Benny Rags was hanging on the wall, screaming loudly for help, when Bobby walked into the Freemont Avenue Social Club. He was making so much noise that it wasn’t even necessary for Bobby to turn up the volume on the radio. “Jesus H.,” Bobby said, cringing at his yelling. “Please. Somebody turn that guy down.”
Little Eddie put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, a loud, shrill bolt of sound. “Benny! Shut the fuck up or I swear to God, I’ll leave you hanging there all day.”
“Bobby, help me out here,” Benny pleaded, trying desperately to maintain his dignity. “Guy’s fucking crazy. Hey, get me down and I got a great shirt for you, no kidding.”
“I don’t know, Benny. I thought you liked hanging around with all of us.” Bobby took off his hat and handed it to him. Instinctively Benny took it. “Here. Make yourself useful. And don’t go getting it dirty.”
Over the laughter Benny said, “That ain’t funny. I swear to God I ain’t never coming around here with clothes again. Go ahead, pay full price for all I care.”
It turned out Benny had come around with a carton of velour zip-up tops. When Little Eddie demanded his money back for the cheap Banlon shirts he’d bought, Benny had the cojones to tell him that his business was strictly cash-and-carry. To which Little Eddie responded that if Benny didn’t refund his cash, they were going to have to carry him out.
That forced Benny to gently remind Little Eddie that he had never actually paid cash for the shirts, so technically he wasn’t entitled to a refund. Little Eddie told him that he wasn’t interested in all that technical bullshit, he just wanted his money back. That was when Eddie picked up Benny and hung him by his shirt on the coat hook. For a short time Benny had flailed around like Road Runner just after discovering he’d run off a cliff into midair, but then he’d given up until Bobby walked in.
Bobby had been really surprised. Until that moment he hadn’t believed that a coat hook was strong enough to support a person, even a skinny guy like Benny. But there he was, hanging there.
When Benny finally shut up, Georgie continued the story he’d been telling. “So like I was saying, Frankie Pits started a superstructure job. Gees, this is going back gotta be fifteen years ago, with all these guys from the union. I went on the job and I knocked them all off. I got my own guys, am I right? So Frankie says to me, ‘You can’t knock my men off.’ I said to him, ‘I can’t knock your men off. Fucking watch me.’ I forget who was delivering the concrete. Mileto maybe.”
An old-timer, Nick Nunzio, who didn’t come around that often, said, “Had to be Mileto or Amato fifteen years ago. Had to be.”
“Whatever,” Georgie continued. “Sos I called him up and I told him, ‘No concrete.’ Then I called Frankie and I tole him, ‘Don’t bother ordering no concrete for tomorrow, ’cause you ain’t getting any.’ That was the end of that. He seen I had a fucking stranglehold on him, so what the fuck could he do? I mean, you know what I mean?”
Bobby sat down next to Mickey Fists, who was using the butt of his cigarette to light his next one. “Don’t you know that shit’s bad for you?” Bobby said. “You trying to kill us all?”
“I’m a fucking attic, Bobby,” Mickey agreed. “I can’t help it.”
“Addict, you mean,” Bobby corrected him. “You’re a fucking addict.”
The Duke picked up Mickey’s full ashtray and replaced it with a clean one on permanent loan from Rao’s. “No, I’m an attic. When I was coming up, we all used to go up into my attic to smoke,” he explained. “I swear to God, the smoke was so thick up there the motherfucking rats just rolled over and suffocated, that’s how bad it was. That’s what my lungs are like now, so that makes me a fucking attic.”
Lenny showed his approval by punching him in the shoulder. “Fucking guy,” he said, impressed. And then he imitated him: “I’m an attic.” Finally he pointed at Mickey’s Camels. “Gimme one a those.”
The Duke returned with the cappuccino. “Who’s in?” Tony Cupcakes asked, desperate for a card game. Vito V wanted in, and Georgie, Eddie, Mickey. “Bobby, you in?”
He shook his head. “Later.” Bobby sat there quietly, sipping his cappuccino, leaning over to look at Mickey’s hand, laughing at the right times, occasionally throwing a funny line into the conversation—once he glanced over his shoulder to ask, “So, Benny, how they hanging?”—but mostly savoring the comfort of this place and the companionship of these people. There was a level of friendship and trust, honor and pride, that he had never experienced before in his life. Bobby had been a good athlete, he’d been second-team all-Catholic league in baseball and lettered in baseball, basketball, and soccer at St. Mac’s, so he had experienced the euphoria of being part of a successful, winning group, but this was much more than that. Much more. He was surrounded by people who had made it in a tough, tough world. People who were not afraid to break rules or heads. These were the kind of people you trusted with your freedom and your life. A bunch of very good guys going through life together. Even the Duke and crazy Benny Rags played their roles perfectly.
Fast Lenny spun a card into the middle of the table. “Stick that baby up your behind,” he said to the table, laying down his winning hand. And then he asked Bobby, “So whattya want to do about that thing?”
That thing to which Lenny was referring was the ten thousand gallons of fuel. Bobby didn’t have an answer yet. “I don’t know, open a gas station maybe.” He was definitely going to have to do something, there was no question about that. When Franklin Washington Jefferson Lincoln Roosevelt whatever didn’t show up to drive the truck, there was a pretty good chance that the delivery would be canceled. But Bobby doubted that. There was just too much money involved to leave it in somebody else’s hands. And it was real easy to hire another driver.
Grabbing the truck would be simple, but then what? What do you do with ten thousand gallons of gasoline? You just couldn’t drive into a gas station and ask if they needed ten thousand gallons of high-test. You couldn’t use it yourself—even if you and all your friends were driving ’58 Cadillacs, it would take years to use all that gas. And it wasn’t the kind of merchandise So Solly could stick in his back room until he found a customer.
But Bobby suspected that he might be able to get more out of that load than gasoline. Potentially that truck was a direct connection to the Russians. What he needed more than cash were some answers—which then might be turned into a lot more cash. There was no question in Bobby’s mind that Cosentino was doing business with them. It certainly seemed possible that the Russians had the professor. And nobody wanted to talk about it. Even Lenny’s Russian connection had faded big-time. These might be completely different Russians, but they spoke the language—money—so they knew the right people.
Cooperation was the wave of the future, and people like him were either going to rise with it or get drowned by it. The one thing he knew for sure was that this load was owned by the Russians. If he was smart enough, it could be his passport into their world. He had nothing to lose, and the least he would gain was ten thousand gallons of gas. And it had occurred to him that the first sound of “dollar” was da.
When the hand ended, Little Eddie had gone to the bathroom. On his way back to the table he had this great idea. Hanging on the back of the bathroom door was a dartboard with six long-nosed darts embedded in it. Grabbing those darts, Little Eddie stood eight feet in front of Benny Rags and warned him, “Don’t fucking move!”
“You’re fucking crazy, Eddie!” Benny screamed at him. “That ain’t funny. C’mon, somebody help me.”
Eddie’s first throw bounced off the wall about a foot to the right of Benny’s head. His second throw was short and again off to the right. “Shit,” Eddie muttered disgustedly, then ordered, “Hey, Benny, spread your legs wide as you can.”
Benny’s eyes opened wider than a hooker’s purse on Christmas Eve. “Hey! Hey!”
Lenny was laughing so hard he was having trouble breathing. Bobby yelled above the laughter, “Hey, I get it. I know, I know. You’re William Don’t Tell ’em Nothing!”
Lenny suggested loudly, “I’d spread ’em if I were you, Benny.”
Eddie closed one eye and reached back with the dart two, three, four times. The tip of his tongue poked out of his mouth. He aimed right between Benny’s legs and . . .
Benny Rags was pushing against the wall with his hands and feet as hard as he could. He was screaming, “Don’t you fucking dare.” Finally his shirt ripped open and he dropped straight to the ground. He covered his head with his hands as the dart kind of drooped way over his head, bounced off the wall, and landed right in his lap. He grabbed it and angrily heaved it sideways at Eddie, who was laughing so hard he had to rest his hands on his knees. The dart flew well wide of its target.
Benny was terrified. He scrambled to his feet and took out his wallet. “Here’s your fucking money,” he said, throwing two twenties at Eddie.
“Oh man, I can’t breathe,” Eddie gasped, trying to stop laughing long enough to catch a breath.
“It ain’t that funny,” Benny Rags said, picking up his carton of velour tops and heading for the door. “Fucking bastard ruined a good shirt.”
Eddie picked a dart off the floor to throw at Benny, but he was laughing too hard. The laughter continued for a long time, reinforced two or three times by people imitating Eddie telling Benny to spread his legs. “I swear, Eddie,” Mickey said, “I thought that was it for me. I couldn’t fucking breathe. I thought I was going to die.”
When the laughter finally ended, Bobby carefully laid out his plan for the night. He went through it in detail. Who was going to do what when. And while there was some complaining, eventually everyone went along with it. A few of the people didn’t exactly understand Bobby’s reasoning, but Bobby was Bobby, and that was good enough for them.
According to the truck driver, who was lying in a ditch under a blanket of leaves and now covered by the first snowfall of the season, the load was scheduled to leave the Staten Island storage terminal at about nine o’clock. That would get the truck to the first gas station in Queens after it closed at eleven, which was the way the owner wanted it. Bobby figured that by the time the dispatcher realized that the driver wasn’t showing up and found a replacement, it would be a whole lot later than that. But just to be certain, they got to the terminal a little after eight.
Lenny was driving the car. Tony would drive the truck. Bobby would close the deal and Eddie was there just in case. Just in case of anything. Vito followed them in the backup car.
None of them had ever been near an oil storage depot before, so they didn’t know what to expect. That was okay. Bobby’s plan did not require gaining access to the tank farm. With millions of gallons of highly flammable fuel and valuable equipment just sitting there, he assumed the front gate would be heavily guarded. And if the side gates weren’t manned, at least they would be locked and security cameras would be scanning the entire area. Knowing the route that the truck was going to follow, he planned to wait until it got clear of the depot before making a move.
He assumed wrong. The facility was surrounded by a six-foot-high chain-link fence that was not even topped with barbed wire. The light posts were set about twenty-five yards apart, but they were the old type; they still used dull incandescent bulbs rather than the much brighter neon. Even then several of the lights weren’t working, having either been broken or simply burned out and not been replaced. Rather than illuminating the yard, about the only purpose these lights served was to make themselves visible. The front entrance was open wider than a bookie on Super Bowl Sunday. The gate itself was tied back. There was a guardhouse, but there was a light on inside, so it was easy to see that there was no one there. It was unbelievable, there wasn’t a guard in sight. And if there were any surveillance cameras, no one could spot them. And these were people used to finding the cameras. “How could this be?” Lenny wondered. “These people must be nuts.”
“Well, big guy,” Cupcakes pointed out, “it ain’t like people are coming in off the street to steal five gallons of gas. How many people you know got their own tank truck?”
Bobby wasn’t comfortable with the situation. If there was a Bible of organized crime, the First Commandment would probably be “Nothing is that easy.” Deals, women, life, everything has a price. And to his experienced eye this looked way too easy. So while Tony and Lenny waited in the car, Bobby and Little Eddie strolled through the front gate, easy as tourists walking into a theme restaurant.
They walked into a world of shadows. It was as if they were moving across a checkerboard, from light square to dark square. Long fingers of light from the posts on the perimeter poked between the tanks to illuminate dull gray rectangles of gravel. When they stepped into that light, they cast their own long shadows that faded into the darkness. And when they moved into the shadows, they might just as easily have been walking in a cave. But even in that darkness it was difficult not to be awed by the size of the tanks. Walls of steel towered above them. “Gees,” Bobby said, “I feel like fucking Gulliver.”
“What’s that?” Eddie asked, looking around. “Tell you what, these things are pretty fucking big,” he added, greatly impressed. Then, always the consummate professional, he decided, “You know, you could drop a stiff into one of these things and nobody’d ever find it.”
The storage facility was laid out in a grid. The tanks were aligned in long rows, front to back, side to side, equidistant from each other. In the darkness it was sort of like being in a maze; no matter which way they walked, everything looked pretty much the same. It was a world almost completely devoid of color. All of the tanks were painted the same pedestrian white, the ground was covered with blue-gray gravel. Those patches of night sky visible between the tanks were as grim as the bottom of a burned pot. The only actual color in the whole place was the red airplane warning lights on the top of the tanks in the distance, blinking as brightly as Rudolph’s nose.
Bobby’s jobs had taken him to a great variety of places, from the back room of a run-down strip club on 42nd Street to the sixty-fifth-floor suite of the CEO of one of America’s most successful brokerage houses. He’d been on a yacht in the Caribbean and inside a tenement in Spanish Harlem. He’d been in hospital rooms and locker rooms, factories and showrooms; he knew how to move around the private rooms in the terminals at JFK as easily as the stalls at the Fulton Fish Market. Wherever it was, he’d been there, from the Top of the Sixes to Calvary Cemetery out in Queens. But this was one of the most unusual places Bobby had ever been. It felt like he was out for a stroll on some distant, mostly deserted planet.
The tank farm appeared to be completely unguarded. At one point they saw a man about seventy yards away walking purposefully between two storage tanks. He was wearing a yellow hard hat. The man spotted them, but rather than being alarmed or even curious, he waved pleasantly to them with the clipboard he was carrying and continued on his way.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Eddie decided. “Come on, Bobby, let’s get the fuck outta here.”
Bobby ignored him. With the excitement of an explorer who had just discovered a world of potential riches, Bobby was simply taking it all in. Later, when he had more time, he would try to figure out how to exploit it. Where there was money to be made, there was a way. Suddenly, though, as they moved into a patch of dim light, they heard people talking. Then laughing. They stopped and listened. But the voices were much too far away to be intelligible. “Come on,” Bobby said.
They walked toward the voices. As they rounded a storage tank, three rows over they saw the spotlight illuminating a tanker truck being filled. The truck that brings the gas to the gas station was getting gas. Bobby smiled at that thought. They stood in the shadows and watched. Two men were standing next to the tanker, both of them holding clipboards. One of them was wearing a baseball cap, the other one a yellow hard hat. “That’s got to be our truck,” Bobby said.
After standing there for several more minutes watching absolutely nothing happen, Eddie decided, “This is certainly a big thrill.”
They returned to Lenny’s car and waited. Bobby actually closed his eyes and caught a few minutes’ sleep. Finally, at about eleven o’clock, preceded by two long blasts from the air horn, the fully loaded tanker barreled through the front gate. Lenny gave the truck a big jump—there was only one good road out of the storage yard—then took off after him. Vito V followed close behind.
It took less than a minute to grab the truck. Ba-da-bing . . . The driver stopped at a traffic light. Before he realized what was happening, much less had the chance to get on his radio to call for help, Bobby was standing on the step pointing a gun at his head . . . ba-da-boom. The driver immediately put up his hands and yelled to Bobby, “Whatever you say.” He wasn’t about to risk his life for a load of gas.
Tony slid behind the wheel. If it had an engine and tires, Tony could drive it. Eddie tied the compliant trucker’s hands behind his back and put him in Vito’s car. The only thing the guy said was, “I haven’t seen nothing and I don’t know nothing.” Vito would ride around for a while, then drop him. Tony was going to park the truck up in Hunts Point, near Yankee Stadium.
Bobby’s first stop was the gas station on Queens Boulevard. Lenny stayed in the car, parking around a corner to make sure that nobody in the station could identify his car. The station was closed. Bobby banged on the front door. Eventually an inside door opened and a shining bald head appeared. “I’m closed,” the bald head yelled.
“You expecting a fuel delivery?” Bobby yelled right back.
The bald man was yawning as he unlocked the front door. By the time it dawned on him that there was no tanker sitting outside waiting to be unloaded, it was too late: Bobby was inside, one hand deep in his jacket pocket. The bald guy had been in the business long enough to know what was going on. “Hey, pally,” he explained calmly, “I don’t keep much cash around here.” He started moving toward his desk.
One summer in high school Bobby had pumped gas for dating money. He knew how it all worked. Customers paid mostly by credit card. If the guy was lucky, there was two hundred bucks in the register. He would pay for the delivery by check—no way he was going to keep that much cash around. It didn’t matter what brand of gas he put in his tanks, whatever the sign out front said; nobody knows the difference, and it was all pretty much the same product anyway. And he also knew that the owner kept a baseball bat, a steel rod, or maybe even a gun behind his desk for just such nighttime visits as this one. Running a gas station that stayed open at night was a tough business that attracted tough guys. “Hey,” he ordered sharply, “stay the fuck away from the desk. Just stand right there. I want you to answer me some questions.”
The bald guy took a deep breath. He was prepared to be robbed, not answer questions. “What?” he asked. He seemed a lot more angry than frightened.
Bobby was holding loosely to the butt of his pistol, but he saw no reason to show it. The guy was cooperating, there wasn’t any reason to escalate the situation. For the first time Bobby got a real good look at the guy. There was something strange about him, something weird, besides the fact that a ball of fat hung limp under his chin like a suspended flowerpot, but Bobby couldn’t figure out precisely what it was. “You the owner?”
He nodded, his several chins slightly trailing the rest of his head up and down. “Yeah, so?”
That answer surprised him. Not necessarily what he said, just the way he said it. He’d pretty much figured the owner had to be Russian, but this guy was pure New York. His accent came right off the city streets. That just didn’t fit. Bobby was still trying to figure out the scam the Russians were running; his best guess was that they were stealing gas from the terminal and delivering it to gas stations they owned, or selling it to other Russians. It was basic economics: get free, sell high. One hundred percent profit. That scenario made a lot of sense to him.
But this guy wasn’t Russian, and back at the terminal it didn’t look like they were busting anybody’s balls. “Who are you buying this load from?”
The guy smiled at that question. “Who the fuck you think you are to ask me that?”
Bobby took his hand out of his pocket and let his gun hang at his side. “Well, see, actually it isn’t just me that’s asking the questions. I got my friends with me.” He held up the gun for inspection, purposefully not aiming it at the guy. “You know, Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. So you tell me, who do you want to talk to? Me or my friends?”
The man ran his hand thoughtfully over his impressively bald head. Bobby couldn’t remember ever seeing such a perfectly bald head, with the possible exception of Mr. Clean on the commercials. The guy’s skin was stretched tautly over his skull, and Bobby guessed it was being pulled tight by the weight of the fat under his chin. He looked really carefully at the guy’s head: There wasn’t one single dot of stubble fighting through. And then he realized what was so strange about him: The guy had a glass eye. His left eyeball didn’t move. It was locked in place, precisely in the middle of his eye socket, staring straight ahead. The guy’s right eyeball was darting from side to side, maybe looking for an advantage, but that left eye just bored into Bobby. He’d heard stories about people putting an informer’s head in a vise and tightening it until his eyes popped out of his head, and he knew that Sammy Davis Jr. had a glass eye, but he had never seen one this close. It was almost mesmerizing. “You the law?” the bald guy with the one glass eye asked.
It was Bobby’s turn to smile. “Do I look like the law?”
“Legally, if I ask you, you gotta tell me. Otherwise nothing I say counts. You know that, right?”
Bobby was getting bored with this game. “What are you, Perry fucking Mason? I gotta tell you, you’re starting to piss me off now.” He waved a cautionary finger. The guy’s right eye followed it. The left eye didn’t move. It just kept staring. That was disconcerting. “I promise you, you don’t want to do that. So I’m asking you nice, who you buying this load from?”
The guy shrugged. “Some Russians. They come around with the product and they give me a good price. That’s the whole deal.”
“What do you mean ‘some Russians’? Gimme some names.”
“You’re kidding me, right? Boris and Morris. What the fuck do I know names? They’re selling gas, I’m buying gas. What else do I got to know?”
“So they give you a real good deal?”
“Fuck yes, they do.” The bald guy sighed in frustration. “So is this a robbery or what?”
Bobby was honest with him. “I haven’t decided yet. So how do they afford to do it? What kind of scam they running?”
“This is fucking bullshit,” the bald guy said, moving toward his desk.
Bobby reached him in two steps and shoved the barrel of his gun under the guy’s chin, pushing his head backward. “You wouldn’t be the first,” he warned.
The bald guy with one glass eye finally got the message. “Oh, wait a second. Who you with?” he asked.
“I told you, Smith and Wesson.” Bobby held the gun there. For the first time he saw fear in the man’s eye. “No names, remember? The next time you open your mouth it better be answers coming out. Got it?” He pushed the barrel so deep into the guy’s chin that the front sight disappeared completely into layers of fat, like a rock sinking into quicksand. “Got it?” he repeated.
The man nodded. Gently he grasped the gun with his thumb and forefinger and moved it away.
“Now, tell me the story.”
“Don’t flatter me, there’s no big story. I mind my own business. Guy comes in here one day and wants to sell me a few thousand gallons thirty cents cheaper than I can get anywhere else. Pay after delivery. You don’t got to be no fucking genius to know that’s a good deal. I’m an independent. I don’t have no contract with a brand. I buy on the open market. The truck shows up, the gas is good, I pay him, everybody’s happy. He comes by every couple of weeks for like a year now.”
“What’s your name?”
“Beck. Mike Beck.”
Bobby lowered his gun and took a couple of steps backward. He moved to Beck’s left, partially out of his eyesight. “Okay, so let me ask you this, Mike. How the fuck can they afford to do that?”
“Hey, I don’t need to look a gift horse up the ass to know there’s some shit there. Truth is I don’t give a flying fuck. Maybe it’s my good looks. I don’t ask them no questions, they don’t give me no answers. Everybody goes home happy.”
“Yeah, but Mikey, just between you, me, Smith, and Wesson, you got to have an idea. A bright guy like you, you didn’t get all this”—he indicated the gas station—“by not paying attention. So come on, what do you think?”
Beck eyed Bobby, trying to figure the upside. “I don’t know for sure, I’m telling you this straight up. But if they ain’t draining it out of the tanks, then the only thing I can figure is that they’re not paying no taxes on it. I mean, figure it out, what else could it be? People don’t know it, but there’s like seventy cents taxes on every gallon you put in your car. If you don’t got to pay that”—he exhaled in admiration—“that’s a lot of fucking moolah.”
Cheating the government? Now, there was a concept Bobby could appreciate. “Those fucking commies,” he said with great respect. “Didn’t take them long to figure out capitalism, did it?” He actually laughed at the thought. Waving his gun casually, he asked, “So how do they do it?”
“Magic. How the fuck should I know?”
While listening to the guy, Bobby was running numbers in his head. Without knowing the details—how many gallons times how much per gallon they were putting in their pocket—it was impossible to reach any kind of valid conclusion. But if the Russians really did have access to a substantial amount of gasoline and had figured out a way to sell it without paying taxes on it, then they had discovered the mother lode. Whatever the number was, it had a lot of zeroes backing it up. Millions of dollars, easy. Tens of millions. “Sorry to have to tell you this, Mike, but tonight’s delivery is going to be a little late.”
“Like how late is late?”
“Probably never.” These were potentially the kinds of numbers that mob guys only dreamed about on Christmas Eve. This is incredible, Bobby thought. We’re busting our humps to earn a few thousand bucks, while these commie motherfuckers are making millions. Things were beginning to make sense.
“Shit,” Beck muttered. “You’re killing me here, pal. You’re making me buy from those legitimate bastards. Those no-good fucking thieves.”
Bobby laughed. “Hey, don’t blame me. You lay down with hookers, you’re gonna get fucked.” Beck did not appreciate the joke. “One more thing I want to know,” Bobby continued. “Those Russians who show up to get paid? Tell me about them.”
“Ugly fuckers,” he said, shrugging. “A big guy and a small guy. The big guy’s got this scarred-up face . . .”
“Yeah, I know,” Bobby said. “I know. Lemme guess. I bet they’re driving like a gray Firebird too, right?” Small world, small fucking world.
“You got ’em.”
Bobby shook his head. If all this was true, it was no fucking wonder why Cosentino went outside his crew for this job. He didn’t want people to know what he was doing. It was amazing. When it comes to a couple thousand dollars, he does the right thing: He shares like a good guy, the way he’s supposed to. But when there’s millions of dollars up for grabs, he wants to keep it for himself. Maybe he’d share a few bucks with his people. Unfuckingbelievable.
One thing he still couldn’t figure out was exactly how the professor fit into the whole operation. But he figured he must be getting close. Cosentino was doing business with the Russians, it made sense for him to have a Russian speaker he could trust. So what happened to make the professor disappear? Maybe the Russians happened.
Bobby put his gun back in his pocket. “Hey, Mike,” he asked nicely, “you know my name?”
Beck shook his head from side to side, his chin swaying gently.
“Know where I live?”
Again Beck shook his head.
“Think about that before you go shooting off your mouth to anybody. Know what I mean?” For an instant he considered cleaning out the cash register, then just as quickly decided against it. Holding up gas stations wasn’t his style. He didn’t see any reason to make the bald guy with one glass eye and the hanging chin of Babylon’s life any tougher. So he backed out the door, being careful to stay to Mike’s blind side. He watched Beck watching him through the front window. Now, that’s funny, he thought, he’s keeping an eye on me—which, considering his condition, was the very best he was capable of doing.
No question, that glass eye creeped him out. Walking back rapidly to Lenny’s car, he ran through as many applicable phrases as he could think of: Keep your eye on the ball. The eye has it. Eye eye, sir. Well, that was two eyes. She’s the apple of my eye. By the time he got back to the car, he was stuck on An eye for an eye.
Back in the car, all he told Lenny was that the Russians were running some kind of gas scam. That was absolutely true, if not complete. Not telling Lenny wasn’t a business decision—he wasn’t trying to get over on him—but until he knew a lot more, he decided to keep quiet. He didn’t need people talking. They drove straight up to the parking lot in the North Bronx where the tanker was supposed to be dropped. It was after 1 a.m. by the time they got there.
The lot was packed with trucks of all types, although only a few of the cabs were rigged to trailers. It was pretty much a transit station, a secure place for independent truckers to park for a couple of days while waiting for their load. But unlike the fuel terminal, this place had extensive security. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with the new kind of razor wire. Nobody was going to climb over that fence without leaving a large slab of skin as a souvenir. High-intensity neon lights spaced on poles about twenty-five feet apart were directed inside the lot, and scanning cameras were mounted on every third pole. The front gate was locked and manned by a security guard, who responded to Bobby’s shouts for some help.
Again Lenny had parked out of sight.
Bobby saw immediately that this guard took his job seriously. He was a young, good-looking black kid. His rent-a-cop uniform was immaculate, down to the sharp crease in his pants. The guard approached the gate with a professional smile on his face and a steel club in his hand. “Yes, sir?”
Standing in shadows outside the locked gate, Bobby informed the guard that the tanker scheduled to arrive about that time wasn’t coming. “So you just hold on to that money,” he said, assuming the guard was supposed to pay the driver. The guard wasn’t sure what was going on. Without making a big show of it, he took a couple of steps backward, spread his legs a comfortable distance apart, and began gently tapping the club into the palm of his left hand. There wasn’t too much Bobby could do to change the situation. They were on Candid Camera; he wasn’t about to pull a gun on the guy just to get a few answers. “Now, calm down, okay? There’s just a couple of things I want to ask you.”
The guard stood there impassively.
Bobby reached into his back pocket. The guard tensed but did not make a move. Bobby pulled out his wallet and took a fifty-dollar bill out of it. He curled it up and stuck it in the fence. The guard didn’t move to take it. “Whattya need?” he asked.
“Like I said, just a little information. These people who own this truck. How many deliveries like this do they do every week?” Bobby was just trying to get some idea of the scope of the operation. He was guessing two or three runs a week.
The guard considered the question. “I’m not supposed to give out that kind of information,” he said, but he said it with a lack of conviction.
“Yeah, I know,” Bobby said, holding high a second fifty-dollar bill. “But I figure you can go back inside and rewind this tape so nobody sees this.” He curled the second fifty and stuck it in the gate. They were standing about fifteen feet apart, separated by the fence. From a distance it might have looked a bit like an Old West shoot-out—except it was negotiations at ten paces.
“They run three trucks out of here,” the guard finally blurted out. “Every truck makes at least four or five runs a week.” Then he volunteered, “They use a lot of different drivers. They don’t want anybody knowing too much about their business.”
“You got a phone number for them, don’t you? I mean, you’re supposed to call them when the trucks show up.”
The guard shook his head. “I can’t give that to you.”
Bobby stuck another fifty in the fence.
“I can’t,” the guard said.
“All right,” Bobby agreed, “that’s okay.” He made no move to take back his money. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to call that number and tell them somebody took their truck. Tell them the delivery didn’t get made tonight. Then you tell them that if they want their truck back, they should call this number tomorrow around noon.” Bobby always carried a pen and scrap paper in his pocket. He wrote down the number of the phone in the social club. There was no way the Russians could trace the location of that number. It was bootstrapped, meaning the calls to that number were relayed from the original phone listed in the name of an old Chinese lady who lived on Doyers Street in Chinatown. It was the same system used by every bookmaking operation. “Now, you sure you got that?” Bobby was always careful to make sure his messages were clearly understood.
The guard repeated the message.
“That’s good,” Bobby said, sticking a last fifty in the fence. Bobby turned to leave, then paused. The guard hadn’t moved. Bobby pointed to the security cameras. The guard nodded. “It’s all good,” Bobby said to himself as he walked away, “all good.”
It was almost four o’clock in the morning when Bobby finally got home. Ronnie and Angela were long asleep. He looked in on his daughter, who was lost in dreamland. Ronnie stirred when he sat on the side of the bed and started getting undressed, but said nothing. She’d stopped asking him about his days, and more pointedly his nights, years earlier. She had pretty much figured out his pattern: If he took a shower before getting into bed, he’d been with another woman. If he simply undressed and got into bed, he’d been working. The truth was that in either case she was no longer curious about the details.
He sort of shimmied across the bed and curled himself up against her body. She barely moved. She was wearing flannel pajamas, which he really hated. The feel of a woman’s skin still thrilled him, even his wife’s. He cupped his hand over her flannel-covered breast and wrestled with sleep, wondering how it was possible to be so close to a person yet feel so far away.
Most civilians probably have some difficulty blending their work life and home life, but usually there is some overlap and they can talk about it with their wife or husband, and that person can at least relate to some aspects of it. But in this business—and this is equally true for people working in law enforcement—people have to live two completely different lives. There is no overlap between life with the Family and life with the family, and there was very little about life outside the home that a wiseguy could discuss with his wife. There was a real sense of discordance when either world intruded upon the other.
Bobby lay there with his eyes closed, but his mind was doing laps at Indianapolis. He knew he’d grabbed something big by the tail, but he couldn’t be certain exactly what it was he was holding on to. Whatever it was, it was definitely a lot bigger than he had originally believed. And it was a lot more important than finding some missing teacher. The problem was that the bigger things were, the more dangerous they tended to be. The one thing he knew for sure was that he needed to be careful, real careful, that this thing didn’t suddenly turn around and bite him.
Somehow, though, the professor was in the middle of all of this. And the fact that Cosentino needed him to be found by Thursday night was pretty strong evidence that something important was going down that night. He wondered, how would his life be affected if he woke up Friday morning and the professor hadn’t been found? Or maybe, what would it cost him if he didn’t find the guy? That was only one of the many questions it was impossible to answer without knowing a lot more facts, like the value of a friendship when a million dollars is involved.
Sometimes it seemed to Bobby that the bed must have no right side, because whichever side Ronnie got up on, it was always like it was the wrong one. But she was in a particularly surly mood the next morning, which was just about the last thing he needed. He paid the minimal attention necessary to know when to agree and nod his head, which he did convincingly. Something about visiting his parents on the holidays, problems with her car, play dates for Angela. He caught some of the familiar phrases—“the things I do for you,” “no consideration for anyone else,” “have to do everything around here myself,” “don’t know what it means to give,” and the big one, “she’s your daughter too!”—and resisted the urge to respond. He was smart enough to know that there were some battles he couldn’t win if he had George S. Patton and the entire fucking U.S. Army on his side.
He still kissed her good-bye when he left, though, and most of the time he still meant it. Comfort counted.
The Duke, Little Eddie, and the kid, Vito V, were the only people in the club when he walked in. He rarely got there that early, and the thin shafts of sunlight angling through the exposed top of the front windows gave the place an unusually cold feeling, but it still had that warm familiarity about it. The Daily News and the Post were lying on the card table, and as he waited for the phone call, he read both of them. It was a slow news day; even the regular bullshit was bullshit. That was one of the things he loved so much about New York: It was always the same but constantly different.
Every few minutes he glanced at the clock. When the Russians called, he intended to set up a meet for later that day at some public place. Probably the Tic Toc. Eddie would be his backup, Lenny the outside man. He wasn’t going to play tough guy, no threats, no demands. The thing that these guys had that he wanted was information. In return he could offer them their fuel truck—and his cooperation. He knew the streets and he had hooks into some people who knew some people.
Eddie was trying to figure out the Jumble in the News when the phone rang. It was a few minutes after noon. Mostly out of habit now, the moment it rang he immediately looked at the Duke to see if he responded. Just a little quiver was all the evidence he needed. But as always, the Duke didn’t move.
Bobby answered it. “Yeah?”
In a thick Russian accent a voice asked, “Bobby?”
Bobby froze. In an instant it seemed like every nerve in his body was vibrating. They knew his name. They knew his motherfucking name. “What?” he asked.
The Russian said calmly, “So listen, we got your fucking message.”
“So?”
The Russian laughed. “So now we send you our message.” There was a brief pause, and then he heard a single, long, and desperately tortured scream. It seemed to last forever, and the sound ripped through his body. It was beyond a cry for help, beyond anything he’d ever heard before. This was a plea for a quick death.
When it subsided, the Russian spoke again. “Hey, Bobby, you go fuck yourself, hokay?” And then he hung up.
Bobby stood there holding on to the phone until Eddie took it from his hand and gently put it back on the hook. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.