Safe House (3 page)

I bowed my head in agreement.

“
R
ollo’s is an old-time thief’s bar,” I told Clarence. We were sitting in my booth at Mama’s a little before midnight, drawing the diagrams. “I been in there a few times over the years. Little round tables in the middle, booths against the wall. Lousy food, watered booze. The tables are for bragging and bullshitting, the booths are for deals. You got something you want to buy or sell, you take a booth. Waitress comes over, you order food, she’s gonna tell you the booth’s reserved. You get stupid, say you wanna eat there anyway, guy they call T.B. comes over. I don’t think that’s his initials—man’s bad enough to be named after a disease, you don’t mess with him. Tall, slim build. Nice looking kid, long knife-scar across his face below the left eye. He’s a kenpo man, snap you like a twig without breaking a sweat. So no Bogarting in there, got it?”

“Yes, mahn. It is clear.”

“But if you ask the waitress, ‘Where’s Mimi tonight?’ she’ll just walk away, no problem. Then you’ll get Mimi. A real pretty Latina. Watch her hands: long nails with black polish, gold wedding ring. You tell her what you want, just work around the edges, you don’t have to come right out with it. No drugs, but anything else is all right. She says okay, you give her a hundred. That’s the rental.”

“I tell her firearms, mahn. I am known for this a bit. From when I was with Jacques.”

That’s when I first met Clarence, a long time ago. When he was a young tiger working for a Jake gun-runner in Brooklyn. He hadn’t come up with the rest of us, but he’d been forged just as hard in another fire.

“That’ll do,” I assured him. “I got a crate of AK’s I been holding back to sting one of those dumb-fuck gangbangers, so we could show the goods if anybody wanted a checkout. Now what you gotta do is dance, brother. Make sure you string it out, stay as long as you can, set it up so you come back a couple of times, right?”

“I have it,” the young man said. He was wearing a black jacket—looked like a regular suit coat, but it came down almost to his knees—over a pale-violet silk shirt buttoned at the neck. Clarence doesn’t really peacock it up until the warm weather hits, clothes blooming with the foliage.

“You know who to look for?”

“Porkpie, you already described him, mahn. And a Chinese girl with one of those pillbox hats, like. And a veil.”

“She may not be Chinese, not Chinese like Mama, anyway. Oriental, though, if Porkpie was right. And we don’t know if that outfit is a trademark or she just wanted to hide her face. Porkpie’s the key. No way he stays away from Rollo’s for long. You got any questions?”

“Who will watch my ride, mahn? I do not like to leave her alone in some nasty parking lot, you know?”

“We’ll cover her,” I promised. Clarence’s beloved British Racing Green 1967 Rover 2000 TC was his prize. He took it for granted that we’d have his back at Rollo’s, but his car was a separate commitment. “We can’t go inside, but the parking lot’s no problem.”

I lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, thinking it through. Rollo’s wasn’t a dangerous place. They had to keep it under control to do their business. But still . . .

“Want the Mole to go along?” I asked Clarence. “Porkpie’s never seen him, and he could—”

“Oh, that’s quick, Slick,” the Prof snarled. “What’s that maniac gonna do if something jumps off, blow the place up?”

“Mole’s smart,” I defended him.

“Smart? Man’s a motherfucking genius!” the Prof shot back. “Did I say no? But he ain’t smart like
people,
you understand? I don’t want none of his science shit around my boy, see? We be right outside, laying in the cut. One tap on the cellular and we Rambo the joint, we have to, okay? Ain’t no need to go nuclear.”

“I was just—”

“Nix that,” the Prof cut me off, any concern for Clarence’s safety quickly overridden by even the slightest implication that the kid wasn’t competent to handle the job. “Clarence walks point, we cover the joint. Our dice, loaded nice—it’s all on ice.”

B
ut our dice didn’t make one good pass all night. A five-hour investment drew nothing but blanks. “I didn’t see no Chinese woman, mahn,” Clarence said during debriefing. “And never this Porkpie guy either.”

“It worked like I said? With the booth?”

“Yeah, mahn.
Just
like that. Only two nibbles on the pieces, though.”

“Sound legit?” I asked him, leaning close. In our world, when we’re dealing guns, “legit” means criminal. And “crooked” means the goddamned ATF.

“I think so,” Clarence said. “Hard to tell with those boys. We just . . . talked around it, like. He want to know what I got. I want to know what he want. You know. . . .”

“Yeah. You said two, right?”

“Oh, the second guy, mahn, he was nothing. A kid. One of those European guys from the Bronx, maybe. I could not tell for sure. He wanted a pistol. Just one pistol. It felt like personal, not professional. I blew him off.”

A European guy from the Bronx was Clarence-speak for Armenian. There’s supposed to be a whole tribe of them up there, gunfighters, every one. “He cop an attitude?” I asked.

“Nah, mahn. Nothing like that. I told him bulk only, and he didn’t push. He had his boys with him, over to the side. I think he was just profiling, maybe. Young stupid boy. Probably throw the piece away when the clip get empty.”

If that was so, the kid sure wasn’t Armenian, I thought. “You up for another round?” I asked Clarence.

“I go the distance, mahn.”

T
he next night was the same. “Place is nasty, brother,” Clarence said afterwards, a disgusted look on his face. “I keep this up, I have a big dry-cleaning bill for sure.” He grimaced, examining the sleeve of his plum-colored worsted sport coat as though it contained the answer to some important question.

“The buyer come back?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him, mahn. But I told him next week, right? He was gonna speak to some people, you know how that go.”

“Yeah.”

I gave it some thought, turned to the Prof. “You think we need a different player? Porkpie, he’d take a booth and just open up shop. He’s a middleman. Whatever you want, he could find it for you. Maybe that’s the kind of guy we need. Clarence set himself up as an arms dealer. This Chinese woman, she’s only looking for muscle, maybe?”

“Or maybe she already found it,” the little man replied. “And she’s not coming back, Jack.”

I wasn’t ready to let go of it. “One more time,” I said. Clarence nodded.

F
rom our vantage point deep in the parking lot, we watched from the front seat of the Plymouth as cars came and went all night long. No way to tell who was inside. Sometimes the cars parked, sometimes they just dropped someone off. The weather was too cold and ugly to make a solid ID, everyone wearing coats, all bundled up. A lot of them had hats too. With the lousy light and the slanted sight-lines, I couldn’t tell Chinese from Swedish. But I’d know Porkpie—and he didn’t show.

The Prof and I talked each new sighting over anyway, just to keep the time moving. It was bone-deep cold in the car. Still, we didn’t want to run the heater. Nobody was cruising the lot peering into car windows, but a plume of smoke from the exhaust would mark us even from a distance.

The cell phone in my pocket buzzed once. Twice. I didn’t touch it. In about ten seconds, it did the same thing again.

“He’s got her,” I said to the Prof. It was one buzz for Porkpie, two for the Chinese woman, three for both. “Check to be sure.”

The Prof pulled his own cell phone, punched in a speed-dial number, let it ring a few times, then cut the connection. I lit a cigarette, waiting. The Prof’s phone buzzed, then went dead. Same again. One more time.

Max was on Porkpie. We’d had the little ferret on full-shadow ever since we started this piece. Max can’t hear, but the Mole had fixed him up with a vibrating pager set to go off if we dialed a certain number. The instant callback meant he had Porkpie in his sights. And a single ring meant the weasel was nowhere near Rollo’s.

Like they say in the S&M clubs . . . time to role-play.

I
opened the door to Rollo’s and walked in. Caught Clarence’s eye. He climbed out of his booth and went toward the bathroom in the back. The only way out is through the kitchen, and that isn’t open to customers. He’d stay back there for a few minutes, checking for traps while I set mine.

I was wearing an old leather jacket over a heavy black sweatshirt, jeans and steel-toed work boots. They kept the joint hot enough to make a nun work topless, steam hissing from the industrial radiators lining the windowless walls. I took off my jacket, sat there a few minutes, getting my eyes adjusted to the haze from the low-lying smog. Clarence walked past me to my left, heading for the door. I got up and took an empty booth, jacket over one shoulder.

The place looked like a Southern juke joint, only bigger and without the music. Ramshackle, thrown-together furniture, a big red-and-white Coke sign behind the wood plank bar, yellowing posters on the walls—looked like they’d been swiped from a Medicaid dentist’s office. The low ceiling trapped a heavy, multi-tone hum of voices, keeping the heat close to the floor. Somebody had nailed a
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
sign to the side wall. The floor was a giant ashtray.

I eye-swept the big room, watching the criminal food chain draped over the landscape, everything from bottom-feeders to land sharks. I scanned quickly, looking for familiar faces. Nothing.

At one of the tables a teenager with an Arabic face watched intently as an older man from a similar tribe demonstrated some three-card-monte moves, doing it slow enough so the kid could follow, talking a blue streak in a low voice. Teacher and student.

Right across from them, a skinny blonde woman was getting histrionic with three heavy-bodied, stoic-faced men with identical slicked-back black hair. They looked enough alike to be brothers—Greeks, I thought. All watching quietly as the skinny blonde waved her hands around, contorting her face to make a point.

An old man with a thick shock of graying hair sat alone at a table, a heavy gold watch on each of his broad wrists. People stopped by his table, bent over and said something in his ear. Nobody sat down. Odessa Beach godfather, maybe.

In one corner sat a smooth-bodied man with plain round glasses, dark hair cut right to the scalp. He was big, six six at least, had to weigh in over two fifty. He had a bemused expression on his face, a drawing tablet open before him, right hand sculpting. One of the Greeks spotted what he was doing, started to stand up. The big guy didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off the drawing tablet. An island of quiet popped up out of the ocean of noise. The old Russian got up, walked over to the big guy’s table, put his hand on the big guy’s shoulder as he looked closely at the drawing. A giant diamond on his hand sparkled—the real thing. The old Russian nodded approval, went back to his table. One of the Greek’s brothers whispered something to him—I didn’t need a translator: “Sit still!” The ocean swallowed the island again. Maybe the Greeks were really Russians. Or just guys who knew the score. Whoever the big guy with the drawing tablet was, he was nobody tofuck with.

The waitress strolled over, a stone-faced woman in her forties. “What’ll it be?” Her voice made her face look inviting.

“Mimi around?” I asked.

“I’ll check,” she said, and walked off.

I cracked a wooden match into flame, but I didn’t even have it to the tip of my cigarette when she materialized at the booth.

“You looking for me?” Mimi asked, a friendly smile on her classic Aztec face. Her skin had a lovely pale-bronze glow. Highlights glinted in her long raven hair. But her eyes were as flat as a cadaver’s heart monitor.

“Actually,” I said, “I was looking for some work.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“Body work,” I told her, softly.

Her obsidian eyes ran over my torso appraisingly. “You work with your hands?” she asked, showing me hers. Her fingernails were long black-lacquered talons.

“I do heavy work,” I said, meeting her gaze.

I didn’t know where Mimi had been raised, but she recognized the jailhouse stare quick enough. “We don’t vouch for anyone here,” she said. There wasn’t a trace of accent in her voice. Just a warning.

“I got it,” I told her. Handed her a hundred-dollar bill. It disappeared—she had fast hands.

“You want something while you’re waiting?”

“Rye and ginger. Don’t mix them, okay?”

The waitress brought me the shot glass of what they said was rye and a taller glass with a small bottle of off-brand ginger ale. “Seven-fifty,” was all she said. I gave her a ten. She took it and walked away again. Rollo’s ran like city buses: Exact Change, No Refunds.

Moved just about as fast too. I sat there by myself for a good while. Poured ginger ale into the tall glass and drank most of it off. Then I dumped in the shot and let it sit there melting into the ice cubes until the glass was a quarter full. The waitress came over, asked me if I wanted another one. I told her “Sure,” nodding at the tall glass. She took it away, brought me the same setup, pocketed another ten.

I couldn’t spot the Chinese woman, but the cell phone in my pocket hadn’t gone off, so she hadn’t left. If she was the right one, we had her boxed.

An argument broke out at one of the little round tables. Man and a woman. He grabbed her hair and slapped her a couple of times. Back and forth. Slow. Showing her how things were between them. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to her, but he was talking all the time he was slapping her. The bouncer—the one they call T.B.—glided over, hands empty at his sides. He spread his arms wide, saying something peaceful. The guy dropped the woman’s hair and jumped to his feet. T.B. stepped back. Encouraged, the guy came out with a knife, flicking it open with his thumb as he went into a crouch. A grin split T.B.’s face, twisting the scar under his left eye. I didn’t see his foot move, but the guy’s knee went out. T.B. hit him once, just under the heart, as he was falling. The guy stayed where he was. The girl was on her feet then, but Mimi was behind her, hands on the girl’s wrists, locking her in. The girl said something I couldn’t make out.