Green Ice (50 page)

Wiley removed the radio from Kellerman’s coat pocket.

He pressed the receiver switch.

“Kellerman! What’s happening, Kellerman?”

“Fuck you, Argenti.”

“Wiley? Wiley?”

“I’m the only one left.”

“The emeralds, Wiley, where are the emeralds?”

“Up your ass.”

“I’ll make a deal with you …”

Wiley threw the radio as far away as he could.

He returned to the bunker, to Lillian. Hope made him feel for her pulse. Nothing registered through his numb fingers. He placed his ear to her breast, couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Her open mouth. It seemed he should be able to pour life into her. If only he could. If he could, he would give her all his breath.

He held her to him for a moment, rocked back and forth, unconsciously trying to animate her.

He picked her up, took her dead weight on his shoulders and carried her up the slope and down through the club area to the beach. The tide was at its highest now. There was no dry place to walk, but when the icy water ran up, soaked, and should have shocked his feet and legs, he wasn’t fazed. He was feeling so much he couldn’t feel anything.

He carried her up and across the bridge to the house.

He placed her gently on the sofa in the relaxing room, arranged her arms and legs, put a pillow under her head. No reason she should look uncomfortable.

He sat on the edge of the couch.

Just sat there.

After a few minutes he noticed her cheek twitch, just once.

A left-over impulse, he thought.

In less than another minute her mouth closed.

Wiley tried for her pulse.

Now his fingers were warm.

He found it, felt it, the vital surge in her, extremely weak and slow. Nevertheless
there
!

She was wounded, not dead yet, wounded. How badly? Where?

Her eyelids fluttered slightly.

He removed her windbreaker and the rest of her clothes. There were numerous scratches on the front of her, red raw, the deeper ones accentuated by dried blood.

From the brambles.

But nothing serious.

He turned her over, expecting to see the hole Kellerman’s bullet had made.

There were only more scratches.

And on the left side of the small of her back a tiny puncture from which considerable blood had flowed. It looked as though she’d been jabbed there with a needle.

He made her comfortable again, covered her with a blanket.

Watched with amazement and gratitude as she blinked, tried to focus her eyes. On him. Was coming out of it, whatever it was. She couldn’t speak yet, tried to wet her lips and take deeper breaths. He went to get water.

It was then he noticed the dart on the floor near where he’d dropped her windbreaker. He must have pulled it out when he’d undressed her. He picked it up, examined it, saw that its business end was actually a hypodermic needle about a half inch long, connected to a miniature capsule that, no doubt, injected its contents on impact.

He imagined it had contained a tranquilizer, a concentrated dose, instantly immobilizing.

The emeralds, he thought. Kellerman needed to know where the emeralds were.

What other possible reason could Kellerman have had for not wanting Lillian dead?

35

Out in Three Mile Harbor.

Aboard the yacht
Oscuro
.

Argenti would wear the shin-length genuine-camel-hair topcoat that had been made for him by one of his regular tailors in Milan. Over a black cashmere turtleneck sweater with a white silk scarf tied loosely. For that much of an underworld air.
Capo di tutti capi
(boss of bosses), he thought to the mirror. However, a wide-brim cream-colored Capone-ish felt hat, he decided, was a bit much.

From one of the drawers of his wardrobe he chose one from a half-dozen pairs of black gloves. Kid that was butter-soft, stretchable so they’d be skin tight. He worked his fingers and hands into them, smacked fists against palms left and right and approved of the extreme shine of his black wing-tipped shoes.

No gun. There was a nickel-plated thirty-eight automatic on the wardrobe top. But he wouldn’t need it.

He left his cabin, went up to the lounge, where he poured an ample, last-minute brandy. Took a mouthful and let its fumes burn up into the passages to his nose. He tossed down the rest. A larger gulp than usual. For the cold, not nerve, he told himself.

He’d thought out how he’d handle Wiley. He couldn’t leave it to anyone else. Even Kellerman had proved incompetent. The situation required his, Argenti’s, finesse and insight. He was sure he’d read Wiley correctly, right from the start. Such obvious, futile ambitions. He’d play on them now. Go face to face with Wiley. Take him to the top of power mountain and show him the view. Wiley was a fool, but smart enough to realize he couldn’t possibly safely market all those emeralds. Better, he’d reason with Wiley, make a deal for them. A choice: Come in as, say, a quarter partner in The Concession or settle now for fifty million. He’d feed Wiley the numbered-Swiss-account bullshit, even name the bank in Geneva.

No matter which Wiley chose, he’d end up in Barbosa.

Argenti went out on deck.

He paused, surveyed the shore.

It was, he realized, the United States, one of the many forbidden lands. But the time was three-thirty, reassuring, and this place was so remote, and the lights that were on were scattered all-night lights, unthreatening public lights, none moving.

Such as those that illuminated the landing about a hundred yards away, allowing him to see the three men there, waiting, shuffling their feet in place, trying to keep warm. The three Conduct Section men he had summoned to go along as his escort. How much alike they looked, Argenti thought. All Conduct Section men looked alike. Where had Kellerman recruited them?

The power launch was ready, gurgling the water as it idled alongside. Argenti went down the boarding steps and climbed aboard. At once it pulled away.

The harbor was practically waveless.

The launch headed for shore.

Argenti kept his eyes on the three men.

He gestured to them, a leader’s sort of acknowledgment, as the launch pulled in.

It would be a steady, easy transfer from the launch to the landing.

Argenti placed one foot up on the slip-proof rubber-matted area of the gunwale. Brought his weight up onto that foot. His next step would be on the landing.

In that moment, during that motion, he glanced at the three men. Their faces, stances.

And knew who they really were.

Not his men, or Kellerman’s.

They were there for The System.

The System—which had with reluctant lenience reduced his death sentence to exile and warned him precisely what would be the consequence if he ever, even once, violated those terms.

Argenti tried to recall his step, but his weight had already shifted.

The moment his foot touched the landing he was shot dead.

36

Three days later.

“I’ve got it,” Lillian said, digging into her pocket.

They were in an exact-change lane, had it clear, but Wiley steered to the next lane over, where several cars were ahead of them.

Lillian cocked her head at him quizzically.

He pretended not to notice.

She shrugged, put her exact change back into her pocket.

He took a five dollar bill from his, handed it out to the black woman toll-taker in the booth and thanked her by the name etched on the plastic plate over her breast pocket. The toll-taker didn’t say anything, not even with her eyes, but Wiley didn’t blame her, thought he sure as hell wouldn’t want to be saying thanks ten thousand times a day.

He drove down the grade and into the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, got into the left, the faster lane.

“Where are we going?” Lillian asked.

“I told you, I have some business to take care of.”

“What sort of business?”

Wiley shoved in the ashtray to have the cigarette stubs out of sight.

Lillian noticed that many of the ceramic tiles in the ceiling of the tunnel were missing. She closed her eyes and tried to think of anything other than a whole river above her. She peeked through her lashes a couple of times, but didn’t really open her eyes until they had come out of the tunnel and turned up onto Thirty-seventh Street.

Wiley headed the car crosstown.

“My scratches itch,” Lillian said, and used her fingernails on her left thigh.

Wiley’s mind flashed back to their fall into the brambles. No more of that, he told himself. No more Argenti. With Argenti and Kellerman gone, so was The Concession, its purpose and the way it had been organized. They were in the clear. Wiley still found it difficult to accept.

Sunday morning last he’d thought surely another five or six Conduct Section men would arrive any minute. He’d bolted all the locks and nailed boards across the door Hurtado had broken through. Sat in the relaxing room with groggy Lillian, resigned to it all starting again, knowing they weren’t in any condition to go another round.

By dawn Lillian was less woozy. And Wiley felt better, because they probably wouldn’t come in the daytime. Lillian did some breath-control exercises and got on her makeshift slant board for half an hour to get rid of her tranquilizer hangover. Wiley tried to sleep, was too adrenergic.

They first learned of Argenti’s death on the radio. Between a David Bowie and a Jefferson Starship. They thought they were hearing things.

They saw it on the television news.

The three bodies had been found at the Maidstone Club, were as yet unidentified.

Police were trying to piece it together.

Especially Kellerman, Wiley had thought to himself.

There was believed to be a connection between the three dead men at the Maidstone and the killing of Meno Sebastiano Argenti.

An underworld massacre was the slant of it.

The television reporter repeatedly used the full name—Meno Sebastiano Argenti—as though he enjoyed the sound of it.

That night, Sunday night, Wiley had removed the other two bodies from the house, loaded them into the gray Buick and left it parked in East Hampton, alongside the fence of the West End Burying Ground.

Now, with all that behind them, Wiley and Lillian were pulled up at a light at Forty-second and Seventh Avenue.

A manhole was spouting steam into the cold air a few feet ahead. Thick, extremely white steam, clean-looking. Off to the right, a place called itself The Dirty Bookstore.

“We deserve a vacation,” Lillian said.

A sort of affirmative grunt from Wiley.

“Why don’t we go someplace different, like Fiji or Ireland? I’d really love to go to Northern Ireland. I understand there are some nice, not-too-grand but large-enough houses for sale there now. And the help are so friendly.”

And there’s also that rebellion, Wiley thought, remembering her mother’s name had been Mayo.

“Another area I haven’t seen enough of is the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Cyprus.”

And it occurred to Wiley that it just so happened that the Greeks and Turks were boiling at one another over Cyprus.

She abandoned that tack abruptly, because just then they were entering the Holland Tunnel. She closed her eyes again and hummed the tunnel time away with some random notes. When they were out on the New Jersey side she said, “Marry me.”

“Nope.”

“Please marry me?”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“After I make my first million.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

“How soon after?”

“Right after.”

“Is that before or after taxes, the million?”

“Take home,” he told her.

She thought there had to be ways she could make him that rich without his knowing she was involved. She’d talk to Corey, her chairman, about it. But hell, why did Wiley have to make it so complicated?

“I’m going to knuckle down,” he said.

Which reminded her. She reached into her purse, took out a small, drawstring chamois pouch, the kind she carried marbles in. There were two emeralds in it. Twenty carats each, brilliant cut. The matched pair Wiley had concealed between his toes. Instead of throwing them away, she’d concealed them. Since then she’d been waiting for the right moment. Anyway, that was what she’d told herself. Holding out on him again? Only sort of. The matched pair were worth a half million each, at least. That could be his million, if he skipped taxes. She was about to open the pouch when …

“I mean it, Lillian,” he continued. “I’ve been spinning too long on the wrong tracks, and the promised land was never just around the bend anyway. I realize that now.”

“Good for you,” she said just to say something.

He told her, “What I have to do is put my nose and ass to the grind like any regular, normally privileged American. When they play the song, salute. Know what I mean?”

She nodded, thought, He
has
been under a lot of strain.

“I’m ready to settle,” he said decidedly, “for a split-level out somewhere on the outskirts of somewhere. A refrigerator with a door that spits out ice, cubed or crushed, and plays music. A microwave oven that can bake a medium-size potato during a commercial break. An FHA loan. For once in my life I want to go into any bank, have someone give me a financial proctoscopy and qualify.”

He’s serious, she thought. “Instead of business, wouldn’t you rather just get into me?”

He didn’t say no, but that didn’t mean yes.

“Okay, then, what sort of business do you have in mind?” No matter what it was, he’d be a practically overnight, huge, at least two-million-dollar success. She’d call Corey first chance, from the next pay phone if she could.

“Who knows?” Wiley said. “Like today, it’s a little import-export deal. For starters.”

By then they were in Hoboken.

Wiley turned left and left again and pulled into the parking area outside United States customs shed number thirty-eight.

Lillian waited in the car.

Nearly a half hour later Wiley came out wheeling a hand dolly. Loaded with two burlap sacks, hundred pounders.

He put the sacks in the back seat, returned the dolly, got in and drove away. Deadpan.