The Long Fall

As I sat there waiting for the prey to show itself, I turned my attention to Norman Fell.

I wondered what it was like to live a life when you couldn’t read a word. How strange the titles of books must seem; even your own name would only be familiar in a symbolic kind of way. To be a man like him out there hiding in plain sight, making a life for himself half swathed in internal darkness.

But literacy didn’t make you smart, just like, as Twill had already figured out, money didn’t make you rich.

Both Fell and I knew that finding those men was wrong, but we had bills to pay and shoes to replace, pretenses to keep up. Well after the properties had been condemned, we were still trying to build lives.

I used to believe that I was getting somewhere, that with enough experience and enough money in the bank I could become a well-heeled member of some exclusive club. I’d leave the street life to the mooks that lived it. I’d climb to the penthouse all the time knowing that the higher one gets . . .

I kept a storage space in the Bronx that had information on over three hundred cases that I had been involved in. I had once counted on those files to be my exit plan. I’d call everyone still alive and sell what I had for five thousand dollars a pop, on average. Or, if I got busted, I could use that information to deƒ€ormational myself out of a prison sentence.

But none of that mattered anymore. I was no longer a moral illiterate. I could read the signs and I knew what they meant.

“BLUE MOON” BY the Marcels was just ramping up on my system when a man came out the front of the yellow-and-blue cottage. A Mann. I knew his face from the temporary website Christian had provided. He was walking an elderly dachshund on a red shoulder leash. The old dog was pulling, halfheartedly, I thought, trying to get out and piss on the streets where he’d squandered his doggie youth.

The twelve-pound pet was a mottled brown, his master was pink and bulbous. If A Mann was thirty pounds overweight, forty of that was flab. He walked like a man who had never exercised a day in his life, a little wobbly on every fourth or fifth step. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. This ensemble wasn’t very fashionable but that wasn’t saying much—Mr. Mann would have had to undergo a serious TV makeover to get him looking like he belonged anywhere.

On the other hand, he didn’t seem to care about appearances. A muttered to the dog and waited patiently for it to do its business. He was ready with a little plastic bag. It was painful, seeing him lowering to one knee on those weak and rusty pins.

When he was halfway down the block I got out and followed from the other side of the street.

We strolled in our separate worlds down toward the ocean. He was thinking about his dog and I was wondering how to make him my bitch.

With Christian’s help I knew that A had no wife or children. His mother lived with a sister in Tampa, and they had fallen completely out of touch. He’d changed his name to Dwight Timmerman and lived a very quiet life on a stipend garnered from a lifetime of careful investments. He lived in a kind of self-imposed, self-generated witness protection program.

Christian’s thoughtfully constructed website told me that A, when he realized that he was working for gangsters, had gone to a wealthy friend from high school who had made it rich. This friend, a man simply referred to by Christian as Mr. Jones, helped him change his identity. Jones had done all this with the help of one of Rinaldo’s subordinates.

Alphonse Rinaldo threw a broad web over the city of New York. Almost everyone was connected to him, though few knew it. His control over the city was so complete that he might have even pulled the strings of his own employers.

I had suspicions about Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), but in the case of Tony the Suit there wasn’t a shadow of doubt: the moment I turned over Mann’s address, he and the dog would be dead. And if I refused to turn the name over, I’d be on Tony’s blacklist and someone else would root out the accountant.

The odds between me and Tony were pretty much even but if Harris Vartan decided to weigh in on the gangster’s side I wouldn’t make it a day.

I didn’t havƒ€">I didne much of a choice, and I had a family that needed me breathing in order for them to stay afloat.

THE STROLL LASTED for about thirty minutes. Mann and dog had to stop four times to catch their breath. One time there the accountant plopped down on a bench with his back toward the ocean. He was breathing through his mouth while the dachshund panted laboriously. The dog was looking up at A while he stared at the clouds. It was a moment of grace in an awkward life. I remember feeling a little jealous.

After that five-minute breather the duo lurched back to the cottage—probably to take an afternoon nap.

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