ground, held his heels over the grass for a moment, seemed fascinated by his white running shoes.
“You known Rogowski, what, your whole life?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He always crazy?”
I looked up at Bubba as he crossed the porch and fixed himself a cheeseburger at the condiment table.
“He’s always followed the beat of his own drummer,” I said.
Stevie Zambuca nodded. “I heard all the stories,” he said. “Lived on the streets since he was, what, eight or something, you and some of your friends used to bring him food, shit like that. Then Morty Schwartz, the old Jew bookie, took him in, raised him till he died.”
I nodded.
“They say the only things he cares about are dogs, Vincent Patriso’s granddaughter, the ghost of Morty Schwartz, and you.”
I watched Bubba take a seat away from the rest of the men and eat his burger.
“Is that true?” Stevie Zambuca asked.
“I guess,” I said.
He patted my knee. “You remember Jack Rouse?”
Jack Rouse had been the kingpin of the Irish mob until he disappeared a few years back.
“Sure.”
“He put a hit on you not long before he disappeared. An open hit, Kenzie. And you know why it didn’t go down?”
I shook my head.
Stevie Zambuca tilted his chin up in the direction of the porch. “Rogowski. He walked into a card game filled with capos and said anything happened to you, he’d hit the streets armed, kill every soldier he saw until someone killed him.”
Bubba finished his hamburger and carried his paper plate back for a second. The men near the condiment table drifted away and left him alone. Bubba was always alone. It was his choice but his price, too, for being so unlike the rest of his species.
“Now that’s loyalty,” Stevie Zambuca said. “I try and instill that in my men, but I can’t. They’re only as loyal as their wallets are thick. See, you can’t teach loyalty. You can’t instill it. It’s like trying to teach love. Can’t be done. It’s either in your heart, or it ain’t. You ever get caught bringing him food?”
“By my parents?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.”
“You catch an ass-whipping?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Several.”
“But you kept stealing food from your family’s table, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Why?”
I shrugged. “It’s just what we did. We were kids.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s loyalty. That’s love, Kenzie. You can’t put that in someone. And,” he said with a stretch and a sigh, “you can’t take it out, either.”
I waited. The point, I was pretty sure, was coming.
“You can’t take it out,” Stevie Zambuca repeated. He leaned back and put his arm around my shoulder. “We got this guy does some work for us. Sort of like private contracting, if you know what I mean. He isn’t employed by the organization, but he provides things sometimes. You follow?”
“I guess.”
“This guy? He’s important to me. I really can’t overstress how important.”
He took a few puffs off his cigar, kept his arm around me, and gazed out at his small yard.
“You’re bothering this guy,” he said eventually. “You’re annoying him. That annoys me.”
“Wesley,” I said.
“Oh, his fucking name? That don’t matter. You know who I’m talking about. And I’m telling you, you’re going to stop. You’re going to stop now. If he decides to walk up to you and piss on your head, you’re not even going to reach for a towel. You’re gonna say, ‘Thanks,’ and wait to see if he’s got anything more to give you.”
“This guy,” I said, “destroyed the life of-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Stevie said mildly, and tightened his hand against my shoulder. “I don’t give a shit about you or your problems. My problems are the only thing that matter here. You are an annoyance. I’m not asking you to stop. I’m telling you. Take a good look at your friend up there, Kenzie.”
I looked. Bubba sat down again, bit into his burger.
“He’s a great earner. I’d miss a guy like that. But if I hear you’re bothering this independent contractor friend of mine? Making inquiries? Mentioning his name to people? I hear any of that, and I’ll whack out your buddy. I’ll cut his fucking head off and mail it to you. And then I’ll kill you, Kenzie.” He patted my shoulder several times. “We clear?”
“We’re clear,” I said.
He withdrew his arm, puffed his cigar, leaned forward with elbows on his knees. “That’s great. When he finishes his burger, you take your Irish ass out of my home.” He stood and began to walk toward the deck. “And wipe your feet on the mat before you walk back through the house. Fucking rug in the living room is a bitch to clean.”
23
Bubba can barely read or write. He has just enough rudimentary skills in that area to decipher weapons manuals and other simple instruction texts as long as they’re accompanied by diagrams. He can read his own press clippings, but it takes him half an hour, and he runs into trouble if he can’t sound out the words phonetically. He has no grasp of complex dynamics in any type of human intercourse, knows so little about politics that as recently as last year I had to explain to him what the difference between the House and the Senate was, and his ignorance of current events is so total that the only thing he understands about Lewinsky is as a verb.
But he is not stupid.
There are those who have assumed, fatally as it turned out, that he was, and countless cops and DAs have managed through all their concerted effort to imprison him only twice, both times on weapons infractions so minor compared to what he was truly guilty of that the terms seemed more like vacation time than punishment.
Bubba has traversed the world a few times over and can tell you where to get the best vodka in former Eastern bloc villages you’ve never heard of, how to find a clean brothel in West Africa, and where to get a cheeseburger in Laos. Sitting atop tables scattered throughout the three-story warehouse he calls home, Bubba has constructed from memory Popsicle-stick models of several cities he’s visited; I once checked his version of Beirut against a map and found a small street in Bubba’s model the mapmakers had missed.
But where Bubba’s intelligence is most prominent and most unnerving is in his innate ability to read people without having appeared to even notice them. Bubba can smell an undercover cop from a mile away; he can find a lie in the quiver of an eyelash; and his knack for sensing an ambush is so legendary in his circles that his competitors long ago quit trying and simply allowed him to carve out his slice of pie.
Bubba, Morty Schwartz told me not long before he died, was an animal. Morty meant it as a compliment. Bubba had flawless reflexes, unswerving instinct, and primal focus, and none of these skills were diluted or compromised by conscience. If Bubba had ever had conscience or guilt, he’d left them back in Poland along with his mother tongue when he was five years old.
“So what’d Stevie say?” Bubba asked as we drove through Maverick Square and headed for the tunnel.
I had to be careful here. If Bubba suspected Stevie was using him against me, he’d kill Stevie and half his crew, consequences be damned.
“Nothing much.”
