Known to Evil

38

It was a long ride but all I had to do was catch the 4 train at Borough Hall and take it all the way to the 149th Street stop in the Bronx.

It was a pleasant ride that gave me time to think…

There's a four-story building a block and a half off the shabbiest part of the Grand Concourse. Whatever paint it once had is gone and most of the floors are unoccupied. Now and again a squatter comes in to inhabit one room or another, but a guy named Johnny Nightly finds them soon enough, batters them about the head and shoulders, and then offers them twenty dollars for the promise that they will never come back.

They never do.

The basement of the dilapidated building is a very modern, unregistered pool hall run and tenanted by my comrade Luke Nye. That was the man I was going to see.

I followed a lighted path around the back of the building and approached a cast-iron cage that was painted grass green. There was no button or brass knocker to announce visitors. All you had to do was stand there. Within a minute a buzzer sounded or it didn't.

That evening it did.

I pushed the gate open, walked through the weather-beaten door, and clambered down the dank wooden stairs into darkness. When I reached the bottom a door swung open before me. The world revealed was all yellow light and green relief.

Johnny Nightly was standing to the right, holding the door open.

Johnny was tall and slender, black as the darkness I had just come from, and able, it was rumored, to kill without question or remorse.

"Good afternoon, Mr. McGill," Johnny said. He was a very courteous man, pleasant, and a good conversationalist when he had to be.

"Hey, Johnny. What's up?"

"Everything is nice and peaceful," he said from within an aura of seemingly unshakable calm.

"LT!" Luke called from the third table in a line of three. "Come on over here."

The floor-through room was uninhabited except for the hustler and his bodyguard. The ceiling was high enough to hang three large dark-blue crystal chandeliers that were formed in an abstract symmetry like spiders' webs beaded with blue dew. The walls were shiny green with the sheen of lacquered metal.

Luke was of medium height with a face that resembled a water-going snake. His eyes were slits and his nose so wide that it didn't seem to stand out from his face. His brown skin had a greenish tinge and his head was shaved bald.

Luke Nye was an animator's dream of an alternate evolution of humanity.

"Hey, Luke," I said.

We shook hands and slapped shoulders.

"Must be somethin' important to have you come all the way out to the Bronx," he said.

I handed him the fax from Randolph Peel's machine.

Luke took the flimsy, grayish sheet, glanced at the image, and handed it back to me.

That was all the time he needed.

Crime revealed itself in different manifestations throughout the various terrain of New York and, probably, the rest of the world. Many groups had very organized systems of criminals: The Russians and Italians, Irish and Chinese had their mafias, gangs, and tongs. These were what you might call highly developed organisms like tigers or flies. There were such groups in the African-American community, gangs and blood brotherhoods that paid allegiance to some central figure or ideal. But the black community also had an impressive number of wildcards and jacks-of-all-trades. Luke Nye was one of these.

He was a born leader who also had a gift with the pool cue. He was tough, smart, and independent-minded. He didn't take orders and didn't expect people to bow before him. He'd been in and out of prison, had killed a man or two, dabbled in the sex trade, gambling, armed robbery, and even counterfeiting-all this before he settled down to high-stakes pool and the dissemination of information.

For a thousand dollars Luke might answer any question you had. He was friendly with bad men from up in his neighborhood all the way down to Wall Street. Information rose like chalk dust from the people who played in his little parlor, and sometimes he'd sell what he knew.

"You sure you want this, LT?" he asked.

"The only way I can answer that is for you to tell me his name."

"It's not in a name," he said with a smile. "It's what that name does and who he does it for."

"That mean I have to pay three thousand dollars?"

"Naw, man. I'll give you it all if you want it."

I nodded.

"The name he's been going by on Flatbush is Sam Bennett," Luke said. "But his given name is Adolph Pressman. He was born in Jamaica to a black Jamaican mother and a white German father. Still a citizen of the island there, I hear.

"He's what your friend Hush might call a mid-level hit man. I met him once when he was doing bodyguard work for a man named Pinky."

"Where can I find this Pinky?"

"He's been dead for three years. At least, nobody's seen 'im in that long."

"This Pressman's freelance?"

"No. He works for some group. I never knew who. But just 'cause I can't name 'em don't mean they can't nail you."

I took two thousand of Alphonse Rinaldo's dollars from my pocket and laid them on Luke's table. One for Pressman and the other for our previous conversation about the pimp Gustav.

"There's another thing," I said.

Luke's amphibian eyes glimmered a bit.

"Loan shark named Joe Fleming."

"What about him?"

"I'm wondering if he'd deal in automatic weapons."

"Maybe if the Russians invaded the East Coast and the Secretary of State asked him personally. Maybe then. But, you know, ole Joe is strictly small time. He's jittery as a baby deer, and, you know, guns are likely to go off."

I placed another wad of money on the table, wondering if I should bear the load myself or allow Rinaldo to treat me.

I WAITED UNTIL I was back in my office to make any calls.

It was just after nine and the sun had been down for hours. Gazing out of my window at the Statue of Liberty's torch burning in the dark of the Hudson, I entered a number.

"Hello, Mr. McGill," the young man said in my ear.

"Tiny."

"How can I help you?" he asked.

This greeting was strange. Tiny "Bug" Bateman was at best monotone and at worst taciturn when I called him. The only reason he worked for me at all was because I had done his father a serious favor, and the one true connection the young whiz kid had to the outside world was his old man.

"There's a woman," I said. "Angelique Tara Lear…" I gave him her address, date of birth, place of employment, and school history. "What I'd like is any trace information you might be able to dig up. I'll pay you for this. It's for a client, and there are no favors involved."

"I don't want your money, Mr. McGill."

"Since when?"

"Um…"

Hesitation?

"You remember that girl you had call me last month on that burglary thing?" he asked.

Someone had stolen a client's grandmother's jewelry. There was some sentimental value attached. I had Zephyra Ximenez call Tiny to pass on my needs, as I was preoccupied with another case.

Zephyra might have been a working woman with a title and a business plan, but she was also beautiful enough to be a runway model in Europe.

"Yeah?" I said.

"I found my discussions with her, um, exhilarating."

"And?"

"I'd like a personal introduction."

"You live on the Internet," I said. "So does she. You know how to get in touch. What more can I do?"

Bug considered himself part of a historically based infrastructural movement that he called techno-Anarchism. The members of this (largely unconscious) movement he designated as monadic particulates. I could see why the young brown man might be attracted to Zephyra's mind-as well as the rest of her. Of course they hadn't met face-to-face, but I was sure that Bug had found a picture of her online.

"I just want you to put in a good word for me," the computer genius said.

"Listen, Tiny," I said. "You live in a cocoon in a basement in the West Village. She spends most of her time in a house in Queens. What's a word going to do?"

If there existed an Oxford Pictionary, its entry for "butterball" would have been Bug Bateman. He'd work up a good sweat walking a city block on a chilly autumnal afternoon. Even his hands were moist and pudgy. At twenty- nine, he sat in a chair surrounded by computers all day every day, and probably all night every night.

"You're refusing me?" There was actual pain in his voice.

"No. I'm just saying that I need you to work for a client of mine. I will pay your going rate on that and I'll do what I can for you about Zephyra-I'm just sayin' that you can't predict what a woman's gonna do."

"You'll talk to her?"

"Sure. Why not?"

While Tiny pondered the two-word question, I suspected that I'd just revealed to him a major flaw in his isolationist techno-philosophy.

"Um," he said. "I'll look up information on this woman."

My cell phone made the sound of the clang of a single bell. I had another question to ask Tiny but the incoming call was more important.

"I'll talk to Zephyra in the near future. Bye."

I hung up the office phone and answered the cell just as it was calling for the next round.

"Hey, Gordo," I said. "I was wondering if maybe you retired and moved down to Saint Lucia to live."

"Or die," he said in a voice that was even more strained and raspy than usual.