I studiously avoided smiling. ‘My apologies, of course. No offense was intended.’
‘Accepted,’ he said after a moment, nodding slowly, his thoughts of blood. ‘Too many think as you do – that the Junior is not the Senior, that the Giroies have slipped, that we aren’t to be reckoned with. I assure you,’ he said, snapping his attention back to me, hands folded on the table, back straight, a portrait of composure surrounded by the possessions he’d destroyed. ‘These delusions will swiftly be proven false.’
I picked an ashtray up from off the carpet, set it on the desk, then stumped my cigarette into it. ‘No doubt.’
29
Adisu was a long time coming. Another man would have intended the delay an insult, meant to indicate how little water I drew in their eyes. As it was, I figured he’d probably just forgotten – punctuality was not a strong point of the Bruised Fruit Mob. It can be hard to keep track of the minute hand when you spend most of the day wrapped up in a blanket of high-grade hallucinogens.
Dizzie’s was an ugly restaurant with an odd layout, no bathroom and a very noticeable stable of vermin. But it was located in a section of Offbend that no one ever went to, and the servers knew when to leave you alone. I sat on the small verandah and watched my coffee cool. It was slow going. I wasn’t sure that the kettle had been any hotter than the porch.
Between the weather and the exertions of the last few days, I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings and didn’t notice Adisu till he dropped down on the bench across from me. He’d come accompanied by his bodyguard and a thick layer of body odor.
‘Adisu,’ I said.
‘Warden,’ he returned, but he didn’t look at me while he said it. His eyes were blood red circles around little black dots. An angry sheen of cankers had erupted across his forehead and beneath the patchy growth of his beard. Below the table his foot tapped an uneven rhythm. He hadn’t slept the night before, probably hadn’t slept since last I’d seen him, spending the intervening hours binging on breath and savoring the violence I’d set him to. He was coming down now, feeling antsy and jagged, and easy to provoke. It did not bode well for the remainder of our conversation.
The waitress was dowdy, middle-aged, and frightened. She approached our table in tiny steps, like a rabbit crossing an open field, wary of predators.
Her arrival sparked Adisu to life. ‘How you doing, darling?’ he said, turning his gaze on her full bore. He was making an attempt at being friendly, but between the outsized leer and the clear madness in his eyes, his attention seemed to have the opposite effect.
‘I’m fine,’ she managed.
‘Just fine, huh? Nothing better than that?’
She shrugged.
‘You know, any day you wake up, that could be your last day, you hear? You got this little flame, but all it takes is a stiff wind, you know? A stiff wind and . . .’ He brought his hand up in front of the Muscle’s face and snapped his fingers. The Muscle didn’t react. Part of being the Muscle was not getting rattled when Adisu started acting a little crazy. ‘And you gone, you know? Just like that. You gotta take every minute like it’s on loan, you dig?’
‘I’ll . . . I’ll try and do that,’ she said. I had no doubt that at this moment the poor woman was very conscious of the fragility of her existence.
Adisu smiled and nodded his head up and down for an uninterrupted five seconds, like he’d gotten lost midway through the motion and couldn’t stop. ‘You got steak and eggs?’ he asked finally.
‘Sure.’
‘I’d like an order of steak and eggs.’
‘You want those eggs scrambled, or fried?’
‘Bring me both,’ he said. ‘And some grits. And potatoes. And a cup of coffee. And some milk. Is your milk fresh?’ He didn’t wait for her to respond. ‘And some cornbread. Plus some bacon – burnt to hell, you understand me? Not the steak, though – I like my steak just this side of raw.’ He snapped his attention over to the Muscle. ‘What you want, Zaga?’
‘Coffee,’ he said.
‘That’s it?’ Adisu asked, incredulous and with an odd sense of concern. ‘That’s all you gonna eat? Breakfast is important, man, you gotta fill yourself up, we got shit to do. Have some eggs or something at least.’
It was past noon, but amongst the social conventions ignored by Adisu the Damned was the notion that breakfast ought to be consumed at a specific hour of the day.
Zaga shook his head. ‘Coffee,’ he said again.
Adisu shrugged and turned back to the waitress. ‘You gotta leave people to make their own decisions, at the end of the day, you know what I mean?’
She nodded in frantic agreement. I imagined there was very little she wouldn’t have agreed with at that point, if it meant a speedier end to the conversation.
‘You’re a smart woman,’ Adisu said. ‘But you ought to chop off those bangs, sweetness. They ain’t doing you no favors.’
The waitress put her hand to her forehead, opened her eyes wide as an ochre. I found myself agreeing with Adisu. He had a keen aesthetic, for a man whose pit-stains ran from underarm to crotch. Now more humiliated than frightened, our server took off back to the kitchen at high speed.
I had never seen Adisu by daylight before, it occurred to me then. His madness had been less apparent, or at least less objectionable, in his natural habitat, amidst his decaying mansion and a gang of almost equally cracked confederates. Out in public, contrasted against the civilian world of working stiffs and passing pedestrians, it stood in stark relief. It began to occur to me that perhaps I’d picked the wrong root-breathing lunatic to do my dirty work.
‘Everything go all right?’
In the ten-second interval between speaking to the waitress and my spitting a question, Adisu had delved pretty deeply into the confines of his skull. His lips moved up and down in noticeable but silent conversation. He managed to stall his inner monologue long enough to answer me. ‘What did you say?’
‘Did everything go all right,’ I repeated, ‘with that thing I asked you to do.’
‘Oh. Yeah, it went fine. Everything like you said. Dominoes falling into place and whatnot.’
‘That’s great.’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed, though he didn’t seem particularly excited by it.
‘So then you’ve got my cut.’ It was a statement, though in truth by that point I was far from certain about anything regarding Adisu the Damned.
‘Your cut,’ he repeated, as if unfamiliar with the term. ‘Actually, there’s something I need to tell you about your cut.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m not going to give it to you.’
The Muscle puffed up his shoulders till they were about level with the top of his skull. I sipped at my coffee in the least threatening fashion possible.
‘I want you to understand, Warden, it’s not like I just decided to con you out of the deal.’
‘Of course.’
‘That’s not the way I do business – ruin a good connect just to pick up something on the short end. What kind of sense does that make?’
‘No kind at all.’
‘I’m not the sort to quibble over a couple of copper.’
‘Wouldn’t have thought it of you.’
‘Thank you,’ Adisu said. He seemed genuinely touched. ‘Like I said, I was planning on bringing you your cut. I even had a little package for you, didn’t I, Zaga?’
The Muscle spat out onto the street, which I guess could have been taken as confirmation.
