more important than putting me in my place. I didn’t have the juice to turn down a legitimate request. If I refused to hear him out he would have to send Lucas and Pittman to talk to me.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
The smile returned and Tony leaned forward in the chrome-and-cobalt-vinyl chair.
“There’s this guy I’m lookin’ for.”
“What guy?”
“A Mann.”
“What man?”
“That’s his name. A Mann.”
“What’s the A stand for?”
“No,” Tony said, waving his cigarette around. “His father named him A because he always wanted him to be at the head of the line.”
“But the line goes in alphabetical order by the last name,” I said consciously keeping my hands from becoming fists.
“His old man was a go-getter but nobody ever said he was smart.”
I wanted a cigarette but worried that lighting up would show Tony that I was nervous. So I sat back and stared.
“I need to find Mann,” Tony said.
“What for?”
“To talk to him.”
“About what?”
“That’s my business,” the mobster said, an edge in his raspy voice, smoke rising up above his head.
“If it’s your business, then you go find him.” It struck me then that smoking Tony and his ilk were the fires that drove my dreams.
“What’s wrong with you, LT?” he asked. “I’m willing to pay you to find a missing person. That’s all. No cop could brace you over that.”
“I’m not lookin’ for somebody unless I know why, Tony. I’m just not doin’ it. You got some problem with this guy, then go out and settle it. I’m not on your payroll.”
“I could send Lucas and Pitts over here to convince you,” he said.
“Send ’em, then.”
“Just ’cause you’re friends with Hush don’t mean you can disrespect me, LT.”
That was Tony’s gauntlet. Uttering Hush’s name meant that he was serious. Everybody who was anybody in our world knew that the ex- assassin and I were acquainted. Just mentioning Hush sent serious men on long-term sabbaticals.
“Tell me why you want to see this guy or get outta here,” I said.
The gangster made a motion like he was going to crush his cigarette out on my desk. If he followed through I would have had to do something; neither of us wanted that.
Tony dropped the butt on the floor and stepped on it.
“Eight, nine years ago I had a small job with the button and cloth union,” he said, “handling disputes. The IRS is lookin’ into my [okininfinances from that time and they need records from back then. Mann was my personal accountant, provided by the union, and he’s the only one who’s got those records.”
“So you want the files?”
“I need to talk to the man himself,” Tony said. “The feds will want to interrogate me and I need to get up to speed. It’s been a long time.”
I didn’t believe a word of it but I couldn’t call him a liar straight out.
“So?” Tony asked.
“I got a full plate right now, Tone. There’s lotsa other PIs you could call.”
“I know you.”
“I’m busy.”
“Don’t make this a problem, LT. Find the guy for me. I swear to you it’s legit.”
Not for the first time did I think of my going straight like getting caught in an ant lion’s sand trap. I could get past Tony, maybe, but the more people I got mad the more likely I was to be taken down somewhere along the line. Every step I took upward, it seemed, brought me two rungs down.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“I could send Lucas and Pitts,” The Suit suggested again.
“I’ll think about that, too.”
“You want me to give you what I know?”
“I said I’ll think about it, Tony. Don’t press me.”
We were at an impasse. I wasn’t saying no but I wouldn’t say yes until I had a little time to consider my options. Tony saw all this.
“I’ll be calling,” he said.
Without another word he stood up and walked out of my office. I let a few minutes pass and then checked to make sure that he was gone. After that I got the .38 out of the old jeweler’s safe and made sure that it was clean and loaded.
E€„
11
One thing I’ve learned in fifty-three hard years of living is that there’s a different kind of death waiting for each and every one of us—each and every day of our lives. There’s drunk drivers behind the wheels of cars, subways, trains, planes, and boats; there’s banana peels, diseases and the cockeyed medicines that supposedly cure them; you got airborne viruses, indestructible microbes in the food you eat, jealous husbands and wives, and just plain bad luck.
I once knew a woman named Gert Longman. She had a place down in SoHo. I used to stay there sometimes. One morning, when she had alre ^ knady left for work, I was drinking coffee on her fire escape when a car came careening down the street. A mother and her young son were crossing and the car slammed into them. For a moment it seemed that the car was going to stop to help but then he, or she, stepped on the gas, ran over the bodies, and was gone. I climbed down the fire-escape ladder, but when I got to them I could see that they were dead, very much so. I called 911 and the ambulance came crying. The police arrived a few minutes later and I told them everything I could.
That was a tough day for me. I was so upset that I went home. Katrina had taken the kids to visit her parents in their Miami retirement condo, so I brooded alone in the apartment, worried about Death behind the wheel of a red car, rushing up on you out of nowhere and then hurrying away like a coward. I got in the bathtub with a book but forgot my drink on the sink. I got one foot on the floor and slipped, did a James Brown split, flew up in the air, and landed hard. My skull grazed the edge of the iron tub. And even though the pain in my head and hip was excruciating, I lay there laughing at myself. I had forgotten that Death was watching from all sides; that it comes at you from the place you least expect.
And so even though a gangster had me in his crosshairs, I still had a life to live just like every other doomed soul walking this earth, wondering if he could make it across the street.
I TOOK A bus downtown and got off three blocks from Tiny Bateman’s Charles Street address.
Charles was a narrow street of mostly four- to six-story apartment buildings built of brick and thickly coated with decades of city grime. Most had concrete stoops and little barred gates that led down to the basements. Tiny worked in an underground apartment half a block from Hudson Street. I descended the seven granite stairs and gave that week’s secret code. I felt like a fool with a magic decoder ring but Tiny would never answer unless I tattooed the right sequence on his buzzer.
After three minutes there was a loud click and I pushed open the reinforced steel door that was painted a fanciful shamrock green.
It was more of a compartment than an apartment. Each room, even the toilet, had worktables along the walls. These tables were crowded with wires and chip boards, computers without casings and cameras that looked like ceramic dolls, single-cigar humidors, a copy of
I passed through three packed rooms before coming to Tiny’s office. This had once been the master bedroom of the subterranean abode. Huge light-gray, plastic-encased computers lined the southern wall. They were humming and throwing off a lot of heat, I was sure, but Tiny had enough air-conditioning running to freeze a penguin.
The fat young caramel-colored man was seated in a swive cted
“Hey, Tiny,” I said.
I didn’t sit because there was no visitor’s chair in Tiny’s laboratory. He once told me that he only ever had four visitors. I didn’t know the others’ names but it was a good bet that one of them was his father.
Simon Bateman had introduced me to his nerd-to-the-max son. I helped the elder Bateman once when he was in serious trouble, and he paid me by getting Bug to agree to work for me now and again.
“How’d that phone work out?” the thirty- something misanthrope asked in a high voice that seemed to want to get higher.
“Fine. Fine. I think I might need another couple soon.”
“The blue and pink ones near the front door,” he said.
Bug owned, and slept in, the apartment above his workplace. The people he did business with dropped their deliveries and picked up their orders in a sealed antechamber that he constructed up there. That way he didn’t have to see anyone for weeks at a time.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.
“ ’Bout what?”
I explained about the e-mails that Twill had sent and received.
“I’m worried about my son,” I said.
“Maybe he’s got a good reason,” Tiny said, removing the glasses that had earned him the insect nickname.
