At End of Day (27 page)

At the southeasterly end of the passageway outside the office there was a chain-flushed toilet with an overhead tank, also enclosed by thin paneling. Now it flushed loudly and a man belched nearby noisily enough to be heard over it. Rascob shook his head and snorted. There were eight other molded orange chairs grouped haphazardly around the office and he grimaced every time as coming in he grabbed the handiest to the door and pulled it to the table to commence the work. Each time he reminded himself that the chair provided no support, so that he must sit up straight with shoulders back, and it did not matter; once engaged he gradually bent forward over the table, hunching his shoulders, so that when he finished his back was once more killing him. He heard the toilet door close down the passageway. The deep affronted tone of a diesel tractor’s horn bawled on the boulevard outside, drawing sharp cries of objection from two or three automobile horns. He put his hands on his lumbar region and arched it, taking a deep breath and moaning.

He heard someone passing in the corridor hesitate near the office door and place a hand on the knob, perhaps considering violation of the iron rule that although after Sweeney unlocked the door in the morning it remained so all day until relocked by the last person leaving at night, each person entering or leaving the big office during the day closed the door behind him, and except by invitation it was only to be opened by a person with a key—Rascob, Sweeney, the Frogman or McKeach. So Rascob at once laughed and said, loudly enough to carry through the hollow wooden door: “Nothing serious, I’ll live.” The man outside—perhaps Doran; he had no business in the office—said, “Had me worried for a minute.” Rascob heard him walk away. He shook his head and rubbed the back of his neck.

The paper bags from the trunk now lay crumpled in the grey metal wastebasket next to his left leg. There had been twenty-two of them, for the fourth time one less than McKeach had told him to expect. Taking them one by one from the black duffel bag, now empty under the table next to his right leg, he had emptied the contents onto the table and tallied them on the printing calculator he kept in the top right-hand drawer of the grey steel desk under the windows. The desktop was taken up with a black telephone, a pop-up phone-number indexer, a five-inch Gran Prix black-and-white personal TV, and Sweeney’s account book, a large black looseleaf notebook open on column-ruled pages captioned A
PRIL
P
RODUCE
, A
PRIL
B
AKED
. Rascob had tried the armless wooden castered chair behind it; it was more uncomfortable than the orange plastic chairs.

He had coded the entries as usual by location, using letter designations based upon an alphabet beginning that month with the letter T. McKeach, initiating Rascob: “Brian G. said, all any code can do’s
delay
the cops. No code, even a tough one, is ever gonna stop them from figurin’ out what you’re doin’, from your records of it, if you give ’em enough time. Our code isn’t very tough. Cops ever get their hands on it, they’ll crack it—half an hour.

“But it
can’t
be very tough if you’re gonna use it
and
also be able change it. Your people’ve gotta know it, and use it—without
thinkin’
more about it than they are about the business that they’re doin’ in it. You make it too tough, an’ what happens
then
, they don’t
use
it—so then what the hell good’s it to you? Might as well not have it at all.

“At least with a simple one like this, you got somethin’. Yeah, cops’d figure it out, but they’d hafta hit the joint just right, on a make-up day, and grab the work before you had a chance to add it up, and
mix
it up, and flash the bags and tape.

“ ‘Doin’ that would take great
timing
,’ Brian said. ‘Which very few cops I ever heard of had.

“ ‘Not to mention—half an hour’s quite a lot of time, you know what to do with it. Someone who wasn’t busted but who knew the raid’d happened could make one shitload of phone calls, half an hour, to other guys who’d like to know. Give them time to clean up
their
joints, ’fore cops came to visit them.’ ”

Adams Canteen Catering in the Randolph Industrial Park had been Rascob’s fourth stop of the day. In the office at the back of the freight terminal that Jackie Adams leased for his garage and shop, Rascob had marked each of the five bags Jackie gave him with a
W.
In the office above the spa he had written the same letter next to each of the five sub-subtotals he had reached on the calculator, leading to the
W
subtotal for the Adams Canteen Catering location of $11,930, 430 twenty-dollar bills and 333 ten-dollar bills.

As with the contents of the other bags, he had used wide beige rubber bands to collect four hundred of the twenties into eight stacks of fifty, putting the remaining thirty bills aside for combination with twenties from other locations. He had banded three hundred of the ten-dollar bills in three stacks and reserved the remaining thirty-three for banding with tens from other locations.

When he had emptied and tallied all of the bags, there were four complete rows of fifty greyish-green thousand-dollar stacks and an incomplete row of nine stacks on the table in front of him. He had piled loose bills amounting to $375 to his right on the side. He folded those into a thick wad and put it into his left front pants pocket.

He tore the tape along the serrated edge at the top of the calculator and folded it four times. Then he pushed his chair back from the table and bent over, rolling the dark blue silk sock on
his left calf down below his shin bone, wrapping the tape tightly around his ankle and then rolling the sock back up over it. He humped the chair back up to the table and deleted all of the entries he had stored in the memory of the calculator. Then he reached down and unplugged it from the black extension cord leading to the wall outlet behind him, flipping the cord back to rest against the mopboard. He stood up, gathered the cord around the calculator and replaced it in the top right-hand drawer of the desk.

Returning to the orange chair, he stooped and picked up the grey wastebasket and put it on the table. Then he reached down again, picking up the gaping duffel. He put it at the center of the table and went around to the other side. Using both hands and forearms he gathered the stacks of currency together and dumped them into the duffel bag. He zipped it closed.

Picking the wastebasket up with his left hand, he carried it to the brown stove and set it down on the floor in front of the silent stove. A two-foot iron poker with a wooden handle lay on the floor under it. He went to the wall thermostat and turned the lower pointer on the dial clockwise to 90. As he turned back to the wastebasket, the stove grunted and ignited. He opened the door to the combustion chamber as the gas jet filled it with flames. He took three or four of the lettered paper bags from the wastebasket and drew the poker out from under the stove. He put the bags at the opening of the stove and used the poker to shove them into the flames. They burned brightly and quickly. He kept adding bags until the wastebasket was empty. Then with the stove door open he stood erect and went back to the thermostat, resetting it to 75. The stove subsided, sighing. In front of it again, he crouched and peered in, satisfying himself that no legible fragments remained. Then he replaced the poker beneath the stove and shut the door.

He went back to the table and shrugged into his suit jacket.
Then he nudged the orange chair that he had used back among the others along the southerly wall. He picked up the duffel bag with both hands. He stood holding it and looked around, nodding when he was satisfied that no one surmising what he had been doing in the big office would be able to confirm and prove it from anything that he would leave behind.

“That’s the secret, Maxie,” McKeach had told him after he had met and sized him up in the old Pilothouse beside the Fort Point Channel. “You decide to work for me, for us, you got to forget your strongest instincts. You’re a certified public accountant, trained to keep neat and permanent records. Clear enough so people who had nothin’ to do with keepin’ ’em can take a look and know right off all they need to know about the business you worked for.

“Our business, that’s last thing we want anyone else to be able to do. What we want you to do is make the record
right
, but also make it
temporary.
So as soon’s we read it and we got it in our heads, where we keep the real records, the one you made
disappears.
” He studied Rascob as though appraising him as bodily collateral for a large loan. “And at the same time we do that, you have to make the record that
you
kept in
your
head while you made the written one also disappear.” He smiled. “Think you can do that?”

“Hey,” Rascob said, three weeks out of jail, living in one seedy room, bath down the hall, in the old railroad Hotel Diplomat across the street from South Station. “I’m runnin’ outta money. Guy I met inside down at Plymouth, knew my situation, said he never met you but from what he heard about you I should get in touch with you. Tell you I really need a job.

“There’s only one thing I can do. The law says I can’t do it. That means I got sentenced twice, once to do the fuckin’ time, and then to starve to death.

“Well, I did the first one. I’m not gonna do the second. If it’s
against the law for me to do honest work, I’ll do
dishonest
work, and if the law can hang me for that, well, they gotta catch me first.”

“And if they do,” McKeach said softly, “are you sure you’ll be
willin’
to hang? You already told me how you hated jail. You sure you can face goin’ back, most the rest your life? ’Cause that’d not be your only choice, you know, cops catch you workin’ for me. They’ll do that—they’re gonna ask you, just like I am askin’ now—‘You wanna
hang
? Do
twenny years
? Or wouldja rather go into the Program—help us hang McKeach, then we’ll disappear you, send you to New Zealand, someplace green.’ Still think you’d be willin’ to hang?”

Rascob licked his lips and coughed, but his voice sounded strong to him. “Arthur,” he said, “how the hell do I know? Of course I am gonna say Yes—I need the damn job. But ’til I’m in the position that you just described, which I hope to God I never am, I don’t know what I’d do.”

McKeach nodded. Then he reached across the table with his right hand and clapped Rascob on the left shoulder. “You’re an honest man, Max, I’ll say that for you. Nobody knows in advance what he’d do—stand-up guys have the guts to admit it. Myself, I would bet if they get you by the balls again you’d trade your mother to get loose. But like I said, no one knows.” He paused three beats. “You do understand, though, if you get caught, and fold on me, then no matter where they send you or how long it may take me, I will find you and I’ll kill you.”

Rascob nodded. He moistened his lips again. “I thought that’s what you might say.”

At the door Rascob took both handles of the duffel bag in his left hand and used his right to open it. To the left and right in front of him there was an unfinished passageway four boards wide created by the rear wall of the big office and the row of two-by-four studs on the other side. Sweeney in a Columbus
Day weekend frenzy of unskilled carpentry years before had nailed them to the joists open on the other side beyond them. The space was chiefly lighted by two naked bulbs hanging in silver metal shop-light fixtures suspended from a cross rafter under the flat roof, wired in the same circuit as the fixture in the toilet operated from the single switch at the foot of the open staircase at the end of the passageway to Rascob’s left. Pink Fiberglas foam insulation lay between the joists. In the center of the rear wall, eighteen feet away, was a single twelve-pane window, the glass filthy.

The plan that had existed only in Sweeney’s head had called for the studio apartment in the space. In it the window was to have been replaced with a copper-clad bay window flanked by two casement windows, “which you could then crank them open in the spring and summer, for ventilation, see?”

John Sweeney was a tall, heavy man whose brown hair had receded early, leaving him a sharp prow of it at the front that drew attention to his long sharp nose and bright dark eyes. For his fortieth birthday, in 1976, he had cultivated and then kept sharply groomed a Van Dyke beard that filled in dark red.

“Looks like a crow, don’t he?” Cistaro would say at meetings in the big office, in the mood to get at someone. “Just like a fuckin’ two-hundred-an’-fifty-pound crow, lookin’ for some smaller bird’s nest, he can go an’ rob the eggs. Or some poor bastard’s little garden, trynah grow himself some plum tomatoes he can have fresh pasta sauce, Big Boys for his salad. Crow’ll go there and stab alla tomatoes with that big fuckin’ beak of his, suck out a little of the meat, leave ’em rottin’ onna vine. Ruin ’em for everybody else.

“Same thing, some high-roller tries to stiff him. Jawn doan hafta tellah guy he’ll send
McKeach
around to see him—just gives him that killer-crow look; stiff’ll turn the little wife out onna street by sundown, suckin’ cocks for double sawbucks to
pay off Jawn.” Then Cistaro would laugh. “Jawn’s
own
wife’s got him scared to death—poor fierce old crow is pussy-whipped, but he’s hell on guys don’t pay.”

Straddling the two joists in front of the window and illustrating with his hands, Sweeney had enthused about his plan. “Anna big window in the middle here’d give you all the light you’d need in the main room here, where you’d have your dinette, and your couch and your TV, of course, see? And then up there next to where the john is now, all you’d have to do is put your sink in, and disposal, and just tap inna main plumbing tree, already there—got your water and your waste pipe and your drain right there; wouldn’t hafta put a new one in. And you would use the same toilet where it already is, cut a new door in this side of it, or if that bothered people, going to the john in what would then be this apartment, well, then just put in another one on this side of the cubicle that’s already there, and a Y-joint in the waste pipe, take care of that. And then install one of those Fiberglas stall showers that they’ve got all ready made now, and then you would be all set, ready for whatever happened. And this’s
not
a big project—’nother week or so, you’ll see, it’ll all be finished. Nice. Always have a place to stay.”