“Okay. I’m calm. But I gotta bolt now—meeting at the casino. Call me later with the blow by blow.”
I can hear the scrabble as Zeb sits up in his seat.
“Come on, Danny boy. You got time for this. Might be the last story you’ll ever hear.”
“Tell you what, leave it on the machine and I’ll play it back later.”
I’ve oversold it.
“Screw you, Danny. Goddamn meetings, my ass. You had me going for a second, but I’ll take pity on you. Old Lady Madden went skiing, can you fucking believe that?”
I presume this is a rhetorical question but Zeb waits for an answer.
“No, I cannot believe that,” I say deliberately.
“Well, believe it, Irish. This old lady strapped on her skis and struck out across the veld.”
“Veld. Field. That’s not Hebrew is it?”
“If you know what it ain’t, then why interrupt? It’s like you hate me.”
If there is something more exhausting than a conversation with Dr. Zebulon Kronski then I will shoot myself in the face before attempting it.
“Now it’s not downhill skiing, I’m not saying that, the woman was eighty-five for Christ’s sake, but she takes herself and her dog across the field to see her older sister.” Zeb giggles gleefully. “Older sister. You Irish people are made of volcanic material or some shit.”
“Get on with it.”
“There’s a storm brewing. Big smokestack clouds sitting on the hills, so Ma Madden decides to take a shortcut. A fateful decision, as it turns out.”
I gotta sit through this performance. No choice.
Fateful and smokestacks, fuck me.
“She clambers over a stile, which it took me a while to find out what the hell a stile was, let me tell you. So the old gal is Forrest Gumping over this ditch with her ski pole up in the air when an honest-to-God bolt of lightning hits the pole and blows Ma Madden clear into the afterlife. A bolt of motherfucking lightning.”
A bolt of motherfucking lightning. And there we have our weather reference, with apologies to Elmore.
“You gotta be kidding me?” I ask, totally non-rhetorical. I really want to know if Zeb is shining me on. He does this kind of shit all the time and nothing is off-limits. Last year, in the middle of my own hair transplant procedure, he told me I had skull cancer. Kept it up for three solid hours.
“I kid thee not, Dan. Boiled her eyeballs right in the sockets. One in a million.”
This is bad news. The worst. Mike never struck me as a guy with shares in the forgive and forget business.
“Maybe Mike is a bigger man than we think,” I say, totally grasping. “Maybe he realizes that the club is a good earner and he’s gonna let that thing we had slide.”
Zeb chuckles. “Yeah? And maybe if my Uncle Mort had a pussy I’d snort cocaine off his ass and hump him. No way is Mike letting anything slide.”
Uncle Mort and I have clinked glasses a couple of times, so now Zeb is responsible for yet another grotesque mental image that I will have to repress.
I feel that sudden icy terror in my gut that you get when you’ve accidentally forwarded an e-mail about a grade-A asshole to the grade-A asshole.
“Zeb, tell me bereaved Mike is not sitting opposite you listening to you blather on about his poor, recently deceased mother.”
“’Course not,” says Zeb. “I ain’t a total moron.”
“So how do you know he ain’t letting anything slide?”
“I know this,” says Zeb, calm as you like, “because Mike sent one of his shamrock shmendriks over to pick me up. I’m in the backseat being chauffeured over to the Brass Ring right now.”
“I better get over there,” I say, picking up my pace.
“That’s what the shmendrik said,” says Zeb and hangs up.
I am sincerely worried that my watchdog, Corporal Tommy Fletcher, has gone operational and wired this old lady up to a car battery. Violence never bothered him much even though his Facebook profile describes him as a loveable teddy bear. I would go so far as to say that some of Tommy’s more memorable wisecracks were inspired by moments of extreme violence. An example being one particular night in the Lebanon a few decades back when Tommy and I were Irish army peacekeepers trapped on a muddy rooftop with our colonel between a lookout tower and a bunker, listening to Hezbollah mortar shells whistling overhead. I was swearing to Christ I could hear the tune of “Jealous Guy” in the whistles and thinking to myself, Mud? There’s not supposed to be mud in the Middle East.
But the mud wasn’t the major gripe. Worse than that slick paste, or even the incoming fire, was the fear of death coming off the three-man watch in waves and how it manifested itself in our leader. The colonel who had been green enough to accompany his boys on watch rationalized that he wasn’t even supposed to be there and therefore he couldn’t possibly die.
Don’t these stupid bastards understand? he repeated in a voice that grew increasingly shrill. I only came out to show a little solidarity, for God’s sake. They can’t kill a man for that.
The colonel was right, the Hezbollah didn’t kill him, they just took one eye and one ear, which prompted one of Tommy’s immortal quotes in the billet a couple of hours later: Typical officer. Get on his bad side and he can’t hear nothing, can’t see nothing.
Oscar Wilde had nothing on Corporal Thomas Fletcher when it came to sound bites.
I decide to jog across to the Brass Ring. Downtown Cloisters is only a few square blocks, and a cab would have to follow the mayor’s new one-way system, which seems designed to transform honest citizens into raving psychopaths on their daily commute. Anyway, the run gives me a chance to clear my head, even though a shambling ape-man in a leather jacket is bound to draw what the hell was that looks from people who for a split second are convinced that they’re about to be mugged.
Guys my size are not really supposed to move fast unless we’re in a cage match, and usually I take it nice and nonthreatening among the be-Starbucked civilians, but today is a quasi-emergency, so I pound the pavement over to the Brass Ring. I say quasi because I’m reasonably sure Mike is not gonna do anything violent in his own joint, plus if he wanted to kill me, Zeb would hardly be afforded the opportunity to give me the heads-up.
Mike knows all about my specialized skill set, as another tall Irishman might say, and he has a proposition for me. I just bet that fat faux Mick has been planning his delivery.
You see, laddie. I’m a businessman. And what we got here is a business opportunity.
Except he says opera-toonity. For some reason he can’t pronounce the word right and I wouldn’t mind but he works it into every second sentence. Irish Mike Madden says opera-toonity more than the Pope says Jesus. And the Pope says Jesus a lot, especially when people sneak up on him.
Little things like that really get to me. I can take a straight sock to the jaw, but someone tapping his nails on a table or repeatedly mispronouncing a word drives me crazy. I once slapped a coffee out of a guy’s hand on the subway because he was breathing into the cup before every sip. It was like sitting beside Darth Vader on his break. And I’ll tell you something else: three people applauded.
It’s about half a mile over flat terrain to the Brass Ring, so I’m nice and loosened up by the time I get there. I don’t think I’m gonna have to crack any skulls, but it never hurts to have the kinks worked out. A person can’t just spring into action anymore once he gets past the forty mark. Once upon a time I could hump my sixty-pound backpack down twenty miles of Middle Eastern dust road; now I get short of breath putting out the garbage. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I can put out the garbage just fine but I was trying to make a point. Ain’t none of us as young as we used to be except for the dead. They ain’t getting any older. And I might be joining their ranks if I don’t focus the hell up and stop drifting off on these mind tangents.