Pirate

Chapter Thirty-five

Coney Island

“HE WON’T COME DOWN?” CAPTAIN MARIUCCI WAS ASKING the manager of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. “What do you mean he won’t come down?” The captain was clenching his jaw in frustration. It seemed the semiretired mobster, a Mr. Joseph Bones, was alive but currently unavailable for questioning. Joey was holed up in one of the sixteen swinging cars at the very top of the world’s tallest Ferris wheel.

“How can I say this better? I mean, he won’t come down,” Samuel Gumpertz said, running his hands through the imaginary hair on top of his head. He’d been studying the car where Joey was hiding through his binoculars. He’d gaze in frustration at all the unhappy customers standing around the old Wonder, and then he’d look back up at Joey. The Gumpertz family had been running the number-one attraction at Coney for the last three decades. But it was Sammy’s baby. It was his show. This action, he had to admit, was a first.

His night man, Joey Bones, an old Mob guy who knew his carny shit backward and forward, was ordinarily a stand-up guy. But about an hour ago, what happened was Joey had flipped out about something, he wouldn’t say what. So now, he was up at the top of the wheel holed up in one of the cars and there was no way on earth to get his skinny old ass down.

In addition to a growing crowd of very pissed-off paying customers, he also had this NYPD captain all over his ass. Him and his sidekick, this English cop from Scotland Yard looking like something out of an old Sherlock Holmes movie wearing a caped coat and one of those weird goddamn backward and forward caps on his head. Smoking a pipe, for chrissakes. Give me a frigging break with this shit.

“May I borrow those binoculars?” this English character Congreve asked Gumpertz.

“Why, certainly,” Gumpertz replied, “My pleasure.”

“Thanks so much.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“I hate to interrupt this little tea party, Mr. Gumpertz,” Captain Mariucci said, “But I’m only going to say this one more time. I want you to start up that goddamn Ferris wheel up and bring that man down. Okay? Capisce?”

“How many times I gotta explain this again, Captain? All right. One, Joey is an old goombah, you know. He’s eighty-five. Set in his ways. He’s stubborn. He don’t like being told what to do by nobody. Two, he’s my brother-in-law, all right? He’s my wife Marie’s brother, okay? Bottom line, anything happens to Joey up there, I’m dead meat. And, three, he did something funny to the frigging gearbox. So we can’t turn the wheel. End of story.”

Mariucci said, “Whatever he did to it, it ain’t funny. Fix it.”

“Fix it, he says.”

“That’s what I said, fix it.”

“Would that I could, Captain, just fix it. You see that fat-assed guy in the machine shed now? That’s my mechanic, Manny. What do you think he’s doing in there right now? Jerking off? Playing canasta? No. He’s trying to fix the frigging Ferris wheel. But there’s a little problem, as I explained to you earlier. Joey did something to the mechanism before he went up; you see what I’m saying? He took something out of the machinery, I dunno. Something critical. A wheel, a gear, who the fuck knows.”

“He stuck a fucking monkey wrench in the thing,” the mechanic said. He had appeared in the shed’s doorway, his face and T-shirt blackened with century-old grease from the machinery. The news on his face wasn’t good.

“You see that,” Gumpertz said, “a monkey wrench sounds about right.”

“He jammed a big spanner in the main drive wheel,” Manny said. “He stuck it in so the big wheel would only do one half a rotation. Then she’d lock up. Smart.”

“Yeah, he’s a frigging genius,” Gumpertz said. “So pull the frigging spanner out, all right? Hey! It’s Friday night! Hello? I got huddled masses coming out the friggin’ wazoo here, and you’re giving out progress reports. Get your ass back in there and pull that thing out of there. Could you do that for me, please?”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” the mechanic said, turning his back on them. “I’ll give it another shot.”

“Give it a shot? Do me a favor. Just do it. Jesus. I need this, right, Captain?”

A strong wet wind had suddenly come up, howling in off the Atlantic. The undersides of boiling black and purple clouds were painted bright yellow and red with the carnival glow of the midway below. Congreve stood with the borrowed binoculars observing the car with Joe Bones inside.

The swinging car rocked violently to and fro in the gusty easterly wind. To the east, a flash followed by a rumble of thunder. A big storm. Ambrose imagined the pendulum-like motion of the rocking car was enough to make even a strong man wish he were someplace else. And it hadn’t even started to blow yet.

“Mr. Gumpertz,” Congreve said, “Tell me again precisely what caused Mr. Bones to engineer his current predicament.”

“Okay, look, here’s what I know, Inspector. Something spooked him, okay? Earlier. About nine-thirty I think it was. He got a call in the ticket box. He came outside, offloaded the wheel, then put the chains up, closing down the ride. I said something like, ‘Hey, asshole, what the fuck you think you’re doing?’ and he’s like, ‘Sammy, ya gotta help me, I’m in deep shit.’”

“But he didn’t say what kind of trouble?”

“No. He didn’t have to. Spend your whole life on the streets of Brooklyn, you know that look, believe me. He got the word on the phone. Somebody was coming to whack him.”

“Did he say who called him?” the English detective asked.

“Yeah. He said it was his buddy Lavon over at the Bide-a-Wee rest home. Joey used to go over there all the time and watch ballgames with his old pal Benny Sangster.”

At that moment, someone in the crowd screamed.

Congreve whirled about and saw a large woman in a black babushka pointing upward at another soaring attraction just across the midway from the Ferris wheel. It appeared to have been out of operation for many years. The blackened and twisted wreckage of the tall wrought-iron structure resembled the Eiffel Tower after a bad fire. The thing was enormous. It had to be almost three hundred feet tall. Congreve raised the binoculars to his eyes. A third of the way up, at about a hundred feet above the midway, a man in white coveralls was rapidly climbing the superstructure.

“Captain Mariucci,” Congreve said, “I think we have a problem.”

“What have you got?”

“Up there.” Ambrose handed him the binoculars.

“Aw, shit. I don’t believe this.”

“What’s going on, Captain?” Gumpertz asked, looking up.

“We’re screwed, that’s what’s going on,” the captain said. “You see that little guy all the way up there? He’s going to climb high enough until he’s got a clean shot at your employee Mr. Bones.”

“You got any idea why they want to whack him?”

“He’s the last witness in a thirty-year-old murder case Chief Inspector Congreve here and I happen to be investigating. And there ain’t dick we can do about it at the moment.”

“No shit?” Gumpertz said. “He never told me about that.”

Mariucci was already on his phone and barking orders to the ATAC command. He needed backup, goddamnit. He needed a cherry-picker, he needed a chopper. Now.

“Mr. Gumpertz,” Congreve said, taking the man by the arm and pulling him through the crowd, “what on earth is that thing?”

“That’s the old Parachute Jump. Brooklyn’s Eiffel Tower, we used to call it in the old Dreamland days. She was built back in 1939 for the World’s Fair. Out of service, as you can see. For about thirty years. Piece of rusted junk that could fall down at any minute, but you should have seen it in the glory days.”

“No elevator, I don’t suppose.”

“Elevator? You kidding me? Nah, the only route up the Chute is the one that maniac is taking. Question. Why don’t you just shoot the bastard?”

“I’m sure the captain is trying to arrange that as we speak. A helicopter with a sharpshooter would be helpful. The question, to be sure, is time.”

“Haven’t you got a gun?”

“Not on me, no.”

“Look at that little guy go! Climbs like a frigging monkey.”

“A skillful display.”

“You guys didn’t exactly come prepared, did you?”

“Not for this. Good God, where is that bleeding helicopter?”

A woman in a black raincoat stood slightly apart from the crowd now gathered at the base of the Parachute Jump. She had a paper cone of fluffy pink cotton candy in her left hand. She let the spun sugar melt on her tongue as she watched the madman’s ascent of the tower. The sagging fences around the base were hung with faded signs depicting a skull and crossbones and the word DANGER. Decades of salt air and neglect had made the derelict iron structure dangerous indeed. Four park security men were still arguing about who should climb up and bring the man down before he got too high. No one had yet volunteered.

A low murmur of approval greeted the climber’s virtuosity every few feet. He moved upward with a grace and agility that hardly seemed human. And strength. With powerful strokes, he pulled himself upward from girder to girder and he danced from beam to beam with amazing speed. It appeared that he would be successful reaching the summit as long as he didn’t slip. Or as long as one of the rusted iron girders did not give way beneath his feet.

The wind had come up, and with it, a sharp ozone bite to the air. It had begun to rain, softly at first, and then sheets of it. Lightning filled the black sky above the tower. The woman held her breath when she saw a flash of it etch the Chinaman’s silhouette against the sky. He appeared to lose his grip on a girder. He stood on the beam, arms pinwheeling, his body swaying. Finally, through some miracle, he was able to regain his balance.

He continued upward.

Once Joe Bones was dead, she and Hu Xu would go after the Englishman. The Scotland Yard detective named Ambrose Congreve. He was somewhere here in New York City. With Congreve and the two American witnesses dead, maybe her father’s confidence would finally be restored. Since childhood, Bianca’s sister, Jet, had been the darling, his perfect angel. How could Father love Jet more?

She saw a door opening and she was going to use it. Jet had betrayed their father. Major Tang said she was sleeping with the enemy. Bianca saw her chance. She’d kick the fucking drugs. Kick all the stupid, stupid men who abused her out of her bed. And, one day, one day soon, she’d kick her treacherous sister right out of her father’s heart.

Bianca threw her head all the way back and let the pelting rain strike her full in the face, relishing the sting of the slanting raindrops.

Bianca Moon thought she might finally find the one thing she’d been searching for these last twenty-seven years.

Redemption in her father’s eyes.

And, of course, love.