Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  “Oh, that.” The Professor shrugged. “We robbed a bank.”

  Pause.

  “Of course,” I said. “Only sensible thing you could have done.” General murmur of agreement.

  He nodded. “Unfortunately, the moment Tony examined the money we brought him, he recognized that it was bogus. Or rather, not bogus: fake counterfeit, if you will.”

  “How could he tell?”

  He sketched a grimace. “It’s a long story.”*

  “And it doesn’t matter,” Maureen said. “The point is, he was going to tear us limb from limb, and not metaphorically speaking either. So we brought the problem to Lady Sally, and she…fixed things.” She glanced around automatically, making sure the lodge was tyled, that all present had been stooled to the rogue. “When it was over, Tony Donuts was doing life in a maximum security federal facility…and there is no question it was hard time. The Lady had made certain subtle alterations to his brain.”

  “What, you mean like a lobotomy?” Doc Webster asked.

  Willard’s grimace was a grin, now. “Way subtler. And way nastier. A permanent hand-eye coordination problem. When Her Ladyship was done with Tony, if he tried to hit somebody, he always missed. By at least an inch. The same if he tried to shoot them, or stab them, or throw something at them, or even just grab them. You might say he always aimed to please.” His wife jabbed him with an elbow, but he was expecting it.

  I was awed. “I can see where a maximum security prison would be an unfortunate place in which to have a condition like that.”

  Willard nodded wordlessly, and by now the whole front of his head was mostly grin. Maureen was trying to suppress her own grin, and failing. “Especially for someone too stupid to unlearn a lifetime of aggression and arrogance,” she agreed. “I can’t imagine he survived long, and death was probably a blessing when it came.”

  “Anyway,” Willard said, “the other upshot of the whole business was…the other two upshots were, that I decided to give up screwing people for a living and become an honest prostitute instead…and that Maureen consented to park her cotton balls under my bathroom sink.” They kissed. “So things worked out in the end.”

  “Only it wasn’t de end,” Fast Eddie said.

  * * *

  Willard and Maureen stopped smiling.

  “Apparently not,” he admitted. “Whatever the nature of Lady Sally’s mojo, either it was not hereditary, or—far more likely—Tony had already spawned by then. The man who just left here did not seem as though he’d ever had much trouble hitting anything he wanted to.”

  “You’re sure he’s your Tony’s kid,” I said.

  Willard looked at me. “Jake, can you picture random chance producing a set of genes like that twice? Not only am I sure that was Little Tony Donuts, I’m prepared to wager twenty bucks that every single gene his mother tried to contribute to the mix was a recessive, that died waiting for reinforcements.”

  “Another twenty says she died in childbirth,” Maureen said. “Nobody has that kind of pelvis anymore.”

  “He resembles his father so closely that even though my forebrain knew better, my hindbrain kept insisting he was Tony Donuts. I kept turning my face away so he wouldn’t recognize me.”

  “Me too!” Maureen said. “Somebody like Tony, you see him again thirty years later, you expect him to look absolutely unchanged. Like Mount Rushmore.”

  “This,” Alf said, “is an interestingly tricky situation.”

  “How do you mean?” fellow quadruped Ralph asked.

  “You people have to fight a guy even the Mafia is scared to mess with. But not only can’t you kill him…you can’t even let him try to kill you. For the same reason: it’d cause talk.”

  “Aw, this is Key West,” Long-Drink argued. “People are reasonable, here. Nobody’d mind too much if we put down dangerous wildlife like a Tony Donuts Junior.”

  I had to side with Alf. “The deer’s right, Drink. Sure, the community might well decide Little Nuts needed killin’…that’s not the point. The point is, even this place isn’t so laid back that it’s safe to display paranormal powers here. If Tony kills one of us and we don’t die, it might take a week or two, but sooner or later we’re all gonna find ourselves talking to somebody from Langley, Virginia.”

  “I think you’re all overlooking something,” Erin said.

  If it seems strange to you that a thirteen-year-old girl got the respectful attention of a barroom full of adults, remember that most of them watched her save the entire macrocosmic universe back before she had a single permanent tooth in her head. “Yes, honey?”

  “You keep assuming that just because you can’t be harmed by gunfire or explosion, you can’t be harmed.”

  “Oh.” She had a point. Mickey Finn’s Filarii technology—or “magic,” if you prefer—is highly selective. Of course, you’d want it to be. It wouldn’t be much good if it simply coated you in invisible plastic: how could somebody kiss you? Mickey explained to us once that it’s calibrated to stop only lethal force. Don’t ask me how it can tell, instantly, whether an incoming missile is going to be fatal or not: Mick did explain it, but none of us understood what he said. The point is, you can shoot me with anything from a bow and arrow to a bazooka, or bomb me with anything from a grenade to a nuke, or hit me with anything from a crowbar to a broadsword, without necessarily capturing my attention, if I happen to be working on an especially interesting crossword puzzle at the time. But if you decide to punch me in the mouth, I’m probably going to lose some teeth.

  I knew for a fact I had nothing to fear from atomic weapons. Yet there was an excellent chance that a monster like Little Nuts could hospitalize or kill me with his hands, as long as no single blow was deadly in itself. And even if I owned a gun of sufficiently authoritative caliber to annoy him back, I wouldn’t dare use it in any but the most dire emergency. It may be a little hard for you to believe, especially if you live in a city, but in Key West gunplay is considered bad form.

  “Well,” I said, “when in doubt, consult an expert.”

  Zoey grimaced. “Terrific. Who’s an expert on exterminating mastodons?”

  “Hmm,” Long-Drink said. “The definition of expert is, ‘an ordinary person, a long way from home.’ An ordinary person, far from home, who knows about monsters and how to kill them without getting into the papers…”

  He and I and Doc Webster and Fast Eddie all said it at once: “Bert!”

  * * *

  Bert D’Ambrosio, AKA “Bert The Shirt,” is believed to be the only man who was ever allowed to retire from the Mafia.

  He was well past middle age, on his way up the courthouse steps in Brooklyn to not-testify in some now-forgotten trial or other, when he had a heart attack and died. The medics managed to get him rebooted within a matter of minutes…but as soon as he was back on his feet, he went to see his Don. Look, he said, I died for you: can I go now? The Godfather must have liked him. After some thought he told Bert to go keep an eye on the family’s interests in Key West.

  This was Mafia humor, because there are no family interests in Key West, because who in his right mind would bother exploiting an end-of-the-world rathole and college-student-vomitorium the size of a New York City park, with a speed limit of 30, way more bicycles than cars, and only one road in or out? Bert thanked Don Vincente and retired to southernmost Florida. Today he’s edging into his eighties, and I confidently expect him to dance at my funeral. And the ridiculous thing is, he’s still as connected as he ever was, in a quiet sort of way. Somehow, he manages to stay in touch, keep plugged in. He sits there in the sun, in his splendid silk and linen shirts, and people come along and tell him things. Specifically because there is no action here, nothing to get killed over, Guys From The Old Neighborhood (as Bert always calls them) will come through on vacation, from time to time. They say the Don himself actually visited, once, before my time.

  So Bert seemed the ideal choice for an expert consultant in the matter of how to deal with an extra-l
arge psychotic extortionist without the neighbors noticing.

  * * *

  For some reason Erin was nowhere to be found. I left the bar in Tom Hauptman’s capable hands, and Zoey and I saddled up and pedaled over to to the Paradiso Condos on Smathers Beach. At his age, Bert the Shirt doesn’t come to you: you go to him. In fact, I seldom approach Bert these days without reflecting how extraordinary it is that you still can approach him without first floating down a tunnel toward a very bright light.

  We found him where we expected to, sitting in a lounge chair under an umbrella, watching the zoo parade of beach people across the street. Under the chair, in the small pool of shade it and Bert’s bony flanks afforded, lay what looked like a heap of bread dough that hadn’t risen very well, except that it pulsed in slow rhythm. As we came near it rose slightly at one end and emitted a sustained baritone fart that any camel would have been proud to claim. Bert leaned sideways slightly and glowered down at it.

  “Hi, Bert. Hi, Don Giovanni,” Zoey said happily.

  The object under the chair lifted its other end enough to reveal a face, and turned it up toward the sound of Zoey’s voice. The face made Bert’s look young. Well, younger. Both eyes were so heavily cataracted they looked more like immies than eyes. There were about four surviving whiskers, randomly placed. The nose was the only part of him still capable of running. Basically Don Giovanni is one of the very few blind dogs to have a seeing-eye human.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Bert said to Zoey with real pleasure. “Whadda ya say?” He nodded politely enough to me, but it was clearly my wife’s appearance that had made his day. She gets that a lot.

  Today the shirt was midnight blue silk, a wide-collar thing with an almost liquid sheen and real ivory buttons, an impressive garment even by Bert’s standards. As usual it and his pants were covered with a fine mist of white hairs the length of eyelashes; nonetheless he was almost certainly the snazziest-dressed man in Key West, that or any other day.

  “It’s time to move him,” Zoey replied.

  Bert grimaced and nodded fatalistically. Without looking down, he reached under the lounger and tugged Don Giovanni a few inches, until the dog was once again completely in the shade. Don Giovanni shuddered briefly in what might have been gratitude or merely simple relief, and became completely inert once more. “I’m his personal ozone layer. I never laid anybody from Ozone Park in my life. Hello, Zoey; hiya, Jake—what brings ya all around ta this side a the rock?”

  “Trouble,” Zoey replied, pulling another lounger up alongside his and sitting down. I did the same on the other side.

  Bert nodded again, even more fatalistically. “Everybody could use a little ozone. What’sa beef?”

  Zoey looked at me. Discussing homicidal psychopaths with a representative of the Mafia was the husband’s job. “Ever hear of a traveling mountain range called Donnazio?” I asked.

  Bert sat up straighter so suddenly that the lounger bounced. Somehow Don Giovanni bounced the same amount at the same instant, so the lounger’s feet failed to come down on him anywhere. “Tony Donuts’ kid, ya mean? Tony Junior. Little Nuts, they call him. He’s your trouble?”

  So the kid’s name really was the same as his dad’s. “Yah.”

  When a serious man like Bert, who usually looks solemn even when he’s having fun, suddenly looks grave, the effect is striking, and a little demoralizing. He looked away from me, sent his gaze out across the Atlantic and frowned at Portugal.

  “Ya got a beef with Little Nuts,” he said, “my advice is ta shoot yourself right now. Try and run, you’ll just die tired.”

  “Neither one is an option, Bert.”

  He snorted. “Right, I forgot. You guys don’t get shot. You wanna keep somethin like that quiet. CIA hears about it, you’re up Shit Creek. Okay, ya better explaina situation ta me.”

  So we did. It took longer than if one person had done it, but not twice as long. Quite. In no time Bert had grokked the essentials.

  “So ya can’t kill this bastid, and ya don’t even want him to figure out he can’t kill you.”

  “That’s basically it,” I agreed. “Either one would be liable to cause talk.”

  Bert nodded. “We don’t want no more a that in the world than necessary. Okay, gimme a minute.” He sat back in his lounger, aimed his face at the horizon and closed his eyes.

  Zoey and I exchanged a glance.

  Finally he opened his eyes, studied the horizon a moment, and nodded. “Okay,” he said, “It’s risky, but at least it’s a shot.”

  We displayed respectful attentiveness.

  “Ya can’t take him out, ya can’t drop a dime on him, an ya can’t let him attack ya. So there’s only one thing left ya can do.”

  “What, Bert?” Zoey asked.

  “You’re gonna have to con him, dear.”

  My wife and I smiled.

  * * *

  “We got some people who are pretty good at that,” Zoey assured him.

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Worldclass.”

  Bert nodded. “That’s gotta help.”

  “I don’t know,” I said dubiously. “Their experience has mostly been in conning humans. How do you con a gorilla?”

  “Same way ya con a chimp,” Bert said, “or a college professor. Ya figure out what he wants bad, and then sell him somethin that smells just like it.”

  “That’s what I mean,” I said. “What Tony Donuts, Junior wants bad is everything.”

  Bert shook his head. “Don’t matter. Lotta guys want everything. I known a few in my day. But there’s always some one thing they want most.”

  “So how are we going to find out what Tony Junior wants most?” Zoey asked.

  “Oh, I know, kid,” Bert told her. “Everybody does.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. He wants a button.”

  “Huh?”

  “He wants to get made. Tony Junior wants ta be a wise guy. Common knowledge.”

  I was skeptical. “Are you sure, Bert? The way I hear it, the Donnazio family and the Mafia have always given each other a wide berth. I mean, I met the guy. He’s not just a loose cannon, he’s a loose nuclear weapon.”

  “No argument,” Bert said, holding up his hands. “I’m not talkin’ what he’s gonna get, I’m talkin what he wants. Real bad. I think it’s a way ta, like, succeed where his old man couldn’t.”

  Zoey was frowning. “I don’t see how this helps us. We can’t sell him a counterfeit mob membership card.”

  Bert’s hands were still held up; he turned them both around in a beats me gesture. “I’m just tellin’ ya what he wants most. He talked ta me about it one time, like soundin me out. I hadda tell him I didn’t see it happenin. He wants ta know, what if he put a couple mil on the table? I told him it ain’t money, any asshole in a suit can bring in money. Ta be made, from the outside…I ain’t sayin’ it never happened. But it’d take something special.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Somethin’ different. Outa the ordinary, like. Bringin’ in a new territory…takin’ out a whole police department…dreamin’ up some new racket…somethin flashy like that. And it’s hard to picture Tony Junior pullin’ off somethin’ that impressive.”

  Zoey said, “A new territory, you said? How about Key West?”

  Bert shook his head. “Nah. Fuck’s heah?”

  Zoey shrugged with her eyebrows, conceding the point. “Then I don’t get it. How is shaking down bars in Key West supposed to help get Little Nuts a button?”

  Bert spread his spotted hands. “Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?”

  The four of us sat for a silent while together and watched the sea, the sky, and all the sweating swarming people in the way. Key West is people-watching paradise: you get to see them temporarily freed of nearly all the inhibitions that help define them back home up north, to see them with their wrapper off, so to speak. Well, most of it: despite the lateness of the hour, the sun was so intense today that even
drunken college kids slathered with Factor 100 sunblock had had sense enough to put at least a tee-shirt on. The sun was dropping fast, though; it was almost time to think about where to watch the sunset from.

  “I got a teary,” Bert said suddenly.

  Teary? “A sad story, you mean?”

  “No. A teary.”

  When I failed to respond he glanced at me and realized I was clueless. “A guess that’s been ta college. Some guy in a white coat makes a guess, he don’t wanna admit it’s just a guess, so he calls it a teary.”

  Light dawned. “Of course. Sorry, I didn’t hear you right at first. So what’s your theory?”

  “It just come to me. Maybe there is a new territory here. It ties in with somethin’ I been thinkin’ about for a long time— that everybody’s been thinkin’ about for a long time. Ask yourself: what’s the strangest thing in Key West these days?”

  “The tee-shirt shops on Duval,” Zoey and I said simultaneously.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Bert said. Beneath him, Don Giovanni gently farted, possibly in agreement.

  Duval Street is the heart of Key West’s tourist crawl, over a dozen blocks of road-company French Quarter, and as recently as five years ago it was still a lively, diverse, eclectic mix of bars, galleries, bars, studios, bars, food outlets, taverns, and shops of every conceivable kind, hawking everything from aardvark-hide upholstery to zabaglione. Then at some point nobody has ever been able to pin down, for reasons no one could explain, it all began to change. Today the bars are pretty much all still there…but of the other commercial enterprises on the street, more than half are tee-shirt shops now.

  We Key West locals have all been trying to make sense of it for a long time, without success. It just doesn’t seem reasonable that there could possibly be enough business to support so many competing enterprises with such a narrow product line. Surely when tourists pack to come here, they bring tee-shirts?

  Yet there the tee-shirt shops are—a couple dozen of them. None of them ever seems to have much in the way of customers inside, when you pass by them, but somehow none ever seems to go broke. Even stranger, they seldom put up signs claiming to be about to go broke. As far as anyone has ever been able to learn, they mostly seem to be owned by anonymous distant corporations. They’re usually managed and staffed by hired transients, with a turnover rate rivalling raw combat troops in a jungle war.