The Ninth Step (24 page)

“That you, Maria?” the old man called out, lifting a bony hand; thin plastic tubes trailed from his wrist.

Jack moved across the room in two quick strides and jabbed the stubby barrel of the .38 against the man’s head. “How many people in the house?”

The man sputtered. “Who the hell are you?”

Jack stepped around and saw that a thin plastic tube came up out of the oxygen tank and branched into the man’s nostrils. He compared the face to the one photo he’d managed to find on the Internet, a black-and-white snapshot of Buonfiglia in a snazzy suit, standing behind mobster Paul Castellano. Jack recognized his thin lips, sad eyes, and bony nose, the profile of a corrupt Roman general. Now, with his sunken cheeks and emaciated body, he was just a shell of the man he’d been.

“Answer me or you’re dead: how many people?”

The old man wheezed. “Just one. My night nurse, Maria. She’s up on the third floor.”

Jack bent down so the man could get a good look at his determined face. “If you’re lying and you call for help, I’m gonna shoot you in the teeth.”

The old man didn’t look frightened, which made Jack nervous. “I’m a cop,” he added. “I’ve got men outside, so don’t try anything stupid.”

“How the hell d’you get in here? Cops ain’t allowed to go bustin’ in somebody’s house. You got a warrant?”

Jack held up the .38. “Right here.”

Buonfiglia looked unimpressed. “You came alone. You know, you could’a just rang the doorbell, like a normal person.”

Jack picked up the remote control and turned down the TV’s volume a bit. (The noise gave him some cover, but it was too grating to talk about what he needed to talk about while listening to a plug for crappy jewelry.) He pulled a photo out of his pants pocket, a snapshot damp from the rain: a picture of himself and Petey, two kids making goofy faces for the camera as they stood, bony-chested, on the concrete deck of the Red Hook pool. “
Now
do you know who I am?”

The old man nodded. “Max Leightner’s boy. I been expecting you.”

“I
bet
you have,” Jack replied, thinking of the bomb under his car.

The old man sighed. “I been waiting for you to show up on my doorstep for thirty years now. Ever since I heard you became a cop.”

Jack pressed the .38 against the man’s temple again. “Why is that? Why would I come looking for you?”

Buonfiglia’s hands moved over the blanket that half-covered his wasted body.

Jack yanked it down. No gun.

The old man turned and stared out the window at the rain. “What happened, that was tragic. I’ll tell ya, I feel real bad about it. That jig, he was just supposed to throw a scare into you, you and your brother.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up at this direct talk. (For once, no bullshit about
ancient history
.) “You don’t deny that you hired him?”

Buonfiglia shrugged. “I got nothin’ to hide. Sure, I hired him, but what happened wasn’t my fault.”

“Not your fault, huh? My father stopped translating for you—for that you robbed my brother of his whole life? Just because you were so worried about making a buck?”

The old man scowled. “You judge, but you don’t know nothin’ about it. It wasn’t about the money—it wasn’t so tough to find someone else who spoke Russian. It was the disrespect. When he quit, your old man said some stuff that he should never have got away with. We came to get him one night, and he was all drunk and he called us
thugs
, after we helped that bastard earn! That arrogant pinko—all of a sudden he’s too good for us?”

Jack thought about his father’s volatile moods, his stubborn pride. The man had paid his tributes to the union and the Mob but didn’t hide his reluctance. And so—until he had taken on this translator role—the only jobs he had ever been given were donkey work. Max Leightner had done things his own way as much as possible, given the circumstances. For that, Jack had to offer some grudging respect—evidently, he had inherited the old man’s stubborn nature.

Buonfiglia made a face as if he had just bitten into something foul. “I couldn’t see why Frank didn’t just take care of him right on the spot. Aside from the fact that lettin’ somethin’ like that go is bad for business, why the hell would he let anyone disrespect him like that?” The old man shook his head. “I could never understand it, that weakness. So I took care of it myself.”

“You took care of it? You coward—you hired some kid to do your dirty work!”

Buonfiglia just wrinkled his nose. “
Please
. I wasn’t gonna get my clothes dirty messin’ with a coupl’a son-of-a-bitchin’ punks.”

Jack felt his rage come surging back. He pulled the trigger until the hammer cocked, but at the last second he reconsidered. Shooting the man would just call up a big homicide investigation. Fate had provided a much simpler solution.

He reached out his foot and stepped on the oxygen tube.

Within a few seconds, the old man was gasping; he tried to push the branched tubes deeper into his nostrils. In the morning, no one would know that it was not his illness that had carried the mobster away.

“You’re a lying sack of shit,” Jack said. “You handed that kid Teague a knife.”

The old man wheezed, desperate now. “I never … tole him to use it. It was just … to scare you. I only—”

Jack stared down at the old man. He deserved to die. He had killed Petey, and then—decades later—he had tried to finish off Maxim Leightner’s only surviving son. He had killed three men out in Rockaway Beach, and God only knew how many others. Now it was his turn.

Buonfiglia writhed on the bed, tortured for lack of air. He struggled to speak but couldn’t. After a deeply satisfying minute, Jack took his foot off the oxygen tube—he would let the old man plead for his life, as some of his victims had pleaded, and then he would seal off the tube for good.

Buonfiglia lay back against his pillows for a moment, savoring the returned flow of oxygen into his wasted body. “You know,” he finally rasped, “I talked to that jig Darnel again, after. He said one’a you kids called him a nigger. I guess that made him go a little crazy.”

Jack turned away, determined not to let the old man see how this shot had struck home. Through the picture window, he watched the heavy rain fall through the floodlights’ glare. More than anything, he had hoped this little talk might ease his mind about that long-ago encounter. But he couldn’t deny the old man’s point: if he had not acted so rashly, his brother might still be alive. Or maybe Darnel Teague would have stabbed him anyhow. There was no way of knowing. He realized that killing this withered shell of a man would never free him from the weight of that question.

He felt something go out of him. He turned back to the old man. “How come you don’t have anybody guarding this place?”

“What for? I’m an old fuck. My enemies are all dead.” Buonfiglia glanced at Jack’s gun. “Most of ’em, anyhow.”

“After last night, I’d have thought you’d want plenty of protection.”

The old man gave him a quizzical look. “What happened last night?”

Jack felt his anger coming to a boil again. “Spare me the bullshit. You knew I was asking around. And you knew I was getting close.”

Buonfiglia blinked. “I heard you was askin’. So what?”

“So you thought you’d take me out before I caught up with you.”

The old man made a face. “I got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

“Who’d you get to put the bomb under my car?”

Buonfiglia shook his head. “You lost me.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence.”

Buonfiglia wheezed for a moment, inhaling his oxygen. “Why,” he finally said, “would I bother to do any such thing? You cops are always goin’ on about motives this, motives that. Okay, so what’s mine?”

“You know damn well that there’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

Buonfiglia snorted. “Oh cop, cop, cop. First of all, I didn’t murder your brother. I just wanted to scare him. Second, even if I had done the deed with my own hands, I got no reason to whack you now.”

“Of course you do. Nobody wants to end up in prison.”

Buonfiglia scoffed. He waved his frail hand, a gesture that took in the oxygen tank, the tubes in his wrist, the rows of pill bottles on a bedside table. “I got emphysema. I’m nothin’ but a broken-down valise. The doctors give me three months, tops. You think the D.A.’s gonna take the time and money to prosecute somebody who’s gonna kick before the case even gets to trial?”

Despite Jack’s childhood memories of the immense power of the Mafia, despite Larry Cosenza’s recent warnings, he was starting to sense that this man was like the Wizard of Oz—the biggest part of the mobster’s power came from his fearsome reputation, even though he was now just this shriveled little bastard hidden away on a porch.

Buonfiglia scratched his caved-in chest. “Yeah, I knew you were comin.’ But I had no reason to try and stop ya. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way—I know what happened to your brother means a lot to you, an’ I’m sorry about that. But I’m about to move into a hole in the ground, so your personal troubles right now? They mean about as much to me as a mosquito on an elephant’s ass. You wanna find out who tried to clip you? You’re gonna have to look someplace else. Somebody’s got a hard-on for ya, but it ain’t me.”

Jack stood there in the dark for a couple of minutes, listening to the rain drumming on the roof of the porch.

The old man stared out the window too, musing. “
Our thing?
We’re dinosaurs, cop. Pikers. Used to be, our guys could each pull one, maybe two hundred large a year—we thought that was a big deal. The other day, my grandson came to me, said he wanted to go into the family business. I tole him, Don’t be an idiot, kid, this is the year of Our Lord two thousand an’ five. You don’t need a gun; get an MBA. Go work on Wall Street. You can rake in two, three mil’ a year, and the feds won’t give a flyin’ fuck.”

Jack looked around: the oxygen tank, the pills, the falling rain. He was tired, awful tired, and he had been robbed of the resolution he’d been hoping for. But at least he hadn’t ruined his life’s work by killing a man in cold blood—that was one thing he wouldn’t have to live with. He didn’t have to do anything now; time would soon have its way with Sally Ducks. He stood up and reholstered his .38.

The old man raised up a little from his pillow and smiled a feeble death’s head smile. “Hey, cop? Thanks for stoppin’ by.”

T
HE BIG DOG LUNGED
out of the doorway, snarling, jaws snapping, and Nadim scrambled backward, tripped, and dropped into a bottomless well. He was falling, falling, but then, somehow, he was rising, up toward a bright light …

He cocked a grainy eyelid open, saw slatted light coming down from overhead, and heard a scrabbling sound and a dog’s sharp bark. He spat some sand from his mouth and rolled over; his whole body ached from the damp, cold night. Over his head, the underside of the Coney Island boardwalk stretched off into the distance, its diagonal wooden boards throwing herringbone patterns of brightness across the dim sand below. On the beach side, the sand rose to the level of the boardwalk; on the other side, a chain-link fence obscured by tall weeds created another wall, leaving this strange subterranean alley.

Overhead, a dog was scratching at the wood, as if digging down, trying to get to him. It couldn’t reach him, but it might alert a passing policeman.

Heart thumping, Nadim got to his knees, grabbed the knapsack he had bought at a discount store the other day, and scuttled like a crab past decades of detritus: Styrofoam takeout containers, rotting remnants of beach towels, mounds of plastic water bottles, scraggly deflated condoms. Condoms! The thought of making love down here in this mess boggled his mind.

He edged around a little blue camping tent some homeless person had set up and put some distance between himself and the dog.

After fifty yards of scrambling through this gloomy underworld, he lay back with his head on his knapsack and caught his breath. He listened for the dog, but it had ceased its frantic yapping. Nadim pressed his forearm over his eyes, thinking about another barking dog, the one that had gotten him into this whole terrible mess in the first place.

IT WAS A SMALL
German shepherd with sores on its flanks, and it lived its life, such as it was, in a tiny backyard next door to Nadim’s former apartment in Kensington. It was left outside, day and night, through all but the very coldest times of the year. The dog went on frequent barking jags, upsetting neighbors all around, but the owner was a sour old Caucasian man who refused to listen to their complaints.

The dog affected the members of Nadim’s household in different ways. His sanctimonious father-in-law didn’t like it because he said it was
haraam
, unclean. Nadim resented the animal because he often worked nights and it roused him from his morning sleep. Enny, his dear little Enny, felt sorry for the imprisoned, unloved beast.

Nadim, still an alien in the eyes of the law, did his best to avoid any confrontation with white Americans, but finally his exhaustion and his daughter’s pleas for compassion wore him down. He bought a box of chocolates as a gift, dressed up, and went next door to politely request that the neighbor bring the dog inside. The meeting did not go well.

“I put up with the smells of Injun food comin’ out of your place, don’t I?” snapped the man. “I put up with your goddamn kid laughin’ over there all day, and I don’t complain!”

Indian food. Laughing.
Nadim did his best to keep his temper, and finally—gritting his teeth to avoid an outright altercation—he walked away. But he was branded as a troublemaker. He would never call the police, but when other neighbors did, the old man shouted profanities across the fence at him. And then, just a few days after the terrible events of September 11, when the winds still carried a bitter burning smell across the East River to Brooklyn, a minor tragedy occurred in Kensington. The old man went out one morning and found his mistreated pet lying dead in his yard. Perhaps it had died of illness or of an overstressed heart. But nothing, nothing at all, would disabuse the old man of the notion that it had been poisoned by Nadim.