all protective like and I remember thinking that was kind of a sweet touch, you know? He wasn’t much of an affectionate person, but he thought to put his arm on my shoulders and I thought that was nice.
“The van barrels up and skids to a stop and three sort of gangster looking guys get out, one black and two white and they call Doug by name. ‘You Spilatro?’ the biggest one says. Doug doesn’t answer, but I can hear his breathing stop and truth be told, I was scared to death. I hear another guy say, ‘yeah, he’s Spilatro,’ and I see this guy’s face as he steps into the light and he’s looking a little familiar, like maybe I know him from somewhere, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t Decker, his old army buddy, the one who brought him into the killing life. After Doug told me about him, I looked him up in some of Doug’s old army pictures, and this is the same guy, I’m sure of it. Doug realizes it at the same time as me and I can see him sigh heavily, like this is all just too much. The first guy, the muscle, raises his hand up and he’s holding a gun, some kind of big automatic. Don’t ask me what kind because I don’t know. The last thing Doug says is ‘don’t kill my wife,’ and crack, crack, the muscle shoots him twice in the chest. Blood flies on to me, I feel it hit the side of my face, and out of the corner of my eye I see Doug drop straight down. You know what I mean? Straight down like all his muscles shut down at once? Well, I just stood there like a jackass, you know, and the three guys pick up Doug’s body and throw it in the van. Decker turns and looks at me and I think maybe he’s deciding whether or not to drop me too, but he just gives me that hard stare men are so fond of, moves around to the driver’s side, and varoom, they’re gone. If this was retaliation for something Doug did, nobody said and I don’t know. The van drove off as though nothing ever happened and I stood there, I swear for an hour or two, not in shock but not thinking either, you know?”
Her voice falls quiet and she takes a sip of her coffee, not raising her eyes. She doesn’t have to blow on it this time.
I give her a moment to play it out, check to see if she’s going to say more, and I have to give her an ounce of respect. She doesn’t try to conjure up a tear or manage a sob.
I lean back and wait. Everything I do, every interaction hinges on the principle of dominance. Dominance can be physical, like cracking a man in the knee to drop him in front of you so he knows you’re better than he is. Or it can be mental: a game of wits, a look, a gesture, a word-anything to gain an advantage over an adversary. Sometimes dominance can simply mean waiting.
After a couple of silent minutes, she looks up, eyes dry. There’s resentment in her eyes, resentment for making her draw this out. Finally, when I have her broken, I speak up.
“You know he’s not dead.”
“You want me to say it?”
“Why pretend?”
She moves the coffee cup back and forth in front of her, grimacing. “He didn’t have to do it for me. He could’ve just walked.”
“Didn’t have to hire the guys, you mean.”
“Yeah. Plan the whole thing out. Tack it on to the end of the other job, you know?” She stops looking at me, at the inside of the diner, at anything. “It was actually… well, it was the sweetest thing he did for me the whole time we were married.”
I nod, but this is not good. Not good at all.
“Can I get out of here now? I’m done with this.”
She’s drained now, played out, bitter. If I squeeze her any more, she’ll pop.
I nod and she hauls herself up, then hovers over me for a second as her shadow falls across half my face. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done, making me say it.” I don’t look at her. “It’s a bad thing you’ve done.” When I feel the shadow move away, I know she’s gone.
We meet in a pre-determined spot, a bench in Battery Park. It’s quiet here this time of day. A patch of green. The water. An old man sits at a table by himself, moving chess pieces around while his lips move. Risina is already sitting when I arrive. For a moment, we don’t speak. Anyone passing would think us two office drones meeting for a quiet date; the guy in sales with the girl from accounting.
“You let her leave.”
“Yeah. She was used up.”
I put my arm around Risina, and she leans into me. For just a few short breaths, we’re back in that fishing village halfway around the world. Maybe this is all we’ll have for a while.
“I thought the idea was to kidnap someone he loves…”
“It is. But he doesn’t love her.”
“He didn’t have to set it up for her like that. He could’ve run off.”
“That’s true.”
“So that means something.”
“He loves the process, not her. He loves the mousetrap. He loves setting up all the pieces and knocking them down. He cooked up the dummy fall at the same time as he plotted out the actual kill. Brought her in on the tandem and made the whole thing one piece, you see? First the kill, then the fall… two parts of the same job. In his mind, they were always one. He doesn’t care about her… he gets off on the complication.”
Risina frowns. “But he thought to do it that way. It has to be a sign of… well, at least affection if not love.”
“Maybe. But it’s not enough for what we need.”
She starts to speak, but I get there first. “When I first understood which way this was breaking, I thought maybe I could enlist Carla to help us find Spilatro and hurt him. The way he treated her, faking his death, bringing this world into her life and then walking away? He left her holding the bag. I thought maybe she was bitter and we could use that bitterness. But she’s not. And she’s not the opposite either. She’s not accepting. She’s just… finished.”
Risina nods. The old man stands and collects his pieces. His lips move, but his words are lost in the wind.
“So we still have nothing. After all this?”
“I didn’t say that. She gave us a great deal more than we had before we found her. We know Spilatro was married, we know he was in the army, we know he worked in software sales, at least for a while. We have ways to find him.”
“And we know how he thinks.”
I smile. Risina’s intuition continues to surprise me. “That’s right. Now we know how he thinks.”
We’re going to get to him through his friend, the army buddy who brought him into the game. I notice I’m thinking in plural pronouns again, “we” instead of “I,” and I like the way it sounds in my head. The tandem didn’t work for Doug and Carla, but they’re not us, not even close to us, and Carla served only as a convenience to him. He was using her for cover, that’s it. That was her utility for him.
We’re not like them at all. Carla said she saw a future for them in the moments before that future was wiped away, but he was the one who caused that plan to fail. It’s different for Risina and me. We can pull jobs together, back each other’s play, watch each other’s back. I fell in love with Risina because of the animal inside her, just below the surface. She has more sand than I imagined back in Rome. She demonstrates it over and over. It’s like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, even though she’s not wearing any. We’re not like them. We. Not I. We.
A tiny piece of information can be like a keyword to unravel a code. Based on Carla’s story, I know approximately how old Spilatro is, and I know his army buddy’s name, Decker, and I can guess a pretty accurate timeline of when they must have been in the service together. From there, it’s a reasonable amount of digging to cross-reference the two names, and if the names are false, as I’m sure they will be, then it’s a bit more cumbersome but not unconquerable to find similar names who served in the same unit. Most hit men aren’t too creative in coming up with their aliases.
This is fence work, but most of the fences I know seem to be missing or dead. About that, K-bomb was right. I do have bad luck with fences.
Still, there is one I know who can be of service and is alive and free: the one in Belgium who has a new appreciation for handing out favors.
Doriot meets us two days later in a barbershop in the basement of the St. Regis. A pair of brothers own the joint, having taken over from their father, good guys, and when I reached out to them to use their place for an after-hours meeting, alone, they didn’t hesitate to give me a key. A thousand-dollar tip on a shave and a trim didn’t hurt to solidify the deal.
