The Finder

16

What is the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club of Brooklyn, New York? By law it is a nonprofit organization that happens to own the land and trailer used by Victorious Hauling amp; Sewerage, precursor organization to Victorious Sewerage Services, LLC, precursor to the current and not yet bankrupt company, Victorious Sewerage, LLC, which enjoys a thirty-year lease at $100 a year. Simple enough, it would appear. On a map, the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club is an irregularly shaped lot on landfill near the Dead Horse Inlet of Jamaica Bay. Its baseball field, dugouts, and small clubhouse are heavily used by summer-league baseball teams, most of which have an affiliation with local Catholic schools. As a nonprofit organization, it pays only nominal real estate taxes. A good third of the property is devoted to the sewerage company, a muddy lot of trucks, the office trailer, and a huge two-story cement-block warehouse originally built to house the regional inventory of a national paint company. Judged to contain enormous environmental damage from thousands of leaking cans of paint, the entire lot was sold in the 1960s by the company for $1, with the proviso that all future liabilities would pass to the new ownership. The president of the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club is also the principal owner of Victorious Sewerage, one Victor Rigetti, Jr. The company has been known to engage in commercial activities far outside the scope of its state license, such as buying untaxed #2 home heating oil from various freelance purveyors, providing parking space for the fuel trucks of those same purveyors, supplying warehouse space for "discount" clothing merchants wishing to store inventory temporarily, and so on. The large warehouse includes a three-bay truck garage, as well as several small windowless areas in back, one that is used to store tools, restricted-use chemicals, harsh solvents, cleansers, and other materials used in the sewage and cesspool business, and one that contains two bunks, a toilet, a sink, a refrigerator, and an illegal unvented stove. Another appears to be used to store tires and engine parts, but if you know where to look, which almost no one does, you may find behind the piles of truck tires a spring-loaded, four-foot-square floor panel that lifts up to reveal a homemade ladder that descends into a deep, small, ill-lit room that has in it a bathtub, a chair, a mouse-gnawed mattress, a pile of chains, and a hose.

You could call this a never-used fallout shelter built in the atomically paranoid 1950s or you could call it an infrequently used dungeon. Take your pick; both are right. Anyone with just a hint of claustrophobia would soon be reduced to frenzied panic in this windowless, underground room once the floor panel was replaced and its true smallness had become evident. The room, however, is wired for light (one bare bulb, with a pull chain) and electricity and has running water. At the center of the room is a floor drain. The drain leads to an illegal septic tank directly beneath the hidden room. This room has been carefully vented not to the storage area above it but through the walls and to the roof directly. Any malodorous effluvia issuing from this room are thus released well above the level of human beings and instantly mix with the diesel exhaust of the large trucks leaving or entering the property.

The bathtub, by the way, is a rather elegant old-fashioned enameled one, enamel being useful for its imperviousness to acid and solvents. Oddly enough, its drain is sealed. Yet there is a small hole drilled near the top lip of the bathtub, with a tube attached to it leading from the outside of the tub, and close inspection reveals that the tube is pure copper, oxidized green now, and leads directly to the drain in the middle of the floor. Further inspection of the room shows that the water pipe entering from the wall is divided into three separate uses: one a common hose bib attached to a hose that is neatly coiled in the corner; the second a smaller-gauge tube that runs directly to the drain in the middle of the room; and third, another small tube of equal diameter that runs directly to the old bathtub, providing it with its only source of water. The stopcocks that connect the main pipe to the smaller tubes are welded to set positions: one can turn on only so much water through the tubes and no more.

Once the tubes leading to both the tub and the floor drain are comprehended, it becomes apparent that the tub is slowly filled from the water tube. The tub's contents drain at an equal rate at the top of the tub through the copper pipe that leads to the floor drain, and these contents are further diluted by the second water tube that leads to the drain.

The tub, it should be noted, is full, and its soupy contents are a dark, reddish brown. The water tube leading into the tub trickles perhaps a gallon an hour, which means a gallon an hour of the soupy brown mixture exits the tub to the drain, there to be diluted by the flow of water from the second tube.

Next to the tub are a dozen-odd canisters of various solvents, acids, and caustic jellies, some empty, a few half full, the rest unopened. Each variety of canister has its own respective implement: a glass measuring cup and a tin scoop for dry powder, a steel ladle for jellied matter. The neatness of the canisters and the careful placement of the implements is suggestive of habit, orderly procedure, and thoughtful intention.

Standing overly close to the tub causes one's eyes to water and soon thereafter one suffers from a raspy cough and light-headedness. The chemical stench is bad enough to prevent anyone from wanting to plunge a rubber-gloved hand into the odorous murk in the tub, but if one did, and stirred around a bit, one would find not only that it was hot, because of the exothermal chemical processes at work, but also two dozen metal grommets, such as are typically found on men's work boots, a pair of mushy Vibram soles, a number of tooth fillings, a piece of a jawbone, some slippery, degraded pieces of skin, perhaps one with a lightning bolt tattooed to it, a handful of vertebrae, their most acute tips and wings blunted by the action of the chemicals, a set of large scapulae, male from the size of them, and a complete pelvis, also originally belonging to a large male, already so eroded by the chemicals in just a few hours as to appear to have been lying on a beach for a decade. Within only a few days, all the bones and the skin will be gone, leaving just the rubber shoe soles, the metal fillings, and perhaps some indistinct sandy granular matter. This residue, it may be assumed, will be wiped up with a paper towel and discarded in the local McDonald's in a McDonald's bag retained for this purpose. Meanwhile, the water will continue to trickle into the tub and drain for hours to come, slowly washing away all traces of the tub's contents. Then three gallons of bleach will be poured into the water and this, too, will be allowed to drain away.

If the building and lot used by Victorious Sewerage represent the most tangible assets of the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club of Brooklyn, New York, then the most valuable intangible asset owned by the club would unquestionably be the baseball diamond, flanked along the third base line by aluminum bleachers. Intangible because of the goodwill and great times to be found here. Each summer Victor Rigetti watches his team, Vic's Marine Park Angels, compete on this field. It's a motley team, filled with misfits, delinquents, fatties, and goofballs, but most summers they win two-thirds of their games and usually feature a pitcher stolen or bought from one of the elite teams. The fathers of the boys are often owners of local businesses and otherwise known to each other, and thus it is impossible to eavesdrop on the conversations there unless you are sitting on the bleachers themselves.

Victor Rigetti knows everyone who sits on his bleachers, however, and if a parent of a player on the other team somehow mistakenly assumes that the bleachers are for anyone who wishes to use them and thus finds his way onto them, then he is assaulted with cold stares and silence until the point is made and taken. Victor is a big, handsome man with a full head of black hair, thick as a brush, wide in the shoulders and chest. At work he generally wears a Carhartt jacket, dark blue work pants, and Timberland boots he replaces three times a year. Clean, always clean. Fingernails, hair, clothes, teeth, watch, car, house, everything. Doesn't touch the shit anymore, no sir. He's done his time. That's for the drivers and their helpers. He runs the business. It goes up and down, generally down, but he's branching out, wants to buy the gas station at the intersection of Flatbush and Avenue J, just has to figure out how to scare the Turkish owner into selling to him. Guy does a hell of a business without even trying. The attached convenience store is a gold mine, too. People load up on junk food while they gas up. Kids cry for candy. Vic has stood there and watched the dollars fly. Gas prices are going to keep going up, especially because of the Chinese. Building cars like mad over there. You own a gas station in Brooklyn, you have it made. And an American gas station should belong to an American, not a fucking Turk. Lot of these outsiders stealing the bread and butter from guys like him in Brooklyn. People whose families have put in generations of work and then these other dark people from other countries come in and swoop down on the decent businesses. Not good in his book, and his book gets updated every day. Never forgets. You go to the park, it's like visiting fucking South America. The Mexicans, well, okay, they're good for your basic labor, grunt construction work. Though he's noticed they're getting into the stone trades. The American blacks are mostly finished in Brooklyn, pushed out by the foreigners, as far as he can see. Well, not him. He's hardworking and has a plan. Presents well, he knows. Stands tall, answers questions, knows things. Knows people, lotta different kinds of people. Knows what he's got to do and, if necessary, he does it and doesn't complain. Is he law-abiding? Whose laws we talking about? Men generally fear him. Women aren't sure how they feel. They find the basic package attractive-the size, the strong face, the full head of hair-but there's something about him they pick up on, makes them hesitate. Maybe back away. He's never married. Never wanted to, never needed to. He always has a piece of beaver on the line, usually a younger woman, one of the fuckomatics, he calls them, doesn't know much yet, thinks it's exciting to be with an older guy. Endless supply of the fuckomatics in the bars of Brooklyn. Italian, Irish, Polish, Puerto Rican, whatever. Often have a bad relationship with their fathers, easier to bag if they do.

Then, of course, there is Violet, and that's a whole other story, and even he doesn't understand it.

As president of the Marine Park Athletic amp; Social Club, Vic controls access to the baseball field, controls who plays there from March to October. Which, actually, is a lot of people, teams from all over the place. The field is thus a setting of utterly plausible conversations. One can meet there and have conversations that have meaning or don't. One can have such conversations while appearing to root for the baseball team, and these important conversations can be woven through half a dozen conversations of no import, as well as general commentary on the progress of the game, the quality of the umpiring, the reflexes of the infielders, and so on. It was, in fact, such a conversation a few weeks back in which Victor had listened to Jimmie "Ears" Molissano make him a proposition. Ears wasn't going to say who had first approached him. There was a problem, and it needed a solution. Although the problem couldn't be discussed, except in the most general of terms, the solution merited conversation, and Ears said that he was hoping that Victor and one of his best men, someone like Richie, would be willing to follow a certain car with certain employees of a certain company and send them a message. He would tell him exactly how to find the car in midtown and where it went next to the beach just off the Belt Parkway almost every night, especially if the weather was good. It was not a difficult job, Ears said, and certain people would be grateful.

"I appreciate this gratitude," Vic had said, "but what I really need is some friends who can help me with getting a gas station."

"This is the kind of thing that my friends can help you with."

"Somebody needs to talk to that Turkish guy on Flatbush."

"People can talk to him," said Ears. "People can influence him."

"A vague promise doesn't help me much. You know I been wanting that station for going on five years now. Place has got four gas bays. He can handle sixteen cars at a time. People gas up there right before they go to Jersey, the shore, whatever. I don't understand how these guys right off the boat end up with a gold mine like that. Pisses me off. Makes me crazy."

"I understand."

"No, no, Ears, you don't understand. You don't understand how the Turkish guy does it and you don't understand my frustration. You have the lumber yard your father left you. Life is easy. Me, I'm not asking for much. Couple of your best guys talk to him and he agrees to sell. He sells, I buy."

"Maybe we take a piece of that."

"The sewage business only takes me so far, you understand? I'm ready to diversify."

"I want to get back to this other thing. If it's done right, I think we're talking twenty K," Ears had said, sitting on the bleachers. "If it's done right."

"Twenty thousand is shoeshine money. How much are you getting paid?"

"Hey, Vic, come on."

"Tell me."

"The job's worth thirty-five, I'm taking less than half off the top."

"Twenty-five."

"Shit."

"Twenty-five and I'll take you to a club in the city, pay for a few dances, how's that? Plus you explain to the Turk how it's gotta be."

Ears said nothing, shook his hand. "You'll pay Richie yourself?"

Victor nodded. "All right, tell me more."

"Easy stuff," Ears had said. "You follow a car out of midtown, near Rockefeller Center. It'll be a little Toyota with Georgia plates. It will have a couple of employees in it from a paper-shredding company."

"I should get into that business," Victor interrupted.

"It's trickier than it looks," answered Ears. "The shredding trucks are expensive and need a lot of maintenance. Anyway, you follow this car. It's going to Brooklyn. Lot of times it goes to the beach. Same lot every time. Same spot in the lot. Most nights. Very late, no one else around. Workers there party a little, smoke a joint, something like that. Then you show up."

"And do what?"

"You send a message."

"What's the message?"

"You don't say anything. You terrorize."

"Who's gonna be in the car. Guys have guns?"

"No, no, it's a couple, three Mexicans. No guns. Nothing to worry about."

"I'm terrorizing Mexicans?"

"We want them very scared. We want them to never go back to this business again. We want the message sent that they better stop what they are doing immediately."

"But you don't want me to talk to them?"

"No-the actual message will be sent another way. All you do is terrorize."

"You care how I do it?"

"No."

"You want creative terrorism?"

"I don't care what kind of fucking terrorism it is, so long as nobody is left around to talk about it."

"You want no talking afterward."

"Yes. We want a long period of silence. Like forever. But it can't look like a hit. No guns."

"You want these people dead."

"We want endless silence."

"Fuck you and your mystery bullshit. I want endless gas station profits, let's be very clear about that. And speaking of terrorism, you sure these aren't some kind of Islamic motherfuckers? I don't want to start messing around with that shit, we got all kinds of funky little mosques all over Brooklyn now, you never know where these guys are. I heard those guys are building bombs."

"Naw, it's just a couple of Mexicans in service uniforms. Don't say anything, just scare them to death. Send a message to their whole organization."

So he did. He had Richie ready with an old beater tanker with stolen plates and all the business lettering scraped off. The truck barely drove anymore and he needed to get rid of it anyway. They'd switched around a watery tankload from Queens. Richie had been told to strain the load, get out all the pieces of paper, tampons, anything that could identify it. Pure shit, Vic had told him, I want nothing but pure shit. Then Vic had positioned his pickup truck at Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan, gotten the call that the Toyota two-door with Georgia license plate beginning with H7M had pulled down Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second. Victor had eased over to Fifth along Forty-eighth and looked to his left, north up Fifth Avenue. All he could see were sets of headlights, but the hour was so late that they were irregular, the traffic down the avenue running light. No one was behind him so he sat at the green light, waiting for the downtown traffic on Fifth to get caught by the red light, which it did. Then he spotted the Toyota two-door. Piece of cake. He pulled out as it passed, ignoring the red light. He'd followed it downtown, then east on Canal Street, over the Manhattan Bridge, looping around to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Gowanus Expressway toward Bay Ridge, then the Belt Parkway through Bath Beach, Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay. The car stayed in the right lane, was being driven both cautiously and inexpertly, the speed varying. He hung back most of the time, then blew past to have a look. The car had smoked glass, tough to see in. He thought he saw two, maybe three figures, though, caught a tail of music out the top of the window. He eased off, let the Toyota pass him, let a car get between them, then moved up again and called Richie on the cell. Richie had the truck ready, knew how to get to the lot. And then-well, Victor remembered what happened next. Who wouldn't? The figures inside the car, flailing at the glass. Too bad that they were girls. That was unexpected. Ears should have told him but had been smart not to. Because Vic wouldn't have taken the job. But there it was, a done thing. They'd driven the old truck out to Riverhead that same night, dumped the rest of the load in the morning, then driven it into Queens, taken off the stolen plates, and sold it to a scrap dealer for $400. Dirt cheap, no questions asked. The dealer wanted the truck for the tank, and the rest of it went to a yard. That truck was gone, forever, chewed to pellets and sent in a hopper by rail to Pennsylvania for recycling.

But Victor had a bad feeling. The strange phone call telling him that the caller knew what he did. The also very strange phone call for Richie from "his cousin." Richie had never mentioned a cousin! The way Richie had been acting, like he knew something was up. The way some of the Mexican workers looked at Vic. He didn't like it. He got the feeling there was a problem.

But the worst thing was the light in the bedroom last night. He was right about that, too. Somebody had been in the house. Cleaning up with Clorox, fucking around with the vacuum cleaner. After he left with Sharon and before he came back. He could smell the Clorox. He'd gone over everything carefully before putting Richie in the bag. Found the basement door cut open. That was the clincher. Somebody had been there, checking Richie out, doing something no good, knew about what had happened.

Which is what Vic wanted to talk about with Ears now, in a general way. The baseball-field bleachers were the best place to meet again. In the open air. Safe, low-key. So he'd put in the call that morning, and now Ears appeared at the edge of the grass, shielded his eyes, and shambled slowly toward the bleachers. A big man with big ears and hands and knees. A gut that exploded. Fat-bango, your stomach is huge. The kielbasy and pasta and beer and steaks and clams marinara sloshing around in there like his stomach was a washing machine, with a little porthole window like Victor's mother's machine used to have. He'd put a cat in there once as a kid, and when it was dead, he cut off the head and slipped it into a kid's lunch box at school. Nice. You used to be a nice boy, his mother had said, but they both knew she was lying. I was never nice, Vic reflected, I never had the chance.

Now Ears climbed the bleacher steps.

"Hey."

"Fucking knees," said Ears, sitting down. "Since when do I come to you?"

"Since I asked."

"Let's say we ran into one another."

"You can say anything you like."

"What's the problem, why the attitude? I know I got to pay you tonight."

"Someone's on to me, Ears."

"Who?"

"Don't know. Your guy?" said Victor.

"Not my guy. If it was my guy, you'd be dead by now."

"Thanks a fucking lot."

"Those girls actually died."

"I guess they did," Victor said.

"But just two Mexican girls."

"You seen Richie around?" asked Victor. "He missed work."

"Nope."

"So I think whoever set this thing up is, like, getting anxious about it. Afraid it's going to come back to them."

Ears shrugged. "You think that, why?"

"Like I said, somebody is on to it."

"What's that got to do with your dear old friend Ears?"

"I want you to tell me who set this up."

"Originally? I don't know. It came down from above. The moon, the stars."

Victor stared at him. "Who spoke to you, Ears?"

"You know I don't have to answer that."

"I got my theories."

Ears shrugged.

"Some guy is hunting me. How did he find me? Somebody is setting me up. Maybe he wants my gas station for himself, you know what I'm saying?"

"Hey, Victor, this is sounding, what, a little wacko, you know?"

Victor sat still, not answering. Maybe Ears knew something, maybe he didn't. Somebody was nosing around. Not a cop, but someone else. Somebody working for somebody. Somebody you never heard of, Victor, which is exactly what you always were afraid of. Seemed to know his way around. Not good. Victor didn't like it. He had a feeling that Ears knew exactly what was going on, too. Whack Victor, grab the gas station for himself. Send the killer back to Florida or wherever he came from. Untraceable. Unsolvable, now that Richie was gone. It all made sense now.

"Know what?" Victor said.

"Yeah."

"You're right, I'm fucking wacko. Paranoid."

"There you go." Ears nodded. "I told you, don't worry."

"Anyway, we got a little date tonight."

"I'll have the cash. Some nice girls there tonight, too."

"What time, ten, eleven?"

"Hell, I can go late. Wife and kids are at her mother's."

"Midnight?"

Ears stood to go. "I'll see you then."

Victor shook his hand. Firmly, no bullshit. With a nod of the head. So Ears could relax. Solid. Reaffirming trust.

And the last time I'm ever going to do that, Victor thought.