Nightwise (21 page)

I slipped Skinny's lanyard ID around my neck, picked up the joint off the bloody table, and took another long drag, crushed it out, and gathered up both cigarettes from the ashtray. The smoke in the room was dissipating. I could hear Red's sated chanting in my mind. It reminded me of Aztec pyramids and bloody sand. It made me smile to imagine these two men's souls being digested in the silent green. I shuddered at what I was capable of. Then I walked out the door of the interrogation room for the last time.

In the hall, I kept my head up, my clipboard prominent. If you have an ID and a clipboard, you can navigate most bureaucracies with virtual impunity. A few hundred footsteps, two flights of stairs, and I was out the door, free.

Outside it was night and cold—January in New York cold. The sky was gray light pollution. It looked beautiful. I paused on the stairs of the precinct house and thought about Darren locked away in the Tombs. I pushed it out of my mind, because I knew I deserved to be there a million times more than he. But here I was free and relatively clear.

I never saw Darren Mack again.

Some flurries fell. There was sky above me, not concrete, and I felt exhausted and wired all at the same time.

Dusan Slorzack was not a made man in the Illuminati and therefore not untouchable. He was out there, somewhere, and now he owed me too.

I walked toward the street, pausing to stop a uniformed cop who was entering the precinct.

“Excuse me, Officer,” I said, raising the red-flecked cigarette to my lips. “Do you happen to have a light?”

 

FOURTEEN

One cab ride, a shave and trim, and a quick stop at a thrift store to grab some clothes, and I was back on the job. I didn't want rest; I didn't want to go inside anywhere if I didn't have to for a while. A gentle snow was falling, and I felt like a kid again. I bought a throwaway cloned cell phone off a street hustler and made my way up to Brooklyn Bridge Park. One of the best views in the city. I leaned against the railing and enjoyed the city's lights and the cold, quiet snowfall.

I called the Dreamtime and asked for Didgeri. The bartender screamed to be heard over the noise of the club. After a moment I was transferred from the rumbling bar phone to a private office. Didgeri's warm, mahogany voice kissed me. I said hi.

“You're alive,” she said. “I don't believe it! How do you do that?”

“Luck of the hillbilly, darlin',” I said. “This line clean?”

“Silly boy, do you even need to ask?” she said.

“Magdalena with you?” I asked.

“Yes,” Didgeri said. “She came to me after Grinner and Christine left town. I've been letting her stay with me. Delightful young lady. She's been very worried about you. We thought you were dead and gone.”

“I was,” I said. “I got over it. I need you two to meet me somewhere. New York is going to get a lot of heat very soon, and we all need to change venue for a bit.”

“Where to?” Didgeri asked. “Rome, Paris, Ibiza?”

“Harrisonburg Virginia,” I said. “Farm country.”

“Oh. Well,” she said, “and you are sure this is preferable to imprisonment, torture, and death?”

“Nice,” I said. “There's a place down there called Foxglove Farm. I need you two to meet me there in about two days.” I gave Didgeri the directions, just as Grinner had given them to me.

“Any idea how I can get hold of Grinner?” I asked her. “I need him.”

“No, but Magdalena knows. She wants to speak with you,” Didgeri said.

“No, just…” I said.

“You okay?” Magdalena's voice now. “Grinner said you had some real badasses on your tail. You shake them?”

“Eventually,” I said. “You okay? Didgeri been taking good care of you?”

She laughed. “Yes. Very. Now what's this about you sending us to some chicken ranch in Virginia?”

“The city is going to get hot. Regular cops and cult shields are all going to be looking for me, and they will make their way to you two. I need to get to Foxglove too, but I need to make a side trip first.”

“Where?” Magdalena asked. “And why can't we all go together?”

I sighed. I fished out the last partly crushed Red-weed cigarette and found the white lighter in my new thrift store army parka. I cradled the bootleg cell phone between my ear and neck as I lit the joint.

“Because I am going to go do something bad, and possibly bloody, and I don't need a fucking audience for that.”

“Audience?” Magdalena said, contempt dripping from her voice. “I figure you need help. I'm not the one who has been out of circulation for over a month, grandpa.”

I laughed and nodded. “Okay, okay. Easy with the grandpa shit. Want to give me a complex?” I exhaled the cigarette smoke, it felt good. Her voice felt better.

“And if I say no?” I said.

“Then good luck finding Grinner,” she said.

I sighed again, took another drag on the cigarette. The city was like a fortress of light and glass stretching in every direction. It was beautiful.

“So we're in?” Magdalena said. I could hear her smile across the lousy connection.

“There is a place on Oceanview, in Little Odessa,” I said, and gave her the address. “Meet me there tomorrow afternoon, around two. I'll fill you and Didgeri in when you get there. No guarantees. This is a hasty caper and it is almost one hundred percent to get our shoes wet. This is no fucking field trip.”

She laughed and gave me the number to reach Grinner. I said good-bye and hung up.

This was bad. I kept closing my eyes and seeing Darren in his cell in Rikers. I had meant every word, that I would come back for him, meant it with all my blood, bone, and balls. I could put the energy and firepower I was putting into this new excursion to gain knowledge of whatever Slorzack and Berman had been up to, this Greenway, into getting Darren out. I wasn't doing that. But I would, I swore to myself, I would find a way to get him out. Settle accounts with Boj and Slorzack and then Darren. And I was dragging Magdalena into shit she was not ready for. I had wanted to keep her away from the Life as much as I could.

I called Boj's hospice. After a lot of bullshit and waiting, they got the phone to him.

“Hey, look who's finally decided to check in.” His voice was weak, strained. “How are you, asshole? Any good news?” I told him everything. Well, most of it, anyway.

“You paid up, redneck,” he said. “Man's too big, got too much
chara,
too much juice.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I am on this fucker, and now he owes me too. I am going to find him and I am going to make him pay. Gonna be a hell of a story too, Boj. Best stick around to hear it.”

He laughed; it turned into a burbling, hacking cough. “Okay, I'll try,” he said and hung up. He was dying, and I was running out of time to make this right. So many things to make right in this world, so little time to clean it all up, to make it pretty and square.

I finished my joint, crushed it out on the snow-covered ledge, and flicked it into the night. The view was just a view again, and the snow was no longer wondrous, it just made me cold.

*   *   *

I stopped by my bus locker and picked up a few things I'd need for the caper and scooped the last of my emergency cash. I ditched the cloned cell phone and bought another one off the street. I managed to find a decent flop for fifty dollars a night. I also picked up some cheap soul food, a few packs of American Spirits, and a six-pack of PBR. I asked for Cheerwine at three places. No one had it.

After I ate, I lay on the bed and dialed the number I had for Grinner. He answered on the second ring.

“Go,” he said.

“Hello from hell, asshole,” I said. “The AC's shitty, wish you were here.”

“No fucking way,” he said. “How did you…”

“Clean line?” I asked.

“Hold,” he said. Beat of five seconds, then, “Affirmative. I figured you were dead, Ballard. Holy shit, man.”

“I need some work related to that thing,” I said. “I still got any credit, or frequent-flyer miles? And I need part of it by tomorrow afternoon just to make it sexier.”

“Talk to me,” Grinner said. And I did. I told him what I needed by tomorrow afternoon and where I needed it to be for me to pick it up.

“Should be doable,” he said. “But that quick means quality is going to suffer. It might get bad quick, y'know?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm covering that. Getting some high-end artillery for backup.”

“Anyone I know?” Grinner asked. I ignored him.

“I also need you to find any connections, and they do exist, between James Berman, a guy named Alex Trace, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the Life. Slorzack may have cleaned up his own mess pretty well, but Berman's the chain around his neck. They were into some deep shit together. See what you can dig up, okay?”

“Yeah, and then your credit is all used up, sport,” Grinner said. “Only reason I'm doing this for you is I'm kinda curious what you are going to do next, you crazy son of a bitch.”

“Love to your girl,” I said. “She's better than you deserve.” And I hung up.

I sat by the open window and the fire escape and watched the snow fall lazily and drank my beers. By four
A.M.
I could sleep, and I did.

*   *   *

In the morning I got up, reluctantly, out of my warm bed, to meet the Gun Saint.

Brighton Beach is a neighborhood near Coney Island. Its rows and rows of houses are tombs for old working-class Jews. In the last twenty years or so, it has also become home to more and more Russian immigrants.

At the edge of the ocean is a small park. Today it was filled with children and parents enjoying the snow, building snowmen and forts, having snowball fights. The rows of chess tables had been cleared, and dozens of old men sat playing the game of kings in the cold air and bright sunlight. A portable radio was playing big band music off an AM radio station—Glenn Miller.

Alone on a cleared park bench, an old Asian man sat watching the children play and looked beyond them to the cold blue, foaming waters of the Atlantic. He was short and stocky, but not fat. He had a salt-and-pepper crew cut and a broad, unsmiling face. He looked to be in his sixties, but it was hard to get a handle on his age. While everyone else was bundled up in heavy coats, parkas, scarves, and gloves, he was in a simple maroon windbreaker and white oxford shirt and work pants, with work shoes. He sat with a great deal of serenity and power, as if all before him—the ocean, the sky—was arrayed for his viewing alone.

“Hello Ichi-sama,” I said in my best Japanese. I bowed, low.

“Your Japanese is atrocious,” he said in English. “You've had ten years to improve it.”

“Yeah, kept meaning to get that Rosetta Stone thing. Never did,” I said. “May I sit?”

He rose, a smooth, fluid movement, and bowed slightly. “Yes,” he said. After I sat, he returned to the exact position he had been in before and regarded the waves crashing on the frozen sand. His eyes were black mirrors.

“It has been ten years, hasn't it?” I said. “Still do tai chi here at sunup?”

“Yes,” Ichi said. “I occasionally have to dismiss a few
Bamusu
who have decided to sleep here after gorging themselves on wine. I don't like them here when the children come to play. It frightens the children.”

I nodded. “It's a lovely park. Still play chess?”

“I do,” he said. “There is an eighty-five-year-old gentleman from a little town on the White Sea. He is very good. We talk about his grandchildren and how we both grew up in fishing villages. There is also a man who was the only survivor of his family from Treblinka. He beats me on a regular basis. Very good.”

I nodded toward an open table with a board painted on the top. The pieces were bunched on top of the board. “Care to play me?”

“No,” he said. “You would lose.”

“Humor me,” I said. He stood, regarded me, and walked to the table. I followed. We sat on the cold benches, Ichi seemed not to even notice the cold and began to set up the pieces. He gave me the first move.

“How is your daughter?” I asked.

“Well,” he said. “She completed her schooling at Oxford six years ago and is now a respected barrister in London. She has met a man, an Englishman. I am not completely unsatisfied with her choice. I anticipate a wedding and grandchildren shortly.”

I lost a knight. Ichi lost a pawn.

“Congratulations,” I said. Ichi grunted.

I lost two pawns. Ichi was relieved of a bishop. He paused and looked across the board at me, as if he were analyzing me a molecule at a time.

“I believe the last time you saw my daughter was at my wife's funeral,” Ichi said after a time.

“Yes,” I said. “Your wife was a wonderful woman. I loved the tea she always made me when I visited your home.”

Something approximating a smile crossed Ichi's face, and his cold, dark eyes warmed by a degree.

“Yes,” he said. “She was … wonderful.”

I took a rook, but it was a trap and it cost me a bishop.

“I've come to ask for your assistance, your expertise, in a rather urgent enterprise,” I said. Ichi said nothing but continued to look over the board. “I am planning for some resistance at one point, and I would be honored if you would lend me your experience and your skill, Gun Saint–san.”

Ichi's eyes flicked up from the board to me.

“You ‘planned' for resistance?” he said. “I trust your planning of this mission shows more foresight than your chess game.”

I took Ichi's queen. He looked up at me and narrowed his eyes again. I held the queen between my fingers.

“You were off your game just a hair from the moment your wife came up,” I said. “I saw an opening, and I saw your trap. I worked very hard to make a riposte happen. I sacrificed my bishop, but it got me your queen. You are right, by the way. I am going to lose.”