Luke thought for a moment more and then went to an oak wall at the back of the room. There he slid a panel aside and pulled out an unusual contraption. The greater part of the machine looked like an old-fashioned complex shortwave radio. This was attached to a very ordinary, if outdated, black rotary phone. He set a few dials on the radio portion of the machine, the phone gave a short burp of its ring, and then Luke raised the receiver, dialed six numbers, and, after a forty-five-second wait, said, very clearly, “Paulie DeGeorges.”
He then hung up the phone and returned to a red sofa next to Asha. I had a couch to myself and Johnny occupied the other.
“Tea or gin, Mr. McGill?” Asha asked.
“Better give him tea,” Luke suggested. “With the kinda questions he’s askin’ he’s gonna need all his wits.”
While Asha poured my English Breakfast, Luke continued, “If you can forget Jones, that would be your best option; maybe your only one. He the baddest motherfucker in three states. Slick as oil and deadly as a volcanic eruption. Only man I ever heard of could make somebody commit suicide rather than go up against him.”
“What’s his thing?” I asked, to see if there was more than what Twill and his clients knew.
“Children,” Luke said simply. “The greatest weakness of any species is its young. If they don’t survive, the story is over. If they do, they will bury us.”
“In English, Luke.”
“He got children doin’ his work. They steal for him, prostitute for him, and they will kill, too. He brings ’em in and makes them his creatures. If they cross him they die. If they talk it don’t matter because they don’t really know nuthin’. Nobody knows his name and he’s got dirt on at least a few people in every court, precinct, and government office. Nobody knows what he looks like, or where he calls home. If I was to make book on it I’d say that he was once a part of the juvenile protection department. From there he found out how to use children. But no one knows.”
“No way to beat him?” I asked the man who many believed had all the answers.
“Get somebody in close,” Luke speculated. “Close enough to kill him and brave enough to die. I don’t think he’s the kind of guy trusts anybody with his secrets, so a suicide run would end whatever problem it was that somebody had.”
I was hoping that Twill hadn’t come up with the same conclusion.
The rotary phone rang once, then the sounds of a dot-matrix printer started up. After maybe eight minutes the sounds stopped and Johnny went to the back wall, pulled out a drawer, and removed half a dozen sheets of paper. He glanced through them and then handed the sheets to Luke. Without reading the contents he passed the pages on to me.
I folded the papers and put them in my inside breast pocket.
“What is that?” I said, gesturing at the apparatus.
“That is to me what I am to you,” Luke said.
“What do I owe?”
“The same,” he said. “Always the same. One thousand dollars.”
“What about for Jones?”
“I hand out death notices for free. Public service, you know.”
“LT,” he called.
I had almost made it to the sidewalk in front of Luke Nye’s house.
I turned and waited for Johnny to reach me.
“You need some help on this, man?” he asked.
I took a moment to consider the offer. Johnny was long and lean, powerful and deadly. He was the kind of guy you wanted on your side when the shit came down. I had three deadly forces to contend with, and only two hands. Luke was right when he said that our children are our greatest weakness. Twill was my son and I felt vulnerable for him.
But Johnny almost died the time before last when I needed his help.
“No, Johnny,” I said. “I got this one covered.”
36
From time to time there’s a Rembrandt on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, twenty inches wide and maybe two feet high. It’s an oil rendering of a peasant girl who is looking beyond you into a history of pain and loss. She’s beautiful and you could tell that the artist and many others had fooled themselves that they could love her and that that love would be a good thing. But the longer you sit watching those haunted and haunting eyes, the more concepts like love and beauty drain away; all that’s left, if you look at that painting long enough, is the awareness of the hopelessness that eats at the human soul.
The curators bring that piece out only once every dozen years or so; something to do with anomalies in the medium and their exposure to light. It’s on display for six weeks and then brought back to its dark closet in the lower levels. I have a friend, an old guard named Franz Jester, who tells me whenever that painting is on display.
I sat there in front of the dead but still dangerous peasant girl, looking at her between bouts of reading and rereading the information I’d received on Paulie DeGeorges.
Whoever sent the pages on Paulie was probably a highly placed bureaucrat in some government office. There were six hazy black-and-white photographs of DeGeorges from his teen years up until near his current age, which was forty-three. Four of the pictures were taken by police photographers after an arrest. One picture was taken by a surveillance lens when Paulie was coming out of a restaurant on the Lower East Side. He was standing next to a platinum blonde who would have been beautiful if she could have just gotten the hatred out of her smile.
Paulie was naturally slender, even skinny, with randomly placed prominent bones about his face. He always wore a sports jacket and bow tie, even as a teenager, and he was pale and freckled. He was the kind of thief that stole your car and then offered to sell it back. Sometimes, oftentimes, he worked in collusion with the victim. He’d been arrested a dozen times and convicted four. Six and a half years in prison were behind him and he would definitely be sent up again; his last stint ended five weeks ago.
There were no violent offenses in his jacket. His stats told me that his hair was light brown and his eyes blue. His wife was named Violet Henrys. His mother, Bea Trammel, lived in a retirement home on the West Side about twelve blocks north of the Financial District.
No Violet Henrys in the phone book or on the smartphone Internet. No Bea Trammel either but there was a listing for the Oak Village Retirement Home on Hudson Street. There was a phone number but I didn’t see any reason to call.
It was a very modern, very nice place to die. The ground floor was surrounded by walls made of glass that allowed sun in at any time of day. To the right was a broad platform, a few feet lower than the entrance, where three or four dozen retirement home denizens sat and spoke, wandered and babbled, or simply stood staring out through the wall, or not. To my left was a wide counter behind which stood two women and one man. These attendants wore clothes that could have been civilian wear except for the fact that they were all cut from the same cloth and dyed the same unlikely color green. The women wore skirts and jackets of that color. The man was allowed to wear pants.
“May I help you?” he asked when I approached the desk.
“Ms. Bea Trammel.”
He tapped around on an electronic tablet until coming to a page of data.
“Yes,” he said, “are you a relative?”
“Bradford Littles,” I said. “I was her son’s fourth-grade math teacher. I ran into Paul quite by accident the other day and he told me that his mother was here. He was always in trouble and so his mother and I met pretty often. He said that she might like a visitor. I have a meeting not far from here this afternoon and thought I might see her.”