A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

Chapter 22

In the morning I finally got around to stowing The Dirty Dozen in my safe-deposit box. I bought an ordinary copy to take to Maspeth, then began to imagine some of the things that might go wrong. I returned to the bank and retrieved the genuine article, and I left the replacement cassette in the box so I wouldn't mix them up later on.

If I got killed out in Maspeth, Joe Durkin could watch the cassette over and over, searching for a hidden meaning.

All day long I kept thinking that I ought to go to a meeting. I hadn't been to one since Sunday night. I thought I'd go at lunch hour but didn't, and then I thought about a Happy Hour meeting around five-thirty, and finally figured I'd catch at least the first half of my usual meeting at St. Paul's. But I kept finding other things to do.

At ten-thirty I walked over to Grogan's.

Mick was there, and we went into his office in the back. There's an old wooden desk there, and a safe, along with a pair of old-fashioned wooden office chairs and a Naugahyde recliner. There's an old green leather sofa, too, and sometimes he'll catch a few hours on it. He told me once he has three apartments around town, each of them rented in a name other than his own, and of course he has the farm upstate.

"You're the first," he said. "Tom and Andy'll be here by eleven. Matt, have you thought it over?"

"Some."

"Have you had second thoughts, man?"

"Why should I?"

"It's no harm if you do. There'll likely be bloodshed. I told you that last night."

"I remember."

"You'll have to carry a gun. And if you carry one-"

"You have to be willing to use it. I know that."

"Ah, Jesus," he said. "Are ye sure ye have the heart for it, man?"

"We'll find out, won't we?"

He opened the safe and showed me several guns. The one he recommended was a SIG Sauer 9-mm automatic. It weighed a ton and I figured you could stop a runaway train with it. I played with it, working the slide, taking the clip out and putting it back, and I liked the feel of it. It was a nice piece of machinery and it looked intimidating as all hell. But I wound up giving it back and choosing a.38 S amp;W short-barreled revolver instead. It lacked the SIG Sauer's menacing appearance, to say nothing of its stopping power, but it rode more comfortably tucked under my belt in the small of my back. More to the point, it was a close cousin to the piece I'd carried for years on the job.

Mick took the SIG for himself.

By eleven Tom and Andy had both arrived, and each had come into the office to select a weapon. We kept the office door closed, of course, and we were all pacing around, talking about the good weather, telling each other it would be a piece of cake. Then Andy went out and brought the car around and we filed out of Grogan's and got into it.

The car was a Ford, a big LTD Crown Victoria about five years old. It was long and roomy, with a big trunk and a powerful engine. I thought at first it had been stolen for the occasion, but it turned out to be a car Ballou had bought a while back. Andy Buckley kept it garaged up in the Bronx and drove it on occasions of this sort. The plates were legitimate but if you ran them you wouldn't get anywhere; the name and address on the registration were fictitious.

Andy drove crosstown on Fifty-seventh Street and we took the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge into Queens. I liked his route better than the one I had taken. Nobody talked much once we were in the car, and after we crossed the bridge the silence was only rarely interrupted. Maybe a locker room's like that in the minutes before a championship game. Or maybe not; in sports they don't shoot the losers.

I don't suppose the trip took us much more than half an hour door to door. There was no traffic to speak of and Andy knew the route cold. So it must have been somewhere around midnight when we reached the arena. He had not been driving fast, and he slowed down now to around twenty miles an hour and we looked at the building and scanned the surrounding area as we coasted on by.

We went up one street and down another, and from time to time we would pass the arena and take a good look at it. The streets were as empty as they'd been the night before, and the lateness of the hour made them seem even more desolate. After we'd cruised around for twenty minutes or more Mick told him to give it a rest.

"Keep driving back and forth and some fucking cop's going to pull us over and ask if we're lost."

"I haven't seen a cop since we crossed the bridge," Andy said.

Mick was up front next to Andy. I was in back with Tom, who hadn't opened his mouth since we left Mick's office.

"We're early," Andy said. "What do you want me to do?"

"Park near the place but not on top of it," Mick told him. "We'll sit and wait. If somebody rousts us we'll go home and get drunk."

We wound up parked half a block from the arena on the opposite side of the street. Andy cut the engine and shut off the lights. I sat there trying to figure out which precinct we were in so I'd know who might come along and roust us. It was either the 108 or the 104, and I couldn't remember where the boundary ran or where we were in relation to it. I don't know how long I sat there, frowning in concentration, trying to picture the map of Queens in my mind, trying to impose a map of the precincts on top of it. Nothing could have mattered less, but my mind groped with the question as if the fate of the world depended on the answer.

I still hadn't settled it when Mick turned to me and pointed at his watch. It was one o'clock. It was time to go in.

I had to walk in there alone. That figured to be the easy part, but it didn't feel so easy when it was time to do it. There was no way to know what kind of reception awaited me. If Bergen Stettner had decided reasonably enough that it was cheaper and safer to kill me than to pay me off, all he had to do was open the door a crack and gun me down before I so much as set eyes on him. You could fire a cannon and no one would hear it, or give a damn if they did.

And I didn't even know that they were there. I was right on time and they figured to have been in place hours ago. They were the hosts, and it made no sense for them to arrive late to their own party. Still, I hadn't seen a car on the street that figured to be theirs, and there'd been no signs of life in the arena visible to us out on the street.

There was probably garage space inside the building. I'd seen what looked like a garage door at the far end. If I'd been in his position, I'd want to have a parking spot indoors. I didn't know what he drove, but if it was anything like the rest of his lifestyle it wasn't something you'd want to leave out on the street.

Busywork for the mind, like trying to figure out the precinct. They were there or they weren't; they'd greet me with a handshake or a bullet. And I knew they were there, anyway, because I could feel eyes watching me as I approached the door. I had the cassette in my coat pocket, figuring they wouldn't shoot until they'd made sure I had the thing with me. And I had the.38 Smith where I'd stashed it earlier, under my coat and suit jacket and wedged beneath the waistband of my pants. It would be handier now in my coat pocket, but I'd want to have it within reach after I took the coat off, and-

They'd been watching me, all right. The door opened before I could knock on it. And there was no gun pointing at me. Just Bergen Stettner, dressed as I'd seen him Thursday night in the suede sport jacket. His pants were khaki this time, and looked like army fatigues, and he had the cuffs tucked into the tops of his boots. It was a curious outfit and the parts shouldn't have gone together, but somehow he made it work.

"Scudder," he said. "You're right on time." He thrust his hand at me and I shook it. His grip was firm, but he didn't make a contest of it, just pumped my hand briskly and let go.

"Now I recognize you," he said. "I remembered you but I had no mental picture of you. Olga says you remind her of me. Not physically, I shouldn't think. Or do we look alike, you and I?" He shrugged. "I can't see it myself. Well, shall we go downstairs? The lady awaits us."

There was something stagy about his performance, as if we were being observed by an unseen audience. Was he taping this? I couldn't imagine why.

I turned and caught hold of the door, drawing it shut. I had a wad of chewing gum in my hand and I shoved this into the door's locking mechanism, so that the spring lock would remain retracted when the door was shut. I didn't know if it would work, but then I didn't think it was necessary; Ballou could kick the door in, or shoot his way through the lock if he had to.

"Leave it," Stettner told me. "It locks automatically." I turned from the door and he was at the head of the stairs, urging me on with a bow that was at once gracious and self-mocking.

"After you," he said.

I preceded him down the stairs and he caught up with me at the bottom. He took my arm and led me all the way down the hallway, past the rooms I'd sneaked a look at, to an open door at the very end. The room within was a sharp contrast to the rest of the building, and had certainly not served as the location for their film epic. It was an oversize chamber, perhaps thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with a deep pile carpet of gray broadloom underfoot and an off-white fabric covering and softening the concrete block walls.

At the far end of the room I saw a king-size waterbed, with a throw covering it that looked to be zebraskin. A painting hung over the bed, a geometrical abstract, all right angles and straight lines and primary colors.

Closer to the doorway, an overstuffed couch and two matching armchairs were grouped to face a stand which held a large-screen TV and VCR. The couch and one of the chairs were a charcoal gray, several tones darker than the carpet. The other chair was white, and a maroon leather attaché case rested on top of it.

Along the wall was a modular stereo system, and just to its right was a Mosler safe. It stood six feet high and stretched almost that wide. There was another painting on the wall above the stereo, a small oil of a tree, its leaves a rich and intense green. Across the way, a pair of Early American portraits hung in matching carved and gilded frames.

There was a bar set up on a sideboard beneath the portraits, and Olga turned from it with a glass in her hand and asked what I would like to drink.

"Nothing, thanks."

"But you must have a drink," she said. " Bergen, tell Scudder he has to have a drink."

"He doesn't want one," Stettner said.

Olga pouted. She was dressed as promised in the very outfit she'd worn in the movie, long gloves and high heels, crotchless leather pants and rouged nipples. She walked over to us holding her own drink, a clear liquid over ice. Without my asking she announced that it was aquavit, and was I sure I wouldn't have some? I said I was sure.

"This is quite a room," I said.

Stettner beamed. "A surprise, eh? Here in this hideous building, in the most desolate part of a dreary borough, we have a refuge, a hidden outpost of civilization. There's only one way I'd like to improve on it."

"How's that?"

"I'd like to put it a story further down." He smiled at my puzzlement. "I would excavate," he explained. "I would have a subbasement dug, and I'd create a space running the entire length of the building. I'd dig as deep as I wanted, I'd allow for twelve-foot ceilings. Hell, fifteen-foot ceilings! And of course I'd conceal the entrance. People could search this place to their heart's content and never dream a whole luxurious world existed beneath them."

Olga rolled her eyes and he laughed. "She thinks I'm crazy," he said. "Perhaps I am. But I live the way I want, you know? I always have. I always will. Take off your coat. You must be roasting."

I took it off, got the cassette from the pocket. Stettner took my coat and draped it over the back of the couch. He did not mention the cassette, and I didn't say anything about the attaché case. We were both being as civilized as our surroundings.

"You keep looking at that painting," he said. "Do you know the artist?"

It was the little landscape, the painting of the tree. "It looks like Corot," I said.

He raised his eyebrows, impressed. "You have a good eye," he said.

"Is it genuine?"

"The museum thought so. So did the thief who relieved them of it. Given the circumstances of my own purchase of it, I could hardly bring in an expert to authenticate it." He smiled. "In the present circumstances, perhaps I ought to authenticate what I'm buying. If you don't mind?"

"Not at all," I said.

I handed him the cassette and he read the title aloud and laughed. "So Leveque was not without a sense of humor after all," he said. "He kept it well hidden during his lifetime. If you want to authenticate your end of the proceedings, just open the attaché case."

I worked the snaps and raised the lid. The case held stacks of twenty-dollar bills secured with rubber bands.

"I hope you don't mind twenties," he said. "You didn't specify denomination."

"That's fine."

"Fifty stacks, fifty bills to a stack. Why don't you count it?"

"I'll trust your count."

"I should be as gracious and trust that this is the tape Leveque made. But I think I'll play it to make sure."

"Why not? I opened the case."

"Yes, that would have been an act of faith, wouldn't it? To accept the attaché case unopened. Olga, you were right. I like this man." He clapped a hand on my shoulder. "You know something, Scudder? I think we will be friends, you and I. I think we are destined to become very close."

I remembered what he had told Richard Thurman. "We are closer than close, you and I. We are brothers in blood and semen."

He played the cassette and turned the sound off. He fast-forwarded through the opening in fits and starts, and there was a moment when I thought I'd got everything ass-backward at the bank and we were going to be watching the standard unimproved version of The Dirty Dozen. It wouldn't have mattered what was on the tape if Mick Ballou would get off his ass and hit the door, but things seemed to be dragging out.

"Ah," Stettner said.

And I relaxed, because we were watching their home movie now. Stettner stood with his hands on his hips, gazing attentively at the screen. The set was larger than Elaine's, and the image somewhat more compelling as a result. I found my own attention drawn to it in spite of myself. Olga, drawing closer to her husband's side, was staring at it as if hypnotized.

"What a beautiful woman you are," Stettner told her. To me he said, "Here she is in the flesh, but I have to see her on the screen to appreciate how beautiful she is. Curious, don't you think?"

Whatever my reply might have been, it was lost forever when gunfire rang out somewhere in the building. There were two shots close together, then a brace of answering shots. Stettner said, "Jesus Christ!" and spun around to face the door. I was moving the minute the sounds registered for what they were. I stepped backward, yanked the tail of my suit jacket aside with my left hand, went for my gun with my right. I had it in my hand and got my finger on the trigger and my thumb on the hammer. The wall was at my back, and I could cover them and see the door to the hall all at the same time.

"Freeze," I said. "Nobody move."

On the screen, Olga had mounted the boy, impaling herself upon his penis. She rode him furiously in utter silence. I could see her performance out of the corner of my eye, but Bergen and Olga were no longer watching. They stood side by side and looked at me and the gun in my hand, and all three of us were as silent as the pair on the screen.

A single gunshot broke the silence. Then it returned, and then it was broken again by footsteps on the stairs.

THERE were more footsteps in the hall, and the sounds of doors being opened and closed. Stettner seemed about to say something. Then I heard Ballou call my name.

"In here," I shouted back. "End of the hall."

He came flying into the room, the big automatic looking like a child's toy in his huge hand. He was wearing his father's apron. His face was twisted with rage.

"Tom's shot," he said.

"Bad?"

"Not so bad, but he's down. 'Twas a fucking trap, we came through the door and there was two of 'em in the shadows with guns in their hands. Good job they were bad shots, but Tom caught a bullet before I could take them down." He was breathing heavily, taking in great gulps of air. "I shot one dead and put the other down with two shots in his gut. Just now I stuck the pistol in his mouth and blew the back of his fucking head off. Dirty bastard, shooting a man from ambush."

That's why Stettner had seemed to be performing when he opened the door for me. He'd had an audience after all, guards hidden in the shadows.

"Where's the money, man? Let's get it and get Tom to a doctor."

"There's your money," Stettner said grimly. He pointed at the still-open attaché case. "All you had to do was take it and go. There was no need for any of this."

"You had guards posted," I said.

"Purely as a precautionary measure, and it seems I was right to be cautious. Though it didn't do much good, did it?" He shrugged. "There's your money," he said again. "Take it and get out of here."

"It's fifty thousand," I told Ballou. "But there's more in the safe."

He looked at the big Mosler, then at Stettner. "Open it," he said.

"There's nothing in it."

"Open the fucking safe!"

"Nothing but more tapes, though none as successful as the one playing now. It's interesting, don't you think?"

Ballou glanced at the television set, seeing it for the first time. He took a second or two to register the action unfolding in silence, then pointed the SIG Sauer and squeezed off a shot, his hand rock-solid against the gun's considerable recoil. The set's picture tube exploded and the noise was immense.

"Open the safe," he said.

"I don't keep money here. I keep some in safe-deposit boxes and the rest in the safe at my office."

"Open it or you're dead."

"I don't think I can," Stettner said coolly. "I can never remember the combination."

Ballou grabbed him by his shirtfront and threw him against the wall, backhanding him across the face. Stettner never lost his composure. A little blood trickled from one nostril, but if he was aware of it he gave no sign.

"This is silly," he said. "I'm not going to open the safe. If I open it we're dead."

"You're dead if you don't," Ballou said.

"Only if you're an idiot. If we're alive we can get you more money. If we're dead you'll never get into that safe."

"We're dead anyway," Olga said.

"I don't think so," Stettner told her. To Ballou he said, "You can beat us if you want. You have the gun, you're in charge. But don't you see it's pointless? And meanwhile your man Tom lies bleeding upstairs. He'll die while you waste your time trying to persuade me to open an empty safe. Why not save time and take your fifty thousand and get your man the medical attention he requires?"

Mick looked at me. He asked me what I figured was in the safe. "Something good," I said, "or he would have opened it by now."

He nodded slowly, then turned and set down the SIG Sauer next to the attaché case. I was still covering the two of them with the.38 Smith. From a pocket in the butcher's apron he produced a cleaver, its blade snug in a leather sheath. He drew it from the sheath. The blade was carbon steel, discolored through years of use. It looked intimidating enough to me, but Stettner eyed it with apparent contempt.

"Open the safe," Ballou told him.

"I don't think so."

"I'll hack her fine tits off," he said. "I'll chop her into cat meat."

"That won't put money in your pocket, will it?"

I thought of the drug dealer in Jamaica Estates, and the bluff he'd felt safe enough to call. I didn't know if Mick was bluffing and I wasn't eager to find out.

He grabbed her by the forearm, yanked her toward him.

"Wait," I said.

He looked at me, fury glinting in his eyes.

"The pictures," I said.

"What are you talking about, man?"

I pointed at the little Corot. "That's worth more than he's got in the safe," I said.

"I don't want to try to sell a fucking painting."

"Neither do I," I said, and I swung the gun around and snapped off a shot that caromed off the wall just inches to the side of the painting. It chipped the concrete, and it put a dent in Stettner's sangfroid. "I'll shoot the shit out of it," I told him. "And the others." I swung the gun toward the pair of portraits and squeezed the trigger without actually aiming. The bullet went through the portrait of the woman, making a small round hole just inches from her forehead.

"My God," Stettner said. "You are vandals."

"It's just paint and canvas," I said.

"My God. I'll open the safe."

He worked the combination swiftly and surely. The turning of the dial was the only sound you could hear. I was holding on to the Smith and breathing in the smell of cordite. The gun was heavy and my hand ached slightly from the gun's recoil. I longed to put it down. There was no reason to point it at anyone. Stettner was busy with the safe, Olga frozen with dread and incapable of movement.

Stettner hit the last number, turned the handle, drew open the twin doors. We all looked within at the stacks of bills. I was to the side, my view partly screened by the other two men. I saw Stettner's hand dart into the open safe and I cried out, "Mick, he's got a gun!"

In a film they would show the scene in slow motion, and what's curious is that's the way I remember it. Stettner's hand reaching in, fastening on a little blued-steel automatic pistol. Mick's hand, gripping the huge cleaver, poised high overhead, then flashing down in a deadly arc. The blade biting cleanly, surgically, through the wrist. The hand appearing to leap forward, away from the blade, as if liberated from its arm.

Stettner spun around, away from the open safe, facing toward us. His face was white, his mouth wide with horror. He held his arm in front of him like a shield. Arterial blood, bright as sunrise, spurted wildly from his mutilated arm. He lurched forward, his mouth working soundlessly, his arm spraying blood at us, until Ballou let out an awful sound from deep in his throat and swung the cleaver a second time, burying it in the juncture of Stettner's neck and shoulder. The blow drove the man to his knees and we stepped back out of the way. He sprawled forward and lay still, pouring out blood onto the gray broadloom.

Olga was standing still. I don't think she had moved at all. Her mouth was slack and she had her hands poised at the sides of her breasts, her nail polish a perfect match for the color on her nipples.

I looked from her to Ballou. He was turning toward her now, his apron crimson with fresh blood, his hand locked on the handle of the cleaver.

I swung the Smith around. I didn't hesitate. I squeezed the trigger, and the gun bucked in my hand.