Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (24 page)

CHAPTER 40

PARTY CRASHER

I
t didn’t go as I had planned with Bettenhauser. Nothing in politics had gone as I had planned. You would have thought life would have taught me long ago that plans are written with vanishing ink on tissue paper swirling down a toilet, but about some things I am dim as dusk.

Yet Bettenhauser had unwittingly clarified the precariousness of my position and forced me to count the betrayals like a banker counting his coin. I knew it wouldn’t be long before all that treachery came to a head, and I had immediately taken precautions. Still, when I opened the door to my apartment and walked into a wall of smoke, I was startled that betrayal had breached the barricades so quickly. Within the shadows I saw his unmistakable silhouette, sitting solidly in a chair amidst the scattered ruin of my things, his hat still on, a cigarette glowing like the tip of Satan’s nose.

“Late night, Road Dog?”

I felt a flash of danger in the calm of his voice, but I tried not to show it. This was Stony, my good pal Stony, and I didn’t want him yet to know all that I knew. When I was sufficiently calmed, I switched on the light and looked around at the mess; I hadn’t cleaned the apartment yet from Ossana’s ransacking.

“If I had known you’d be coming,” I said, “I would have tidied up the place.”

“Oh, no need to clean on my account. I have lived in hovels that make this look like the Royal Suite at the Four Seasons. Where were you all this time?”

“Meeting with Bettenhauser,” I said.

“Ah, sleeping with the enemy.”

“Not quite, but almost with the enemy’s wife. I didn’t know Mrs. Bettenhauser was so attractive. I was hitting on her during the whole of her husband’s insipid speech without realizing who she was.”

“Now that would have been a scandal worth having; that could have swung the election all by itself. You don’t mind me barging, do you?”

“Not at all. Friends, right?”

“Friends indeed.”

“In fact,” I said, “I was going to give you a call to tell you what I learned tonight. I didn’t give the Bettenhauser photographs to Sloane, because I had some questions, and Bettenhauser gave me the answers. It turns out that the woman he was hugging was not an illicit lover but someone he helped off the streets and who is now running one of the charities he sponsors.”

“Maybe true, but that doesn’t mean he’s not giving her his charitable best, daily, over and again, if you catch my drift.”

“Yes, except it turns out that the specific woman in the photograph would be more interested in Mrs. Bettenhauser than Mr. Betten–hauser
,
if you catch my drift. And it was Mrs. Bettenhauser who clued me in after her husband called her in to the meeting. I’ll check it out, but Mrs. Bettenhauser’s eyes were so full of sincerity that I believe her. Which means the photographs wouldn’t have damaged, but instead bolstered, Bettenhauser’s campaign. It’s a good thing I didn’t give the photos to the press.”

“In that case,” said Stony, “a very good thing.”

“But you knew all this already.”

“There are so few surprises in our game.”

“And yet for some reason you wanted me to give the photographs to Sloane, even brought him in to meet with me at Rosen’s. Who are you working for, Stony?”

“Don’t be forgetting your rules, now. Rule One: a bagman works only for himself.”

“Yes, the rules, your daddy’s precious rules. Here’s the thing that surprised me. I liked Tommy Bettenhauser more than I thought I would. He is as sickeningly sincere as his wife. Sincerity is nothing you want in a lay, but an interesting trait in a public servant. After our talk he went out and spoke with the pro-gun demonstrators who were picketing his speech, a little protest I had set up. He didn’t turn them around, but he spoke civilly and they spoke civilly back. It was a revelation, a glimpse of what we as people could be. It turns out that Tommy Bettenhauser is a conviction politician.”

“You’re being played, Road Dog. The only difference between a conviction politician and a convicted politician is evidence. The memory card from my camera is missing. You wouldn’t know where it might be? I would have tossed the place to look for it, but someone beat me to it.”

“Ossana DeMathis.”

“A redheaded demon, that one. Remember the story of Odysseus being lashed to the mast so he can’t succumb to the Sirens’ call? Only a fool goes to bed with a demon.”

“Is that another one of Briggs’s Rules?”

“That’s just sheer common sense, which you seem to have misplaced lately. Where is my memory card?”

“Not here, not on me.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun, laid it on his thigh. It wasn’t a flagrant gesture, just a simple restatement of things.

“Maybe I should frisk you just to be sure,” he said.

“It wouldn’t do you any good.”

“So where might it be? And no blustering.”

“I left it at a camera store so they could print up the pictures.”

“Hand over the receipt.”

“It’s just pictures of a little girl,” I said. But I knew it was more than just pictures of a little girl. It was the thread that would unravel everything, a red thread, coppery and bright, like the hair on that little girl, who looked so much like Ossana DeMathis they could have been clones. Once I saw her spinning around that tree in Lancaster, I knew Ossana would be coming after me like she had come after Jessica Barnes and Amanda Duddleman. I just didn’t know how or how soon. Stony, with his gun, was a pretty good answer.

“I’ve been told to clean it up,” said Stony. “All of it.”

“And that includes me.”

“Rule Seven.”

“A bagman never reveals his secrets,” I said. “What would your father say if he saw you here with a gun?”

“He would understand. You know what a bagman’s pension is? Information. I decided to cash in my pension before it disappeared, which it will, sooner than you could ever imagine.” He waved his gun languidly. “The receipt, Road Dog, and don’t make me ask again.”

I took out my wallet. My fingers felt like sausages as I fumbled about while trying to fish out the receipt.

“I’ll just have it all,” he said.

“You’re going to steal it from me?”

“Rule Six.”

I actually laughed as I tossed him the wallet. He looked through it quickly and found the receipt. “Goodrich Camera,” he said before stuffing the whole thing in a pocket. “I’ll be there when it opens. Now let me have your phone.”

“Oh, no, not my phone,” I said flatly.

“Oh, yes, your phone. Tasks hard the man who holds the gun.”

“Who is that? Chandler?”

“Mulroney.”

When I pitched the phone to him, he quickly thumbed around to see if there was anything of concern.

“No texts this evening? Excellent. And no calls in or out. You’re not very popular. Such a shame, Road Dog. If we get through this, I’ll work to expand your social circles.”

“Are we going to get through this?”

“I am,” he said with a hearty grin. “We’ll see about you.” He laughed, bright and easy, a laugh that smoothed my jagged nerves like a shot of whiskey. “But unless you go off and do something half-cocked, like try to run from me, it should all work itself out. Now come on, we can’t stay here, the state this place is in.”

He pushed himself to standing and waved the pistol at me again before sticking it in his jacket pocket, the gun barrel aimed now at my chest.

“Pretend you’re a stray dog and let me take you home. Oh, and bring along the bag.”

CHAPTER 41

A BAGMAN’S CANTATA

W
hat was your father?” said Stony. “What did he do?”

It was early afternoon the day after my abduction. We were now in the basement of the Briggs Mulroney house in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia, a modest fully detached stone structure, perched on a rise above the street. You would have thought, with all I had heard about the late departed pater Mulroney, there would have been a historical marker on a post outside:

H
ERE LIVED
B
RIGGS
M
ULRONEY
,
LEGENDARY
P
HILADELPHIA BAGMAN
,
WHO HAD THE CITY COURTS AND
C
ITY
C
OUNCIL IN HIS BACK POCKET FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES
. “H
E MADE STRONG MEN WEEP
.”

Stony sat calmly in a spindly wooden chair set in front of me, his heavy black shoes flat on the cement floor. His jacket was off, his suspenders were thick and red to match his socks, his shirt cuffs were rolled, his hat was still in place. It wasn’t hot in the basement, but even so, great drips of sweat fell from his temples. Resting on one wide thigh was an envelope fresh from the camera store. In his left hand was a cigarette; in his right hand was the gun.

“My father cut lawns for a living,” I said.

“Now there’s a job, yes. Fresh air, summer sun, working with your shirt off, the smell of clean sweat and freshly mowed grass. And clients so appreciative to come home to a smooth emerald carpet, where before was a sprouting mess of weeds.” He took a long draft from his cigarette and let the smoke sit in his lungs as a drop of sweat rolled down his cheek like a tear. “I would have liked that, I think. I could have sung my arias beneath the roar of the mowers.”

“We all make our choices,” I said.

“Not all of us,” he said, tilting his head low as he looked down at me.

I was sitting splat on the cracked cement floor of that basement, my wrist handcuffed to a cast-iron pipe sticking out of the stone wall. To my right, teetering like an old drunk, stood a rusted water tank slowly leaking into a puddle at its feet. Beyond that was a single glass window high on the wall. Thoughtfully set within my reach was a large silver thermos.

“You maybe chose to give up the fresh green grass for the stunted tundra of the law,” said Stony, “but what choice was there for Briggs Mulroney’s son? I was like a prince, raised under the stick and shelter of my father’s expectations. How does one abdicate from that? And so here I am, with just a spit shine on my shoes and a bag in my hand, struggling to make my way in a compromised world.”

“Willy Loman with a gun.”

“And why not? For what is a bagman, really, but a salesman at heart, selling access, selling power, selling other people’s integrity? Those with money have wants; public servants want money; all I do is make the sale. I’m like a little Irish sprite spreading happiness. So why, I ask, must I ply my trade in the shadows, behind Dumpsters, away from prying eyes?”

Stony had left me alone for a few hours that morning when he went off to pick up my photographs, and in that gap I had tried desperately to effect my escape. But the cast-iron pipe was affixed so firmly to the wall that all my heaving and shaking did nothing except scrape raw the skin of my wrist. And my pathetic shouts for help came to naught. When a mouse made a quick appearance from behind the water heater and stared at me for a moment, I wondered if I could induce it to nibble the handcuffs in two. That might have worked if I were tied with a rope. That might have worked if it weren’t a mouse. But despite all my shouting and yanking and pleading and tears, still there I was, trapped in the basement as Stony sang the sad ballad of his life.

“It gets old fast, Road Dog, carrying the bag. I’ve gotten old, fast. How many years do I have left? Ten, fifteen at the most before my heart explodes in my chest. Am I not to drink champagne from the slipper of a slim nineteen-year-old? Am I not to bake like a beached whale on the sands of some tropical paradise? Am I destined to die as I lived, in this house, bound by these braces, clutching to the death this stinking bag?”

“The sad lament of the aging bagman,” I said. “You’re making me sick to my stomach, Stony.”

“Use the thermos if you must. But I have my dreams.”

“And to reach for them you sold me out.”

“I sold you out?”

He put the cigarette in his mouth and tossed the envelope from the camera store, spun it hard so that it would have nicked my face had I not knocked it down with my free hand.

“Take a gander,” he said, a line of spite now in his voice. “Take a good look at the reason why you won’t ever be rising from this basement, at least not in one piece. I’ll have to chop you up and bag the bits to get you out.”

The envelope was already open. I tilted it so that the photographs I had ordered from Goodrich Camera spilled onto the floor. I went through them as best I could, sliding through the pile one by one. And in the middle I stopped, picked up a photograph, stared at it for a moment before looking up at the sweating figure sitting across from me.

“Oh, Stony,” I said.

“And now you know.”

“Now I know.”

“It was not what I was intending.”

“Oh, Stony,” I said again, and strangely, even as he had me cuffed to a pipe on the floor of his basement, even as he was threatening to cut me up and stuff me into black plastic garbage bags, I couldn’t help but feel a great heaving pity for him. I knew now why he was sweating, why his emotions were veering madly across the landscape: he had been swallowed by his crimes and had lost himself.

Along with the photographs of the girl in Lancaster, and the photographs of Bettenhauser and his charitable friend that I had already been given, were photographs of me, yes, snaps of me. There I was making my way through the town, there I was walking with Ossana, there I was captured through a diner window breakfasting with McDeiss, there I was passing my envelopes to this labor leader and that community organizer, there I was stepping with my bag into the Devereaux mansion. And let’s just say the angles weren’t flattering.

He had been spying on me, my friend Stony Mulroney, and based on the photograph of me entering Boyds to buy a tuxedo, he had been shadowing me even from before we first met. There were photographs of Duddleman waiting outside my apartment and then later talking with me before going up my stairs, pictures that nearly broke my heart. But even the Duddleman pictures were not the saddest, no.

The saddest pictures were the photographs of a woman walking out of a bar on Eighteenth Street, walking out of the Franklin, photographs of Jessica Barnes leaving her meeting with me. But Stony’s camera didn’t stay at the bar, waiting for me to emerge. Suddenly it was following Jessica, down this street and that street, until, in a close-up, she was looking with fear on her pretty face as someone approached her. And then the full pan of the girl and two men who were approaching, Colin Frost and the skinny bearded kid, the same ones who would kill Duddleman.

“You told them where she was,” I said. “You told them where she was going.”

“I thought all they wanted was a bit of a talk.”

“Oh, Stony.”

“I didn’t know it would end in a murder,” he said with a crack of despair in his voice. “It wasn’t I that wielded the hammer, believe that. It wasn’t those two blaggards either.”

“Who, then?”

“Your demon lover, Victor. How does that feel, to know you were slipping it to her that did the hammering? But I wasn’t a part of it, I didn’t know.”

“You’re as much a part of it as they are.”

“Not without the evidence, see? Oh, Road Dog, if it were only the photographs in that envelope, we’d be having a different conversation now, wouldn’t we? I would have already burnt the pictures and smashed the memory card. You’d be none the wiser and I’d be off scot-free. After that I would only keep you here until the deed was done and then we’d leave again as best of friends.”

There had been a high level of fear eating at my liver from the moment I saw Stony in my apartment, but now it was like someone had jacked one end of a wire into fear’s brain and the other end into a socket.

“What deed?” I said.

“And after all the dust had settled, and all the crimes were over and done with, I would have invited you down to my eventual redoubt on the Yucatan, and we’d have swallowed daiquiris on the beach together and screwed twenty-peso whores and laughed about the old times when all we could stomach was something as hard as a Sazerac.”

“What deed are we talking about, Stony?”

“It was the clerk at the camera store, a pretty young thing behind the counter, who laid your perfidy bare. She told me about the other clerk, the one who received two bills to deliver a disk from a Mr. Carl. I suppose she was hoping for more of the same from me, the little conniver. And that right there put a crimp in all our plans. It took me all morning to find him, but I did. And after some encouragement he told me where he delivered the disk. Like a knife in the heart.”

“They’re going to do something to the girl in Lancaster? When?”

“It was you who set the timetable.”

“What are they going to do?”

He stood suddenly, too angry anymore to sit. He began to pace, growing more agitated with each step of those heavy black stompers. The sweat beaded on his forehead now, as from a fever.

“What they tell me is nothing,” said Stony. “I’m merely a bagman to them. ‘Take the money and shut up,’ he says with his affected little snivel, and so I do, and I do. But in the end it wasn’t them, it was you who betrayed me. By sending that disk to McDeiss, you as good as put my head on a pike. How could you do me like that?”

I looked at my hand, at the handcuff, at the pipe to which I was chained, and then back at Stony.

“I should kick you in the head for what you did,” he said.

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “I really, really do.”

And so he did.

In the moment before I closed my eyes, I saw the big black sledgehammer of a shoe come at me like a bounding panther. And then, in the darkness, a bright light exploded as the blow landed just above my jaw and sent me spinning until my other cheek slammed into the basement wall and my wrist jerked, excruciating, in its cuff. My face felt like a smashed ceramic mask, and a bell was ringing in my ear.

When I opened my eyes again, even as the pain was diffusing through the whole of my head, Stony was back in the chair, breathing deeply. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

“That was curiously satisfying,” he said.

I could barely hear him over the ringing. He lit a cigarette, took a luxurious inhale, lifted his jaw as he blew out the smoke. I reached my free hand to my face and it came away slick with blood.

“Now what?” I said, trying and failing to keep the hate out of my voice.

“The plan was a simple one,” he said, eerily calm, as if the violence had taken something sharp out of him. “I would let this little game of ours play out, pocket the money, go on as I’ve been going on as I set up my departure. I had enough if I sold the house, collected a few debts, twisted what I could out of those I had bought in my years lugging the bag. Maybe even put the squeeze on the old lady, and the runt keeping the Big Butter’s eye on her. And then I’d be off, ahead of the inevitable indictment. Now it’s too late. Thanks to you, I’m already on the run. Now the only way I collect anything is to make her happy, our demon dream.”

He took another inhale, examining me carefully as I lay sprawled and bloody on the cement floor.

“She wants your shoes,” he said.

“Take them.”

“You know that’s not enough.”

“You’re not a killer, Stony.”

“You’re right, I’m not, and that’s what makes this so difficult. I was stepping over the line with my payoffs and schemes, yes, but at least I always knew where the line it was, and my farthest step was never too far from the straight and the narrow. That was fine when I was answering to the small-money boys, but when you sign up with the Big Butter, the money smothers you in zeroes and suddenly the whole of your soul is in the bill of sale. The line that was firstly here is suddenly there, and then over there, and then so far away it can’t even be seen from where you were before. And now here I am.”

“Don’t cross it, Stony.”

“It’s already crossed. That’s the problem. I’m already on the other side. I want to be more than this. I want to be better than this. And yet they have dragged me into the mire.”

“You did it to yourself. Let me go and we’ll start to unravel the damage.”

“I want to. Believe me.” He locked his eyes on mine. “Do you believe me?”

“Does it matter?”

“My father, he always told me to be courageous, yes, and that’s the ticket here. But is it more courageous to stand up to them, or to step over my pathetic hesitations by putting a bullet in your throat?”

“Not the second thing, the first thing.”

“I’m confused, Road Dog. And sad. And angry. I’m an animal caught in a trap, and there is only one way out.”

“You kill me, Stony, and you’ll regret it today, tomorrow, for the rest of your life.”

“Maybe so, but what choice do I have?” He pushed himself to standing and staggered toward me. “It won’t be the grand retirement I had planned, but what I end up with will be something. I can’t run away with nothing. My father made of me a bagman, isn’t this just the inevitable next step?”

“No.”

“Yes, no, what does it matter in the end? In the end all that matters is the doing, and the time for the doing has come. Open up, Road Dog, it’s dinnertime.”