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by Unknown

  Normally, I wouldn't have given the old man so much credit, but I was in for a drive, and car trips tend to make me sentimental. Thinking about the old man, and the papers and books he'd obviously collected for years, I started to think of him in terms of the stories he'd kept. Like the Richmond Taylor of the pulp novel, all sophistication and class, perfectly in his element among the elite and the dregs of society alike. Remembering the odd friends who turned up from time to time, ancient men who arrived unannounced to share a quiet drink with my grandfather and then disappeared again, that seemed to make sense. I'd never really thought about it, but few of those guys I'd have picked out of a lineup as my grandfather's "type." Some were money, sure, like O'Connor and his ilk, but others seemed like they'd be more at home splitting a bottle with Tan than sitting up in Richmond Taylor's study sipping a glass of port. But still they came, seeming more to respect the old man more than like him, and sometimes with little gifts or a pat on the head for my brother and me. We hated them, of course, though we accepted their gifts without question.

  One time, when the old man was feeling uncharacteristically familial, he had my brother and me sit on the floor snacking on cookies Maria had baked while he sat talking with another old guy. His name was Martin, or Martinson, or something like that, and he was a big, beefy bruiser of a guy. Bald headed, red as a beet, he had hands like hams and laughed loud and long whenever the chance permitted. He brought us little plastic police badges and cap-guns, and I liked him immediately.

  The two of them were talking about old guy stuff, my brother and I not really paying attention, when the bald bruiser started in on the time my grandfather had spent out west. Suddenly my grandfather jumped out of his chair, told his friend to be quiet, and ordered my brother and me out of the room. The friend looked embarrassed, like he said something he knew he shouldn't have, and kept his head down while we kids shuffled out of the room, pocketing a couple more cookies as we went.

  In retrospect, it's hard to imagine what my grandfather didn't want us to hear. It wasn't as if he cared about us hearing people talking about sex, or crime, or drugs. To be honest, he seemed hardly to care what we heard at all, so long as we kept ourselves clean and out of trouble. Later, he'd insist on intense study and physical exercise, which helped me make my eventual decision to leave, but when we were younger we were unwanted pets, to be tolerated underfoot on occasion, but best kept out of sight and out of mind.

  I often wondered just what the old man hoped to accomplish with his work schedules and exercise regimen. After a few years of that, the toughest training Tan could think to put me through seemed like elementary school recess. But though I despised my grandfather for years for putting us through it, I never once really understood the point.

  After studiously ignoring us from the age of five on, when we turned twelve suddenly we were the focus of every bit of the old man's attention. The day before we were to start the seventh grade, after Maria had taken us shopping and helped pick out new school clothes and tried unsuccessfully to get us into coordinated outfits, my grandfather called us both down to the study and had us stand in front of his desk while he paced back and forth behind it.

  He was quiet for a long while, aimlessly wandering along the wall and running his wrinkled hands over the stacked papers and books, brushing the display cases and framed prints. We were getting restless when, finally, he spoke.

  He told us that we'd been wasting our time all the years we'd been with him, not once taking advantage of his obvious wisdom and years of experience. He had let it go on long enough, and had decided it was time for a change.

  My brother and I risked a glance at one another, and I could tell he was thinking the same as me: the old man had finally lost it. Patrick, always braver in these situations than I, was about to speak when our grandfather came around the desk and put a heavy hand on my left shoulder, another on Patrick's right.

  He kept talking, shaking us as he did, telling us about the dangers the world presented day in and day out. He said it was getting worse, that horrors unimaginable when he was our age had simply become routine, and that terrors undreamt of in those days were now being unleashed on the world.

  For these reasons, he said, and for others he hoped one day to reveal, we had to improve ourselves, to be better equipped for the challenges of a changing world.

  At this point I was starting to worry. This was sounding like something that might threaten to cut into my free time, already booked solid with MTV and superhero comics, and I could tell Patrick felt the same way. We had little choice, though, terrified of the old man as we were, and so we waited patiently while he spelled out his grand scheme. From what we could tell, it involved very little sleep, lots of study and even more exercise.

  Up an hour before school for calisthenics, a cold shower, and then a ten block run to school. Then our normal classes, where we were naturally expected to excel, a midday meal of fruits and carbohydrates, then the ten block run home, an hour of martial arts exercises, and two hours of intense study in addition to our regular schoolwork. A few hours sleep, and up the next morning to do the whole thing again. Weekends varied only in that the ten-block run was a round trip, with a brief pause at the school playground for a drink of water, and the extra hours for study and exercise. Every day, seven days a week, every week of the year.

  I managed to make it almost two years of that before finally throwing in the towel, packing a bag, and running away to New Orleans. But by that time it was too late. Though I could take on any grown man barehanded, and was better educated than most of my teachers, I carried away with me only two things: I hated my grandfather, and I never wanted to get up before dawn again.

  I pulled into the town of Sizemore with time to spare and enough gas to get me the rest of the way, so I stopped at a fast food joint to fill up before continuing on. Sizemore was little more than an off-ramp and a blinking red light, with the requisite truck stops and fast food eateries. Identical to every other blip on the map, it didn't look like the town had been there more than ten years which, from what Tan had told me, sounded about right.

  The auction, Tan had said, was to be held at one of the more secure locations in the American Southwest, which he figured would have proved a test to break into even in his best days. Built a decade before, an oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert, it had originally been intended as a health spa, to put it charitably, or a fat farm when you got right down to it. It did pretty well the first few years, made the investors real happy, and then the bottom fell out when their resident nutritionist was discredited by every medical journal in the country. Even the alternative types, having no problems with sticking yourself full of needles and setting them on fire, thought this guy was just a bit too far out. It could be said that the world simply wasn't ready for a diet composed entirely of reconstituted human waste, or the "Second Harvest" as the brochures discretely put it, but then again maybe it was just a horribly wrong idea.

  In any case, when it was all said and done Second Harvest Enterprises was left with vast tracts of developed land in the ass end of nowhere, with the little gas-stop town of Sizemore the only thing to have profited from the whole farrago – understandably, as it was the only place within one hundred miles to offer non-feces-based foodstuffs to the starved and starving guests of the spa. Efforts to unload the property on the public market failed miserably, the entire affair having left in the mouths of investors a bad taste.

  To the rescue of Second Harvest Enterprises came a consortium of business men and private citizens, who stated only that they wished to use the property for "company events." The sellers asked no questions, happily accepted an offer half the market value of the buildings alone, and quietly left with their money. The new owners didn't bother to change the name of the complex, though they did invest heavily in a state of the art security system and established a permanently staffed guard station on the premises. The good people of Sizemore, sorry to see the shit-eaters go, found any overture
s to the new tenants quickly and decisively rebuffed, usually at gunpoint. They couldn't quite complain, however, when several times a year sharply dressed men and women poured off the highway from the private airstrip down the road, bought up everything in sight, and headed out to the former spa. The new guests were particularly fond of anything with local color, and the sale of curios, knickknacks, and "authentic Indian artifacts" skyrocketed. In the end, it was a pretty agreeable arrangement all around.

  From where I sat in the window of the burger joint, thinking from the taste of the food that I'd accidentally thrown away the meal and was munching on the wrapping, I could see that the entrepreneurial spirit in Sizemore was in full swing. Indian blankets – manufactured no doubt in Taiwan – hung from racks set up in front of the gas station, and a collection of bleached cow skulls were artfully arranged under a tent in the parking lot of the truck stop next door. The burger joint, I noticed, had broken with franchise standards to offer the "Big Chief Whopper Meal" and "Buffalo-Sized Shakes." I'd settled for the white bread menu, cautiously, and was beginning to regret even that.

  As I was finishing up the last bites of my flavored cardboard, a big black Cadillac sedan rolled to a stop in the parking lot and a collection of walking stereotypes climbed out. Watching them head inside, squinting in the bright sun even behind dark sunglasses, I wondered if they had any idea how much they advertised just what they were. They might just as well have been wearing nametags reading "HI, I'M WITH THE MOB." When one of the guys in the train caught my eye and I noticed the pistol-shaped bulge under his suit coat, I decided to keep all my clever observations and witticisms to myself.

  Facing the window, my back to the entourage, I could hear them ordering in loud, east coast accents every themed item on the menu. The store manager, personally taking their orders and shouting them back to the guys staffing the grill, was obviously thrilled.

  "So, you wanna eat it here, or head on up to the place?" I heard one of suits say to the others when confronted with the question of Here or To Go.

  "I don't know," another answered. "Whatta you wanna do?"

  "I wouldn't a asked ya if I knew, would I?"

  "Oh, no we don't," came a third voice, a woman's this time, "we're not doing this again. Shit, it's like eating out with the Bowery Boys every time we stop. Jesus." I heard her sigh deeply and then add, "Let's just eat here, alright? We don't want to get there too early, anyhow. Makes us look desperate."

  "Right," the first voice answered. "Just what I was thinking."

  "I was going to say that," the second voice said eagerly. "Makes us look desperate."

  "Jesus," the woman said. "How do you two get dressed in the morning?" I'd begun to wonder the same thing.

  This being the middle of nowhere, and Arizona to boot, the tables all had little disposable ashtrays on them, those flimsy aluminum Frisbees that used to be stacked like communion wafers in every fast food joint worthy of the name. Never one to pass up a chance to smoke indoors, I pulled a cigarette from my pocket, lit it, and settled back to enjoy the show.

  Their food ready to roll, the trio carried their trays to a table a few jumps away from mine and settled in to make do with their meals. I waited patiently, hoping to hear something useful from them before heading out. You never know what mobsters might let slip while enjoying a tasty burger, and I'm always primed for new material. Instead of conversation, though, I was greeted only with the sounds of chairs scuffing across the linoleum, and then contented chewing and gulping. I was glad I'd already finished.

  "Hey," came a gruff voice at my elbow, and I almost started right out of my seat. I turned, trying for casual, and looked up into the wide face of one of the two men. "You done with that?" He jabbed a fat finger, heavy with gold, at the table in front of me.

  "I-I…" I stammered, losing all cool. "I was just smoking…" I surprised myself; I'm usually good with gangsters.

  "Nah, sparky," he said, his eyebrows knitted. "Your salt. You done with it?"

  I looked from the bruiser to the salt shaker and back again. Then I nodded absently and felt the breeze as his arm shot past me to retrieve the shaker.

  "Thanks," he called over his shoulder, heading back to his table. I heard him mutter something like "Spaz" under his breath, but couldn't be sure.

  It wasn't until the woman spoke that I realized I was still staring at their group. The eating habits of the other guy were leaving me spellbound.

  "You here for the auction?" the woman said a second time, more slowly this time and with emphasis. Suddenly I was the baffled foreigner, or the escaped mental patient.

  "Yeah," I answered casually, treating her to a Louisiana accent. "Just got in a while back. In from N'Orleans, you know."

  "New Orleans," she repeated, animated. "I love New Orleans."

  "Really," I said, pushing my chair back and climbing to my feet, never breaking eye contact. "Which parts?" I had a real opportunity here, even after choking a second before, and didn't want to lose it.

  "Oh," she said, apologetically, "I've never been. But I've heard a lot of nice things, and it always looks good in movies."

  "James Bond," the monkey on the left said, dribbling sauce down his chin, "that was cool."

  "Right, right," the other chimed in, "that crazy funeral thing."

  The woman waved them quiet, and then turned back to me. From the obvious cost of her necklace and the way she ordered around the two mooks, I could see that she ranked in her organization. A chief's moll? Or daughter? Or, given the enlightened times, an exec herself?

  "Who are you with, Mister…?" She left the sentence hanging in the air, waiting for me to finish for her.

  "Cassidy," I answered. "David Cassidy. And I don't suppose I'm with much of anyone, aside from myself." I came up a few feet from her, and offered my hand. "I'm here representing certain interests who would prefer to remain… shall we say, nameless… at this juncture."

  She took my hand and smiled.

  "Charmed," she said, giving my hand a squeeze. "I'm–"

  One of the mooks coughed, theatrically, and a bit of pickle went shooting from between his teeth to hit the other one in the neck. The other, ignoring the pickle for the moment, joined his companion in staring with narrowed eyes at the woman, giving her a none-too-subtle message.

  "Relax," she told them both, "relax. He knows about the auction already, and he'll get the introductions soon enough." She turned to me. "These functions run best when there's a level of trust involved. Don't you agree, Mr. Cassidy?"

  "I certainly do, ma'am," I answered.

  "And besides," she answered, turning back to the pair, "if he should try anything, I know the two of you can handle him. Right? Otherwise, why did I even bring you along?"

  The two exchanged a quick glance and then, shrugging, returned to their meals.

  "Excuse them," the woman said to me, "but I don't pay them for their brains, if you get me."

  "I get you," I said evenly.

  She took my hand again, in both of hers this time, and smiled.

  "I'm Angela Rosetti," she said, pumping my hand. "And that's Benny, and that's Nick." I nodded greetings all around, while the two guys studiously ignored me.

  "And who're you with?" I said. "If you don't mind me asking, that is."

  "Salvatore," she answered, like I knew who she meant. I did. "I normally just handle our interests on the west coast, SoCal mostly, but I'm the only one in the business with any kind of eye for art so I'm usually tapped to take the auctions."

  I nodded. So she was an exec and not just window dressing. Though not the first time I'd met a mob boss in a fast food joint, this was still shaping up nicely. Besides, Louie the Neck had been nowhere near as nice to look at.

  "Anything in particular you're after?" I asked. She sat back down, and motioned for me to pull up a chair.

  "Officially, I'm supposed to be looking for Rockwell. It's a long shot, but the boss loves Americana, and you never know what these skells pick up in the wa
y of payment or merchandise. Unofficially, I'm looking for late French expressionism. I'm building a new house in Anaheim, and I've got some wall space to fill." She took a sip of her soda, and then flashed her lashes at me. "And you?" she said. "What are you in the market for, Mr. Cassidy?"

  The way she asked, the way she was looking at me, was making my knees quiver, and sent butterflies sumo-wrestling in my gut. I chanced a glance at the muscle, reminded myself why I was there, and plowed ahead.

  "Nothing in particular," I answered casually, "though the interests I represent are always on the lookout for antique books." I paused, letting the last word hang in the air, looking for some reaction. None came. "Something of a bibliophile, I suppose you could say," I added, relaxing.

  "Hmm," Angela hummed, giving nothing away.

  "When we finish up here," she finally said, "we're heading on over. You want to follow us in?"

  "Sure," I answered. "I've never been here before, and the directions I got from my principle were a little sketchy."

  "Great," she said, clapping her hands. "Maybe then I'll have someone to talk to." She leaned in close, and I got two nostrils' full of her perfume. "There's a certain old world charm to these things, but the conversation is usually for shit. I mean, I can only listen so many times to the story about how Rocky Stompanato took out that whole group of Triads single-handed, or to the one about what Mack Diamond did to that spic he caught in bed with his wife, before it starts to get old. You know what I mean?"

  I nodded, trying to smile. I was getting in deep now. Movie stars and pop singers seemed a whole world away.

  I followed the limo up the narrow road from Sizemore to the compound in my little rented Ford. Angela had offered to let me ride up with them, but I wanted my ride handy, so politely declined. For a second it looked like she might want to ride with me, but the two mooks stepped in front of that one and ushered her into the waiting limo. They eyed me as I walked back to my Escort, one of them thoughtfully patting the bulge under his arm.