Damned right he could.
Paul Tarkanian was nothing if not a realist. Which was why he agreed to meet Joel Rapaport at Tony Packo’s on the east side. Better, he decided, a highly public place where he would certainly be noticed than a hole in the corner where the meet would look furtive. With luck, he could pass it off as a campaign talk, shaking hands with the lunch crowd before sitting down at a table. And if Rap had any brains at all, he’d show dressed like a Toledo businessman and not a drug dealer.
When the handshakes were finished and the backs slapped, Tarky, as if he’d completed the only thing he’d come for, sauntered over to the corner table where Rap waited. He slid the chair out and settled himself in it, giving the hovering waiter the kind of big campaign smile he usually left to his candidate.
“I’ll take two Hungarians, extra onions,” he said, patting his ample stomach as if it could hardly wait for the treat.
When the kid was gone, Tarky leaned over and said, “I hope to hell you’ve got Maalox. These dogs kill me every time I come here.”
Rap’s crooked smile answered him. “Then why don’t you order the cottage cheese plate?” He held up a bony hand. “No, don’t tell me. The Congressman’s campaign manager can’t be seen eating cottage cheese in a place famous for its heartburn. You have to show the voters you’re a real man. You have to—”
“Cut the crap and tell me what I’m doing here.” Tark the Shark said the words in a low voice; his face still wore the campaign-mode smile. No one observing the two would realize there was anything but casual small talk going on.
“There’s a ballbusting U.S. attorney on my back.” Rap lifted a beer to his lips and drank, then wiped away a foam mustache. “I need her off my back.”
Tarky leaned over the table and whispered, “If you think I’m going to quash a drug charge for you—”
“I think you’re going to do anything I need you to do,” Rap replied. The lazy, insolent smile on his lips infuriated Tark.
“If, that is, you have any desire to get free of Al Czik. I hear he’s holding your paper and wants the full amount by midnight. I could see to it that a substantial contribution is made to the Tannock campaign by a political action committee.”
A substantial contribution. One that Tarky could siphon off to pay the loan shark and then repay from the winnings on his next decent bet. And with PAC money flowing like honey into political campaigns all over the country, the election commissioners were unlikely to investigate one little congressional race.
Tarky’s mind was made up of watertight compartments, like the Titanic. Even those few people who thought they knew Paul Tarkanian failed to see the sealed-off compartments under the waterline.
In one compartment was his life with Wes, playing political wife, working behind the scenes to create the illusion that was John Wesley Tannock. In another was his secret passion. He gambled the way other men breathed; needed it the way other men needed sex. He’d never met, or even fantasized about, the woman who could give him the ecstasy a good long-shot win provided.
His partnership with Wes Tannock was the same kind of gamble. He’d spent ten years grooming and building John Wesley Tannock, and now he was gambling those ten years of his life on another man.
If Wes found out that he was taking money from Rap, Wes would fire him. If the election commission found out he was using campaign contributions for his own use, he could go to jail. He put these inconvenient facts into one of the watertight compartments and filed them away.
Then he proceeded to do what he did best: convince himself he was betting on a winner.
Who knew, maybe the money might never be missed. Maybe Wes would never find out that there had ever been a contribution by this phony PAC of Rap’s.
But what did Rap want him to do for it?
He opened his mouth to ask, but Rap anticipated him. “No, this isn’t about drugs. It’s just a little side business Dana and I have.”
“How illegal is this side business?”
“We rebuild electronic components for airplanes. Strictly on the up-and-up, according to FAA specifications. But some of our workers aren’t exactly in this country legally, and we don’t comply with every Mickey Mouse government regulation. Penny-ante shit, Wes, you have my word. But we don’t need the hassle with this sanctuary thing going on. If you could just buy us a little time on it, I’d be in your debt.”
“Doesn’t sound like anything a U.S. attorney would waste her time on,” Tarky remarked. He steepled his fingers and gazed at Rap.
“But then,” he went on, his voice silky, “you’ve given me your word that this isn’t going to blow up in my face. And your word, of course, has always been—”
He broke off as the waiter brought lunch. “Those look fantastic.” He picked up a hot dog dripping with onion sauce and lifted it to his mouth. He bit off a morsel and made loud noises of appreciation. Two guys at the next table turned their heads. One gave him a thumbs-up sign and the other said, “Great food, huh, Tark?”
Tarky could only nod, his mouth full. He returned the thumbs-up and turned his attention back to Rap. His old friend had a cheese fry in his left hand and a derisive smile on his face.
“We’re both going to be in the emergency room together from this traef,” Rap said. “Between my ulcer and your irritable bowel, we’ll be in serious pain.”
“Which United States attorney are we talking about?” Tarky mopped sauce from his chin. He was careful to hold the hot dog at a distance from his custom-made shirt and linen jacket. His tie was tossed over his shoulder to keep it out of the way of flying grease.
“Her name is Sawicki. Can’t think of her first name. But she’s on a crusade. Seems to think Dana and I are the Bonnie and Clyde of Lucas County.”
“Just tell me again that this has nothing to do with drugs. I can help with anything but that.”
“As God is my witness,” Rapaport replied, his hand raised as if to take an oath in court, “drugs are not involved.”
“It’s a business, Jan. That’s all. A perfectly ordinary business.” Dana spaced the words as if talking to a child.
It was Rap’s fault for enlisting Jan in the first place. Rap had assured her they had nothing to fear from Jan. She was a basket case, Rap said, a neurotic with a drinking problem and a coke habit. So what the hell was she doing snooping around the factory?
“It’s a sweatshop,” Jan retorted. “A portable sweatshop.” She pointed to the three trailers, grouped behind the cornfield. “I can believe Rap would do this, but you? How can you—”
“How can I what?” Dana’s color rose as anger infused her. Who the hell did Jan think she was? “How can I pay these workers three times what they’d get in Mexico? Almost twice what they’d get hoeing pickles? How can I take them out of the fields, give them a job where they get to sit down?”
“I suppose you pay minimum wage, too,” Jan replied. “And take out for Social Security and FICA. And give them a pension. And what about day care? An old radical like you, I’m sure you have a day care center for the children somewhere around here. Maybe in a chicken coop.” She screwed up her thin face. “God, this is so disgusting. You and Rap exploiting the—”
“Exploiting! Don’t talk to me about exploiting. Thanks to Rap and me these people aren’t doing backbreaking physical labor. Thanks to us they learn a skill other than weeding and picking. Thanks to us they earn American money instead of worthless pesos back in Mexico.”
“Thanks to you they live a life off the books. They work for peanuts, because even peanuts are better than pesos. Okay, I grant you that. They make more from you than they would in Mexico. But it’s still under minimum wage. It’s still against the law. Which is why it’s hidden back here where the authorities can’t find it. Because you and Rap both know what you’re doing is wrong.”
“It’s illegal. That doesn’t make it wrong.” Dana’s tone was flat; she’d thought this out long ago and her rationale was fully formed. No room for doubt.
“You remember our old slogan, ‘Fuck the System.’ Well, that’s all Rap and I are doing. Nobody gets hurt, we all get paid, and Uncle Sam gets screwed. What’s not to like?”
“I repeat, are these people—”
“Let’s take a little walk down memory lane, shall we?” Dana put her hands on her hips, legs apart, squared off and facing her opponent like a judo master.
“While you were boozing it up, doping your way through adulthood, I had a kid to support. After I left Rap in Nepal and came back home, I had no job, no skills, and a hell of a lot of anger. And if you think Rap pays child support—”
“Gee, that’s tough,” Jan cut in. “I hear worse than that every day at AA meetings, Dana.” She gestured toward the trailers. “These people don’t have any of your advantages. They take the shit you and Rap feed them because they’ve got no choice. Don’t you see? When people have no choice and you do, and you take advantage of the fact that they have no choice, that’s exploitation. And it sucks.”
Dana looked at Jan, raking her eyes up and down the familiar lines of her. Thin, passionate, strung out, hyper Jan with her emotions on the surface. No protective layers of booze or dope to soften the hard edges of reality. There was a terrible honesty about Jan; she talked as though the whole world were an AA meeting where she could share her deepest truth and be heard without consequences.
But that wasn’t true. She was in the real world now, and there would be consequences.
“What are you going to do about it?” Dana asked.
“What I have to do. See that it stops. See that these people aren’t used anymore.”
“You do that and you’ll get them all deported.” Dana’s voice held a hint of gloat. “Is that your idea of helping the poor and downtrodden—have them shipped back to countries where they’ll starve at best and be tortured at worst? You turn us in, Jan, and you condemn the people you say you care about.” She paused and then moved in for the kill. “At least let us get Joaquín Baltasar out of here. He’s at the Migrant Rest Center and we’ve got to move him quickly. After that, we’ll get the others out and it will all be over anyway.”
After a minute Jan said, “Okay. I see your point. But if it continues, I’ll have no choice but to go to the authorities.”
Unlike Jan, Dana was an able liar. She nodded her agreement. “Fair enough,” she agreed. “Come back in three days and these trailers won’t be here.” She didn’t say where they would be—Rap undoubtedly had several fallback locations. The factory wasn’t in trailers for nothing. Mobility was a major asset to their operation.
But Jan wasn’t stupid. “And I don’t mean setting up again behind someone else’s cornfield. I mean the whole show shut down. Nobody sweating it out in these sardine cans. Or else. I mean it, Dana. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
So will I, sister, Dana thought. So will I.
And if I don’t, Rap will.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The old Rivoli Bar was gone, a victim of urban renewal—or, as we used to call it in those days, Negro removal. So when Rap and I decided to meet for an after-dinner drink, we settled for a fern bar in the Portside shopping complex. There were no painted wooden airplanes hanging from the ceiling, no old-fashioned bowling game with a real wooden ball and miniature pins, no hookers lounging on barstools waiting for the guys from the third shift.
But one thing hadn’t changed. “Still the same old Rapper,” I said, my words coming out a tad slurred. Three rum-and-Cokes in thirty minutes will do that to you. “You always used to say there were two kinds of people: those who seduce and those who are seduced. And you’re still a seducer, aren’t you? You’re still Coyote the Trickster.”
Rap raised his glass in a mock-salute; he was still on his first gin-and-tonic. Always in control, the Rapper. Always watching and waiting for the other person to show weakness.
“At least I know where I stand with you,” I continued. “Or should I say I take comfort in the fact that I never have known and never will know where I stand with you. That, at least, is predictable and therefore safe.” I was under the illusion that my ability to construct complex sentences constituted proof positive of sobriety.
He spread his skinny arms wide in a gesture of openness that didn’t fool me for a minute. “Hey, Little Sister,” he said, slurring the sibilants, “what you see is what you get.”
“How many businesses do you have?” I considered this a very penetrating question.
“I own a store,” he answered, his gray eyes widening to show sincerity. “Sounds of Silence. Stereos, radios, a little recording equipment—”
“Stop right there.” I held up a hand. “Recording equipment as in little tiny gadgets you can put in a cigarette lighter? Telephone bugs? How much of the stuff you sell in there is legal according to the FCC?”
“I know you like murder mysteries, Cassie, but you’re talking James Bond, not real life.”
“Cut the shit, Rap. I’ve known you too long to believe—”
“Correction.” The sharp voice sliced through my words. “You knew me for one summer a long, long time ago. Don’t pretend you know thing one about me, okay? And don’t believe everything you hear from my darling ex-wife, either. She’d like nothing better than to find out I’m up to my ears in illegal shit. It would confirm her good judgment in walking out on me. Never mind that it was nearly thirty years ago and that both of us were very different people back then.”
“Were you?”
“Weren’t you?”
He had me there. If I’d changed, why couldn’t I believe he might have done the same?
Because he looked like the same old Rap, for one thing. Oh, thinner hair, a touch of gray, more lines in the lean face. But the same gimlet gray eyes, the same restless hands, the same whippet body. The same gleam of rapacious intelligence in those unforgettable eyes. The same hint of danger, the same go-to-hell attitude.
It was Wes I’d wanted. It was Ted I got. It was Rap, I realized with sudden drunken understanding, who’d made me shiver all the way down to my toes. What I’d thought was a mixture of fear and loathing turned out to be plain old sexual chemistry.
I shivered now. “Goddamn air conditioning,” I muttered. I picked up my glass and downed the watery dregs of my drink.
Rap signaled the waiter for another round. I promised myself I’d nurse this one. I glanced out the window, to where the High Level Bridge spanned the Maumee River. It was getting dark, and lights from the bridge twinkled against the violet sky.
“I just can’t believe,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on a logical instead of an emotional plane, “that you were involved in the sanctuary movement out of pure idealism. You had to have something else going on, and I can only come up with one alternative.”
“How unimaginative of you,” my companion murmured. I made a mental note to return to this point, but plowed on with my original remark.
“Drugs. Cocaine, to be exact.”
My bombshell fizzled. “You’ve been talking to Dana,” Rap said. He stretched his arm over the back of the leatherette booth. “She always had a one-track mind. I’d hoped you, on the other hand, would be able to—”
“But the problem is,” I went on, raising my voice, “that even if you’d shipped half the coke in Colombia to half the noses in Canada, the statute of limitations has run. So why would you have tried to kill Jan? No matter how much she might have known about your activities, the truth couldn’t really hurt you anymore. It’s not as if you were running for Congress or anything.”
“I have never sought the bubble reputation,” he replied with a half smile that reminded me of the big bad wolf. “Unlike your old flame Wes Tannock.”
“Not you, too,” I said. “I’ve had about enough of that shit from Ron. Wes was not my old flame.”
Rap was the master of deception, but he wasn’t going to deceive me so easily. All of this banter was a way to keep my mind off the important fact: that he had things to hide, things he didn’t
want Jan talking about.
I went doggedly back to my point. “The statute of limitations has run on every crime in the book except one.”
“And you don’t need a law degree to know what that one is, do you, Sister Cassie?” The vulpine teeth showed.
“So who did you kill?”
“When?” Rap’s smile reminded me of Luke Stoddard’s deep-sea smile. “Are we talking 1982 or 1969?”
Any illusion I might have had that I was in control of this conversation fled at this point. “You don’t mean you believe Jan’s craziness about Kenny being murdered?”
“Your sainted brother does.”
“My sainted brother has been married to that crazy bitch for fourteen years and never told me.” To my horror, tears clogged my voice. “Fourteen fucking years and he never said a word.”
Rap was out of his seat and in mine in less than ten seconds. His long sinewy arm stretched around me and his big bony hand squeezed my shoulder. He gently guided my head toward his chest and stroked my hair.
I fell apart. Four drinks hit me all at once and I let the full impact of Ron’s betrayal sink in. Rap handed me a cocktail napkin and I pressed it against my eyes and nose. Within seconds it was a soggy mess of tears and mucus.
He handed me another one, and then another and another until I’d sobbed out all my pain.
“Oh, my God,” I said. I straightened up and pulled back from Rap. “I can’t believe I did that.”
Rap lifted his hand and a college-boy waiter appeared. “Coffee,” he ordered. “Make it two.”
He made no move to go back to his side of the booth. He was so close I could smell aftershave and gin, sweat and another, musky smell that I couldn’t identify but which sent an electric buzz through my skin.
Joel Alan Rapaport was not a good-looking man. His nose was too big and too broken-looking, his thinning hair was a mess of uncombed kinks, and his body was too lanky to be a comfortable resting place. His voice, while insinuating, lacked the deep sexiness of Luke Stoddard’s. But he was alive—every cell of his body seemed deeply involved in the business of enjoying life.
Troubled Waters Page 16
