Screwed

CHAPTER 1

Cloisters

Essex County, New Jersey

THE GREAT ELMORE LEONARD ONCE SAID THAT YOU SHOULD never start a story with weather. That’s all well and good for Mr. Leonard to say and for all his acolytes to scribble into their moleskin notebooks, but sometimes a story starts off with weather and does not give a damn about what some legendary genre guy recommends, even if it is the big EL. So if there’s weather at the start then that’s where you better put it or the whole thing could unravel and you find yourself with the shavings of a tale swirling around your ankles and no idea how to glue them together again.

So expect some major meteorological conditions smack bang in the middle of Chapter One, and if there were kids and animals around they’d be in here too, screw that old-timey movie-star guy with the cigar and squint eye. The story is what it is.

And the story being what it is, let’s get to it:

I am lying in bed with a beautiful woman watching the morning sun light up her blonde hair like some kind of electric nimbus and thinking for the umpteenth time that this is the closest to happy that I am ever likely to get and several degrees closer than I deserve after all the blood I’ve been forced to spill.

The woman is asleep, which is frankly the best time to gaze upon her. Sofia Delano doesn’t like being stared at when she’s awake. A casual glance is okay, but after five seconds of eye contact her insecurities and phobias kick their way out of the sack and you find yourself dealing with a whole different animal, especially if she hasn’t been taking her lithium.

Various psychoses were not part of Sofia’s nature. They were nurtured. When she was still a teenage bride, Sofia was psychologically hothoused by Carmine Delano, her abusive husband, until she began to exhibit symptoms of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and dementia, at which point Carmine, the prince, thought to himself, Bitch be crazy, and bought himself a ticket to far away, leaving his young damaged wife to sit at home and pine. The guy hasn’t been seen since. Not a peep, not a dickey bird.

And nobody pines like Sofia Delano. If pining was an art form, then Sofia is the Picasso of the pine. Her only distraction was tormenting the downstairs tenant, which happened to be me. Then six months ago I did her a pretty measly household service and boom she’s convinced I’m her long lost husband who hasn’t been in the picture for twenty years. The last time Sofia was truly happy was when she and Carmine first dated in the late eighties, so consequently that’s the decade Sofia’s needle got stuck in. Her Madonna getup is pretty hot, her Cyndi Lauper is stunning, but I will say her Chaka Khan needs work.

We’ve made out a couple of times, but I can’t in all conscience take it any further than that. I know couples often pretend to be with somebody else, but there’s probably something illegal going on if one of them actually believes it.

But kissing’s okay, right?

And man, she can kiss. It’s like she sucks the beats right out of my heart. And those eyes? Big and blue, rimmed with way too much eyeliner. Men have climbed into hollow wooden horses for eyes like that.

My hand grazed her boob once, but it was an accident, honest.

I think she knows who I am sometimes. Maybe in the beginning I was Carmine, but now . . . I think there’s a glimmer.

So if I’m so goddamn noble, how come I’m in bed with this delusional woman? First of all, screw you and your dirty mind. And secondly, I’m lying on top of the covers and Sofia is tucked in nice and safe under the duvet. This is the only time I’ve stayed over in six months because last night we split a bottle of liquor-store red that had enough tannins in it to poleax an elephant, and watched Amelie, which is possibly the best nonviolent movie I’ve ever seen.

We laughed a lot.

In French accents.

I remember thinking: It could be like this all the time.

I’ve found that Sofia’s sweet spot is meds plus two glasses of wine. Then I swim into focus and we can enjoy a movie date like two middle-agers in love.

And I do love her. I love her like a high-school kid loves the prom queen.

Simon Moriarty, my off-and-on shrink since the Irish army years, tells me that I am obsessed with something unobtainable and therefore forever pure. But what the hell does he know? There ain’t a guy on this planet who could lie where I’m lying and not feel his heart swell.

And believe me, Sofia ain’t unobtainable. She’s been doing her level best to get obtained ever since we became pals. But I can’t do it and all this lying on the bed together ain’t helping.

Sofia opens her eyes and I’m thinking, please God recognize me.

And she says in a voice so husky it would make a cat purr, “Hey, Dan. How you doing?”

And there it is: the perfect moment, so I snap off a blink photo before answering.

“I’m doing real good,” I say, and it’s the truth. Any day that I ain’t Carmine is a good day for D. McEvoy.

“Why are you out there?” she asks, trailing a finger down my face, her nail catching in my stubble. “Come in here where it’s warm.”

I could. Why not? Consenting adults and so forth. But Sofia could flip in a heartbeat and then who would I be?

Carmine?

A stranger?

And this girl doesn’t need any more trauma or mind games.

So I say, “Hey, how about I bring you some coffee?”

Sofia sighs. “I’m forty in a couple of months, Dan. The clock’s ticking here.”

I try to smile but it comes off like a grimace and Sofia takes pity on me.

“Okay, Dan. Coffee.”

She closes her eyes and stretches, arching her back, one long leg sliding out from under the duvet.

I think maybe I’ll have some coffee too.

I leave propped up on her pillows with one of those cappuccinos from a sachet and her copy of Caribbean Cruising, which she’s read a hundred times even though she hasn’t left the building on more than a handful of occasions in the past twenty years. We both make a promise before I go. I pledge to come over after I’m finished at my casino to watch Manon des Sources, which is not one of my DVD favorites, and Sofia swears that she will swallow the pills I leave in a cup on her locker.

I am optimistic that tonight could be another little slice of heaven.

This could be beginning of something good. Sofia is getting her head right and I’m picking up a few words of French. The casino is staying afloat and no one has tried to kill me for half a year. Best of all, outside of giving a coupla drunks the bum’s rush from the club, I haven’t been forced to hurt anyone in a while.

I could get very used to that.

People can be content. It’s possible. I’ve seen them in parks or outside theaters. Christ, I’ve even met a few contented people personally. It could be my turn.

Don’t get happy, I warn myself. The universe cannot suffer happiness for long, which is probably not gonna be the title of any self-help books on the shelves next Christmas.

I haven’t walked five blocks keeping my eyes open for contented people to bolster my argument when my cell rings. I know without looking that the caller is Zebulon Kronski, one of my few friends. I know this because he has set the Miami Sound Machine’s “Dr. Beat” as his personal ring tone.

This little detail tells you a lot about my friend Zeb. You listen to five seconds of Cuba/Florida polyphonics and without ever meeting the guy you have an epiphany. So, Zeb’s a doctor, obviously. He considers himself a player, hence the retro-cool Miami tune, and also he’s a something of a douche for going into a guy’s phone and screwing with the settings. Who likes that? A man’s phone is personal, you don’t mess around there. I never heard anybody say, Hey, you dicked around with my wallpaper. Great.

This is all true; Zebulon Kronski is a douche cosmetic surgeon who sees himself as a player. And if we met under normal circumstances I can imagine me leaving the room with clenched fists so I wouldn’t punch his lights out, but we met when I was with the UN peacekeepers in the Lebanon during wartime and under sea-trench levels of pressure, so we’re bonded by blood and shrapnel. Sometimes having a wartime friend is the only way to make it through peacetime. The fact that we were on opposite sides in the Middle East doesn’t matter, we’re both too old to have any faith in sides. I put my faith in people nowadays. And not too many of them either.

And technically, I wasn’t on a side. I was in the middle.

I wait till Gloria Estefan has finished the bar then swish my iPhone.

“Hello,” I say, adhering to the Irish maxim of not volunteering information.

“Top of the morning to you, Sergeant,” says Dr. Zebulon Kronski, ear-shagging me with his Hollywood Irish accent.

“Morning, Zeb,” I reply wearily and warily.

I have an army buddy who would not even admit that it was morning over the phone in case it would help triangulate his position.

“You been practicing that accent?” I ask him. “It’s good.”

“Really?”

“No, not really, you dick. That accent is so bad it’s racist.”

This is a bit of a cheap shot as Zebulon has just begun taking acting classes and fancies himself a character actor.

I got the quirk thing going on, he once confided after a bottle of something illegal from the Everglades that may or may not have contained Alligator penis. A little bit Jeff Goldblum and a slice of that guy Monk. Know what I mean? I once did a walk-on in CSI some-fucking-city-or-other. Director said I had an interesting face.

Interesting face? Sing it, brother.

Like a normal face except squashed between two sheets of plate glass. Then again, my own face ain’t nothing to write home about. I’ve had the hard-man scowl pasted on for so long that the wind changed and it stuck.

Zeb is not impressed by my racist crack and so comes back strong, breaking some heavy news without any sugarcoating.

“Mrs. Madden died, Dan. We are überfucked.”

Zeb and I both appreciate the term über, so in the era of casual awesomes and total generational confusion over the terms sick, bad, wicked and radical, we reserve über for verbs that really deserve it.

My heart stutters and the phone seems heavier than a brick. I shouldn’t have even contemplated contentment; this is what happens.

Mrs. Madden dead? Already?

This is not right. I don’t have any wiggle room in my life for trouble right now. My issues are packed tighter than shells in a magazine.

She cannot be dead.

“Bullshit,” I say, but it’s just a stall to give my heart a chance to settle back into a rhythm.

“No bullshit, Irish,” says Zeb. “I said über. You don’t fuck with über, that’s our code.”

Generally I would not be broken up when a lady that I did not personally know totters off her coil, even one from Ireland, but my own welfare is very dependent on Mrs. Madden being alive enough to call her son once a week.

Here’s what it is: Mike Madden, the beloved son, is the big fish in our small pond, and by big fish I mean the most vicious sonofan-A-hole gangster in our quiet burg. Mike runs all the usuals from the Brass Ring club on Cloisters’ strip. He’s got maybe a dozen hooligans with too many weapons and too few high-school diplomas among them, all desperate to laugh at Irish Mike’s jokes and put the hurt on anyone throwing a monkey wrench in the Madden machine. It’s laughable really, this faux Celtic dick with his Oirish lilt straight outta The Quiet Man. I came across a lotta guys like him in the corps; local warlords with delusions of power, confusing brawn with brain, but they never held on to the crown for long. The next hard man was always coming down the pipe with a chip on his shoulder and an A-K under his jacket. But Mike fell into a sweet setup here in Cloisters, because it’s too minor league for any self-respecting darksider to throw any bodies at it. Mike ain’t as cash rich as other bosses, but he ain’t fighting a turf war every second week neither. Plus Mike can speechify from morning to night and no one so much as whispers, oh for fuck sake.

Nobody but me.

Me and Mike had a tête-à-tête last year over a little fatal friction I had with his lieutenant. Zeb was in the mix too, which rubbed all participants the wrong way. The upshot being that I was forced to ask one of my Irish army buddies to make like an armed-to-the-teeth gnome in Mrs. Madden’s garden back in Ballyvaloo, just to ensure Zeb and I kept breathing Essex County air.

I felt a part of my soul wither when I threatened a guy’s mother. It was about as low as I’ve ever crawled but I couldn’t see any other way clear. Every day since I struck that deal I have honestly believed that part of the fallout from dealing with the devil is that you re-make yourself in his image. There was a time when threatening a guy’s mother was not on the table no matter what the circumstances, especially considering what my own mom went through.

I would never have made good on that threat, I tell myself daily. I am not that bad.

Maybe I can claw my way back to how I used to be. Maybe with Sofia lying beside me in bed, her hair backlit to a golden nimbus by the morning sun.

Listen to me. I sound like Celine Dion on a boat.

Anyhow . . .

Irish Mike Madden was only promising not to butcher Zebulon and me so long as his mom was alive, or rather he promised to kill us just as soon as his mom passed away. The nuts and bolts aren’t important as such. Basically, now that his mom is gone, this guy Mike has Zeb and me strapped over a barrel with our pants down and half a pint of K-Y Jelly wobbling on his palm.

Metaphorical jelly.

I hope.

I am in two minds about this latest development. I feel the familiar brain fatigue that comes with being tossed once more into the cauldron of combat, but also I am the tiniest bit relieved that Mrs. Madden died and I didn’t have anything to do with it. At least I hope I didn’t have anything to do with it. I better call my gnome when I get a minute, because the ex-army guy I had watching Mrs. Madden is known for being a little pre-emptive. Maybe Corporal Tommy Fletcher got fed up keeping an eye out.

I hear Zeb in my ear.

“Yo, D-man? You passed out on the sidewalk?”

Yo? Zeb loves his adopted culture. He called me bee-yatch last week and I had to knuckle him quite seriously on the forehead.

“Yeah. I’m here. Just had the wind knocked out of my sails a bit with that news.”

“Ah, Jaysus. We’re not pushin’ up the daisies just yet.”

“So what happened to the mother? Natural causes, was it?”

I hope to Christ it was natural causes.

“Some of it was natural,” says Zeb, with titillating vagueness.

I gotta admit, for a long time I thought titillating meant something else.

“What do you mean, some if it?”

“Well, the snow and the lightning.”

“Go on. Tell me, I know you’re dying to.”

“I wish you had FaceTime. This is a hard one to do justice without video.”

Zeb is really testing me now. I shouldn’t have disrespected his acting skills.

“Zeb. Lay it out.”

“Lay it out? Who the fuck are you? Shaft?”

I shout into the phone’s speaker. “What happened to the bloody mother?”

I have lost it and so Zeb wins.

“Calm down already, Irish. What the hell?”

Zeb is all about the games. His favorite one is pushing my buttons, but I have some game myself. The army psychiatrist taught me a little about manipulation, which wasn’t really on the lesson plan but he thought it might come in handy seeing as I was moving to NYC.

“Okay. I’m calm. But I gotta bolt now—meeting at the casino. Call me later with the blow by blow.”

I can hear the scrabble as Zeb sits up in his seat.

“Come on, Danny boy. You got time for this. Might be the last story you’ll ever hear.”

“Tell you what, leave it on the machine and I’ll play it back later.”

I’ve oversold it.

“Screw you, Danny. Goddamn meetings, my ass. You had me going for a second, but I’ll take pity on you. Old Lady Madden went skiing, can you fucking believe that?”

I presume this is a rhetorical question but Zeb waits for an answer.

“No, I cannot believe that,” I say deliberately.

“Well, believe it, Irish. This old lady strapped on her skis and struck out across the veld.”

“Veld. Field. That’s not Hebrew is it?”

“If you know what it ain’t, then why interrupt? It’s like you hate me.”

If there is something more exhausting than a conversation with Dr. Zebulon Kronski then I will shoot myself in the face before attempting it.

“Now it’s not downhill skiing, I’m not saying that, the woman was eighty-five for Christ’s sake, but she takes herself and her dog across the field to see her older sister.” Zeb giggles gleefully. “Older sister. You Irish people are made of volcanic material or some shit.”

“Get on with it.”

“There’s a storm brewing. Big smokestack clouds sitting on the hills, so Ma Madden decides to take a shortcut. A fateful decision, as it turns out.”

I gotta sit through this performance. No choice.

Fateful and smokestacks, fuck me.

“She clambers over a stile, which it took me a while to find out what the hell a stile was, let me tell you. So the old gal is Forrest Gumping over this ditch with her ski pole up in the air when an honest-to-God bolt of lightning hits the pole and blows Ma Madden clear into the afterlife. A bolt of motherfucking lightning.”

A bolt of motherfucking lightning. And there we have our weather reference, with apologies to Elmore.

“You gotta be kidding me?” I ask, totally non-rhetorical. I really want to know if Zeb is shining me on. He does this kind of shit all the time and nothing is off-limits. Last year, in the middle of my own hair transplant procedure, he told me I had skull cancer. Kept it up for three solid hours.

“I kid thee not, Dan. Boiled her eyeballs right in the sockets. One in a million.”

This is bad news. The worst. Mike never struck me as a guy with shares in the forgive and forget business.

“Maybe Mike is a bigger man than we think,” I say, totally grasping. “Maybe he realizes that the club is a good earner and he’s gonna let that thing we had slide.”

Zeb chuckles. “Yeah? And maybe if my Uncle Mort had a pussy I’d snort cocaine off his ass and hump him. No way is Mike letting anything slide.”

Uncle Mort and I have clinked glasses a couple of times, so now Zeb is responsible for yet another grotesque mental image that I will have to repress.

I feel that sudden icy terror in my gut that you get when you’ve accidentally forwarded an e-mail about a grade-A asshole to the grade-A asshole.

“Zeb, tell me bereaved Mike is not sitting opposite you listening to you blather on about his poor, recently deceased mother.”

“’Course not,” says Zeb. “I ain’t a total moron.”

“So how do you know he ain’t letting anything slide?”

“I know this,” says Zeb, calm as you like, “because Mike sent one of his shamrock shmendriks over to pick me up. I’m in the backseat being chauffeured over to the Brass Ring right now.”

“I better get over there,” I say, picking up my pace.

“That’s what the shmendrik said,” says Zeb and hangs up.

I am sincerely worried that my watchdog, Corporal Tommy Fletcher, has gone operational and wired this old lady up to a car battery. Violence never bothered him much even though his Facebook profile describes him as a loveable teddy bear. I would go so far as to say that some of Tommy’s more memorable wisecracks were inspired by moments of extreme violence. An example being one particular night in the Lebanon a few decades back when Tommy and I were Irish army peacekeepers trapped on a muddy rooftop with our colonel between a lookout tower and a bunker, listening to Hezbollah mortar shells whistling overhead. I was swearing to Christ I could hear the tune of “Jealous Guy” in the whistles and thinking to myself, Mud? There’s not supposed to be mud in the Middle East.

But the mud wasn’t the major gripe. Worse than that slick paste, or even the incoming fire, was the fear of death coming off the three-man watch in waves and how it manifested itself in our leader. The colonel who had been green enough to accompany his boys on watch rationalized that he wasn’t even supposed to be there and therefore he couldn’t possibly die.

Don’t these stupid bastards understand? he repeated in a voice that grew increasingly shrill. I only came out to show a little solidarity, for God’s sake. They can’t kill a man for that.

The colonel was right, the Hezbollah didn’t kill him, they just took one eye and one ear, which prompted one of Tommy’s immortal quotes in the billet a couple of hours later: Typical officer. Get on his bad side and he can’t hear nothing, can’t see nothing.

Oscar Wilde had nothing on Corporal Thomas Fletcher when it came to sound bites.

I decide to jog across to the Brass Ring. Downtown Cloisters is only a few square blocks, and a cab would have to follow the mayor’s new one-way system, which seems designed to transform honest citizens into raving psychopaths on their daily commute. Anyway, the run gives me a chance to clear my head, even though a shambling ape-man in a leather jacket is bound to draw what the hell was that looks from people who for a split second are convinced that they’re about to be mugged.

Guys my size are not really supposed to move fast unless we’re in a cage match, and usually I take it nice and nonthreatening among the be-Starbucked civilians, but today is a quasi-emergency, so I pound the pavement over to the Brass Ring. I say quasi because I’m reasonably sure Mike is not gonna do anything violent in his own joint, plus if he wanted to kill me, Zeb would hardly be afforded the opportunity to give me the heads-up.

Mike knows all about my specialized skill set, as another tall Irishman might say, and he has a proposition for me. I just bet that fat faux Mick has been planning his delivery.

You see, laddie. I’m a businessman. And what we got here is a business opportunity.

Except he says opera-toonity. For some reason he can’t pronounce the word right and I wouldn’t mind but he works it into every second sentence. Irish Mike Madden says opera-toonity more than the Pope says Jesus. And the Pope says Jesus a lot, especially when people sneak up on him.

Little things like that really get to me. I can take a straight sock to the jaw, but someone tapping his nails on a table or repeatedly mispronouncing a word drives me crazy. I once slapped a coffee out of a guy’s hand on the subway because he was breathing into the cup before every sip. It was like sitting beside Darth Vader on his break. And I’ll tell you something else: three people applauded.

It’s about half a mile over flat terrain to the Brass Ring, so I’m nice and loosened up by the time I get there. I don’t think I’m gonna have to crack any skulls, but it never hurts to have the kinks worked out. A person can’t just spring into action anymore once he gets past the forty mark. Once upon a time I could hump my sixty-pound backpack down twenty miles of Middle Eastern dust road; now I get short of breath putting out the garbage. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I can put out the garbage just fine but I was trying to make a point. Ain’t none of us as young as we used to be except for the dead. They ain’t getting any older. And I might be joining their ranks if I don’t focus the hell up and stop drifting off on these mind tangents.

Middle Eastern dust roads? Jesus Christ.

Mike bought the Brass Ring at a knockdown price after the previous owner found himself with a few extra holes in his person. The joint is about as classy as clubs get in Cloisters, Essex County. The façade has got a half-assed nautical theme going on that extends to the wooden cladding and porthole windows but not to the door, which is brushed aluminum with several chunky locks dotting the metal like watch bezels.

There’s a guy out front, smoking. He’s not that big, but he’s mean and twitchy. Also, this goon isn’t overly fond of me because I put a little hurt on him a while back. Actually I’ve kicked the living shit out of most of Mike’s crew at one time or another, so while I am welcome in this club, it’s the kind of welcome piranhas extend to raw meat.

“Yo, Manny,” I call, waving like we’re tennis buddies. “Mike is expecting me.”

Manny Booker jerks like he’s been slapped and I figure he’s flashing back to our last meeting.

“Just fucking calm down, McEvoy,” he says, his hand strangling the air in front of his breast pocket. This is because he’s aching to pull his cannon and shoot me, but he’s under orders never to draw in public.

“I am calm, Manny, but you look a bit jumpy. You worried I’m not outnumbered enough?”

“We got your friend inside, with a gun pointed at his face.” Manny blurts this out, right on the street.

I can’t look at Manny for too long because of his beard. He’s got one of these Midlake folk-singer bushes that are springing up on cool faces all over these days, which is okay, I don’t have a problem with that, had a nice beard myself back in the nineties. What makes me squirm is the fact that his wiry nose hair is so long that it grows right into the beard, so in effect he has a beard growing out of his nose. I’m not surprised Mike keeps him on the door; who could get any work done with a nose beard hovering around the place? Fecker’s beard hair is red too, so from a distance it looks like Manny got himself punched in the face and is fine with blood all over himself.

Nosebleed beard? People are animals.

I give Booker a nice shoulder-check on my way in, just to remind him of past pains. You never know, if negotiations break down, he might choose to run away.

The Brass Ring has got nice carpet, chocolate brown with golden thread. Plush is the word. And the bar has a comforting walnut burnish that gives a drinker confidence in the barman before he ever sets eyes on him. Irish Mike and eight of his boys are seated in the lounge with their pieces right out on the table. And there, in the middle, sits Zebulon Kronski, spinning one of his war stories. I think it’s the one about how we met in the souk outside UN headquarters in the Lebanon, where Zeb had set up an underground cosmetic surgery, supplying fillers to religious fanatics.

“So, anyways. In marches Daniel palooka McEvoy just when I’m about to inject a syringe of fat into the militia guy’s dick.”

Mike laughs, but his goons don’t because they’ve seen me come in. They jump out of their seats, scrabbling for weapons. Two guys get their guns mixed up and argue like kids until one guy actually produces a photo of his gun that he keeps in his wallet.

It’s embarrassing.

Mike’s impulse is to stand up but he checks himself. He is the boss after all.

“Daniel, laddie,” he says. “Sit yourself down.”

I walk around the tables a few times, mapping the layout, banking the positions of the chairs in case I have to toss a few.

Mike is antsy. “Sit down, for fuck sake. You ain’t a spaniel.”

In olden days, his boys would have guffawed at this, but now I’m a known quantity and it’s like there’s a gorilla loose in the room.

I sit between Mike and the bar, with the door in my eye line and Zeb on my left in case I have to slap his stupid head for getting this ball of shit rolling downhill.

“Mike,” I say, giving him the sad face. “Sorry to hear about your mother.”

Mike has a picture of his old ma in a lace frame pinned to his lapel. If this is an Irish custom I never heard of it, and I lived there for twenty-odd years.

“Yeah, she was a great old dame.”

“How come you’re not on a plane?”

Mike reddens like I’m making some kind of subtle accusation that he’d rather be here taking care of grudge business than in the auld sod burying his mother. Of course this is exactly what I’m doing. The thing about this situation is that Mike is holding nearly all the cards. The only thing he can’t control is my attitude, so I don’t intend handing over that last card until I have to.

“I am not exactly welcome in Ireland. They got a photo of me in the customs booth. I did a bit of Semtex business with the boys.” He drops me a wink on the boys so I know he’s talking the Republican movement, though the mention of Semtex had pointed me in that direction.

“Yeah, that would be a problem. Why don’t we cut directly to the part where you tell me why I’m here?”

Mike enjoys a bit of drama and so this request pains him. This pain shows in his expression, though with Mike’s bar-fight potato head it’s a bit like watching someone squeeze a fat, old sponge.

“It ain’t that simple, laddie,” he says, touching the picture of Ma Madden on his lapel. “I’m grieving. I got the sweats, the shits and mood swings. I been drunk since yesterday.”

His guys mumble sympathetically. They sound like faraway monks.

Zeb pipes up. “I got stuff for all that. Three pills twice a day. Suppositories though, so you gotta get them right up there.”

Tarantino is the man, but I never really bought those indoor triangular shoot-outs he’s done a couple of times. Who’s gonna get annoyed enough to start blasting with a barrel pointed at their own head? But now I’m starting to think that with Zebulon Kronski somewhere in that triangle, everyone’s past caring about their own lives. Zeb could get the Dalai Lama to shoot dolphins. Here I am trying to jockey for some leverage and he just comes out with some shit about suppositories.

“Do me a favor, Mike,” I say hurriedly. “Get this little prick outta here before someone can’t take it anymore.”

Mike clicks his fingers at Manny. “You are so fucking right. I nearly strangled him three times already. The wife loves him though. Her little miracle worker Zeb.”

Something clicks with me.

Zeb ain’t on the hook anymore.

Just me.

Zeb has done more than make himself invaluable to Mike, he has made himself and his Botox needle indispensible to Mrs. Madden. Maybe he’s not as cavalier with his own life as I thought.

Manny hauls Zeb outta there and he’s trying to make eye contact the whole way, but I blank him. Zeb’s been running a game, and all the time playing it like we’re down the same hole.

“Come on, Daniel. Danny boy. What is it?”

Zeb’s got that guilty whine in his voice. He bloody knows. I want him to know I know, which kind of typifies the juvenile relationship we have, so I let him have a blast of my ire.

“You guys don’t like Jesus, right? How about Judas? You got him in your book?”

I gotta hand it to Zeb, he’s not a bad actor. He pulls off shock and hurt pretty well. First his entire head jerks with the force of my words, then the pain creeps into his eyes. Not too shabby.

“What are you saying, Dan? Talk to me.”

This is where Zeb’s gig falls down. Anyone who is familiar with Dr. Kronski knows all too well that his response to any false accusation is a bilingual litany of variations on the phrase fuck you.

I look him square in the eye. “You’re drifting out of character, Zeb. You’ve lost your motivation.”

His jaws are still flapping when Manny pushes him through the swing door and I cannot believe that I have risked my life several times for this ingrate. I don’t want thanks but I would appreciate a little solidarity.

When Zeb leaves a lot of the crazy leaves with him and it’s just believable that Mike and I can do a little mano a mano and then Mike says:

“Daniel. I know we’re in a bit of a bind, but I think we should look for the opera-toonity here.”

Opera-toonity. I grind my teeth. I gotta make the best deal I can here and blowing my top over a mispronunciation seems a little childish.

So I do not slap Mike in his greasy chops. What I do is say, “Mike. You’re grieving, man. You just lost your mom and that’s major trauma for anyone, but for us Irish, it’s earth-shattering.”

Pretty good, eh? I rehearsed that on the way over here.

“That’s it exactly, Dan. Earth-shattering. You hit the nail on the head.” Mike fingers the lace on his lapel. “But we have a duty to the dead, and that duty is to keep on living. We respect those who have passed on by grabbing life by the throat, as it were.”

Looks like I wasn’t the only one rehearsing. I nod for a while, seemingly absorbing the wisdom of Mike’s words, but actually trying to gauge if I could sink my fingers into his fat neck before his boys shoot me. It’s doubtful. We got a table and ten feet of space between us.

“It’s like this, Daniel,” says Mike. “I got a proposition to make. This is a real opera-toonity for you to get out from under.”

He said it again and I feel my face spasm like I got slapped.

“Out from under? How far out?”

“Out from under in that I don’t have to kill you no more.”

“Me and Zeb, you mean?”

Mike grimace/grins like it’s out of his control. “Well, not so much Zeb. He’s like Mrs. Madden’s little pet doctor. She’s got way more friends now. Everyone’s a winner. But you, you’re expendable.”

Fabulous. I’m expendable. When have I ever been anything else? They’re gonna scrawl that on the body bag I get buried in. What’s-his-name was expendable.

“Is that it? You don’t have to kill me no more? What about protection on the club? Is that on the table?”

Mike laughs. “No. That ain’t anywhere near the table. That ain’t even in the same zip code as the fuckin’ table.”

This is good news, because if Mike wasn’t expecting me to come back alive from whatever his proposition is, he would throw the monthly payment into the pot. Why not? Then again, I could be getting played.

Mile clears his throat for the big speech. “You gotta ask yourself, Dan, why Mr. Madden would give me an opera-toonity to get square.”

This is confusing: Mike is talking about himself in the third person but me in the first person.

“Should I take that opera-toonity?” continues Mike. “Or should I throw that opera-toonity back in his face?”

You gotta be kidding me. I feel a vein pulse in my forehead.

“Because opera-toonities like this don’t come along every day.”

Aaaargh. I gotta cut this off. I gotta speak.

“Mike, let me ask you a question.”

In Mike’s head he’s already two paragraphs further into his monologue, so this catches his breath in his throat. I plow ahead before he can find another excuse to say opera-toonity.

“What are you doing here?”

Mike squints his little beady eyes and for a moment they disappear entirely in his broken-vein face. “What are any of us doing here, Daniel?”

“No. I mean what are you doing here? In Cloisters. New Jersey is an Italian state. There are no Irish gangs in Jersey. You’re like a boil on a supermodel’s ass, Mike. You do not belong.”

Mike’s chair squeaks when he leans back and I get to take in his entire corpulent frame, which five years ago might have been fearsome. All I see now is an aging hard drinker squashed into an expensive suit, which he is sweating the class out of. He’s still got strength, but if he uses too much of it he could have a cardiac. In my uneducated opinion, Mike has got five years tops before the bacon grease pops his heart. Maybe I could have accelerated that process just by leaving Zeb in the room.

“The Italians don’t want to fuck with me,” he says finally, actually answering my question, if not truthfully. “We’re a quiet little burg, laddie, and it wouldn’t be worth the bloodshed.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I say, offhand, implying that Mike would indeed inflict a lot of damage on an Italian crew.

Now this simple comment might seem at odds with all the argumentative junk I’ve been spouting, but I have a method. Back when I was in between tours in the Middle East with the Irish army, my appointed shrink, Dr. Simon Moriarty, gave me a few tips to try and deal with the authority issues I’d been having. I can see him now, stretched out on the office couch that I should have been lying on, smoking a thick cigar and tapping the ash into a mug balanced on his Ramones T-shirt.

You see, Dan. Your average boss man bullied his way to the top, so deep down he doesn’t think he deserves to be there. So, first you give him a few well-constructed insults, just to show you got the smarts. Then, when he’s feeling good and intimidated, start drip feeding compliments. A fortnight of flimflam like that and he’ll be eating out of your hands.

I don’t have a couple of weeks, so I’ll have to trust that Zeb laid the insult groundwork.

“Nah, the Italians ain’t coming in here,” continued Mike, straightening his flat cap in a manner presumably meant to convey his hard-line attitude toward Italian gangsters. “It’s like that Spartan thing. They can’t fit too many in here all at once and we can knock down SpaghettiOs all day.”

SpaghettiOs. Nice.

“You certainly got the men,” I say, setting up another insult with a compliment.

Mike’s men flex their muscles, making their jackets squeak. “Then again I did beat the crap out of most of these guys on my lonesome, twice, while injured, a few months back. I could probably take four or five of them now, if I have to.”

Mike is ready for that. “Oh, no, laddie. We ain’t getting suckered again. Calvin has a red dot painted on your skull right now.”

And not in the Buddhist sense, I’m guessing.

Calvin. I remember him. Young guy, all up on his police procedures. Says stuff like trace evidence and DNA typing with a straight face. Mike adores him. Moved the kid right up to number two last year. Suddenly I swear I can feel the laser dot on the back of my head.

“Okay, so let’s cut to the chase. What am I doing here?”

“You mean metaphysically?” says Mike, proving that people can always surprise you.

“No. I mean, why am I sitting here in your new clubhouse when I should be in mine working on the refurb so you can up your rates?”

“You’re here because I owe you a killing. You set my whole operation back months. Hell, laddie, you put my lieutenant in the ground. You saw the opera-toonity to hurt me and you took that op—”

I can’t take it. Damn my impetuous nature. “Hold on there a second, laddie. You think I wanted to put your guy down? You think that doesn’t keep me awake? I gave him every chance to walk away, but no, your fuckwit of a lieutenant attacked me with a spike and I defended myself. I saw an opera-toonity to survive and I took it.”

Calvin sniggers and immediately apologizes.

“Sorry, Mike. He said that word. You know, the one you say, the way you say it.”

Mike is upset that this entire conversation is not rolling out the way he expected.

“What word, Calvin? What fucking word would that be?”

I save Calvin’s ass. “You’re a bully, Mike, you know that? Always trying to make excuses for your bullshit. You’re gonna kill me and burn down my club unless I do something for you, right? So just tell me what the something is.”

I have obviously abandoned my psychological tactics at this point. I didn’t last too long. Premature exasperation.

“Maybe I’m just gonna kill you,” says Mike, peeved at being predictable. “You ever think of that?”

“No, Mike. Because if you wanted me dead, then four or five of your guys would be in the hospital and I’d have a flesh wound. Maybe.”

This comment sends us sailing past Mike’s shit limit and he closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, we are in the presence of Dark Mike. Mike the Merciless. This guy has shed the veneer of civilization like a snake sheds its dead skin. Irish Mike is carrying the race memories of bloody revolution, prison protest and back-alley shankings around inside him and a few decades in New Jersey making the occasional pilgrimage to a Broadway show is not gonna wipe those away for long.

“Okay, you know what? Fuck you, Dan. Fuck you. I am getting a fucking migraine listening to your fucking shit.”

That’s a lotta fucks all of a sudden. When I was a doorman full-time, I developed a theory that stated that there was a definite correlation between the amount of fucks in a sentence and the imminence of the fuck-utterer taking a swing.

Four fucks, and you took your hands out of your pockets.

The room seems to heat up. Mike’s boys lean inward like tall flowers attracted to the sun. They sense that the time to earn their salaries could be at hand.

“Here’s the situation, okay?” says Mike, spit flecking his lips. “I own this town and you fucking owe me, McEvoy. Whatever way you want to dress it up. So, there are two ways for you to get yourself out of the hole. Either Calvin plugs you in the head right now and I have to Clorox the floor, or I need a dummy to deliver a package to a guy called Shea in Soho, who can be a little touchy. That’s it. Two choices. A or B, no option C. Oh, actually, wait. There is an option C. Option C is Calvin shoots you in the balls first, then shoots you in the head.”

Option B sounds less immediately terminal than the others. Seems too easy though: Deliver a package to a guy who can be a little touchy?

A little touchy. I bet that’s the understatement of the century.

This is bullshit.

Mike is probably setting me up as the biggest fall guy in history. I could end up looking dumber than those Trojan guys who towed a hollow wooden horse into their until recently besieged city, gave the sentries a night off and had themselves a drunken orgy. On the plus side I probably wouldn’t stay dumb for long as a swift death would surely be hot on the tail of the dawning dumbness.

“No, Mike. Screw that. I’ll take my chances right now. Why don’t we do a death match scenario kind of thing? I’ll take your boys two at a time.”

Mike reaches into his pocket and pulls out a baggie of cocaine, which he pours onto his palm and licks right off there, like a donkey chowing down on sugar.

“I gotta have something to take the edge off,” he says after a minute of zone-out. “Otherwise, laddie. I would just kill you and fuck it. You think I don’t know you’re crapping bullets? You can give me lip until Judgment Day, but the truth is you’re scared and that’s a smart way to feel right now.”

Shit. Cocaine seems to have smartened Mike up.

“Yeah, I’m scared, but I ain’t jumping outta this frying pan to put out your fire. I need more details. What’s in the package? How do I know this Shea guy won’t shoot me on the spot?”

“I could deliver the package, Mr. Madden,” says Calvin, eager to claw his way back up the popularity ladder after the opera-toonity giggle.

Mike rubs his eyes with stubby thumbs. “No, Calvin. You’re my guy and I need you here. Shea is a live wire, so I need a peacekeeper.” He looks at me. “You’re a peacekeeper, ain’t you, McEvoy?”

Mike pulls an envelope from the drawer, takes out its contents and fans the sheaf on the table.

“Bearer bonds, McEvoy. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. These are better than cash. I owe this guy Shea, and this is how he wants to be paid. These little bastards are fifty years old and have seen more blood than the Bay of Pigs, and yet they are squeaky clean and easier to transport than money. I want you to take these bonds and deliver them to Mr. Shea at this SoHo hotel in the middle of the day. Simple as that. You do this one thing without any more of your wiseass bullshit and I will consider you twenty-five percent outta the hole.”

“Twenty-five percent, bullshit,” I say. “Make it fifty.”

“Sure,” says Mike with a curling grin. “Fuck it, fifty.”

Damn, I got played by Mike Madden.

“And what if I turn down your offer?”

“You know what.”

“Tell me. Spell it out, we ain’t got no wires in here, do we?”

Mike licks the wrinkles in his palm and I see for the first time that the man is honestly grieving, in his own twisted way. When some guys are feeling blue they can’t feel better until everyone else feels worse.

“If you don’t do this for me I’m gonna do something to you, or that nutcase Sofia that you got under your wing, or maybe that partner of yours. I don’t know. Something. I can’t really think about it now, but it will be totally out of proportion, violence-wise, to what you are owed. Nothing is more certain except those bearer bonds.” Mike’s pupils focus to pinholes. “So you guard those bonds like your life depended on it.”

Which of course it does.

He doesn’t need to say it, I can infer.