11

INVISIBLE WAR

Funny thing about Fatboy Mooch: you never saw him indoors. Zach never had, anyway. He always met with him on street corners—in cafés—in parks. Today it was in one of those little pocket arcades with the waterfalls: the butter-bellied thug liked to meet in such venues, to sit at one of the tables amidst the white folks and honey locust trees and nibble delicately on a croissant from the snack bar while he talked pure wickedness. Zach wondered if this was some form of ironic street theater or something like that. Or maybe the point was just that the Mooch wasn’t hiding, wasn’t scuttling around to protect his rep. Dealing with law dogs was part of doing business in this city, so why not do it in the open? Or maybe the Mooch was just claustrophobic, who could say?

“Do you even have a place to live?” Zach asked him.

“The foxes have they holes,” said Fatboy Mooch, “and the birds of the air have they nests, but Fatboy Mooch got nowhere to lay his head.”

“That’s a sad story.”

“You wanna see sad? I’ll show you sad. Come with me, Agent.”

Fatboy Mooch was fat all right, but he was big and carried his lard spread collar-to-jockstrap so he was shaped more like a bomb than a beachball. He favored T-shirts with slogans on them like KILLER, or a picture of a .38 with the caption WELCOME TO NEW YORK. Which was more or less truth in advertising because, despite his imitation-civilized raconteur veneer, there were all sorts of stories about what he’d done to guys with his bare hands. Most of the stories ended up with the Mooch’s enemies liquefied and hard men losing their lunches left and right at the sight of what remained.

“You know this corner? You see this corner?” he asked Zach after a while.

They’d been strolling west and north together, talking baseball and the weather. Fatboy had been laying down a running commentary on the Yankees’ chances in the postseason, with glosses on Houston’s crap-ass pitching to try to get under the Texan’s skin. But they stopped now, on the northeast corner, looking to the northwest, and Zach took in the panorama with a cop’s eyes: the school playground down the block to his left, the rundown brownstones directly across from him, the empty lot, the scaffolding in front of the grocer’s shop. He could guess at the location of the dead drop where the drugs would be hidden. He could guess where the corner boys would have been stationed—dealer there, steerer there, runner there—if there had been corner boys, which there were not.

“I see it,” said Zach.

“You know whose corner this is?” Fatboy asked him.

“I’m a federale, Mooch. Which dirtbag is poisoning children where—that’s local stuff. Not my beat.”

“You see it, though. You see it with that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.”

Zach nodded. “It’s your corner, sure.”

“It is my corner, Agent.”

“But where’s your corner boys?”

“Where indeed? Pretty soon, those third graders gonna be let out for recess, where they gonna get their re-up at?”

“Goddamned city. Nothing runs right.”

“You know where I think my corner boys is at?”

Zach drew his gaze slowly off the scenery and turned to show his baby blues to Fatboy. The two men were about the same height—Mooch maybe half an inch taller—so it was a direct hit, stare to stare. Zach wanted the gangster-man to read him: he knew all this—everything the Mooch was about to say—he’d guessed it, anyway—or seen it with that inward eye that is . . . whatever Fatboy said it was—that’s why he was here in the first place.

“I think they be at that land from which no traveler returns,” said Fatboy, straight at him.

“You think your corner boys are dead.”

“That’s my deduction. You know how I deduces that? I deduces it because one of them—a young brother go by the name STD—he wear a ring on his finger with a gold skull on it, have some diamonds for the eyes, you know. And that very ring was still on his finger when his hand showed up in a paper bag at my park bench where I eat my morning burrito.”

“Does sound like a clue.”

“The bad man uses a sword, I heard.”

“He does.”

“Put me off my damned breakfast.”

“You shouldn’t eat that crap anyway. It’ll turn your heart to stone—although maybe that warning comes a bit too late.”

“They an invisible war going on out here, Detective. I’m getting that you already know that, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“We ain’t fighting against flesh and blood no more. We’re fighting against principalities. And powers. Against spiritual forces in the heavenly places. This is a battle between good and evil going on, Agent Adams.”

“Which one are you?” Zach couldn’t help asking.

“Me? Why, I bring the gift of laughter to a sorrowful world!” Fatboy Mooch protested, as if his feelings had been hurt. “No one has to give me money to get they self high. Reality is free. Ask yourself who deals out that shit. I’m a better man than God, when you come to think about it. I make you feel better than He does, anyway.”

You cannot survive as a lawman unless corruption amuses you at some level. Otherwise, it’d be a life with no laughs at all. Zach was amused by Fatboy Mooch, and Fatboy Mooch was pleased by that and smiled to himself as he surveyed what had, until very lately, been his domain.

“What if I told you I had a lead on Dominic Abend?” Zach said. “That I could bring him down with the right intel? Get you your corner back so you can go on killing those children with your drugs.”

Without another word, Fatboy Mooch began to walk again—to walk along the school fence, the empty playground at his shoulder. Zach hesitated only a moment, then followed after him until he caught up, until he had a view of Fatboy’s profile. He could see the gangster was doing a nervous scan of every face that came toward them on the sidewalk.

Fatboy noticed that he’d noticed and murmured low, “A world full of faces—and every face a face to meet the faces that it meets.”

“Someone stole something from him,” Zach answered, side of the mouth. “Abend. By accident or on purpose, I don’t know. But whatever it was, he wants it back. Wants it bad enough to show himself. We think he was there in person when they sliced and diced up Marco Paz.”

The street was noisy. Traffic; sirens; truck panels rumbling as tires hit potholes. Even the sound of footsteps on concrete was loud. Voices could get lost—intimations and innuendoes could get lost. Nonetheless, Zach heard the Mooch’s breathing change, or sensed it. He smelled . . . something coming off the man. He smelled him thinking the situation through. He smelled him putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Apparently that had a smell. Who knew?

“The Guyland heists,” said Fatboy then.

Smart, thought Zach. Say whatever else you would about him, the gangster was smart.

Fatboy Mooch continued: “Out in Gravesend near Avenue U, near a red brick building across from Moody Square, there’s a dumpster in an alley with a black plastic bag inside. And in that plastic bag there is a moldy old mess of shit that looks like papier-mâché before it dries. You ever seen that?”

“Papier-mâché before it dries? In school when I was little, sure.”

“Well, good. Then maybe you will be able to tell the difference between what that looks like and the remains of Billy Grimhouse, which is what’s in that bag—all that’s left of him after that devil was done.”

“And Billy Grimhouse is? Or was . . . ?”

“The brother of Johnny Grimhouse. Which made them the Brothers Grimhouse. The pair of fools who did the Guyland heists.”

Now it was Zach’s turn to make the connections—a whole series of them rattling into place in his mind like dice coming up Yahtzee. These Grimhouse clowns had been doing mansions out on Long Island. They had taken something from Dominic Abend. Dominic Abend had traced some fenced merchandise back to Paz, tortured Paz to get to the Grimhouse brothers, tortured Billy Grimhouse. . . .

“How long ago was this?”

“Don’t know,” said Fatboy Mooch. “Two days. Three. A week at most.”

Before the storage unit had been tossed. So Billy didn’t have the answers and Abend still hadn’t found what he wanted, Zach thought. Which raised a new question: If Billy was the Guyland thief, why didn’t he know where Abend’s merchandise had gotten to?

“If you were up on all this,” Zach asked the Mooch, “why didn’t you drop a dime and let me in on it, give me a head start?”

“’Cause that German mo-fo already owns half the cops in town. And though Fatboy Mooch is wiser than the children of light in his generation, even he isn’t wise enough to know which half is which.”

This sent another twinge through Zach’s anxiety centers re: Goulart. Was Goulart one of the fifty percent of cops Abend already owned?

“But I figure . . .” Fatboy Mooch went on. “I figure if you’re asking me, you want to know. And if you want to know, maybe you ain’t yet been body-snatched. Maybe you’re still clean.”

If, thought Zach, annoyed to think it, cursing Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell because she had made him think it. If you want to know. . . . Did Goulart want to know? Did he really? Or was he just helping Abend stay out in front of Task Force Zero?

Zach and the Mooch were stopped at a corner, at a red light. They didn’t have the schoolyard on their flank anymore, so there were pedestrians on every side of them. Yellow cabs and panel trucks and cars whooshed past them from every direction. Fatboy Mooch’s head was swiveling, eyes watching everything at once.

And Zach, when he spoke, spoke in a secretive mutter. “There’s still Johnny Grimhouse, then.”

“Last I heard.”

“And I’m guessing Johnny Grimhouse is on the run.”

“All men fear death,” said Fatboy Mooch.

“Of course if Abend could find Billy, he can find Johnny too.”

“Johnny the smarter one.”

“All the same.”

Fatboy Mooch’s Killer T-shirt rose and fell and rose and fell while he considered whether to trust Zach with what he knew. At last he spoke into the middle distance. “You trying to tell me you the only hope of saving Western civilization?”

“You trying to tell me you’re Western civilization?”

“You was expecting maybe Mozart?”

The light turned green, but the two big men stayed right there at the sidewalk’s edge while the other pedestrians streamed past them, while Fatboy Mooch made his decision.

“Johnny got a hole I know in Long Island City,” he said then. He murmured an address. “And was I you, I would hie me hence with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.”

Zach had already pivoted on his heel, was already hurrying away.