True enough, but first, I had to…
Behind me, I heard the sound of the trap door opening again, and I turned around to see Evans hit the dirt in a heap. He rolled over, groaned loudly, looked around, and propped himself up on one elbow. With his other hand, he slowly extended his huge semiauto in my direction. His shirtfront and one side of his face were covered with blood, drool was coming out of his mouth, and one of his legs was twitching oddly. But there was no doubt that he had me squarely in his sights. And at this range, he couldn’t miss. Hell, in that narrow little passage, he could have bounced the bullets off the walls and still been sure of hitting me. From the shop above, I thought there was the sound of the jingle bells again, but it was hard to imagine them doing me any good.
“Out of bullets, are we?” he said. “What a fucking shame.”
We both looked at my right hand, where I still held the .380, the open chamber clearly advertising that it was empty.
“Why don’t you hop a freight train again, asshole?”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Know where I can find one?”
“I just happen to have one, pointed straight at you. And you are standing on the tracks, right where I want you. I’d rather run you down with a car, of course, but we don’t…”
“Why, for crying out loud?”
“Huh? The hell you mean, ‘why?’”
“Why means why, is all. Why a car, why me, why Amy Cox, why any of it? If you’re going to waste me anyway, you could at least tell me.”
“You trying to confuse me now?”
Do I have that option? Damn right.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean? You think I’m half gone, you can play with my mind? I ain’t that far gone. Tell you what, though: you tell me where the violin is, and I’ll let you off with a nice, clean, painless head shot. Or better yet, don’t tell me, and I’ll just shoot both your kneecaps off and let you bleed out. I’d like that a lot.”
“Or maybe you ought to just drop the gun now, while you still can.” The voice came from above, through the still-open trap door. Rosie, bless her rabbit-hunting, free-spirited little heart. I could only see her in backlit silhouette, but she had never looked so good to me.
“Who the fuck are you?” said Evans, and without waiting for an answer, he rolled over, pointed his gun up, and started to squeeze the trigger. Or at least, he looked like he was going to squeeze it, and that was enough. Rosie let fly with three shots that pounded him into the dirt floor as if a building had dropped on him. His gun arm flopped to the dirt beside him, and he didn’t move after that.
“Herman?” Rosie came partway down the ladder and squinted into the cellar. “Are you down there, Herman? God, I hope you are, because otherwise, I just killed a man for some complete stranger.”
“Relax, Rosie.”
“Are you all right, Herman?”
“I am now.” I laughed, first a giggle and then a roar. I couldn’t help it. After what seemed like ages, I sobered up, kicked the gun away from Evans’ inert hand, just to be safe, and climbed the ladder by the trap door. “Let’s get out of here, my love,” I said.
“What did you call me?”
People say the damnedest things under stress.
Aftershock
“Praise Yah!” said the voice on the phone.
“I absolutely do not believe this. Prophet?”
“Himself. The disembodied voice in the wilderness, the unobserved of all observers. How goes the sojourn, Pilgrim?”
“I’ve had better trips. What the hell are you doing on Wilkie’s phone?”
“As usual, the pilgrim sees but does not comprehend. It is the big man who is at my phone, not the other way around. Except that at the moment, he’s at my laptop, probing the dark secrets of the cosmos. You wish me to interrupt him?”
“I wish.”
Your laptop? Dark secrets of the cosmos?
I waited and listened to some predictable background noises, while outside the plastic half-egg canopy of the public phone I was using, a thousand seagulls kept up a running argument with the waves that exploded against the breakwaters in front of Chicago’s old Navy Pier. The place had been converted since I was last there into a sort of combination upscale flea market and fast food emporium. It was a good place to get lost in a crowd. Lots of young families there, with loud, badly-behaved little kids. People like that only pay attention to themselves and their own little broods. It was better, Rosie said, than Grant Park, which had a lot of old people on benches, people who watched and remembered everything and everybody.
Rosie was out by the rocks, throwing popcorn at the gulls and looking fresh and smart in some new slacks and a pullover and jacket from Marshall Fields. She had been shopping again, while I took a tourists’ boat ride up the Chicago river, complete with running commentary by an architecture student from the University of Illinois. Along the way, I dropped the disassembled pieces from my .380 and Rosie’s nine-millimeter over the stern, in six different places. I dropped one of the receiver assemblies within sight of the old Jewelers Building, which, according to our guide, used to be one of the operations centers for Al Capone. It seemed like a fitting thing to do. Not a tribute so much as an addition. The last two pieces, the actual gun barrels, Rosie now tossed into Lake Michigan, along with more popcorn. If anybody noticed the large, dark lumps flying off among the smaller white ones, they damn sure were not going to jump into that kind of surf to check things out. The gulls didn’t seem to care, one way or the other.
Rosie’s sharp new outfit also included a pair of stylish unlined driving gloves. Neither of us knew if latent fingerprints could survive being underwater, so we had wiped down all the metal and handled it literally with kid gloves after that. If somebody else’s prints were on the shells left in the magazine, that was their problem. All in all, the events of the late morning were already starting to seem like another lifetime.
I pretended not to have survivor’s euphoria, mainly because I didn’t want Rosie to think I was celebrating the fact that she had been forced to kill a man. The fact that I would have gleefully killed him myself if I hadn’t been out of bullets was beside the point. Killing is never a trivial event, and I wasn’t sure how it would hit her when it finally soaked in. Hell, I wasn’t sure how it would hit me. The only thing that will affect your psyche more profoundly than killing is being killed yourself, and we’re not even sure about that. So Rosie romped with the gulls, and I took that as a good thing, while I privately drifted between elation at still being alive and sorrow over what we had left.
Stefan Yonkos had still been alive when we left him, though his odds for staying that way did not look good at all. We made some crude but effective compress bandages for him from the fotune-telling table cloth, then put his feet up a bit and covered him with a drape to help with the shock. That was as much as we knew how to do. Vadoma was beyond help. Evans had shot her in the head, and she was probably dead before she hit the floor. The sight of her had made me want to kill him all over again.
Easy, there, Herman. You’re just a minor referee in the big league justice game, remember?
Like hell. I calmed myself with a major force of will and remembered to wipe down the coffee cup that had been the token of my acceptance, way back when. Then we split.
When we left, there were still no sounds of sirens. Apparently Gypsies only call the cops if they are
their
cops. And if there was a doctor on the way, he must have been riding one of those horses that Yonkos said requires a whole rump. Rosie and I casually slipped into the rented Pontiac and cruised away without meeting a single emergency vehicle. We stopped at the first gas station, used a pay phone to call 911, and left again without giving the operator any unnecessary chitchat, like who we were. A clean exit, but a sorry business to leave behind.
Not that I expected anybody to be sorry about Evans. If there was a Mrs. Evans, we could probably have hit her up for a service fee. But there I go, taking people at face value again, which is exactly what bondsmen, cops and judges do, and exactly what human beings should not. Shaky Bill said it best: one man in his time plays many parts, and the people who sometimes act like assholes are not always evil from the ground up.
We have an entire industry devoted to judging people for specific acts, not basic worth, and for better or worse, I’m part of it. Most of the time, I play the part with professional detachment. I think of myself as being like the croupier at a craps table. It’s none of my business that most of the people who bet too much shouldn’t even be playing, or that I can see when they’re going to lose even before the dice start to turn on them, or that I can spot the cheats from across the room. I just collect the fees and make sure everybody plays by the rules and gets the same, pathetic chances. As much as anybody, I have a right to be cynical about it. But it’s hard to see things that way when it’s personal.
Personal or not, I thought I had learned as much as I could here on the sparkling shores of Lake Michigan. True or false, Evans and Yonkos had told me all they were going to. And one thing Evans had told me, whether he meant to or not, was that, rotten as he might have been, he did not kill Amy Cox. I still hadn’t figured out why he wanted to kill me, but I did not think his confusion, when I had asked him about Amy, had been faked. So the truth, whatever it was, lay somewhere along the road that had brought me here. Time to go back. If I could.
“Herman, my man! You remembered the code.”
I did?
I looked at my watch and saw that it was just after one o’clock. God, was that possible? Three hours since I had first stepped into the world of the crystal ball? A lifetime and a blink.
How time flies when you’re halving guns
. I chuckled at my own horrible joke, realizing that I had been strung much too tight for much too long.
“Good to hear your voice, Wide. What are you doing with the Proph?”
“Would you believe it’s his cell phone you’re calling?”
“No. What would he be doing with a cell phone?”
Not to mention a laptop.
“Just because you’re a holy man doesn’t mean you have to be a techno-dumbshit, he says. That’s not how he said it, but…”
“I’m hip.”
“Yeah, that’s what he says, too. You’re hip. Personally, I never know what the hell he’s talking about. Anyway, I’m out doing a little poking around here and there yesterday, earning your money and all, and he keeps popping up in my shadow. Says he has a holy mission to find you again, and some kind of Carmen bullshit, and I should give you his cell phone number, in case you need an untraceable contact point.”
“Oh, really? You think he actually knows if it’s untraceable or not?”
“Beats me, but he knows a whole shitload more stuff than I would have guessed. He’s got a laptop that’s wired into more damn secure databases than you can shake holy water at, and he knows how to massage them all. Would you believe I checked out the Amy Cox ME report that way? It doesn’t give a time of discovery, by the way, only a time of death and the time of the autopsy. I flunked out there. I suppose I could try to schmooze one of the lab staff. There’s a really ugly broad there who thinks I’m kind of…”
“Forget it. It’s not an issue anymore.”
“It’s not? Why’s that?”
“Tell you later. I don’t suppose the Proph does all this high-powered computer searching just for the good of his and your souls?”
“No damn way. He may be goofier than a clock going backwards, but he’s not stupid. I’m into him for a yard and a half already, and more getting added up right now. You did say it was all right to run up some expenses, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t say, but it is. In fact, it might be more than all right. With all those high-powered illegal entry portals, can he get into military records?”
“You mean like where the Pentagon hides the ICBMs and the good booze?”
“No, I mean like Army personnel records. Discharges, duty stations, stuff like that.”
“Hell, is that all? He can probably get
Cuban
army personnel records, with CIA footnotes on them. You want I should ask?”
“Ask.” There was some more background noise while I waited again and watched Rosie frolic around the waterfront like a little kid. I found myself staring at her shoes. This time around, she had managed to include shoes in her shopping, and the ones she was wearing now were white, with a sort of squashed, compromise high heel that gave her foot a very nice line.
And so what?
So what, indeed? Since when did I become a fancier of shoes? They must have reminded me of something else, something back at the scene I didn’t much want to remember, back in the cellar and the dark, when…
“The Proph says if you’ve got the bread, he’s definitely got the meat.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“It means tell me what kind of records you want to see, and he can get them, but the meter is running.”
“Remind him that I gave him a Chevy and a holy mission, will you? You got something to write on there?”
“Fire away.”
“Okay, I want the service record of one Gerald Cox, Gerald with a ‘G,’ who served with the 101st Airborne in World War Two.”
“Jesus, Herman, why don’t you give me a toughie? The Army never heard of computers back then.”
“The Proph says he can get it, so let’s give it a try. I’m especially interested in his mustering-out physical exam. Get a print of that if you can. If there’s anything on what happened to him after the war, that would be good, too. In fact, that would be better.”
“I can see the dollar signs rolling up in his big, spaced-out eyes now.”
“If he comes through, it’ll be worth it. Tell him if he doesn’t, you won’t pay him at all.”
“No starter’s purse, huh?”
“None. My money, my rules.”
“That ought to do it. Anything else?”
“Two things. Go see Agnes and find out if the check we got from Amy Cox was any good. If it was, find out where the funds came from. I want to know a person, if possible, not just an account number.”
“That ought to be an easy one. What’s the other?”
“Have Agnes show you a couple of emails I got from somebody claiming to be Gerald Cox. He wanted to set up a meeting, to buy the Amati violin. Send him a reply telling him you accept, or I do. Have Aggie draft it. She knows how I write. But don’t send a final confirmation until you and I get a chance to talk about the place for the meet. I want someplace where you can cover my back.”
“Hey, I know how to do that. Does this mean you’re on your way back? Is the heat off?”
“Good question. You really believe this is a secure phone?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Look into it a little, okay? I’ll call you tomorrow, same time.”
“I’ll be here. The Proph says to keep the faith, by the way. Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“If you figure it out, let me know.”
“Not likely. Tomorrow, my man.”
“Talk at you, Wide.”
I hung up just in time to turn and get an open-mouthed kiss from Rosie, who was apparently out of popcorn but not energy. And either I felt the same way or it was infectious.
“You were staring at me again,” she said.
“Again?” She couldn’t possibly have seen me looking at her shoes.
“The last time, I didn’t have any clothes on, remember?”
“Oh, that time. Well, that’ll do it.”
“Maybe it’s time to do it again, see what happens when there’s no brake lever to get in the way.”
“I do seem to remember something about a hotel room,” I said.
“You figure it’s safe now?”
“Since when do you use words like ‘safe?’”
“Since I started hanging around with this guy who needs an armed escort.”
“You ought to dump him. He’s going to get you seriously killed one of these days.”
“Uh huh. Well, in the meantime, he better be ready to make it all worth my while. What temperature do you like the Jacuzzi?” So much for the question of how the events of the morning were going to hit us.
***
Much later, we sat at a table by the window of a Hungarian restaurant Rosie knew called Csardas, back on the near-north side, in the middle of a Hispanic-looking neighborhood. The streets there had more people on them than cars, all in a high state of animation and noise, and it was another good place to get lost.
It had turned out to be quite a day. A little pursuit, a little intrigue, a little adrenaline, a lot of blood, a bit of prudent track-covering, and finally some celebratory sex and coma-like sleep. All that activity tends to make one hungry. We had gorged ourselves on food with unpronounceable names like
halászlé
and
gulyás
, which was about half paprika and totally delicious. Now we were drinking a sparkling wine called
Törley
and seriously working at the business of doing nothing. It was dark outside by then, and the waiters were going around lighting the candles on the tables, while the yellowish overhead lights bumped up a notch, accenting the stamped metal ceiling panels. Fans lazily turned below them, rustling the plastic leaves on some phony grape arbors. In the back of the place, a troupe of Gypsy musicians were getting their gear out and warming up.
“You didn’t tell me this place had live music,” I said.
“I didn’t remember that. You want to leave?”