Authors: R.J. Ellory
‘Later Frank.’
Duchaunak closed the door silently behind him and made his way down towards the street.
Moments later the door opened and Sergeant Oates looked into the room. ‘You seen Sampson?’ he asked.
Faulkner shook his head. ‘No, why?’
‘I got a bad one for him . . . some guy got himself beaten to death. Duplex down on Vandam Street.’
‘Anyone we know?’
Oates shook his head. ‘McCaffrey, Darryl McCaffrey, social worker I think. Neighbors called it in.’
Faulkner frowned. ‘Don’t know him. If I see Sampson I’ll tell him you’re after him.’
‘Fuck no, don’t say a thing. He hears I’m looking for him he’ll leave the fucking building.’
Faulkner smiled.
Sergeant Oates closed the door.
‘No question about it.’
Sol Neumann looked directly at the man facing him, a man with a bad case of smallpox-scarred skin. ‘I’m taking what you’re telling me directly to Mr Marcus. You understand what that means, right?’
Smallpox-face, a dark-haired man in his mid-forties called Micky Levin, looked right back at Sol Neumann, his gaze unerring, unflinching. Sol Neumann didn’t scare him. Sol Neumann was only so tough because of Marcus. Take Marcus away and Sol Neumann was nothing more than five and a half feet of stiff shit in a two thousand-dollar suit.
‘You know me, Sol, eh? You know me for how many years? I tell you something you take it to the bank, right? When did I ever give you something that wasn’t kosher, eh? Tell me one time Sol, one time when I gave you something that wasn’t straight like a railtrack?’
Sol Neumann raised his hand and silenced Levin. ‘Sonny Bernstein, right?’
‘That’s right, that’s what they called him. On my mother’s fucking life—’
‘Your mother’s dead, Micky.’
‘On my mother’s fucking grave then, what the fuck does it matter, eh? I stood there and listened to that motherfucker Freiberg, so help me God he’s a fucking Jew . . . you believe it? I have to celebrate Passover knowing that that two-bit shoeshine motherfucker—’
‘Okay, okay, okay. Enough with getting a hard-on for this guy, okay? So you tell me again . . . you were there, Walt Freiberg, the girl, right?’
Micky Levin was nodding furiously. ‘Yeah, yeah, me and Walt Freiberg and the girl.’
‘And Freiberg said that Sonny Bernstein would take care of this thing?’
‘Right, right, you got it. . . Sonny Bernstein would take care of this thing.’
‘He make any reference to a crew in Miami, anything like that?’
Micky shook his head. ‘He didn’t say nothing about a crew, no. He didn’t say nothing directly.’
Neumann shook his head. ‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Did he say something or didn’t he fucking say something?’
Micky Levin shrugged. ‘Freiberg . . . he said that Sonny Bernstein was pissed about his father getting shot, that was all. Said he was pissed, that it wasn’t good that this had happened because Sonny Bernstein had a reputation for causing trouble.’
‘He said that?’
Micky Levin nodded.
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure Sol, I’m sure. He didn’t say nothing specific about a crew, but I got the feeling that this guy was some kind of player.’
Sol Neumann leaned back in the chair. He looked around the narrow, windowless office at the back of the West Ninth Street Diner, an office where many such meetings had taken place over the previous years. What these walls had heard; what words the floor, the furniture, the redundant wooden colonial-style ceiling fan had absorbed – and never understood their meaning. Summer of ’94, heady and intoxicating, heat so bad there was no way anyone could have stood to be in the room more than ten or fifteen minutes, and Sol Neumann and a weasel-faced man called Haywood Roebling had tied a guy called Kent Bayard to the chair where Micky Levin now sat. Tied him tight with duct tape, his wrists, his ankles, even around his neck, and then they beat the crap out of him in the hope that he’d tell them the drop-times on a bookie’s pick-up schedule. Kent Bayard was not a bad man, nor a stupid man, but he was a man with a heart defect, and he seized up and stayed dead after twenty-five minutes of Sol Neumann’s hospitality. Haywood Roebling didn’t make it beyond Christmas; he got hit with an assault and battery charge from way back when, something to do with a bottle-bleach blonde and a jealous husband from Brooklyn Heights; a
week in pre-arraignment lock-up and someone shivved him in the kidney. Haywood didn’t have his Blue Cross up to date and he died in triage at Pace University Beekman Hospital.
‘You done good, Micky,’ Sol Neumann said, and from the drawer ahead of him he took a flat brown envelope. He tossed it over to Levin; Levin snatched it from the air and had it inside his jacket within a heartbeat.
‘So go do your worst, eh?’ Neumann said.
‘Consider it done,’ Levin replied, and rose from the chair. He backed up two steps, turned, opened the door, and disappeared into the diner.
Neumann leaned forward and lifted the telephone receiver. He dialled a cellphone number. It rang three, four, five times, and then someone answered.
‘Micky comes to see me,’ Neumann said. ‘He gives me the impression that the minor
is
going to stand for the major . . . I need whatever information you can get on what he’s got in Miami.’
Neumann listened, nodded, half smiled.
‘Good enough,’ he said. ‘What goes around goes around, right?’
Another pause.
‘Well, let the orchestra tune up, eh? The show goes on. We need cars like I said, four of them. Get hold of the garage guy who does the spray-jobs. I’m gonna need all the guns you can buy for the money I gave you. Speak to the people you usually deal with. Come back to me with specifics when you’ve got them. Mr Marcus is going to want a daily progress report, okay?’
Neumann paused, listened again.
‘Whatever you got. Call me later.’
Neumann set the receiver back in the cradle. He stood up, buttoned his jacket, then walked around the desk and took his overcoat from the stand behind the door. He was out of the building and heading down the street within moments.
On West Ninth he turned right towards Fifth. Head down, walking a straight line, crossed the junction onto East Ninth and kept on going. Took a right onto Broadway and made his way to the Eighth Street Station. Boarded a train up to Union Square, bought a newspaper at a stand. Up the steps into daylight, and
then he cut north-east across the park and was lost somewhere in Gramercy.
Only when he reached St George’s off of Rutherford did he stop and make a call from a kiosk on the street.
‘Get Mr Marcus on the phone.’
He waited as the message was passed. He heard the familiar sound of Marcus clearing his throat.
‘We’re on,’ Neumann said quietly.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes Ben, I’m sure.’
‘You got confirmation?’ ‘Yes . . . from Levin. He saw Freiberg himself, Freiberg and the girl, and he said again that the thing is going to go forward, that the kid will stand for Lenny if it comes to that.’
‘You on the way back?’
‘I am.’
‘You got someone working on the Miami end? I need to know everything there is to know about this boy and the strength of his Miami crew.’
‘Yeah, someone is going to make some calls and find out what he can.’
‘Okay. Make it as fast as you can . . . we have the meeting at noon.’
‘On my way.’ Neumann replaced the receiver and stepped out of the kiosk. He tugged his collar up around his throat and began walking back the way he’d come.
Up above the sky was clear, the breeze from the East River bitterly cold. He wanted a cigarette bad but he was trying to quit. Why, he didn’t know. Not a question of health. One of his girls had pulled a face and said it was like kissing an ashtray. He exhaled a lungful of white mist and made believe. Smiled to himself. Head down again, walking fast, like he was trying to lose a tail.
In a narrow-fronted bookshop on the corner of Desbrosses and Hudson, a place that he could have missed had he turned his head for just a second, John Harper found a dog-eared and battered copy of
Depth of Fingerprints
. He took it to the counter, paid three dollars, made sure that he passed it face up so the counter clerk did not see the picture on the back. In all
likelihood, even had she seen it, she would not have connected the two. Harper believed he had not so much changed as become an entirely different person. The intervening fifteen years of emptiness and frustration had modified and altered his features. He was not the same man, neither inwardly nor outwardly.
He left the store and walked across Watts and Canal Street, running a parallel to West and Washington, and then he was bearing east almost automatically, something pulling him that way, something preternatural and instinctive. Within minutes he had turned right onto West Houston, and it was then that he realized he was only a block from Carmine. He had walked back to his childhood, the stop at the bookstore representative of the one occurrence of worth between his leaving New York and his return. Seventeen years, and all he had to show for it was a battered paperback in a brown paper bag buried in his overcoat pocket. Harper stood for a moment, stood and imagined looking back at himself. He had on a tailored suit and white shirt, a pair of hand-tooled leather shoes, a seven hundred-dollar cashmere overcoat. The man he now appeared to be was perhaps the man he had intended to become. He’d believed such an identity would be found by leaving. He had found it, ironically, only upon his return.
For some time he vacillated, uncertain about whether he should go and speak with Evelyn. He knew little of the truth of his father. He believed Evelyn knew everything. He stood on the corner of Clarkson and Seventh, hands buried deep in his pockets. He was summoning sufficient courage to confront the past, and in considering this he realized that what he was really confronting was an unknown future. What Evelyn would tell him could only serve to influence how he felt about himself, his roots, the place from which he’d come. That, regardless of anything else, would inevitably alter tomorrow, next week, the months and years ahead of him. Past became present became future. That simple.
Harper, in no doubt as to his
need
to know, took a last deep breath, gritted his teeth and started walking.
For a long while Duchaunak stood with his face a few inches from the glass.
Every so often he reached up and rubbed a hole in the condensation created by his breath. He made-believe he was looking at someone he knew nothing about. He quietly watched as they fought against the damage that had been done to the body.
Frank Duchaunak believed that Edward Bernstein was dying. Bernstein was not a quitter, never had been, but what he was battling with had ripped right through him and out the other side. The bullet had come like an invading force – swift, merciless, without the faintest sense of remorse or compunction.
Fuck you
, it said.
Fuck you for getting in the way. Fuck you for being there you . . . you human being
! It had punctured his right lung, broken some ribs, grazed his heart, God only knew what. The doctor had explained each element of the injuries sustained: Duchaunak had stood listening patiently, and though he had understood very little of what he was being told he did understand the final comment the doctor made.
‘Not a normal person.’
‘What?’
The doctor shrugged, glanced towards the window through which they could both see the still form of Edward Bernstein. ‘Not a normal person,’ he repeated.
Duchaunak frowned. ‘What d’you mean, not a normal person?’
‘Normal people don’t come away from something like that, especially someone of his age. The caliber, the close range, the internal hemorrhaging . . .’ The doctor shook his head. ‘Takes a particular kind of individual to come away from that. Remarkable enough that he’s still alive after this many days. Tonight it
will be five days since he was shot – quite something, believe me – what we have here is quite out of the ordinary.’
Duchaunak had heard that, clear as a bell, and then the doctor had left him alone in the ante-room, his face almost touching the glass, his mind turning over every connection he had made with Edward Bernstein during the previous seven years.
Watching Edward Bernstein die was like witnessing the slowmotion departure of a member of his own family.
Duchaunak smiled. There could only be a handful of years between himself and Harper. Evelyn Sawyer had maintained a lie all these years, telling her own nephew that his father was dead. Harper had never spoken to Bernstein, whereas Duchaunak had talked with the man many times. Ironic, but Duchaunak was perhaps closer to family than Harper himself.
In some small and quiet way he almost resented Harper’s appearance so late in the game. He resented whoever had pulled the liquor store robbery. He resented the fact that Bernstein had possessed sufficient nerve to challenge the guy, to scare him into reacting the way he had. More than everything else he resented the fact that the man who had arranged and orchestrated whatever was to occur before Christmas now possessed the perfect alibi. And if the job went down, and if it was successful, and if Edward Bernstein recovered from his injuries and walked away . . . well, wouldn’t that have been the perfect crime? The D.A. wouldn’t even give Duchaunak the time of day.
You want me to build a case against a man who was in hospital . . . not only in hospital but in Intensive Care suffering a serious and life-threatening gunshot wound as a result of attempting to prevent a liquor store robbery . . . you want me to put a man like that in court and ask a jury to take me seriously . . . Jesus Christ, who do you think we are? In fact, who the hell do you think
you
are? Get the hell outta here and go do something useful with your life!
Duchaunak shook his head resignedly and glanced at his watch. He figured he would kill for a cigarette.
The Marcus crew was already at the restaurant by the time Freiberg and Cathy Hollander arrived. Freiberg’s people came in twos, separate cars, a few minutes apart. Neverthless, had anyone been watching the front of the building it would have seemed strange. Between eleven-forty a.m. and a few minutes
past noon, a total of seventeen people arrived. It was too early for the lunchtime traffic and, besides, the Trattoria St Angelo was never that busy, even on a Friday night. But no-one was watching, and thus the event went unnoticed by anyone but those directly involved. Such a meeting was in some small way an historic event. A collaboration between Ben Marcus and Lenny Bernstein – men who’d been neither friends nor enemies for thirty or more years. The last time Marcus and Bernstein had spoken it had been about Cathy Hollander, a wager that had seen the woman traded between them, nothing more than a commodity. Thus there was a degree of tension present when she first saw Ben Marcus and Sol Neumann seated at a table at the far end of the basement room.