Authors: Peter Spiegelman
“You want an apology? Fine, we’ve got plenty of those—even more than we’ve got money. That’s all we do now is say we’re sorry. I say I’m sorry to Rick, for being . . . for not being what he thought I was. He says he’s sorry to me for the mistakes he’s made. He breaks down; I hold him together, and he says he’s sorry for that too. We both say it, silently, to the children, and we pray they never know any of this.” She stopped and held her glass, as if she was about to drink, but she didn’t. Her voice was exhausted, too thin and strained to carry anger or sadness or anything other than her plain words.
“Jesus, I am just so tired of it all. I just want it to be over. But what’s one more between friends, huh, John?” She straightened herself in her seat and put her hands in her lap. Tears were still rolling slowly down her cheeks. “I’m sorry, John. I’m sorry I lied. I’m sorry I let you down. I’m sorry you think I’m a whore. I’m sorry Rick and I weren’t worthy of your efforts. There, does that about cover it?” She stood and pulled on her coat. She reached down the counter and took the envelope and tucked it in her bag. She chuckled ironically.
“Maybe you should have some kind of test for prospective clients; find out beforehand if they measure up to your moral standards. Find out if they’re the kind of people who deserve your help. Then you could avoid these problems.” She wiped her eyes and cheeks with the back of her hand, and drank some seltzer. Then she looked at me and shook her head. She put her hand lightly on my arm.
“I’m sorry, John. That was . . . that wasn’t right. This has been so terrible. It’s taken such a toll. I wish you could’ve known us before all this. This isn’t us. We’re . . . we’re good people. I know that must sound stupid to you.” She squeezed my arm gently and moved away, unhurried, to the door. I spoke as she reached for the knob.
“You ever go back to East Hampton?” I asked. She turned around.
“It was expensive to keep up, and there were vandalism problems, too, and it took so long to get out there, that’s why we sold it,” she said.
Her answer was matter-of-fact and mundane, low-key and unexceptional. It was delivered smoothly, but with pauses and stops in all the right places, so it didn’t seem practiced. It was the best kind of lying. But it was the answer to a question I hadn’t quite asked, and in the instant the words passed her lips, we both knew it. We looked at each other across a dense silence.
There was the briefest flash of something in Helene’s eyes. Fear? Anger? It was gone too quickly to tell, replaced by a steely calculation, a quick, cold weighing of options and odds and possible outcomes. It reminded me, suddenly and vividly, of the look in Bernhard Trautmann’s eyes when I’d stared at them over the barrel of my gun.
“Fuck you,” she said, like she was spitting out a pit, and she left.
I stared at the door for a long time, until the hairs on the back of my neck relaxed and my spine warmed up. Helene Pierro was a scary person, less obviously so than someone like Trautmann, but all the more dangerous because of that. Her perfume still hung in the air, more like a threat than a promise now.
I rinsed Helene’s glass and my own and put them in the dishwasher. Then I wrote out a check to Randy DiSilva, slipped it in an envelope, and went out to mail it. The temperature was dropping with the sun, and a chill ran through me as I stood in the doorway of my building. I found myself checking the street, as I had when I’d thought Trautmann might be around, looking for payback, and realized I had that same creepy, watch-your-back feeling. I shook my head. Helene was scary, I told myself, but a drive-by wasn’t her style. I dropped the letter in the box on the corner and went back home. I was hurting in many different places, and my bed was calling.
I pulled the shades and kicked off my shoes and stretched out. I thought some more about my conversation with Helene, and about calling Mike, and somewhere in there I drifted off. Despite my weariness, or maybe because of it, my sleep was tiring and fevered. I tossed and turned and got tangled in the sheets and pillows. I came near to waking several times, and when I did I was sweating. My eyes were hot, and my throat felt parched and dusty. I willed myself back down. At some point I had the dream again, or a version of it. It was by the lake and Anne was there, but so was Helene Pierro and someone else, whose face I couldn’t see. I was calling out to . . . someone, when the doorbell woke me.
It was dark out, just six p.m., according to my clock. I rubbed my face and my head. I went into the bathroom and drank cold water from the tap. The bell rang again. I splashed water on my face and took some deep breaths. Then I went to the door, flicking on lights as I walked. I looked through the peephole. Jane Lu. I opened the door and Jane smiled at me, but her smile turned into a frown as she surveyed the latest damage.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “How can you get any health insurance?” She wore a charcoal gray pants suit with a bolero jacket, and underneath it a square-necked blouse in pearl gray. Her boots were black suede with a square heel. She held two paper bags in her arms. The delicious smell of Chinese food hit me, and my stomach made a longing noise. Hunger chased away my grogginess.
“Come in,” I yawned. “We can talk about my health plan after we eat.” I turned into the apartment, and as I did there were fast footsteps in the hallway. I turned back and saw a dark figure there, and Jane lurched forward and staggered into my arms. Her packages scattered. Evan Mills locked the door and pointed my gun at my face.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Mills may have been an amateur when he started with Trautmann, but he’d been an apt pupil. He made us turn around, and then he grabbed a handful of Jane’s hair and screwed the gun barrel up under her chin. He made me lie on the floor, with my hands behind me. He made Jane put the cuffs on me. They were plastic again, thumb cuffs this time. Jane knelt by me, and I could hear her ragged breathing, and smell her perfume, and feel the heat coming off of her. She was trembling badly. When she finished, he made her lie on the floor too. Then he tightened my cuffs and cuffed her. Then he sat us both on the sofa. He worked quickly and said maybe ten words the whole time.
We sprawled uncomfortably back on the sofa and he stood before us and we all looked at each other. The air was thick with fear, adrenaline, and the sound of hard breathing. My heart was hammering, shaking my body, and my ears were full of pounding blood. I concentrated on breathing slowly and deeply, on driving my heart rate down, and I saw that Mills was doing the same. Jane’s eyes were large, and they darted back and forth between Mills and me. She was still shaking, though not as much now. Her body was rigid, and her mouth was a tight, angry line. But I saw that she, too, had wrestled her breathing under control—slow, deep, in through the nose, out through the mouth.
Mills wore the same clothes as he had yesterday—the black slacks, the navy sweater over a yellow shirt—but the overcoat was gone, replaced by a bulky black parka. The look was less aging preppy now than speed freak, amped out and coming down off a weeklong jag. He was wrinkled and sodden and grimy—like he’d slept in an ashtray, though he probably hadn’t slept at all. His face was skeletal and unshaven, and there was lots of gray in the stubble around his chin. His hair was dark and matted. There were burns on his dirty hands and a strong smell of smoke around him.
The skin under his eyes was gray with fatigue, but the eyes themselves were wired and scary. They roiled with a crazy mix of fear, anger, brutal exhaustion, some of the furious calculation I’d seen last night, and . . . something else. Something that was over the edge and around the bend, something that had slipped its moorings and drifted way out of the harbor. Something that came from putting two bullets in a man and finding that you liked it and that you were looking for a chance to do it again. When I spoke, I did it softly and slowly.
“They’ve got nothing on you. Zero. Trautmann was self-defense, and no one will say anything different. He was going to do you; that was clear to me, and it’s what I told the cops. They were surprised to find him in that basement instead of you. As for the blackmail—that’s up in smoke. There’s no proof, and none of the victims will say a word. Get yourself the right lawyer and you walk away clean on this,” I said.
Mills looked at me and smiled a little. He took a deep breath and walked into my kitchen. He put the gun down on the counter and peeled off his parka and tossed it on the counter too. He worked his neck and stretched his arms and shook them out, like a broad jumper limbering up. He ran his hands through his dirty hair, pushing it back behind his ears. He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and pushed his sleeves up over his wiry forearms and washed his hands and face in my sink. He dried them with a paper towel that he balled up and tossed on the counter. He took another deep breath and looked around the place and nodded appreciatively. Then he picked up the gun and came around the counter and hit me two times in the face with it.
He was strong, but he was sloppy and not that fast, so I could roll a little with the blows. On the other hand, I was bound and lying nearly prone, so I couldn’t roll much. It hurt like hell. The barrel raked my cheek and my ear, and my head somehow ended up in Jane’s lap. I heard her cry out and felt her start to shake again. I knew I was bleeding on her. Mills grabbed my shoulder and hoisted me back up and started talking.
“Do you know how long I put up with that Neanderthal? How long I had to listen to his ravings and his insults and his bullying and his stupid fucking nicknames? Almost three years, John. Almost three years of that shit. And do you know how hard I worked? I mean, it’s not like it was all laid out for us. It took research. I had to study those files, figure out what scam Nassouli had going with each of those people, figure out where they all were today, how much they were worth, how much they had at stake. And all the while listening to that ape-man grunting in the background.”
He paced slowly in front of me, gesturing casually with the gun. His voice was calm, almost distracted, but his eyes were weird and frantic. He’d liked hitting me, and a part of him was thinking about that.
“I worked hard, and I put up with a lot of crap, and that’s not even counting my day job. But all that’s behind me, now. I’m a rich man, John. You don’t know what it feels like, becoming rich, do you? From what Bernie said, you’ve always been rich. But I’ll tell you, it’s very . . . liberating. You think I’m going to give that up? Your bullshit isn’t even convincing.” He paused and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I know DiPaolo, and I know Pell. I know how hungry they are. And even if they did let go of this, you think my masters at Parsons and Perkins would? Not likely. Best case, I’m stuck in civil court for the rest of my life, hocking my underwear to pay the lawyers. No thanks.” He thought for a moment, and gave us a conspiratorial look.
“Besides, the cops will eventually find a delivery guy in Cobble Hill with no coat and a hole in his head, and the bullet they dig out of him will match what they pull out of Bernie. And after that they’ll have something on me, don’t you think?” I heard Jane inhale sharply, and then there was quiet. Shit.
“Why aren’t you on your way out of town?” I asked after a while. Mills looked at me sharply, less distracted now.
“Well, you’re kind of the reason for that, John. You kind of fucked that up for me, big time. When you torched Bernie’s place, you torched my plane tickets and all my traveling cash too. And what do I find when I go back to my apartment? Why, cops, of course. And at my garage too, so I can’t even get my goddamned car out. And I can’t very well use my credit cards, now can I? Even I know that. So I figured you could help me out a little, John. I figured you could make up for all the trouble you caused and give me a hand getting to Miami. We can start with the couple of thousand that went up the chimney, and a change of clothes and the keys to your car and . . .”—he looked at Jane and wiggled his eyebrows theatrically—“and then we’ll see what else comes to mind.” Shit. Shit. Shit. Mills went to the kitchen counter and took a seat, the same one Helene had used. He hitched his arm over the back and crossed his legs, gesturing with the gun in his hand.
“Yes, I could use a little R and R before I run down south. I did a lot of wandering last night, all over town—Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan. Quite a journey—very gritty, very noir, very Charles Bukowski. A real dark night of the soul. I never realized how busy the subway is, even late at night. But I was surprised, how little cash people carry these days—or maybe it was just my bad luck. That delivery guy was my best, and he had maybe three hundred bucks, plus the coat. Of course, he made me work for it. He . . .”
The telephone rang like a grenade, once, twice, three times before it went to voice mail. Mills looked at me, more figuring going on in his head. Who was it? Would they call again? How long before they got worried? How long before someone knocked on the door? He got up and flexed his shoulders.
“First things first,” he said.
He made us lie on the bathroom floor while he took a leak and showered and shaved. My bathroom isn’t small, but even so it was cramped with the three of us in there, and the forced intimacy with Mills—the proximity of his white, hairless body, and his smell, and the sounds he made—was bizarre and repellent. I was filled with a sudden rage when he picked through my medicine cabinet, and I had to stop myself straining at the cuffs. Jane had grown very still. Her body was relaxed and her breathing was like clockwork, but her face was immobile and her eyes remote. I spoke to her softly while Mills was in the shower and we lay on the floor, our faces against the tile.