“Ha!” he shouted. “Very quick, Pat. You’re good, buddy. Or was that a lucky guess?”
I looked east to Clarendon Street. Just street traffic crossing at the light, no one on a cellular that I could see.
“Little of both, Wesley. Little of both.”
“Well, I’m real proud of you, Pat.”
I turned very slowly to my right and through the thick mist and drizzle, I saw him.
He stood on the southeast corner of Dartmouth and Commonwealth. He’d covered his upper half with a hooded, transparent slicker. When our eyes met, he gave me a wide grin and waved.
“Now you see me…” he said.
I took a step off the curb and cars that had just jumped off the light at Dartmouth screamed past. A Karmann Ghia almost clipped my kneecap as its horn blared and it jerked a hair to its right.
“Oooh,” Wesley said. “Close one. Careful, Pat. Careful.”
I walked along the edge of the mall toward Dartmouth, my eyes on Wesley as he took several casual steps backward.
“I knew a guy who got hit by a car once,” Wesley said as I lost him around the corner.
I broke into a trot and reached Dartmouth. The traffic continued to smoke the road in front of me, rain hissing off the tires. Wesley stood at the mouth of the public alley that ran parallel to Commonwealth Avenue from the Public Garden to the Fens a mile west.
“This guy tripped and a car fender hit his head while he was down. Turned his frontal lobe to egg salad.”
The light turned yellow, but this was merely an excuse for eight cars in two lanes to speed up as they broke through the intersection.
Wesley gave me another wave and disappeared into the alley.
“Always be careful, Pat. Always.”
I bolted across the avenue as a Volvo turned right onto Commonwealth and cut me off. The driver, a woman, shook her head at me, and then roared down the avenue.
I reached the sidewalk, spoke into the phone as I ran toward the mouth of the alley. “Wesley, you still there, buddy?”
“I’m not your buddy,” he whispered.
“But you said you were.”
“I lied, Pat.”
I reached the alley and slid on the sole strip of cobblestone at its mouth, banged into an overflowing Dumpster. A soaked paper bag exploded upward from the Dumpster and a rat surged up and over the edge, dropped to the alley. A cat that had been lying in wait under the Dumpster took off after it, and the two of them bolted the length of a city block in about six seconds. The cat looked big and mean, but so did the rat, and I wondered who exactly was controlling the chase. If I’d been betting, I’d have to have given a slight edge to the rat.
“You ever play Bronco Buster?” Wesley whispered.
“Which?” I looked up at the fire escapes dripping water from chipped iron. Nothing.
“Bronco Buster,” Wesley whispered. “It’s a game. Try it with Vanessa Moore some night. What you do is you mount the woman from behind, doggie style. You with me?”
“Sure.” I walked down the center of the alley, peering through the fog and drizzle at the rear doorways of opulent town houses, the small garages, and the shadowed places where buildings met buildings and some jutted out and others didn’t.
“So you have her from behind and you slip your dick in there so it’s good and firm, as deep as it can go. How deep would that be in your case, Pat?”
“I’m Irish, Wesley. You figure it out.”
“None too deep, then,” he said, and a low “ha-ha” rode his whisper.
I craned my head up at the odd collection of small wooden decks that protruded from the brick, like lean-tos for those underneath. I peered up at the cracks between the wood slats, looking for any shape resembling feet.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “once the two of you are attached good and snug, you whisper another woman’s name in her ear and then hold on tight like a bronco buster as the bitch goes wild.”
I spotted a few roof gardens, but they were too high up to tell if anyone was in them, and besides, none of the fire escapes looked close enough for easy access.
“Think you’d like that game, Pat?”
I turned a slow 360, willed my eyes to relax, to glide over the surface and see if anything incongruous showed itself.
“I asked if you’d like that game, Pat.”
“No, Wes.”
“Too bad. Oh, Pat?”
“What, Wes?”
“Take another look due east.”
I turned 180 degrees to my right and saw him down the far end of the alley, a tall figure made opaque by the fog, silhouette of a phone held to his ear.
“Whattaya say?” he said. “Let’s play.”
I broke into a run and he bolted as soon as I did. I heard the slap and clatter of his feet on wet cement and then he broke the connection.
By the time I reached the Clarendon Street end of the alley, he was gone. Shoppers and tourists and high school students filled the sidewalks. I saw men in trench coats and yellow macs and construction workers drenched to the bone. I saw steam rising from the sewer grates and enveloping taxis as they rolled past. I saw a kid on Rollerblades wipe out in front of a parking lot on Newbury. But not Wesley.
Just the mist and rain he’d left behind.
22
The morning after I had my encounter with Wesley in the rain, I got a call from Bubba telling me to be outside my house in half an hour because he was coming to pick me up.
“Where we going?”
“To see Stevie Zambuca.”
I stepped back from the small telephone table, took a long breath. Stevie Zambuca? Why the hell would he want to see me? I’d never met the man. I would have assumed the man had never heard of me. I’d been kind of hoping to keep it that way.
“Why?”
“Dunno. He called me, said to come to his house and bring you.”
“I was requested.”
“You wanna call it that, sure. You were requested.” Bubba hung up.
I went back out into the kitchen and sat at the table, drank my morning coffee, and tried to breathe steadily enough to avoid a panic attack. Yes, Stevie Zambuca scared me, but that wasn’t rare. Stevie Zambuca scared most people.
Stevie “The Pick” Zambuca ran a crew out of East Boston and Revere that, among other things, controlled most North Shore gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and chop-shop operations. Stevie was called “The Pick” not because he carried an ice pick or because he was skinny or knew his way around a lock, but because he was famous for giving his victims a choice on how they’d die. Stevie would enter a room where three or four of his goons held a guy to a chair, and he’d place an ax and a hacksaw in front of the guy and tell the guy to pick. Ax or saw. Knife or sword. Garrote or hammer. If the victim couldn’t pick, or didn’t do so in time, Stevie was rumored to use a drill, his weapon of choice. This was one of the reasons why newspapers sometimes erroneously called Stevie “The Drill,” which, according to rumor, pissed off a Somerville made guy named Frankie DiFalco who had a really big dick.
For half a second I wondered if Cody Falk’s bodyguard, Leonard, could be connected to this. I’d made him for a North Shore guy, after all. But that was just the panic. If Leonard had enough pull to get Stevie Zambuca to call me to his house, then Leonard wouldn’t have needed to hire himself out to Cody Falk.
This didn’t make sense. Bubba traveled in mob circles. I didn’t.
So why did Stevie Zambuca want to see me? What had I done? And how could I undo it? Quickly. Really quickly. By yesterday, perhaps.
Stevie Zambuca’s house was a small, unprepossessing split-level ranch that sat on the end of a dead-end street on top of a hill that looked down over Route 1 and Logan Airport in East Boston. He could even see the harbor from there, though I doubt he looked much. All Stevie needed to see was the airport; half his crew’s income came from there—baggage handlers’ unions, transport unions, shit that fell off the back of trucks and planes and landed in Stevie?
??s lap.
The house had an above-ground pool and a chain-link fence surrounding a small front yard. The backyard was bigger, but not by much, and kerosene torches were staked into the ground every ten feet, throwing light on a summer morning made blue by fog and a temperature dip that felt more like October than August.
“It’s his Saturday brunch,” Bubba said as we exited his Humvee and headed for the house. “He does it every week.”
“A wise guy brunch,” I said. “How quaint.”
“The mimosas are good,” Bubba said. “But stay away from the canoli, or the rest of the day your best friend will be your fucking toilet seat.”
A fifteen-year-old girl with a waterfall of orange-highlighted black hair pushed up off her forehead opened the door, her face a mask of fifteen-year-old fuck-you apathy and repressed anger she had no idea what to do with yet.
Then she recognized Bubba and a shy smile fought its way across her dim lips. “Mr. Rogowski. Hi.”
“Hey, Josephina. Nice streaks.”
She touched her hair nervously. “The orange? You like it?”
“It kicks,” Bubba said.
Josephina looked down at her knees and twisted her ankles together, swayed slightly in the doorway. “My dad hates it.”
“Hey,” Bubba said, “that’s what dads do.”
Josephina absently pulled a strand of hair into her mouth, continued to sway a bit under Bubba’s open gaze and wide smile.
Bubba as sex symbol. Now I’d seen it all.
“Your dad around?” Bubba asked.
“He’s in back?” Josephina said as if asking Bubba if that were okay.
“We’ll find him.” Bubba kissed her cheek. “How’s your mom?”
“On my ass,” Josephina said. “Like, constantly.”
“And that’s what moms do,” Bubba said. “Fun being fifteen, huh?”
Josephina looked up at him and for a moment I feared she’d grab his face right there and plant one on his oversized lips.
Instead, she pivoted on her toes like a dancer and said, “I gotta go,” and ran out of the room.
“Weird kid,” Bubba said.
“She’s got a crush on you.”
“Fuck off.”
“She does, you idiot. Are you blind?”
“Fuck off or I’ll kill you.”
“Oh,” I said. “In that case never mind.”
“Better,” Bubba said as we worked our way through a crowd in the kitchen.
“She does, though.”
“You’re dead.”
“Kill me later.”
“If there’s anything left after Stevie gets through.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re pissa.”
The small house was jammed. Everywhere you looked, you saw a wise guy or a wise guy’s wife or a wise guy’s kid. It was a crowd of crushed velour jogging suits and Champion sweatshirts on the men, black nylon stretch pants and loud yellow-and-black or purple-and-black or white-and-silver blouses on the women. The kids wore mostly pro sports team apparel, the brighter the better, and all of it loose and baggy and uniform so that a Cincinnati Bengals red-and-black zebra-striped hat gave way to an identical jersey and sweatpants.
The interior of the house was one of the ugliest I’d ever seen. White marble steps dropped off the kitchen and into a living room covered in white shag carpeting so deep you couldn’t see anyone’s shoes. Running through the white shag were what appeared to be sparkling pinstripes the color of pearl. The couches and armchairs were white leather, but the coffee table, end tables, and enormous home entertainment armoire were a shiny metallic black. The lower half of the walls was covered by an industrial plastic shell made to look like cave rock, and the upper half was clad in red silk wallpaper. A wet bar, encased in mirrored glass and lit by 150-watt bulbs, was built into the far corner of all that red and cave rock, and painted black to match the armoire. Amid pictures of Stevie and his family hanging from the walls, the Zambucas had placed framed photos of their favorite Italians—John Travolta as Tony Manero, Al Pacino as Michael Corleone, Frank Sinatra, Dino, Sophia Loren, Vince Lombardi, and, inexplicably, Elvis. I guess with the dark hair and the questionable taste in clothing, the King was an honorary goomba, kind of guy you could’ve trusted to do a hit and keep his mouth shut, make you a nice sausage-and-peppers hoagie afterward.
Bubba shook a bunch of hands, kissed a few cheeks, but didn’t pause for conversation, and no one looked like they wanted to engage him in one anyway. Even in a room full of second-story men, bank robbers, bookies, and killers, Bubba sent an electric trill through the house, a distinct aura of threat and otherworldliness. The men’s smiles were fragmented and slightly shaky when they saw him, and the women’s reconstructed faces bore an odd mixture of fear and arousal.
As we neared the edge of the living room, a middle-aged woman with bleached-blond hair and tanning-lamp flesh threw out her arms and screamed, “Aaah, Bubba!”
He lifted her off her feet when he hugged her and she smacked a kiss as loud as her greeting onto the side of his face.
He deposited her gently back to the shag carpet and said, “Mira, how are ya, hon?”
“Great, big fella!” She leaned back and cupped her elbow in her hand as she took a drag from a white cigarette so long it could have hit somebody in the kitchen if she’d turned without warning. She wore a bright blue blouse over matching blue pants and blue open-toed heels with four-inch spikes. Her face and body were a miracle of modern medicine—tiny tuck marks where the jaw line met the ears, jutting ass and breasts an eighteen-year-old would envy, hands as creamy porcelain as a doll’s. “Where you been hiding? You seen Josephina?”
Bubba answered the second question. “She let us in, yeah. She looks great.”
“Pain in my patootie,” Mira said, and laughed through a burst of smoke. “Stevie wants to put her in a convent.”
“Sister Josephina?” Bubba asked with a cocked eyebrow.
Mira’s cackle ripped through the room. “Wouldn’t that be a sight? Ha!”
She looked at me suddenly and her bright eyes dulled with suspicion.
“Mira,” Bubba said, “this is my friend Patrick. Stevie has some business with him.”
Mira slid a smooth hand into mine. “Mira Zambuca. Pleased to meet you, Pat.”
I hate being called Pat, but I decided not to mention it.
“Mrs. Zambuca,” I said, “a pleasure.”
Mira didn’t look all that pleased having a pale-faced Mick in her living room, but she gave me a distant smile that told me she’d bear it as long I stayed away from the silverware.
“Stevie’s out by the grill.” She cocked her head in the direction of streams of smoke billowing by the glass doors that led out back. “Making them veal and pork sausages everyone loves so much.”
Particularly for brunch, I thought.
“Thanks, hon,” Bubba said. “You look dynamite, by the way.”
“Aw, thanks, sweetie. Ain’t you a caution?” She turned away from us and almost ignited sixteen pounds of another woman’s hair with her cigarette before the woman saw it coming and leaned back.
Bubba and I worked our way through the rest of the crowd and out through the back. We closed the door behind us and waved at the clouds of smoke filling the back deck.
Out here, it was strictly men, and a master blaster propped up on the deck rail played Springsteen, another honorary goomba, and most of the guys were fatter than the ones inside, stuffing their mouths even now with cheeseburgers and hot dogs piled high with peppers and onions and relish chunks the size of bricks.
A short guy worked the grill, his jet-black pompadour adding three inches to his height. He wore jeans over white running shoes and sported a T-shirt emblazoned with the words WORLD’S GREATEST DAD on the back. A red-and-white-checkered apron covered the front of him as he worked a steel spatula over a two-tiered grill stuffed from end to end with sausages, hamburgers, marinated chicken breasts, hot dogs, red and green peppers, o
nions, and a small pile of garlic chunks in a nest of foil.
“Hey, Charlie,” the short guy called out, “you like your burger black, right?”
“Black as Michael Jordan,” a greasy sea of flesh called back as several men laughed.
“That’s some black.” The short guy nodded and lifted a cigar from an ashtray beside the grill and popped it in his mouth.
“Stevie,” Bubba said.
The guy turned and smiled around his cigar. “Hey, Rogowski! Hey, everyone, the Polack’s here!”
There were calls of “Bub-ba!” and “Rogowski!” and “Kill-a!” and several men slapped Bubba’s broad back or shook his hand, but no one acknowledged my presence, because Stevie hadn’t. It was as if I wouldn’t exist until he said so.
“That thing last week,” Stevie Zambuca said to Bubba. “You have any problems?”
“Nope.”
“That guy was talking shit? He give you any headaches?”
“Nope,” Bubba said again.
“Heard that suit in Norfolk is looking to give you grief.”
“Heard that, too,” Bubba said.
“You want a hand with it?”
“No, thanks,” Bubba said.
“You sure? Be the least we could do.”
“Thanks,” Bubba said, “but I got it covered.”
Stevie Zambuca looked up from the grill and smiled at Bubba. “You don’t ever ask for nothing, Rogowski. It makes people nervous.”
“You, Stevie?”
“Me?” He shook his head. “No. It’s old school, far as I’m concerned. Something most of these fucking guys could learn from. Me and you, Rogowski, we’re almost all that’s left of the old days and we ain’t that old. The rest of these fucking guys?” He looked back over his shoulder at the fat farm on his porch. “They’re hoping for movie deals, shopping book ideas to agents.”
Bubba glanced at the men with complete disinterest. “Freddy’s got it bad, I hear.”
Fat Freddy Constantine ran the mob here, but word was he wouldn’t be around much longer. The guy favored to take his seat was currently grilling sausage in front of us.