by Paul Watkins
Mackenzie remembered Ungaro as someone who was always doing small favors for people that they didn’t really need and didn’t ask for. Then Ungaro would ask a favor in return that required a ridiculous amount of effort and seemed designed more for the pleasure Ungaro took in seeing people work for him than anything else.
Shortly after graduating, Ungaro had gone into a line of work that was never made clear, except that it was for the government. The rumor had reached Mackenzie that he was involved with smuggling German war criminals out of Europe into North or South America. During the Cold War, experts were needed to fight Communism; the only true experts were Nazis. So many deals were made that in the end the deal-makers themselves became criminals. Sal Ungaro disappeared, only to surface again two years later at the Yale Club, suntanned and half-starved and out of work. Nobody knew where he’d been.
From the start, Mackenzie did not like Ungaro. Nothing to trust—these three words became a catchphrase that people used when speaking about Sal, as if it had been the motto on a coat of arms assigned to him. Ungaro didn’t expect to be trusted. He occupied a niche between people who wanted illegal jobs done but didn’t want to get their hands dirty, and people who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty but who had no way of getting in touch with the people who needed jobs done. He could acquire handguns, their serial numbers burnt off with acid, for acquaintances who thought they might need untraceable protection. He could produce passports, driver’s licenses, license plates, immigration papers, green cards. Mackenzie had seen Ungaro arrange for second-term abortions, deliver unpleasant messages, make someone’s life miserable. None of it was personal. That was why you could count on Ungaro to do the job. You didn’t need to ask him how he did it. You just had to pay him a lot of money and then get as far away from him as you could.
Ungaro was there if you needed to fight dirty, and everyone Mackenzie ever knew who had survived had a deep and lasting knowledge of the methods of fighting dirty and had survived because they were prepared to use them. Ungaro was the button you could push when all honorable methods had failed.
“Thanks for coming, Sal.” Mackenzie pulled his trenchcoat off the chair beside him so that Ungaro could sit down.
“It sounded serious.” Ungaro threw his own trenchcoat onto the back of his chair. Its lining was the tan, red and black of a Burberry. Then he sat down, working his backside into the seat to be comfortable. “Did you come all the way here just to see me?”
“I did.”
Ungaro folded his hands across his belly and flashed a smile. “Well, then it is serious. How’s your family?”
Mackenzie ignored the question. He didn’t want to make small talk. He leaned forward so he could lower his voice. Then he explained what had been happening. When Mackenzie was finished, he breathed deeply and sat back. “I need this done quietly. I need you to find me someone who will stop it.”
“Stop it how? You mean with a court case? I’m not sure I’m the right—”
Mackenzie swept his hand in front of his face, cutting off Ungaro’s words. “I don’t have time for a court case. I’m working on a deadline. I don’t want the press on my back. I want these people stopped completely and as soon as possible.”
“Completely. I see.” Ungaro sat forward and wiggled a finger in his ear, as if to make sure he had heard Mackenzie correctly. “That’s the operative word, isn’t it? You know, I’m not really involved in that sort of work anymore.”
“But you can find someone who is,” Mackenzie said with a fed-up voice, to show he had not come to play the game.
“No, you misunderstand me, Mac.” Ungaro slowly pressed his thick-palmed hands together. “I’m just not involved anymore. Not at all. It’s not even a question of money.”
“It’s always a question of money.” Mackenzie hated asking Ungaro for help.
Ungaro swept his eyes over the pale yellowy walls and the ceiling far above them. The room was full of people now, all of them locked in conversation, heads bowed toward one another so that they could be heard above the mutter in the room. Nobody raised a voice here. They just leaned closer. Waiters in short blue uniform jackets delivered drinks, sidestepping the dozens of briefcases set down beside the chairs. Club numbers were muttered quietly to the waiters and the waiters walked back to the bar to start a tab. No money changed hands in this room.
Mackenzie knew full well that Ungaro had not left this line of work and would never leave it, because it was not in his nature to do so. Ungaro was just playing the game that all people like Ungaro loved to play, forcing Mackenzie to ask again and again for help. Making him beg. This was Ungaro’s edge. He played it up like someone who hadn’t felt the edge in a long time.
“I’m sure you can look up some of your old contacts, Sal.” Mackenzie knew that now would be a good time to smile, but he could not bring himself to do it.
Ungaro wrapped his arms around his ribs, as if the room had grown suddenly cold. “Why don’t you get us a couple of drinks? No, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we have some champagne? Celebrate. We haven’t seen each other in so long.”
“Fine.” He’ll choose the Cristal Roederer, Mackenzie thought: $175 a bottle at this place.
Ungaro chose the Roederer.
The waiter opened the bottle, holding a towel over the mouth. At the dull pop, a few heads bobbed up from the huddles across the room. They knew that someone was either very happy or very desperate.
Ungaro inspected the bubbles before he drank the silvery liquid. “Why come to me, Mac? Can’t you solve this by yourself?”
“No, I think I need some help at this point.” Fucking Cristal Roederer, he was thinking.
“And your old friend Sal came to mind after all these years. Is that it?”
Mackenzie nodded solemnly. “That’s it.” Ungaro was sparing him nothing.
“You haven’t been in touch, Mac.” Ungaro rapped him on the knee in playful punishment. He was getting what he wanted.
“I know. I feel just terrible.”
“It’s a shame to neglect a friendship.”
“Certainly it is, Sal.”
“And now you need a favor.” The politeness had gone suddenly and completely from his voice.
“No, Sal. Not a favor. Let’s not call it that. I’m not asking you to do it for free.”
“Oh, but it would be a favor. The kind of thing you’re asking. No, I just don’t think I—” Ungaro let his words disappear into the glittering champagne flute.
“Look, Sal”—Mackenzie measured a space in front of him, as if trying to cram his thoughts into a box—“you’re the only one who can help me out of this.” He’s making me dance, Mackenzie thought. He looked at Ungaro and the words filed past behind his eyes—I hate you so fucking much I could kill you with one of my chain saws. But a different set of words unraveled from his mouth. “You really would be doing me a favor.”
Ungaro helped himself to more champagne.
“Well, I really can’t stay any longer.” Mackenzie shifted in his chair, ready to stand. The idea flicked through his head, a sputtering candle flame of an idea, that perhaps he had misjudged Ungaro, and the man truly had a different life now. Mackenzie wondered if maybe he should stay and see this new man, see what was left of the grinning, slithering one he had known. He rose to his feet, frowning with uncertainty. “I’m sorry to have bothered you with this.”
“Sit down for a second, Mac.” Ungaro wafted his hand toward Mackenzie’s chair.
Mackenzie slumped back, not quite gracefully, as if given a shove by Ungaro’s words. There had been no misjudgment after all.
“Just how good friends are we?”
You bandy-legged fucker, thought Mackenzie. You’re about to go too far. “You’ve always been a good friend of mine, Sal.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I never really felt that, though. All through college. Always seemed as if you were trying to avoid me.”
“I’m sorry you remember it that way, Sal.”
&
nbsp; “The truth is, Mac. I’ve fallen on hard times.”
What’s that mean? Mackenzie wanted to ask. You no longer have your $300 shirts made at Turnbull & Asser?
Ungaro kept talking, “If we weren’t good friends, you and I, I’d never mention this. Of course I wouldn’t.”
Mackenzie felt a headache gathering at the base of his skull. “So you are interested?”
“Not really. I think you could say I am compelled.”
Now Mackenzie sat back and drank some of the champagne that had been growing warm in his glass. The hard part was over, he knew. Now it would only be about money, and that he did not mind. Unlike with people, Mackenzie knew exactly how far he would go with money before a mental guillotine came down on his patience.
“This is a very delicate business,” Ungaro muttered. “If it’s not done properly, it puts us both at risk.”
“I trust you completely, Sal.” This is a day of Great Lies, Mackenzie announced to himself.
“But how much can I trust you, Mac? I’m asking myself how well I really know you. A thing like this—”
“Oh, I think you know me pretty well. And I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, Sal.” Mackenzie bowed his head toward the man. “But if you think I would have come all this way just to fucking buy you champagne, then you don’t know me after all.”
Ungaro’s gaze seemed to soften a little, as if the two were finally speaking the same language. “All right, Mac.”
Suddenly Mackenzie did not want to waste any more time on this fancy badminton with words. He told Ungaro he would pay thirty-five thousand dollars to have the job done. “I don’t want a whole crew of people. I want one man. One woman, if you like. But one person to go into those woods and find whoever is hammering all those fucking nails into my trees. And then I want your employee to stop that person or those people. I really don’t give a shit how.”
“Give me five thousand to get it started.” Ungaro’s face was without expression. He had reached the part of bargaining that was sacred to him and not to be muddled with emotion.
Mackenzie pulled an envelope out of his breast pocket and from it he took fifty hundred-dollar bills, which were wrapped in bundles of ten with a yellow banker’s band. There was more in the envelope, and Ungaro squinted to see how much.
“You shouldn’t carry that much money in this city,” Ungaro said.
Mackenzie stood, and for good this time. He put on his trenchcoat and tied the belt at his waist. “I always have to carry this kind of money when I talk to someone like you.”
The two men paused for a moment outside the Yale Club. A humid wind was blowing down the street, making the whole city smell like the locker room in a gym. The blue-and-white Yale flag snapped in the breeze above them. “When you have your person,” Mackenzie said, “call me. Send him to meet me, so that I can fill him in. You’ll get half of the money up front and the rest when the work is done.”
“Good to see you again, my old friend,” Ungaro held out his hairy-knuckled hand.
Mackenzie just nodded good-bye, and kept his hands at his sides. This was a bigger insult than any parting words he could have heaved into Ungaro’s face. It was payback for making him beg.
Ungaro’s lips pursed slightly. Then his hand curled slowly in upon itself. “You know,” he said slowly, his voice raised above the thundering engines of the city, “even if I can get this problem of yours stopped, it will probably come back. The conscience of the world is turning against the way you do your business. The days when you can just go in and clear out forests are numbered.”
“What do you know about the conscience of the world?” You protector of Nazis, he wanted to say. You handshaker of butchers.
“I see the balance between what people say is justice and how far they are prepared to go to get that justice.” There was no irony in his speech. “There’s always a point when people have had enough. A line they refuse to cross. And from everything I know, you’re a little too close to the line.”
“You let me worry about that,” Mackenzie said, but Ungaro had already turned away. He walked across the street with his loping stride, disappearing into the bowels of Grand Central Station.
When Ungaro had gone, Mackenzie stood still for a moment. He thought of a story Ungaro had told him about one of the Nazi doctors who had been smuggled to Brazil. The man had done experiments on Polish prisoners of war. The experiments involved placing people in almost-freezing water and then trying to revive them again when they slipped into comas. They also put men in low-pressure chambers to see when their lungs collapsed. The information was used to treat pilots who had crash-landed in cold water, or whose pressurized cockpits had failed. The information was useful, Ungaro had explained, even if the results had been unethically obtained. Mackenzie thought to himself—if Ungaro had not found this reason to excuse himself, he would have found another. That’s the kind of person I am dealing with. A destroyer of worlds. A zoot-suited Horseman of the Apocalypse.
Mackenzie raised his hand and flagged a cab. A trickle of sweat ran from between his fingers, across his palm and down the sleeve of his shirt. Six hours later, he was home, the constant rolling thunder of the city not yet faded from his bones.
CHAPTER 12
Mackenzie sat by himself at the Dutch Boy diner in Skowhegan. Ungaro had called that morning and told him to meet a man there. First, Mackenzie had to transfer the money into Ungaro’s bank account. Now everything was in motion. Mackenzie had the feeling that events had slipped suddenly and completely beyond his control.
Mackenzie looked at the door whenever anyone walked in. Sometimes he kept his gaze on the person, hoping to make eye contact because he felt sure this was the one. Every time he raised his head, he caught sight of the sign out in front of the diner—a blond-haired boy in Dutch costume. The boy had a fat-lipped smile and stood with his arms folded and one wooden-shoed foot stuck out, as if frozen in the middle of a Cossack dance. The boy’s clogs were outlined with glass bars of white neon. They lit up at night.
At last one man returned his stare. Mackenzie’s hands clenched under the table. Despite all the mental preparation he had done, the face still caught Mackenzie by surprise. He looked like a college boy, square-chinned and heavy chested from bench-pressing weights. He wore hiking boots and slightly baggy khaki trousers tucked into his heavy wool socks. He walked with his hands in his pockets. His blue-jean jacket had a worn-out corduroy collar. The man walked over. He had rosy cheeks and dirty blond hair and eyes like old glacier ice.
“Hey,” the boy said, and sat down. He moved confidently. “You are Mr. Mackenzie, right?”
Mackenzie nodded. Face-to-face with the person who would help him, he felt suddenly embarrassed to be needing the assistance.
The boy set his folded hands on the place mat. On the ring finger of his right hand he wore a gold college ring of the knuckle-duster type, with two lacrosse sticks in an X set into black enamel at the top. “Well, I hear you got some trouble, sir.”
“A little.” He listened to the boy’s accent. South but not Deep South. Not Alabama south. Virginia maybe. Kentucky. The great-great-grandson of some Bowie-waving Rebel at Bull Run.
“Well, all we have to do here is find out who you think is causing your problem.”
“How do you know Sal?” Mackenzie asked. Questions crammed Mackenzie’s head. What on earth is a clean-cut boy like you doing in this job? Do your parents know? Do you do this for a living? Who the hell trained you? How much is Sal paying you? The questions jostled in his head, lining up to be asked.
“Friend of a friend. My name is Shelby.” He extended his hand to MacKenzie.
Mackenzie shook the hand and felt its strength. He told Shelby how he thought Madeleine was either out there in the woods spiking the trees herself or was getting someone to do it for her. He mentioned Wilbur Hazard’s death, but nothing more about it.
“Are the police still carrying out an investigation?”
“There’s
only one guy. He patrols the woods twice a day and once at night. It’s not having any effect.”
“And if it is who you think? Exactly how far are we going here?”
And here it is, thought Mackenzie. Of all the questions I have asked myself, this one I did not answer. “I just want them to stop.”
“Good. Then that gives me some latitude.”
“Take all the latitude you want, as long as you can make them quit.” Just thinking about it made Mackenzie angry. “Have you been to Abenaki Junction before?”
“I’ve been there for the past four days. I passed your Range Rover on the way down here. I wanted to get a feel for the place before we met.”
“I didn’t see you around.” Mackenzie felt old and slow. The boy was far ahead of him. The people who never play games, Mackenzie thought.
“No, I expect you didn’t see me,” said Shelby. The south twanged in his voice. “I’ll see if this woman is spiking the trees. If she is, I will give her grief. But if it isn’t her, we might have to meet again.”
“Yes. I’ll give you my number.” Mackenzie fumbled for his notebook.
Before Mackenzie could write anything, Shelby rapped on the table with his knuckle-duster ring. “Good-bye, Mr. Mackenzie.” He slipped out of the diner. No waitress had come to give him coffee. No one turned to watch him go.
Mackenzie looked out into the parking lot but did not see where Shelby had gone. Suddenly he knew who else Shelby reminded him of. It was the Dutch Boy. The one whose wooden shoes lit up after dark. Shelby the Dutch Boy. Mackenzie tried to laugh about it but only slumped further into quiet. He did not feel the cat’s purr in his heart as control returned to his life, the way he had hoped he would. Instead, Mackenzie knew he had unleashed a wave of chaos into the neatly ordered streets of his town.
Shelby drove straight to Abenaki Junction. He parked his metallic-blue Honda Civic across the street from the Forest Sentinel office. For three hours, he watched who walked in and who came out. He thought it was a shame to be sitting in his car on a beautiful morning like this when he could have been out canoeing on the lake or climbing the mountain that rose up so steeply beyond the town.
