Beat the Reaper: A Novel (16 page)

Reconnecting the esophagus to the intestine is more irritating, like sewing two pieces of cooked fish together. But even that gets done eventually.

“Go ahead and close,” Friendly finally says to me. “I’ll go do the op report.”

Closing will take at least another hour, and I’m as tired as I’ve ever been in my life. Plus the fingers of my right hand are cramping almost to the point of uselessness.

But I’d rather close Squillante up alone than with Friendly. There are so many layers in the human body that even a good surgeon will skip sewing some of them up if the operation’s running late. As long as the layers closest to the surface are done, the patient won’t know the difference. They’ll just be more likely to rupture later on.

And I, for one, want Squillante trussed as tightly as possible. Snug and waterproof as a latex dress.

When I finally stumble out of the operating room, Friendly’s standing in the hall, drinking a Diet Coke and stroking the ass of a frightened-looking nurse.

“Remember to will the thrill, kid,” he says to me.

I’m not even sure if I’m awake. I’ve gotten through the last half hour by promising myself I’ll lie down the second I can. So maybe I already have and am now dreaming.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” I say.

“Then I’m lucky this isn’t a democracy,” he says. “It’s an ass-kisstocracy. And I’m the king.”

This last part he says to the nurse. I don’t care.

I’m already staggering past him down the hall.

I wake up. There’s an alarm going off like a truck backing up. Also a bunch of voices.

I’m in a hospital bed. I have no idea why or where. Every wall except the one behind me is a curtain.

Then my beeper and the alarm on my watch go off at the same time, and I remember: I lay down for a twenty-minute nap. In the recovery room. In the bed next to Squillante’s.

I jump up and swat aside the curtain between his bed and mine.

There are people all around him. Nurses and doctors, but also, near the foot of the bed, a pack of civilians. Aggressive family members, I figure, come to see how it has all turned out. The noise level is incredible.

Because Squillante is coding.

As I watch, his EKG stops jagging all over the place and flatlines, setting off yet another alarm. The medical people shout and throw hypodermics to each other, which they jab into various parts of his body.

“Shock him! Shock him!” one of the civilians yells.

No one shocks him. There’s no point. You shock people whose heart rhythm is wrong, not absent. That’s why they call it “defibrillating” instead of “fibrillating.”

As it is, Squillante stays dead. Eventually the ICU assholes start giving up, and pushing the civilians away to have something to do.

I try to figure out which civilian is Jimmy, the guy whose job it is to get Squillante’s message about me to David Locano in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Complex in Texas. My money’s on the guy in the three-piece suit who’s already pulling out a cell phone as he leaves the recovery room. But there are other contenders as well. Too many to do anything about.

So I go to the head of the bed and tear off the printout from Squillante’s EKG machine. It’s perfectly normal up to a point about eight minutes ago, where it starts spiking all over the place.

The spikes aren’t even close to normal. They form a bunch of “M“s and “U“s, like they’re trying to spell “MURDER.” I pick up the red “biohazard” bin and take it back around the curtain to where I was napping. Dump it out on the bed.

Even with all the used syringes and bloody gauze squares, it doesn’t take long to find the two empty vials that say “Martin-Whiting Aldomed” on them.

And which used to be filled with potassium.

18

Both of Les Karcher’s wives had been named Mary, though the younger one had been affectionately known within the family as “Tits.” The cops and paramedics found Older Mary in front of the house, where Skinflick and I had left her. Her skull had been crushed in, presumably by the iron stove grate that was found near her body, with (according to the Feds) no recoverable prints but a fair amount of Older Mary’s brain tissue on it. Tits, like the three male Karchers, was simply gone.
*
Unlike them, she hadn’t left any blood.

That the Feds would charge me with the murders of the Marys and not those of the Karcher Boys, as the father and sons came to be called, made a certain amount of sense. The Marys were a hell of a lot more sympathetic, and the Feds had one of their corpses. And if the case didn’t fly, they could always charge me with the Boys’ murders later.
*

On the other hand, trying me for the murders of the Marys was in other ways a bad move, because I hadn’t actually done them. Any evidence the prosecution presented would be either fabricated or misinterpreted, and it would be impossible for them to disprove the “alternative explanation”: that Tits, after God knows what mistreatment over the years, had brained Older Mary and run off with the 200,000 dollars that one of the Ukrainian girls had overheard was in the house.

Let me state for the record, by the way:

Tits, if this
is
in fact what happened, then I bear you no ill will. Even if you were off somewhere the whole time, reading about my trial in the
New York Post
every day and laughing about how you could step in to save me at any time but weren’t going to—which I doubt—your actions are completely understandable.

Though I can’t swear I’d feel this way if things had turned out differently.

My “defense team” was assembled by the firm of Moraday Childe. It included, notably, both Ed “The Tri-State Johnnie Cochran” Louvak and Donovan “The Only Member Of Your Legal Team Who Will Ever Return Your Calls, Even Though Everyone Else Will Bill You $450 An Hour, Rounded Up, To Listen To Your Messages” Robinson.

Donovan, who is now a Special Assistant in the Office of the Mayor of the City of San Francisco—
Hi, Donovan!
—is about five years older than I am, so at the time was around twenty-eight. He was sharp but looked stupid—
Sorry, Donovan! I know what it’s like!
—which is exactly what you want in a defense lawyer. He did his best to help me, I think because he believed I was innocent. At least of those specific charges.

For example, Donovan was the first to pick up on how weird it was that I was being charged with murder involving torture, given that there was no evidence supporting the charge, and there
was
direct witness testimony from several of the Ukrainian girls that Older Mary had, if not directly participated in, then at least provided ancillary services to a couple of pretty horrific sessions. So it wasn’t a topic you’d think the prosecution would want to raise.

Donovan came to see me one day in jail—funny, I don’t remember Ed Louvak ever doing that—and said, “They’ve got something on you. What is it?”

“What do you mean?” I said to him.

“They have some piece of evidence they haven’t told us about.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Technically, yes. The rule is they have to show us anything they’ve got ‘in a timely fashion.’ But if it’s something good, the judge will allow it anyway. We can try for a mistrial on that basis, but we probably won’t get it. So if you have any idea what they might have, you might want to think about telling me about it.”

“I have no idea,” I said. Which was the truth.

David Locano was paying for all this, by the way, though not directly. He didn’t want a formal link to me, and probably also wanted to be able to cut me off if he thought I was turning dangerous to him or Skinflick.

But at the moment there wasn’t any reason for that to happen. We all knew the Feds would hold off on prosecuting Locano for solicitation of murder until they had proven that I had, in fact, murdered someone. And Skinflick wasn’t even a suspect.

Locano had kept Skinflick scrupulously clean. He had forbidden him to take credit for the hits unless it became clear that there wasn’t any heat. And he himself had never once mentioned Skinflick in connection to the Karchers outside of the steam room of the Russian Baths on 10th Street.

Unfortunately, he had been a bit looser when it came to me. The Feds had about eight hours of recorded phone calls in which he referred to me as “The Polack.” As in
“Don’t worry about the Brothers K. The Polack’s visiting them next week.”
But at least that gave Locano a strong incentive to try to keep me from being convicted.

The Feds told us about the tapes early, to encourage me to turn on Locano. They also told us they had some already-incarcerated mob guy who was willing to testify that, in general, I was a hitter who was known to do work for Locano.

But the Feds were keeping the Mystery Evidence, if Donovan was right and they had some, a secret till the last moment.

And in the meantime I rotted in jail.

Wendy Kaminer, that genius, says that if a Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged, then a Democrat is a Republican who’s been arrested. You might think a mafia hitman is not exactly the guy to be representing that argument, and in fact
fuck
me, but let me point a couple of things out.

One is that, if you are accused—
accused
, mind you—of a capital crime, you will not be offered bail. I was in the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center for the Northeast Region (FMCCNR), across from City Hall in downtown Manhattan, for eight months
before my trial even started.

Another is that, unless you’re a scary-looking famous hitman like I was, what will happen to you in jail will be a fuck of a lot worse than what happened to me. I was never forced to sleep next to the lidless aluminum toilet, for instance, which had a perfect surface-tension dome of urine, shit, and vomit at all times, just waiting to slop over any time anyone used it. I was never forced to do what they call “taking out the laundry,” or any of the other thousand fantastically imaginative degradations incarcerated people come up with to demonstrate their power over each other and to fight off boredom. Even the guards kissed my ass.

And remember: this wasn’t prison. It was
jail.
The place they send people who are presumed
innocent.
In New York City, getting sent to Rikers Island (where I would have gone if my charges hadn’t been Federal) just means you’ve got charges pending.

And you might think you’ll never end up there, because you’re white, so the justice system works
for
you, and you never smoke pot or cheat on your taxes or leave any other opening for anyone who wants to hurt you—but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Mistakes get made, at which point you will fall into the hands of what is essentially the DMV, but with much less stringent hiring requirements.

And—even in New York City, and no matter who you are— your odds of getting arrested are about 150 times your odds of getting mugged.

Plus, newsflash: jail sucks.

Like they promise, it’s
loud.
Dog kennels are supposedly loud because any noise over ninety-five decibels is painful to dogs, so once one dog starts barking from the pain, all the rest start too, and the decibel count just keeps rising. In jail it’s the same thing. There’s always someone too crazy to stop screaming, and there are always the fucking radios, but those things are only part of it.

People in jail talk constantly. Sometimes they do it to hustle each other. In jail, even the people so stupid you’re surprised they know how to breathe are constantly on the make. Because odds are good they’ll find someone even stupider than they are: someone more stressed-out, or more fucked-up on drugs, or whose mother drank more alcohol when she was pregnant with them or whatever.

But people in jail also talk just to talk. Information, in a place that chaotic, comes to seem vital no matter what the quality.

The real value of conversation in jail, though, seems to be that it
keeps
people from thinking. There’s no other way to explain it. People in jail will have a conversation with someone four cells away rather than shut their fucking faces for two minutes. Like there’s not enough noise from the guy knifing and/or raping someone near you, or sharpening his homemade syringe on the wall. People you threaten with
death
will keep talking to you.

What they’re all hoping for is that in the mindlessness of the place you’ll tell them something you shouldn’t, which they can then go sell to the warden. People in jail talk all the time about how much they hate
snitches,
and how people shouldn’t
snitch,
and how you’ll have to excuse them for a minute while they go off to knife someone for
snitching
. “Snitch” is one of their favorite words.
*
But
all
those fuckheads, no matter how many times they tell you they’d rather die than be a
snitch,
spend most of their day trying to dig up something to snitch about. To lessen their sentence, or kiss ass, or just to fight the boredom.

Another favorite topic in jail is where everyone is headed.

As a mob guy and a killer, it was clear I’d be sent to one of the two facilities that make up Level 5, the highest level of security in the Federal system. The question was which one—Leavenworth or Marion.

What’s interesting about Leavenworth and Marion is that although they’re the only two Level 5 prisons, and although they’re also the two worst prisons in the U.S., they’re complete opposites. At Leavenworth the cell doors are open for sixteen hours a day, during which the prisoners are free to “mingle.” Apparently the mingling gets particularly baroque from June through September, because that’s when the warden leaves the lights off in the upper tiers. He has to: it gets so hot in Leavenworth that if he turns the lights on, the prisoners will destroy them to cut down on the heat production.

At Marion, meanwhile, the esthetic is completely different. You’re in “Ad Seg,” or “Administrative Segregation,” which means a tiny white cell, alone, with a fluorescent diffusion light over you that never shuts off and is the only thing you have to look at. You spend twenty-three hours a day there, with the other hour spent showering, going out to a solitary twelve-foot pacing run, or putting on and taking off your leg irons, which you have to do any time you do anything. In your cell you start to feel like you’re floating in fluorescent white nothingness, and that nothing else really exists.

If Leavenworth is fire, Marion is ice. It’s the Hobbesian hell vs. the Benthamite one. The dipshits I was in jail with all said Leavenworth was preferable, because at Marion you inevitably go insane. They also said that in free-range Leavenworth I, particularly, would do well, since as a mob guy I would get
respect
. At least as long as I was young enough to defend myself.

“Respect,” by the way, is the third word people in jail say all the time. As in
“You tryin to start a war, dog? It ain’t
respect
to call that punk bitch Carlos! You got to call her Rosa
lita,
dog. No, I mean it ain’t respect to the violators who are
men
in the block!”
Which a guard actually said to me once.

I figured all told I would prefer Marion. But I didn’t worry about it too much, because the choice of whether you spend the rest of your life at Marion or at Leavenworth is not one you get to make. Bizarrely, it’s not one
anyone
gets to make. It gets decided randomly, on the basis of available beds.
*

And anyway, I was planning to avoid both places. By snitching or whatever else it took.

I was willing to tell the Feds everything I knew, about the mob in general and David Locano in particular. True, I had once loved Skinflick like a brother. His parents had been closer to me than my own parents. Also true, I loved Magdalena so badly that I would have sold the Locanos and anything else I had access to in an instant, for one hour alone with her, anywhere.

I just didn’t know how long to wait. If it turned out that I would somehow walk, it would be crazy to tangle with the mob unnecessarily. But if I waited too long, and got convicted, it would be a lot harder to plea-bargain.

Locano’s guys were smart enough not to threaten Magdalena—or me, for that matter—directly, because they knew that if they did I’d start thinking about how to hurt them, and never stop. But they didn’t have to say much. I was in a cage, and they were out there, where she was. The ones who came to visit mentioned her all the time:
“The case is bullshi’. It’s shi’. You’ll be back out wit your girl again. Wha’s her name? Magdalena? Nice name. Gray girl. You’ll be wit her in no time. We’ll sen her somin.”

Magdalena herself came to visit me four times a week.

Visitation rights are looser in jail than they are in prison— because
Hey, you’re innocent!
—and apparently they’re looser in Fed than they are in State. You’re not allowed to touch, but you can sit at opposite ends of a long metal table that has no divider, as long as the prisoner keeps his hands in sight on the tabletop. The visitor can keep her hands wherever, and do things to herself with them while you talk, and after a few weeks you don’t even think about the guards being there when this happens. And if you and she are fast you can stand at the same time, and you can kiss her or she can get her fingers into your mouth before you’re pulled apart and she’s thrown out and you get searched by a dentist. Because the warning that she won’t be allowed back turns out to be bullshit. And the guards, those sorry derelicts, are all willing to lie for you.

I loved Magdalena more and more with each visit and with each of her strange, formal letters.
“In the quartet they keep telling me I am playing out of time. I am, because I am thinking about you. But it makes me play better, not worse, as I am so much more alive then, so I do not feel I am letting them down. I play best when I play from my heart, and you are my heart, I love you.”