Personal injuries (43 page)

"Whatsa matter?" we heard Milacki ask. "Ticklish?"

"Very"

"Come on, Roberta. I won't pinch. This is a scream." He hitched his head, and still appeared to be smiling. Even in black-and-white, you could see he had high color and a beautiful widow's peak. Years ago, he'd been a dirty blond but his oiled hair was now mostly gray. Robbie raised his arms vaguely, like a suspect unsure about giving up.

"I paid two grand at Zegna for this suit, Milacki. I oughta make you wash your hands."

"Right, it's very pretty. So they go like this"-he frisked Robbie, starting from the boot tops, while he maintained his patter-"and so help me God, the jamoke has a threefoot salami in there, wrapped in tinfoil." He reached right into Robbie's jacket at that point to feel under the arm. "Can you imagine? We were all laughing so hard, I thought somebody'd bust an artery." In the van, not a breath was taken in the interval.

"Where is it?" Sennett asked quietly.

Evon had initiated today, but McManis said that since acquiring his new footwear Robbie had made a habit of placing the FoxBIte in a holster in his boot.

"Could he miss the lead?" Sennett asked.

It was taped along Robbie's inseam, McManis said, so it was possible. Indeed, Milacki so far had not dropped a beat. He put his arm on Robbie's shoulder, then patted him up and down the back as he racked with laughter. Robbie, onstage again, showed no further sign of flinching, even when Milacki gave him a cheerful clap on the butt.

Sensing he'd passed, Robbie, as he explained afterwards, figured the only credible reaction was outrage. He grabbed his suit coat by the lapels to settle it on his shoulders and pointed at the cop.

"Why didn't you just bring the fucking metal detector, Sig?”

Milacki didn't bother with pretense. "Better safe than sorry, bunky. Times we live in. Your lady friend's made everybody a little jumpy, maybe it rubs off on you. Couple folks been worrying about you, anyway. Said you seemed a little frayed around the collar." Crowthers and Walter, probably. This wasn't good news, either.

Robbie kept up his front. "Is that right?"

"Yeah, there's talk. It's like what Minnie Mouse told the judge when she asked to divorce Mickey? You heard that? She said she had to get out because he's been fucking Goofy." Milacki, taller than Robbie, could see he was getting nowhere with the efforts at humor, but he pounded Feaver's shoulder anyway as he roared.

"I got a lot at home, Sig."

"Hey, fuck, who loves you, baby?" Milacki took his large ruddy hand and jerked Robbie by the neck, as if trying to shake him into a better mood. "Fellow down the bar would like to see you." In the van, McManis tapped his heart. In the meanwhile, Sennett leaned toward the top monitor, which displayed a panorama of the entire establishment. Bulling through the happy throng, Robbie seemed to know where he was going.

"Tuohey," Stan whispered. "Make it Tuohey."

"Kosic," Alf said and stood for just a second to touch the top screen. Rollo again was at the extreme end of the bar under the white piano. One of the surveillance agents who'd been tailing Kosic for weeks had spotted him before and turned out to be on the stool beside him. The pianist, a different one than last time, was accompanying himself, crooning in the style of Tony Bennett, and the music piped up loudly on every channel. Alf spun his dials to little avail and griped, saying what everybody knew: these guys were smart.

The trio of Asian agents had apparently kept pace with Robbie crossing the room, as a clear image of Kosic suddenly came into focus on the bottom monitor. Rollo was on his third oldfashioned by now. The glasses were lined up on the bar in front of him, the other two empty except for the maraschino cherries whose stems looked like hands waving for rescue as they sank between the melting cubes. When Feaver arrived and greeted Kosic, the surveillance agent seated beside Rollo abruptly picked up his drink, allowing Feaver to slide onto the brushed-steel stool. Feaver's initial words to Rollo were largely lost by the time the applause died down after "Three Coins in the Fountain," but Robbie could be seen addressing Kosic, looking forward to the mirror in a deadeyed, humorless fashion. When his voice came through again he was talking indignantly about his encounter with Milacki.

"Yeah, we just had a touchy-feely, Sig and I. The wrong kind. I had the impression he sort of expected my balls to go beep."

Kosic, much as last time, showed no reaction. Dressed in a golf windbreaker, he lifted his hand toward Lutese, the index finger crooked to hide the bad nail as he signaled for another drink. Then he removed a pen from his jacket pocket and began doodling on a cocktail napkin, while Robbie went on.

"You know, I respect you, Rollo. Mama brought me up right. And maybe, okay, maybe my trolley's a little off the tracks these days. I don't need anybody's shoulder, but I got a load now. But I gotta tell you, after all the beer that's flowed from the brewery, I don't think I deserve to be treated like somebody nobody knows." As if he half expected to be poisoned, Kosic raptly watched Lutese shake the bottle of bitters over the new glass and drop in another cherry. "You tell Brendan I said that."

Kosic, who had started to reach for the drink, flinched, reacting as a religious conservative might if Feaver had said `Jehovah.'

Lutese, who'd remained for Robbie's order, had cut off all her hair. Her dark scalp was gristled with the sandpapery nubbins the clippers had left behind. "Kind of radical," she acknowledged. If anything, she was more striking, nearly six feet, with cascading earrings that looked like the crystals from a chandelier.

Kosic was taking in the usual byplay between Robbie and the bartender when he suddenly turned toward the room. Beneath his chin, where he showed most of his age in the stringy grayish wattles that hung there, his Adam's apple bobbed several times and he finally knocked his elbow on Feaver's.

Evon was three or four feet behind them, holding a glass and yukking it up with the agent who'd just vacated the barstool.

"Oh shit," Robbie said when he faced back. "Figures. She's busting my balls. Hell hath no fury. She's sky-high cause I gave her two weeks' notice."

Kosic spoke for the first time. "Two weeks?"

"Sure. Like I said, I want it to look normal. I told her I'm ramping down cause of Rainey. But she's not going gently. She's breaking real bad on me in the office. And following me around half the time when I leave. I can feel a lawsuit coming on," said Robbie, "the way Grandpa felt bad weather in his lumbago."

Kosic watched Evon in the mirror, his look as unfeeling as some cats', then broke off and returned to his doodle. Now that she'd been noticed in accord with the plan, Evon drifted off to a safer distance, while Robbie continued speaking about his problems with her.

"I mean, Rollo, I'm asking myself, What the fuck am I doing? You know. Maybe it's not that way and I'm turning her into an enemy. Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot letting her go. Could be the uncle was wrong when he said to fire her. I'd like to go over it with him again. Explain. I don't wanna piss him off, but maybe we should be thinking about this." As ever, there was no way to tell if Kosic had even heard Feaver's remark. He doodled again for a minute, then turned toward the room, his eyes drifting over Robbie's shoulder as he apparently took in the tumbling scene, the women and men joshing, tippling, holding their cigarettes overhead to avoid accidental burns to passersby. On the monitor, Rollo looked straight at the three agents and their camera without any change in his unpleasant expression. Watching the tape afterwards, you could see that as he was surveying, he slid the little cocktail napkin he'd been writing on in Robbie's direction. What attracted him, Robbie said subsequently, was that Kosic had unfurled the bad nail and tapped it a couple of times. There was writing amid several geometric shapes, the first two lines slanting off from what was inscribed below them:

FBI FOR SURE.

GET RID-NOW.

DON'T TELL ANYONE ANYTHING. EVEN MASON

On the replay, Rollo could be seen taking the most fleeting glance to be certain that Robbie had the message, then he crushed the napkin within his fist and slid it in his pocket.

"Whoa," Robbie said finally. He'd taken a tight grip on the bar. "Motherfuck. Are you sure?" Kosic looked up toward the piano. "Where the hell does this come from, Rollo? Why me? Does anybody know?"

Kosic took the bad nail and tapped it on his lips a little too precise to be random.

"Rollo, cut the crap. I'm trying not to have a bowel movement in my trousers here, Gimme some help. What's she there for? How do you know all of this? Listen, what I'm hearing is that they've been looking at accident swindlers, okay? Guys setting up phony accidents and suing. Fella I saw thinks that's what this is. Okay? Does that match?"

Kosic delivered his lethal glance, then scooped up the four cherries and popped them in his mouth all at once. He ate them after coming to his feet beside his stool. Bobbie grabbed Kosic's sleeve between two fingers to keep him from getting away.

"Listen, I'm the one hanging out there, Rollo. Way out there. That's okay, I'm a big boy. But I'll be fucked if I won't be treated with some respect. Anybody's got any more messages for me to take on faith, wanna hear them from the organ-grinder, not the monkey. You tell Brendan I said that, too."

Kosic finished chewing with his face lifted into the smoky air, then leaned Feaver's way before he departed. It looked as if he was going to whisper some final word, but instead he suddenly took hold of Robbie's necktie. Improbably, Feaver jerked back, virtually strangling himself, as he braced his arms on the smooth mahogany curve affixed the leading edge of the granite bar. At the time, it was unclear what was happening. But, looking at the tape later, you could see that as Robbie had first been elevated off the seat by Kosic's grip on his tie, Rollo had reached under the bar with the other hand and grabbed Feaver's genitals. As Robbie reported it, Kosic had one testicle and his penis inside his fist and he squeezed for quite some time, until he finally whispered in his high ladylike voice. What he said was too soft for the FoxBlte pick up in the clamor, but Robbie heard it and took note as well of the sick smile with which the message was delivered.

"I'm the only organ-grinder you know," Kosic had told him.

CHAPTER 36

EVON DID NOT SEE WHAT WAS COMING.

After they left Attitude, she sat in McManis's conference room while Jim went through the debriefings of Feaver and the surveillance agents. They replayed the tapes. On the audio, critical points in the conversations were frequently obscured by the piano and the raucous laughter; occasional odd remarks were sucked in by the directional mikes as unpredictably as coins rattling up in a vacuum. Someone complained bitterly about Clinton's proposed tax increase; another moment revealed the passing of insider information on an upcoming corporate spinoff. The listening took more than an hour and a half.

Including the surveillance agents, the core group was now up to fifteen, far more bodies than there were chairs. They passed around pop and chips, since no one had had dinner, and as ever tried to figure the next move. Sennett was still talking about another shot at Tuohey.

"As long as you can give me a transplant down there."

Robbie answered. There was a lot of laughter. "Kosic'll pull it off, Stan, the next time I use Brendan's name."

Sennett looked toward McManis for his evaluation. Jim thought there was no chance of getting to Tuohey.

"They're writing notes, for fear of speaking."

"But Robbie passed the frisk. They have to trust him more now."

"Only so much. Stan, these fellows know better than to trust anyone. They told Robbie about Evon because they don't want him to get himself in any deeper. But they know he's radioactive-he's about to get it from the feds and all bets are off then. You can run all the scenarios you want with Tuohey. We'll just stack up the tapes he can play during his defense case. He's never going to step in quicksand with Robbie."

"They all do," Sennett shot back. "If you find the right thing, they
all
do." His eyes flashed over to me. This was a bit of prosecutorial parlor talk probably best not shared in front of a defense lawyer.

Jim's advice was to abandon the frontal assault. The best approach to Brendan was from the flanks. They had to hope that someone turned on him. Someone like Kosic-or Milacki-might be able to catch Tuohey unawares. If they kept pushing with Robbie, they could blow that chance. The eminent good sense of what Jim was saying seemed to win over everyone else. But Stan was unwilling to say quit. His great scheming intelligence worked in service of the gratification he got from winning in the direct showdown. The triumph he craved was to outduel Brendan, one-on-one. Near the end of their argument, the two stepped outside. When they returned, McManis waved Evon into his office. She still didn't realize what he was going to say.

"We're pulling you in," he said. "It's over."

She felt like one of those eggs from which, as kids, they'd blown out the yolk and the white to make Easter decorations. That frail. That hollow.

"Because you're worried about what Kosic meant about getting rid of me?"

"We're not going to wait to find out. But that's not the problem. You're burned and Robbie's supposed to know that. He has to get you out of the office on Monday. There's nothing left for UCA Evon Miller to do."

"What does Sennett think?"

"This isn't Sennett's call. And he recognizes the logic." "Maybe I can stay in town, though?

Maybe they'll make a move. "

"No," he said. "I'm done saying I dare you. There's no operational need. After Monday, it's adios."

She felt absolutely desperate. She couldn't go back.

"Go home," he said. "See your family. You've got accumulated leave for months. We'll probably pull you back when we start the flips. You won't miss the grand finale. But for now I want you out of harm's way. Orders," he said. He watched her absorb it, seeing how little good he was doing. "I told you," he said, "this isn't easy. The whole journey. Start to finish. It's rugged." When Jim opened the door, Sennett was waiting. She hoped he was there to argue with McManis, but instead, he took her hand. He said all the right words. And meant them as near as she could tell. Extraordinary, she heard him say. He said Courage, more than once. He said Patriot.