Floating City (13 page)

“You’re the man,” he said in a rumbly, breathy voice, “who’s been fucking the shit outta my wife.”

Nicely put,
Croaker thought. To Tony DeCamillo, he said, “I’m the man who doesn’t lift a hand to her.”

Standoff.

There was nothing intellectual or even rational about their mutual hatred. They were like two bulls, blood-maddened and in heat, each determined to own the high ground, the prize female, and the herd.

“She thinks you’re swell,” Tony D. said flatly. “Nevertheless, I’m gonna blow your brains into this brick.”

“Don’t you have any respect for her at all?” It was a funny line, but Tony chose to ignore it. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood.

He lifted one hand, and the passenger door to the Lincoln opened. Out stepped Sal, no doubt Tony’s bodyguard. He handled a high-powered rifle the way an expert would, swinging it up, resting it on the top of the car, aiming carefully. Croaker could see that Tony had choreographed this with precision. Croaker was within range of a guaranteed hit, and Tony was not in the line of fire, would not even have to move unless he didn’t want a spray of Croaker’s blood all over his Sulka tie. No matter. With his attention to detail, he had probably brought a couple of replacements in the Lincoln.

Sal settled his cheek against the stock of the gun; his eye was in the sight.

“You ready to die, you sonuvabitch?” Tony D.’s voice was thick with emotion.

“Who is?” Croaker was thinking not about life and death, but about how Tony DeCamillo needed to learn the difference between thought and emotion. Perhaps this was why he couldn’t help beating his wife.

Margarite. He thought of her and knew he did not want to die, most especially not at the hands of this jerk. But it was a shut-ended situation. He was in no position to deal, and even if he were, he suspected that Tony D. was in no mood to listen. He was angry for allowing himself to get into this position. Marco Island had blunted his instincts. Too much booze, carousing with customers, lolling in the heat. You went loopy, but long before that you lost your edge. This is what had happened to him, and now he was going to pay the ultimate price for his sin. How many good cops had he seen go down, the victim of one fatal mistake, one lapse? Now it was his turn.

Jesus.

He remembered Alix, sun-splashed in a Marco Island sunset, an impossibly beautiful woman, a model who had so improbably fallen in love with him. He remembered Margarite, so complex, strong-willed, incandescent, saddled with her brother’s love and his legacy, an empire built on blood, influence, and vigorish. He remembered Nicholas, in Tokyo, their friendship bonded in battle, a mutual trust that stemmed from saving one another’s life. He remembered his father, gunned down in a back alley of Hell’s Kitchen, his policeman’s uniform stained with blood. Croaker’s mother had refused to have him buried in that uniform, had, in fact, thrown it out. But Croaker had retrieved it from the garbage, had reverently folded it into a plastic bag. He had taken it out, stiff and black with his father’s dried blood, on the day he had made detective.

As if it were all happening in slow motion, Croaker saw Tony D. nod his head. He could almost feel Sal’s forefinger tightening on the trigger, the marksman’s eye staring at him through the magnifying lens of the scope.

The sound of a shot exploded, but no bullet slammed into Croaker. His heart hammered in his chest. He heard a little groan, and he and Tony D. turned at the same time. Sal was slumped on the rubble of brick and concrete, the rifle an arm’s length away.

“What the fuck—”

“Don’t try thinking it through, Tony,” a commanding voice said. “It’ll be too much for you.”

Croaker saw a figure striding across the junkyard. He was somewhat older than Tony, nevertheless his shock of unruly, curling hair and his wide grin gave him something of the aspect of an adolescent. He bounded across the uneven ground on long, powerful legs.

Tony’s jaw dropped open. “Mary, Mother of God. Bad Clams.”

“In person,” Caesare Leonforte said, his jaunty grin in place.

“You got a fuckin’ nerve stepping into my territory without permission.”

Leonforte peered curiously at Tony as if he were an exotic exhibit in a zoo. “You think so? Yeah, I know, I had a deal with Dominic, rest his soul, that I’d stay on the West Coast and he’d stay in the East.” He shrugged. “But you know how it is, counselor, human nature being what it is, Dom started expanding westward and I, well, I moved east.”

“You fucking
gavone!”
Tony screamed, red-faced. “You come here, kill my bodyguard, you’re looking for an all-out war!”

“Calm yourself, counselor,” Leonforte said. “I’m only looking out for my interests. Just because you allow your balls to run your life doesn’t mean I have to go along with your mistakes.”

He had the eyes of a killer. A film of red madness danced close to the surface of his irises. Croaker had seen it many times during his stint on the street. But there was a difference here; Leonforte had about him an air of calm and calculation that was at odds with the berserk look in his eyes. It was, Croaker thought, as if he were two men inhabiting the same body.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“When are you going to wake up, counselor? You’re a fucking amateur trying to make it in a game you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

“I don’t have to listen to this garbage. I have private business with this bastard. What the fuck d’you want with him?”

“Let’s not overtax that brain of yours. I tell you what, counselor, why don’t you take the ride back across the river in your new Lincoln, which by the way I very much admire, and we’ll discuss this another day.”

“What? You think you can waltz onto my turf and
order
me around?”

“Take it easy, counselor. You need either a dose of Halcion or a good blow job, preferably both.”

“You’re a dead man, Bad Clams.” Tony D.’s voice was heavy with the kind of menace that impressed production executives at Paramount and MGM.

Caesare Leonforte, however, was unmoved. He clucked his tongue as two heavyset men in overcoats appeared. From beneath their coats they lifted MAC-10 machine pistols.

“There’s no need for an altercation, counselor. And to show my sincerity, I’ll ignore the threat to my person. I don’t want trouble—”

“Well, you’ve fucking got it, buddy.”

“—and neither do you.”

Tony looked from the MAC-10s to Croaker. “I don’t believe your luck.” Croaker’s teeth grated. “And neither should you.”

Reduced to parroting Caesare Leonforte, he retreated to the relative safety of the Lincoln. His face had drained of all blood now. He looked as if he were going to pass out. “You’ll wish you’d never set foot here, Bad Clams, that’s my fucking promise to you.”

“Big man,” Leonforte said as Tony drove off. Then he turned to Croaker and laughed. “Well, look at you. All ready for the wringer.” He shook his head. “That boy was serious. He means to have your nuts in a sling.”

“Yours, too. That makes us, what, some kind of soul mates?”

Leonforte regarded Croaker for some time. “My God, you’re a cool customer.” He smirked. “Or should I have one of the guys check to see whether you’ve wet yourself?”

“What, no babes around to do the dirty work?”

Caesare Leonforte threw his head back and laughed, but he sobered up quickly enough. “Make a joke of it all you want, but you owe me your life, Mr. Croaker. Now I want my quid pro quo.”

The vibrations filled Nicholas’s frame with discordant music. He was in the back of Chief Inspector Van Kiet’s military jeep. Blindfolded and bound tightly with metal flex, he made calculations based on the incoming sensory data. He heard Van Kiet shouting terse orders for vehicles to pull aside. He inhaled the scents of fresh eel, cut sugarcane, longan and rambutan, fruits with distinctive smells.

Even without opening his
tanjian
eye, he had deduced that he was being taken back to Saigon. Then he was not to be summarily executed, as Van Kiet had intimated. No doubt an interrogation was planned before they put him in front of a military firing squad. Forget about a lawyer or even a trial; he knew he was beyond such basic amenities of the civilized world.

He knew what needed to be done. Shindo was dead, and now, too, was Bay. At each step he was coming closer to the answer to the riddle of Vincent Tinh’s murder. Now he knew the name of the theoretical-language cyberneticist who had put together the illegal Chi-Hive hybrid computer, a Russian national named Abramanov, who was in hiding somewhere northwest of Saigon. The Cu Chi tunnels were the halfway point.

He knew what needed to be done now. Shindo had been convinced that Chief Inspector Van Kiet knew more about Tinh’s death than he was acknowledging. Nicholas knew he needed twenty minutes alone with Van Kiet to extract the information.

Twenty minutes.

He concentrated on the flex binding his wrists and ankles. He was half-lying across one of the backseats of the jeep. The flex was no problem. Though it had been wound tightly, Nicholas had expanded the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in his wrists when he was bound. Contracting them now gave him enough leeway to find the end of the flex with his fingertips and begin unwinding it.

He was careful about it, even though, with the jouncing of the jeep, he was certain no one would be able to tell what was happening even if he periodically glanced his way.

His hands were free within ten minutes. Then he began work on the flex around his ankles. When this dropped away, he moved his head back and forth against the seat back, as if being bounced by the terrible condition of the highway. The blindfold slowly rose until it slipped off.

And Nicholas found himself staring into Van Kiet’s grinning face. The chief inspector, turned around in his front seat, was pointing a Russian-made pistol at him.

“No good,” he said. “You see, I know who you are. Or, I should say,
what
you are. I know the things you are capable of, and believe me when I tell you I will not allow you to do any of them. I’d sooner put a bullet through your brain right here.” As Nicholas shifted, he said, “Don’t play brinkmanship with me. I mean everything I say.”

Opening his
tanjian
eye, Nicholas knew that in this, at least, Van Kiet was telling the truth. He relaxed, sat back in the jeep’s rear seat. Even though he remained unbound, he was now further from freedom than he had been when he had been dumped into the jeep at Cu Chi.

They remained in silence while the driver maneuvered through the cart-clogged outskirts of the city. Nicholas saw almost at once that Van Kiet had no intention of taking him to the police station. That was an ominous sign, and Nicholas began to speculate on whose orders Van Kiet was following. A man like him, in the thick of intrigue in Saigon and its environs, might conceivably be on the payroll of more than one major operator. If he was sufficiently enterprising and clever enough, Van Kiet could juggle these multiple responsibilities while keeping them separate. It certainly wouldn’t do to let the Shan opium warlord who might be paying him off learn that he was also selling intelligence and protection to an international arms trader in the area. Such a misstep could only lead to the kind of violent death that overtook Vincent Tinh.

Nicholas knew he had to concentrate on surviving in any way possible. Van Kiet appeared to be acting on someone else’s orders, and in all likelihood someone who was in some way connected to Tinh’s murder. Nicholas had set events in motion along this path. Tinh had been making money on, among other things, the illegal computer hybrid using the stolen Chi technology, a first-generation neural-net chip. Now Tinh was gone and so was the illegal computer, and Nicholas had established himself in Saigon with a second-generation neural-net chip. Surely, he had reasoned, this was the most potent bait for the people with whom Tinh had been in business.

Bay had given him one name, the Russian national Abramanov. But Abramanov was a Russian, not a businessman. Besides, he would have no influence in Vietnam; Russians were universally reviled here. Who was behind Abramanov? Nicholas could not escape the suspicion that whoever it was, was the same person who had ordered Tinh’s murder. Now, it seemed likely that Nicholas was being taken to that man or one of his group. If he could survive long enough.

At length, they pulled up in front of an anonymous building with only a number affixed to the crumbling stucco facade.

Something about the address seemed familiar. Bicycles and
cyclos
passed by as they climbed out of the jeep. Nicholas could appreciate the element of freedom these passersby had, for the first time separating that freedom from the extreme poverty that was ubiquitous. These people, poor and miserable as they were, possessed something invaluable he did not. When he had arrived in Saigon, he would have found it inconceivable to envy anyone here, but now he did, and he felt humbled by it.

Inside, the building appeared deserted. Then Nicholas turned and, peering back down the hallway, felt his memory engage. The address. This building was where Vincent Tinh had rented space to do his illegal business, according to Shindo. Now Nicholas felt another step closer to solving the riddle of Tinh’s murder.

With the driver leading the way and Chief Inspector Van Kiet just behind Nicholas, they mounted a steep flight of metal stairs. But before they could reach the first landing, their way was blocked by a figure coming down from above.

“Chief Inspector,” a well-modulated voice said.

“You!” Van Kiet was as still as a statue.

“I’ll take charge of this man now,” Seiko said.

“Impossible! Have you any idea what he’s charged with?”

“I know everything.”

“Even so, I can’t just—”

“This is me you’re talking to, Van Kiet. You can and you will.”

Nicholas, listening to this extraordinary exchange, felt his heart skip a beat. This beautiful Japanese woman, Seiko Ito, had been his assistant. It had been she who had suggested he hire Vincent Tinh to be the director of Sato-Tomkin’s new Saigon office. Apparently, she had also been involved in the smuggling of the Chi neural-net chip out of Tokyo to Tinh here in Saigon. In Nicholas’s absence, and without solid proof, Tanzan Nangi, Nicholas’s partner, had sent her here to take over the operations, hoping that he would give her enough rope to hang herself. If she was convinced that she was trusted by management in Tokyo, Nangi reasoned, she might become careless and give herself away.