Or you could hear it if you were off by yourself like this. Just you and the crooked money man.
“Kit, come on.” Leo’s expression turned smutty. “You’re looking at me like I’m one of those wise guys from the Human Sexual Response.”
“I need to talk to you.”
He touched his neck. Shamed again by his voice, blinking across the cluttered pit, he noticed the surrounding factories. Sweatshops from the turn of the century, they loomed on three sides. Blunt places, efficient.
“Anyway,” Leo was saying, “I got what you want.”
“I don’t want it any more.”
“He-ey.” Leo kept his head down, fishing under his coat for a pants pocket. “Kit, at least wait’ll you see it.”
“I don’t want it, that’s what I came to tell you, I can’t take it. You can’t trick me into taking it.”
Leo brought out the cash, a thick fold in a money clip. A Nutshell Library of his own.
“You can’t trick me, Leo. I know what’s going on. After this I’m going right over to the office to explain.”
“Trick you? Kit, kid, lighten up.” Leo waggled the clip beside his broad face. “You call this a trick?”
Leo had the fistful of hardpacked cash, and all Kit had was this flyaway rush of words. “It’s — I call it a mistake, Leo. It’s the same mistake I made just last week, the same all over. I have to figure out why it happened.”
“What? What are you talking about? Kit, you don’t mind my saying so, you’re sounding kind of nutty these days.”
Kit frowned. “Garrison already tried that one, Leo.”
“Garrison, ayy. Guy like that, Kit, you’re lucky we got him to talk to you at all. He had his way, he’d rip you open and pull you out from inside.”
Still the old man smiled, holding the cash in one relaxed hand. All Kit could think was—we.
“But it’s not just a gorilla like him, says you’re sounding nutty. You should’ve heard my daughter last night. She needed some money, you should’ve heard her talking.”
To Kit, even the site’s TV-sized workmen seemed part of that we. They seemed there just to whisper about him.
“She was counting on that next paycheck, Kit. You’re no friend of hers, man. No friend of that girl.”
She needed the paycheck? But Kit had told her … “She asked you for money, Leo?”
“Yeah, she asked. What, that surprise you?”
Kit shook his head, or tried to. Just what were they talking about? Garrison, Zia?
“Kit, come on. What’s your big news?” Now Leo held the cash at his belly. “What, you expect some kind of wrestlemania here? Let it all hang out? Hey, I’ll let it all hang out.”
“Leo, I, I told you …”
“You want to know how my daughter fits into this, Kit? ‘Zia,’ huh. Hey, I didn’t set that girl up down there just so she could write about her faggot friends.”
In the surrounding factories, glare filled the windows. The winter sun in Boston: it hurt the eyes but gave no heat.
“I told that girl myself, Kit. Last night I told her. She was all excited about Esquire, I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about you and your sick faggot friends.’ I mean, her brothers, they listen to me. They understand how a man does business.”
Kit straightened his spine. “Leo, they’re not the only ones. Your sons.”
“Oh yeah? Kit, you think you know about my business?”
“I know about Sea Level, what it means for you. It’s about cash, isn’t it, Leo. A cash business, that’s what you wanted. And not for taking down to Surinam either.”
“Surinam.” The old man had never quite lost his smile, and now it came on strong again. “The scams I can play off that Surinam. It’s as good as Pozzuoli after the war.”
“Don’t change the subject. Don’t try to trick me. The cash is for right here in Boston, isn’t it.”
It was a child’s smile, Little Leo knows a secret. The man flipped and caught his money clip.
“I’m sure Forbes Croftall gets his share, for instance.”
“Ahh, Croftall.” He waved the money as if shooing a fly. “That guy never needed me to help him find trouble.”
Kit had been bracing for hardball. In one coat pocket he’d made a fist and in the other — since the gun was in the way — he’d gotten a grip on the stock and trigger.
“You’re, you’re not denying you’ve done business with Senator Croftall?”
Leo snorted. “Kit, kid. If you’re going to finger me in front of that Grand Jury, don’t do it just because I know Croftall and I carry a lot of cash. I mean, at least get me for something juicy.”
Kit had his hands out of his pockets, clasping and unclasping them against the cold.
“At least Kit, huh. Let’s think about your home, there.”
“My home?”
“It’s a nice little place, I hear. Nice Cambridge place for you and the wife. Nice wood.”
Kit couldn’t be sure of the singing in his ears. Nerves? Or the wind along the lip of the dark lower site?
“Nice old wood,” Leo went on. “Old, old, dry wood.”
Now it was nerves. “What?”
“Place like that, wood can get very dry. Downcellar out of the weather, it gets dry like a newspaper. Just like one of your old newspapers, Kit.”
The old man changed the angle of his chin. “That old wood.”
“Leo, I don’t believe this.”
“And that’s everything you own, there, right? Everything you care about’s up on the second story, there.”
“You know,” Kit said, “generally speaking, people don’t try frighten other people unless they’re—”
“Frighten you? Frighten you, I’m trying to help you.” Leo tapped his cash against Kit’s tightened chest. “Kit, stay with me here. Remember what I’m trying to tell you, here. I’m saying, you’re going to go after me in that Grand Jury, at least get me for something juicy.”
Kit backed away from the tapping, the grinning. He stumbled on the corrugated lip of the lower site’s dam; he tried to get Leo to admit he’d been talking about arson.
“Hey. You think it’s that simple, Kit? Just one word, the right word? One word, and you’ve got the old man at last?”
Kit steadied himself. “Skip it. I said what I came here to say.”
“If I were you, Kit, I’d be worried about this. About how nutty you’ve been, trying to get the old man.”
“Keep your money, Leo. I’ll find my own way out.”
“Bullshit. Bullshit, asshole. You’re going nowhere.”
Across the work site, the hardhats didn’t look quite human. Faceless over the heavy equipment, rodent-like amid plumbing and cable, they whispered together.
“You’re going nowhere till I say so, and same with the Grand Jury. That Grand Jury, ayy. You’re going to walk into a room where everybody knows your worst secret.”
Turning from the workmen, frowning down into the dig, Kit was aware of the heat in his hands. In his fists, in his pockets.
“Kit, I already gave them the note from yesterday. The note where you asked for the money.”
“Leo — no more tricks. I’m going to stop you.”
“You’re going to stop me?” The old man’s smile was his worst yet. “What’re you talking, the Crimefighter’s Code?”
“That note I left, it doesn’t matter. What you know about Sea Level, that doesn’t matter.”
“Kit, I know it all. Got my daughter right down there under my desk all this time, her and you and her junkie bitch friends across the hall too. Nothing I don’t know, Kit.”
“It doesn’t matter. Leo, when it’s just you against me, people will know the difference.”
“Got her right down there. Protecting my investment.”