The Charlie Parker Collection 2

  But then Queens had always been different. It wasn’t like Brooklyn, or the Bronx. It was disparate. It sprawled. People didn’t write affectionate books about it. It didn’t have a Pete Hamill to mythologize it. ‘Someplace in Queens’: if Willie had a buck for every time he’d heard someone use that phrase, he’d be a wealthy man. For those who lived outside the borough, everywhere within it was just ‘someplace in Queens.’ To them, Queens was like the ocean: big and unknowable, and if you dropped something into it, it got lost and it stayed lost.

  And, despite it all, Willie had loved almost every minute of his life there. Then his wife had tried to take it away from him, and even with Arno adding to the fund the money that he had saved there still wasn’t enough to pay her off. To cap it all, the landlord had put the building up for sale, so even if Willie managed to satisfy his old lady’s demands he still wasn’t sure that he would have a business once the premises were sold. He had been left with forty-eight hours to make a decision, forty-eight hours to write off nearly twenty years of effort and commitment (he was thinking of the garage, not the marriage), when a tall black man in an expensive suit and a long black overcoat arrived at the door of the little office in which Willie tried, and usually failed, to keep track of his paperwork, and offered him a way out.

  The man knocked gently on the glass. Willie looked up and asked what he could do for him. The man closed the door behind him, and something in Willie’s stomach tensed. He might have been a mechanic in the military, but he’d learned how to fire a gun, and he’d had to use it more than once, although as far as he knew he’d never managed to kill anybody with it, mainly because he hadn’t really tried. Mostly, he had just done his best to avoid getting his own head shot off. He wanted to fix things, not break them, didn’t matter if they were jeeps, helicopters, or human beings.

  In turn, he’d been surrounded by other men who were like him, and some who were not, the kind who were willing and able to kill if push came to shove. There were the ones who did so reluctantly, or pragmatically, and there were a couple who were just plain psychotic, who liked what they did and got off on the carnage they wreaked. And then there were those – and he could have counted them on his thumbs – who were naturals, who killed cold-bloodedly and without remorse, who derived satisfaction from the exercise of a skill with which they had been born. They had something quiet and still inside them, something that could not be touched, but Willie often suspected that the thing inside them was hollow, and it contained a raging maelstrom that they had either learned to accommodate or declined to acknowledge, like the great protective frame that houses a nuclear reactor. Willie had tried to stay away from such men, but now he sensed that, once again, he was in the presence of one of them.

  It was dark outside, and Arno had just gone home. He had wanted to stay with Willie, knowing that, if things didn’t work out, tomorrow would be their final day in the shop, and he didn’t want to lose a single minute that might otherwise have been spent in its environs, but Willie had sent him on his way so that he could be alone. He understood Arno’s need to be there because he felt it himself, but this was still his business, his place. Tonight, he would sleep here, surrounded by the sights and smells that meant most to him in the world. He could not imagine a life without them. Perhaps, he thought, he could get some work in a body shop elsewhere, although he would find it difficult to toil for someone else after so many years as his own boss. In time, he might even be able to set himself up again in other premises, if he could save enough money. His bank had been sympathetic to his plight, but finally unhelpful. He was a man in the throes of a painful and potentially ruinous divorce, with a business (soon to be half a business, and that was no business at all) that was profitable but not profitable enough, and such a man was not worth the bank’s time or money.

  Now his solitude had been disturbed by the visitor, and to Willie’s burdens had been added a strong helping of unease. Willie could have sworn that he had locked the door behind Arno when he left, but either he hadn’t done it properly or this was an individual who wasn’t about to let the small matter of a locked door stand in the way of whatever business he might wish to conduct.

  ‘Sorry, we’re closed,’ said Willie.

  ‘So I see,’ said the man. ‘My name is Louis.’

  He extended a hand. Willie, who was never one to be ruder than necessary, shook it.

  ‘Listen, I’m happy to meet you, but it doesn’t change anything,’ said Willie. ‘We’re closed. I’d tell you to come back another day, but I got my hands full just finishing what’s out there already, and I’m not even sure if I’ll still be here once the sun sets tomorrow.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Louis. ‘I heard that you were in trouble. I can help you out of it.’

  Willie bristled. He thought he knew what was coming. He’d seen too many jumped-up loan sharks in his time to be dumb enough to put his head between their jaws. His wife was about to take half of all that he had. This guy was trying to take what was left.

  ‘I don’t know what you heard,’ Willie replied, ‘and I could give a damn. I can take care of my own problems. Now, if you don’t mind, I got things to do.’

  He wanted to turn his back on the man in a gesture of dismissal, but despite his bravado he felt that the only thing worse than facing the visitor would be not facing him. You didn’t turn your back on a man like this, and not only because you might end up with a knife in it. There was a dignity about him, a stillness. If he was a loan shark, then he wasn’t a typical one. Willie might have differed on occasion with some of his customers (and, indeed, Arno) on the definition of how much rudeness was appropriate in the course of one’s daily affairs, but he wasn’t about to cross this man, not if he could help it. He’d talk his way out of it politely. It would be a strain, but Willie would manage it.

  ‘You’re going to lose this place,’ said Louis. ‘I don’t want that to happen.’

  Willie sighed. The conversation, it seemed, was not at an end.

  ‘What’s it to you if I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Call me a good Samaritan. I’m worried about the neighbor hood.’

  ‘Then run for mayor. I’ll vote for you.’

  The man smiled. ‘I prefer to keep a lower profile.’

  Willie held his gaze. ‘I’ll bet you do.’

  ‘I’ll invest in your business. I’ll give you exactly fifty percent of what it’s worth. In return you’ll pay me a dollar a year as interest on the loan until it’s paid off.’

  Willie’s jaw went slack. This guy was either the worst loan shark in the business, or there was a catch in the deal big enough to snap Willie in two.

  ‘A dollar a year,’ he said, once he’d managed to get his mouth under control again.

  ‘I know. I drive a hard bargain. Tell you what, I’ll leave you to think about it overnight. I hear your wife has given you forty-eight hours to reach a decision, and half of them are already gone. I guess I’m just not as reasonable as she is.’

  ‘Nobody ever called my old lady reasonable before,’ said Willie.

  ‘She sounds like a special person,’ said Louis. His expression was studiedly neutral.

  ‘She used to be,’ said Willie. ‘Not so much anymore.’

  Louis handed Willie a card. On it was a telephone number, and the image of a snake being crushed underfoot by a winged angel, but nothing else.

  ‘There’s no name on the card,’ said Willie.

  ‘No, there isn’t.’

  ‘Hardly worth having a business card that doesn’t have a business on it. Must be hard to make a living.’

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What do you do, kill snakes?’

  And the words were no sooner out of Willie’s mouth than he regretted them, his mind uttering a silent ‘Goddamn’ as it realized that it had lost the race to catch up with his tongue.

  ‘Kind of. I’m in pest control.’

  ‘Pest control. Right.’

  The man ex
tended his hand once again in farewell. Almost in a daze, Willie shook it.

  ‘Louis?’ said Willie. ‘That’s it, just Louis?’

  ‘Just Louis,’ said the man. ‘Oh, and as of today, I’m your new landlord.’

  And that was how it had begun.

  Willie splashed water on his face. From outside, he heard laughter, and a voice that sounded like Arno’s giving his opinion on the Mets, an entirely negative view that seemed to involve only the word ‘Mets’ and a seemingly infinite series of variations on a second word that Arno, who prided himself on his sophistication when he wasn’t on his fourth double vodka, liked to refer to as ‘the copulative.’ Arno was funny like that. He might have looked like an aging rat, but he knew more words than Webster’s. Willie had been to Arno’s apartment only once, and nearly had his skull fractured when a pile of novels came toppling down on his head. Every available space seemed to be occupied by newspapers, books, and the occasional car part. On those rare occasions when Arno was late for work, Willie was tormented by images of him lying unconscious beneath an entire stack of encyclopedias from the 1950s, or smoking away like a piece of fish beneath layer upon layer of smoldering newsprint. Well, maybe ‘tormented’ was putting it kind of strongly. ‘Mildly bothered’ might have been closer to the mark.

  Someone had written Jake is a male slut in lipstick at the bottom right-hand corner of the glass. Willie hoped that the culprit was a woman, although homosexuality didn’t bother him so much now. Love and let love, that was his motto. Anyway, that black gentleman who had saved his business (and, let’s face it, his life, because he’d always had a weakness for booze, and by the time the divorce was reaching its filthy nadir he was putting away a bottle of Four Roses a day, and say what you like about Four Roses but gentle it ain’t) had a partner named Angel, and while it wasn’t as if there were wedding bells in the offing, or an announcement in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, they were just about the closest-knit couple that Willie had ever encountered. ‘The couple that slays together stays together,’ as Arno had once put it, and Willie had instinctively looked over his shoulder in the quiet of the garage, half-expecting to see a black figure looming unhappily over him, a smaller one beside him looking equally discontented. It wasn’t that they scared him, or not much – that feeling had passed a long time ago, or so he liked to tell himself – but he hated to think that their feelings might be hurt. He had said as much to Arno, and Arno had apologized and had never issued a similar utterance since, but sometimes Willie wondered if Arno had been so far off the mark, all things considered.

  The door of the men’s room opened. Arno’s head popped through the gap.

  ‘The hell are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Washing my hands.’

  ‘Well, hurry up. There’s a party waiting for you out here.’ Arno paused as he saw the writing on the mirror. ‘Who’s Jake?’ he asked. ‘Hey, did you write that?’

  He ducked just in time to avoid being hit by a wadded paper towel, and then Willie Brew, sixty years old and sometime associate of two of the most lethal men in the city, went out to join his birthday party.

  3

  The interior of Nate’s was dimly lit. It was always that way. Even in summer, when streams of harsh sunlight struck the windows, the beams seemed to melt against the glass and then drizzle like honey through the panes, their energy dissipated as though they, like the patrons inside, had, in the transition from beyond to within, absorbed just a little too much alcohol to be truly useful for the rest of the day. Apart from an area two feet square beside the double doors, no part of Nate’s had seen unfiltered natural illumination for more than half a century.

  And yet Nate’s was not a cheerless place. White fairy lights adorned the bar all year around, and each table was lit by a candle in a glass lamp seated on an iron bowl. The bowls were secured to the wood of the tables with inch-long screws (Nate was no fool) but the candles were scrupulously monitored, and as soon as they began to flicker they were replaced by a waitress or, on quiet evenings, by Nate himself, who was small, sixtyish and jug-eared, and was said to have once bitten a man’s nose off in a bar fight down in Baja when he was in the Navy. No one had ever asked Nate if that was true because Nate would happily talk to anyone about ball scores, the idiots who ran the city of New York and the country whose space the city occupied, and the general wellbeing of friends and family, but as soon as someone tried to get more personal with him, Nate would wander off to clean glasses, or check the taps, or replenish the candles, and the unwise party who had inadvertently offended him would be left to wait on a refill and rue his brashness. Nate’s was not that kind of place, as Nate liked to point out, although nobody had ever managed to nail him down on just what kind of place Nate’s was, exactly. Nate liked it that way, and so did the people who frequented his bar.

  Nate’s, like its owner, was a relic of another time, when this part of Queens was predominantly Irish, before the Indians and the Afghans and the Mexicans and the Colombians came along and began carving it up into their own little enclaves. Nate wasn’t Irish, and neither was his bar: even on St Patrick’s Day, Nate wasn’t about to change his white fairy lights for green ones, or begin drawing shamrocks on the heads of his patrons’ beer. No, it was more to do with a certain state of mind, a particular attitude. Surrounded by foreign smells and strange accents, in a city that was constantly changing, Nate’s represented solidity. It was an old world bar. You came here to drink, and to eat good, simple food that didn’t pander to dietary fads or concerns about cholesterol. You behaved yourself. If you used foul language, you kept your voice down, particularly if there were ladies present. You paid your tab at the end of the night, and you tipped appropriately. The chairs were comfortable, the restrooms, occasional graffiti apart, were clean, and Nate’s pouring hand was neither too heavy nor too light. He made good cocktails, but he didn’t do shooters. ‘You want shooters, go to Hooters,’ as he once told some college kids who had made the mistake of asking for a tray of Dive Bombers. In fact, as Nate said later, once he had thrown their asses out, their first mistake was coming into his bar to begin with. Nate did not like college kids, which was not to say that he was not proud of the local boys who had made good by going on to further education. He knew their parents, and their grandparents. They were not ‘college kids’. They were his kids, and they would always be welcome in his bar, although he still wouldn’t serve them shooters, not even if a shooter was going to cure them of cancer. A man had to have standards.

  The bar did not have a private room, but there were four tables at the back that were cut off from the rest of the premises by a wall of wood inset with three frosted glass panes, and it was there that the party to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Willie Brew was taking place. In truth, the party had spread out a little as the evening drew on. There was a noisy core of six or seven seated around Arno, then a second table of four or five that was quieter, mellowed by Jameson and the general good nature of those gathered there. A third was occupied by assorted wives and girlfriends, of which Willie had initially not entirely approved. Willie had been under the impression that this was to be a men-only night, but he supposed that, under the circumstances, he could afford to be tolerant, as long as non-males kept themselves to themselves, within reason. Actually, he supposed that, deep down, he was a little flattered that they had come along. Willie was gruff, and he was by no means a looker. Since his wife left him, the only females with whom he had enjoyed actual physical contact were metal and had headlights where their boobs should have been, and he had almost forgotten how good it felt to be hugged by a woman, and smothered in perfume and kisses. He had blushed down to his ankles as a series of what might generally be termed ‘women of a certain age’ had, either singly or in pairs, reminded him of the charms of the fairer sex by pressing said charms firmly against Willie’s body. One of the reasons he had headed for the men’s room was to remove the lipstick traces from his cheeks and mouth so that he no longer lo
oked, as Arno had put it, like an overweight Cupid advertising a poor man’s Valentine’s Day.

  Now, as he stood at the men’s room door, he took in the assorted faces as though seeing them afresh. The first thing that struck him was that he knew a lot of people with criminal pasts. There was Groucho, the hot-wire expert, who might have made a good mechanic if he could have been trusted not to boost and then sell the cars on which he was supposed to be working. Beside him was Tommy Q, who was the most indiscreet man Willie had ever met, an individual apparently born without a filter between his mouth and his brain. Tommy Q, a purveyor of illegally copied movies, music, and computer software, was such a pirate that he should have sported an eye patch and carried a parrot on his shoulder. Willie had once, in a fit of madness, bought a bootleg copy of a movie from Tommy, the soundtrack to which had consisted almost entirely of the sounds of someone munching popcorn, and a couple having sex nearby, or as close to it as they could get in a crowded movie theater. In fact, thought Willie, it had been pretty similar to the actual experience of seeing a movie in New York on a Friday night, which was precisely why Willie didn’t go to the movies in the first place. Tommy Q’s inexpertly wrapped birthday tribute to Willie sat on top of the pile of gifts in one corner. It looked, thought Willie, suspiciously like a collection of pirated DVDs.

  Then there were those who should have been there but, for vastly different reasons, were not. Coffin Ed was doing two-to-five in Snake River over in Oregon for desecrating a corpse. Willie wasn’t sure what the precise wording of the charge had been and, to be honest, he didn’t want to know. Willie wasn’t the kind of man to judge another’s sexual proclivities, and one naked person being found in a position of intimacy with another naked person didn’t bother him in the slightest, but when one of the naked people was in something less than the fullest bloom of health, then that was slightly more problematic. Willie had always thought there was something kind of creepy about Coffin Ed. It was hard to feel entirely comfortable around a man who had attempted to make a living from stealing corpses and holding them for ransom. Willie had just assumed that Coffin Ed kept the corpses in a freezer somewhere until the ransom was paid, not in his bed.