Bandits

13

THERE WAS NO WAY to miss Little One, even at night, the size of him coming along Bienville from the hotel, toward Royal, where Jack was waiting near the corner. Little One put out his hand and palmed Jack the room key. He said, “That fucking Roy. Okay, now we even. Tell him that.”

“We appreciate it.”

“You better ‘preciate it. Leave the key under the chifforobe, where the maid can find it. See, like the man dropped it. The man’s mostly drunk, having a good time. He won’t know.”

“I may have to go back in.”

“Come on, Jack.” Little One twisting his head, in pain. “You see how far out my neck is right now?”

“I’m not gonna take anything. The guy won’t even know I was there. In and out, take me ten minutes.”

“Yeah, you slick, like all those boys at ‘Gola use to think of themselves, cool dudes. I remember correctly, Jack, was up there you and I met, wasn’t it?”

“I did something pretty dumb one time,” Jack said. “I should’ve known better. This is different. One more time, that’s it.”

“Yeah, like the Count say, ‘One more once,’ huh? Only that was ‘April in Paris’ and this is April in N’Awlins, man, gets hot and sticky.”

“I’m not back in business, anything like that.”

“Just want to check the man out.”

“That’s all. Take a look around.”

“Man with the Cuban skin and five-hundred-dollar suits. Sweep his room, see if he’s got a badge or any bugs ‘fore you start to deal.”

“Nothing like that.”

“Jack, when you get back up to the farm, give my best to Smoke and Too Good, and that cute little rascal Minne Mo, if he still there. Lemme think who else…”

Jack walked through the empty lobby and across one end of the garden courtyard to the cocktail lounge, cream-colored in soft lights, elegant, and not a soul here. The Oriental barman came to life and poured Jack a vodka.

If he were back working his trade he would have looked in, turned around, and walked out to find a big downtown hotel full of noise, full of tourists and people with name tags drinking and having fun in the bar. He’d become someone else as he felt the glow, breathed the scent of girls in cocktail dresses, girls scouting their own game while Jack looked for ladies wearing respectable diamonds, husbands who brought billfolds out of their jackets or folds of currency in silver clips. He’d take a few days to sort them out, then ride up in the elevator with a likely pair, get off a floor below the button they punch and run up the stairs to watch them going into their suite. An hour later he’d try their door to see if they put on the chain. The next day he’d slip into those rooms while they were snapping pictures in Jackson Square; go through the drawers, their suitcases and bathroom kits, look in their shoes, feel through clothes hanging in the closet. He’d look at the door chain then. If they used it he’d remove the chain and replace it with one he’d brought along that had three or four more links in it. The couple would slip the chain on that night and never notice the difference. He’d come along later, open the door with his fire key, and be able to reach in and slip off the chain. Then hook it up again on the way out, if it was a better-than-average score and he was feeling good. Or else he could cut it going in.

Do all that, get away with it, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it.

He’d hear salesmen bullshitting the girls, trying to impress them with how many computers they’d sold, and he’d sit there at the bar or reach for something like, “Didn’t you and I do a modeling shoot last year?” Or he’d tell them he was learning English and put on a half-assed French accent.

He tried it on Helene the first time he saw her in the bar at the Roosevelt, knocked out by her profile, her bare legs crossed beneath a short green skirt, told her he was from Paree, and Helene said, “Is that by any chance near Morgan City?”

She told him it wasn’t a bad approach, it was different, but how far could he take it? Or was his life so boring he had to pretend he was someone else?

He told her, without the French accent, she had the most beautiful nose and brown eyes-he threw in the eyes-he had ever seen and that his life, his profession, was far from boring.

“What do you do?”

“See if you can guess.”

“Do you live here?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a lot of money?”

“Enough.”

“You sell dope.”

“I don’t sell anything.”

“You buy things.”

“No.”

“You steal things.”

“Right.”

She hesitated. “What do you steal?”

“Guess.”

“Cars?”

“No.”

“Jewels.”

“Right.”

She said, “Sure you do.” She said, “Really? Come on.” She said, “What do you do with them, the jewels?”

“I sell ’em to a guy for about a quarter of what they’re worth.”

She said, “I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” with a different tone now, softer, hesitant.

Jack turned half around on his stool, looked over the room, and came back to Helene. “What’re you doing tomorrow?”

“I work. For a lawyer.”

“Stop by here during your lunch hour. I’m in 610.”

“What if I’m not hungry?”

“You see the lady in the blue net?”

“Chiffon.”

“The guy has on a tux.”

“What about her?”

“You see the ring she’s wearing?”

It was about one-fifteen the next day, the hotel room silent except for faint street sounds, when Helene turned her head on the pillow and said, “Jacques, I think I’m falling in love with you.”

Buddy Jeannette had told him, “Always look nice and always ride the elevator. You run into somebody on the stairs they gonna remember you, ’cause you don’t see nobody on the stairs as a rule. But a elevator, man, you so close to people they don’t see you.”

So Jack rode an empty elevator up to the fifth floor of the St. Louis Hotel in his navy-blue work suit, got off, and there was 501 in the elevator alcove, out of sight from the courtyard below. He stepped over to the door and knocked three times, waited, giving the man plenty of time if he was in there, then used the key to enter the suite.

The fundraiser had left lights on, even the one in the bathroom. Little One told Roy he had checked on the man at seven, phoned to see if he could pick up the room-service table and there was no answer; but the man and two other Latinos were there at five-thirty when Little One said he brought up the champagne and booze and snacks, and a couple white girls had come in while he was there that looked like whores.

The party mess was in the sitting room, bottles and glasses and a tray with a few canapés left on it, tiny sandwiches, deviled eggs, and a bowl of melted ice and shrimp tails. There were shrimp tails in ashtrays, napkins on the floor, wet spots on the red carpeting… several envelopes on the desk addressed to Col. Dagoberto Godoy, c/o the St. Louis Hotel, postmarked Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The letters were typed in Spanish. Jack saw himself in the mirror over the sofa as he crossed to the phone on the end table. He remembered letters from his dad with the Honduras postmark; he had soaked off the stamps and saved them. There was nothing by the phone; a few shrimp tails.

This was like an afternoon scouting trip, not even close to what the real thing felt like, going in when you knew the people were there in the dark, hearing their breathing and more different kinds of snoring sounds than anyone could imagine.

He’d said to Helene, “Did you know women snore as much as men? I’ve made a study. Women aren’t as loud, but they’re more original. Some of ’em go, ‘chit… chit,’ like a little sneeze. Some of ’em go, ‘pissssss,’ on the exhale.” Helene said, “You fascinate me,” shining her brown eyes at him, chin resting on her hand with the blue stone, the sapphire. He had told her she was the only person in the world, outside of Buddy Jeannette, who knew what he did. She liked that; she hunched her shoulders. He told her he knew he was going to tell her; as soon as they started talking that night he knew it. She said she knew right away there was something different about him, mysterious. She said, “It’s real scary, huh? Doing that.” He said, sometimes, when it was quiet, he would imagine the man and woman lying there listening and that was really scary. She said, “That’s why you do it, huh? ’Cause it’s scary.” He said he didn’t think too much about why he did it. But he did think, every once in a while, that maybe if he’d gone to Vietnam he wouldn’t be doing it. Strange? He was turned down when he took his physical, he had mono; then after that was just never called. He told her that sometimes after he left the room with his flight bag and would be standing there waiting for an elevator, that was scarier than being in the room. The best part was when he got to his own room and closed the door, or when he walked out of the hotel, if he wasn’t staying there. Jesus, the relief. Helene said, “Like it doesn’t have anything to do with robbing people.” He said, well, there had to be something in it for you; you weren’t gonna put your ass on the line just for thrills. That was part of it, though. Doing it. Yeah, because he never thought of it as… you know, just a robbery. Did that make sense? Helene said, “I want to go with you. Once, that’s all. Please?”

It took a few weeks to let himself be talked into it. Then spent the next thirty-five months wondering how he could have been so fucking dumb. When he told Roy, Roy said, “Jesus, you deserve to be in here. Take a fall just on stupidity alone.”

They went into a suite at 3:00 a.m. and weren’t even across the room before Helene bumped into something and giggled, Jesus Christ, and a voice said from the bedroom, “Who’s in there?” and a light came on and they ran down the stairs from the fifteenth floor, no elevator ride this trip, and hotel security was waiting in the lobby. Jack opened his eyes wide and said, “What’s this about?” Looked puzzled as he said, “You have the wrong party.” Put on a pissed-off look as he said, “We’re staying in this hotel.” The guy in the bathrobe said, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s them.” Jack told hotel security they were going to hear from his lawyer. Only the lawyer they heard from was Helene’s, the guy she worked for, a lawyer who specialized in divorces and didn’t know shit about plea bargaining on a criminal justice level. But that’s what he did, stuck his nose in and offered them a deal when he didn’t have to: immunity for Helene if she’d put Jack Delaney in that hotel room and the cops and the district attorney could’ve kissed him. They got a search warrant and found his fire keys and an alligator attaché case with the initials RDB he’d picked up months before, stuck in his closet, and forgot he had. They tried to hit him with thirty burglaries over the past two years; so Jack and his Broad Street lawyer made their own plea deal. Okay, he’d give them the thirty and they could close the files in exchange for one Unlawful Entry, look at five years, and be out in three if he was a good boy. Helene said, “Jack? I’m awful sorry.”

There were wet towels on the floor in the bathroom, two pair of Jockey briefs, both bright red; five $100 bills rolled tightly together and a 35-millimeter film container of cocaine in the fundraiser’s shaving kit. His bed was unmade, thrashed apart it looked like, pillows and spread on the floor. There were at least a dozen pair of Jockeys, all that bright red, in the dresser; a Beretta automatic tucked away beneath the shirts.

The good stuff was on the desk in the bedroom, by the phone. Bank deposit slips, a stack of them in different pastel shades… Wait. Some of them were withdrawal receipts. Here was the same amount deposited, withdrawn, and deposited again on different dates… and realized there were four or five different Whitney and Hibernia branch banks involved. The guy wasn’t putting everything into one account. Jack copied the figures, with plus and minus signs, on a hotel memo pad.

On another memo pad was a name and telephone number. Alvin Cromwell (601) 682-2423. Jack copied this, too, wondering about the Mississippi area code. In a file folder were a dozen or more sheets stapled together that listed names of individuals and companies, most of the addresses in New Orleans, Lafayette, and Morgan City. R. W. Nichols, Nichols Enterprises, was one of the names that had a check mark after it. There were a lot of check marks… And a sheet of stationery in the file folder that Jack picked up and began to read, because at the top of the sheet was printed The White House, Washington, D.C.

It was a letter to the fundraiser from… Jesus Christ, Ronald Reagan. It said:

And there, under “Sincerely,” was the president’s signature.

Amazing. He wrote the way he spoke. Or he spoke the way one of his aides, who believed all this or could do it out of either side of his mouth or with either hand, spoke or wrote. They all sounded the same, presidents; presidents of anything. But look at that, his autograph. Jack wet a finger with his tongue, touched “Ronald Reagan” and saw it smudge, but not much.

He began to read the letter again, bent over the desk, got as far as “win a big one for democracy,” and heard the TV set in the sitting room go on.

Voices. A man and woman talking almost at the same time, snapping one-liners at each other, fast, without letup, the voices hyper, irritating. What was the show? A guy and a girl private eyes…

He pictured the sitting room. From the bedroom doorway the door out was close on the left, within ten feet. The TV set was to the right in there, in the corner past the desk. He listened. There were no voices other than the nonstop television voices. Maybe it was the maid. Turned on the TV while she cleaned up. Jack said, Sure, it’s the maid. And walked around the bed to the doorway and looked into the sitting room.

It wasn’t the maid.

It wasn’t a Nicaraguan either. It was a guy in profile with slicked-back dark hair, seedy-looking in an old gray tweed sport coat that reminded Jack of Lucy’s soup kitchen and told him the guy didn’t belong here. The guy stood within a few feet of the TV set looking down at the lady private eye and her partner snarling at each other in fun, acting wacky. The guy in the herringbone sport coat chuckled, rubbed one of his eyes.

In that moment Jack would bet ten bucks the guy had served time; twenty bucks he wasn’t with the Nicaraguans. Except that he seemed to know where he was.

So Jack stepped over to the dresser and dug out the fundraiser’s pistol, the same model Beretta as the ones they’d picked up last night. He didn’t check to see if it was loaded; he wasn’t going to shoot the guy. He wouldn’t mind popping the TV set, the annoying sounds, but not the guy. For some reason he felt sorry for him. Jack moved into the doorway again and stood with the Beretta down at his side. The guy appeared to be in his forties; all dressed up in the ratty sport coat, dark pants that dragged on the floor and nearly covered his worn-out tan shoes. A commercial came on before he looked around.

Paused and said, “Oh, my. I have the wrong room, don’t I?”

Buddy Jeannette had said he bet he had the wrong room. This guy’s line was close enough and either way it took an awful lot of poise. “Oh, I have the wrong room…” The guy crossing to the door now in his raggedy outfit, trying to pull it off. Look at that. Jack watched the guy hesitate, his hand on the knob, then look over his shoulder with a frown, a question on his face.

He said, “Or do I? Or might we both have the wrong room.” With an accent from some British isle.

What was it, Irish?

Jack said, “Step away from the door and turn around.”

The man opened his arms wide to show a belly beneath the awful tie. “Please yourself, but trust me, I don’t go about your city armed.”

It was Irish. Jack said, “Take off your coat.”

“I’m happy to oblige you.” He pulled it off to show a soiled and wrinkled white shirt, a red-and-gray patterned tie, and dropped the coat on the floor as he did a turn all the way around to face Jack again. “There. Tell me you’re not a cop, please. It’s all I ask.”

“Do I look like a cop?” He watched the man’s expression relax, begin to smile.

“Not now you don’t, no. You have a sense of play about you, a soft quality to your voice. It indicates to me you’re a man of reason, not a dumb brute, and I say this from experience. The last copper I spoke to was in Belfast, an RUC thug what he was. He asked me my name, I answered him in Irish. The fucker said, ‘Speak the Queen’s English,’ and beat me with a stick. I’ll show you the marks.”

Jack said, “What’s your name?”

And drew a smile. “You say it different to what he did. First I’m beaten, then lifted for disorderly behavior. My name’s Jerry Boylan. Will you tell me yours?”

Jack was waiting to tell him. From the moment the man opened his mouth Jack could feel something between them, because the man was familiar to him. Not as someone he knew, but someone from an old photograph brought to life: snapshots from a family picnic at Bayou Barataria in the 1920s, before he was born; the women wearing straw hats their faces peeked out of, dresses that looked like slips; but it was the men he remembered now, the men with slick-combed hair like Jerry Boylan’s, the men posing in white shirts without collars, their Irish Channel mugs grinning at the camera on a sunny day, his dad’s dad or an uncle holding Spanish moss to his face to make a beard. This one, Jerry Boylan, could be one of them now, come to life in the St. Louis Hotel.

He said, “Jack Delaney.”

And saw the familiar slit-mouth grin from the photographs, eyes beaming for a moment, then turned to low as the man said, “How serious a Delaney are you? Where you come from?”

“I think Kilkenny, my dad’s grandfather.”

“Of course you do,” Boylan said. “Castlecomer in North Kilkenny. There was a Ben Delaney played horn in the Castlecomer Brass Band… Oh, but wait now, it could be Ballylinan. Sure, Michael Delaney was from there, my God, second in command of the North Kilkenny Brigade, IRA from 1918 to ’21, before the truce, when they were giving the crown bloody hell. Made land mines out of iron skillets packed with gelignite. Before plastique and pipe bombs”-his voice drifting-“and rocket launchers you can stick under your coat…”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m from there. Swan, a stop in the road, if you’ve heard of it.”

“I mean what happened a long time ago. How do you know about a Delaney and that IRA stuff?”

“How do I know? It’s my fucking life. Ask me where I’ve been the past month, since I wasn’t dodging Brit patrols and getting the stick from the bloody peelers.” Boylan frowned. “You know what I’m talking about? The Belfast coppers, Jack, the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Their idea of great crack is cornering one such as myself, alone. But you say that IRA stuff a long time ago, like you don’t know any of this. It still is, Jack, more than ever. My God, don’t you read the newspapers?”

The man played his voice like a hi-fi system, adjusting up and down, treble to bass. Now he was silent, at rest, his gaze wandering to the coffee table, the bottles and glasses, the tray of picked-over canapés. Jack watched him cross the room to bend over the tray and poke at the dainty sandwiches before choosing one.

Look at him.

Unconcerned, turning to watch television as the voices shrilled and he stuck a sandwich in his mouth, sucked two fingers, and wiped them on his coat.

The guy thinking they were buddies now, like they might’ve marched together last month in the Saint Patrick’s Day parade. It was one thing for Jack to feel a tie, reminded of Delaneys that had come before, but this guy was presuming way too much. Jack walked over to the TV set, the annoying voices still competing, and shut them off.

Boylan, bent over the tray again, looked up. “What’re you doing there?”

“Sit down, on the sofa.”

Boylan popped half a deviled egg in his mouth. “I do, I’ll fall asleep sure. It’s half nine, the man could be coming back any time.”

Jack crossed to him raising the Beretta and put it in his face. Boylan cocked his head, still bent over, and opened his eyes and Jack could see the deviled egg in his mouth as he stopped chewing and stared.

“Sure, Jack, I’d be happy to.”

He lowered the gun to feel it against his leg. “You’ve done time, haven’t you?” Watching the man step around the coffee table to ease himself carefully into the chintz-covered sofa.

Boylan sighed. “Long Kesh. Where we smeared our shit on the walls and the lads in H-Block woke up the world with their hunger strike. The bloody Maze, some call it.”

“What were you in for?”

“Talking in church,” Boylan said. “To a bastard that touted on me. They came in the night as they do, knocked my old woman’s teeth out breaking in the bloody door, found a revolver in the dirty wash, and that was my sin. I got five Hail Marys and five years in the Kesh.” Boylan bent over, took his time choosing another canapé. “How is it we know our own kind, Jack? What was your sin? Don’t tell me you’re only a burglar. Come in here in your proper attire all lavender-scented. What would you steal, his shirts? Christ, but he’s got enough of them.”

“You’ve been here before,” Jack said.

“Now and again.” Boylan eased forward, placing his hands on his knees. “We’re going to chat, we might go down the way. Watch the naked ladies dance and have a jar. Would that be to your liking?”

“You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?”

“You prefer to test my nerves. Keep me on the hook till I tell you what I’m up to. See who outlasts the other, before the nasty colonel returns. Oh, I’d love to know your game, Jack, before I say.” A squint narrowed his eyes and he nodded. “I would like to believe our politics are near enough the same…” And now his eyes opened with hope. “Have you seen me before, Jack? Heard me speak at a Holy Name Communion breakfast?”

Jack said, “Will you cut the shit and tell me what you’re doing here?”

Boylan blew his breath out in a sigh. “All right, I’ll take the risk and put it flat to you. The man from Nicaragua is here for guns. You know that?”

Jack nodded.

“Well, so am I.”

Jack said, “Only he’s going to buy his.” And let it hang and saw the Irishman’s sly smile forming.

Boylan said in a soft voice, “Oh, but our minds run in harness, don’t they, Jack?”