He squatted in the shadow of the tree, watching the windows and doors carefully for any shadow or any movement, then approached the French door at the back. He could hear the phone ringing. It rang for an unusually long time before stopping. Baby Joe knew from his previous visit that the house was not alarmed, and he took the door handles and pulled. He smiled. The door was locked, but the restraining bolts at the top and bottom were not fastened, and the two doors pulled apart. He would have to remember to speak to her about that. The phone began to ring again, and continued ringing, an insistent monotonous clanging. Baby Joe pulled his piece and moved swiftly through the rooms. Nothing.
The telephone finally stopped, and in the exaggerated silence Baby Joe heard a faint creak coming from upstairs. He started to walk up, silently, each foot placed with care, easing himself upwards on the balls of his feet. The doors at the head of the stairs were open, and Baby Joe stepped noiselessly across, set his back against the wall, and eased his head around the corner until he could see partially into the room. The doors to Asia’s walk-in closet were open, and in the mirror on the inside of one of them he saw a thin figure stretched out on the bed. He had his trousers pulled down and was masturbating vigorously with a pair of Asia’s silk panties over his face. Baby Joe could not restrain a grin. He stepped quickly into the room, put the cold steel barrel of the Smith & Wesson against the man’s balls, and said, “Don’t shoot!”
The man yelled in alarm and sat up, dropping the knickers. “For the love of Christ,” he yelled, staring wild-eyed at the gun.
“Hey, Maxie,” said Baby Joe. “Didn’t come at an inconvenient time, did I?”
Maxie looked at Baby Joe’s face for the first time, recognizing him. An embarrassed grin spread across his face. “Jeez, Baby Joe. I think I shit myself.”
Maxie started to bring his legs off the bed. Baby Joe swung the gun in a lazy backhand, breaking Maxie’s nose, and sending blood spraying from a deep cut across its bridge. Maxie squealed and fell back, holding his nose in disbelief.
“What are you doing here, Maxie?”
Maxie acted as if he hadn’t heard the question. “My nose. You broke my fucken nose, ya cocksucka.”
“Who sent you?”
Something in Baby Joe’s voice should have told Maxie not to get smart, something that said getting smart with Baby Joe would be the worst thing in the world. But Maxie didn’t listen.
“Fuck you. None of your fucken business. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Baby Joe clubbed him with the gun again, in the temple, hard this time. A deep, blue indentation on Maxie’s head slowly filled with blood. He was out. The phone started again, relentless and unending. Baby Joe frisked Maxie. In his back pocket he found a straight razor and opened it, holding it against the light, watching it shine with latent malice. Maxie groaned, and Baby Joe slapped him twice and hauled him upright. The phone kept on ringing. Baby Joe pocketed the gun, grabbed Maxie by the balls, held the blade against them, and looked Maxie in the eye.
Maxie went to pieces. “Jeez, Baby Joe, for fuck’s sake. The Don, the fucken Don. It’s the girl, I dunno why, I swear. The fucken Don, man. You don’t ask questions, you know that. You just do. It’s just a job, man, it’s just business. What the fuck am I s’pose to do? Nobody says no to the Don. You know that. C’mon, Baby Joe, give me a break. Baby Joe, for fuck’s sake.”
Baby Joe lifted the razor, and held it in front of Maxie. Maxie seemed to shrink into the bed. The phone kept ringing.
“You were going to use this.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. Now Maxie was listening. And what he was listening to was scaring him worse than the razor.
“You were going to cut her with this. You were going to hurt her, and watch her bleed, and then you were going to kill her.”
“Baby Joe, I swear I…”
Baby Joe saw a picture in his mind’s eye, a picture of Asia’s beautiful face, cut and bleeding, and Maxie standing over her, leering, liking it.
Maxie made a small gulping noise, and his eyes went wide, and his hands flew to his throat as the razor separated his jugular, and separated Maxie Grimmstein from the seedy, squalid little existence that he had called life.
The phone was still ringing. Baby Joe dropped the razor, walked over to the bedside table, picked up the receiver, and listened.
“Hello, hello, who’s there? Hello.”
Asia.
“Hey, baby.”
“Oh, Baby Joe. Thank God. Are you okay? My friend Rhonda called. She was crying. She said two guys pulled her, one great big guy and one small, ratty little guy with nasty eyes. They hurt her. They made her tell them where I lived. I was so worried. I thought something might have happened to you.”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry,” he said, gently. “It’s taken care of. Just sit tight. I’ll be back as soon as I check out Monsoon’s place. I’ll bring you a few spare things. You’re going to need them.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not going to be able to come home for a while. I have to go. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Baby Joe found a small bag, stuffed it with an assortment of things, and left the way he had come in. As he drove out of Asia’s street, the big guy was sitting in the Mercedes, picking his nose and smoking.
Chapter 10.
The basketball dwarfs were standing on the corner as Baby Joe approached, trying very hard to radiate an aura of menace, and managing to look every bit as intimidating as garden gnomes in party hats. Baby Joe had made a swing by the place, then parked the car in a nearby 76 lot and walked back. Baby Kobe peeled himself off the wall as Baby Joe approached, and blocked his path. The others gathered round.
“‘Sup, homes?”
“If you’re looking for Snow White, I haven’t seen her.”
“Huh?”
A flicker of unease ran through the pack. This old dude wasn’t playing the game.
“We the NV Street Posse,” said Baby Kobe, trying to maintain face.
“Maybe I can get your autograph on the way back.”
Baby Kobe looked confused. “Say wha’?”
“Listen, Rumpelstiltskin, I’ve got a really good idea. Why don’t you get out of my way, before I kick the fuck out of you and steal your tootsie rolls.”
One of the kids giggled, and a couple of them stepped back. Baby Kobe stood there, scared now, wanting to move but not daring to. The other kids were watching. If he backed down now, he would lose the gang. He spit. A big wet gob spattered next to Baby Joe’s shoe. Baby Joe slapped him, grabbed him by the front of his Lakers shirt, and heaved him off the ground.
“Son,” he said, “I don’t know how old you are, but if you live to be a hundred you’ll never know how lucky you are that that didn’t hit me.”
Kobe squirmed and let out a stream of invective.
Nearby was a yellow dumpster, daubed with graffiti, and Baby Joe heaved Baby Kobe into it. He landed with a loud, resounding clang. As Baby Joe walked away, he could he hear Baby Kobe’s voice squealing from the metal depths of the dumpster.
“Get me out. Yo, mothafuckas, get me out!”
Baby Joe glanced back and the other kids were standing around the dumpster, laughing.
The door to Monsoon’s house had been hastily repaired. Baby Joe had no trouble letting himself in, and entered to find that Monsoon had not made much of an effort to repair the damage that the Don’s crew had done. The place stank, the unmistakable smell of poverty and neglect. Your average Depression-era hobo would have been embarrassed to stay there. Baby Joe went through to the garage, where Crispin had told him he would find the coffin. It was still there, on the floor, and there was some kind of scale next to it. Baby Joe pondered it for a few moments, but it didn’t speak to him. Broken glass cracked under foot as he traversed the “living” room and went into the bedroom. If the lounge smelled bad, it was the Hanging Gardens of Babylon compared to the bedroom. A pair of skanky underpants lay in the do
orway and Baby Joe briefly considered shooting them, just to be on the safe side.
His eyes were immediately drawn to the military equipment scattered on the floor next to the bed, and he bent down to retrieve the bayonet. As he did so, he saw—under the bed, lying in a decade’s accumulation of dust—a set of medals. Baby Joe picked them up and sat back onto the bed, blowing the dust from them and rubbing them clean on his shirt. They were very impressive. Congressional Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, Purple Heart and oak leaves, Republic of Vietnam campaign medal, Vietnam service medal.
Baby Joe was suddenly angry. Some poor bastard had waded through that shit, fighting for his country in a war his country didn’t want to fight, every waking day a living hell of booby traps and shrapnel and incoming, and mouth-drying asshole-tightening fear, getting royally fucked over by Charlie and the brass both, watching his friends die, watching surgeons sewing pieces of him back together. And the symbols of all this, the actual material manifestation of what it all meant, these small memorials to his comrades and his courage, had ended up underneath a piss-stained bed in some reeking shithole in a meaningless town in the fucking desert.
Baby Joe slipped the medals into his pocket. On the floor was an overturned military suitcase with the lining ripped out, and when Baby Joe picked it up to right it photographs cascaded out and landed at his feet in a black-and-white mosaic. He looked at the name, barely legible on the case. Philip Parker. Captain. He paused. The name rang a bell. Something rustled in the damp and darkened closet of his memory. A voice. He listened, but it would not come out into the light. He turned to the pictures. He gathered them up and sorted them out, carried them back into the living room, and sat at a table studying them in the light from the window, examining each one and then flipping it over to read the inscription of the back.
Suddenly he was right back there. He could almost smell it. The old familiar names, the equipment, the ancient looks on the faces of young men, little more than children—murderous, uncomprehending children, cops and robbers on an epic scale. Bang, you’re dead. Except in this game you stayed dead, and if you lived you came back with a piece of you stolen away before you ever had the chance to understand what it was that you had. You came back with your mind altered and the course of your life altered, melted down in the forge of war and recast as something else, pummeled prematurely into a different kind of manhood, so that for the rest of your life you saw the world in different colors than the people who had not been there.
The same face appeared in a lot of the pictures: a tall, handsome black man with a broad, confident smile. You could see from the photographs that this one had not been afraid. This must be the man. Baby Joe took a full-face photo and studied it. Hawaiian shirt, flowers around his neck, a bottle of beer, and a smile to light the world. From the edge of the picture appeared some strands of long, wavy black hair and a slim, brown arm, its hand resting on the man’s shoulder. He flipped the picture over. Hanging ten in Honolulu, baby.
Baby Joe turned the picture back over and gazed at it. Where are you now, bro? Did the cup pass? How did it turn out for you? Then, looking into the dark, laughing eyes from long ago, some veil of mist suddenly parted in Baby Joe’s brain. He let the photo drop to his lap.
Fuck me. I don’t fucking believe it. Philip Parker. He hadn’t immediately recognized the face because it was an occurence so completely unexpected that he just wasn’t ready for it. Phil Parker. Christ! Baby Joe stared at the picture. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, as if someone long dead stood behind him, and he had the sensation that he was not alone.
And he wasn’t, for in that instant some portal in his mind opened, and the carefully constructed dam that had kept those dreadful memories from flooding his brain burst, and the banshees came howling in. Baby Joe took up the photo again and stared at it, as if he was staring down a long tunnel. Because he knew now that Philip Parker’s cup did not pass. And he knew why.
Subic Bay. He was on his way home, escorting some dickless desk-jockey General on a “fact-finding mission.” The fact he had discovered was that if you stayed in your cabin and drank scotch all day, you could pretend that the war didn’t really exist and that you were back in Washington, filling out forms and staring at your secretary’s ass. General Bombast Bullshit! This fucking toy soldier had wanted to go to this bar, hang out with “the boys,” as he called them, show them what a cool, unsuperior superior dude he was, maybe get some pictures to stick on his office wall back at the P. Only “the boys” had told him to fuck off back to his mammy and threatened to kick ten bells of shit out of him, and the general had skulked off back to the base to sulk and write a report about the lack of civility among the enlisted men. When he ordered Baby Joe to drive him, Baby Joe told him to fuck off as well. Where could they send him that was worse than where he had been?
So he stayed in the bar. Got talking about music to this seriously cool black dude. Airborne. Blew the fuck out of the harp and listened to Bo, and the Wolf, and Muddy. Said the heat and the water reminded him of Fort Benning, except back there it wasn’t the zips you had to worry about, it was the white boys. The seriously cool black dude was Philip Parker.
The sound of a car pulling up snapped him out of his reverie. He pulled his gun and moved over to the wall next to the window, pulling an edge of the curtain aside and looking out. A taxi was pulled up at the curb, and an ancient, white-haired old man in some kind of yodeling outfit was climbing out of the back seat. The driver had gotten out, too, and was sitting on the hood of her cab, lighting up.
Baby Joe stashed the gun and moved over to the door, opening it when the old man knocked. Shock registered on the old man’s face as he saw the carnage behind Baby Joe, quickly replaced by suspicion.
“Who are you? Vere is my grandson? I demand to speak vith him.”
“Sir, I have no idea who your grandson is. Please, come inside. I’ll explain.” Baby Joe stepped aside to let the old man pass, and closed the door behind him.
“My gott. The stench, ja. Vat has happened here?”
“The house has been broken into.”
“Who by?” said Bjørn Eggen, continuing to gaze around in bewilderment. “The Third Reich?”
“Did you say you were looking for your grandson?”
“Ja, ja. Sure. This is the address. He is a useless bastard, always asking for money, but he is all I haf left. I haf my son promised I vould take care of him, ja.”
Baby Joe moved over to the table and picked up the picture of Philip Parker. He looked at the pale old man, and down at the grinning black face. It couldn’t possibly be, but what the fuck?
“Sir, do you know this man?” he said, handing the old man the picture. The old man peered first at Baby Joe, and then at the picture. He looked at it for a long time, and as Baby Joe watched the old man’s eyes began to mist over.
“Ja. Is my son. They haf killed him. From vere do you get this?”
It took a second before Baby Joe was able to speak. The suspicion crept back into the old man’s eyes.
“I found it here, today, just now. I was in the war with your son. Philip Parker, right?”
“Ja. Captain Philip Parker. My son. The mother was very beautiful, ja. Very beautiful. From Alabama. I haf met her in Italy after vhen I vas fighting the Germans in the desert in the var. I used to take care of the dogs that found the mines.”
Baby Joe extended his hand. “My name is Baby Joe Young. I’m a private investigator. Pleased to meet you, sir.”
Baby Joe was surprised by the power of the old man’s grip as he took the proffered hand, and said, “Bjørn Eggen Christiansson, at your service.”
“Well, Mr. Christiansson, this is all something of a coincidence. I came here on behalf of my client and found the place deserted. I was just looking around when I found these photographs. Is your grandson expecting you?”
“Ja, ja. But vas yesterday. I am late one day. I vas in Alabama for to see the grave of me v
ife. Meet up vith some fonny kids. Get dronk, miss me damn flight. He wrote me this letter.”
Bjørn Eggen took out the much-read letter and handed it to Baby Joe. Baby Joe scanned it, while the old man looked around him as if in a daze. Baby Joe looked at the clipping. He handed it back.
“Mr. Christiansson…”
“Call me Bjørn Eggen.”
Baby Joe smiled. “Bjørn Eggen, I believe your grandson may have already left.”
“No, my friend, this is not possible. He vould not go without me. I haf here the letter. I vil vait, ja. Sure he vil come back soon. Ve vil go together. Bring back my son, ja.”
Baby Joe was at a loss as to what to say. The old man had had a long flight and a bad shock. Whatever other bad news he had coming, it could wait. “Well, Bjørn Eggen, perhaps you are right. I don’t know what happened here, but maybe you should rest and we can find out about Monsoon tomorrow. I will help you. This is not a good place to stay, right now. Have you someplace else to stay?”
“I hav an hotel, ja. The hotel Shimmer.”
“The what now?”
“You know. Like ven the heat make the road move.”
“Oh, the Mirage.”
“Ja, ja, this is the name, ja. Mirage.”
“Okay. This is my card. Call me when you get to your hotel.”
“Ja, ja, sure,” Bjørn Eggen said, not really listening. He had picked up the photographs and was looking at them, examining each one carefully.
“See you, then,” said Baby Joe.
The old man waved absently, and wandered over to the chair with the pictures.
Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1) Page 16
