A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  The gravel voice actually laughed. “No sweat. We’ll accept delivery in a wheelchair.”

  I told him I’d scout around for a suitable site and would phone back at four that afternoon.

  “Four, okay. Don’t talk to the fuzz. You talk to the fuzz, you never see the girl no more.” The line went dead in my ear.

  I suppose the blood must have drained from my face because Friday looked frightened. “It’s your doing,” I burst out. “If you hadn’t—”

  The lovely lady who tended to the counter and her two customers were all staring at me. I took Ornella by the elbow and steered her out of the store. Standing at the edge of the Mojave, I explained the situation to her in a few brittle words. She looked at me, heartbroken. “Oh my God!” she whispered.

  “I’ve got to figure something out,” I said.

  I turned and walked across the tracks into the desert. Ornella trailed after me several paces behind. I was in the mood for an orgy of recriminations. “If my daughter winds up dead because of you—”

  I heard her words over my sore shoulder, the one I’d used to break Gava’s jaw. “What will you do? Could you bring yourself to kill me, Lemuel? Maybe you don’t have the stomach for that. Maybe you’ll only beat me up like Emilio did, with short little punches to the breasts that make me gasp for breath.”

  I winced when she called him Emilio again. I was afraid to turn and face her, afraid that I would punch her in the chest. Violence begets violence. I kept walking, walking and thinking. Behind me, Friday had the good sense to shut up. Slowly the bits and pieces of a plan began to fall into place. It started with the wheelchair and went on from there. It was a long shot but my only shot. We were deep into the desert when I finally turned around. Ornella sank to her knees, her face speckled with grains of fine sand that had stuck to her skin where it was streaked with tears. “I would go back and change things if I could,” she murmured.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” I said.

  Twenty-eight

  We were crouching next to the Toyota on the rise in the desert across the tracks and up from Kelso Depot, not far from where we’d set out the tarpaulin and watched Gava’s Ferrari come down the road the night before. Gava’s body, which I’d excavated from his wadi grave and brushed pretty much clean of sand, was propped up with a neck brace and lashed onto the motorized wheelchair in front of the car. I’d rented both the brace and the wheelchair from the medical supplies store above the Beauty Emporium in Searchlight. The idea had come to me when I remembered Mr. Baldini tooling around his office in a motorized wheelchair. Max-Leo, the son in Millman & Son Hard and Soft Ware, had jury-rigged a remote joystick from one of his remote-controlled model planes so I could steer the wheelchair from a distance. Max-Leo was a whiz kid with electronics. He’d produced a two-deck tape player and toggled back and forth between my tape of Gava calling the police and a virgin cassette, recording from one tape to the other, until I had Gava saying what I wanted. Then Max-Leo had wired on a battery-powered loudspeaker so that I could broadcast Gava’s voice into the desert. Friday, meanwhile, had rummaged around the shelves of Searchlight’s secondhand apparel boutique and come away with black tights, black Reeboks, long black opera gloves and a long-sleeved midnight blue turtleneck sweater. She’d blackened her face with a cosmetic she kept in her astronaut knapsack for when she worked life-sized puppets with sticks. I’d caught her act in that Pueblo youth club, I was about to catch it again. Crouching next to me in the darkness, you’d never know she was there if you didn’t know she was there. I’d dialed an 800 number from a booth in Searchlight to double-check the Union Pacific freight train schedule, then phoned the Nevada number again to set a time and a place for the exchange—eleven thirty on the nose at Kelso Depot. God willing, my live Kubra for their dead Gava. I’d used the last of the daylight to scout the desert trails around Kelso before going to ground. Or should I say going to sand.

  I could see Ornella was jumpy. I needed her to perform flawlessly, so I tried to calm her down. “This is going to work out,” I said.

  Friday said, “I’ll never forgive myself if it doesn’t. If only—”

  The wind had come up and with it the sand. Both of us were rubbing it out of our eyes. When the Ruggeri crowd showed up they would, thank God, be rubbing it out of their eyes, too. “We have to deal with the situation we have,” I said. “There’s no place for ifs.”

  “If is the storyline of my life.”

  “Not mine.”

  “You’ve been lucky.”

  “I like to think I made my luck.”

  Headlights flickered down the road, then a second pair, then a third. Three cars appeared over a rise on the tarmac. Two of the cars pulled up behind the hotel, the third car, a long black limousine, parked alongside the hotel’s dilapidated porch. Its headlights dimmed and then went off. I could hear car doors opening. Watching through the night-vision goggles, I could make out four men emerging into the bluish green seascape from the limousine. Men from the other cars joined them—I counted nine men standing on either side of the limousine. Several cradled rifles in the crook of their arms. One of the men had both his hands up to his face. I supposed he was looking through night-vision binoculars.

  The headlights of the limousine blinked on and off twice. I reached through the open window of the Toyota and flashed my headlights twice in reply.

  A handheld spotlight swept the desert and came to rest on Gava, strapped into the wheelchair.

  From the hotel porch, the hoarse voice of an older man called through a tinny megaphone, “You okay, Silvio?”

  Ornella, squatting behind the wheelchair, worked the sticks that we had attached to the backs of the wrists of the very dead Emilio Gava. Seen from the limousine, seen by the Ruggeri foot soldiers with sand in their eyes, Gava must have looked as if he were waving his arms over his head as his voice, broadcast from a speaker Max-Leo had wired to the tape deck, echoed over the dunes.

  “I’m awright, I’m awright, take my woid for it, huh?”

  From the hotel porch, the hoarse voice started to ask a question but Gava’s voice cut him off. “Awright, I have not got all night. What do you say we put this show on the road, huh?”

  The thin figure of a young woman appeared in front of the limousine. A man reached behind her to untie her hands. Massaging her wrists, she looked back at the older man on the porch, then started walking toward the tracks and the desert. At the Toyota, I turned on the wheelchair’s motor from my remote and then worked the joystick so that it started slowly down the track toward the railroad crossing. The handheld spotlight followed it. I took a quick look at my Bulova—it was 11:44. I caught the distant whimper of the Union Pacific freight train as its headlights appeared around a bend of the tracks. The wheelchair and Kubra crossed each other at the tracks. Kubra slowed to take a look at the man—oh, was I proud of her then. She must have noticed that his head was propped up in a neck brace, she couldn’t have missed the dried bloodstains on his skin and shirt, it surely dawned on her that the man was stone dead. She must have seen the note I’d pinned to the chest of the corpse because she looked uphill in my direction, then back at the Ruggeri crew around the limousine. I could see from her body language that she’d pretty much figured out what had happened. “Thanks a lot and the same to you, you son of a bitch,” she shouted at the man in the wheelchair—loud enough for the goons back at the limousine to think the two had exchanged pleasantries. “Resist the impulse to run,” I said under my breath—and by golly, Kubra did. She kept walking on up the track, closing the distance between her and the Toyota with each lovely step.

  “Your daughter’s got a lot of gumption,” Ornella said in my ear.

  “What she has is lot of guts. That’s how she survived Afghanistan.”

  Two figures detached themselves from the others at the limousine. I could have sworn one of them was that Mario character who had scratched his diamond ring across the fender of my Studebaker. I recognized him because he was on
the short side, short and thickset, with a fedora planted on his head. He walked up to the tracks to meet the man in the wheelchair. Under my breath, I muttered, “Come on, Kubra, run for it now.” Then I called out, “Run, Kubra,” and she did, she ran with the long-legged strides of a beautiful girl who had run for her life before. To me it looked as if her feet barely touched the ground.

  Across the tracks, the bellow of rage from Mario as he reached the wheelchair was drowned out by the shrill whistle of the Union Pacific locomotive coming down the tracks. The goons at the limousine produced pistols, the men with rifles snapped the butts to their shoulders, but before any of them could get off a shot the locomotive hauling freight across Arizona was on the tracks between them and us.

  It was one of those endless trains and it gave me the precious minutes I needed to bundle Kubra and Friday into the four-wheel-drive Toyota and plunge back into the Mojave along the trails I’d scouted that afternoon.

  “Why’d you kill him, Gunn?” Kubra asked once we’d put some distance between us and Kelso Depot.

  “It was me who killed him,” Friday announced.

  I pulled off the night-vision goggles and flicked on the Toyota’s high beams. By happenstance we were passing through the wadi where I’d buried Gava, and then deburied him. “It was justifiable homicide,” I explained.

  “Who is she?” Kubra looked sharply at Ornella. “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “My name’s Ornella. Ornella Neppi. Your father calls me Friday, which was the day of the week our life lines first crossed.” Ornella touched my elbow. “I’ve become very attached to the nickname.”

  I could see Kubra’s head in the rearview mirror. She reached for my shoulder. I was so elated to have her in the car I didn’t tell her it was sore. “I have a lot of catching up to do,” she said. “Who was the dead guy, Gunn?”

  “A thug.”

  “What did you write on the note you pinned to his chest?”

  “I wrote An eye for an eye. I signed it Giancarlo Baldini.”

  “Who is Giancarlo Baldini?” Kubra asked.

  “He’s the godfather of the Baldini family—his son was set up for a kill by the dead goon in the wheelchair.”

  “That’s going to provoke gang war between the two casino families,” Friday guessed.

  “Couldn’t happen to nicer mobsters,” I said.

  Twenty-nine

  To my eternal relief, Giancarlo Baldini didn’t deposit a not-so-small packet of money in an out-of-the-way bank by way of bounty for eliminating the Ruggeri soldier who had set up the hit on his son Salvatore. It wasn’t hard to figure out why. In the settling of scores at Clinch Corners that followed my malevolent An eye for an eye note pinned to the corpse at Kelso Depot, Giancarlo, the don of the Baldini family, met his maker when the elevator in his casino lost its brakes and plunged from his office to the casino’s subbasement, the one where they stored broken slot machines. I think those two proctologists assigned to the elevator were killed with him.

  And that was just the beginning.

  In the days that followed, stories of a Mafia feud in Clinch Corners, Nevada, made headlines in the Albuquerque Times Herald. Two rival Mafia families, which ran casinos across the highway from each other, were at war. There had been seven murders. One of the casinos and a members-only joint on the Colorado River code-named Whistlestop had been burned to the ground. Bombs had exploded in several mobile homes and automobiles. State police had moved in and arrested eighteen members of the two families, some on murder charges, others on income tax evasion and racketeering charges.

  The FBI’s regional witness protection guru, Charlie Coffin, has since become a good pal of mine. He slipped Kubra into the FBI program—he outfitted her with one of those pint-sized mobile telephones so I could check in with her from time to time and gave her a new identity in case a stray Baldini or Ruggeri got it into his head to get back at me through my daughter for Gava and the subsequent end of the Clinch Corners armistice. Charlie was glad to help out, the more so since I had no intention of going to the newspapers with the story of how the FBI fell for Emilio Gava’s story, which led to the sniper assassination of a member of a rival Mafia family already in the federal witness protection program. We were drinking beer in a roadside bar and keeping track, from afar, of the dustup at Clinch Corners when Charlie pointed out that there were still some loose ends to tie up.

  “How,” he asked, scratching his balding head in puzzlement, “did the Ruggeris discover that a private investigator named Lemuel Gunn was on the trail of one of their soldiers, Emilio Gava?”

  “Excellent question,” I said. On a paper napkin, I drew up a list of possibilities: There was Lyle Leggett, the Las Cruces Star photographer; Detective Awlson of the Las Cruces police; D.D. Dillinger, the bartender at the Blue Grass who dreams of inventing a new cocktail and giving his name to it; Alvin Epley, the concierge at East of Eden Gardens; Jesus Oropesa, the Chicano drug dealer; R. Russell Fontenrose, the three-hundred-dollar-an-hour fancy-pants attorney; the East of Eden regulars in Emilio’s Sunday night poker shootout, Frank Uzzel, Hank and Millie Kugler, and Hattie Hillslip. All of the above knew I was walking back the cat on Gava. Somewhere along the way one of these people alerted the Ruggeris, who then nosed around Hatch, found out about Kubra and kidnapped her. Through a process of elimination, based mostly on instinct and my reading of character, I ruled out one candidate after another until I was finally left with three: Jesus Oropesa, R. Russell Fontenrose and Hattie Hillslip, who just might have had a secret affair with Emilio Gava.

  “Leave me take care of this for you,” Charlie said.

  Later that afternoon he turned up at the Once in a Blue Moon with a smug grin on his face. He explained that he had gotten the Chicano drug pusher’s phone number from Detective Awlson and looked up the other two in the phone book. Slipping a growl into his already gravelly voice, he’d phoned each of the three candidates.

  I was hanging on Charlie’s every word.

  “The Chicano kid told me to fuck off. Hattie Hillslip thought I was the director of the Las Cruces old-age home calling to thank her for her volunteer work.”

  “What about R. Russell?”

  “Ah, R. Russell. I had one hell of a time getting past the secretary of his secretary. Finally, pretending to be affiliated with the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, I was put through to the man himself. ‘I’m calling to thank you for services rendered,’” I told him. ‘We got long memories. We don’t forget favors like the one you did us.’

  “And?”

  “R. Russell cleared his throat, then mumbled, ‘This is not something we should be talking about on the phone.’” He must have had a sudden twinge of doubt, because he blurted out, ‘Hold on, who is this?’”

  I’d brought in two cold bottles of Mexican Modelos and was kneading the bottletop from one of them into a ball with my fingers. “How the hell do you do that?” Charlie asked.

  I smiled. “I don’t do it. Pent-up anger does it. What’d you say to R. Russell?”

  “I told him my name wasn’t important. I told him I was an amigo of Lemuel Gunn, a private detective who had once admired his antique globes. I told him the aforementioned Mr. Gunn happened to be sitting next to me listening to the conversation. I told him Mr. Gunn was smiling a particularly nasty smile—if I didn’t know Mr. Gunn was incapable of violence, I would have described it as a brutal smile that hinted at cruel and unusual punishment. I told him I suspected he would be hearing directly from Mr. Gunn when he least expected it. It could be in a week or a month or a year. I told him to stay tuned.”

  “R. Russell’s going to have a lot of sleepless nights,” I said. “Thanks, sport.”

  “Hey, my pleasure,” Coffin said.

  Thirty

  I drove the Studebaker over to Las Cruces and picked up some army survey maps of Arizona east of the Grand Canyon, the area known as the Painted Desert. I bought a dozen six-packs of Dos Equis, a two-week supply of food stapl
es, and filled four twenty-gallon jerry cans with gasoline. Back at the Once in a Blue Moon, I checked to make sure the spare batteries were charged, and phoned the state weather office in Gallup and got the recorded voice that gives you the long-range forecast for the desert. Then I rented a four-wheel-drive pickup from the guy who owns the mobile home park in Hatch. As the sun was dipping behind the pines, I hitched the Once in a Blue Moon up to it. Friday pulled herself up into the pickup’s copilot seat. She was wearing a pair of white jogging shorts with slits up the sides and a white halter that revealed almost as much as it concealed. I had to admit she was a very attractive package, welts and all.

  “So with all that food and beer, you’d think we were heading off to Australia or something,” she remarked. “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”

  “You’re helping by being here,” I said. I slid behind the pickup’s wheel, started the motor, and pulled Once in a Blue Moon out of its berth and onto Interstate 25, heading north for Gallup and the Painted Desert.

  I’ve always liked to drive at night—the roads empty out, which makes towing Mr. Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s enormous mobile home a piece of cake. We were both lost in our thoughts for a long while. “Hot night,” Friday murmured at one point. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her dip both hands behind her back in that lovely gesture females have perfected, and her halter fell away.

  In the darkness we exchanged smiles. We’d come a long way from the weightless kiss she’d deposited on my lips in the parking lot of the slow-food restaurant.

  With my bare-breasted contessa sitting next to me, I worked my way north and, skirting Albuquerque at Los Lunas, headed west. By sunup the next morning we had put Gallup behind us and could make out the shimmering heat rising off the floor of the desert. I had spent three weeks in the Painted Desert once, muddling through a CIA survival course. Some British sergeants who had cut their teeth on the Sahara taught us how to spot topographical features that indicated there was fresh water under the ground; taught us how to trap and eat lizards, which was not something I really wanted to learn. Using the army maps and the hour hand of my wristwatch to determine due south, I came across the old single-lane road that meandered through the eroded layers of colored clay and came to a dead end at a spot where the Little Colorado River widened into something resembling a lake.