steak on me, we forget all about it.”
“You’re one strange dude there, you know that? Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Almost everybody.”
Tangier chuckled.
“Okay, so you know it. So talk to me.” He waved his two men away from the door and pointed to a booth. They sat down. “Feed ‘em while we talk, they been on their feet most of the day.”
Keegan nodded to Tiny, then toward the two bodyguards.
“Okay,” Keegan said, “here it is. Let’s say you want to get lost. Disappear, start over someplace else. You need an identity, license, whatever. How would you go about that? What’s the procedure?”
“Somebody could still recognize you.”
“No. The Phantom’s from across the pond. A foreigner.”
“Hey, this ain’t some kinda spy stuff? Look, I’m not about to screw around with the feds.”
“Thing is, Eddie, he doesn’t have to worry about his face. What he needs is an identity. I mean, can you buy that kind of thing?”
Tangier leaned back and caressed his lower lip with the rim of the wineglass. He took a sip and put the glass back on the table.
“Look, whyn’t you take this to the G-boys? They got the moxie, got the people.”
“I tried that.”
“And?”
“It’s too vague. They don’t have the time or the people. They think I’m a crackpot. They’re just not interested, blah, blab, blah. ‘Take your pick.”
“So forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it.”
“This a personal thing?”
“Very.”
“You gonna whack this guy when you find him?”
“Probably.”
“I heard you don’t even carry a piece.”
“I know how to use one.”
Tangier looked around the saloon for a moment, then, “Okay, tell me everything you
“Then
“Hey, I got the worst memory you ever met.”
Keegan sighed. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“The mark is highly trained. A very smart guy. He came here in ‘33, spent a year someplace. Then sometime in the spring or early summer of ‘34 he got in a mix-up with the feds. It wasn’t something he did personally, it was like he was maybe an innocent bystander, something like that. Anyway, he had to cool off, disappear, start all over. So now he’s got a new identity and I don’t know where the hell he is. That’s all I know.”
“No description at all?”
Keegan shook his head.
“That’s a bitch.”
“Tell me about it.”
Tangier finished his wine and poured himself another. He thought for several seconds.
“Once there’s this guy called Speed Cicorella, who’s a numbers boss up in the Bronx only he’s shaving off the top and the boys get wind of it and they put his feet to the fire and it’s like, y’know, cough up thirty big ones, Speedy, or it’s curtains, so Speed turns rabbit and Mr. C calls me in.
“Now this Speed is a very bright guy except when it comes to tearing a piece off don’t belong to him. I got to figure, scheduled for a box like that, he’s gonna get real lost. The easiest way to do this, you go to a town, not a big town, not a small town, an in-between town, like, uh, Trenton or Rochester, and you go to the cemetery and you look over the stones and you find where a baby cashed in right after it was hatched, a week or so old, and this mark died about the same time you was born. You know, Baby Smith, born on Tuesday, died on Thursday, we miss you, that kinda thing. The reason you don’t wanna pick a small town, probably everybody in the courthouse knows about Baby Smith. You pick a big town like New York, you get lost in paperwork. So anyways you pick a medium town and you find your mark and you go to the courthouse and you get a birth certificate. And you become Baby Smith only now you’re like thirty years old.”
“How about death certificates?”
“They don’t match ‘em up. You get born, your stuff is in one place, you die, it’s someplace else. They don’t match ‘em up ‘cause it’s too much trouble plus who cares, okay? What I’m sayin’, it ain’t a problem, matchin’ up birth papers and death papers. It don’t happen.”
“Okay.”
