Iggy picked up two tiny espresso demitasses and put them under the filter. There was something tentative, almost nervous about the gesture — two characteristics foreign to Iggy. He turned a knob on the machine then looked up. “Tiny Rockatansky crossed the border at Champlain an hour ago.”
Jimmy reached for the phone: the boys needed to know that Satan was coming to town.
Jimmy faced the big window, hands in pockets, head tilted to one side. On a good day he could see Upstate New York from here. Maybe even Vermont. Now the world stopped somewhere in the flickering image of Westmount below, an intermittent signal pulsing in the blizzard. The snow crippling the city looked like a Christmas movie effect, thick fist-sized clumps dropping from the sky that stuck to everything like baby shit to Russian sable. CNN was on the tube in flat-panel silence, the chryon stating that the whole East Coast was shut down. Wolf Blitzer was shaking his head as if driving over speed bumps, soundlessly professing doom and gloom and loss of life. Jimmy often wondered when — specifically — the pussification of society had started. People were afraid of a little fucking snow. It wasn’t like this was Aruba. And it was February. What did the sports fans expect?
It was all shut down, from New York up through Quebec, and it looked like the city of the dead. Chimneys burped pollution into the sky and a few cars did their best to thread their way through drifts and accidents. The handful of people who were out looked like astronauts, bundled up in coats that could be stuffed with pink fiberglass insulation. But for the most part, it looked as if a sniper warning had been issued.
The abandoned blizzard-painted cityscape held very little of his available attention; like the ticking of a clock, it was relegated to the status of background noise. Jimmy was too immersed in his regular function: outthinking the rest of the motherfuckers in the room. He had an almost preternatural ability in solving problems — it was this core competency, not nepotism, that had earned him his place in the ecosystem of his father’s business.
Jimmy turned away from the window, back to the men scattered around the living room. Iggy stood back in the kitchen, brewing coffee, where he could see everyone. Jimmy brought his focus to Harold in the chair by the fireplace. Harold saw the world through the single prism of legality. He was not good at creative thinking unless it involved fancy legal footwork. And a huge fucking invoice. He had been on retainer for Poppa for the better part of half a century. Very much one of the pillars of the old regime.
Harold sat perfectly poised in his suit — no doubt Brioni — balancing the delicate demitasse and saucer on the arm of the chair. “Through a friend in the DHS south of the border, we know that ten mil just went into a Caribbean account owned by Rockatansky.”
Jimmy nodded. Rockatansky’s contractual requirements were well known: half on signing, half on completion. Boilerplate and nonnegotiable. Which left him crossing the border to do a hit for twenty million dollars. A big pile of money. Poppa kind of money.
Marcus — one of his old-school captains — unfolded from the sofa and walked over to the window. “I got guys on every hotel in the city, from the Ritz-Carlton down to the Colibri. I have people checking out every apartment, loft, and room that has been rented out on the Internet in the past six weeks. Unless the guy’s sleeping on a bench, he has to turn up.”
Jimmy took his hands out of his pockets for this part. “Except nobody knows what he looks like. He drives through a border checkpoint and we don’t have a photograph. How is that even possible? This isn’t Keyser fucking Söze.” Jimmy looked around the room. Half a dozen men in here and not a single one he trusted. Including Harold.
Harold finished his espresso in one poised tilt of his head, wiped his mustache on a linen napkin, and pointed at Jimmy in a we-need-to-talk gesture. “No one has ever seen Rockatansky.”
Jimmy heard caution in Harold’s voice. When Jimmy was on his meds, his temper was pretty much under control. But when he was free-ranging it, his reaction-proportion meter could be pretty off; last fall he had put one of his Ferraris through the window of the dealership. He had taken it in three times to replace a piece of trim that kept falling off. On the third visit they had tried to charge him nine hundred and sixty-nine bucks, saying that it wasn’t covered by the bumper-to-bumper that came with the car. Jimmy smiled over the counter at the service manager, then pointed at the phone. “Call the police,” he said.
The service manager just stared at him.
“Nine one one. Tell them that a customer just put a million-dollar car through your window.”
The manager’s expression was still stuck on skeptical when Jimmy launched the Enzo through the wall of plate glass, scattering the salesmen and destroying two floor models.
Jimmy stepped out of his car onto a floor frosted with broken glass. What was left of the carbon fiber nose section was embedded two feet into the sheetrock at the back of the showroom. “Better get out your Price Reduced! stickers, asshole,” he said. The police arrived three minutes after Harold, by which point the dealership had decided not to press charges. They replaced his Ferrari. Free of charge.
And that had been over a car. This was a hit man hired to take out his father. The response had to be stepped up by orders of magnitude.
Jimmy spotted the Range Rover idling by the wall in the courtyard below, the wipers thumping away in a perfectly timed beat. The city was hidden in the blizzard and Tiny Rockatansky was hidden in the city. Planning bad things.
It was impossible to think of Rockatansky without getting melodramatic. People liked to say shit like, This guy is the deadliest assassin alive, or, That guy is the most notorious hit man who ever lived, but either allocation would be hyperbole.
Rockatansky was a monster because he loved what he did. With him it was never business, it was always personal, and that made him infinitely more frightening.
His resume was a who’s who of top-tier alpha male targets — from dictators in lost little banana republics to captains of industry and barons of crime. One of the tamer stories involved a former Dutch acquaintance — Mr. Van Dorman, the president of a shipping line — who stupidly refused to pay the second half on a job he had contracted. Rockatansky blew up the school where Van Dorman’s grandchildren went; three dozen five-year-olds lost their lives. The device was packed with leaflets stating Mr. Van Dorman should pay his bills to prevent bad things from happening. Six months later, his daughter and son were shot in their sleep. Four months after that, his wife was found dismembered in a parking lot, her driver and bodyguard burned alive in the trunk of the car. Two months on, Van Dorman was killed in his shower with an axe.
And that was just one story; there were plenty more.
Jimmy shook his head, thinking that if this wasn’t so fucking serious, it would be sad; a pair of hundred-year-old guys playing cat-and-mouse. Only the cat wasn’t playing. Which was sad on a whole new level.
“I’m thinking I want to pull this guy’s teeth out one at a time then piss in his mouth.”
“What’s first?” Harold asked.
Jimmy didn’t have to think about it. There was only one piece of information they were missing. “I want to know where that money came from.”
Harold was already shaking his head. “It’s not important who hired him, only that he’s here. What I sugg—”
“Fuck that.” Jimmy paused and dropped his volume. Not everything needed to be shared with these people. “Look, just find this guy. Put one in his stomach and bring him to me in a hockey bag.”
Harold smiled up at the roomful of stereotypes. “You heard the man, go find Rockatansky.”