by Chuck Wendig
Thirty years ago. When the Sandhogs opened up the Great Below and hell came spilling out. The monsters wanted a slice. Between the Sandhogs and Zoladski’s crime coalition, the nightmares got pushed back into the dark.
“Hell with it. Nobody came to listen to an old man talk about bullshit everybody already knows. Business is good. And business is gonna stay good. This thing that we do runs itself and me being six feet under ain’t gonna change that – not like I was getting any younger. Every day is a day gone, a day you don’t get back, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise to any one of us. Still, somebody needs to step up. Take the reins.”
Mookie looks around the room. The lieuts look anxious. And suddenly excited. Like one of them is going to be called up here and now and handed the keys to the city. Zoladski had a son, but the son died in a deal gone bad with one of the gangs, the Crimson Kings. The Kings paid for that transgression – heads cut off and sent to the other gangs as a message: This is what you get when you fuck with a Zoladski.
But it’s then that Haversham gives a nod to the far corner of the room and out from behind a stack of trays and chairs walks this young, reedy kid in an ill-fitting black suit with a narrow black tie. The kid hurries up to the front like a couple mop handles falling out of a hallway closet. Got two gold rings on his bulbous knuckles. Thin gold chain around his neck. It’s then Mookie sees the resemblance – square-shaped head, hair styled the same way (even though the kid’s is penny-red and the old man’s is like fresh snow). Same nose, too. Nose like an owl’s beak.
Mookie’s seen him before. But last time he saw him he was, what, knee-high to a chipmunk? Just a little boy then.
“My grandson,” the Boss says, the words a rheumy rattle. “Casimir Zoladski. Some of you have met him. He’s a good kid. He’ll succeed me in this. When I’m gone, he’s the new Boss, so give him the respect he deserves or he’ll cut your balls off. And I’ll come back from the dead to eat ’em.”
A moment hangs in the air before the applause, a handful of seconds bundled in the string of uncertainty where the lieuts shift nervously and wonder if this is some kind of fucking joke, that the Boss is going to hand over the entire Organization to a twenty-year-old wet-behind-the-ears whelp like this.
“So there it is,” the Boss says. Like he just pissed on the floor and is daring anybody to say something about it. “Let’s eat.”
Servers from downstairs put out chairs and tables and bring out food. A lot of it. Trays over burners. It’s a whole Polish spread: pierogies, three different types of kielbasa, golabki, pyzy dumplings, tomato soup, poppy seed rolls. Mookie wants to eat it all. He’s starving. He’s always starving but now’s worse than ever because the venom has him feeling gutted, like his blood sugar has fallen through the floor – and then this news? Cancer? Casimir? Mookie’s always been the type to eat his emotions and right now his emotions want him to shovel pierogies and sausage into his mouth until he passes out.
Then there’s that nagging thought: Nora knew about this. She told me he was sick.
How the hell did she know?
Mookie moves to get in line. He jostles Shawndell Washington, who turns to say something but then sees who he’s dealing with and then shuts up. Sometimes Mookie likes scaring people. Other times it makes him sad. Right now he just wants to eat.
Which is why it sucks that Werth comes up, grabs him out of line.
“Hey goddamnit,” Mookie protests with a grindstone growl.
“Shut up, you’ll get to eat. You’re like one of those goddamn Hungry Hungry Hippos.” He waves Mookie on. “Let’s go see the Boss.”
“He doesn’t want to see us.”
“He doesn’t want to see you. But we gotta pay our respects.”
“All right, all right. But then we eat?”
As they head over to the corner table where the Boss has parked himself, his tank, and Haversham, Werth slaps Mookie’s gut through his stained shirt. “I remember when you were cut like a slab of mountain rock. You got fat.”
“I got old.”
“I’m older than you,” Werth says. “And I’m thinner than ever.”
“You got a tapeworm. And you’re part goat.”
They stand in line behind a couple of other lieuts looking to kiss the ring, metaphorically-speaking. Werth keeps egging Mookie on: “I’m just saying, Mookie, you used to be a mean cut of meat. Now you’re like a… flabby chuck roast.”
“I can still hit things.” He snorts. “And chuck makes a damn good pot roast.”
“Oh, here we go. You and your little… froofy foodie obsession.”
“It’s charcuterie.”
“Shark cootery. Sounds French.”
“It is.”
“You’re too dumb to speak froofy French.”
Mookie shrugs. “Only French word I know. And it ain’t froofy. It’s meat. I kill pigs. I take their meat. I put it in sausages. I cure the fat. I eat it.”
“Whatever. You know what I like? That two cheeseburger meal at McDonald’s. Same every time. Couple bucks. Greasy and sweet. The pickle? The ketchup and mustard? Right on the money. And those fucking French fries, Jesus Christ on a cupcake those are like, the perfect– Oh, here we go.”
Ahead of them, Marla Koladky-Pinsky steps out of their way, gives them a pissy look like they’re the last pair of dingleberries hanging, and then–
There he is. The Boss. Looking small and crumpled. Like an origami tiger on the seat that somebody sat on without realizing.
The Boss stands. Steps around his oxygen tank, thrusts out a hand. That’s his thing. He shakes your hand no matter who you are.
Mookie takes the hand.
“Don’t break my arm,” the Boss says with a wink. He stifles a hard cough.
“I won’t.”
“You got a good grip. Confident. But not too confident.” The Boss doesn’t let go. He casts a squinty look down at the two hands – his own hand dwarfed by the human oven mitt that is Mookie’s. “I can tell everything with a handshake. Everything. It all comes together in that moment. I can tell if I like a guy. Or if I want to stick him in the gills with a switchblade. I can tell if he’s gonna betray me or if he’ll stand by me as Hell pisses on my head.” He licks his teeth. “You’re rock fucking solid, you are. Not just physically. You’re loyal. A good soldier. And you–”
He turns to Werth. Werth says, “Boss, I’m sorry as hell to hear about this.”
Zoladski waves a hand.
“God comes for all of us in the end. You know how he got me? Asbestos. This is a fuckin’ asbestos cancer.”
Haversham, in a clipped tone, adds: “Mesothiolioma.”
“Right. Asbestos cancer. Some time in my life, way back when, a little shitty speck of asbestos embedded in my lung-meat and now here we are. Death sentence.” He sniffs. “We had that shit in our house down in Kensington. In the roof shingles. In the siding. Wrapped around the pipes. Inevitable, I guess.”
“They got surgery they can do,” Werth says. “Right? Lung transplants. And then there’s chemo and radiation and, and– what?”
“Hell with all that,” the Boss says, flecks of saliva dotting his lip and gathering at the corners of his mouth like sea foam. “I go that way they maybe give me another three, four months, and my quality of life goes down the crapper. I’ll look like a baby bird what lost his feathers. No. We have to project strength. Continuance. We got a good thing going here in the Organization, but soon as those fuckin’ gangland piranhas smell blood in the water, it’s over. They’ll churn the river good trying to get to me. What we got here, boys, is a real fragile situation. Like an egg balanced on the tip of the finger, could get messy. Could all go tits up in a blink.” His voice goes low and his eyes lose focus. “All because of a little piece of asbestos.”
The Boss’s gaze returns to Mookie.
“You used to work with asbestos.”
“Uh. Yeah.” How’d he know that?
“You were a Sandhog.”
Mookie
grunts in assent.
“Family thing?”
“My Pop. My Grampop, too.”
“But not for you, not anymore. Why you’d quit?”
Mookie shrugs. “This is my thing.”
“This thing we do,” the Boss says, the words almost musical, like a Sinatra croon lurks somewhere behind the words, a sing-song ghost. “Christ, I’m hungry. But the cancer’s a jealous mistress. It eats me; I don’t get to eat anything else. Food here’s good, though. Kielbasa’s solid.” He pronounces it kill-baasy. “They know a good kilbo. Still ain’t like in my Philly days, though. They, they knew kilbos. Before we came here they called us the Kielbasa Gang. You know that? Maybe you did. I repeat myself in my old age – forgive me that sin, yeah? Where you come from, Mookie?”
“Jersey originally.”
“Good. Well. You go eat.” Then the Boss waves them off. Sits back down. And that’s that. You’re dismissed.
On the way back to the food line, Werth says, “Fuckin’ cancer, am I right?”
“Fuckin’ cancer,” Mookie says.
The plate is heavy. Pierogies – fat dough pockets filled with cheese, slathered with butter and onions. Kielbasa red like a Russian rocket. Beet salad. He’s tempted to toss the plastic fork away and just use his hands, but people would stare.
Fuck it. They stare anyway. He starts using his hands.
Mookie sits by himself in the corner. Rips apart a pierogie. Cheesy filling spills; steam rises. Just as he’s about to cram it in his salivating mouth, a hand falls on his forearm.
It’s the kid. The grandson. Casimir.
“You’re Mookie Pearl,” he says.
Mookie looks left, looks right. Like this is some kind of joke.
“That’s me.” He almost adds, Whaddya want, kid? but then remembers that this “kid” is going to be the Big Boss with the Red Hot Sauce before too long.
“Can I sit?”
“You can do anything you want.”
And yet the kid doesn’t sit. He stands there. Hands in his pockets.
Casimir lowers his voice. “I’m not ready for this.”
“To sit down?”
“To take over.”
“Oh.” Mookie looks down at the drippy blob of butter-ooze dough at the end of the pierogie and sighs. Be rude to eat in front of the next Boss. He sets the food down, an act that is almost painful to perform. “You got some time yet.”
Now, Casimir sits. “Not much. Not enough.”
“You’ll be OK.”
“Up until now, he kept me out of it. The business. Now it’s like–” He knocks two fists together. “Boom. Crash course. And I’m not ready.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I need you to do something.”
Can he do that? Does the kid have the power yet? He’s more important than Mookie by a hundred miles. A thousand. So, yeah, probably. “OK, sure.”
“I need you to cure my dziadzia.”
“Your who?”
“My Pop-Pop. The Boss.”
“Cure. Like, the cancer.”
“That’s right. I need you to cure his cancer.”
Mookie almost laughs. This kid isn’t too bright. “I know I don’t look like a doctor.”
“But you know things. You’ve been…” The kid points toward the floor. “Downstairs.” He means the Great Below. The Underworld. Hell itself. Mookie’s surprised the kid knows about that, but if they’ve been giving him a real crash course and he’s going to take the wheel…
“Hell’s not a hospital. It’s the… opposite of one. No help there for your grandfather.”
“I’ve been reading.”
“Good for you. I hear it’s fundamental.”
“No, I mean– I have these pages. From this journal? This guy named Oakes…”
Shit. This. “John Atticus, yeah. He went down fifteen, twenty years ago. Went nuts. Never came back. End of story.”
“He says that the…” And here Casimir lowers his voice even further as if he’s summoning the Devil. “Blue stuff isn’t the only pigment. That there are five in addition to the Blue and that one of them can cure anything, can end death itself–”
All anybody has of Oakes’ journal are a dozen or so pages that have been found scattered around the Underworld over the years. Mookie knew him. Well, met him, anyway. Was a reformed thief-turned-explorer. A self-proclaimed “cartographer”. Like the dead of Daisypusher, he wanted to chart the whole Underworld. Thousands of miles of subterranean labyrinth. He got a lot of things right but some stuff…
“You’re talking about Death’s Head. Caput Mortuum. It’s not real. Nobody’s ever seen the stuff. Nobody’s seen anything but the Blue.”
“They say that they found the Red–”
“Fuck the Red.” The kid flinches. It’s only then Mookie hears the anger in his own voice. He’s tired. Hungry. Seeing Nora didn’t do him any favors. “I just mean, until I see it, I don’t buy it.”
“But if Death’s Head were real, it could cure him.”
Mookie shrugs. “If it does what Oakes said it could do, yeah.”
“So you’ll find it.”
“Kid–”
“You’d be helping me. And him. And the whole Organization. Can you imagine it? Curing his cancer?” Casimir runs his hands through his copper hair. “I’m not ready. I need more time.”
“Why me? Why not go to Werth?”
“James Werth is a half-and-half. A hybrid.”
So, he knows what that is. Mookie wonders if the kid’s ever Blazed, torn the scales off of his eyes to see what’s really out there. “So? You some kind of racist?”
“No. I mean – I don’t know. You’re human. And you come highly recommended.”
“From who?”
The kid blanches. “From, I dunno. People.”
“Jesus. Fine. I’ll look.”
Casimir offers a hand to shake. “Thank you, Mookie.”
Mookie takes the hand. Shakes it. Tries not to roll the kid’s knuckles. If the measure of a handshake really matters, then Mookie wonders what it means that it feels like he’s shaking a dead carp instead of the kid’s hand. Maybe the kid really isn’t ready.
Which is bad news for everybody.
Mookie heads for the door. He ate. His stomach feels fit to burst. In a good way. He likes that feeling beyond satiety – the fullness of the flesh, the sense of being somehow completed by a good meal.
Werth hobbles over to him. “You leaving?”
“I figure.” He doesn’t say anything about what Casimir wanted. Werth would call it crazy. It is crazy. “I got things to check on while I’m in the city.”
“You should move back. Get an apartment in the village. Or Brooklyn at least.”
“I got my bar.”
“It’s not a bar. It’s a house with a bar in it.”
He shrugs. “Got a freezer for meat. Got shelves for liquor.” But he notices that Werth has mentally checked out. His tongue is fidgeting with his loose gray tooth and he’s staring off toward the door.
“Who’s that?” Werth asks, lifting his whiskery chin.
The man that enters the small banquet room isn’t one Mookie recognizes. Definitely not a thug. Nobody from a gang. He’s too well-dressed. Like he’s in a Cuban café – tan fedora, red embroidered guayabera shirt, a gold watch, and shoes so shiny other shoes might use them as mirrors.
Mookie doesn’t know what makes one guy good looking and another guy ugly, but he knows that if he’s at the ass-end of the spectrum, this guy’s at the other. He looks like someone out of a movie. Dark-drawn lines around the eyes, a glimmer in his gaze.
Following behind is a thin slip of a man, skin so pale it might as well be gray, sliding along with all the posture of a broken coat-rack. A black V-neck T-shirt hangs loose over his sickly frame – his match-stick arms are inked with symbols and sigils, ones Mookie’s seen but can’t place, ones that tell him right away what he’s looking at even without blazing.
“Ten to one that guy in the black shirt is a Snakeface,” Mookie says.
“Shit, yeah. Look at the arms.”
The man in the suit and his wormy attaché head toward the Boss’s table in the back of the room, the pair gliding through the crowd, earning stares. They don’t belong.
Mookie feels himself tense up. This could be it. This could be a hit. Maybe one of the gangs is sending someone. Or maybe this is from another city: the Sicilians, the Irish, or any number of Mexican, Aryan, or Dominican gangs. Or maybe it’s someone from the Deep Downstairs – some pissed off half-and-half wants to take over.
Mookie reaches into his pocket and starts to move toward the new guests. His big hand fumbles for his little tin of Cerulean – he’s ready to powder up, rip open his third eye and become aware. But then he sees Haversham stand and cross the room. Haversham and the man in the suit shake hands.
“Mr Candlefly?” Haversham says.
Mookie lets the tin drop back into his pocket.
Haversham greets the man in the suit. This man, Candlefly, speaks with a European accent. A Spanish roll to it. The voice warm, dark, like a fresh cup of black coffee. “Good day, Mr Haversham. Nice to finally meet in person.” Candlefly gestures toward the Snakeface: “This is my associate, Mr Sorago.”
The Snakeface – Sorago – bows his already bent head.
And with that, Haversham ushers them toward the Boss.
Werth pops up again by Mookie’s side. He’s eating a roll. “Why would a Snakeface be hanging out with the Boss?”
