Jenko’s intelligence would always be greater. He had more eyes than Penerin, and they were trained without training. His men had grown up in these untoward neighborhoods. It lent them the kind of easy attunement that the state’s agents could never quite match.
Jenko’s stake in the matter was also greater, which gave him the advantage of urgency, one the police couldn’t have felt, not for this demographic. Half the maimed hookers were his, though even the victims wouldn’t have known they belonged to him. Jenko operated at a remove. His girls answered directly to a committee of pimps he’d handpicked, or rather, that his assistant had. Two removes then.
Tending to the beaten girls cost Jenko much; but then, there had to be some benefit to working for him, splitting their earnings with him instead of going out on their own (though that had its own risks). He would pay for the girls’ hospital care, and then for some time afterward their rent, nursing them back to health. Erin, Mariela’s friend, was the last of his that had been hurt, many weeks ago. She was better now, back to maximum capacity, seeing one or two johns most days of the week.
It took longer than expected to identify the source of this cost, the one troubling Jenko’s girls. But in time the profile his men developed, the portrait they painted, turned singular. Its subject, Lewis, came into view, though he remained as obscure as ever to Penerin and his agents.
How to deal with him, though? A warning of some sort? A tit-for-tat beating? The only rule Jenko insisted on observing in this business: no deaths.
“So that’s him,” Aaron said. “Lewis Eldern.” It was midday, and he and Jenko were in their not-yet-reopened pool hall. Its windows were still boarded. Aaron was Jenko’s assistant, the one he used for the operations Jenko suspected his business partners, especially Celano, might not smile on. Prostitution, say.
In a Platonic sense, the old friends shared a politics. But Celano’s blood was bluer, his money purer, so the ordinary world, the one of flux, did less violence to his ideals.
This is how Jenko explained the complications. Certainly he himself believed the country had failed the weak. He was in fact only a few generations removed from having that very same grievance, though against another country (Slovenia), on another continent. Equally, he was doing what he could to arrange the world in a way that fortified labor, though he left the details to men like Celano. He’d spent far too much time and money on Celano’s political projects for that to be gainsaid.
But he also believed he was part of a family enterprise. He drew no line between his own fortune, his father’s, and his father’s father’s, and felt more than a little duty to keep it in good health. And a fortune, a business, an empire that wasn’t growing could never be in good health. So he’d done his part and expanded it, overseas, in America, in partnership with other developers like Celano.
It was true that the Jenko empire wasn’t pretty from all angles. It hadn’t been in the beginning either, when it was just in London. There were girls then too. But it had to be said, Jenko thought, that until the state might be remolded to provide decently for these sex laborers, he was giving them a livelihood, as well as protection. There was something stark about the arrangement, of course, nothing like ideal, but this was what Celano didn’t understand: the world that is has a claim on us that the world that might be must settle before it can come into being.
Anyway, on the broader issue, Celano must have felt the same duty toward his own father’s business concerns, to keep things growing. He was just lucky they were cleaner, purely in construction and real estate, or at least seemed to be. There were things Celano, his dear friend, must be keeping from him, after all. What exactly was he doing in Spain now, for instance, so soon after the museum defacement? The unannounced trip had left Jenko to answer most of the police inquiries into the attack alone.
But really he didn’t mind that he didn’t know. No man can reconcile all the facts about himself, for another or for himself. No man should be asked to. What Jenko needed to rely on Celano for, in construction and in politics, he could, and vice versa. That was enough.
Aaron pointed at the lean man in rolled French cuffs on the wall-mounted screen, viewable from anywhere in the now partitionless hall. The place gleamed. The virgin felt was as rich as green could be, and the wood of the tables was an oily reddish brown: matched rosewood, bought from black-market stock and inlaid with ebony. The bar itself had doubled in size since everything had been burned.
The image of Lewis on the screen was not very new. It had been collected from the cameras of several strip clubs and bars Jenko had a stake in. The tapes couldn’t have been turned over to the police, even though Jenko would have liked nothing better than having the police solve this problem for him, protect his investment, his girls. They carried too much self-incriminating evidence for that.
They wouldn’t have been enough anyway. Lewis hadn’t been singled out by footage alone. It took the pooled capacities of a community of traders in contraband, sex most of all, steered by some of Jenko’s higher ups, to detect him. None of this data could be passed on to the police, for the same reasons the tapes couldn’t. The clubs would have been seized the next day and Jenko would have found himself a new home, in prison.
So he’d ordered his own investigation. Jenko’s men were all given simple instructions: whoever they talked to in the streets and clubs, whoever seemed like a candidate for the crimes, nudge things toward the dark, toward hookers and violence especially, and see what appeared. This came naturally to most of the men; the innuendo involved wasn’t so different from, say, selling drugs or girls. What made it even easier was that they shared in Lewis’s violent fantasies. Grittier versions, if anything.
The men could almost be themselves, then, so much so that sometimes they would forget that they were acting on orders at all. The difference was mainly one of restraint, namely, letting their own war stories be bested by the targets’. They had to let them emerge as the victors in recklessness, in contempt. This was more difficult than it sounded. They were used to winning that game. They were also told to convey a willingness to collude in whatever schemes the targets floated. This came much easier to them. Looking for an angle, that was just life.
They talked to dozens of false leads, men who seemed to have done plenty wrong, but not the particular wrong their boss was interested in: the beatings. Finally a promising incident occurred. One of Jenko’s men, Terry, got a strange reply to a standard question in a local dive. He tried to sell a bleary-eyed regular he recognized from the tapes on a hooker for the night. But the man didn’t just accept or decline. Instead he said he’d had his share of girls, and he couldn’t be less interested now. In whores? Terry asked him. Whores, yes, but more than that, the whole thing disgusted him now, sex itself. Which you really don’t hear.
“And what did Terry tell him?” Jenko asked.
“He let him rant for a while,” Aaron said, “about sex, money, porno. They got drunker. Eventually Terry got his name. So we checked him out.”
“Well?” Jenko ask.
“He rented a cargo van from our little fleet, out of Boston though, just a few months back. We had the girls look at that particular van, and Erin said, yeah, it had the same little dent in the door she remembered. Then we showed her the footage and said he looked right, though he’d had sunglasses and a baseball cap on then. She couldn’t be sure. But the other girls confirmed it was him.”
“So what will we do?” Jenko asked himself aloud.
“This is the thing. Terry kept encouraging him that night, about what he wished would happen to all those ‘disgusting’ people. Lewis started saying some strange stuff… He talked about wanting to give.”
Jenko laughed. “Give?”
“Give, yeah.”
Jenko peered at the image on screen, Lewis caught mid-stride, a leg hanging in the air. “He does have the look of money. Money hard done. His name, his father.”
“Leo, the trader.”
“I kept money with him at one time,” Jenko said. “He did well for me. Twenty-five percent, year on year. But I don’t think he or his son has anything much to give now. Everyone pulled out of that fund. Trust is everything—and Leo couldn’t be trusted anymore.”
“A half million is what he said.”
“That sounds like drunk talk to me. Bragging.”
“That’s not what we think.”
“Well, I suppose things could have improved for Leo. Sure. It’s possible. So then, how will the son ‘give’?”
“He didn’t know exactly,” Aaron said. “He kept talking about these porno awards—”
“In Vegas.”
“Yeah—”
“What about them?”
“He wished he could give those people something.”
“Not the money, I guess.”
“He wants them—I mean, the way he put it, he wants them to get some air.”
“Is that a joke? If it is, I don’t think I get it.”
“This is nuts, but Terry thinks he meant, like, halothane or BZ. Gas. At the ceremony. For the half mil.”
“Ah.” Jenko smiled and tapped the table twice with his middle and ring fingers. “You believe this.”
“Not to hurt anyone is what he said. Only to make them ‘see things.’”
“And exactly how gone was he when he said this? Or how gone was Terry, that’s what we should be asking.”
“I mean, it’s true, he did look like he hadn’t slept in a while.”
“The fantasies we have.”
“But he also sounded like he could mean what he said. Terry wouldn’t have bothered me with this otherwise.”
“And Terry’s very bright?”
“Look, we already know he kicked the shit out of all these whores. Isn’t that fucking crazy too? Why couldn’t he mean it?”
The two of them held a long look.
“So what did Terry say to him, after hearing all this?” Jenko asked finally.
“Nothing, of course. He just listened. Lewis had no idea he was basically talking to you. But we can get back to him. It’ll be easy to find him now, see if he’s really game to go through with this. And if it’s all bullshit, we’ll know. Nothing’s lost.”
“Five hundred thousand is actually not enough to fill an auditorium with an airborne agent, even just an incapacitator. There are the usual risks for us. Every incident, every event, brings another risk with it. And this one would be very large. The logistics, getting to all the vents without detection. But then, it is a life sentence for Lewis.”
“Probably.”
“And if you add the beatings, that’s more than life.”
“But we don’t want to touch those, right. A bunch of those whores are ours. It could lead them here.”
“Can you please stop calling them whores?”
“Girls, I mean.”
“Better. So then there’s the gas. Let’s talk to Leo’s little boy and check his nerve. Terry can handle it, if you feed him the information?”
“And if he’s looking for some time off.”
“Otherwise someone else. Somebody’s always looking.”
“So, halothane, BZ, what?”
“Do we actually need it? To make this work for us? If we have everything else set up and call in the anonymous tip just before, we could probably just pretend about the agent itself.”
“Oh. Well, I guess—”
“But check the labs. Talk to him first, of course, make sure this is real. And then, sure, we can think about doing exactly what we say this time. It would be easier to bury Lewis in a trial with everything being authentic. Trust, you know.”