Against the Law

by Against the Law (epub)

  “What is that?” she asked. “I have my channel clicker right here.” She held up her cable remote. “Then there’s this one for the TV, I have to press that red button first.”

  “This is for the DVD player. See?” He pointed to the logo on the remote, which matched the player.

  “Well I’ll be,” Gladys said, adding it to the pile. “You’re gonna be chief one day, young man. That’s fine police work.”

  Parks grinned. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Donna!” Andy’s voice rang out from the back bedroom. “I mean, Agent Zamora. You might want to get in here.”

  Hearing the excitement in Andy’s voice, Donna left Janet to check the sugar, flour, and other powdered products in the kitchen and hurried into Joe’s room, eager to see what he’d discovered. Dope? A gun? Instead she found a girl, naked, or so it seemed, under a sheet. She was sitting up and smoking a cigarette.

  “I asked you not to smoke in here,” Joe was saying. He had jeans on now and was pulling on a T-shirt.

  The girl shrugged and ashed in a cup on the nightstand. “I am doing by the air conditioner.”

  “So what?” Joe said. “That blows air in, it doesn’t suck smoke out.” He turned to Donna. “Maybe you can explain this to her?”

  “Miss,” Donna said, keeping her voice level. “We are sorry to disturb you. Can I see some ID?”

  Yelena leaned over and pulled a passport from her purse, letting the sheet slip off. Donna looked away. Andy stared and smiled. “Here.” She held it out.

  “Irina Malecovich,” Donna read.

  “I am dancer at Club Rendezvous,” she said, exaggerating her accent.

  Joe smiled and shrugged. “Last night was so busy, she was exhausted, poor girl. So I let her sleep here.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that your job is so tiring, miss,” Donna said. “But I’m going to have to ask you to get up and get dressed so that we can search this room. We will avert our eyes of course,” she added, glaring at Andy.

  Yelena shrugged, dousing her smoke in the cup with a hiss. “You don’t have to avert,” she said, and stood up.

  At this Andy giggled, and Donna, to her horror, felt herself blush. Yelena pulled on her panties and then wriggled into jeans.

  “You know how dancers are,” Joe told them. “Very in touch with their bodies. I actually think it’s a healthy attitude. We have so much shame in our culture.”

  “Mr. Brody,” Donna said. “Please come into the living room while we execute this search.”

  “Right,” Joe said and followed. Now Janet, having finished a fruitless search, was helping Gladys make coffee. Parks, after putting fresh batteries in the remote, was rooting in the hall closet, while Fusco checked Gladys’s room.

  “Put an extra scoop of coffee and a pinch of cinnamon in the pot, hun,” Gladys told Janet. “That’s my secret.” She elbowed her. “A little sambuca in it doesn’t hurt either.” Janet laughed

  Joe sat on the couch next to Yelena and watched as Fusco reentered. “Bedroom’s clean,” he said, although he had actually ignored a snub-nosed .38 revolver under the mattress. Parks came back with a paper grocery bag from Key Food.

  “I found this in the closet,” he said, holding it out for Donna to see. “Looks to be about twenty grand.”

  “That is mine,” Yelena said. “My tips from club.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars? In tips? And you carry it around in a shopping bag?”

  “In Russia we don’t trust bank.”

  “Actually Irina needs to get going,” Joe said. “She’s due at the club.”

  “In the morning?” Donna asked.

  “Staff meeting,” Joe said. “Unless your warrant allows you to take her money.”

  Donna nodded angrily at Parks, who gave the bag to Yelena. She kissed Gladys on both cheeks. “Bye Joe,” she said, then nodded at Donna, “Officer.” To Andy, who was entering, empty-handed, from Joe’s room, she gave a happy wave. “Goodbye Agent Andy!” And she went.

  “Aren’t you due at this staff meeting?” Donna asked Joe, in a resigned tone, now that she could see this search was going nowhere fast.

  “No,” Joe said. “I took the day off. For a funeral.”

  Carol drove Gio to Big Eddie’s funeral. His back was still stiff from where they’d dug the glass out, and too much driving, at least the way Gio drove in morning traffic, might pull out the stitches. She’d convinced him to let the kids stay at home. True, they’d known Eddie all their lives, but the manner of his death, shot dead protecting their father, was more than they should have to be exposed to. As it was, visiting Gio in the ER after “the accident” in Brooklyn was supposedly traumatic.

  He’d relented, but he wasn’t so sure he agreed. God knows, he understood the urge to shield one’s kids from the world. What else was his life but a gigantic force field designed to keep them in a different reality than the one he knew so well, the same reality his own father and grandfather had exposed him to deliberately, making sure he knew exactly where the food on the table came from, how the house he slept in was paid for and protected? It was sick, twisted, a form of abuse, Carol said. It was trauma. And he saw her point, he wasn’t asking his own son to defrost any severed limbs any time soon, but there was a lot of love there too, even if it was expressed in an odd way. The night his Dad made him watch him kill a man, an informer, was also the night he took him to a high-end brothel to pop his cherry, and then for steak at Peter Luger’s. Rebbe was there for the dinner; the hit had been to protect him too. He shook young Gio’s hand and said, “Happy Bar Mitzvah, you’re a man now,” and everyone laughed. Later on, in college, when other guys would freak out about their parents visiting, about grades or asking them for money, he was amused. He knew his family would do anything for him, anything, and so would he for them. That was blood. And when it came time for him to go out into the world on his own, he was ready in a way that those punks never were, even with their degrees. Would his kids be? Wasn’t it exactly the “trauma” he’d been subject to that made him strong? Then again, it also got him shot at. So maybe the safest thing for his own kids was to be sure they were nothing at all like their Dad.

  The chapel was packed, with heaps of flowers and wreaths from all over the tristate area, even from Philly, Chicago, Boston, and Miami. And along with all the family and friends, and “family” and “friends,” the nature of Eddie’s death, in that wave of attacks, meant that all the other bosses sent people to show their respect and solidarity. This made Gio a kind of de facto host at the event, and he would need to shake hands with almost every single person there, but he went to the widow first, and hugged her, along with Eddie’s kids. Of course he’d been to the house already. He’d explained how Eddie died saving him, a hero, left a fat envelope of cash on the coffee table, and told her not to worry, that he’d make sure her three kids’ college got paid for. Still, that depended on them getting into college, and he couldn’t make any promises about their elder son, Eddie Jr., known, of course, as Little Eddie, despite standing over six feet tall, and weighing two-fifty, all muscle. He’d barely made it out of high school and already had a criminal record far more impressive than his transcripts. He had inherited his dad’s brains. But some of his heart too. What he wanted, he’d made clear, was to come in with Gio, and it might suit him. But could Gio say yes to that while shielding his own kids? Would Little Eddie, like his father, be the shield?

  And speaking of shields, as he took his seat next to Carol, who’d found them a spot in the front row, he saw Joe, in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie, standing by the door. Always the bouncer. Though, if he were going to carry the metaphor further, he’d have to describe Joe not as a shield, but a sword. He was the angel of Gio’s justice, or vengeance, if there was a difference, slaying those who’d tried to slay Gio, who threatened his life, his family, his town. He nodded his head at Joe in greeting, and Joe returned a quick nod. They’d talk later, after the praying was done.

  As it began,
with the priest’s arrival at the pulpit, Carol squeezed his hand and Gio held it. Their own relationship had shifted since the attack, when she’d rushed into the Emergency Room to find him lying on his stomach, with a doctor tweezing glass shards from his back. She’d said later that even though she knew he was okay—he’d been the one to call her after all—she still had this sudden image of him lying there dead, if not for a few inches and a few seconds, and she’d burst into tears. From that moment on, he knew his marriage would survive. He wasn’t saying the problems were over, but rather that their connection, their family bond, would prove stronger than anything else. Her killing Paul—as a realist, Gio knew some of it was sexual jealousy, or possessiveness, or just rage, and that she might just as easily have shot him also, but the real reason, her most primal motive, was to eliminate a threat to their family. Her family. And so, in that way, despite all of her judgment, she was not as different from him and his own clan as she imagined.

  As for the “issue,” it was on hold, at least until they were ready to discuss it further, and that was fine with Gio. Again, he was a realist, and he knew sometimes, with some problems, just tabling them indefinitely was the best you could hope for. When he got home from the hospital, they had sex, great sex, for the first time since it all happened. It had been awkward, physically—he had to be on the bottom, to avoid pulling a stitch, but also sitting up straight, so as not to rub against his back—but emotionally it had been natural and real, the deep connection between two people who loved each other and who knew nothing, not one night or one kiss more, could be taken for granted in this world. So Gio decided fuck everything else, for now.

  Joe watched the service from the back, observing, like an anthropologist, the different social structures interacting as part of this solemn rite. It was, before everything else, a family tragedy, and the tears and moans of Eddie’s wife and mother-in-law, the quieter sobs of his children, were the realest, rawest truth. They made him feel ashamed, or perhaps humbled was the better word. Even the bosses in the room, and there were some very powerful and dangerous men here, were humbled by the grief of a wife, or a mother, or a child.

  But it was also the funeral of a soldier. Bullshit, of course, in a way: an enterprise like Gio’s was about money first and last, money they bled illegally from society and protected with blood if need be. But by choosing to live outside society’s laws (if choosing was the right word for someone like Big Eddie, who’d flunked out of junior high and been educated in the streets and juvenile detention centers), they had in effect chosen one another, and over time, developed their own social network, with its own bonds of support or affection, its own code of conduct—to which each one adhered or not, just as straight citizens chose which rules they obeyed: taxes, traffic, adultery—and its own rituals and rites of passage. This was one. Dumb and lazy, Eddie, for all of his faults, had lived closer to the code than most, and had died for it. He was one of them, he’d fallen, and so they came, these unsmiling men in black suits, standing along the walls or sitting in back, with faces that represented every ethnicity, every religion and culture in the city, but all of them marked with a certain hardness, a truth that set them apart from the regular people, the ones sitting in the front pews: they knew it could just as easily be them lying in the coffin, and might very well be, next time. RIP Big Eddie.

  That was the thing about Donna. That’s how Joe thought of her, still, as someone he knew, Donna, not as Agent Zamora who’d just tossed his crib. His grandmother’s bedroom for fuck’s sake. He knew that she had violated his privacy, deliberately, that she was making it clear she was onto him, that she was after him, that she was coming for him, and yet he had been strangely elated to see her, to be, even in some sick way, the center of her attention. Like a lovestruck little boy who acts out in class just so his beautiful, brilliant teacher will look at him, yell at him. Angry, yes . . . but at him! He knew, too, that part of what drew her to him, made her come over and nearly kick his door down, was her own feelings for him, the bond that had grown between them, the times they’d saved and spared and covered for each other. Like it or not, they were joined. Their attraction was all the more potent for being unspoken, their complicity all the more binding for being unacknowledged. But it also drove her nearly crazy to know he’d broken the law. She couldn’t stand it. Everything in her nature told her to chase him down and catch him, just as he was born and bred to run. She was a cop, a Fed, and when she put on black and stood in a row at a funeral, shoulder to shoulder with her people, it would be for her fallen comrade, not for his. She was law. And he was against the law. So how could they be for each other?

  25

  THEY BURIED BIG EDDIE in Calvary, the vast cemetery in Queens, a city of the dead within the city, with over three million souls, from Civil War veterans on down to Eddie, fallen on a Brooklyn sidewalk in the line of duty. The endless rows of gravestones created their own landscape, a necropolis mirroring, or perhaps mocking, the Manhattan skyline that blared triumphantly, and vainly, in the background: from ornate mausoleums proclaiming the persistence of ego beyond death, to the family crypts, layered generation over generation, to the crumbling forgotten stones of the poor, their names erased by weather as by history, to the lost traces of the past, sleeping under our feet. Everyone striving, fighting, buying, selling, loving, hating, and feverishly living in those towers across the river that reached for the sun would soon end up here, if there was still room for them. If some even worse fate hadn’t already taken us.

  After the interment, Carol took the car and went to help Annette get food and drinks ready for the mourners who’d be filling the family house with their sympathy. Gio lingered, to walk and talk with Joe, safe with those secret-keepers, who truly understood the code of silence. Nero waited by the car, finally enjoying a smoke, among those beyond caring about their health, or his.

  “How’s the back?” Joe asked, as the last mourners got into cars and left.

  Gio waved it off. “Fine. Hurts. But I’ll live. Unlike some.” He looked at Joe. “So it’s Anton? That Russian motherfucker double-crossed us.”

  “Looks that way. Hard to see how anyone could be running that operation in his territory, with Russian talent, without him knowing. And they were ready for us. They had a sniper on point and an ambush waiting. Someone told them we’d be coming sooner or later. Someone from that meeting at Rebbe’s. Who else could it be?”

  “I knew it. I never liked that prick. First of all, those cigarettes he smokes stink like burning dog shit. And who smokes inside, in a windowless room, with other people? And talk about milking a joke. You ever notice that? Every time I say something that gets a laugh he has to try and top it.”

  “Sounds like the death penalty to me.”

  “Petty bullshit I know. But my point is, I never liked him, but I held my tongue, and my temper. Now we have no choice. He hit first. We unite, all of us, and we take him out for good.”

  “Not yet,” Joe said. “You’ve got to hold it a little longer.”

  “Why?”

  “Even if we are sure Anton is running White Angel, he is not the one behind those attacks. Or the ambush last night. Those police reports Fusco gave you? Nero showed them to me and I read them in the car. The bomb in Alonzo’s car was high-tech military stuff. The attack on Maria’s crew used high-velocity sniper rounds fired from a distance by a sharpshooter. Last night they fired armor-piercing rounds at us.”

  “So?”

  “That’s the shit they shoot at tanks. It cut through the refrigerated truck like butter. I’m pretty sure they had infrared heat detectors on us too. Full body armor . . .”

  “I get you,” Gio said, nodding now, calmer.

  “The guys at the service today? Sure they’d march into battle for you or for Eddie. But I don’t care how tough they are. They’re still street guys. These were trained soldiers.”

  “Army? Spies? Who?”

  “Mercenaries. Just like the ones we ran across in Afghanistan.
The way I figure it, Wildwater and their accomplices are behind the whole Zahir thing, using it as a cover to steal dope, smuggle it, and make money to finance whatever shady shit they’re up to, corporate, political . . .”

  “CIA?”

  Joe shrugged. “Why not? Wouldn’t be the first time. And Yelena made a Russian spy at the Wildwater building. Let’s say that’s the connection to Anton. They bring him in to run their New York distribution, handle the street crews.”

  “And he’s clever about it,” Gio adds. “He knows the shit’s so good he can expand fast, move in on new territory, but he hires neighborhood people to sling it on the corners, so it doesn’t connect back to him.”

  “Right. These local crews don’t even know who they’re working for, just a smoking package and muscle if they need it. But the security, the deep security anyway, is Wildwater people. Has to be.”

  “And with all that money flowing in and all that firepower behind him, Anton figures it was time to step up and move against us.”

  “Or he knew that with us looking into Zahir, we’d get to him eventually. So he struck first.”

  “And you hit back hard last night. The street value of that stash once they cut it? You cost him millions. Not a knockout but you hurt him. Why back off now?”

  “Not back off, stop to figure the next shot. Like you said, we hurt him, financially. And it is going to be hard to hold all that territory with no product. So what does he care about most right now? The next shipment. That’s the key. How are they getting the stuff in? Until we figure that out, we can’t cut the head off the monster.” Joe shrugged. “Even if we wiped out Anton and his whole gang today, you’d still have that pipeline and that private army loose in the city, just looking for their next front man.”