want a gun? You’re fuckin’ nuts, man. Why don’t you just ask me to put one to your head and pull the trigger?”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m going on with this thing. I don’t have any options, Johnny. And I need something behind me if I’m going to get this kid.”
“I don’t think so, Nick,” he said, and shook his head as he walked away. “I gotta get back out on the floor.”
“Think about it,” I yelled to his back. But he was already out the door.
Late in the afternoon I stopped in the Good Times Lunch and had a seat at the counter. Kim came over with a pad in his hand.
“The special, Kim,” I said sheepishly, “and a coffee, black.”
He nodded and returned shortly with a fried-fish platter. I shoveled it in and had a cigarette with my coffee. After that I paid the check that Kim laid in front of me.
“Kim,” I said, and he turned back around. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was out of control. It won’t happen again.”
“No problem, Nick,” he said. “But you should get rest. You don’t look so good.”
The red light on my answering machine was blinking when I entered my apartment. I pushed down on the bar.
The first message, from McGinnes, told me to meet him at the store tomorrow. He would have what I wanted. The second message was from Joe Dane. I called him at home, and he picked up on the third ring.
“Hello?”
“Joe, it’s Nick, calling you back.”
“Nick, we need to talk.”
“I think it’s time. How about right now?”
“No, not now. I’m busy tonight. Tomorrow morning in the park.”
“Tomorrow’s fine, but not in the park. Someplace more public.” He hesitated. “So it’s like that.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Tomorrow morning at ten, in the bell tower at the Old Post Office downtown.”
“Okay, Nick,” he said. “Ten o’clock.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
To get into the tower'0et=p height of the Old Post Office at Twelfth and Penn, one has to take the tour. I stood amid a group of eight tourists on the ground level, around a brightly lit, U-shaped counter.
A gangly Park Service employee was giving us a brief history of the Post Office. He mumbled into a microphone in a barely intelligible, nasal voice. The man next to me was taping him with a video camera.
After his speech we were ushered into a glass elevator and began our ascent to the tower base. The checkerboard floor of the Pavilion fell away rapidly as we rose higher. A little girl near me said to her father, “Daddy, if we fell now, we’d be dead, right?” An older woman who already looked a little frightened touched her collar and laughed nervously.
The doors opened and we walked out to a circle of white and red ropes that rang the Congress Bells. A rotund guide informed us that the bells, a gift from Great Britain, were rung on the opening and closing days of Congress, and on all national holidays. The only other instances when they were rung, she said, were in honor of the Challenger’s crew, and “when the Redskins won the Super Bowl.”
Then the guide herded us into another elevator. She reached in and pushed the floor button from the outside. “You picked a great day for the tower,” she said, as the doors closed and her fat, bespectacled face disappeared.
When the doors opened again, the group walked out into the openair tower and scattered. The clock mechanism was housed in a raised platform in the center. A Park Ranger sat on the platform and looked through binoculars.
A circular walkway afforded a view of the city in all directions. Three of the sides were strung with narrowly spaced wire to discourage jumpers. The south side had a Plexiglas shield. Joe Dane was standing on the east side, looking out. I tapped his shoulder.
He turned without surprise. Though his clothes were clean, he looked as disheveled as always. There was a dead look to his watery brown eyes.
“I don’t really like this view,” he said, turning his head towards the expanse of Pennsylvania, Constitution, and the Capitol.
“We can move,” I said.
We walked past the southern view of the Potomac and the Jefferson Memorial, and over to the west wall. Dane stared through the wires. The curving lines of the Federal Building below were like a horseshoe framing the Mall and the Lincoln Memorial.
“All those tourists,” he said. “They waste their time standing in line to get up the Washington Monument, when the best view of D.C. is right here.” He smiled. “Remember when you and me and Sarah and Karen used to come down here on Sundays? Smoke a joint out in the car, then come up and take pictures with our heads through the wires and shit like that? After that spend a couple of hours munching our way through the eatery downstairs.”
“Joe,” I said. “Let’s just get down to it, all right?”
“All right, Nick,” he said softly. His smile faded, and he buried his hands in his pockets. m' '27'›‹ “Give it to me straight up. Did they get Jimmy Broda?”
“Yes.”
“Is he alive?”
“Yes.”
I smiled and slapped the wall. The ranger and a couple of tourists looked my way. I wanted to hug Dane but didn’t show it. I wasn’t finished with him.
“Why are you here, Joe?”
“Last shot at redemption, I guess.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Are you still with them?”
“No. But they don’t know that.”
“Tell me about it.”
He shrugged. “It’s not all that complicated. It’s a small operation, smaller than you think. Only a few people involved. And this was their first time at this sort of thing. At least it was for Rosen.”
“Jerry Rosen in charge of it all?”
“On the D.C. end.”
“What about Nathan Plavin?”
“No. It was easy to keep him out of it. Rosen had him insulated from the day-to-day aspects of the business, anyway.”
“Who else at Nathan’s? Brandon?”
“No.”
“How did you get in, Joe?”
“Rosen knew I was hard up for money,” he said. “He came to me with a proposal. Supervise the shipment, in and out, and keep an eye on it while it was in the barn. The payoff was pretty sweet. And I rationalized it with that old mentality you and I grew up with-drugs are innocent, done by innocent people.”
“That was a long time ago.”
He looked down at his shoes. “When one of the warehouse guys tipped me that the Broda kid had stolen the VCR, I knew things were going to fall apart. Then you started to poke around. I wanted to tell you and get out then, but I had to make a choice… I had to make a choice between warning you and looking out for Sarah.” He spread his hands out.
“Keep talking,” I said.
“I went to Rosen,” he said, still looking at his shoes. “He had Brandon fire you, then had his boys beat you up to warn you off. They followed the kids south. The Shultz boy was killed. Then they caught Broda and brought him
