way in this rich state, was prepared to pay handsomely for it.
This fellow was so determined, he paid double to have not one, but two sharpshooters, to make absolutely sure,' Sarti, a Corsican-born killer, had explained to Nimmo and Licio Montini. Jefferson, he planned how we do it. To catch our target in a crossfire, I would be on top of the Rice Hotel, while Jefferson, he is on top of the Gulf Building. Pffft. It was simple. We shot the guy right on Main Street, as they say in the cowboy films. I got him in the throat, and Jefferson hit him in the back of the head. We were in Houston for only a couple of days. Less than thirty-six hours. I would not say I got to know him very well, except to say that he is an excellent shot. The best I have seen. And that he is a quiet man. He liked to read, always reading, and to play golf, he said. He liked to play boules, also. The American boules, you know? One other thing. He was a late bird. Not sleeping very much. You might almost say nocturnal, like a bat.'
There were twenty-eight bowling alleys in Manhattan, and most of them were open twenty-four hours a day. Nimmo could see no point in visiting them all, so what he did was to try and construct a little probability theorem he hoped that in time he could prove. It worked like this: Chez Joie, the topless joint on Maurensig's list, was at 3740 Broadway, and the Prelude was at 3219. Close to these spots were three bowling alleys: Pinewood Lanes, on the corner of West 125th Street; Harlem Lanes, which was a little further along 125th near Seventh; and Lenox Lanes, which was up on 146th. Detective work! A dark, inscrutable workmanship that reconciles discordant elements, and makes them cling together in one society Imagination! Insight! Amplitude of mind! Reason in her most exalted mood! Gut Feel! Hunch!
In the two weeks up to New Year, Nimmo got into an investigative routine he was certain would yield a result. Perseverance was an essential quality in a detective, as were obstinacy and fixity of purpose. They were the very same characteristics that helped him to ignore Christmas and, as a corollary of that joyful season, his complete and utter loneliness. Not that he saw it that way at all. He knew the difference between solitude and separation, and convinced himself that he was armed with solitude's self-sufficing power. He was like Moses gone up into the mountain, Christ sent by himself into the wilderness, or Luther fasting to draw nearer to his God.
Which was why he avoided calling those few old friends he still had in the city, and stayed away from his former favourite bars and restaurants: PJ. Bernstein's Delicatessen on 3rd near 71st, the Cafe Hindenburg on East 86th, and the Red Hackle on 2nd near 88th. He even stayed away from the Luxor Baths on West 46th, figuring that the more he denied himself, the more focused he would be on tracking down Tom Jefferson, and the sooner he could get back to his normal life. That was what he told himself. And that was what he came to believe. He forgot that he had taken the job from Sam Giancana, not just because of the money, but to give his normal life some meaning. Walking the streets at night, looking for someone who may or may not have been there, passing the time, talking to himself, or to the four walls of his hotel room, alone with his thoughts, exchanging a few words here and there with total strangers - this was his life, and it was no more normal than the Flying Dutchman's.
Every day he would drop into the library and wander around the main reading room and the periodicals room. Sometimes he would sit there and read a book, or a newspaper, or a magazine, but, as in an art gallery, he was always more interested in the people around him, their studious, bookish faces themselves a whole Frick of portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Titian, Holbein, Rembrandt, and El Greco. But a crowd is not company, and at noon Nimmo would head out of the library to one or other of the two lunchtime addresses on Maurensig's list. This was no great hardship. Liborio on 8th Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd, was an excellent Spanish restaurant. Le Vouvray, on East 55th, was an equally good French restaurant, but with the added attraction of a shapely proprietor, Yvette, who was soon welcoming Nimmo as if he had been one of her long-standing customers. After lunch, Nimmo would head back to the hotel for a short nap.
Around five o'clock he would return to the library for an hour, or less. At six o'clock he would walk up to West 51st and La Barraca, drink a couple of very dry Martinis, and listen to a pretty good Flamenco guitarist they had playing there, a guy by the name of Arnaldo Sevilla. Sometimes, he even stayed for dinner, but never if he had been to Liborio that day. You could have too much of a good thing when it was paella or arroz con polio. On Liborio days, he would leave La Barraca and walk down to Basin Street East on 48th, and have dinner there. The food was Chinese and not so good, but the jazz was first rate, and he saw Johnnie Ray, George Shearing, and Quincy Jones, but never Tom Jefferson. Nimmo's thoughts on leaving the Basin Street East were always the same: if Jefferson really was a jazz fan, then how could he miss hearing the Prince of Wails do Cry'? Maybe Johnnie Ray was a faggot and a junkie, but he could still sing the pants off anyone but Sinatra. Or the nigger covering Ray Charles and Count Basie? The blind limey he'd never heard of, but he was good, too.
Around ten to ten thirty he would catch a cab up Broadway, and try the Prelude, or Chez Joie. Naturally he preferred Chez Joie because there was more to look at, such as the half-dressed waitresses, especially the one with the forty-four-inch bust who looked like a Vargas drawing. The place was run by one Joie Dee, a snub-nosed, gap- toothed, lascivious blonde beauty of indeterminate age, who wore only a little more than the girls who worked for her, and who much appreciated the way Nimmo handled his money in her club, which was none too carefully. Upstairs in the Chez Joie was a Gay Nineties bar, where the girls wore next to nothing at all, and were not too bothered where or on whom they sat. You could only get upstairs with Joie's blessing, which the free-spending Nimmo soon had, and with holy oil. There was no minimum cover charge, but Nimmo always bought champagne for Joie and the girls, and never looked too closely at his check. He hoped that one night Joie would like him well enough to take a look at the picture of Tom Jefferson he carried in his wallet.
Chez Joie closed around one thirty a.m. A few times he took one of the B-girls bowling, or, if she was hungry, to La Luna restaurant, on the corner of 140th and Broadway, where you could eat a beef dinner until five a.m., or on to the Prelude, which was open until four, and did a pretty good burger plate for a dollar twenty-five. A couple of nights before Christmas he even persuaded one of the girls, a big, tall, kraut-looking blonde named Lisa, to spend the night with him, but the night ended none too satisfactorily when he caught her taking a twenty from his coat pocket, which was on top of the twenty he had given her already. Any other time he might have slapped her in the mouth and kicked her fabulous ass out on the street, but it was the season of goodwill to all men, and women - even Nazi-faced B-girls who dipped your pocket. So he let it go with just a slap in the mouth.
Lenox Lanes on West 146th, near Lenox Avenue, never closed. There were thirty-four lanes, all wood, with a bar and a luncheonette. It was fifty-five cents a line, and fifty cents for shoe rental. The house balls were the latest thing, being plastic instead of rubber, and the pins, also plastic, flew, but not normally into each other, and Nimmo had lots of tens. Some nights the floor was a mess, but he usually played after a league, and he knew the guy that ran the place, Quinton Hindrew, was trying. Nimmo figured that Jefferson would almost certainly prefer Lenox Lanes to Harlem Lanes, where there were papers in the settee area, old league standing-sheets, sticky tables, and dirty toilets; or Pinewood Lanes, where the pins were old and did not have much left on them, so that he only ever had a few light hits that carried.
Nimmo was not much of a bowler, but his ex-wife, Hannah, had been a real anchor. When they had still been living together in the Bronx, on Aqueduct Avenue, close to where she worked as a midwife at University Heights Hospital, they used to take a bus across the Harlem River and go bowling at a bowl on Dyckman Street. Hannah could bowl a straight line like the ball was on rails. The Christmas Eve he went to the Dyckman Bowlway was also the night he went to see his old neighbourhood and his old apartment building - a sentimental journey that left him feeling hollower than a dugout canoe in a dried-up riverbed.
Nimmo never saw Tom Jefferson at any of the places he visited. A couple of times he went to the Kennedy family addresses on Park and Madison, and spoke to the guys from the Gambino family crew who were watching the front doors from parked cars, reminding them that Jack Kennedy was due to arrive in New York on 2 January, and to keep on their toes. He told them the closer they got to January, the more likely Jefferson was to show up, but some of them didn't look convinced that their obviously tedious assignment was anything other than a waste of time. With Nimmo sitting in the back of their grey Oldsmobile convertible, the two watching the Carlyle on Madison made no secret of their opinion that Jack Kennedy was a minghia, which is Sicilian for a prick.
And not just him,' explained the older of the two men, whose white head, wrinkled brow, and crooked jaw put Nimmo in mind of Moby Dick. His name was Antimo Gelli, and he spoke in a rasping, barking, pungent way that sounded as if at any moment his larynx might throw up a cloud of volcanic ash. Him, his smartass brother, his cock-sucking father, the whole fucking family. They're all a bunch of Irish pricks. Buttiga devilo, I don't care if someone does shoot that sonofabitch. Te jura anima futa. He's no friend to us. Momo's wrong if he thinks you can make deals with these fuckers. You mark my words. These assholes don't play by the same rules as the rest of us. Momo isn't from New York. He didn't have to work with Joe Kennedy. That guy has no fucking honour. You could ask Longy Zwillman, if he was still alive. Longy was one of Kennedy's bootlegging partners in the twenties, until
