28
Once fair, now foul, someday fair again? The Gowanus Canal in South Brooklyn is a green vein of seepage, a topographic remnant of what was once a burbling creek, and the nineteenth-century brick factory buildings on either side slowly crumbling into its sluggish shallows are the source of endless speculation by local investors who dream that the canal will soon be discovered as the next hot zone in New York's real estate market. No less a man than the great American trickster Donald Trump is rumored to have bought up large swaths on the sly. Indeed, nearby neighborhoods have begun to draw people with trendy eyeglasses and laptop computers, but for the canal the question as to who will dredge and remove the thousands of tons of toxic sludge within its banks-mud laced with heavy metals, PCBs, and nearly every other cancer-causing chemical ever dumped by American industry-is a question that no one can quite yet answer.
Which is why the neighborhood is mostly still home to car repair businesses, carpentry shops, a casket company or two, and other not so well specified enterprises that may or may not be legal. A perfect place for a little conversation with the driver of the white limousine that had ferried around the Chinese men.
He was a small man named DiLetti, fat in the middle, thin in the arms, with a dimple in his chin. He sat in a wooden chair in a nearly empty room.
'We know you're nervous,' said Victor, standing on the warped floorboards. 'That's expectable.'
'You guys grabbed me.' He looked at Victor in abject bafflement. 'What, what did I do?'
'You drive a limo, right?'
'Yeah. But you know that.'
'We want some information.'
'What?'
'Where you were driving three, four days ago? We know you were driving around in Brooklyn.'
'I don't have the log in front of me.'
'I do.' Victor held out the sheet. It had cost him exactly $100. 'You picked up a bunch of Chinese guys at the Time Warner building and then drove them around. I want to know exactly where you went.'
The driver's slow response told Victor that he remembered the answer to the question. It had to have been a memorable night, not the usual clientele for a cheesy Manhattan limo company. Not fake rap moguls getting blow jobs from a hire-a-ho, no East Side private school girls in jeans and party shoes on their way to a sixteenth birthday party. But something odd, not hard to recall. 'Well, you, ah, you discussed this with Lem?'
The owner of the limo company.
'Where you think I got this sheet?' Victor said calmly, feeling the game with DiLetti engage, the negotiation take bite. 'Lem gave us the green light.'
'You guys cops?'
This was an interesting question. Because it gave Victor an opportunity. 'Let me answer you this way,' said Victor. 'We have the authority to do what we're doing.'
The very ambiguity of the statement seemed to relieve the driver.
'Okay,' he said, nodding as if he knew exactly what Victor was referring to. 'The pickup was at the Time Warner, like you said. It was four guys, actually. Only one or two spoke any kind of English. One of them translated. So I pick them up and they tell me to go to an address in Bay Ridge. Most of the time they had the partition closed.'
'Bay Ridge.'
'Yeah. Three guys got out there.'
'Tell me something about these guys.'
'Big. Very big for Chinese guys, maybe six one.'
'Then?'
'Then they go into the house,' said DiLetti.
'Address?'
'I don't remember the address. Third or fourth house on the left on Seventy-eighth Street off Ridge Boulevard. Green door. Porch is green, too.'
'We can find it.' He pointed at his friend Jimmy, who was serving as muscle, the way Richie used to. 'Call Violet, tell her to get that address. She can have somebody over there in five, ten minutes, then tell her to check it out.' He nodded back to the driver. 'Okay. Keep going.'
'So the guys go into the house and then two of them come out a few minutes later with something in a cardboard box. One of them stayed in the house. The rest get back in the car. So now there's a total of three Chinese guys in the car. A lot of discussion in Chinese, let me tell you. Very interested. I looked in my mirror but really couldn't see it. Then we go to another address a few minutes away. There's a red truck in the drive-'
'Old-red Ford F-150?' said Vic, remembering the vehicle driven by the man inquiring after Richie in the company trailer.
'Old, yes, Ford, I didn't notice. I don't know trucks.'
'Then?'
'Then the three guys go into one house and come out a minute later with nothing and then they go into the house next door, which has lights on, and a couple of minutes later they drag a guy out of there and put him in the car.' The driver paused. 'This was a white guy, spoke English, so I heard that. They called him Ray.'
'This Ray guy, he was in his early thirties, dark hair, good build?'
'Yes.' The driver paused.
'You get the feeling he's pretty tough?'
'Yeah, you could say that.'
Vic felt a surge of fury go through him. 'Go on.'
'Yeah, yeah, I will. But I'm starting to wonder something about the information, why it's like, so valuable.'
'You're wondering about that,' Victor repeated.
The driver smiled nervously, resettled himself, and then worked up his answer. 'Yeah, you know, this is something that's, uh, valuable'
'To us.'
'That's what I mean.'
'You want payment for the information?'
'Well, you know, I mean-'
Victor nodded sagely. 'What do you think this information is worth?'
'Well, I don't know, couple of thousand, anyway.'
'What?'
'I said, a couple of-'
'No, no, I heard you. I just disagreed with you.'
'So-'
'It's not the right amount,' said Victor.
'Well, then maybe a thousand, seven fifty?'
Victor shook his head. 'Still not right.'
'I think-'
'I think you're really selling yourself short here,' Victor said, nodding with animated judiciousness. 'I mean, we want to be fair, we do want to be reasonable.'
'You do?' asked DiLetti, amazed at his luck.
'Oh, sure. Honestly, this information is worth a lot more than a couple of thousand bucks to us.'
'It is?' the driver said hopefully, his voice echoing in the empty, dilapidated room.
'Oh, yeah. It's worth-well, maybe a million bucks, actually.'
'Really?'
'If you can deliver it accurately.'
'Oh, I remember everything, don't have to worry about that.'
