“How long, Peter?”
Hermann was one of the few who called him by his Christian name. “Since my father’s funeral,” he said. “Fourteen years.”
“Fourteen years. Divided into seventy it is not long. You’ve aged.”
“Well, if I had to choose.”
The corners of the old man’s lips twitched. It might have been a tic. “He was a good man, dependable. That time those two guinea punks had my brother David pinned against the cash register, they were going to cut his manhood because he wouldn’t pay them not to, your father drove a Kenworth cab right through the window. Afterwards my other brother Simon wanted to charge him for the damage to the headlights and grille and the office, take it out of his salary. We talked him out of it. David gave your father a raise and a nice coin purse made out of one of the guineas’ scrotums. I wonder what happened to it.”
Macklin said he didn’t know.
“Bad times.” Hermann picked up his glass. “One thing, you knew who your enemies were then. Italian against Jew, Polack against Ukrainian, and all of them against the Greeks. Now all these shvartzes, spies, oy, Arabs, who knows how those animals think? We’re all mixed together now and a Jew could get his throat cut by another Jew as quick as by anyone else. Look at you, a good Scotch lad, working for the wops.”
“I’m working for myself these days.”
“You sell your loyalty on the street like a whore, no one’s blaming you. You’re forced to it. Simon would be spinning in his grave if he had one instead of a hundred pounds of concrete on the bottom of Lake Erie.”
Macklin smelled another story brewing. “At the funeral, you told me I had a favor coming if I ever needed one,” he said quickly.
Hermann swirled the pale liquid in his glass. “He wanted better for you, your father did. He had your life all mapped out from your christening. You were going to break Babe Ruth’s home run record before you were thirty and then you were going to run for senator. He wanted to make sure you were presidential material by the time you turned thirty-five and became eligible.” He drank, touched his lip. Slowly the pupils of his faded blue eyes opened to let in the present. “What is it you want?”
Macklin said, “I want to kidnap someone.”
CHAPTER 19
The building, in the warehouse district two blocks east of the Renaissance Center, had been used to store liquor during the dry time, then machine parts after Repeal. In the sixties Hermann had had it converted to offices, but it had been empty for ten years, the last five of which the former junk magnate had spent in a legal hammerlock with members of the urban planning commission who wanted to condemn it. It was blackened brick with big segmented windows paneled over during renovation and a soundproofed second floor that had been a dance studio complete with a fifteen-foot brass barre and a pale rectangle on the hardwood floor where a piano had stood. Macklin tested the soundproofing by tossing a string of lit firecrackers into the big room and shutting the door against the noise, leaned all his weight on the barre without managing to loosen the bolts where it was fastened to the wall, and pronounced the place perfect.
The next morning, Wednesday, he had the lights turned back on and installed bars on the windows and a deadbolt lock on the door leading to the hallway just in case the barre didn’t hold. He spent the afternoon reporting to Carmen, part of it in bed, and later he went back to the trailer park to complete his transaction with Sooty. From there he returned to the dance studio in order to meet the men Hermann had sent over.
There were three of them. He knew them by nicknames only, and they knew him by no name at all. Two were black. One of them, called Deac, had done twenty-seven months in Marquette for his part in an armored car robbery with three other blacks who called themselves the Nairobi Army of Liberty. He was nearly as big as any of the Reverend’s elders, wore his hair in a mohawk, and strung himself with a rainbow of beads over a denim jacket cut off at the shoulders to show off the muscles in his arms and the head of a water buffalo tattooed on his left bicep with N.A.L. blocked between its horns. The other black man, Ski, was as tall as Deac but at least a hundred pounds lighter, straight up and down with no hips in black jeans held up with suspenders under a tan silk jacket that hung on him like a bath towel. His hair had been straightened and combed into a glossy pompadour and he had on wraparound sunglasses that completely hid his eyes. The Willow Run police had arrested him for the blowtorch murder of a city councilman, but the case had been thrown out of court when no witnesses came forward.
“Why do they call you Ski?” Macklin asked him. “You sure aren’t Polish.”
His grin lent him a close resemblance to Stevie Wonder. “’Cause when I walks I slides.”
Macklin reached up and removed the dark glasses. Ski’s pupils shrank in the sudden exposure to light. “Use?”
“Reefer now and again. Tried snorting coke once but I almost drowned.” He giggled, a soft bubbling sound.
“Lay off that shit while I’m paying you.”
The giggling stopped. The grin fell away. “I hear you.”
Macklin gave him back his glasses.
The white man in the trio was five-seven and wide, not fat, with thin brown hair combed straight forward down the slope of his forehead and eyes set far enough apart to lay a hand between without touching either. They were brown and looked like thin paper circles pasted on. His face was unadorned and unblemished and unmemorable but for the eyes. He was wearing a brown jacket with snaps and a brown sportshirt tucked into brown double-knit trousers. Brown wingtips on his feet. Noticing him at all required effort. Macklin made it. “You’re Hank?”
“I guess I must be.”
“What’ve you done?”
“Nothing you’ve heard about.”
His voice had all the inflection of a dial tone.
“No sheet?”
He shook his head.
“Indulge me.”
“Chile, 1974. El Salvador, 1982. Grenada, 1983. India, 1984.”
“CIA?”
“Same thing. Other letters.”
“Why’d you quit?”
“I was starting to forget English.”
“What were you doing between 1974 and 1982?”
“Recovering.” He unbuttoned his shirt to the belt buckle and pulled it open. His abdomen was a relief map of healed-over scars.
“Shrapnel?”
“M-16.” He snorted. “One of ours. They took out a kidney and four feet of gut and stuck me in charge of Central American requisitions for eight years.”
“Anything against automatic weapons because of it?”
“Not as long as I’m behind them.” He redid the buttons.
“What do you think of the MAC-10?”
“Kiddie shit. But it does its job.”
Macklin stepped away to address the group. “No killing on this one. If someone stops breathing the lady stops paying.”
“Lady?” Ski was grinning again.
“You’ll meet her later. Hermann tell you the job?”
Deac said, “We snatch somebody.”
Macklin took from a window ledge a sheaf of flyers he had found in one of the reading rooms that the Reverend Sunsmith’s church maintained throughout the city and handed one to each of the three. They contained passages from the Bible on the sin of greed and on the lots cast for Jesus’ robe. Each included a picture of Sunsmith in his robes behind a pulpit with a life-size bronze cast of Christ on the cross at his back. “Recognize him?”
“Them holes in his hands and feet rings a bell,” Ski said.
“You know who I mean.”
“Yeah, I know him. Heavy shit.”
“He comes back here alive and he stays until the lady says he goes. Anybody have any problems with that?”
“How we get him away from his bodyguards?” Deac asked.
“We take them too.”
“You mean breathing?”
“You heard what I said about that.”
Hank said, “What’s it
pay?”
“Ten thousand apiece, guaranteed. If no one gets killed.”
Ski touched his sunglasses. “Well, it’ll be something new.”
“You’re in?”
“Shit. Yeah, I’m in.”
“Hank?”
“Where and when’s this go down?”
“Tomorrow, in an alley off Montcalm.”
“I got to see the plan first.”
“Uh-uh. This isn’t one of Sunsmith’s reading rooms. The literature stays here.”
“How do I know you’re not some cracker thinks he’s James Bond with a hard-on?”
“How do I know you didn’t get those belly scars bending over a barbed-wire fence to pick your toes?”
“Because Hermann told you different.”
“That’s right.”
The brown eyes were flat and reflected no light. “Yeah, I get you. Count me.”
Macklin looked at Deac, who shrugged, bunching the muscles atop his great shoulders. Taking that as his answer, Macklin turned and tossed his keys to Ski, who caught them against his chest.
“Green Camaro behind the building. There’s a box in the trunk. Don’t drop it.”
Ski twirled the ring around his right index finger, let it fly into a steep arc that brushed the high paneled ceiling, and caught it in his left hand. Then he went out. Five minutes later he returned carrying a fiberboard box and set it on the floor. Macklin opened it and stepped back while the three separated the flat black hand-held automatics and twelve-inch magazines from the excelsior inside. Hank had his together and a round jacked into the chamber inside of three seconds. Then he undid it and repeated the maneuver more slowly for the others. They had theirs ready to fire a minute later.
Macklin said, “I was going to turn them back to semiauto, but we might have to spray some lead in order to get the bodyguards’ attention. Hank, that’ll be your job if we need it. Those things are harder to control than the heavier automatics.”
“Not if you know what you’re doing.”
“No killing, remember. If it goes sour we split.”
“What’s the matter, you don’t like red?”
Macklin drew the nickel-plated .357 magnum from under his jacket and shot Hank in the left eye. The bullet took off the back of his skull and tore into the soundproofed wall behind him. His finger tightened convulsively on the MAC-10’s trigger as his knees folded. The gun spat out an empty shell casing and jammed. The shell bounced on the floor with a tapping noise in the silence following the revolver’s roar. Hank fell the rest of the way onto his face.
Ski and Deac fumbled with their weapons.
“Don’t bother,” Macklin said. “Yours are loaded with empties just like his. You get live rounds later.”
Ski said, “You said no killing.”
“On the job. This was a favor I did for Hermann in return for you two and the use of the hall. Hank was getting set to cut a deal with the feds for his old job back.”
“A hit. Jesus Christ.”
“I figured as long as I had to do it anyway it might as well count for something. I’ll kill the first one of you that departs from the script.”
Deac said, “What about the stiff?”
“Hermann’s sending a clean-up crew. Either of you want to walk?”
Ski grinned. “Man, we just watched you dust a dude. You ain’t going to turn out either one of us, so why ask?”
“Just testing for team spirit.”
“We’re short a man,” Deac said.
“A man maybe.”
Deac and Ski turned to watch the slim tawny brown-haired woman coming in the door. She had on an olive-drab jumpsuit and worn hiking boots that laced up her ankles with the trousers bloused out above the tops.
“You’ll call her Carmen,” Macklin told them. “She’ll be driving the crash car.”
Ski had lost his grin when the women entered. Now it flickered. “A broad? Shit.”
Macklin belted his magnum and squatted to pick up Hank’s MAC-10 from the floor where it had dropped. Standing, he handed it to Carmen, whose face had paled infinitesimally under its dark pigment in the presence of the corpse. She hesitated only a second, then released the gun’s magazine with a flick of her thumb, ran back the action to clear the jammed shell casing, and reassembled the weapon. She was nearly as fast at it as Hank had been.
“She comes from a country where every little kid can grow up to be a revolutionary general,” said Macklin. “If she lived in Kansas she’d know how to operate a twelve-bottom plow. And she can drive.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ski said again.
Macklin said nothing. At his feet, the spreading blood from Hank’s broken head, slowing now, stained the corner of the picture of the Reverend standing in front of the great crucifix.
CHAPTER 20
Sergeant Lovelady hadn’t slept with his wife in eight years.
They had plenty of affection for each other. Together they had put a son and a daughter through college, adopted a Vietnamese refugee girl when they were both past forty, and started the long torturous path of special education when the girl proved to be severely retarded. But after twenty-four years of marriage the sergeant’s tendency to sprawl all over both the bed and his partner had overcome their fears and hesitations and he had moved into one of the children’s old bedrooms for purposes of sleeping. Unfortunately, when the telephone rang late Wednesday night it caught him sharing his wife’s bed for another purpose entirely. She lifted the receiver on the eleventh ring, listened, and handed it over without comment.
“Lovelady?”
“Yeah, Inspector.”
“You okay? You sound like you’ve been running.”
“I work out sometimes. What’s up?”
“It just occurred to me who’s trying to kill Sunsmith.”
The sergeant was aware of his wife’s scrutiny. His ear felt hot. He changed hands on the receiver. “Maggiore?”
“No, his life’s complicated enough just now without that. Try Mike Boniface.”
“He don’t know shit about gambling. I bet he votes against it. If he’s registered.”
“That’s what I mean. We’ve been approaching this thing all wrong. The last thing the pro-gamblers want is for the Reverend to get whacked in the middle of a campaign against gambling. That’d slide all the undecideds into his camp. It’s what the guy who signed the contract on him is counting on.”
“I don’t know, it don’t sound like Boniface. His thinking ain’t that bent.”
“That’s Boniface B.M.”
“B.M?” He changed hands again.
“Before Milan. The slam’s the strongest attitude adjustment I know.”
“Well, who signed the contract on Maggiore?”
Pontier hesitated. “I’m still working on that part.”
“Thanks for sharing it, Inspector.”
“You sure you’re all right? I’ve heard busted radiators that sounded better.”
Lovelady said he was fine and they said good night. He handed the receiver back to his wife. “Where were we?”
“Breaking the mood.” She cradled it.
CHAPTER 21
The Reverend Thomas Aquinas Sunsmith confessed privately to one material weakness, and that was his weakness for material. If requested to abandon his jewelry or his church or even his guitar in the name of his faith he would not have hesitated to comply; but should the mandate include his suits and robes he would have felt something of Job’s burden. His musician’s spirit quenched itself in reds and purples and pinks and cool pastels and no woman’s naked flesh compared to the sensation of raw silk and virgin wool sliding between his calloused fingertips. Outside his church the only place where he felt truly close to his God was in the little second-floor tailor’s shop on Montcalm.
Kwan Duc waited on him personally, unlocking the door to the fitting room with a little bow while the four elders waited outside in the hallway. Once inside he took off his coat and vest and hung them up, then s
lipped into the satin cardinal-colored robe, carefully avoiding looking at his reflection in the three-way mirrors until he had it fastened. When he did look, he almost stepped back away from the flames of hell that leapt from the play of light over the glossy material. He planned to wear it at the rally in Hart Plaza a week from Monday, when he would summon forth all the brimstone at his command to condemn the gambling measure up for referendum the next day.
He stepped out of the fitting room, towering and broad and very red in the natural light coming through the windows. Kwan Duc fussed about him, smoothing creases and tugging at pouches and flipping the skirt this way and that to see how it hung. He had the Reverend raise his arms and rotate them at the shoulders and scampered about him, muttering to himself in Korean when he bent to remove a pin from the hem.
“Shoulders tight?”
“No, they’re fine.”
“Too long, I think.”
“Not at all. It should just brush the floor.”
“More yoke, maybe.”
“I don’t want to look like Darth Vader.”
“Satisfy?”
He admired himself once more in the standing mirror inside the counter. Then he unbuttoned the robe and took it off, standing there in salmon-colored shirt and electric blue tie with matching stripes, and handed it to the Oriental. “Wrap it.”
It was returned to him a few minutes later in a long white box tied with string, along with instructions to hang it as soon as he got home. Carrying the box under one arm, the Reverend went out into the hallway and descended the staircase to the street with two of the elders in front of him and the other two following behind.
The cream stretch and two-tone Buick Electra all but filled the alley. The Reverend handed the box to one of the elders to avoid crumpling it while he got into the back of the limousine, then accepted it and laid it lovingly across his lap while the elder who had been holding the door for him closed it and climbed behind the wheel. Another got in beside him in front and the others boarded the Buick. The procession started rolling.
A white van squirted across the mouth of the alley and halted with a shriek of tires, bouncing on its frame. At the same instant the door on the passenger’s side sprang open and a middle-aged man with thinning dark hair and a tired face threw a leg out onto the pavement and leveled a shiny revolver at the limousine’s windshield.
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