The Art of Disposal (38 page)

Then I snapped back, and the voices cleared right up, and it was me who was talking, and I said, boldly, with crinkled eyebrows:

“How's about Eddie being a rat, huh? What a crock. The closest Eddie Sesto's ever been to the government is that time he took Irene to Washington D.C. to see the Lincoln Memorial.”

It's funny how a guy like Frank Conese, with a bachelors degree in dishonesty and a masters in backstabbing, can sit there and lecture you on ethics. And without a hint of irony. He just smiled at me, sly as a snake on a hot stone enjoying the sun.

“And who the hell is Jack Lomand?” I said. “I don't much care for babysitters. And while we're at it, how's about that punk hood-rat you sent to Eddie's office, you know—to clean up the mess?”

Frank grinned. “You didn't do your job.”

“Neither did he,” I said. “I'm still alive.”

I heard Frank's sonorous voice buzzing around the room like a horsefly, and his hands were going this way and that, but all I could focus on was the espresso sitting right in front of him, sending up curls of steam; foggier versions of the nearby blue smoke from his cigarette in its ornate holder, burning neglected in a clear glass ashtray. Take a sip, Frank. Take a goddamn sip.

“Eddie was clean,” I said. “You lied.”

“Corporations get restructured,” Frank said.

We stared at each other, and I went far into the irises of his steely gray eyes. He was a businessman, one hundred and ten percent. If there was a real emotion living somewhere in his eyes it was only a crazed and stubborn will to power, relegated to the bloodshot edges.

I reached a little way under the table to feel around for the knives.

And boy did I ever find one.

You always know when you get a bad cut. Even a slip of the razor while you're shaving has a certain feel to it. I'd found the edge of a chef's knife, and, reaching with a full curiosity, I'd run my thumb right along it.

But I kept my eyes on Frank, and I brought my balled-up hand back into my lap, and I told myself not to look down at it. A deep cut only hurts when you look right at it. Until you look, it's just a sharp sting; an airy feeling that something that should be closed has opened up. I stared at Frank, and I watched him smoke. The room slowed down and tilted, and I studied the silent talking mouths of Bullfrog, Carlino, and Frank. In the background, Mudcap and Dante stood like menacing statues at the mouth of some haunted river.

And still Frank hadn't touched that goddamn espresso. Leila had made a white heart on top of the foam, and I stared at that heart, and I watched the curls of steam, and I squeezed my fist and felt the slick wetness of blood. When I was a teenager, I tried to open a stubborn jar of peanut butter. I twisted and twisted with all of my might, and when the lid finally gave way, so did the top half of the jar. My thumb got cut to the bone.

The room sped up. Frank's voice burst through like a radio, when you've finally nailed the station after tuning it uselessly back and forth.

“…a knife, right in my back, Carlino.”

“Boss—”

“And after everything? After I helped you with that Dominick problem?”

“And I owe you,” Carlino said. “Look. Ronnie here, he didn't do nothing. Well, all right, all right: he might've messed things up a little. But we can fix it, boss. You let us back on the street, and we'll track down Eddie Sesto like a pair of bloodhounds. You got my word.”

“Your word has dropped considerably in value,” Frank said.

I squeezed my hand, and the slickness of the blood felt like something greasy and stillborn. Dante raised his beer bottle and toasted Carlino.

“To mí amigo, Carlinito. Truly a legend in his own mind. Heh, heh, heh.”

Dante downed half of the cold Modelo. He raised his Glock and aimed at Carlino.

“Heff-ay. Can we do this thing or what?” he said to Frank.

Frank drew a final hit from his cigarette, plucked it from the holder, and smooshed it into the ashtray. His espresso remained untouched: the perfect cream heart rode on the surface, unbroken.

“They're all yours,” Frank said, like he'd decided to part with a few trinkets for a slightly lower price than he'd hoped to get.

“I'll make it quick for you, poot,” Dante said to Carlino. “But you,” he said to me, “I might take me a little while to kill you, wair-o. Slowwwww. Like Tortuga. Eh, heh, heh.”

He dropped his gun. His face went pale. The poison hit him. The beer bottle, held precariously in his fingertips, swung around in lazy circles. He looked like a guy with a horrible flu, about to throw up and rushing around to find the nearest trash can. He let out a low groan. The beer bottle fell to the floor and shattered. Frank pushed himself away from the table, aware that something terrible had begun.

“Now!” Carlino said, and we stood and flipped the table up so it formed a little wall, and the chef's knives were there, taped on the bottom, one of them red with my blood.

Carlino ripped off a knife. Bullfrog ducked, like he was hiding in a trench in the middle of a World War. A gun fired and tore into the drywall behind us. I pulled off a knife and stood straight up, and there was Frank Conese, weaving back and forth like a dancer who'd forgotten his routine. Dante gripped his stomach and coughed, and spit dribbled from his mouth.

I lunged at Frank, and tried to stab him. But he moved to the left, like a boxer, and knocked the knife from my hand. Carlino had told me how Frank spent some time on the ropes when he was a teenager—and it showed. He was fast and strong for an old man. But I swung a punch and landed it. He doubled over and held his knees, and Mudcap was right there behind him.

Mudcap leveled his piece right at me, and I stared down the barrel into a black circular afterlife that looked mighty uninviting. I dropped to the floor right when the bullet cracked and boomed and tore through the leaves of the ficus plant in the corner.

Surviving gunfire is mostly a matter of luck. You can hide from it, you can rush right into it, but if a bullet finds you, it finds you. You hear old war stories about guys running straight through a hail of bullets without a scratch. It makes you wonder about fate and luck and divine intervention. Soldiers who served with Hitler during the first World War considered him good luck. Whenever he was around, no one got hurt. He was immune to gunfire. It makes you wonder: if there really is a God, what kind of God would see a young Hitler safely through the first World War?

When I looked up, Carlino was stabbing Mudcap in the gut and pushing him down to the ground. Once he got him there, he buried that knife into him again and again. Mudcap grabbed the offending blade and shredded his hands in the process. His shirt flooded, like a white cloth dropped on a spilled puddle of wine.

One time I saw my Grandpa Jim kill a catfish that didn't want to die. He hit it upside the head. He held it by the tail and hit it against a tree stump. But still it wouldn't die. Finally, he took a hammer and drove a nail right through its slimy head and into an old plank of wood. And still the catfish kept on living.

Carlino was a wild-eyed ghoul, laughing like a guy just buttoned into a straitjacket. Long strings of his hair came uncombed and hung down, oily, like Shemp from the Three Stooges. Carlino must've stabbed Mudcap a good fifteen times, but he wouldn't die.

Then Carlino punched the side of Mudcap's head so hard that his marble eye launched right out of the socket and rolled across the floor.

Frank Conese came at me and fired his gun. I heard Bullfrog cry out. I lifted one of the chairs and swung it hard at Frank. It connected, and the gun flew out of Frank's hand and into a metal filing cabinet a few feet away. But this wasn't Frank's first street brawl.

Out in the nine to five square world, you might have some college grad overseeing a whole crew of workers building a rail-line, or a sewer system, and the big-cheese hasn't even scrubbed any dirt out from under his fingernails. He starts right at the top.

Not in the mob. In the Corporation, the highest guy up was once just some soldier on a street corner, roughing up deadbeats and knocking in teeth. Everyone starts at the bottom. Even a guy whose Pop was the boss: he still does some time on the street.

Frank threw a punch at me, and boy did it ever connect. I saw an infinite black space with a dozen blue and green stars falling gently through it, and I strolled around in that dark meadow for a while, seeing my Grandpa Jim waving to me, and the old frog pond, and Blind Shannon walking along the edge of the road with her white stick.

When I pulled myself back out of that heavy ether, I felt the burn of short carpet on my back, and a ten ton weight on my chest. Frank Conese was on top of me, wrapping his smelly hands around my neck. His fingernails were pungent with sweat and garlic.

I punched at Frank, and I landed a few, but they were weak. And I thought how if Frank came out of this thing the winner, one of his lackeys would be hacking me up like a killed deer, or dropping me into the river with concrete blocks tied to my feet. I wondered what kind of fish would get rid of me. Perch. Bluegill. Catfish. One nibble at a time: my carcass reduced to bones.

I forced my fingers between Frank's hands and my neck, and I scratched the hell out of my neck in the process—and bent one fingernail, too. It hurt like hell.

Then I prayed for Carlino or Bullfrog or Leila to show up and save me, but all I could see was that brass owl sculpture, out of focus, staring at me with an utter lack of concern.

Across the expanse of short carpet, I saw Mudcap's lost lonely eye, a few feet away like a kid's marble shooter without any smaller ducks. From my vantage point, low to the ground, the marble was a huge planet, and I could stare right through its burnt orange and yellow streaked core, where a small and psychedelic Carlino DiTommaso had finished murdering Mudcap. He stood up and slicked back the strands of his wandering hair.

Then he stomped over toward me, knife in hand, ready to bury it into Conese's back. I watched his feet, and I tried to call out and warn him about the marble, but I couldn't produce much of a sound. Conese was putting his heart and soul into choking the life out of me.

Carlino's huge feet came closer, and he stepped right onto the marble which promptly flung him backward; the marble shot over and hit the wall behind me, and Carlino tumbled back and conked his head on the edge of the bookcase.

I hadn't seen or heard from Bullfrog in what felt like years. He'd been shot—that was that, I thought. Poor Bullfrog. It was just me and Frank Conese. And he was winning. I pushed with all of my strength, and I swung at his face a few more times, but he was large and all of his weight was on top of me, and all I could see was the blue stubble of hair on his Adam's apple, and all I could smell was the sweat and the day old garlic on his hands.

For a moment I saw Emily, standing in the kitchen of our old apartment, laughing at some joke I couldn't remember, dicing up a pile of fine garlic for a pasta sauce. She'd use four or five cloves. Smell is a powerful thing, more so than sight or sound, and it stirs up forgotten memories.

I snorted and fought for quick breaths, but things were going dark around me. Still, you never give up. Just the way Mudcap had gripped with fearsome indifference against the sharp edge of the knife in his belly, instinct compels you to fight.

Then I saw that brass owl, flying silently toward me, so bright and golden it looked like some treasure from King Tut's tomb; and attached to the brass owl was a large brown hand with pale half-crescent moons near the base of the fingernails. The owl hit Frank Conese's head, flew back a few feet, struck again, and a spatter of hot blood showered my nose and lips. The full weight of Conese slumped down on top of me; at the same moment I drew in the longest sweetest breath, and my head cleared, for Conese's hands had come undone from my neck. Bullfrog stood above me, holding the brass owl in his hand.

“You all right, son?” he said.

I couldn't speak. My throat was tight. But I was sure glad to see him. Bullfrog kicked Conese's corpse off of me, and extended his hand. I took it, and floated up, and felt like I was ten feet tall just standing up again.

We walked over to Carlino, motionless on the floor. We slapped his face a few times.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I'm awake. What time is it? Damn, I made some bank on that game!”

“What game?” Bullfrog said.

“Yankees, Indians.”

“That ain't no game,” Bullfrog said.

“Indians: Twenty-two. Yankees: Zero.”

“Fool, that was 2004, and it ain't never happenin' again.” Bullfrog looked at me. “You think he's messed up? Like, permanent?”

“Nah,” I said, my voice coming back. “Bumped his head. Passed out. Hey, D-T, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three,” he said, sitting upright and rubbing the back of his head.

“What's the capital of Texas?”

“Dallas,” he said.

“Wrong. Austin.”

“Yeah, well it should be Dallas,” he said.

Carlino stood up and stumbled around, like a drunk waking up at four in the morning, still full of the stuff. “My head,” he said. “Goddamn that's a bump right there.”

The door creaked open, and Leila peeked in like a curious mouse. Then she strode right in, carrying a smaller knife, to survey the carnage. She walked around the table and looked down at Frank Conese, and then she gave him a good hard kick with the tip of her high heeled boot. He didn't move. That brass owl had knocked a big chunk right out of the back of his head. You could see a bit of brain on the floor, like spilled undercooked scrambled eggs.

Then she walked up to Dante's corpse, and gave it a kick of the same caliber. His mouth was caked with dry foam.

“He's the only one drank the poison,” Carlino said.

“And?” she said.

“And you think we're still s'posed to pay you the full twenty-five? Uh-uh, sweetheart. Not when you only got one out of three.”

“This ain't the horse track,” Bullfrog said. “She did her part.”

“Eight thousand, five hundred,” Carlino said.

Leila walked up to Carlino, pushed her face right up to his, and pouted her glossy lips; she reached down and rubbed the front of his pants, gently kneading the goods. Carlino smiled. Then she grabbed his balls and pushed the tip of her knife to the side of his neck.