“You okay?” I offer.
“What do you think?” she answers flatly.
I know not to push it from there.
It takes another twenty minutes to find the final file. When we leave the aluminum factory, Smoke’s office is ablaze because, like I said, accidents don’t exist in this business.
We sit on opposite ends of a couch, our backs to the armrests, our feet intertwined, facing each other. A pizza box is open on the small, glass coffee table and Risina digs into her third slice. We’re in a two-bedroom suite in one of those corporate hotels that rent by the month to traveling executives. Smoke set us up before we got here, and I’m almost certain the information of where we’re living while we’re in Chicago died with him.
“It’s natural to be nervous,” I offer as Risina polishes off a pepperoni.
“I know it is.” Her response is matter-of-fact, as though she’s already chewed on her flaw for a bit and decided to approach it clinically. “I thought I did a fine job of keeping it under control.”
I agree, but I don’t say so. Instead, I ask, “But for how long?”
“As long as was needed.”
“And if he’d’ve rushed you instead of backing away? What would you have done?”
“He didn’t, so I don’t know.”
“Would you have pulled the trigger?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Because you need to already play it out in your head… decide what to do before it happens. You already have an analyst’s eye and you’re going to have to rely on that to see everything from all angles. Improvisation is a weapon too, but it’s dangerous. Planning is key.”
She starts to interrupt but I hold up a finger. “Planning doesn’t mean you have to know everything before you walk into a room, though it helps. Planning means that as a situation emerges, your brain needs to immediately start calculating, ‘if this, then that. If that, then this.’ Rapid fire, as soon as it’s happening.
“Take the guy today. He walks in unannounced, and you did the right thing, got your gun up and out and pointed in his direction before he could step a foot in the door. Put him on his heels and on the defense. It’s like a chess match, you have to always be thrusting forward, on the offensive. But you can’t just stop there; you can’t think linearly. Immediately, your brain needs to kick in with… ‘if he runs, I follow. If he pulls a gun, I shoot. If he bum-rushes, I shoot. If he wants to talk, I give him some rope.’ All of those decisions at once, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
“Now by the size of him, I figured he was some low-level muscle Archie kept around for protection, but since Smoke wasn’t there to tell us he was on the payroll, I wasn’t going to take any chances. You follow me?”
“I’d follow you anywhere,” she says with a mock-seductive intonation.
“It’s an expression. It means…”
“I know it’s an expression. I just like to see you worked up.”
“Goddam, Risina…”
“Awwww…” she tosses the pizza aside and reverses positions so her body falls on top of mine. “I’m just having some fun.”
Before I can protest, she cuts me off. “Kiss me.”
“What?”
“You’re warm. Kiss me. You can teach me how to act like a killer later.”
And like with the man who walked into Archie’s office, she doesn’t leave me with much of a choice.
The three remaining files fill in some gaps on Spilatro. When he employs a new contract killer, Archie likes to first flesh out the file with information on the assassin himself, and then additional facts and opinions are added to the dossier after the initial hit is complete. Archie’s sister Ruby once told me he put together a file on me, but I never asked for it, and he never gave it to me. Not that it really mattered. If it existed at one time, if it was in his office with all the others, it’s nothing but ashes now.
Spilatro came to Archie as a recommendation from a Brooklyn fence named Jeffrey “K-bomb” Kirschenbaum, a brilliant and feared player in the killing business, a man who wrote the book on how middlemen conduct their lives. Kirschenbaum grew up Jewish in the Bed-Stuy portion of the borough, which toughened him the way fire tempers steel. A gangly white kid in an all-black neighborhood, he had to learn to maneuver like an army strategist from the time he was in grade school, figure out how to manipulate opposing forces so he was never caught in the middle. Let the black kids have their turf wars and street fights. Deduce who was going to stand at the top of the hill, and make sure his allegiance fell in line. He was smart with numbers, but even better, he was smart with information, and a word here or a note there could swing a rivalry in a direction that most benefited “K-bomb.” He liked playing the role of the man behind the curtain, the puller of strings, and as an adult fresh from a short stint at CUNY, he found his way into the killing business, constructing a stable of assassins out of his old contacts from the neighborhood and running his new venture like a CEO. He pioneered the idea of doing the grunt work for his hit men, of not just accepting a fee and doling out assignments, but of following a mark, of putting together a dossier on the target’s life, of setting the table for his hired guns to make their hits. It was a real service operation, from top to bottom, soup to nuts. He provided each gunman with so much information, the shooter could plot myriad ways of killing his target while escaping cleanly. Consequently, a number of skilled assassins sought him out for their assignments, and his reputation grew. He treated his men fairly, and after thirty years, he remains a towering figure in the game.
Archie knew him, and he had exchanged resources with K-bomb from time to time. Five years ago, when a client hired Archie to specifically make a hit look like an accident, Archie reached out to Kirschenbaum to seek advice about whom he should bring in for the job. K-bomb said he had just the man, and farmed Spilatro out to Archie for a percentage. Unfortunately, Archie didn’t collect much more information on Spilatro beyond who his fence was. This sticks out to me, a bit out of character for such a diligent fence. It speaks to how much Archie trusted or looked up to Kirschenbaum. It’s awfully hard to see clearly when we have stars in our eyes.
That first hit was on a news reporter named Timothy O’Donnell, who also happened to be serving on a jury at the time of his death. The New York Times reported that on May 6, construction scaffolding collapsed on top of the middle-aged man while he was jogging his familiar route through downtown. It seems Spilatro isn’t afraid to use old tricks for new assignments.
The other two files present similar kills… a bookkeeper died of asphyxiation in a building fire, and a police detective had his ticket punched when he slipped on a patch of ice and froze to death, unconscious, in an alley behind his local bar in Boston. That particular job was worked as a tandem sweep: Spilatro and the same assassin who struck me as odd before, the woman named Carla who’d worked the personal kill for Archie. What role she played in this murder isn’t mentioned, just that it was a success.
“Here’s what’s absent from all these files…”
“What’s that?” Risina asks.
“Any personal information on Spilatro. What his real name is, where he lives, how he got his start, where he grew up.”
“And Archie usually has that?”
“Yes.”
“But no one knows any of that information about you, either.”
“Except Archie did at one point. And someone else does now.”
She starts to say something, then smiles. “Yes, of course. I know.”
“So we need to find out if Spilatro has a ‘you’ in his life.”
“I see. And how do we do that?”
“We go to New York and talk to his fence. Kirschenbaum.”
“He won’t want to give up that information.”
“No, he won’t.”
“But we’re going to make him.”
“Yes, we are.”
“And he’s good at this. So he’s going to be protected.”
“That’s right.”
I take her face in my hands, one palm on each cheek, and put our foreheads together.
“If you don’t want to do this… if you have any concern at all, I won’t think less of you.”
