Nine Fingers

by Thom August

  “You’re late,” I say, for no reason at all. He hands me a sandwich and a Styrofoam cup.

  “We made a little detour,” he says. “Picked up some hitchhiker by the side of the road.”

  I look at him. “Hitchhikers can be dangerous,” I say.

  “Especially that one,” Powell mutters. Amatucci hands him a sandwich and a cup. “Decaf for you, as always,” he says to Powell. “There’s cream and sugar in the bag.” I notice I am starving. I take a big bite. I take a big gulp. It tastes like the best thing I’ve ever eaten, even if the sandwich is soggy and the coffee is lukewarm.

  We fall silent while we eat. I have the same thought I had when Amatucci first laid out his plan: It’s a great plan to get them all in one place together, and it’s a place we get to choose. And once we get them all together, something will happen. I don’t know what, but something. That’s a hell of a start. But after that—nothing. I look up at them. They’re wrapping up the breakfast things, stashing them in a garbage bag Amatucci has produced from somewhere.

  “Let’s do it,” Jones says, somehow reading my mind. “Figure it all out later.”

  CHAPTER 56

  Ken Ridlin

  In the House on the Lake

  Saturday Morning, January 25

  We walk away from the house toward a road that will take us north and east. There is slush underfoot. We are all wearing the wrong shoes for this except for Jones, who always wears these black sneaker-boot kind of things. Within a hundred yards my feet are soaked and frozen. We walk single file, except for Jones and Laura, holding hands in the back.

  After another hundred yards, there is a single lane winding through the trees. I stop, look back at Laura. She nods her head.

  It’s only forty yards but it takes us two minutes to slog through the mud. After a turn, the house reveals itself. It looks just as impressive from this angle, silhouetted against the lake.

  We come to a set of five stairs, leading up to a wide half-covered porch that wraps around the house. We all stop. Akiko and Laura come up behind me, step to the front. Jones gives Laura’s hand a squeeze, and Laura turns toward the house, puts her foot on the first step.

  Before she can move, the door opens. Her mother, Amelia, steps outside. She is wearing a green silk bathrobe, tied loosely in front. Landreau steps out from behind her in a black terry-cloth bathrobe. She reaches over and takes hold of his hand.

  Jones steps up and grabs Laura’s hand. We all stand there.

  “Hello, darling,” Amelia says, “you set off the motion sensors.”

  “Sorry to wake you,” she says.

  “We were already awake,” the mother says. She turns to Landreau and smiles. “In fact, we’ve been awake all night.”

  “Yeah,”Amatucci says. “So have we.”

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Landreau says.

  Amelia turns to him, kisses him lightly on the lips. She turns to the rest of us. “You’d better take those shoes off—you don’t want to be tracking mud in the house.”

  We move up toward the porch. Jones lets go of Laura to untie her sneakers. Amelia comes up to her, holds out her hand. “You must be Akiko,” she says, saying it Ah-KEE-ko.

  “Yes,” Jones says, “Akiko,” saying it AHH-kee-ko.

  “Ah, AHH-kee-ko,” Amelia says, correcting herself. “Why don’t you and your friends come in and warm up.”

  As we step into what seems to be a vestibule, I turn to her. “We’re really sorry to have to impose on you, ma’am.”

  She turns. Looks at me. “No, you’re not. You’re here to get Jack, aren’t you?”

  “Actually,” I say, “we’re here for you.”

  She raises her eyebrows, turns and looks at Laura.

  Laura lowers her eyes. She is oddly deferential. She nods her head up and down, twice.

  “We’re here to try to help your daughter, and her, uh, friend,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “And it’s going to take both Franco and me to help you do it, isn’t it?”

  Amatucci is standing there.

  “Franco?” he says.

  “It’s a long story,” I say.

  CHAPTER 57

  Vinnie Amatucci

  At Amelia’s House

  Sunday, January 26

  Jack’s story came out, eventually: the musical prodigy, the symphony star, Amelia’s engagement to the Don, their affair, his finger. Ridlin told most of it, Amelia occasionally filled in the gaps, and the rest of us sat there with our mouths hanging open. Jack himself said nothing to confirm it and not a word to deny it. Mostly he sat slouching behind Amelia, his gaze resting longingly on the white baby grand piano in the center of the room.

  The Akiko/Laura story got told, mostly by me, without either of them contributing much to it. I somehow got located sitting between them on the couch, the two of them holding hands across my lap, as if I weren’t there. It posed a real dilemma to my lap, which I fought by talking nonstop. Typical.

  Then we went over the plan.

  At one point, Amelia turned to Laura, and asked, “Is this who I think it is?” Laura mumbled, “Uncle Josef?” and Amelia held up her hand. “They don’t call him that anymore.”

  Ridlin sat up when she said this.

  “What do they call him?” he asked, looking straight at her.

  She paused, looked straight at him.

  “They call him ‘The Cleaner.’ ”

  I looked at Paul, and his eyes met mine. Nice. You got a mess? Call the Cleaner.

  Then she dropped another bomb.

  “And you’d better expect the Nephew to be there, too.

  That’s the way it’s supposed to work now.”

  “The Nephew?” I asked.

  “Gianni Della Chiesa. Johnny Chase,” Ridlin said. “New front man. Supposed to be making all the decisions. Our sources say different.”

  “So do mine,” Amelia said.

  Paul jumped in. “I don’t really read that section of the paper. What should we expect him to bring to the dynamic?”

  Amelia looked at him, then looked away.

  “Chaos,” she said. “That’s all he brings. Chaos.”

  Ridlin turned to Amelia and asked if she saw any angles we could use, maybe talking to her ex, reasoning with him, maybe using the Don against the Nephew, using the Nephew against the Don. With every alternative she just shook her head. We talked and talked but there were no great insights. Ridlin was set on grabbing the assassin, and we never really pushed him on it. Akiko was firm on her need to confront them head-on, and for Laura to be there with her. Laura herself sat there as calm as a cat on a rock and did everything but purr. Landreau was fidgeting, but fighting it. Ridlin and Paul and I kept at it. We would find these little threads, and we’d pull on them, but they’d break off as soon as we tried to tie them together. We couldn’t seem to get past the setup. Every next step seemed to involve someone shooting someone else.

  We broke for coffee, and everyone but Ridlin wandered away.

  I stepped up to him.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” I said, sotto voce.

  He shrugged.

  “Let’s find a way to leave Paul and Sidney out of it?”

  He stared at me.

  “I mean, they can’t really help, all they can do is get hurt.

  It’s not their fight.”

  “You wanna be the one to tell them?” he asks.

  I looked down. “My idea was to tell them we’ll all meet up someplace, but the wrong place, far enough away that once they figure out it’s bogus, they won’t be able to get to the real spot on time,” I said. “You know; my specialty: something lame but simple.”

  “I see your point,” he said. “What’s the Professor gonna do? Hit Joe Zep with his tuba?”

  I nodded.

  “OK, we’ll do it the way you want.”

  Akiko and Laura came down the stairs, Amelia swung out of the kitchen with coffee and some pastry, and we all got back to talking, but it went nowher
e. Around midday, we all crashed. Amelia and Jack excused themselves. Paul leaned his head back and fell asleep immediately—he’s always been able to do that, and I have always hated him for it. Laura and Akiko fell asleep leaning on my shoulders, and I slumped down and crashed in between them.

  Around three o’clock, I heard a sound and roused myself. I limboed out from between the two women without waking them. The sound was coming from outside, so I slid the door open, stepped out, and eased it closed behind me. It was Paul, playing long tones on his horn into a mute, the sound rippling out across the lake. I stood there, pulled the pipe out of my pocket, took a couple of hits, and let the sound wash over me. There was no melody, just long individual notes, each one starting crisply, then dropping down to pianissimo, building steadily in intensity, then slowly fading away until at one second the note was there and at the next only its echo remained. It sounds easy to do, one simple note at a time, but it’s not. I studied the French horn when I was a kid before taking up the piano, and it was precisely this exercise that made me switch; it took enormous control, and I didn’t have it, and I didn’t have the patience to develop it. It can be boring to listen to, but at that moment it filled a deep hole in my soul. My hand had been aching all day, and suddenly it stopped. I felt my breath go a little deeper, my shoulders drop a little lower.

  He must have sensed me there, because he turned around, without breaking his concentration, raised his right pinkie from the horn and wiggled it at me. I gave him a little nod, and he turned back toward the lake, and continued for another few minutes, working steadily up in his register until it must have required a phenomenal effort to hold each note. But each note was like a rounded little pearl, fat and shiny and hard, even the high ones. Paul wasn’t one of those screechers—“hernia trumpet,” he called that style—with him every note was full and ripe. That was because he worked at it, constantly, just like he was doing right now. But listening to it, it didn’t sound like work.

  That’s the thing about technique: when you really have it, it doesn’t sound like technique.

  When he was done, he opened his spit valve, blew the moisture out, and turned around. A cloud of steam was coming off his head in the cold air. He twisted off his mouthpiece, slipped it into his pocket, and tucked the horn under his arm.

  “So what do you think, Vince?” he asked.

  “I think you’ve never sounded better.”

  “That’s not what I was asking,” he said.

  I lowered my head. “Yeah…”

  He turned to me. “Maybe if we just shot the Don and shot the Cleaner and walked, let Ridlin explain it all away…”

  “And the Nephew,” I added.

  “And the Nephew, of course, we can’t forget the Nephew,” he echoed.

  Paul is usually a complete pacifist; do your own thing, live and let live. I had had the same thought but had kept it to myself, and was shocked to hear it coming from him.

  “What, you have a gun?” I asked.

  “No, but I’m sure I could get my hands on one,” he said.

  “You? Where?” I asked.

  He looked at me. “I live on Forty-seventh, remember? All I’d have to do is walk one block to the north and wait for someone to offer me one. It wouldn’t take five minutes, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I live off Fifty-ninth, all I’d have to do is walk south across the Midway and be in the same kind of neighborhood.”

  “If you walked south of the Esplanade, you’d get a gun, all right,” he said. “Someone would stick it right in your ribs.”

  “And you? Nobody would jack you?” I asked.

  “Yo, yo, yo, you be forgettin—, man,” he said. “I’m a ‘person of color,’ dawg, or, at least, I could pass for one in the presence of my brothers.”

  “As long as you didn’t go flappin—yo’motherfuckin—gums, blood,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Word,” he said.

  “ ‘Word’?” I echoed. “I didn’t know you knew that one.”

  “I must have read it somewhere,” he said, a slight smile creasing his face. “Which means no one uses it anymore.”

  We had always been tight, he and I, and I hadn’t been sure if the recent craziness had affected that. My attention had been on Akiko, on Laura, on Ridlin. Shit—my attention had been on myself. Paul’s focus had stayed on the music, where it had always been.

  I shifted my weight, and changed the topic. “Would you really kill someone so Akiko and Laura could be together?” I asked.

  “Check your premise, Vince,” he said. “I doubt they’ll be ‘together’ all that long,” he said. “Laura, from her history, doesn’t seem to be the ‘together’ type.”

  I nodded. There was truth in that, for sure.

  “But would I kill someone so that Akiko could have the right to be together, with whomever? If the one I had to kill was himself a killer, who had killed Jeff and that guy Roger Tremblay, and almost killed you?”

  I nodded again. That was the question, when you got down to it.

  “It’d be a ‘righteous shoot,’ as they say,” I said.

  “And add one more condition to it: would I do it if I were assured I could get away with it? I’m afraid I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t go to prison for twenty-five-to-life so Akiko could get herself some choice Eye-talian pussy,” he admitted, and I loved him for it. “But if I could walk away, clean? I’d consider it, Vince. It’s Akiko, you know? And besides, it’s a ‘rights thing,’ you know, and I’m kind of predisposed to be ‘down with that.’ ”

  “Yeah, when you put it that way…” I said. And as I thought this, my resolve to keep him as far away as possible from this mess only strengthened.

  “But—”

  “Yeah?”

  “But I can’t see walking away from it, not unless a whole lot of people happen to die. And I’m trying not to think of scenarios in which a whole lot of people happen to die.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Myself, every thought that goes through my head seems to push me one way or the other. I can’t seem to find the middle way, that Taoist line, anywhere in there.”

  “That’s because you’re trying to find it by thinking,” he said. “That’s not Taoist, that’s Confucian, or maybe just confusion.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, OK, I hear you. So what do you do? I mean, what the fuck do you do?”

  He took the trumpet, raised it to his lips, blew some more spit out of it.

  “I was doing it before you interrupted me,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. That’s what I’ve been missing. I can’t slide back into the music like I used to be able to.”

  He looked at me. “Why not?” he asked.

  I held up my left hand, knocked the cast on the porch railing. “Can’t fly on one wing.”

  He looked at me again. “Why not?”

  “Why not?”

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m just saying. It’s not like your right hand is perfect and a little practice would mess it up. It’s not like there aren’t any options. I mean, Jesus, look at Jack.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but he’s Jack, he’s from another fucking universe, and I’m only me.”

  He looked at me, paused, looked back down.

  “This might be a good thing, Vince. We’ve talked about this before—how everything has always come easy for you, how you sometimes have to handicap yourself, just to keep it interesting. You know—creating an impossible double major at Columbia; picking an insane thesis topic even your advisors don’t understand; driving all around this crazy city in that Black Maria totally stoned; always having to fall in love with the one woman you know is totally unattainable…”

  “Yeah, well,” I muttered, thinking, “make that the two women who are totally unattainable,” and adding, out loud, “That’s me, making the simple shit difficult.”

  “You can also make the hard stuff easy. But this is a real handicap. Might be interesting.”

  It was bracing t
o hear that he was thinking of options, not obstacles.

  Stop, I told myself. Be patient. There’s still plenty of time for them to kill you and relieve you of having to commit to anything.

  CHAPTER 58

  Vinnie Amatucci

  In the Fat Man’s Cab

  Monday, January 27

  I left Lake Geneva at four-thirty in the morning with Ridlin and Paul trailing close behind. Ridlin would drop Paul off at the first CTA station, and he would supposedly meet up with us later. Before we left, Ridlin sat us all down and said that we would all meet at short-term parking at O’Hare, that he had a place, “a safe-house kind of place,” somewhere out in DesPlaines. We were supposed to park facing outward with our lights on at a certain level in a certain row, and at 5:00 P.M. we were supposed to turn our alarms on for one minute, and keep doing it every five minutes until he drove past, at which point we would caravan over to his “secret safe-house location.” He told this with such detail and conviction that he had to nudge me on the way out to the cars to remind me it was all just bullshit.

  The weather was still dry but had turned warmer. Most of the slush had dried from the highways, and the interstate felt like a dark gray corridor meant for only us. I kept the needle at sixty-five—I didn’t see the need to burn that much adrenaline; I had a feeling we would be needing plenty of it later—and cruised along, alone with my thoughts. Ridlin was a precise six-and-a-half lengths back.

  Three or four times I thought about filling up the pipe and getting a little buzz on, and every time I talked myself out of it. My rationalizations were classic—you ought to make it like any other day driving the cab; you need to relax and be cool so you don’t spook the Accountant; it will force you to concentrate because you’ll know you’re stoned—all bullshit reasons that would have sufficed at any other time. But today I wasn’t buying it. I would feel my hand reach for the pipe, hear the comforting sound of “why not?” in my head, but my hand would stall and wander back to the wheel.

  We came in from the west, and I swung north onto Cermak from the Stevenson, dropped Paul off, drove up fifteen blocks, hung a right, looked for a space and parked my car. I cleared out my stuff, locked up and walked to where Ridlin was waiting for me. I threw my stuff in the back of his car and got in the front. He hung a U-turn and we got back on the Adlai and in twelve minutes we were on 21st Street.