There were signs clearly indicating the stairs had recently been mopped, that pedestrians should be cautious, that the surface was slippery. The signs had graphics, too-the familiar yellow triangle accompanied by an exclamation point-“caution” it said. “Cuidado.” But Ann must have had her head in a book (a common occurrence, and a conclusion the police quickly reached). At the landing between the third and fourth floors lay a copy of John Donne’s sonnets. Next to the open book lay Ann Hoeppner, a gash in her forehead and her neck snapped. She wasn’t discovered until an hour after her fall. The death was ruled accidental after a cursory police investigation. Later, her estate was divided amongst her many family members-those same envious aunts, uncles, and cousins-as designated in her will.
But Ann Hoeppner’s death was no more accidental than Smoke’s. Her neck was snapped by a fall, but it didn’t happen the way the police wrote it up, didn’t happen because she had her nose buried in a book, didn’t happen because she failed to pay attention to the caution signs placed at each stairwell entrance. A professional assassin named Spilatro, one of Archie’s contract killers, performed the hit.
Like I said, bagmen use different methods to kill their marks, and Spilatro has a rare specialty: he makes his kills look like accidents. There has to be a direct line between this man’s specialty and the way Smoke just died. Has to be. And I’m willing to bet you can connect the dots from Ann’s file to Archie’s abduction to the note that summoned me out of hiding.
“According to this, Archie used Spilatro three other times. Let’s find those files and hustle out of here.”
We locate two of the three before a large man enters the office through the front door. I have my Glock up and pointed his way before he can step another inch into the room. He keeps his hands in his pockets and meets my stare with blank eyes.
“Who’re you?” he asks, his face unreadable.
“Nobody.”
“Well, Nobody, what’re you doing rifling through the boss’s stuff?”
“The boss is gone.”
He greets this news with the same disaffected expression. His eyes flit to Risina, but I won’t look her way.
“You gonna put that gun down?”
“No.”
He nods now, sniffs a few times. Despite his attempt to play it cool, I take the sniffs for what they are, a nervous tic.
“I think you and your lady friend best vacate.”
“I think you better watch your fucking mouth.”
Those words come from Risina, not me. Now I tilt my head around to look at her, and for the first time I see she has her pistol up too. I expect to see anxiousness on her face, but I see that she’s sporting a half smile instead. It’s unnerving for me; I have no doubt it’s unsettling for the man staring down the barrel.
Slowly, he takes his empty hands out of his pockets and shows them to her…
“I apologize, ma’am…” he’s saying, but she doesn’t let him finish, interrupting-
“My friend and I are going to find the last thing we came to find and then you’ll never see us again. Now you can do one of three things
… you can sit in the corner and watch us until we go, you can leave and never come back, or you can make a play and see what happens. It’s up to you.”
I’ll be damned if I don’t break into a smile. The big man looks at her one more time, back at me, and then makes his decision.
“Don’t shoot me in the back on the way out the door.”
“Get the hell out of here.” Risina waves at the exit with the barrel of her gun. The man takes a last look at us, then nods, turns, and doesn’t look back.
As soon as he’s gone, Risina blows out a deep breath, like a kettle holding the pressure at bay as long as it can before it finally releases steam. When I look over at her, she ignores me and resumes her search for the files. I can see her hands shaking as she sorts through the stack.
“You okay?” I offer.
“What do you think?” she answers flatly.
I know not to push it from there.
It takes another twenty minutes to find the final file. When we leave the aluminum factory, Smoke’s office is ablaze because, like I said, accidents don’t exist in this business.
We sit on opposite ends of a couch, our backs to the armrests, our feet intertwined, facing each other. A pizza box is open on the small, glass coffee table and Risina digs into her third slice. We’re in a two-bedroom suite in one of those corporate hotels that rent by the month to traveling executives. Smoke set us up before we got here, and I’m almost certain the information of where we’re living while we’re in Chicago died with him.
“It’s natural to be nervous,” I offer as Risina polishes off a pepperoni.
“I know it is.” Her response is matter-of-fact, as though she’s already chewed on her flaw for a bit and decided to approach it clinically. “I thought I did a fine job of keeping it under control.”
I agree, but I don’t say so. Instead, I ask, “But for how long?”
“As long as was needed.”
“And if he’d’ve rushed you instead of backing away? What would you have done?”
“He didn’t, so I don’t know.”
“Would you have pulled the trigger?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Because you need to already play it out in your head… decide what to do before it happens. You already have an analyst’s eye and you’re going to have to rely on that to see everything from all angles. Improvisation is a weapon too, but it’s dangerous. Planning is key.”
She starts to interrupt but I hold up a finger. “Planning doesn’t mean you have to know everything before you walk into a room, though it helps. Planning means that as a situation emerges, your brain needs to immediately start calculating, ‘if this, then that. If that, then this.’ Rapid fire, as soon as it’s happening.
“Take the guy today. He walks in unannounced, and you did the right thing, got your gun up and out and pointed in his direction before he could step a foot in the door. Put him on his heels and on the defense. It’s like a chess match, you have to always be thrusting forward, on the offensive. But you can’t just stop there; you can’t think linearly. Immediately, your brain needs to kick in with… ‘if he runs, I follow. If he pulls a gun, I shoot. If he bum-rushes, I shoot. If he wants to talk, I give him some rope.’ All of those decisions at once, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
“Now by the size of him, I figured he was some low-level muscle Archie kept around for protection, but since Smoke wasn’t there to tell us he was on the payroll, I wasn’t going to take any chances. You follow me?”
“I’d follow you anywhere,” she says with a mock-seductive intonation.
“It’s an expression. It means…”
“I know it’s an expression. I just like to see you worked up.”
“Goddam, Risina…”
“Awwww…” she tosses the pizza aside and reverses positions so her body falls on top of mine. “I’m just having some fun.”
Before I can protest, she cuts me off. “Kiss me.”
“What?”
“You’re warm. Kiss me. You can teach me how to act like a killer later.”
And like with the man who walked into Archie’s office, she doesn’t leave me with much of a choice.
The three remaining files fill in some gaps on Spilatro. When he employs a new contract killer, Archie likes to first flesh out the file with information on the assassin himself, and then additional facts and opinions are added to the dossier after the initial hit is complete. Archie’s sister Ruby once told me he put together a file on me, but I never asked for it, and he never gave it to me. Not that it really mattered. If it existed at one time, if it was in his office with all the others, it’s nothing but ashes now.
Spilatro came to Archie as a recommendation from a Brooklyn fence named Jeffrey “K-bomb” Kirschenbaum, a brilliant and feared player in the killing business, a man who wrote the book on how middlemen conduct their lives. Kirschenbaum grew up Jewish in the Bed-Stuy portion of the borough, which toughened him the way fire tempers steel. A gangly white kid in an all-black neighborhood, he had to learn to maneuver like an army strategist from the time he was in grade school, figure out how to manipulate opposing forces so he was never caught in the middle. Let the black kids have their turf wars and street fights. Deduce who was going to stand at the top of the hill, and make sure his allegiance fell in line. He was smart with numbers, but even better, he was smart with information, and a word here or a note there could swing a rivalry in a direction that most benefited “K-bomb.” He liked playing the role of the man behind the curtain, the puller of strings, and as an adult fresh from a short stint at CUNY, he found his way into the killing business, constructing a stable of assassins out of his old contacts from the neighborhood and running his new venture like a CEO. He pioneered the idea of doing the grunt work for his hit men, of not just accepting a fee and doling out assignments, but of following a mark, of putting together a dossier on the target’s life, of setting the table for his hired guns to make their hits. It was a real service operation, from top to bottom, soup to nuts. He provided each gunman with so much information, the shooter could plot myriad ways of killing his target while escaping cleanly. Consequently, a number of skilled assassins sought him out for their assignments, and his reputation grew. He treated his men fairly, and after thirty years, he remains a towering figure in the game.