Star Chamber Brotherhood (18 page)

“Hey, not so loud in here,” Werner chided his young friend with a look of mock surprise and a sidelong glance toward the thirty-something in the banker’s suit.

Oshiro raised his hands as if in surrender.

“Say, Hank, would you mind coming with me for a minute?” Werner asked abruptly, motioning toward the dining room. “I need to talk to you about something. Wait till I leave the bar, then follow me into the kitchen, okay?”

“Am I busted already?” Oshiro protested. “Not fit to associate with the regular clientele? You’re a hard man, Frank. Can I at least bring my drink?”

“Sure, bring it,” Werner replied without looking back as he started toward the dining room.

When Oshiro arrived at the kitchen door, Werner took him into the manager’s office and switched on a radio before closing the door behind them.

“Sorry to drag you away from all the fun, but before you get too excited about your brilliant commercial future, there’s something I’d like to show you,” Werner began as he raised a leg to sit on a corner of the heavy oak desk. “Here, hold out your hand.”
 

“Why?” Oshiro challenged, no longer smiling.

“Just do it. You’ll see.”

Hank Oshiro leaned forward slowly from the soft leather armchair opposite the desk and extended his right hand toward Werner, who took it and pressed something into the palm. Upon seeing the paper disc with the five-pointed star carefully drawn in black ink, Oshiro grew pale.

“Man, don’t ever play a joke like that on me again. Not ever, I mean it.”

“It’s no prank,” Werner answered. “It’s from the Kamas Star Committee. They reconvened one last time. They’ve asked me to form a team.”
 

“A Star Team? Here?” Oshiro blurted out in anger as much as surprise. “You’ve got to be nuts!”
 

Werner turned up the volume on the radio.

“We’re not in Kamas anymore, Frank,” Oshiro continued, lowering his voice and missing his inadvertent pun. “The revolt’s over and the good guys lost. Hell, the camp doesn’t even exist. Don’t bring it back.”

“And the camps that didn’t revolt? Have they been closed?” Werner asked without emotion. “And has the CLA stopped dragging in new prisoners to replace the ones they worked to death?”

“You know they haven’t, Frank, but you and I aren’t going to change it. So, whatever craziness you’re planning, I’ll thank you to leave me out of it.”

 
“Oh, so now you’re
for
the Unionists,” Werner mocked. “All that rage in you against the Party
nomenklatura
and the New Class is forgiven. Now that business is good and you’ve got your wheels, life is sweet again. Live and let live. Kamas was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“Don’t go there, Frank,” Oshiro warned through clenched teeth. “I hate the Party as much as you do and I haven’t forgotten Kamas for a minute. But you seem to forget that one of your Star Teams came after me once. Yeah, they held their kangaroo court late one night and roasted me real good. It must have made them feel so righteous to send out a team to whack a poor slob like me who made the stupid mistake of accepting a favor from the Wart. Only I never betrayed anyone, and thank God, the team was called off before I was hit. But what did any of those teams really accomplish? And why didn’t they send one after Whiting or Chambers or the Warden? Why not whack the people who turned all those dumb slobs into stool pigeons? That kind of Starcom might have made sense to me. If they ever get around to it, let me know.”

“Good, then. So you’re in,” Werner declared with a trace of a smile.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The team is going to do exactly what you’ve proposed. We’re going to hit the Warden. Here. In Boston.”

For the second time the blood seemed to drain from Hank Oshiro’s face.

“Rocco? In Boston?” he asked in disbelief. “Are you shitting me?”
 

“I’ve seen him up close and personal,” Werner replied. “They even announced his new job in the newspaper. You could look it up.”

“Holy Shit,” Oshiro exclaimed as the reality began to sink in. “If he’s here, we can’t let the bastard get away. How big is your team?”
 

“Five, including the two of us.”

“And how do you see your chances? I mean, do you stand a chance of getting away with it or is this some kind of suicide mission?”

“I don’t do suicide missions,” Werner declared. “We’re all going to walk away and go on to live happy, productive lives.”

“Fine, then. At the risk of seeming fickle, I take back everything I said about Star Teams,” Oshiro announced with a wry smile. “If we’re going after Rocco, you can count me in.”

“Tremendous!” Werner replied. “We’ll meet tomorrow morning to read you in on the plan. Is ten okay?”

“Yeah, I can do it,” Oshiro replied after a quick look at his watch.
 

“What’s more, you’ll have to stop coming to the Club. From now on, we can’t be seen together. If you want to meet, call me or leave a voice message that you want to come over to my place. Whatever time you give on the phone, we’ll meet one hour before in the coffee shop near your flat on Commonwealth. Got it?”

Oshiro nodded.
 

“How about the rest of the team?” he asked. “Do I know any of them?”

“Sorry, Hank, but I can’t tell you that. We’re going to keep everything compartmentalized until the last possible moment. For now, I’ll be your only contact.”

Oshiro laughed and looked around the room.
 

“Bummer. I’m going to miss this place.”

****

An hour after Hank Oshiro left the Somerset Club by the alley door, Werner noticed a familiar-looking man in a tweed jacket and bow tie walk into the lobby. From behind his owlish, horn-rimmed glasses, Harvey Konig’s eyes swept the room as if he were searching for someone.

He turned toward the dining room and for a few moments dropped out of sight. When he returned, Konig entered the bar and seated himself at a stool near the door. Werner noticed at once that Konig, while projecting energy and vitality on his previous visit, now seemed to convey a listlessness that reminded Werner of an exhausted addict coming down from a high. He recalled Hank Oshiro’s remark the week before about having sold his entire stock of Ambien and Valium that night, and wondered if Konig could have run through them in less than a week.
 

“Welcome back, Harvey,” Werner greeted him. “What would you like to drink?”

“An Old Fashioned would be just the thing,” Konig answered with a bonhomie that seemed less than genuine.

“Jimmy style?”

“Yes, that’s the ticket,” Konig agreed.

While Werner muddled some freshly cut lemon and orange peel into a mixture of simple syrup and aromatic bitters, he watched Konig look over his shoulder repeatedly. When he delivered the completed drink to his customer, Werner noticed that two strangers had entered the room.

Both were stocky linebacker types with thick necks and shoulders encased in cheap gray suits. Werner sized them up right away as federals, possibly DSS or FBI, though perhaps affiliated with one of the minor-league federal security teams like Treasury or Energy. They slithered across the room to a vacant table, their stares burning a hole in the back of Konig’s tweed jacket.

Konig saw them, too, and reached out compulsively every few seconds for the bowl of peanuts before him as if eating enough of them might make the two gumshoes disappear. The former professor then launched into a wandering monologue about his social life in London, his flat in Mayfair, his offices in the City and the important personages he knew on both sides of the Atlantic.
 

Then, without any logical transition, he dredged up memories of the old Somerset Club, before the Events, when he was a rising star on the MIT faculty and took every opportunity to dine out with clients and colleagues.

Werner humored Konig by appearing to listen while he took drink orders and filled them for patrons who bellied up to the bar on either side of Konig. The visiting Moneyman ordered a second Old Fashioned and nursed it while he rambled on about the hallowed financial institutions of Old Boston. Apparently oblivious that he was crossing the frontier into dangerous political territory, he leaned over to Werner and offered in a conspiratorial voice that the recent growth in the Unionist economy was unsustainable.

“Their economists couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag,” Konig asserted. “The only thing they know how to do is steal. First it was from the taxpayers, then the corporations, and finally the foreign debt holders. They taxed, regulated, inflated, and nationalized the middle class all the way to serfdom, and now they say they want to nurture a private sector again. Believe me, Frank, as surely as the sun rises in the east, the moment the business sector gets on its feet again, the Party will strip it bare. If you have any money at all, keep it buried under the mattress.”

Konig finished the second Old Fashioned and ordered a third. Werner wondered how Konig’s constitution would handle the combination of alcohol and prescription drugs, if indeed he were consuming everything he had bought from Hank Oshiro. By now, Konig appeared to have forgotten about the two men in the cheap gray suits; they, however, kept their eyes fixed on him.

Konig drew Werner’s attention to a foursome of elderly patrons in a corner booth, all former members of the original Somerset Club, all dressed in tweeds and gray flannel trousers closely resembling his own.

“I know those men,” Konig claimed. “They were all big fund managers when I was a professor. If they still have any money left, I suspect it’s because they supported the President-for-Life before he was elected, and were too blind or stupid to leave the country when they had the chance. The Party certainly wouldn’t let old-line Moneymen like them hold onto their pre-Events loot and live like Boston Brahmins unless they first sold out every free-market principle they ever had. Tell me, Frank, do you know the original meaning of fascism?”

Werner looked both ways and was relieved to see that nobody appeared to be paying attention to Konig.

“Refresh my memory,” he replied in a low voice.

“Mussolini called it the corporate state,” the professor continued. “The idea was to unite government and corporate power under a single leader by controlling the private owners of capital. Today they call themselves Unionists, but from the outset what they aimed for was pure fascism. And by bringing together the most rapacious individuals from both public and private sectors, they succeeded in hijacking the federal government while everybody else was busy fighting wars, financial panics, epidemics, and natural disasters.

“If you read your ancient history, that’s how republics always end: in bloody dictatorship. It starts out with someone like Augustus and degenerates from Tiberias to Caligula to Nero. If the President-for-Life was our Augustus, then I say, brace yourself for what’s to come.”

Harvey Konig finished the last of his drink and drew some bills from his wallet to cover the tab. Straightening his bow tie, he tentatively extended one foot toward the floor, then the other, while keeping a hand on the stool for balance.
 

“Take care of yourself, Professor,” Werner cautioned, noticing Konig’s unsteadiness. “Would you like me to call you a cab?”

“No, I think I’ll walk, thank you,” Konig replied, drawing himself up to his full height. “I need time alone to think.”

“As you like, Professor, but it looks as if you have company whether you want it or not. Do you know the two men who followed you in?”

“Yes, though not personally,” Konig answered. “But don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
 

And without giving Werner or the government men a second look, Harvey Konig strode out into the lobby.

The moment Konig stood to leave, one of the gumshoes paid the nearest waitress while the other rose to follow his mark out of the bar. When they were gone, the first gumshoe, a compact bullet of a man with a crew cut and a bulldog sort of face, approached the bar.

“Are you the owner here?” he asked Werner.

“The owner is upstairs in his office,” Werner replied evenly. “Would you like to talk to him?”

Suddenly the man’s head twitched and Werner guessed that he was receiving instructions through an earphone. He refocused his attention and gave Werner a menacing scowl.

“Not now. Maybe some other time. Meanwhile, tell your owner to make sure that everybody’s papers are in good order. You know, just in case someone downtown takes an interest in the place.”

****

Despite a promising open, the crowd at the Somerset Club thinned out after nine o’clock and the bar was quiet by eleven. Jake closed the dining room early, and Werner set out for the Park Street T station well before midnight.
 

As he walked along Boston Common and turned up the collar of his trench coat against the cold wet wind, he had an uneasy feeling. Though his recruitment of Hank Oshiro had gone well, the appearance of Harvey Konig and the two government agents unnerved him. The assignment he had accepted from the Star Committee was no longer an inchoate idea. It had become concrete and increasingly complex. With each day he had more decisions to make, more obstacles to overcome, more responsibilities to shoulder. He was well past the point of no return, since the mere discussion of their conspiracy to kill Fred Rocco was sufficient to hang them all, even if they never fired a shot.