Their last assignment together was the one Archie brokered. Did my name come up during that job? Did Archie mention me casually and Spilatro pounced on the name and came up with a plan to lure me out? Why would he want to?
The answer probably lies in the same reason I turned Archie’s office into ash. I knew if those files were left behind, vultures would descend on them to pick over the pieces. There is value in those files, the same value Archie told Smoke about in a prison cafeteria. Information. I’ve pulled a lot of jobs over the years, some extremely prominent, some that changed the political landscape of this country. If someone knew where to find me, he could broker that information to the relatives of my marks who were looking for atonement. Maybe Archie mentioned he worked with me, and maybe Spilatro turned that into a job for himself, sold my name to the highest bidder while he promised he would be the instrument of revenge.
So why did Carla think Doug Spilatro was dead?
When I was a kid at Waxham Juvey in Western Mass, there was a board game we could check out as long as we played it in the library. It was called “Mousetrap,” and it involved building an elaborate, Rube Goldbergian machine to catch a mouse. A crank rotated a gear that pushed an elastic lever that kicked over a bucket that sent a marble down a zig-zagging incline that fed into a chute and on and on until the cage fell on the unsuspecting mouse. But over the years, a few of the plastic pieces went missing and the trap wouldn’t spring. We used straws and toothpicks and toothpaste caps to fill in the blanks, rigging it so the cage would drop. The mouse didn’t know the real pieces weren’t there, and it didn’t matter as long as the trap sprung.
I think Spilatro has built his own mousetrap. Psychologically, he takes no pleasure in the kill itself; in fact, it repulses him. So he’s thrown all of his passion, all of his expertise, into building elaborate killing machines, elaborate mousetraps. With a living, breathing target, the machine has to be able to contract or expand or adapt based on the movement of the prey. He can build miniatures and plan to his heart’s content, but at some point toothpicks have to replace plastic pieces.
So the question is: how much has Spilatro been thrown off of his plan to kill me? Was I supposed to die in the construction accident that claimed Smoke? Was I supposed to get caught in the crossfire at Kirschenbaum’s house, trapped between the bodyguards and the police? Or am I still scurrying my way through the mousetrap, tripping a rubber band instead of a crank?
And one more thing: Carla referred to Spilatro as a Silver Bear, even though he takes no pleasure in the actual kill. My first fence taught me that to do what I do, to live with what I do, I have to make the connection to my mark so I can sever the connection later. I have to get inside his head, exploit whatever evil I find there, so I can continue to the next job. What I’m missing from all this, what I still don’t know, is why Spilatro singled me out. What connection do we have?
Carla and I move from the stoop on Warren Street to a coffee shop around the corner. I tell her she doesn’t have to worry about getting shot, that I just want to hear the rest of her story, but my words don’t seem to lift any weight off her shoulders. She sits like a prisoner in the corner of a cell, with no hope of rescue. I know Risina is out there watching, and I wonder if she can see the effects the killing business has on its participants.
“The last job. The one you did for Archie. Tell me about it.”
“Archie?”
“Archibald Grant. He was the fence.”
“Oh. Yes, Archie Grant. I only talked to him on the phone.”
“You never met him face-to-face?”
“I didn’t meet anyone except for K-bomb. And he, I only met once.” She holds up one finger. “He came to me after the job you’re talking about, when I was still trying to figure out what the hell I was gonna do now that Doug was gone. I never knew the fence’s name before that. I didn’t even know what a fence was, to tell you the truth. He just showed up and asked me if I wanted to continue working. I’ll be honest, I’ve only pulled a couple of jobs on my own. Today’s call came in from a third party and I thought it was weird and my antenna went up, but I showed up anyway because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore. Should’ve known…”
“Yeah, well, here you are. If it makes you feel better, I’d’ve gotten to you one way or another.”
She shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Tell me about that last tandem job. I want to hear every detail.”
“You have to understand, Doug only told me the bare minimum to keep me involved. I was the flash of light, the honking horn, you know what I mean?”
I shake my head.
“The distraction. The feint. The thing that causes the mark to look one way when death is coming from the other direction.”
“Bait?”
“Look at me. Do I look like bait?”
“I meant…”
“I know what you meant. Sure, I’d meet a few of the marks. Get ’em to a particular spot Doug would designate in the run-up. That was tough for me, I gotta say. It’s one thing to see these targets from afar, another to shake their hands, hear them speak, watch ’em smile or what not.”
“The last job…”
“Yeah, I’m getting there. I’d been off for a while. I know Doug was taking contracts and fulfilling them without me. Two or three in a row and truth be told, I didn’t mind. I thought I’d like the adventure of it, the game, you know, but when I was lying in bed each night, I’d think about those men I helped put under, and I had a real hard time closing my eyes.”
She’s checking my face, looking for a sympathetic nod, but I give her nothing. She blows a bit on the top of her coffee before taking a sip.
“Anyway, he’d been home for a while and I knew he must’ve gotten a new gig because he spent a lot of time down in the basement. I’m talking a good two months, only coming up for a meal, a smoke, a bathroom break, or bed. I figured he was going to work this one solo, but this particular Sunday, he calls me down there.
“This is a simple one, he tells me. Police detective in Boston who drinks too much. This cop must’ve tossed the wrong guy in the can, because there’s a price on his head and Doug is collecting. The procuring fence wanted it to be a tandem, to make sure it went down on a certain day, and Doug convinced the acquiring fence that he’d supply the other contract killer. Me. So this fence…”
“Archie Grant,” I interrupt. I keep mentioning his name to see if it’ll elicit a response, but so far, nothing.
“If you say so. Anyway, Doug tells me this fence is skeptical, but Doug insists on bringing me on, and we can kill two birds with one rock. We’ll work the tandem and we’ll make sure it looks like an accident. I guess that satisfied what’s-his-name, because Doug got the gig and procured the down payment for both hitters.
“I remember thinking, so this is why you want me to work with you now… so you can collect double fees on the same hit. Say what you want about Doug, the man knew how to game a system no matter what it was. You thought you were pulling the strings? That’s only cause he let you think so. He was the one working the puppets, didn’t matter what the play was. It wasn’t till I saw him doing it to others that I realized all these years, he’d been doing the same to me, you know? I guess that’s neither here nor there now, but there it is.
“So getting back to this hit… Doug built this elaborate model of this alleyway in Boston. Painted and sanded and lit up to the very last detail. The bar where this detective liked to drown his sorrows was specially made with a flying roof so he could take it off and you could see inside. It was like nothing you ever saw. This one made the one he did for Cleveland look like a kindergartner’s shitty homework assignment. Doug had little bartenders in there, little dishwashers, little beer mugs, even miniature peanut shells on the floor. The works.
“So he starts talking me through the plan. This mark comes in this joint every Saturday night like clockwork and stays not only till the bar closes, but after the owner locks the front door. The target is chummy with the owner or shaking him down or whatever but he gets special treatment, one last glass of whiskey on the house before the lights go out. The owner’s a salty old Southey who fixes that last highball himself before running receipts in his office until the mark finally heads out the back door.
“So Doug has this plan. It involves me showing up just as the doors close, pretending to be a health inspector. I’m supposed to do a few hocus pocus maneuvers, you know, get the front door locked, slip a roofie in the mark’s drink, keep the owner occupied in his office or the kitchen, wave our target out the back door, and that’s just half of it. Doug’s showing me this elaborate set up he’s got worked out in the alley, real domino rally type stuff, ice on the steps, trip wire on the bottom, a lever that’ll whack his feet out from under him so that he’ll nail the back of his head on the ice, five other things I’m forgetting about. Complicated stuff and his eyes light up as he’s telling me all about it.
“I tell him it’s all too complicated and for just a moment, he looks at me the way he did when I confronted him in the basement when I first found the model. Oooh, boy, if the devil wears a face, that’s what it looks like. I shut up quick and he catches himself like he stepped past the caution signs and straightens up right away but it was there and I saw it. He smiles and tells me how hard he’s worked and how even if it’s a small job getting a drunk to slip on some icy steps, he wants it done right. He’s made a career out of getting it done right and I know better than to pop off again, so I button it and say however he wants to plug this guy is fine with me. I did not want to see that look again, I can assure you that.
“The night of the hit, everything is fine. I’m with Doug running lookout while he sets up the pieces of the trap in the alley. I haven’t seen him work like this and I can tell he’s excited about it, the way he’s moving around, a smile on his face, all hopped up like a football player before a big game, you know? Like a kid on Christmas Eve? He’s wearing a BWSC uniform-Boston Water and Sewer-and a fake beard and all that seemed unnecessary looking back but it made him happy so what the hell was I gonna say? He signals me when the trap is all set, and right on time, I hit the front door, just as the owner is cleaning up. Health Inspector is the best cover you can use with bars or restaurants because no one questions it-the manager or owner is mildly annoyed but always accommodating. This was no different and I got the mickey into the detective’s drink while the owner and he looked up at a fire exit with a faulty light I pointed out. No big deal. It’s amazing how many things people miss each day when they’re made to look in a certain direction, you know? Look at the birdie over there while I take the wallet from your back pocket here. People, for the most part, are suckers.
“The plan goes exactly the way Doug drew it up. I took the owner to his office while he told the cop to head out back. I watched out of the corner of my eye, you know, as our target got up and stumbled off. I counted to a hundred in my mind, all while I was talking about grease traps and proper temperatures on the refrigeration system and where the ‘wash your hands’ signs have to be displayed in the bathroom and I could see the owner’s eyes glaze over.
“Abruptly, I get to a hundred and I tell him everything looks good and he can count on a top notch report and can he let me out the front? Doug had told me the probabilities were he would follow me out since he liked to park his Dodge Charger right out in front of his bar. Sure enough, he comes with me outside and I watch from across the street as he climbs into the muscle car and drives away.”
“So where’s the complication?”
“There wasn’t one, is what I’m saying. Not on this job…”
“So…”
“So I go to meet Doug at the rendezvous spot which is three blocks away, this street corner near a motel and he’s got this smile big as summer on his face, you know? I’ll never forget it. He’s really happy. Says it went off without a hitch. Drunk detective stumbles down the stairs, the lever sweeps his feet, he cracks his skull, out cold. No way he won’t freeze to death. Doug even rigged it so some water would spill off the gutter above him, ensuring the detective would be found as frozen as a popsicle. No other way to rule this one but straight up accidental death.”
“What about the lever?”
“Doug fixed it with a string so he could slide it away. Everything planned to the last detail, like I said. This is how his mind worked.
“He told me all about the kill as we walked toward the car. I remember thinking I hadn’t seen him this happy since before we were married. And I was happy too, as weird as that sounds. I started seeing this life together, this future together. Me and Doug, a team. Other couples can sit on their asses watching the evening news while we’ll be out-I don’t know-changing the world. That’s something you do, you know? You imagine the work you’re doing is for the greater good although it’s probably just settling some small-time scores. Maybe we can make this work, I thought. Maybe this partnership is all we need to make it work between us, better than it ever was before. It seems silly now, but that’s what was going through my head.
All of a sudden, this black van roars around the corner and I get the uneasy feeling it’s coming up on us. You know that feeling? The kind that warms you up even though it’s cold as balls outside? Doug puts his arm around me all protective like and I remember thinking that was kind of a sweet touch, you know? He wasn’t much of an affectionate person, but he thought to put his arm on my shoulders and I thought that was nice.
“The van barrels up and skids to a stop and three sort of gangster looking guys get out, one black and two white and they call Doug by name. ‘You Spilatro?’ the biggest one says. Doug doesn’t answer, but I can hear his breathing stop and truth be told, I was scared to death. I hear another guy say, ‘yeah, he’s Spilatro,’ and I see this guy’s face as he steps into the light and he’s looking a little familiar, like maybe I know him from somewhere, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t Decker, his old army buddy, the one who brought him into the killing life. After Doug told me about him, I looked him up in some of Doug’s old army pictures, and this is the same guy, I’m sure of it. Doug realizes it at the same time as me and I can see him sigh heavily, like this is all just too much. The first guy, the muscle, raises his hand up and he’s holding a gun, some kind of big automatic. Don’t ask me what kind because I don’t know. The last thing Doug says is ‘don’t kill my wife,’ and crack, crack, the muscle shoots him twice in the chest. Blood flies on to me, I feel it hit the side of my face, and out of the corner of my eye I see Doug drop straight down. You know what I mean? Straight down like all his muscles shut down at once? Well, I just stood there like a jackass, you know, and the three guys pick up Doug’s body and throw it in the van. Decker turns and looks at me and I think maybe he’s deciding whether or not to drop me too, but he just gives me that hard stare men are so fond of, moves around to the driver’s side, and varoom, they’re gone. If this was retaliation for something Doug did, nobody said and I don’t know. The van drove off as though nothing ever happened and I stood there, I swear for an hour or two, not in shock but not thinking either, you know?”
Her voice falls quiet and she takes a sip of her coffee, not raising her eyes. She doesn’t have to blow on it this time.
I give her a moment to play it out, check to see if she’s going to say more, and I have to give her an ounce of respect. She doesn’t try to conjure up a tear or manage a sob.
I lean back and wait. Everything I do, every interaction hinges on the principle of dominance. Dominance can be physical, like cracking a man in the knee to drop him in front of you so he knows you’re better than he is. Or it can be mental: a game of wits, a look, a gesture, a word-anything to gain an advantage over an adversary. Sometimes dominance can simply mean waiting.
After a couple of silent minutes, she looks up, eyes dry. There’s resentment in her eyes, resentment for making her draw this out. Finally, when I have her broken, I speak up.
“You know he’s not dead.”
“You want me to say it?”
“Why pretend?”
She moves the coffee cup back and forth in front of her, grimacing. “He didn’t have to do it for me. He could’ve just walked.”
“Didn’t have to hire the guys, you mean.”
“Yeah. Plan the whole thing out. Tack it on to the end of the other job, you know?” She stops looking at me, at the inside of the diner, at anything. “It was actually… well, it was the sweetest thing he did for me the whole time we were married.”
I nod, but this is not good. Not good at all.
“Can I get out of here now? I’m done with this.”
She’s drained now, played out, bitter. If I squeeze her any more, she’ll pop.
I nod and she hauls herself up, then hovers over me for a second as her shadow falls across half my face. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done, making me say it.” I don’t look at her. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done.” When I feel the shadow move away, I know she’s gone.
We meet in a pre-determined spot, a bench in Battery Park. It’s quiet here this time of day. A patch of green. The water. An old man sits at a table by himself, moving chess pieces around while his lips move. Risina is already sitting when I arrive. For a moment, we don’t speak. Anyone passing would think us two office drones meeting for a quiet date; the guy in sales with the girl from accounting.
“You let her leave.”
“Yeah. She was used up.”
I put my arm around Risina, and she leans into me. For just a few short breaths, we’re back in that fishing village halfway around the world. Maybe this is all we’ll have for a while.
“I thought the idea was to kidnap someone he loves…”
“It is. But he doesn’t love her.”
“He didn’t have to set it up for her like that. He could’ve run off.”
“That’s true.”
“So that means something.”
“He loves the process, not her. He loves the mousetrap. He loves setting up all the pieces and knocking them down. He cooked up the dummy fall at the same time as he plotted out the actual kill. Brought her in on the tandem and made the whole thing one piece, you see? First the kill, then the fall… two parts of the same job. In his mind, they were always one. He doesn’t care about her… he gets off on the complication.”
Risina frowns. “But he thought to do it that way. It has to be a sign of… well, at least affection if not love.”
“Maybe. But it’s not enough for what we need.”
She starts to speak, but I get there first. “When I first understood which way this was breaking, I thought maybe I could enlist Carla to help us find Spilatro and hurt him. The way he treated her, faking his death, bringing this world into her life and then walking away? He left her holding the bag. I thought maybe she was bitter and we could use that bitterness. But she’s not. And she’s not the opposite either. She’s not accepting. She’s just… finished.”
Risina nods. The old man stands and collects his pieces. His lips move, but his words are lost in the wind.
“So we still have nothing. After all this?”
“I didn’t say that. She gave us a great deal more than we had before we found her. We know Spilatro was married, we know he was in the army, we know he worked in software sales, at least for a while. We have ways to find him.”
“And we know how he thinks.”
I smile. Risina’s intuition continues to surprise me. “That’s right. Now we know how he thinks.”
We’re going to get to him through his friend, the army buddy who brought him into the game. I notice I’m thinking in plural pronouns again, “we” instead of “I,” and I like the way it sounds in my head. The tandem didn’t work for Doug and Carla, but they’re not us, not even close to us, and Carla served only as a convenience to him. He was using her for cover, that’s it. That was her utility for him.
We’re not like them at all. Carla said she saw a future for them in the moments before that future was wiped away, but he was the one who caused that plan to fail. It’s different for Risina and me. We can pull jobs together, back each other’s play, watch each other’s back. I fell in love with Risina because of the animal inside her, just below the surface. She has more sand than I imagined back in Rome. She demonstrates it over and over. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, even though she’s not wearing any. We’re not like them. We. Not I. We.
A tiny piece of information can be like a keyword to unravel a code. Based on Carla’s story, I know approximately how old Spilatro is, and I know his army buddy’s name, Decker, and I can guess a pretty accurate timeline of when they must have been in the service together. From there, it’s a reasonable amount of digging to cross-reference the two names, and if the names are false, as I’m sure they will be, then it’s a bit more cumbersome but not unconquerable to find similar names who served in the same unit. Most hit men aren’t too creative in coming up with their aliases.
This is fence work, but most of the fences I know seem to be missing or dead. About that, K-bomb was right. I do have bad luck with fences.
Still, there is one I know who can be of service and is alive and free: the one in Belgium who has a new appreciation for handing out favors.
Doriot meets us two days later in a barbershop in the basement of the St. Regis. A pair of brothers own the joint, having taken over from their father, good guys, and when I reached out to them to use their place for an after-hours meeting, alone, they didn’t hesitate to give me a key. A thousand-dollar tip on a shave and a trim didn’t hurt to solidify the deal.
“I told you providence would smile on me for treating you respectfully, Columbus, and here I am in New York City, the Big Apple, so what can I do for you and how much can I be expected to earn? Not that I am only in it for the money since I like you so much, but business is business as I’m sure you understand.”
“I need a file on a guy.”
“Twenty thousand,” he says immediately.
“Give me a fucking break. Twenty thousand…”
“I have a ten percent relationship with my hitters, Columbus. This is what I make…”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, fifteen…”
I could press him to twelve but I don’t want to hurt his feelings before he goes to work for me. I’d rather cough up a few extra grand than have to worry about his effort.
“Fifteen’s a deal but I don’t want to decide on a play from your file and then find out the information is lacking.”
He shakes his head vigorously, feigning offense. “I do this right for you, you maybe come back to me for more work. I see how this goes. You’ll have a file so filled with truth you can lay it on top of the Bible.”
“All right then.”
“So who must I find for you?”
I give him everything I know about Decker and Spilatro as I regurgitate my conversation with Carla.
“How much time do I have?” he asks when I’m done.
“Three weeks enough?”
He frowns as though he’s thinking about it. “Are you sure you can’t come up to eighteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just asking the question. I’ll start right away. You’ll see. You have never worked with a fence like me. This file will be like Brussels chocolate.” He does that chef thing of kissing the tips of his fingers.
“I need one other thing.”
He pauses at the door, then surveys the barber implements surrounding us. “If you tell me you need me to trim your hair, then I’m afraid you will have to come up with the twenty thousand after all.” He produces a short laugh that sounds more like a smoker’s cough.
“I need to rent a house upstate until your file is ready. Somewhere in the country, somewhere back from a road, somewhere no one’s gonna visit, even a mailman. Leave a key and an address for Jack Walker at reception tomorrow and you can have your twenty.”
He smacks his lips and raises his eyebrows.
“You sure you don’t want a haircut too?”
“Just the keys.”
He smiles and heads out the door.
I want to see her kill something.
The house is a good find, a fifteen-minute drive inside the property line from a dirt road only marked by an unassuming gate. I walked the fence line on our first few days and it’s over five miles from front to back and side to side. Doriot suspended mail service while we’re renting the place, and I have yet to hear a car engine anywhere in the vicinity.
The woods surrounding the house are as thick as a blanket and teem with life. Deer, badgers, squirrels, woodchucks, robins, sparrows and quail go about their days foraging and fighting. I need to see her kill something. I don’t care about the hunt or her ability to keep silent or her ability to hold the gun steady or her nerve in pulling the trigger. It’s the after I’m worried about, the after I need to see. How she reacts to blood spilled by her own hand. Will she be like Spilatro and shy away from the mess? Or will she be like me and seek out another opportunity? And which do I really want?
“Why do you carry a Glock?”
“It’s a good, lightweight semi-automatic that’ll hold seventeen bullets in the clip and one in the chamber. It’s made of polymer so it doesn’t warp in bad weather and it takes just a second to slam in another clip if you’re in a spot.”
She smirks and racks a round into the chamber. Her eyes narrow in a mock display of gravity, like she’s playing a character in an action film, and then she laughs.
“You still think this is fun and games?”
“I think you need to break the tension sometimes or this would all be overwhelming.”
“Sometimes you have to rely on that tension, use it to heighten your senses.”
“Or break it to relax.”
“Who is teaching whom here?”
“Oh, come on. Don’t look at me like that. You want me to say I’m scared, I’ll say it without shame. I’ve been scared since the moment you came back from the bookstore with that look on your face. I haven’t stopped being scared. If I paused to think about it, I’d probably start screaming and I don’t know that I’d be able to stop. But I’ve always been good at learning and I’ve learned by watching you. I keep the fear inside and I make jokes and I laugh and I talk back and I try to look cool and all of that is to keep the fear choked down. So let me do this my way, please. I don’t ask much of you and I pay attention, but you have to let me do this my way.”
I move in and pull her into me and we stand in the forest as the world falls silent. I’m not sure if I’m holding her or she’s holding me, and when we break, her eyes are wet.
“Can you at least make the jokes better?”
She starts to react, then realizes I’m having fun with her. “You shouldn’t do that when I have a pistol in my hand.”
“You haven’t even taken the safety off.”
She looks down at the grip and when she does I snatch the gun from her hand.
“Oldest trick in the book.”
She starts laughing, hard. The woods come to life again.
A squirrel darts into the path in front of us. It’s a bit wary and cocks its head to the side to give us a once-over. It sniffs the air, hops twice more across the path, and rears on its hind legs again to gauge whether or not we present a threat.
Risina stops, levels her gun, and before I can say anything, she pulls the trigger, once, twice, three times, missing the first two shots low before she corrects and sends the creature pinwheeling backward, tumbling end over end like a bowling pin, its hide a mess of blood and fur.
“Anything else you want me to kill?” she asks, unsmiling.
I study her face, and she breaks eye contact to saunter off. I’m starting to think I don’t need to worry about the after. Maybe, instead, I should be worrying about what I’ve created.
He’s waiting for us in the cabin.
That fucking bastard Doriot must’ve sold us out, and I never saw it coming. Didn’t even have an inkling it was coming. I’ve grown too fucking seat-of-the-pants on this whole mission… except it’s not really a mission, is it? Christ, I should be shot in the head. Ever since I brought Risina into this and I didn’t have a fence and I thought I could call in favors and I thought the name Columbus still meant something, it has been one thing after another and I still haven’t learned. And that’s the rubber meeting the road right there. Columbus. The name carries no weight. Not anymore.
When I was incarcerated in Waxham, I learned a term called “chin-checking.” Roughly translated, it describes a gang leader who returns to his neighborhood after time in the joint. While he was gone, some young buck stepped in to fill his shoes in the power vacuum. The ex-con has to reassert his authority by walking up and punching the new kid right in the fucking mouth. Chin-checking. Hello, I’m back. I thought stepping back into this life would be like I never left, except I did leave, and memories are short. Doriot used to be afraid of me, but he’s not anymore. If I get through this, Doriot’s gonna learn a new term.
I open the cabin door and a cell phone is standing up on the table like a scar. Risina senses something is wrong the way animals perk up whenever a predator roams nearby. The phone rings before I can say anything to comfort her.
If he wanted to kill us, he could’ve shot us when we walked inside the door. If he wanted to plant a bomb in the phone, then we’re already dead. But in my experience, people call when they want to talk.
Risina shakes her head but I press the green button on the phone.
“Hello.”
“You’ve been asking about me.”
“You wanted to flush me, here I am.”
“You presume to know my intentions?”
“I know a few things. I’ll learn more.”
“I’ll help you out. Here’s a fact about me: I’m smarter than you.”
“That why you missed me outside the restaurant in Chicago?”
“Who says I missed?”
“It was sloppy.”
“Accidents are sloppy by nature. And sloppy by design.”
“And the police at Kirschenbaum’s house?”
“Now looking for a murderer who happens to fit your description.”
“Not exactly the way you drew it up.”
He chuckles, and the sound is disturbing in its confidence. “You don’t sound sure about that.”
He’s right. I don’t. Even this conversation feels like I’m being spun whichever direction he wants me to go.
“You want-“
But I cut him off in a clumsy attempt to gain control. “What’s your play?”
“I don’t-“
“Why kidnap Archie Grant? Why call me out by name?”
“You gonna let me finish?”
Is this how boxers feel as a round slips away? Right hooks coming but you’re just too slow or tired or old or rusty to get out of the way?
“Is he alive?”
“Check the phone.”
The phone beeps in my hand, an incoming text message. I click on it without hanging up the line and there is a picture of Archie holding a New York Times with a photograph of a blazing inferno on the front page-fire trucks out and about, spraying the flames down, and I have no doubt if I drive to a newsstand, it’ll be today’s paper. Archie looks defiant in the photo, a fuck you face if I ever saw one. I put the phone to my ear again.
“Satisfied?”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He doesn’t feel like talking.”
“What’s this about? Why the games? You want me, here I am.”
“You contact my wife again and I’ll blow Mr. Grant up in front of you. You’ll walk around a corner or step off an elevator and he’ll be tied up sitting in a chair. You’ll barely have time to register what is happening before parts of your friend slap you in the face.”
“Come on. You wanted to flush me? You flushed me. Let’s finish this out in the open.” Flailing. Too tired. Stumbling.
“You’ll be out in the open, Columbus. You won’t know where I’ll be.”
“Just tell me what this is about. I don’t mind spinning in circles, but at least tell me why I’m spinning.”
And right when I don’t think he’s going to say anything else, he surprises me. “Dark men.”
I’ve heard that expression once before, in a hotel room in the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles, from the lips of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Democratic Nominee for President, Abe Mann, moments before I killed him. “ When I had my problem with your mother, some dark men made that problem disappear. You understand about dark men, I take it… ” he had said.
He went on to tell me about the men who were the real players behind the politicians, the dark men who moved the representative’s mouths like ventriloquists, the dark men who wouldn’t let their candidates, candidates like Abe Mann, leave the game. So the Speaker of the House hired a killer named Columbus and designated himself as the target. His only escape was death, and I was his suicide method.
The dark men must not have been happy about that decision. All this time I was worried about someone in law enforcement tracking me down, but now I see my anxiety was misplaced. I killed the man I was hired to kill, but I upset the dark men who wanted him alive so they could keep pulling his strings. It seems they’ve held his death against me all these years and now they’ve hired Spilatro to exact their revenge. He went to them with my name and they said “bring us his head.” This changes everything.
Risina and I leave the house immediately, and instead of planning our next move, I just drive. The sun is heading west, dropping toward the horizon, so fuck it, I drive into it headlong, the light fierce in my eyes but maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe I deserve it. Maybe I’ve stuck to the shadows for too long and need to spend a little time with the sun in my eyes. Maybe some light will clean my fucking head.
Risina is pensive as she fights the urge to speak. Farms roll past the window, looking properly pastoral. After a moment, she pivots toward me. “What did he mean by dark men?”
“An old job. I probably upset a few apple carts.”
“So these men want revenge?”
“Yes.”
“And they hired Spilatro to kill you?”
“I think so.”
She nods. “Why him?”
“I think he went to them with my name.”
“You think Archie gave you up?”
I chew on the inside of my lower lip, and a new idea takes shape in my head.
“I don’t believe so… I think there’s a second explanation.”
“Give it to me.”
“What if these dark men work for the government? The CIA?”
“And…”
“And Spilatro was a soldier.”
“So?”
“So… what if he never left the military?”
We pull into a Hampton Inn somewhere outside the Berkshires. I switch cars at a used car lot, paying too much but not enough for the salesman to remember us. I choose a room at the inn on the first floor, in a corner with two windows and an outside door nearby in case we need to split in a hurry. I may not be all the way where I was three years ago, but I’m starting to take the smoothness off the edges.
After we make some bad coffee in the four-cup maker provided by the inn, Risina and I take a moment to sit and rest and think.
“You have that look in your eye.”
“What do you mean?”
“That same look you gave me that last day in our house before we headed to the US. You look like you want me to leave.”
“We’re entering new territory here. I’ve spent my professional life in a world I understand. A world of outlaws. Government agents are a separate entity entirely. They have resources I don’t have, access I can’t imagine. We have to work around the law… they break laws with impunity.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re in this together until the end. Spilatro knows about me. He’s probably known about me since we landed in Chicago.”
I nod. She’s right.
“If you tried to take care of this on your own, he’d find me and use me against you. There’s no sending me away. No hiding me somewhere. If you’re not watching me, then you won’t know I’m safe. And he’ll compromise you at a point when it’ll matter.”
I keep nodding.
“I love you. I’ll do whatever you tell me at this point. If you tell me to run, I’ll run. If you tell me to hide, I’ll do it. I’ll wait for you to come back to me. But it’s not the smart play, as you call it. He knows about me, and he knows you love me.”
“I do.”
“You’ll just have to be your best with me dragging on your back.”
“No.”
Her eyes flash. “What is this ‘no’?”
“No, I won’t drag you on my back. You’re going to have to step up and be the tiger I know you have inside you.”
She sets her jaw, and when she looks up, her eyes fill with resolve. “I can be a tiger.”
“You’re going to have to kill more than a squirrel.”
“I will pull the trigger when I have to.”
“Then let’s find Lieutenant Decker.”