Only Child

undercover? No, I didn’t get your ranking off some OC chart?”

He took a deep breath through his nose. Let it out, slow. “Sorry,” he said again; a reflex, not an apology. “I’ve been over some rocky ground. All twists and tricks. It’s hard to trust.”

“I didn’t come to you,” I reminded him.

“Yeah. I know.” He took another deep breath. Looked over at the Latino. “Fuck it. All right. Me and Felix, we’ve got a business relationship. A good one, for both of us. But it’s the kind of thing that some people wouldn’t understand. You following me?”

“Sure. Want me to spell it out?”

“A little. Just so we can be sure you—”

“You’re like a salesman,” I said, as casual as if I was giving directions back to Manhattan. “The boss gives you a territory. He says, You got the franchise; now go out there and make us all some money. Your franchise, say it’s for vacuum cleaners. And a lot of other stuff. But not for TV sets. Those, you got no license to sell.

“Now, there’s a lot of money in TV sets, but the boss doesn’t make TV sets, and he doesn’t trust the people who do. So they’re off limits. But you got a crew to take care of. If you don’t give them a chance to earn, they get...unreliable. So what you do, you find yourself a good solid manufacturer of TV sets. And you sell a few of them. Carefully, and only to the right people. This is good for you, good for your crew. Hell, it’d be good for everyone if your boss would just green-light it. But he’s not going to do that, and you know it.”

Giovanni looked bored. Except for his eyes.

“Meanwhile,” I went on, “you’ve got a regular payroll to meet, a big nut to crack. Much bigger than the boss knows. You’ve got to keep those wheels oiled. Another problem you’ve got, you’ve been one of the top salesmen, on the books. And the way you manage that, you sweeten all the deals on vacuum cleaners. Say the boss expects a hundred a month. But you, you’re handing him ten more. Keep him happy. But what that means is you’ve got to move a few more of those TV sets to make up the deficit.

“Now, maybe, probably, in fact, the boss knows you’re into TV sets. He’s got his rules, but so long as you’re earning that strong, and he gets his taste, he might not be so heavy into enforcement. Some bosses, they’re like bitches; you know what I’m saying? ‘Bring me that money, honey. Buy me presents. Get me stuff. Take me places. But don’t tell me where you get it all, that’s not my problem.’ Then, when you get popped for something, they go, ‘Ohmygod, I had no idea!’ That sound about right?”

“Like you were listening in,” the Italian said.

“A big boss is always a politician,” the Latino said, trying to smooth over his partner’s habit of playing picador. “This is the same in my business, too. A politician wants things done, but he doesn’t want to touch the work with his own hands.”

I nodded the way you do when you hear great wisdom, marking what the Latin was really telling me—he wasn’t the boss in his organization, either.

“How can I help you?” I asked them.

The two men exchanged looks at the outer edge of my vision. I leaned forward, opened the pack of cigarettes they’d brought me, fired one up with the gold lighter. I took a deep drag, then put the cigarette in the ashtray, stared at the smoke, waiting.

“This gets complicated,” the Italian said.

I watched the smoke. The trick is to look into it, never through it.

“You got any idea how dirty the feds play, sometimes?” the Italian asked.

“There’s all kinds of feds,” I told him. “Vietnam was the feds. Waco and Ruby Ridge, that was the feds. So was COINTELPRO.”

“What’s that last one?”

“Political,” the Latin answered for me.

“This isn’t that,” the Italian said.

“Political?”

“What it is, it’s personal.”

“I don’t know any feds,” I said, to head him off in case he was talking about solving his problems with a bribe. I’ve got no moral problem with being a bagman, but I’d never trust strangers at either end.

The Italian did the thing with his breath again. The Latin lit a cigarette of his own, apparently used to it.

“You know the best way to flip a man?” he asked me.

“Depends on the man,” I said. “And where his handle is.”

“Right. But it’s not true that everybody’s got one. Gotti took the ride alone. And he never said word fucking one.”

“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “Everybody talks Old School, but only a few walk it when the weather turns bad.”

“Remember the first of the super-rats?” he asked me, like a kid testing a newcomer’s knowledge with a soft lob down the middle of the plate.

“Valachi?”

“Joe Valachi. He blew the covers off our thing major, back in the day. You know what turned him?”

“Same thing Henry Hill said turned him. Barbosa, Pesnick, plenty of others, too.”

“‘Said’ is right. But Valachi, see, they thought he was going to roll over. So they put out a contract on him. And they missed. They didn’t clip him, so now what’s he going to do?”

“What he did.”

“Yeah. You ever wonder how they got the idea that Valachi had gone rotten?”

“Who knows? Maybe some old man got paranoid. Or maybe they figured, He’s doing forever, and you never know. So, what the hell, let’s eliminate the possibility.”

“What happened,” the Italian said, his voice almost religious with conviction, “is that the feds planted that word. It’s perfect. You hear you’re on the spot, what’re you going to do? Sit down with the boss, ask him, ‘Hey, you got a hit out on me?’ You got no place to run, because you been around the same people all your life and that’s all you know. You know how easy it is to get someone done in prison. The only safe harbor is to make a deal with the feds. And since you got so much to trade...”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“I wasn’t there. You know where I was once? In a war. That war’s been over for a while. Guess which side gets to say who was in the right?”

“Verdad,” the Latin said. “Same as in my country.”

“This isn’t fucking history,” the Italian said, his voice tight as piano wire. “This is right now. Today. Look at how the feds use the super-maxes. Pelican Bay, they lock you down for being a gang member. Then they tell you, right to your face, you’re staying there until you get out of the car, all right? Only thing is, you do it, you have to prove it. And how do you do that? The only way they accept is, you turn rat. Give some people up.” He stopped talking, closed his eyes so hard the corners crinkled. The way you do if you don’t know the technique to fight a headache. “So, if they want to kill a man, all they have to do is fucking put him back in population, am I right?”

“Yes,” I said, waiting.

The Italian did his breathing thing again. I ground out my cigarette, stayed patient.

“There’s a new twist on that game,” he finally said. “The way this one works, you put word out that someone’s already cooperating.”

“When he’s not?”

“When he’s not; right.”

“What’s the gain for them? Getting someone whacked?”

“No. They don’t want the guy whacked. What they want is for the rumor they planted to be true. To