Black Water Transit

by Carsten Stroud

  The ocean sounded like a sheet of tin that somebody was rattling. Thunder was out there somewhere, he could hear it in the distance, like enemy artillery. Low clouds heavy with unspilled rain lay across the horizon line, looking like a fence running along the edge of the world. And now Jack could see a single figure trudging along the waterline in the hazy distance.

  “Okay, here we go,” Jack said, talking to himself, watching as a man came down the shoreline, old and slightly bent, but big, powerful, heavy in the chest and shoulders, wearing a gray plastic raincoat over a dark brown suit, thick black leather shoes. Now and then he’d put a cigarette up to his face and puff at it and shreds of smoke would fly away from him like white birds let out of a cage.

  Jack popped the door of the van, stepped out into the warm wind and the feathery rain. He reached back inside and took one of the uniform jackets hanging on a hook, shiny dark brown with a big gold star on the right breast, slipped it on, and walked out onto the beach. The old man saw him, stopped and waited. The beach was long and wide and empty and the whole place had an end-of-the-earth look. The old man was facing out to sea, watching the surfers.

  “Hey there,” Jack said, coming up slow on his right side. “Mr. Senza. Thank you for coming.”

  The man did not turn or speak. Fabrizio Senza was a big man, over six-two. Up close like this, Jack could smell his cigarette smoke in the wind off the sea, and a scent coming off him like garlic and wet wool. His hollowed-out cheeks were heavily tanned, dark as hardwood planks, covered with spiky gray hairs, and his trimmed white mustache was large and stained with tobacco. His deep eyes were surrounded by lines and rays of seamed skin, as if he’d been freeze-dried. His shirt had once been white and expensive and his thin black tie was pulled in tight.

  “Mr. Senza,” he said again, and reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. Senza moved it just enough to avoid the contact.

  “I know you,” he said, still not looking at him. “Little Jackie Vermillion. Used to see you on Ditmars. Your momma was a wonderful woman, lovely like a cypress. Your pop I knew as a man you could talk to. Had the flower truck, I think? Big blue one with the yellow letters. I don’t remember so good anymore. Frank says they’re both dead now. Everybody’s dying these days. Where’s your buddy, what’s his name, stupid name? Like a ditch, only smaller?”

  “Creek. Creek Johnson.”

  “Yeah. The party boy. I seen him at Frank’s all the time. Booze, women. Always with the Vegas line, always the bookies and the bets and the booze. Not a serious guy. Frank says you’re a serious guy. That’s why I come. Carmine says to say hello. Hello from Carmine. Will ya look at those mutts out there? What is that, spend all your day out on the board, waiting for a wave to ride? Why ain’t they working?”

  Jack watched the surfers, waited.

  “Okay,” the old man said. “Open up your jacket there.”

  He turned around to face Jack. Four hundred yards away, on the roof of a shabby apartment block called the Sea Heaven Towers, two ATF agents huddled next to the seaward wall of the roof and struggled to keep their gear dry. One was Derry Flynn, wearing a rain slicker over black jeans and a black tee, combat boots, the other a female in full rain gear, late forties, thick around the middle, with a wide Slovak face and small bright black eyes, skin powdery and coarse, by the name of Maya Bergmann, one of the agents who had been there at Red Hook and survived.

  “Who is it?” she asked Derry. Derry had his eye up to the scope of a video camera fitted with a directional microwave mike. Maya was handling the Nagra recorder.

  “I don’t … okay, dammit! It’s Fabrizio Senza.”

  “That’s Torinetti’s gardener, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe now. Back in the seventies he was a button man for Johnny Papalia, ran the family business in Montreal and Toronto. They called him the Barber because he liked to use a straight razor on guys who pissed him off. He’d take an hour if he had one.”

  Maya Bergmann peered over the roof at the distant figures standing together on the shoreline.

  “So tell me Vermillion’s not connected.”

  “I don’t know,” said Derry. “When the law itself starts to fuck you over, who you gonna call? Amnesty International? The UN?”

  “You still soft on this hapless mutt, Derry?”

  “Quiet,” he said. “I’m trying to follow this.”

  The old man stepped in close to Jack and frisked him expertly. Jack had left the Glock in the van, knowing that a pistol would do him no good with Fabrizio Senza and maybe a lot of damage. The old man even raised Jack’s cuffs to see if he was trailing antenna wire. A gull shrieked into the thin gray sky and wheeled away over the water. Jack watched it go, keeping very still. Then the man stepped back, shrugged, and let his hands fall to his sides.

  “You may be clean. I dunno. Could have some guys taping all this from a truck up there. Got a guy on the roof. Forget it. Who cares? Frank says to check you out. Me, I got no game going. What do I care, you wanna tape me anyway? Frank’s a worrier. Lotta things have changed since I was a player.”

  “You got that right,” said Jack. “Last time I had a guy feel me up like that, I was twenty years old and the guy was the doctor at Camp Lejeune.”

  “I’m being careful. Frank said be careful. Frank says to me, go down there, talk to him. I’m here. Fine. I do what I’m told. I’m a fucking errand boy now. But I know you supposed to be inna slam, and here you are walking around inna jacket widda nice gold star. Why, I don’t know. Maybe now you got a federal leash on you, you working against Frank.”

  “I’m not the only guy standing here,” said Jack. “This is Far Rockaway. They know you all over here. How’d it be, Jerry Vale comes back to Queens and nobody knows him?”

  “Nobody would know him,” said the man, baring his sharp yellow teeth. “It’d be ‘Jerry Vale? Who the fuck is Jerry Vale?’ ”

  The man closed his eyes and pulled in a breath, let it go slowly out. Jack saw that his eyes were sunk into dark pouches and rimmed in red. He remembered Fabrizio being drunk that night at Frank’s, and Carmine saying something about a dead child.

  “Carmine said you lost somebody. A relative?”

  The old man rocked as if buffeted by a wind off the sea, his craggy face hardening. He looked at Jack as if Jack had struck him.

  “You don’t mind, we don’t speak of her. I don’t like to think about it. Nothing can be done. Let’s stick to the business.”

  “I’m sorry. I apologize. I saw you at Frank’s last week, I thought you were in Sicily. Everybody said you had gone home.”

  “Hah. Where you think a guy like me is gonna go? I went up to the north for a while, shit, Milan’s just like Pittsburgh, fulla Swiss and Krauts, and the weather’s worse than here. I’m old, I need sunshine. I got some friends in Taormina, nice view of Etna in the morning, sun’s on it from out of the Aegean Sea there.”

  “I know it,” said Jack, smiling at the memory. “My father was from Catania. I was back there just last year. Why’d you leave a beautiful place like that?”

  “You hear things. Even il papa was shooting off his Polack mouth about our business. Crazy old prick. Why we let some Polack get the job instead of one of our own, that’s all screwed up there, hah? Old ways are changing. People start acting funny around you, stop talking when you come in the room. I figured I should go.”

  “For your health, Zio?” said Jack, asking politely, but maybe teasing a little. Fabrizio Senza had been caught up in the federal RICO actions of the late seventies, busted for tax evasion. He pulled his time and never testified about anything. But the Mafia didn’t like to take chances. Nothing personal, but we need you to be dead now, paisano. The old man didn’t smile back and seemed to have decided to stop talking for a while.

  “So … how long you been back, then?”

  Another long silence. The gull came back from the sea with something dead hanging from its beak. Other gulls appeared out of nowhere and tried to take it away. Th
ey cawed and screeched in the voices of schoolyard children, and then the whole flock soared away inland and the silence came back down.

  Eventually the man spoke.

  “I dunno … six years, maybe. What’s it to you? You was gonna rat me out to the press, you’da showed up with the New York One truck. So, what is it? You in a jam. What do you want from Frank?”

  “You know I have some trouble. With the feds?”

  “The feds,” growled the old man, suddenly angry. “Forget about it. Those mutts couldn’t throw a cluster-fuck in a steambath.”

  Stung, Jack’s temper flared.

  “With respect, Zio, they did a job on you.”

  The old man blew out his cheeks and went for another cigarette. His hands were bumpy and knotted like lumps of oak burl. A wedding ring, thin and pitted and bent, was almost buried in the arthritis that had swollen around his knuckles and in his fingers.

  “Stati di grazi, io. I said nothing, ratted out nobody. Took my time and ate it cold in solitary. Still the Papalia family sent a guy after me, a pezzo novante nigger with a shank. I cut his pezzo off and flushed it downa crapper, him lying there on the floor, bleeding and squealing, beggin’ me don’t do it. Hah! I’m supposed to worry about the guys running things now? Alla old-timers, the serious men, they’re gone. Big Paulie was the last of the good ones, and that fashion model had him whacked. Now what? The Jews, the Russkies, the blacks? I saw that, I figured, salud, there goes the neighborhood. And I was right too. That mook Gravano calls himself Sammy the Bull—nobody else ever called him that—I hear he has a book out. Alla ’bout the hard guys he personally whacked. What is that? My day, you did things, you didn’t talk about it. I’m gonna hide out from a bunch of celebrity mutts like that? From TV stars? Let them come find me. I am in my stagione morta and I am not afraid. What am I now? Fucking gate boy. Frank’s dying. Everything is different now. Enough of this. I’m getting wet here. You talk to me, your situation, what Frank’s supposed to do about it.”

  The old man fell silent, waited for Jack’s answer. There was an air about him of livestock, of animal calm. Jack nodded once, cupped his hands in front of his mouth and blew into them, rubbing them.

  “Here it comes,” said Derry Flynn, up on the roof of the Sea Heaven Towers. Maya Bergmann shivered in the wind and pulled her collar up against the dripping rain.

  Jack looked out to sea, thinking about Fabrizio’s question. What was Frank supposed to do? What was fair to expect?

  “You know Frank’s dealership?”

  “Yeah. Little toy cars for little toy boys.”

  “Who runs it now?”

  “Whaddya mean? Frank runs it.”

  “I mean the day-to-day, now Frank is sick.”

  “Frank isn’t sick, Jackie. Frank is dying. His kid runs it. Tony. The blowfish, the coke boy.”

  “Okay. Tony runs the day-to-day, but it’s still Frank’s shop. Would Frank know if something hinky was going on in the detailing area? Where they clean up the cars for people?”

  “I don’t know. Why would he? I been there. It’s a big shop. Whaddya mean by hinky?”

  “I had a car in there last Wednesday. A black Shelby Cobra. It was in for detailing. It’s a rare car. Only twenty in the world. I got busted for trying to ship a stolen one down the Hudson. The feds got a tip, they cracked the container. Found the Cobra, also found a trunk full of drug money from Canada. My prints were all over the car, inside and out. Somebody switched the cars on me. Set me up.”

  “Canada? What? You mean like Montreal?”

  “Yeah. Like Montreal. Why?”

  Fabrizio was silent. He turned and looked at the rows and blocks of wooden houses, the shabby apartment towers that studded the flat sweep of the island. The wind whipped at his coat collar and his thin white hair fluttered against his shiny scalp. His eyes were squinted almost shut and his mouth was a thin hard line. He looked at Jack and then turned to face the ocean. The surfers were sliding down a wall of green water. The sun was breaking through and shafts of light were shimmering through the clouds. A surfer arced through a patch of sunlight, his wet suit shining with yellow fire.

  “Jackie, you need to watch these kids,” said Fabrizio.

  “Why?”

  “You turn around now, kid. Watch these mooks.”

  They both turned to face the sea. Senza pulled out a little notebook, scratched out some words, held it up so Jack could see it.

  YOU GOT A TAIL

  YOU GOT CAMERAS ON YOU RIGHT NOW

  YOU GOT MIKES ON YOU

  SHUT UP

  Jack read the note. He wasted no time trying to convince himself that Senza was wrong. It made sense. It was the only thing that did. He hadn’t been running at all. He’d been let loose, see where he goes. Now he was bringing the trouble all the way back home.

  Up on the roof, Flynn and Bergmann were getting nervous.

  “Okay. Now they’ve turned away. I can’t get anything but the damn wave noise.”

  Maya adjusted a dial.

  “That better?”

  “No. It just makes the hissing louder.”

  He looked through the telephoto lens. He saw the two men standing side by side, looking out at some kids surfing. Out on the horizon, the sunlight was a wavering screen of shining silk curtains.

  “What are they doing?” asked Bergmann.

  “I don’t know. Dammit. I can’t get anything.”

  Down on the shore, Jack was watching Senza write on his notepaper. Senza’s hand was knotted and he wrote with effort.

  SAY SOMETHING TO END THIS

  GET IN THE TRUCK

  GO TO CONEY AND TAKE THE GOWANUS

  WAIT FOR A CALL ON YOUR CELL PHONE

  Jack read the words, nodded once. He started to walk away, but Senza put out a hand, stopped him.

  “Hey, Jackie, you know Montreal? You ever been there?”

  “No. Not in a long time.”

  “Good food. Great broads. I just come back from there.”

  Jack said nothing. He watched Fabrizio’s hands.

  “Yeah, I know a guy, goes alla time. Always back and forth. This time he takes me. He needs a driver. For the cars. You follow?”

  Jack waited. The wind ruffled the tops of the waves, making the white tips glitter in the sun like shark’s teeth. Fabrizio was writing one last word. The pen moved across the lined page like the needle on a cardiograph, shaky and spiking, the old man’s fingers knotted as tree roots, the little blue plastic pen tiny in his hand.

  CREEK

  SUNDAY, JUNE 25

  U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE

  WATER STREET

  LOWER MANHATTAN

  1200 HOURS

  Earl Pike came into the U.S. attorney’s office alone. Valeriana Greco was waiting for him, along with several agents of the ATF. Derry Flynn and Maya Bergmann were still on the Jack Vermillion surveillance. Pike walked into the spacious mahogany-paneled office wearing a navy-blue pinstripe suit by Armani over a sapphire-blue shirt and a sky-blue silk tie held in place with a gold pin through the collar points. He wore shiny black brogues and had a ring on the third finger of his right hand with the insignia of West Point in raised enamel on the bright yellow gold. Greco watched him move across the thick Persian rug from behind a desk the size of Kansas. She was wearing a gray suit and a black silk blouse. Behind her on the wall was a massive carved wooden crest, the eagle of the Department of Justice. A wide window opened onto a view of Water Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the East River. The other agents, all male, all packed with muscle, all young and angry and wired to the teeth, stirred and tensed as Pike reached the desk and put out a hand. Greco, smiling sweetly, shook it.

  “Thank you for coming in, Mr. Pike. We’ve been looking forward to seeing you. Please have a chair. Ben, can you run and get us some fresh coffee? Will coffee be all right, or would you like tea?”

  “Coffee would be wonderful, Ms. Greco.”

  She nodded at a young man with black curly hair, who jogge
d out of the room and was back in seconds with a silver tray and a full sterling coffee service. Greco poured out two cups, handed one to Earl Pike, who took it with a gracious comment and sat back, erect in the heavy damask chair, the coffee cup balanced on one knee. Greco took her place and there was a generator hum of power and silence as she leaned forward over the desk.

  “You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer present?”

  “Am I about to be charged?”

  “You’re aware of the interception of your shipment?”

  “I am. My colleagues at CCS were very diligent. I got the word last night and flew straight in.”

  “Flew? From where?”

  “Sioux Falls. I’ve been out there on a job.”

  “Sioux Falls? Really? There’s no record on any major carrier that indicates you were a passenger on any domestic flight in the last three days. Last Friday night there was an indication that you were on a private jet out of LaGuardia. You are said to have left at midnight. And you are said to have gone to Harrisburg and not Sioux Falls. The time frame is rather important, since, as you are no doubt aware, there was a confrontation at Red Hook that same night during which several of my people were taken down by a very skilled sniper. The weapon used was a Barrett Fifty. You know this weapon?”

  “Of course. I’m fully checked out on the M-eighty-two-A-one. So are thousands of other ex-army shooters. I read about Red Hook. Terrible thing. I’ve been under fire myself. Such a senseless tragedy.”

  “Well, you’d know about such things. We understand from your army records that you yourself are a fully qualified military sniper, that you spent several years doing just that kind of thing for the Special Operations forces in places like Guatemala, Ecuador, the Middle East, the Gulf War. You earned a Bronze Star for what you did in some place called Co Roc, although the record isn’t complete.”

  “No, it isn’t. Never will be. But I wasn’t at Red Hook. Sorry.”

  “But then we have this discrepancy. As I have pointed out, the clerk at LaGuardia said you had taken a midnight flight to Harrisburg. Not Sioux Falls. This presents us with a conundrum.”