The Blue Blazes (3 page)

I could call the gangs.
 

I could leak it to Smiley.
 

I could stir up a pack of pissed-off gobbos looking for a chance to get back at the group of humans who have helped keep them bottled up and kept below.
 

I could call up some hobo with a shotgun to kick down the door and blast all those a-holes into bloody bits.
 

But she just stands there. Eating a Luna bar.

She could do a lot of things. Instead, she does nothing. Just stands there. Eating a Luna bar.

It’s all going to shake out the right way no matter what. Patience will win the day. She has her way in. The old man is going bye-bye. The house of cards will fall and she will be the one to help rebuild it.

She tells herself it has nothing to do with the fact her father’s inside. Instead of sleeping off the Snakeface venom on the floor of his Podunk bar. That’s definitely not it. Because she hates him. That’s what she tells herself.

 

The door bangs as it shuts. A big banquet room full of the Organization’s lieutenants turn and stare at him as Mookie comes through. Jimmy Luscas in his sharkskin suit. Maria O’Malley in a heavy wool turtleneck. Not far away, Saul Bloom gives him an irritated look over his dark-rimmed glasses like,
The fuck is wrong with you
? But fear flashes in Bloom’s eyes, too – fear of who Mookie is and what he does.

These aren’t Mookie’s people. Not really. They know him. Or know
of
him. They operate business in the city: gambling, protection, prostitution, imports, exports, all of it. They don’t handle what goes on beneath the streets. That’s what Werth does. And beneath Werth is Mookie. On paper, Werth’s a lieutenant and Mookie’s a soldier, but that ain’t quite right, either. They’re a two-man operation, a broken branch of the Organization’s family tree. Werth’s got Mookie, and Mookie has his own people. Mole Men. Blue-sifters. Informants. Addicts.

Werth appears, catches Mookie’s elbow. Werth, the old goat. Wiry chin hairs. One half-lidded eye. One gray tooth. And now, thanks to Mookie’s own daughter, a cane. Werth isn’t a classy guy – given half a chance he’ll hang around in a dirty polo shirt drinking bad beer – but he’s got a top-shelf cane. Black like volcanic glass. Topped with a silver goat head. He gives Mookie the same look Bloom gave him, and whispers: “You’re late, you big asshole.”

“I know.” He doesn’t say why.

“You look like hot hell. I told you to dress nice.”

“Didn’t have time.”

“Didn’t have–? You had
all night
. You know what, never mind. I swear to fuck, Mook, sometimes…” He shakes his head. “Haversham talked for a little while. The company man ran the numbers, I ’bout fell asleep standing up. No Boss yet.”

“Yeah.” The lieutenants start to mill and mumble. Impatient types. Mookie says, “Sorry I’m late.”

Werth sizes him up. Keeps his voice low. “You didn’t call me back last night.”

“Like I said, I was–”

“Tired, I heard you. Was it her?”

“Her who?” But Mookie knows what he’s asking and who he’s asking about.

“Don’t fuck with me, Mook. You get a chance to take her out, you need to take her out.” He lowers his voice to a scratchy, rheumy whisper: “The Boss doesn’t know. Who she is to you. But the longer she’s out there the bigger the chance he’s going to figure it out. And that’s bad news. You hear?”

He’s about to tell him,
yeah, yeah, I hear
, but then the crowd hushes.

Up on the dais – a dais still ringed with crêpe ribbon and cut-out paper wedding bells from some event nights before – steps the Boss.

The dread realization strikes him:
Nora was right
.

The Boss has always been a small man: sharp and etched like a peach-pit, mean and jagged like a little kidney stone. But here he looks smaller. And weaker. Skin like paper. Hair like wisps of white silk.

Haversham trails behind, wheeling an oxygen tank. In an Italian family he’d be considered a
consigliere
, but this isn’t an Italian family – and Haversham’s about the furthest thing from Italian you’ll get: pinched accountant face, white blond hair as thin and airy as a cottonball.

The wheels on the oxygen tank squeak.

The Boss steps up. Takes a hit off of the tank’s mask, then hands it to Haversham.

The old man speaks.

“I’ve got–”

Voice like dry leaves in a closing fist. He coughs into his armpit. Something wet rumbles in his lungs and he pulls his arm away and tries again.

 

3

 

The criminal organization found in other cities is barely that – “organization” is a joke, a lie, an easy bit of short-code spoken by people who don’t understand. It’s gang against gang. No quarter. No peace. No treaty. No cleanly-drawn territorial lines. A constant push-and-pull of drug corners and gun-runs and stables of foreign girls made into sex slaves. The battle lines redrawn in new blood day after day. That’s not New York. Here the Great Below altered the landscape both literally and figuratively. The monsters that came crawling up out of the broken mantle forced the game to change. Here the gangs found a tense, but effective, peace. They operate under a central authority: the Organization.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

The Boss stares out over a room with eyes so brown they’re almost black. Coals in cotton. The Lieutenants shift uncomfortably. Mookie feels gut-shot. The Boss being off the radar for so long – that was a mystery on its own but they figured, well, they figured a lot of things. Maybe he was running things on the down-low; he was old, approaching eighty, and the Organization was a creaky-but-effective machine. Maybe he was off somewhere talking to other criminal organizations – Philly, Boston, DC. Maybe he was taking an extended vacation. But this? Cancer?

Behind the Boss, Haversham steeples his fingers – each hand a spider on a mirror. He looks ever the accountant, the company man.

“I’m dying,” the Boss says again. He’s a small man, but the lights behind him lend him a long shadow. “The cancer’s all up in me. It’s, ahh–” Here he looks to Haversham. “What’s the word?” Haversham whispers and the Boss returns his gaze to the crowd. “Metastasized. Like bedbugs in city hotels. By the time they saw it, well.” He gives a shrug, takes another hit off the oxygen, throws the mask down like it’s a dirty rag. “I hate that thing. The oxygen tastes funny. Like minerals. Or pool chemicals.”

Everybody’s quiet. After a few moments, Zoladski resumes speaking:

“I built this thing we do from the ground-up fifty fucking years ago. I came up out of Philly, me and just a couple other guys. Alfie Luscas – Little Jimmy’s pop. Cyril Bartosiewicz. Max Dombrowski and his little brother, Joshy. I stole business from the Italians–” He pronounces it
Eye-talians
. “–and then me and my boys pushed back the Irish all the way to the Bowery and then we took the Bowery a few years later. Little gangs popped up, the Puerto Ricans, the Jamaicans, the Lantern Jacks, the Black Sleeves, the Railroad Boys…” He takes a moment, starts to cough. Haversham hands him the mask, but he swipes it away. “And instead of beating them back we brought them in. Made them a part of it. A real coalition. A fucking
Organization
, all official-like. You’re either in it and alive or outside it and dead. And the time came that we learned what lurked underneath our feet, we stood tall and kept what was ours.”

Thirty years ago. When the Sandhogs opened up the Great Below and hell came spilling out. The monsters wanted a slice. Between the Sandhogs and Zoladski’s crime coalition, the nightmares got pushed back into the dark.

“Hell with it. Nobody came to listen to an old man talk about bullshit everybody already knows. Business is good. And business is gonna stay good. This thing that we do runs itself and me being six feet under ain’t gonna change that – not like I was getting any younger. Every day is a day gone, a day you don’t get back, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to any one of us. Still, somebody needs to step up. Take the reins.”

Mookie looks around the room. The lieuts look anxious. And suddenly excited. Like one of them is going to be called up here and now and handed the keys to the city. Zoladski had a son, but the son died in a deal gone bad with one of the gangs, the Crimson Kings. The Kings paid for that transgression – heads cut off and sent to the other gangs as a message:
This is what you get when you fuck with a Zoladski
.

But it’s then that Haversham gives a nod to the far corner of the room and out from behind a stack of trays and chairs walks this young, reedy kid in an ill-fitting black suit with a narrow black tie. The kid hurries up to the front like a couple mop handles falling out of a hallway closet. Got two gold rings on his bulbous knuckles. Thin gold chain around his neck. It’s then Mookie sees the resemblance – square-shaped head, hair styled the same way (even though the kid’s is penny-red and the old man’s is like fresh snow). Same nose, too. Nose like an owl’s beak.

Mookie’s seen him before. But last time he saw him he was, what, knee-high to a chipmunk? Just a little boy then.

“My grandson,” the Boss says, the words a rheumy rattle. “Casimir Zoladski. Some of you have met him. He’s a good kid. He’ll succeed me in this. When I’m gone, he’s the new Boss, so give him the respect he deserves or he’ll cut your balls off. And I’ll come back from the dead to eat ’em.”

A moment hangs in the air before the applause, a handful of seconds bundled in the string of uncertainty where the lieuts shift nervously and wonder if this is some kind of fucking joke, that the Boss is going to hand over the entire Organization to a twenty-year-old wet-behind-the-ears
whelp
like this.

“So there it is,” the Boss says. Like he just pissed on the floor and is daring anybody to say something about it. “Let’s eat.”

 

Servers from downstairs put out chairs and tables and bring out food. A lot of it. Trays over burners. It’s a whole Polish spread: pierogies, three different types of kielbasa, golabki, pyzy dumplings, tomato soup, poppy seed rolls. Mookie wants to eat it all. He’s starving. He’s always starving but now’s worse than ever because the venom has him feeling gutted, like his blood sugar has fallen through the floor – and then this news? Cancer? Casimir? Mookie’s always been the type to eat his emotions and right now his emotions want him to shovel pierogies and sausage into his mouth until he passes out.

Then there’s that nagging thought:
Nora knew about this. She told me he was sick.
 

How the hell did she know?

Mookie moves to get in line. He jostles Shawndell Washington, who turns to say something but then sees who he’s dealing with and then shuts up. Sometimes Mookie likes scaring people. Other times it makes him sad. Right now he just wants to eat.

Which is why it sucks that Werth comes up, grabs him out of line.

“Hey goddamnit,” Mookie protests with a grindstone growl.

“Shut up, you’ll get to eat. You’re like one of those goddamn Hungry Hungry Hippos.” He waves Mookie on. “Let’s go see the Boss.”

“He doesn’t want to see us.”

“He doesn’t want to see
you
. But we gotta pay our respects.”

“All right, all right. But then we eat?”

As they head over to the corner table where the Boss has parked himself, his tank, and Haversham, Werth slaps Mookie’s gut through his stained shirt. “I remember when you were cut like a slab of mountain rock. You got fat.”

“I got old.”

“I’m older than you,” Werth says. “And I’m thinner than ever.”

“You got a tapeworm. And you’re part goat.”

They stand in line behind a couple of other lieuts looking to kiss the ring, metaphorically-speaking. Werth keeps egging Mookie on: “I’m just saying, Mookie, you used to be a mean cut of meat. Now you’re like a… flabby chuck roast.”

“I can still hit things.” He snorts. “And chuck makes a damn good pot roast.”

“Oh, here we go. You and your little… froofy foodie obsession.”

“It’s charcuterie.”

“
Shark cootery.
Sounds French.”

“It is.”

“You’re too dumb to speak froofy French.”

Mookie shrugs. “Only French word I know. And it ain’t froofy. It’s meat. I kill pigs. I take their meat. I put it in sausages. I cure the fat. I eat it.”

“Whatever. You know what I like? That two cheeseburger meal at McDonald’s. Same every time. Couple bucks. Greasy and sweet. The pickle? The ketchup and mustard? Right on the money. And those fucking French fries, Jesus Christ on a cupcake those are like, the perfect– Oh, here we go.”

Ahead of them, Marla Koladky-Pinsky steps out of their way, gives them a pissy look like they’re the last pair of dingleberries hanging, and then–

There he is. The Boss. Looking small and crumpled. Like an origami tiger on the seat that somebody sat on without realizing.

The Boss stands. Steps around his oxygen tank, thrusts out a hand. That’s his thing. He shakes your hand no matter who you are.

Mookie takes the hand.

“Don’t break my arm,” the Boss says with a wink. He stifles a hard cough.

“I won’t.”

“You got a good grip. Confident. But not too confident.” The Boss doesn’t let go. He casts a squinty look down at the two hands – his own hand dwarfed by the human oven mitt that is Mookie’s. “I can tell everything with a handshake. Everything. It all comes together in that moment. I can tell if I like a guy. Or if I want to stick him in the gills with a switchblade. I can tell if he’s gonna betray me or if he’ll stand by me as Hell pisses on my head.” He licks his teeth. “You’re rock fucking solid, you are. Not just physically. You’re loyal. A good soldier. And you–”

He turns to Werth. Werth says, “Boss, I’m sorry as hell to hear about this.”

Zoladski waves a hand.

“God comes for all of us in the end. You know how he got me? Asbestos. This is a fuckin’
asbestos cancer
.”

Haversham, in a clipped tone, adds: “Mesothiolioma.”

“Right. Asbestos cancer. Some time in my life, way back when, a little shitty
speck
of asbestos embedded in my lung-meat and now here we are. Death sentence.” He sniffs. “We had that shit in our house down in Kensington. In the roof shingles. In the siding. Wrapped around the pipes. Inevitable, I guess.”

“They got surgery they can do,” Werth says. “Right? Lung transplants. And then there’s chemo and radiation and, and– what?”

“Hell with all that,” the Boss says, flecks of saliva dotting his lip and gathering at the corners of his mouth like sea foam. “I go that way they maybe give me another three, four months, and my quality of life goes down the crapper. I’ll look like a baby bird what lost his feathers. No. We have to project strength. Continuance. We got a good thing going here in the Organization, but soon as those fuckin’ gangland piranhas smell blood in the water, it’s over. They’ll churn the river good trying to get to me. What we got here, boys, is a real
fragile situation.
Like an egg balanced on the tip of the finger, could get messy. Could all go
tits up
in a blink.” His voice goes low and his eyes lose focus. “All because of a little piece of asbestos.”

The Boss’s gaze returns to Mookie.

“You used to work with asbestos.”

“Uh. Yeah.” How’d he know that?

“You were a Sandhog.”

Mookie grunts in assent.

“Family thing?”

“My Pop. My Grampop, too.”

“But not for you, not anymore. Why you’d quit?”

Mookie shrugs. “This is my thing.”

“This thing we do,” the Boss says, the words almost musical, like a Sinatra croon lurks somewhere behind the words, a sing-song ghost. “Christ, I’m hungry. But the cancer’s a jealous mistress. It eats me; I don’t get to eat anything else. Food here’s good, though. Kielbasa’s solid.” He pronounces it
kill-baasy
. “They know a good kilbo. Still ain’t like in my Philly days, though. They,
they
knew kilbos. Before we came here they called us the Kielbasa Gang. You know that? Maybe you did. I repeat myself in my old age – forgive me that sin, yeah? Where you come from, Mookie?”

“Jersey originally.”

“Good. Well. You go eat.” Then the Boss waves them off. Sits back down. And that’s that.
You’re dismissed
.

On the way back to the food line, Werth says, “Fuckin’ cancer, am I right?”

“Fuckin’ cancer,” Mookie says.

 

The plate is heavy. Pierogies – fat dough pockets filled with cheese, slathered with butter and onions. Kielbasa red like a Russian rocket. Beet salad. He’s tempted to toss the plastic fork away and just use his hands, but people would stare.

Fuck it. They stare anyway. He starts using his hands.

Mookie sits by himself in the corner. Rips apart a pierogie. Cheesy filling spills; steam rises. Just as he’s about to cram it in his salivating mouth, a hand falls on his forearm.

It’s the kid. The grandson. Casimir.

“You’re Mookie Pearl,” he says.

Mookie looks left, looks right. Like this is some kind of joke.

“That’s me.” He almost adds,
Whaddya want, kid?
but then remembers that this “kid” is going to be the Big Boss with the Red Hot Sauce before too long.

“Can I sit?”

“You can do anything you want.”

And yet the kid doesn’t sit. He stands there. Hands in his pockets.

Casimir lowers his voice. “I’m not ready for this.”

“To sit down?”

“To take over.”

“Oh.” Mookie looks down at the drippy blob of butter-ooze dough at the end of the pierogie and sighs.
Be rude to eat in front of the next Boss
. He sets the food down, an act that is almost painful to perform. “You got some time yet.”

Now, Casimir sits. “Not much. Not enough.”

“You’ll be OK.”

“Up until now, he kept me out of it. The business. Now it’s like–” He knocks two fists together. “Boom. Crash course. And I’m not ready.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I need you to do something.”

Can he do that? Does the kid have the power yet? He’s more important than Mookie by a hundred miles. A thousand. So, yeah, probably. “OK, sure.”

“I need you to cure my
dziadzia
.”