Dark Men (11 page)

There are several ways to reach a man who doesn’t want to be reached. Usually, I focus on vices since most people who dip their toes into this pool have a few secrets they want kept in the deep end. They’ll visit whores or buy narcotics or have a thing for guns or want to diddle boys, and this gives me a way to get to them. But I don’t have time to plan a successful sneak attack, and I don’t have a fence to help me figure out and explore his vices, and with Risina along for the ride, guns blazing might not be the best approach either. Navigating this world over the years, I’ve learned there’s a time to explode, loud and aggressive, and there’s a time to be supplicant, quiet and introspective.

Risina and I approach the brick columns bordering the gate leading to Kirschenbaum’s property. There is a callbox but no button to press and no cameras visible even though I know they are there.

“Tell Kirschenbaum Columbus wants to see him,” I say to the gate. “I don’t have the time or resources to go through the proper channels. I’ll be in room 202 tonight at the West Lane Inn for the ten minutes following midnight. If men come through the door with guns out, those men will be dropped. I have no problem with Kirschenbaum; I just need information.”

We turn and head down the path back to the street.

Kirschenbaum arrives on the hour and enters the room alone. If he’s trying to set a tone, trying to signal he isn’t intimidated, it works. I’m impressed. He doesn’t need an entourage, doesn’t bother with his retinue of bodyguards—he watched me on the tape at his gate and decided on this strategy, to come devoid of self-doubt.

From what I’d read about him, I knew he was tall, but his height is pronounced in person, or maybe it’s accented by the way he almost has to stoop under the low ceilings of this old rustic inn. His hair is jet-black without a trace of gray, swept back from his forehead like he’s wearing a helmet. He wears a tight navy sweater and black slacks. His eyes are pale, striking, alert. He has half of a robusto cigar jutting out of the corner of his mouth like an extension of his face, and the smoke hangs around his head like a wreath.

He stands just inside the doorway, and looks at me, seated in a wooden chair near the small table, then turns his neck without moving his body to pick up Risina, who hasn’t moved from the corner near the door. I placed her there, in his blind spot, and she has her hands behind her back, leaning against the wall. A threat but not threatening.

“Where do you want to do this?” His voice is a lower register than I would have guessed. It seems to come from somewhere near his abdomen and has a raspy quality, like a frog croaking. He talks around the cigar like it isn’t there.

“You want to have a seat?”

He heads for the only other chair in the room without nodding, sits and crosses one ankle on his knee, then folds his arms across his chest, comfortable as can be. After a moment, he takes the cigar out and holds it between his thumb and forefinger to use it as a pointer.

“She joining us?”

I shake my head.

He turns to her. “What’s your name, darling?”

That’s something we hadn’t yet discussed, and I curse myself for not thinking to do it sooner. There is an art to a fake name, and we should have decided on one a long time ago, before we entered the country. I’m hoping she doesn’t answer, but one thing I’ve learned about Risina, she rarely does what I think she’ll do. I may not have thought of a name for her, but she has.

“Tigre,” she says, not missing a beat, her accent thick.

I feel warmth rise up in my chest, though I keep my face blank. A tiger is a goddamned tiger. Since Smoke located me in that bookstore, I’ve thought
I
was the tiger, the hibernating predator who recognized the familiar scent of prey after a long lay-off. What I hadn’t thought about, what I hadn’t considered until just now, is that Risina, too, is a tiger. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Am I relieved she is more like me than I thought, or disappointed?

Kirschenbaum seems satisfied and spins back to me.

“You two working a tandem?”

“That’s right.”

“How can I help you, Columbus?”

“You know my work?”

“I’ve been following you since your early days with Pooley. I never met the guy but his reputation was solid. It’s too bad he had his ticket punched. You were with Bill Ryan after that?”

“Yeah.”

“Too bad about that one, too. And now Archibald Grant.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone ever tell you you’ve had some bad luck with fences?” He says this matter-of-factly, and pops the cigar back in his mouth. I’m starting to understand how Kirschenbaum made such a name for himself. I feel like maybe I stepped under the ropes and into a ring, except we’re going to spar with words instead of boxing gloves.

“That’s why I’m here. Archie’s been taken.”

“I heard. That’s why you approached my gate. Where I live. With no appointment. No warning. Just walked up to my front gate.”

“Like I said, I want information.”

He spins to Risina again. “Can you get me a glass of water, honey?”

She doesn’t move, just smiles. He turns back to me, now grinning. He raises his eyebrows like he took a shot at shaking her, and no harm done. Then his face turns grave again. He’s switching tones and moods and expressions so fast, it’s dizzying.

“Information costs.”

“It always does.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know everything about a contract killer you represent named Spilatro.”

He doesn’t blink. “I know quite a bit about him.”

“That’s good. Now I know we’re not wasting each other’s time.”

“Here’s a tidbit to wet your whistle. He doesn’t do the work you think he does.”

He’s telling me this so, like any salesman dangling a carrot, I’ll bite. Instead I duck his jab . . .

“Do you know his real name?”

“As sure as I know your real name ain’t Columbus. And you’re originally from Boston. And your first fence wasn’t Pooley but a dark Italian named Vespucci. And . . .”

Fuck, is he good. He’s jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, trying to stagger me. To throw him off his rhythm, I interrupt. “And if I were here to find out what you know about me, I’d be impressed, but I’m not, so I could give a shit. I want you to give up Spilatro.”

“So you can kill him.”

“Possibly.”

“How much you guesstimate giving him up is worth?”

“You tell me.”

“I’ll take her.”

He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at Risina. The air in the room cools instantly, like a chill wind blew in through the vents. He puffs out a cloud of smoke and watches me through the haze.

I narrow my eyes but otherwise check my emotions. I hope Risina won’t react, won’t drop her wall, but Kirschenbaum doesn’t give her the chance. He brays out laughter, a harsh, barking sound that, like his voice, seems to come from deep inside him.

“You should see your face right now. Jesus. I’m just fucking with you. Something tells me if I tried to take—what’d you call yourself again, babe? Tigre?—something tells me if I tried to take her, Tigre would stick a knife down my throat.”

“Try me,” Risina says, coolly.

“Nooooo, thank you.” He holds his hands up innocently, then turns back to me as his smile fades. “Two hundred thousand.”

“How do you want the money?”

“Bank transfer. You have a cell phone?”

I shake my head. He fishes one out of his pants pocket, moving quickly and deliberately, not at all concerned that one of us is going to shoot him for putting his hands where we can’t see them. He punches some numbers into the panel and then flips the phone to me.

“That’s my accountant’s number. Have your bank call him and work it out.”

“Okay. Transfer goes through in the morning . . . I’ll pick up the information on Spilatro tomorrow night. Where do you want to make the exchange?”

“I’m sure as hell not going to write anything down for you. You know where I live, so come on over and we’ll pour drinks, clink glasses, and have a powwow. You’re invited this time.”

I flip him back the phone.

“Keep it,” he says and starts to toss it again my way.

“No thanks. I’ll remember the number.”

“Of course you will, Columbus.” He bolts up quickly and, without shaking hands, heads for the door. “Tomorrow night then. And like you said to me so colorfully, you come in with guns leading the way and you’ll be dropped.” He takes one last look at Risina and says, “That goes for you, too, honey. You mind if I call you ‘honey’?”

“You can call me whatever you want as long as you give us what we’re looking for.”

“What part of Italy are you from?”

“The part that ends in an ‘a.’”

He smiles at that—or it could be a sneer—shoots a finger-gun her way, turns the knob, and heads out, only a cloud of smoke left behind to let us know he was here.

“How’d I do?” Risina asks when we’re sure he’s gone.

“You’re a natural,” I say, and I’ll be damned if I don’t mean it.

Eight minutes later, and we’re out of the hotel without checking out, leaving Ridgefield until tomorrow night.

After breakfast at an all-night diner, we hole up in a chain bookstore in nearby Danbury, a two-story anchor to a shopping center. The place isn’t crowded this time of day, and a clerk with “Janine” on her nametag points us upstairs to the fiction shelves where we can get lost in the maze of bookcases, couches, and corners.

Risina flits among the titles like a butterfly, stooping over here or standing on her tiptoes there to read an author’s name or a jacket blurb. She looks over the books, and I look over her.

Why aren’t I more concerned?
Or better yet . . .
why don’t I feel guilty over what I’ve done?
I’m like a condemned prisoner who, instead of slinking off to a cell to live out his sentence, drags someone down the hole with him. I’ve lived sleeping with one eye open for so long, why would I ever wish wary nights and watchful days on someone else? But it’s not that simple, and here’s the part I have trouble admitting. This job is dangerous, yes, it is haunting, yes, and it exacts a moral toll, yes, but it also holds an allure that is almost impossible to understand until you’ve hunted a mark, ended his life, and escaped without a soul knowing you are the shooter. It’s a drug, a high, a tonic. It’s not a delusion of grandeur, because it is grandeur itself.

What I realize now is I want someone to share the experience with me. It’s one thing to tell these details to a stranger, another to discuss everything with someone who is there, going through the same swings, the same highs with me.

Was I lying to myself when I justified bringing Risina along by saying she was already in the game so she might as well learn the rules? Or was I, once more, putting myself first?

“How much time do we have?” she asks, her finger inside a David Levien novel.

“All day.”

“Good.” She heads to an overstuffed chair at the end of an aisle, back to a faux-paneled wall, plops down, and starts reading.

Another answer is possible. The reason I found Risina, or maybe the reason she found me: she’s been a tiger all along and only needed someone to unlock her cage. She’s a natural. A predator.

And if that’s the case, what happens when she first tastes blood?

The gate buzzes open, and Risina and I pull our sedan in and park near the front door. I’ll admit, I’m troubled by the one sentence Kirschenbaum jabbed with:
He doesn’t do the work you think he does
. I didn’t know where he was going with that, but I didn’t want to chase my tail either. He wasn’t lying to me—he definitely knew something about Spilatro he didn’t want to come right out and say. But what?
He doesn’t do the work you think he does.
I did bite the carrot after all.

Smoke died in an accident the same way this contract killer operated in the past. I have the files that prove it. Spilatro killed Smoke, but he meant to kill me. He has to be the guy who put my name on the paper, the guy who kidnapped Archie. So why would Kirschenbaum say Spilatro doesn’t do the work I think he does? What other work does Spilatro do?

Efficiently, Risina and I cross to the entrance and don’t have long to wait as a mustachioed guard opens the door and points upstairs without saying a word. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place him and he has me wondering: did Kirschenbaum plant him somewhere else around us? Was he in the hotel? The bookstore? Have we been watched from the moment we left his front gate? And if this guy was trailing us and I didn’t pick him up, then how many other men did K-bomb put on us? Kirschenbaum didn’t have the career he had by flying by the seat of his pants, and maybe what I mistook for calm bravado in our hotel room was actually informed caution.

I’ve got a feeling of foreboding I’ve learned to trust over the years, but I don’t want to look back at the guard and give away any hesitation, so I head up the staircase. Risina is in front of me and maybe that’s what’s making me jumpy . . . we’ve been on someone else’s turf together before, but this is the first time that someone’s known we were coming. My intuition told me that Kirschenbaum’s play would be to give me what I want, that he’s a bottom-line opportunist and the percentages were to give up information on Spilatro rather than risk a confrontation with me, but maybe my intuition is rusty and I’m going to find out I’m wrong the hard way.

We make it to a long hallway with wood floors and the first thing I notice is that the guard—where did I see him before?—didn’t follow us up and, in fact, there are no other guards visible on the second floor. I know Kirschenbaum platoons his security but I don’t know where they position themselves in the house, and the whole thing is starting to reek like a corpse.

Risina looks back at me for guidance. She knows instinctively not to ask questions aloud, and I nod her forward toward the cracked door that spills light at the end of the corridor. I think she picks up something on my face because she blanches a bit, swallows hard, and then keeps moving.

I’m acutely aware of our breathing, the only breathing I can hear in the house, and the front door opens and closes downstairs, I’m sure of it. What the hell are we walking into? If I could think of where I saw that guy, maybe without the mustache, maybe with different color hair or no hair, goddammit, I’m coming up blank . . . I can now glimpse a four-poster through the crack in the door, so this must be the master bedroom, and I touch Risina on the elbow to let me pass and enter first. She steps back and my heart pulses now, a welcome feeling, a fine feeling, and maybe Risina feels it too because she looks alert and spry.