It's in the Book (5 page)

She swallowed and nodded. “And the other thing?”

“I want you to call your son right now,” I said, “and tell him I'm coming to visit him. I'll talk to him briefly myself, so that he'll know my voice. I'll come alone. If more than one person shows up at his door, even if one of them claims to be me, he's not to let them in. If that happens, he's to get out and get away, as fast as he can. Is all of that clear?”

She wore a funny little smile. “You know, Mr. Hammer, I think my impression of you all those years ago was wrong, very wrong.”

“Yeah?”

“You really are quite a nice, caring human being.”

I glanced at Velda, who didn't bother stifling her grin.

“Yeah,” I said. “I get that a lot.”

If Wilcox at eight-thirty p.m. was a ghost town, the East Village at eleven-something was a freak show. This was a landscape of crumbling buildings, with as many people living on the streets as walking down them, where in a candy store you could buy a Snickers Bar or an eightball of smack, and when morning came, bodies with bullet holes or smaller but just as deadly ones would be on sidewalks and alleyways like so much trash set out for collection.

Tompkins Square Park was this neighborhood's central gathering place, from oldtimers who had voted for FDR and operated traditional businesses like diners and laundries to students, punkers, artists, and poets seeking life experience and cheap lodging. Every second tenement storefront seemed home to a gallery showcasing work inspired by the tragic but colorful street life around them.

NYU student Nick Burrows lived in a second-floor apartment over a gallery peddling works by an artist whose canvases of graffiti struck me as little different from the free stuff on alley walls.

His buzzer worked, which was saying something in this neighborhood, and he met me on a landing as spongy as the steps coming up had been. He wore a black CBGB T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, a kid of twenty or so with the wiry frame of his father but taller, and the pleasant features of his mother, their prettiness turned masculine by heavy eyebrows.

He offered his hand and we shook under the dim yellowish glow of a single mounted bulb. “I appreciate you helping out my mom, Mr. Hammer. You know, I think I've heard of you.”

“A lot of people think they've heard of me,” I said, moving past him into the apartment. “They're just not sure anymore.”

His was a typical college kid's pad—thrift-shop furnishings, atomic-age stuff that had looked modern in the fifties and seemed quaint now. Plank and cement-block bookcases lined the walls, paperbacks and school books mostly, and the occasional poster advertising an East Village art show or theatrical production were taped here and there to the brick walls. The kitchenette area was off to one side and a doorless doorframe led to a bedroom with a waterbed. We sat on a thin-cushioned couch with sparkly turquoise upholstery.

He offered me a smoke and I declined. He got one going, then leaned back, an arm along the upper cushions, and studied me like the smart college kid he was. His mother had told him on the phone that I had something important to talk to him about. I had spoken to him briefly, as well, but nothing about the book.

Still, he'd been told there was danger and he seemed unruffled. There was strength in this kid.

I said, “You know who your real father was, don't you, Nick?”

He nodded.

I grinned. “I figured a smart kid like you would do some poking into that Vietnam-hero malarkey. Did the don ever get in touch with you? He came to the occasional school event, I understand.”

He sighed smoke. “Get in touch? No, not in the sense that he ever introduced himself. But he started seeking me out after a concert, a basketball game, just to come up and say, ‘Good job tonight,' or ‘Nice going out there.' Even shook my hand a couple of times.”

“So you noticed him.”

“Yeah, and when I got older, I recognized him. He was in the papers now and then, you know. I did some digging on my own, old newspaper files and that kind of thing. Ran across my mom's picture with him, too, back when she was a real knockout. She wasn't just a chorus girl, you know, like the press would have it. She had speaking parts, got mentioned in reviews sometimes.”

“Your mother doesn't know that you know any of this.”

“Why worry her?”

“Nick, I'm here because your father kept a ledger, a book said to contain all of his secrets. Word was he planned to give it to the person he trusted most in the world. Are
you
that person?”

He sighed, smiled, allowed himself a private laugh.

Then he asked, “Would you like a beer? You look like a guy who could use a beer.”

“Has been a long day.”

So he got us cold cans of beer and he leaned back and I did too. And he told me his story.

Two weeks ago, he'd received a phone call from Don Nicholas Giraldi—a breathy voice that had a deathbed ring to it, making a request that young Nick come to a certain hospital room at St. Luke's. No mention of old Nicholas being young Nick's father, not on the phone.

“But when I stood at his bedside,” Nick said, “he told me. He said, ‘I'm your father.' Very melodramatic. Ever see
Stars Wars?
‘Luke, I am your father'? Like that.”

“And what did you say?”

He shrugged. “Just, ‘I know. I've known for years.' That seemed to throw the old boy, but he didn't have the wind or the energy to discuss it or ask for details or anything. He just said, ‘You're going to come into money when you graduate from the university.'”

“You didn't know there was a trust fund?”

“No. And I still don't know how much is in it. I'll be happy to accept whatever it is, because I think I kind of deserve it, growing up without a father. I'm hoping it'll be enough for me to start a business. Don't let the arty neighborhood fool you, Mr. Hammer. I'm a business major.”

“Is that what Old Nic had in mind, you starting up something of your own?”

The young man frowned, shook his head. “I'm not sure. He may have wanted me to step into
his
role in his … organization. Or he may have been fine with me going my own way. Who knows? In any event, he said, ‘I have something for you. Whatever you do in life, it will be valuable to you.'”

“The book?”

He nodded. “The book, Mr. Hammer. He gave it to me right there in that hospital room. The book of his secrets.”

I sat forward. “Containing everything your father knew, a record of every crooked thing he'd done, and all of those he'd conspired with to break God knows how many laws.”

“Something like that.”

I shook my head. “Even if you go down a straight path, son, that book would be valuable.”

He nodded. “It's valuable, all right. But I don't want it, Mr. Hammer. I'm not interested in it or what it represents.”

“What are you going to do with the thing?”

“Give it to you.” He shrugged. “Do what you will with it. I want only one thing in return.”

“Yeah?”

“Ensure that my mother is safe. That she is not in any danger. And do the same for me, if you can. But Mom … she did so
much
for me, sacrificed everything, gave her
life
to me … I want her
safe.”

“I think I can handle that.”

He extended his hand for me to shake, and I did.

He got up and went over to a plank-and-block bookcase under the window onto the neon-winking street. I followed him. He was selecting an ancient-looking sheepskin-covered volume from a stack of books carelessly piled on top when the door splintered open, kicked in viciously, and two men burst in with guns in hand.

First was Flavio, still wearing the light-blue suit and yellow pointy-collar shirt, but I never did get the name of his pal, the big guy with the weak chin and Neanderthal forehead. They come in twos, you know, hoods who work for guys like Sonny Giraldi.

They had big pieces in their fists, matching .357 mags. In this part of town, where gunshots were commonplace, who needed .22 autos with silencers? The big guy fell back to be framed in the doorway like another work of East Village art, and Flavio took two more steps inside, training his .357 on both of us, as young Nick and I were clustered together.

Flavio, in his comically high-pitched voice, said, “Is that the book? Give me that goddamned
book
!”

“Take it,” Nick said, frowning, more disgusted than afraid, and stepped forward, holding out the small, thick volume, blocking me as he did.

I used that to whip the .45 out from under my shoulder, and I shoved the kid to the floor and rode him down, firing up.

Flavio may have had a .357, but that's a card a .45 trumps easy, particularly if you get the first shot off, and even more so if you make it a head shot that cuts off any motor action. What few brains the bastard had got splashed in a shower of bone and blood onto his startled pal's puss, and the Neanderthal reacted like he'd been hit with a gory pie, giving me the half second I needed to shatter that protruding forehead with a slug and paint an abstract picture on the brick out in that landing, worthy of any East Village gallery.

Now
Nick was scared, taking in the bloody mess on his doorstep. “Jesus, man! What are you going to do?”

“Call a cop. You got a phone?”

“Yeah, yeah, call the cops!” He was pointing. “Phone's over there.”

I picked the sheepskin-covered book up off the floor. “No—not the cops.
A
cop.”

And I called Pat Chambers.

I didn't call Sonny Giraldi until I got back to the office around three a.m. I had wanted to get that book into my office safe.

The heir to the old don's throne pretended I'd woken him, but I knew damn well he'd been waiting up to hear from his boys. Or maybe some cop in his pocket had already called to say the apartment invasion in the East Village had failed, in which case it was unlikely Sonny would be in the midst of a soothing night's sleep when I used the private number he'd provided me.

Cheerfully I asked, “Did you know that your boy Flavio and his slopehead buddy won a free ride to the county morgue tonight?”

“What?”

“I sent them there. Just like you sent them to the Burrows kid's apartment. They'd been following me, hadn't they? I really
must
be getting old. Velda caught it, but I didn't.”

The radio-announcer voice conveyed words in a tumble. “Hammer, I didn't send them. They must be working for one of my rivals or something. I played it absolutely straight with you, I swear to God.”

“No, you didn't. You wanted me to lead you to the book, and whoever had it needed to die, because they knew what was in it, and I had to die, too, just to keep things tidy. Right? Who would miss an old broken-down PI like me, anyway?”

“Believe me, Hammer, I—”

“I don't believe you, Sonny. But you can believe me.”

Actually, I was about to tell him a whopper, but he'd never know.

I went on: “This book will go in a safe deposit box in some distant bank and will not come out again until my death. If that death is nice and peaceful, I will leave instructions that the book be burned. If I have an unpleasant going away party, then that book will go to the feds. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“And the Burrows woman and her son, they're out of this. Any harm befalls either one, that book comes out of mothballs and into federal hands.
Capeesh?”

“Capeesh,”
he said glumly.

“Then there's the matter of my fee.”

“Your
fee!
What the hell—”

“Sonny, I found the book for you. You owe me one-hundred grand.”

His voice turned thin and nasty. “I heard a lot of bad things about you, Hammer. But I never heard you were a blackmailing prick.”

“Well, you learn something every day, if you're paying attention. I want that hundred K donated to whatever charities that Father Mandano designates. Think of the fine reputation you'll earn, Sonny, continuing your late uncle's good works in Little Italy.”

And I hung up on him.

Cops always come in twos, they say, but the next morning, when Hanson entered my private office, he left his nameless crony in the outer one, to read old magazines. Velda wasn't back at her reception desk yet, but she soon would be.

“Have a seat, Inspector,” I said, getting behind my desk.

The brown sheepskin volume, its spine ancient and cracked, lay on my blotter at a casual angle, where I'd tossed it in anticipation of his visit.

“
That's
the book,” he said, eyes wide.

“That's the book. And it's all yours for ten grand.”

“May I?” he asked, reaching for it.

“Be my guest.”

He thumbed it open. The pleasure on his face turned to confusion, then to shock.

“My God …” he said.

“It's valuable, all right. I'm no expert, though, so you may be overpaying. You may want to hold onto it for a while.”

“I'll be damned,” he said, leafing through.

“As advertised, it has in it everything the old don knew about dirty schemes and double-dealing. Stuff that applies to crooks and cops and senators and even presidents.”

He was shaking his head, eyes still on the book.

“Of course, we
were
wrong about it being a ledger. It's more a how-to-book by another Italian gangster. First-edition English-language translation, though—1640, it says.”

“A gangster named Machiavelli,” Hanson said dryly.

“And a book,” I said, “called
The Prince.”

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