The secret plan, known only to Humphrey, was to get out. It was the one thing he couldn’t talk about. So he talked about everything else. Mainly, he talked about himself.
Helen observed that he was an erudite man (she used the phrase “well read”) and yet he pretended to be not too bright. “I don’t mean it quite that way,” she said. “You don’t act stupid, but you have this kind of dumb manner, most of the time. But I know it’s just a facade.”
“Nobody likes a brain,” Humphrey said. “People say ‘pointy-headed,’ or something like that. Crazy, ain’t it? Everybody wants to be smart, they don’t want to be dumb, theirselves, but they don’t like it if you’re too smart. Sure, I read books. I like to read, always did. But I never went to college, I never even graduated from high school. Nobody ever called me dumb, though. What it is, you gotta act like an ordinary guy, a little dumb, and I guess that reassures people—you ain’t too smart. But at the same time you gotta make sure that the people who need you, who rely on you, understand that you’re not really dumb, that maybe you’re pretty sharp.
“Everybody does that, to a degree,” he went on. “You’re a woman, you know about that—women do it all the time. There’s some things you aren’t supposed to be a genius about. Guy things. You don’t know nothing about football, say. But you probably know quite a bit.”
“I don’t know nothing about football,” Helen said, affecting a dull tone.
“Okay,” he said, smiling, “so maybe it’s cars, or guns, or something else that you aren’t supposed to be interested in—because you’re a woman. Me, I’m in the business, as we say. I’m not supposed to know about books. That’s for pointy-headed intellectuals. But … I read. Machiavelli, for instance.”
“Machiavelli,” she said, and sighed. “What is it with you and him?”
The Machiavelli thing, he explained at length, came about for two reasons. He had noticed that people frequently invoked Machiavelli’s name, generally as a byword for deceit or cunning, but if one inquired more closely, they didn’t seem to know much, if anything, about him. He was supposed to be bad, almost the Devil himself, or a close associate. But few even knew when he had lived.
“Oh, they heard of The Prince, maybe,” Humphrey said, “but that’s about it. When I was a kid I heard grown-ups talking about Machiavelli and I thought he was some Italian guy, somebody they knew. And later, I heard him used in that way so much, to me he was like the original Italian. And I had this thing for wanting to be Italian.”
“You are Italian,” she said.
“You’re Italian if your mama is Italian,” Humphrey said. “It’s like being a Jew. Everybody knows Sammy Davis Jr. is a Jew, but they also know he ain’t a real Jew. That’s the way it is with me. Everybody knows I’m Italian, but they know it like they know Machiavelli is Italian. Me, I don’t know. I never knew my old man … well, I knew him, but at the time I didn’t know he was my old man. And now I’m not so sure, again.
“My mother, I never knew her or even anything about her. I was raised by my ‘aunt’ Sophie, Carmine’s mother, except she wasn’t my real aunt, I think. She tried to be good to me, but she already had a kid—Carmine. I always understood that I was like a charity, or something. And Aunt Sophie would never talk about my mother. Nobody would ever say anything about her when I was a kid. Maybe they thought they were being kind. For a long time I dreamed she was an angel, or a kind of princess, like in a fairy tale.
“When I got older, I was on the street. I was caught up in that. The Life. You know? It’s exciting. You learn something new three times a day. By then I didn’t want to hear anything about my folks. I didn’t want to think about them.
“A little later, now I know a little bit, I’m a little calmer, but still so young. I’m your basic Detroit guy, you know? Tough guy, a cynic. If I thought about my mother at all, I thought she was probably a whore that my old man—by now, at least, I knew who he was, but he’s dead—that he knocked up and for some reason he got stuck with the kid and he managed to shuffle me off on Carmine’s old lady, Aunt Sophie, who was a sucker for this kind of stuff.
“So I get a little older, not quite so dumb. I even went to Italy by now. Actually, I’d been once before, after the war, with Aunt Sophie and Uncle Dom, but I didn’t remember too much about it, I was just a kid. To me they were my real folks. When Uncle Dom died, as a favor to my stepmother, I took the body back to be buried. I also took a little trip to Eboli, to look up some relatives. It’s inland a little ways from Salerno, in Campania.”
“Eboli?” Helen said. “What’s in Eboli?”
“I was born a Gagliano but Aunt Sophie used to say my folks were from Eboli, so when I turned twenty-one I took the name DiEbola. Anyway, I had some time to kill. I was in no hurry to get back to Detroit.”
“You were cooling off?” Helen said. “A little trouble?”
“Well, I escorted Uncle Dom’s body, but yeah,” Humphrey said. “And I was looking up my roots, you know.”
“I thought of going to the Old Country,” Helen said, “but I wasn’t sure where I would go.”
“Well, your ma’s right here,” Humphrey said. “Didn’t you ever ask her?”
“Mama likes to talk about her home,” Helen said. “You’ve heard her. When she was here the other day, she talked about Belgrade. But whenever I ask her about Papa, she just shrugs.”
“Roman would know,” Humphrey said. “Ask him.”
“Roman!” She laughed. “They don’t call him the Yak for nothing. Talk about playing dumb. He’s the original dummy.”
“Yeah, Roman plays it close to the vest,” Humphrey said. “One of these days I’ll find out if he’s really so dumb. Well, anyway, I went to Eboli after I got Uncle Dom buried, but I didn’t find out anything. I don’t know what I expected, but over there, you ain’t Italian. To them, you’re American. I had a few names, people to look up, but they treat you funny. They’re suspicious, they don’t tell you shit. You sit around in some hotel, you don’t know the language, everything’s so strange. Finally I went to a church and talked to a priest. He laughed when I said my name was DiEbola. He knew it was made up. So I give him the old man’s name, Gagliano, thinking there maybe was a record of the marriage. He rolls his eyes, makes this little hand gesture to ward off the Devil. He said Gagliano was a village way over the mountains, in Lucania. A bad place, he said. ‘Don’t go there. They eat Christians,’ he said. He was half serious. ‘Bad people. They won’t tell you anything.’ Guys leave Gagliano, they take that name, sort of like I did with DiEbola. I gave up on it.”
“So you never found your Italian connection,” Helen said.
“No, and I never said nothing to Aunt Sophie. I think she meant well. It’s like my folks were hillbillies, or something, so it was better to say they were from a nice town like Eboli than from some shithole in the sticks like Gagliano, which I guess is why she’d encouraged me to change my name.
“Anyway, I settled on Machiavelli. He was my Italian connection. Some people, they think Italian, if they don’t immediately think of DiMaggio or Sinatra, they think of Dante, or maybe da Vinci, somebody like that. But I started reading Machiavelli, and you know what? He wasn’t hard, at all. Right off the bat I understood what he was saying. And he didn’t bullshit. It all made sense to me.”
Helen supposed a person could make that kind of indentification, but it seemed artificial. Still, if it worked for Humphrey … well, she guessed it worked for him.
“Mac—I think of him as Mac, for short,” Humphrey said. “Mac talks about things like success, power, glory. Those are the big things. Success is survival, getting power, getting glory. The truth is, I never worried about glory much. Maybe it meant more in Mac’s time. To me it’s fame and notoriety. Today, everybody and anybody gets famous, at least for a little while. I don’t care about that. In the business, which I like to think is a little like Mac’s princedom, but after all, ain’t exactly like it … glory is not in the cards. You get known among the powerful, that’s the glory. I think I can claim a little of that.”
“So, you are interested in glory after all,” Helen said slyly.
“A little. But only a little. Power, though … that’s the number. I followed Mac as closely as I could in getting to power, but I never lost sight of the fact that I was operating in a different field than Borgia and them guys Mac talked about … although, there are plenty of comparisons.
“Mac says that it’s better to be feared than loved,” he observed, thoughtfully. “People are fickle. When you’re good, when you treat everybody good, they love you. They’ll do anything for you, praise you, offer their children to you. But you can’t always be a sweetheart to everybody. Right? The minute you turn somebody down, you’re a bastard. So it’s better to be feared than loved, he says. You don’t go out of your way to piss people off, you treat ’em right, but when the deal comes down, you can’t think about how much they like you.”
Helen wondered if it wasn’t a bit like being dumb and smart at the same time. Humphrey conceded the point. But he came back with the notion that sometimes, after an act of brutality, even just not being a hard-ass looks like kindness. That was from Mac, he said.
“When I was just the Fat Man, it was no problem,” he said. “Carmine was the boss, but he never took the rap for the hard stuff—he said it was me.” He laughed. “He’d tell ’em, whoever was bitching, that he’d see what he could do, but it was the Fat Man who was grinding them. And when they came to me, I’d say, ‘See the man.’ And, of course, being a Fat Man … everybody likes a fat man, they think you aren’t tough. Only now, not only am I not fat, I don’t have no Fat Man to lay it off on.” He sighed and shook his head.
“The main thing, though,” he observed, “is that Mac taught me that a man is what he makes of himself. You got governments, society, religion … none of it means shit, if you only got the guts to be your own man. And, of course, if you got the power.
“Everything comes from power,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “Money, pleasure, and survival. Only, it looks like it’s easier to get, maybe, than to keep. Especially when you start getting on. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. I can use some help. Somebody has to run this business when I’m gone.”
“You’re not getting on,” Helen hastened to assure him. “And I’m no Fat Man. Anyway, I don’t know anything about running the business, but if I can help …”
“Forget the Fat Man stuff,” he said, smiling his amusement. “That was yesterday. Maybe you could be the Bitch. That would help. Then I could be the Fat Man, again. I’ll be the kindly old grampa.”
“The Bitch!”
“Hey, I’m joking,” he said. “But it’s a thought. You don’t have to be a bitch … some days I was the Evil Fat Man and the next day the Jolly Fat Man. What have you got goin’ for you? You’re smart, you’re young, educated, you look like a million bucks, and you got connections from your old man—”
“I’m not sure that’s a help,” she interjected.
“It’s a help. It don’t matter what he did, how he screwed up. He was in the business. He was well known, and people liked him. The funny thing about something like that is, they don’t blame you for his screwups, they just notice that you were born into the business.”
“But when it comes to power,” Helen observed, “they aren’t ever going to give a woman any real power in this business.”
“That’s the tradition,” Humphrey agreed, “and it’ll probably go on that way for a long time, but that don’t mean there aren’t exceptions. You can be an exception. I was reading a while back about this Egyptian queen, Hashaput.”
“You’ve been reading again, you cryptoscholar,” she teased. “Who is this? Hasha—?”
“Hashaput, or Hatchep— Oh, I don’t know how they pronounce it. Maybe it’s Hotchapuss.” They both laughed.
“Listen!” he said. “It’s you. I saw it right away. In something like three thousand years of pharaohs, there’s only one Hotchapuss. But she pulled it off. As far as anyone can tell she was a pretty good pharaoh. It’s a long shot, sure, but there oughtta be one. Your odds are better today, ’cause we’re in America. A woman’s got a much better shot today.”
“Maybe it’s Hatchetpuss,” she joked. “She’s the Bitch. Hotchapuss is the Honey.”
They bantered this way for a while, but eventually they turned to a serious analysis of the present situation. The way Humphrey saw it, the traditional mob business of the past was in serious decline. The mob had been successful in the U.S., maybe too successful. They had forgotten how they got here. But that was all right. Things inevitably change. The mob had gotten into legitimate business so thoroughly that legitimate business had taken on some of the characteristics of the mob. Maybe it was always so, he wasn’t confident of his economic history, no one was, really. There were a lot of theorists out there, but who was right?
This discussion became rather complex and confused, but Helen finally asked: What were the major problems facing them (she was thinking in terms of “us” by now) today?
“A major problem,” he said, promptly, “is Mulheisen.”
“Sergeant Mulheisen?” she said. “A precinct detective? That’s a major problem?”
“Mulheisen is poking around in the Hoffa business,” Humphrey said.
Helen was interested. “You were involved with Hoffa? With his disappearance?”
“You don’t want to know,” Humphrey told her. “It’s all history. I knew Hoffa. I know what happened.”
“What happened?”
“It’s too complicated,” Humphrey told her. He’d liked Hoffa, thought he was a good man, but excitable. Not easy to work with. Humphrey was vague. There had been a misunderstanding. An accident. It was nothing, but it wouldn’t do for a guy like Mulheisen to dig too deep. It could bring the whole thing down, especially right now, when the FBI had brought a huge case against several guys who used to be major players in the Detroit business. Humphrey didn’t think that case could touch him, but the Hoffa case surely could.
“The man’s trouble,” Humphrey said.
“Hoffa?”
“Mulheisen. He doesn’t let go. He’s one of those guys,” Humphrey said, “they don’t seem to be a problem. Like you say, you didn’t think he was much help with your old man’s case, but then he found out just about everything there was to know. The thing is, he doesn’t give up. You think you’ve put him off the scent, you don’t hear anything from him for ages, and then, there he is. He’s been picking up a little something here, something there. And then, one day, he’s standing at your front door, that weird smile on his face. I hate to see him coming. That face. It’s so … so flat.”
Helen didn’t understand what he meant.
“Not physically flat,” Humphrey said, “it’s that flat, open expression. He seems simple. You think he don’t know anything, but maybe he knows almost everything. Believe me, it’s a big mistake to underrate Mulheisen.”
“So? What are you going to do?”
He outlined a plan. It seemed overly elaborate to Helen. A Rube Goldberg device to catch a mouse. But Humphrey was serious. He wanted to set up a foundation, a phony historical research project. They’d hire a young graduate student, something like that, who would keep tabs on Mulheisen’s activities in the guise of doing historical research. Only the kid doing the research wouldn’t know what the research was really about, what it would be used for. From time to time they could feed Mulheisen a little info, through the researcher and some other outlets; kind of steer him in the direction they wanted him to go, keep him busy, running down old trails.
Helen thought it sounded dangerous and expensive. Humphrey was excited about the plan, however. He wanted Helen to set it up and run it. She had some expertise in things like that. She agreed to do it. It was something to do. But she couldn’t shake her misgivings.
The other thing Humphrey wanted was for her to get acquainted with the business, at least the legitimate side of it. She could do that. If she didn’t want to get into the other stuff, well, that was up to her. They’d see about that down the road. But anything she could do with the legitimate stuff would be a big help. Humphrey said he was getting to the retirement stage. He wasn’t interested in all the detail work anymore. He didn’t have the mind for it, these days, everything was so much more complex, and he had lost the old drive.
At one point, he said, he’d considered bringing Pepe into the business, but then the young man had taken off. Gone back to Mexico, apparently. It was a disappointment. Pepe was a smart young fellow, a lot more to him than he’d looked. But what can you do? Young men, they have other ideas. Well, more power to him.
Helen was sorry he’d gone, too, but she didn’t say anything. She kept waiting for Humphrey to say something about the money, about Joe, but he didn’t bring it up. Instead, he talked about how she had to start finding herself some allies, people who weren’t necessarily his guys. “Not just anybody, of course,” he said. “I know you’re tight with Itchy, he likes you. That’s good. But I don’t want you getting cozy with guys who might not be friendly toward me, or who’d be thinking they’d be stepping into my shoes—my shoes are going to be empty before you know it. No, don’t give me any bullshit about how young and vital I am. I mean it. You gotta be thinking about yourself. About how you would run things. You’ll need some strong-arms around you, but guys you can trust. That’s my problem now. Thanks to age and the FBI, and Mulheisen, most of my old guys are gone. That’s why I’m talking to you.”
“The only strong arms I want about me are yours, big boy,” she said, playfully. She leaped onto his lap, throwing her arms about him.
Humphrey was delighted. He loved the close feel of her. It aroused him. He made some tentative squeezes. She allowed it, a little. It was amazing, he thought, how she knew just how much intimacy to permit before she stopped him, subtly, with a kind of stiffening or drawing away. Just enough, not too much. In truth, he was grateful. It was the way he saw it. The thought of actually being intimate, really intimate, with her was scary to him. He wanted it, he knew he did, but he couldn’t give in to it. He had other plans.
Helen, for her part, was simply doing what came naturally. She loved to tease him, even to the edge of sex. But she was thinking about Joe. She was certain that Humphrey was thinking of Joe, as well, but neither of them could mention his name. “And what are you going to be doing while I’m learning to be HatchetHellion or HotchaHelen?” she asked impertinently.
“Puss. Puss,” he urged. “Me? I’ll still be running things, don’t worry. But I’m gonna step back, as much as I can. I want you out there in the forefront, where the others can see you running the show. I’m like the old spider in the web. I’m thinking what I need is a kind of hidey-hole, a nerve center, where I can keep tabs on what’s stepping on the wires, who’s rattling the cage.”
“You’ve got that,” she said, referring to his security devices.
“That’s nothing,” he said. “That’s sort of what gave me the idea, though. I got thinking, my sensors just go out to the gate. I gotta have real communications that go out to the whole …” He paused, searching for the right word.
“The whole kingdom,” she said.
He shrugged. “Something like that.”
* * *
He started building his web almost immediately. Sending her out to learn about the business, he immersed himself in a building project.
Humphrey wanted to construct the command post right at the house. Why, in this electronic age, was he driving all the way into Detroit, practically downtown, to Krispee Chips? Of course, he’d still go out and check his traps, he said, but in the future he’d keep tabs on things from his new office. It was being built in the basement. A nice little suite, practically an apartment, with the most up-to-date, powerful computers, a place to lie down, take a nap when he got tired. He was amazingly enthusiastic about it. The builders were there for weeks, putting everything in.
Once or twice a week, Humphrey would drive into town to take care of business. Helen usually went with him, but she didn’t often stick very closely. She was busy with her projects. Besides the historical foundation she was learning about the potato chip business, reorganizing that office. Another project was the cigar business.
She had done a lot of research. Apparently, Detroit had once been a big cigar-manufacturing center. That had faded after World War Two. The phony cigar business was one thing, but she considered it paltry, more a lark than anything else. She didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t manufacture real, legitimate cigars in Detroit. They had the facilities. She was looking into that.
Sometimes she and Humphrey would go together to Strom Davidson’s operation. She would look at the books, talk to the people, especially the girls working in the loft and the people making the labels. Humphrey would wander off with Strom, for which Helen was grateful. She found him abrasive and difficult. In the new operation, if she got it going, there wouldn’t be any room for Strom Davidson.
One of the women, the one Strom had been raging at when Helen first visited the operation, was particularly interesting. Her name was Berta and it was her brother, Ramón, who had designed the LaDonna label. He was not well, and she was concerned about him. He needed to be in a clinic, but they had no health insurance. A business like illegal relabeling did not provide workers with benefits.
Berta was a very capable woman. Besides caring for her brother, she had two children at home, being looked after by her younger sister and her aunt. Berta often worked sixteen-hour days— ten hours packing cigars, then another four to six hours as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant in Dearborn. She herself was Cuban and had left the island with her mother more than ten years ago. The Cuban government had let them emigrate when it was confirmed that Berta’s father had died in Miami. He had been a Castro supporter, a revolutionary, but the postrevolutionary executions had soon turned him into a disillusioned expatriate. Berta’s uncle Jorge had fled Cuba with her father, but eventually made his way to Detroit, where he landed a fine job on Ford’s assembly line. He had brought Berta and her family here. But then he died. Her mother died. Berta’s husband ran away.
It was a long sad tale, but Berta wasn’t one of those who liked to spin it out in detail. “He died,” she said. “She died.” No explanation unless asked, and then only if she knew you well. The husband: “Ran away.”
Berta didn’t seem crushed. While she wasn’t delighted with her situation, she was not overwhelmed, not yet. The other women looked up to her, she was their leader. She didn’t mind Strom Davidson, she said to Helen. She was being circumspect, of course, but Helen could see she was not intimidated by the boss. She confided that some of the younger, prettier women were the sexual prey of Davidson and he sometimes made a pass at her, but—she made an obscure gesture with her fingers, a scissors movement—“He knows he will not get me.”
None of this really shocked Helen, but it disgusted her. She determined to put an end to it. She was also curious how she could go about getting into legitimate cigar making. Her new friend Berta was skeptical. Berta knew something about the business. “In Cuba, it is a matter of pride, of passion!” she declared. “You must grow the tobacco. You must have people who know how to pick it, cure it, age it. And buyers to find the tobacco you don’t grow—binder leaf, wrapper leaf. It doesn’t all grow in the same place. There is much involved and you must not rush this process. The big tobacco companies came to Cuba before and after the revolution, you know. They would make everyone rich. Lots of employment, big factories. But the Cubans could not see it that way. We preferred the old ways.”
It was all very interesting, but not to the point. The problem was that because of the embargo on Cuban goods, the only tobacco that Helen would be able to obtain, if she wanted to seriously go into manufacture, was non-Cuban—Dominican, Mexican, Honduran, whatever. And what could she offer if she were able to get good tobacco? Berta could easily find her some cigar rollers, women who had been expert at this trade in the Caribbean and elsewhere, living right here in Detroit, but so what? There were already too many makers of cigars. Another brand would just be lost in the welter, especially one made in Detroit. Who would buy it? You could not make cigars cheaply enough in Detroit to sell them at a competitive price.
On the other hand … Berta had a cousin who rolled for a Canadian maker, in Toronto. That guy put out some very respectable cigars. They were about as Cuban as a cigar could be if it wasn’t made in Cuba. The tobacco came from Cuba, the rollers were Cuban expatriates. The Canadian maker, Harold Jespersen, was from a Danish family that had been in the tobacco business in Copenhagen for generations, before relocating to Canada. Berta wondered if it was possible to buy cigars wholesale from Jespersen. The U.S. Customs wouldn’t consider those Cuban cigars, would they? They could then be relabeled in Detroit, perhaps sold to a limited clientele. It wasn’t what Helen had in mind, she knew, but it might be a start.
Helen would find out. In the meantime, she would do something about Strom Davidson. She went to look for him one afternoon, after a conversation with Berta. She had thought that he was with Humphrey, but he was not. He was perched on the edge of his desk, with his back to the door, when she walked in.
He swiveled his head, and when he saw who it was, he swore. “For godssake, don’t you ever fuckin’ knock?” He straightened up, adjusted his clothing, and then the secretary stood up, looking rather disheveled. She was beet red as she went by Helen without a word and disappeared into the bathroom.
Helen didn’t comment on the scene. “Where’s Humphrey?” she asked.
“Don’t ask me,” Davidson said. “Down in the warehouse, somewhere. What can I do for ya, honey? Or maybe you could do something for me.” He glanced down meaningfully at his crotch.
“You can do something for yourself,” she said. “Leave these women alone.”
Strom’s eyebrows shot up. “Leave them alone? Oh, dear! Is some little bitch complaining? She’s not getting enough?”
Helen drew a deep breath. She was very conscious of how small she was next to this tall, rangy man. He was old enough to be her father, but he was a bastard. She was not afraid of him. She spoke calmly. “Leave them alone, Strom. I mean it. You’ve got a nice little racket here. If you want to keep it, concentrate on doing the job right. No more yelling, no more threatening, no more abuse. I don’t want to hear one word of complaint or it’s gold-watch time.”
Strom’s face darkened and he leaned over her. “Who in the fuck do you think you are, you dried-up little twat? I’ve been in this business for fifty fuckin’ years. You’re gonna come in here and tell me how to run my shop?” He leaned his face down and expelled a cigarish “Hah!” into hers.
Helen could hardly avoid reacting. But she didn’t show any anger. Instead, she smiled. “I’m running this show,” she said calmly. “I hope you weren’t expecting fair. Fair ain’t in it, is it, you stupid prick? No, don’t raise your hand, Strom. Think. Think for a minute. How do I come off talking to you like this? Think! I’m not just some little twat. I can talk to you like this.” She fixed him with her deep-set eyes, suddenly gleaming like coal about ready to burst into flame.
She could see it was sinking in. He was thinking. This was a woman who had blasted Carmine to shreds with a shotgun. And got away with it. She might not be aiming a Model 70 at him, but she had muscle behind her. She’s doing all the talking, but there’s heavy muscle here. He wasn’t buying it without checking the label, however. He knew better than that. He stalked out, looking for Humphrey. Helen decided not to make the secretary hang out in the john any longer. She went out to the car.
Two of the guys were lounging there, smoking cigarettes. They straightened up when she approached. “Hi, boss lady,” they said, almost in unison. They had taken to calling her that lately. She knew Humphrey had put them up to it. They were nice-looking young men, handsome even, in their early twenties. They had the dark looks of Italian men, with beautiful white teeth and flirty manners.
She smiled at the one called Mike. He had a vague European accent, not much. “How’s it going, guys?” she said. It was going well, they said, pleased with the attention. “Listen,” she said, “if that big old fart comes roaring out here, you know the one I mean?”
“Mr. Davidson?” Mike said, looking concerned. His hand went immediately to his suit jacket, to the bulge. “He bothering you, Miz Helen?”
“Not as much as he thinks,” she said, with a smile. “I told him you guys wouldn’t stand for it.”
“We wouldn’t!” Mike declared. They looked eager, staring at the door of the factory. Mike unbuttoned his suit coat and stood with his feet apart, balanced, his arms slightly bent.
She put her hand on Mike’s arm. He flexed his bicep underneath it, his teeth gleaming. “I knew I could count on you.” She looked him in the eye.
“You can count on us,” his friend Alessandro said. “Why don’t you sit in the car? We’ll be here.” He opened the door.
“Thanks,” she said, and got in to wait.
But Strom Davidson didn’t come out. He was down in the basement. He waited impatiently while Humphrey finished up his conversation with Mongelo.
Mongelo had lost quite a bit of weight. He was wearing some old clothes of Humphrey’s, that Humphrey had kept when he was losing the pounds. He had also lost a lot of his anger. The first few times Humphrey had come calling Mongelo had raged. Then Humphrey would haul out the butt plug. He kept it in a leather bag.
“You know what Action looked like when they found him?” he asked. “He was a fucking fat bag of pus. He’d been hanging for a week. His face and arms and legs were swollen up like balloons, filled with old blood and shit. There was a lot of him in a puddle on the floor below him.”
Mongelo was frankly scared. He had calmed himself and learned to relax and enjoy his confinement. Humphrey got nicer— or less brutal, which was the same thing. Never a devotee of exercise, Mongelo got out daily for a little workout with a treadmill Humphrey had ordered in for him, while a woman cleaned the cell. He watched a lot of television, especially an enormous supply of erotic videos that the boys replenished regularly. He devoured the food they brought, and although he couldn’t say that he loved the peppery cuisine, he was more than a little proud of the way he was looking.
But the main thing that soothed his fury was the way the boss was talking to him, lately. Once Mongelo had adjusted to things, Humphrey had even apologized for the rude way they had kidnapped him and for the confinement. At first, that had made him wary. He still wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to be whacked. Today, however, the approach was different. The boss was confiding. “Monge,” Humphrey said, after he’d sent the boys back out to the car, “I gotta talk to you. We got a huge problem, and only you can help. You heard about the guys,” he said, mentioning three or four names of their acquaintance who were undergoing trial for racketeering. “The FBI has got them by the balls,” he said.
“Those pricks,” Mongelo said.
“Monge, when did you ever know the FBI to get so close? Think about it, Monge. There’s no way those dumb fuckers could nail those guys. Unless they had help.”
Monge frowned. He caught the drift right away. “Somebody ratted ’em out?”
“Somebody’s in deep, Monge.”
“Who?”
“We don’t know, Monge. But you’re gonna find out.”
“Me, boss? I don’t know nothin’.”
“I know you don’t, Monge. You’re the one guy I can trust. You and me go back a long way. If I can’t trust you, I can’t trust nobody.”
Mongelo nodded, a serious look knotting his face.
“I had to put out the word that you left town, Monge,” Humphrey told him. “I even told Ellie,” he said, meaning Mongelo’s wife of thirty years. Monge shrugged. “And Carla,” he added after a moment, referring to Mongelo’s frequently battered twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend. He didn’t tell him that Carla had said “Thank God!” “Now sometime soon you’ll be moving, Monge,” Humphrey said. He could see that made Monge anxious. He was feeling secure here in his comfortable prison apartment. A move might not be a good sign. It might be a long car ride, one way. Humphrey let him feel that anxiety for as long as he could before he reassured him.
“You’ll be moving out with me, Monge,” he said. “I need you by me. Things are getting a little tight and, like I said, I don’t know who’s on the team and who ain’t. I gotta have someone I can trust. The thing is, you can’t breathe a word of this. When I come for you, we gotta be careful. No fooling around. I know it’s hard on you, but you gotta keep up the diet, you gotta stay quiet, and no chatting with nobody. I don’t want no one to know that you’re with me, by my side. If they knew, and I don’t know who they are, they’d grab you for sure. Wouldja even make it to prison? I gotta doubt it. They’re after me, bad. You’re my secret weapon.”
Mongelo liked this notion. They talked about it in hushed tones somewhat longer. When Humphrey got up to go, he pointed at a plastic sack by the door and said, “That your trash?”
“Yanh,” Mongelo said. “The wetback lady put it there.”
“I’ll take it,” Humphrey said, bending to pick up the bag. He locked the door, smiling apologetically. “It won’t be long, Monge. You’ll like the house. I fixed it up for you.”
Mongelo was grateful.
As he left Humphrey was surprised to find Strom pacing up and down at the other end of the dark cellar. How much had he overheard, Humphrey wondered? From the man’s expression, evidently nothing. The man was very hot about something. Helen.
Humphrey listened to his raging as they returned upstairs. But before they got to the office he stopped and said, “So what are you telling me, Strom? You don’t like your job?”
Strom looked shocked. Then he recovered. “No, no. I just thought you should know. I mean … you know me, boss … if that’s the way you want it … I mean …”
“Well, what?” Humphrey said.
“Okay. Nothing.”
At the car, Humphrey hefted the plastic bag. Alessandro opened the trunk. Humphrey put the bag in the trunk and then got into the back seat with Helen.
“So, which was it,” he asked, “Hatchet or Hotcha?”
“Both, actually.”