The Long Fall

“Sometimes it’s not so clear who is working for whom.”

“That may be,” I speculated, “except when the individual in question is self-employed.”

“No man is an island,” Vartan lamented, “no king not a man.”

At that point Lucas and Pittman appeared at the open glass doors of the coffee shop. Vartan raised a solitary finger, stopping them in their tracks.

“Do your job, Leonid,” Vartan said as he stood up from the table. “That’s all anyone expects.”

A waiter came up to him, saying, “Did you want your check, sir?”

“My friend is paying.”

Vartan departed with Tony’s dogs at his heels.

While taking out my wallet I wondered what it was my father’s old friend was telling me. Every nuance, including appearing there with Tony’s men, meant that whatever I did, it had to be just right.

Or not.

Ê€„

28

I once had a partner. His name was Bill. Bill was an okay guy and we were, at least from a technical standpoint, an ideal team in a shady kind of way. He was white—a tall, sandy-haired, handsome guy with a couple of years of college, which made him at least literate and able to deal with the concept of two plus two. I was a tree stump of a black man, home-schooled by a dyed-in-the-wool Communist revolutionary, with more books and ideas shoved into my mind than the librarian at Oxford’s Bodleian.

We, Bill and I, did things that would not have made us look good in front of a judge and jury but we were slicker than graphite on a block of ice, so the courts might as well have been in heaven while our feet were mired in New York clay.

I trusted Bill.

He trusted me.

I suspected that he’d slept with my wife a time or two, but Katrina and I slept around so much that the word “betrayal,” in our private lexicon, had synonyms like “naughty” and “sly.”

Bill and I didn’t have an office. We’d meet in coffee shops and stand-up pizza joints, planning how to take down innocents on behalf of our bent clientele. That was half of our business. The other half entailed the secret resolution of internal disputes.

One time we were hired by Four-fingers John Marr to pass a document to the police that would incriminate his rival, Hard Joe Tyner. It was a delicate procedure that took half a day of planning. We did it whær tile strolling through the Museum of Modern Art. Pretending to study the paintings of Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, we hammered out a plan that would hit all the points of the service we provided.

Hard Joe had made one mistake in his otherwise spotless criminal career. He was extorting the president of an insurance company and accepting the money personally through a complex series of money transfers. Marr had gotten a list of the account numbers used. That’s all the cops would need. Once they identified the victim, all they had to do was offer him immunity and Tyner would fall, hard.

But Marr didn’t want his associates to suspect him and so he came to us—me and Bill.

“I don’t see why we can’t just put the shit in an envelope and send it to the detective in charge of investigating organized crime,” Bill said after we gave the guard our tickets.

“Tyner’s people would suspect Marr,” I said patiently. “He’s the one with the most to gain.”

“So?”

“It’s not professional, and anyway a good lawyer might be able to get evidence obtained in that fashion thrown out on some obscure technicality. Also, the police would get suspicious. Or worse, they might get stupid and ignore it.”

“We could turn it in ourselves,” Bill offered then. “Just walk into One Police Plaza and say, ‘Hey, look what we found.’ ”

“And we’d be their bitches from then on. Anytime we said no they’d threaten to turn us out.”

Our talks always started out like that. Bill had a good mind but he was lazy. He didn’t see our job as a craft, more like a pickup pool hustle, where there was always a chance that you could lose. Luckily he deferred to me when it came to finalizing a plan, so we went on with our museum excursion.

After getting our fill of culture we settled into the restaurant bar for espressos and biscotti. I brought up a friend of Bill’s who worked for Tyner. The man’s name was Sharp. Sharp was in debt to a bookie who wasn’t afraid of Tyner. Tyner didn’t like his people gambling and would have come down hard on Sharp if he heard about it. Sharp was also well acquainted with Tyner’s accountant, a man named Norman Bly. Bly had a girlfriend, Mae Lynn, who managed to look like Jayne Mansfield while not being much older than Shirley Temple—when Temple was singing “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”

The plan followed nature, which was always the best way to go. Why blast a path down a mountain when erosion has already excavated the best route?

First we would take some incriminating pictures of Bly and Mae Lynn, then we would go to Sharp and offer him the cash he needed to call off the leg-breakers; all he’d have to do was put a few papers in Bly’s briefcase on a certain day. We’d pretend that the papers were only there to incriminate Bly.