Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel)

by William Lashner

  I actually laughed as I tossed him the wallet. He looked through it quickly and found the receipt. “Goodrich Camera,” he said before stuffing the whole thing in a pocket. “I’ll be there when it opens. Now let me have your phone.”

  “Oh, no, not my phone,” I said flatly.

  “Oh, yes, your phone. Tasks hard the man who holds the gun.”

  “Who is that? Chandler?”

  “Mulroney.”

  When I pitched the phone to him, he quickly thumbed around to see if there was anything of concern.

  “No texts this evening? Excellent. And no calls in or out. You’re not very popular. Such a shame, Road Dog. If we get through this, I’ll work to expand your social circles.”

  “Are we going to get through this?”

  “I am,” he said with a hearty grin. “We’ll see about you.” He laughed, bright and easy, a laugh that smoothed my jagged nerves like a shot of whiskey. “But unless you go off and do something half-cocked, like try to run from me, it should all work itself out. Now come on, we can’t stay here, the state this place is in.”

  He pushed himself to standing and waved the pistol at me again before sticking it in his jacket pocket, the gun barrel aimed now at my chest.

  “Pretend you’re a stray dog and let me take you home. Oh, and bring along the bag.”

  CHAPTER 41

  A BAGMAN’S CANTATA

  What was your father?” said Stony. “What did he do?”

  It was early afternoon the day after my abduction. We were now in the basement of the Briggs Mulroney house in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia, a modest fully detached stone structure, perched on a rise above the street. You would have thought, with all I had heard about the late departed pater Mulroney, there would have been a historical marker on a post outside:

  HERE LIVED BRIGGS MULRONEY, LEGENDARY PHILADELPHIA BAGMAN, WHO HAD THE CITY COURTS AND CITY COUNCIL IN HIS BACK POCKET FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES. “HE MADE STRONG MEN WEEP.”

  Stony sat calmly in a spindly wooden chair set in front of me, his heavy black shoes flat on the cement floor. His jacket was off, his suspenders were thick and red to match his socks, his shirt cuffs were rolled, his hat was still in place. It wasn’t hot in the basement, but even so, great drips of sweat fell from his temples. Resting on one wide thigh was an envelope fresh from the camera store. In his left hand was a cigarette; in his right hand was the gun.

  “My father cut lawns for a living,” I said.

  “Now there’s a job, yes. Fresh air, summer sun, working with your shirt off, the smell of clean sweat and freshly mowed grass. And clients so appreciative to come home to a smooth emerald carpet, where before was a sprouting mess of weeds.” He took a long draft from his cigarette and let the smoke sit in his lungs as a drop of sweat rolled down his cheek like a tear. “I would have liked that, I think. I could have sung my arias beneath the roar of the mowers.”

  “We all make our choices,” I said.

  “Not all of us,” he said, tilting his head low as he looked down at me.

  I was sitting splat on the cracked cement floor of that basement, my wrist handcuffed to a cast-iron pipe sticking out of the stone wall. To my right, teetering like an old drunk, stood a rusted water tank slowly leaking into a puddle at its feet. Beyond that was a single glass window high on the wall. Thoughtfully set within my reach was a large silver thermos.

  “You maybe chose to give up the fresh green grass for the stunted tundra of the law,” said Stony, “but what choice was there for Briggs Mulroney’s son? I was like a prince, raised under the stick and shelter of my father’s expectations. How does one abdicate from that? And so here I am, with just a spit shine on my shoes and a bag in my hand, struggling to make my way in a compromised world.”

  “Willy Loman with a gun.”

  “And why not? For what is a bagman, really, but a salesman at heart, selling access, selling power, selling other people’s integrity? Those with money have wants; public servants want money; all I do is make the sale. I’m like a little Irish sprite spreading happiness. So why, I ask, must I ply my trade in the shadows, behind Dumpsters, away from prying eyes?”

  Stony had left me alone for a few hours that morning when he went off to pick up my photographs, and in that gap I had tried desperately to effect my escape. But the cast-iron pipe was affixed so firmly to the wall that all my heaving and shaking did nothing except scrape raw the skin of my wrist. And my pathetic shouts for help came to naught. When a mouse made a quick appearance from behind the water heater and stared at me for a moment, I wondered if I could induce it to nibble the handcuffs in two. That might have worked if I were tied with a rope. That might have worked if it weren’t a mouse. But despite all my shouting and yanking and pleading and tears, still there I was, trapped in the basement as Stony sang the sad ballad of his life.

  “It gets old fast, Road Dog, carrying the bag. I’ve gotten old, fast. How many years do I have left? Ten, fifteen at the most before my heart explodes in my chest. Am I not to drink champagne from the slipper of a slim nineteen-year-old? Am I not to bake like a beached whale on the sands of some tropical paradise? Am I destined to die as I lived, in this house, bound by these braces, clutching to the death this stinking bag?”

  “The sad lament of the aging bagman,” I said. “You’re making me sick to my stomach, Stony.”

  “Use the thermos if you must. But I have my dreams.”

  “And to reach for them you sold me out.”

  “I sold you out?”

  He put the cigarette in his mouth and tossed the envelope from the camera store, spun it hard so that it would have nicked my face had I not knocked it down with my free hand.

  “Take a gander,” he said, a line of spite now in his voice. “Take a good look at the reason why you won’t ever be rising from this basement, at least not in one piece. I’ll have to chop you up and bag the bits to get you out.”

  The envelope was already open. I tilted it so that the photographs I had ordered from Goodrich Camera spilled onto the floor. I went through them as best I could, sliding through the pile one by one. And in the middle I stopped, picked up a photograph, stared at it for a moment before looking up at the sweating figure sitting across from me.

  “Oh, Stony,” I said.

  “And now you know.”

  “Now I know.”

  “It was not what I was intending.”

  “Oh, Stony,” I said again, and strangely, even as he had me cuffed to a pipe on the floor of his basement, even as he was threatening to cut me up and stuff me into black plastic garbage bags, I couldn’t help but feel a great heaving pity for him. I knew now why he was sweating, why his emotions were veering madly across the landscape: he had been swallowed by his crimes and had lost himself.

  Along with the photographs of the girl in Lancaster, and the photographs of Bettenhauser and his charitable friend that I had already been given, were photographs of me, yes, snaps of me. There I was making my way through the town, there I was walking with Ossana, there I was captured through a diner window breakfasting with McDeiss, there I was passing my envelopes to this labor leader and that community organizer, there I was stepping with my bag into the Devereaux mansion. And let’s just say the angles weren’t flattering.

  He had been spying on me, my friend Stony Mulroney, and based on the photograph of me entering Boyds to buy a tuxedo, he had been shadowing me even from before we first met. There were photographs of Duddleman waiting outside my apartment and then later talking with me before going up my stairs, pictures that nearly broke my heart. But even the Duddleman pictures were not the saddest, no.

  The saddest pictures were the photographs of a woman walking out of a bar on Eighteenth Street, walking out of the Franklin, photographs of Jessica Barnes leaving her meeting with me. But Stony’s camera didn’t stay at the bar, waiting for me to emerge. Sudde
nly it was following Jessica, down this street and that street, until, in a close-up, she was looking with fear on her pretty face as someone approached her. And then the full pan of the girl and two men who were approaching, Colin Frost and the skinny bearded kid, the same ones who would kill Duddleman.

  “You told them where she was,” I said. “You told them where she was going.”

  “I thought all they wanted was a bit of a talk.”

  “Oh, Stony.”

  “I didn’t know it would end in a murder,” he said with a crack of despair in his voice. “It wasn’t I that wielded the hammer, believe that. It wasn’t those two blaggards either.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Your demon lover, Victor. How does that feel, to know you were slipping it to her that did the hammering? But I wasn’t a part of it, I didn’t know.”

  “You’re as much a part of it as they are.”

  “Not without the evidence, see? Oh, Road Dog, if it were only the photographs in that envelope, we’d be having a different conversation now, wouldn’t we? I would have already burnt the pictures and smashed the memory card. You’d be none the wiser and I’d be off scot-free. After that I would only keep you here until the deed was done and then we’d leave again as best of friends.”

  There had been a high level of fear eating at my liver from the moment I saw Stony in my apartment, but now it was like someone had jacked one end of a wire into fear’s brain and the other end into a socket.

  “What deed?” I said.

  “And after all the dust had settled, and all the crimes were over and done with, I would have invited you down to my eventual redoubt on the Yucatan, and we’d have swallowed daiquiris on the beach together and screwed twenty-peso whores and laughed about the old times when all we could stomach was something as hard as a Sazerac.”

  “What deed are we talking about, Stony?”

  “It was the clerk at the camera store, a pretty young thing behind the counter, who laid your perfidy bare. She told me about the other clerk, the one who received two bills to deliver a disk from a Mr. Carl. I suppose she was hoping for more of the same from me, the little conniver. And that right there put a crimp in all our plans. It took me all morning to find him, but I did. And after some encouragement he told me where he delivered the disk. Like a knife in the heart.”

  “They’re going to do something to the girl in Lancaster? When?”

  “It was you who set the timetable.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  He stood suddenly, too angry anymore to sit. He began to pace, growing more agitated with each step of those heavy black stompers. The sweat beaded on his forehead now, as from a fever.

  “What they tell me is nothing,” said Stony. “I’m merely a bagman to them. ‘Take the money and shut up,’ he says with his affected little snivel, and so I do, and I do. But in the end it wasn’t them, it was you who betrayed me. By sending that disk to McDeiss, you as good as put my head on a pike. How could you do me like that?”

  I looked at my hand, at the handcuff, at the pipe to which I was chained, and then back at Stony.

  “I should kick you in the head for what you did,” he said.

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Oh, but I do,” he said. “I really, really do.”

  And so he did.

  In the moment before I closed my eyes, I saw the big black sledgehammer of a shoe come at me like a bounding panther. And then, in the darkness, a bright light exploded as the blow landed just above my jaw and sent me spinning until my other cheek slammed into the basement wall and my wrist jerked, excruciating, in its cuff. My face felt like a smashed ceramic mask, and a bell was ringing in my ear.

  When I opened my eyes again, even as the pain was diffusing through the whole of my head, Stony was back in the chair, breathing deeply. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead with a sleeve.

  “That was curiously satisfying,” he said.

  I could barely hear him over the ringing. He lit a cigarette, took a luxurious inhale, lifted his jaw as he blew out the smoke. I reached my free hand to my face and it came away slick with blood.

  “Now what?” I said, trying and failing to keep the hate out of my voice.

  “The plan was a simple one,” he said, eerily calm, as if the violence had taken something sharp out of him. “I would let this little game of ours play out, pocket the money, go on as I’ve been going on as I set up my departure. I had enough if I sold the house, collected a few debts, twisted what I could out of those I had bought in my years lugging the bag. Maybe even put the squeeze on the old lady, and the runt keeping the Big Butter’s eye on her. And then I’d be off, ahead of the inevitable indictment. Now it’s too late. Thanks to you, I’m already on the run. Now the only way I collect anything is to make her happy, our demon dream.”

  He took another inhale, examining me carefully as I lay sprawled and bloody on the cement floor.

  “She wants your shoes,” he said.

  “Take them.”

  “You know that’s not enough.”

  “You’re not a killer, Stony.”

  “You’re right, I’m not, and that’s what makes this so difficult. I was stepping over the line with my payoffs and schemes, yes, but at least I always knew where the line it was, and my farthest step was never too far from the straight and the narrow. That was fine when I was answering to the small-money boys, but when you sign up with the Big Butter, the money smothers you in zeroes and suddenly the whole of your soul is in the bill of sale. The line that was firstly here is suddenly there, and then over there, and then so far away it can’t even be seen from where you were before. And now here I am.”

  “Don’t cross it, Stony.”

  “It’s already crossed. That’s the problem. I’m already on the other side. I want to be more than this. I want to be better than this. And yet they have dragged me into the mire.”

  “You did it to yourself. Let me go and we’ll start to unravel the damage.”

  “I want to. Believe me.” He locked his eyes on mine. “Do you believe me?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “My father, he always told me to be courageous, yes, and that’s the ticket here. But is it more courageous to stand up to them, or to step over my pathetic hesitations by putting a bullet in your throat?”

  “Not the second thing, the first thing.”

  “I’m confused, Road Dog. And sad. And angry. I’m an animal caught in a trap, and there is only one way out.”

  “You kill me, Stony, and you’ll regret it today, tomorrow, for the rest of your life.”

  “Maybe so, but what choice do I have?” He pushed himself to standing and staggered toward me. “It won’t be the grand retirement I had planned, but what I end up with will be something. I can’t run away with nothing. My father made of me a bagman, isn’t this just the inevitable next step?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, no, what does it matter in the end? In the end all that matters is the doing, and the time for the doing has come. Open up, Road Dog, it’s dinnertime.”

  CHAPTER 42

  LIKE HOFFA

  When the gun fired, and it did fire, like the crack of the devil’s whip, accompanied as it was with a hint of smoke and the scent of sulfur, it wasn’t pointed in my direction. At the moment Stony was aiming his black automatic at my open mouth, we were both interrupted, him from killing me and me from dying, by the sound of the basement window being smashed: a crash and a tinkle accompanied by a stone clattering and skidding on the floor.

  With the alacrity of an overweight nip-addicted cat, Stony whirled and fired.

  He missed the window. The bullet hit the stone wall and ricocheted into the water heater, where the old thing started pissing for real, two nice steady flows, one right onto my head, as if the bullet had killed not an int
ruder but the water heater’s prostate. I scrabbled as best I could out of the thin, steaming stream.

  “Damn, Stony,” came a deep voice from on high, “you done killed that water heater.”

  Stony wheeled around again and shot twice reflexively, splintering the ragged wood of the empty stairwell.

  “Aw, now you’ve gone and murdered the stairs. What’s next, the boiler?”

  Stony cocked his head. “Hump? Is that you, Hump?”

  “Indeed. You going to try to shoot me if I come on down?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Then aim for my head. That way I know you’ll miss me but good.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, Hump?”

  “We aim to pull you out of the shithouse, boy. You ain’t making nothing but mistakes lately. You still okay there, Victor?”

  “I’m a little wet,” I said.

  “The bladder is always the first to let go. We’re coming down now, Stony. You stay calm and put away the gun.”

  “I will, surely I will. Just as soon as I kill Road Dog here. Do you know what he did, Hump? Do you have any idea how badly he betrayed me?”

  “Let’s not quibble about who betrayed who,” I said.

  “He turned me in to McDeiss,” said Stony. “Gave the copper enough evidence to string me up good and tight. And after all I did for him. Why, Brutus was a loving son to Caesar compared to what this little bastard has been to me. I deserve my justice.”

  “Since when is any of what we do about justice?” This was a different voice calling down the stairs, hard and sharp with a tobacco-stained roughness. “Put that thing away, now, before you shoot yourself in the ass. We’re coming down.”

  Climbing down the stairs bravely were a pair of low heels attached to a set of stick-thin legs. Stony aimed the gun at the stairs as Maud descended, but there was something so implacable about her manner, and her face when it appeared was so calm and unalarmed, that her very presence made the gun seem absurd. Behind Maud came Hump, hard and hatted, his black raincoat swirling about him like a superhero’s cape. Hump went right to the water heater and turned off the water so that the scalding stream eased and then stopped. Scuttling down behind the two, breathlessly catching up, was Miles Schimmeck.