Sweeney on the Rocks Read online

  ~

  They sit in the cruiser, engine idling. Marilyn says, “Sheriff’s office has that NCIC? That National Crime Information Center? Subscriber only type of thing.” Even now she enjoys her privileges. “That’s where I found the picture.”

  In his hands, a printout of a web page. A Department of Justice eagle seal in the upper left hand corner, then a block of text (continuing from a previous page) describing the more recent string of Eddie’s exonerations. And then, taking up the entire bottom half of the page, and in the pale halftones of a printer losing its ink, a grainy photo of Eddie’s corpse.

  He’s sitting in the front seat of an anonymous Buick sedan, wearing a blood-spattered white t-shirt, the left sleeve askew enough to reveal his age-blurred yin-yang tattoo. Temple propped against the wheel, eyes fixed, staring past the camera.

  His throat’s been cut.

  Eddie used to be skinny, but in the photo he’s put on some muscle. Joined a gym or something. He looks fit. He looks like he could live forever. If it weren’t for the neat incision under his throat, the thin slit, sharp as a piece of paper, the lips of it pressed tight.

  He wears a spattered bib of blood. The inside of the car has been washed in gore. Sweeney flashes to photos of old gangland hits, to Dillinger and Capone.

  “I’m sorry,” Marilyn says.

  “Why…Jesus, why…” Sweeney rubs his face. “You’d think somebody would have said something.”

  “Too soon, I guess. This is only from ten days ago.”

  Sweeney stares at the photo. “Ten days?”

  “Came in over the transom, apparently. Anonymous source, some guy bragging.”

  He considers Tina’s timeline. She’d said that Eddie had brought her the rocks, what…? A week ago? He mumbles, “Same M.O. as those bodies I found.”

  “Yeah, sure. I thought of…Bodies? Plural?”

  He considers Tina, kicking it back just a few feet away in his living room, sipping her beer.

  “Ted? Bodeez?”

  “Anybody have any thoughts about who did it?”

  Marilyn’s still digesting the pluralization. Her jaw sits askew, a cow caught mid cud. Finally says, “My other piece of news. That guy with the shotgun? A kid named Fontana Castori. Ring any bells?”

  “Tony Castori’s little brother. Yeah, works for Moretti.”

  Marilyn’s face is a Venetian blind, and she’s just twisted down a whole new look. Cop suspicion, tempered by reassessment. She’d expected him to be astonished, grateful for the information. “Yeah, so, uh. Kid got tagged for a dope possession last year, which was enough to put him in the system. Otherwise, he’s clean.”

  Sweeney folds the snapshot of his dead cousin Eddie along its existing crease, then folds it again. Tucks it into a shirt pocket. Smooths it flat. “Thank you for this, sweetheart. I mean it.”

  She’s still got the look. “You should talk to people, Ted. Open up a little. You got to trust somebody.”

  He stares off into the middle distance. “That’s one theory, sure.”

  ~

  It’s going to be a relief, in a way. To let this loose. He’s been holding his thumb over this particular nozzle for so, so long.

  He finds Tina kicked back crossways in his chair, ankles crossed. She says, “That was your ex? I saw her once in New York. I ever tell you? Tracked her down. I was jealous. She used to be a hottie. Kind of let herself go now, though.”

  Sweeney sits across from her. Elbows on his knees.

  “What.”

  He pulls the paper from his shirt pocket, smoothes it flat.

  Tina can barely be bothered for a glance. “Uh huh.”

  Sweeney’s right arm floats out, disembodied. It’s somebody’s arm but maybe not his. He watches it grab a handful of Tina’s black hair. His other hand comes around for a matching clump. “This happened ten days ago, Tina. Ten days. Look at it.”

  “Get the fuck offa me.”

  Which is when things go red for a while.

  When he swims up out of it, Tina’s got his handprint on her cheek and some blood welling out of one nostril, puddling over the rim of her upper lip.

  So. Cosmo’s back.

  And it’s like an alcoholic taking his first shot of booze in ten years. All that effort, all that time, all that penance…phhst. Gone. He feels the disappointment of it, and yes, what is this? What’s this other thing? Anticipation, maybe.

  He finds a box of Kleenex. Tosses it to her. “Here.”

  “Thanks. You dick.”

  She goes to work with the Kleenex, twisting one up a nostril. And it’s not like it’s the first time.

  “Ten days ago.”

  She still hasn’t looked at the printout. “If I came here, if I said, yeah, some guys took care of Eddie, but I need your help. Yeah, the last guy that tried to move these rocks, they still haven’t found his body. Shit, Cosmo. What do you think would have happened? You’d disappear. You’d be that guy, what’s his name, D. B. Cooper.”

  “Not true.”

  “I’m still bleeding.”

  “I’ll get some ice.”

  He comes back with a dishtowel wrapped around cubes, his outrage balanced on a spoon. “So were you guys even married? Or was that a lie, too?”

  “Sure, yeah, of course we were married.” She glances at him. “Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “You don’t seem too broken up about it is all. Eddie being dead.”

  “Let’s just say, Eddie changed.” She holds the cold towel first to one nostril, then pulls it away to study the pink in the dampness. “Let’s just say, compared to what he’s been putting me through? This bloody nose is a kiss on the cheek.”

  “Where’d he get the rocks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’d you get them?”

  “Pretty much like I said. Black bag, Eddie, Russians chopping at the back door.”

  “When’d you find out that Eddie was dead?”

  “He didn’t come home for a while. No big deal, right? There’s a girlfriend over in Redhook. He doesn’t know I know. Anyway, then I get that picture in the mail.” Her eyes go to the coffee table where the printout is rebounding toward its former folds. “Same picture.”

  “The Russians?”

  “Trashed our house that same night. That’s when I took off.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “The rocks? Safe deposit box in Brooklyn.”

  “The fuck.”

  “Eddie said you’d have to go to New York for a decent fence. And you know I’m not driving across country with however-many-millions in my glovebox.”

  “Where’d he get the rocks, Tina?”

  She inspects the damp knot of towel in her hand. That outer layer of disdain she’s been carrying around, the heavy coat of contemptuousness, it’s gone. She sighs heavily, surrendering. “Breetvah. He said he, quote, lifted them off Breetvah, unquote.”

  Sweeney goes to the window. Outside, a Montana late afternoon. Hazy in the distance. Maybe a forest fire somewhere. He’s had this view for seven years now. The ranch house quartering away. Paint peeling on the south faces. A loose gutter knocking in the wind. Distant black specks of slow-grazing Angus. The smell of cow shit and hay and his own unwashed shirts. Seven years inside a Hank Williams song.

  Behind him, she says, “I got the impression Breetvah was working some kind of middle man deal.”

  The old folks could dog sit for him. And Aggie’s safe enough for a couple of days. And the kind of money we’re talking about? He pulls it off, he could take Aggie for a slow cruise around the world.

  Sweeney picks up the photo of Eddie. Consider the toner-gray splatters of blood. The fixed eyes. “And Moretti?”

  “He was the cleaner. I don’t know the details, but Eddie was complaining about how big a cut he was taking. I mean, like, half?”

  “Breetvah needed Moretti to clean the diamonds? That don’t make sense.”

  “I’m just telling you what I
heard.”

  Breetvah and the Russians. Moretti and the Luccheses. That’s on one end of the scale.

  And on the other? His outrage on Eddie’s behalf. A life cut short, stolen.

  Also, diamonds.

  Sweeney pays attention to a new pulse in his throat. Years ago he’d compared it to sex, this same kind of feeling. He’d told Eddie, building up to a good score, it’s like getting wood. You can’t argue with it.

  “All right,” he says.

  “All right what.”

  “New York is what. Get your credit cards.”

  ~

  Sweeney and Eddie did three jobs with Bytchkov. The computer chip gig that almost went south. That was first. Then a shared investment in high quality Rolex Submariners out of Beijing. Such a beautiful weight and heft, those watches. Silky-smooth second hands. “Niiice.” Sweeney’s first exposure to the lucrative world of knockoffs, and he liked it. Dig the return on investment. Eighty bucks a watch, sold for five hundred per over the course of a summer. Bytchkov set the price point.

  Eddie said, “Five hundred bucks, or Bytchkov backs out of the deal.” And while Sweeney resented being told what to do, he came to admire the foresight. These babies went for thirty-five hundred bucks straight retail. If they’d sold them for anything less than $500, the scam would have fallen apart. But any more than that? You might as well go buy the real thing. It became a rolling bazaar out of the trunk of his Caddy. Sweeney flipped through a thick roll of hundreds. “I ever get to meet this Bytchkov guy, I’m shaking his hand. Goddamn genius is what he is.”

  “I been telling you.”

  The third gig put Sweeney on the road to Montana.

  Saturday afternoon in December, one week before Christmas, Eddie and Sweeney drove in slush through the decrepit ghettos of broke-down Brooklyn. Sad strings of Christmas lights hung from the limbs of bare trees. The homes of plumbers and electricians fallen on hard times. Eddie said, “Take a left up here.”

  “You tell him when we’d be showing up?”

  “He just said show up.” Eddie unwrapped a mint toothpick, rolled it back and forth in his mouth. “I told you about him, right? How he’s kind of crazy?”

  “Yeah, you mentioned it.”

  Eddie had been squatting in a basement off Dyker Beach. A Murphy bed, mini fridge, two bar stools, and an old coin-operated pool table with the coin mechanism ripped out. A sheet of plywood could turn it into a dining table, but who’s got time for that. Three nights a week they’d drink beer and shoot stick. Nine ball, eight ball, straight pool.

  Eddie bent to break a full rack. “When these guys came over,” he sent the cue ball careening, “these Russians from the late seventies, early eighties, they emptied out the prisons.” The nine ball dropped in the side. “I’m stripes, I guess. Okay, ten ball, corner.” He dropped it. “Those prisons, they’d have forty, fifty guys in a cell with ten beds. Lice, bedbugs, oatmeal three times a day. Teeth coming out from scurvy. Nothing we could ever do to them here over that’s worse than where they came from. Twelve ball, side.” He shot and missed. “Shit.”

  “Bytchkov. How’d you hook up?” Sweeney dropped the two ball.

  “He came to me, man. Had this idea he’d, you know, unite the tribes or something. Italians and Russians. That’s how crazy.”

  “Three in the corner.”

  “Nice shot. But he’s got good ideas, too. That gasoline tax scam, right? Everybody was into it, but he’s the one come up with it.”

  “Five over here.”

  “But. But I mean, these guys, there’s honor, then everything else. Step on their toes, insult them, they’ll do anything. Anything, Cosmo. Kill your mother, crucify your dog, burn your house down.”

  “Crucify your dog?”

  “Seriously crazy …”

  Twelve hours later, Eddie said, “Okay, this is it. This is Bytchkov’s place.”

  A narrow plank house on Sheepshead Bay. East 24th Street. A flimsy white metal fence crooked around a patchy square of lawn. Cracked concrete and an old Ford Econoline with dark windows. A puddle of oil, bald tires.

  “Gee, this is a real shithole.”

  “His palace, he calls it.”

  Bytchkov came to the door himself. Chewing and wiping grease on a sleeveless t-shirt. “My friend Eddie! So good always a see you. And you, you are Coseemo.”

  “Cosmo, yeah.”

  Six inches shorter than Sweeney, Bytchkov had issues with his neck. It didn’t swivel too good. His dark eyes darted to compensate. The skin of his chest, his arms, hung off him in a sheet. Under his shirt, an intricate crucifix. The five domes of an orthodox church. Jesus weeping tears of blood. “You are the badass that Eddie tells me about? The Shakespeare? The one without the mercy?”

  Sweeney glanced at Eddie. “Uh.”

  “He looks meek and mild,” Eddie said, “just don’t get him mad.”

  “Like the Hulk, yes? Grrrr.” Bytchkov showed his teeth. Heavy on the stained enamel, short on gum. “Bruce Banner. American comic books. I love them.”

  From the bowels of the house, they heard children running up wooden stairs. A giggle, and a young girl shouting in Russian. Bytchkov scowled fondly at the noise. “We go down to my office now, okay? Okay. Less crazy. More privacy.”

  Bytchkov led them down a narrow staircase, damp and carpeted, away from the smell of boiled cabbage and into an odor of mice and wet newspapers. Sweeney touched dark paneling for his balance. Bad juju down here, man. “Appreciate you putting us onto those Rolexes. Made my Christmas merrier.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” At the bottom of the stairs, a heavy door painted black. And instead of a knob, a plug of fiberboard and a padlock. Bytchkov pressed the door open with his flat palm. “My office, welcome.”

  To the extent that there was a desk (one leg broken off short and shimmed up with romance novels), a metal file cabinet, a floor lamp, Sweeney supposed that yes, this was an office. But every other detail suggested a deranged lunatic trying desperately to pass as sane and industrious. The iron gray shelves were filled with folders bleeding paper and an old dot matrix printer wrapped in its own wires, a pewter bowl full of…what. Were those teeth? Some with mercury fillings. A matched pair of lime-green armchairs leaked stuffing. A deal coffee table held, centered like a floral arrangement, a specimen jar full of milky formaldehyde and the decomposing threads of a human hand.

  Off his elbow, Bytchkov said, “Cozy, yes?”

  No dummy, Sweeney was hip to the test. Reaction? He opted for bland and ironic. “Cozy, yeah. Nice. Warm.”

  “Thanks, yes.”

  But then, because he was a little irked, a little pissed—who did this guy think he was, testing him—added, “Kind of like Breetvah’s pad. Smaller, but you know, tasteful.” Here’s Sweeney swinging dicks in some abattoir of a basement with a Russian psychopath.

  A long, long moment later, the lower half of Bytchkov’s bucket-sized head split into a halitosis-clouded grin. His fist sledgehammered into Sweeney’s arm. To Eddie, he said gleefully, “You were right my friend. One crazy motherfuck. Am I right? Yes, I am right. Bytchkov is right. I like you, my friend. Breetvah!”

  Eddie: “Yeah, crazy.” And handed Sweeney his most unreadable glance.

  ~

  Ten years since Sweeney’s been on a plane, and flying’s a novelty again. Bozeman to Denver, he’s got his forehead against the plexiglass, naming landmarks. Paradise Valley, Hellroaring Plateau, Yellowstone Lake. Eight hours later, coasting into LaGuardia, it’s Dyker Heights, Greenwood Cemetery, Prospect Park. “I played little league on those fields.”

  Tina pops gum over a fashion magazine. “Uh huh.”

  It’s all down there, all of it, the whole world. Neighborhoods appearing ex nihilo at the top of their subway stairs. West 14th with its fake bohemianism, the gaggles of NYU students lining up for cheap pizza. The financial district with its high-priced lunches, its silk-tied aficionados of good Scotch and bad business. SoHo street vendors and Upper East Side Jewish h
ousewives walking terriers. The angry and muttering homeless; tourists standing befuddled on street corners. The endless recycling of subway trains twenty feet beneath the city, the dark, stale air and rancid odors of urine and garbage, dimly lit concrete pylons scrawled with graffiti. Chinese couples in identical black polyester pants and sec ondhand dress shirts, arguing incomprehensibly. The Yemeni clerks at corner bodegas, working when you pick up your paper in the morning and still there at ten that night when you buy your beer. The Great Wall of China may be filled with the corpses of its workers but the buildings of New York are kept level by the sleepless bones of immigrants.

  God, he’s missed it.

  But coming off the plane, he’s the only guy in a baseball cap, hiking boots. His jeans are the wrong shade of blue and his shirt only acceptable if it were ironic, if it were vintage, if he were fifteen years younger. Standing in the cab line, Sweeney says, “I need a suit. I know a place.”

  “Tre Fretelli on Madison? Yeah they’re gone. They got a Duane Reade there now.”

  “Well. I need a suit. I need a suit.”

  “You always was a clothes horse, Cosmo.” She gives a genuine smile. Her first one. “There’s a place in Atlantic Center. Eddie used to shop there.”

  They’re not going back to Tina’s place. The Russians might be watching. Certainly the Russians would be watching. Instead, they’ve booked rooms off Park Slope. Close to her bank, Tina says.

  This being Sunday, though, the banks are closed. “Haven’t had good Thai in a while,” Sweeney says. “I read about this place on the web. You mind?”

  Tina’s okay with it, and they end up out on the sidewalk at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street. A bright Sunday evening in Brooklyn. The shadows going long and the heat leaving the streets in a faint fog of body odor and exhaust, an undercurrent of dog shit and melting ice cream. Kids on razor scooters trundling down the sidewalk, bumping seam to seam. Cadres of Park Slope parents behind baby carriages. The too-slim trust fund hipsters suckling at their ATM tits. Sweeney, half to himself: “This used to be all crack houses and hookers.”

  Tina has her chopsticks and she’s not bad with them, shoveling up Pad Thai. “What’s across the street?”