The Old Turk's Load (13 page)

The Plague of Smiling Fishermen
H

aving polished off half a dozen cherries and the grilled bluefish special at Sammy’s, Kelly ambled back to his office, his head full of images of the Mailman’s ravaged face and blasted hopes. He poured himself a shorty and sat in his chair, drowsy. Then he lost touch with the waking edge of himself and a dream filled him. He was waiting for smugglers who worked on a fishing boat in a seaport town. He had a room upstairs in a tenement by the harbor and when he went down on the street he bumped into a burly, bearded fisherman in a checkered shirt. It was cold. He could see the other man’s breath. He wondered if this might be the smuggler and looked up into his face, all bright red cheeks and nose, and the merriest eyes, gay slits under bushy brows, enjoying the joke of an enormous secret. Who cared about smuggling? This was better. The late-afternoon winter sun made the brick buildings burn orange. Kelly walked around the corner and saw another man approaching. Strangely, this man was identical to the first. Same clothes, red cheeks, laughing crinkles. Then, riding that wave of coincidence, two more, walking together step for step. By the time he got to Main Street there was a steady stream on the sidewalk, all identical fishermen. Kelly looked across the street and it was the same. Legions of merry fishermen, burly and silent and twinkling. Waves of them replicating in doorways and around corners, up from cracks in the sidewalk, out of one another. A plague of smiling fishermen crowding out the rest of the world. That was their joke. He tried to turn off the street, into a store, but when he opened the door a river of them gushed out and pushed him back to the curb. He could smell the wet wool of their shirts; see the condensed breath glistening like jewels in their red beards. They pushed up close against him, smiling. His arms were pinned. It was difficult to breathe. They were crushing him.

He woke with a start, in his chair, under the lamp, glass in hand. Then he heard the noise that woke him. A key in the door to his office.

Jarkey rushed in followed by, of all people, Gloria Mundi. Still punchy from the dream, Kelly rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Gad, sir. What is the meaning of this?”
“Kelly, this is serious.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“Better sit back down. It’s going to take some explaining.” Gloria broke in. “Harry, we’ve got to get out of here!” “On second thought, come with us.”
Back in the Fairlane they explained the whole thing in stereo,

Jarkey from the driver’s seat, Gloria in back. Gloria intended to scare him out of town.

Kelly didn’t care for what they had to say. Being lied to was one thing; getting set up to be murdered by enraged Mafia hit men was downright abusive. He sat in silence for a long time, trying to figure out where it’d all gone wrong and how to make it right.

Suddenly he leaned over to Gloria in the backseat.“Your father had a very hard time talking to me about your mother’s role in this.”
“My
mother
?”
“Don’t play cute with me, Sweetheart. I know what’s going down here.”
Gloria stared at the detective, shocked, as if he’d just slapped her.This man was a complete idiot. He’d do very well for what they had in mind.
Kelly turned to Jarkey. “Get her home. I’m going to need the car for a while.”
“I’ll bet you’re going to need it. What’ll it be? Mexico or Canada?” Jarkey imagined Kelly doing just what he would have done. Driving night and day. To someplace very far from Newark, New Jersey.
Kelly shot him a look. “You’re thinking small, Jark. That’d be playing right into their hand.”
His friend was up to something, but Jarkey didn’t want any part of it. A vision of 116th Street was already tugging at him.
“Okay. I don’t need to tell you to be careful.”
“Thanks, Harry. Be careful your own self. I’ll give you a call later, see how you’re doing.”
Right, thought Jarkey. A call asking me where the car keys are.

Smoot’s Doom
K

elly stopped by Sammy’s and drank two shots of Wilson’s, bang, bang, standing at the bar, working out his plan.Then he marched out the side door and headed up the street to the All Nite Deli where he bought a large black coffee and went to the liquor store across the street for a half-pint of Wilson’s. He proceeded to the pay phone on the corner and called Lloyd.

“We got a problem here, Kelly. The Mailman won’t take the paintings home.”
“That’s perfect. Tell him not to worry. I’ve got a proposition for him that’s going to make everything okay.”
“You’re not hearing me. It’s really bad. He won’t talk. He won’t get off my couch.What do I do with him when Helen comes home?”
“Just keep him there. Do whatever you have to do. I’ve got a deal going down tonight that’ll put everything right.”
“I’ll try.”
It had turned into a pleasant enough evening. Kelly took his coffee and hooch over to Lexington Avenue and stationed himself in a doorway kitty-corner from his building.
The Mob had him in their sights already, or soon would, which meant he’d be a dead man unless he could bring some resolution to the situation. No point dragging Mundi in front of the Newark boss to make him confess. He’d kill the both of them on the spot.
He knew he was right about Agnes Day, but that didn’t matter for the moment. It wasn’t about her. It wasn’t about Gloria either, or Gallagher.The whole thing had been a con from the start. Mundi’d set him up. Hired him so that he’d have someone to dump the heroin on if the Mob got too close. Now the situation was already beyond redemption. He’d have to do the Vietcong thing—disappear into the jungle and commence guerrilla action. It was regrettable. It’d be messy.
One thing for sure—none of those bastards would ever see that smack again.
Presently, a tan Olds pulled up to the front door of his building. Out stepped a burly bald guy with a small suitcase. Kelly recognized him from Mundi’s office. He put the case down and fiddled with the lock on the lobby door almost like he was trying to get the right key. In less than two minutes, Kelly noted admiringly, the door was open. Before long he was out again, into the Olds, and gone.
Kelly figured he had a little margin, but he didn’t want to waste any time. As soon as the car was around the corner he sprinted across the street and let himself in, heart hammering on the seemingly endless elevator ride up to his office.
The suitcase was on top of a filing cabinet, not even hidden. Kelly set it on the desk and flipped it open.

There sat Smoot’s doom—wafting tendrils past Kelly, to Roth, Jarkey, Gloria, Lloyd, Mundi, Mr. D., and the Mailman. Not because
THE OLD TURK’S LOAD
143

it had selected these people or because they wanted it so badly, but simply because of the construction of things. There were no people, no junkies or detectives, just whorls of energy forming and re-forming. And there was no time, no endgame, just gravity sluices between the whorls. No motives, only geometry. And the old Turk’s load was not ten plastic sacks of diacetyl morphine sitting in a suitcase, but itself a tendril, tied back through endless iterations to the Promise with the first men who grew and harvested it.

Mekonion,
so called by the ancients, locked since Neolithic times in its proprietary arrangement with humans, to whom it offered knowledge of heaven in exchange for its own continuance. Hippocrates called it
opos
.To Galen it was
Opium thebaicum
. Godly purplish flowers in their sacred dance with old men in rippling fields, consuming light, making divine juice.
Papaver somniferum.

The Promise held until the British got strung out on tea and sent most of their free cash to China in exchange for that invigorating herb. Enter Clive, himself a junkie, and India, where they grew the most lustrous poppies, which the Brits refined and started sending to China in increasing quantities, knowing that once tried, the stuff would create its own demand—“junk,” as William Burroughs observed, being the ideal product. One thousand chests of opium in 1767; four thousand by 1790; thirty thousand by the time the first Opium War ripped China open to the West, with missionaries helping to push it in exchange for a chance to spread the Gospel. By the 1870s a third of that nation was addicted and Britain had settled the massive trade deficit caused by its own insatiable craving for Chinese tea. Then a Brit discovered C
₁₇
H
₁₇
NO(C
₂
H
₃
O
₂
)
₂
. A German gave the stuff its Heroic appellation—thinking it might be good for curing morphine addiction and—you know the rest. Kelly snapped the suitcase shut and went down to Lloyd’s. Roth called Mr. D. and ratted Kelly out.
Irene Kornecki let Harry Jarkey back in.
Kevin Gallagher told Agent Spaulding that Gloria’s father

was holding the stash.
Lloyd and the Mailman did another line.
Mundi’s Revenge
M

undi headed for the airport. Hauling his bulk into the cab made his wrist hurt again, so he took a couple more pills. There were certainly difficulties to be overcome, but in saying good-bye to Gloria he’d felt, for the first time in a long time, the glow of accomplishment.They’d arrived at an essential understanding. Soon DiNoto would be off his back and the highly annoying Kelly would be dead. He hadn’t figured out precisely how he’d punish Gallagher, but he reckoned Gloria would be happy to help him there. And Roth, with some careful supervision, would dispose of what was left of Mundi Enterprises. (Kraft and Murchison could go to hell.) So no finders keepers, but he’d make do. He’d sell the house in Westchester and add the proceeds to his Swiss account. Spend a little time on the Costa del Sol, just like he and Agnes used to do. He still had a few Spanish connections.Talk to Franco’s people about local business opportunities.

The problem hadn’t been that he was getting old—though that was manifestly the case—it was that he’d gotten tired, bored, stale. As the cab sped toward JFK, the image came to him of driving, falling asleep at the wheel for an instant, and being wakened by the noise of the tires on the road’s shoulder. He’d gotten control just in time. He was still in the game. He was riding a terrific adrenaline buzz.

As the driver was dropping him off, and he was fishing with his good hand for a twenty, a car screeched to a stop immediately behind them. The commotion attracted his attention. He saw two men get out and approach him. Mundi recognized them as the two who’d destroyed his office that afternoon. He realized they were there to kill him and, with that realization, his heart seized up. God’s hand descended into the plane of our daily lives, squeezed his chest, and pulled him back with it into the firmament. A blue jolt shot up Mundi’s spine into his brain and he went down on the curb, still clutching the twenty.

As his dying eyes beheld Vince and Woody, frozen in astonishment, his last thought was: “How about
that,
you fucking assholes.”
Too Little, Too Late
I

rene let Harry back in, but not until Gloria was finished with him. “Give me the keys to Kelly’s office.” They were standing on Fifteenth Street, just off Union Square, where Kelly’d unceremoniously dumped them. The bars hadn’t closed yet, but sleepy sailors were beginning to stagger back to the Seafarers Hotel around the corner. If Kelly had been there, he’d have recognized a few from his dream.

“What for?” Jarkey was getting tugged a lot of different ways.

Lust, loyalty, and lucre gleamed in the night.
“C’mon, Harry. You know what for. We’ve already warned
your pal. What happens to him depends on his choices now. But
that heroin’s sitting in his office, just waiting to be grabbed. Why
leave it for the bad guys?”
“It’s shit, Gloria. It’s poison. No matter where it ends up, it’s
going to destroy people.”
“At least with us some of those losses will be redeemed. Do
you have any idea how far even a quarter-million dollars would go?” “Do you know how much jail time you’d do if you got caught
with ten kilos? Think about it!”
“I
have
been thinking, Harry. All those hours of bullshitting
in the
foco
I’ve been thinking there had to be a better way.” “And then, oh Jesus, you’re going to be walking around Manhattan in the middle of the night with all that smack? The junkies’ll
eat you alive.”
“Look, I’ve been on the streets. I’ve done the tear gas and
the dogs and the pigs in their riot gear. That’s not the Revolution.
That’s nothing but cheap thrills. Street theater. This is risk, Harry.
Real, honest, calculated risk, with a huge upside.We put that money
into legal action and education and we accomplish way more than
guns and bombs.”
The argument went back and forth, and they finally had to sit
down on a bench. Was Jarkey with them or against them? Jarkey went silent, trying to figure out if helping her get the
heroin would be a betrayal of Kelly. She kept at him. They walked.
He could’ve gotten on the subway and left her standing there but,
just like in the car, couldn’t bring himself to break it off with her.
A beautiful rich girl begging him for help—this was more excitement than he’d had in years. Irene might’ve scrambled his brains,
but Gloria still had his imagination. He was a romantic, after all. She heard the tumbler click, nudged closer to him. “Let’s try it,” he said.

No one in front of Kelly’s building. No one on the elevator. Jarkey turned the key in the lock to Kelly’s office door, reached his arm around, and flicked the light switch.

Silence. The familiar, friendly clutter. Nothing but the usual. No heroin.
Gloria said, “I’ll be goddamned.”

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149

Jarkey didn’t know what to make of that. “Huh?” “Roth kept the stuff,”she told him.“Got it from Curtis and . . .” “I’ll be goddamned,”he repeated solemnly, happy at not being

murdered by waiting thugs, trying his best to honor her perplexity. She was wearing a beguiling mustache of perspiration. “We need to get out of here.”

“I need a phone.”
They stopped at a booth a few corners away. Gloria called

Roth’s home number in Forest Hills.
“Julie, what the hell are you doing?”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

I’m
trying to go to sleep.”
“The drugs weren’t at Kelly’s, as perhaps you knew.” “You little brat. I didn’t think you had it in you. You just came