Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  “What did you want me to do?” Teddy said, exasperated.

  “Get a job,” she said. “A real job.”

  “This is better than a job,” he said. “This is a legitimate business venture.”

  “You come in here with Nick Pusateri’s pizza, and you’re going to talk to me about legitimate?”

  “This has nothing to do with him.” Which was the truth. “All I did was buy a pizza.” Which was a lie. He’d stopped by Pusateri’s to talk about their next job. But he couldn’t tell her that, because he’d promised that he’d never work for that man, or the Outfit, again.

  “Then tell me what this investment is,” she said. “No hemming and hawing. None of your flimflam. Tell me exactly who you’re in business with, and what you’re doing.”

  “I can’t, Mo. I just can’t. You just have to trust that what I’m doing, I’m doing for the family.”

  “Trust,” she said bitterly.

  He nodded. “That’s all I need. A little trust.”

  “Yet you can’t trust me,” she said. Her lips were trembling. “Your wife.”

  “Not until it pays off. Then, I swear, you’ll understand why I—”

  Frankie burst into the kitchen, followed by Buddy. “Can you make cookies?”

  “I’m not one of your marks,” Maureen said. She gathered up the bank statements, ignoring the boys, who were clamoring for her attention. He watched her in silence, thinking they were done with the argument, and then she handed him the pile. “That’s not true,” she said. “I was your first mark.”

  The next morning, Maureen informed him that she’d accepted Destin Smalls’s offer to work for the government in a new program called Project Star Gate. And not long after that, Nick Pusateri ended Teddy’s career as a cardshark.

  Graciella unlocked the door to the offices from the inside and let them in. There were no hugs—she was not that kinda gal—but she shook hands with Irene. “Welcome to NG Group.”

  “You’re the G?” Irene asked.

  “The N liked to keep me in the dark, even though I was the owner on paper.”

  “And now you want to be the owner in fact,” Teddy said.

  “Now I have to be. I don’t know how much of this business is real, and how much of it is a front for the other Pusateri business. I don’t even know if I’m the only owner. I wouldn’t be surprised to uncover a few silent partners.” She led them through an empty cubicle farm—none of the agents had yet come in—to a big glassed-in office. She gestured toward the computer and the large beige monitor. “Nick Junior gave me the password for the accounting software, but I don’t know what I’m doing. Your dad said you were good at this.”

  Irene gave him a look, then said to Graciella, “What are you looking for, exactly?”

  “The money,” Graciella said, and Teddy laughed.

  Irene went to work like some kind of…computer person. She got the machine running, and for the next five minutes did nothing but grunt and talk to herself, eyes scanning the screen, while Graciella hovered behind her. He’d have never expected his telepathic daughter to learn accounting, but he had to admit it was a pleasure to have a child with such arcane skills.

  Teddy, ensconced in an overstuffed womb chair designed, evidently, to lure clients into childlike trust, watched the women as long as he could before boredom overcame him. He checked the Rolex. They’d been here five minutes. “Tell her about the teeth,” Teddy said to Graciella.

  “I think she’s busy,” Graciella said.

  Irene looked up. “Did you say teeth?”

  “You’re distracting her,” Graciella said.

  “It’s pertinent to the situation,” Teddy said. “It’s why we’re here.”

  “Teeth?” Irene repeated.

  “I want her to hear it from you,” Teddy said to Graciella. Then to Irene: “They’re proof that Nick Junior is an innocent man.”

  “He’s not completely innocent,” Graciella said. “But he is the father of my children. I have to think of them.”

  “Teeth,” Irene prompted.

  Graciella leaned back against the window ledge, crossed her long legs, and frowned as if deciding where to start. She looked terrific in a tight green skirt and a Creamsicle-orange blouse, a combination that he wouldn’t have thought would work but most certainly did. More evidence that women were braver than men.

  “This can’t leave this room,” Graciella said. Irene nodded, waiting for her to continue. Graciella said, “You know Nick Junior is on trial for the murder of Rick Mazzione. And you may have read that Nick Senior owned a piece of Rick Mazzione’s business. Took it, really, when Rick fell behind on his loan payments. Rick tried to pay up, but the debt was never settled, and Rick began to complain openly about this. He was perhaps getting angry enough to go to the police. Maybe he already had. So Nick Senior decided to find out.”

  Irene took in this information like a pro. No girly gasps, no derailing questions. But she was definitely evaluating each sentence. That was why Teddy wanted Graciella to tell the story. If Teddy had done it, Irene would know only that Teddy believed what the woman had told him. With Irene, you always had to be thinking of the secondhand-story problem.

  “This is where my husband gets involved,” Graciella said. “Nick Senior told him to invite Mazzione to a meeting, and then drive him out to a construction site. They began to…ask him questions. Nick Senior didn’t like the answers, and got angry. He punched Mazzione in the mouth.”

  Irene nodded. “Teeth.”

  “He knocked a few of them loose. Nick’s hand started bleeding, which only made him angrier.”

  “He gets angry easily,” Teddy explained to Irene.

  “I’m getting that impression,” Irene said.

  “My husband told me that Nick Senior went a little crazy then. He started pulling Mazzione’s teeth out with a pair of pliers. All of his teeth. Except for the molars. He couldn’t get the molars.”

  Irene looked at Teddy. “You were friends with this guy?”

  “Work friends,” he said. “Not the same thing.”

  “Then Nick shot him. Not my husband. Nick Senior.”

  “Your husband told you this?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you believe your husband.”

  Teddy almost laughed. The secondhand-story problem, in action.

  “Nick Senior made my husband bury the body on his own,” Graciella said. “When they found it, months later, it was missing those teeth, and they weren’t at the crime scene. My husband had saved them. He kept them in a cigar box in his sock drawer.”

  “Because keeping souvenirs of human body parts is a normal thing to do,” Irene said.

  “Monks keep bones of saints,” Teddy said reasonably.

  “You don’t have to defend him,” Graciella said. “My husband’s not perfect. And he doesn’t always think through his actions. But in this case, it’s a good thing.”

  Irene raised an eyebrow. “Because…”

  “Nick Senior’s blood is on Mazzione’s teeth. They put him at the scene of the crime.”

  “They wouldn’t take Junior’s word for it?” Irene asked.

  “My husband won’t testify against his father. He’d never do that. But I will absolutely turn the teeth over to the district attorney. I’ve already hinted to the police that I have proof. That may have been a mistake, though. Nick Senior seems to know I have something.”

  “You can’t get cops to shut up,” Teddy said. “Plus, Nick Senior may have bought a few of them.”

  “Or a lot of them,” Graciella said.

  “So why haven’t you done it?” Irene asked. “Turned them over. Gotten Nick Senior charged.”

  “Because the charges may not stick, and I want something more than his arrest,” Graciella said. “I want independence.”

  Somehow, when Graciella was melodramatic, it worked, like orange on green. Who knew?

  “I want my own life after my husband goes to jail,”
Graciella said. “I want a clean business with no Outfit connections. And I want my boys to grow up without seeing their grandfather’s face ever again. I’ll trade the teeth to him for that.”

  Teddy watched his daughter’s face. Her eyes had gone squinty. It was the look Maureen used to give him when he came home with liquor on his breath. Damn it, had Graciella lied to her—lied to them both?

  “How many photocopiers are in this building?” Irene asked.

  “Three,” Graciella said. “One is color.”

  “I’m going to need copies of all the tax returns, and all the paper ledgers you can find,” Irene said. “Oh, and blank floppy disks. A lot of floppy disks.”

  He used to love the feel of cards in his hands. There was no finer pleasure than to sit around a table drinking and smoking and telling lies with a group of well-heeled men, dealing them exactly the cards he wanted them to hold. Of course, those men weren’t friends, could never be friends. The next best pleasure was to sit around a table drinking and smoking and telling lies with men who knew him well enough never to let him deal a deck of cards, or even cut them.

  “Tell ’em about Cleveland,” Nick Senior said.

  “That’s okay,” Teddy demurred. He’d only returned from Ohio a couple of nights before.

  “No, really. Guys, you will not fucking believe this story.” The Guys being Charlie, Teppo, and Bert the German. The regulars. Their usual Tuesday-night routine was to camp out in the back of Nick’s restaurant and eat pizza and drink Canadian Mist until dawn. They played, Teddy watched.

  “What happened in Cleveland?” Charlie asked. Not the sharpest knife, Charlie. It was a miracle that he could talk and deal at the same time.

  “Nothing,” Teddy said. He glanced at Nick, who was rolling out pizza dough at a big table. The best part of playing in the kitchen was that Nick kept them fed. The worst part was that every game was on Nick’s home turf. “A little trouble with a card game.”

  “Come on, what’d you do?” Charlie asked. Already laughing. He was the group’s official fuckup, a kind of mascot who’d lost Nick almost as much money as he’d made him. He sensed that Nick was mad. They all moved carefully when he was in a mood, for the same reason that you played gently with nitroglycerin.

  “Tell ’em,” Nick said. His stevedore arms were white to the elbow with flour. He was a big man, and determined to stay as big as he’d been in the fifties. He kept his hair in an oil-black D.A., wore the same shirts and tight pants he’d worn as a teenager, and listened to the oldies channel on the AM. The fixation on his youth was beginning to look ridiculous, but of course nobody was going to point this out to his face. “It was a hell of a setup,” Nick said. “I put Teddy in a tough spot.”

  Teddy shrugged. He was not going to complain to Nick in front of these guys. “Why don’t we just play cards?” he asked.

  “See, I sent Teddy down to help my cousin Angelo,” Nick continued. “He’d gotten himself into a game with a couple New Yorkers, Castellano guys.”

  “Castellano,” Charlie said. “Shit, why?”

  “Angelo was forced into being polite,” Nick said. “I said, hell, if you’re stuck playing with these fuckers, the least we can do is take their money. I said, I’m sending you a guy. I’ll bankroll him myself, twenty grand of my own money. I said, this guy’s the best fucking mechanic in the business.”

  The guys looked at Teddy, who offered a self-deprecating smile.

  Charlie laughed. “They let you be dealer?”

  Teddy shook his head. “I was playing the whale.”

  Nick said, “I told him to wear that fucking Newman Rolie. Flash it around.”

  Teddy was wearing it now. A 1966 “Paul Newman” Rolex Daytona with a diamond dial. Worth twenty-five grand, and the thing would only gain in value. It was like walking around with a Lakefront condo on his arm. Teddy dropped his hand below the table. “My job was to lose, but mostly to Angelo,” Teddy said. “Angelo, though, was struggling to keep up with the New Yorkers.”

  Nick snorted. “For good reason, it turns out. But to make it worse, the New Yorkers have two backup guys in the next room, hanging out with Angelo’s guys. Everybody’s armed to the teeth.”

  “Holy shit!” Charlie exclaimed.

  “But tell ’em the real problem,” Nick said.

  Teddy kept his face still, projecting calm. Good humor.

  “Go on,” Nick said. A commandment.

  “The real problem,” Teddy said finally, “was that the New Yorkers were tag-teaming us. They were signaling to each other, trying to cheat Angelo and me. One of them even tried bottom-dealing.”

  “On you?” Charlie said. “He’s trying to out-mechanic the mechanic?”

  “Fat chance,” Teppo said. He was five-foot-squat, a hundred and forty pounds, but Teddy had seen him crush the windpipes of men twice his weight. “So what’d you do? Start cheating back?”

  “Of course,” Teddy said. “But I couldn’t make any big moves during my deals, because I can’t tip ’em off that I’m a plant. But I can’t let the game keep going, because Angelo’s losing money every hand.”

  Bert the German grunted in appreciation of the conundrum. Bert hardly ever spoke. He was more dangerous than Teppo, and completely loyal to Nick.

  “It was eating you, too,” Nick said. “Admit it. You didn’t like these guys trying to out-cheat you, Teddy Telemachus.”

  “Of course he was mad!” Charlie said. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  Shut the hell up, Teddy thought.

  “Pride,” Nick said. “Pride starts to creep in.”

  Teddy looked up into Nick’s eyes. “Yes,” Teddy said. “A little bit of pride.”

  “So you had to take them down,” Nick said.

  Teddy nodded.

  Teppo and Bert had gone still. They could feel the change in the room. But fucking Charlie was swiveling his head between Nick and Teddy, laughing. “How’d you do it? Teddy? How’d you do it?”

  “I’d like to know that myself,” Nick said. “Somehow he rigged the next hand, without even dealing it himself. How’d you do that, Teddy?”

  Teddy tapped the surface of the table, remembering the last hand of the game. One of the New Yorkers was dealing. He pushed the deck to Teddy for the cut. Teddy made an amateurish cut using both hands and slid the deck back to the dealer.

  So much preparation had gone into that simple transaction. Teddy had arrived in Cleveland with all the decks that they’d be using that night. One was clean, but the rest were pegged so that he could read the bumps under his fingers as he dealt. Plus he had two extra decks, one in his jacket pocket, one in a felt pocket stitched to the underside of the table, loaded in two different schemes.

  Nobody noticed when he slid the pocket deck free. Nobody noticed when, thirty seconds later, he borrowed a card from the jacket deck and slipped it into the deck in his hand. And nobody noticed that the deck he returned after the cut was not the one he’d been handed.

  Nick was waiting for an answer. Teddy shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  Nick smiled. “I guess not.”

  “Okay, so what happened?” Charlie asked.

  “I only know this secondhand from Angelo,” Nick said. “And he was pretty hard to understand through all the bandages. But supposedly? Incredible. See, those two cheating fucks from New York, they find themselves with incredible hands. They start outbidding each other, and Angelo’s too stupid to get out of the way. Soon the pot’s huge, and everybody’s still in. They turn over the cards, and one of the New Yorkers’s got a straight, and the other’s got four of a kind, all deuces. Amazing, right? But here’s the topper: both New Yorkers are holding the two of spades.”

  Charlie was laughing, confused. “What? Holy shit!” Teppo and Bert weren’t laughing, though. Teddy had suspected that the two of them had already heard this story from Nick, and the suspicion was turning his gut to ice.

  “You can imagine how pissed off Angelo is,” Nick said. “Not the coolest head in the
best of times. He starts shouting, and the New Yorkers know that somebody’s just fucked with them, and now they’re pissed. The goons storm in from the next room, and that’s when the shit hits the fan.”

  Nick is looking at Teddy now. “A gun comes out. Angelo holds up his hand, and the bullet goes through his hand and into his jaw. The docs think the jaw can be fixed, but the hand, well the hand is just fucked. He’s going to bat lefty now.”

  “Holy shit,” Charlie said. He was not an imaginative curser.

  “I drove him to the hospital,” Teddy said. “I apologized to him.”

  The men mulled the end of the story as if savoring a meal.

  Then Nick shrugged. “I’d have preferred you held on to my money.”

  Teddy felt his heart thump once in his chest. Everyone looked at Nick.

  He wasn’t even pretending to work with the dough now. He flipped the switch on the pizza roller, and the two big cylinders whined up to speed.

  Bert the German put a beefy hand on Teddy’s arm, tugged for him to stand up.

  But Teddy couldn’t stand up. His legs had stopped working. Acid stung the back of his throat.

  Teppo and Bert hauled him upright. Charlie said, “What’s going on, guys?” He was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was about to happen.

  “Take off the watch,” Nick said.

  After three hours of poring over files, Irene told him and Graciella that two things were clear: there was too much to copy, and there was definitely something fishy going on with the numbers. Irene, though, was due for her shift at Aldi’s.

  “Let’s pack it up,” Graciella said. She no longer trusted for the paperwork to be safe in the office, because she had no idea how many people had keys, and who those people were loyal to. The only solution was to take everything they could get their hands on and move it off-site, where the women would go through it at their leisure. They filled the Buick’s trunk and the back of Graciella’s station wagon. She followed Teddy and Irene to the house, where they enlisted Buddy and Matty to help them unload.