Screwed: A Novel

  “Because opera-toonities like this don’t come along every day.”

  Aaaargh. I gotta cut this off. I gotta speak.

  “Mike, let me ask you a question.”

  In Mike’s head he’s already two paragraphs further into his monologue, so this catches his breath in his throat. I plow ahead before he can find another excuse to say opera-toonity.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Mike squints his little beady eyes and for a moment they disappear entirely in his broken-vein face. “What are any of us doing here, Daniel?”

  “No. I mean what are you doing here? In Cloisters. New Jersey is an Italian state. There are no Irish gangs in Jersey. You’re like a boil on a supermodel’s ass, Mike. You do not belong.”

  Mike’s chair squeaks when he leans back and I get to take in his entire corpulent frame, which five years ago might have been fearsome. All I see now is an aging hard drinker squashed into an expensive suit, which he is sweating the class out of. He’s still got strength, but if he uses too much of it he could have a cardiac. In my uneducated opinion, Mike has got five years tops before the bacon grease pops his heart. Maybe I could have accelerated that process just by leaving Zeb in the room.

  “The Italians don’t want to fuck with me,” he says finally, actually answering my question, if not truthfully. “We’re a quiet little burg, laddie, and it wouldn’t be worth the bloodshed.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I say, offhand, implying that Mike would indeed inflict a lot of damage on an Italian crew.

  Now this simple comment might seem at odds with all the argumentative junk I’ve been spouting, but I have a method. Back when I was in between tours in the Middle East with the Irish army, my appointed shrink, Dr. Simon Moriarty, gave me a few tips to try and deal with the authority issues I’d been having. I can see him now, stretched out on the office couch that I should have been lying on, smoking a thick cigar and tapping the ash into a mug balanced on his Ramones T-shirt.

  You see, Dan. Your average boss man bullied his way to the top, so deep down he doesn’t think he deserves to be there. So, first you give him a few well-constructed insults, just to show you got the smarts. Then, when he’s feeling good and intimidated, start drip feeding compliments. A fortnight of flimflam like that and he’ll be eating out of your hands.

  I don’t have a couple of weeks, so I’ll have to trust that Zeb laid the insult groundwork.

  “Nah, the Italians ain’t coming in here,” continued Mike, straightening his flat cap in a manner presumably meant to convey his hard-line attitude toward Italian gangsters. “It’s like that Spartan thing. They can’t fit too many in here all at once and we can knock down SpaghettiOs all day.”

  SpaghettiOs. Nice.

  “You certainly got the men,” I say, setting up another insult with a compliment.

  Mike’s men flex their muscles, making their jackets squeak. “Then again I did beat the crap out of most of these guys on my lonesome, twice, while injured, a few months back. I could probably take four or five of them now, if I have to.”

  Mike is ready for that. “Oh, no, laddie. We ain’t getting suckered again. Calvin has a red dot painted on your skull right now.”

  And not in the Buddhist sense, I’m guessing.

  Calvin. I remember him. Young guy, all up on his police procedures. Says stuff like trace evidence and DNA typing with a straight face. Mike adores him. Moved the kid right up to number two last year. Suddenly I swear I can feel the laser dot on the back of my head.

  “Okay, so let’s cut to the chase. What am I doing here?”

  “You mean metaphysically?” says Mike, proving that people can always surprise you.

  “No. I mean, why am I sitting here in your new clubhouse when I should be in mine working on the refurb so you can up your rates?”

  “You’re here because I owe you a killing. You set my whole operation back months. Hell, laddie, you put my lieutenant in the ground. You saw the opera-toonity to hurt me and you took that op—”

  I can’t take it. Damn my impetuous nature. “Hold on there a second, laddie. You think I wanted to put your guy down? You think that doesn’t keep me awake? I gave him every chance to walk away, but no, your fuckwit of a lieutenant attacked me with a spike and I defended myself. I saw an opera-toonity to survive and I took it.”

  Calvin sniggers and immediately apologizes.

  “Sorry, Mike. He said that word. You know, the one you say, the way you say it.”

  Mike is upset that this entire conversation is not rolling out the way he expected.

  “What word, Calvin? What fucking word would that be?”

  I save Calvin’s ass. “You’re a bully, Mike, you know that? Always trying to make excuses for your bullshit. You’re gonna kill me and burn down my club unless I do something for you, right? So just tell me what the something is.”

  I have obviously abandoned my psychological tactics at this point. I didn’t last too long. Premature exasperation.

  “Maybe I’m just gonna kill you,” says Mike, peeved at being predictable. “You ever think of that?”

  “No, Mike. Because if you wanted me dead, then four or five of your guys would be in the hospital and I’d have a flesh wound. Maybe.”

  This comment sends us sailing past Mike’s shit limit and he closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, we are in the presence of Dark Mike. Mike the Merciless. This guy has shed the veneer of civilization like a snake sheds its dead skin. Irish Mike is carrying the race memories of bloody revolution, prison protest and back-alley shankings around inside him and a few decades in New Jersey making the occasional pilgrimage to a Broadway show is not gonna wipe those away for long.

  “Okay, you know what? Fuck you, Dan. Fuck you. I am getting a fucking migraine listening to your fucking shit.”

  That’s a lotta fucks all of a sudden. When I was a doorman full-time, I developed a theory that stated that there was a definite correlation between the amount of fucks in a sentence and the imminence of the fuck-utterer taking a swing.

  Four fucks, and you took your hands out of your pockets.

  The room seems to heat up. Mike’s boys lean inward like tall flowers attracted to the sun. They sense that the time to earn their salaries could be at hand.

  “Here’s the situation, okay?” says Mike, spit flecking his lips. “I own this town and you fucking owe me, McEvoy. Whatever way you want to dress it up. So, there are two ways for you to get yourself out of the hole. Either Calvin plugs you in the head right now and I have to Clorox the floor, or I need a dummy to deliver a package to a guy called Shea in Soho, who can be a little touchy. That’s it. Two choices. A or B, no option C. Oh, actually, wait. There is an option C. Option C is Calvin shoots you in the balls first, then shoots you in the head.”

  Option B sounds less immediately terminal than the others. Seems too easy though: Deliver a package to a guy who can be a little touchy?

  A little touchy. I bet that’s the understatement of the century.

  This is bullshit.

  Mike is probably setting me up as the biggest fall guy in history. I could end up looking dumber than those Trojan guys who towed a hollow wooden horse into their until recently besieged city, gave the sentries a night off and had themselves a drunken orgy. On the plus side I probably wouldn’t stay dumb for long as a swift death would surely be hot on the tail of the dawning dumbness.

  “No, Mike. Screw that. I’ll take my chances right now. Why don’t we do a death match scenario kind of thing? I’ll take your boys two at a time.”

  Mike reaches into his pocket and pulls out a baggie of cocaine, which he pours onto his palm and licks right off there, like a donkey chowing down on sugar.

  “I gotta have something to take the edge off,” he says after a minute of zone-out. “Otherwise, laddie. I would just kill you and fuck it. You think I don’t know you’re crapping bullets? You can give me lip until Judgment Day, but the truth is you’re scared and that’s a sm
art way to feel right now.”

  Shit. Cocaine seems to have smartened Mike up.

  “Yeah, I’m scared, but I ain’t jumping outta this frying pan to put out your fire. I need more details. What’s in the package? How do I know this Shea guy won’t shoot me on the spot?”

  “I could deliver the package, Mr. Madden,” says Calvin, eager to claw his way back up the popularity ladder after the opera-toonity giggle.

  Mike rubs his eyes with stubby thumbs. “No, Calvin. You’re my guy and I need you here. Shea is a live wire, so I need a peacekeeper.” He looks at me. “You’re a peacekeeper, ain’t you, McEvoy?”

  Mike pulls an envelope from the drawer, takes out its contents and fans the sheaf on the table.

  “Bearer bonds, McEvoy. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. These are better than cash. I owe this guy Shea, and this is how he wants to be paid. These little bastards are fifty years old and have seen more blood than the Bay of Pigs, and yet they are squeaky clean and easier to transport than money. I want you to take these bonds and deliver them to Mr. Shea at this SoHo hotel in the middle of the day. Simple as that. You do this one thing without any more of your wiseass bullshit and I will consider you twenty-five percent outta the hole.”

  “Twenty-five percent, bullshit,” I say. “Make it fifty.”

  “Sure,” says Mike with a curling grin. “Fuck it, fifty.”

  Damn, I got played by Mike Madden.

  “And what if I turn down your offer?”

  “You know what.”

  “Tell me. Spell it out, we ain’t got no wires in here, do we?”

  Mike licks the wrinkles in his palm and I see for the first time that the man is honestly grieving, in his own twisted way. When some guys are feeling blue they can’t feel better until everyone else feels worse.

  “If you don’t do this for me I’m gonna do something to you, or that nutcase Sofia that you got under your wing, or maybe that partner of yours. I don’t know. Something. I can’t really think about it now, but it will be totally out of proportion, violence-wise, to what you are owed. Nothing is more certain except those bearer bonds.” Mike’s pupils focus to pinholes. “So you guard those bonds like your life depended on it.”

  Which of course it does.

  He doesn’t need to say it, I can infer.

  CHAPTER 2

  MY DAY JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT MORE COMPLICATED AND I can’t help feeling that a large percentage of that is down to the poison chalice of friendship with Dr. Zebulon Kronski. But my own mouth has gotta shoulder some responsibility too. Every time I have a face-to-face with Mike, I find myself back talking and slinging zingers. When I get too anxious it’s like my mouth runs independently of my mind, which is shriveling like a cut of meat on a hot rock. Simon Moriarty, my sometime shrink, commented on this tendency during one of our sessions when I’d made a stab at humor to gloss over my shell shock.

  “You have two problems, Sergeant McEvoy.” He told me as I stood by the window looking out over the quad.

  “Only two,” I remember saying. “We are getting somewhere.”

  “You see that’s one of your problems right there. All the chatter. The verbal diarrhea.”

  “Verbal diarrhea gives me the shits,” my mouth said.

  Simon clapped his hands. “There it is again. The technical name for this tic is denial. You use it as a coping mechanism.”

  “Denial. That word is too complicated for a lowly sergeant, Doctor.”

  “Once upon a time you were vaguely amusing, but now you’re wasting your own time.”

  I relented. “Okay, Simon. Tell me.”

  “Denial is a classic defense mechanism. It protects the ego from things that the individual cannot cope with. So the patient will basically refuse to believe that he is experiencing stress, and I imagine you crack wise in any stressful situation without even realizing it. The more dangerous the situation, the more smart-assed you get.”

  I mulled this over. It was undeniably true that I often shot off my mouth and hit myself in the foot. I had thought this was bravado, something for other people to grudgingly admire.

  Something occurred to me. “Hey, Doc. You said I had a second problem?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You planning on telling me?”

  Simon scooted to the window on his office chair and lit a cheroot, blowing the smoke outside.

  “Your second problem is that you’re not very funny, and the only way people are going to tolerate a smart-ass is if he’s amusing.”

  This wounded me. I had always quietly thought myself reasonably witty.

  Zeb is in the corridor begging Manny to hit him in the stomach.

  “Come on, man, punch me,” he urges, yanking up his shirttails to reveal a stomach with about as much definition as a bag of milk. “Just do it. I’ve been working out with the Zoom Overmaster Trainer to the Stars DVDs. You couldn’t hurt me if you tried. These abs are like rocks.”

  I can see Manny Booker’s brain going into meltdown. People do not usually ask to be assaulted, and yet hurting people is what he is employed to do. I put them both out of their misery by jabbing Zeb in the solar plexus on my way past. He collapses in a breathless ball and I can’t say that I don’t grin a little.

  “You should ask for a refund on those DVDs, Zeb,” I say, still walking, which must look pretty cool if anyone’s filming.

  I’m tempted to stop and watch Zeb writhe on the carpet, but it’s enough that I can hear him retch.

  I am two blocks away before he draws level with me in his Prius. Someone told Zeb that Leonardo drives a Prius and that was it.

  “What the fuck, Irish? You are testing our friendship.”

  I keep walking. You can’t enter into a debate with Zeb Kronski or it will drive you demented. All the same, I can’t help thinking what I would reply.

  I’m testing our friendship? Me? Because of you I’m delivering a mystery envelope to a touchy guy in SoHo. Because of you I am involved, yet again, in a life-or-death situation. The life being mine and also probably the death.

  “I thought we were a team, Dan. Semper fi, bro.”

  Semper fi, my Irish arse. He was a medic with the Israeli army, I was a peacekeeper for the UN. Not a Marine between us.

  I stride down the block and he cruises alongside like a john.

  “Is this about Mike’s old lady? Okay, I was getting in good there, man, but at a later date I was gonna bring you in to lay some emerald pipe. I was doing it for both of us.”

  I grit my teeth. Really? Both of us? So how come I’ve got this envelope in my pocket and you’re off to inject Jersey housewives’ faces with cheap Chinese filler? Doesn’t seem fair.

  Zeb lights a fat cigar and fills the Toyota’s interior with blue smoke. “I was thinking long term. I shoot Mike’s bitches up for a couple of years and then we’re golden. How was I to know Mrs. Madden would get herself electro-fuckin’-cuted?”

  A couple more blocks, then I’m at the casino and Zeb will find himself barred from Slotz.

  “I can’t believe you hit me,” says Zeb, who never could stay penitent for long. “I thought you were my bobeshi.”

  I am starting to believe that Zeb comes out with these incredibly dense statements just to trick me into engaging. If it is a ploy, it works every time.

  I take two rapid steps to the Prius’s window. “You can’t believe I hit you?” I shout, drawing looks from the clusters of midmorning cigarette-break employees on the sidewalk. “You were begging to be hit. You lifted up your shirt, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I wasn’t begging to be hit by you,” argues Zeb. “That other guy was a jelly roll. My abs coulda taken a shot from him.”

  I change tack. “And bobeshi?” I say, slapping the Toyota with my palm. “Really?”

  “Hey,” says Zeb. “Take it easy on the car. Have you got something against the environment?”

  “I’m a feckin’ Irish Catholic and even I know bobeshi means grandmother. I’m your grandmo
ther now?”

  Zeb is unrepentant. “Patients like the Yiddish, so I throw it in every now and then. Makes me seem wise or some shit. I was just going for the family vibe, like we’re brothers. I’m more of a Hebrew guy to be honest, Dan. Is that what this whole sulk is about? I don’t know Yiddish?”

  It’s a goddamn maze arguing with this guy. Like trying to hold onto an eel, if you’ll excuse me mangling my metaphors.

  I rest on the car for a moment, feeling it thrumming gently through my forehead, then I straighten.

  “Okay. Go home, Zeb.”

  “Are we good?”

  “Yeah. Golden. Whatever. Just forget it.”

  Zeb flicks ash onto the asphalt. “What about my accent?”

  I’m beaten now, he knows it. “Your accent?”

  “You said my Irish accent was bad. I worked on that, man. I watched Far and Away twice.” He screws up his face for a Tom Cruise impersonation. “You’re a corker, Shannon,” he lilts. “What a corker you are.”

  I feel like heaving on the sidewalk. I could be dead by nightfall and this dick is nursing a bruised ego.

  “That’s good,” I say for peace sake. “Uncanny.”

  Zeb’s eyes find the middle distance. “I coulda played the shit out of that role.”

  “Maybe they’ll do a reboot,” I say.

  I know this term because Zeb and I spend a lot of our free time, as two single middle-aged bucks, watching TV. How cool and edgy is that? Most of our references are pop culture and our favorites at the moment are old episodes of the egregiously canceled shows Terriers and Deadwood.

  Whores get fuckin’.

  Classic.

  Why the hell would anyone cancel Deadwood? If that guy ever comes into my club he better have the viewing figures in his pocket.

  Zeb perks up. “Reboot. Fuckin’ A.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” I agree wearily.

  Seeing it all ahead of him, Zeb guns the Prius and shoots off down the street at the speed of a four-year-old on roller skates, and I wonder not for the first time whether my life would be less pathetic without him in it.

  Fuckin’ A.

  At the raggedy end of Cloisters’ nightclub alley sits Slotz. My kingdom.