by Andrew Grant
“You have no idea what it was like over there, Paul. You so dodged a bullet. The corruption? The injustice? It made you ashamed to be human. And the way Walcott pimped himself out to those crooked asshole politicians who were basically raping their own country? It was disgusting. And all we could do was watch. Fill in forms. Put them in files. Anyway, one day I came across this scam Walcott was running. People over there, the regular Azerbaijanis, they were desperate to get out. To start new lives in Europe, America, wherever they could. I don’t know how they got in contact, but Walcott was telling people he could get them US visas. For their whole families. All they had to do was bring one of their daughters to his compound. She could be sixteen. Fourteen. Younger. He didn’t care. He’d keep the girl for a weekend. Maybe some of his government buddies would come over. And afterward, guess what? No one was getting visas. So I reported what I’d found out, and nothing happened. I pushed, and I was told nothing could be done, due to diplomatic considerations. Walcott was basically untouchable. I came up with six different ways to snatch the guy without harming any locals, and every time I was told no. In the end, I just snapped. I decided to deal with him my own way. But I could never get close to him in Baku, even after I became a civilian. So when the government collapsed and all his buddies abandoned him, I followed him back here. I was waiting for the right moment to take him down, but I must have spooked him somehow, ’cause all of a sudden he hired a bunch of guards and dropped out of sight.”
“If that’s true, I can’t say I blame you for going after him.”
“It is true. But the army did blame me. And now it wants Walcott all of a sudden? Which makes me want to know why. What’s changed?”
“This has nothing to do with the army.” I held my hands out, palms first. “I’m just a janitor now. A civilian, like you.”
“Then why are you fucking with Walcott’s phones?” Robson took a step closer to me. “Why are you here at all?”
“For the same reason you are, I guess. My path crossed with Walcott’s. I didn’t like what I saw. The authorities weren’t interested. So I decided to do something about it myself.”
“What did Walcott do?”
“Nothing, to me personally. But he’s mixed up with two other assholes I took a dislike to. One’s an Azerbaijani mobster who traffics young girls. The other’s a landlord who had an old woman beaten so bad she’s in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.”
Robson smiled, but with no trace of humor. “Sounds like Walcott’s kind of people.”
“There’s one other thing, though, that might be important. You didn’t spook Walcott. He dropped out of sight because he owes the Azerbaijani guy money. A lot. And he doesn’t have it. Which means you may not have to worry about him much longer. If Walcott can’t pay, your problem will be taken care of for you.”
Robson turned and slammed his palm against the wall. “No! That’s no good. My life was ruined because of Walcott. I have to take him down myself. And I will, if it’s the last thing I do.”
A phone rang from somewhere on the floor, behind Robson’s back.
“That’s mine.” I patted my empty pocket. “Must have fallen out.”
Robson stepped back and glanced down at its screen. “Some guy called Jonny Evans.”
“Outstanding.” I held out my hand. “This could be important. Do you mind?”
Robson waggled the gun as a silent reminder to watch what I said, then slid the phone toward me with his foot.
I talked for a minute, then hung up.
“John, what if bringing Walcott down wasn’t the last thing you did?” I slipped the phone back into my pocket. “What if we could work together? Join forces, and nail all three of the assholes I mentioned?”
“Working together could be good.” Robson jammed the gun in the waistband of his jeans. “But not if it drags things out even longer. If you’re serious, prove it. Come to his office with me, right now. You take the guards. I’ll take Walcott. Show him exactly how untouchable he really is.”
“I’m serious, all right.” I paused until Robson met my eye. “But we’re not going to do it like that. We’re not going to act like a couple of low-rent button men. We’re going to hit these guys where it hurts them the most. That phone call? It put the last piece in place. Almost. We just need to do a little more groundwork, then we’ll be good to go. It’ll be beautiful. Just like old times. As long as you’re still up for some shenanigans…”
I
THIRTY YEARS AGO
Roberto di Matteo could be described as many things, but he certainly was never one of life’s deep thinkers. If anything, he was always a binary type of guy. To him, things were either OK, or they were not OK. If they were OK, he was happy to go with the flow. If they were not OK, he tried to change his course.
During his time at Columbia Grammar School, things were predominantly OK. The work wasn’t too hard. He never stood out as a student, but he was never in danger of being asked to leave. There was plenty of time for the kinds of activities most suited to his abilities. Sleeping late. Playing cards. Drinking. Chasing girls. Playing video games, which had seemed super advanced back then but were laughably dated now.
Despite all the distractions, Roberto did just enough good work to get into Vassar. That was the version of history he liked, anyway. The rumor spread by some of his classmates said his admission had more to do with his mother being an alum, and a generous donation from his father, than his grades. But even if that was true, Roberto was OK with it.
At college, Roberto followed essentially the same path. Only there was more time for sleeping. More girls to chase. More beer to drink. Lots of other substances to experiment with. And video games that improved by the month. As long as you could foot the bill, which Roberto was able to do. Thanks to his father. And that was OK.
Roberto didn’t get down to any serious work until it was time to think about law school. He must have raised his game sufficiently, though, because he ended up getting admitted to Yale. There were more pesky rumors about his father’s donations, of course, but Roberto didn’t care. By now, his eyes were firmly on the prize. He was ready to knuckle down. To tick all the necessary boxes—his degree, the bar (albeit not the kind he was previously familiar with)—and grab his future with both hands. Because there was a place waiting for him at his father’s firm, in New York. It was a very prestigious firm: Suggett, Lyons, and Darracott.
At first, Roberto was OK with following in his father’s footsteps. He liked the firm’s fancy office on Lexington. The daily bagel delivery from H&H. The three- (or in his case, four- or five-) martini lunches with clients he was sometimes invited to sit in on. But when the initial gloss wore off, he found the going a lot more difficult than he’d expected. It turned out that his father being a partner made settling in harder, not easier. The other associates resented him. The other partners had high expectations, which left them frequently disappointed in him. He limped his way through one boring research assignment after another and made the occasional lackluster second chair appearance, hoping that if he could survive his first year, his prospects would somehow improve. He was wrong. His performance review on the anniversary of his hiring was harsh. And Roberto was not OK with that.
So he quit.
There were advantages to life as a solo operator, as Roberto soon found out. Sure, the office space he wound up with wasn’t quite as upmarket as the big firm’s. But what it lacked in polish and prestige, it gained in other ways. Like not having anyone in it who kept tabs on what time he arrived in the morning. What time he came back from lunch. If he came back. And when it came to hiring secretaries, he could apply his own set of criteria to the selection process. Criteria that weren’t exclusively related to administrative ability. Or to any kind of ability, for that matter.
The first couple of cases Roberto tried after hanging up his own shingle worked out surprisingl
y well. They didn’t draw him into deep legal waters, so they weren’t too hard for him to navigate. They didn’t take too long for him to wrap up, or require too much effort along the way. Those aspects were definitely OK. Less OK was the paltry amount of money they brought with them, but Roberto felt he shouldn’t complain. The cases had really just been bones that his father and his friends had been kind enough to throw, and Roberto didn’t want the source of such easy work to dry up. But regardless of his wishes, after a few months the flow of referrals had slowed to a trickle. Soon a full-on drought had set in. Faced with the prospect of having to slink back to his old man with his tail between his legs, Roberto was forced into an unpalatable realization. He was going to have to make his own rain, as they say in the legal profession. And that was not OK. He didn’t mind snow, as long as he was in Klosters or Cortina for the skiing. He enjoyed the sun, provided he was on the beach in Bora Bora or the Maldives. But as far as he could see, rain had no redeeming features. All it did was leave you damp and soggy. He’d never liked it. Not even the metaphorical kind.
Roberto had often heard it said that you could make your own luck. He’d always thought that sounded tedious, so was amazed to discover that all you had to do was postpone any thought of rainmaking until you’d completed the final level of The Legend of Zelda. He achieved that feat one Monday around lunchtime and had been about to head out for a quick slice of pizza and maybe a couple of Peronis when Samantha, his latest assistant, announced that he had a visitor. Before Roberto could respond with a suitable excuse to dodge the meeting, a guy came into his office. He was around six feet tall with gray hair buzzed so short his stubble looked sharp, like hundreds of minuscule daggers. He moved with no apparent effort and folded himself into Roberto’s visitor’s chair without waiting for an invitation.
The spiky-looking guy spoke with a pronounced foreign accent. At first Roberto thought it must be Russian, though it turned out to be Azerbaijani. After the guy left Roberto had to look the place up on a map. He didn’t have to think too long about the case the guy had offered him, though. It was to represent a friend of his. The guy made no bones about it, his friend was guilty. He wasn’t looking for an acquittal. Just reasonable bail, so that he could be present at his daughter’s wedding. That sounded straightforward enough. And the guy was paying cash, which was definitely OK.
As luck would have it, the ADA prosecuting the case was a friend of Roberto’s from law school. Roberto had a word in the ADA’s ear over a long, well-lubricated lunch. The ADA agreed to do Roberto a solid. Everyone was happy. Until the client skipped bail. He didn’t even show up to see his daughter walk down the aisle. Roberto was having a hard time deciding whether he was OK with that when the guy who’d hired him showed back up. He brought more cash with him. A lot more cash. It was a retainer, he said, for a new client. The kind who, if nurtured correctly—and Roberto wasn’t too naïve to understand what that meant—would leave Roberto never having to worry about making rain again.
And Roberto was most definitely OK with that.
II
THIRTY YEARS AGO
The dictionaries have it all wrong. So do the history books.
They say that mines go down, under the ground. And that all the gold in America was to be found out west. Neither of which can be so, George Carrick thought to himself. Because he’d just found his very own gold mine, right there in Queens. And there was nothing subterranean about it, except for maybe the basement, which he wasn’t interested in anyway because there was no rentable space down there. He was focused on the twenty-two floors that rose up above the sidewalk. The eight apartments that shared each of those floors. The fact that he’d just secured the job of rental agent for the entire building. And based on the quick and dirty door-to-door survey he’d just done, it was high time for some of the units to change hands. For new tenants to come in. Tenants with a lot more cash to spend on their rent. Oh, yes. The building’s turnover rate was about to skyrocket. And as a result, truckloads of commission were about to come his way.
Carrick stepped out into the street and the pleasant visions of giant stacks of cash instantly vanished. They hadn’t gone permanently, though. Nothing was going to rob him of his dream. They’d just been chased temporarily to a safer place by his sixth sense. Because he was looking at his car. It was parked diagonally across the street. Close enough to the building to be convenient, but far enough away for a casual observer not to necessarily peg it as his. There was no specific reason for him to pick his spot like that. It’s just the way your instincts lead you to behave when you grow up in a place like Alphabet City. And it was the same kind of instincts that had attracted two kids to his car. It wasn’t a nice car, by any means. It would be an embarrassment in most parts of the city. But it was a little too nice for that neighborhood. Which made it a problem. The only question in George Carrick’s mind as he crossed the street was how big of a problem was it going to be?
Carrick reached into his briefcase, grasped his wrench, and stopped ten feet short of his car. He was ready to fight if necessary. The kids hardly looked formidable. There was a time when he would have welcomed the chance to deal out such a straightforward ass-kicking. But the months he’d spent in Sing Sing had altered his perspective. They’d given him a more strategic outlook. He now knew that violence is best avoided. Unless you can get someone else to do it for you, which didn’t seem like an option in this particular situation.
“Five bucks.” The first kid stepped up closer. He looked around eighteen. He seemed reasonably lively, but was so scrawny Carrick figured he’d snap if someone stared at him hard enough.
“How much?” Carrick bounced up on the balls of his feet. He didn’t know what to do with a demand like that. It was a similar type of half-assed racket that had landed him behind bars. The experience hadn’t been pleasant. He was older and wiser now. Part of him felt he should encourage the kids to take a different course. But five bucks? He was shocked at their lack of ambition.
“You heard.” The kid took another step and behind him his buddy straightened up, ready to weigh in if necessary. “Give me the dough, asshole. Right now.”
Before he could respond, another solution occurred to Carrick. He was going to be in the neighborhood a lot over the next few months. Mining every last vein of new tenancies in the building would take time. It could be useful to have his car looked after while he worked. To have some eyes on the street. But five bucks? Could he trust anyone who set their sights so low? He decided to test the water.
“I could give you ten bucks.” Carrick tightened his grip on the wrench. “Or I could break your legs. Tell me why I should go with option A.”
“Is there a problem?” It was a man’s voice. Coming from behind him. And it wasn’t friendly. Carrick should have anticipated that such green kids wouldn’t be allowed out on their own. He should have been more aware of his surroundings. His instincts had gotten rusty. He’d been spending too much time in libraries, researching real estate opportunities, and going to job interviews. But this was no time for self-recrimination. So Carrick spun around, pulling the wrench out of his case as he moved.
The man he now faced was holding a length of lead pipe in one hand. He had a bicycle chain in the other. He was broad. Powerful. The black leather of his boots was torn at the toes, revealing the glint of the steel caps beneath. His jeans were ripped at the knees. He wore a leather vest over a stained denim jacket. Several buttons were missing and an approximation of a Maltese cross had been clumsily embroidered on the left side of the chest.
The guy was taller than Carrick by about six inches. That gave him an advantage when it came to reach. He gained even more through his choice of weapons. Carrick automatically stepped back, even as it dawned on him that he recognized the guy’s face. From Sing Sing. He was named Donny. They’d never shared a cell, but had been in the same block in the jail. It was well known in there—don’t get on t
he wrong side of Donny, or you’ll end your sentence in the prison infirmary. Donny lunged forward. Carrick braced himself, thinking, I don’t know the neighborhood yet! Where’s the nearest ER? Then Donny’s face, usually a snarling mask of pure hate, suddenly softened. His arms shot out, but the pipe didn’t connect with flesh or bone. Neither did the chain. Instead, Donny pulled Carrick in close for a hug.
“Georgey? Man, am I glad to see you.” Donny uncoiled his arms after fifteen suffocating seconds. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of schmucks I’ve had to deal with since getting out of the joint.”
* * *
—
Ten minutes later, Carrick and Donny were in a bar two blocks away. Its scarred wooden floor hadn’t seen varnish in a decade, but it was safe to assume it had seen other fluids—like blood—much more recently. The mirror behind the line of grimy second-tier spirit bottles was cracked. The half-dozen tall stools looked like invitations for back surgery. The smell lingering in the air was part abattoir, part chemicals from an industrial laundry. And Steppenwolf was on the jukebox, on a seemingly endless loop.
Donny led the way to a table with two chairs in the back corner. A giant photograph of a crying, naked kid after a napalm attack in Vietnam was on the wall near it. Carrick couldn’t tell whether it was there as a protest or a celebration. He was still trying to figure that out when the bartender brought them some drinks without waiting to be asked. He left a beer for Carrick, and a beer plus two generous shots of whiskey for Donny. The guy quickly deposited the glasses then hurried away. He avoided making eye contact with Donny but couldn’t help taking a curious glance at the newcomer.
“So.” Donny downed one of the whiskeys. “What’s new?”
“Not much.” Carrick tried a sip of his beer. It was watery with no discernible beer taste, but he wasn’t worried about that. He was straining to pick up traces of other flavors. He didn’t want to give offense. But he didn’t want botulism, either. “Just making a living. Or trying to.”
