The Long Fall

47

T

his time I sat in the front seat as Hush drove down toward Manhattan. Most of the way we rode in silence, but a few blocks from my door he began to speak in a voice so deep it seemed to be coming up from out of the ground.

“That was very unprofessional.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Why didn’t you let me kill him?”

“I don’t kill people,” I said. “I mean, I’ve done a lot of things . . . and some of them have ended up with people dying. But I steer clear of anything like that nowadays.”

“Found religion?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just one day I realized something.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s hard to explain. I mean, it’s not a thing, it’s a feeling.”

“Like what?”

He pulled to the curb in front of my building.

“It’s like you walk up behind somebody that you intend to kill,” I said, trying to speak his language, I guess. “There you are with your gun pointed to the back of the man’s head. You feel cold inside. It’s just a job. And all of a sudden you aren’t the man holding the gun but the one about to be shot. And you don’t have any idea that there’s somebody behind you, and all the days of your life have led you to this moment.”

“So it’s like you’re killing yourself,” the assassin intoned.

It felt as if I were instructing a newborn deity who was moments away from ascension.

Hush was staring at me. His eyes tightened.

“So, then, it felt like you were saving my life in there?” he asked.

“And mine.”

Hush’s laugh was a friendly thing, boyish and almost silly.

“I’ll be seein’ you, LT,” he said.

I GOT OUT of the Lincoln and it rolled on its way.

I stopped at the door to my building, imagining going up to the eleventh floor, opening the door, taking off my pants before climbing into bed. Then I saw myself wide-eyed in the dark bedroom next to a woman who never understood me; a woman I could not trust. I think I must have stood there for some time before turning away and walking toward Broadway and the parking garage.

I RANG THE BELL multiple times and still had to wait fifteen minutes for the nighttime attendant to rouse himself from sleep in somebody’s backseat.

ON THE WAY OUT to Coney Island I tried thinking about Roman Hull. He was the patriarch of the clan but, according to Poppy Pollis, Bryant ran the family business. Why would the old man order my murder? Had he been behind all the killings? And if so, why?

It was obvious that he’d done this kind of work before. The setup was almost seamless. Moore couldn’t prove that Hull had called him, and after that he only spoke to a subordinate. The phone and the cash were probably untraceable.

The cash. I’d offered to split it with Hush but he turned it down. Now the money was mine. Like the gun that the me of my imagination used to commit murder-suicide, Roman Hull had thrown the money at his own backside.

AT 6:00 A.M. SHARP, A Mann walked out his front door with the dachshund on a different-color leash. In the pale morning the accountant was more pink than white, more a citizen than an individual. He waited at the red light at the end of his block, even though there wasn’t a car on the road as far as you could see.

The accountant ambled down the street as steady as a toddler but with dignity and purpose.

I was beginning to like the man.

I watched him until he’d turned a corner and then I began thinking about how to go against a billionaire who had links to the unions and, at least to a degree, to the mob.

Maybe I should have let Hush kill Moore. That would have sent a clear message to Roman.

My right eye started blinking. There was no itch or irritation, just a repetitious wink that got faster. The left eye joined in with the beat and before I knew it I had drifted off into a light, semi-conscious doze.

The sun shone on my face, and so the darkness of my closed eyes was lightened by solar radiance. This crimson glare seemed almost to have a sound, a humming that caught the syncopation of a kind of buzzing. It felt like I could almost count the beats.

My head nodded and then lifted up abruptly.

It was seventeen minutes later and A Mann was waddling back toward his front door.

Could I let him die?

My phone let out a cry of gibbering monkeys.

“Hey, Tone,” I said after the third repetition of my ancestors’ chattering.

“Where’s my accountant?”

“I caught a glimpse of him yesterday afternoon.”

“Where?”

“Saratoga. He was betting on a nag.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He knew somebody who worked there and they took him into the offices. He was with this blonde that would set you back twenty-five hundred dollars a night.”

“You lost him?”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t matter. I know his tastes and I got a line on the blonde. It might cost me twenty-five hundred but I think I can get to him through her.”

“I don’t care how much you have to spend,” The Suit said. “I need to get to A Mann.”

“No more than a couple’a days, Tony,” I said.

“He spend a lotta time at the track?”

“He was there yesterday.”

“That’s funny. ’Cause, you know, Mann didn’t seem like the gambling type.”

“Maybe it’s the blonde pullin’ him by the nose.”

“Maybe. What’s her name?”

“She called herself Amelia but that was just a dodge,” I said, biting my lip so as not to trip on it. “I’ll have something for you in a couple’a days.”

“All right. But stay in touch.”

“Tony.”

“What?”

“You ever heard of a guy named Roman Hull?”

“No. He have something to do with Mann?”

“Uh-uh,” I grunted. It was worth a try. “It’s this other thing. Don’t worry, though. Mann is number one on my list.”

“With a bullet,” the gangster added.

I WAS HALF the way back to Manhattan when the phone gibbered again.

“Yeah?”

“Hello, Leonid,” Harris Vartan said pleasantly.

“Mr. V,” I said, wondering if it was my phone or Tony’s that was bugged.

“How’s it going witƒ€€wash your searches?”

“What do you want from me?” Maybe I sounded a bit testy.

“You should never lose your composure, Leonid. Even when you’ve lost your temper you should not let it show. The boxer lives by such a creed, does he not?”

“Sometimes they carry him out on a stretcher.”

“In the end we all go out that way.”

No news there. I waited for further information.

“I’ll be checking in on you, Leonid,” Vartan said and the connection was broken.

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