WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1987
Joey Piretta knew knocks. The cops, they knocked one way—bang bang bang like there was a pissed-off elephant coming through. Then there was the landlord, old man Fazetti; he knocked hard, but only once, showing his authority, ’cause he was the landlord and all, but still showing respect because if he didn’t Joey might kill him. The one that woke him up, though, wasn’t like either one of those. It was just a quiet double tap. That was Mazzucchelli.
Joey got up from the couch, adrenaline pumping, and didn’t quite knock over the half-empty beer cans on the coffee table. He grabbed the orange prescription bottle off the floor and pushed it down between the rough beige cushions. It rattled like a fucking baby toy. He delivered a quick prayer up the heaven that Mazzucchelli hadn’t heard it and crossed himself. The knock came again, a half a beat less time between the impacts. Joey pulled himself up, ran a hand through his hair, and tried to suck in his gut.
When he opened the door, Chris Mazzucchelli greeted him with a smile and a raised eyebrow.
“Hey,” Joey said, faking pleasure and surprise. “Chris! How you doin’?”
“Fine, Joey. And you?” Mazzuccheli asked, walking into the apartment. “The wrists still bothering you?”
“They still hurt a little sometimes. The scar tissue’s all messed up with the nerves. But you know how it is.”
Mazzucchelli smiled and nodded to the door. Joey closed it, apologizing with a gesture. The apartment looked like hell and smelled like a cheap bar. He wished he’d gotten around to washing the dishes last night. It just didn’t look professional the way they were all stacked up in the sink. Mazzucchelli walked into the living room but didn’t sit. Joey stood respectfully back, crossing his arms and scratching absently at the recent pink flesh the size of a quarter on his right forearm.
“You’re not still on the pain stuff,” Mazzucchelli said.
“Nah. Not for weeks. Just some aspirin sometimes.”
“Good. I have a job for you, Joey.”
Joey tried to pull himself up a little taller and deepened his scowl, just so as Mazzucchelli knew he was taking it seriously.
“Someone interrupted a negotiation last night. They killed some of our men and the jokers we were doing business with. They also took the merchandise we were picking up and the money we’d taken to pay for it. Half a million dollar, untraceable, and suitcase of heroin.”
“Ah,” Joey said, nodding.
“You understand?”
“Sure,” he said shrugging. “Find ’em. Kill ’em. Get the stuff back.”
“How about you start with just looking around. Once we find it, we can worry about killing people.”
“Just look around. Check.”
“You’ve been out of action for a while, Joey. You think you’re up for this?”
“No trouble. None at all.”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. I’ll have Lapierre get in touch with you and . . .”
“Ah, c’mon boss. I don’t need some smart-ass college fucker hanging off of me. I got sources. I can do this.”
“You want to take this one by yourself?”
“Yeah. Look, if I find something, I’ll let you know. Don’t worry about before. The thing with Chrysalis and the arrow guy, that was a one-time thing. Never happen again.”
Mazzucchelli paused, then walked over and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s good to have you back, Joey.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“Show some respect for yourself. Clean the place.”
“I will, boss.”
Mazzucchelli went out, closing the door behind him. Joey lumbered back to the couch and sat down heavily. He dug his hand into the cushions and came out with the rattling bottle of darvon. He popped two of the great big hot pink capsules into his hand even though his arms weren’t really aching much and swallowed them dry.
The pills seemed to lodge about halfway down his throat.
It just wasn’t starting off to be a good day.
The Crystal Palace always looked worse in the daylight. Darkness and neon suited it better. Demise slouched across the empty lot beside it, Phan Lo two steps behind him and to his left. The day was overcast, but Phan wore dark Blues Brothers sunglasses all the same.
“Danny Mao was pretty pissed off, eh?”
“It’s fine,” Demise said. “I told him it was your fault.”
Phan went silent for a moment, only the sound of their footsteps over the constant murmur of the city.
“You’re fucking with me, right?” Phan said.
“Look,” Demise said, sighing, “let’s just get the shit back and then it won’t matter what I said.”
Demise reached the service entrance and pushed his way into the darkness. The storeroom was filled with kegs of beer and crates and boxes of harder liquor. A violet-skinned joker with a wattle like a rooster bent over a wooden crate of wine bottles, counting on his fingers. When he looked up, his eyes met Demise’s briefly and a shock of pain appeared in the joker’s face, the wattle shriveling and turning gray at the edges.
“We need to talk to Chrysalis,” Demise said.
The joker turned and ran back into the building. Phan Lo strode forward and barked his shin on a crate.
“Take the shades off,” Demise said. “You look like an idiot.”
“Nah, man. I like ’em.”
“Look, I promise not to kill you . . .”
“What do you want?” a man’s voice demanded. Sascha, eyeless and frowning, walked toward them. Demise grimaced. Sascha always gave him the creeps.
“Where’s Chrysalis?”
“India, I think,” Sascha said.
“Fuck, that’s right. She’s on that thing with Tachyon and the senator, isn’t she.”
“What do you want, Spector?” Sascha asked again.
“What does anyone ever want from Chrysalis? We need some information. And we can pay for it.”
Sascha’s expression seemed to change. He nodded.
“There’s about to be someone trying to unload about twenty-five pounds of uncut white heroin at fire-sale prices.”
“And you’re looking to buy?”
“No. We just need to talk with the seller.”
“Since when are you working with the Fist?”
“Ran into the Sleeper a while back. He pointed out they might be hiring. The seller I’m looking for is an independent, though,” he said. “Anything the Mafia’s going to get pissed about has already happened. You’ll be out of the crossfire.”
“Leave a number,” Sascha said. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
Demise took a card out of his pocket and placed it silently on a wine rack, then nodded to Phan Lo and headed back out. A thin, cold rain misted down, and Demise turned his collar up against it.
“You must really hate that guy,” Phan said. “He’d be a pain in the ass for you to kill. You’d actually have to shoot him.”
“I’d manage.”
“All right now,” Father Henry said. “I just want you to listen here. Let me know what you think.”
The church was empty except for the two of them. Quasiman sat in the first pew, his misshapen back making him look like he was praying. Father Henry, leaning against the altar, cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, and read from his notebook.
“Jesus could change water to wine, but it didn’t put him in AA meetings the way it did me. These days, somebody walking on water would hardly get them looked at funny, and I know of two or three people who have raised folks from the dead. The virus has changed more than our bodies. It has changed what we mean by ‘miracle’ and . . . Now boy, you’re laughing, and I haven’t got to any of the funny parts yet.”
Quasiman’s attention had flickered away, his eyes fixed on a spot in the aisle. Something about the carpet seemed to have given him the giggles.
“Oh,” Quasiman said, pointing to the space and grinning. “That’s sad. I mean that’s just . . . sad. I wish I was going to remember it.”
Father Henry closed his notebook and smiled, trying to swallow his annoyance.
“I’m sorry, son. Am I interrupting something here?”
Quasiman flickered rapidly for a moment, reappeared without his left arm, and frowned vacantly at him.
“I don’t know who you are right now,” the hunchback commented. “There was something I was supposed to do.”
Father Henry took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. Talking to the man was like preaching to an electrical problem.
“That’s all right. We can try this another time.”
“Try what?”
“You were showing me how to polka,” Father Henry said and headed back for the sacristy.
He paused at the head of the basement stairs. He’d talked with the girl more in the night—her name was Gina, she was seventeen and running away from her pimp. That wouldn’t have been difficult, except that the pimp was also an informant for the police, and so she wasn’t likely to get help from that quarter. She needed to stay in town for a couple more days until her brother drove in from Seattle to get her.
He believed about half of it. Still, it was clear enough that she needed help. And if the Church wasn’t there to help out whores in trouble, well then it wasn’t the church Mary Magdalene had thought it was. Besides, he had a feeling about the girl . . .
Which didn’t mean she’d be a good person to talk his sermon over with, but Lord knew she couldn’t be much worse. He rapped his knuckles on the wall as he went down the stairs.
“Gina?”
“Hey, Father,” she said. She sat on the cot, her legs tucked beneath her, watching a soap opera on the old, grainy television. He’d shown her where the clothing donations were, and she’d picked out a blue wrap-around skirt and an oversize white men’s shirt. The outfit made her look like a normal girl, maybe just about to start college.
“You feeling better today?” he asked.
She nodded and turned down the volume on the set.
“Fine,” she said. “Whatshisface got me a sandwich this morning.”
“Good, good. I was wondering . . . well, I had a little trouble with the sermon last week. And I was working on some material, as it were, for Sunday. And while Quasiman is a good hearted fella, he doesn’t listen for spit, and I was thinking, if it wasn’t too much of an imposition . . .”
“Cool,” she said and thumbed off the TV. “The show’s boring, anyway. Fire away.”
He smiled, nodded, and opened his notebook, searching for a moment to find the right spot. Gina tilted her head, her expression serious.
“Jesus,” he began, “could change water into wine . . .”
She listened patiently as he moved through the homily, cited the passages of the bible that supported him, cracked wise a couple times, then took the tone down to somber at the middle and ended with a bright, hopeful, but also realistic finish.
Gina leaned back, considering. He took off his glasses, polishing the lenses on his shirttail.
“No,” she said. “Sorry, father. You got it wrong. I mean it’s a nice talk, but it’s all about nats and aces. You’re preaching to jokers. Jokers don’t give a shit about miracles—except for miracles that make jokers not jokers anymore, I guess.”
“But faith is a universal. The proof of Christ’s holiness . . .”
“No one gives a shit,” she said. “Sorry. I mean I know you’re a priest and all, but really, jokers don’t care. They want to hear about how even though they’re fucking ugly, someone still loves them. Or that they have beautiful souls. Or that the righteous are made to suffer. Like with Job. That kind of shit.”
“Watch your language, young lady,” he admonished, but his mind was already elsewhere. “So you don’t think it’d go over well?”
“You’re not selling what they’re buying,” she said. “They don’t want another challenge. They want comfort. It’s what they come here for.”
“I suppose . . .” he said, and sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t looked at it like that. I’ll go see what can be salvaged.”
“Put in someplace how ugly men are better because the world makes them tough,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. That seems a little harsh.”
“Always works for me,” she said, shrugging. “We’re kind of in the same business that way. Making jokers feel better.”
She winked and lay back on the cot, turning the TV back on as she descended. Father Henry found himself speechless for a moment, then walked up the stairs laughing.
The revisions took the better part of an hour, but in the end, there was more that could be saved than he’d imagined. With a little work, he had his very first jokers-only sermon, and by God, he was proud of it.
So proud and so excited, in fact, that he forgot to knock on his way down the stairs.
“. . . unload it now, Randy. Don’t tell me you . . . buyer.”
Father Henry stopped, slowly easing his foot back to the step above. Gina’s voice was muffled, but he could still make out some words here and there.
“Hundred thousand . . . tomorrow . . . would never guess where I . . . shit, really? Is she okay? Shit . . . No, I’ll call you.”
The plastic clatter of the telephone handset slipping into its cradle ended the conversation, and Father Henry slowly backed up the stairs. That certainly didn’t sound much like her brother calling in from Minnesota.
Well Lord, he thought, if this lesson is not to get took in by a pretty face, I could have sworn we’d covered that already.
He went back down, knocking this time. Gina was all smiles and pleasant company.
Oh yes. This little girl was going to take some watching.
Joey smiled. Not a hey-that-was-funny smile. More like hey-I’m-gonna-take-your-eyes-out-with-a-fucking-spoon. Jerzy didn’t seem to know the difference.
“Human target, get it?” the skinny Jew said again, like repeating it would make it funny. “Like that guy with the arrows.” He pantomimed plinking a bow at Joey.
“That guy with the arrows killed my boys and tried to cripple me,” Joey pointed out coolly.
Jerzy’s shrugged, smile fading, and he sipped his coffee. It was the closest he ever came to apology. The foot traffic going past the café was pretty light for the garment district, but it was still early in the afternoon. Come five o’clock, the overflow from Times Square would fill things up a little more. Joey wanted to be out before then.
“You got the coroner’s reports?”
“Nah,” Jerzy said. “I don’t make copies. What you want to know, I’ll tell you. I got a photographic memory.”
Joey looked around. The whole place was the size of a school bus—the short kind for the dumb kids. The guy behind the counter looked archly back it him. An old lady in a puffy blue ski jacket was sitting right up against the window and muttering to herself. Other than that they were alone.
Joey leaned forward.
“Okay,” he said. “So I’m hearing there’s something about the way they got offed? Something about aces?”
“Everybody’s buying up aces. Mafia, Shadow Fist. Everyone,” Jerzy said. He wasn’t so stupid, thank God, that he didn’t know to keep his voice down.
“Okay, but it’s not like the ones the Mafia hired are gonna queer a Mafia deal, right?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Jerzy said, waggling a bushy eyebrow. “Thing is, a couple of the guys that died? They shouldn’t have. It’s like they were hurt, but not so bad they woulda died. You see what I’m getting at?”
Joey scowled and shook his head. Talking to Jerzy was about as much fun as talking to Lapierre.
“People hiring aces?” Jerzy said, his hand moving in a little circular come-along motion. “Guys dead for no reason?”
“Hey Jerzy. How about you fucking tell me?”
The woman in the ski jacket glanced at them, scowling.
“Shouldn’t yell,” Jerzy said. “We’re in public.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to. It’s the wrists thing. Pain makes me jumpy.”
“Demise,” Jerzy said and sighed. “Find whoever hired Demise, you’ll find the shit.”
“Demise,” Joey said, nodding. “Great. And, ah, what about the percidan?”
“I can hook you up next week. You got enough darvon to hold you ’til then?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What? What is this with the long face?”
“It’s just the darvon pills are all pink,” Joey confided. “They make me look like a faggot, you know?”
Randy McHaley lived in a basement apartment with six other jokers. Two of them were there with him when Demise and Phan Lo got there. They were happy, though, to give the three of them a little privacy.
The place looked like the worst of the 1960s left to rot for a couple decades. Beaded strands substituted for doors, old psychedelic posters of the Lizard King yellowed and cracked on the grimy wall. Sandalwood incense mixed with something close to wet dog. And Randy slumped on the low couch with his hands between his knees.
The wildcard hadn’t been kind to Randy. His greasy brown fedora rested on a forest of spikes like a hedgehog. His pale, fishy skin wept a thin mucous, soaking his clothes. Tiny blind eyes opened and closed along his neck and down behind his shirt, some staring, some rolling wildly. Demise could see the distaste in corners of Phan Lo’s mouth and it made him want to draw the conversation out.
“I don’t know anything about it,” the sad joker said again, wagging his head.
“Okay,” Demise said. “Let me clear this up, fuckhead. A piece of shit like you can’t—cannot—set up a hundred thousand dollar horse deal in this town without us finding out. Okay? Where’s the meet?”
“I swear guys, you’ve got the wrong fuckup. I mean look at me,” the joker smiled desperately. “Look at the place I live. I’m not dealing with that kind of money.”
“You’re a junkie,” Demise said. “You and your buddies could blow that kind of money up your arms in a couple weeks.”
“I swear to Christ, you guys got it wrong. I’m really sorry. I wish I could help, but . . .”
“Could we just do this?” Phan asked.
Demise sighed and nodded. It had been fun while it lasted, but business being business . . .
Phan Lo stepped forward, drawing a pistol. The little joker squealed and pulled back, but Phan leaned in, pressing the barrel under Randy’s chin, forcing his head up. Demise stood, shot his cuffs, and leaned in close. When their eyes met, Randy was caught like a fish. Demise let the pain of his own death, the sick feeling of spiraling down into darkness, the visceral knowledge of dying flow into the joker for a second, two, three . . . and looked away.
Randy drew a long, grating breath like a diver who’s been under too long, then bent over and retched. Phan Lo danced back, disgusted. Demise sat down.
“The meet,” Demise said.
“Bryant Park. Noon tomorrow. She’s supposed to bring a sample. Please don’t kill me.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She calls me.”
“You believe him?” Demise asked.
Phan Lo shrugged.
“The buyer’s a Brit. Looking to export. He’s gonna be wearing an Aerosmith t-shirt and reading the Wall Street Journal.”
“Probably won’t be two of those,” Phan said.
“Please,” the joker whined. “That’s all I know. I swear to God that’s all I know.”
“You know, Phan. I think that’s all he knows.”
Phan nodded and crossed his arms.
“You want to kill him, or you want me to?” Demise asked. Randy looked from one to the other, his jaw working silently, then curled up in a ball on the couch and started crying. Phan curled his lip and shook his head. Demise frowned and nodded toward the weeping joker. Phan shook his head again.
“If she’s not there tomorrow, we’ll be back,” Phan said, holstering his pistol. “You understand?”
Randy wailed wordlessly, his shoulders shaking. Demise stood and followed Phan out through the kicked-in front door and up the steps to the midnight-dark street.
“What the fuck was that?” Demise asked.
“It’s better for the mystique if some of them are alive and scared shitless,” Phan said.
“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.”
Phan shrugged and walked to the car.
“You felt sorry for him, didn’t you?” Demise accused.
“Fuck you.”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“No. Get in the car.”