“Soda,” said Colin.
“Corn soda?”
“Quiet down,” said Ossana before leaning toward me, caressing my face with her long slender fingers, slipping her tongue into my ear.
“Oh, Victor, Victor,” she whispered, “you poor little innocent. There’s no one out there, and there is no one coming. You must understand that a very influential man is very much convinced that my brother will provide him something no one else can.”
“Who is he?”
“It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he wants what he wants and he’s willing to do what he must to get it. Calls have been made up and down a long and complex chain. The Lancaster police won’t be charging in with guns drawn. Oh, no. Instead, they’re going to help a distraught mother find her darling daughter.”
“Not if McDeiss has his way.”
“Your precious detective might be incorruptible, but he works for someone who works for someone. Everyone at some point has to follow orders.”
“Except you.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m going to miss your little pout, Victor. And the hat, especially the hat.”
She stood up and kissed the top of my head. As she walked away from me in that same catwalk stride, she said to Jason Howard, “Kill him.”
“I don’t think you should count on your benefactor to save you this time,” I said.
She stopped, turned around, put up a hand to halt whatever Jason Howard was intending to do. “You have something to say?”
“Just a little story you might find interesting. I was asked to get the goods on Bettenhauser, your brother’s opponent in the upcoming congressional race. And I was guided in the search by an operative who was being ordered around and paid by the same rich bastard that you think is going to get you out of this jam. And together we found a neat little scandal that by all appearances could have ruined Bettenhauser before he even got out of the gate. But it turns out it wasn’t a scandal at all; rather, it was an example of Bettenhauser’s civic magnanimity. If I had given it to the press, it would have greatly boosted his chances at the expense of your brother. Which was just what the rich bastard intended to happen.”
“What are you getting at?”
“That the man you’re counting on to protect you has hedged his bets, has already put Bettenhauser in his pocket, and no longer has to stick his neck out for a murderous bitch like you.”
“Uh-oh,” said Jason Howard, still peering out the window and now pulling the gun out of his belt. “We’ve got company.”
CHAPTER 50
ATTICA
And then the kid pulls the gun out of his belt and says, ‘We’ve got company.’ ”
I took a sip of my drink—hard rye and bright bitters in a stolid lowball rinsed with absinthe—and winced at the alcohol and the memory as I looked around the table for effect. We were at Rosen’s, of course, drinking Sazeracs, hats on the table, briefcases by our sides, cigarettes burning in mute defiance of the laws of man and nature. It was late afternoon and the place was empty except for the group at our round table and an old lady with a pillbox hat drinking vodka alone at the bar.
“What did you think right about then?” said Hump.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Hump,” I said. “First I thought McDeiss had saved me, hallelujah. And then, when Colin pointed his gun at my face again, I thought I was dead.”
“And how did that make you feel?” said Maud, sitting back with her arms crossed as usual, the smoke from her cigarette rising in a line before it curlicued into chaos.
I thought about it for a moment. How did I feel when Colin pointed his gun at my face for a second time—or was it a third time—and it seemed, finally, that he was going to end it all and take my shoes? I felt fear, of course, a blind terror that rises in times of mortal peril as naturally as a sneeze. But there was something else, too, something that tasted bitter and sweet at the same time.
“Relieved,” I said. “So it had come for me at last. About stinking time.”
“I’d be shitting, I would,” said Miles Schimmeck, crushing out a cigarette. “Right in my pants.”
“What you got to live for anyway, you little muskrat?” said Briggs Mulroney. Yes, Briggs Mulroney, swollen-eared, hulking Briggs Mulroney had worked out a deal with the powers that had sent him scurrying, and had come out of retirement to carry his son’s bag just long enough to personally instruct a surprising new trainee.
“I got plenty to live for,” said Miles.
“Tell me one measly thing,” said Briggs.
“Cigarettes.”
“What else?”
“Sazeracs.”
“What else.”
“More cigarettes.”
“Try something that ain’t killing you.”
“I got plenty, I do,” said Miles, looking around at the rest of the table. “Don’t I got plenty?”
“Sure, Miles,” said Maud. “You’ve got plenty.”
“Aubrey,” yelled out Briggs Mulroney. “Miles ain’t the only one needs something to stay alive for. Another round for all of us.”
“Truth was,” I said, “I didn’t have time for a metaphysical wrestling match just then, because at that moment, with his gun still in my face, Colin tells Jason to check out the back, and that’s what the kid does. He bolts out to the back of the house, we hear the screen door slam, and the next thing you know—crackatooey—the bullets are flying out there like angry bees.”
“Damn,” said Hump.
“Apparently, Jason just barreled out of the back of the house, saw a line of cops, and thought the best way forward was to fire wildly in panic.”
“Guns are for amateurs,” said Briggs, “like I was trying to tell Stony. Once it starts raining lead, it never stops cheap.”
“How is our boy Stony doing?” said Maud.
“Already blistered with sunburn,” said Briggs. “I’m told he looks like an overstuffed salmon. I’ve the sense none of this will end well for him.”
“It didn’t end well for the kid with the gun,” said Hump. “One word you never want written in the same sentence with your name in the papers is ‘riddled.’ ”
“Or ‘indictment,’ ” said Maud.
“Or ‘gonorrhea,’ ” said Miles. “I should know.”
We all looked at Miles.
“What?” he said.
“Go on, Victor,” said Maud.
“When the kid went down, there were a few shots rattling around the inside of the farmhouse, which caused me some concern,” I said. “And the next thing you know, I hear McDeiss’s sour voice coming out of a loudspeaker. ‘We don’t want any more trouble.’ ‘We don’t want anyone else getting hurt.’ ‘Come out with your hands up.’ That kind of thing.”
“Does this ever work?” said Lyudmila Porishkova, smoking impassively. Tall and stylishly dressed, she was sitting between Maud and Briggs, who was teaching Lyudmila his rules for aspiring bagmen so that she could take over the police route. Imagine that.
“No,” said Maud.
“But I suppose they need to try,” said Hump, “before they level the place.”
“And that was when Ossana came up with her brilliant idea,” I said.
Aubrey appeared at the table, a magician emerging from a puff of smoke. In his left hand he was balancing a tray of drinks: five Sazeracs and a shot of vodka. Lyudmila hadn’t yet developed a taste for rye, but it would surely come. I gulped down what was left of my current drink, my third, and felt the burn and swoon of the alcohol. The killed drinks stayed on the table, along with the dead cigarettes and empty hats, creating a tableau of corruption and degeneracy that was surprisingly cheerful.
Briggs lifted his glass. “To the Brotherhood of the Bag and its newes
t member.”
There were hurrahs to Lyudmila, and clinks of glass, and swallows followed by hacks and coughs and the inhale of tobacco, with a couple of swear words thrown in for effect.
“How the hell did I ever end up back here?” said Briggs, shaking his head.
“Bad parenting,” said Maud.
“So, Victor?” said Miles. “What was the sister’s idea?”
I took a moment, sipped my drink, looked around the table, catching each of the gazes one by one. I had to be careful here, I had to do this right. It had been a brutal afternoon, horrific enough that it still felt like a wound. But I wasn’t here just to pass the time and weave a story or two like any common pub-crawler. Oh, I was here to pass the time and weave a story, sure, but all of it had a purpose behind it, and I had to be sure to keep my eye on the purpose through the whole of the telling. I lowered my gaze and ran my finger across a stray bit of condensation on the table, leaving a smeared trail.
“She told us we had to get out of there, and the only way we were going to get out of there is if the police escorted us out,” I said. “She had thought the Big Butter could save her when the time came, but I clued her in that the Big Butter had hedged his bets with Bettenhauser and that in all likelihood she was on her own. So she decided she was going to go play it differently, she was going to go all Dog Day Afternoon on McDeiss’s ass.”
“Dog Day Afternoon?” said Hump.
“You know,” I said. “Al Pacino in the bank? Chants of ‘Attica!’? The whole sex-change thing?”
“Sex change?” said Lyudmila.
“Al Pacino’s boyfriend wants a sex-change operation,” I said. “That’s why Al Pacino was robbing the bank.”
“I must be thinking of a different movie,” said Miles Schimmeck. “What was the one where Al Pacino holes up in a house and the wife gets raped over and over?”
“That was Dustin Hoffman.”
“I could never tell them two apart,” said Miles.
“So Ossana DeMathis came up with the ridiculous idea to turn it into a hostage situation?” said Maud.
“And worst of all,” I said, “she decided the hostage she’d use to get out of her impossible mess would be me.”
“Isn’t that one of your rules, Briggs?” said Hump. “Never become no hostage?”
“If it’s not, it should be,” said Briggs.
“I didn’t volunteer, Hump, but that didn’t matter to the two of them. They had a quick huddle, and next thing I know Colin’s got his arm around my neck and his gun at my head and he’s dragging me out of the house and down the front steps, keeping me in front like a shield.”
“What did terrorist, he ask for?” said Lyudmila.
“What they always ask for,” I said. “A way out.”
“I just want to leave here without any trouble,” shouted Colin to the row of cops, hidden behind tree and car. His voice was a shriek that left one of my ears ringing; the gun was jammed into the hinge of my jaw just beneath the other. Colin gripped my neck so tightly with his arm that I had to grab at the thing just to breathe. “All I want is for you to guarantee me a safe exit. You do that, no one gets hurt.”
An electric whine came from a distant loudspeaker before McDeiss’s voice could be heard, stretched and roughed by the amplification. “Let’s start at the beginning, son,” said McDeiss. “How many are you?”
“There’s just me,” shouted Colin. “Just me and four hostages.”
Four? I thought.
“Four?” said McDeiss.
In the midst of the terror I tried to count, fumbled about in my mind, and came up short, until Colin explained it to us all.
“I got Victor here, who will be the first to get it, I promise you that. And inside, bound so they can’t get anywhere, is an old lady, the dead lady’s husband, and the Congressman’s sister.”
Ahh, yes. Now I saw it. Ossana, Ossana: how dark are your ways, how persuasive is your visage. Ossana. But the panic had twisted her reason. There was no way she could get away with it. No way in hell. Was there?
“Is anybody hurt?” called out McDeiss.
“The husband’s been coldcocked. The rest are just shitting scared.”
“Will you release some of the hostages in a show of good faith?”
“I don’t have any good faith to spare,” shouted Colin. “I don’t have any faith at all. But you let me go and I’ll leave two of the hostages behind when I make my run. I’ll just take Victor here, and the sister.”
“Where are you going?” said McDeiss.
“That’s my business. But if you don’t want a dead lawyer and a dead politician’s sister on your hands, you’ll let me go.”
There was a long moment of silence. I wondered if McDeiss was thinking that neither result would be so tragic. I began to slip through sheer gravity out of Colin’s grip. I bent my knees to increase the slippage before Colin yanked me back up and slapped my head with the gun. A sharp white light edged like a knife into my vision.
“Don’t get frisky,” he whispered into my ear.
“What kind of car do you want?” said McDeiss finally, through the loudspeaker.
“Something big and fast. A pickup with power. And no tricks.”
“No tricks,” said McDeiss.
“Or Victor here gets a bullet in the brain.”
“It will take some time,” said McDeiss.
“Not too much time, because I’m getting antsy. Twenty minutes, no more.”
“I can’t get you anything in twenty minutes.”
“This area is lousy with pickups. Twenty minutes, or the hostages start dying one by one, one by one by—”
All I saw was a cloud of red in front of me before I was pulled to the ground in a strange quiet, pulled down to the ground by a lifeless arm around my neck, sent off-balance and dragged down by gravity and death. I landed atop a dead sack of something, lying now in a puddle of something, and in the confusion it took me a moment to realize the dead sack of something was Colin Frost, and the puddle of something was the spreading stain of his blood.
I sat up amidst the gore, feeling weighed down by the horror and the blood, and looked for the army of police running my way. A sharpshooter somewhere had killed Colin, I was sure. The police had taken him out to save my life, I was sure. There should have been an army of police charging the scene after their success. Where were they? When were they coming to rescue me? Why were they still hunkered low behind their shelters?
And then McDeiss’s voice. “Put down the gun and step out of the house with your hands empty and high.”
I turned around, my hands sliding through the blood, and I saw her in the doorway, standing high in her heels, her shirt now modestly buttoned. Her copper hair swept across her impassive face. Her long pale arms were raised languidly over her head, showing the flighty birds of her tattoo. And hanging from her right forefinger was a small black automatic. She tossed it to the side like it was a bad peach and started walking down the steps, walking right toward me.
“Keep walking,” said McDeiss’s voice over the loudspeaker. “Don’t stop. Keep walking toward us.”
But she didn’t obey, did she? Obeying was never Ossana’s way. Instead of walking to McDeiss, she walked to me, the slightest smile on her bright-red lips, her breasts heaving with some hidden emotion. And she kneeled down and put her hand in my hair, despite the blood and gore, and leaned close with a kindly smile, like she was ministering to the halt or the lame, and she whispered with her sweet, vile voice, sugary and slick, into my ear . . .
CHAPTER 51
THE BROTHERHOOD
And what she said was this,” I said at that table at Rosen’s, each member of the Brotherhood leaning forward, eyes wide, rapt at the telling.
I stopped to take a sip of my drink. And then another.
“Don’t leave us ha
nging here,” said Schimmeck.
“Amidst the blood and death that she had caused, root and stem,” I said, “she leaned her pretty lips close to my ear and in the softest, sexiest of whispers she said—and this is a direct quote, mind you—she said, ‘I just saved your life, lover. Now do your job and save me back, like a good little bagman.’ ”
Maud leaned slowly away from the table, put her cigarette in her mouth, inhaled deeply.
“Eesos Christos,” said Lyudmila.
“Indeed,” said Hump.
“Now that is a woman,” said Briggs before swallowing the rest of his Sazerac like it was a gulp of air. “I could have owned the city with a woman like that.”
“And lost your soul,” said Maud.
“I’d have rather had the city. Tell me true, now: Is there anyone at this table, anyone, who isn’t even the slightest bit turned on?” He looked around at the five of us, tried to detect dissent, then leaned back. “Oh, what a sick pack of bastards we are. Aubrey, my good man, let’s do it again.”
“Another round and I’ll be crawling home,” I said.
“Perfectly acceptable way to go home for a maggot,” said Briggs. “You think yourself better than a maggot?”
“No, sir.”
“So what did you do, Victor?” said Maud. “Did you concoct a story for her?”
“I sold her out,” I said. “I told them every stinking thing that happened in that house, that she was the leader, not a hostage, and that killing Colin Frost was her way to stay free. She’s a killer and she’d plug me like she plugged Colin if she had half the chance.”
“Rule Four,” said Briggs, nodding.
“You bet, not that it did any good. While the cops and the DA were figuring out who to believe and whether to charge her, there was some sort of screwup in the paperwork and she was able to just walk out the door, simple as that.”
“Imagine such terrible thing,” said Lyudmila.
“I couldn’t,” said Briggs. “Not in a million years.”
“There’s an ongoing investigation into how it happened,” I said. “McDeiss promised to get to the bottom of it and see that heads roll.”
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