Bad Business

by Anthony Bruno

  “Yes, and there should also be tape binding her hands and feet. That’s your lawyer’s daughter.”

  The silence was like an oven door being thrown open, silent but blistering.

  “Tozzi has already agreed to make a trade: the rug for the child. He apparently cares a great deal for Ms. Halloran, so he’ll do anything to get the little girl back safely.”

  More blistering silence.

  “Trust me on this, Ugo. It’ll all work out. I’ve got all the bases covered. You’ll get your heroin, and Tozzi will take the fall. I guarantee it. It’ll be at least a year before Figaro is tried again, and in that time I can do a lot. Evidence can disappear. Witnesses can be encouraged to become forgetful. There are all kinds of possibilities.”

  Salamandra wasn’t listening, though. He was talking to someone else, in Italian. He spoke fast and excited. Other voices asked short, sharp questions. It was hard to tell over the phone just how many people were in on the conversation. They sounded confused, though, and Augustine didn’t like that. Confusion led to panic, and that wouldn’t do. They had to send someone out to get the rug now, or this whole thing would fall apart. Augustine’s face was throbbing so hard on that side it was difficult keeping that eye open. You couldn’t expect Tozzi to ring the doorbell and bring the goddamn thing in himself. No. But Tozzi shouldn’t be kept waiting. He was another excitable wop, unpredictable and prone to reckless behavior. Salamandra had to act now before Tozzi did something rash. Tozzi could screw this up royally.

  “Salamandra,” he barked into the phone, but Salamandra was busy, jabbering with his fellow monkeys. Goddamn him.

  “Salamandra!”

  Good Christ, why can’t they listen to reason? His goddamn heroin was right there. The perfect fall guy was right there, waiting. McCleery and his camera, right there. They were this far from bringing the whole trial toppling down, this far from doing it, this far.

  “Salamandra! Answer me!”

  But no one was listening to him.

  “Salamandra!”

  Augustine fought to keep his eyes open. That infernal drill was boring into his skull again.

  “Salamandra! Talk to me!”

  — 23 —

  Lesley stuck her head out the car window. Tozzi thought she was all cried out, but now she was on the verge of tears again. “What’s wrong, Mike? We’ve been here fifteen minutes. Where is she?”

  Tozzi tried not to show it, but he was getting worried, and she was picking up on that. Where the hell were they? He knew they wanted their dope—there was no question about that. Augustine was supposed to have arranged everything, but maybe he was having problems with the Zips, maybe they were trying to screw each other. Shit. This wasn’t good. It should’ve happened already. Quick and clean. Patricia for the rug. Something must’ve gone wrong. And he had a bad feeling that Patricia was gonna suffer for it.

  “Mike, talk to me, for God’s sake! Where are they? Are you sure this is the right place?” Lesley was hanging out the window, pleading with him. He had to do something. But what?

  He looked up at Salamandra’s tenement. Christmas decorations were still hanging from the telephone poles—huge candy canes wrapped in silver garland. He could see curtains moving on the third floor in all four front windows. They were up there, and there was a bunch of them. They were watching, but they weren’t doing anything. Tozzi became very aware of all the hardware he had strapped to him. It radiated on his skin like uranium. The Beretta 92 under his jacket in a shoulder holster. A .38 Ruger SP101 in a belt clip. The little Bauer 25 on his ankle. A total of twenty-seven rounds, plus two full clips for the Beretta in his pocket. Yeah, but how many of them were up there? What kind of fucking arsenal did they have? And what about Patricia and Lesley? Couldn’t start a goddamn firefight with them here. Shit. There had to be another way. There had to be something else he could do.

  Lead their fucking minds. You got a bunch of guys attacking you on the mat, you lead their minds and make advantages for yourself, create openings and opportunities.

  Yeah, but this wasn’t aikido class and they weren’t on the mat. This was Little Italy. The odds were terrible, and this definitely wasn’t gonna be open-hand fighting.

  Tozzi watched Lesley’s tortured face and tried to think. Aikido principles were supposed to apply to all situations, and in the past they always had worked for him in one way or another. Keeping calm and centered, waiting for the attack to come to you, using ki not muscle, keeping a positive mind—it had all worked for him before. So why was he so stumped now? Was it because he wasn’t defending just himself? He had Lesley and Patricia to think about, and that seemed to skew everything he’d learned from aikido about confronting aggression. He felt he had to have a plan, had to mount a preemptive strike, do something to get them before they had a chance to make the first move.

  But maybe that was the whole problem. He was racking his brain to come up with a set plan, and that just wasn’t the aikido way. Cooking up a plan of attack is aggression, and aggression puts you in the weaker position because you commit yourself to the attack and make yourself vulnerable. That’s why aikido works. You wait for the attack to come, wait for the attacker to commit himself, then you take advantage of that commitment, move him the way you want when he’s off balance, use his force against him to throw him down. His problem was that he wasn’t thinking in terms of aikido. He shouldn’t be worrying about putting together a plan at all. Let them make the first move and then act accordingly. Let their aggression determine his retaliation. Keep an open mind so you can catch the opportunities when they come. Of course. It was obvious.

  But there was one problem. They weren’t attacking. They weren’t doing anything. And they had Patricia. So now what?

  Tozzi stared at the trunk of the car. So you make them attack. You lead their minds by giving them a nice big target, something they want. That’s what you do.

  “Lesley, come out here and give me a hand.”

  He went around to the trunk and unlocked it as she got out of the car on the passenger side.

  “What are you doing?”

  “We seem to have an impasse here. Maybe they forgot what they wanted. We’re gonna remind them.”

  “What?”

  “You ever hear the joke about leading a donkey to water?”

  “You mean the one where the man smacks the donkey between the eyes with a two-by-four to get his attention?”

  “Exactly. We’re gonna get their attention and lead their minds.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Just help me with the rug.”

  Tozzi pulled out the rolled rug and let it hang out of the trunk like a big skinny tongue. He took one end and Lesley reluctantly took the other. Balancing his end under one arm, he shut the trunk, then they carried it to the front of the car.

  “Lay it out lengthwise across the hood,” he told her.

  “What’re you doing, Mike?”

  “Just trust me.”

  When the rug was in position across the hood, like a big enchilada draped over a shark’s snout, Tozzi started to unroll it. “Unroll the whole thing,” he told her. She looked puzzled, but she did as he said, unrolling the rug until it covered the entire front of the car and rested on the pavement with plenty to go. The shark had a veil over its face now, an intricately patterned maroon, blue, and beige veil.

  Lesley was clutching her arms around her, her teeth chattering. “Now what?”

  “Now we see how much they want their dope.”

  “What if they’re waiting to see how much we want Patricia?”

  Tozzi gestured toward the rug. “We’re showing them we’re ready to deal. What else can we do?”

  “You’re awfully calm about this.” She was accusing him.

  “Getting all excited isn’t gonna get Patricia back.” He was glad to hear that he looked calm. He didn’t feel calm. But he was trying. “Why don’t you get back in the car? You look like you’re freezing.”


  “I don’t want to get in the car.” She was mad now.

  “Listen, you weren’t supposed to be here in the first place. Augustine told me to come alone. They wanted to deal with me by myself. So get in the car. Or else, he said, the deal is scotched.”

  Scotched. Augustine’s word. It felt funny saying it. Nobody he knows would ever say something like that. Snooty son of a bitch.

  Lesley was scowling at him, but she got back into the car. Tozzi moved around to her side and leaned on the fender, facing the tenement. The curtains on the third floor were twitching. He scanned the big painted sign over the restaurant, then focused on the front door that led up to the apartments.

  Come on.

  Minutes passed. Two big eighteen-wheelers thundered by in a row. A Puerto Rican guy driving a moving van yelled at him for being double-parked. Tozzi ignored him and kept his eye on the tenement. Three old Chinese women stopped and stared at the rug. Tozzi thought one of them was asking him if it was for sale, but her English was so bad he couldn’t tell. He shook his head no and they walked on. Then as he watched them walking away, it struck him that it was suddenly quiet. There was no traffic in the street. Tozzi could see the red light two blocks away and he could hear traffic noise coming over the rooftops from other streets, but for the moment Grand Street was dead, as if time had stopped. Only Tozzi’s heart kept beating.

  Jesus Christ, come on!

  A car horn blared. Tozzi glanced toward the traffic light. It was green. An impatient taxi veered around the first car in line, gunned up Grand, and whizzed past. When Tozzi looked back at the tenement, someone was at the front door, a little old man standing on the step just outside the door. He was small, very tan, thin, and wrinkled, dressed only in a dark suit, no coat, no tie, his shirt buttoned at the neck. Tozzi stared at him, wondering why the hell Salamandra had sent this poor old guy down to get the rug. He didn’t look like he could carry it in even if he had help. But then Tozzi focused on the old guy’s sharp eyes, and he realized who this was. It was Emilio Zucchetti, the big Zip boss from Sicily. What the fuck . . .?

  Tozzi got off the fender and stood up straight. Zucchetti was staring at him, just standing there, staring at him. The curtains were open on those windows on the third floor. Tozzi could see faces up there. He thought he caught a glimpse of a shotgun barrel in one window.

  The old man stepped down off the stoop and started walking toward him. Tozzi couldn’t figure this out. It didn’t make any sense. The capo di capi of the entire family was coming out to negotiate for the rug? It didn’t make any sense. Bosses don’t do this kind of thing, they don’t implicate themselves. They give orders from a safe distance, they let their underlings handle the dirty work. Tozzi’s pulse was racing. He glanced up at the windows. It couldn’t be a trap. They weren’t gonna start shooting with Zucchetti down here. This was crazy.

  The old man came across the sidewalk and stepped off the curb. He wasn’t staring at Tozzi now, and he wasn’t looking at the rug. He was looking at something across the street. He passed in front of Tozzi’s car, completely ignoring his forty kilos of dope, and glanced up and down the block, waiting for the cars to pass so he could cross the street.

  Tozzi couldn’t fucking believe this. It was a trick. It had to be. The goddamn old man was leading his mind.

  Zucchetti hunched his shoulders against the blustery wind and flipped up the collar of his suit coat, his thin wispy hair blowing wildly over his head. He crossed the street and went over to that white van with all the rust that had been parked there since they arrived. He stopped at the passenger door and stared in, then pointed to the lock, silently demanded that it be opened. There was someone inside. Tozzi saw the figure reaching over from the driver’s side, but he couldn’t make out the face. The stern old man jerked his thumb, motioning for the driver to get out and come around to him. Tozzi heard the driver’s squeaky door open and slam shut. Then he saw the man emerge from between the bumpers. Tozzi couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was the Short Man, the elusive dwarf from the surveillance pictures, the one who always managed to have his back to the camera, the one they knew only as “little Nemo.”

  The guy looked like he’d slept in his clothes. His hair was on end, his nose was red, and his eyes were raw and scared. He kept wiping his runny nose and his forehead with his sleeve, and he was shivering something awful, clutching his chest as if the cold had penetrated his bones. Nemo could have had the flu, but Tozzi didn’t think so. There was a subtle difference that Tozzi had seen before, and he recognized it now. It wasn’t the flu Nemo was suffering from. He was a junkie going through withdrawal.

  “Come sta, Mr. Zucchetti? Come sta?” Nemo started bowing and scraping like a plantation slave.

  The old man’s face was like stone as he stared at Nemo.

  Nemo’s smile crumbled, and he clutched his gut and doubled over as if he’d been punched. It was definitely withdrawal.

  “Mr. Zucchetti, I got the, the . . . you know.” Nemo’s eyes darted from the van to the rug. “We can make the trade.”

  “Quiet.” The boss pointed at the ground, indicating that Nemo should step away.

  Nemo skulked to the side like a bad dog.

  The old man opened the van door and leaned in.

  Lesley gasped from inside the car. “Oh, my God.”

  It was Patricia. She’d been in that van the whole time, not thirty feet away from them.

  Zucchetti lifted the child off the floor and sat her down on the seat. He peeled the gray duct tape off her hands and feet, soothing her, stroking her cheek the same way Tozzi remembered his grandmother soothing him when he was little. The old man smoothed her hair, nodding and assuring her as he pulled the tape off her mouth. She was terrified, too scared to make a sound, her little mouth a frozen O of fear. Tozzi looked through the windshield at Lesley. The mother-daughter resemblance when they were frightened was heart-wrenching.

  The old man hugged Patricia close and picked her up. He held her in his arms, her blond hair blowing in his face as he looked both ways and crossed the street.

  Tozzi could hear him murmuring a little lullaby in Patricia’s ear. Tozzi stiffened, his heart pounding, his gut aching, waiting for something to happen, pissed as shit that the old fox had turned everything upside-down. The old man was a wolf in grandfather’s clothing, goddammit. He was trying to trick them. But what was the trick?

  Zucchetti walked up to the driver’s door on Tozzi’s car and reached for the handle. He opened the door and gently passed the child to Lesley, who took Patricia into her arms like a glass taking water. Lesley’s face crumpled, fresh tears overflowing from her eyes as Patricia grasped her around the neck. The old man stroked Patricia’s head once more, and his face broke into a startlingly kind smile. It was like seeing Boris Karloff smile.

  “Never should a baby be taken from its mother.” Zucchetti’s eyes were liquid as he tried to catch Lesley’s gaze. “Never.”

  Lesley’s eyes were squeezed shut, but she nodded.

  The old man stood up then and shut the door, then walked around the front of the car, ignoring both Tozzi and the rug, and headed back toward the tenement.

  “Mr. Zucchetti! Mr. Zucchetti!” Nemo was yelling from the other side of the street. He was too scared to disobey his master’s order and move off his spot, but he was desperate to get the boss’s attention. “The rug, Mr. Zucchetti. What about the rug?”

  The old man kept walking.

  “Please, Mr. Zucchetti. The rug, the rug. I need . . . I have to . . .” Nemo’s face was streaked with tears. “Please! The other guy, our patron saint, he said we’d get it. He said it would all work out. For me. For everybody, I mean, for all of us. Please, Mr. Zucchetti. Please! Tell me what to do.”

  Zucchetti opened the front door of the building and went inside without looking back. The glass door closed behind him, and he disappeared.

  “Please, Mr. Zucchetti. Please tell me what to do.” Nemo squeezed out his plea throu
gh clenched teeth, doubled over in pain, crying and wailing.

  Tozzi stared at him, stared at the rug, stared at the door, stared into the car at Lesley hugging Patricia. He couldn’t fucking believe this. It wasn’t real, couldn’t be happening. They had Patricia back and they still had the rug and he hadn’t done a goddamn thing. How? Okay, Zucchetti would never risk touching the dope himself. That was understandable. But was he just gonna let it go? And what was Tozzi supposed to do with it, just leave it on the street? He was afraid to think what might happen if he tried to put it back in the trunk and drive away with it. The old bastard was a real fucker. Zucchetti was leading his mind, and Tozzi had absolutely no idea what the hell he could get away with here. Jesus!

  “Mike!” Lesley’s muffled scream carried through the windshield.

  Tozzi looked through the windshield. She was frantically pointing across the street. Nemo was stooped over, holding his belly. The dwarf had a pistol in his hand, and it was pointed right at him.

  Shit.

  Nemo blinked and shook and shuddered as he yelled. “You. Bring that fuckin’ rug over here. Hurry up!”

  Tozzi drew in his elbow and felt the Beretta inside his jacket. He glanced at Lesley and Patricia, then glanced up at the windows. It was no place for a firefight. He let out a slow breath and moved over to the side of the car, raising his hands and nodding, making eye contact with Nemo. “Be cool. I’m coming,” he called out. “I’ll bring it to you.” He leaned over the hood and rolled the rug until it rolled right off the nose of the car. He folded it over twice and started to haul it up onto his shoulder. It was heavy and hard to get a good grip on. He bent his knees and got under the weight, hoisting it higher on his shoulder, which made his stitches smart.

  As Tozzi struggled with the bulky load, checking for traffic before he crossed, a taxi and a pickup truck suddenly raced by, the drivers ducked down behind their steering wheels. They must’ve seen the junkie with the gun. Tozzi kept his back straight and held his breath as he walked across the street and headed for Nemo.