The Four-Night Run (21 page)

34

S
HADOW OF THE
B
REEST

“Caleb Breest’s boyhood home,” said Thomas Surwin, nodding to a brightly lit house, its brick scrubbed and repointed, its siding painted, the little patch of lawn neatly edged. On the porch, a beefy lug in a white cable-knit sweater and a black beret swiveled his head as Surwin and Scrbacek drove slowly past and then stopped half a block down the street. “His mother still lives there, with twenty-four-hour sides of beef to chase the door-to-door salesmen away.”

“During the trial she seemed in perpetual fright.”

“It’s sometimes hard to tell if the guards are keeping criminals out or her in.”

“Nice neighborhood,” said Scrbacek. “Like Berlin after the war.”

Every other building on the block was rubble, as if a B-52 had indeed dropped a full load on the neighborhood. Walls without windows, fronts without walls, not a pane of glass that hadn’t been shattered, not a door that hadn’t been forced open so that the copper pipe could be stripped, not a floor that hadn’t been covered to the height of a rat’s ass with debris. Every building but one had lost its roof. Every building but one had been covered with foul graffiti. Every building but one. That one, that house, stood brightly lit and perfectly maintained, as if it had fallen into that tragic urban landscape like Dorothy’s house into a firebombed Oz.

“Are you sure you really want to learn exactly who it is you defended?” said Surwin.

“Last thing I did before the hammer came down was represent Caleb Breest. For me, he’s the present I need to discover.”

“You might not like what you find.”

“I didn’t find much to like in my past, either.”

“This used to be a nice neighborhood,” said Surwin. “Fourth of July barbecues at the fire station, pickup basketball in the park. Breest’s father worked at a metal-pressing factory, half a mile down, that used to employ a hundred men and women manufacturing rain gutters and spouts from great rolls of sheet metal. Ever-Dry. Ever-Dry products were shipped all over the eastern United States. Breest’s father worked at Ever-Dry from the time he left high school. He rose to shop foreman and helped build Ever-Dry into one of the largest employers in the city.”

“An American success story.”

“He was supposed to have been a hell of a guy, Caleb Breest’s father, until the tragedy.”

“Tragedy?”

“He had a son.”

Scrbacek sat silent for a moment. In the side mirror, he could see the brightly lit house. The guard was still on the porch, but no longer seated. He was standing at the rail, looking at their car.

“I’ve heard the rumors of the father’s bones being buried in the basement of his house,” said Scrbacek.

“He disappeared when Breest was fourteen. I’d love to go into that house with a pick and shovel, but it’s hard to get a warrant to dig up a basement floor based on hearsay rumors of legendary crimes.”

“What kind of kid was he?”

“Your client? The kind that put firecrackers down the throats of hamsters. The kind that was suspended from kindergarten for biting.”

“A lot of kids that age bite.”

“Not an ear off a little girl. And that’s not rumor, that’s in the record.”

“The permanent record. What else does it show?”

“Emotional outbursts in the classroom, brutalizing students half his size, threatening teachers. He was such a problem he was put into a special-ed class with kids in wheelchairs, which he knocked over regularly, kids with Down syndrome that he egged on to do horrible things. He was already big, as big as some of his teachers even in elementary school, and he became as wild and as uncontrollable as his size allowed.”

“Why didn’t they do something for him?”

“The high school football coach came to the elementary school to get a look at this huge aggressive kid he had heard so much about, and after that the coach pulled every string he could to keep Breest from being expelled or sent away. They gave him special programs, tutors, psychological testing and counseling. Nothing did any good. And then, in his physical for the junior high football team, the doctor found Breest’s heart to be grossly oversize. He would never play football. The coach lost interest, the district threw up its hands, and that was the end of Breest in school.”

“Sounds like a kid desperate for help and not finding any.”

“You don’t have any children, do you, Scrbacek?”

Scrbacek shrugged.

“I have two sons. They live with their mother now in Delaware. They’re both great kids and both completely different—one loud and physical, one quiet. We didn’t form them as if out of clay. They simply came out the way they are. Mozart came out with the ability to be a great musician. Caleb Breest came out a monster. You can’t blame the parents or society all the time. Sometimes out pops Mozart, sometimes out pops Breest.”

“And who judges which is which?”

“You don’t have to judge. They let you know. Some kids you can chart a slide from a specific point—the death of a father at an early age, say, or a period of abuse. But with Breest there was no slide. At six he was biting off a little girl’s ear, and then he turned nasty.”

Scrbacek looked up again at the house. The guard, while still staring at their car, was walking down the steps, his hand reaching into his belt. A second man, also in cable-knit and beret, was now standing in the doorway.

“The guy on the porch is coming for us,” said Scrbacek.

Surwin checked out the rearview mirror without noticeable alarm. “Like I said, this used to be a nice neighborhood. But then a swarm of cutthroats and thieves descended like a plague. Burglaries. Arsons. It didn’t take long. Within a few months the whole thing was a ghost town, except for Mrs. Breest’s house. One rumor had it that Breest decided to clear the whole block, even though families had lived here for generations. The neighbors hadn’t been nice enough to him as a boy.”

Surwin took a final glance at the man coming toward them before putting the Hyundai in gear and slowly pulling away. Scrbacek eyed the expanse of ruin and rubble as it slid past his window.

“All the abandoned properties on the block,” Surwin continued, “were bought for pennies by a developer named Frances Galloway.”

“Galloway?”

“You know her?”

Scrbacek shrugged. “Not personally. I’ve read her name in the papers.”

“She keeps a low profile, but she’s the biggest slumlord in the city. Inherited great swaths of real estate from the husband she married when he was eighty-four and she was thirty-one, with two failed marriages already behind her. She hasn’t done a thing to these houses. She’s let them fester and crumble. Word is, she’s afraid of what Breest will do if she rebuilds. In effect, the garden of ruins that surrounds the house is now a permanent fixture of Mrs. Breest’s landscape. A fitting tribute, I figure, to the blessings she has bestowed upon all of us through her son.”

“The corner plot of land used to be the seat of power in this town,” said Surwin as they drove toward a high wooden fence, covered in posters advertising this angry new rap band or that high-octane new movie. “The place where those who wanted to do business had to come and get their permits.”

“A government office?”

“A restaurant. Migello’s. They made a cioppino that was legendary. Fresh clams, mussels, vermouth, enough cracked peppercorn to light your mouth on fire. Migello’s was where three generations of the Puchesi family did business.”

Immediately surrounding the fence, buildings that had once been fine, grand, with facades of cut stone, lay abandoned, boarded up, crumbling one into the other. The whole neighborhood appeared abandoned as if in a hurry. Something terrible had happened here, something long ago, from which the neighborhood had never recovered. Surwin parked the little blue Hyundai beside the high wooden fence at the corner of Ninth and Polk.

“They had carved this niche out for themselves, the Puchesis, controlling crime in this city even as they ruthlessly kept the bigger families in New York and Philadelphia from moving in. This was before the casinos, when gambling meant the numbers, and the Puchesi syndicate kept strict control of prostitution, loan sharking, extortion, and a minimal amount of drug trafficking. In the old days they said the Puchesis were the biggest problem facing the city. Now they seem like kindly old caretakers who were keeping the city together.”

“What happened to them?”

“They made a mistake in personnel.”

Scrbacek simply looked at Surwin and waited.

“Caleb Breest was fifteen when he was sent to reform school for assault. It seemed a high school football player made a snide comment about Breest’s weak heart, and in response Caleb Breest repeatedly slammed his fist into the kid’s face until it fell apart. Breest, being only fifteen, was locked away in reform school for the last three years of his minority. It was in reform school that he met Joey Torresdale.”

“I wondered when Torresdale entered the picture.”

“After Breest turned eighteen and was released, Joey brought him in to meet Luigi Puchesi. Torresdale was just a hanger-on with the Puchesi syndicate, but Luigi was always in the market for big amoral thugs who liked pounding flesh, and he immediately hired Caleb Breest as one of his collection agents. Breest proved himself to the bosses in his very first week by taking care of a deadbeat debtor with six kids who couldn’t come up with the three hundred he owed. He killed him with his bare hands, in front of three witnesses from the syndicate. Breest’s evident enthusiasm for his work earned for himself and for Joey enough promotions so that after only a few short years of mayhem, Breest was making loans himself, using his boss’s money, while Joey had become one of Luigi Puchesi’s captains. Breest wasn’t Sicilian, so there was only so far he could rise in the family, but he was rising, gaining more responsibility, garnering more fear. Then the inevitable happened. A Puchesi lieutenant accused Breest of shorting the family on profits.”

“Was he?”

“Probably. It was a criminal organization, and Breest is a criminal. But the truth of it didn’t matter. A week later they found the lieutenant stuffed shoulders-first into a trash can, his legs sticking out and his head missing. Not so earth-shattering a move except this lieutenant was married to a granddaughter of the old man himself. The feds had a bug in Migello’s, and they caught Luigi Puchesi in a meeting with his top men. ‘There’s a cancer in the family,’ he said in a hoarse Old World voice. ‘You don’t negotiate with a cancer, you don’t make deals with a cancer, you don’t sign treaties with a cancer. What you do with a cancer is you cut it out and stamp it dead and then feed it to the rats. There’s a cancer in the family, and it’s time to feed the rats.’ It was a declaration of war, and the outcome is all there on the tape. Luigi’s declaration, a discussion of strategy, Joey Torresdale leaving the restaurant to relay orders to the troops, and then, exactly thirty-seven minutes after Luigi Puchesi said it was time to feed the rats, there is a dark rumble of sound before the tape goes dead.”

“What happened?”

Surwin leaned over to his glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight, which he handed to Scrbacek. He nodded at the fence surrounding the corner lot. “Go see for yourself.”

Scrbacek approached the wooden wall with trepidation, keeping the flashlight off as he moved closer. A moist rot seeped through the edges of the posts. The fence was over six feet high, too tall for him to see over, and the top was jagged and full of splinters, so pulling himself up with his hands was not an attractive possibility. He tramped up and down the edge, looking for something to stand upon, and found, finally, a piece of cinder block with one edge flat enough to serve as a stoop. He hoisted the block close to the wall and stepped up onto it, pressing one hand on the wall for balance. The scent of rot grew stronger. Slowly he rose on tiptoes to peer over the jagged top.

Nothing.

Not a building, not a sidewalk, not a light, not even a vacant lot. Instead there was a great hole in the surface of the earth, a massive crater, as if something supernatural had reached down and grabbed a handful out of Crapstown, leaving nothing but the nauseating scent of ruin and death.

In the thin glimmer bleeding over the fence from the streetlights, Scrbacek could barely make out the edge of the crater, but not its depth. He switched on Surwin’s flashlight, lifted it over his head, and focused it on the center of the crater’s darkness.

It was impossibly deep, the crater. The flashlight’s uneven circular light was too weak to light up the entire pit, so Scrbacek could not immediately get a clear view of what was inside, but he could tell, even in the uneven light, that it was fearsome and deep. And, somehow, in motion.

He shifted the beam back and forth to get a better view, and suddenly he realized what he was seeing, and from the sight and the smell he gagged loudly and gagged again. The puddled bottom of the pit was alive with a scavenging army of rats, huge angry rats, scores of them, their fur slick, tumbling one over the other, gnawing at an oily pile of fat and bone. As the beam moved among the plague, their eyes, caught in the light, glowed red.