Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  At one end of the pool were three neckless guys machined by Bronx Wiseguy Tool & Die Co, playing cards. Hearts. Two of them were as broad as the Goodyear blimp. The other was wider. The sort of guys who had difficulty with right and wrong, and right and left. And never had nine to fives.

  A stack of poker chips was on their table. They looked us over long enough to let us know they’d clocked us, and went back to their game. They had cigars clamped firmly in their mouths, under down-brimmed Ecuadorian panamas.

  Ricky walked over to join a companion and a couple of DD cupped blondes with torque wrench lips and rears like Jessica Rabbit. They were sitting near the jetty. His crony stood up and they talked a bit, keeping their eyes on us. I guessed it was Ernie the Hammer.

  They walked over to us after saying something to their playmates. Ernie was a body builder. He’d obviously had a couple of years with little else to do, when he was in the joint. He’d gone for muscle definition and had been a steroid jockey, which explained but didn’t excuse his reputation for psychotic and irrational behaviour.

  He wore a tight fitting half singlet, the string sort that insecure jocks wear, and a chunky Swiss watch. On his other wrist was a bracelet of knotted elephant hair but I doubted he’d read Hemingway. His tight, low cut thong revealed his religion and had its designer logo in 72-point type around its waist. It made him look pleased to see everyone, and it made me think his bracelet was made from his pubic hair. Nothing surprised me anymore in this town.

  A gold ‘H’ hung from his neck on a heavy chain. He nodded to Tomas and looked me up and down like he was a lion looking for a limp, giving a small flex of his deltoids and triceps as he did so. He tried to create a ripple effect. I looked suitably unimpressed. It wasn’t difficult.

  ‘So you’re the English tough guy. We’re very scared,’ he said.

  His black wet-look hair was slicked back into a duck’s ass, and his eyes and lips were rodent like. A slightly beaked nose gave him an air of permanent insolence.

  I caught a whiff of fried onions cooked in bad fat, unmasked by his equally savoury aftershave. But I was feeling too polite to mention it, being English. Besides, we hadn’t yet been formally introduced. It could wait for a later date. I felt sure there’d be one.

  ‘Mr Quaranto will join youse in the pool. There’s some shorts for you. In there.’ He gestured to a changing room and shower area.

  I followed Tomas through a sliding glass door into a long narrow room with a concrete floor. Viscous slime in the showers harboured as yet unknown strains of fungal disease. We put on tightly fitting Speedos, Quaranto assuming you were federally wired unless he could see otherwise.

  I put my Sig Sauer among my folded-up clothes, hoping the Bayliner was going to be on cue.

  A guy I took to be Quaranto was at the pool when we returned, rubbing Vaseline on his lips. Moresco walked over towards me and looked me over again. I stand six one and a bit, with one ninety pounds of fairly solid flesh. His eyes took in every inch, before lingering at two scars, where bullets had gone through my chest and abdomen in Djibouti, fired from a fifty-five-year-old .303 calibre Lee Enfield on a hot and dusty day a long time and another life ago. His voyeurism was interrupted by the arrival of Quaranto.

  He gave a recently manicured hand to Tomas and then to me. In his mid to late sixties, he looked in fairly good shape. His body was well tanned where it wasn’t covered in greying hairs. His face said he’d seen it all and didn’t give a shit about any of it. His ponytail was scrunched together by a shiny gold clip under a red bandanna atop heavily logo’d shades, narcissism being one of his half-dozen personality disorders.

  ‘Welcome to my humble retreat,’ he said, in heavy New Jerseyese.

  ‘I guess it makes a pleasant change from Marion,’ I said. ‘You must miss being away from family.’

  Moresco pushed forward towards me but Quaranto slowly and thoughtfully shook his head at him. He’d deal with me as and when, and said, ‘Let’s go have a drink and talk.’

  We walked to the far end of the pool and down some steps to a semi-submerged bar under a sunshade.

  I could see a Bayliner nosing its way fifty or so yards off the jetty. Moresco walked toward the water to have a closer look as Quaranto waded behind the bar. We sat in front of him on stools whose seat tops were below the waterline to render useless anally inserted microphones. After a couple of minutes, Moresco returned and sat on the stool beside Tomas. We were out of the line of sight of the Bayliner, which Quaranto knew would make directional microphones useless.

  He turned to Tomas. ‘Bunch of fuckers with binoculars and Brooks Brothers swimsuits. You drop a dime on me?’

  Tomas shook his head vigorously. ‘No way.’ His eyes bulged like a catfish. Even I believed him.

  ‘You better fucking not have.’

  I looked over. The boat was now about forty yards off the end of Quaranto’s jetty. I could see no one on deck or behind the darkened windows. Quaranto seemed unconcerned. This was probably a regular event.

  He lifted a cooler full of ice and Italian bottled beers out of the water. He put it on the bar and offered us each a bottle.

  ‘I don’t like Limeys,’ he said by way of introduction, pointing his bottle at me.

  I raised my bottle towards him. ‘Chin-chin.’ He ignored me. ‘So. Is this the whole Cliff Richard thing again? I can explain.’

  ‘Explain what?’ he said. He was rapidly losing patience despite the fact we’d just sat down.

  ‘Listen. I could apologise for Cliff and the inexcusable Summer Holiday. But look at it this way. He was just part of the evolutionary process that eventually led to the Stones and the Beatles.’

  ‘What you fucking on about –’ he said. ‘Who’s this Cliff asshole.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I get it. You’re going to counter the great days of the Beatles with the subsequent misdeeds of Paul and Linda McCartney and Wings, then hit me below the belt with that whole sorry Mull of Kintyre episode. Or even worse, you’ll blow me away completely with Ebony and Ivory. So I’ll shut up.’

  He stared at me, McEnroe glaring down a line judge.

  ‘Typical Limey smartass. Like I said, I don’t like Limeys. You just reminded me why,’ he said. ‘You’re all bullshit. Pomp and no circumstance. Plus youse assholes whacked Princess Diana.’

  ‘Princess Di,’ said Moresco, self-satisfied with his contribution.

  I said, ‘Why would we have done such a thing?’

  ‘Because you didn’t want her to be Queen and she wanted to marry an Ayrab. And you don’t want no sand-nigger as your king.’

  I decided not to pursue a discussion about the line of succession to the throne in the Royal House Of Windsor. Not even at a later date. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I saw the Ayrab’s father on TV. He owns Harrods, your Saks Fifth Avenue. Said that the ex-Nazi King Philip directed your CIA to kill them, and your bullshit government whitewashed the whole fucking thing in some crap-shit inquest.’

  MI6 couldn’t organise a clap festival in a whorehouse let alone an effective assassination. I didn’t tell him that either. ‘A drunken chauffeur killed her.’

  ‘So youse fuckers spiked his drinks.’

  I let it pass and took a long pull from the neck of the beer bottle. It was premium Italian brew and it tasted half-decent like most things Italian.

  ‘Who the fuck’re you anyway? What was you doing out at the Gables? You ain’t got no dying fucking mother,’ said Quaranto.

  Moresco had been chafing to join in again. ‘Not yet he ain’t got no dying mother. A dying motherfucker maybe. That’s all he got.’

  He turned to give me his undivided attention. So I looked at him to give him mine.

  ‘Youse sniff around them ovens out there, youse liable to get a little burnt,’ he said. ‘See, we’re an equal opportunity crematory, where all men are cremated equal. Even a Limey asswipe like you.’

  No one laughed, least of all Tomas. Ernie kept eyeballing me, wai
ting for my reaction, seemingly unsure if his crack worked. I threw him a couple of raised eyebrows and a shrug. Eventually Quaranto let out a gratuitous chuckle. Ernie looked forlorn, his face like battered tripe, as if he had just been jeered off the stage of The Comedy Store on give-the-shitawful-newcomers-a-break night.

  Music started playing against the sound of falling water. I recognised the signature tune from The Sopranos; Woke up this morning. Got yourself a gun. What a bunch of wankers.

  Moresco was mouthing the words of the song and shaking his shoulders to the music. He watched me watching him so he tapped his beer bottle against the bar while beating in rhythm with his free hand and a nodding head as he sniffed in tune, having decided he was an ensemble. He’d been gnawing at the catnip bush.

  Quaranto pointed his beer bottle at me. ‘I asked you a fuckin’ question.’

  ‘Tomas has a problem and I’m his friend, the pro from Dover,’ I said. ‘The designated hitter here to help him out in the clutch situation.’ I could have gone on. The Red Adair of redemption maybe.

  Quaranto lit a cruise missile-sized Montecristo with a long match from a Habanos box. He hadn’t heard of the Cuban embargo either. He pointed the cigar at me.

  ‘You fucking right he got a fucking problem wit me. One point five million fucking problems and counting. You need me to draw a diagram?’

  Tomas didn’t. ‘I told you I can raise the monies – just give me another ninety days and the interest rate we agreed.’

  Quaranto laughed. ‘Listen to you. You want fuggin’ bank rates you go to the fuggin’ bank. You want my rates, you come to me.’ He was in orbit in his private shit-stream.

  ‘But we agreed –’

  ‘You fuggin’ agreed, not me. Now youse come crying here wit your Limey faggot friend to hold your hand,’ he said.

  Moresco aired my alleged sexual preferences in Italian street slang at me. ‘Fucking Fanook.’

  Quaranto diverted the aim of his cigar to Tomas. Moresco turned trying to make eye contact with me. He didn’t, so he went back to nodding incessantly to his imaginary beat.

  ‘Listen to me, Tomas. A man has three things in life. Respect, his word and his balls,’ said Quaranto.

  ‘That’s four,’ I said, counting on my fingers to help Ernie.

  ‘Shut up, piece of shit,’ said Moresco popping the cap on a beer using another bottle’s cap as the opener.

  I ignored him. Quaranto opened another beer for himself without offering one to us. He stood on his stool and raised it to the Bayliner.

  ‘Up your Federal asses. And remember the Titanic.’

  He and Moresco thought that was very funny, and background canned laughter was echoed from the card playing morons.

  Quaranto sat and drank from the bottle’s neck, and then looked at Tomas and me in turn. He stared very hard at Tomas. ‘You just both better believe you don’t rat to them Feds,’ he said. ‘You know what happens to rats?’

  Tomas nodded slowly, then he increased the tempo, out of his depth on the edge of the pool.

  ‘Listen to me. It’s started as a nice sunny day and now you’re spoiling it for me. I want youse both outta here ‘cos I got better things to do,’ said Quaranto.

  ‘So’ve I,’ said Moresco, rubbernecking the women with the overexposed hair, like a jackdaw eying shiny pickings.

  ‘So here’s my offer and it’s non-fuggin’ negotiable,’ continued Quaranto, pointing out the last three of these words with his cigar.

  ‘An associate of mine has a company going public in a couple of weeks. You gonna put your clients into three mil of its stock. He’ll tell you where to send the money youse collect, less five percent, which is generously yours. Your rip. We’ll then talk about a settlement on the other matter. The fucking debt to me.’ Quaranto stared at Tomas. ‘So whaddya say? This could be the start of beautiful business between us. We all make money. So you gonna be a stand-up guy or what. Or a pucchiacha.’

  Tomas thought awhile about being an Italian vagina and said, ‘Who’s the company?’

  ‘Forget about it. You’ll be told on Monday when this business associate comes to see you.’

  I said, ‘He meant what’s the fucking scam.’

  Quaranto ignored me. Moresco leaned forward. ‘Shut it, penis breath,’ he said.

  Quaranto leant over the bar, his finger pointing at Tomas. ‘Look at me and listen shit-for-brains. Listen very carefully. You might just need a bit of moral flexibility here and there, that’s all. Don’t tell me your business is so straight all the fucking time. Try a little creative triple-entry bookkeeping. Grease the books a little here and there. Become the Chef Boyardee of book-cooking.’

  Tomas breathed deeply to stop himself from hyperventilating. ‘And if I don’t do this?’

  ‘You pay me one point five mil, plus juice, by next Friday. Plus any payments you missed will be added to the amount of the debt. Compounded to the principal is the term I think you yuppie fuckers understand. And if you can’t pay you’ll become the broker what’s broker.’

  Moresco and Quaranto took a moment to enjoy the joke. The card players laughed as well even though they hadn’t heard it.

  Tomas eventually controlled himself enough to say, ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Everything is possible in this world, Tomas. You just give it some serious thought. I think I’ve explained the ramifications to you of what happens if you ain’t co-operative. So much to lose. So much to gain. So little time. Capice.’ Quaranto crossed his arms and leant back, waiting for his answer.

  Tomas’ expression was of a poker player who’d just realised he’d bet his farm on a pair of twos against a probable royal flush. Eventually he said, ‘I’ll see this guy on Monday and let you know. I just can’t do anything illegal. Anything against the SEC laws. Plus I can’t pay you next week. It’s as simple as that.’

  Quaranto uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, declaring his hand. So I looked at mine, and decided to up the ante. ‘I guess in that case, Mr Quaranto, we’ll have to see you in court. I’ll have our attorney call yours.’

  ‘I thought I told you to shut it, you butt-sucking dickfucker,’ said Moresco.

  ‘Am I talking to you or to your bimboy here,’ I said to Quaranto, nodding over towards Ernie. ‘Or is he your himbo?’ I’d need a while to think about the anatomical possibility of butt-sucking dickfucker.

  Moresco’s clutch had now slipped completely and he lurched over Tomas at me. I’d sensed something was coming, figuring him as predictable as a wino at a tasting, so I leapt backwards into the water, carrying him and Tomas with me. I’d doubted that Ernie had learnt to swim where he came from in The Five Boroughs and I was right.

  The sign on the bar ledge said the water was nine feet deep. It was a big pool and Ernie was out of his depth in many ways. He swung at my face as he was struggling to keep his head above water, so I went under and came up right behind him. Tomas swam to the pool’s edge.

  The others were standing around the perimeter, non-swimmers to a man. I put both hands on Moresco’s head and pushed it down from my raised body and then went under again, staying behind him. I held him for just long enough to exercise his imagination and his lungs, before letting him surface. His arms were flailing wildly as he tried to tread water and keep his head up to gasp for breath. His bikini thong wasn’t made for swimming and I could see it around his knees as I knifed under. I yanked it down and off, pulling him under again in the process and holding him while I counted slowly to ten. I let him go, watching him rise to the surface like an arthritic frog on speed. I surfaced and swam to the far edge by the changing room.

  I looked back and saw Ricky Bezzant leaning out over the pool with the pole of the pool-cleaning net. Ernie was in the middle, windmilling his arms and wailing like a banshee as he tried to keep afloat. I climbed out and looked toward the jetty to a welcome sight.

  At the pier end of the pool was Jonah, dressed in black. He was holding a Franchi Spas combat shotgun in the I mean business
here, low ready position, his finger astride the trigger guard, a hi-charge solid-shot round undoubtedly chambered. To aim and fire he simply had to raise the gun to his line of sight and squeeze. A direct hit on one of the mobsters would turn him into a crew. The frozen calm in his eyes said that he was a man in complete control. His body demeanour echoed the sentiment.

  Quaranto and his men were looking at him and his two companions who were standing on the further end of the jetty. They were toting Benelli M1s and also doing pretty good FBI masquerades. It was a scene from the silent movies, dialogue being redundant.

  Jonah moved slowly nearer the pool. The wiseguys were rigid, near Ernie Moresco who was now at the pool’s edge, his eyes divided equally between Jonah and me. I motioned Tomas to come toward me, with a flick of my head.

  I walked casually, to show who’s in control here, into the shower room and took our clothes and my Sig Sauer, then went back out and joined Tomas. The others did not move toward us. I threw Ernie’s G toward the blondes, now near the end of the pool.

  ‘Find someone whose balls are small enough for these,’ I said. The nearer one picked the soggy thong up with her fingertips remembering more than she wanted to about what they’d enclosed.

  Moresco was still in the pool, at its side. He looked at me with his finger pointed gun barrel-like, and shot a silent bullet to my head, cocking his thumb as the hammer. It was far more convincing than Irish’s pantomime shot of a few days ago.

  ‘You’re one fucking dead Limey,’ he said, just loud enough for me to hear.

  Tomas and I walked quickly through the house. I pressed the button beside the front door to open the gate. We drove out as Maria Viscione was approaching the driveway. She was dressed in her Sunday finest in the passenger seat of a hearse. Her driver was a young Hispanic with oiled hair and large looped earrings.

  She had either come for brunch or to make a collection. If it was the latter case, we had just got out in time. I waved at her.

  She didn’t wave back.

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