Cold Service

41

HAWK AND I spent the next two days in my office. We drank too much coffee. We ate too much Chinese food. We sat and we stood. We took turns standing and looking out the window at the women walking toward Boylston Street. I did a lot of scribbling on yellow legal-size pads.

"We gonna make sure that kid get his money," Hawk said every hour or so.

"We'll do that," I said every hour or so. "We just gotta figure out whose money he is going to get."

"We'll figure it out," Hawk said.

"We will," I said.

We both badly wanted a plan. I wanted one even more badly because Susan had suggested it, and I wanted it to work. In the middle of the afternoon on our second day of deliberations, the Gray Man came silently into the office and closed the door carefully behind him.

"I am in," he said, and sat down on the couch.

"In?" I said.

"The Boots Podolak organization," the Gray Man said. "I am now a member, and have already done them a service which ingratiates me."

"You kill somebody for them?" Hawk said.

The Gray Man nodded.

"They like that," Hawk said. "Nothing like scragging somebody, make people trust you."

"I know," the Gray Man said.

For a moment I felt it. A thing the Gray Man shared with Hawk.

"There's a balcony outside the window of Podolak's office in City Hall," the Gray Man said. "Somebody, some street soldier that's skimming, needs to be punished, Podolak goes out on the balcony. Somebody hands him a.22 target pistol. Podolak sticks it in his belt. Down below, they shove the miscreant out of a cellar door, onto the street, and tell him to run for it. Podolak lets him get halfway up the block and draws, and just before he's going to make it to the corner, shoots him dead center between the shoulder blades at a good hundred yards. Miscreant goes down and Podolak shoots him several more times to be sure. He never misses, I'm told."

"He demonstrated this to you?" I said.

"Yes. It's supposed to impress me," the Gray Man said, "and, of course, to frighten me."

Hawk nodded. He had no expression.

"How far up you think you can get."

"Just below the Ukrainians," the Gray Man said.

"What happen if the Ukrainians go away?" Hawk said.

"I'd be just below Podolak."

"And if he went away," Hawk said.

"I believe I could replace him."

Hawk nodded. He walked to my desk and picked up my yellow pad and stared at the names and notes I had written and crossed out. I'm not sure he saw them.

"Boots doesn't suspect you," I said.

"No. Podolak is not a worldly man. I tell him stories of my adventures in countries he has never been to."

"They true?" I said.

The Gray Man smiled.

"Of course," he said. "Podolak has never traveled. He is very impressed."

"Neither worldly nor smart," I said. "Boots is living testimony to what simple meanness can achieve."

Hawk put the yellow pad down and looked out the window.

"And good aim," the Gray Man said. "But he is more than mean."

"More?"

"He enjoys cruelty and the power that comes from being able to inflict it."

"You know him that well already?" I said.

"I have known him most of my life," the Gray Man said.

Hawk turned back from the window.

"Okay," he said, "we in business."

"You have a plan?" I said.

"I do," Hawk said.