"I appreciate this gratitude," Vic had said, "but what I really need is some friends who can help me with getting a gas station."
"This is the kind of thing that my friends can help you with."
"Somebody needs to talk to that Turkish guy on Flatbush."
"People can talk to him," said Ears. "People can influence him."
"A vague promise doesn't help me much. You know I been wanting that station for going on five years now. Place has got four gas bays. He can handle sixteen cars at a time. People gas up there right before they go to Jersey, the shore, whatever. I don't understand how these guys right off the boat end up with a gold mine like that. Pisses me off. Makes me crazy."
"I understand."
"No, no, Ears, you don't understand. You don't understand how the
Turkish guy does it and you don't understand my frustration. You have the lumber yard your father left you. Life is easy. Me, I'm not asking for much. Couple of your best guys talk to him and he agrees to sell. He sells, I buy."
"Maybe we take a piece of that."
"The sewage business only takes me so far, you understand? I'm ready to diversify."
"I want to get back to this other thing. If it's done right, I think we're talking twenty K," Ears had said, sitting on the bleachers. "If it's done right."
"Twenty thousand is shoeshine money. How much are you getting paid?"
"Hey, Vic, come on."
"Tell me."
"The job's worth thirty-five, I'm taking less than half off the top."
"Twenty-five."
"Shit."
"Twenty-five and I'll take you to a club in the city, pay for a few dances, how's that? Plus you explain to the Turk how it's gotta be."
Ears said nothing, shook his hand. "You'll pay Richie yourself?"
Victor nodded. "All right, tell me more."
"Easy stuff," Ears had said. "You follow a car out of midtown, near Rockefeller Center. It'll be a little Toyota with Georgia plates. It will have a couple of employees in it from a paper-shredding company."
"I should get into that business," Victor interrupted.
"It's trickier than it looks," answered Ears. "The shredding trucks are expensive and need a lot of maintenance. Anyway, you follow this car. It's going to Brooklyn. Lot of times it goes to the beach. Same lot every time. Same spot in the lot. Most nights. Very late, no one else around. Workers there party a little, smoke a joint, something like that. Then you show up."
"And do what?"
"You send a message."
"What's the message?"
"You don't say anything. You terrorize."
"Who's gonna be in the car. Guys have guns?"
"No, no, it's a couple, three Mexicans. No guns. Nothing to worry about."
"I'm terrorizing Mexicans?"
"We want them very scared. We want them to never go back to this business again. We want the message sent that they better stop what they are doing immediately."
"But you don't want me to talk to them?"
"No—the actual message will be sent another way. All you do is terrorize."
"You care how I do it?"
"No."
"You want creative terrorism?"
"I don't care what kind of fucking terrorism it is, so long as nobody is left around to talk about it."
"You want no talking afterward."
"Yes. We want a long period of silence. Like forever. But it can't look like a hit. No guns."
"You want these people dead."
"We want endless silence."
"Fuck you and your mystery bullshit. I want endless gas station profits, let's be very clear about that. And speaking of terrorism, you sure these aren't some kind of Islamic motherfuckers? I don't want to start messing around with that shit, we got all kinds of funky little mosques all over Brooklyn now, you never know where these guys are. I heard those guys are building bombs."
"Naw, it's just a couple of Mexicans in service uniforms. Don't say anything, just scare them to death. Send a message to their whole organization."
So he did. He had Richie ready with an old beater tanker with stolen plates and all the business lettering scraped off. The truck barely drove anymore and he needed to get rid of it anyway. They'd switched around a watery tankload from Queens. Richie had been told to strain the load, get out all the pieces of paper, tampons, anything that could identify it. Pure shit, Vic had told him, I want nothing but pure shit.
Then Vic had positioned his pickup truck at Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan, gotten the call that the Toyota two-door with Georgia license plate beginning with H7M had pulled down Fifth Avenue at Fifty-second. Victor had eased over to Fifth along Forty-eighth and looked to his left, north up Fifth Avenue. All he could see were sets of headlights, but the hour was so late that they were irregular, the traffic down the avenue running light. No one was behind him so he sat at the green light, waiting for the downtown traffic on Fifth to get caught by the red light, which it did. Then he spotted the Toyota two-door. Piece of cake. He pulled out as it passed, ignoring the red light. He'd followed it downtown, then east on Canal Street, over the Manhattan Bridge, looping around to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, onto the Gowanus Expressway toward Bay Ridge, then the Belt Parkway through Bath Beach, Gravesend, Sheepshead Bay. The car stayed in the right lane, was being driven both cautiously and inexpertly, the speed varying. He hung back most of the time, then blew past to have a look. The car had smoked glass, tough to see in. He thought he saw two, maybe three figures, though, caught a tail of music out the top of the window. He eased off, let the Toyota pass him, let a car get between them, then moved up again and called Richie on the cell. Richie had the truck ready, knew how to get to the lot. And then—well, Victor remembered what happened next. Who wouldn't? The figures inside the car, flailing at the glass. Too bad that they were girls. That was unexpected. Ears should have told him but had been smart not to. Because Vic wouldn't have taken the job. But there it was, a done thing. They'd driven the old truck out to Riverhead that same night, dumped the rest of the load in the morning, then driven it into Queens, taken off the stolen plates, and sold it to a scrap dealer for $400. Dirt cheap, no questions asked. The dealer wanted the truck for the tank, and the rest of it went to a yard. That truck was gone, forever, chewed to pellets and sent in a hopper by rail to Pennsylvania for recycling.
But Victor had a bad feeling. The strange phone call telling him that the caller knew what he did. The also very strange phone call for Richie from "his cousin." Richie had never mentioned a cousin! The
way Richie had been acting, like he knew something was up. The way some of the Mexican workers looked at Vic. He didn't like it. He got the feeling there was a problem.
But the worst thing was the light in the bedroom last night. He was right about that, too.
Somebody had been in the house.
Cleaning up with Clorox, fucking around with the vacuum cleaner. After he left with Sharon and before he came back. He could smell the Clorox. He'd gone over everything carefully before putting Richie in the bag. Found the basement door cut open. That was the clincher. Somebody had been there, checking Richie out, doing something no good, knew about what had happened.
Which is what Vic wanted to talk about with Ears now, in a general way. The baseball-field bleachers were the best place to meet again. In the open air. Safe, low-key. So he'd put in the call that morning, and now Ears appeared at the edge of the grass, shielded his eyes, and shambled slowly toward the bleachers. A big man with big ears and hands and knees. A gut that exploded. Fat-bango, your stomach is huge. The kielbasy and pasta and beer and steaks and clams marinara sloshing around in there like his stomach was a washing machine, with a little porthole window like Victor's mother's machine used to have. He'd put a cat in there once as a kid, and when it was dead, he cut off the head and slipped it into a kid's lunch box at school. Nice. You used to be a nice boy, his mother had said, but they both knew she was lying. I was never nice, Vic reflected, I never had the chance.
Now Ears climbed the bleacher steps.
"Hey."
"Fucking knees," said Ears, sitting down. "Since when do I come to you?"
"Since I asked."
"Let's say we ran into one another."
"You can say anything you like."
"What's the problem, why the attitude? I know I got to pay you tonight."
"Someone's on to me, Ears."
"Who?"
"Don't know. Your guy?" said Victor.
"Not my guy. If it was my guy, you'd be dead by now."
"Thanks a fucking lot."
"Those girls actually died."
"I guess they did," Victor said.
"But just two Mexican girls."
"You seen Richie around?" asked Victor. "He missed work."
"Nope."
"So I think whoever set this thing up is, like, getting anxious about it. Afraid it's going to come back to them."
Ears shrugged. "You think that, why?"
"Like I said, somebody is on to it."
"What's that got to do with your dear old friend Ears?"
"I want you to tell me who set this up."
"Originally? I don't know. It came down from above. The moon, the stars."
Victor stared at him. "Who spoke to you, Ears?"
"You know I don't have to answer that."
"I got my theories."
Ears shrugged.
"Some guy is hunting me. How did he find me? Somebody is setting me up. Maybe he wants my gas station for himself, you know what I'm saying?"
"Hey, Victor, this is sounding, what, a little wacko, you know?"
Victor sat still, not answering. Maybe Ears knew something, maybe he didn't. Somebody was nosing around. Not a cop, but someone else. Somebody working for somebody. Somebody you never heard of, Victor, which is exactly what you always were afraid of. Seemed to know his way around. Not good. Victor didn't like it. He had a feeling that Ears knew exactly what was going on, too. Whack Victor, grab the gas station for himself. Send the killer back to Florida or wherever he came from. Untraceable. Unsolvable, now that Richie was gone. It all made sense now.
"Know what?"Victor said.
"Yeah."
"You're right, I'm fucking wacko. Paranoid."
"There you go." Ears nodded. "I told you, don't worry."
"Anyway, we got a little date tonight."
"I'll have the cash. Some nice girls there tonight, too."
"What time, ten, eleven?"
"Hell, I can go late. Wife and kids are at her mother's."
"Midnight?"
Ears stood to go. "I'll see you then."
Victor shook his hand. Firmly, no bullshit. With a nod of the head. So Ears could relax. Solid. Reaffirming trust.
And the last time I'm ever going to do that, Victor thought.
I like New York,
realized Chen as he walked past horse carriages waiting at the edge of Central Park for tourists. Now I understand why people visit here, even people from China. New York was not as good as Shanghai, of course, but everyone knew that. New York was old, now, losing strength, and Shanghai would soon be the world's greatest city. Want proof? New York hadn't even rebuilt the World Trade Center and it was many years since it had been destroyed. In Shanghai, the government would have rebuilt those buildings in a year and made them bigger. But of course that was expectable now, for China's economy was growing three times faster than any other country's and would be the leading global power within ten or fifteen years. Especially since America had wasted so many resources in the war in Iraq. And kept borrowing money, weakening the dollar year by year. He knew that some people said that Russia would come back up, because it had oil and because global warming would strengthen its agriculture, but he had been to Moscow and St. Petersburg and it seemed to him that Russians were weak and drank too much. They had problems with drugs, too. He had also been to Paris and London and Berlin and Rome, among other places, and it was his objective, well-educated opinion that these cities were slowly dying and could in no way compare to Shanghai. But of course the real reason was that Asians were smarter than whites. All the tests proved it! The Americans knew this, too, which was why they wanted Asian immigrants. To lift the average. To compete with China!
He walked along the southern edge of the park toward the Time Warner building. Later he would do some shopping at Saks. He had three girlfriends, each the same size, and he'd decided just to get three of everything and give one of each to each girl. Of course, anything you could buy in New York you could buy in China, but they would be excited to see the Saks box and wrapping paper.
Chen stopped at a park bench and pulled out his phone, which worked in America, of course. You could get that, you just had to pay more. He dialed Ray Grant's house, and a woman answered.
"Ray Grant, please."
"The older Ray Grant can't come to the phone," she said. "I assume you mean the younger Ray Grant."