The Old Turk's Load (5 page)

“All the help you wish you could give them, Kevin, is just postponing the inevitable. And what do you think you could actually
do
down there, anyway? What have you done up here?”

Kelly sighed. A lovers’quarrel was at least more interesting, in some immediate way, than the Revolution. Then he glanced across the room and saw Helen standing by the refrigerator, a wineglass in her hand, smiling back at him. She was tall and slender, with straight hair, deep green eyes, ample breasts, and a slightly hysterical laugh, which he considered proof of the frustrated passion raging within her. She had a pouty mouth and a way of tilting her head so that her hair came partway over her face, making her seem vulnerable and already violated all at once.The beat-up dame. He was crazy for her.

They looked at each other for a long time, undressing in their minds. He approached. She tilted her head and stroked his lapel with the back of her long white hand.

“You seem so beautiful to me when I’m drunk,” she said. “I know,” he replied. “You, too.” Now he ran his hand along her slender shoulder, down her bare arm, snared her fingers with his. “Let’s go up on the roof.”
“No,” she said, “We’d better not.”
There was something wrong about her, and Kelly knew it was her husband’s money. Ultimately Lloyd would wind up dead or in rehab, and she’d be widowed or divorced, and slide into what was left of his dough. All she had to do was sit there and watch, as his life went down the drain. It didn’t make her seem like a very nice person, but it didn’t cause Kelly to want her any less. His desire for her was just a habit, like smoking, that had been pleasurable at first. Now all it did was kill time at parties.
He went up to the roof and had a smoke.

Richard Mundi’s blond hair was turning white, and he combed it forward like Burton in
Cleopatra
. He must’ve been something in his prime—maybe five foot eight with thick square shoulders and the shortest arms Kelly had ever seen on a human. The hands were square, too. Stumpy strong fingers that looked like they could remove lug nuts without a wrench. Kelly figured the man had started as a truck driver. But he was old now and gone to seed. His belly ran from thighs to shoulders and his face was red, as if he had trouble with his blood pressure or was drinking a quart of whiskey a day.

Kelly had already been grilled by Mundi’s bulldog, a toughlooking chunk of muscle by the name of Roth. He’d had to answer a lot of questions regarding his prior employers, his qualifications for this line of work, and the types of jobs he was willing to do. His memory was fairly well tapped out. He couldn’t remember who Jurgen Kramer was.

Mundi Enterprises was on the thirtieth floor of the Tishman Building, the new one on Fifth Avenue, all glass and aluminum, with the big
666
lit up in red numbers on the top floor at night. On the doorway to the office suite it said me in gold leaf. Kelly wasn’t rushing to judgment, but maybe Richard Mundi did make his money doing the devil’s work.The man’s clipped directness suggested loan-sharking, extortion, numbers, drugs, and prostitution. He could have been a made guy except that no Mafioso would ever hire a private dick. Kelly sat in one of the heavy leather office chairs, hat in his lap. Mundi stood like a fireplug in front of his desk.

Manhattan played an endless Warhol movie through the immense office windows. Mundi opened a file of papers, which, except for a telephone and an ashtray, was the only object marring the blank perfection of the vast mahogany surface of his desk. He extracted a business card from the file and handed it across. It was Kelly’s card, with a name and phone number written on the back of it.

“Kramer works for a West German construction cartel. They wanted to get something going over here and they were looking at my company as a way in. Kramer was their rep. Apparently you hauled his ass out of a difficult situation.”

Past tense.The deal must’ve fallen through. Remembering the German made Kelly’s ankle throb.
“Kramer needs a brain, Mr. Mundi, not a PI.”
“Forget about him. He told me about you, is all, when I inquired about his broken nose. Said you could handle yourself. As it happened I needed to hire someone and he gave me your card.”
Kelly eyed the file. “Everyone’s got needs. What are yours, exactly?”
“I’m concerned about my daughter.” He paused, looked at the ceiling. This was difficult for him. “Worried about her future.”
Kelly didn’t say anything. He extended his feet and leaned back in the chair. His hat was in his lap and his hands were clasped over his belly. He was going to wait until Mundi cut the shit. If that didn’t happen, he was going to say he didn’t think he could help and walk toward the door.
Mundi got the message right away.“All right. Here’s the deal. My daughter’s been running around with a creep named Kevin Gallagher. I don’t know who the fuck he thinks he is, but he’s trouble. Some kinda Communist, or revolutionary, supposedly. A bad influence.”
“I’m not a leg-breaker, Mr. Mundi.”
“Oh yes, you are. But that’s not the issue here. I just want you to tail Gallagher and my daughter. I want to know what they’re up to.”
“Him or your daughter?”
“Him. But as near as I can tell she’s with him all the time.”
“So I spy on your daughter and her boyfriend. Where does that get us?”
“Well, he’s some kind of professional agitator. Already been arrested a couple of times. I’m sure the Feds’d love to put him away.”
Kelly looked through the glass wall behind Mundi, where the north tower of the World Trade Center was clawing the sky like Ronan emerging from his egg.“You’ve got a big operation here, Mr. Mundi. Don’t you have people who could take care of this for you?”
Mundi shook his head. “I’ve got the best. But this’ll tell you something about my daughter. A few years ago, the summer after she graduated college, she was doing some kinda poverty program down south. And I sent my guys down to keep an eye on her, and all that happened was, she made them right away. And they came back and said, ‘Boss, this is a waste of time. Your daughter don’t need us.’” He began fidgeting with the file. “That’s the kind of kid she is, see? Smart. Independent.”
“Only child?”
“Yeah, why?”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six.”
“Don’t you think she’s old enough to make her own bad decisions?”
“You don’t understand. She’s going to be running this company someday. She’s the future, and the future is pretty damned soon.This Gallagher is turning her against me. Ever since she started going around with him—no, even before—it’s been different. First, it was poverty and civil rights.That wasn’t so bad, even if it was unrealistic. Then it was the war. We had plenty of arguments, believe me, but I could still respect her position. She just hasn’t seen enough, doesn’t understand how things work.”
Kelly could imagine the arguments. Stubborn old man, headstrong rich girl. This guy had been through the Depression and World War II. He’d seen the system and he trusted it. All his kid could see was the bullshit, the hypocrisy.
“She’s an idealist. Maybe that’s not so bad.”
“That’s beside the point, dammit. She’s turned into a fanatic about what she refers to as moral issues.We do construction and real estate, see? Nothing to do with the government. But ever since this Gallagher’s gotten hold of her, she’s thinking of this company— our company—as part of the system. Part of the problem. Now it’s the people’s struggle. Fuckin’ revolution.”
Mundi stopped, in distress.
“What does her mother think of all this?”
“My wife died ten years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What’s your daughter’s name?”
“Gloria.This was supposed to be her second year of law school. Columbia. She’s a smart one, I’m telling you. But that’s in the shitter now. This Gallagher’s stolen her mind.”
In Kelly’s view, it was never a good idea for men like Richard Mundi to show pain. It was blood in the water. Kelly nodded respectfully, helping bring him down a little.
“I think I understand what you mean.”
“Anyway, she knows who my people are. She’d be furious if she found out I was . . .”
Kelly thought he could see it pretty clearly. It wasn’t Gloria. It wasn’t Gallagher, either.This was some kind of come-on. Mundi wanted him around for some obscure reason—something he wasn’t owning up to—and that captured Kelly’s interest. He gave a sympathetic nod.
“So it’s really about this Gallagher.”
“I just want her to see the truth about the people she’s running with.”
“Something messy.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s the way you’d like it.”
“All right, goddamn it. I don’t care what it is. I want him gone. You interested in the job or not?”
“All I can promise you is information. Anything else, we’ll just have to see what happens. And it’ll cost you a hundred a day plus expenses.”
Mundi reached in his pocket and came out with a dainty, banded stack of bills. A grand, Kelly guessed. He took a white envelope from the file folder, slipped the bills inside, placed it in the file, and handed the whole thing to Kelly.
“Do your job and there’s more.”
Kelly took it from him, stared at the shape of the empty desk, was reminded suddenly of a coffin, of the dead Mrs. Mundi, of this guy trying to steer an only child into adulthood. Misreading Kelly’s silent stare as a comment on the emptiness of his desk, Mundi broke into his reverie. “I move people, Kelly. Not paper.”
Kelly nodded, rose. “I’ll look this stuff over. If I think I can help I’ll send you a weekly report with consultation any time you ask for it. If the job’s not for me, you’ll get the money back tomorrow.”
But that was just client talk. The world had already redefined itself around Mundi’s problem. Kelly’s job now was to figure out what his new employer’s problem really was, and how to solve it if it could be solved, and how to stay unharmed while doing so, in a manner that resulted in his being further paid cash money or otherwise rewarded. Kelly was happiest absorbed like this.
He walked past his own office and on to Sammy’s, thinking of the wad in the white envelope, imagining what kind of information the money might buy. He didn’t want to look in the folder yet. He didn’t want details about the girl and her boyfriend and the father and dead mother. He just wanted to move them around, for now, into the classic configurations.
Little hunks of mind cheese, like a man setting himself up for heartbreak by forcing his rebellious daughter into a role she didn’t want. A spoiled, willful girl determined to escape her domineering father. A predatory boyfriend who knew how to work his meal ticket. And vaguely—the late Mrs. Mundi. His instinct told him
she
could be the key to all this.
He’d have to figure out her story to get to the bottom of Mundi’s bullshit, which would mean having Jarkey tail Gloria, which was fine. That was how he’d do it.
The clams arrived, Bloody Mary standing tall behind them.

ulius Roth had a shiny balding head, a thick neck, and slabs of torso that rippled beneath his short-sleeved white shirt. He projected the genial physicality of a football player who’d taken up accountancy and he reinforced the impression by keeping a mechanical pencil in his breast pocket.

Richard Mundi had discovered Roth during the postwar years when he, Jimmy Murchison and Harlan Kraft, were doing suburban developments on Long Island.The sprawl was moving unstoppably across Nassau County and he and his partners were getting very rich buying farmland cheap and turning it into “affordable housing”— acres of tacky boxes with names like Seaview Heights. Julius Roth, really just a kid then, was one of Murchison’s project managers and he stood out from the hard, greedy crowd of low-level bosses because he had an uncanny ability to make men work. Itinerant framers, Canuck wallboard guys, burned-out GI electricians, it didn’t matter. Roth had his crews running like drill teams. He was as tough as any, but he was smart with people, too, and Mundi recognized he was bound for bigger things. So he took him on as a protégé and Roth blossomed. Mundi then moved him over to the Newark operation and watched him work his way to the top of the heap, overseeing the squads of snoops, mules, and goons in that branch of the enterprise. It turned out to have been a brilliant move.

Along with his nascent administrative skills, Roth demonstrated a knack for real estate. As the Long Island action dried up, he began acquiring distressed properties in the greater Newark area on behalf of Mundi Enterprises. He was able to squeeze value out of these tenements, small businesses, and defunct industrial sites by recycling them for use by immigrants and African-American entrepreneurs. Over the years he’d turned Newark into the company’s sole profit source, and now he answered only to Mundi, having risen above Seamster and Mossman, displacing Murchison and Kraft in the chain of command.

At the moment he was briefing his boss on a troubling occurrence over in Jersey. Two of their offices, the one on Ferry Street and the one down on Hillside Avenue, had been tossed. In broad daylight. No doubt about it being Mob guys, either. They’d barged in, slapped people around, emptied drawers, and turned over desks, just the way they’d come around trying to intimidate some business, trying to muscle in. Except it wasn’t a shakedown.

“They’re letting you know that
they
know you’ve got their stuff,” Roth told his boss.
“It’s a bluff.”
“Call it that. But it’s also a reasonable deduction. First, they wait for the shit to show up on the streets. When that doesn’t happen, they start looking around for someone smart enough to sit them out.They have to figure out the whole operation and who’s running it. When they get all that, then they start to squeeze.”
“Fuck them.”
“You don’t want to get into it with those guys.”
“They got no proof of anything. Seamster took care of that at street level. There’s no fuckin’ way they can connect us. They’re just shaking trees, waiting for something to fall out.”
“Maybe. But supposing they tried everyone else and you’re the last one left? They’re gonna shake pretty damned hard.”
“So I’m supposed to wrap it in a baby blanket and leave it outside their door?”
“Look, Boss, we should’ve sold that shit the day we found it. Or even better, just handed it back to DiNoto. He would’ve treated us right. Now it’s just a matter of time before he’s on to us, if he isn’t already. All I’m saying is, you need to figure out how to get the stuff back to them or you’ll have a real problem.”
Mundi swiveled his chair around and stared through the window into brown gloom. He didn’t want to figure anything out. He needed a rest. But he wasn’t going to get one anytime soon.
For the past ten days Manhattan had been trapped under a bubble of cold air, breathing and rebreathing its own gasses. Such things occasionally happened in the summer. The papers called it a temperature inversion. Mundi guessed the air was toxic by this time. It certainly looked like it could kill you.
His chest felt constricted. It was all polluted. Everything. From some primal leak. The cosmic sump pump on the long-forgotten universal construction site, coughing out vile ooze,
ka-thunk, splat,
as the great wheel went around, probing the same cesspool over and over. A dead wife, a daughter who was breaking his heart, and a business that was going under. Now Roth was pressing him for an answer to the latest problem. What the fuck did Roth know about problems?
The whole operation was in the tank, had been for years.They’d long since run out of gullible Long Island farmers, and the Newark riots had devastated their underinsured or uninsured properties there.To make matters worse, the Germans—who initially seemed very interested in a major deal for Newark—had backed out, frightened by the uprising of
die Schwartzen
. Didn’t even ask to look at the books, which had been Mundi’s greatest dread prior to the riots.
Now Roth wanted him to go crawling to DiNoto, begging for a break. Fuck that. All Roth cared about was keeping Mundi Enterprises alive so that he’d have a job. He’d been a good soldier, Mundi would never say otherwise. Back in the old days he’d even been a creative force. But lately he was just on the tit like everybody else. Well, that act was getting old. It was time to lose him. It was time to fold the whole fucking outfit.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to shut Mundi Enterprises down. Gloria didn’t want any part of the company, so what point was there trying to save it? For that matter, in trying to win her back, trying to convince her of anything? She’d already made her choices.
It was damned sad, he saw now, because the choice had been his. He’d always been too busy, too distracted to put in any real time with her. There’d always been reasons. When Gloria was an infant he told himself he’d be able to relate to her better when she could talk. When she learned to talk he realized the things he had to say were too serious for a little girl, so he decided to wait. Then her mother’s health problems came to dominate everything and there never seemed to be the right moment. Now his daughter was fullgrown, and the two of them had no language, no experience, nothing in common. Hell, Roth had been more of a father to her than he.
This line of thought was almost immediately displaced by a whole scrapbook of images of Gloria’s sullen face, ages one to twenty-six, by memory flashes of her tantrums, of her sidelong glimpses of intense loathing—when all he’d done was love her, his only child, as completely as he could. He’d provided her with the best life he could—including a high-class education—and the fact that she’d chosen to throw it back in his face was her decision, not his. It was probably the fucking education that put the nail in the coffin. Big mistake.
Thinking about Gloria in this way caused him to remember the detective, Kelly. Suddenly, Mundi’s depression and self-pity were enhanced by a pang of mortal embarrassment. What was he doing, hiring a dick—laying out his troubles to a complete stranger? It had been a desperate, sentimental gesture and would only make things worse with Gloria. He’d have to whack Kelly, too.
Not literally, of course. Just that it was time to cut and run. And if Julie thought those drugs were going back to DiNoto, he had another think coming.That load of heroin, purring contentedly in the safe across the room, was going to be his ticket out.