“In the course of business,” Willard continued, ignoring my interjection, “I found myself in sudden urgent need of a fair amount of really good funny money.
Fifty large, to be exact.
So
sudden and urgent that I was willing to deal with Tony Donuts, who had only recently finished murdering the best counterfeiter in the country and stealing his equipment.
I knew better than to do business with Tony.
And I was right, too.
Almost the
moment
I had put the amusing currency to its intended use, and it was forever gone from my control…Tony decided he wanted it back again.
The feds had got on to him, and suddenly he didn’t want large blocks of evidence in circulation.”
“Jesus,” I said, “he wanted you to sell him back his counterfeit fifty grand?”
“No.”
He shook his head.
“Just give it back.”
“But that’s not fair!” Erin exclaimed.
Willard did not smile.
“He said he would keep the phony fifty thousand…plus, to cover his time and general aggravation, the five thousand in real money I’d already paid him for it…and in return, I could keep all twenty fingers and toes,
and
my genitalia.
Sounded like a fair deal to
me
, at the time.
A bargain, in fact.”
“A steal,” Maureen said.
“With the genitalia.”
“Ah,” Erin said.
“If I could possibly have returned Tony’s money-like paper, I would have done so without regret—even though it was the bait in a million-dollar sting I had working.
Unfortunately, that bait was
gone
, already deep in the water with a large shark’s mouth around it.
And disobedience was simply too novel a concept to risk baffling Tony Donuts with.
So I changed my appearance and went underground at Lady Sally’s House…which is where I hooked up with Maureen again.”
Without looking he reached his hand toward her; without looking she took it.
“That complicated things.”
“The Professor couldn’t hide in a whorehouse and impress a girl at the same time,” Maureen said, “especially not one who worked in the whorehouse.
So he needed to cool Tony.”
Willard took the narration back.
I was pretty sure they hadn’t rehearsed this story; maybe they were passing cues through their joined hands somehow.
“There just wasn’t any way to come up with another counterfeit fifty large—not of that high quality, not quickly.”
“Besides, all the Professor’s seed-money was spent,” Maureen said.
“There was only one thing to do,” Willard agreed.
After the silence had gone on long enough, I finally got it.
I drew a pint of Rickard’s Red and slid it down the bar to him.
“Thank you, Jake.”
He raised his mug to me, took a long sip, set the mug down, held up one finger and looked down at his belt for a long moment.
Finally he threw his head back, belched ringingly, lowered his finger and said, “We stiffed Tony Donuts.
We gave him real money.”
Well, there was a bit of rooba-rooba-rooba over that, of course.
All of us simultaneously saying some version of,
I thought you said you were broke, where’d you come up with fifty thousand bucks?
Finally I whistled for silence.
And when I got it—I once studied whistling under a traffic cop—I said, “I thought you said you were broke.
Where’d you manage to come up with fifty kay?”
“Oh, that.”
The Professor shrugged.
“We robbed a bank.”
Pause.
“Of course,” I said.
“Only sensible thing you could have done.”
General murmur of agreement.
He nodded.
“Unfortunately, the moment Tony examined the money we brought him, he recognized that it was bogus.
Or rather,
not
bogus: fake counterfeit, if you will.”
“How could he tell?”
He sketched a grimace.
“It’s a long story.”
*
“And it doesn’t matter,” Maureen said.
“The point is, he was going to tear us limb from limb, and not metaphorically speaking either.
So we brought the problem to Lady Sally, and she…fixed things.”
She glanced around automatically, making sure the lodge was tyled, that all present had been stooled to the rogue.
“When it was over, Tony Donuts was doing life in a maximum security federal facility…and there is no question it was hard time.
The Lady had made certain subtle alterations to his brain.”
“What, you mean like a lobotomy?” Doc Webster asked.
Willard’s grimace was a grin, now.
“Way subtler.
And way nastier.
A permanent hand-eye coordination problem.
When Her Ladyship was done with Tony, if he tried to hit somebody, he
always
missed.
By at least an inch.
The same if he tried to shoot them, or stab them, or throw something at them, or even just grab them.
You might say he always aimed to please.”
His wife jabbed him with an elbow, but he was expecting it.
I was awed.
“I can see where a maximum security prison would be an unfortunate place in which to have a condition like that.”
Willard nodded wordlessly, and by now the whole front of his head was mostly grin.
Maureen was trying to suppress her own grin, and failing.
“Especially for someone too stupid to unlearn a lifetime of aggression and arrogance,” she agreed.
“I can’t imagine he survived long, and death was probably a blessing when it came.”
“Anyway,” Willard said, “the other upshot of the whole business was…the other
two
upshots
were,
that I decided to give up screwing people for a living and become an honest prostitute instead…and that Maureen consented to park her cotton balls under my bathroom sink.”
They kissed.
“So things worked out in the end.”
“Only it wasn’t de end,” Fast Eddie said.
*
*
*
Willard and Maureen stopped smiling.
“Apparently not,” he admitted.
“Whatever the nature of Lady Sally’s mojo, either it was not hereditary, or—far more likely—Tony had already spawned by then.
The man who just left here did not seem as though he’d ever had much trouble hitting anything he wanted to.”
“You’re sure he’s your Tony’s kid,” I said.
Willard looked at me.
“Jake, can you picture random chance producing a set of genes like that
twice
?
Not only am I sure that was Little Tony Donuts, I’m prepared to wager twenty bucks that every single gene his mother tried to contribute to the mix was a recessive, that died waiting for reinforcements.”
“Another twenty says she died in childbirth,” Maureen said.
“Nobody has that kind of pelvis anymore.”
“He resembles his father
so
closely that even though my forebrain knew better, my hindbrain kept insisting he
was
Tony Donuts.
I kept turning my face away so he wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Me too!” Maureen said.
“Somebody like Tony, you see him again thirty years later, you
expect
him to look absolutely unchanged.
Like Mount Rushmore.”
“This,” Alf said, “is an interestingly tricky situation.”
“How do you mean?” fellow quadruped Ralph asked.
“You people have to fight a guy even the Mafia is scared to mess with.
But not only can’t you kill him…you can’t even let him try to kill you.
For the same reason: it’d cause talk.”
“Aw, this is Key West,” Long-Drink argued.
“People are reasonable, here.
Nobody’d mind too much if we put down dangerous wildlife like a Tony Donuts Junior.”
I had to side with Alf.
“The deer’s right, Drink.
Sure, the community might well decide Little Nuts needed killin’…that’s not the point.
The point is, even this place isn’t so laid back that it’s safe to display paranormal powers here.
If Tony kills one of us and we don’t die, it might take a week or two, but sooner or later we’re all gonna find ourselves talking to somebody from Langley, Virginia.”
“I think you’re all overlooking something,” Erin said.
If it seems strange to you that a thirteen-year-old girl got the respectful attention of a barroom full of adults, remember that most of them watched her save the entire macrocosmic universe back before she had a single permanent tooth in her head.
“Yes, honey?”
“You keep assuming that just because you can’t be harmed by gunfire or explosion, you can’t be harmed.”
“
Oh
.”
She had a point.
Mickey Finn’s Filarii technology—or “magic,” if you prefer—is highly selective.
Of course, you’d want it to be.
It wouldn’t be much good if it simply coated you in invisible plastic: how could somebody kiss you?
Mickey explained to us once that it’s calibrated to stop only lethal force.
Don’t ask me how it can tell,
instantly
, whether an incoming missile is going to be fatal or not: Mick did explain it, but none of us understood what he said.
The point is, you can shoot me with anything from a bow and arrow to a bazooka, or bomb me with anything from a grenade to a nuke, or hit me with anything from a crowbar to a broadsword, without necessarily capturing my attention, if I happen to be working on an especially interesting crossword puzzle at the time.
But if you decide to punch me in the mouth, I’m probably going to lose some teeth.
I knew for a fact I had nothing to fear from atomic weapons.
Yet there was an excellent chance that a monster like Little Nuts could hospitalize or kill me with his hands, as long as no single blow was deadly in itself.
And even if I owned a gun of sufficiently authoritative caliber to annoy him back, I wouldn’t dare use it in any but the most dire emergency.
It may be a little hard for you to believe, especially if you live in a city, but in Key West gunplay is considered bad form.
“Well,” I said, “when in doubt, consult an expert.”
Zoey grimaced.
“Terrific.
Who’s an expert on exterminating mastodons?”
“Hmm,” Long-Drink said.
“The definition of expert is, ‘an ordinary person, a long way from home.’
An ordinary person, far from home, who knows about monsters and how to kill them without getting into the papers…”
He and I and Doc Webster and Fast Eddie all said it at once: “Bert!”
*
*
*
Bert D’Ambrosio, AKA “Bert The Shirt,” is believed to be the only man who was ever allowed to retire from the Mafia.
He was well past middle age, on his way up the courthouse steps in Brooklyn to not-testify in some now-forgotten trial or other, when he had a heart attack and died.
The medics managed to get him rebooted within a matter of minutes…but as soon as he was back on his feet, he went to see his Don.
Look, he said, I died for you: can I go now?
The Godfather must have liked him.
After some thought he told Bert to go keep an eye on the family’s interests in Key West.
This was Mafia humor, because there
are
no family interests in Key West, because who in his right mind would bother exploiting an end-of-the-world rathole and college-student-vomitorium the size of a New York City park, with a speed limit of 30, way more bicycles than cars, and only one road in or out?
Bert thanked Don Vincente and retired to southernmost Florida.
Today he’s edging into his eighties, and I confidently expect him to dance at my funeral.
And the ridiculous thing is, he’s still as connected as he ever was, in a quiet sort of way.
Somehow, he manages to stay in touch, keep plugged in.
He sits there in the sun, in his splendid silk and linen shirts, and people come along and tell him things.
Specifically because there is no action here, nothing to get killed over, Guys From The Old Neighborhood (as Bert always calls them) will come through on vacation, from time to time.
They say the Don himself actually visited, once, before my time.
So Bert seemed the ideal choice for an expert consultant in the matter of how to deal with an extra-large psychotic extortionist without the neighbors noticing.
*
*
*
For some reason Erin was nowhere to be found.
I left the bar in Tom Hauptman’s capable hands, and Zoey and I saddled up and pedaled over to to the Paradiso Condos on Smathers Beach.
At his age, Bert the Shirt doesn’t come to you: you go to him.
In fact, I seldom approach Bert these days without reflecting how extraordinary it is that you still
can
approach him without first floating down a tunnel toward a very bright light.