Like sewer gas, the street excretes its true nature. Congested, tumbledown and grim. Cretins roam the streets at night amid the gentle homeless. Hoods park black vans in front of hydrants, defying cops to ticket them. They don’t. Hookers slouch in doorways. Muggers lurk. The bars are merely rowdy; violence in a few nightclubs is controlled by a tap the owners turn on to suit their inclinations.
Street-fighters remain numerous down on rue Notre-Dame Ouest, around the corner from the check-cashing, money-loaning, money-laundering, leg-breaking agencies on Atwater Street. The West End Irish don’t hang out there, but they visit. French heavyweight gangs keep their profile visible. Burgeoning bikers maintain a modest clubhouse with plans to expand. Mafia crews are still prominent but a tad uneasy as their numbers dwindle.
Rue Notre-Dame Ouest was perfectly located for The Rabbit’s bar salon.
He called it Dino’s, the name it had when he bought the place. He’d given the previous owner a choice between a low-ball offer or arson. He wouldn’t guarantee that the premises would be empty when a fireball sealed off the front door, or that the rear exit wouldn’t be stuck.
The Rabbit did not run the district, as many assumed. No one had the army to control that district. Too many competing forces, all lethal. The Rabbit ran his club, and he strong-armed a variety of businesses near and far, maintained a drug corner, and prospered on the avails of women. Call girls, hookers, strippers, underage runaways. Country girls who worked the city didn’t know him; The Rabbit brokered local talent exclusively. He operated his enterprises with a serrated edge. Rumor held that when he scrunched his brow, pimps lost control of their bladders. In recent years, as the intimidating might of the local Mafia was being compromised by attrition, he was a fist, a gun, and commanded a crew for hire. No light between him and the Mafia, he claimed. Mafioso agreed. With reluctance, they consented to adding the Russian to their contingent of Italian henchmen.
He increased his influence by day, his ferocity by night.
The man’s last name was Lappin. Close to lapin, French for rabbit. Hence his moniker. Despite the English nickname that derived from a French-sounding surname, the man’s origins were Russian. Not that he was known to speak the language. He was comfortable in French and spoke a fractured English he’d learned from others who talked that way. As a child, he had not known the company of children or of women, only of sailors upon a sea. Older, he moved through both his English and French lowlife connections as a man to be feared, a bearing perfected in prison.
He accepted being called ‘The Rabbit’, but never ‘Rabbit’.
‘There’s a difference.’ No one dared ask him to explain.
After midnight, the man a few referred to as Coalface and others knew only as Willy stepped into The Rabbit’s dark warren. A quiet night. A few stragglers in the nightclub looked up. His arrival was bound to cause a stir. The boss would learn of his entry before Willy crossed the floor and planted his posterior on a barstool. Despite the dim murkiness, a somnambulant troposphere, some news traveled more speedily than light.
The bartender inquired if he was in his right mind. As he put it, ‘In your head, Willy?’
‘More or less, yeah.’
‘Your funeral.’
‘Hope you show up for it. Somebody better.’
‘Not if it means my exit.’
‘Won’t come to that, maybe. A guy can hope.’
‘Dream on. Beer?’
‘Ex. Yeah.’
‘On the house. Drink up. Might be your last.’
‘That’s been suggested lately. Still standing.’
The bartender put the bottle down.
‘Thanks, Luc,’ Willy said.
‘No worries,’ the bartender replied. ‘Behind you.’
Speed of light. No time at all. The Rabbit sat down beside him. Put his forearms on the bar. His eyes were small. Somehow that emphasized the blaze of scar that cut through his left eyebrow. The scar tissue picked up what light was emitted by the overheads and shone.
‘New thing for me, Willy,’ he said in French. ‘Bourbon. Got a kick.’
‘I’ll stay true to my Ex, thanks.’ He spoke French, also. A proper courtesy to his host.
‘Wasn’t offering. Too good to waste on the likes of you, right? Luc,’ he instructed the bartender, ‘Eagle Rare.’
The bartender was already pouring. He set the glass down on the bar top.
‘The likes of me,’ Willy said.
‘Don’t go all sensitive. Heard you were in the fry-chair. Real sorry to hear. I got nothing against you myself. Hoping I didn’t get the call to clock your time. So, one minute, your ass is wired, next thing, hallelujah baby, you’re allowed to live again. You’re like Christ. Roll back the rock after taking a nap for a few days. A born-again fuck without no religion.’
‘Been a ride,’ Willy agreed.
‘Don’t know how you turn that ship around. Somebody can do that? Find a way to live when there’s no way out? A man who does that I don’t trust no more.’
‘Not asking you to, The Rabbit.’
‘Then why the fuck’re you here, Willy? Makes no sense to me, you here.’
‘My job.’
The Rabbit shook his head. ‘Don’t like the sound of that.’ He took a moment to savor his bourbon. Struck both palms on the bar as the spirit slipped down his gullet. ‘Shit’s good,’ he said.
‘Salut, The Rabbit,’ Willy said.
‘Salut, Willy-boy. You, back from the dead.’
The two clinked glasses.
Visible in the mirror aft of the bar, a young woman took to the stage with a blanket and an inflated exercise ball as large as a chair. The music came up. She began by sitting on the ball in her sequined thong and tassels and nonchalantly gazing into space. Sexier than gyrating, Willy thought, the way she stared into nowhere. A man might be provoked into being tender.
‘Talk to me, Willy-boy. How come you still breathe when you ain’t got the right?’
‘Never mind that, OK? OK? I’m here for a good reason, The Rabbit.’
‘What reason?’
‘Finding stuff out.’
‘For who? What stuff?’
‘For who. Who do you think for who? For who.’
‘Ciampini. What stuff?’
‘I know what you’re doing, The Rabbit. Want I should grease the fat end of the bat for you?’
Willy said this looking into the mirror behind the bar, where he could observe the woman staring into nothingness and simultaneously observe both himself and The Rabbit. His eyes met The Rabbit’s gaze amid the bottles of vermouth and gin. Nobody ever challenged The Rabbit. Nobody. Ever. To threaten him in any way was suicide. The moment was worth commemorating with a protracted pause.
‘A cat now you think you are?’ The Rabbit queried. ‘You got nine lives?’
Willy swiveled on his barstool and met The Rabbit’s gaze directly. ‘How about we take our drinks upstairs? Talk in private.’
Not that there was anyone around. Even the bartender had separated from them.
The Rabbit took his time responding while he considered the situation.
‘Pat you down first,’ he forewarned.
‘Get a hard-on doing that, save it for the next guy. I’m not interested.’ An old line. One he’d used before. One The Rabbit had heard before.
They headed for the private stairs going up. Once through the upper door, Willy submitted to a thorough pat down, arms spread wide, legs apart. Joking aside, he endured a sexual component beyond what he expected.
‘You got your jollies off that,’ Willy said.
‘No jack-off’s getting by me.’
They went into his office.
The room was dark, and The Rabbit turned on a desk lamp only, which left both their faces in shadow. The Rabbit took a pistol from the back of his belt and placed it on the desk.
‘In case,’ he said.
‘Of what, you think?’ Willy sat in the chair opposite him.
‘The unexpected.’
Tantamount to a commitment of trust, although Willy knew The Rabbit didn’t mean it that way. Inadvertently, he had revealed that he did not expect Willy to pull a fast one.
‘Talk,’ The Rabbit directed.
The telephone awakened Émile Cinq-Mars from sleep. A call had been received at his poste, a woman demanding to see him immediately.
‘What’s the caller’s name?’
‘Moira Ellibee.’
‘I’ll pass. If she calls again, I’ll see her tomorrow. If she’s in trouble or danger, send uniforms. Not a detective.’
‘Roger that.’
Roger-keep-your-phone-calls-until-the-morning, Cinq-Mars silently mumbled as he returned the phone to its cradle. He rolled over and went back to sleep with remarkable ease. In itself, unusual.
Willy couldn’t put his finger on what struck him as being odd, then it hit him. The Rabbit was behind a desk. A contradiction in perception. The Rabbit. Behind a desk. Had he gone to a bank and found Al Capone’s ghost working as a teller, he’d be less surprised.
‘You’re like a regular businessman,’ Willy said.
‘I am regular businessman. You are pencil-pusher fuck, but everybody got to do his thing. When business is complicate, you give best advice like my ladies give good head. Ciampini, he figure out to keep you close by.’
‘I hope I’m worth keeping close by.’
‘Too much maybe your hands stay clean. Like schoolboy. Then you go kill somebody. Like that. People amaze by you. Now you talk to me, I don’t know why. Amaze me, Willy. Tell me something out of this fucking world.’
‘The Rabbit, I know what you’re doing.’
The Rabbit clamped his hands together. ‘What is this I do, fuck? What you think in your stupid head you know? Somebody told you something? A rumor, like that? You know what you can do with that, where to put.’
‘Just saying.’
‘You sound like some tough guy now, Willy. Try to shake me down. Two things wrong with that, do you know?’
‘I can guess.’
‘Go ahead. Let me see.’
‘One, I’m not a tough guy.’
‘You right. Number two?’
‘You don’t shake down so easy.’
The Rabbit slouched lower in his chair. He was impressed by Willy’s confidence. He knew which side was up, yet he was still in the room, speaking as though he had conversations like these twice a day. He’d never had a conversation like this with Willy. Never before had he let him into his office. Some people, if they left his office alive, wished they hadn’t, and he presumed Willy knew that. Yet he was still bravely seated in front of him and keeping his piss off the floor.
‘I begin to understand in my head why Ciampini gave you free pass.’
‘Temporary, I’m sure.’
‘You know that, too?’
‘I’m supposed to be the smart guy, remember?’
‘Then talk to me, smart guy. What you want?’
‘The Dime went down, blown up. Nic Jobin, gunned down. Accidents, people think. Or that’s how things go when you live the life. Couple of country boys went down, too.’
‘Country boys,’ The Rabbit said in a flat tone, but he betrayed his concern with Willy’s level of knowledge.
‘One in Sorel. The other in Drummondville. Both ran girls for The Dime and Jobin. Suddenly, there’s a dearth.’
‘A what? A death, you mean?’
Funny, he hadn’t noticed that since arriving in the office, they’d switched to English. If French was the language of love, English was the language of business, though The Rabbit’s diction was a lot more fractured in English.
‘Dearth. Means a shortage,’ Willy explained.
‘Short of what?’
‘Women. Everything in life is supply and demand. You understand the demand. You have the supply. As I see it, you’re taking over the stripper and prostitution rackets right across town. All yours. Maybe you’ll give the big boss a taste, but from here on out, you’re in control. Right, The Rabbit? Isn’t that the facts of life? You’re cutting Ciampini out of prostitution and he doesn’t know it. He won’t find out until it’s too late. He doesn’t see it happening even when it’s happening. He’ll probably think you’re doing him a favor.’
The Rabbit’s silence was heavy, penetrating. He had patted his visitor down, done the necessary examination even in the vicinity of his sexual organs, but he still had to worry that he’d missed a wire or some minute transmitter. He had to mind his tongue in this discourse. That worry inhibited any inclination to listen to the man gargling on his own blood, which was a large temptation. Fearless, rapacious, The Rabbit nevertheless was wary of danger. He understood that he was stepping in it – they both were – at that moment. Cops could be right outside. The Italian mob could be outside. Either way, he had to conduct himself accordingly.
‘As weird for me as it is for you,’ Willy assured him. ‘Me, talking to you like this, like I got the right. I got the advantage, though. I know that.’
‘What advantage, you prick, over me? You?’
‘You don’t know my game. You don’t know my call. Am I a radio or not? I know you’re not. You didn’t know I was coming. Am I a radio, The Rabbit?’
‘You tell me. I could strip you down and find out.’
‘If I say a safe word, you’d be busted if I am. Can you take the chance? If you wanted to, you would’ve already, right?’
‘What your business, Willy-boy? Tell me it.’
‘Wanted to tell you a war story, The Rabbit. You might find it an education. For me, it’s been like an inspiration, this story.’
‘What war?’
‘Real one. Number two. Out in the world.’
‘I like war stories. Tell me yours.’
‘Germany. Used to be the Kaiser in charge of all the German people. Wearing their lederhosen. Drinking good beer. But he had help. You need help to run a country. The Kaiser had people who worked for the government, what you call a bureaucracy.’
The Rabbit smiled. ‘You think I don’t know English big words.’
‘Trying to make my story clear is all. This Adolf guy comes along. Lots of goose-stepping. The Fascists are in power now. The bureaucracy? Goes on like always. The Kaiser, the Fascists, makes no difference. Then the war goes bad for him, Adolf takes the poison pill, and the commies take over the eastern half of the country, the big money guys the west. Totally opposite regimes, but the guys who run things, the men and women who see that bills get paid and taxes collected, all that, once again, they stay the same. Same people. Doesn’t matter if they’re in the west or the east, they keep their old jobs. How is that possible? Because, The Rabbit, they know what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a commie or a Nazi or the Kaiser in charge, or a democracy, it’s the bureaucracy that’s necessary. Each new guy in power is smart enough to choose the people who know how to run the works, and the people who can do that are the same people who always run the works.’
He didn’t explain why he was telling The Rabbit the story. He let him figure it out for himself, knowing that it should be obvious. Indeed, his gambit demanded that he play to the man’s intelligence. His survival depended on it.
‘That you? The bureau-crazy?’ The Rabbit asked. Not really a question.
‘That’s me,’ Willy said. Partly an answer, mostly a prayer.
‘Lay it out, Willy,’ The Rabbit told him.
He did so. The Rabbit knew better than to take on the Mafia, especially now that they were making nice with the Hells Angels and starting to rely on a mercenary arm instead of their own muscle. The Mafia had The Rabbit do their dirty work in recent years, but he wasn’t enough. The Rabbit was getting the message. He was honing in on his own action, not taking on the Mafia but fooling them into releasing their hold on running the prostitution rackets at the wholesale level. Ciampini didn’t even realize that the operation was being taken out of his hands, because he wasn’t looking, and anyway he didn’t know where to look.
‘Unless you tell him,’ The Rabbit said. ‘Which is what you here for. So how you live until morning? A question I keep to ask myself in my head.’
‘You figured it out in advance. You figured I’d know where to look, that I have the knowledge only a bureaucrat has, that I’d spot the play. You figured I’d shine a light on your face. Why not take me out, too? Who’d notice? Who’d care? Maybe nobody. Sad to say.’
‘Interest to me that you agree, Willy.’
‘Get an outsider to do the job. Nobody would figure it out.’
‘Not agree, me. You think I’m that smart?’
‘I know what you’re saying, The Rabbit. And why you’re saying it. But how much easier everything will be and how much more stable – that’s a key word, the stability of the enterprise – how much more stable if you don’t get rid of me. Replace me with me, The Rabbit.’
‘You with you.’
‘Makes everything work. Like clockwork. Not only better than before, for you, but it can work in a way that Ciampini won’t figure it out in his lifetime. You take over the entire prostitution racket in the whole city, but it still looks like it’s Mafia run. Once you have it, the Hells don’t. That’s important, because you know they want it. You know it’s the first thing they’re gunning for even when they really want the drug trade. You, maybe you want the drug trade, too. Maybe you’re satisfied without it. Either way, first the women. I can do that for you. Make you seamless. Seamless is good, The Rabbit. You should definitely consider my proposal.’
The Rabbit appeared to be doing so. He located an elastic band on his desk and was pulling it and twisting it over one finger and then another. His thought processes, the turns and mis-directions and alternatives, seemed to be duplicated by the elastic. Then he scratched an eyebrow, the one without the scar.
‘You take big chance coming here to me.’
‘With you. With Ciampini. Big time. Big chance. Two most feared men in the city. You know why I’m taking my chances.’
‘Dead meat otherwise.’
‘That, too. Mostly because I’m right. We can do this. I can run what needs to be run the way I run it. Only difference, a different boss. Two, not one. A real one, and one like a figurehead. You’ve pulled this off so far, The Rabbit. After this, it’s the day-to-day, the books, the problem-solving. What’re you going to do when the next big convention hits town and you need to pull in girls from twenty different clubs for private shows, and another three dozen hookers to work the room, without disrupting your regular client base? That takes expertise. Planning. It takes me, The Rabbit.’
As he spoke, he realized that he’d been right to hold back a suspicion. The killer who’d come to his apartment might not have arrived with an intent to kill. He had shown up with an intent to abduct. They’d wanted him alive. The Rabbit had wanted him alive, without anyone knowing that he’d been taken. He was supposed to be missing, not dead. In a sense, Willy was offering him now what The Rabbit had wanted all along. Unfettered access to his knowledge and expertise.
‘I see how you talked Ciampini into not blowing your stupid head off.’
‘This is a harder talk. I think you see it. It’s the boring stuff that I look after, so you don’t have to.’ He shifted his weight to the forward lip of his chair, as though to emulate leaning across the desk to whisper in The Rabbit’s ear. He spoke more quietly, which caused The Rabbit to incline himself forward as well. ‘Ciampini has to be placated. He has to see this move as a defense of his operations as a whole.’
‘What you talking? How?’
‘He’s working more with the Hells. You know that. I’m telling you what I’m telling him. They’re not planning to stay in place, be the poor cousins because they’re French. This is their turf, when you think about it. Ciampini has to see your move as a way of thwarting the Hells, of keeping them in their place, because what will they come after first?’
‘Drugs.’
‘Second, then. But I’m telling you, I told you already, it’ll be first.’
‘The women.’
‘The Hells don’t have a move against you if you take over the sex trade, not if you have Mafia support. Their first big move gets sunk. I’m the only one who can convince Ciampini that you take the prostitution racket and the dancers for yourself, cut him a nice slice, that that diversifies the market. Makes it less attractive, less accessible for the Hells to penetrate his operation. They’ll have to figure something else out. Buys him time. He’ll see you as a loyal confederate, thanks to me. Sooner or later, you will need that. You don’t want him calling in reinforcements from New York against you. Against the Hells? That’s down the road. Meantime, we’ll make an alliance and he won’t even know that anything changed.’
The Rabbit worked his elastic band until it broke, then worked the single strand some more. Winding it around the fingers of his left hand, then his right. Then he spoke.
‘I think about it, Willy. Finish your beer at the bar. Then walk out of here with nobody bust your legs, crack you off at the knees.’
‘Can’t tell you how much that’s appreciated.’
The Rabbit tossed a notepad toward him, then a pen. ‘Write down how I keep in touch.’
Willy made a motion to follow through on that, then stopped himself as though he had a new idea, one that was only occurring to him in the moment. He moved the pad back toward The Rabbit, leaving it blank.
‘I’ll call you, The Rabbit. I’m the one at risk.’
‘Don’t make me go look for you, Willy. Hear me clear?’