Chapter 13

The rain kept up all weekend. It was lashing my window when I opened my eyes around noon Friday, but it must have been the phone that woke me. I sat on the edge of the bed and decided not to answer it, and after a few more rings it quit.

My head ached fiercely and my gut felt like it had taken somebody's best shot. I lay down again, got up quickly when the room started to spin. In the bathroom I washed down a couple of aspirin with a half-glass of water, but they came right back up again.

I remembered the bottle Billie had pressed on me. I looked around for it and finally found it in the flight bag. I couldn't remember putting it back after the last drink of the night, but then there were other things I couldn't recall either, like most of the walk home from his apartment. That sort ofminiblackout didn't bother me much. When you drove cross-country you didn't remember every billboard, every mile of highway. Why bother recalling every minute of your life?

The bottle was a third gone, and that surprised me. I could recall having had one drink with Billie while we listened to the record, then a short one before I turned the lights out. I didn't want one now, but there are the ones you want and the ones you need, and this came under the latter heading. I poured a short shot into the water glass and shuddered when I swallowed it. It didn't stay down either, but it fixed things so the next one did. And then I could swallow another couple of aspirins with another half-glass of water, and this time they stayed swallowed.

If I'd been drunk when I was born…

I stayed right there in my room. The weather gave me every reason to remain where I was, but I didn't really need an excuse. I had the sort of hangover I knew enough to treat with respect. If I'd ever felt that bad without having drunk the night before, I'd have gone straight to a hospital. As it was, I stayed put and treated myself like a man with an illness, which in retrospect would seem to have been more than metaphor.

The phone rang again later in the afternoon. I could have had the desk stop my calls, but I didn't feel equal to the conversation that would have required. It seemed easier to let it ring itself out.

It rang a third time in the early evening, and this time I picked it up. It was SkipDevoe.

"I was looking for you," he said. "You goingto bounce around later?"

"I don't want to go out in this."

"Yeah, it's coming down again. It was slacking off for a while there and now it's teeming. The weather guy says we'regonna get a lot of it. We saw those guys yesterday."

"Already?"

"Not the guys in the black hats, not the bad guys.The lawyers and the accountants. Our accountant's armed with what he calls a Jewish revolver. You know what that is?"

"A fountain pen."

"You heard it, huh? Anyway, they all told us what we already knew, which is terrific, considering they'll bill us for the advice. We got to pay."

"Well, that's what you figured."

"Yeah, but it doesn't mean I like it. I spoke to the guy again, Mr. Voice on the Phone. I told old Telephone Tommy we needed the weekend to find the money."

"You toldTillary?"

"Tillary?What are you talking about?"

"You said-"

"Oh, right, I didn't even make the connection. No, notTillary, I just said Telephone Tommy, I could have said Teddy or any name with a T.Which suddenly I can't think of. Name me some names start with T."

"Do I have to?"

There was a pause. "You don't feel so hot," he said.

"Keegan had me up till dawn listening to records," I said. "I'm not a hundred percent yet."

"Fucking Keegan," he said. "We all hit it pretty good, but he'sgonna kill himself with it."

"He does keep at it."

"Yeah.Listen, I won't keep you. What I want to know, can you keep Monday open?The day and the night. Because I think that's when we'regonna move on this, and if we have to do it I'd just as soon get it over with."

"What do you want me to do?"

"We'll talk about that, iron it out. Okay?"

What did I have to do on Monday? I was still working for TommyTillary, but I didn't much care what hours I put in. My conversation with Jack Diebold had confirmed my own opinion that I was wasting my time andTillary's money, that they didn't have a case against him and weren't likely to make one. Carolyn Cheatham's diatribe had left me not greatly inclined to do much for Tommy anyway, or to feel all that guilty about taking his money and giving him small value for it.

I had a couple of things to tell Drew Kaplan next time I talked to him. And I'd dig up a few more along the way. But I might not have to put in too many long hours inSunsetPark 's bars and bodegas.

I told Skip Monday was wide open.

LATER that evening I called the liquor store across the street, I ordered up two quarts of Early Times and asked them to have the kid stop at the deli and pick up a six-pack of ale and a couple of sandwiches. They knew me and knew I'd make it worth the delivery boy's while to give me special service, and I did. It was worth it to me.

I took it easy with the hard booze, drank a can of ale, and made myself eat half a sandwich. I took a hot shower, and that helped, and then I ate another half-sandwich and drank another can of ale.

I went to sleep, and when I woke up I put the TV on and watched Bogart and IdaLupino, I guess it was, in High Sierra. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the movie but it was company. I went over to the window now and then and watched the rain. I ate part of the remaining sandwich, drank some more ale, and nipped a little from the bourbon bottle. When the movie ended I turned the set off and had a couple of aspirins and went back to bed.


* * *

SATURDAY I was a little more mobile. I needed a drink again on awakening but I made it a short one, and the first one stayed down this time. I had a shower, drank the last can of ale, and went downstairs and had breakfast at the Red Flame. I left half of the eggs but ate the potatoes and a double order of rye toast and drank a lot of coffee. I read the paper, or tried to. I couldn't make much sense out of what I read.

After breakfast I stopped in McGovern's for a quick one. Then I went around the corner toSt. Paul 's and sat there in the soft stillness for a half-hour or so.

Then back to the hotel.

I watched a baseball game in my room, and a fight on "Wide World of Sports," along with the arm-wrestling championship of the world and some women doing some kind of aquatic mono-ski exhibition. What they were doing was evidently very difficult, but not terribly interesting to look at. I turned them off and left. I dropped in at Armstrong's and talked to a couple of people, then went over to Joey Farrell's for a bowl of three-alarm chili and a couple ofCartaBlancas.

I had a brandy with my coffee before returning to the hotel for the night. I had enough bourbon in the room to get me through Sunday but I stopped and picked up some beer because I was almost out and the stores can't sell it before noon on Sunday. Nobody knows why. Maybe the churches are behind it, maybe they want the faithful showing up with their hangovers sharp at the edges,maybe repentance is easier to sell to the severely afflicted.

I sipped and watched TV movies. I slept in front of the set, woke up in the middle of a war movie, had a shower and shaved and sat around in my underwear watching the end of that movie and the start of another, sipping bourbon and beer until I could go back to sleep again.

When I woke up again, it was Sunday afternoon and it was still raining.

AROUND three-thirty the phone rang. I picked it up on the third ring and said hello.

"Matthew?" It was a woman, and for an instant I thought it was Anita. Then she said, "I tried you day before yesterday, but there was no answer," and I heard theTarheel in her voice.

"I want to thank you," she said.

"Nothing to thank me for, Carolyn."

"I want to thank you for being a gentleman," she said, and her laughter came gently."A bourbon-drinking gentleman. I seem to remember having a lot to say on that subject."

"As I recall, you were reasonably eloquent."

"And on other subjects as well.I apologized to Billie for being less than a lady and he assured me I was fine, but bartenders always tell you that, don't they? I want to thank you-all for seeing me home."A pause. "Uh, did we-"

"No."

A sigh."Well, I'm glad of that, but only 'cause I'd hate to not remember it. I hope I wasn't too disgraceful, Matthew."

"You were perfectly fine."

"I was not perfectly fine. I remember that much. Matthew, I said some hard things about Tommy. I was bad-mouthing him something awful, and I hope you know that was just the drink talking."

"I never thought otherwise."

"He treats me fine, you know. He's a good man. He's got his faults. He's strong, but he has his weaknesses."

At a fellow police officer's wake, I once heard an Irish woman speak thus of the drink. "Sure, it's a strong man's weakness," she had said.

"He cares for me," Carolyn said. "Don't you pay any mind to what I saidbefore. "

I told her I'd never doubted he cared for her, and that I wasn't all that clear on what she had or hadn't said, that I'd been hitting it pretty hard that night myself.

SUNDAY night I walked over to Miss Kitty's. A light rain was falling but it didn't amount to much.

I'd stopped at Armstrong's first, briefly, and Miss Kitty's had the same Sunday-night feel to it. A handful of regulars and neighborhood people rode a mood that was the flip side of Thank God It's Friday. On the jukebox, a girl sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates. Her voice seemed to slip in between the notes and find sounds that weren't on the scale.

I didn't know the bartender. When I asked for Skip he pointed toward the office in back.

Skip was there, and so was his partner. JohnKasabian had a round face, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses with circular lenses that magnified his deep-set dark eyes. He was Skip's age or close to it, but he looked younger, an owlish schoolboy. He had tattoos on both forearms, and he didn't look at all to be the sort of person who got tattooed.

One tattoo was a conventional if garish representation of a snake entwined around a dagger. The snake was ready to strike, and the tip of the dagger dripped blood. The other tattoo was simpler, even tasteful: a chain-link bracelet encircling his right wrist. "If I'd at least had it on the other wrist," he had said, "at least thewatch'd cover it."

I don't know how he really felt about the tattoos. He affected disdain for them, contempt for the young man who'd elected to get himself thus branded, and sometimes he did seem genuinely embarrassed by them. At other times I sensed that he was proud of them.

I didn't really know him all that well. His was a less expansive personality than Skip's. He didn't like to bounce around the bars, worked the early shift and did the marketing before that. And he wasn't the drinker his partner was. He liked his beer, but he didn't hit it the way Skip did.

"Matt," he said, and pointed to a chair. "Glad you're going to help us with this."

"Whatever I can."

"It's tomorrow night," Skip said. "We're supposed to be in this room, eight o'clock sharp, phone'sgonna ring."

"And?"

"We get instructions. I should have a car ready. That's part of the instructions."

"Have you got a car?"

"I got mycar, it's no hassle having it ready."

"Has John got a car?"

"I'll get it out of the garage," John said. "You think we might want to take two cars?"

"I don't know. He told you to have a car and I presume he told you to have the money ready-"

"Yeah, strangely enough he happened to mention it."

"- but he didn't give any indication of where he's going to want you to drive."

"None."

I thought about it. "What concerns me-"

"Is walking into something."

"That's right."

"I got the same concern. It's like walking point, you're out there and they can just bang away at you. It's bad enough paying ransom, but who knows if we're evengonna get what we pay for? It could wind up being a hijack, and they could waste us while they're at it."

"Why would they do that?"

"I don't know. 'Dead men tell no tales.' Isn't that what they say?"

"Maybe they do, but murder brings heat." I was trying to concentrate, and I wasn't thinking as clearly as I wanted to. I asked if I could have a beer.

"Oh, Jesus, where's my manners? What do you want, bourbon, cup of coffee?"

"I think just a beer."

Skip went to get it. While he was gone his partner said, "This is crazy. It's unreal, you know what I mean?Stolen books, extortion, voices over the phone. It has no reality."

"I guess."

"The money has no reality. I can't relate to it. The number-"

Skip brought me a bottle of Carlsberg and a bell-shaped glass. I sipped a little beer and frowned in what was supposed to be thought. Skip lit a cigarette, offered the pack to me, then said, "No, of course you don't want one, you don't smoke," and put the pack in his pocket.

I said, "It shouldn't be a hijack. But there's one way it could be."

"How's that?"

"If they haven't got the books."

"Of course they got the books. The books are gone and there's this voice on the phone."

"Suppose someone hasn't got the books, but knows that they're missing. If he doesn't have to prove possession of them, he's got a chance to take a few dollars off you."

"A few dollars," JohnKasabian said.

Skip said, "Then who's got the books?The Feds? You mean they could have them all along and be preparing a case and in the meantime we're paying ransom to somebody who hasn't got shit." He stood up, walked around the desk. "Ifuckin ' love it," he said. "I love it so much I want to marry it, I want to have babies with it. Jesus."

"It's just a possibility, but I think we have to guard against it."

"How?Everything's set for tomorrow."

"When he calls, you have him read a page from the books."

He stared at me. "You just thought of that?Just now? Nobody move."Kasabian asked him where he was going. "To get two more of thoseCarlsbergs," he said. "The fucking beer stimulates thought. They should use it in their advertising."


* * *

HE brought back two bottles. He sat on the edge of the desk with his feet swinging, sipping his beer straight from the brown bottle. Kasabian stayed in his chair and peeled the label from his bottle. He was in no hurry to drink it. We had our war council, making what plans we could. John and Skip were both comingalong, and so of course was I.

"And I was thinkingBobby'd come," Skip said.

"Ruslander?"

"He's my best friend, he knows what's happening. I don't know if he could do much if the shit hit the fan, but who could? I'mgonna be armed, but if it's a trap I suppose they'll shoot first, so a lot of fuckinggood a gun'sgonna do me. You got anybody you want to bring in on this?"

Kasabianshook his head. "I thought of my brother," he said. "First person I thought of, but what does Zeke need with this shit, you know?"

"What does anybody need with it? Matt, you got anybody you want to bring?"

"No."

"I was thinking maybe Billie Keegan," Skip said. "What do you think?"

"He's good company."

"Yeah, right.When you think about it,who the hell needs good company? What we need is heavy artillery and air support. Set up the meet and lay down a mortar barrage on their position. John, tell him about the spades with the mortar."

"Oh,"Kasabian said.

"Tell him."

"It was just something I saw."

"Something he saw. Listen to this."

"It was whenever it was, a month or so ago. I was at my girl's house, she's onWest End in the Eighties, I'm supposed to walk her dog, and I come out of the building and diagonally across the street there are these three black guys."

"So he turns around and goes back in the building," Skip offered.

"No, they didn't even look in my direction,"Kasabian said. "They're wearing fatigue jackets, like, and one's got a cap. They look like soldiers."

"Tell him what they did."

"Well, it's hard to believe I really saw this," he said. He took off his glasses, massaged the bridge of his nose. "They took a look around, and if they saw me they decided I was nothing to worry about-"

"Shrewd judges of character," Skip put in.

"- and they set up this mortar, like they've done this drill a thousand times before, and one of them drops a shell in, and they lob a round into the Hudson, nice easy shot, they're on the corner and they can see clear to the river, and we all like check it out, and they still don't pay any attention to me, and they nod to each other and strip the mortar down and pack it up and walk off together."

"Jesus," I said.

"It happened so fast," he said, "and with so little fanfare, I wondered if I imagined it. But it happened."

"Did the round make a lot of noise?"

"No, not a whole lot.There was the sort ofwhump!sound a mortar makes on firing, and if there was an explosion when the round hit the water I didn't hear it."

"Probably a blank," Skip said. "They were probably, you know, testing the firing mechanism, checking out the trajectory."

"Yeah, but for what?"

"Well, shit," he said. "You never know when you'regonna need a mortar in this town." He tipped up his beer bottle, drank deeply, and drummed his heels against the side of the desk. "I don't know," he said, "I'm drinking this stuff but I'm not thinking any better than before. Matt, let's talk about money."

I thought he was referring to the ransom. But he meant money for me, and I was at a loss. I didn't know how to set a price, said something about being a friend.

He said, "So? This is what you do for a living, right? Do favors for friends?"

"Sure, but-"

"You're doing us a favor.Kasabian and I don't know what the hell we're doing. Am I right, John?"

"Absolutely."

"I'm notgonna give Bobby anything for coming, he wouldn't take it, and if Keegan comes along it won't be for the money. But you're a professional and a professional gets paid.Tillary's paying you, isn't he?"

"There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"You're a friend of mine."

"And he isn't?"

"Not in the same way. In fact I like him less and less. He's-"

"He's an asshole," Skip said. "No argument.Makes no difference." He opened a drawer in the desk, counted money, folded the bills,handed them to me. "Here," he said. "That's twenty-five there. Tell me if it's not enough."

"I don't know," I said slowly. "Twenty-five dollars doesn't seem like much, but-"

"It's twenty-five hundred, you dumb fuck." We all started laughing." 'Twenty -five dollars doesn't seem like much.' Johnny, why did we have to hire a comedian? Seriously, Matt, is it okay?"

"Seriously, it seems a little high."

"You know what the ransom comes to?"

I shook my head. "Everybody's been careful not to mention it."

"Well, you don't mention rope in the house of the hanged, do you? We're paying thosecocksuckers fifty grand."

"Jesus Christ," I said.

"His name came up already,"Kasabian said."He a friend of yours, by any chance? Bring him along tomorrow, he's got nothing else on for the evening."

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