He studies my face, his own expression stuck between a smirk and a frown, but whatever he is looking for, he doesn’t find it. He has little choice but to laugh it off so his muscle will understand I am not being disrespectful.
“Heh-hah.” Only part of a laugh. “Yeah. That’s good. Well, it’s all there.”
I help him out by taking the case off the desk, and he is happy to see me stand. This time, he does not offer his hand.
I walk away from the desk, toward the door, case in hand, but his voice stops me. He can’t help himself, his curiosity wins over his cautiousness; he isn’t sure if he’ll ever see me again, and he has to know.
“Did’ja really pop Corlazzi on that boat?”
You’d be surprised how many times I get this one. Corlazzi was a Chicago underworld luminary responsible for much of the city’s butchery in the sixties and seventies, a man who redefined the mafia’s role when narcotics started to replace liquor as America’s drug of choice. He saw the future first, and deftly rose to prominence. As hated as he was feared, he had a paranoid streak that threatened his sanity. To ensure that he would reign to a ripe old age, he removed himself to a gigantic houseboat docked in the middle of Lake Michigan. It was armed to the teeth, and its only connection with land was through a speedboat manned by his son, Nicolas. Six years ago, he was found dead, a single bullet lodged in the aorta of his heart, though no one heard a shot and the man was behind locked doors with a bevy of guards posted outside.
Now, I don’t have to answer this question. I can leave and let Archibald and his entourage wonder how a guy like me could possibly do the things attributed to the name Columbus. This is a tactic I’ve used in the past, when questions like his are posed. But, today, the last day of the cruelest month, I think differently. I have six eyes on me, and a man’s reputation can live for years on the witness of three black guys in a warehouse on the outskirts of Boston.
I spin with a whirl part tornado and part grace, and before an inhale can become an exhale, I have a pistol up and raised in my hand. I squeeze the trigger in the same motion, and the cigarette jumps out of Archibald’s mouth and twirls like a baton through the air. The bullet plugs in the brick wall above the credenza as gravity takes the cigarette like a helicopter to a gentle landing on the cement floor. When the six eyes look up, I am gone.
CHAPTER 2
LATERAL
bursts of wind prick the side of my face as I walk into my building. By the time I hear the story again, the scene in Archibald’s warehouse will have taken on Herculean proportions. There will have been ten guys, instead of three, all with their guns drawn and trained on me. Archibald will have insulted me by saying, “There’s your case, bitch,” or some other endearment. I will have danced around bullets, mowed down seven guys, and walked on water before the cigarette was shot out of Archibald’s mouth. Advertising doesn’t hold a candle to the underworld’s word of mouth.
My apartment does not reflect the size of my bank account. It is eight hundred square feet, sparsely decorated, with only the furniture and appliances necessary to sustain me for a week, the longest I stay most of the time. I do not have a cleaning service, or take a newspaper, or own a mailbox. My landlord has never met me, but receives a payment for double rent in cash once a year. In return, he asks no questions.
On my one table, I open the case carefully and spread its contents in neat stacks. Twenty dollars to a bill, a hundred bills to a band, five hundred bands in the case. This up front, triple when the job is complete. Underneath all of the money is a manila envelope. The money holds no allure for me. I am as immune to its siren’s song as if I had taken a vaccine. The envelope, however, is my addiction.
I slide my finger under the seal and carefully open the flap, withdrawing its contents as though these pages are precious—brittle, breakable, vulnerable. This is what makes my breath catch, my heart spin, my stomach tighten. This is what keeps me looking for the next assignment, and the next, and the next—no matter what the cost to my conscience. This . . . the first look at the person I am going to kill.
Twenty sheets of paper, two binders of photographs, a schedule map, an itinerary, and a copy of a Washington, D.C. driver’s license. I savor the first look at these items the way a hungry man savors the smell of steak. This mark will occupy my next eight weeks, and, though he doesn’t know it, these papers are the first lines written on his death certificate. The envelope is before me, the contents laid out next to the money on my table, the end of his life now a foregone conclusion, as certain as the rising sun.
Quickly, I hold the first paper to the light that is snaking through my window, my eyes settling on the largest type, the name at the top of the page.
And then a gasp, as though an invisible fist flies through the air and knocks the breath from my lungs.
Can it be? Can someone have known, have somehow discovered my background and set this up as some sort of a joke? But . . . it is unthinkable. No one knows anything about my identity; no fingerprints, no calling card, no trace of my existence ever left carelessly at the scene of a killing. Nothing survives to link Columbus to that infant child taken from his mother’s arms by the “authorities” and rendered a ward of the state.
ABE MANN. The name at the top of the sheet. Can this be a mere coincidence? Doubtful. My experience has proven to me time and time again that coincidence is a staple of fiction, but holds little authority in the real world. I open the binder, and my eyes absorb photograph after photograph. There is no mistake: this is the same Abe Mann who is currently Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America, the same Abe Mann who represents the seventh district of the state of New York, the same Abe Mann who will soon be launching his first bid for his party’s nomination for president. But none of these reasons caused the air to be sucked from my lungs. I have killed powerful men and relish the chance to do so again. There is more to the story of Abe Mann.
Twenty-nine years ago, Abe Mann was a freshman congressman with a comfortable wife and a comfortable house and a comfortable reputation. He attended more sessions of congress than any other congressman, joined three committees and was invited to join three more, and was viewed as a rising star in his party, enjoying his share of air time on the Sunday morning political programs. He also enjoyed his share of whores.
Abe was a big man. Six-foot-four, and a one-time college basketball star at Syracuse. He married an accountant’s daughter, and her frigid upbringing continued unabated to her marriage bed. He stopped loving her before their honeymoon ended, and had his first taste of a prostitute the Monday after they returned from Bermuda. His weekdays he spent at the state capitol as a district representative; his weekends he spent anywhere but home. For five years, he rarely slept in his own bed, and his wife kept her mouth sealed tight, fearful that intimate details of their marriage would end up sandwiched between the world report and the weekend weather on the five o’clock news.
Once elected to serve in the nation’s capital, Abe discovered a whole new level of prostitution. There were high-quality whores in New York, mind you, but even they paled in comparison to the women who serviced the leaders of this country. The best part was, he didn’t even have to make polite inquiries. He was approached before he was sworn in, approached the first night of his first trip to Washington after the election. A senator, a man he had seen only on television and whom he had never met in person, called him directly at his hotel room and asked if he would like to join him for a party. What an incredible time he had had that night. With the stakes higher, the women so young, so beautiful, and so willing, he had experienced a new ecstasy that still made his mind reel when he thought of it.
Later that year, after he had settled, he grew fond of a hard-bodied black prostitute named Amanda B. Though she argued against it, he forced her to fuck him without a condom, satisfying his growing thirst for bigger and bigger thrills. For about six months, he fucked her in increasingly public locations, in increasingly dangerous positions, with increasingly animalistic ferocity. Each fix begat the next, and he needed stronger doses to satisfy his appetite.
When she became pregnant, his world caved in. He crawled to her in tears, begging for forgiveness. She was not frightened of him until she saw this change. This change meant he was more dangerous than she had anticipated. She knew what would happen next: after the tears, after the self-flagellation, after the “why me?” and the self-loathing, he would turn. His internal remorse would eventually be directed outward; he would have been made to face his own weakness, and he would not like what he had seen. And so he would destroy that which made him feel helpless. Even in the altered state cocaine had made of her mind, Amanda B. knew this as surely as she knew anything.
But she liked the way the baby felt inside her. She liked the way it was growing, swelling her stomach, moving inside her. Her! Amanda B., formerly LaWanda Dickerson of East Providence, Rhode Island, formerly inmate 43254 of the Slawson Home for Girls, her! Amanda B.!
She
could create life as well as any uppity wife of a congressman, any homemaker in a big house on a big lot next to a big lake. Her! As good as any of them.
So she decided to hide. She knew he would come for her, and when he did, she would be gone. She had a friend back home, a john who had proposed to her when she was fourteen. He still called, long-distance and not collect either! He would take her in, would hide her from the congressman when he came looking. If she could just get to him. . . .
But she didn’t make it to Rhode Island. Instead, she ended up in the hospital, her nose bleeding, her lungs exploding, her heart beating holes into her chest. The police had found her seven-months-pregnant frame in the basement of an abandoned tenement building during a routine drug raid, a rubber cord tied around her bicep, a needle sticking out of her forearm. She was checked into the hospital as Jane Doe number 13 that day. The next day, she went into labor and gave birth to a four-pound boy. Social Services took him from her before she had held him for more than a minute.
Congressman Mann saw her for the last time two months later. Having seen the error of his ways, having re-dedicated his life to his country, his wife, and his God, he had her forcibly escorted from his front yard as she screamed louder and with more vehemence than she had ever screamed in her life. Ten days after the police report was filed, she was found dead in an alley behind a Sohio gas station, a knife handle sticking at an awkward angle from her neck. The policeman on the scene, a sixteen-year veteran named William Handley, speculated the wound was self-inflicted, though the coroner thought the circumstances of the death were inconclusive.
It took me two and a half years to put all that together. I did not ask the clay’s question of who is the potter until I had achieved adulthood, not believing I would survive long enough to care. Then, after killing my eighth mark in three years, achieving a level of professionalism few have matched, I started to wonder who I was. Where did I come from? Who could possibly have sired me? The past, for which I had held no deference, reached out its huge, black paw and batted me right in the face.
So I clawed and scratched and exercised the necessary patience and restraint, and slowly put the jigsaw puzzle together, starting with the edges and working my way toward the center. A newspaper story connected to a hospital report connected to a police record until it all took shape and became whole. Once the puzzle was complete, I decided to dismiss the past once and for all. The present would be my domain, always the present. Every time I had tried to befriend the past, it chose to have no amity for me. Well, no more. I would bury my mother, Amanda B., so deep I would never find her again. And so I would my father, Congressman Abe Mann of New York.
And then, here is his name at the top of the sheet. Seven black letters printed in a careful hand, strong in their order, powerful in their conciseness. ABE MANN. My father. The next person I am to kill, in Los Angeles, eight weeks from now.
Can this be a coincidence, or has someone discovered my secret past and put the jigsaw puzzle together as I had? In my line of work, I can take no chances with the answer. I have to react quickly, waste as little time as possible, for if this does prove to be just another assignment, I’ll have to compensate for each minute missed.
I,
too, have a middleman. Pooley is the closest thing to friend or family I have, but we prefer the noncommittal label “business associates.” I take one more glance over the documents, stack everything back in the case, and head out the door.
A hotel a block away provides me with quick access to taxicabs whenever I need them. The rain diminishing, I make my way over to where the hotel’s doorman can hail me a car. The driver feels like chatting me up, but I stare out the window and let the buildings slide by outside like they’re on a conveyer belt, one after the other, each looking just like the one before it. Stymied, the driver lights a cigarette and turns up the radio, a day game, a businessman’s special, broadcasting from Fenway.
We make it to Downey Street in SoBo, and I have the driver pull over to a nondescript corner. I do nothing that will cause him to remember me; I pay a fair tip and move up the street quickly. A day from now, he won’t be able to distinguish me from any other fare.
I buy two coffees from a Greek delicatessen and climb the stoop to a loft apartment above the neighboring bakery. I am buzzed in before I can even juggle the foam cups and press the button. Pooley must be at his desk.
“You brought me coffee?” He acts surprised as I hand him one of the cups and sit heavily in the only other chair in the room. “You thoughtful bastard.”