WHO THE HELL are you?” rasped the small man with the big gun. His voice seemed to bubble up from a deep well of death. “Kyle Byrne.”
“Byrne, huh? Byrne?”
“Liam Byrne’s son.”
“Of course you are. It’s amazing how his name is suddenly on the
tip of everyone’s tongue. And why are you sitting on Vern?” “He was rude.”
“That’s what I pay him for, though I can see now that I pay him
too much. What do you want, Byrne?”
“To talk to you. I have a file of my father’s I want to give you.” “A file of your father’s? To give to me? How marvelous. With the
untimely death of Laszlo Toth, I was just thinking about such a file.
And now it’s as if his ghost has led you straight to me. Be a good boy,
Liam Byrne’s son, and get the hell off of Vern’s chest before he defecates in his pants and stinks up the office for a week.”
Kyle lifted his knee from Vern’s neck and his foot from Vern’s arm
and then stood. Vern jerked to a sitting position and rubbed his neck
while staring insolently at Kyle.
“Want us to haul him away, boss?” said one of the men from out
side.
“A little late, isn’t it? Since he’s already past the two of you.” “It’s just he was quicker than—”
“It don’t take much. No, leave him be. If this is Liam Byrne’s son,
he is always welcome here. Why don’t you and Frank stuff another
cannoli in your gullets while this boy and I talk about old times. But
first, each of you, you need to apologize to our guest.”
“But, boss, we was just—”
“He is the son of Liam Byrne. He deserves respect.”
“We didn’t know—”
“Apologize,” screamed the little man, his face reddening, the gun
shaking with anger as spittle flew in deranged arcs from his suddenly
foaming mouth. Peeling paint flaked off the walls at the sound. Vern scrambled to his feet, and the three huge men started mumbling apologies like schoolkids caught slipping frogs down the backs
of little girls’ blouses, complete with slouched postures and toes kicking into the ground.
We didn’t mean nothing. Sorry about that. We didn’t
know.
“Okay, enough of your sniveling,” said Tiny Tony, shutting off the
embarrassing display. “You three make me sick. Come along, young
Byrne, and we’ll take a look at that file.”
Tiny Tony stuck his gun into one of the side pockets of his jacket
and ushered Kyle into the inner office, before closing the door behind
Kyle and leaving him alone for a moment. While the storefront was
shabby and the outer office a bare, dusty wreck of a space, the inner
office was as lushly overdecorated as the bar of an Italian bordello. An
obscenely red couch, an easy chair covered with a golden throw, velvet
wallpaper, a marble fireplace, above which hung a huge painting of a woman lying on a divan wearing a fortune-teller’s turban, and nothing else. Kyle was still eyeing the painted woman’s fantabulous breasts
when the door opened and Tiny Tony Sorrentino reentered the room. “Nice painting,” said Kyle.
Tiny Tony turned and stared at it for a moment. “My first wife,”
he said. “Eleanor. Her breasts were marvelous, but she turned out to
be as vicious as a polecat. My second wife was even worse. But we’re
not here to discuss my catastrophic family life. Sit, sit.” He gestured
Kyle toward the easy chair and then moved behind an ornate mahogany desk, picked a box off the desktop and flipped open its lid.
“Cigarette?”
“No thank you,” said Kyle, sitting.
“A man of good habits, then, unlike your father,” said Tiny Tony
as he pulled a cigarette from the box, tapped it on the desktop, lit it
with a crystal lighter the size of a grapefruit. “All my habits are bad,
which is why I’m still alive. No one cared enough to kill me, seeing as
I was doing such a good job killing myself.”
Just then the phone on the desk rang. It was a big black phone,
with a heavy handset that lay in a cradle. Tiny Tony put the huge
handset to his ear, listened. “Six and a half, five and a half,” he said.
“How many? Done.” He scratched something on a small pad, hung
up the phone. For a moment, as a waft of smoke rose from the halfhidden face, he stared at Kyle with eyes burning bright and angry. “I
didn’t know Liam had any children,” he said finally.
“He wasn’t married to my mother.”
“And that makes you . . .”
“Yes, it does.”
“Ahh, I see. But still you were close.”
“Not really.”
“Yet here you are, like a responsible young son. And you have for
me a file.”
“I was going through some of my father’s old things in his office,”
said Kyle, raising the file in his hand, “and I found this.” “And the lawyers there, they let you rifle through the files?” “Well, they didn’t quite let me.”
“Ahh, a scoundrel. You are indeed Liam Byrne’s son.” The phone rang again. Tiny Tony stared at Kyle for a moment
as if Kyle were responsible for the ring itself, and then picked up the
phone, listened. “Three to one against. Even money the sap doesn’t
last six. Done.”
Tiny scribbled a few more lines on his pad, scratched his nose
with a thumb, snuffed out the cigarette, took another from the box,
flicked the crystal grapefruit to life, inhaled, exhaled. “Okay,” he said,
“enough with the suspense.”
A greedy little hand reached up from the desk, and its fingers
snapped.
“Before I hand the file over,” said Kyle, “I have a question.” “A question, hey?” The old man reached into a pocket, pulled out
the gun. He slapped it on the desktop, gave it a spin until the barrel
pointed at Kyle. “Okay, shoot.”
“Double Eye investments.”
“You get right to the meat of it, don’t you?”
“Who are the two eyes?”
“Double Eye, the Italian and the Irishman. Your dad and I were
partners of a sort.”
“What sort?”
“Quiet partners. Your dad did all the investing, kept all the papers,
made all the filings.”
“What did you do?”
“I paid.”
“So Double Eye was a way to launder your gambling earnings.” “Clever, aren’t you? You know, in this part of town clever usually
gets you dead. Let’s cut to it, shall we? What is it you’re after?” “I’m looking for a file cabinet of my father’s. It is big and heavy
and brown, with fake wood grain painted on the metal. I wondered if
you might have it along with the partnership records.”
“You’re looking for a file cabinet of your father’s.”
“Yes.”
“And so you’ve come to me.”
“Yes.”
“And that is why you beat the hell out of my men.”
“Yes.”
“If the cigarettes hadn’t taken all my wind, I would be laughing
now.”
“I’m glad I can be such a source of humor.”
“Oh, you are, young Byrne, you are. Your father and I were partners, yes. But things don’t always work out the way we would want
them to. Have you noticed that most stories end either with a marriage or with death? This story didn’t end with a marriage.” “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You will, in time. Now, let me have the damn file.” Tiny Tony
snapped his fingers and then snapped them again.
Kyle looked at the old man’s hand, once more outstretched, and
the barrel of the gun, still pointing in his direction. He stood, put the
file in the old man’s hand, sat down again. He watched as Tiny Tony
pushed a pair of glasses onto his nose, lifted his chin, and paged
through the file quickly.
“What the hell is this?” said Tiny Tony.
“Your last will and testament.”
“I can see that. But why the hell would I want this?”
“I thought you might need it in case—”
“In case?” He threw the file atop his desk. “Since your father made
this for me, I’ve had three more. Each new will revokes the last. This
is useless to me.”
“What about the betting slips?”
“As valuable as yesterday’s lottery tickets. If this is all you’re bringing to the table, what the hell good is this to me?”
The phone rang. Tony answered, listened. “He’s going off at seven
to two. You won’t make me send Vern this time, right? Okay. Done.”
He slammed down the phone and made a jot on his pad even as he
gave Kyle another accusatory stare.
“You don’t care about the file cabinet, do you?” said the old man.
“This is something else. The bastard son on a quest to learn the truth
about his long-dead father. And you think I have it, or at least some of
it. And you may be right.”
“How did my father die?”
“I heard it was his heart.”
“Were those his slips?”
“No. Your father didn’t gamble. At least not on football or the
horses. Toth was the bettor. After your father died, Toth took over
some of the matters your father was working on for me. And over the
years he discovered a predilection for wagering.”
“Was he any good?”
“Terrible.” Another waft of smoke, a wave of the cigarette. “They’re
all terrible. That’s how I can afford the wives.” He looked up to the
painting with the breasts. “Eleanor is dead, roaring at the devil in hell, I suppose, but I’m still supporting all the rest. Thanks to fools like that wily Hungarian, I’m on my fourth. In fact, Toth owed me two arms and a leg before his death, which meant he was screwing me more thoroughly than my current wife. But he said he had a way to pay me off,
which was good, since Frank had already broken three of his fingers.” “Ouch.”
“It happens. Laszlo said he found something, something of your
father’s that was going to get him off my hook and out of his stinking
law office for good. A file that he said had vast worth. He called it the
O’Malley file.”
Kyle nodded, as if it all made perfect sense, which it actually was
starting to. He didn’t understand everything yet, but suddenly he
knew that O’Malley’s name wasn’t O’Malley and that as soon as he
got out of here, he was giving that fake O’Malley a call.
“I was hoping it was this file that you were bringing to me,” said
Tiny Tony.
Kyle thought a moment. “If there was a file of great worth, why
would I be bringing it to you?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
The phone rang, Tiny Tony answered it. “Even. How much?
Done.” He hung up, scribbled in his book, flashed another accusatory stare at Kyle.
“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” said Kyle. Sorrentino stared a bit more and considered the question. “It’s just
that I see him in you. There’s something in your face, in the way you
hold yourself. It’s uncanny the way the dead continue to haunt us.
The son of Liam Byrne,” he said, shaking his head. “Funny thing is,
all this time I didn’t know the son of a bitch had any kids.” The phone rang. Tiny Tony stared at Kyle from behind the desk
as it rang again and then again. Finally he answered the phone. “Hold
on,” he said into the handset, and then put his palm over the mouthpiece. “Listen, Kyle, I need to take this in private, you understand.” “Sure,” said Kyle, rising.
“We’ll meet again, I promise you, and I’ll answer all your questions then. Meanwhile, I’ll do what I can to try to find that file cabinet you’re so interested in. There are some possibilities I need to
check out.”
“I’d appreciate that. Thank you.”
“We’re going to get along famously,” said Tiny Tony Sorrentino.
“Just like your father and me. I can tell. We’re going to do business
together. I am certain. Write down your phone number, and I’ll give
you a call.”
Kyle leaned over the desk and scribbled his cell number on a proffered piece of paper and then, to be safe, Kat’s number, too. “If you
can’t get me on the cell, the second’s where I’m staying now. I’ll be
waiting.”
Tony watched him as he headed for the door to the outer office. “Kyle, can I give you some advice? As a dear friend of your father’s? I don’t think it wise for you to go out the front door. You
humiliated my men, which was quite impressive but isn’t calculated
to make lasting friendships. Perhaps it would be better if you avoid all
three by going out the rear. There is a door to the alley behind that
curtain that would be safer.”
“Thanks,” said Kyle.
“It’s nothing. We are almost family, you and I. Now go, and be
well, and I’ll be in touch.”
Kyle nodded at the old man, stepped toward the curtain and pushed it aside, revealing two doors, one open, leading down a set of stairs to a basement, and the second closed, leading, Kyle assumed, to the alley. As he opened the second door, he could hear the old man