Hurt Machine (33 page)

“About three seconds before the gun was shoved into my neck.”

Nick shook his head at me. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone?”

“That’s the funny thing,” I said.

“There’s something funny about this?”

“I guess I mean ironic, not funny.”

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t me who couldn’t leave it alone. It was you, Nicky. You made a big show of giving me the security footage. You were the one who made noise about us getting together. It was you who treated me to dinner. You who served up Jorge Delgado up on a silver platter for me. If you had just shaken my hand and said goodbye that first time I stopped by the Grotto, we wouldn’t be here now.”

“I guess that was pretty dumb, huh? But I always did kinda look up to you when we were on the job and I was honestly happy to see you when you came to the Grotto that day.”

“For all the good it’s gonna do me now.”

“Sorry, Moe. I got no choice. We work for him,” he said, pointing his free hand in the direction of the passenger, “not the other way around.”

“You’re not a killer, Nicky. It’s not in your nature. That’s why you quit the job. You said it to me yourself. You couldn’t stand the bodies and the blood. You hated the smells: the piss, the shit, the decay.”

“Don’t fool yourself, Moe. I’ll do what I have to.”

“I know that. You’ll do anything to protect your family. That’s what this is all about, right? You protecting the family business, you saving your fuck-up brother. He is a fuck-up. That’s right, isn’t it, Gus?”

Gus, half-turned, one hand on the steering wheel, a Sig Sauer pointed at my head. “Keep talking, motherfucker and I’ll—”

Gus never finished his threat because the stoic passenger slapped him across the face. The sharp smack was amplified by the metal walls of the van. “Shut up mouth and drive van. Pay attention.”

Slavic accent, I thought, but not Russian.

“You’ll kill me. I know that, Nick.” I tried sounding calm, but I wasn’t. I thought I would have been okay with dying, with avoiding the pain of surgery, of recovery, and loss of pride that was sure to come with the treatments, but I never wanted to live more than at that moment. “No, I’m talking about Alta Conseco. I know it wasn’t in you to kill a woman like that. That had to be your brother.”

Nick didn’t say a word, hanging his head in shame. That was answer enough.

“But what did Alta see that made Gus chase her down the block, stab her in the back—that was really brave of you, by the way, stabbing a defenseless, unsuspecting woman in the back—”

“That’s not how it happened!” Gus yelled, half-turning again. “I didn’t want to—”

“You didn’t want to, but what, you fucking coward? Your mommy made you stab her in the back?”

“Shut up! Just shut up, Moe!” Nick yelled, shoving the short barrel of the .38 into my chest. “Shut up, Moe!”

“No! Let him speak,” the passenger ordered.

“Serbian?” I said. “No. Bulgarian, maybe.”

“Very good, smart man. Not idiot like Nick or moron brother. Maybe I get rid of them and keep you alive.” He had a good laugh at that. He was the only one laughing. “Go ahead vit you story. I am entertained.”

“Alta saw something or you thought she saw something she shouldn’t have, like one of these late night deliveries of yours. And I’m thinking there aren’t many things even an asshole like Gus would think was worth killing a woman over. Drugs come to mind. Heroin?”

Gus confirmed it. “That’s right, asshole.”

“Keep quiet, Gus,” Nick warned half-heartedly.

“Why? He knows we’re gonna kill him. What the fuck does it matter?”

There, he said aloud what we all knew. Don’t ask me why, but I wanted to thank him. I could deal with it now. With no hope I was less tormented, calmer. If I was about to die, though, I didn’t want to die curious.

“The Pizza Connection all over again,” I said, referring to how the Mafia had distributed heroin through New York pizzerias from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. “It’s Afghani heroin, isn’t it?”

The passenger applauded.

“How could you know that?” Nick asked.

“Look at a map. Bulgaria has access to the Black Sea and the Adriatic and it’s not really that far away from Afghanistan. You could transship it through Greece, Turkey, the Balkans. I hope that protecting your fuck-up brother is worth helping finance al-Qaeda.”

“Enough!” The passenger turned around, a Glock 26 in his hand. The rest of his face wasn’t much prettier than his profile. “Enough!”

“We’re here anyways,” Gus said, the van rolling to a stop.

The Bulgarian and Gus flung their doors open. Nick crawled past me, keeping a bead on me as he slid open the van’s side door. “Get out, Moe. Come on.”

We were all standing along the shore of Coney Island Creek; the not too distant buzz of cars from the Belt Parkway and the rumble of the subway from Shell Road would have covered the firing of a howitzer let alone the loud
pop, pop, pop
of a 9 mm. I knew very well that my body wouldn’t be the only one in the creek, but I took little comfort in that.

“Did you know there’s a scuttled submarine in here?” I heard myself say.

They all looked at me like I was crazy. I was crazy, crazy with fear. That calm I’d had in the van only moments before was gone, evaporated.

“Okay, asshole, let’s go,” Gus said, pushing my shoulder, poking me in the neck with his Sig.

It was then I realized I wasn’t as crazed with fear as I might have been because I dropped to the moist, rocky ground and kicked Gus’s legs out from under him. He fell into the creek. “Fuck you! You fucking coward!” I screamed at him.

The Bulgarian barked at Nick, “Kill him. Now!”

Nick fired without hesitation, but not at me. The Bulgarian grabbed his throat, fell to his knees, then toppled face forward onto an old tire, stone dead. I struggled to my knees.

Gus came up out of the creek. “What the fuck, Nicky! We’re dead. Do you know what they’re gonna do to us? Wait a second. Let me—I know.” Gus reached down and took the dead man’s Glock, aiming it at me. “We’ll kill Moe with Iliya’s gun. Then we’ll put the .38 in Moe’s—”

“Drop your weapons! Drop them down on the ground and kick them away.” It was Fuqua. Sirens were blaring in the background. “Do it. Do it now!”

Gus wheeled on Fuqua just as an F train pulled into the station a few hundred feet away. It was the last stupid thing he would ever do. Three flashes lit up the night and Gus Roussis collapsed to the ground, his body rolling back into the creek. His head was covered by black, filthy water. Reflexively, Nicky raised the .38, but I lunged forward off my knees, my shoulder connecting with the back of his legs and Nick crumpled backwards over me. By the time he collected himself, Fuqua was there and Nicky had no choice but to drop the gun.

“It wasn’t Esme. It was him,” I said, nodding at Gus’s body.

Ten minutes later this dirty, mostly forgotten patch of Coney Island was swarming with blue uniforms. Crime scene tape seemed to appear as if by magic. I was rubbing the feeling back into my wrists as I sat on the back deck of an ambulance.

“Thanks, Fuqua. I take it that was your car that came around the corner and passed us as I was getting shoved into the van.”

“Good for you I could not sleep and I was in the mood for pizza.”

“Not really. The pizza at the Grotto stinks.”

“Are you all right?”

“For now. I have stomach cancer.”

He crossed himself. “I am so sorry.”

“Don’t be. My daughter’s getting married next weekend and now I’ll live to see it. You gave that back to me: the last best gift I’ll ever get.”

EPILOGUE—IFS AND MAYBES

It was a single column on page twelve of the paper:

BODY IDENTIFIED

A week earlier I’m not sure I’d have seen it. I would have been too busy puking my guts up after chemo or too tired to lift my head. I was on the cancer diet, all right. Sometimes I think it wasn’t so much that I was nauseous all the time—a lot of the time, yes, but not always—as much as I was so exhausted that I barely had the energy to eat. Don’t think for a second there weren’t moments I didn’t wish that Gus or the Bulgarian had just shoved me out of the van and put one in my ear. As I anticipated, death wasn’t the tough part. It was the dying that was murder.

I’d gone up to Vermont on the Tuesday before the wedding, but plenty had happened in the interim. Nick Roussis ignored his attorney’s advice and spoke to federal prosecutors, the cops, and the Brooklyn DA for nearly twelve hours straight. From a pragmatic standpoint, it was a very stupid and dangerous thing to do. From a moral standpoint, it was the only thing to do. Nick could have used his knowledge of the Bulgarian crime gangs as a bargaining chip to reduce his sentence or as an entrée into witness protection, but soul cleansing isn’t about wheeling and dealing.

The story of the collapse of the Roussis family business into the abyss of organized crime was an old and painfully familiar one. Gus, a junkie and a gambler, had made some bad investments with company funds and had helped himself to other assets. He’d done such a good job of covering his tracks—addicts are expert at covering tracks—that by the time the accountants caught wind of it, it was too late. The business was fucked. Gus vowed to make it right and to save the family. Of course, trusting a gambler and a junkie to save the family business was tantamount to trusting Hitler to be the Shabbos goy. What Gus Roussis did was borrow money, a lot of money, from the people who supplied him with junk and who held his markers.

Like I said, it’s an old story. The Bulgarians, who were looking for a foothold in New York City, knew Gus would never be able to keep up with the payments even at zero percent interest. With the vig they added to the loan, forget it. Within months, the wolves were at Gus and Nicky’s door and the choice was a very simple one: immediately pay the loan in full, let the Bulgarians launder money through the business and use the restaurants as distribution points, or watch the Bulgarians murder their families. On the Monday before I left for New England, I got a call from Fuqua that Nicky wanted to see me.

He was being held in a high-security section of the Brooklyn House of Detention, the Brooklyn Tombs as we called it when I was on the job. It was on Atlantic Avenue, within walking distance of both Bordeaux in Brooklyn and of the PI office at 40 Court Street that I once shared with Carmella, Brian Doyle, and Devo.

I talked into the cubicle phone. “Hey, Nicky.”

He could barely look at me through the Plexiglas, a guard standing a few feet over his right shoulder. He picked up the phone. “Thanks for comin’.”

“You did the right thing by talking, but how is your family?”

“They’re safe for now.” Tears rolled down his face. We both knew what for now meant. “If my testimony ends up convicting enough of them, we’ll get into the program. But these guys, Moe, they ain’t like the old Five Families. They will never stop looking for me and they’ll do anything it takes for payback.”

I didn’t think this was a good avenue for either of us to explore. “What did you want to see me about, Nick?”

“Those things you said about Gus being a coward, they’re not true.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to tell you what happened, really. The Bulgarians used to hide their heroin in plastic-wrapped bricks inside sacks of flour. The night that women, that Alta, was killed, she parked right by the loading dock. Gus was helping one of the Bulgarians off-load flour and he slipped. He screamed when he fell and she came over to see if anyone needed first aid. The sack of flour had busted open and there were four bricks of heroin laying there in the flour. She took off. The Bulgarian pulled his piece, but Gus grabbed his arm. Then the guy turned it on Gus and told him it was him or her. If only she had run for her car, she mighta had a chance. See, Moe, Gus had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice. Not always a good one, but there’s always a choice.”

He shook his head in denial. “You don’t understand. He had no choice.”

“Why’d you even get involved with these guys? You had to know that letting Gus try to fix things was gonna get you fucked tenfold.”

“You said it yourself when you came to the Grotto that first day. How you and your brother had done some stuff to keep your business afloat, stuff you weren’t real proud of. Remember, you said that business was a strange kinda creature, a predator and prey animal and scavenger all at once? To keep it going, you said, you had to use what worked even if you had to hold your nose while you did it.”

“I didn’t mean it literally, Nicky.”

“If you had my brother instead of yours and the Bulgarians knockin’ at your door, you’d see it that way.”

That’s where I wanted to leave it. I moved to put the intercom phone back in its cradle.

“I saved your life twice, Moe. Don’t you think you owe me at least a goodbye?”

“Twice?”

“Yeah, I shot Iliya, but that was as much for me and the hell they put my family through as for you. See, once the Bulgarians found out you were snooping around about Conseco’s murder, they were gonna just kill you. Instead I got them to let you talk to Joey Fortuna to throw you off the trail. I figured you’d give up sooner or later and they would leave you alone.”