The Silent Hour

20

__________

There are plenty of good restaurants on Murray Hill, but Mama Santa’s pizzeria is one of the oldest and best known. Ken and I were ahead of the lunch crowd and got a table in the back of the dark, wood-paneled dining room.

“I hope Mike sits next to you,” I said as we took our seats.

“He’s that big?”

“Three hundred at least.”

“That’s not tiny.”

“I knew a guy who worked a surveillance with him once, said Mike brought this feed bag of beef jerky along, like five pounds of the stuff. Went through that in the first hour, then spent the rest of the night bitching about how hungry he was. Guy said the longer the surveillance went on, the less he liked the way Mike looked at him, started to feel like he was out with the Donner Party.”

Ken smiled as he leaned back from the table, stretched out his long legs, and crossed his feet at the ankles. “What’s your best surveillance story? Or worst experience, rather. Those usually make the best stories.”

“That’s easy. I was in an unmarked car by myself not long after I switched to narcotics and started working with Joe. This is early on, and Joe was something of a legend, so I’m trying to impress, right? Well, it’s February, bad snowstorm had just blown through, left it cold as a bastard, and my lovely and charming fiancee—yes, I was engaged, and no, it didn’t stick—she’s feeling bad for me and decides to give me a present. One of these heated pads for the car seat, you plug it into the cigarette lighter. I was embarrassed by the damn thing since it didn’t exactly feed the tough-guy image I was trying to cultivate. I threw it in the car, though, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

“So, the night of this surveillance, we sit on the guy’s house for hours, and nothing happens. Started in late afternoon, and now it’s two in the morning and our guy hasn’t moved, which means neither have we. It’s getting colder and colder, just crawling into my bones, you know, and I figure, hell, might as well use her gift for a little while, just long enough to warm up. I plugged it in for maybe twenty minutes. Half hour at best.”

Ken’s smile widened as he saw where I was headed.

“Thing warms me up, and now I understand why—it must have been burning watts like a set of stadium lights. I unplug it about an hour before our guy moves. He comes out of the house and gets into his car, and I think, finally, and turn the key.”

“Click,” Ken said, and laughed.

I nodded. “Click. Absolutely no juice, battery’s dead. So I have to get on the radio with Joe and say, uh, our boy’s in motion, but I can’t tail him until I get a jump.”

“You tell him what killed the battery?”

“Hell no. You kidding me? I spent the next three weeks bitching about the shitty unmarked cars they gave us. Joe still doesn’t know the truth about that one.”

“Nice.”

“All right, your turn,” I said.

“You’ll like this—worst surveillance I ever went on was a fake surveillance.”

“A fake surveillance?”

“I have—had, rather—a brother-in-law who I simply could not stand. He was older than my wife, had the protective big brother thing going on, but he was also just a dick, you know? Owned a car lot, made piles of money, told bad jokes and laughed at them way too loud. Only his own jokes, though. Never cracked a smile at anything anybody else had to say, but when he’d make a joke he always cut up, roared at his own dazzling wit. When we first got married, my patience with him could last about an hour. That’s how long I could stand to be in the same room. That time frame diminished over the years.”

“I can imagine.”

“One Friday night my wife informs me that he’s coming by for dinner, and I thought, oh, shit, not on a weekend. Because on the weekends he liked to hit the bottle, and when he did that, he lingered longer and laughed louder. So I thought, just tell one little white lie and give yourself a night off. Tell them you have to work, a rush surveillance job came up, and then go sit in a bar and watch a basketball game.”

“Good plan.”

“That’s what I thought. When I came home that night, I planned to sell the story to my wife by picking up a tripod and acting real annoyed at this last-minute development. Well, the son of a bitch was already there. He’d shown up early. So he started asking a thousand questions about the surveillance, what it is that I do, all of that. I was edging for the door, he was following me with beer in hand, and just as I was about to escape, he turned to my wife and said, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t mind if I skipped dinner and tagged along with Ken, would you?’ ”

I started to laugh.

“Yeah,” Ken said, nodding. “Of course she agreed to it. So now instead of dealing with this asshole over dinner in my own home, with my wife to distract him, I’ve got him alone, and in my car.”

“Without any surveillance to do.”

“Exactly. So I thought, well, what the hell can you do at this point but play it out? I drove us to some apartment complex, just picked one at random, and gave him a story about what we were watching for. We sat there for five hours, him drinking and talking and pointing at every car that came and went—‘is that them, is that them?’ ”

“That’s fantastic,” I said. “A cautionary tale.”

We traded a few more war stories while we waited. Ken asked if I had a surveillance theme song, and I had to laugh.

“A theme song? Are you kidding me? You play the Mission Impossible sound track when you’re working?”

“Everybody should have a theme song,” he said, unbothered, “and, no, mine’s not the Mission Impossible sound track. Song’s called ‘Cold Trail Blues.’ By a guy named Peter Case. Ever heard it?”

I shook my head.

“Thing speaks to me,” he said with a faint grin. “Speaks about the Cantrells, too. All about some guy searching through the gloom, wondering if he’ll ever find what he’s looking for. Thinking it’s too late, and he’s too far behind.”

“If that’s your theme song,” I said, “it’s no damn wonder that you haven’t found Alexandra yet. Encouraging shit.”

His smile was hollow. “I’ll burn you a copy.”

When Mike finally entered, it was twenty past twelve. He wedged in through the door, lumbered across the room, extended his hand, and set to work crushing my fingers. A Mike London handshake was both a greeting and a warning, I always thought.

“How are you, Mike?”

“Hungry. I am hungry, Lincoln, my boy.” He turned and cast an interrogator’s stare down at Ken. “You’re Pennsylvania?”

“Ken Merriman.”

“From Pennsylvania,” Mike said, as if that dismissed any need for Ken to have a name. A location would suffice. He dropped into the chair beside Ken and heaved his bulk up to the table’s edge. I saw Ken trying to slide closer to the wall to make room for him, and I had to hide a grin.

“The way we got to Bertoli,” I began, but Mike lifted a hand to silence me.

“I need a menu and a waitress. Then you can tell me all that shit.”

We got him a menu and a waitress, and once the food was ordered he drained his glass of water as if it were a shot and said, “All right, get to it.”

“Ken was hired by the parents of Joshua Cantrell a while back,” I said. “Do you remember that story?”