We’d also gotten her father’s magnum back, but it was impossible to conceal, the way she was going, and useless at any distance no matter what you’ve seen in the movies. I would be lazing on a bench at harborside, apparently listening to a Walkman-style tape recorder; Jamie and Mike would be elsewhere, with cover and support should it be necessary, Mike from somewhere on the rooftops and Jamie on a small rented one-person sailboat. Her versatility, considering that she was supposed to have spent most of her life in that medieval place, was surprising. I had a strong idea that Jamie’s background was quite different than she’d let on, proper speech pattern or not. I grew up near two bays, several big rivers, and an ocean with lots of beach, and I couldn’t sail one of those little suckers if my life depended on it.
“How are you going to arrange a meeting with him?” I asked her. “He never gets off that damned boat.”
“I’m just gonna walk right up and say hello,” she responded, and that is exactly what she did.
I’ll tell you, she looked absolutely incredible when she walked out onto that pier, wearing about as little as you could and still be legal most places, sunglasses, the wig, and not much else; and despite being barefoot, she wiggled like she was wearing the highest heels around. There were men on about half the boats docked at the slips there, and she made an instant impression on all who noticed her. She stopped to talk to one or another, passed pleasantries, asked a lot of dumb questions, and kept her voice high and her vocabulary low. It took a little effort before one of them asked her where she was from, and when she said she was an American, they asked her if she was with the big boat at the end. She looked surprised. “That big thing’s American? Ooooh! Gee, I wonder if they’re from anyplace I know?”
Little Jimmy had gone below, by this point, and one of his girls, the white one, was up top where the wheel was doing something. That didn’t bother Brandy a bit.
“Hi! Hey, up there! Hi!”
The woman on the boat looked puzzled, but when she saw who—or rather, what—was hailing her, she seemed to relax a bit.
“What d’ya want, honey?” the guard called down.
“Lionel over there just said you was Americans. I’m an American and I just thought I’d be neighborly and say ‘Hi!’ ”
“Well, hi, then, and good-bye. We don’t want no company right now.”
“Well, jeez, it’s just such a gorgeous boat—or is it a ship? I just thought—”
“Well, don’t think so much.”
Whoever she was, she sounded like working-class Philadelphia or very nearby. She wasn’t familiar to me, but I had a hunch now that all three might be either whores (getting a little long in the tooth) with whom he’d had relationships, or maybe mistresses stashed around the area. Either way, that made them addicts dependent on Little Jimmy for their source in this remote place.
Brandy pushed hard, stepping on the gang-plank. “Well, sorry. All I wanted to do was see what a boat like this looked like. Jeez—it’s real big.”
“Don’t you come on here!” the woman on the bridge screamed and started down. “Fuck off, sister! Now!”
At that moment Little Jimmy decided to stick his head up and see what the commotion was all about. He looked around warily, spotted Brandy on the gangplank, and had the expected reaction, “Annie! Enough! I’ll take care of this!” he said sharply, stopping the woman just before she reached the gangplank herself. Annie looked uncertain, gave what must have been a real dirty and disgusted look in Little Jimmy’s direction, and backed off.
The old loan shark hauled himself on deck and went over to Brandy. “My apologies, my dear. Annie can be a bit—protective.”
“Well, jeez, I was only tryin’ t’be sociable,” Brandy responded, sounding little-girl hurt. “She ain’t got no call talkin’ that way.”
“My abject apologies. I am Joseph Mohammed.”
“Sandy Parks,” she responded. “At least that’s what they told me to tell everybody, and I kinda like the sound, don’t you?” Somehow she’d made her way up the short gangplank and actually onto the boat in minute movements.
“It’s very nice. It suits you. But that’s not your real name?”
“Nah! My real name’s Brenda, but I like this new one so good I might keep it. Don’t tell nobody, though.”
“Not a soul,” he promised. “But why an assumed name, if I may ask?”
“Oh, Dave—I mean, Jake—is tryin’ t’skip on some dumb lawyers for somethin’. Oh, shit! This name stuff is so hard to keep straight.”
“I’ll keep your secret,” Little Jimmy promised. We were pretty sure that by this time of the afternoon he had at least the full cover story on us. “Would you care for a drink?”
“Gee, you mean y’got a bar here?”
“And a bartender. Nan! Vodka and tonic for me, and—you?”
“I guess a daiquiri is a little much, even for you out here.”
“One daiquiri coming up. Banana all right?”
“Yeah, great. Gee, this is somethin’. I mean, Dave’s got a lot of dough—oh, damn! I mean Jake—but he don’t have no boats. Just b’tween you’n me, he can’t swim.” She turned. “That’s him, just sittin’ there listenin’ to that borin’ music on his Walkman and readin’ business magazines. Can’t do much else right now. I mean, his wife’s around someplace.”
Little Jimmy did not require diagrams. “You know, I have the oddest feeling that we have met before,” he said, and I tightened. “Could that be possible?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I been in Dallas the past coupla years, but I was born in Philadelphia. Where you from?”
“That is a coincidence! We might well have met.”
“You from Dallas, too?”
“No, Philadelphia. That area, anyway. I thought I heard it in your voice.”
Well, Nan, the black one, came out with the drinks, and the pair on the deck continued to small-talk and gossip. Little Jimmy had a few trick questions that only a Philadelphia-area person would know, which was easy enough to cover, and he seemed to lose his suspicion as she spun a very convincing life story that was almost all inference. The biggest inference was that she’d met me while doing some hooking nights, to pay for secretarial school days, while I was in Philadelphia on business, and that I’d finally taken her on as a secretary—officially. There was a suspicion that my wife suspected, but since she was frigid tended to tolerate it so long as the fiction was maintained around her.
“Perhaps it’s not all one-sided, my dear,” Little Jimmy told her. “That wife picked up no less than a government minister last night in a bar and they went off together.”
“Oooh! She did? That slut. Wait’ll I tell Dave!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that. Save it until you or he needs it, like maybe she decides on a divorce or something. You seem a smart girl. Play it right.”
“Yeah, thanks. Maybe you’re right. You know, it drives him nuts to pretend, but we gotta. I mean, be real. He’s white, I’m black, and his business is in Dallas, for crissake! I ain’t complainin’. I mean, I’m treated real well. All them Dallas rednecks only get uptight if there’s a piece of paper and all, and I don’t need that. Hell, half of them bigmouths got dark girls in their closets.”
Nkrumah chuckled. “How well I know. It’s tragic, though, that such a thing still exists in our day and age. I was born poor and illegitimate, and my mother spent her life on welfare. I promised myself I’d have everything the white man had but that I would use whitey, like he used us, but never depend or work for him. I did pretty good, too. The money for all this is all mine, but its sources are very thoroughly integrated.”
And Little Jimmy was off with his grandiose bragging. He was retiring, he told her, because the kind of business where a black man could make this kind of money got dangerous sometimes, and he figured he had enough to quit while he was still young enough to enjoy things. Brandy was getting both tongue-tied and giggly in the heat; I suspected that the drink she had been given had a proof
content high enough for spontaneous combustion. Back when she was fat she’d taken booze real well, but after a year on the wagon and now thin, I remembered that even the ale in that monastery had made her real mellow. It was getting time to break this up.
The only question in my mind was whether or not to force the issue now or wait a bit and hope we could catch whoever he was going to meet. I figured the best time was the present. With this boat, there was every chance that the meet would be at sea, probably at night, and he’d be impossible to track and all hopes of any answers would be gone. Besides, if he got hit, it wouldn’t do us any good at all. Right now I had Mike somewhere in back of me, also wired, with a nice rifle and telescopic sight, and Jamie skirting around in the harbor. We’d learned about all we were going to learn from him at this point, including the fact that he intended to be around for a while yet. This had already accomplished what we needed: to get us access to Little Jimmy while he was tied to the pier, and in broad daylight.
“Oh, oh. I fear your man has grown a bit jealous,” Little Jimmy said. “I think perhaps we should say adieu for now.”
Jamie was just coming around again and I gave her a hand signal. Mike had a wire, so I knew he’d be on us. I walked straight up the gangplank and over to Brandy, my back to the sea, and looked at Little Jimmy. “Hello, Nkrumah,” I said, real friendly-like.
I never saw somebody jump like that. “Annie! Nan! Suzy! Stations!”
Annie up front came up with a pistol from nowhere, and Nan opened the door and showed a real-nasty-looking M16 rifle, the kind that can fire fifteen rounds in a half second and kill with any hit to the body. I still didn’t see Suzy, but it didn’t matter.
“Now, is that any way to treat an old friend and ex-employee?” I asked him, trying to keep the confidence in my voice. “I’m not even armed. If I wanted to hit you, I could do it at any moment. I got a sniper trained right on your fat head right now, just as insurance. Girls, you can get us, but we can sure as hell get him—and what good’ll that do you? Relax. It’s talk time.”
Little Jimmy stared at me. “Horowitz? Horowitz? Is that really you?”
“Aw, I thought I’d fool you with the beard.”
He started to relax a moment, then grew tense again. “That beard isn’t fake. It’s real. I can see that. Nobody grows a full beard that size in a few weeks! You’re not Horowitz—you’re one of them!”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Brandy put in. “Little Jimmy, for a man with the smarts, you sure been actin’ stupid and careless of late.”
I could see it in his eyes and in the tremble in his hands. The man was scared to death. “You—you’re Brandy! But. you’re not the Brandy I knew!”
“Still wrong,” she replied. “You hired the two of us, and you fired the two of us, right here, in this world. Only thing is, after we got canned we took a little trip right outta this world, and things go faster there. We’re back now, though.”
Little Jimmy started to get a little of his confidence back. “So, you tracked me down. So what? All I have to do is give the word and you’re dead, right now. I don’t know what this game is, or who’s paying you, but you have my retainer. I own you until the fifteenth.”
“No, Jimmy boy, you released me on the phone and told me to bank the retainer. Remember?” I said calmly. “And can the threats. I got a sniper on you, and if Black Beauty in there opens up with that cannon she’ll mess you up as bad as me.”
“I—fired you?” He started looking around. “You’re bluffing on all this, Horowitz. I don’t know which one you are, but I’ve got you.”
I sighed. “Girls, don’t get itchy, or this will end real bad real fast. Hey, Mike, if you can hear me, see if you can put one where it’ll be a nice demo but not spill any blood, huh?” I waited, and for a couple of seconds I wondered if Mike was really there at all, but suddenly there was a distant firecracker-like pop and Little Jimmy’s latest vodka and tonic got blown to smithereens. I tensed, but the girls looked far less confident now than before, and Little Jimmy let out a screech and fell back.
“Sorry to scar your fine table, here,” I told him, “but I think I’ve made my point as well as you made yours. Standoff. Except you’re the target of our man, and I don’t think the ladies here would find much profit in shooting us if you’re blown away. In fact, ladies, I suggest that if he makes that necessary, you not shoot at all—or you will surely wish that you were as dead as he was. We have a client who’s got a lot of people and a lot of resources and don’t care much about people except as lessons.”
Little Jimmy composed himself, and both Brandy and I started to relax a bit. If we were going to die, we’d have been dead by now.
“What do you want here, Horowitz?”
“Just information. Seems we got hung out to drip dry by you and your crowd, Nkrumah. I don’t like setting up people for hitters, and I don’t like getting in the crossfire.”
“That was your own damned fault and you know it! I told you to take the money and split!”
“Yeah, well, we all got taken for a ride anyway, and your hitters shot a fat zero. They’re both gone, and their targets, both decoys, are alive and away, and so are we.”
“Decoys! But . . . ”
“The man’s still around, Little Jimmy, and he wants to go home, only he can’t, ’cause he’s got a backstabber in his neighborhood and we still don’t have the whole picture,” Brandy told him. “You got the missin’ part.”
“I don’t! I was used, just like everybody else!” he replied. “I didn’t know who, or what, was involved here! Who the hell could have even imagined such a thing?”
“But you know now, just like we do,” I pointed out to him. “Only we found out by falling right out of this world. You didn’t. That means between the time we searched Whitlock’s apartment and the time we talked to each other that last time when I got to Bend, you learned more than a little. You found out the whole damned thing.”
“I swear I knew nothing!” Little Jimmy protested, and finally his side came out.
He had been picked up, while leaving his office in Camden, by some of Big Tony’s boys and taken for what they said was a meet. He was scared it was a one-way trip, that Big Tony was going to finish him off because he’d lost the money and was now undependable, but it wasn’t Big Tony they took him to see. Instead, it was Whitlock himself, clean-shaven and distinguished looking. Except, of course, it wasn’t Whitlock—not the one he thought. The double freely admitted he was a double and had switched places with the other one while that other was “playing games in queenie-land.” He said he knew that Little Jimmy handled a number of investment accounts for Big Tony, that he was something of a laundry for the mobster, and he wanted the names and dates and information on those accounts and transactions. Whitlock Two offered him his money back—in exchange for Big Tony.
Little Jimmy shrugged. “I mean, what the hell? I never liked those white Italian bastards anyway. Kept people like me on the fringe of the real power, took us out when we got too uppity for them. Big Tony thought blacks should be back picking cotton except that they were profitable, but a hundred times he called me nigger to my face and I took it. I had no choice but to take it. Not then. But I was ruined. Wiped out. I knew I couldn’t keep the news from Big Tony much longer about the money, and I knew what he’d do to me even though it hadn’t cost him. Waste one nigger, you set an example. I had a way out, so I took the deal. I gave him Big Tony, and he gave me a list of safety-deposit boxes spread all over the Caribbean, each containing some of my money, and the authorizations. I went home just long enough to pack, and then Whitlock was there! At my house! Only he had a three days’ growth of beard!”
“The real one,” I commented, nodding.
“Yeah, that’s right. Or, I think so. Who the hell knows anymore? He tells me what kind of thing I’m up against. He tells me where the doubles come from. He tells me he doesn’t work for Big Tony, that Big Tony works for him. He offers to make good my money, and keep m
e out of this mess, if I tell him what I know. Of course, I’m scared to death at this point, so I agree to go along with him and lie low for a while, but as soon as he leaves, I split, man. I hit my stash fund, then I started taking a quick tour of the Caribbean. The first two banks, the money was there; but when I hit the third, in Barbados, they acted like they knew me on sight, and insisted that I’d been there only an hour before—dressed differently, but otherwise the same. I went from there to Martinique—same story. Finally I skipped down to Kingston, made certain I hadn’t been there before, and waited.”
He sighed, paused a moment, then continued, “I staked out that bank for four days. On the fourth day, I saw—”
“Yourself,” Brandy guessed. “You watched you goin’ into the bank.”
He nodded and buried his head in his hands. “Yes! I knew then that what the Whitlocks had told me was at least partly true. They’re taking us over! One by one, they’re taking us over, replacing us with exact duplicates! I made for this island and this boat, which I’d prepared long ago, and which the ladies here helped maintain, and I’ve been on it ever since. I don’t want to be replaced!” He stared at us. “You think this is your world, but are you sure? Are you sure of anything?”
“No,” I admitted, remembering Cranston’s comment that paranoia was part and parcel of this business when you knew the truth. “But I’m as sure as I can be. So what are you going to do now? Sit here on this tub until the money runs out? Sooner or later you’re going to have to get involved again in some way to keep the money flowing.”
“I am involved. You said I fired you.”
“Yeah. Over the phone, when I called you from Bend.”
“Horowitz—the last time we talked was the call you made after leaving the apartment in northeast Philly. They picked me up that night, and the other Whitlock was at my house when I got there in the wee hours of the morning. I was gone after that. As God as my witness, I never talked to you after that. He did.”
The Labyrinth Of Dreams Page 22
