He nodded to the M-16 pointed at my back.
The Mafia mentality was medieval but it had some logic. Better to know I was someone, even the man I denied being, than to deal with a phantom, especially a phantom who might take a much more unpleasant shape than that of a corpse.
With the automatic rifle at my back I was marched to the billiard room. The other Raki Senevres pushed the pool tables to the side, a job that would have taken me a block and tackle. I looked at my watch as I removed it. The time was 12:30. I’d be cold by the time Hawk arrived.
Senevres and I stripped down to rolled up pants and bare feet. It’s fair to say that I am a muscular, well-proportioned man, but I looked small. The Turk was an ape. Hairy platforms of muscle sloped up from his shoulders to his neck. His stomach was broad but without a wrinkle of fat, and his curled fingers hung to his knees. Just in case I thought I might have an advantage in speed, he turned a warmup cartwheel and flipped from his hands to his feet.
King looked pleased.
“Gentlemen, this is Turkish greased wrestling. Our competitors, both of whom happened to be called Raki Senevres, will be covered in olive oil. There will be one fall. A fall is scored, according to Turkish rules, by picking your opponent up and carrying him three steps, or by flipping him completely over, or by dragging him face down by his feet. You can do this to him before or after he is dead. There are no other rules. The winner will receive $100,000,” he said to Senevres. “And the loser will simply be the loser,” he said to me.
Cans of cooking oil were punched and poured over our heads. As the slick ooze spread over my skin, I heard the betting action among the chiefs. I was 100 to one, what you might call a longshot.
“Shall we begin,” King waved us to the cleared center of the room. I mimicked the Turk’s loping, athletic approach. There was no point in appearing completely ignorant of the Turkish national sport. Every Turk was a fan and every Turkish man learned the rudiments in the Turkish Army.
“Allah, Allah, there is no god but Allah.” Senevres and I stepped toward each other, each singing the ancient battle cry. Our bodies glistened with oil. The heavy muscles of Senevres’s chest expanded like a bronzed balloon. His skull had the glow of a new bullet. He meant to kill me as quickly and efficiently as possible, but there was ritual to go through first
Senevres and I crossed each other’s path, embraced, and slapped each other on the thigh. The traditional start looks like pure friendliness. What it is is a ritualized search for hidden weapons.
“They both seem to know what they’re doing,” the Boston chief said.
King replied in Italian, and the audience laughed. Loosely translated, he’d said, “the pig is on his back.” A pig is only put on his back to be castrated or slaughtered, and he was talking about me.
The Turk punched my shoulder with the heel of his hand, and I rocked back. I retaliated, and his shoulder moved less than an inch. This was the last part of the rite, testing the opponent’s strength. The Turk’s confidence grew. He grabbed my arms in his hands and bulled me at will from one billiard table to another. I spread my arms and disengaged, then I tried the same bullying tactic. My fingers wouldn’t even reach around his biceps. My hands slipped off his oiled skin futilely.
The Turk grunted and stepped back. Tradition had been satisfied. Now the slaughter would begin.
Crouching, our hands out, the Turk and I locked, heads and shoulders meeting. He feinted a shove to one side, shoved to the other, but I kept my balance. He disengaged and slapped my face to the side, raking my forehead with his nails and sliding to the floor at the same time for a leg tackle. I pulled my leg away and elbowed his kidney as he went by. His hand caught my belt and swung me down on the floor like a sack, but my head had rolled out of the way when the edge of his hand slashed at my throat. We both got to our feet warily. He was a little surprised that his work wasn’t over, and I was thinking that in hand-to-hand combat, the Turk was one of the strongest opponents I’d ever met.
He moved forward with his big hands out again, but, as soon as we engaged, his shaven head shot forward like a cannonball. He held onto my arms and butted again and again. His skull was as thick as armor plate. I ducked, but he’d opened up cuts, and the blood ran into my eyes, blinding me. His head came through my reddened vision like a concrete fist. I rolled back with his momentum and kicked him off. He landed on his feet like an acrobat, laughing, and waiting briefly.
I wiped my blood off on his shirt, which changed his humor. He bounced forward again.
At the top of one of his bounces, I made a bounce of my own, flying with both feet high. My heel exploded onto his nose, snapping the cartilage from the bone. He dropped onto his back and rolled away. I’d missed. He’d already been pulling away when I hit, proof of unusual reflexes and body control in a big man. Otherwise, the bones of his nose would have been broken, too, and shoved up into his brain. He blew a crimson stream from his nose and moved towards me again, not the least bothered by the trail of blood he left. I wiped the blood from my forehead and met him.
I ducked the straightened fingers that jabbed at my eyes. My fingers, straightened in the same fatal karate form, shot at the Turk’s solar plexus. He caught my wrist in mid-air. Wheeling with all his weight, he swung me around and off the floor up to his shoulder. He began walking the three steps that would give him victory. I brought the palms of my hands together on his ears in a deadly clap. Cerebral hemorrhage should have killed him instantly, and I tensed for his collapse. Instead, the Turk screamed with pain and threw me over the audience. I hit a wall and landed half-in and half-out of a trophy vase. I was covered with small cuts.
The Turk, howling in agony, bled dark blood from his ears and mouth. He tore through the Mafiosos and grabbed my hair. I felt dizzy and helpless, vaguely aware that I was traveling through the air again. I smashed head first through a rack of cues. I rolled desperately as soon as I hit the floor, moving underneath billiard tables on my elbows and knees. The Turk cursed in frustration. I stood up in front of the room’s bulletproof picture window, and at once he pushed one of the billiard tables at me. I jumped to one side and the table caved through the glass into the dark night. The temperature of the room began dropping.
The Mafiosos were getting cold and frightened. They’d come for entertainment. Now they found themselves in a room splattered with blood and glass. Not just in front of them, but all around the room, the huge Turk raged after me. When he caught me we fought at close quarters with butts, elbows, and fists. I landed first every time but once, and then his knuckles nearly broke through my rib cage. I backed off gasping for air and threw an arm chair at him. He ducked, while the Mafiosos scattered. When the Turk lunged forward, I knocked his arm up, locked his wrist back and started forcing him onto his knees. As if he were snatching an insect, he grabbed my neck with his free hand and pulled his wrist out from my grasp. Air rushed from my throat as the Turk squeezed. The muscles of his shoulders and arms swelled with the pleasure of murder. My vision was already pink with blood. Now it became splotched from the lack of oxygen reaching my brain. King and the other Mafiosos were shouting encouragement to the Turk. The sound rose and fell with my pulse.
My hands, locked together in one fist, slammed up on the Turk’s jaw, once, twice, three times. The vise on my throat loosened. I hooked into his exposed gut, knocking some of the air from his lungs and out his bloodied mouth and nose. With one knuckle out, I punched his sternum, a blow hard and precise enough to stop another man’s heart, enough to make the Turk’s skip a beat. I hooked into him again, first into his abdomen and then into his ear.