Songs of Innocence

Chapter 9

Before Michael Florio inherited it from his father, the Barking Boat was a neighborhood teahouse, an eight-table downtown hangout originally frequented by unemployed beatniks who liked to pay their tab by scrawling sketches and scraps of incoherent poetry on napkins. Florio père apparently let them get away with this, which left me wondering how he’d managed to stay in business for thirty years. Michael let me in on the secret: Out of the back room, his father had run a long-standing numbers operation, one blessed by the Genovese family. Those were the days when the people running organized crime would give their blessing to men with names like Vincent Florio. Today, the nod was more likely to go to a Dmitri or a Nguyen—or a Miklos.

Michael did away with the numbers business when he took the place over, renovated the kitchen and the seating area, and did his best to turn the Boat into a real restaurant. But that didn’t mean that honest business was the only business conducted under his roof. When he wasn’t cooking, Michael liked to describe himself as a go-between, a provider of liquidity. My old boss, Leo, an ex-cop from the days before the sort of sensitivity training they forced on James Mirsky, put it more succinctly, calling him a fence and a shylock. Michael would take things off your hands for a fraction of what they were worth, and he’d loan you money when you needed it badly enough that you were willing to pay more than it was worth. There was always an angle with him. When I’d needed a new place to live three years back, he’d told me about the building across the street and had leaned on the landlord to give me a good deal; the condition was that every once in a while, when he was holding something particularly hot, he could treat my closet as an extension of his storeroom. I could live with that. For the rent I was paying, I could live with a lot of things.

On weekends at brunch time, the line trailed out to the corner to get a taste of Michael’s Eggs Florentine, but right now it was a weekday evening in the dead time between the end of lunch and the start of dinner. The place was empty except for Michael’s one waitress, a 24-year-old whose longevity in the job probably had more to do with how she looked in a Barking Boat t-shirt than how good she was at waiting on tables. He trusted her and would discuss business in front of her, but I didn’t and wouldn’t. I pushed the swinging door to the storeroom open and gestured for him to follow me.

Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held sacks and cans and bottles of various supplies: red mesh bags of onions and potatoes, five-gallon containers of extra virgin olive oil, jars of cored whole pineapples in syrup, cardboard boxes of produce. I went to the corner furthest from the door and reached behind a box with Spoons written on it in barely legible magic marker. My knapsack was still there. I pulled it out.

“What?” Michael said. “What do you want?”

I tugged open the pair of buckles holding the knapsack closed, shoved the plastic bag of shredded paper to one side and pulled out Dorrie’s laptop. “Where’s an outlet?” I said. Before he could answer, I spotted one and headed over to it. I plugged in the adaptor, turned the machine on. It whirred quietly to life.

“Listen, Michael,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”

He looked unsure about it. “Okay.”

“You ever hear of a man named Ardo?”

I watched his eyebrows ride up on his forehead. He’d been going bald long enough that you’d barely call what he had left a hairline, so they had plenty of forehead to ride.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard about him. So have you. So’s everybody else in this city, though they don’t know it. Remember the Bishop murders last summer?”

I shook my head.

“Yes you do. Social club out in Red Hook, eleven people gunned down? Marty Bishop and his two brothers, some guys worked for them, the two bartenders? The waitress?”

It rang a bell. Faintly. “I guess I read about it. That was Ardo?”

“You never saw his name in the papers, but between you, me, and the lamppost, damn straight it was Ardo. Fuckin’ Hungarian psycho.”

The laptop’s screen faded from black to pale blue and icons popped up like little square weeds. One of them showed the wireless modem searching for an Internet connection. I double-clicked on another to bring up Dorrie’s Web browser. The computer made some more soft whirring sounds.

“I thought it was some street gang thing,” I said, stirring the cold ashes of my memory to try to get a spark.

“The guys who pulled the trigger were in a gang, sure. But who gave them the guns and told them where to go?”

“Ardo?”

He nodded. “And why? Because Marty Bishop wouldn’t kick back a piece of the action from his houses when Ardo told him to. We’re talking houses out in Brooklyn, for Christ’s sake.”

“Houses?”

“Whorehouses,” Marty said. “ ‘Brothels’ to a college boy like you. That’s Ardo’s business—whorehouses, massage parlors, those Chinese tui-na places. If it’ll get you off and it’s in New York, Ardo’s got a piece of it.”

“That can’t be true. There must be hundreds—”

“So he’s got a piece of half of them. A third. I don’t know. But I do know he wants a piece of all of them. If he could find a way, he’d charge my wife every time she blows me. Not that he’d get rich that way, god knows.” He leaned over my shoulder. “What are you doing? Surfing for porn?”

“Checking my e-mail,” I said, and turned the screen away from him. Yahoo’s home page had just come up. I typed “Cassie 19934” into the ID box and pressed the tab key.

The password box automatically filled with a row of asterisks, eight of them.

“What?” Michael said again. He’d seen my face, seen my reaction. Hell, he could probably hear my heartbeat, racing like a little triphammer. This was what I’d been hoping for. To save you the trouble of remembering your password at every Web site you visit, some Web browsers give you the option of having them remember your passwords for you and enter them automatically. It’s a shortcut, and it compromises your security, but it’s a compromise a lot of people decide they can live with. As Dorrie apparently had.

I pressed the “Sign In” button and waited for the page to load.

“That better be some e-mail,” Michael said. “You look like you hit a Pick 6.”

“Michael,” I said, “do you have any idea where I’d find Ardo if I wanted to?”

“You wouldn’t want to,” he said. “Seriously. You wouldn’t.”

“But if I did.” The Yahoo Mail page was slowly assembling itself on the computer’s screen.

“You wouldn’t. You know what this man did? Listen to me, you can read your e-mail later. With Bishop? He didn’t just pay those kids to shoot up the club. He didn’t just tell them to kill everyone in the place, not just Marty and his brothers but everyone in the whole fucking club. That wasn’t enough for him. You remember the waitress? The one who survived? Took two bullets in the stomach and one in the leg, but she wasn’t dead? They took her to New York Methodist. You remember what happened?” He tucked an index finger under my chin, forced my face away from the screen.

“No,” I said. “I don’t remember what happened.”

“He killed her, that’s what happened. First day she’s out of intensive care, there’s an accident, whoops, middle of the night she’s disconnected from the monitor they’ve got her on and has a heart attack and dies. A heart attack! In the middle of the fucking hospital, in the middle of the night, a woman 42 years old, and nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything.”

“Maybe she really had a heart attack.”

“Maybe I’ve got a twelve-inch dick and fuck unicorns in my back yard—what’s the matter with you? You stupid all of a sudden, Johnny? I’m telling you this man is hardcore scorched earth. We’re talking about a waitress here, she didn’t know anything, she wasn’t anybody. He just wanted to make a point. That nobody’s safe. Nobody gets out alive. You know what they call him on the street? Black Ardo. And it’s not because he’s a schvartze. It’s because he’s like the Black Plague, he’ll kill everyone, anyone, it doesn’t matter to him. The man’s not right in the head. And you’re asking how you can find him. Why not just lie down under a subway car? It’s safer.” Michael was flushed in the face, really worked up. I couldn’t help wondering what Ardo might have done to him, or to people he knew.

“John, listen to me. Seriously. Cards on the table. You know how they ran all those stories in the papers ten years ago, how the Italian mob was getting outgunned by the Russians? And how the Russians were mean sons of bitches but they didn’t compare to the South Americans? And how even the South Americans were afraid of the Asians? Well, who do you think the Asians are scared of?”

“The Hungarians?”

“Fuck the Hungarians. They’re scared of Ardo.”

The page had finished loading. But I wasn’t looking at it. I’d had a sudden flash of Julie lying in her hospital bed, sedated, sleeping, with no one guarding the door to her room, nothing to stop someone from walking in, taking that understuffed pillow from under her head and pressing it down over her face.

Michael was looking at me, nodding, pleased that he’d finally gotten through to me.

Maybe Ardo wasn’t quite as bloodthirsty Michael was making him out to be—no one outside the pages of a comic book was. But I was certainly prepared to believe that he was capable of extreme behavior. Julie’s hand was proof enough of that. If he found out where she was, I wouldn’t put it past him to send someone to finish the job. And given that she was registered under her real name...

“Listen,” I said. “There’s a woman who’s in the hospital. Now, I mean. She’s someone I know. Ardo’s gone after her twice. I need to get someone to watch her room tonight. Do you know anyone...?”

He shook his head, kept shaking it as he spoke. “No. No, John. Someone to stand in Ardo’s way? Who’d take that job?”

“There’s got to be someone.”

“You can hire a bodyguard, sure, but given who you’re dealing with, it’s going to cost you a shitload of money. You got that kind of money?”

“I don’t have any kind,” I said. “That’s why I asked if you knew someone.”

“Even if I did, it would cost. And with Ardo in the picture, it’d cost a lot.”

“As a favor?”

“Your apartment’s a favor,” Michael said. “Keeping your bag here, that’s a favor. Getting you someone who might wind up taking a bullet’s not a favor.”

I thought about who else I could ask. There was Leo—but Leo and I hadn’t spoken since I’d quit, and that was three years ago. If I called him now...well, he might agree to help or he might hang up on me. And I wasn’t sure which would be worse. Because if he agreed to help it would mean Leo himself sitting at the door to Julie’s room, and if what Michael had said was true, there was a good chance he’d wind up facing people no one Leo’s age should be asked to face.

That left...who? I could go myself, but it would be a futile gesture. Even without a broken rib I’d have hardly been an obstacle to the sort of person Ardo would send. I needed someone who could hold his own, someone who’d look frightening and could follow through on the promise if he had to. And, of course, someone who wouldn’t charge me—at least not in cash.

I unholstered my cell phone, cycled through the address book till I got to ‘W,’ and waited while the phone on the other end rang twice, three times.

On the fourth ring, the call was answered—it stopped ringing, anyway. But the person on the other end didn’t say anything. I hoped I hadn’t reached voicemail.

“Kurland?” I said. “It’s John Blake.”

“Yeah?” He sounded like he was outdoors. I heard traffic noises in the background.

“I’m calling to ask you a favor,” I said. “It’s important. You’re the only person I know who can help.” Silence. “There’s a woman in the hospital, a friend of mine. Her name is Julie. A man attacked her earlier today. He may come after her again. I need someone to stay with her tonight.”

There was some more silence. I pictured Kurland Wessels standing on a street corner, cell phone to his ear, overdeveloped bicep straining through his t-shirt sleeve, prison tattoos frightening away anyone who came close enough to notice them. He was a serious, intense memoirist and actually not half bad as a poet, but you’d have to have gone through a writing workshop with the man to know this. At a glance you’d figure his writing ability would top out at inking “LOVE” on one set of knuckles and “HATE” on the other.

We weren’t friends. I wouldn’t even go as far as to say we liked each other. But two years in the program together meant we’d gotten to know each other. A lot comes through about a person in his writing, even someone as guarded as Kurland. And he and I had been through some of the same things in our lives, things most other people hadn’t. There was a level of understanding there.

Plus it wouldn’t have escaped his notice that, thanks to my job, I had administrative privileges in the office that maybe could help him in some way at some point. I wasn’t in charge, god knows—I was more like a trusty in a jail, a fellow prisoner with some limited authority and access to the supply closet and the ability to influence whether your stay was an easy or a hard one. But I imagined that Kurland Wessels had done plenty of business with trusties in his day.

“Why should I do this?” he asked.

“Because I need your help,” I said. “And you might need my help some day.”

He made a noncommittal sound.

“Please,” I said. “She’s five-foot-one, she weighs maybe a hundred pounds, and the guy who put her in the hospital’s your size.” I thought back to the first piece he’d turned in, a vignette called “All In The Family,” about a ten-year-old girl and her older brother and the father that beat them both. It wasn’t the last we’d heard from him on the subject. “Every bone in her hand is broken. Every bone, Kurland. He took her hand and slammed it in a door. Three times.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Enough.” I could hear him breathing heavily, thinking it over. “You just need me to sit there?”

“Hopefully,” I said.

He didn’t sound happy, but then I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound happy. “You’ll pay me back.”

It wasn’t a question. “I will,” I said. “Somehow.” I gave him the address and room number, told him to call me if anything happened.

“Thank you,” I said, but he’d hung up.

“Real smooth,” Michael said as I holstered my phone, “making it sound like she was beat up by her boyfriend or something.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You know what else you didn’t say? One word. It’s spelled A-R-D-O.”

“Kurland did three years at Rikers for assault and armed robbery. He can handle himself.”

“You’d better hope so,” Michael said. “And then you’d better hope he’s not too pissed off at you when he finds out just what it is you neglected to tell him.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But in the meantime, at least I don’t have to worry about Julie making it through the night.”

He put his hands up in a don’t-blame-me gesture. “Your call.” Then he pointed at the screen. “So, hey, what’s the story with that e-mail you were so excited about? There’s nothing there.”

He was right. Dorrie’s e-mail account was open before me. The Inbox was empty. Zero new messages, zero old ones. I quickly clicked through the other folders. They were all empty too. Like someone had gotten there before me and wiped the place clean.