Hush Money

5

Nolan didn’t know what to think. The situation was ideal, really, but he wasn’t sure how the Family would react to his wanting out.

It wasn’t as if he were someone important in the Family; in fact, it wasn’t as if he were someone in the Family at all. He was a minor employee who was probably more bother to them then he was worth, and he certainly wasn’t involved in anything important enough to make it matter whether or not he stayed.

Years ago it had been different. Years ago he’d left the Family and all hell had broken loose. He had been in a position then not so very different from the one he was in now. He’d been managing a nightclub on Rush Street for mob backers; today he was doing the same thing, essentially, with a motel and supper-club arrangement out in the Illinois countryside, sixty or seventy miles out of Chicago. But today, at least, they were leaving him alone, not trying to involve him in any of their bloodletting and bone-breaking bullshit. Fifteen, sixteen years ago they had asked him to leave his club on Rush Street and move into head-crushing, a field that didn’t particularly appeal to him.

He supposed his reputation for being a hard-nose, which had developed from his doing his own bouncing in that Rush Street joint, had convinced the Family high-ups that he’d make a good enforcer and that because of his administrative background in managing clubs he’d therefore have the potential to move up in the organization, a young exec who could start at the bottom and work up.

Except up was one place Nolan had no desire to go. Not in the Family, anyway. There were few things in life Nolan wouldn’t do for money, but killing people was one of them. Later on, when he’d become involved in full-scale, big-time heists, an occasional innocent bystander might get in the way of a bullet, sure. A cop, a nightwatchman could go down; that was part of his job and theirs. A fellow heister with ideas of double-cross on his mind might get blown away — fine. That was a hazard of war; he could live with that. Going up to some poor guy in a parking lot and putting a .45 behind his ear and blasting — that was something else again. That was psycho stuff, that was for the ice-water-in-the-veins boys, the animals, and he wanted no fucking part of it.

But the Family had decided that that was the way they wanted him to go, and to start him off, to make him a “made man,” they asked him to knock off a friend of his who worked with him at the club. This friend had evidently been messing around with some Family guy’s prize pussy and had earned himself a place on the shittiest shit list in town. Nolan said no on general principles, and besides, he couldn’t see knocking off a piece was worth knocking off a guy over and told them so. Told them he was going to tell his friend all about it if the hit wasn’t called off. And he was assured it would be. The next day his friend was found swimming in the river. And a couple of gallons of the river was found swimming in his friend.

So Nolan resigned from the Family. This is how Nolan resigned: he went to the office of the guy who’d ordered the hit — the same stupid goddamn guy who’d been trying so hard to get Nolan to kill people for money — and Nolan shot him through the head. For free. Or almost for free. Afterward Nolan and twenty thou from the Family till disappeared.

An open contract went out.

The open contract stayed open for a long time. Something like sixteen years, during which time Nolan moved into heisting. He’d shown a natural ability for organization, running that club for the Family (getting Rush Street’s perennial loser into the black in his first three months), and that same ability worked even more profitably for him as a professional thief. Nolan organized and led institutional robberies (banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks) and had a flawless record: a minimum of violence, a maximum of dollars. A Nolan heist was as precise and perfect as a well-performed ballet, as regimented and timed to the split-second as a military operation, with every option covered, every possibility of human error considered. It was the old Dillinger/Karpis school of professional robbery, with refinements, and it still worked good as ever. Perhaps better. No member of a Nolan heist had ever spent an hour behind bars — at least not in conjunction with anything Nolan had engineered.

A couple of years ago Nolan had heard that his Family troubles had cooled off. His source seemed reliable, and after all, it was into the second decade since all that happened, so why shouldn’t things cool off? He loosened up some of his precautions (the major one being to stay out of the Chicago area altogether) and had been doing preliminary work in Cicero on a bank job when some Family muscle spotted him and guns started going off. It took over a month to recover from that, and when he came out of hiding, recuperated, but weak and tired of getting shot at, he arranged a sitdown with the Family to negotiate an end to the goddamn war.

The sitdown hadn’t worked. There’d been more gunfire and more months of recuperating from Family-induced bullet wounds. But then something had happened. A change in regime in Chicago, a relatively bloodless Family coup, turned everything around. One day Nolan woke up and his Family enemies were gone and in their place was the new regime, who viewed Nolan, enemy of the former ruling class, as a comrade in arms.

As a reward of sorts, Nolan had been set up at the Tropical, a motel with four buildings (sixteen units each), two heated swimming pools (one outdoor, one in) and another central building that housed the supper club whose pseudo-Caribbean decor gave the place its name. Actually, the Tropical was a trial-run center where potential managers for similar but bigger Family operations were given a try. Nolan had been in the midst of just such a trial run when nearly half a million bucks of his (with which he was set to buy into one of those bigger Family operations) was stolen and eventually went up in smoke. Since his agreement with the Family had been to buy in and since he no longer could, Nolan was asked by Felix — the Family lawyer through whom Nolan had been doing all of his Family dealings of late — to stay on at the Tropical and supervise other trial runs, sort of manage the managers.

It was a terrific deal as far as work load compared to salary went. Pretty good money for sitting around bored, only Nolan didn’t like sitting around bored. In his opinion sitting around bored was boring as hell, and his ass got sweaty besides. He guessed maybe he’d been part of the active side too long to chuck it completely, even if he did find the prospect of no longer having to duck Family bullets a nice one.

Earlier this month Nolan had struck out in response to the boredom of the Tropical. The nephew of an old business partner of his had been tagging along with Nolan lately, and he and this kid, Jon, had pulled a heist in Detroit just last week that had run into some snags but eventually came out okay, resulting in a good chunk of change ($200,000 — in marked bills, unfortunately, but easily fenced at seventy cents on the dollar), and now Nolan was again in a position to buy in.

Only not with the Family. Because a condition of Nolan’s present employment with the Family was that he was not to engage in heists anymore. The Family had gone to great lengths to build a new identity for him, an identity that had everything from credit cards to college education, and they did not like their employees (those involved in the legitimate side of their operations, anyway) risking everything by doing something stupid.

Like pulling a heist.

So Nolan was frustrated. He had money again, but no place to spend it. He had a job again, managing a supper club and motel, which was ideal, but the job was numbing and thankless and paid okay but not really enough to suit him. He had his freedom again, with no one in particular trying to kill him, but it was an empty freedom. He was on a desert island with Raquel Welch and he couldn’t get it up.

He was sitting in the basement of Wagner’s house. The basement was remodeled. There was a bar at the end opposite the couch Nolan was sitting on. Between the bar and the couch most of the space was taken up by a big, regulation-size pool table. The lighting was dim, but there was a Tiffany-shade hanging lamp over the pool table you could turn on if need be. There was a dart-board, a poker table, a central circular metallic fireplace, all of which was to Nolan’s right. It was obviously a bachelor’s retreat, in this case an aging bachelor. Wagner had been married once but just for a short time, and that was a lot of years ago. There were framed prints of naked sexy women on the dark blue stucco walls: Vargas, Petty, Earl Moran. Good paintings, but very dated: Betty Grable-style women, Dorothy Lamour-style women. The fantasy of a generation that grew up without Playboy let alone Penthouse; the fantasy of a generation that masturbated to pictures of girls in bathing suits. The fantasy of Wagner’s generation, an old man’s generation.

Nolan’s generation.

Nolan was fifty years old and pissed off about it. Wagner was his friend, but Wagner irritated him, because Wagner was only a few years older than Nolan and was an old fucking man. Wagner was going on his third heart attack. Wagner’s doctor had told him to quit smoking. Wagner’s doctor had told him to quit drinking. Wagner had done neither, and was on his way to his third heart attack.

Wagner was down at the bar end of the room, building drinks. He was a small, thin, intense man who was trying intensely not to be intense any more. He had the pallor of a man who just got out of prison, though it had been maybe twenty-five years since his one prison term. Wagner was lucky he hadn’t spent more time in stir than that, the way Nolan saw it. Wagner had been a box-man, a professional safecracker, and, what’s more, he’d been the best and, as such, in demand; but instead of picking only the plums, Wagner had taken everything he could, every goddamn job that came his way. That was stupid, Nolan knew. You take only a few jobs a year and only the ones that smell absolutely 100 percent right. Otherwise you find yourself in the middle of a job as sloppy as Fibber McGee’s closet and afterward in a jail cell about as big. Otherwise you find yourself with a bunch of punks who afterward shoot you behind the ear rather than give you your split.

Of course Wagner’s skill contributed to keeping even the most ill-advised scores from being sloppy, and that same skill made him worth having around, so perhaps, Nolan conceded, perhaps Wagner had some assurance of not being crossed, even by punks. But none of that had mattered a damn to Wagner. Wagner had been the intense sort of guy who had to work, had to work all the time, much as possible, and Nolan knew the little man was lucky he was alive and out of stir. Lucky as hell.

Another thing about Wagner, he’d saved his money. Wagner had dreamed of retiring early and getting into something legitimate, more or less. It was a dream Nolan could understand; he had it himself. The difference was Nolan’s fifteen-year savings turned to so much air when a carefully-built cover got blown, making it impossible for him to go near the bank accounts where even now that money was making tens of thousands of dollars interest every year.

Wagner had been lucky. He got out early (age fifty) and with a nest egg so big Godzilla might’ve laid it. He bought the old Elks Club in Iowa City and turned it into a restaurant and nightclub combined. The old Elks building was three floors, counting the remodeled lower level, which Wagner converted into a nightclub below, supper-club above, and banquet room above that. It was Nolan’s dream come true, only Wagner’d made it work where Nolan hadn’t.

But Wagner’d made it work too well. Wagner went after the restaurant business with the same vengeance he had heisting. And at fifty-two he’d had his first heart attack. Slow down, the doctor said, among other things. At fifty-three he’d had his second heart attack. Slow down, goddamn it, the doctor said, among other things. And now, at fifty-four, he was on his way to his third and had, on the spur of the moment, invited his old friend Nolan over to ask him if he wanted to buy in and be his partner and take some of the load off and help him avoid that third and no doubt fatal heart attack.

Wagner looked relaxed, anyway. He was wearing a yellow sports shirt with pale gray slacks, like his complexion, only healthier. Nolan was dressed almost identically, though his sports shirt was blue and his pants brown.

Their clothes began and ended the similarity of the two men’s appearances. Wagner was white-haired, cut very short but lying down, like a butch that surrendered. His face was flat: his nose barely stuck out at all. It was a nebbish face, saved only by a giving, sincere smile. Nolan’s face, on the other hand, seemed uncomfortable when it smiled, as if smiling were against its nature. He was a tall man, lean but muscular and with a slight paunch from easy days of Tropical non-work. He had a hawkish look, high cheekbones and narrow eyes; perhaps an American Indian was in his ancestry somewhere. His hair was shaggy and black and widow’s peaked, with graying sideburns. He wore a mustache, a droopy, gunfighter mustache that underlined his naturally sour expression. Nolan did have a sense of humor, but he didn’t want it getting around.

Wagner skirted the pool table, almost bumping into it, bringing the drinks back from the bar too fast.

“Take it easy, Wag,” Nolan said, taking the Scotch from his friend. “I’m out of breath just watching you.”

“Shit, I’m just excited to see you again after so long. Didn’t Planner ever mention I was in town?”

“I guess maybe he did once. But it slipped my mind.”

Wagner and Nolan had run into each other on the street this afternoon, in Iowa City. Planner was the business associate of Nolan’s, dead now, whose nephew Jon had been Nolan’s companion on his last three “adventures,” as Jon might put it.

“I’m sorry as hell about Planner. I guess I was the only one at his funeral from the old days. The only one there who knew him before he retired.”

Planner, too, had been active in professional thievery and had retired — or semi-retired — twenty years ago. In his remaining years, Planner (as his name would imply) had continued to help Nolan and other pros in the planning of jobs, using his Iowa City antique shop as a front.

“I never did get the story on how Planner got it, Nolan. I mean, I don’t buy him dying of old age, for Christ’s sake. He was too tough an old bird for that. I wish I had his ticker.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly pass away in his sleep.”

“That’s how it sounded in the paper.”

“It better have, considering what I paid out to Doc Ainsworth for the death certificate.”

“What really happened?”

“He was watching some money for me, and some guys came in and shot him and took it.”

“Jesus. Did you find those guys? And your money?”

“The guys are dead. Or one of them is, anyway. The other one was what you might call an unwitting accomplice, and I let him go. I’m getting soft in my old age.”

“What about the money?”

“Gone. Irretrievable.”

“Well, what money was it? I mean, from one job or what?”

“It was all of my money, Wag. Everything I had.”

Wagner stroked his thin gray face, and Nolan could see embarrassment flickering nervously in the man’s eyes. Embarrassment because Wagner had earlier, on impulse, proposed to Nolan that he join with Wagner in the restaurant business — but that proposal had been made on Wagner’s assumption that Nolan would have a healthy nest egg of his own.

Nolan took him off the hook. “I’m not broke, Wag, if that’s what your latest heart attack’s about.”

Wagner grinned. “Jesus, Nolan, I’m sorry if I...”

“Fuck it. Money, I got. Not as much as I’d like, but enough to buy in, I think. I think I can muster seventy grand.”

“Oh, well, no sweat, then.”

“If I bought in, I’d want it rigged so I could eventually take over the entire ownership. I want my own place, Wag.”

“I know. That’s how I used to think. It’s how I still think, but I got to slow down, Nolan, you know that. I’m thinking maybe I’ll spend the winters in Florida, or something. You lay some heavy money on me and I can go buy me a condominium and stay down there half the year or something, you know? I got to slow down.”

Wagner said all that in about five seconds, which indicated to Nolan how much chance there was of Wagner slowing down. He could picture the little guy running along the shore in Florida grabbing up seashells like a son of a bitch.

“Look, Wag, this appeals to me. You don’t know how this appeals to me. But I got a funny situation going with Chicago.”

“I thought you said...”

“Yeah. Everything’s straight. All the guys who wanted me dead are dead themselves. But I’m in with these guys, the new ones, and they been treating me pretty good. I got a not bad set-up with them as it is. And there’s some complications you don’t know about that I can’t tell you about.”

“But you will think about it.”

“Sure I will.”

“I’d like to have you aboard, Nolan.”

“I know you would. I’d like to be aboard, Wag. The only thing I don’t like about you, Wag, is it makes me so fucking tired watching you take it easy.”

“Well, I am taking it easy, Nolan, damnit.”

“Then what are you shaking your goddamn foot for, Wag?”

Wagner’s legs were crossed and he was shaking his foot. He stopped. He grinned at Nolan. “You buy in and I’ll take it easy. You’ll see.”

“Well, I want to be sole owner of the place, Wag, but I’d rather buy you out eventually, than have you die on me and leave me the damn place in your will. So quit running life like it’s the goddamn four-minute mile or something, will you?”

“Jesus, Nolan. Now you’re a philosopher.”

“It’s just my arteries hardening. It goes with senility.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“Fifty.”

“You look younger. You look like you always did.”

“Not with my clothes off I don’t. I mean, I’m not going to show you, but take my word for it. I got enough scars you could chart a map on me.”

“Hey, you want to check my books over, Nolan, look into how I been running the place?”

“Let’s think about it first. If I seriously think I’ll want to buy in, then we’ll go into that. How about getting me another Scotch?”

“Sure!”

“But take your fucking time, Wag. Nobody’s holding a stopwatch over you.”

While Wagner was building new drinks, the phone rang. Fortunately it was on the bar, otherwise, Nolan supposed, Wag would’ve gone running after it like a fireman responding to the bell.

“For you,” Wagner said. “It’s that lad, Planner’s nephew.”

Nolan went to the phone. “What is it, Jon?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, Nolan, but you better get over here right away. There’s some guy with a gun here who wants to talk to you.”

“Christ, kid, what the hell’s happening? You okay?”

“Yeah, I got things in control, I guess. But I’ll feel better about it with you here.”

“I’m on my way.”

He slammed the phone down, said, “Got to be going, Wag, catch you later,” and headed up the stairs two at a time.

From down below him Wagner said, “Hey, Nolan! What’s the rush?”

6

The floor was covered with comic strips. Old Sunday pages from the thirties, forties, early fifties, spread across the floor of his room like a four-color, pulp-paper carpet, but God help anybody who dared walk across that carpet; Jon’d kill ’em. Hell, some of the pages were so brittle, around the edges anyway, that heavy breathing was enough to turn precious paper into worthless flakes.

In fact, that was a problem Jon was doing his best to take care of now. He was sitting in the middle of the strip-covered floor, sitting like an Indian waiting for the pipe to be passed to him, and was painstakingly trimming the yellowed edges of the pages with barber shears, returning each strip, when properly trimmed, to its respective stack. He had already cut the pages up and sorted them, stacking each character individually — Li’l Abner, Terry and the Pirates, Joe Palooka, Alley Oop, dozens of others. Later, on another day, he would tackle the oppressive job of arranging them chronologically. Even a diehard comics freak like Jon had his breaking point, after all.

Jon was twenty-one years old. He was short — barely over five and a half feet tall — but with the build of a fullback in miniature; he’d worked his tail off to get in shape, through Charles Atlas muscle-building courses (anytime a bully wanted to kick sand in Jon’s face, Jon was ready) and continued on with isometrics and lifting weights. His hair was brown and curly — a white man’s Afro — his eyes blue, his nose turned up in a manner he considered piggish but most girls, thank God, found it cute. He was wearing his usual apparel: worn jeans, tennis shoes, T-shirt with satirical superhero Wonder Warthog on the front.

His life was wrapped up in comic art. He was an aspiring cartoonist himself and a devoted collector of comic books and strips and related memorabilia. He had no profession, outside of comics, having dropped out of college several years ago because of a lack of funds. He’d intended to go back when he got the cash, but when he finally did get it (from that bank robbery he’d been a part of, with Nolan) he’d had so much money that going back to school seemed irrelevant.

The comic-strip “carpet” Jon was presently in the midst of was a fitting accompaniment to the rest of the room. The walls were all but papered with posters of famous comics characters, which Jon had drawn himself: Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, Batman, recreated in pen and ink and watercolor, uncanny facsimiles of their original artists’ style. The room was a bright and colorful shrine to comic art, and had come a long way from when Jon’s uncle Planner had first turned it over to him, a dreary, dusty storeroom in the back of the antique shop, its gray walls and cement floor straight out of a penal colony bunk-house. Jon had changed all that, first with his homemade posters, then with some throw rugs, circles of cartoony color splashed across the cold cement floor; and his uncle had donated a genuine antique walnut chest of drawers and almost-matching bed with finely carved headboard, neither of which Jon had spared from the comic art motif: bright decals of Zippy the Pinhead and the Freak Brothers, and taped-on examples of Jon’s own comic art, clung to the fancy wood irreverently. Boxes of comics, each book plastic-bagged and properly filed, stood three-deep hugging the walls, and a file cabinet in one corner was a vault that guarded his most precious comic artifacts.

On the wall next to his drawing easel was one of the few noncomic art posters in the room: Lee Van Cleef decked out in his “man in black” spaghetti western regalia, staring across the room with slanty, malevolent eyes. Jon felt the resemblance between Van Cleef and Nolan was almost spooky, though Nolan himself was unimpressed. Nolan was, in many ways, a fantasy of Jon’s come to life: a tough guy in the Van Cleef or Clint Eastwood tradition and a personification of the all-knowing, indestructible super-heroes of the comic books as well.

Initially Jon had been almost awestruck in Nolan’s presence. It was like coming face to face with a figment of his imagination and was unnerving as hell. Now, however, after two years of on-and-off close contact with the man, Jon realized Nolan was just another human being, an interesting and singular human being, yes, but a human being, imperfect, complete with human frailties and peculiarities. Take Nolan’s tightness for example. Monetary tightness, that is, not alcoholic. Nolan was a penny pincher, a money hoarder whose Scrooge-like habits were too ingrained to be thrown off even when on two separate damn occasions his miser’s life savings had been completely wiped out.

But the man was tough, no denying that. Jon knew of twice when Nolan had pulled through when he had enough bullets in him to provide ammunition for a banana-republic revolution. That alone was proof of the man’s toughness and perhaps indicated a certain shopworn indestructibility.

Nolan was in Iowa City, but Jon hadn’t seen him yet. He’d called Jon in the early afternoon to say that he was in town and that he’d stopped at the Hamburg Inn to grab a sandwich, where he’d run into an old friend named Wagner, with whom he was now spending the evening. Tomorrow Jon and Nolan would be driving in to Des Moines to sell some hot money to a fence — the money from the Detroit heist, which was all in marked bills.

Jon was getting a little groggy. The images of Li’l Abner, Alley Oop and company were starting to swim in front of his eyes, and maybe it was time he took a break and sacked out a few hours.

He checked his watch (early 1930s Dick Tracy), and it was almost nine-thirty. He’d been at this since just after lunch. He’d driven out to the country this morning to pick up the strips from an old farmer named Larson who had boxes of funnies up in his attic, stored there since the childhood of his two long since grown daughters and forgotten ’til Jon’s ad, seeking old comic books and strips, came out in the local tabloid shopper. Jon had all but stolen the pages — there were thousands of them, easily worth a quarter to a buck per page — and felt almost guilty about it. But the old guy seemed tickled as sin to get fifty bucks in return for a bunch of yellowing old funny papers, so what the hell? As soon as he had finished a quick lunch at the Dairy Queen across the street from the antique shop, Jon had gone to work, cutting up the pages and stacking them for future, more thorough sorting.

There was a reason, he knew, for his going at the project with such manic intensity. Every time something went haywire in his life, he turned to his hobby, to comics, spending more than he should, both time and money. Collecting old comic books was no kiddie game; it was a rich man’s hobby, roughly similar to the restoration of old automobiles but potentially more expensive. He’d gotten in the habit as a kid, when he was living with first one relative and then another, while his mother (who liked to call herself a chanteuse) toured around playing piano and singing in cheap bars. He’d never lived in one town long enough to make any friends to speak of. The relatives he stayed with, for the most part, provided hostile quarters where his was just one more mouth to feed and not a mouth that rated high on the priority list either. So he’d gotten into comics, a cheap ticket to worlds of fantasy infinitely more pleasant than the drab soap opera of his reality. Ever since then, he had turned to comics for escape. He was, in a way, a comic-book junkie. He needed his daily dose of four-color fantasy just as a heroin addict needs his hit of smack and for similar reasons. And prices.

But who could put a price tag on escape, anyway? To Jon, comics were the only happiness money could buy, a physically harmless “upper” he could pop to his heart’s content.

Take yesterday, for example. He’d gone over to see Karen. Karen was the thirty-one-year-old divorcee he’d been screwing for going on two years now. She had brown hair (lots of it — wild and flowing and fun to get lost in) and the sort of firm, bountiful boobs Jon had always hoped to get to know first-hand. She was great company, both in and out of bed, and looked and acted perhaps ten years younger than her age, while at the same time being very together, very mature, mature enough to run a business (a candle shop below her downtown Iowa City apartment) that was making her disgustingly wealthy. Sounds terrific, right? A rich, fantastic-looking woman, with a beautiful body and a mind to match, as faithful and devoted to Jon as John Wayne was to the flag, a woman absolutely without a fault.

Or almost.

She did have one fault. The fault’s name was Larry.

Larry was her ten-year-old, red-haired, freckled-face pride and joy. Larry was the one thing about Karen that Jon didn’t like. Jon hated Larry in fact. Larry was a forty-year-old man hiding out in a ten-year-old’s body. Larry schemed and manipulated and did everything in his considerable power to break up his mommy and Jon.

And yesterday he had damn near succeeded.

Yesterday Larry had been sitting across the room in Karen’s apartment, staring at Jon with those shit-eating brown eyes, saucer-size brown eyes like the waifs in those godawful Keane paintings, and he gave Jon the finger. The goddamn kid just sat there and out of the blue thrust his middle finger in the air and waved it at Jon with a brazen defiance only ten-year-olds and Nazis can muster. Karen was in the other room making lunch. Jon glanced toward the kitchen to make sure Karen wasn’t looking. He got up and went over and grabbed the. finger in his fist and whispered, “Don’t ever finger me again, you little turd, or I’ll break your goddamn finger off and feed it to you.” Jon let all that sink in, then released Larry’s finger and returned to his position on the couch, proud of himself; he’d handled the situation well. Nolan would’ve approved.

Suddenly Larry began to cry.

Suddenly Larry began to scream.

And Karen came rushing in, saying, what’s the matter, honey? “He hurt me! He hurt me! He hurt my hand and called me a little turd, Mommy! He said he’d break my goddamn arm, Mommy!”

Well, Jon had insisted that he hadn’t said he’d break Larry’s goddamn arm, that he’d said he’d break Larry’s goddamn finger, and he had tried to explain his side of the story, but Karen hadn’t believed him; she’d gotten teary-eyed and indignant and ordered Jon out of the apartment, and that was yesterday and he hadn’t heard from her since. He had tried to call her, but every time he did he got Larry and Larry would hang up on him. So Jon had decided to let the scene cool, and he’d patch things up later.

For right now, he’d decided, the best thing to do was drown his sorrows in the comics. Escape to a brighter, more simple world. And so he found himself floating in a sea of Sunday funnies, his fingers dark with their ink, his butt cramped from sitting so long, his back aching from bending over so much, and it was time to get up and have something to eat and sack out awhile.

He made his way out of the room and into the larger outer room of the antique shop. It was getting dusty out there, and he would have to get around to cleaning up a little. He’d kept the shop closed since his uncle’s death a few months ago, and as he had no intention of maintaining his uncle’s antique-selling front, had been meaning to contact some buyers to sell out his uncle’s stock. But he hadn’t got around to that, either. In time, in time.

He went upstairs, to the remodeled upper floor and its pine-panelled walls and thick carpeting. (“I work all day downstairs with the old,” his Uncle Planner used to say, “so I live at night around the new.” Planner had remodeled the apartment-like upper floor four times in fifteen years.) It had taken Jon a while to be able to get some enjoyment out of the pleasant, all but plush upper floor. These rooms had been his uncle’s living quarters, and ever since his uncle’s murder he’d had a creepy feeling, a ghoulish sort of feeling, whenever he spent any time upstairs. But he was pretty much over that now. He went to the refrigerator, got a Coke and the makings of a boiled-ham sandwich, went into the living room and sat in front of the TV and watched and ate.

But TV was lousy, some phony cop show, so when he finished his sandwich and Coke, he switched off the set and stretched out on the couch and drifted off to sleep in a matter of seconds. He dreamed he was sorting and cutting and stacking comic strips, and pretty soon somebody nudged him awake.

“Uh, Nolan?” he said.

But it wasn’t Nolan.

Jon’s eyes came into slow focus, and he saw a mousy little guy with a mousy little mustache, wearing an expensive dark-blue suit that was a shade too big for him, tailor-made or not. The guy’s eyes were so wide set you had to look at one at a time, and his nose was long, skinny, and slightly off-center. The extensive pockmarks on his ash-colored, sunken cheeks were like craters on the surface of the moon, and his teeth were cigarette-stained and looked like a sloppy shuffle. Jon put that all together and it spelled ugly, but it was more than that. It was frighteningly ugly, a strange, sullen, scary face that more than offset the guy’s lack of size, a face calculated to give a gargoyle the shakes.

“I ain’t Nolan,” the guy said. “Where is Nolan?”

The guy’s suitcoat was open, and Jon looked in and saw that one of the reasons the suit was too big for the guy was that the guy didn’t want the bulge of the gun under his arm showing. It was a revolver — a long-barrel .38, like Nolan always carried — and it was in a brown leather shoulder holster that was hand-tooled, Western-style.

“Wake up, kid. I said, where’s Nolan?”

Jon hit tie guy in the nose. He hit the guy in the nose with his forehead. That was a trick Nolan had taught him. Nolan had said that one thing people don’t expect to get hit with is a head. Nolan had pointed out that your head — your forehead, anyway — is hard as hell, a great natural weapon, and it doesn’t hurt you much to use it as a bludgeon, and if you strike your opponent’s weak spots, like the bridge of the nose or one of the temples, you can mess him up bad before he knows what hit him.

The guy toppled backward, one hand clutching his nose, the other grabbing for the holstered gun. Jon was still only half awake, but he lurched at the guy and fumbled toward that holstered gun himself, still not entirely convinced he wasn’t dreaming all this.

The sleepiness beat him. Jon was still fumbling after the gun when he felt something cold and round and hard jam into his Adam’s apple. His hand was down in the empty holster before he realized the guy was jamming the gun barrel in his throat.

“Get offa me, you little fucker,” the guy said. “Get the fuck off!”

Jon got off.

“I got a fuckin’ nose bleed, thanks to you, you little cocksucker. Get me some fuckin’ Kleenex, for Christ’s sake.”

Jon was scared, but he knew enough not to let it show, thanks again to Nolan. He said, not without some difficulty as the gun barrel was still prodding his throat. “Try not to bleed on my carpet, will you? Try not to make a mess.”

The guy shoved Jon away and stepped back. “Fuck you, you little brat. Get me a Kleenex before I blow your fuckin’ balls off.”

“The Kleenex is in the bathroom.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll be following you, you fuckin’ little shit.”

Jon led the guy into the bathroom, withdrew some Kleenex from the box on the john and handed them over. The guy held them to his nose and, with an orgasmic sigh of pleasure, of relief, lowered his guard just enough to give Jon an opening, which he used to do two things in quick succession. First, he reached up and latched onto the shower curtain rod and brought the whole works down around the little guy. Second, he brought a knee up and smashed the guy in the balls.

That was something else Nolan had advised him to do. When you fight somebody, Nolan had said more than once, you can’t beat hitting ’em in the balls — assuming, of course, they aren’t women.

This guy was no woman. He was on the floor tangled up with the shower curtain and rod doing an agonized dance, screaming to beat the band. The gun was loose and mixed up in the curtain somewhere, and Jon found it and retreated to the stool, where he sat and waited for the guy to get over it. It took a while.

The guy’s nose was still bleeding, blood getting all over everything, the curtain, floor, the expensive blue suit. Jon tossed him some Kleenex, but the guy thought Jon was trying to be a smart-ass and grabbed for Jon’s leg. Jon kicked him in the head. Not hard. Just enough.

When he woke up, the guy put hand on forehead as if checking for a fever and said, “Jesus shit. What makes a fuckin’ little punk like you such a hard-ass, is what I wanna know?”

Jon shrugged, enjoying the tough-guy role to an extent, but not completely past being scared.

The guy sat up, rearranged himself, got the shower curtain pushed off to one side and said, “Look, kid. I didn’t come lookin’ for no fuckin’ trouble.”

And Jon laughed. “Oh, you didn’t come looking for trouble. Well, I didn’t understand that before. Could you explain one detail for me? Could you explain why you didn’t just knock instead of breaking in and scaring the piss out of me?”

“Listen, I came to talk to Nolan, not some fuck-ass punk kid.”

“You should’ve thought of that before you let the fuck-ass punk kid take your gun away from you. Now why do you want to see Nolan? What do you want him for?”

“I don’t even know who the fuck you are, kid. What’s Nolan to you, anyway?”

“I’m a friend of his. What’s he to you?”

The guy shrugged. “He ain’t jack-shit to me, kid. I never met the guy.”

“So why do you want him?”

“Somebody sent me to get him.”

“Get him?”

“Fetch him, I mean. Jesus. Hey, give me some more Kleenex. This fuckin’ nose is still bleedin’.”

Jon did, then said, “So who sent you?”

The guy hesitated, thought a moment; his mouth puckered under the mousy mustache, like an asshole.

“Who?” Jon repeated, giving emphasis with a motion of the .38.

“Take it easy with that fuckin’ thing! You wanna kill somebody? Felix sent me.”

“Felix,” Jon said. “Felix, that lawyer for the Family?”

“That’s right.”

“Then we’re back around to my first question: Why the hell didn’t you just knock?”

“I knocked but you didn’t fuckin’ answer, that’s why! I saw the light upstairs and used a credit card to trip the lock and get in, and all of a sudden you’re hitting me in the fuckin’ nose with your fuckin’ head! Jesus.”

“Well, Nolan’s not here right now.”

“I got to see him. Felix’s got to see him.”

“Something urgent? You want Nolan to go to Chicago right away, then?”

“More urgent than that, kid. Felix came himself. He’s waitin’ out at the Howard Johnson’s. Something’s come up that can’t fuckin’ wait, kid, so shake it, will you?”

“I know where Nolan is. I can call him.”

“Then call him, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okay. You can get up now, if you want. If you can.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can get up, all right. You ain’t that fuckin’ tough, you little punk.”

“I thought we were on friendly terms now. I thought you weren’t looking for trouble.”

“Friendly terms, my fuckin’ ass. You best keep your balls covered when you see me comin’, kid. I like to even my scores.”

“Then you better not forget to give me a nose bleed, too, while you’re at it.”

“Fuck you. Give me my gun, why don’t you, before you shoot your dick off or something?”

“When Nolan gets here. Let’s go out and call him. Come on, get up. This time I’ll be following you, remember.”

And Jon, gun in hand, followed the guy into the living room, deposited him on the couch. Jon pulled a chair up opposite the guy so he could face him, keep an eye on him, and used the phone on the coffee table between them. Jon’s hand trembled around the receiver. He was acting tough, as Nolan would’ve wanted him to. He’d handled himself well, he knew that. But he was trembling just the same.

7

Nolan pulled the Eldorado in next to a Lincoln Continental and got out, confused.

The Eldorado, which was gold, and the Continental, which was dark blue, took up all three of the slantwise spaces alongside the antique shop. Nolan’s Eldorado was actually the Tropical’s. His ever owning a Cadillac was unlikely, because he saw them as the automotive equivalent of an alcoholic, swilling gas with no thought of tomorrow. As far as he was concerned, a Cadillac was just a Pontiac with gland trouble. Still, being behind the wheel of one for the past couple of months had given him a feeling of — what? — prestige he guessed, and seeing the Lincoln Continental was somehow a sobering experience.

Neither car made much sense in the context of the old antique shop, which was a two-story white clapboard structure bordering on the rundown, whose junk-filled showcase windows wouldn’t seem likely to attract even the most eccentric of wealthy collectors. In fact the shop looked more like a big old house than a place of business, which was only right because, other than the Dairy Queen and grade school across the way and the gas station next door, this was a residential neighborhood, a quiet, middle-class Iowa City street lined with trees still thick with red and copper leaves. The inhabitants of this shady lane would’ve been shocked to know of the different sort of shadiness attached to various activities centered for some years now in the harmless-looking old shop. This thought occurred to Nolan as he opened the trunk of the Eldorado, reaching behind the spare tire for the holstered Smith & Wesson .38 stowed there. Not that the thought worried him. It was late now, approaching midnight, the street was empty, no one at all who might notice him. Even the gas station across the alley was closed. He shut the trunk, slung on the shoulder holster, grabbed his sports coat out of the back seat, slipped into the coat.

He’d immediately recognized the Lincoln Continental as Felix’s, but that only served to confuse him further. What in hell was Felix doing in Iowa City? The answer to that was obvious enough: he was here to see Nolan. But why? No obvious answer there.

No pleasant one, anyway.

The side door to the shop wasn’t locked. Nolan withdrew the .38 and went in, cautious to the point of paranoia. There was always the chance that Jon had lost control of the situation since calling or, worse yet, that Jon had been forced to make the call in the first place. Nolan doubted the latter, as he felt pretty sure Jon would’ve sneaked a warning into his words somewhere, some indication, implication of trouble, and Nolan had been over Jon’s words and their inflections a dozen times in the course of the ten-minute drive from Wagner’s house out on the edge of town.

But being careful never hurt, and when the footing wasn’t sure, Nolan was the most careful man alive. Because alive was how he intended to stay.

“Nolan?” Jon called from upstairs. “Is that you, Nolan?”

“It’s me.”

“Come on up.”

Nolan leaned against the wall at the bottom of the stairwell. He said, “How you hanging, kid?”

“Loose, Nolan. Nice and easy and loose. Come on up.”

That convinced him. Jon’s voice had nothing in it but relief Nolan was there.

And once upstairs he found that Jon did indeed have things well in hand. Sitting on the couch was a rat-faced little mustached man, his blue suit cut large in the coat to accommodate shoulder holster and gun, though the latter was presently being trained on its owner by Jon, and the way the suit was rumpled it was apparent the guy had been on the floor a couple of times lately and not making love, either. Also the guy was holding some Kleenex to his nose and had a generally battered look about him. Nolan put his gun away and Jon said hello.

“You’re getting better all the time, kid,” Nolan said, unable to repress a grin. “I got to learn to stop underestimating you.”

Jon, too, was unable to suppress his reaction, getting an aw-shucks look, which faded quickly as he said, “I’m not so sure you did underestimate me, Nolan. The first time I fouled up. I hit him in the nose—” Jon bobbed his head forward to indicate what he’d hit the guy with — “but he bounced back and it wasn’t till I kicked him in the balls that I finally got him.”

Nolan nodded. “That’ll do it.”

The rat-faced guy lowered the Kleenex and said, “You two fuckers gonna gloat all night, or can we get over to the Howard Johnson’s and see Felix? He’s been waiting half an hour. What do you say?”

“Felix sent you?” Nolan said, acting surprised. “I don’t believe it. And you say he’s waiting to see me out at the Howard Johnson’s? I don’t believe that, either.”

“I wouldn’t fuck around, I were you,” the guy said. “You think Felix came all the way from Chicago just to check out the fuckin’ Howard John son’s.”

“Maybe he likes the clams,” Nolan said.

“I’m laughin’,” the guy said. “I were you, Nolan, I’d shake a fuckin’ leg.”

“Don’t call me Nolan,” Nolan said.

“Oh? Why the fuck not?”

“Because,” Nolan said, “I don’t know you and you don’t know me, and it’s an arrangement that’s worked fine ’til now, so leave it alone.”

Jon said, “Nolan, I had no idea he works for that Felix character. I mean, the guy broke in the house and came up on me when I was asleep, and I saw his gun and...”

“You did the right thing. It’s just a little surprising Felix would send such low-caliber help around. I didn’t know the Family was hurting so bad.”

“Hey, Nolan,” the guy said, “tell you what. How ’bout you suck my dick and choke on it?”

Nolan went over and grabbed the guy’s ear and twisted. “Be polite,” he said.

“Christ! Awright, awright! Christ almighty, let go my fuckin’ ear! Here on out, I’m Emily fuckin’ Post!”

“Okay,” Nolan said and let go of the ear.

The guy sat with one hand on his ear and the other covering his nose and eyes with Kleenex; if he’d had another hand to cover his mouth, he could’ve been all three monkeys.

Nolan reached over and picked the phone off the coffee table and tossed it on the guy’s lap.

“Make a call,” Nolan said. “I want to talk to Felix.”

“Call him yourself, motherfucker!”

“I thought I told you to be polite.”

“Okay, okay! Shit. Jesus.” The guy stopped to look at lie Kleenex and decided his nose was no longer bleeding. He composed himself. He dialed the phone and when he got the desk clerk he asked for Felix’s room.

“This is Cotter,” the guy said. “Well, I’m here with Nolan now is where I am.... Yeah, at the antique shop... Well, I had a little trouble... No, just a little trouble. I guess you might say I didn’t handle this the best I could... Yeah, I guess you could say that too. Look, Nolan wants to talk to you.” Cotter covered the mouthpiece and said, “Hey, I was supposed to bring you out to see him right away, and now I’m calling up and you’re wanting to talk to him and it’s making me look bad. Give me a goddamn break and don’t go into the, you know, little hassles we been havin’. I mean I come out on the shitty end of the stick anyway, right? A fuckin’ half-hour nosebleed, you twistin’ my fuckin’ ear off my head, and I’m sittin’ here with my balls needin’ a fuckin’ ice pack or something, so give me a goddamn break, what do you say?”

“Sure,” Nolan said and took the phone.

“Nolan?” Felix said. “What’s going on there?”

“Hello, Felix,” Nolan said. “Say, are you missing an incompetent asshole? One turned up here.”

“Nolan, I apologize,” Felix said. “I don’t know what’s been happening there, but you have my apologies. This was a rather hastily contrived affair and I regret its being so rough around the edges.”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean, Felix?”

“I have a room here at the motel, Nolan. This is a very important matter I’ve come to discuss with you, a matter of utmost urgency. Can you come out here straight away so we can put our heads together?”

“Well, I tell you, Felix. We put our heads together maybe four or five times so far this year and each time it’s in a motel room. Every damn time I see you it’s in a motel room. I start to feeling like some cheap whore meeting a businessman on his lunch hour.”

Felix laughed at that, trying to keep the laugh from sounding nervous, and came back jokingly, “Now how can you compare yourself to a whore, Nolan, with the kind of money you make?”

“Call girl, then. What’s in a name? Either way you get screwed.”

“Nolan...”

One nice thing about Felix was that he was afraid of Nolan. Nolan had learned early on that intimidation was his most effective means of dealing with Felix, which was one of the big advantages of going through a middle-man lawyer instead of dealing with the Family direct.

“Felix, maybe you don’t think it’s important, maybe you don’t think it’s worth talking about, but when you send a guy around who breaks into my friend’s house and sticks a gun in my friend’s face, I guess I get a little — I don’t know — perturbed, you could say. So I don’t think I want to come see you at Howard Johnson’s, Felix, whether you come all the way from Chicago to see me or China or where. You come here and we’ll talk, if I’m over being perturbed by that time.”

“Nolan, I don’t even have the car here.”

“Take a cab, Felix. Hitchhike. Walk. Do what you want.”

Nolan hung up.

Cotter said, “Thanks a whole fuckin’ bunch, pal. Now I’m really gonna get my fuckin’ ass fried. Thanks, fucker, thanks for—”

“Jon, take that Kleenex he’s been bleeding in and stick it in his mouth, will you? I’m tired of listening to him.”

“Hey,” Cotter said. “Here on out, I’m a deaf mute.” And he covered his mouth.

Nolan dragged a chair over by the window and had Cotter sit in it.

“You watch for Felix,” he told him. “And let us know when he’s here.”

So Cotter sat by the window and Nolan and Jon sat at the table in the kitchen, from which they could see Cotter plainly through the open archway.

Jon asked Nolan if he wanted a beer, and Nolan said no, he’d been drinking Scotch all night and maybe he ought to have some coffee before Felix got there. Jon fixed instant coffee and had a cup himself. They didn’t say much for the next few minutes, just sitting and drinking their coffee and enjoying the silence. Finally Nolan spoke, in a soft tone that their guest in the outer room wasn’t likely to pick up, “Kid, you did all right out there.”

“Yeah, well I hope I didn’t screw things up for you with that Family lawyer.”

“I can handle Felix. He ought to know better than to send the likes of that around.”

“How was your friend?”

“Wagner? Okay for a guy whose hobby is heart attacks.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He’s one of those guys who pushes himself all the time. Runs all day, then goes home and runs in place. He owns that restaurant downtown, that Elks Club they converted.”

“I hear it’s really something. Seafood restaurant, isn’t it?”

“Haven’t been in there myself.” Nolan sipped his coffee. “He asked me in.”

“He asked you in? He asked you to buy in, you mean, as a partner?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what.”

“You going to do it?”

“Don’t know. Might be hard. You know where I stand with the Family.”

Jon lowered his voice even further. “You mean that if they found out about Detroit they might get pissed off? Is that what you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“But don’t you want out of the Tropical? Aren’t you getting bored with that?”

“The word is numb.”

Out in the other room, Cotter said, “A cab’s pulling in. Felix is getting out.”

By the time Nolan got downstairs and outside, Felix was sitting in the back seat of the Continental, waiting with the door open for Nolan to join him. The plush interior seemed large even for a Continental, but perhaps the diminutive Felix just made it seem that way. The lawyer was wearing a gray suit, so perfectly in style he might have picked it up at the tailor’s that afternoon; his shirt was deep blue and his tie light blue. He had a Miami suntan, and a face so ordinary, so bland, if you looked away for a second you forgot it. His hair was prematurely gray and cut in a sculpted sort of way that made it look like an expensive wig. Felix was older than thirty and younger than fifty, but Nolan wouldn’t lay odds where exactly.

Nolan leaned into the car and said, “So we’re out of the motel and into the back seat. You really think that’s an improvement, Felix?”

“Nolan, please,” Felix said, his annoyance from the inconvenience Nolan had caused him showing around the edges of his voice. “Can’t you set aside your perverse sense of humor for the moment so we can get on to business at hand?”

Felix was right.

Nolan got in, shut the door, settled back to listen.

Felix cleared his throat, folded his hands like a minister counseling one of his congregation. “I’m here to make a proposition, Nolan. I’m going to have to be vague at first, and I hope you’ll bear with me. The Family is facing a, well, sensitive situation, and I can’t go into detail until I feel reasonably sure you’ll be along for the ride.”

Vague is right, Nolan thought, but he didn’t say anything.

“Once we get into the... problem at hand, I think you’ll understand my caution. Before I do, may I ask a question? May I ask what your financial situation is currently?”

Nolan hesitated. Could it be Felix knew about the Detroit heist, and that this meeting was a pronouncement to the effect that Nolan was once again in the bad graces of the Chicago Family? No, Nolan thought, that couldn’t be it; otherwise, what was that bullshit about wanting Nolan “along for the ride”?

“You know my situation, Felix,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” Felix said. “If you’ll excuse my bluntness, it can be stated this simply: You’re broke.”

Good, Nolan thought. They don’t know about Detroit; this has nothing to do with that.

“If not ‘broke’ exactly,” Felix continued, “your savings from these few months at the Tropical can’t be much to write home about, eh, Nolan?” And he laughed at his little joke.

Nolan didn’t; he just nodded.

“You’ve shown a great capability at the Tropical, Nolan. Which was of course no surprise to anyone in the Family. As you know, before, when you were more financially solvent, the Family was anxious to have your participation in a more important, more rewarding operation. But then you had some money troubles and — well, I don’t have to go into that, do I? Nolan... are you familiar with the Hacienda outside of Joliet?”

“Sure.”

The Hacienda was a resort purporting to be a slice of “old Mexico,” with such rustic old Mexican features as two golf courses, three swimming pools, and a dinner theater with name performers. The decor had a rich, Spanish look to it, and the most expensive of the resort’s four expensive restaurants was a glorified taco stand where patrons were served Americanized Mexican dinners at lobster prices, and nobody seemed to mind. Nobody seemed to mind, either, that you could’ve gone to Mexico itself on a three week vacation for the cost of a week at the Hacienda. And Nolan, who had been there before, knew why: the Hacienda was just the sort of elaborate, glossy hokum the rich widows and the honeymooners and the rest of the tourist trade eat up. It was a fantastic piece of work, and he’d have done anything to have a shot at running it.

“How would you like to rim the Hacienda, Nolan?”

“Now who’s got a perverse sense of humor, Felix?”

“The present manager is being moved into a similar operation at Lake Geneva. The opening at the Hacienda is there to be filled. By you, if you say the word.”

Felix had a “Let’s Make a Deal” tone in his voice: Which door will you take, Nolan, one, two, or three?

“What do you want me to say, Felix? The Tropical bores my ass off. You know that. Of course I want something bigger. Of course I want the Hacienda.”

“You’d have to buy in, naturally.”

“Well, no problem. You can have my watch as down payment.”

“One hundred thousand dollars would buy you a considerable block of stock, with options to buy more. Your salary would start at sixty thousand a year and climb. How does that sound to you?”

It sounded fine, but Nolan was starting to wonder if Felix did know about the Detroit haul. One hundred thousand bucks was, after all, Nolan’s split, prior to the loss of thirty grand or so he’d take fencing the hot money.

“You see, Nolan, the Family has... an assignment, you could call it, for you that wouldn’t take much of your time and effort. But it’s an assignment that you are uniquely qualified to carry out. And it’s an assignment that would pay one hundred thousand dollars.”

Nolan thought for a moment, shrugged. “My mother’s already dead. Who else is there I could kill for you?”

And Felix laughed, nervousness cracking his voice in a way that told Nolan he was perhaps not far wrong.