lot of things.
On weekends at brunch time, the line trailed out to the corner to get a taste of Michael’s Eggs Florentine, but right now it was a weekday evening in the dead time between the end of lunch and the start of dinner. The place was empty except for Michael’s one waitress, a 24-year-old whose longevity in the job probably had more to do with how she looked in a Barking Boat t-shirt than how good she was at waiting on tables. He trusted her and would discuss business in front of her, but I didn’t and wouldn’t. I pushed the swinging door to the storeroom open and gestured for him to follow me.
Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves held sacks and cans and bottles of various supplies: red mesh bags of onions and potatoes, five-gallon containers of extra virgin olive oil, jars of cored whole pineapples in syrup, cardboard boxes of produce. I went to the corner furthest from the door and reached behind a box with
“What?” Michael said. “What do you want?”
I tugged open the pair of buckles holding the knapsack closed, shoved the plastic bag of shredded paper to one side and pulled out Dorrie’s laptop. “Where’s an outlet?” I said. Before he could answer, I spotted one and headed over to it. I plugged in the adaptor, turned the machine on. It whirred quietly to life.
“Listen, Michael,” I said, “I need to ask you something, and you can’t ask me why. Okay?”
He looked unsure about it. “Okay.”
“You ever hear of a man named Ardo?”
I watched his eyebrows ride up on his forehead. He’d been going bald long enough that you’d barely call what he had left a hairline, so they had plenty of forehead to ride.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve heard about him. So have you. So’s everybody else in this city, though they don’t know it. Remember the Bishop murders last summer?”
I shook my head.
“Yes you do. Social club out in Red Hook, eleven people gunned down? Marty Bishop and his two brothers, some guys worked for them, the two bartenders? The waitress?”
It rang a bell. Faintly. “I guess I read about it. That was Ardo?”
“You never saw his name in the papers, but between you, me, and the lamppost, damn straight it was Ardo. Fuckin’ Hungarian psycho.”
The laptop’s screen faded from black to pale blue and icons popped up like little square weeds. One of them showed the wireless modem searching for an Internet connection. I double-clicked on another to bring up Dorrie’s Web browser. The computer made some more soft whirring sounds.
“I thought it was some street gang thing,” I said, stirring the cold ashes of my memory to try to get a spark.
“The guys who pulled the trigger were in a gang, sure. But who gave them the guns and told them where to go?”
“Ardo?”
He nodded. “And why? Because Marty Bishop wouldn’t kick back a piece of the action from his houses when Ardo told him to. We’re talking houses out in Brooklyn, for Christ’s sake.”
“Houses?”
“Whorehouses,” Marty said. “ ‘Brothels’ to a college boy like you. That’s Ardo’s business—whorehouses, massage parlors, those Chinese tui-na places. If it’ll get you off and it’s in New York, Ardo’s got a piece of it.”
“That can’t be true. There must be hundreds—”
“So he’s got a piece of half of them. A third. I don’t know. But I do know he
“Checking my e-mail,” I said, and turned the screen away from him. Yahoo’s home page had just come up. I typed “Cassie 19934” into the ID box and pressed the tab key.
The password box automatically filled with a row of asterisks, eight of them.
“What?” Michael said again. He’d seen my face, seen my reaction. Hell, he could probably hear my heartbeat, racing like a little triphammer. This was what I’d been hoping for. To save you the trouble of remembering your password at every Web site you visit, some Web browsers give you the option of having them remember your passwords for you and enter them automatically. It’s a shortcut, and it compromises your security, but it’s a compromise a lot of people decide they can live with. As Dorrie apparently had.
I pressed the “Sign In” button and waited for the page to load.
“That better be some e-mail,” Michael said. “You look like you hit a Pick 6.”
“Michael,” I said, “do you have any idea where I’d find Ardo if I wanted to?”
“You wouldn’t want to,” he said. “Seriously. You wouldn’t.”
“But if I did.” The Yahoo Mail page was slowly assembling itself on the computer’s screen.
“You wouldn’t. You know what this man did? Listen to me, you can read your e-mail later. With Bishop? He didn’t just pay those kids to shoot up the club. He didn’t just tell them to kill everyone in the place, not just Marty and his brothers but everyone in the whole fucking club. That wasn’t enough for him. You remember the waitress? The one who survived? Took two bullets in the stomach and one in the leg, but she wasn’t dead? They took her to New York Methodist. You remember what happened?” He tucked an index finger under my chin, forced my face away from the screen.
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember what happened.”
“He killed her, that’s what happened. First day she’s out of intensive care, there’s an accident, whoops, middle of the night she’s disconnected from the monitor they’ve got her on and has a heart attack and dies. A heart attack! In the middle of the fucking hospital, in the middle of the night, a woman 42 years old, and nobody sees anything, nobody knows anything.”
“Maybe she really had a heart attack.”
“Maybe I’ve got a twelve-inch dick and fuck unicorns in my back yard—what’s the matter with you? You stupid all of a sudden, Johnny? I’m telling you this man is hardcore scorched earth. We’re talking about a
“John, listen to me. Seriously. Cards on the table. You know how they ran all those stories in the papers ten years ago, how the Italian mob was getting outgunned by the Russians? And how the Russians were mean sons of bitches but they didn’t compare to the South Americans? And how even the South Americans were afraid of the Asians? Well, who do you think the Asians are scared of?”
“The Hungarians?”
“Fuck the Hungarians. They’re scared of Ardo.”
The page had finished loading. But I wasn’t looking at it. I’d had a sudden flash of Julie lying in her hospital bed, sedated, sleeping, with no one guarding the door to her room, nothing to stop someone from walking in, taking that understuffed pillow from under her head and pressing it down over her face.
Michael was looking at me, nodding, pleased that he’d finally gotten through to me.
Maybe Ardo wasn’t quite as bloodthirsty Michael was making him out to be—no one outside the pages of a comic book was. But I was certainly prepared to believe that he was capable of extreme behavior. Julie’s hand was proof enough of that. If he found out where she was, I wouldn’t put it past him to send someone to finish the job. And given that she was registered under her real name...
“Listen,” I said. “There’s a woman who’s in the hospital. Now, I mean. She’s someone I know. Ardo’s gone after her twice. I need to get someone to watch her room tonight. Do you know anyone...?”
He shook his head, kept shaking it as he spoke. “No. No, John. Someone to stand in Ardo’s way? Who’d take that job?”
“There’s got to be someone.”
“You can hire a bodyguard, sure, but given who you’re dealing with, it’s going to cost you a shitload of
