anything. See, when she wouldn’t say nothing to you, that was when she knew something but didn’t want to tell you. Like when you asked did she have their phone number. She didn’t answer. But when you asked her if she had their address, she said no, she didn’t.”
“She could be lying, couldn’t she?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t expect that phone call, anybody asking about them, so the woman didn’t have any lies ready. When she didn’t want to tell you something, she didn’t say nothing, she kept quiet. You understand what I mean?”
“Hey, Bird, I don’t give a fuck what she said or didn’t. If she knows where they are I’m gonna find it out. That’s what we’re here for.”
This guy continued to be a punk and would never change.
“That’s what we want to do,” Armand said, “but when you talk to her you got to be cool, ’ey? Like when you talk to her on the phone. See, what I’m thinking, if she’ll tell us their phone number, then we can find out from it where they are. Call the operator and say where is this anyway, this number?”
“
“Yeah, but you have to take it easy,” Armand said, wanting to punch this guy in the mouth as hard as he could. “You don’t want to get rough with her.”
Richie said, “I don’t?” slowing down and hunching over the wheel. They were getting close now, the road lined with a wall of wooden garages and fences, one after another on deep, narrow lots along here. Richie was looking at the house numbers that were nailed over the garage doors or painted on. Some of the places bore names, “Lazy Daze,” “E-Z Rest” . . .
“No, we want to keep her friendly,” Armand said. “Maybe she can’t tell us something today, but then she finds out tomorrow they gonna be someplace for a few days, yeah, we can send the check there. See, you get rough then we can’t use her no more, she calls the cops. What’s this? All this time they think we took off, we’re gone. Oh, those guys are still around, ’ey? They put up roadblocks and we can’t go nowhere, we can’t fucking move or we get caught and you go back to prison. You don’t want nothing like that, do you? ... Hey, you hear what I’m saying?”
“There it is,” Richie said. The house number was painted on the gate in the board fence. He pulled up close to it and opened his door. “You don’t want to come watch? Or you don’t want her seeing what you look like? Shit, I know your game.”
“Remember that it’s nice to be nice,” Armand said.
He got a look at the house, a quick one—three stories counting the windows in the attic, narrow, straight up and down, white frame with green trim—as Richie went through the gate and it swung closed again.
Armand sat back thinking, You let him go in there with a gun.
So what difference does it make he has a gun or he doesn’t have a gun, a guy like that?
So you don’t care, do you?
He thought some more and decided, yeah, but not much. He had come this far, now he was along for the ride.
Carmen and Mr. Molina were in the living room, facing each other from opposite ends of the white sofa: Carmen dressed in a shirt and jeans, curlers gone from her hair, Molina smoking cigarettes, stubbing another one into the ashtray on the coffee table.
“All this stuff I was dealing in,” Molina said, “the bonds, the stock certificates, were either stolen or counterfeit. I was the middleman, you might say. I’d go up to Toronto every couple months and lay it off on the family there. They knew what it was, they were only using it as collateral, buying up property downtown. So I got to know those people. What was the guy’s name again?”
“Armand Degas,” Carmen said.
“No, I never heard that name. He could be connected, but I can tell you he’s not family. This’s going back, what I’m talking about, eight nine years. He could’ve come along since then. I still can’t see an Indian in any kind of position with those guys.”
“He kills people,” Carmen said.
“Yeah, well, whatever he was doing in Algonac, Michigan, doesn’t sound to me like a family operation. I was in a different position, one phone call I could find out for you, but from what you told me”—Molina shook his head —“they’re not gonna go after a real estate company for any ten grand. They’d want a piece of it, steady income off the top. Same way it happened to me. I’m in the printing business, it’s slow, my accounts receivable are fulla deadbeats, like I owe a paper house fifteen hundred past due a hundred and twenty days. So I borrow it from a shylock. By the end of the year— listen to this—I’ve paid them twenty-seven thousand and they’re into my business. I can run off phony bonds or end up in the Susquehanna, that’s my choice.”
He paused to light a cigarette and Carmen stared at his hairpiece, its abrupt line across his forehead, the part, the wave in front, permanently combed.
“Ferris told us you were a loan shark, from New Jersey.”
“Ferris doesn’t have the right state even,” Molina said. “I don’t know how he got out of school, if he ever went. Seven years I’ve been in the government witness program. Started out, went to Washington, D.C., for orientation. I’ve met I don’t know how many U.S. marshals and every one of them was a decent guy except this asshole. There was one other one wasn’t too bright I can tell you about. But this guy Ferris, he comes on like he’s running for office—am I right? Next thing you know he turns into a fucking Nazi. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to say it. Listen, at the time my wife had enough of this and left, I went back to Scranton for a week, talked to the FBI and the marshal there, the people that got me into this. They took me before a Senate committee and I told them my experiences as a protected witness.”
Carmen said, “You’ve been in it seven years?”
“That’s right, but it isn’t just the time spent. My first wife I was married to for twenty-six years divorced me. I haven’t seen my kids—I got three grandchildren I probably won’t ever see.”
“So you didn’t start out here.”
“No, the first place I was relocated ... Remember them telling you they’re gonna, quote, provide suitable documents to enable the person to establish a new identity?”
Carmen nodded. “I remember, but we didn’t change our names.”
“I had to,” Molina said. “And you know how long it took to get suitable documents? Four months for a driver’s license. Almost a year for a social security card. I still don’t have a birth certificate. Try and get credit when you don’t have a history. Try and get any kind of a job on your own. The kid marshal takes me out to Procter and Gamble, they put me on the Pampers line. I’m fifty-nine years old with this white smock on making diapers. You know how long I lasted? I tell all this to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. They’re sympathetic, up to a point. The chairman says, ‘Well, our survey shows that seventy-three percent of the people in the program want to stay in it.’ I said to him, of course, they want to stay in. You leave it, you’re dead. I could’ve done ten at Allenwood instead of this shit and I’d be out by now, good behavior.”
“You didn’t like the first place they sent you,” Carmen said, “so you left? Can you do that?”
“The only thing that was good about it, I met my present wife, Roseanne. If we get along half the time it’s better than nothing. But that’s when they were bringing me back to Scranton to testify and the marshal—this’s the other one that wasn’t too bright—puts me on a direct flight.” Molina paused. “You understand what I’m saying? You land at Avoca, the airport there, anybody watching for you knows where you came from. That’s not bad enough, we’re leaving the courtroom after the trial, people all around, the guy, the marshal, tells another marshal where we’re going. I mean he says it right out loud, anybody could’ve heard it. There people still in the courtroom, friends of the guy I just got done testifying against. I said to the marshal, ‘You crazy? I’m not going back there.’ They had to drag me on the plane. But then I bitched enough after that . . .” Molina paused, his head raised. “You hear a car door slam?”
“It could be Wayne,” Carmen said. She watched Molina stub out his cigarette and get up.
Walking over to the window he said, “I’ve been doing this for nine years. I hear something, I jump.”
“Is it a light-tan pickup?”
The man didn’t answer and Carmen started to get up.
By the time he said, “I hate to tell you this, it’s that fucking Nazi . . .”
Carmen was out of the sofa. “We won’t let him in. I’ll put the chain on.”
“Don’t,” Molina said. “I did that one time, he busted the door.”
