CHAPTER TWO
Michael hailed a cab and gave the driver an address in Alphabet City. When they arrived, he pushed a fifty through the glass and told the man to wait.
Michael’s apartment was a third-floor walk-up with two bedrooms, bars on the windows, and a reinforced steel door. Elena had never been there, and he planned to keep it that way. The second bedroom closet held rifles and handguns, body armor, and stacks of cash. There was a long shelf of knives and edged projectiles, neat coils of shiny wire. Things that might be difficult to explain.
Michael disengaged the alarm and crossed the large living room. Tall windows let in midday light, but he ignored the things it touched: the wall of books, the fine furnishings and original art. He made for the short hall at the back, walked past the room that held his gear and into the bedroom beyond. The bed was large, but clean-lined and spartan, and on the dresser sat the only photograph he owned. Pressed between glass, faded and cracked, the picture was of two boys in a snowy field splotched with mud. Not sure that he would ever see the apartment again, Michael slipped the photograph from its frame and carried it with him to the closet. It was the only thing he owned that really mattered.
At the closet door, Michael stripped out of his clothes and left them in a heap. From a long cedar rack he selected a pair of hand-tooled English shoes, then a custom suit from a row of twenty. The suit was English, too, as were the shirts. He slipped into a cream-colored one and a tie dark enough to mirror the occasion of his visit. The old man appreciated a good suit. He considered it a matter of respect, and so did Michael. He put the photograph in the jacket’s inside pocket, then returned to the cab, where he gave the driver another address. They rode north and east to where the river touched the upper fifties. If you were rich and wanted privacy, Sutton Place was a good area to call home. Celebrities and politicians lived there, and no one looked twice at long cars with mirrored glass. The old man owned the entire building in which he planned to die, and while the FBI undoubtedly knew who lived in the five-story town house with a view of the river, none of the neighbors had a clue; that was the point. After a life in the press and in the courts, after three incarcerations, forty-seven years of persecution, and public scorn, the old man wanted to die in peace.
Michael didn’t blame him.
He had the cabbie drive by the residence, then stop a full block north, near the defunct Sixtieth Street heliport. The space was a dog run now, and when Michael stepped from the cab he saw well-dressed women chatting while small dogs played. One of the women saw him and said something to her friends, so that all three turned as Michael paid off the cab. Michael nodded, then turned to walk twice past the house, once moving south, then coming back north. A portico drive led to private parking in the back. When he stopped before the door, he stood with his palms up, eyes moving between the security cameras mounted at the corners and above the main door. Someone moved behind a third-floor window. Curtains stirred at the ground level, too.
Eventually, Michael knocked, and after a long minute the door swung open to reveal four men. Two were low-level soldiers whose names Michael had never bothered to learn. In their twenties, they wore dark pants and shirts that shone like silk under their suit jackets. One chewed gum, and both stood with fingers inside their coats, as if Michael needed to be told they carried. Under slicked hair their faces were lean and frightened. They’d heard stories of Michael, of the things he’d done. He was a fighter and a killer, a prince of the street so widely feared he rarely had to kill anymore. His presence alone was sufficient. His name. The threat of his name.
The third man was a stranger, young and calm and lean, but the fourth, Michael knew well.
“Hello, Jimmy.”
Jimmy stood an inch taller than Michael, but weighed thirty pounds less, narrow-shouldered and thin to the point of desiccation. Dapper in bottle-green pants and a brushed velvet coat, he was forty-eight years old, balding on top and vain enough to care. Michael knew from long acquaintance that his arms and chest carried more than a dozen scars. Knife wounds. Bite marks. Bullet holes. Eighteen years ago, he’d shown Michael things that would make a grown man faint. Michael was fifteen years old at the time, hard but not cruel; and Jimmy was all about cruel. He was about message and fear, a hard-core, brutal sadist who even now was the most dangerous man Michael had ever known.
“May I come in?” Michael asked.
“I’m thinking.”
“Well, think faster.”
Jimmy was a complicated man, equal parts appetite, ego, and self-preservation. He respected Michael, but didn’t like him. Jimmy was a butcher, Michael a surgeon. The difference caused problems. It was an ego thing. Matters of principle.
Their gazes held for long seconds, then Jimmy said, “Whatever.”
He moved back a pace and Michael stepped into the dim interior. The entry hall was massive, with white and black marble floors and a red-carpeted stairway that curved up both sides of the room before meeting on a landing twelve feet higher. A billiards room filled the space to Michael’s right, and he could see through into the formal parlor, the small study beyond. He sensed movement deeper in the house, saw food on a long table, other men, other guns, and Michael knew then that they were marking time, waiting in stillness for the old man to die.
“I’d like to see him, Jimmy.”
“He can’t save you.”
“No one’s asking.”
Jimmy shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Michael. All these years, all the things you’ve been given. Opportunity. Skills. Respect. You were nothing when we found you.”
“You don’t have the right to feel that way, Jimmy.”
“I have every right.”
He was angry and barely hiding it. Michael tilted his head to see the men behind him, then looked back at Jimmy. “The opportunity came from the old man, not you; the respect I earned on my own. Some of the skills may have started with you, but that’s all it was, a start. I’ve made my own way since then.”
“And yet, I helped choose you.”
“For good reasons.”
“Are you really so arrogant?”
“Are you?”
The silence held until Jimmy blinked. Michael said, “I want to see him.”
“Do you still think you have that right?”
“Step back, Jimmy.”
Jimmy shrugged, half-smiling, then moved back and allowed Michael to enter all the way. In the light of the chandelier, Michael saw how wired Jimmy looked, how taut. His dark eyes pulled in light, and there was emptiness there, the same vacuum-behind-glass look Michael had seen so many times. It was the look he got before people died.
“The old man released me, Jimmy. He gave standing orders that I was to be left alone. I’d say I still have the right to see him.”
Jimmy blinked, and the look faded. “Tell Stevan that.”
Stevan was thirty-six years old, with degrees from Columbia and Harvard, not because he cared about the education, but because he craved respectability in a city that knew his name too well. The old man’s only son, he and Michael had been friends once-brothers-but that bridge was burnt to smoke and ruin. Eight days had passed since Michael quit the life. One week and a day. A world of change.
“How is my brother?” Michael masked the rage with sarcasm. Stevan drove a black Audi, and Michael knew for a fact that he kept a twenty-five in the glove compartment.
