Shamrock Alley (42 page)

He walked silently down the hallway and crept into the spare room at the front of the apartment. There were still boxes here from the move—now just mostly his junk—and the television and VCR had been propped on a stained butcher block. Beside the television, Katie had erected and decorated a scrawny-looking fake tree for Christmas.

Silently, in the gloom of morning, he began wrapping his wife’s Christmas presents.

In the days since Tressa Walker’s surprise visit to the field office, he’d purchased two more guns from Mickey, neither of which had been linked to any unsolved homicides or possessed any of Jimmy Kahn’s fingerprints. And in the passage of those days, he could feel the urgency to move things along like a festering disease at the pit of his stomach. Each subsequent time he met with Mickey, he found it very difficult to put Tressa’s face out of his mind. The nervous sound of her voice served as a constant ticking inside his head. He feared it was only a matter of time before the cracks in the structure of his undercover operation started to show.

“You’re up early,” Katie said from the doorway.

“Did I wake you?”

“Not you,” she said. “The phone. Didn’t you hear it ringing? Bill Kersh is on the line.”

On the phone, Kersh sounded more energetic than usual.

“What’s up, Bill?”

“Sorry to ruin your day, but we gotta roll out.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You’ll never guess who just called me.”

Morris, Evelyn Gethers’s butler, stood outside a strip of storefronts along the Bowery. Dressed in gray Brooks Brothers slacks, a pinstripe shirt, and a long black coat, he looked out of place among the subverted streets and devastated buildings. More incriminating was Morris’s black El Dorado, buffed to a dull shine and idling in a street surrounded by burned-out VW Beetles and an old Comet stripped of its chrome.

Following Kersh’s phone call, John had headed into the city and met Kersh at the field office. Now, in Kersh’s sedan, they both pulled up together behind Morris’s Cadillac. Morris approached John’s side of the car and began speaking before he was even out the door.

“I thought I should call you, thought you should know. It’s—come with me—it’s up here.”

The road rose to a slight incline. John and Kersh followed Morris up the sidewalk. To their left, five-story tenements pressed against the colorless sky. To their right, a chain-link fence surrounded a series of dilapidated storefronts, each of their windows soaped, their fronts the bleached color of bone. Metal roll-down doors covered some of the entranceways, most of them locked with industrial-sized padlocks and chains.

“We’ve had this space for years,” Morris continued. “It’s all Mr. Gethers’s stuff. His wife refused to part with it after his death, so she had it all tucked away here. It’s all junk, really, but it has some sentimental value to her, I suppose.”

Morris led them through the fence and over to one of the storefronts. They lined the street here, identical brick buildings with spray-painted steel roll-down doors. Some of them had numbers painted above the doors, but time and the elements had caused the numbers to fade. Most were hardly legible.

While Morris dug around for a set of keys in his coat, John rubbed his gloved hands together, exhaled warm breath onto the palms. The day before Christmas Eve, but one would never notice down here: the streets looked vacant, the windows in the buildings like blind, gaping eyes. As far as he could see, the only evidence of red and green were the cheerless bulbs of the traffic lights at each intersection.

“Here we are,” Morris muttered, finding the appropriate key. He bent and slipped the key into the zigzag niche at the base of a padlock. The lock was as large as a grown man’s fist. It popped open, and Morris slid it from the loop that held the giant roll-down door closed. “I’m going to need some assistance …”

Bending down, giving his hands one last rub, John grabbed the lip at the bottom of the roll-down door and helped Morris hoist it off the ground. It opened with surprising effortlessness. Above their heads, the beams that secured the door rattled and clanged like the chains of Marley’s ghost. There was a grinding of gears that echoed through the dull afternoon. One final push, and the door locked in place.

Behind the roll-down door was a smaller door, accessible after a simple turn of the knob. Morris reached out and unlocked this door, too, turned the knob, and held the door open.

The inside of the place was dark, and it took their eyes a few moments to adjust as they stepped inside.

“What’s that smell?” Kersh said, taking small, shuffling steps and sniffing the air.

John recognized it, too. It smelled like the computer room back at the office, after the ink jet printers became too hot and overworked.

Morris felt along the wall for a light switch. He clicked it on, throwing shadows into corners and crevices.

John whistled.

At first glance, the stuff that filled the room looked like junk jettisoned from the Museum of Natural History’s basement. Packaged wooden crates lined most of the walls, unlabeled and in a variety of sizes. The center part of the room served as a collage of ancient, mismatched artifacts: splintered furniture; a number of headless dress-maker’s dummies; a large mattresses, sodden with mildew and folded into an upside-down V; a dusty leather trunk with brass buckles; what appeared to be an interior door of a house, the knob and hinges still attached; a bookshelf littered with wires and cables and hoses coiled like snakes. And that was only the beginning. The room went far back, most of it cloaked in shadow. With each step closer to the rear, more and more of Charles Gethers’s forgotten relics appeared, like great reaches of stalagmites.

“Come toward the back,” Morris said, already on his way past the junk. It was like maneuvering through an obstacle course. “Like I’ve said,” the butler continued, “Mrs. Gethers has kept this place running for some time. She obviously pays the electric bill, but as you can imagine, no one comes here often and the bill is not much. However,” he added, swinging one leg around a large ceramic lamp with some difficulty, “I’ve recently received the electric bill to cover the past several months. It was through the roof. I thought there had to be some mistake, so I called the company—but they insisted it was correct. So I figured I’d come down here and see what the heck was going on. That’s when I discovered this.”

Morris stopped abruptly toward the back of the room, and John nearly slammed into the man’s back. Behind him, Kersh grunted and knocked over the ceramic lamp Morris had been careful to avoid.

The first thing John noticed were the two large machines that rested against the back wall. He immediately recognized them for what they were: dry offset printing presses. That was the smell he and Kersh had noticed upon entering the storage room—the smell of ink. Lots of it. He was aware of Kersh saddling up beside him, then pausing, just as dumbfounded by the presses as John. When they finally averted their eyes, they glanced at each other with a twin look of amazement on their faces.

This was where the money was printed.

Yet the printing presses were not what Morris had taken them here to see. The butler was looking in the direction opposite of the presses, pointing to a jumbled swath of clothing balled against the floor. Behind the clothing was a New York Jets duffel bag, the canvas dotted with specks of spilled ink. More ink had dried like syrup on the cement floor behind the duffel bag.

“These are his. Clifton’s,” Morris said. “I recognize his clothes.” He turned to the agents, scowling. “That bastard’s been living here.”

It occurred to John that Morris was not aware Douglas Clifton had taken a nosedive out his hospital window last month. And although the butler would have undoubtedly received some great satisfaction from the knowledge, John did not say anything to him about it.

Instead, he walked slowly around the printing presses. “These presses,” he said. “Mr. Gethers …”

“He was in publishing,” Morris said. “It was his career. As you know, it turned him into a very wealthy man. These were his first two printing presses, I believe, when he was developing magazine prototypes, mockups … those sort of things.” Morris cleared his throat. “Is there something wrong? What about these clothes? What about Mr. Clifton?”

“He had access to this place?” John asked the butler.

“Apparently
he does,” Morris said, “though neither myself or Mrs. Gethers knew about it until now.”

“Anyone else?”

“Anyone else what?”

“Have access to this place? “John said. He bent down and peered around the side of one of the presses, then turned and glanced over at the pile of Clifton’s clothes and the Jets duffel bag. The clothes looked hardened, molded to one another. They hadn’t been worn in some time.

“Just myself and Mrs. Gethers,” Morris said. Then, after a pause, he added rather unwillingly, “And, I suppose, anyone else our friend Clifton passed the key along to. Do you think he’ll be back here this evening?”

Considering the mess Clifton must have left on the sidewalk below his hospital window, John said, “Doubt it.” He leaned closer, looking at the spilled ink on the floor. “Bill … come take a look at this …”

“What?” Kersh said, leaning over one of John’s shoulders.

“This ain’t ink.”

“What is it?” But at the last second, something clicked at the back of Kersh’s throat, and John realized the older agent suddenly knew
exactly
what it was.

“Blood,” John said. “Coagulated. Almost dry.”

“I’m sorry?” Morris said, taking a hesitant step closer to the duffel bag.
“Blood?
Whose?”

If I had to guess
, John thought,
I’d say this is where Douglas Clifton lost his hand
.

“John.” There was an excited tremor in Kersh’s voice. He felt the man’s fingers close around his shoulder. “John … take a look …”

Turning his head to follow Kersh’s finger, his eyes landed on a Rubbermaid trash receptacle, the triangular ecru corners of paper jutting from above the receptacle’s rim.
Printing
paper.

Kersh went over to the receptacle, tipped it at an angle, peered inside. With one hand he fished out crinkled sheaves of paper, held them up, examined them in the light. Many of the discarded sheets of paper had partially printed hundred-dollar bills on them.

Cocking a thin eyebrow, Morris said, “What’re those?”

“Waste,” Kersh said, tossing the paper back into the receptacle. “Dry runs.”

“Excuse me?”

John lifted some articles of clothing. They were damp and stiff, and he moved several articles in a heap at one time. Large, black roaches had taken up residence in the sodden channels and darkened creases of the clothing; they scattered like dust the moment they were struck by light. The powerful, coppery smell of blood mingled with the moist reek of mildew made his stomach caterwaul and roll over.

Reaching over the pile of clothing, John grappled with the zipper of the Jets bag, and with a series of rigid tugs he managed to unzip it.

“Bill.” His own voice sounded very far away. “Bill, I got your Christmas present over here.”

Inside the duffel bag and wrapped in lengths of cloth were the plates and negatives necessary for printing counterfeit hundred-dollar bills.

And buried beneath the plates and negatives was a million dollars worth of phony notes.

Back at the field office, John and Kersh set to work bagging the counterfeit money. Though John had wanted to leave the storage garage exactly as they’d found it to avoid arousing Mickey and Jimmy’s suspicions, he knew the money needed to be confiscated. Now, at his desk, he’d counted it a number of times, examining the quality of the print, the matching serial numbers to the bills purchased during previous buy-throughs. These, like the other stacks he’d gotten from Mickey, were also banded and crisp. They even
smelled
new.

“This was it,” he said to Kersh, who sat across from him at his desk. “This was the million they wanted me to move.”

“I still can’t imagine how they managed to print this much,” Kersh said. “Or how they got their greasy hands on Lowenstein’s plates and negatives.”