but it’s necessary. My enemies are nothing to me when I have a knife in my hand and bullets in my rifle. Afterward is a different story, but, in the moment, you have to close yourself off to their suffering if you want to live.”
I never did that. Perhaps I was weak; that explained why I had almost died several times, while she seemed to be bulletproof. I sat down in a rickety chair. Allen was silent, unable to pull itself from the conversation.
“I told you about my first kill. Tell me about yours,” I said, to break the silence.
She still didn’t turn to face me. “An old German bastard manning a machine gun. The French hated machine-gunners. They’d let every other German boy live, but the best Germans with the most stripes manned those guns. I was young, small, and I could sneak through shelled-out trenches to get to the German line. You shot your first man, I stabbed mine. How did you feel after your first kill?”
“I threw up,” I said, almost laughing. “I vomited all over myself and my gun. Paddy hasn’t let it go ever since. How did you feel?”
“Not a goddamn thing.” She turned to me now. I wished she hadn’t. “But now … now I can’t sleep, now it takes ten coffees to get through a day, because I wake up in the night screaming. I felt nothing back then, but it caught up with me, fast.” She looked at Allen, her brow furrowed. “How about you, capek?”
Allen didn’t respond.
“I don’t think it wants to talk about it …” I began.
“Well, I do. Killed a man yet? Got blood on your hands? Not an Automatic, huh? Bullshit. To think I gave either of you the time of day.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Allen spat back.
I put my hand on Simone to pull her away and was met with a knife to my throat. She had grabbed it off the worktable. She was quick.
“Don’t you fucking touch me,” she said.
“Understood.” I pulled away, and she lowered the knife slowly. “You framed me, didn’t you? At the Met.”
“Framed you? No. I skirted around the cameras, sure, but I didn’t think they’d go hunting for you over that. I thought you’d be immune due to your reputation, but it seems not. I didn’t mean to get you charged for my actions.”
“So you knew where all the cameras were?”
“Some, not all of them.”
The conversation was cut short by a crackling noise. I knew that sound. There was a police scanner in here. She was listening in on police radio chatter. No wonder she always knew what was happening and w
here.
“Call the 5th, get R here. Firefight in Midtown … 3rd Precinct officers on scene, requesting backup. Maranzano’s people are on the move.”
Simone turned to me. “Looks like you’re needed.” I glanced back at the radio, raising my eyebrows. “I had to track you somehow,” she said.
“How did you get the scanner?” I asked.
“Don’t you have a call to answer?”
I nodded and got up slowly. Allen and I headed for the door.
“I’m coming with you,” Simone said.
“Absolutely not. If you want to make the most of your freedom, stay here, maybe move apartments, but do not come with us.”
“It’s my fault you’ve been incriminated. I owe you for my negligence, and I’m coming with you, like it or not. Besides, with that injury of yours, do you really think you could take me in a fair fight, let alone Maranzano’s thugs?”
I gripped my side and took a minute to consider the options.
“Stay in the back and follow my orders,” I said.
“Roche, if you want her to live, she’s not leaving this building,” Allen cried.
Simone grabbed the rifle, cracked the breech open, and loaded three rounds and one shell. She tossed it to me, ignoring Allen.
“Wait for me in the car. I need to change into something more appropriate. Don’t you dare leave without me.”
“Will you be quick?” I asked.
“Shut up and get in your car.”
CHAPTER 25
I PARKED THE TALBOT BEHIND a small blockade of police cars on 50th. Four cruisers were lined up bumper to bumper, blocking the street, and eight officers were crouched behind the vehicles, holding .38s. Allen and I made our way to the blockade, ducking behind one of the cruisers for cover, while Simone kept her distance. I hoped she wouldn’t decide to turn the gun on us to keep her secret safe.
I approached the nearest officer. “What’s the news?”
The rookie jumped at the sound of my voice. “Sir, please, we need you to back up, this is an ongoing crisis.” He had a faint French accent. Figured, being from the 3rd.
“I’m the guy you called for.”
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