Strawman Made Steel (18 page)

Five Points produced a string of men like
Al Capone. But he was a boy scout compared to the gangster’s New York bred
after the Event.

I said the current Tombs stands over the
same ground. To be precise, ten stories
above
it. This modern Tombs is a
seven story, ten-thousand square foot splinter wedged snug in the guts of
Liberty Borough. A cage housed in freedom.

I’m not sure if that’s irony. It’s damn
funny in any case. My head tried to sort it out while I shuffled forward in a
queue at glacial speed, waiting to see my confidence man, Mr. Tritt.

The Tombs has, beyond the public facade,
few access points for a complex its size. It is encased in a deadzone that is
only skewered by a single bank of elevators, and punctured by a handful of
bridges like the one on which I waited, the aptly named Bridge of Sighs. The
jail itself seems to float in Liberty’s structure as though the megascraper had
excluded a toxic particle.

When I got to the counter at the queue’s
head I surrendered my piece. They frisked me anyway, gave me a form to fill in,
and told me to wait on a bare bench fixed to the wall. I didn’t bother flashing
my card. It would only have gummed the works.

Half an hour later I was reading the backs
of my eyelids, having decided it
was
irony, when a guard called into the
room: “Forster.”

That was the name I’d put on the form. I
doubted Mr. Tritt would want to see me.

The guard who led me to the visiting room
smelled of sweat. The air was hot with the heat of thousands of seething men.
The engines driving the air conditioning were big enough to power cruiseliners,
but the mechanical actuators retrofitted to the building could never match
electronic sensors.

I sat in the booth indicated by the guard
and watched the empty seat on the other side of the perforated glass, waiting
for it to fill.

Tritt entered, eyes full of questions. When
he saw me he looked like he might vomit, and backed out like a dog pulling its
snout from a bee hive.

I had a split second to stop him. I
breathed the word ‘Strawman’ with theatre emphasis and watched him freeze.

The choice had been that or ‘Speigh’.
Perhaps it didn’t matter. The names worked like keys to the city. I was
beginning to think them a handy acquisition.

Tritt sat twisted away from me. He was a
far cry from the confident-but-pissed banker that had strolled into my office
over a week ago. The bright yellow prison overalls didn’t help. Justice is
swift in Newer York―but so is the flow.

Tritt’s dark hair was lank, plastered to
his scalp. He hadn’t shaved it for lice. Didn’t seem to think he’d be staying.

When he sat there silent I realized he was
waiting for me to talk. My mind wheeled furiously. I had to say something fast.

“You’re lucky to be alive, Tritt,” I said,
and strained to read him. “Dick you are, you probably thought I was the real
deal. That’s your first fail, which is one more than most get with the
bossman.”

“I’ll fix it,” he said savagely over his
shoulder. “Give me a job, and I’ll fix it this time.”

I couldn’t have asked for more. He really
was an idiot.

“Did nothing about this setup stick in your
craw?” I said. “Why the hell would a banker use a private dick to snatch a
deed? A car salesman might, maybe. A pimp. Hell, a pimp’s mother―”

Tritt hissed, “Keep it down.” His eyes
flitted about the room. A murmur of conversation came from a couple of booths
down.

I pressed on. “Bankers have whole
departments
to handle that crap. The boss has no use for dimwits who jump at any half-assed
tale. Those guys end up being worked by the cops.”

Tritt was hunched up on his chair. He
chewed in turn on the nail of each digit of his right hand. Then a glimmer came
into his eye and I saw his smile spread either side of his hand.

“Something just stuck in my craw,” he said.
His limbs unhooked, and flowed to a new level. “They paid. They don’t pay for
nothing.” He jutted his dark-peppered chin at me. “You were no test. You’re the
one fishing.”

Okay. Not a complete idiot.

“Could be,” I said, magnanimous in
concession. I leaned toward the glass, and said, “But who’s to say we’re not
partners?”

It took a while for the threat to dawn on
him. His body contracted into the posture in which it had started.

A hoarse whisper was all that would escape
his mouth. “Shut your mouth. You know what they do to snitches in here.”

“The Strawman would do worse.” A guess, but
an informed guess.

The color drained from his face, leaving it
a pasty white slick. His three-day growth stood out like typewritten text.

“Talk,” I said, “Then I’ll get out of here
and you’ll never see me again. Who sent me to see the psychotic midget and his
demon dog?”

Tritt sat back and began chewing the nails
of his left hand. Fear had demolished the lifeblood of his trade. Behind his
pupils, cogs were whirring fast, as he looked for an exit from the bog I’d
tossed him in.

When he lowered his hand and sat forward
again, I guessed his frantic mind had dug up a character sheet for him to play
to. The change in his manner was dramatic. Chameleonic. If I hadn’t already
seen the naked actor I might have fallen for it ... again.

“You got kids?” he said. Didn’t wait for an
answer. “I got kids. Three. Boy, girl, boy.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “The youngest needs
a kidney.”

He breathed a world-weary sigh, gave me a
wry smile.

“No. They’re fine. Fantastic, in fact.”

“Your wife needs a kidney?”

He shook his head. “They’re all fine.
Living the suburban life in Boston. Private school. Tennis club. The American
nightmare.”

“Funded by a litany of defrauded widows,” I
said.

An edge of anger cut his words. “Hey, I
pump the fat cats.”

“A regular Robin Hood,” I said. He looked
at me blankly. “So you have a happy satellite family. I don’t care. I want to
know who wanted what from me. Wanted it enough to kill me.”

“That’s just it,” he said, voice coated in
oil again. “I didn’t want the job. Would’ve run a mile from it.” A tear budded
in his eye.

“But you didn’t. You waltzed into my office
in Wall St. Stripes and sold me the bull.”

“Because in the brief were photos of my
kids.” He dragged a finger across his leaking eye. “I got the message. And
besides, I didn’t know they were going to do the dirty on you.”

Sure he didn’t. His kids had just been
dangled off a cliff. His boss was a regular Samaritan.

“Kids,” I said. “Family. That how the
Strawman insures the work?”

“Strawman?” he said, disdain straining
through his character. “Nobody said that name.”

“Then why did you wet yourself when I said
it?”

“Nobody says straight out, ‘You got a job
from the Strawman.’ But you know.” He shivered. I couldn’t tell if it was part
of the act.

“How?”

“I’m not an idiot. I thought maybe I’d just
get the hell out of here. So I dug around. The guy who gave me the job was just
a grunt. I tailed him from Eastside, found his contact at a restaurant across
the street from the Constellation Bar on Rector Street―slope-shouldered guy
with, ah―” He paused, blinked. “―A spiral tattoo on his neck, and then tailed
that guy. But if I had to guess―and I guess well―the spiral was also just a
mule.”

Whoever had paid for the job had used at
least two cutouts, which probably made it a big operation. But it hardly made
it the Strawman or bust.

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Tritt.
“But I’ve done the odd job for the networks. And nothing was organized like
this. They set up the alias, squared it with the bank so if you checked it
would hold up.”

“I did,” I grunted. “It did.”

“They knew when you’d finished working for
that rail guy―”

“Cleeves,” I said.

“Yeah, Cleeves. Good job that didn’t make
it to the papers, right?”

It had been a good job. Cleeves got his
money back, in exchange for his dignity. But the dignity of lecherous rail
barons wasn’t front and center right then.

Tritt kept talking.

“So chances were you’d go straight on out
to the scrapyard that night. And the money,” he said, and couldn’t help a smile
splitting his shining face.

“Big?” I said matter-of-factly.

“School fees are paid up to college,” he
said.

I sat silent, kicked around what he’d told
me. Tritt’s glib tongue was still too. He was probably mentally fondling his
paycheck.

“You ever hear the name Frieter?”

He shook his head.

“See a guy like an accountant on speed?” I
said “Big double-decker glasses, itchy trigger finger?”

He shook his head again.

I slapped my thighs and stood. “Well, my
love to your family. You’ve been so helpful.”

He smiled, then absorbed what I’d said. He
came to pieces again.

“You won’t say anything.” He wrestled with
himself. “I’ll pay you―”

“Why do people in this city keep throwing
money at me?” I said, more to myself than Tritt.

I looked at him again. A man shrunken with
fear, and riven by greed. Maybe his story about the photos was true. Maybe it
wasn’t. Maybe he didn’t even have a family in Boston.

“I’m invoicing you for one tetanus shot.
Stay out of my way and I’ll forget I ever saw you.”

I turned away, didn’t want to watch him
fawn.

The trip home that night was smooth,
the atmosphere between mirrors calm. It still stung like desert wind on raw
flesh, but the way was clear.

The passage between the dead floor above
Harlem and my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen looped through the ever-shifting
dream geometry of that place. I imagined myself a comet riding streamers of
interstellar gravitational current, and then a bacterium swimming the intestine
of a threadworm.

I don’t navigate so much as intuit. The
trip home, taken so many times, has the force of habit, of a well-worn rut.

I stepped from the mirror into the hallway
and waited for my skin to stop prickling. This trip felt like finding what’s at
the bottom of the bottle. From outside came the wail of an ambulance, and
beneath it, from an adjacent apartment, the rumble and crunch of a sub-woofer.

I doffed my coat and for the first time in
many nights snubbed the whiskey and instead sat at the typewriter.

* Middle brother, Eutarch, confirmed that
all three brothers were at the crime scene. Wonder what Eustace thinks about
that. Eustace lied about being home sick that night.

* Nicole’s scar from attempted rape –
Eveylne’s reticence natural. Nicole thinks Eutarch had a hand in setting up the
assault. Eutarch and Eury fought about something.

* See what a good shake does to Eutarch –
cops to shake, hopefully bake.

* From Tritt I learn that someone knew my
case load prior to sending me to the scrapyard – they didn’t get it from me or
Ailsa. Surveilled.

* Why me?

I ripped the sheet from the typewriter,
passed an eye over it, and filed it away with the others.

From my coat in the hall I retrieved the
Strawman dossier I’d obtained the previous day from Organized Crime. I returned
to the bedroom and sat in the recliner.

I held it up end-on and groaned. It was a
half-inch thick. When Joseph Valachi had outed New York’s Cosa Nostra boss,
Vito Genovese, he’d managed to do it in twenty-two pages. Since when did
brevity become a vice?

I folded the cover back and began to read.

By the time I finished, my eyelids felt
like they were made of lead. This was the wash-up: the moniker ‘Strawman’ had
first hit the Newer York police radar eleven years prior in the Manhattan
precincts, when snitches began using it to gain a premium on their
information―a Strawman job meant a big job. After that, it had mushroomed in
the other boroughs, and even been heard upstate and on the west coast. It had
been tagged to heavy revenue spinners, bank fraud, drug trafficking and
laundering. But it seemed the Strawman wasn’t above protection rackets,
blackmail and extortion, and even the occasional hit―almost as though those
crimes were seasonal sports, a bit of spice on the meat and veg of money
making. But as time wore on it became difficult to separate genuine use from
hijackers riding on its reputation. The Organized Crime Bureau estimated the
size of the Strawman’s network in the hundreds. It was a guess. That was how
big they thought the iceberg was based on the bit poking above the water. But
even if their guess was too small by half, it still wasn’t big enough to sink a
ship like New York. There were some pretty big fish on the OC register, and it
was always full.