Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  I cleared my throat. “Anyway…Levitch and Latzo, no reason to worry about either of them.”

  Again he said nothing, at least at first, as if absorbing the underlying meaning of my statement. “I’m not worried,” he finally said. “I’m just keeping you up-to-date, like you asked.”

  “Good, good…So, uh, where do you want to meet?” I said. “I have the cash for you, and a new disposable phone. We should change out the phones every day or so.”

  “Just leave it in my mailbox with the cash.”

  “Your mailbox at home? That is not secure.”

  “It’s on me. Do it.”

  “Why not meet me here at the Medusa? Your mother and me met here and—”

  “Just drop off the fuckin’ cash. I really need it.”

  He hung up.

  Christ, I should not have mentioned his mother, I thought at the time, but this place causes me to obsess over her.

  At that point I was in the lounge area. Though put off by Leo, I nonetheless managed to be pleasant to the young woman tending bar—a wholesome-looking green-eyed brunette with a warm smile—and sat on a stool. “Stoli martini, very dry and up, with a twist,” I said to her, and she winked and expertly set to work on one.

  My cellphone rang.

  Joe calling.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve sent you three fuckin’ text messages.”

  “Oh, uh, text messages, yeah. Sorry, but I forget to check for text messages. Hardly anybody used text messaging when I went away last time. What did your text messages say?”

  “To call me, damn it.”

  “Why not just call me to begin with?”

  His exasperated breath riffled across the phone. “Nico called to say Leo got in a fight at the Venetian.”

  “Yeah, Leo told me about that.”

  “Did he tell you the lesbian accused him of helping our friend along on his trip?”

  “Yes, and he said he kicked her ass for it. I told him I had nothing to do with it and that was that. No worries.”

  “If you’re sure,” Joe finally said after pausing. “Oh, yeah, you need to call Tarasov.”

  “What does he want?”

  “Tonight’s cleanup we talked about earlier.”

  “Ah, I will call him,” I said, and mouthed a silent Thank you to the bartender when she handed me the martini. “What about the other messes we talked about earlier?”

  “Call me tomorrow at noon sharp,” he said.

  “Will do….Hey, uh, you want to stop by the Medusa and have a drink with me?”

  “I’m happy to say I have a better alternative. In a couple hours Michael is picking up the little Cambodian doll he told me about.”

  His new whore again, Jesus. “You have time to stop by for a drink or two?”

  “No, I need all my strength to keep up with the young stuff, and have to rest up. Maybe we can have a drink tomorrow.” He hung up without further comment.

  Damn, I could not even lure Joe Sacci out to play with me.

  I sipped my martini as I dialed Tarasov, telling the bartender, “Hey, thanks again. This martini is very good. In fact, it is perfect.”

  Working to keep up with the crowd, she smiled large as she started mixing what appeared to be a margarita. In a Southwestern accent, she said, “When you want another, sweetie, just ask for Sheila. That’s me.”

  “Well, Sheila, when you want something, just ask for Babe. That’s me.”

  “Babe,” she said, “as in Ruth?”

  I nod.

  “Cool name.”

  Tarasov interrupted our conversation by answering my call, saying he had little time to talk. He was in the middle of so-called telephone negotiations with Levitch, a ruse that would soon lead to her reunion with her dear uncle.

  “Stay where you now are,” Tarasov said. “At the bar Medusa on Beverly close to Dillon, yes?”

  I did not bother to ask how he knew this. He is as protective of me as a lioness is of her cubs, eternally indebted to me for saving his life when we were at San Quentin. So Joe, no doubt, had already informed him of my whereabouts and of the guys he placed outside the Medusa to watch my rear.

  I hung up from Tarasov after agreeing to stay put until he called me back again.

  —

  Tarasov told me to wait an hour and now it has been almost two.

  No worries.

  Me and Sheila really hit it off. Not in a romantic way, understand, but we talked and laughed without putting much effort or show into it, and she kept the martini assembly line rolling. During her busy periods I chatted with other patrons. Just idle chitchat as far as they were concerned, but intriguing conversation to me. A medical-device sales manager, a paralegal for a tax lawyer, two young studs in flashy suits who smugly claimed to have had a “kick-ass day” without saying whose ass they kicked or to what end—all so-called “ordinary” people who I would bet a million bucks had not murdered anyone their entire lives.

  Sheila’s shift ended about thirty minutes ago. Appreciative of the over-the-top tip I gave her, she invited me out to her car to share a joint—“Primo turbo, Babe, that’ll give you a bump for the rest of the night. You cool with it?”

  Yeah, I was cool with it.

  I am primarily a drinking man who will occasionally accept the offer of recreational drugs—especially so soon after getting released from prison—but I would rather not get as shit-faced as I am now. Tends to lighten the trigger on my emotions and makes me prone to morose bouts of sentimentality and overly critical introspection.

  At the bar now, I recall my son’s words at La Parrilla: You’re a fuckin’ killer, man.

  Up from my barstool I go, martini in hand, already fed up with overly critical introspection and primed for morose sentimentality.

  What occurs to me as I move through the evening crowd is that serving prison time is a form of suspended animation. The worst thing about prison is not the sadistically cramped conditions, the homicidal maniacs you must constantly guard against, the mind-numbing daily routine, or even the bad food. No, the worst thing about prison is the way the authorities keep you isolated from the Outside World. Their purpose is to effect your social demise through temporal and sensory deprivation, to socially maroon you, to disconnect you from the free-flowing rhythms and melodies of time that allow you to boogie through your day in the Free World. To survive without losing touch with the reality of freedom, I therefore fantasized every moment I could, put myself in a different time and place. The time I transported myself to most often was the ’80s, my heyday, and one of the places I thought about most often was here, the Medusa.

  So many things have changed since the ’80s:

  Cellphones, for instance. The first cellphone I ever touched was as big as a brick. Now they are little handheld computers more powerful than the PCs that once took up a corner of a room, and they connect you to the internet whenever and wherever you want. And everyone uses the damn things to send text messages, shit, not to mention emails.

  Checking out the crowd here, I see many other things that have not changed: The same little black dresses prancing and posing here and there, all filled to bursting with young breasts heaped on top of long legs and spiked heels. There are also the same young studs trying their damnedest to get their hands on what’s inside the little black dresses.

  The culture here, though, has changed: There are many more blacks and Asians, Latinos, and the current male uniform is vastly different; the ’80s code for men was dressy hip, high-end suits and sport coats with open collars. Now what you see are tattered designer jeans and untucked dress shirts. And, perhaps most notably in my mind, the music is different—still some contemporary jazz, sure, but also a lot of hip hop and rap, both of which being totally out of my musical wheelhouse.

  I am thinking I should go to the Hermosa Strip tomorrow and buy some shirts and tattered jeans when the music changes to a classic jazz tune from the ’80s, Spyro Gyra’s “Morning Dance,” which a few minutes ag
o I paid the DJ to play. Moved by it, I am drawn, like a salmon migrating upstream to its ancestral spawning ground, through the river of people to the little alcove where I met Lorraine. It is a romantic little niche set off from the rest of the club by the obligatory strings of beads, with a cushy couch, a low table, flickering candles. The niche is pretty much the same, though there were ashtrays on the tables back then, before passage of no-smoking ordinances, and a film of cigarette smoke always blued the air.

  Dreamy from drink and ganja, I lean against the stone archway and sip my martini and think back, conjuring up her image. Before long I actually see her there, Lorraine, lounging on a love seat, the exact spot she occupied the night we met. She appears as she did before our relationship went psycho, which happened pretty much the instant we said “I do,” in that campy wedding chapel in Vegas. She was dark and gorgeous in a brick-shithouse way, huge black eyes and full lips that formed the kind of smile that let you know she was fast and available but only at a premium price. She sat with a mutual acquaintance when I first approached her, a woman I had had a passing sexual relationship with. Lorraine smiled her smile at our friend then turned it on me. “Parla del diavolo,” she said, Italian for “Speak of the devil.”

  My Italian had faded over time but I knew the proverb well enough to finish it in English: “And he shall appear,” I said.

  Our friend moved out of our way, winking at us both, and Lorraine patted the spot on the love seat next to her. “Well, well, the one and only Babe Crucci. Sit down and buy me a drink, tell me some secrets.”

  I signaled the waitress for two drinks and sat. “Be careful now. I may lie to you.”

  “So I hear.”

  “What else have you heard?”

  She snuggled close, a sinister glint in her eyes. “If I tell you, you promise not to kill me?”

  I promised I would not kill her.

  Damn it, as high-strung and demanding and unfaithful as she was, I loved her. Wanted to give her the world and live the rest of my life with her, to die a natural death with her at my side. And one slip on my winding road of crime, just one wrong maneuver, fucked it all up: my one, my only, not to mention my last foray into the drug business went south when Border Patrol nabbed me in a dune buggy at the Mexican border with twenty-three keys of smack in the hold, a gold mine that would have put me and Lorraine and little Leo on easy street for years.

  What we received was far different: nine years of prison.

  She knew it was a risk. Knew I was a wiseguy, was taken with that aspect of me and signed on to the program from the start. Knew the benefits of the Life had this corresponding burden we both might one day have to bear, and she accepted it as part of the deal. And she was the one to break the contract when, in my absence, she started carrying on with this hood named Carlo Bustamonte.

  Which is something I might have allowed her, if she had dumped the bastard when I got out.

  But when I got out of prison it got worse, much worse.

  God, it could not have gotten any worse.

  Why did you do it, Lorraine? Why? See what you made me do to you?

  You’re a fuckin’ killer, man.

  Something ignites inside me. This vision of her lingers, and I have this irrational desire to talk to her, to ask her, Why?

  My disposable phone chirps, the one I use for communicating with Tarasov. I return my gaze to the couch for a final look at Lorraine.

  Poof, she is gone.

  Dejected, I sit in the love seat I first shared with Lorraine and answer the phone.

  Tarasov sounds as wrecked as I am, is more humorous and animated than I have ever known him to be. “Hey, listen, you, Big Man, you think I forget you, no?”

  Stroking the love-seat cushion where Lorraine once placed her lovely ass, I said, “Never crossed my mind. What is up?”

  Tarasov laughs. “Listen. You speak like Andrei here, my nephew. He say, ‘Whuzzup,’ to me today, eh, like American soul guy? He hep dude, right? He, what, slay me?” He laughs again. “What a kidder asswipe he is….Listen…you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, listen. I take care of everything, okay? You and Big Son in total clear. Me and the Jew dyke make deal.” A muffled voice in the background followed by Tarasov’s horsey laugh. “Andrei call her ‘Kike Dyke.’ ” Another laugh. “I make Kike Dyke offer she cannot refute.”

  “Cannot refuse,” I say. “The saying is, ‘I made her an offer she cannot refuse.’ ”

  “Ah, okay, refuse, refuse…Listen, this dyke, I like this dyke up to this point now in time—right?—intend to use her in business, right? She so crazy, man, do anything I say. Now I decide she too crazy. ‘Uncle Macky, Uncle Macky,’ shit, all she say. Cry like big baby. She no good to me now. She telling me this, she telling me that…She telling me she and this, um, Latzo, er, Fatso, something, are witness. Say they see your big Caddy at warehouse. Say they kill you and Mister Joe, too, because you kill Uncle Macky, Uncle Macky, boo hoo hoo….Shit. Like I give fat fuck, right? Like I got dumb enough brains to take up on her side, right? Fuck her. Listen…you there?”

  “I am here, Viktor, following you as well as I can.”

  “Good, listen. I say to her everything okay and good with me and her, that I afraid you and Mister Joe plans to kill me, too, the way you evil bad fuckers kill Uncle Macky Uncle Macky, boo hoo hoo….Listen, this is good part, best part: I offer her big money to kill you, Big Man, like you no skin peeled off my fatter cock, right?

  “But, listen, she crazy out of her fat fucking Jew head to think you are one who got to die, right? Wait a second—” He puts his hand over the phone, then comes back to say, “Andrei call her ‘Dead Dyke Walking.’ ” Laughs. “Listen,” he says. “Dead Dyke and Latzo, they in car outside waiting for you. I tell them to kill you—a fat lie, right?—but they get biiig surprise from me when you walk out. They now in Ukrainian witness protection program.” He laughs again and says to somebody on his end, probably Andrei, “Witness protection program, a good one, no?” After another laugh, to me he says, “You, like, dig my rap, Big Man?”

  “No, I am not sure I do. You want me to, uh, do something to these two people?”

  “Ahh, man, what kind of shit jive is that, eh? Today you work too hard already, Big Man. Listen, all you do is go outside. What I mean you to do is see good show out there, the best. Ukrainian witness protection program can be a reeeal cocksucker, man.”

  I swivel my head around to make sure no one is within earshot. “Viktor, if there are going to be bullets flying around out there, I am not—”

  “Hey, listen! Would I let my Big Man get bullet-fucked, eh? No way, Jose! A hot act outside there, yes—hot bullets, no. You go outside now and look your head to left. Fatso Latzo and Kike Dyke is in blue car across street from Caddy you drive.” He muffles the phone again before he talks. “Andrei say a Taurus, a blue one. You look at that. I tell guys to start show when you look, okay? So shoo…shoo you, go. A good show waits for you, what Americans say is hot act.” Laughs. “No bullets, okay? If I lie, I fly.”

  “Fine, yeah, I will walk out there in a minute.”

  “Good. See you ’round, Big Man. Listen, soon you come to my castle and we do a party with bitches and shit, my treats. We talk bullshit to the bitches and see who make out better, eh?”

  “Consider it done.”

  Laughs. “And bring Big Son. I meet Big Son at bar of Venetian with Mr. Joe, and he a good fucker. You a good fucker, too, Big Man. This I say sincerious, okay, no bullshit. Bye-bye, now, got to fly, guy.”

  His laughs abruptly end when he disconnects.

  Tickled by Tarasov’s gymnastic English, which is the worst I have ever heard him speak, I let loose a chuckle, sigh, and sip my martini as the recent developments filter through my brain….The only known witnesses who can even circumstantially place my son at Macky’s warehouse will soon be silenced, and it is therefore reasonable to assume the authorities will not compromise him. Which means Joe
and Viktor will have no reason to kill him. More to the point, my son will not die due to my so-called criminal intrigues. Still, while it is difficult to fathom how horrible I would have felt had the Macky hit took a wrong turn, it is more difficult to fathom how I could have acted any other way. Criminal intrigue is what I do and have done my entire life, and it put bread on my son’s table and clothes on his back. He knew this from adolescence onward and never turned down a single penny I offered him. So how can he complain about the role I forced him to play in the new Sacci-Tarasov alignment?

  These Machiavellian shifts of power could not happen without men like me. Some would call me a hit man, a button man, a leg breaker, and doing so would not offend me. The thing is, my role is more sophisticated than these tags convey. My actions today facilitated a major swing in the criminal economy and I feel no small pride in the accomplishment: Large businesses rely on lawyers and financial brokers to facilitate hostile takeovers of businesses; governments rely on soldiers and assassins to facilitate hostile takeovers of other countries. I see my role no differently.

  So if you want to flatter me, call me a facilitator.

  But you better do it fast.

  As proud of and as secure in my work as I have been these many years, in prison I came to the conclusion that I cannot keep it up much longer. For about a month at the Q I had a French cellmate, this gay porn star who in a fit of jealousy stabbed his male lover to death. (I know what some may be thinking of me and my fag cellmate. Do not go there, understand? Do not go there.) Paul was his name, and as amateur murderers often do, Paul got hooked on religion as soon as he stepped Inside. He became a disciple of a French religious philosopher named Jacques Ellul, a so-called religious anarchist—which meant absolutely nothing to me and I cared even less. But this Ellul guy wrote a lot about violence, about how violence always gives birth to more violence, a fresh spin on the biblical, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword.” The religious hook never took hold of me, as you might imagine, but the dying by the sword bit did. It was impossible to not reflect on when I will receive the payback—the unheard bullet to the head, the white flash of the car bomb, the slow, agonizing garrote…