The Defense: A Novel (23 page)
There was no embellishment to this story. Again, it was a simple statement of fact, clear and unemotional.
“I won’t run. I won’t give up my daughter. But I need you to understand that I’m playing your game because I want her back. She means everything to me—so you don’t need to worry about me running.”
The limo slowly progressed up Mott Street. I’d told Arturas that I didn’t feel the side doors of the restaurant would be safe either. In truth, I didn’t know, but I did know that I needed to impress Jimmy. I needed a monumental favor from him, and the money, and whatever value our old friendship held for him, probably didn’t warrant the risk. I couldn’t ask him to put his faith in me if I skulked in through the back door; he needed to know the
real
Eddie Flynn was back, and to do that, I needed to make an entrance: I needed to walk in through the front door without the cops seeing me.
“Stop here,” I said. “I need five hundred dollars, and I can’t dip into the four million. I know a couple of guys who can help me get into the restaurant without being spotted.”
Victor gave me five hundred in a roll. I stepped out of the limo and into the fish market.
Ten minutes later, I put my back to a corner half a block from Jimmy’s. The limo waited up the street. I began my approach and scanned the area for surveillance crews. A year before Jimmy opened his restaurant, there had been two diners across the street. One served pretty decent food. The other turned out pretty special food. Then Jimmy’s opened, and he didn’t need the evening competition. So the diners closed at seven p.m. They still made good, though. No charge for protection and a monthly sub on the profits from Jimmy’s. Some months, the cafés made more money being closed than open. Jimmy eventually bought out both premises. He used them for storage. That created a problem for the FBI and the ATF and the other agencies that categorized Jimmy as a person of interest—there were no diner booths for agents anymore. They could no longer hold up a table with a cup of coffee and watch Jimmy’s restaurant from across the street. Instead they had to get creative with their surveillance methods.
I slowed my walk, and within a minute I made the agents—a brown van with tinted windows; cigarette butts gathered on the pavement outside the passenger window—this was Control.
This mobile monitoring unit controlled the rest of the surveillance operatives. Given the street layout, I guessed a three-man team: one with ready vehicle access, one to cover the traffic going into Jimmy’s, and one with a high view, to monitor who came out. I saw a black Honda motorcycle on the sidewalk. The rider seemed to be taking a long time over take-out coffee—rover one. The other two were split for optimum POV. They would have one in the Laundromat with a view of the goods vehicles and the route to the subway station—rover two. The other would have a high position. I glanced up and saw a few people at their windows. Nothing stood out. Then I saw a man at a window in a crumpled shirt, like he’d slept in it. He was the top view. The eye in the sky would pose the most problems for me, unless I was across the street from the restaurant, out of sight. I made for that position, and once I got there, I parked my ass on a bus bench, whistled, and watched everything unfold.
I’d first represented Pete Tulisi about two years ago. Pete worked all hours in the fish market on Mott Street, and when Friday came, he took his wages to a bar, blew every cent on vodka, and started a fight—an average Friday night for Pete. His record showed a lot of assaults, disorderly conducts, and not much else. When the court fines began to rack up, Pete stopped paying his legal bills. We came to an arrangement. When he couldn’t pay cash—he paid me in fresh fish. I had never insisted on being paid if it meant that the client couldn’t make their fine payments because if they fell short on the fine, they would do time. I had called at Mott Street earlier, paid Pete the five hundred bucks Victor had given me, and now he was ready to give me my show.
Pete’s pal, a delivery truck driver from the docks, stopped to tie his shoelaces outside Jimmy’s. He pointed at Pete, who had just walked around the corner, having heard my signal. Both men eyeballed each other before stripping off their coats and shirts. A second later, Pete and his pal began killing each other. They were both big men: baseball-mitt fists and football shoulders, each weighing well over two fifty, and they weren’t pulling their punches, what my old man would have called a real
slobberknocker
of a fight.
Soon they were rolling around on the sidewalk, throwing garbage at each other. Then a real piece of luck. NYPD showed up but refused to go near the men. The fight grew wilder as they moved down Mulberry Street, away from the restaurant, with Pete and his pal throwing each other into parked cars, setting off the alarms, and generally making as much noise and mayhem as possible. As long as each man gave as good as he got, PD would hang back and let the monsters tire each other out. When the police deal with guys this big, there’s no guarantee that Tasers will have any effect.
Five hundred dollars was a small price to pay for the perfect distraction.
I checked both rovers and then the high-view agent—they couldn’t take their eyes off the fight. The limo pulled up beside me, and the passenger door opened.
“It should take no longer than a half hour to count the cash, bill for bill. If you’re not standing here in an hour, I will make that phone call and your daughter’s blood will be on your hands,” said Arturas.
“You forgot I have to brief Tony on what he’s going to say in court today. I need two hours,” I said.
“I’ll give you one hour, no more.”
An hour gave me problems. I would have to work fast.
My watch read 6:01 a.m. Less than ten hours to go before my deadline.
I took two bags full of cash from Arturas and headed for Jimmy’s. Pushing my way through the front door, unobserved, I walked straight into the barrel of a .45 Colt automatic.
I was met at the door by muscle. Two of Jimmy’s guys, dressed in black leather jackets and tailored pants. The smaller of the two men held the Colt at his side, pointing it at my chest. The weight of all that money pulled at my shoulders.
“Jimmy’s expecting me. My name’s Eddie Flynn.”
“Hands against the wall,” said the guy with the Colt. He didn’t look as ugly as his pal. The man with the Colt had pools of black below his dull brown eyes, which were only barely visible beneath his caveman brow. His friend was taller and presumably had been born with a nose before somebody decided to bite it clean off. A red mound of scar tissue sat in the middle of his face, underlined with two black slashes, which must have passed for nostrils.
I didn’t move.
“I don’t give a shit who you are. You’re not gettin’ in here without me pattin’ you down,” said the gunman.
“You’re not touching me and you’re not touching these bags. I got four million reasons in here to hurt you and your boyfriend here, Rudolph. And if I walk out, Jimmy’s going to want to know which asshole made me walk. I’ll tell him it was the cute one. Now let me through, gorgeous, or I’ll give you a kiss you won’t wake up from.”
Both guys looked at each other.
“You put a foot wrong and we’ll blow you away.”
They each pointed a gun at the back of my head and followed me to the dining area. The restaurant only seated one table at this time of the day: Jimmy’s breakfast meeting. It was basically a small riot, but with catering.
Despite what people are told in the movies and the media, there were no real ranks or titles in the mob. Not these days, anyway. There was a counselor, an adviser, but no Mafia captains, no boss of bosses; leave that to Scorsese and Coppola.
Of course, the mob didn’t operate like some kind of communist collective either. There was
a
boss. That was Jimmy, but the other families all worked together and elected a speaker for the committee. Out of the ten guys at the table, probably all of them had killed at least once. Jimmy probably more than most and usually up close and personal. Very personal. That was the job. Generally and wherever possible, their individual roles would be suited to their particular skills. For example, Cousin Albie, who was everybody’s cousin no matter where you were from, had been through high school, graduated to college, and was a qualified accountant. He handled the moves; the large deposits and withdrawals of currency were Cousin Albie’s affair, along with the “dirty thirty runs.” Albie said that there were thirty foolproof ways to launder money, but you had to use all thirty at once. If you simply used one method, you’d get caught. Thirty processes cut down the risk to the overall cash sum and helped keep things relatively on the lowdown. Albie dressed well, looked young and professional and not at all like a gangster.
Cousin Albie was eating a bowl of cereal. He sat on Jimmy’s left. On Jimmy’s right, I saw the polar opposite of Cousin Albie—Frankie. Frankie qualified as one of the more hands-on type of operators. The skin on Frankie’s hands shared a similar consistency to grade-three sandpaper. I remembered the story about Frankie’s new knuckle: a large piece of hard skin on his middle-finger knuckle had built up over the course of three days, while Frankie beat on a Polish informer. By the time Frankie finished with him, the poor guy had no teeth left and his face had swelled to twice its normal size and bled constantly. Frankie’s hands were so bad he couldn’t drive for a week. He stayed home with his purple, broken hands in bowls of iced water. Frankie’s face didn’t look at all dissimilar from his hands. He was in his late fifties and it showed. At the table that morning, Frankie’s old, dangerous hands were safely wrapped around a breakfast sandwich.
The restaurant’s heating must have been turned up full. I could feel sweat beginning to bead on my forehead. The restaurant could seat around a hundred people with its fifty or so tables. A thick carpet, which was a mix of grays and lilacs, set off the retro decor. In contrast to this decorative style, twelve large chandeliers lit the place like an old movie theater.
Jimmy looked ordinary, like he always did. He usually wore sweaters with black pants, and he never went anywhere without his hat, hence the name. The hat was his grandfather’s, bought in Sicily in the sixties. That hat was a flat, gray cap. Ever since Jimmy’s grandfather had been cut down in Chicago by the cops, Jimmy wore his granddaddy’s hat every day. Some said he even slept in that hat. It was about respect. Short black hair escaped from the sides of the hat. Jimmy was small and built like a fighter: thick arms and lots of muscle on the chest and neck. We’d built our bodies together in Mickey Hooley’s gym, pounding the heavy bags and running up and down the old stairs. When my dad first brought me to that place, I didn’t know any of the other kids. They were all first- and second-generation Irish. There was one kid nobody went near, and that kid was Jimmy Fellini. Because I was half Italian, Jimmy and I got on well together, and we were soon tearing up our knuckles doing push-ups on Mickey’s painted concrete floor. In truth, Jimmy had been my best friend for the better part of fifteen years. He’d put on quite a few pounds since I’d last seen him. I still kept my weight to an even one eighty-five, which was by no means lean but nowhere near overweight.
* * *
As the doormen brought me close, all activity on the table stopped and everybody looked at me.
“What the hell’s going on, Eddie?” said Jimmy.
“I’m here to buy some help,” I said.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Four million dollars. Olek Volchek has my daughter. I’m in the market for a contractor.”
“Are you sure? Haven’t seen you in years, con man. How do I know you’re not working for the Russians?”
“Because if I wanted to kill all of you guys, I could, in a heartbeat.” I removed the detonator from my coat. “You want a couple of million dollars and a job? Or do you want me to redecorate?”
Silence bellowed around the table. Nobody moved. All eyes were on Jimmy. Waiting. One word from him and these men would tear me apart.
A smile broke through his lips. I was yanking his chain.
Then Jimmy got up and wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief before bursting into deep laughter.
“Eddie Fly, I missed you, bub,” he said as he embraced me.
Eddie Fly
. I hadn’t heard that name in a long time.
Jimmy wrapped his hands around my back and patted me. It was a friendly gesture, but he was also checking for wires, guns. I felt relieved that I’d left the bomb in the courthouse. Coming back to Jimmy’s felt like going home. That feeling lasted no more than a second when I realized that I’d gambled my daughter’s life coming here. I loved my little girl and I wanted her to be back so bad I could feel it in my teeth.
I gripped Jimmy in a bear hug as I fought back the rising emotion in my voice.
“Jimmy, they have my little girl.”
“Not for much longer,” he said.
It didn’t take me long to recount the events of yesterday, from Ted’s Diner to my trip to the restaurant. There were a few open mouths around the table. I noticed a couple of suspicious looks as well, along with the stone-faced silence of the two men on either side of Jimmy.
Jimmy didn’t give anything away, as usual. He didn’t react to anything I’d told him. He just sat there, occasionally drinking his coffee but alert and paying close attention to every word. Sometimes his eyes would flit to his men, to gauge their reaction. I finished my tale and he lowered his eyes to his half-eaten breakfast.
“So let me get this right,” he said. “You’re supposed to plant a bomb in the witness stand and take out the informer, Benny. Amy’s been kidnapped and is being held somewhere. You don’t know where, but somewhere in Manhattan. You can’t go to the cops or the feds. And you don’t want Tony to testify in Volchek’s trial. Have I got that pretty good?”
“Pretty perfect,” I said, “but I left out Harry. Superior Judge Ford, that is. Harry got some stuff for me—like the phone I called you from.”
Jimmy looked as if he were rolling the possibilities around in his head.
