Butcher's Moon

Five

Adolf Lozini, at the electric wok, said, “The trouble with a lot of people is, they don’t understand about Chinese cooking.”

The three men standing around the patio gave respectful nods. Their wives were sitting over in the pool area with Mr. Lozini’s wife, talking about racially integrated high schools. The underwater lights were on, making rippling light streaks all around that part of the yard, and the wives in their pink and blue taffeta looked like dowdy mermaids past their prime.

“The Chinese,” Lozini said, “respect their food, that’s the whole secret. Like it was a person.” He poked at the water chestnuts and celery pieces with a fork, and the three men all nodded once more.

The three were executives. The one in the bright blue suit and dark green ascot was Frankie Faran, a sometime union officer and also currently manager of the New York Room, a club downtown with live entertainment: two strippers all week, plus a jazz group on weekends. The one sweating in the white turtleneck was Jack Walters, an attorney and an officer in several holding companies. And the one in the black bow tie and bright madras jacket was a former accountant, Nathan Simms by name, who now ran the local policy game and also took care of a number of personal financial matters for Mr. Lozini.

Although the house in the background was very Northeastern in style, with its steep roof and small double-hung windows and dark shingle siding, the large yard at the rear was completely Southern California, the result of several business trips Lozini had made to Los Angeles a few years ago. Green and amber floodlights glowed on the plane trees and maple trees and the rear wall of the house. The patio was pink slate, the pool was blue and kidney-shaped, the tennis court ran north-south. Stockade fencing enclosed the area, but the ivy that was supposed to have spread over the fencing had mostly died, leaving only straggling remnants climbing upward here and there, like leafy cracks in a rooming-house wall.

The weather was warm tonight, more suitable to the California yard than the New England house. The watery smell of cooking vegetables hung in the air, mixed with the chatter of the women over by the pool. Lozini smiled at his handiwork, then smiled around in a general way at his guests, and they obediently smiled right back.

Lozini considered himself a gourmet cook, and there was no one in his circle to contradict him, either through greater knowledge or greater power. Pleased with his own cooking, and pleased as well with the status of power he had finally reached after many years of struggle, Lozini three or four times each week invited guests from among his subordinates and fed them dishes from Italy or Spain or France or China or almost anywhere; he was a gourmet with catholic tastes. It was considered an honor to be invited to a Lozini dinner, and a disaster to go too long without being invited. No one ever refused.

The vegetables were cooking; too slowly, but Lozini didn’t know that. He smiled paternally at them, stirred them a bit more, and looked up as Harold approached from the house. Harold’s white serving jacket was tailored so carefully that no gun was evident at all; Lozini’s wife didn’t like the look of guns, especially in the house.

Lozini waited, the wooden spoon in his hand, and his three guests stepped discreetly backward out of the way. Theirs was a world in which it was better not to overhear other people’s conversations.

Harold arrived. Leaning over the wok, his face in the upward current of thin steam, he said quietly, “Somebody on the phone for you, Mr. Lozini.”

“Who?”

”I don’t know, Mr. Lozini. He won’t give a name.” Lozini frowned. “Why should I talk to him? What does he want?”

“He said it’s about the guy in the amusement park, Mr. Lozini.”

Lozini squinted as though it were his own face in the steam, not Harold’s. “What guy in the—” But then he remembered.

“I don’t know, Mr. Lozini,” Harold said. He wouldn’t know anything about that, of course. “He just said I should tell you—”

“All right, all right,” Lozini said. He nodded briskly to shut Harold up, and stood squinting toward the house. The heist artist in the amusement park, hiding in there with the loot from an armored-car robbery. Lozini had sent some people in to get him, and they’d failed. That was a couple years ago—and who would want to talk to him about it now, on the phone?

Harold waited patiently, his face in the steam. The three guests were in a low meaningless conversation to one side. Lozini came to a decision. “All right,” he said, and turned toward the three men. “Nate?”

Simms, the former accountant, came over with his eyebrows politely raised. “Anything I can do?”

Lozini handed him the wooden spoon. “Stir this,” he said. “Don’t let it burn.” To Harold he said, “I’ll take it in the cabana.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”

Harold went back to the house, and Lozini marched over to the cabanas, a row of three dressing rooms, each with its own cot and toilet and sink. The one at the end also held a telephone; Lozini went in there, switched on the light, closed the door, sat on the bed, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Lozini?” The voice was somewhat harsh, but neutral.

“Speaking,” Lozini said, and heard the click as Harold hung up the kitchen extension.

“Last time you saw me,” the voice said, “you thought I was a cop named O’Hara. You thought I hurt my head.”

Lozini got it right away; it was the heistman himself, the one he’d helped hunt down in the amusement park. The bastard had gotten out dressed like a cop, palming himself off as one of Lozini’s tame cops. “You son of a bitch,” Lozini said, squeezing the phone, leaning forward over his knees. He wanted to say that three good men had been killed that time, and that the heister still had to pay for it, but he held himself in check; things like that weren’t said on the phone. “I want to see you again,” Lozini said. He was breathing hard, as though he’d run up a flight of stairs.

“You owe me some money,” the voice said.

That one left Lozini with nothing to say at all. He stared at the sink on the opposite wall, speechless. He couldn’t begin to think what the son of a bitch was talking about.

“Lozini?”

“Where—” Lozini cleared his throat. “Where are you?”

“This is a local call. You’ve got my money, I came back for it.”

“What money, you son of a bitch? I don’t have any of your money, that’s not the score we have to settle.”

“The money I left behind. You got it and I want it. Do you give it to me easy, or do you give it to me after I make trouble?”

“I won’t give you anything,” Lozini yelled, “but a one-way ticket!”

The voice was staying calm. It said, “Do you know a guy named Karns?”

“What?”

“He runs things,” the voice said. “Your kind of thing.”

“No, he doesn’t, that’s— Oh, I know who you mean.” Then Lozini remembered to be mad again, and said, “I don’t care who you know. I’m after your head, and I’ll get it.”

“Call Karns,” the voice said.

“I don’t have to call any—”

“Call him and ask him,” the voice said, “what you should do if you owe some money to a guy named Parker.”

“You come over here,” Lozini said. “I’ll pay you off, all right.”

“Ask Karns,” the voice said. “I’ll call you tomorrow night, tell you where to leave the—”

“I’m not asking anybody anything!”

“You’re making a mistake,” the voice said.

Lozini slammed the phone down. An instant later he regretted that and picked the receiver up again, but the connection was broken. Maybe he could have figured out some way to get the bastard within arm’s reach. Parker, did he say his name was? All right.

Lozini made a quick call. His really good number-two man, Joe Caliato, had been killed in that amusement park, killed by this same son of a bitch coming around now, looking for money. His replacement, Ted Shevelly, was going to be Grade A some day, but that day hadn’t quite happened yet. Still, he’d be more than good enough for this.

“Hello?”

“Ted?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Lozini.”

“Ted, you remember that trouble at the amusement park, a couple years ago?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The fella that caused it, he says his name is Parker, says he’s in town. Just called me on the phone.”

“On the level?”

“I think so. I’d like to meet up with him, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, sir, sure do.”

“Think you can find him?”

“If he’s in town,” Ted Shevelly said, “I can find him.”

“Good boy.”

Lozini hung up, and sat brooding at the phone a minute longer. An itch in his brain wanted him to make a long-distance call to Karns, a man he hardly knew at all, but powerful nationally. But what did it matter what Karns said? If this bastard Parker was really under Karns’ protection, he’d come in here openly, with soldiers of his own to back him up. He was a four-flusher, that’s all, a cheap heist artist with a gun in his hand.

Besides, even if Karns or anybody else said it would be a good idea to give Parker his money back, it wouldn’t do any good. Because Lozini didn’t have the bastard’s money. He’d had that amusement park tossed from one end to the other two years ago, after Parker had gotten away, and there hadn’t been a sign of it. And you can’t give it back if you don’t have it.

Lozini got to his feet, left the cabana, and walked back over to where his guests were standing around the wok, taking turns stirring the vegetables inside. They were relieved when their host came back to join them.

“Thanks, fellows,” Lozini said, and took the wooden spoon back from Nate Simms and looked in the wok. The vegetables had mushed down to a kind of wet green mass, a steaming swamp. The steam smelled like mildew.